Photo by eric lynch.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling a favorite gem of eco-advice out of the archives each week. With Memorial Day weekend approaching, we thought it was time to revisit how to be properly patriotic. From Seattle reader Anne B.:

“Like any proud American, I want to fly our flag 24 hours a day to show my reverence for this awesome country. I am torn, though, because section 6a of the Flag Code requires the flag to be lit up during hours of darkness and this conflicts with my desire to cut back on my energy use. Can this rule be ignored in the name of the environment?”

Umbra reads Anne’s flag its rights, wonders if Seattle’s gloomy weather rains on Anne’s parade more than the night sky, and ceremoniously suggests a solution that will keep her flag basking in glory as long anyone is looking. Read on for the full Umbra answer.

Find more of Umbra’s pearls of wisdom here.

It’s great when celebrities get the green bug and decide they want to use their fame to tell people “hey, this climate change thing? It’s a problem.” But guys, GUYS, as much as we appreciate the support, we’re REALLY going to need you not to pull stunts like the one will.i.am just did: showing up to a meeting about climate change in a goddamn gigantic helicopter.

The rapper was paying a visit to climate change expert Myles Allen, who apparently is not as exasperated about this as we are. I do believe that, as Allen put it, will.i.am is “committed to the issues.” He’s written a whole song about this stuff! But. BUT. Riding in a helicopter and then BIKING to your meeting? Does not make sense. Sure, sure, every little bit counts. But that little bit of carbon you saved by biking was pretty much made irrelevant by the gigantic pile of pollution that helicopter dumped into the air.

This is great fodder for right-wingers: In its coverage of this story, the Free Beacon attached the epithet “eco-hypocrite” to the rapper and noted that he is “a max donor to the Obama administration, which has focused on green energy production as a way to mitigate climate change, despite the fact that green energy projects are disastrous for many endangered species.” Ha ha, these lefty greenies, right? They don’t know which way their heads are screwed on, riding helicopters even though they believe in global warming and supporting clean energy even though they like animals! They are crazy and therefore destroying the planet to squeeze oil out of it is sane! WILL.I.AM DO NOT ENCOURAGE THESE PEOPLE.

And for us, here at Grist List? Stunts like this make it harder for us to do our jobs. With all due respect, will.i.am, we need to be able to make fun of Chris Christie for tooling around in a helicopter without feeling like hypocrites for not making fun of you.

Photo by Steve Ryan.

It’s always nice when someone writes an article so you don’t have to. In this case it was New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who has been doing the thankless job of writing about the health risks of toxic chemicals in our environment, as well as the politicization of the regulatory process that’s supposed to be in place.

From arsenic in chicken feed to cancer-causing chemicals to endocrine disruptors, Kristof has given new visibility to a critical issue: how toxic chemicals affect us, and how reluctant our government has been to protect us.

Kristof’s latest tale involves flame retardants, and is inspired by this knockout multimedia investigative series on the subject from the Chicago Tribune. These chemicals — various flavors of a group known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — are everywhere and in everything, from carpet padding to furniture to baby toys to consumer electronics to dust (yes, dust).

As a result, PBDEs are in our blood. This is a problem because PBDEs are known endocrine disruptors, with growing evidence of links to the trifecta of cancer, fetal defects, and reproductive problems. A 2005 study found significant levels of PBDEs in all U.S. blood samples it tested, compared to samples from 1973, which had undetectable levels of PBDEs.

What happened between 1973 and now? Kristof’s column reads:

It turns out that our furniture first became full of flame retardants because of the tobacco industry, according to internal cigarette company documents examined by The Tribune. A generation ago, tobacco companies were facing growing pressure to produce fire-safe cigarettes, because so many house fires started with smoldering cigarettes. So tobacco companies mounted a surreptitious campaign for flame retardant furniture, rather than safe cigarettes, as the best way to reduce house fires.

Big Tobacco used every tool in its toolbox — including creating fake interest groups, finding doctors to make up horror stories, and manipulating data. That last bit is important because, as it turns out, there is virtually no evidence that PBDEs in the levels used in furniture and other products actually, you know, retard flame. In other words, all risk, no reward. And our government stood by and let it happen.

