Hi. It’s been a while…
Sent in by Amy Wilkerson (thanks!), The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard, is an entertaining, sobering and often funny look at our consumer economy.
Check it out here.
The Story of Stuff
December 10th, 2007We have achieved ‘Butterfly’
June 27th, 2007
Looks as though the butterfly garden near the hospital has begun to attact winged guests.
Photo by Dan Gianfagna
We have achieved duckling
May 24th, 2007The “Name the Ducks” contest is officially open. (There are eleven little ones.)
Photos by Alex Kogan:
Urban wildlife this weekend
May 23rd, 2007I haven’t seen any of our dozen ducklings yet (but the pigeon chicks hatched — and, believe it or not, pigeons start out fuzzy and yellow). But this weekend there are a lot of chances to get back to Nature with some urban wildlife expeditions in the parks:
If the wildlife of the outer boroughs is a little too wild for you, here in Manhattan there’s a tour of the Highbridge Water Tower, one of the oldest parts of the city’s remarkable water infrastructure. It was built in 1872 to equalize water pressure as water came in from the Croton Aqueduct over the Highbridge itself. (The Highbridge is our oldest remaining inter-borough bridge, 35 years older than the Brooklyn Bridge.)
And hopefully you can see a little bit of wildlife around campus in the near future. In the meantime, courtesy of PaleMale.com, here are some local neighborhood ducklings and hawklings photographed last weekend by Lincoln Karim:
Big Green Taxi, part deux
May 22nd, 2007Hey Max, Mayor Mike must read your posts!
According to CNN, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to announce today (Tuesday) that the entire taxi fleet should be converted to gas-electric hybrid vehicles by 2012.
So says the article:
The ubiquitous New York City yellow cab is going green.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to announce Tuesday that he will order the city’s entire taxi fleet be converted to gas-electric hybrids by 2012, sources close to the mayor told CNN.
According to the sources, Bloomberg will instruct Matthew Daus, the commissioner of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, to begin a cycle of replacement that will see 20 percent replaced each year until all of the city’s approximately 13,000 taxis are hybrids in 2012.
The commission has approved eight models of hybrids for use on city streets. The vehicles include four SUVs - the Toyota Highlander, Lexus RX 400H, Ford Escape and Saturn VUE Green Line - and four four-door sedans - the Toyota Prius, Toyota Camry, Honda Accord and Honda Civic.
Organic Wine Making in Carmel Valley, CA
May 16th, 2007
For the past few days, I had the privilege of spending some time along the Central Coast of California. I attended a wedding in Santa Barbara, and then headed up Highway 1 to the Carmel/Monterey area through the magnificant Big Sur region. As this was my first time visiting the area, I found the scenery to be breathtaking. The sky was a cloudless blue, with some typical fog a few miles off the coast. Simply amazing.
(I regret to say that I did have to fly there in a fuel-guzzling 757, though I’m happy to share with our readership that at least the planes there and back were full!)
Aside from the visual beauty that I experienced, I did have a chance to learn a bit about how some wines are being produced at one of the few “100 percent organic, California certified” vineyards - Heller Estates.
Heller, located in the Carmel Valley east of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterey, utilizes natural methods of grape production and pest reduction.
For pest reduction, Heller installed a dozen or so boxes throughout the 120 acres of vines to house barn owls. The owls are encouraged to take up residence in the boxes to combat gophers, which thrive under vineyards and do signficant damage to vine roots. Gophers thrive on grape vines, and barn owls thrive on gophers.
Heller also uses tiny predatory wasps to eat the eggs of leaf hoppers and mites, two common enemies of grape vines. To sustain the wasps - which do not bite humans - viticulturists have planted Frech prune trees in the vineyard. The vineyard uses organic matter left after the pressing of the grapes for compost, and control weeds by using vineyard spiders. Lastly, they have eliminated fossil fuel use in farming practices by switching to biodiesel. According to the winery:
Heller Estate decided to switch to biodiesel as the safest fuel to use, handle and store, for a healthier, cleaner burning fuel and elimination of dependence on foreign crude oil and the further depletion of the world’s natural resources.”
Congrats to them on their eco-friendly practices.
If you’re wondering, the wine was terrific. I most especially enjoyed their 2006 Chenin Blanc and their 2003 Cachagua Cabernet. Look for it at your local specialty shop, or on the web - www.hellerestate.com.
Thanks to Susanne @ Heller for correcting my vintages!
Greenmarkets talk tonight
May 16th, 2007Food grown locally is rapidly becoming seen as being as important as food grown organically. It’s fresher, it supports local farms over centralized mega-farms, and — maybe most importantly — it saves tremendously on the environmental costs of transporting all that food across the country and around the world, a high price just to get to eat fresh tomatoes in winter.
