In honor of Earth Day, I wrote what may start off as a pessimistic run-down of how to green your life, as well as a guide to green labels. So there. Everybody guzzle plastics! There's no escaping them. But what do they mean? Still, the planet will probably do just fine without us. Maybe we should have a "People on Earth Day," since the resources we seem to be ruining are what keep us hanging here.
Here's some more stuff I wrote recently for work:
San Francisco's greenest home?
Killing the oyster pack: An end to 'wrap rage'? (photos)
Treasure trove for the pocket protector set
How data centers are cooling down (photos)
Mapping the U.S. carbon footprint
Shadow falls on San Francisco solar rebates
International Home & Housewares Show (photos): Housewares makers seek greener products
So says Ray Pierrehumbert (right), professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, speaking before graduate students at the Lutheran School of Theology. I'll loosely quote/paraphrase tonight's talk:
Fossil fuels have forbidden fruit written all over them.
We are basically undoing the cycle which involves the burial of carbon for hundreds of millions of years. We’re liberating that carbon. No organic process can tap into that and oxidize it. We have become more than a force of nature. We humans are nature, a force of geology...
We are literally setting the kind of climate for pretty much rest of the history of the human species. Managing these next few generations is very critical in terms of our stewardship, what kind of environment we bequeath to future generations.
This natural carbon cycle that regulates our climate…ticks along with something like 1/10 of a gigaton of carbon a year. How does human fossil fuel stack up against that?
Last year carbon coming from fossil fuel was 8 gigatons.
CO2 is not like other pollutants where you can take a wait-and-see attitude. Unlike acid rain where it wil stop within weeks of cleaning up power plants, carbon dioxide is only removed slowly.
The Northwest Passage was clear from May to September 2007 for the 1st time in known history.
There are 400 molecules per million of CO2 in atmosphere versus 200 a century ago. Things are happening in sea ice faster than models predict.
No physical theory based on the sun or volcanoes has been able to match this [warming] curve… so we know our theories are right.
A heat wave near 2100 would be 35 degress Fahrenheit warmer than in the year 2000. That would be 135 degress F in Chicago. It would hit the poorest the hardest.
While there have been mass extinctions over hundreds of millions of years, now we’re at the stage where the next big crash will not be externally. It will be internally, if we let it happen.
Who is more defenseless than our descendants 1,000 yrs from now who have no say in what we do?
A person in China puts out 2/10 of a ton of carbon per year. 1/10 is too much to be sustainable but it still buys time. France: 1.6 tons/year. Average U.S. person is 5.5 tons per year.
Even if we don’t manage to get our acts together to prevent the doubling of carbon dioxide, we need to prevent the quadrupling. For the next 400 years there will still be a chance to do something to make life better for subsequent generations. There's no point at which you should despair.
A lot of things we do with energy are material substitutes for human interactions. What uses less carbon than sitting around playing guitar and singing songs?
Every pound you take out of that 5 tons will resound throughout the ages. There’s a long way to go, a lot of opportunity for virtue:
Reducing personal carbon emissions is almost an act of devotion. It’s like putting a brick in a cathedral. We’re working on a spiritual edifice we’re leaving for the future.
It’s not really a matter of guilt; it’s a matter of virtue.
Here's some other stuff I've been working on at work:
'Green' furniture cut out from cardboard
50 minutes with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom
More coverage related to the Cleantech Forum
Q&A with Cameron Sinclair, Open Architecture Network
(Photos: Open source housing for those in need)
Ecomodders make fuel good to the last drop
Photos: Green bloggers stash trash
Ecobloggers bring the landfill home
Photos: A future in bioplastics
Car-sharing is great. I use rent-by-the-hour Zipcar and live in a small big city where I can get around on two feet or two wheels for most things.
Most Americans probably can't imagine getting by without a car in unsustainable subdivision land.
But not having a car even sucks in pedestrian-friendly 7x7-square-miles San Francisco. For nearly two years, I've bitterly missed my 1981 Mercedes 300D (so much, perhaps, that I fetishized such cars in this story).
Why?