These kinds of stories are starting to get depressingly familiar. Meanwhile, the changes we might be wreaking on our bodies from exposure to these chemicals are only now being explored.

Making matters worse, there is now growing evidence that health effects from toxic chemical exposure can last generations. A study published in February on PLoS ONE found that exposure to a set of common endocrine-disrupting chemicals (including bisphenol-A, phthalates, and dioxin) in one generation of rats can cause reproductive problems in those animal’s great-grandchildren. Yikes! And now the same scientists just came back for more.

In a new study [PDF] published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Texas and Washington State University found that exposing rats to the common fungicide vinclozolin (still used by some farmers to control blight) caused changes in physiology, behavior, and metabolic activity in their descendants three generations removed. In other words, it’s affecting the rats’ brains for generations — which leads not just to change in their bodies but in their behaviors, including an increase in anxiety. All from an exposure generations ago. If further research bears this result out, it’s an ominous prospect.

Now, as one of the scientists involved in the study assured me in an email exchange, this work is not a risk assessment (as it happens, vinclozolin is declining in use) — it’s rather an examination of epigenetic changes these chemicals can cause at high enough exposures.

But he also observed to me that “many other environmental compounds promote these types of phenomena.” He also suggested that “future science and policy needs to consider such phenomena and mechanisms.” Um. Yeah.

The point is that we don’t know half of what these chemicals might be doing to our bodies. And now we’re learning that the changes they cause may have consequences beyond ourselves and our children, persisting generations after the chemical exposure occurred. If that’s not enough to scare us into action, including more aggressive regulation of toxic chemicals, I don’t know what is.

How the rich live in Aspen.

The exclusive resort town of Aspen, Colo., has an international reputation for high-end service and a stunning landscape of pristine mountains, all configured to welcome wealthy tourists. Like many communities in the U.S., Aspen depends on low-wage immigrant labor to fuel its service economy. Also like many communities in the U.S., Aspen passed a resolution calling on the federal government to restrict both documented and undocumented immigration in order to preserve the economic and cultural integrity of the nation.

But Aspen’s resolution, passed unanimously by the city council in 1999, was different from many others around the country in that it played up environmental concerns as well, providing green cover for the demonization of low-income immigrants from Latin America.

Shortly after its passage, city council member Terry Paulson — a longtime immigration critic and self-avowed environmentalist — announced that he would be working on a statewide campaign to “promote overpopulation awareness” and declared, “If we address population and do something about it, everything else will fall in line.”

When we traveled to the area, we found two very different Aspens. The dominant, commercial Aspen was an idyllic, post-industrial refuge with stretch Range Rover limousines, toy poodles with diamond-encrusted collars, world-class ski slopes, and Hollywood celebrities who spend just a few weeks a year in multimillion-dollar single-family homes.

How immigrants live outside of Aspen. (Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism)

The other Aspen is a place where foreign-born laborers from Latin America work in low-status, often dangerous, jobs for low wages with few benefits. In some cases, they drive 60 to 140 miles round-trip daily to get to those jobs because they can’t afford to live near Aspen’s core. Many of these workers live in deplorable housing conditions, including campers and cars “down valley” in trailer parks along the highway in dangerous flood zones.

Aspen’s goal is to be a “city beautiful,” a beacon of sustainability. Unfortunately, its path toward that goal has been paved with nativism and exclusion. The town’s resolution reflects the longstanding link between nativism and environmentalism in the U.S. As Aspen council member Tom McCabe cautioned, “The planet’s a finite resource … We can’t indefinitely welcome people and expect to maintain our quality of life.”

And this is precisely the point: Many Aspenites and others in similarly privileged communities across the U.S. want to protect their quality of life, which requires resources and wealth derived from ecosystems and labor from around the world.

While the city council put the blame on immigrants, Aspen has continued to allow construction of rarely inhabited vacation homes made of materials from across the globe, requiring year-round maintenance and energy usage. One local who looked after homes while absentee owners were out of town told a journalist that most of the properties he managed were empty 45 weeks of the year. “Yet they had to stay heated so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and their swimming pools, as a rule, were heated continuously — not drained — so they’d be ready for use when the owners arrived.” One Aspen resident and multimillionaire financier dug up and hauled away an entire hillside so that he could more easily “keep an eye on his horses.” He thought this was perfectly reasonable for his new “cabin” — a 7,500-square-foot luxury home that sits on a 157-acre lot.

