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Not your father’s backyard garden

Is there an urban, suburban, or peri-urban garden in your community, where you can sustainably produce or buy fresh local produce? Well, I think there should be, and I'm not alone.

As part of my interest in "eating local," I have embarked on a mission to try to increase the amount of sustainable agriculture in my own neighborhood. Since I live on an island (admittedly a rather large one called Long Island), I would include the whole thing as my neighborhood, but the west end has already got a big head-start and the east end hasn't yet become as "well developed," so I'm going to concentrate a little narrower and stick to my home county, Nassau.

Demanding action on elementary school below coal slurry pond

Gristmill readers have heard before about Marsh Fork Elementary school, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, perched about 300 feet downhill from a massive, leaking coal refuse dam holding back billions of gallons of toxic coal slurry (click below the fold for a picture). As we speak, a group of about 60 activists has occupied the […]

But aren’t those things mutually exclusive?

A hopeful Friday note: a significant downloadable report (PDF) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It was just brought to my attention, but it's from 2004. Its message bears repeating: energy efficiency/technologies have the potential to dramatically reduce energy use while supporting economic growth.

This European agency estimates that the E.U. could accommodate a 65 percent increase in energy services by 2050, yet simultaneously use two-thirds less energy than today. In the U.S., the estimate is that we could reduce energy demand to one-sixth of our use today through more efficient technologies.

NRDC report on military and sea habitats

The interplay between the U.S. military and the environment is fascinating. On land, many military policies have actually been beneficial to the environment -- the military has been a good steward of many endangered habitats.

Out at sea, the reality is not quite as good. The sonar systems employed by the Navy are increasingly implicated as a source of major damage to marine mammals from whales to dolphins, as this new NRDC piece outlines. This issue will continue to heat up and should be watched closely.

Brown to make green

NYT has a story today about some prominent "green-tech" venture capitalists who are investing in fossil-fuel development, making them more "brown-tech."

Defense of this muddying of the green-tech profile rests on our collective worship of the profit motive ("I'm here to make the kind of green my limited partners can spend"). But what made me laugh out loud (even as my stomach was turning) was this quote by Joseph Lacob, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, which is investing heavily in Terralliance, an oil and gas exploration company: "If we can improve the efficiencies of the oil and gas exploration, in some ways that's a green message as well."

Please, please please tell me how expansion of oil and gas development is a "green message"?

is a smart guy.

… was great on the Daily Show:

Cap-and-trade has ugly local effects

Because there is always a short end of the cap-and-trade stick, the concern about concentrating emissions is not theoretical:

Defense in the NYT

A letter to the editor in today’s NYT: Discussions and action on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions anywhere and everywhere in the world are hugely important. But when referring to electricity and natural gas use at Mr. Gore’s Tennessee home, it’s unreasonable to contrast them with use in an “average” American home. Obviously anyone […]

Before and after shots of mountaintop-removal in Google Earth.

Back in January, Grist's InterActivist column featured John Amos, the head of SkyTruth. SkyTruth uses satellite photos and digital mapping technologies to reveal what is difficult to see from the highway: just how exactly we're changing our planet. Seeing a clearcut or a mine from a bird's-eye perspective often adds a visceral dimension to an otherwise rather abstract-seeming issue.

One especially useful application for this sort of imagery: showing the extent of the havoc wrought by companies doing mountaintop-removal mining. Recently a coalition of Appalachian grassroots organizations, ILoveMountains.org, released a series of overlays for Google Earth showing "before" and "after" landscapes in several heavily-mined regions.

What really boggles my brain is that some of the mine footprints are visible in a view of the entire eastern half of the United States.

The Google Earth file is available here. A tutorial on how to download and use Google Earth to view the overlays is here.

Fearmongering hippies!

Damn liberal media.