1. Without a car, you look like you're in the fourth grade no matter where you go. That's because you have to lug a backpack around town if you're bringing simple things like lunch, a jacket for the evening, a change of shoes for work, a laptop or books for the café, an umbrella. A car is like having a closet, a desk, and a dresser on wheels--perhaps even a kitchen cabinet too. You can't really chow on chocolate in a shared Zipcar because it may fall and melt into the seat, which the next user won't appreciate.
2. Riding a bicycle in a city means taking your life into your hands, let's face it. Ditto for motorcycles and mopeds. But at least you'll probably die quickly if someone hits you, if you're not paralyzed instead. A Segway could get you killed simply because the sight of your smug, upright posture gliding uphill in a business suit can inspire murderous rage in passersby.
3. Taxis burn a hole in your pocket. They're never there when you need one. And again, there's the risk of taking your life into your hands.
4. You have to schedule a Zipcar usually days in advance, especially on weekends. You can't zip across town at night on a whim to meet friends. You get used to canceling plans and staying in your neighborhood. You miss chances to go anywhere interesting in any nearby cities, which can really screw up your job if there's a conference 30 miles away. And even if you do get a car, you have to leave it at the drop-off spot far from your house, then walk home from there on a poorly lighted street, again taking your life into your hands, when the evening's over. Every Zipcar reservation must be a round trip. Thanks for the "convenience."
5. Forget about petite shoes or pedicures. And while your seat may not spread out because you hoof it or bike so much, your lower legs start looking meaty. (This is pathetic; please pretend you didn't read such shallowness here. Scroll down to see #2 on the next list of why it's good not to have a car.)
6. Your life slows down. You wait for buses. You wait for trains. You wait at stoplights. You wait for an opening between the shoulders ahead of you on the sidewalk so you can pass dawdling walkers. If you want to call people you love in other time zones, you can usually only talk to them while you're panting on the way home because by the time you reach your couch, it's midnight on the east coast. In a car you could gab for hours, shielded from the rain.
7. In mountainous places, the bike can be painful or impossible to ride. In cities with snow, bikes are no-go half the year.
8. To jaunt off on a road trip, you'll probably have to rent a car from the airport to get a good rate. That means going to the airport. And it costs more than $60 per day to rent a car with a car sharing service. I might as well buy a couple of 1978 Volvos each month at that rate.
9. You feel like a mooch when asking a friend for a ride home--again--even if it's only 10 blocks out of their way. At the same time, you fine tune a bad attitude about drivers and start to preach to friends and family about how evil driving is, usually while they're scowling behind the wheel in rush hour during your chat. Mooching and self-righteousness are unattractive qualities, but you will learn to nurture them without a car.
10. Groceries are heavy. When will I get around to buying that backup case of Clif bars in case the Big One rocks the West Coast? And forget about picking up 50s furniture on a whim from a garage sale, once a beloved pastime. I've biked uphill from Alemany Flea Market with a folding table on my back. Won't repeat that.
11. You don't get to listen to NPR on the way to work. Scratch that, I forgot about iPods and podcasts. But I refuse to dangle those white strings from my ears, tuning out the real world around me. It's bad enough that I'm always on the phone while walking to and from work.
Am I a total wimp? Siel of Green LA Girl/Emerald City seems to love de-caring in Los Angeles. Many other people relish their petroleum-free lifestyle. But I still want to throw things in a trunk and wear cute shoes.
On the other hand, not having a car is great because:
1. Your life slows down a bit. You smell the flowers. Your sense of smell becomes acute, especially when exhaust fumes from muscle cars leave you in the dust.
2. Exercise is built into your form of transportation. That's hot, right--defying gravity and age without going to a germy gym--even though you fantasize about foot massage? Again, shallowness: blame me for having been a scholarship kid at a private grammar school.
3. Your carbon footprint shrinks. Of course, you're not supporting the evils of Big Oil (or the Big Agra ethanol lobby, for that matter).
4. You probably save money. I'll add this up and figure it out eventually. Car sharing does include gas and insurance, but I spent nearly $400 on it last August.
5. You never have to deal with parking and parking tickets.
6. Without a car, you no longer power a weapon of mass destruction. If you're in an accident on your bike, at least you won't kill anybody (However, you'll be dead and won't know how good it feels to be the killee rather than the killer.).