So who is actually causing the most environmental harm?

Read the authors’ book, The Slums of Aspen.

For more than three decades, scholars have presented evidence that low-income, immigrant, and minority communities face greater threats from environmental problems than other groups. While these studies reveal the hardships associated with environmental inequality, fewer studies consider the flip side of that reality: environmental privilege. Environmental privilege results from the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power, enabling some groups to enjoy near-exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as parks, mountains, and open lands. Environmental privileges accrue to the few while environmental burdens confront the many.

We have a more optimistic vision for the future, arrived at after talking with immigrant workers about their hopes and dreams for the community, and after learning about the work being done by local citizen-activists. We came away from that beautiful place with a belief that we can equitably care for both ecosystems and humankind, creating a society where social and environmental justice, inclusivity, and democracy can all thrive.

Also check out:

• Stephen Colbert mocks group that blames immigrants for climate change
• Is the environmental crisis caused by the 7 billion or the 1%?

There are all kinds of futuristic-looking energy-efficient light bulbs on the market — not just the traditional piggy-tail model, but liquid-cooled bulbs that look like glass jellyfish, and bulbs with gills like a mushroom or fins like a Cadillac. But for our money, this wooden bulb by artist Ryosuke Fukusada is the most beautiful energy-efficient light fixture going. (And yes, it really is a light fixture.)

The bulb isn’t solid wood, as it appears — it’s a thin wooden shell that’s opaque when the LED is off, but translucent when lit from within. Because efficient LEDs put most of their energy into creating light, not heat, the wood isn’t in danger.

If you like this concept, incidentally, there’s also a wood-block digital clock that operates on the same principles, and ReadyMade magazine has even printed instructions on how to DIY it. Maybe a similar approach could apply if you wanted to roll your own wooden LED bulbs.

Like other stuff that is good for your health (not smoking, sobriety, living slow, and dying old), bike helmets are uncool. But you can’t really enjoy your coolness with a giant crack in your skull. How do you protect your noggin without sacrificing your mojo? Swedish company Hovding has the answer: airbag bike helmets.

Unless it’s called upon to perform, this helmet stays safely stowed in a futuristic-looking black collar that you can pretend is a scarf. (Hovding also offers printed shells that go around the collar, to make it even more chic.) But if you get hit, presto, it bursts open like a popcorn kernel:

(Fast-forward to 00:36 for the slow-motion version.)

Hovding’s been working on the Invisible Bike Helmet since 2005 — Grist even wrote about it years ago. At that time it only came in black and could only be purchased by Swedes, but now Hovding is preparing to launch the product in the United Kingdom. It’s possible to order it online, but be warned, you will pay a price not to wear a geeky helmet. And that price will be $560, before tax and shipping.

Over the last eight (!) years at Grist, I have written a great deal about what humanity is doing wrong — in particular, those bits of humanity that live in the United States, and even more particularly, those humanoids who run, fund, or otherwise influence the federal government, known these days as the World Headquarters of Fail. I’ve covered climate change, resource shortages, air pollutants and other unpriced externalities, political dysfunction, bad policy, media irresponsibility, social alienation, and bad television. It’s been a veritable Festival of Fail.

Meanwhile, over the last eight (seriously, eight?) years, I have also frequently mentioned the intense need these days for positive visions of the future — what is being done right, and could be done right, rather than just what’s going wrong. Indeed, a recent post concluded thusly: “In the meantime, the job is to define a new American way of life for young people, so when they take over they won’t view Walmart as akin to church.”

A couple of years ago, I started agitating for Grist to start painting that picture of a positive future. I wanted us to move beyond the tales of defilement and degradation that readers have come to expect from “environmental media” and into something more forward-looking, wide-ranging, optimistic, and, well, helpful. I even wrote a rather turgid internal memo on the matter, the theme of which was that Grist should turn its gaze toward “a future that makes sense.” OK, we as a society are doing it wrong. What would it mean to do it right, to stay within carbon and other resource limits while enjoying a high quality of life?

Since then, in my humble opinion, Grist has done fantastic work in this vein. We’re covering bike culture, livable neighborhoods, urban agriculture, sharing economies, distributed energy, and many other ways people in America today are trying to live better, more sustainable lives. There’s much more that we could do, but we’re moving in the right direction.

