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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Back in October, I trekked to Burlington, VT, for an annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Plus, one of my bestest friends, Amani, lives within a two-minute jog of the conference center, so I got to hang out with him. Lo and behold, I even ran into Nicole from high school as she spoke about green labeling on products and foodstuffs.
Arguments and emotions were intense in more than one conference discussion, especially those about nuclear power, climate change, and government secrecy. I'd have so much more to show (such as the hydrogen car fueling station) and tell if I'd remembered to bring my camera battery charger. Luckily, though, plenty of journalists did what comes naturally, so you can listen to MP3s of the heated debates and check out slide shows here.
At least I typed up some notes about the well-attended panel on toxic trash. You can blame Moore's Law for chips doubling in power and dropping in price every two years or so, feeding the mad cycle of obsolescence in consumer electronics. Want a phone with a video camera? You'll probably throw away last season's model that only took still pictures. Some 4,000 tons of gadgets and appliances get tossed each hour around the world.
''We're going through the largest industrial expansion in the history of the world,'' said Ted Smith, former executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
Lately, however, big stories are piquing the public's interest in electronics waste. For instance, IBM electronics factory workers suffer high rates of cancer. We hear about iPod maker FoxConn's labor rights violations. The SVTC's Toxic Sweatshops report shows how prison labor is used to make shiny, new digital toys.
''It's not a good guys versus bad guys kind of issue," says High Tech Trash author Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grossman, whose book took an axe and gave the electronics industry so many whacks.
The Electronics Industry Alliance's Richard Goss agreed. "There's no desire by industry to use mercury or lead," he said, adding that the alternatives are dubious both in terms of practicality and safety. For instance, what if we learn later, after phasing out lead solder, that the substitute solder falls apart and millions of products need to be recalled? Wouldn't that be a bigger disaster than simply managing and recycling the known toxicants responsibly?
Goss noted that even while Europe bans heavy metals and brominated flame retardants from electronics, there are many exemptions. Flat screen monitors like the one that might be in your lap are allowed to contain 5 milligrams of lead. But that's far better than the four to 6 pounds of lead in boxy CRT monitors that were necessary to shield us from radiation back in the day. Plus, LCD monitors use 10 times less energy than cathode ray tube boxes.
Plastics containing DECA, a brominated flame retardant, are also exempt from Europe's ROHS rules, although manufacturers are phasing out this endocrine disruptor. But little is known about the ingredients in these plastics because NO epidemiological studies exist about BFRS, said Kellyn Betts, an editor at Environmental Science and Technology.
"This is one of the hottest research areas that we write about," she said.
Europe banned BFRs Deca, Penta and Octa. But because the United States and Canada have such high fire safety standards, BFRS and PBDES are 10 times more common in the bodies of North Americans than in people in the rest of the world. Omnipresent, these substances travel in dust, leaking from our supposedly sealed personal computers, televisions, and so much more.
"'They're everywhere,"' Betts said--probably in the cushions you sit on, the carpet underfoot, the drapes you toss open when you rise from the flame-retardant-soaked mattress on which you sleep. And these poisonous flame retardants wind up in our tissues and breast milk.
Next year China will introduce a good housekeeping seal on the bottom of all iPods, cell phones, TVs and all such electronics big and small, with a date stamp spelling when the safety of chemicals contained therein might start to seep outward, said Mark Schapiro of the Center for Investigative Reporting during another panel. He's working on a book to detail that and much more about how the U.S. is no longer the standard bearer for environmental, chemical, product safety (although Californians are fighting the powers that be, as usual).
The European Union and China are going much further to take precautions to protect people and ecosystems from potential hazards. Their new laws will change global industries, so we'll see the effects trickling down, but still the lower standards Stateside could mean more poisonous products for Americans. Just as China is shipping formaldehyde-laced lumber banned there to our shores, so we'll probably see an influx of junky, expired electronics shipped here, oozing chemicals that can cause cancer and monkey with our reproductive systems.
Hasn't New Orleans dried out and begun resprouting as a green, sustainable city? Sure, much of it stewed for weeks in water teeming with 45,000 the amount of bacteria safe for swimming (not to mention those pesky heavy metals, organochlorines and stuff). But the EPA recently gave the environmental conditions down there a green light anyway. Can't we just load up some barges with mushrooms to float down the Mississippi and deep clean the Gulf Coast upon arrival?
New Orleans' woes may be forgotten in the headlines, but they're not gone. It's a mess and much of it is far from habitable. What's taking so long to get this place back on its feet? Brad Pitt can only do so much. So who's rebuilding the city without gloves, face masks, or goggles?
To find out, watch New Orleans' secret history in the making in this 11-minute movie. It airs Thursday on Current TV ("Al Gore's station" is channel 107 in SF)--or at any time right here.
About a year after Katrina, Miguel flew down to New Orleans from SF on a whim. Armed with Gregory's camera, yet without knowing a soul in the city or a lick about making a documentary, Miguel chatted up strangers over the course of a week and wrapped up the editing in less than a month. Check out his raw footage of the ongoing dirty work in what some might call Nueva Orleans.
Said Miguel on location in September:"Why aren't there tons of trucks over here cleaning up? You'd think you were at the end of the world, and the center of the world is here...It's really twisted. It's so f***ing heartbreaking. This place will change your life, it's unreal. This isn't reality. What the hell, I don't know what to say about it."
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Recent Comments