Fsck Your Hummer, And His Hummer, and Her Hummer, and That Hummer Over by the Tree

10 Miles Per Gallon…
2 Soldiers a Day.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. FUCKYOURHUMMER.com doesn’t mince word:

Welcome to FUCKYOURHUMMER.COM. This site is being set up as on omage to vandalized hummers. Whether it is a hard to peel off bumper sticker, slashed tires, keying, spray painted… we want to have your pictures of it! WHY you might ask? This grotesque monster of an SUV is a symbol that says “I could give a shit about the enviroment, wars over oil, global warming, energy independance, or any number of other issues.” You are the epitomy of stupid americans, and make the rest of us look like assholes. Some of us in this country actually do give a shit. Now I hope others will force you to give a shit.

While we don’t condone scratching up your neighbor’s Hummer, it’s hard for us to muster up any sympathy for the “victims” of such an act. Hummers are teh suck.

Link [FUCKYOURHUMMER]

Earth Day Awesomeness, from Conception to 2008

Smug Alert! It’s Earth Day, people!

Obviously, if you’re a fan of EarthFirst.com, you act as if every day is Earth Day (you do, of course, don’t you?), but that doesn’t mean the symbolism of the holiday isn’t significant to all of us. No, not because we get to go on Smug Alert. Luckily, for the most part, the general public no longer considers Earth Day to be that annoying day that sanctimonious little shits in Greenpeace t-shirts tell everyone else what to do with their pickup trucks and recyclables. More and more people are starting to actually, like, care and stuff.

How’d Earth Day start, after all, in this nation of McDonalds and fossil fuels? Envirolink.org has the scoop straight from the source. Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, says the idea started back in 1962:

For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

Senator Nelson kept on truckin’ for the next seven years, trying to get the message out despite little interest from politicians. The people were starting to get it, though, and what better time than the summer of love, 1969, for it to take off? In September of that year, Senator Nelson announced that the following spring, April 1970, there would be a ‘nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment’ and asked everyone to take part. The message spread, people got excited, and the day itself turned out to be a great success. 20 million people demonstrated in thousands of schools and communities nationwide, with Senator Nelson marveling that it ‘organized itself’.

Since then, Earth Day has been celebrated in thousands of different ways all over the world. Many cities center their festivities around local natural wonders and efforts to preserve them, while others take the chance to educate the public about what they can do to be ‘green’. At Earth Day events you can typically find local environmentally friendly retailers, purchase local organic food & beverages, participate in interactive exhibits and enjoy live music.

Of all the Earth Day celebrations, the largest and best known is the nationwide Green Apple Music Festival which actually took place this past weekend (April 18th-20th) in 8 cities around the U.S. including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Washington DC & NYC. In Miami, Menudo played. Menudo!

Others who celebrated over the weekend include Tokyo and Barcelona. Buenos Aires and Russia plan to be fashionably late, throwing their own Earth Day bashes on the 26th. Some of the happenings around the globe include awareness of genetic modification of our food, showing off new advances in green technology, cultural performances, and (in America) voter registration.

Sure, there are still people out there that think global warming isn’t real. And there are plenty of trees all over the world, so we’re not going to run out any time soon (eye roll), humans were meant to lord over the earth and everything will just adapt to our gluttony and gross misuse of the amazing natural bounty we’ve been blessed with by God, nature, science or what have you. Right? Uh, no, and that’s why you should take this opportunity to spread the Earth Day love.

So let’s all hold hands and sing: “Come on, people now people now… people driving hybrids people now…” Kidding, kidding. Ride your bike to work, attend a festival in your area, do something good for the earth or at least get outside. Or, you can join us as we live blog Earth Day, all day long! Come on, it will be fun (but you should take a break to go outside at some point, seriously).

Link [Envirolink]

Photo credit: South Park Studios & Wikimedia Commons

Going Green? Blue Might be Better

So, you feel as if you’re already reducing your carbon footprint in every way possible. Recycling, buying organic produce from the local farmer’s market, taking public transportation and buying fewer disposables. Is it enough? You might think so, but others would disagree: particularly, those who subscribe to the ‘BLUE movement’.

Before you start groaning about color-labeling and wondering what people will come up with for orange, yellow and purple, check out what the BLUE movement is all about.

Here’s how former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach described it to Gristmill:

People who are part of the BLUE movement aspire to make a difference through the people and products that touch their lives. It encompasses green issues like protecting our last wild places and reducing our output of CO2, but it also includes personal concerns like saving money, losing weight, and spending time with friends and family.

