Students for Environmental Action, a collective blog

Chegg it

2009-12-02T16:39:00.000-06:00

Everyone knows how expensive their college textbooks were at the start of the term. Here we are, it’s the end of the term and the bookstore wants to give you pennies on the dollar for your books. I say forget the bookstore! You can make some real dough by going to www.chegg.com/buyback/. They’ll pay you top dollar for your books, like $40 each – and no lines because it’s online. What could you do with double the money the bookstore would give you? Chegg even pays the shipping and plants a tree for every book you sell.

How about the fact I have a promo code CC106937 that gets you an extra $5 with your order?

GET lots of cash + GET more cash + they plant trees = A green way to sell your books

Go to www.chegg.com/buyback/, you can get your used textbooks sold now. After all, you read your books cover to cover, or at least that’s what your professor believes, so you should be smart enough to know where to sell them for the extra buck, smarty pants.

Wind Energy!

2009-10-14T17:50:00.001-05:00

check it out:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#9CucHx/www.magenn.com//

Energy Committee

2009-09-19T05:33:00.001-05:00

Ideas for reducing energy consumption and increasing awareness on campus:

-Get involved with IT to examine the viability of automatic computer shutdowns for campus computers after an extended idle period.

-Get involved with administration(/student gov?) to look at funding for installing lighting occupancy sensors.

-Place stickers on light switches to remind to turnoff after exiting a room.

-Create and place signs to encourage the use of stairs over elevators.

-Devise an experiment to examine the viability of waiting for a parking spot to open versus walking to campus through polling, car counting, or devising an experiment. Get connected with campus media to distribute results.

-Look into possible metering of campus electric utilities to model building energy use.

Homecoming Task Force

2009-09-17T12:54:00.001-05:00

We thought having a covered wagon would be cool. Possibly pulling it with bikes.

We also thought for a banner a THEN NOW & NEW FRONTIER would work. We would divide the banner in thirds and have picture of an old frontier in the THEN section. Factories and pollution in the NOW. And Earth Ships and Green practices in the NEW FRONTIER.

For a banner/chalk we also considered having factories in the background polluting and then a covered wagon coming from that mess. We discussed some slogan with 'Blazing a trail..'

Food & Health Committe Project Ideas

2009-09-16T10:01:00.003-05:00

-Local foods frenzy- Event inviting Peoples Grocery, the Student Farm, fair trade advocates. We could also share information from/about Food Inc, invite different agriculture groups, talk about making healthy decisions. Contact the organizer of movies on the grass could be a good idea.

Veg pledge- We could collaborate with the Student Farm about this, maybe work on discount vegetables during that week. We could also do an organic food awareness campaign (both positive and negative aspects). A veggie potluck could also be cool.

Healthy, Exercise Day- possibly at Konza? Biking? top of the world/scenic overlook, walk the whole campus with faculty from campus, "more in depth hike"

Kitchen Composting (Help Kramer & The HOES)- provide information to educate people on composting, contact housing and dining about starting a composting program

Other events/projects- GO TO HUNGER BANQUET from fair trade!!!

Green Living/ Education Committee Project Ideas

2009-09-15T22:27:00.003-05:00

Ideas generating at the Green Living/ Education Meeting:

-Team up with the Student Farm to help promote consumption of their produce or that of other local growers

-Bring in guest speakers to the university. Dr. Vandana Shiva will be coming to K-State to speak on Friday, October 16th. What sort of creative methods can SEA use to promote this AWESOME event?

-Make more visits to elementary schools as a way of engaging the community. What sort of topics/activities could we present?

-America Recycles Day is on November 15th. SEA could make new fliers on reducing, reusing, and recycling to hand out. We could also get a Green Pledge going. What other creative ways could we raise awareness about waste reduction?

-Does anyone want to go to any of the Green Festivals?

What is your water footprint?

2009-02-26T18:33:00.000-06:00

check it out: http://h2oconserve.org/home.php?pd=index

I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

2009-01-29T22:10:00.002-06:00

The retired scientist formerly in charge of key NASA climate programs has come out as a sceptic.

Dr John Theon, who supervised James Hansen - the activist-scientist who helped give the manmade global warming hypothesis centre prominent media attention - repents at length in a published letter. Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009, and excerpts were published by skeptic Senator Inhofe's office here last night.

"As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research," Theon wrote. "I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made.”

Theon takes aim at the models, and implicitly criticises Hansen for revising to the data set:

“My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it.

"They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.” (Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/)

TED Talks...

2009-01-29T21:34:00.002-06:00

Hey all -

TED talks are awesome and worldchange.com's founder speaks in this one. It's quite awesome. Watch, comment, discuss with me!

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jamais_cascio_looks_ahead.html

and then if you want to keep watching on perhaps the most nifty software I have seen in a long while (and it ties into the above TED), watch http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

How Dean Kamen's Magical Water Machine Could Save the World

2008-11-25T13:01:00.000-06:00

This IS different than the below article, and EVERYONE should read it (the original article). It is fascinating.

The "sling" is Lord Dumpling's revolutionary new version of the Stirling engine, a no-emission power source that engineers have been trying to perfect for almost two hundred years. Instead of the tiny explosions that drive the pistons of a standard internal-combustion engine, the Stirling drives its piston by forcing gas from one chamber to another in a perfectly closed system. He's pretty much got it nailed, aside from a few tweaks and a few niggling questions about who will pay for it. The "shot" is his equally revolutionary vapor-compression water distiller, which can make pure medicinal-grade water out of anything that's wet, even urine or toxic waste -- water so clean you could inject it into your arm. Together, the sling and the shot could save millions of lives. That's why he spent $50 million of his own money developing the prototypes and testing them in Third World villages, and they work, and we have to get the word out because 50 percent of all human illness is caused by waterborne pathogens.

He really can't. There's just too much he wants to do. When he proved that FIRST worked, he was sure it would be in every school in the country the next year. Same with the Segway. It's 100 percent more efficient than cars, those metal boxes designed for the open road when 50 percent of the people alive live in cities. It's just stupid. It's lunacy. And someday, the Slingshot will go into production, too. And one of the kids from FIRST will win the Nobel prize or cure cancer. But it takes time for an innovation to become a commodity. Because the Wright brothers flew a plane and it was a long time before frequent-flier miles. You have to be patient, give the world time to catch up.

Entire Article: http://www.esquire.com/features/dean-kamen-1208

Water Out of Thin Air

2008-11-25T00:35:00.000-06:00

Element Four has developed a machine that it hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave. Their creation, the WaterMill, uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water.

It works by drawing air through filters to remove dust and particles, then cooling it to just below the temperature at which dew forms. The condensed water is passed through a self-sterilising chamber that uses microbe-busting UV light to eradicate any possibility of Legionnaires' disease or other infections. Finally, it is filtered and passed through a pipe to the owner's fridge or kitchen tap.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/23/water-mill-eco-invention

Proposed Recycling Survey

2008-11-20T14:03:00.000-06:00

Here is the recycling survey that I have drafted and hope to send to students living in the residence halls in the next couple of weeks. Right now the main objective of the survey is to assess how many residents want an all-hall recycling program and if they would be willing to pay for one. The survey would go out to about 500 randomly selected residents. Please leave comments with suggestions about how to rephrase questions currently on the survey (they need to be unbiased), about adding additional questions, or if you think any are irrelevant and should be removed.

Residence Hall Recycling Survey

Survey Description

This survey is being conducted by Students for Environmental Action to assess the current level of recycling and waste output in the residence halls as well as to determine the desire of residents to have an all hall recycling program.

Opening Instructions

Please answer the following questions.

Page 1

Closing Message

Thank you for taking time to voice your opinion.

- End of Survey -

Veg Pledge Info

2008-11-14T13:54:00.000-06:00

Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat:

The Meatrix (factory farming):

Further reading:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb04/Mickeyz0212.htm (reasons to be vegan)
http://www.thegreenguide.com/doc/51/slaughterhouse (factory farming)
http://www.vegan.org/

Laura wanted to post most of this material, but she is too weak.

NBAF

2008-11-10T20:01:00.000-06:00

NBAF this stands for national bio and agro-defense facility. Right now k-state is in the selection process to bring such a facility right here onto campus. This would mean there would be research conducted here on biological warfare agents and lethal animal diseases. It sounds like a horrible idea to me to put all the students here at risk of these diseases. Also many of the animal diseases they are going to be researching are not in the United States and if they were to get out it would be a huge disaster. This includes Rift Valley fever (virus)3 which during the outbreak in Egypt in 1977-78, several million people were infected and thousands died. Also did you know lyme disease and west nile came to the US from a similar facility on Plum island off the east coast. That was an island and it got out. As a scientist myself I realize the great potential a facilty such as this one would have to investigate these diseases but I dont think campus is the place for it. You can check out the pros here http://www.k-state.edu/media/nbaf/faqs.html. The cons are a lot harder to find becasue the facility would potentially bring in a lot of money. It would make more sense to study these diseases where they currently exist and not put our environment at risk of infection and spread.

Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles

2008-11-06T01:30:00.000-06:00

Nov 04, 2008 05:19:01 GMT

A new nanoengineered anti-reflective coating developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels (from 67 to 96 percent) and allows them to absorb the entire spectrum of sunlight from any angle, regardless of the sun's position in the sky. It could help to overcome two major hurdles blocking the progress and wider use of solar power.

(Source: http://www.physorg.com/news144940463.html)

Activist says Green Needs To Touch Blue Collar

2008-10-27T12:44:00.000-05:00

Here is an interview with Van Jones, founder of Green for All, a group advocating training for emerging green jobs. He talks about the necessity of making emerging green technologies available for middle and lower income brackets as well as lifting people out of poverty by giving them training to hold new "green collar" jobs. The article does a good job of emphasizing the need for holistic solutions to environmental problems.

Some people defend against the idea of the "eco-elite," saying that individuals paying for high priced green products are helping the development of green technology along by making it profitable for companies to be innovative. With continued support from these individuals, businesses will become more efficient at producing green technologies, making it more affordable for lower income groups. Van Jones suggests that this may not be the case, that green technology may always be relatively unaffordable for those with lower incomes. Do you agree? Is there anything that could be done to expedite the process of making this technology more affordable?

Eco-themed Halloween costume ideas

2008-10-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

If anyone is still looking for a good costume idea for Halloween, here are some that Umbra suggested in her weekly advice column on Grist.org. (Some of you may have already seen this, but I thought it was amusing and that it might be of interest.) :

Al Gore bitten by polar bear. Find Al Gore mask (eBay?) or pomade hair and add cardboard armature to chin area. Attach stuffed polar animal by mouth to humorous body area of your choosing.

CFL bulb. Wear shiny white body suit and electrify hair in some way (Bride of Frank wig?). Build CFL filament around yourself, using white foam tubes, stuffed white fabric/socks, or white balloons.

Prius owner. Dress in clean, tasteful clothing and walk around with contented air, holding Prius key casually at chin level (paint small matchbox black and write "Prius" in shiny letters or, if you have actual Prius, write "Prius" on key). Stuff pockets to overflowing with money saved on gas.

Landfill. Don dun clothing with the following attached by tape or thread: lots of garbage, toy bulldozer, seagulls, trash pickers, or, for international credit, houses.

Glacier in 2050. Carry glass of water.

The nation's highways. Wear black, put yellow stripes down your middle. Add local humor with toy vehicles, signs, and figurines referencing specific transportation dilemma.

Here's the link, if you want to read more.

