April 2009
26 posts
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Study: For Consumers, Green Is Greenwash →
We’re wising up to green-washing, and we’re doing it wisely. Not every ad featuring glossy images of the verdant globe is greeted with full-on skepticism. Put another way, we may be dumb, but we’re not so dumb that we buy GM’s “gas-friendly to gas-free” ad campaign.
Consumers are skeptical about a wave of green advertising even as the overall value of that...
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Finally!
I’ve been working at the CUNY Building Performance Lab for two years and have gotten a lot of blank stares when I explain what we do — improve the energy efficiency of NYC’s commercial buildings through a number of programs. (People usually think of green buildings as new construction — frankly, no new building is going to save the world. It’s improving what...
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Green Apples and Bad Apples: NRDC's Annual 2009... →
A list of environmental winners and losers in New York.
My favorite “Green Apple” is the Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn:
Established by the non-profit organization Added Value with Parks Department cooperation, is one of just a handful of urban farms throughout the city. And 2008 was perhaps its best year ever. The farm is located in Coffey Park, on a 2.75 acre plot that was...
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Eat fresh, eat local →
The Natural Resource Defense Council has a nifty application to find out what’s fresh in your region.
Here’s New York’s annual calendar. The sad news all we have going for us right now are apples, onions, potatoes, and turnips. But neighboring states have asparagus, herbs, lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes (some of which are grown in hothouses).
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Michael Pollan: "A Food Revolution in the Making,... →
I’m creating an Urban Agriculture Study Group at the City University of New York (where I’m on the staff of a green building program) with a couple of crazy-passionate, very inspiring students. One of them went off to Power Shift 2009 and came back excited to change the word through urban farming. But he hadn’t even read Michael Pollan yet, so I set him to work. Lesson One:...
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“Great job, trees. Dirt, you did a good job.”
– Vice President Biden (via notthatkindagay)
Via peterwknox, who writes: “And with that, Happy Earth day everyone.”
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Video: Greening of the American Hard Hat →
Construction workers in South Boston learn the principles of sustainable construction practices. “Everybody said ‘green building,’” one hard-hatted worker remarks, “I said, ‘What do you mean? They’re going to paint this green?”
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“Let’s start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic. More or less,...”
– Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson in “Why Isn’t The Brain Green?”, an examination of why climate change placed at #20 in a Pew Research Center poll “ranking the issues that Americans said were the most important priorities for this year.”
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The "natural" artificial sweetener
“Stevia” is the common name for rebaudioside A, an artifical, no-calorie sweetener that is extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant. Long popular in Japan, the FDA deemed it safe for use in food and drink this past December — after years of lobbying from “large food and drink manufacturers” who sensed ” an eager audience for a sugar substitute perceived as...
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.eco →
The goal of Dot Eco LLC:
.com, .net, .org, … .eco: it feels so natural to have a top level domain for the environmental movement, and yet it still doesn’t exist. Working with Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate protection, our goal is to make this vision a reality.
It seems sort of arbitrary. Why isn’t .org enough? And wouldn’t companies rush to get a .eco domain, taking...
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'Green Revolution' Trapping India's Farmers In... →
As the world’s population surges, the international community faces a pressing problem: How will it feed everybody?
Until recently, people thought India had an answer.
Farmers in the state of Punjab abandoned traditional farming methods in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the national program called the “Green Revolution,” backed by advisers from the U.S. and other countries.
...
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Eco-Dilemma: When Organic Eggs Are Sold In... →
cathyerway:
Any way you cut it, egg packaging just kind of blows. So much waste. I’d like to see clever industrial designers go to task on less-waste versions, or some kind of new system that allows consumers to bring their own baskets to the market… (Pipe dream, perhaps.)
No kidding. The only solution I have is that I bring back my egg cartons to the Coop and get a tiny refund (they reuse them)....
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Empire State Building Plans Environmental Retrofit... →
I learned today from someone from the Clinton Climate Initiative, which helped to facilitate this project, that the paper of record did an excellent job covering this story except for one not-so-small detail: the retrofits will reduce energy consumption a total of 38% by 2013 … not 38% every year, as they reported (which, not incidentally, makes very little sense).
Oh, grey lady, you are...
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2009 Earth Expo at the Bronx Zoo - a showcase of... →
mallisser:
First company: Aquafina.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that bottling water in general is bad for the environment, what with the amount of oil it takes to produce, transport & refridgerate the bottles.
Great point. Read more about the evils of bottled water here. But on a positive note, David de Rothschild is upcycling water bottles for reuse as an...
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WatchThere’s a great article in a recent New Yorker about David de Rothschild’s quest to sail across the Pacific to the East Garbage Patch — an oceanic gyre of floating plastic that’s bigger than Texas — in a sailing boat made from plastic water bottles.
Unfortunately, the article isn’t available online, but this video, in which he and some of his lead designers...
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Economy vs. Environment →
Excerpted from a thought-provoking piece by David Owen in The New Yorker (it’s short; I recommend reading the whole thing):
The world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and...
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An Environmental Brain Drain to D.C. →
During the Bush administration, environmentalists wandered in the wilderness. Now that Washington has suddenly become the promised land, many are leaving their groups and heading to jobs in policy.
I feel like I know half the people cited in the blog post (Van Jones, Cathy Zoi, Jonathan Pershing) — they’re always sending me emails! ;)
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E.P.A. Revisits Position on Dry Cleaning Chemical →
They’ll spend the first 100 days undoing all the damage (and the first 1,000 days wouldn’t be enough).