The BLUE movement challenges you to improve your life and increase your effectiveness in making the world a better place. It’s not just about living green, it’s about ‘PSP’ or ‘Personal Sustainability Practice’: actions you take regularly that are good for you, the community and the planet. It takes eco-consciousness one step further into the realm of total self-improvement.

People are urged to translate PSP into their every day buying practices, using consumer power to initiate positive change. Revolution starts with the individual, and the BLUE movement wants us all to fight the power one smart purchase at a time.

Seems to me like the BLUE movement is a natural extension of being ‘green’. Anything that might help people vote with their feet - or, more specifically, with their wallets - is a good thing in my book. Be more conscious about what you buy - it’s so simple, and it has the power to spur real change.

Link [Gristmill]

Photo: Flickr user loop_oh

Axis of Corporate Evil: Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA Hired Black Ops Private Security Team to Spy on Green Activists

Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA hired the private security firm Carlyle Group to get all “black ops” on eco-activists asses. They rumaged through their garbage to find confidential documents (the lesson here- shred your papers) and even social security numbers.

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

Evil motherbleeping corporations. Souless, hungry, exploitative corporations. Grrr… This stuff makes Mr. Cranky Green mad!

Link [Mother Jones] via [The Raw Story]

March 29th- Live Blogging Earth Hour: Because Someone Had To

We’re live blogging Earth Hour.

8:10 pm- Ahh…. It’s nice to have the Green Blogosphere all to myself. Treehugger, EcoGeek, GroovyGreen, and WorldChanging are all dark and abandoned ghost towns. I’m sitting in the ol’ living room with all the lights in the house on watching an hour long marathon of Cops. I’m warming my feet with a plug in heater and have a few pieces of toast in the toaster. I’ll make some hot chocolate in the microwave in a bit.

8:18- A good Cops so far, they just took out a guy running from them. Looks like it’s time to bust some crack heads. Stupid cops.

8:22- Nice- only four and a half minutes on high in the microwave to heat up a big ass mug of half and half hot chocolate.

8:25- I just turned up the radio downstairs real loud, every kilowatt helps. You can barely hear it with the door shut.

8:27- Just noticed an outside light that I had missed. Flicked it on.

8:30- First Cops is over, one more to go.

8:32- Plugging in the Foreman Grill, it’s grilled cheese and Fluff time!

8:34- Nice, a good looking lady cop in Sacramento. She’s got the taser!

8:35- We’ve got a chase on our hands!

8:36- Oh yeah, I’ve seen this one on Hulu. The guy had a good hiding spot (in the recycling bin), but the damn dog tracked him down.

8:40- Awesome! I found a big ass light and disco ball in the basement from back in the college days. I wonder how much juice that sucker pulls. I hope everyone in the dark is having a good break away from the grid. I’m thinking of you and doing my part to use the extra energy now flooding the system. I’m helping to stabilize the load- I’m a damn hero.

8:43- Now is a good time to plug in all my rechargeable batteries.

8:44- I love seeing rich white guys get busted on Cops. I also love warm clothes right out of the dryer. Popped in another load to wash and dry.

8:48- The floodlights I plugged in outside is melting down into the snow. I can’t stand how cops just slime their way into searching you and your car. Everyone should see Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters.

8:50- It’ll be nice when the rest of the world plugs back in. It’s lonely in here.

8:53- Blender is out- mmmm…. super thick milkshake.

8:54- Suspicious Vehicle in Broward County. The guy isn’t getting off the cell phone or rolling down the window.

8:56- Well it’s was a great hour live blogging Earth Hour. Going to make some coffee to ice up for tomorrow in the last few minutes.

8:59- That’s it for me tonight, shutting down and going to sleep. I’ve got to wake up early to go to my second job at Wal-Mart. How else do you think I’m going to be able to pay the power bill from today?

9:01 pm- Welcome back everyone.

Catch Us After You Plug Back In: EarthFirst is Liveblogging Earth Hour Tonight 8-9pm

I’ll be liveblogging tonight from 8-9pm to help celebrate Earth Hour, the 60 minute span when the world is being asked to turn off all lights and electricity. I will be camped out at EarthFirst HQ East (my living room) with all my lights on watching the TV set to something good and trashy while warming my hands over my plugin heater. My posts will cover what I’m watching on TV, any snacks I happen to make, and the general atmosphere in the room as we suck up all the excess energy left on the power grid by the rest of you do-gooders.