Minutes – 14 October, 2008

2008-10-15T12:56:00.000-05:00

As requested, here are the minutes . . . posted on the coblog! I guess people can ask questions about them here if they have them.

Event announcements . . . mark your calendars!

This Thursday, October 16 (TOMORROW) @ City Hall (1101 Poyntz Avenue) 6-8pm
BICYCLE MEETING!
Open house to discuss bicycling in Manhattan! We all want Manhattan to be more bicycle friendly, so this is your chance to have your voice heard and your presence noted. Go, go, go.
Friday, October 17 from 9-2 in the quad on campus
Farm Club (Harvesters of Environmental Sustainability) will be holding a Farmer's Market. And apparently they WILL be selling sweet potatoes, thank goodness.
Saturday, October 18 – also with the Farm Club, another farm help day and camp out!
Starting at around 10am and throughout the whole day and night, come help and camp out and have a lot of fun!
So we've got a spot in the Homecoming Parade, and we decided at the meeting that we're going to go for it! . . . Which means we have to make a float now! We threw around a couple of ideas at the meeting – including an Earth made out of recycled materials, or a field with wind turbines on it. Sound awesome? I thought so. Come to the meeting next Tuesday (October 21) a little early and help work on the float. We'll be there starting at 6pm and just stay through the meeting.
November 19 – VegPledge! Think about signing it – see Laura's email from October 11 for more information.
Here's the petition and also check out the Facebook event.

Some other announcements:

SEA is in need of a Fundraiser! Lani has opted to step down from that position due to busy-ness with school and other responsibilities.
Here's the description of the position:  "The Fundraiser chair will coordinate fundraising activities and research new and creative recycled fundraising merchandise to sell at any of the social functions or Union tabling." There are the usual crafts (recycled notebooks, hemp bracelets, bottle cap magnets, etc.) The fundraiser also usually plans a craft party each semester.

This is a great opportunity to be more involved in the club. This position also allows you to be as creative as you want to be. Think about it, if anyone is interested, come to next week's meeting or send Zack (zackp@ksu.edu) an email. We'll probably hold nominations and elections soon.
The Udall Scholarship is available for college sophomores and juniors (or any students who have at least another year of school)
Around 85 scholarships are awarded each year to students interested in environmental or Native American health. If anyone wants more info, talk to Ben (champion@ksu.edu).
Use the coblog! See Andrew's email from this morning if you're having any trouble with it.

Until next week,
Erica

The Giant Pool of Money

2008-10-06T10:10:00.000-05:00

As one who knew (or cared) little about how investment markets work and how they are related to everything else (including the environment), I have found the latest happenings in our economy pretty interesting. With all the news reports that are out on the subject I've found its also an excellent time to learn...

Here's an episode of This American Life that explains the housing crisis, how it started, how it is linked to Wall Street, and its implications on the economy. As in any episode of This American Life, "The Giant Pool of Money" also provides interesting perspectives of people, in this case of ones who were directly involved in buildup of the housing crisis. Check it out.

Saving the World for a Latte

2008-10-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting article about a recycling program where customers actually get paid based on amount they recycle.

Do you think RecycleBank (or using economic incentives in general) is a good way to entice people to recycle?

Do you feel the article accurately portrayed the Midwest?

Colbert Report

2008-10-01T14:34:00.000-05:00

I thought this was amusing.

http://www.aashe.org/index.php

2008-05-15T22:14:00.000-05:00

Anybody familiar with this organization or their STARS program?

I found it through Truthout.org

They are also hosting a conference in November from the 9-11 in Raleigh, NC. Might be an alternative/supplement to GreenFest in SF that same month.

-David Beckley

Championing KSU's Sustainability Initiatives

2008-05-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

Monday, May 12, 2008

BEN CHAMPION TO DIRECT K-STATE'S MULTIPLE INITIATIVES IN SUSTAINABILITY

MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University has multiple initiatives going on to encourage the campus to go green.

The K-State administration has recognized the need for university-wide leadership of these initiatives, so Ben Champion, a 2002 K-State graduate and Rhodes scholar, is returning to campus to coordinate these efforts. Champion has been appointed to the newly formed position of director of sustainability for the university, tasked with developing a university-wide approach for addressing sustainability at K-State.

According to Tom Rawson, vice president for administration and finance, "Ben will provide leadership for sustainability efforts and be the spokesperson for K-State's initiatives in this area."

Champion will provide leadership and oversight to existing initiatives such as campus recycling and construction of green buildings on campus, but he will also identify opportunities for new initiatives, help develop curriculum, facilitate interdisciplinary research, work with students, and engage the broader community in areas where K-State can be a leader in terms of sustainability.

Champion earned K-State bachelor's degrees in chemistry, natural resources and environmental sciences with minors in Spanish and political science in 2002. He is a 2003 Rhodes scholar who in January of this year completed a doctoral degree in geography at Oxford University researching sustainable food systems.

Champion was an intern for Rep. Dennis Moore in summer 2002. He was a Udall Scholarship winner in 2000. He also was a finalist in the 2002 Truman scholarship competition. He is an Eagle Scout, a Kansas Honors Scholar, a K-State Putnam Scholar, a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Scholar, as well as winner of June Hull Sherrid Biology Scholarship. He was an environmental director on his residence hall floor and president of Students for Environmental Action at K-State. He is a member of Alpha Chi Sigma chemical fraternity and Golden Key and Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Societies. The son of Mike and Paula Champion, Olathe, he is a 1998 graduate of Olathe South High School.

For information on "green" activities at K-State, visit http://www.k-state.edu/media/webzine/green/index.html

Gardening?

2008-04-29T14:32:00.001-05:00

Does anyone have gardening plans for the summer. Is the garden at Knabe's going to get going again?

Home Brewed Ethanol

2008-04-28T22:18:00.000-05:00

New York Times
April 27, 2008

Prototype

Home Brew for the Car, Not the Beer Cup

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

WHAT if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard for less than you pay at the pump? Would you?

The first question has driven Floyd S. Butterfield for more than two decades. Mr. Butterfield, 52, is something of a legend for people who make their own ethanol. In 1982, he won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still, albeit one that he could not market profitably at the time.

Now he thinks that he can, thanks to his partnership with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas J. Quinn. The two have started the E-Fuel Corporation, which soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. It will be about as large as a stackable washer-dryer, sell for $9,995 and ship before year-end.

The net cost to consumers could drop by half after government incentives for alternate fuels, like tax credits, are applied.

The MicroFueler will use sugar as its main fuel source, or feedstock, along with a specially packaged time-release yeast the company has developed. Depending on the cost of sugar, plus water and electricity, the company says it could cost as little as a dollar a gallon to make ethanol. In fact, Mr. Quinn sometimes collects left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants in Los Gatos, Calif., where he lives, and turns it into ethanol; the only cost is for the electricity used in processing.

In general, he says, burning a gallon of ethanol made by his system will produce one-eighth the carbon of the same amount of gasoline.

Read Entire Article

"Eating Local" Has Little Effect on Warming, Study Says

2008-04-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

Mason Inman
for National Geographic News

April 22, 2008

Being a "locavore" and eating foods grown near where you live may not help the environment as much as you might think, according a new study.

When it comes to global warming, focusing simply on where food comes from will make only a small difference, the study's authors say.

"In terms of the average American diet, 'food miles' are not so important as what you're eating," said study leader Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University.

On average, food racks up about 1,000 food miles (or 1,650 "food kilometers") traveling from farms to processing or packaging plants before reaching Americans' dinner plates, the study estimates.

The whole supply chain—including delivering grains to feed cattle and delivering fuel to farms, for example—adds another 4,200 miles (6,750 kilometers).

Yet all that shipping, driving, and flying accounts for only a sliver of foods' climate impact—just 11 percent of the total—compared with the impact from producing the food itself, the study showed.

The research appeared last week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Read Entire Article

USDA Renewable Energy Grants/Loans/Combos

2008-03-18T19:54:00.000-05:00

Coming soon to a theater near us:

Section 9006: Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Program

The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (the Farm Bill) established the Renewable Energy Systems and Energy Efficiency Improvements Program under Title IX, Section 9006. This program currently funds grants and loan guarantees to agricultural producers and rural small business for assistance with purchasing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.

On this site you will find information on the Section 9006 grant and guaranteed loan programs including details on project and applicant eligibility, application procedures, required forms and other useful information to assist you in the application process. For full information on the program, please refer to the program rule, 7 CFR Part 4280.

NEWS: March 6, 2008 - Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Program Federal Register Announcement - USDA published a notice in the announcing it is accepting applications for fiscal year (FY) 2008 to purchase renewable energy systems and make energy efficiency improvements for agriculture producers and rural small businesses in eligible rural areas. Funding will be available in the form of grants, guaranteed loans, and combined guaranteed loans and grant applications. For FY 2008 there is approximately $15.8 million in funding for competitive grants and $204.9 million in authority for guaranteed loans. This Notice of Funds Availability can be downloaded here.

Guerilla Gardening

2008-03-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

hmmm . . . unofficial SEA gathering? (click here for more info)

one more thing

2008-03-05T00:16:00.000-06:00

Please be the critical students that I know you are... critique the heck out of the website and blogs... I am very interested in your opinions and what you think has prospects of working and what does not... We really are at a time when things have to start happening. It is heartening to see the many things that are happening with and via SEA and all around us. So many possibilities. somehow you've got to believe in them. I am really proud to say I know you.

Much thanks,

Jeff

Kansas Clean Energy Day

2008-03-04T15:23:00.000-06:00

Kansas Clean Energy Day!

Recently, the state legislature passed bills that would allow two coal-ﬁred power
plants in Western KS to be built. This came a+er the Secretary of KDHE made a
landmark decision to deny the plant permit based on concerns of their global
warming impact. Concerned citizens and community groups from across the state
will gather for a Clean Energy Day at the Capitol to urge our state leaders to
support a clean, secure energy future.
Health
Economy
Environment Energy
Independence
Speak out for Clean Energy!
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
11:00-3:00
3rd ﬂoor, State Capitol Building
300 SW 10th St. Topeka, KS
For more information visit
www.kansascleanenergy.com
Buses and carpools will be leaving for this non-partisan event
from around the state. Check the website for details!
There will be a bus going there from Manhattan!

Eco-operate and BlueEarth blogs

2008-03-04T09:39:00.000-06:00

Hi all,

I recently created a couple of blogs related to an "eco-operation" that I am forming called Blue Earth (www.blueearth.googlepages.com)... The Blue Earth blog is at: www.blueearthling.blogspot.com, and the Eco-operation blog is at: www.eco-operation.blogspot.com. I am just beginning to fiddle with content, etc. and am learning how to make it easy for others to join and share. The Eco-operation blog is intended for exchange and discussion of ideas related to what eco-operation might mean and might look like. It is also about envisioning a future in which humans are living in harmony with the environment and its ecology and what the steps for realizing the future will have to be. Any thoughts? My best~ jeff

Focus the Nation

2008-01-27T19:08:00.000-06:00

http://www.focusthenation.org/

We Stand at a Critical Time in History

In the next few years, we as a nation will make, or fail to make, critical decisions regarding global warming pollution and clean technology investments. These decisions will have far-reaching and irreversible impacts on the lives of today’s students and the lives of their children. At this moment in time, we owe our young people at least a day of focused discussion about global warming solutions for America.