The cafeteria at Google’s main campus now serves only food harvested within 150 miles (and employees eat free). That’s one thing when you’ve got the Pacific Ocean on one side, and so much of California’s farms and ranches on the other. It’s a little harder to do it here in New York City.
But there are some folks trying to make it easier. Our neighbors over at Upper Green Side have helped bring a greenmarket to our neighborhood that, I believe, will be opening this summer. Greenmarkets are a great way to find fresh locally grown food, and NYC is trying to get more of them, and get more people to shop there.
There’s a talk by Gabrielle Langholtz, the manager of NYC’s Greenmarkets program, at 6:30 tonight at the NY Public Library on 40th St. and Fifth Ave. She’ll be talking about the Greenmarkets of today, and what she’d like to see for the Greenmarkets of tomorrow. More info here
The footprint of flying
May 10th, 2007Most scientists at RU are already living green. We mostly reside in high-population-density apartment towers, we mostly don’t drive. In general, just by living here we are reducing our environmental footprint tremendously.
But one part of the science life where that doesn’t apply is travel: cross-country and international flights to meetings, flying speakers and collaborators in to visit with us here. It’s an essential part of science, but plane travel is simply not green. And there’s not much you can do about that.
An interesting idea has popped up recently, in the form of a little gizmo you can stick on your web browser that shows you the carbon cost of air travel as you’re browsing flights on Orbitz or other airline websites. It’s called “The Real Costs” and it’s a plug-in for the FireFox browser. After you install it, when you search for flights you will see something like:
Right beside the price of the flight in dollars it shows you what that trip costs in carbon dioxide emissions. (The green text, click the image for a bigger version.)
Currently it is cute, but sort of useless, because it calculates carbon simply as a function of distance, making comparison shopping impossible: if you have to fly to LA, you are going to fly to LA, and all this tool does is make you feel guilty about it.
But I think there is real promise for this kind of tool if it took into account other features such as the type of aircraft being flown and the number of passengers per plane usually on that route. If different JFK-LAX flights had different carbon costs, some of us might be willing to pay an extra $20 for a greener flight.
In an age when airlines are turning over every rock to find better ways to compete, tools that help us comparison-shop based on fuel efficiency would be a novel and welcome tactic.
Quack, quack, quack…
May 8th, 2007As reported to me this morning by Alex Kogan, our ducks are back!
The exact location of the nest will be kept closely guarded. Let’s just say it is near the Philospher’s Garden pool…and there are little ones on the way!
Please respect our Mallard mama-to-be’s area so her little ones arrive safely!
Nature’s new climate blog
May 8th, 2007Last week, Nature magazine went on-line with Climate Feedback, a blog dedicated to commentary about climate change, as it appears both in expert scientific articles as well as pop science media coverage.
Their first set of postings have been great, including a brief review of the “hockey stick model” of climate change and its critics, a blurb on a New Phytologist paper that fails to replicate the results of a Nature paper saying that plants release the greenhouse gas methane, and a debunking of a front-page New York Times article that claimed that human-caused global warming has resulted in the shift of plant growing regions by up to two zones:
In a front page article today, the NYT reports on how the National Arbor Day Foundation has updated plant hardiness maps to reflect recent changes in climate. (A plant hardiness map presents the lowest annual temperature as a guideline to what plants will thrive in what climate zones.) The NYT misrepresents understandings of variability and trend and in the process confuse more than clarify.
[The NYT reports]:
Atlanta, which was in Zone 7 in 1990, is now in Zone 8, along with the rest of northern Georgia. That means that areas in the northern half of the state where the average low temperature was zero to 10 degrees Fahrenheit are now in a zone where the average low is 10 to 20 degrees. A scientific consensus has concluded that this warming trend has largely been caused by the human production of heat-trapping gases.
Because the zones span 10 degrees (or 5 degrees in the case of the 1990 USDA map) and the largest change shown on the difference map is 2 degrees, then clearly no location has jumped 2 zones! This is just an error.
More important than this simple mistake is the claim in the NYT that the changes in temperature observed in Atlanta can be attributed to human-caused greenhouse gases. In fact, the IPCC argues that it needs 30 years of records to detect trends, much less make attribution. In fact, the IPCC report just out has reported that the U.S. southeast has actually cooled over the period of record…
It will be extremely helpful to have the imprimatur of Nature behind the debunking of pop science misrepresentations of climate change, and for it to be done in this kind of rapid-response format.
It will also be interesting to see how they manage the conflicts that are sure to arise when editors who oversee the publication of manuscripts on climate change find themselves blogging about those papers, or critiques of those papers. They are already skirting this problem and, so far, so good.
It’s also important to note that Nature has realized that blogs are a critical tool for communicating with a large audience in an engaging way about climate change. But you knew that already, didn’t you?