7. Taxi drivers become some of your closest companions, at least for 15 minutes at a pop. Hey, they might hook you up with cousins to stay with when you travel across the globe.
8. When it comes to greener transportation, you walk the talk, or cycle the…something.
9. Without that broom closet on wheels, you have no car to wash.
10. Maybe I'll add more to this list. Trying to live a greener lifestyle is great, but mostly I'm finding that it's a pain in the rear. Call me coddled, an ugly, lazy American imperialist. I get it.
But people's approaches to alleviating the inconveniences of daily living, without considering the ecological impacts, have led to this inconvenient truth of global warming. It needs to be easier to be eco-friendlier so we as masses can make sweeping changes in our daily habits. Otherwise, major calamities--whether economical or ecological or both--eventually will force the issue.
A better transporation situation, for me at least, would be sharing a car with a cluster of friends who live nearby. That way, you could run household errands together, share maintenance costs, and yet never have to walk home far from where you park. If you really get along, you can go on the same road trips, or use a car sharing service in a pinch.
Alas, the era of communes is long gone, and they were a wreck anyway. People don't want to share anymore. Since nobody wants to share, would someone like to donate instead? Somebody, pretty please, gimme a car. I'd prefer leather seats and a sunroof. I'll give everybody a ride home like I used to. Thanks in advance.
By the way, I apologize for not having updated this blog in so many months. I'll blame that on not having a car as well.
Brr. During this frosty week, it's no wonder that travel is on the brains of many bloggers at this week's Carnival of the Green.
MadEejits (What's an eejit?) hosted last week's Carnival. Step inside EcoLibertarian's tent to find the Carnival next week.
Judith of the Savvy Vegetarian longs for sunny beaches in tropical climes, but finds it a drag to fly to some third world country as a hated tourist. If you need a real reason to travel, Volunteer Latin America (VLA) offers assistance to humanitarian volunteer travelers.
Karina of Tiny Choices recently hit the slopes at a ski resort powered partly by wind turbines. She offers great trips for greening your next ski trips.
Many people may not realize the polar fleece jacket keeping them toasty on that Antarctic expedition may be bad for polar bears, as polyester comes from petroleum. But as David of the Good Human notes, Patagonia's new Synchilla Marsupial polyester is a fine blend of 85 percent plastic bottles and used garments. He's psyched that the fabric is soft, and many colors are on sale. But is it better to opt for something with a smaller "travel pattern?"
If you're only going places in the bedroom, condoms can save lives. But do they help to save the planet too, or just create more litter? Beth of Fake Plastic Fish finds that regardless of the plastic waste condoms create or not, their potential for curbing the population may be ecologically beneficial overall.
In the wake of Valentine's Day, can you offset those non-green gifts and greetings? Lynn of Organic Mania likes crafting organic Valentine's Day cards with her son, but now the grown-up kindergartener is into Hot Wheels.
Don't get your panties in a bunch when there are more eco-friendly underwear options. At Life Goggles, Adam interviews the designers behind GreenKnickers. He also reviews Dr. Bronner's gel and a Minnie Meile Bag. Is The Green Book a worthwhile go-to guide? Check out a review by Joel, also of Life Googles.
When you want to go green for less, it's a bright idea to start by swapping old incandescent bulbs for compact flourescents (CFLs). But as Jean Paul notes at Green Deals Daily, new LED bulbs last five times longer, contain no mercury and they're twice as efficient. Should you switch again?
Please see Treehugger for more details on the Carnival of the Green. Thanks for stopping by!
Even around Halloween, I don't wish upon my worst enemy the hell of looking for a place to live around San Francisco. By the way, please explain how this city has an equal number of dogs as children, when landlords of overpriced properties seem to shun either creature. Good luck finding a one bedroom outside the Tenderloin for $1400, which is more than half the monthly paycheck for anyone lucky enough to have a middle-class salary here.