Focus the Nation is organizing a national teach-in on global warming solutions for America—creating a dialogue at over a thousand colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, places of worship, civic organizations and businesses, and directly engaging millions of students and citizens with the nation’s decision-makers. Focus the Nation will culminate January 31st, 2008 in simultaneous educational symposia held across the country. Our intent is to move America beyond fatalism to a determination to face up to this civilizational challenge, the challenge of our generation.

Focus the Nation is an educational initiative, but we also promote civic engagement. Each Focus team will invite local, state and federal political leaders and decision-makers to come to campus and participate in a non-partisan, round-table discussion of global warming solutions. US Senators and members of congress, state representatives, mayors and city councilors, all will be receiving dozens of invitations to speak about global warming, from over a thousand institutions nation-wide. Every institution will also vote on their top five national priorities for global warming action, producing a campus and citizen endorsed policy agenda for 2008.

Currently over 1000 institutions, mostly colleges and universities, have signed on to participate, and dozens of college and university Presidents have endorsed the initiative. To maximize both education and civic engagement, Focus the Nation has four key components:

NATIONAL TEACH-IN: On January 31st , thousands of students on every campus, millions of students nationwide, participate in workshops and panels, brainstorming global warming solutions. Are you with us? Are your faculty supporting you? Ask ten, twenty, fifty faculty to stand up as educators on behalf of your future. They will say yes. To make this happen, start with the sample teach-in.

GREEN DEMOCRACY: Campus to Congress. Tell top decision-makers in this country about solutions. Invite every US senator and congressperson to engage in person. If they can’t be there physically, then they will face a student audience via a video-chat. Focus the Nation is working with leaders in the House of Representatives to make this happen, in conjunction with their efforts to green the congress. The face-to-face, intergenerational dialogue of Green Democracy will move America to confront this civilizational challenge.

CHOOSE YOUR FUTURE: Vote on the top five solutions to global warming. Proposed solutions range from a coal moratorium, to large scale renewables investment, to initiatives to strengthen forests for carbon storage. Choose the Future is the place for serious discussion about how to achieve what science and justice demand. The week leading up to January 31st, you vote, and your Focus team delivers the results to your congressional office. Every political leader in the country will hear your voice. Join the discussion today!

2% SOLUTION: A national, interactive webcast, airing live the evening of January 30th, featuring Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider, sustainability expert Hunter Lovins, and green jobs pioneer Van Jones. Show the webcast to launch your teach-in. Screen it at your high school, faith group, civic organization, or at a house party. Our goal—10,000 screenings and a determination TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING.

With these four components, together we will Focus the Nation.

“I believe that a business as usual scenario will guarantee disintegration of West Antarctica and parts of Greenland” — Dr. James Hansen, 2/2/07

Over the next decade, critical policy decisions will be made with irreversible consequences for the future. Dr. James Hansen, the top US government climate scientist, believes that if we do not stabilize greenhouse gas emissions soon, we may set in motion a process leading to collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice sheets, events that would raise global sea levels by over 40 feet, inundating many of the world’s major cities. This of course is just one of the myriad potential consequences of human-induced warming, with regional and global impacts ranging from hurricanes of greater intensity and duration, global water shortages, altered patterns of rainfall, drought and flood, massive forest die-back, and large-scale species extinction.

Students today face many important social, economic, and security issues. Global warming however, is unique, in that if we are to reduce the risk of large-scale, irreversible, world-wide damages, then ambitious—and potentially costly—policy solutions must be undertaken within a very compressed time frame. Failure to act soon increases the likelihood of a swing in global temperatures of Ice Age magnitude within our children’s lifetimes, only in the opposite direction. We have a window of time now to create the foundation for a just and sustainable future.

The second motivation for this project is to explore a new model of collaborative, interdisciplinary education, on a national scale. Focus the Nation will require campus-based teams of faculty and students to draw on campus expertise across the broad range of disciplines. Focus the Nation provides an exciting model opportunity to create, for one day, a true national community of scholarship bridging traditional disciplinary boundaries.

This is an opportunity for educators to take a leadership role, and catalyze a process which indeed will “Focus the Nation”. For the last 150 years we have been engaged in an unprecedented natural experiment, drastically altering the basic nature of the planet’s climate control system. Focus the Nation is engaging the country with the question: How far can we let that experiment go?

To be a part of Focus the Nation, simply SIGN UP to participate. By signing up, you are committing to help organize an educational event about global warming solutions at your institution on (or around) January 31st, 2008. This involves, at a minimum, screening The 2% Solution webcast, but the times demand, if at all possible, that we step into a real leadership role as educators in our communities. As colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, faith organizations, businesses, and civic groups come together, we can launch a discussion far-reaching enough to change the future.

Once you sign up, you will receive bi-weekly updates from Focus the Nation that will suggest many ways to build your event. To hold global warming to the low end, we have only a few short years to act. To ensure action, we have only a few short months to Focus the Nation. Please sign up today.

THE FOCUS THE NATION RESOLUTION
Once you have a launched a Focus the Nation organizing team at your institution, build support for a truly deep conversation by obtaining the endorsement of the following resolutions by your President, Head of School, CEO, Boards of Directors, Student government, Faculty Senate, or Organization. (See who has already endorsed!).

biodiesel from grass

2008-01-14T13:39:00.000-06:00

ALTERNATIVE FUEL - BIO-DIESEL FROM GRASS.

SUBJECT: ALTERNATIVE FUEL - BIO-DIESEL FROM GRASS

SOURCE: JUAN WILSON juanwilson@earthlink.net

POSTED: 29 December 2006 - 8:30am
Going Native: Bad news for Big Ag Biz

These plots of mixed grassland species in Minnesota showed smart choice for biofuels

Diverse grassland plants edge out crops as biofuel
by Aimee Cunningham on 9 December 2006 in Science News

Mixtures of plants native to prairies can give a better energy return as biofuel than corn and soybeans do, a new study finds. Biofuel production from grassland plants would also result in lower emissions of carbon dioxide and reduced pollution from agricultural chemicals.

Corn-grain ethanol and soybean biodiesel are starting to replace some gasoline and petrodiesel Science News: 7/15/06, page 36: www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060715/fob4.asp

However, corn and soy crops need large amounts of pesticides, water, and fertilizers.

TilmanEcologist David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and his colleagues determined the resources required for and energy gained from biofuels made from perennial grassland plants. These species wouldn't require regular herbicide treatments, irrigation, or fertilization and could be grown on agriculturally abandoned land. Grassland plants aren't yet used in biofuels.

In 1994, the researchers planted 152 plots of agriculturally degraded land with different numbers of perennial grassland species, such as legumes, grasses, and herbs. They monitored and sampled the plots from 1996 to 2005.

The researchers found that the most diverse plots—those with 16 different species—were also the most productive, with the potential to generate more than three times as much energy as plots that bore only one species.

The prairie-grass mixtures would give a net energy return that's more than 17 times that of corn-grain ethanol, Tilman says.

His team also calculated that with the use of an alternative chemical process now being investigated for biofuel production, fuel from grassland plants yields 51 percent more net energy per hectare than corn-grain ethanol does. The scientists report their findings in the December 8th, 2006 Science Magazine.

The production and combustion of both corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel increase carbon dioxide emissions, although less so than those of an equivalent amount of gasoline and petrodiesel. Therefore, the researchers determined how much carbon dioxide the prairie plants sequester in their roots and the soil and the amount of this gas that would be released from fossil fuel combustion during the cultivation, transport, and processing of the plants and combustion of the biofuel.

The team found that each acre of diverse prairie plants removes from the atmosphere the amount of carbon dioxide released by burning about 190 gallons of gasoline.

In the search for new energy sources, "we should be trying to optimize all the things that society needs," says Tilman. He adds that the planting of degraded lands would prevent competition with food crops.

"The answer to sustainable energy production is going to be to use sound ecological approaches like they've spelled out here," says John Sheehan, who works on energy efficiency at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. But with the large amount of agricultural land in the United States, "it may make very good sense to use at least a portion of that land for energy production," says Sheehan. .

It's exciting to me...

2007-12-20T21:39:00.001-06:00

At $1 per Watt, the iTunes of Solar Energy Has Arrived | SolveClimate.com Annotated

A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar shipped its first solar panels -- priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. Curious that this story is not on every front page.

While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing.

Nanosolar has developed proprietary process technology that makes it possible to produce 100x thinner solar cells 100x faster.

Nanosolar - 7 Areas of Innovation Annotated

As opposed to using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film deposition processes, we developed a proprietary ink (1) to allow us to use much simpler and higher-yield printing (2) for depositing the solar cell's semiconductor.

We use a highly conductive yet low-cost foil as a substrate (3), which allows us to avoid the need to separately deposit an expensive bottom electrode layer (as required for a non-conductive substrate such as glass).

The foil furthermore allows us to

apply the superior economics of high-yield continuous roll-to-roll processing (4),
achieve a lower-cost high-performance top electrode (5),
assemble cells by individually matched electrical characteristics (6), and
develop high-power high-current panels (7) with lower balance-of-system cost.

2007-12-20T10:46:00.000-06:00

New Forms of Life

Check out the video in this Treehugger post! http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/strandbeests_bl.php

a nice word

2007-12-17T14:17:00.000-06:00

Michael Pollan's latest NY Times article on sustainability & food.

Our Decrepit Food Factories

MICHAEL POLLAN

Published: December 16, 2007

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.

he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)

“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”

We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.

My Dad Hates Left Turns!

2007-12-12T19:30:00.001-06:00

Left-Hand-Turn Elimination - New York Times Annotated

It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which among other hyperefficient practices involving the packing and sorting of its cargo, maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

SocialWay

2007-12-10T10:43:00.000-06:00

check this website out, a friend told me to take a gander at it and I'm just passing it along.

Social Way

Chemical Dangers from Nalgene?

2007-12-09T15:06:00.000-06:00

A Canadian retailer has just banned Nalgene bottles from being sold in its stores until more is known about the effects of a chemical used to make Nalgene plastic are bettern known.

Read Article

Google Energy

2007-11-28T13:46:00.001-06:00

Google Invests in Green with Renewable Energy Initiative | Epicenter from Wired.com Annotated

The new iative, dubbed Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, will primarily target energy sources like advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies and enhanced geothermal, according to Google co-founder Larry Page, and the company plans to shell out tens of millions of dollars in 2008 on R&D and related investments.

Google also said it anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in other renewable energy projects which the company also hopes will generate positive returns.

Being Google, it's not just about helping the environment. The company said it also expects the new iative will be pretty good for its bottom line as well.

Google´s Goal - Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal Annotated

Depending on how fast Google spends its money, its investment could rival the federal government's investment in renewable energy. A Government Accountability Office report found that Department of Energy spending on research and development of biomass, wind and solar energy sources totaled just $65 million in 2006. (Since this was posted this morning, the folks over at reddit have identified other Department of Energy budget documents that make the GAO estimate seem far too low, with $1.16 billion being appropriated for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 2006, and $1.24 billion requested for 2008.)

Magnetic Wind Energy

2007-11-26T22:21:00.001-06:00

Inhabitat » THE MAGLEV: The Super-powered Magnetic Wind Turbine Annotated

The MagLev wind turbine, which was first unveiled at the Wind Power Asia exhibition in Beijing, is expected take wind power technology to the next level with magnetic levitation.

