We don't need some crazy cool new technology

"Under the 80% scenario, wind power is the single-largest energy source, roughly 35% of electricity, biomass is roughly 20%, solar power (PV and concentrating) is a bit over 10%, as is hydropower, nuclear power and coal hanging in there at just under 10%, with geothermal and natural gas in the low single digits.

The key take-away for me is the same point CP is highlighting:

We don't need some crazy cool new technology or some groundbreaking invention. We aren't waiting on the scientific community to make some breakthrough."

80% Renewable Energy by 2050 is Possible, Just Using Today's Commercially-Available Technology : TreeHugger

"To wound the earth is to wound yourself"

"The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him food, language, and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died… To wound the earth is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.

So, they’re a hybrid of Berkeleyan idealism and indigenous pagan naturalism. Esse ist percipi, to be is to be perceived. And honor thy mother.

There are worse things to be, worse perceptions to sing. As Carl Safina pointed out, most western philosophy (David Hume a notable exception) “hasn’t had the world in mind,” hasn’t appreciated the natural sympathy, the “feeling for the other” that is fundamental to our humanity." Continues: Up@dawn

Children, Citizenship and Environment

Nurturing a democratic imagination in a changing world

"Children growing up today are confronted by four difficult and intersecting challenges: dangerous environmental change, weakening democracies, growing social inequality, and a global economy marked by unprecedented youth unemployment and unsustainable resource extraction. Yet on streets everywhere, there is also a strong, youthful energy for change.

This book sets out an inspiring new agenda for citizenship and environmental education which reflects the responsibility and opportunities facing educators, researchers, parents and community groups to support young citizens as they learn to 'make a difference' on the issues that concern them..."

Children, Citizenship and Environment: Nurturing a democratic imagination in a changing world (Paperback) - Routledge

Commons Law Project

"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics.  This will require a new architecture of “green governance”―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small..."

Commons Law Project

Sustainable solar air conditioning

"During the hot summer months, watching an outdoor sports match or concert can be tantamount to baking uncomfortably in the sun -- but it doesn’t have to be. At the TEDxSummit in Doha, physicist Wolfgang Kessling reveals sustainable design innovations that cool us from above and below, and even collects solar energy for later use."

Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces | Video on TED.com

"Precious little time to act"

Turn off the air conditioning, get in the pool.

"if all the equipment entering the world market uses the newest gases currently employed in air-conditioners, up to 27 percent of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050.
So the therapy to cure one global environmental disaster is now seeding another. “There is precious little time to do something, to act”

In Rising Use of Air-Conditioning, Hard Choices - NYTimes.com

Nobody's an island, say bod-ecologists

"Biologists once thought that human beings were phys­iological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes—pathogens—while at the same time sparing our own tissues.


Over the past 10 years or so, however, researchers have demonstrated that the human body is not such a neatly self-sufficient island after all. It is more like a complex ecosystem—a social network—"

Continues: How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health: Scientific American

Carl Zimmer, Tending the Body's Microbial Garden

The View from Lazy Point

"Safina insists from page one that “we are natural,” that being natural means being forever at risk, and that “the future is by no means doomed.” Wise up, homo sapiens, we can still save ourselves and our compadres on earth if we’ll just grasp that we’re all “facets of the same gemtone.” Like all good naturalists he respects and regenerates with the dawn. His June chapter concludes..."

Continues: The infinitely healing dawn « Up@dawn:

A Year in the Woods

"Moving our family from the New Jersey suburbs to the woods of Maine for a year was a big step. It took planning, perseverance and a willingness to deal with biting insects, no dishwasher, no coffeemaker, no microwave and doing laundry at the laundromat. (Thankfully, the laundromat doubles as the pub.)

But why spend just a year in the woods? Why not longer, or for those less tolerant of black flies, why not just July and August?"

Continues: Making the Most of a Year in the Woods - NYTimes.com

The other side of ecotopia

#endfossilfuelsubsidies "If we act now, it is realistic to imagine trajectories where population growth comes to a halt, consumption becomes sustainable, human-induced global change is kept within manageable limits, and human well-being increases. A failure to act will put us on track to alternative futures with severe and potentially catastrophic implications for human well-being. The longer the delay, the more radical and difficult measures will be needed..."

Population, Consumption Threaten Earth’s Future—Who’s Surprised? | Center for Inquiry

A summer fantasy

Finished the late Ernest Callenbach‘s 1981 fantasy Ecotopia Emerging, the prequel to his earlier Ecotopia and a perfect beach (or redneck pool) read. It’s an amusing page-turner with a dramatically fanciful story of secession in the Pacific Northwest that inspires as much as it entertains, and fuels summery visions of an alternative world not flummoxed by the petro-based codependencies of ours.