You might be stuck finding a place to share. This is a great way to boost your self esteem sense of humor. Many, many potential roommates specify persnickety dietary regimes you must respect to share a kitchen, from run of the mill veganism to the primal diet. If you're going to shack up with strangers, you may have to put up with a perplexing array of rules, such as only cooking fish in the iron pot on third Thursdays, or agreeing to give up the living room on Sundays so housemates can practice various rebirthing sessions or orgasmic breathing exercises from the friendly cult down the street. The challenges persist even if you move across the Bay. This is probably the most interesting Craigslist post I've seen yet:
$1250 3 joining rooms available in new Goddess Temple (oakland piedmont / montclair)
Seeking 2 women looking for a live/work spaces starting November 15th!
We are in the beginning stages of creating a Mother Earth Temple in the Piedmont area of Oakland. We have secured a very large house on Oakland Ave. that is beautiful.
...
The Vision: The temple will be a sacred space and a community of individuals who have a strong commitment to the celebration and honoring of the Earth Mother in all her forms. Included in her many names are Gaia, Danu, Pacha Mama, Bhumidevi, Chibirias, Cybele, Terra Mater, Hu-Tu, Changing Woman, Demeter, Sita, Tlazolteotl.
...
If you are interested, please write us telling us a bit about yourself, including your relationship with the Earth Mother...
Like it's not bad enough that you already have to sign a blood-ink contract bequeathing your firstborn daughter to the property deities to get a room. Didn't anybody watch "Pursuit of Happyness" or read this article?
Update: I finally uploaded video stuff to this post. Home now, but connectivity was too spotty where I traveled in Vietnam.
This is not speeding, actually, since Bao Anh is a cautious driver as far as Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City goes. You may feel that crossing the street is a game of roulette. Step into the flow of traffic, maybe with a hand outstretched, and it magically parts for you. Helmet laws are coming into effect by the year's end (see the billboard, right? I wish I could buy one).
By all accounts, traffic and air pollution in urban Vietnam have worsened as more cars have taken to the road since the nation's acceptance into the World Trade Organization in November dropped prices. Vietnam's GDP is growing at the second-fastest rate in Asia, just behind China. People are earning more money. Those who can afford cars and new cell phones every month will splurge. Cars cost double their sticker price due to taxes. Four wheels may be a show-off status symbol, but motorbikes are faster for most commutes.
Nobody here is pedaling to work out of any desire to be "green" and save the planet. They're just getting around the best way they can afford. Bicycles are still widespread, used by students and by workers to deliver perilously-balanced loads you'd be arrested for in North America, from bananas to bricks to granite for countertops for so much new construction (Think San Francisco's insane? Real estate here rises about a percent a day). You'll see the occasional electric bicycle, but forget about biofuels. You might spot the rare Segway every few months; a few are parked in front of Nguyen Kim electronics megastore, which is making a gazillionaire out of its 30something namesake.
Updated Jan. 11, 2008--Usually I share stories that I write for work only with family and friends who care (or pretend to, politely). Now that I'm trying to get organized, I'll fling at you some of those stories that have a greenish tinge:
Vietnam:
Vietnam a crouching tech tiger
Gadget-hungry Vietnam at a crossroads
Vietnam confabs mix tech fever with restraint
Green culture & stuff:
Tech for the rest of the world
Solar festival as green as it gets
How green was Burning Man?
Dealers hold the keys to biodiesel cars (with photos)
Green building:
Chicago's supersize green buildings
Extreme tree houses
Does that house come in green? (with photos)
Special delivery: your house in a box
PCBC: Building a greener future
Adobe's green office space
Just for fun:
Believe it or not: ghost hunting goes high tech (with photos)
Where the menu is an appetizer
Synthetic diamonds still a rough cut (with photos)
Stanford's x-ray vision
Shutterfly's secret workshop
Plane recycling takes off
Interviews:
Van Jones: Green jobs will clean up economy, communities
Dean Kamen: Segway inventor scoots to bigger matters
Helen Caldicott: Nuclear power not so clean or green
How-to (older):
Shrink your next energy bill
Trash your old tech
Greenlight: Autumn adjustments
Greenlight: Reinventing summer
Greenlight: No-brainer choices
(Who knew it would be so hard to find pictures online of green fingers? No Star Trek fandom implied.)
West Coast Green last weekend was huge. Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco. Eco-friendly everything, down to the printed programs and recycled grocery bag giveaways. See what other people wrote about it here. The mkLotus house got a lot of love.