Magnetic levitation is an extremely efficient system for wind energy. Here’s how it works: the vertically oriented blades of the wind turbine are suspended in the air above the base of the machine, replacing the need for ball bearings. The turbine uses “full-permanent” magnets, not electromagnets — therefore, it does not require electricty to run. The full-permanent magnet system employs neodymium (”rare earth”) magnets and there is no energy loss through friction. This also helps reduce maintenance costs and increases the lifespan of the generator.

they’re able to use winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 meters per second (m/s). Also, they could operate in winds exceeding 40 m/s.

one large maglev wind turbine could generate one gigawatt of clean power, enough to supply energy to 750,000 homes

the maglev wind turbines will be operational for about 500 years!

Construction began on the world’s largest production site for maglev wind turbines in central China on November 5, 2007. Zhongke Hengyuan Energy Technology has invested 400 million yuan in building this facility, which will produce maglev wind turbines with capacities ranging from 400 to 5,000 watts.

In the US, Arizona-based MagLev Wind Turbine Technologies will be manufacturing these turbines.

The estimated cost of building this colossal structure is $53 million.

Top 10s

2007-11-11T14:57:00.000-06:00

Like top 10 lists? Here are a couple of interesting ones I found this week.

Top 10 Most Bicycle Friendly Cities

Go here for the criteria

1. Amsterdam
2. Portland, Oregon
3. Copenhagen
4. Boulder, Colorado
5. Davis, California
6. Sandnes, Norway
7. Tronheim, Norway
8. San Francisco, California
9. Berlin
10. Barcelona
11. Basel, Switzerland

Source: TreeHugger

Top 10 Farmer´s Markets in the U.S.

Source: Green Light

Instead of googling it, blackle it!

2007-11-09T11:58:00.000-06:00

http://www.blackle.com/about/

The above link describes exactly what Blackle is, and the following link is the actual website. Check it out! Take a small step and save energy while you search the world wide web.

http://www.blackle.com/

Controversy?

2007-11-05T19:30:00.000-06:00

"The ecological crisis--or Gaia´s main problem--is not pollution, toxic dumping, ozone depletion, or any such. Gaia´s main problem is that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness, wherein they will automatically be moved to care for the global commons. And human beings develop to those postconventional levels, not by learning systems theories, but by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia. The primary cure for the ecological crisis is not learning that Gaia is a Web of Life, however true that may be, but learning ways to foster these many arduous waves of interior growth, none of which are addressed by most of the new-paradigm approaches."

-- Ken Wilber - Integral Psychology (pgs. 137-138)

I came across this in my reading today and found it to strike a real chord. I have posted similar passages before, but I felt like this concisely does the job in one short paragraph.

What do you think?

Colleges Graded on Sustainability

2007-10-29T09:43:00.000-05:00

It was a nice weekend at K-State with Homecoming and another K-State football victory.

On environmental business, it looks like we have much work to do about getting our campus moving toward "green" and sustainable.
As the following article indicates, of 200 US colleges evaluated, K-State rates with a D+.
Of interest, SEA is mentioned in the K-State profile. Now is an essential time for students to step forward and make a change for something better on campus.

Daily Grist 10/26/07

Wondering which colleges are greenest? The Sustainable Endowment Institute has released its second College Sustainability Report Card, grading the environmentaliciousness of the 200 U.S. colleges with the largest endowments. Two-thirds of the schools got better grades this time than last; the average overall grade was a C+, and six schools received an overall A- for their efforts -- Carleton College, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of Washington. The colleges were graded on transportation, administration, climate and energy, food and recycling, green building, and investment priorities, as well as endowment transparency and shareholder engagement (both of which most schools solidly failed). Among the encouraging statistics: Around half of the schools have committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, more than two-thirds have green building policies, and more than 80 percent source at least some cafeteria food locally.

K-State's profile:
http://www.endowmentinstitute.org/report2008/profile90.pdf

sources: The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, PR Newswire
straight to the report: College Sustainability Report Card 2008
see also, in Gristmill: College Sustainability Report Card 2008 released
see also, in Grist: 15 Green Colleges and Universities
see also, in Grist: College and university presidents sign on to climate pledge

Power Shift 2007

2007-10-26T12:19:00.001-05:00

Hi Students for Environmental Action,

I just came across your blog and website, and first off: impressive
site. Pretty spiffy!

I'm a fellow blogger and a young climate activist. I live in Oregon,
but I blog on climate change and energy issues regularly at my blog,
Watthead and at It's Getting Hot In Here (the youth climate
movement's blog). I thought you'all might be interested in a couple
of recent posts on the upcoming Power Shift 2007 national youth
climate summit, Step it Up 2, and the growing strength of the youth
climate movement. Feel free to repost these at your blog. Hopefully
I'll see some of you at Power Shift

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/24/watch-out-for-the-echo-boom-
why-politicians-had-better-start-paying-attention-to-the-millennial-
generation/
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/22/generation-anything-but-
quiet-just-wait-for-the-noise-at-power-shift-2007/

Also attached is a short news blurb on Power Shift.

Power to the (young) people!

Jesse Jenkins
________________________
WattHead - Energy News and Commentary
http://watthead.blogspot.com
watthead.blog@gmail.com

Type the rest of your post here.

Lou Douglass Lecture

2007-10-23T15:51:00.000-05:00

An activist dubbed one of the most powerful people in the nonprofit sector will be the next Lou Douglas Lectures speaker on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 7:00 pm in Forum Hall of the K-State Student Union.

Robert Egger, founder and president of the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C., which combats hunger and creates jobs for unemployed and homeless men and women will speak on “Our 40 Year Journey from Charity to Change.”. His talk is free and open to the public.

At the D.C. Kitchen, unemployed and homeless men and women learn marketable skills by turning foods donated by restaurants, hotels and caterers into balanced meals and then serving them at the D.C. Central Kitchen. Since opening in 1989, the Kitchen has distributed 17.4 million meals and helped more than 605 men and women gain full-time employment.

Egger is also developing the Campus Kitchens Project, which brings colleges and universities together with student volunteers, dining service workers and community organizations to combat hunger across the country.

Valerie Coltharp
Special Projects Coordinator
UFM Representative Payee
UFM Community Learning Center
1221 Thurston, Manhattan, KS 66502
(785) 539-8763
(785) 539-9460 (fax)

Type the rest of your post here.

Copy Co. in Manhattan

2007-10-21T21:43:00.000-05:00

I would like to direct you to the following message that was sent to SEA via multiple mediums. If you would like to pick up the discussion, please click on the "Message Board" tab above which will take you to the SEA Message Board (Google Group). This is a great example of what can happen with the host of tools incorporated in the Coblog. Brittany found us on her own...

"Hello to anyone who cares to read this::

I work at copy co, and when I started we were recycling, or at least
we had recycling boxes full of paper.

When my old manager left, and the owner came in, he pilled up about 10
boxes of paper that we had been saving to recycle and promptly threw
it in the dumpster. I was quit upset when I found out!!

No one really cares to help me recycle it seems, and I was hoping that
there was someone out there who would like to share my view with me to
this Aggieville business (Copy Co).

As a company that goes through hundreds of messed up sheets of paper a
day, I believe this copy company has an obligation to recycle.

It really makes me sad, if anyone would like to help me. Please e-mail
me.

Sincerely,

Brittany Smith "

Interesting Dichotomy

2007-10-19T22:42:00.001-05:00

It´s interesting the dichotomy that occurs here. On the one hand you have this really cool design and concept of a sustainable sky-scraper. On the other you have it being financed and built in the location of the most audacious and arrogant example of wealth and exploitation in the history of human kind. Exciting or terrifying?

Zero-Energy Tower for the Middle East Annotated

Field School for Environmental Organizing

2007-10-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing,
founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental
organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on
experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in
permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups.
Jesse Littlewood
Recruitment Director, Green Corps
jesse@greencorps.org
617-426-8506
www.greencorps.org
Celebrating 15 Years: Green Corps, Field School for Environmental
Organizing

** Applications due Oct. 26, 2007 - apply online today at
http://www.greencorps.org **

Green Corps is the non-profit Field School for Environmental Organizing,
founded by leading environmentalists in 1992 to train environmental
organizers. Our program includes intensive classroom training, hands-on
experience running urgent environmental campaigns, and placement in
permanent positions with leading environmental and social change groups.

Classroom Training. Our intensive classroom training combines issue
briefings, workshops and skills trainings to prepare you to run a
grassroots
campaign. Issue briefings include Clean Cars, Renewable Energy, Forests
and
Endangered Species. Strategy workshops include The Legislative Process,
Social Change Methodology and Effective Media: Messaging and Framing.
Finally, hands-on skills trainings include Leadership Development,
Training
Volunteers and Running Effective Meetings. Training is run by the Green
Corps Central Staff, as well as environmental and social change experts
such
as John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA, Bill
McKibben,
author and climate change expert, and Wendy Wendlandt, Political
Director,
U.S. PIRG.

Field Training. Our field training puts you on the front lines of
today's
most urgent environmental campaigns. With Green Corps, you will work in
multiple cities nationwide, chosen for their ability to make an impact
on
critical environmental problems. Potential locations include, but are
not
limited to, San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC and Boston,
MA.
You must be willing to relocate during your year with Green Corps.

Dates. The program begins in August 2008 and concludes with graduation
in
August 2009.

Responsibilities. Plan and implement a series of critical environmental
campaigns with groups like Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and
Greenpeace. You will secure media coverage, recruit and manage
volunteers,
train new leaders, and mobilize grassroots activists.

Career Development. Upon completion of the training program, Green Corps
will connect you to organizations that are seeking full-time
professional
staff. Green Corps graduates hold positions with MoveOn.org, Sierra
Club,
Greenpeace, Global Exchange, Endangered Species Coalition, Global Trade
Watch, Corporate Accountability International, ForestEthics, and many
other
environmental and progressive groups.

Qualifications. Each year we select 35 recent college graduates to join
Green Corps. We are looking for people who are serious about saving the
planet, have demonstrated leadership experience, and want to work for
change
over the long haul at the grassroots level.

Salary & Benefits. Salary of $23,750. Optional group health care
coverage,
paid sick days and holidays, two weeks paid vacation, and a student loan
repayment program for qualifying staff.

To Apply. To apply to Green Corps, fill out our online application by
the
Early Application Deadline of Oct. 26, 2007. Deadlines, 2nd round
interview
locations and our online application are at http://www.greencorps.org.

Contact. Jesse Littlewood, Recruitment Director, at jobs@greencorps.org,
617-426-8506,

Step It Up 2007 for Climate Change

2007-10-08T17:01:00.000-05:00

On November 3rd, Americans will demand real leadership on global warming. From coast to coast, we'll rally in our communities and invite our politicians to join us. We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time.

With a month to go, people by the thousands have begun inviting presidential candidates and members of Congress to come speak about climate change at Step It Up events on Nov. 3 -- and we've started getting some RSVPs.

http://www.stepitup2007.org/

Article at Daily Grist...
Step it Up

Bill McKibben is organizing Step It Up 2, a national day of climate action. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.

The Green Bliss Fest

2007-10-03T17:47:00.000-05:00

http://www.greenblissfest.org/

Organic Beer

2007-10-02T21:51:00.000-05:00

Last week I was at the liquor store and I happened upon an interesting discovery. New Belgium is temporarily distributing an organic beer here in Manhattan. It is called "Mothership Wit" and I do say it is quite delicious.

"A delicious and certified organic balance of citrus and sour flavors"

If you´re a beer drinker, go pick up a six pack to taste the organic goodness and support one of the most enviro friendly companies around, and a somewhat local option for alcohol. I found it at Library Liquor in Aggieville; I am not sure if it is elsewhere in town.

What do you believe?

