Articles by Sarah K. Burkhalter

Wal-Mart boss gets some tips from the Prince of Wales

Here is a story about Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott seeking greenie advice from the Prince of Wales. Any attempt on my part to summarize the tale wouldn't be nearly as good as the article itself, so I offer you the best tidbits of blunt British reporting. I love me some British.

The Times on Wal-Mart:

Mr Scott is desperate to transform the image of the monolithic retail organisation, which has a history of building huge superstores on the edge of towns on greenfield sites and squashing competition with an aggressive pricing policy.

The Times on the Prince of Wales:

[A] champion of green causes whose own lavish lifestyle often comes in for criticism.

The Times on Charles' twitterpation with Scott:

The Prince, who is acutely aware of the bad public relations profile of Wal-Mart, decided to go ahead with the meeting because it was a rare chance to meet the head of such a large company.

The Times on why the Prince shouldn't have been so twitterpated:

When Wal-Mart took over Asda [the second-biggest retailer in Britain] in 1999 it withdrew from Business in the Community, which is headed by the Prince and which seeks to introduce good corporate practice in all sizes of companies.

Apparently Scott and the Prince just talked and made out and stuff. No word on what tidbits of wisdom the Prince actually provided -- if you know what I mean. Incidentally, Wal-Mart, while making steps in the environment department, still sucks at taking care of its workers.

Concept gym floats on the Hudson River.

In response to the "silly question" asked of Umbra about human-powered gyms, alert reader Erin B. directed us to architectural visionary Mitchell Joaquim.

Enter the Human-Powered River Gym For New York City, the name of which gives all the basic information about it, the pictures of which are worth a thousand words. Or at least the 167 words of this post.

As writes Joachim:

This training protocol will exploit the inherent disequilibrium of floatation devices.  Often the average urbanite exercising at the gym performs controlled repetitive single plane movements using industrial fitness equipment.  All of this energy is summarily dissipated and ultimately exhausted for the sake of a single individual's wellbeing.  Other potentials exist to harness this vast human expenditure of caloric energy.

Translation: Running on the treadmill is boring and pointless. Exercising in a pod in the middle of the Hudson River is awesome!

The concept for this water-purifying, commuter-hauling, calorie-burning bundle of clean energy won third place in New York Magazine's Create a Gym competition.

EPA set to test toxics on humans.

This NRDC press release is vague but ominous:

More humans are about to become lab rats for the pesticide industry, according to a leaked copy of a rule due to be finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency later this week.

This even though the EPA recently released stricter regulations on testing toxics on humanfolk.

Said an NRDC attorney:

EPA is giving its official blessing for pesticide companies to use pregnant women, infants and children as lab rats in flagrant violation of a new federal law cracking down on this repugnant practice. There is simply no legal or moral justification for the agency to allow human testing of dangerous chemicals. None.

Word.

An assessment.

The UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was completed by 1,360 researchers from 95 countries and published last year; a five-volume coda has just been published that "outlines four plausible ways the planet could develop politically, economically, and socially by 2050, and the effect they would have on people and the environment." According to a CSM article:

By 2050, it estimates that the highly global approach - with liberal trade policies, and concerted efforts to reduce poverty, improve education and public health, yet respond reactively to environmental issues - could yield the lowest population growth and the highest economic growth. But the environmental scorecard would be mixed.

In a fragmented world that focuses largely on security and regional markets and takes a reactive approach to ecological problems, economic growth rates are the lowest and the population is the highest of the four pathways.

Two other paths, which place a greater emphasis on technology and a proactive approach to the environment, yield population growth rates somewhere in the middle, and economic growth rates that may be slow at first, but accelerate with time.

Huh. The title of the article is "Forecast for Earth in 2050: It's not so gloomy," but I, living in a highly reactive, security-focused, highly influential country, am skeptical.