I couldn't figure out how to work this waterproof camera. This post also protests proper layout etiquette, benign neglect. What do you call "digititis," being fed up with all things digital? That includes my sore fingers.
My favorite vendor was Nature's Hardware, cabinet accessories billed as eco-friendly. The woman collects skipping and beach stones where she travels, and uses them as knobs. Stone, recycled glass and metal, bamboo, faux ivory too. A stunning cobalt kitchen sink. Bamboo handles.
No knobs, buttons, cables, keyboards or (much) hardware or software for me for the next two weeks--heading to Vietnam.
In 1981, the New York Times described the problem of the incredible shrinking woman:
an unusually low tolerance for the poisons contained in hair sprays, floor waxes, feminine deodorants, junk food, spaceage glues and paints, water softeners, vitamin supplements, food preservatives, artificial colorings and flavorings, plastic wrappings, nondairy creamers and air fresheners.
Doesn't that sound like any Whole Foods shopper who checks her eco-labels? However, rather than describing the chemical-sensitivities of some upwardly-mobile, post-modern working mother, this article was reviewing Lily Tomlin's vintage comedy, "The Incredible Shrinking Woman." Rober Ebert summarized the plot 26 years ago:
As Lily Tomlin slaves away in her suburban dream home, her husband (Charles Grodin) gets big raises and promotions for advertising home-care products. And eventually one of those products (was it the dye? detergent? glue?) causes Lily Tomlin to start shrinking.
Her wedding ring begins to fit differently whenever she comes into contact with a toxic puddle. Meanwhile, evil corporate powers like World Management Organization, a consortium of Third World Chemicals and other generic, Acme-sounding entities, plot to shrink lesser parts of the world.
This should be the theme film of the Environmental Working Group, which tracks the dubious chemicals in household products. Who doesn't sense their skin, hormones and very DNA recoiling from the torrent of spanking new, mundane, everyday goods and goos laden with profane pollutants like plasticizers and pesticides?
"Do we really need another cute little doll?" pleads Tomlin's character. "Do we really need another soap that eats away germs when it eats away your life?" She eventually resorts to a Barbie wardrobe and into the arms of a faux Ken doll. Her neighbors brag to TV cameras about introducing their little neighbor to EST--another jab against the coziness of commercials, brainwashing and subdivisions.
By the time the credits roll, of course, you'll see that one small person really can make a difference! "These people were so big, the only way they could get any bigger is by making the rest of us smaller," says Tomlin, victorious (or is she?) after all.
Corny but charming, the supersize sets with cotton-candy home decor to make Pedro Almodovar envious are other renting points. I still can't find it on Netflix, but luckily TISW just showed up as a freebie on Comcast cable. Plus, star Lily Tomlin doesn't get enough props anymore as the innovative, one-woman-show who helped pave the way for Tracey Ullman and others. Tomlin's SNL skits included the girl in the humungous chair and the prototypical snotty phone operator with disc earrings.
The term "Incredible shrinking woman" has been borrowed by happy weight-losers as well as by women who call diet a four-letter word, by other size fetishists, by microphilic bloggers, by magazine writers to discuss eroding abortion-rights laws and by fans of the anime phenomenon known as koonago. Sure, feminism is implied in the flick, released during the U.S. divorce boom of all time, just before the mid-80s ubiquity of shoulder pads and red-stiletto powersuits.
Include this title in that library of mom-friendly, eco-themed films alongside, say, Blue Vinyl and Erin Brockovich or whatever. My mom bought TISW used on beta cassette, and it was one of the only movies we could both watch without yelling, crying or cringing. Moms have long gone green before the rest of us. You can't blame breasts and fetuses for being at the end of the food chain, collecting so many pollutants, so that the alarm sounds first in their tissues.
I'll welcome any nostalgic poke at the chemical-industrial empire. We might look back someday at even the silliest pop culture proof, maybe via comedies like these, that we've known for long enough that there might be a better way to engineer the ingredients in what we eat, slather on our skin and coat our countertops.
Still, chemicals in anything from paint to microwave popcorn bags have never been tested for their long-term, low-level health effects--or tested at all for what they do when mixed together. Europe just started requiring companies to label 35,000 ingredients in products we ingest or inhale every day--a monstrous effort of to-be-determined effectiveness.