2007-09-27T14:53:00.000-05:00

Check this out. If you haven't already.

www.mondonation.com

Tonights Speaker: Sarah Hill-Nelson

2007-09-25T13:18:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to Ljworld.com. There is a published chat, "Chat about Lawrence sustainability with Sarah Hill-Nelson," and it talks a little about what Sarah does and some of the pros and cons of 'green tags' and other sustainability issues. Give it a look-see and come to the SEA meeting tonight and she can answer any questions.

www2.ljworld.com/chats/2007/may/21/sarah_hillnelson/

Seminar September 20th

2007-09-19T18:38:00.000-05:00

This is tomorrow - sorry - but it looks very interesting. 4:00 pm in 201 Trotter Hall

A seminar by Craig Beech will be presented in 201 Trotter Hall (at the
vet school) on Thursday Sept. 20 at 4 p.m.

The title will be:

Peace Parks, Africaâ€™s great (un)divide: Using international
conservation to join regions and peoples
Craig Beech is the GIS manager of the Peace Parks Foundation, the
people behind the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas in
Africa, which joins countries in cross-border conservation efforts. The
countries involved include South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe,
Namibia, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia and others. This is a significant
development in Africa with far-reaching implications for conservation,
land use options, political science and geographic science,
international trade, and biosecurity concerns such as possible impacts
on important diseases like Foot and Mouth Disease. GIS was and is used
throughout the process of transfrontier conservation planning and
implementation.

Report from the World Watch Institute

2007-09-14T08:33:00.000-05:00

This is a sobering report from the World Watch Institute. See the whole story at: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5340/print

Window to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change Closing; EU Should Press for Immediate U.S. Action
By Worldwatch Institute
Created Sep 13 2007 - 1:00pm

The warming climate is undermining biodiversity by accelerating habitat loss, according to Vital Signs 2007–2008.

Washington, D.C.— Consumption of energy and many other critical resources is consistently breaking records, disrupting the climate and undermining life on the planet, according to the latest Worldwatch Institute report, Vital Signs 2007-2008.

To see the rest of the report:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5340/print
.

Type the rest of your post here.

The Designer's Challenge

2007-09-13T20:16:00.000-05:00

David Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of directors,
is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and
Politics at Oberlin College, and the James Marsh Professor at Large,
University of Vermont.

This talk was delivered as the commencement address to the School of
Design, University of Pennsylvania, on May 14, 2007.

The Designer's Challenge

By David W. Orr
.

Dean Hack, distinguished faculty of the School of Design, honored
guests, and most important, you the members of the class of 2007: It
is a great privilege to stand before you on your graduation day.

As a Penn alumnus I feel a deep sense of affection for this
institution and for this place. My own interest in design was kindled
here long ago by Ian McHarg, who as much as anyone was the founder of
modern landscape design and the larger field of ecological design. His
book Design with Nature remains a classic statement of the art of
intelligent inhabitation. From its founding, the city of Philadelphia
has been home to a great deal of innovative urban design and
experimentation now carried on here in the School of Design. You are a
part of a great history and have inherited a legacy of which you may
be justly proud. But the work of designers is now entering its
critical and most important phase.

It is said that we are entitled to hold whatever opinions we choose,
but we are not entitled to whatever facts we wish. Whatever opinions
you may have, there are four facts that will fundamentally shape the
world in which you will live and work.

The first is the fact that we spend upwards of 95 percent of our time
in houses, cars, malls, and offices. We are becoming an indoor species
increasingly shut off from sky, land, forests, waters, and animals.
Nature, as a result, is becoming more and more an abstraction to us.
The problem is most severe for children who now spend up to eight
hours each day before a television or computer screen and less and
less time outdoors in nature. Author Richard Louv describes the
results as "nature deficit disorder" — the loss of our sense of
rootedness in place and connection to the natural world. In some
future time, it is not farfetched to think that disconnected and
rootless we would become unhinged in a fundamental way and that is a
spiritual crisis for which there is no precedent.

Second, when Benjamin Franklin walked the streets of Philadelphia
there were fewer than one billion of us on Earth. The human population
is now 6.5 billion and will likely crest at 9 or 10 billion.
One-and-a-half billion live in the most abject poverty, while another
billion live in considerable wealth. One billion suffer from the
afflictions of eating too much while others suffer from malnutrition.
When I was a graduate student at Penn the ratio of richest to poorest
was said to be 35:1. It is now approaching 100:1 and growing. The
problem of a more crowded world is not just about what ecologists call
carrying capacity of the Earth. It also a problem of justice with more
and more people competing for less and less.

A third fact has been particularly difficult for a society built on
the foundation of cheap portable fossil fuels to acknowledge. We are
at or near the year of peak oil extraction, the point at which we will
have consumed the easy and better half of the accessible oil. The
other half is harder to refine, farther out, and deeper down, and
mostly located in places where people do not like us. We are not
likely to run out of oil or liquid fossil fuels from one source or
another, but we are nearing the end of the era of cheap oil. We have
known this for decades, but we still have no coherent or farsighted
energy policy. In the meantime the penalty for procrastination grows
daily along with the risks of supply interruptions and volatile energy
prices.

There is a fourth fact. When the University of Pennsylvania was
founded the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per
million. But now the level of all human-generated heat-trapping gases
is 430 parts per million CO2 equivalent. We have already warmed the
Earth by .8 degrees C and are committed at least to another .6 degrees
C. According to the scientists who participated in writing the Fourth
Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change we are not
just warming the Earth, but destabilizing the entire planet. Climate
scientist James Hansen says that we are close to making Earth a
different planet and one that we will not much like.

Four facts.

One has to do with the largeness of the human spirit and our capacity
to connect to life.

The second has to do with justice, fairness, and decency in a more
crowded world.

The third has to do with our wisdom and creativity in the face of
limits to the biosphere.

The last is about human survival on a hotter and less stable and
predictable planet.

In the face of the remorseless working out of large numbers do you
have reason to be optimistic? Frankly, no. Optimism is a prediction
that the odds are in your favor — like being a Yankees fan with a
one-run lead in the ninth inning and two outs and a two-strike count
on a .200 hitter and Mariano Rivera — in his prime — on the mound. You
have good reason to believe that you will win the game. That's
optimism. The Red Sox fans, on the other hand, believing in the
salvation of small percentages, hope for a hit to get the runner home
from second base to tie the game. Optimism is a bet that the odds are
in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever
the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people
are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds. But
optimism leans back, puts its feet up, and sports a confident look
knowing that the deck is stacked.

If you know enough, you cannot honestly be optimistic. But you have
every reason to be hopeful and to act faithfully and competently on
that hope. And what does that mean for you as designers?

My message to you is this. As designers you hold the keys to creating
a far better world than that in prospect, but only if you respond
creatively, smartly, wisely, and quickly to the four facts described
above. Your generation does not have a choice to solve one or two of
these problems. You must solve them all — rather like solving a
quadratic equation. And you have no time to lose. As designers you
must design so artfully and carefully as to help reconnect people to
nature and to their places. You must design to promote justice in a
more crowded world. You must design a world powered by efficiency and
sunlight. You do not have the option of maintaining the status quo — a
world dependent on ancient sunlight. And since Nature is a ruthless
and unforgiving bookkeeper, you must do your work in a way that
balances the carbon books. How will you do such things? The answers,
fortunately, are many, but the principles of design are few. Let me
suggest three.

The first has to do with the scope of your work. You must see design
as a large and unifying concept — quite literally the remaking of the
human presence on Earth. Design in its largest sense has to do with
how we provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter,
livelihood, transport, water, and waste cycling. It is the calibration
of human intentions with how the world works as a physical system and
the awareness of how the world works to inform our intentions. And
good design at all times joins our five senses (and perhaps others
that we suspect) with the human fabricated world. When designers get
it right, they create in ways that reinforce our common humanity at
the deepest level.

Ecological design is flourishing in fields as diverse as architecture,
landscape architecture, biomimicry, industrial ecology, urban
planning, ecological engineering, agriculture, and forestry. It is
gathering momentum, driven by necessity, better technology, and
economic opportunity. Designers in diverse fields are learning how to

* use nature as the standard, as Ian McHarg proposed;
* power the world on current sunlight;
* eliminate waste;
* pay the full cost of development;
* build prosperity on a durable basis.

Design as a large concept means, in Wendell Berry felicitous words,
"solving for pattern," creating solutions that solve many problems.
When you solve for pattern you will also have created resilience,
which is the capacity of systems to persist in a world perturbed by
human error, malevolence, and what we call "acts of God." And by
solving for pattern you are also likely to learn the virtues of
reparability, redundancy, locality, and simplicity.

Here is an example of good design: Last week I took a class to a farm
in Virginia in which the farmer raises poultry, cattle, and hogs so
artfully that each element enhances the others while improving soil
fertility and making a substantial profit by selling directly to a
large base of local customers. As a designer, he has designed out
chemicals, pollution, genetically modified organisms, pharmaceuticals,
and most of the fossil fuels necessary to transport food long
distances. The result is health in the large: of land, animals,
people, and economy.

As a corollary, you must see yourselves as the designers, not just of
buildings, landscapes, and objects, but of the systems in which these
are components. That means that you must reckon with economic,
political, and social aspects of design. And the hardest but most
important object for designers is the design of what Peter Senge calls
learning organizations, in which designing ecologically becomes the
default setting, not an aberration.

Second, you will need a standard for your work, rather like the
Hippocratic Oath or a compass by which you chart a journey. For that I
propose that designers should aim to cause no ugliness, human or
ecological, somewhere else or at some later time. That standard will
cause you to think upstream from the particular design project or
object to the wells, mines, forests, farms, and manufacturing
establishments from which materials are drawn and crystallized into
the particularities of design. It will cause you, as well, to look
downstream to the effects of design on climate and health of people
and ecosystems. If there is ugliness, human or ecological, at either
end you cannot claim success as a designer regardless of the
artfulness of what you make.

As a corollary, you, as designers, ought to think of yourselves first
as place makers, not merely form makers. The difference is crucial.
Form making puts a premium on artistry and sometimes merely fashion.
It is mostly indifferent to human and ecological costs incurred
elsewhere. The first rule of place making, on the other hand, is to
honor and preserve other places, however remote in space and culture.
When you become accomplished designers, of course, you will have
mastered the integration of both making places and making them
beautiful.

Third, as designers, you will need to place your work in a larger
historical context — what philosopher Thomas Berry calls, your Great
Work. No generation ever asks for its Great Work. The generation of
the Civil War certainly did not wish to fight and die at places like
Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, or the Wilderness. But their Great Work,
the end of human bondage, required just that of tens of thousands of
them...and they rose to do their Great Work. Those now passing from
the scene that Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation" did not wish
to fight and die in places like Iwo Jima or the battlefields of
Europe. But their Great Work, the fight against Nazism, required them
to do so and they rose to the challenge to do their Great Work as
well. Your Great Work, however, is not one of fighting wars, but of
extending and speeding a worldwide ecological enlightenment that joins
human needs and purposes with the way the world works as a biophysical
system.

