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Bay Area escapes aerial spraying, for now

A plan to spray Santa Cruz County with synthetic pheromones must be postponed until an environmental review is completed, a county judge ruled Thursday. The spraying, an attempt by agriculture officials to curb the invasion of the crop-gobbling light brown apple moth, was to begin in Santa Cruz County in June and expand to seven […]

Home Depot announces an end to traditional pesticide sales in Canada

For consumers concerned about pervasive toxics in the environment, this has been a very good Earth Week.  Especially if you live in Canada.

Home Depot announced this week that it would stop selling "traditional" lawn and garden pesticides in all its Canadian stores.

The reason? Consumers don't want them anymore. People in Canada seem to have discovered that you don't need to spread poisons around your yard in order to garden. Amazing! A huge part of that awakening is happening because of committed advocates, particularly from the public health community, that have helped lead hundreds of local by-laws in communities around Canada that have ended the use of "cosmetic" pesticides on lawns & gardens.

I am trying to imagine what it would be like to walk into the garden aisle in a big-box home improvement store without the noxious bags of granulated death ... I think I like it.

The bell is tolling in Canada for lawn & garden pesticides. I hope we catch whatever they've got.

The Betty Crocker’s Cookbook of low-carbon living

When I got to college, the best book I bought was a 3-ring notebook-style Betty Crocker's Cookbook. Not adventurous food, but for someone who knew very little about anything concerning food, it was a great first book. It assumes that you are reading a cookbook because you want to know what to do, step-by-step -- instead of just hinting, it lays it out, with pictures and plain language. Great stuff. A couple times a year my wife and I still will ask one another, "What does Betty say to do with these?"

I always think of Betty (and the old How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive) as the epitome of good technical instruction books. They are all about practical information first, with a minimum of wasted words.

Today I found a new one for that list.

Thought of the day: American foreign policy

U.S. foreign policy is extremely opposed to big government. In fact, our rulers will spend huge amounts of taxpayer dollars trying to stir up military coups to impose dictatorships in any countries who try to institute more big government than we approve of.

Jay Leno Earth Day videos

Because I’m a video hu-a and will basically embed anything anybody sends me, I give you this from NBC:

Snippets from the news

• Airline slows down to help climate. • Wal-Mart rations rice. • Nalgene sued for downplaying health risks. • National parks and coal plants may get cozy. • Arctic ice melting faster than anticipated.

Northwest sea lions granted stay of execution

Sea lions all set to gobble their last salmon supper at a Northwest dam have been granted a stay of execution by a U.S. appeals court. Judges granted an injunction, requested by the Humane Society, that a lower court had denied last week. It’s only a partial victory for the Humane Society, however, as the […]

Thoughts on the farm bill and the skyrocketing cost of food

The rising cost of food worldwide is more complex than portrayed in recent articles in The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Like a magician revealing his secrets, the once-invisible farm and food system is drawing scrutiny from the media, policymakers, and the public as we realize how intertwined our farm and food system is with the energy sector and global markets.

But how did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.

Are fixing the climate and the ozone layer mutually exclusive?

A geoengineering scheme to solve climate change could hurt the Antarctic ozone layer, while recovery of the ozone hole could increase Antarctic warming, new research suggests. A study published Thursday in Science decries suggestions to solve climate change by spewing sulfur into the atmosphere, saying that such a scheme would wipe out the Arctic ozone […]

Spendy mercury-free LED bulb supposedly lasts 50,000 hours

Somewhere, in school or on the job, every engineer learns about tradeoffs -- that there is no free lunch, and that, once a design is at all reasonable, gains in one dimension come at the cost of compromises in others.

The shorthand statement of this is the pithy evergreen in design classes: "Good, fast, and cheap. Pick two!"

There's a new bulb out: a 13-watt LED array bulb with an integral diffuser, so you don't see the annoying space-craft look of little tiny rows of LEDs like the first-generation LED lamps offer. It has no mercury, a boon, and lasts about five times longer than its 13-watt compact-florescent competitors, while being much faster-acting and producing a warmer light.

It costs a boatload, at least now ($90). But I still have my first compact florescent bulbs from 1989: huge, heavy ballasts, barely "compact" at all. I'll buy one of these whenever I need a new bulb and gradually switch over all the hard-to-reach spots.

An interesting video comparison with 100-watt incandescent bulbs and 13-watt compact florescent bulbs is available at the link.