Contrary to expectations, I actually made it to Burning Man this year. You can check out some of the damage here. Despite so many good intentions and the hard work of many burners, Green Man was no Las Vegas, but it wasn't so green. Then again, what is? For me, the least green aspect was losing my shirt--not literally, but figuratively, in advance of the event, by shopping at Target and about four other big-box stores for a tent, cooler, LED lights for the bike, and so many other overpackaged, phthalate-ridden camping products. (I felt less crazy after a new artist friend admitted that she, too, nearly cries in such emporia. Oh, the humanity.) I didn't realize that the last time I used my own tent was for post-high school graduation bacchanalia on the beach. Because I decided to go at the last minute, I didn't have the luxury of collecting these things slowly and sustainably from friends, craigslist, or resale shops.
My petroleum-based "powdered" wig had to be new too. Or maybe the least green aspect was supplying gasoline to the theme camp's generators. Oh wait, that five gallons was nothing compared to the gasoline filling up the rental car. While I hate air conditioning in real life, some of my happiest Black Rock moments were of resting inside of other people's freon-cooled RVs and trucks for several hours during withering mid-day desert heat.
But I congratulate myself, as any self-righteous San Franciscan should, for spending $25 on a bucket of biodegradable, organic lavender handi-wipes, a hot item under the hotter sun. I brought a bottle of rosewater to spritz on dried-out compatriots too. The bottle claimed that people had prayed over it, and that it possessed special magnetic properties, but my failure to cover up the label made me feel as if I were advertising, a big burner no-no that may have demagnetized all that energy.
And despite the rush to shop at the last minute, the Alemany flea market the week before the burn was the best source of sustainable gifts. I bought a hat box worth of hand-embroidered, mid-century handkerchiefs, which my grandmother still requests at holidays, and passed them around to people. The least commercial, big tent aspect of the Burning Man experience was stopping at local shops and "Indian" taco stands on the way in and out of Black Rock, and sharing small talk with some Paiute people. Pyramid Lake is the bluest thing I've ever seen, especially after nearly a week of so much burning of the brain and fossil fuels.
P.S. See what I wrote for work on this subject here.
This poor blog is becoming overrun by spam comments, like "bag leprechaun paper puppy," from prolific posters calling themselves "definition of douche bag" and so on. I'll keep updating the greener side here and there, but more often down the road you'll be likely to find me occasionally over at the Gristmill blog. Do you know what grist is? It's grain for grinding, or I guess you'd say something to chew on. Grist with a capital G is gritty, funny green news. You'll find my posts here once in a while, maybe more than that. More stuff I write elsewhere is here, here, here, and here. OK, I guess I've "outed" myself. Maybe I'll never work in this town again, as they say in Hollywood. Ah, what a relief.
Will is gonna die of embarrassment, but check out this video of his trip to a pygmy village with New York Times reporter Nick Kristof. We talk about green building in North America in terms of wheatboard cabinets and $40,000 solar panels, but look where this woman and her family live.
When Jessamay and I went to Brazil with Will a few years ago, all the ladies called him "Brad Peet" since Brad and Jennifer Aniston happened to be visiting Rio. Will was down with camping out in hostel bunkbeds, but being cultural imperialists,credit card owners (who are stil paying off the trip today, ahem), Jessamay and I carted the three of us to a suite in Ipanema and spent a day in salons. Poor Will found a way to do his own thing.
Will's an incredible photographer and teacher who's been documenting the wild
West Side of Chicago for years. He refuses to sell out--er, sell his work. Instead, he gives the pictures back to the people who are in them. If you're jealous that he won the NYT trip, just remember karma: some cretin recently stole his computer, camera equipment and digital photographs from his and Naomi's apartment.
At Paris CDG airport a few years ago, I made my only splurge in France other than a big, fluffy white sweater: a stack of tins of Anis de Flavigny in every flavor. These old-school candies are fashioned in a sustainable way. I imagine Marie Antionette popping these during a long soak in the bathtub (OK, that’s not a sustainable image, and forgive the insufferable “when I was in Europe” start to this post. Zzz.).