Your Great Work will be no less demanding and no less complex than
that of any previous generation. But in outline it is very simple.
Your Great Work as designers is to:

1. Stabilize and reduce all heat trapping gases
2. Make a rapid transition to efficiency and renewable energy
3. Build a world secure by design for everyone...a world in which
every child has a decent home, food, water, education, medical care
4. Preserve the best of our history and culture
5. Enable us to see our way forward to a world that is sustainable
and spiritually sustaining

This challenge, your Great Work, is neither liberal nor conservative;
neither Republican nor Democrat. It is, rather, the recognition that
the present generation is a trustee standing midway between a distant
past and the horizon of the future. As trustees we are obligated to
pass on the best of our civilization and the ecological requisites on
which it depends — including a stable climate and biological diversity
— to future generations. The idea that we are no more than trustees
was proposed long ago by Edmund Burke, the founder of modern
conservatism (1790), and by one of the founders of modern
revolutionary politics, Thomas Jefferson (1789), as well. It is a
perspective that unites us across our present divisions in service to
our posterity.

Your Great Work is a sacred trust given only to your generation. If
you do not rise to do your Great Work, it will not be done. We know
enough now to say what no other generation could rightfully say: the
price for that dereliction — not rising to do your Great Work — will
be high and perhaps total. Your Great Work as designers is to honor
wholeness, health, and the great holy mystery of life. No other
generation before you ever had a greater challenge and none more
reason to rise to greatness.

My charge to you is to do your work so well that those who will look
back on your time — the beneficiaries of your Great Work — will know
that this was indeed humankind's finest hour.

Copyright(c) 2007 David W. Orr

David W. Orr, a member of the Center for Ecoliteracy board of
directors, is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental
Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and the James Marsh Professor
at Large, University of Vermont. Nationally recognized as a leader in
environmental education, ecological literacy, and environmental
design, he is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the
author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment
in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and
Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The
Campus and Environmental Responsibility..

Walk Score

2007-09-12T22:42:00.000-05:00

Check out this site I ran across that calculates the walkability of where you live. It was designed for real-estate purposes to help people find a good place to live, but I think it works well for the enviro crowd too. It is a complete google maps mash-up, using multiple sets of semantic data and an algorithm to calculate how easy it is to get places from any location. My house scored an 88, what does yours score?

Perhaps this would be a good tool to demonstrate to people how silly it is to drive most places in Manhattan, or at least that you don´t need to drive to campus if you live close.

Your Diet and the Environment

2007-09-10T16:26:00.000-05:00

I received my monthly issue of Co-Op America recently, which mainly consists of information concerning investments and ways to cool the earth through them. This month however, there was an interesting article concerning the diet and it's effects on the environment, specifically meat diets. A 2006 study conducted by Drs. Pamela Martin and Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago, http://geosci.uchicago.edul~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html, provided a neat graph that compared different meat (and non-meat) diets with their average annual greenhouse gas emissions. The results: Vegan: 0 tons, Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian: .8 ton, Poultry: .9 ton, Avg. American: 1.485 tons, Fish: 2 tons, Red Meat: 2 tons. These diets are based on a 3,774 calorie diet. All diets including meat are calculated as 72 percent plant-based, 14 percent meat, 14 percent eggs and dairy. The lacto-ovo diet is 90 percent plant based, 10 percent eggs and dairy, reflecting the actual animal product consumption o the average lacto-ovo vegetarian. You might be asking yourself, why such an outrageous amount of calories when the usual average is 2000? Well- this 3,774 number is an "FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) figure that represents the number of calories produced and distributed per person in the US, meaning that while we don't necessarily eat that much on average, we eat or waste that much at grocery stores and at home." This study took into account the entire life cycle of these diets. How much energy it took to grow, harvest , transport , and prepare them. The FAO released a report this past February stating livestock accounts for 18 percent of our world global warming emissions. Switching from a Toyota Camry to a hybrid Toyota Prius would save 1 ton of greenhouse gases annually while making the switch to a vegan diet would save 1.5 tons! After reading this article, it only reaffirms what I heard on Real Time a couple of weeks ago; "One can't be an environmentalist and a meat eater." These words spoken by a representative of PETA. What really surprises me is that the fish diet is equivalent to the red meat diet in avg. annual ghg emmisions. "I am a vegetarian, but I still eat fish" doesn't cut it anymore.

The Underground Railroad Bus Tour

2007-09-06T10:29:00.000-05:00

Upcoming Tour of the Underground Railroad by local good guy and director of the Wonder Workshop Richard Pitts. The bus tour is September 16, 2007 from 3-6 p.m.

The Underground Railroad Bus Tour

Lead by Richard Pitts, the author of "A Self-Guided Tour of the Underground Railroad in Kansas" & Executive Producer of the DVD Documentary "The Kansas Underground Railroad"

COST – FREE

Arrive early to get a seat on the bus otherwise you will have to drive your own vehicle

Date: September 16, 2007 Time: 3 – 6 pm, Where: Triangle Park in Aggieville

Co-Sponsored by CCHW at K-STATE & USD 383

The year is 1858. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed just eight years ago; bad news for you and your small group who just managed a narrow escape from slavery's doorsteps in Missouri. Alas, you thought your adventure was over now that you are in Kansas. You now are going to carefully navigate your way through to get your passengers to Canada on the Underground Railroad.

Richard Pitts, Executive Director of the Wonder Workshop, proudly presents a journey back in time to Underground Railroad sites in Riley and Wabaunsee Counties. This tour will travel to various sites within fifteen miles of Manhattan. At each site, (there will be seven stops made on this tour) participants will be presented with information regarding its historical significance. You should plan to spend at least 3 ½ hours to complete the entire route. Travelers will learn about the famous Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, Captain Mitchell, Strong Farm, Reverend Blood, and others who helped to make Kansas a free state! Your group will take part in interactive activities along the way. This adventure will place you in the shoes of enslaved Africans, Slave Owners, and Abolitionists as you learn about the true meaning of strength, courage, and endurance experienced by those early "Human Rights" activists whose broad shoulders we all stand upon!

FAQ

How long is the tour? Between 3 - 5 hours to complete

.

Another Global Warming Scare

2007-09-05T22:09:00.001-05:00

Loss of Arctic ice leaves experts stunned | Environment | Guardian Unlimited Annotated

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.

If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.

Dr Serreze said: "If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our childrens' lifetimes."

The sea ice usually melts in the Arctic summer and freezes again in the winter. But Dr Serreze said that would be difficult this year.

"This summer we've got all this open water and added heat going into the ocean. That is going to make it much harder for the ice to grow back."

How big is Greenland?

2007-08-29T18:24:00.000-05:00

Fun clip- Aside from West Winger's ignorance of the world as it actually is, the lack of Geography in grade school is unfortunate. Not that Geography is solely maps...

Type the rest of your post here.

Lecture of Interest

2007-08-29T18:16:00.000-05:00

Lecture: Why Are Humans so Willing to Bite the Land that Feeds Them? 5:30 p.m., 2414 Throckmorton Hall. Presented by Ken Warren as a continuation of the Sustainable Dialog

Irish Cobbler Potatoes and the heat woes of Summer...

2007-08-18T21:29:00.000-05:00

The Irish Cobbler Potatoes should be ready to harvest. Champ, if you want to call me and setup a time to come over with your pitch fork, or just drop it off, that would be great.

Megan: I still have frozen homemade marinara sauce for you. Maybe some tomatoes, plenty of cayenne and jalapeno peppers.

There are plenty of peppers for everyone, so feel free to stop by and just pick some, or come collect some that are in the house.

The heat has really hit the garden,
and I'm not sure if either of the cucumber plants, one of the eggplants, and quite a lot of the tomato plants will actually make it. The heat has been intense, and even though I've been watering at night, the heat is too much. We've also had ant problems with the back melon patch. Fortunately, we should have plenty of butternut squash, and if any would like, I could post a very simple butternut squash lasagna recipe that is delicious and filling. The corn seem to be hanging on, and ~ dozen husks are visible. On a bright note, the sun flowers seem to be basking up the sun.

After the garden has stopped producing this year, I'd like to have a workday to try to flatten and better irrigate an area of the yard for next year's garden. This could possibly involve a trip to the dairy farm to apprehend some poo. Trust me, its great fun at 8 o'clock on a saturday morning.

Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well as they get back into town. Stop by and say hi if you haven't in a while :-)

~Sir Knabe

Energy Efficient Renting

2007-08-14T23:12:00.001-05:00

Top 10 Tips for Renters : ENERGY STAR Annotated

My question is, why don´t we as renters have rights to request greater energy efficiency from our landlords? Especially for students in Manhattan, KS, of whom a large number rent old, outdated homes that have had little or no repairs in 30 years. I have been following each of these tips at least to the extent they recommend, if not more so, and I still pay out the ass in utilities. At what point do we, as a society, deem energy inefficiency to violate safety and thus to be against code? Could there be government subsidies allocated for this purpose? Especially since those worse off economically are going to be stuck in the least energy efficient homes, thus furthering their financial burden. Wes Jackson once outlined that efficiency actually increases usage. By this account, it is easy to see why. Those who have, get more efficient, so they can have more. - post by kjc6688

Top 10 Tips for Renters!

Lighting is one of the easiest places to start saving energy. Replacing your five most frequently used light fixtures or the bulbs in them with ENERGY STAR qualified lights can save more than $60 a year in energy costs. ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) provide high-quality light output, use less energy, and last 6–10 times longer than standard incandescent light bulbs, saving money on energy bills and replacement costs.

Considering purchasing a room air conditioner? Consider an ENERGY STAR qualified model. They use at least 10 percent less energy than standard models.

If possible, install a programmable thermostat to automatically adjust your home's temperature settings when you're away or sleeping.

Consumer electronics play an increasingly larger role in your home's energy consumption, accounting for 15 percent of household electricity use. Many consumer electronics products use energy even when switched off. Electronics equipment that has earned the ENERGY STAR helps save energy when off, while maintaining features like clock displays, channel settings, and remote-control functions.

A ten minute shower can use less water than a full bath.

Make sure all air registers are clear of furniture so that air can circulate freely. If your home has radiators, place heat-resistant reflectors between radiators and walls. In the winter, this will help heat the room instead of the wall.

During cold weather, take advantage of the sun's warmth by keeping drapes open during daylight hours. To keep out the heat of the summer sun, close window shades and drapes in warm weather.

Save water by scraping dishes instead of rinsing them before loading in the dishwasher. Run your dishwasher with a full load and use the air-dry option if available.

Wash your laundry with cold water whenever possible. To save water, try to wash full loads or, if you must wash a partial load, reduce the level of water appropriately.

Don't over dry your clothes. If your dryer has a moisture sensor that will automatically turn the machine off when clothes are done, use it to avoid over drying. Remember to clean the lint trap before every load. Dry full loads, or reduce drying time for partial loads.

First SEA Event Fall 2007

2007-08-07T22:51:00.001-05:00

Believe it or not, the first SEA event of the fall semester starts even before the semester does! This is the environmentally themed version of the Movies on the Grass series this year and thus, SEA is a sponsor. SEA will need to set up a booth and help set up and pull down the event. Since it is before school actually begins, this is the most difficult film to pull attendance for. So, tell your friends and colleagues to come on out, and don´t forget to come yourself!

K-State Libraries: What's the Haps?: Movies on the Grass 08/19/07

Annotated

That´s right, Movies on the Grass is back! For it´s third year running, Movies on the Grass (sponsored by K-State Libraries and the Dow Chemical Multicultural Resource Center) is putting on four free socially conscious movies in Coffman Commons on the south side of Hale Library. The first showing will be the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?", which will feature a pre-event Electric Car Show! The car show will begin at 7pm, followed by the film at 8pm (or when it gets dark enough). For more information about this and other Movies On the Grass events, follow Me

This edition of Movies on the Grass is before the semester officially starts, so make sure to get the word out and tell all your friends!

