Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Environment channel

 

Is Your Greek Yogurt Destroying the Earth?

May 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
greek-yogurt

Your Greek yogurt just might be harming the planet, according to a story at Modern Farmer (which you should all be reading). So, Greek yogurt. You see it everywhere, and you probably even eat it, too. It's healthy and tastes enough like nothing that you can make it taste good. But to make it healthy-enough, there's a menacing byproduct called "acid whey." As Justin Elliott writes: For every three or four ounces of milk, Chobani and other companies can produce only one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt. The rest becomes acid whey. It’s a thin, runny waste product that can’t simply be ... Read More

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The Rise of the Green Burial

May 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
green-burial

After a two-year battle with cancer, Joseph Fitzgerald was determined to leave his final resting place to Mother Nature. On a quiet February day in rural Florida, Fitzgerald's body was carried through the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery on a bamboo stretcher made by family members. In an ecologically approved "green burial," he was laid to rest on a plot of land surrounded by oak trees and Spanish moss he picked out just months before his passing in a grave that was dug by hand just two days prior. Green burial options have become a small but growing trend in the U.S. funeral industry, ... Read More

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The Deluge Continues

April 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
great-rift-valley

East Africa’s largest economy is about to become a major oil producer, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The U.K. oil giant Tullow estimates that Kenya’s Great Rift Valley area—known as the "Cradle of Mankind" due to the discovery there of the earliest known human remains—could yield 10 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the country for three centuries. Production remains years away; officials first hope to build a $5 billion network of pipelines to the nation’s Indian Ocean coast in order to facilitate shipping to, notably, China, India, and other Asian countries. With ... Read More

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The Invisible Sea Creatures Worth More Than Uranium, Silver, and Kobe Beef Combined

April 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
elver

There is something happening in Maine, which is notable in itself because, well, Maine. But it's also notable because it involves Native Americans, the government, and obviously lots of money. Oh, and these crazy-expensive, glass-colored baby eels. So, these eels. They're called elvers, and in North America they're usually born near the Bahamas and then carried up the East Coast—as far north as Canada—by currents. The Economist says they "look rather like clear noodles." They're worth about $2,600 a pound. For reference: uranium is around $42.25 per pound, silver $445 per pound, ... Read More

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Germany Unplugs Nuclear Power, Doesn’t Plug in Anything Else

April 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Two years after deciding to phase out nuclear power, Germany's government just reported that it is still producing more energy than it needs. Europe's largest economy has suffered no shortfalls in electricity supply and quadrupled its energy exports to neighbors compared to 2010—before the phase-out. That's according to Germany's state statistical service. Before the drawdown, German nuclear plants represented 20-25 percent of the country's electricity supply. Solar and wind alternatives, meanwhile, are not yet online in sufficient force to take up the shortfall. The lights, however, have ... Read More

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Is That Plastic in Your Trash a Hazard?

March 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: RECHITAN SORIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Plastic has taken its lumps of late. Plastic bags are being chased from store checkouts around the world. Bisphenol A, or BPA, in plastic containers has been linked to a Pandora’s box of hormonal and genetic problems. And the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans each have a gigantic soupy concoction of plastic waste at their centers—the Pacific and Atlantic have one such patch in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Despite this, the world’s general attitude to plastic has been pretty cavalier. And since we’re not sweating the advent of peak oil as much, at least not in North ... Read More

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The Deluge

March 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: CHRISTOPH MORLINGHAUS)

OIL SEEPING TO THE SURFACE of the lazy Kern River, just north of Bakersfield, California, first caught James Elwood’s attention in 1899. The state was in the midst of an oil boom, and Elwood wanted in on the action. He rounded up a few relatives, got some picks and shovels, chose a patch of sun-baked earth near the river seep, and started digging. Forty-odd feet down, they switched to an auger, and punched down another couple of dozen feet. Oil—trapped in the stone’s pores for millions of years—began oozing into the crude well. The strike made the front page of the local ... Read More

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Barbie Saves Borneo

February 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Greenpeace tags Mattel headquarters in a still from one of their videos protesting the toy company's association with Indonesian paper producer Asia Pulp and Paper

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor (remember them?) highlights an unlikely success story for environmental organizations, and a lesson in "market based" political campaigns: ...Paper – so ubiquitous you only really notice it when it's not there, has been coming at a horrific cost – the annihilation of the richest, most biologically diverse rain forests on the planet by a sprawling company with over $4 billion in annual revenue that you've probably never heard of: Asia Pulp & Paper Co. Ltd. (The company says it's worth about $10 billion.) But this month, if the company is ... Read More

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The Cheapest Way to Fight Climate Change? Block Out the Sun

September 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

This summer, the volume and extent of arctic sea ice fell to the lowest level on record; America experienced one of the hottest seasons in the last century; and the United Nations issued warnings about a coming world food crisis that could be catastrophic for tens of millions of people across the globe. All this, argues Bill McKibben, the patron saint of environmental soothsaying, is the New Normal. So what’s a world to do as we get increasingly hotter, more extreme weather events? Block out the sun, of course. Geoenginnering is the strange, far-from-perfect, science of deliberately ... Read More

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Consider the Crawdad

September 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Procambarus clarkii

Recently dubbed the “ultimate survivor” by British biologists, the Louisiana red swamp crawdad and its globe-trotting adventures have made it the poster crustacean for pluck in the face of adversity. As legends go, the American export, a Gulf Coast native, first landed in Africa in the 1960s. Despite harsh conditions, food scarcity, and fierce predators, the swamp crawdad thrived—and today boasts progeny across the continent. In these challenging social and economic times, the crawdad’s superior coping skills have caught the attention of scientists the world over. Herewith, the ... Read More

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