Records show that the treats were given to travelers in 1591, but they may have been around for centuries longer. Here’s what I could translate from their sweet site: The staff of 25 works out of the precious-looking village of Flavigny, in an abbey built in 718. They get anise seeds from Spain, Turkey and Syria, and then roll them around and around in sugar snowballing for about 15 days until forming one-gram pastille confections. 
They use real sugar instead of skimping with cheap-o corn syrup like most soda pop makers do. The mouth-watering Candy Blog paid tribute recently:
The pastille was often the work of a pharmacist or herbalist, not a confectioner. They started with seeds or herbs that were prescribed for various reasons (fever, digestion, impotence)… The most talented pharmacists made beautiful pastilles that looked like shimmering opalescent spheres and were kept as if they were treasures as well, inside ornate boxes, often locked by the lady of the household.
Well-crafted candy can be medicinal, a work of art. Mais quelle horreur! Much of the postmodern world has lost its taste for artisanal, all-natural confections. Look how the FDA may try to pass off cocoa butter as true chocolate (hurry up and petition the government by April 25!). Sustainable sweet stuff is important in light of the obesity epidemic. For instance, former President Clinton chose to focus his speech before a crowd of educators in San Francisco this week on how the ever-growing heft of American children could collapse our healthcare system in the coming decades. So go ahead, be a food snob.
I’ll continue to budget as much as several dollars a day for real, dark chocolate, 65 percent and up, and I’ll down anything with a floral scent. When traveling through Paris, Venice and Rome back in the day, I scarfed my way through cone after cup after petite cone of ice cream and gelato in violet, lavender and rose flavors. Not a bad budget diet at $2 a pop. (Starving? Let them eat cake cones!) And one of my favorite all-time meals was a lavender-flavored pasta dish around quirky Bolinas, California.
Don’t crinkle your nose; these flavors are really no more radical than rosemary or peppermint. You can grow them in your windowsill and toss them into stir fries and stews. And hooray, floral herbs are surfacing more lately in mainstream American cooking.
In Florida last month, I reluctantly agreed to the Gator Tour. Please don't tell anyone. It really wasn't my idea. Just ask Tracy; I was tricked into this trip. But OK, I'll admit that I love the name of Miami Nice Tours, which take you to the Everglades.
"Don't you want to see it before it's gone?" my mom pleaded.
In the bus ride from the chain of downtown hotels in that construction zone called Miami, it was obvious how urban sprawl is eating up the Everglades. White fences low to the ground abut swampy waterways. That didn't stop some hungry alligator from getting in the yard of one homeowner last year, who unintentionally fed himself to the reptile (so the bus driver said).
The tour of a corner of the endangered Everglades is done by air boat, a noisy thing with a giant fan in back. Earplugs are included. 
Everyone in the boat stands up, gawks, and snaps shots when the guide calls out . I wished we had the grizzled guide behind us, whose voice sounded like a buzzsaw. But our guide was friendly enough. He talked a bit about conservation, regaled us with the wonders of the 3,000 teeth (I bought a pack of 12--but these as well as gator meat and leather come only from our farmed friends) an alligator may grow over its lifetime, and wondered if we had any questions. There was barely a peep back, so I made a peep.
"Can't they run these things with diesel engines, and run them on biofuel, so they don't pollute the ecosystem?"
That would make the boats too heavy, he said.
"Um, really? I doubt it."
Uncomfortable silence.
"How many tours are there on average?" I continued.
Some 50 each day.
I imagined alligators and egrets gulping the rainbow swirls of gasoline left by the busy air boats. But I hope I didn't offend the tour guide. The other boat passengers studiously avoided me, or maybe I'm imagining that.
Update: Admit it, I may be the foolish-looking one for doubting the boat would be too heavy for a bigger engine, now that an air boat overturned last week and dumped tourists into the Everglades. But no reptile snacks became of them.
So take that, Gordon Gekko--er, Ivan Boesky. I poked around the Cleantech Forum a bit this week. Lots of gray and navy blue suits there, with few of the jeans-and-polos found at dot-com dealmaking events, but it was relatively laid back nevertheless when you consider all the money-matchmaking involved. The $3.6 billion poured into the emerging clean tech sector in 2006 is twice the 2004 amount for North America and Europe. There are billions and billions of dollars just waiting to anoint the next clean, green, money-making machine. Startup CEOs and scientists were snapping wishbones, crossing fingers, trading cards.
