The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) should get props for constantly pushing conservation and eco friendly approaches to water use. Building on that history is their new Our Water Our World (OWOW) program that has much practical informaiton to help you build safer, water conscious front & back-scapes. Another handy dandy link for you Californians is this Nifty 50 PDF that has 50 great, native choices to consider when building real local looking gardens.
All water eventually leads to the ocean, and every bit of whatever that is so casually flushed away does not simply disappear. Your choices echo on and on, sometimes in really disturbing ways. Here is one of the latest updates on Oceanic Dead Zones – something most of us hear about from time to time, perhaps in a 30 second spot on the news or a small blurb box in the local market rag. Sure, maybe large scale industrial & agricultural pollution IS the main culprit here, but you look at the 20 LB bag of nitrogen fertilizer in your garage for your lawn, hell look at your damn lawn, and you think about all the water, fertilizer and pesticides you dump there, that I have dumped there, and you ask yourself is it worth it?
So its 4/22 and everything has gone green in some sort of weird global St. Patrick’s Day redux. Don’t get me wrong, I love Earth day – but if I get an Earth Day greeting card from the Hallmark store, complete with 82% post consumer waste paper and soy based ink, I will have a frakin fit.
Commercialization is as pervasive as gravity, and it is one of the many threats and opportunities to global sustainability, and global sustainability is the holly grail we all need to be looking for here. Commercialization is a threat in the sense that it allows every snake oil salesman out there to slap “GREEN” and “ECO” on whatever product they are shilling for to squeeze a few more dollars out of your pockets. I have seen it with the Organic movement in food labeling, reducing the word so badly that it really is impossible to know what it means when you see it on some random whatever at your local market. Green, Eco and other foot soldiers of the lexicon going the same way, so the burden is going to be on you, the consumer, as it always is.
But commercialization is an opportunity as well, because unless sustainable principles of living, eating, building; unless these principles get blown out on a global scale we are all just spinning our wheels. Concrete with high concentration of fly ash content needs to simply be the expected option when building 100 story buildings or replacing your driveway – not an unusual “green” feature. High efficiency lighting needs to be part of the building codes of every community, and newer and better technologies, next generation bulbs without the toxic issues surrounding CFLS need to be imagined, invented and mass produced to the point where that is what you have in the local hardware store, not just an end display of “Eco” products. People need to get filthy rich doing this – unless we manage to replace capitalism as the foundation of the global economy.
Which is not a bad thought, but practically speaking I do not see it happening soon enough for us to make the deep changes we must to survive. So we have to use whats right in front of us to make it happen – and that means those sales types in their organic cotton shirts I was just talking about. You need to be rough with these guys. When one of them tells you its green, you have to say, Why? How? It is a semantic battle as much as a push for better insulation, and let me tell you something, were losing. If we lose the battle for the language of the movement, we cede the high ground. Define or be defined. Do you want some nationalist freako Bush loving totalitarian telling you what “Earth Day” is all about?
When faced with the vastness of our world, its complexity, I am almost daily reminded by how little I am aware of. We may live in the greatest country on Earth, but that does not shelter us from deep environmental tragedy. What, for example, is the connection between something as ubiquitous as your light switch with your community, your state, your country…your world?
The 2009 Goldman prizes for Grassroots Environementalism have been announced. Honoring 6 individuals from the 6 inhabited continents, the prize recognizes “a group of fearless grassroots leaders taking on government and corporate interests and working to improve the environment for people in their communities.”
Real grassroots achievements, not things like last weeks bullshit “tea parties” hosted by Fox News, but dedicated, local community activists working on local problems that touch global lives…this is what the Goldman Prizes salute. The achievements of true grassroots leaders like Maria Gunnoe demand not only recognition, but also admiration.
Maria has lead the fight against mountaintop removal – a practice of literally blowing up mountains to harvest the coal beneath them. To date close to 500 mountains have been blown up; the millions of tons of toxic debris dumped into the Appalachian watershed in the form of valley fills as casually as someone throws a plastic water bottle into a garbage can.
Maria has defended her great state of West Virginia and the Appalachian mountains because she loves her home and cannot stand idly by while the rest of us destroy it by our collective indifference, but her efforts have come with great personal cost:
“Observers confirm that mine managers point to Gunnoe as an enemy of mine workers and their jobs, and have encouraged acts of harassment. Gunnoe has received numerous verbal threats on her life, and her children are frequently harassed at school. Gunnoe’s neighbors recently overheard people planning an arson attack on her home. Her daughter’s dog was shot dead, and “wanted” posters of Gunnoe have appeared in local convenience stores…”
Her “crime”? Pointing out the catastrophic environmental damage done to her home by corporate profit whores bowing at the altar of the dollar, environment and community be damned. But her environment, her community, is also ours. And the damage done belongs to us all. As Maria says, “when you flip the switch on there is a 52% chance you are destroying the water, air and land of where I live.”
Kelly Moore has been kicking around a new line of Zero VOC paints – I bought a few gallons of the Green Coat Line (I Have been using the Low-VOC EnvriCoat line for a few years now) and its seems pretty good. Fairly low cost, $17.33 a gallon with my commercial discount – seemed to work just fine. KM also has a line called “Yolo” I have not used, but props of some sort for a nice sustainable display in the store, complete with Soy Based ink, FSC certified little brochures – I am guessing they are a third party selling their paint through KM, but I am not 100% on that. Anyhoo seems worth a whirl though I have not myself, but if anyone has leave a note. One thing I finally figured out was what exactly some of these mysterious VOCs are – I always new formaldhyde was one, that crap seems to be everywhere, and amonia, but you can also add to the list ethylene glycol and crystalline silica – though for me, the non chemist guy, crystalline silica does not seem particularely horrid. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
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