As you gaze into the night sky this holiday weekend and marvel at the colorful fireworks display exploding before your eyes, give thanks that the founding fathers didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence on February 4, 1776. Fireworks and snowfall, it seems, are a problematic combination. That’s the conclusion of a 2008 study, one of several published in recent years that suggest these awe-inspiring fireworks displays may have unforeseen health and environmental consequences. This very old technology, which has been traced back to China’s Song Dynasty (960-1280 A.D.), has been ... Read More
Green Habits Stay Home on Vacation
July 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
School's out, and many people who diligently bike or take the bus to work have bought their plane tickets for vacation. They may not know or care that flying will dramatically increase their carbon footprint. Using a kind of "moral accounting," people who thriftily save fuel getting to work may feel they've done "their fair share" and can indulge themselves in their time off, says a Norwegian study titled, "Troublesome Leisure Travel." This is the unintended side effect of building compact cities, promoting environmental awareness and telecommuting — three of the most common policies for ... Read More
The Last Mountain: A Scary Movie About … Coal
June 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Last Mountain is scarier than any Saw, Alien or Friday the 13th film ever made. It's a documentary about mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia, starring a group of locals whose environment is slowly turning into toxic sludge and an energy company whose methods are so predatory, they make Wall Street bankers look like acolytes of Mother Teresa. "If someone tried to blow up a mountain in Utah or Colorado, they'd be put in jail. Why is that allowed in West Virginia?" asks environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who figures prominently in the film. "It's because the public does ... Read More
Environmental Footprints May Produce Backlash
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Measuring a person’s ecological footprint or carbon footprint is a popular tool among environmentalists. Many see it as a way to educate people about the damage they inflict on the environment on an everyday basis — information that may prompt them to change their behavior. But newly published research suggests that for many people — perhaps most — the receipt of such data may produce the opposite result. In an experiment described in the journal Social Influence, “Only people who had invested their self-esteem in environmentalism — a strong form of commitment — reacted to ... Read More
Solar Showdown: Are New Solar Power Projects Anti-Environmental?
April 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last December, I flew to Phoenix, rented a car and drove two hours west on Interstate 10 to Blythe, Calif., a sun-baked town of 13,000 on the lower Colorado River surrounded by orange groves and irrigated farmland. In the winter, this area attracts tens of thousands of snowbirds, many of whom park their recreational trailers along dirt roads in the desert and tool around in all-terrain vehicles. I hadn't come to see them, though. I wanted to learn about another new arrival, an international consortium called Solar Millennium LLC, which is building a 7,000-acre solar power generating station ... Read More
Teaching Sustainability Has Benefits for Big Business
April 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Bill Thomas used to be a climate change skeptic, not believing that humans could have influenced the dramatic atmospheric shift, but two weeks in the woods — and chats with scientists — changed his mind. "I remember vividly that first day with Dr. Jess Parker; he showed us a chart of CO2 levels increasing about the time of the industrial revolution," says Thomas, who works for HSBC bank and participated in a 2007 Climate Champions training program. There, a personal epiphany led to a job title change — the former relationship manager for HSBC Technical Services is now group head of ... Read More
As Environment Degrades, Our Well-Being Grows?
April 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Earth's ecosystems are steadily deteriorating thanks to unsustainable practices like overfishing, rainforest clearing and natural gas "fracking." So, wouldn't it follow that human beings around the globe are getting sicker, poorer and less satisfied with their lives? Not so, according to Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, an environmental consultant and part-time lecturer at Montreal's McGill University. In "Untangling the Environmentalist's Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade," published i n the September issue of BioScience, Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues found ... Read More
Cohen’s Nonprofit Helps Hospitals Go Green
December 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Gary Cohen is not a doctor or a nurse. He has never worked in a hospital, and, he admits, he thinks hospitals are kind of scary, in part because both of his parents died in one. But when the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report in the mid-1990s, citing hospital incinerators as the country's No. 1 source of carcinogenic dioxin emissions, Cohen, a longtime environmental activist, simply couldn't abide the irony. How could the industry that existed to heal people be doing so much harm? In 1996, he and colleague Charlotte Brody founded the nonprofit Health Care Without Harm, ... Read More
Putting Sustainability to Music
November 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The tradition of celebrities flitting from cause to cause is a well-engrained meme in the Western pop psyche. But a body of environmentally minded musicians and music industry types, while not abandoning the public face of action, are working to create institutional change behind the scenes. Speaking Friday during the second annual New Noise Santa Barbara conference in California, a collection of businesspeople, artists and a conservation scientist outlined some of the structural improvements, current and speculative, washing over the music biz. The conference is a sort of “South by ... Read More
Smart Money and Green Investments
November 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
There are lots of reasons for going green — 1.5 million of them in California alone. That's the number of jobs that have been created over the past 35 years as a result of the state's energy efficiency policies. Together, they've generated a $45 billion payroll. California jobs in clean transportation, renewable energy, clean air quality, green building construction, energy efficiency and environmental protection have grown 10 percent since 2005, or 10 times as fast as state jobs overall, research shows. It's a trend fueled by volatile prices of oil and gas, increased environmental ... Read More