Want to gobble up clean stocks? Be on the lookout for the IPO of some yet-unpopular, cleantech cousin of Google! But which company will it be? One that can print thin-film solar panels? A large-scale maker of biofuel blends? A startup that's making LED bulbs cheaper?
I wandered around some booths and learned about Group IV Semiconductor, backed by $10 million and working to make silicon-based,
energy-efficient LED lightbulbs that might sell for a mere $3 a pop by
2010. Cheaper, white LED bulbs could be the holy grail of bright, low-energy lighting. SpringStar is working to get rid of things that bug you without pesticides with gizmos that mimic insects' mating calls and perfumes. However, there's no bedbug treatment yet because mimicking their stinky pheromones would make your boudoir smell pretty skanky. Engineers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs are building air quality sensors that they hope they can shrink to fit in or on cell phones. Here's more show-and-tell.
In the adjoining rooms, each panel seemed to be running nearly an hour late. At a talk about corporate market drivers, Ali Iz of G.E. said his company has been snapping up great money-making green businesses, but it needs to figure out how to support innovation that's not yet profitable without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
PG&E, the villain of Erin Brokovich, has greened nearly every bus station in San Francisco with ads for its eco-friendly efforts in recent months. During the Cleantech Forum, PG&E let loose that it's donating a year of office space to hot startups Adura Technologies (makes wireless lighting sensors)
and GreenVolts (working on cheaper, more concentrated solar panels). I planned to make it to the mayor's announcement about launching a cleantech S.F. business campus near the former PG&E plant, but I was interrupted by friends who were wine tasting a block away. Cabbing it home two champagne flutes later, there was no hybrid to flag down. But that could change soon too.
What's next? If you're dying to get rich off of companies built to keep the planet from dying, then scroll down and look in the left column for my updated "Green Money" links of lots of cleantech-related blogs. The tickers at Sustainable Business can be useful too.
There's a lot of guilt-free jewelry around if you shop carefully. But what if you like to string your own beads and sculpt your own pendants? Here are some green supplies for making jewelry. I'm almost too late for Valentine's Day, but keep this in mind next time you're stringing beads or bending wire for your beloved (chow on happy chocolate here).
The Beaded Needle, the best source of links I've found on this subject, advises buying beads manufactured in the U.S., Czech Republic, Germany, Italy
and Japan because "all of these countries protect their workers." Glass beads from India or China? A big no-no (U.S. furnace glass artists such as David Christensen: yes, yes.). Yet even the popular Fire Mountain Gems fails to protect Chinese workers from fatal silicosis, says the L.A. Times. Insert comment here about how beauty shouldn't kill. After I received Fire Mountain's giant recycled paper catalog, which contains all sorts of information about the company's do-good deeds around breast cancer and so on, I e-mailed them asking about the eco- and human-friendliness of its goods. Two weeks later, haven't heard back.
On the shinier side, look for Karen Hill tribe silver (also sold by Fire Mountain , Shiana, and Nina Designs), Ands' Bali beads, or Rishashay's Fair Trade Federation-approved Indonesian sterling--rather than from random, unregulated sources. Ethical Metalsmiths want to work with silver untarnished by eco-violations.
Rings & Things sells some 20,000 items online or in a 300-page catalog, and the owner told Beaded Needle that the stone cutters he visited seemed ethical enough. The family-owned A Grain of Sand says it handpicks stones and silver.
When dealing with Swarovski and other high-quality crystal, don't chew on the beads or uh...stud a goblet or silver platter with them, since they contain lead. You might want to wash your hands after handling beads, chains and filings. Some beads are dyed, heated, and irradiated. A reputable supplier should label their goods accordingly as the FTC demands.
Don't worry about quartz crystal, though, since that's so natural that it can be shaped make sweet music (beware soundtrack) and bring out your inner shaman. Kacha's Celtic crystals are hand-mined. Earthly Gems says it cares about ethical sourcing. You can buy Discount Crystals NOW! at Healing Crystals, where they pray for your order but don't guarantee how the rocks were mined. Just don'
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