If you’re a good little greenie you’ll have to catch up on things after you plug back into the system at 9pm. Woot.

Sit In the Dark For An Hour To Save the World-Does Earth Hour REALLY Make Sense?

OK, I see the value of the symbolism behind Earth Hour and appreciate the ‘awareness’ it’s raising, but do we really want to be telling everyone that the way to save the planet from ourselves is by sitting in a dark house? Doesn’t the other side accuse us of wanting to push the world back to a Stone Age of no cars, hot showers, or lighting after sunset? Doesn’t telling everyone that they have to turn off their lights for an hour kinda support that accusation? Isn’t the idea to find a way that we can all stay up after the sun goes down without having to destroy the environment to do it?

I’m just saying…

Link [Earth Hour]

Very Stupid Eco-Arsonists Torch Green Homes in Seattle Suburb

The Earth Liberation Front has been blamed for burning down a handful of some fairly “green” homes in a big money suburb of Seattle. The three million dollar homes were part of the “Street of Dreams” development and were designed, built, and sold (or in the process of being sold) for charity.

The Huffington Post has it:

No injuries were reported in the fires, which began before dawn in the wooded subdivision and were still smoldering by midmorning.

The sign left behind said in red scraggly letters, “Built Green? Nope black!” and “McMansions in RCDs r not green,” a reference to rural cluster developments.

In an alternate universe it was a shady developer or bank looking to get out of having to sell homes in a suddenly very unfriendly market with a quick spray painted sign to throw the blame ELFs way.

Whoever did this is a dumbass, especially if they try to claim they did it for the environment. Torching a bunch of big homes releases all sorts of crazybad pollutants into the air. I don’t understand the logic of lighting fire to a development that was actually taking a step towards being green and either way you know a new home will be built on the lot after they bulldoze away the charred wood and ash.

Stupid eco-arsonists.

Link [Huffington Post]

Low Carbon Man Lives Like a Homeless Bum for the Environment

Environmentalists have a hard enough time convincing the world that we’re not a bunch of dirty tree hugging hippies without guys like Ben Clowney, aka Fair Trade Man, aka Low Carbon Man, mucking it up for us.

Ben first got on the green radar with his bid to eat only Fair Trade food for two weeks. Now he’s living in a tent in the parking lot of his office and taken the new name of Low Carbon Man. His goal to to cut his carbon footprint by 95% by living in the tent and using wind up electronics for communicating. Basically, he’s living like a homeless bum.

I don’t think his example is what we need to be celebrating. Of course someone can cut their carbon footprint by living in a tent down by the river for a few weeks. That’s not a challenge that most of us can and will take up. We need to show people how they can live in real houses with heat and electricity and running water without destroying the earth to do it. Low Carbon Man is just muddying the green waters with his homeless antics.

Link [Treehugger]

The Department of the Interior Arrests a Protesting Greenpeace Polar Bear

Why do the Feds suck so much? They make us take our shoes off when we fly, tap into our phone conversations illegally, and arrest our protesting polar bears.

Wait, wha?

Yup, the Department of Interior (also known as the Department of Buzzkill) had a peaceful protester dressed as a polar bear arrested in front of their Washington, DC headquarters.

Here’s what Greenpeace has to report about the whole affair:

A Greenpeace activist was arrested today for peacefully protesting the Bush Administration’s delay in issuing a final Endangered Species Act listing for the polar bear due to global warming. The activist, dressed in a polar bear suit, initiated a vigil by sitting in a paddleboat in a park pond in front of the Department of Interior.
While the Department of Interior is dragging their feet on protecting polar bears, they are moving full steam ahead on plans to drill for oil in prime polar bear habitat. New oil leases are opening up in the Chukchi Sea and oil companies are lining up quickly to obtain licenses to drill. A fifth of the remaining Arctic polar bears depend on Chukchi Sea ice in their hunt for food.

In December of 2005, Greenpeace and two other conservation groups sued the Bush administration when it missed its first legal deadline to respond to the petition for an endangered species listing. On December 27, 2006, the Service announced its proposal to list the species as “threatened” and had one year to make a final listing decision. The legal deadline for doing so was January 9, 2008.

Here’s the video of the takedown.

Swing over to the Greenpeace blog and read the whole story.

Link [Greenpeace] via Boing Boing