It’s satisfying in the same way that Edward Bellamy’s 19th century socialist-utopian classic Looking Backward was: for the briefest tantalizing moment it allows readers like me to believe we could get there from here, and may even  constructively motivate some of us to positive action. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” It’s a nice tune to hum on a summer’s day, at least...(continues: Ecotopia emerging in the back yard « Up@dawn)

The Beauty of the Largest Solar Farm in the World

"Out in the Mojave Desert in California, a power plant that could eventually generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes hopes to get its moment in the sun soon. When the $2.2 billion solar thermal plant known as Ivanpah is completed — sometime next year, if all goes according to plan — nearly 350,000 mirrors on 3,600 acres will reflect light onto boilers. Steam will power turbines, which will generate electricity that flows to California homes. It will be the largest such plant in the world..."

The Beauty of the Largest Solar Farm in the World - Slide Show - NYTimes.com

Buddhism engaged & active

“What’s affecting the world is the unhealthy state of mind — culture, environment and society,” a teacher reminded us: “violence, horror, bias, ecological catastrophe, the entire range of human pain.”


Engaged Buddhism — a concept new to me — has a tradition in the West. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, among its early American proponents, didn’t just cultivate their gardens. Kerouac’s Buddha-worshiping “Dharma Bums” were precursors of the sexual revolution (their tantric “yabyum” rituals sound like fun); Ginsberg, a co-founder with Anne Waldman of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., the first accredited Buddhist-inspired college in the United States, faced down the police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago by using meditation as an instrument of passive resistance.

Reading “Buddhism in the Modern World,” a collection of essays edited by David L. McMahan, I was struck by the pragmatic tone of the contributors, their preoccupation with what Mr. McMahan identified as “globalization, gender issues, and the ways in which Buddhism has confronted modernity, science, popular culture and national politics.” Their goal is to make Buddhism active...

Buddhists’ Delight - NYTimes.com

McKibben on "On Point"

"Environmental champion Bill McKibben wrote nearly a quarter century ago about what he called “the end of nature.”  The untouched wild.  He didn’t think he was writing about the end of the world.  But the climate change path since then has been a scary one.  Bad to worse.

And McKibben has gone from writerly philosopher to full-on environmentalist to activist in handcuffs.  Political street fighter.  He was at the heart of the campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.  Arrested at the gates of the White House..."



Bill McKibben | On Point with Tom Ashbrook

Granola didacticism?

"Whenever I hear nature-writing types talk about the lack of “ecofiction,” I think, “Haven’t they read Le Guin?” Goodness knows her work stands, pardon the pun, light-years over such granola didacticism as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia." Instead of Suns, the Earth | Orion Magazine

I happen to like granola. Callenbach, too.

Time to start imagining & building good things

"the climate movement could do more to define a positive vision and a positive agenda — and put activist muscle behind them. It needs to figure out how to midwife the new communities, systems, and technologies that can put us on a trajectory toward a future that makes sense. How can a movement that grew out of the “counterculture” become the culture? How can it get stuff created and built?"



Can climate hawks campaign for something good instead of against something bad? | Grist

Solar energy should be a picnic

The Solar Power-Dok is a solar powered picnic table that is a fully sustainable solar powered charging station and works great for use as a laptop charging station, as well as a cell phone charging station!  Our products are aimed to ensure that whenever you need to plug in, we will be there to provide "Green" power for your electronic devices. 
Solar
Delight Springs: Solar Dok:

In the year 2025, if man is still alive...

"By 2025 Copenhagen hopes to become one of the world’s first fully carbon neutral cities, according to the ambitious plan released yesterday by the City Council.

It is a holistic vision for the city that reduces carbon dioxide emissions by transitioning energy production away from coal and toward biomass, wind and solar energy, while also reducing energy consumption and improving energy efficiency in transport, housing, heating and industry."

Copenhagen announces ambitious climate plan | The Copenhagen Post | The Danish News in English

An epic rant at North Carolina

"Some lawmakers will go to great lengths to deny the reality of climate change. But this week, North Carolina lawmakers reached new heights of denial, proposing a new law that would require estimates of sea level rise to be based only on historical data—not on all the evidence that demonstrates that the seas are rising much faster now thanks to global warming.

The sea level along the coast of North Carolina is expected to rise about a meter by the end of the century. But business interests in the state are worried that grim projections that account for climate-induced sea level rise will make it harder for them to develop along the coast line. So policymakers in the state plan to deal with that issue by writing a law requiring inaccurate projections. No joke, here's what the measure says:

These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly …

I'll stop here, because Scientific American's Scott Huler, a North Carolina resident, has an epic rant about this that can't be outdone..." North Carolina tries to wish away sea-level rise | Environment | guardian.co.uk