Birthday Party

2007-07-25T19:18:00.000-05:00

Hello people. Just wanted to post my birthday plans on the blog. Tomorrow night, Thursday the 26th at 10ish (really whenever), it is going to be at Kevin's. There will be libations but you may want to bring your own too. Midnight, I am officially legal to enter official alcohol selling establishments..so at 12 that is what is happening. Hoorayy!!!!

Type the rest of your post here.

DiCaprio-produced series will rebuild tornado-ravaged Kansas town

2007-07-24T17:00:00.000-05:00

From the Daily Grist if you missed it...
It's official: Nine months after the rumors began, Leonardo DiCaprio has confirmed that he and a partner will give birth to ... a reality series on green building. DiCaprio will executive produce the 13-part Eco-Town on the Discovery Channel's Planet Green arm, launching in 2008. The original notion was to upgrade Anywhere, USA, for a show called E-topia, but the new series will focus on rebuilding a Kansas town that was hit by a tornado in May.

The tornado caused 10 deaths, displaced almost all of the town's roughly 1,500 residents, and leveled homes, a hospital, and other buildings. And we're not saying Leo and his peeps are crass, cold-hearted vultures, but how excited do you think they were when Mother Nature wiped out a town called -- wait for it -- Greensburg? "This is not about a TV show and about a cable channel that reaches 50 million homes," says Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav. "We're the number one non-fiction media company in the world, but we also want to make a difference."

straight to the source: CBC News, 15 Jul 2007

straight to the source: The Washington Post, Reuters, Kimberly Nordyke, 13 Jul 2007

straight to the source: E! Online, Natalie Finn, 13 Jul 2007

Deuce update

2007-07-18T10:20:00.000-05:00

I think we've decided on the payment system for the garden: pay $10 and you'll get a portion of the produce for as long as the garden is growing......which, with the tomatoes growing like they are, shouldn't take very long to make this a good deal!

Let me know if you're interested, or if your friends are; we probably can't have more than about 10 or 12 people, and we already have 2 signed up. So either post here, email me, or call me!

thanks,

Sir Knabe
kok6785@ksu.edu
317-5007

Deuce veggies + workday Sunday

2007-07-13T14:31:00.000-05:00

Everyone,

The Deuce Gardens finally has some tomatoes! We also have a healthy share of cucumbers, and I think that the garlic and onions are probably ready to be harvested.

So, I haven't firmly said anything about money yet, but here's what I was thinking: Jeffers, Ugolini and I are the only people who have spent any money on the garden (no one else has been asked). Therefore, to make some of the money back, I was thinking about offering the veggies for a discounted price for those who have helped out with the garden (or offering them to everyone, but giving precedence to those who've helped out). I'll check on average prices in the super market, and make sure that we are comparable, if not lower.

Another option would be to make salsa and/or marinara sauce out of the tomatoes, and sell the salsa.....

Anyways, I'm open to options, so let me know what you'd like to do!

As always, we need help weeding this Sunday around 2pm, and we'll be digging and placing some posts.

~Sir Knabe

How a singular/individual action produced plural thinking of the internal and external

2007-07-12T19:30:00.001-05:00

Fasting – Re-Thinking The System That Is Food (TreeHugger) Annotated

Last week I spent a whole week fasting, on a Jiva retreat in France. I should probably call it cleansing because not eating for a week is one means to the whole process of totally rejuvenating my system and re-thinking my framing of food, happiness and wellbeing. The process is very reflective, not only in the first person ie, how I consume food and drink and the patterns that rule my life, but also a good look at the system that provides me with nourishment –industrial farming – and the global commodity that is food. I cannot tell you how powerful the week was, in many ways: it was personally re-energizing and empowering, and globally relevant, challenging the systemic insanity industrial farming and globalization has led to. I am a lucky, hard working, middle class chick who can afford the luxury of a week away fasting, but I would love to see the principles of the retreat, and the fast ideally, experienced by the wider Westernized world. It should be promoted through corporate businesses, schools (perhaps not the fasting part), culture, and health services... I think it would change so much and put us well on the way to a sustainable world.

That bagged lettuce is washed in Chlorine. Let me say that again. Bagged lettuce in washed in Chlorine. That we seem more worried a small insect will infest us with germs than we are about inducing Chlorine.

That animal produce is grown on corn, hormones and antibiotics. Animals should eat grass, which is 2-3% saturated fat, instead corn-feed is a concentrated 30-50% fat.

that cows are fed hormones to induce Mothers’ milk around the clock and that these hormones are significantly altering the development of children in our overfed Western world.

Duece Community Gardens 06/20/07

2007-07-05T00:39:00.000-05:00

More Chicago Green Fest News

2007-07-04T17:13:00.000-05:00

Chicago Green Festival Attracts Huge Crowds
Our first-ever Chicago Green Festival, held over Earth Day weekend, broke records and exceeded all expectations. With more than 30,000 people attending, it was our biggest launch of a new Green Festival yet. Setting an example for other large-scale events, we recovered more than 92 percent of the Green Festival's waste through recycling and composing, and we offset all carbon emissions associated with the festival.
Co-op America Quarterly

I must add, some of us SEAers helped accomplish that! Even though Mariel and I couldn't convince a man to buy the "perfect scarf, the only one with just the right amount of orange fabric", all 10 or 12 of us helped out in numerous other ways.
Upcoming festivals this year:
Washington, DC Oct. 6-7, 2007, San Francisco, CA Nov 9-11, 2007, Seattle, WA April 12-13 2008 (I think the Seattle one is new) and Chicago, IL (TBA).

I vote our nations capitol this year...

Type the rest of your post here.

Vertical farming in the big Apple

2007-06-19T22:02:00.000-05:00

Is this how farms will look in the future?

Jeremy Cook
BBC News , New York

Professor Despommier lists many advantages of this revolutionary kind of agriculture. They include:

Year round crop production in a controlled environment

All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs

Elimination of environmentally damaging agricultural runoff

Food being produced locally to where it is consumed

Read Full Article

Deuce Update

2007-06-18T00:05:00.000-05:00

Everyone:

The garden is in full bloom! Included are some pictures. We need help weeding! On wednesday of this week (the 20th), we'll be tending to the garden, so if you want to help out, please stop by! We probably won't start until about 6:30, and we'll work until sundown.

thanks,

Sir Knabe
404 S. 18th St.

Electric Bicycles...

2007-06-12T17:47:00.000-05:00

Andrew Gondzur from St. Louis, MO has installed a kit that added a rechargeable electric motor to his old bike. With the twist of his handlebar he can go from pedaling to a nice boost of "motorized help." "'I can, go farther and faster than I would if I were just pedaling," he says, which is why Andrew now takes his bike, not his car, to the post office, the library, his childrens's schools, and the grocery store. "Why take 5,000 pounds of car and burn expensive gas to get one thing you forgot at the supermarker? Now I leave my car at home." Its the equivalent to a hybrid car, no idling, both pedaling and electric at your fingerprints, literally.

Type the rest of your post here.

Earthship

2007-06-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

Earthships offer sustainable housing options.

I was down in Taos, NM on a day off from work and visited an Earthship community. These seem to be a very sustainable as well as intriguing housing option. The main issues that emerged when discussing Earthships with my coworkers included modifying city housing restrictions or the Earthships to allow them within city limits, insuring such homes, and getting people to see Earthships not as a housing possibility for hippies but as a plausible housing option. Check out the website and see what you think.

EWaste

2007-05-31T19:42:00.001-05:00

YouTube - Video Log 2 - U.S. and Canada stall on eWaste export limits Annotated

Naturally Attracted: Connecting with Michael J. Cohen

2007-05-31T11:47:00.000-05:00

Naturally Attracted... This might be a good documentary film for Movies on the Grass, though it is only 45 minutes long...

I have included some additional information about Michael J. Cohen below. It is from an article called "Maverick Genius at Work." In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."

It has made me curious anyway... What do you think?

Michael J. Cohen: Maverick Genius at Work?

2007-05-31T11:33:00.000-05:00

Here is a blurb about Michael J. Cohen from "Maverick Genius at Work." Also learn more about Dr. Cohen at: http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html

by Mardi Jones, Ph.D.

In 1955 neither an art nor science was available that explained how or why you could make conscious sensory contact with nature and increase mental health, stress relief, learning ability, conflict resolution and personal and environmental wellness. Then, as today, most great thinkers and leaders expounded on what should be done about our important social and environmental problems. However, they seldom offered a tool or process that enabled us to accomplish what their brilliance suggested so these problems persisted.

Dr. Michael J. Cohen's genius is exceptional in this regard. He has not only acknowledged the problems but has, in addition, identified their ordinarily invisible source and created a nature-connecting solution for them. It is doable and available for anybody interested in reaping its benefits.

Throughout his adult life, Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has devoted his energies to bring into consciousness, identify and think with webstrings, unifying energy substances in nature that are far more common than air. While all species and minerals enjoy webstrings and their benefits, contemporary thinking in its conquest of nature has been taught to ignore, conquer or transform them from their natural status. This has led to the deterioration of natural systems in the environment and people

Cohen has successfully demonstrated the power we have to use unadulterated webstrings to regenerate the purity of nature's balance, beauty and peace around and within us (2). His work is an act of genius for it enables anyone to use webstrings to help resolve "unsolvable" personal, social and environmental problems (1).

Cohen has largely been ignored because contemporary thinking neither believes in nor respects webstrings and their potential for good. To our loss, our history has been to destroy or inadequately substitute for webstring relationships (3). For this reason, webstrings in their pure beneficial form remain foreign to most of us, even though they are right before our eyes. It is similiar to your consciousness registering the words you are now reading but not registering the air that sits between your eyes and this screen at this moment (until you are now reminded of it.)

WEBSTRINGS DESCRIBED:
Environmental experts accurately portray webstrings, nature and the web of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person is asked to represent some part of nature, a bird, soil, water, etc. A large ball of string then demonstrates the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example, the bird eats insects so the string is passed from the "bird person" to the "insect person." That string represents their connection. The insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string is formed interconnecting all members of the group, from minerals to the solar system, including somebody representing a person. In this model each of the connecting strands is a webstring (4).

Every aspect of the global life community, from the space between sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of the web of life. The diversity of natural system webstring interconnections produces nature's regenerative balance that prevents runaway disorders. For this reason, undulterated natural systems neither create garbage nor display our mental health problems or our abusiveness, stress and isolation. Everything that is part of nature, including people, belongs and is supported in nature.

In the web of life activity, dramatically, people pull back, sense, and enjoy how the strings of the web peacefully unite, support and interconnect them and all of life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or natural relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web's integrity, unifying ability and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because this deterioration and loss of support from the wholeness of the web of life reflects the reality of our nature-separated lives, it triggers feelings of hurt, despair and sadness in many activity participants. In reality, Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string" disintegration (5).

With respect to the webstring model, Dr. Cohen asks people if they ever went into a natural area and actually saw strings interconnecting things there. Usually their answer is something like, "No, if I saw them I'd be hallucinating or psychotic." Cohen has responded, "If you see no strings there, what then are the actual strands that hold the natural community together in its perfection and beauty?"
It becomes very, very quiet.
Too quiet.
Are you quiet, too?
Pay close attention to this silence. It flags a vital but missing element in our thinking, perceptions and relationships whose loss results in many troubles (6).

Natural beings sustain their own and nature's wellness while in contact with the whole of the web through webstrings. As part of nature, we are born with this ability. Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard, affirms that nature's web of life holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction (7). Albert Einstein noted that, "Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people....Our task must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty" (8).