It has come to my attention, however, that even as I advocate for a bright-green focus on the future, I continue right on with my own dark-green bitching and moaning about the dysfunctions of the present; indeed, that I’m a giant hypocrite.

In that spirit, my editor has challenged me to put up or shut up on the future-that-makes-sense business. So I’m going to start writing about it regularly, at least once a week or so. I expect to be groping my way forward in the dark (even more than usual!), so my hope is that readers will approach the noodling in a spirit of charity and be moved to join in the discussion.

I’ll be gathering this stuff up in bits and pieces over the next little while, but just a few scene-setting comments.

Young People These Days (YPTD) in the U.S. are emerging from college and starting their adult lives in grim circumstances: a terrible economy, high unemployment, huge student loan debt, stagnant middle-class wages, rising health-care costs, and widening income inequality. The notion that America is in decline has been rather exaggerated, but there’s no denying the cloud hanging over the younger generation.

A great deal of it can be explained by the state of the economy, which affects poll numbers on all sorts of other issues. But I believe there’s also something deeper going on, a sense among young people that America has lost a sense of its collective aspiration. It has lost its future.

There’s an intense conservative grassroots movement in the U.S. fighting for an imagined 1950s status quo. The left in the U.S., such as it is, often seems to be fighting for nothing more than a competing status quo, the late-20th century U.S. welfare state. There is very little shared cultural understanding of what will (or should) come next, even among those subcultures prone to ponder such things.

YPTD — the folks coming up just behind my old ass, basically — represent the first generations who have spent their entire lives online. They are accustomed to radically transparent, egalitarian, meritocratic networks in which any idea (“meme”) can catch on and spread, regardless of the source, in which a geeky kid can have a good idea and almost immediately become famous or rich, in which anyone can learn anything and connect with anyone, in which there is virtually no barrier to entry to becoming a creator or entrepreneur. It is Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere put, literally, into our hands.

When these young people emerge from college into the job market, start building homes and families, or engage in the political system, they encounter a world that is, in many ways, the opposite of the one they grew up in. Our civic institutions are withered, our political institutions bloated, hierarchical, opaque, and acutely responsive to class and ethnic privilege. These institutions, left over from the 20th century, do not make sense to YPTD — especially the vanguard, the cultural creatives.

What are they doing about it? Much of what we think of today as social activism or liberalism grew out of the culture clashes of the ’60s. The counterculture stood outside the gates of the institutions, shouting, marching, and threatening to bring it all down. The backlash has continued ever since.

My sense is that YPTD are not particularly attracted to that model, or to the kind of identity politics that liberalism fractured into afterward. YPTD don’t want to be on the outside looking in. They have spent their lives empowered; they expect to infiltrate institutions and transform them from the inside. They expect to take over. And they don’t seem inclined to join issue-based groups at the same rates as their parents. (The average membership age of the big green groups has been rising for years.) To be online these days is to author an identity through bricolage. Sustainability is a piece of the puzzle for many people, but comparatively few identify as “environmentalists,” partly, I think, because it’s reductionist. I believe in social justice and beauty and humor, but I’m not an -ist for any of them.

Getting to a future that makes sense is not primarily about critique or protest. It’s about imagination, innovation, and hard work. There’s tons of stuff to build. Creating those new social, economic, and technological models does not necessarily look like what we’re used to thinking of as activism, but it is part of the effort, which is far larger than any issue-based movement or lobbying group, larger than politics, larger than any one generation.

I’d like Grist to help illuminate new thinking and new models, spread the success stories, show how various efforts link up. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like. But it will not be “environmental journalism” and Grist won’t be an “environmental website.” But what will it be, and what will we be? I don’t know that there’s a good name for it. I just know it when I see it. There’s something happening out there, something taking shape. We’ll do our best to help it along and bring it to light.

A decade ago, British Columbia had 40 full-time park rangers who monitored 1,000 parks. Today, it only has 10. And they don’t often make it out to faraway parks like the Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park, which is on the southern end of Vancouver Island.

With no one around regularly, it must have been easy for poachers to come into the park and hack away at an 800-year-old red cedar tree. Well, “easy” is relative, because we’re talking about a lot of sawing — this granddaddy cedar was so old, its stump measures almost 10 feet in diameter. But there was so little supervision of the park that the tree thieves could return multiple times to hack at the tree and then haul sections of it away.

Aside from being ethically monstrous, it’s kind of the perfect crime. Cedar’s valuable — a truckload of the stuff could be worth thousands of dollars, the Canadian press reports. And there’s basically no chance the perpetrators will be caught, even though there are real, live Mounties involved:

“There’s not much we can investigate since we have no physical evidence or description of offenders and once wood is removed from the forest, it’s extremely difficult to track where it came from,” [Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Dave] Voller said.

“That’s one of the logistical problems with having a park that’s miles from anywhere, with no one who is on site as far as management goes,” he said.

Man, if Mounties can’t protect trees, WHO CAN?

Q. Dear Umbra,

I have a large collection of CDs from the ’90s and early ’00s. The CDs are stored in a wallet, but I’m not sure what to do with all my CD cases. I guess recycle the plastic and paper separately?

Justin J.
Elmhurst, Ill.

Photo by Vanessa Lynn.

A. Dearest Justin,

Your conundrum is as vexing and pervasive as a Third Eye Blind hit. I’ve given some suggestions for recycling CD cases before, but this time around I have some new material.

First of all, the paper inserts should be easy enough to recycle with your other paper goods, if that’s really the route you want to go. I know many people get sentimentally attached to the liners for the art, lyrics, and what have you. But yes, they’re generally recyclable.

If you wish to recycle the plastic cases, you might have a bit of a tougher go. These are #6 plastic (polystyrene), which may be recyclable where you live — be sure to check with your local authorities. Since #6 is not as wildly popular as, say, Maroon 5 in its heyday, a better bet might be one of several outfits around the country that will recycle these items for you; generally your costs are just for shipping. Check out GreenDisk, which takes all manner of “technotrash,” from iPods to X-rays; CD Recycling Center of America, which has several locations around the country; and CD Recycling Central, based in California, which recycles other e-waste items too.

What happens to your CD cases when you send them off this way? According to Earth 911, they are simply recycled into new plastic items, which we hope will be useful to someone — and then eventually recycled again.

You could also contact your local library to ask whether they need any replacement cases — I see from many discussions online that library patrons are wild and reckless, and CD cases often come back smashed. Many people also recommend posting the cases on a site such as Craigslist or Freecycle. One man’s trash, and all that.

So those are some avenues for you to pursue, Jason. But I have higher aims for you. Because it turns out your fellow music-lovers across the country have devised some very crafty ideas for reusing these relics of our modern music era. [Ed. Note: Fore more on these projects, check out our pretty pictures on Pinterest!] They include:

• photo-related projects such as wall murals, calendars, and towel hook identifiers

• little houses for plants and birds (though the jury’s out on whether birds could or should live in a jewel-toned plastic abode)

• handy desk items such as a notebook or pen and pencil holder

• a simple candle holder or, for the more ambitious, a night light or lamp (one designer even made a CD-case chandelier)

• kid-friendly craft projects like a terrarium, mosaic, or mini-maze

Creative! And we haven’t even gotten into things you can do with the CDs themselves. Boomerang! Shower curtain rods! The mind reels.

Dearest readers, let me know if you give any of these projects a try, or if you have other ideas. Rumors are swirling that 2012 will be the year the music industry gives up on the CD, after 30 years (the first CD, produced in 1982, was ABBA’s The Visitors) and more than 200 billion sold. Whether or not that’s the case, we have certainly bebopped our way into a waste-disposal mess. Let’s be on the lookout for fun ways to reduce this impact and quirkify our habitats.

Semi-charmedly,
Umbra

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling one particularly poignant question or tidbit of eco-advice out of the archives each week. Today, May 18, is Bike to Work Day. After we hung up our helmets and checked out the news cycle, we took a trip down memory lane with this Umbra video classic on commuting by bike. 

What’s that you say? You’re already in your cubicle, miles from your trusty single-speed? We have two more weeks of National Bike Month. Even if you missed the chance to ride with all the cool kids today, there’s still plenty of time to get your fixie fix.

Find more of Umbra’s pearls of wisdom here.