Webstrings are part of survival, just as authentic and important as the plants, animals and minerals that they interconnect, including ourselves. The strings are as real and true as 2 + 2 = 4; they are facts as genuine as water or thirst. We ask for our troubles by ignoring them.

Cohen has demonstrated that as part of nature we are born with the natural ability for our mentality to sense, register and respond to at least 53 different webstrings that we need for survival. However, contemporary thinking learns to neither acknowledge nor exercise this ability. Instead, we usually subdue it along with nature. Our troubles and discontents result frojm thinking and relationships based on our use of less than ten, rather than 53 natural webstring senses.

Without seeing, sensing or respecting the webstrings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure or ignore them so they no longer register in our consciousness and thinking. Their disappearance there produces an unnatural void, a discomforting sensory emptiness in our psyche and spirit that we constantly try to fill. This emotional vacuum prevents us from registering and thinking with attractions that otherwise help us, as part of nature, produce unpolluted balance, wellness and peace. The void prevents the formation of many vital relationships; this causes depression and stress in us; we unnecessarily want, and when we want there is never enough. We become greedy, abusive and reckless while trying to artificially replace our missing 43 webstring fulfillments. This dysfunction places ourselves, others and Earth at risk for with respect to the perfection of the web of life there are few, if any, known substitutes for nature's webstrings that do not produce destructive side effects in people and places (9).

Cohen's quest to understand and utilize webstrings has brought him, for the last 40 years, to live and teach in natural areas year round. This led to his Grand Canyon discovery in 1966 that Planet Earth acted like, and could be related to, as a living organism, a fact substantiated twelve years later by James Lovelock in the Gaia Hypotheses (10). From this realization Cohen personally risked founding the Trailside Country School and National Audubon Society Expedition Institute along with other organic webstring education programs, books, curricula, psychologies, therapies, courses, schools, institutions and processes. These include the Whole Life Factor, Organic Psychology, the Natural Systems Thinking Process and the 9-leg thinking model that helps us offset our addictive, nature-disconnected 5-leg thinking (2, 16). Each or these tools is part of Cohen's nature-reconnecting process that helps us build balanced relationships and wellness. The process provides us with empirical evidence and genuine contact with webstrings in natural areas that express themselves in us as 53 natural attraction senses (17, 11). Each sense gives people a unique means to make more sense and implement their deeper hopes and ideals (15).

Because, on average, over 95% of our time and 99% of our thinking is separated from nature, Cohen demonstrates that the crux of our troubles is that our mind is uprooted from nature's purifying webstring balance around and within us. He says,

"Like a deer severed by the wheels of a train, our extreme separation from nature psychologically severs us from our mentality's sensory connections and support in nature. This hurtful disconnection ungrounds us; it disconnects our thinking from many inherent natural ways of thinking, knowing and relating. This numbs our mentality to most of the sensory connections that produce nature's perfection and recuperative powers in our mind and body. Disconnected from webstrings inside and around us, our stricken psyche thinks that our nature-separated lives are 'normal' so we deny our mental dysfunctions rather than address them as such. Our disconnection is so severe that even though most of us have had wonderful restorative experiences in nature, our thinking negates rather than welcomes exercises that enable us to increase and strengthen these experiences.

Webstring sensory reconnection activities help us reduce our troubles by enabling us, at will, to genuinely connect our thinking with authentic nature, backyard or back country, and use its recuperative powers to restore our sensibilities and wellness. This also helps us strengthen our love of nature which is important because we don't fight to preserve what we don't love."

In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it" (13). Dr. Bruce Denness, the conference convener, partially in jest suggested that Cohen, who still today sleeps outdoors year round, might be the reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau as a Psychologist.

If our society was dedicated to living in peace and balance with people and the environment, "genius" would accurately describe Dr. Cohen and his work's contribution, for which he received the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award (12, 14). However, in our nature-conquering society where profit, power and exploiting nature are often rewarded, Cohen's webstring learning and relationship building tools go against the grain. His nature-connecting art makes him a maverick, a genius who tries to teach the science of co-creating with nature to an "anti-nature" society (2, 16). He argues, "With respect to the Web of Life, we are part of the whole; when connected to the whole, webstrings renew themselves and thereby us. In our nature-separated society, a person who succeeds in helping us sustain personal and environmental wellness by genuinely reconnecting injured parts of us with nature must be, by definition, a maverick. It is strange to realize that our thinking is our destiny yet one is a maverick if they recognize that we can't isolate our thinking from nature's perfection and healing powers and not suffer from that loss."

References:

1. Descriptions of genius to which Cohen's work applies:

"When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The principal mark of a genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers."
Arthur Koestler

"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers."
Robert Graves

"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple."
C. W. Ceran

"It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us."
Edmond Duranty

"Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
Ezra Pound

"A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."
Author unknown

"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training."
Bernard Berenson

"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
Winston Churchill

"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored."
Abraham Lincoln

Creative genius: "Individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity."
Author unknown

"Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such they are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature."
Pope

"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough."
Eugene Delacroix

"Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them."
Joseph Joubert

"A good criteria to determine a genius is to see whether he has caused a paradigm shift in his time."
Author unknown

"My father taught me that a symphony was an edifice of sound, and I learned pretty soon that it was built by the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building was built.... Even the very word 'organic' means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose, a true part of entity."
-Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing

Genius: "Those individuals that rise to the particular challenges of emerging in a civilization when it is in some way endangered and who make a response to ensure the continuity of the civilization."
Arnold Toynbee

"The willingness and ability to challenge conventional wisdom. Perhaps even more importantly, scientific genius depends on an instinct for invention, an ability to focus on the problem at hand, and a determination to pursue that problem to a successful conclusion."
Author unknown

"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health."
Henry David Thoreau

"A genius adds to every equation our inborn love of nature and its global intelligence."
Michael J. Cohen

2. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The Web of Life Imperative, Trafford, Victoria, B.C. Canada and (1997) Reconnecting With Nature, Ecopress, Corvalis, Oregon, and Einstein's World, Project NatureConnect, Friday Harbor, WA. Also see Nature Connected Psychology: creating moments that let Earth teach. Greenwich Journal of Science and Technology, July, 2000.
http://www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html

3. McKibben, W. (1999). The End of Nature Anchor Books/Doubleday.

4. Storer, J. Title: The Web of Life. Devin-Adair 1953.

5. Cohen, M. J. (2000). Einstein's World, Institute of Global Education, Friday Harbor, WA

6. Cohen, M. J. (1997). The Natural Systms Thinking Process, How Applied Ecopsychlogy Brings People to their Senses. PROCEEDINGS, 26th Annual Conference of North American Association For Environmental Education, Vancouver, British Columbia.

7, Wilson (1984). The Biophilia Hypothesis, Harvard Univ Press,

8. Einstein, A. (1997) in Neligh, R.D. The Grand Unification: A Unified Field Theory of Social Order, New Constellation Press

9. Pearce, J. (1980). Magical Child. New York, NY: Bantam.

10. Cohen, M. J.(ed.) and Lovelock, J. (1986). PROCEEDINGS of the 1985 international symposium Is The Earth A Living Organism? Sharon, Connecticut: The National Audubon Society.

11. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The personal page of an innovative scientist-counselor-ecopsychologist
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html

12. Jones, M. A. Genius at Work. http://www.ecopsych.com/think3genius.html

13. Cohen, M. J.(1986). Education as of Nature Mattered: Reaffirming Kinship with the Living Earth. in Denness, B., Editor, PROCEEDINGS of "The Maverick Genius Conference" The International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology. Bureau of Applied Sciences, Isle of Wight, England.

14. Kofalk, H (1995) The Distinguished World Citizen Award, Taproots, Journal of the Coalition for Education in the Out of Doors, Cortland, N.Y.
http://www.ecopsych.com/overview.html

15. Evaluation and Testimonials http://www.ecopsych.com/testeval1.html

16. Cohen, M.J. The Stairway to Personal and Global Sanity Institute of Global Education http://www.ecopsych.com/wholeness2.html

17. Cohen, M.J. (2002) Organic Psychology.com The Organic Psychology Revolution: an environmentally friendly, nature-based, therapeutic tool.

18. Cohen, M.J. (1997) Reconnecting With Nature: finding wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth, Eugene OR. Ecopress

INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION

Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council

PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science tools
for the health of person, planet and spirit

P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 www.ecopsych.com

ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process

Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director

The Coal Trap: NY Times Editorial

2007-05-30T08:52:00.000-05:00

Posted from the NY Times, May 30, 2007
There is a rule for judging solutions to the twin problems of energy dependence and global warming: A policy designed to solve one problem should not make the other worse. But that is a likely outcome of the many “energy independence” bills circulating in Congress that aim to build a whole new generation of coal-to-liquid plants to convert coal into automotive fuel.

These bills have already acquired an enthusiastic constituency and will be offered as amendments to what is now a relatively simple and sound energy bill designed to increase the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks, encourage the production of biofuels and provide research and development money for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

There are, of course, ways to make this bill better. Senator Jeff Bingaman will offer a useful amendment to require utilities to generate a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources like wind. But there are also ways to make the bill a lot worse. One of them is to require the expenditure of billions of dollars in loans, tax incentives and price guarantees to lock in a technology that could end up doing more harm than good.

Coal is far and away America’s most abundant fuel. It provides more than half the country’s electricity. And there is no doubt that it could substitute for foreign oil, although how much and at what price is not clear. In addition, the technology to convert coal into liquid fuels is well established. But it is also true that between the production process and burning it in cars, coal-to-liquid fuel produces more than twice the greenhouse gas emissions as gasoline and nearly twice the emissions of ordinary diesel. These are terrible ratios.

Congressional and industry proponents of coal-to-liquid plants argue that the same technologies that may someday capture and store emissions from coal-fired plants will also be available to coal-to-liquid plants. But that deals with only half of the problem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, coal-based automobile fuel would still be marginally dirtier than ordinary gasoline and only marginally cleaner than conventional diesel.

What this means is that the country would be investing billions to produce fuels that, from a global warming perspective, leave us at best treading water. That is unacceptable at a time when mainstream scientists are warning that greenhouse gases must be cut by 60 percent or better over the next half-century to avert the worst consequences of global warming.

Researchers at M.I.T. estimate that it will cost $70 billion to build enough coal-to-liquid plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption. A similar investment in biofuels like cellulosic or sugar-based ethanol — which could yield substantial reductions in greenhouse gases — would seem a lot smarter.

Given the dimensions of our energy problems, new ideas must be explored. But it makes little sense to shackle the country now to a coal-based technology of such uncertain promise.

Buyer´s Guide

2007-05-23T00:04:00.000-05:00

After a year and a half of thinking about how to do this...

I think I finally have an answer about how to organize the information for the Buyer´s Guide electronically. For anyone who knows what I have been up to for the last six or so months, it may come as no surprise that I think we can do it with a blog! A very special blog that is. A blog that really won´t be a blog when we´re done with it!

I have been experimenting with making Blogger into a database. From a really crazy and strange place came the inspiration to start thinking about this again... and just as important, to get excited about it. So, the gist of this is: anyone who would like to help out with the project, starting immediately, leave a comment on this post. I will need some help in developing the structure (feedback/people to bounce ideas off of). Once I get the structure in place it will be real easy to hit the ground running. Of course, I´ve said that before...

US Dept of Interior Troubles

2007-05-16T14:22:00.000-05:00

Interior officials messed with science, say witnesses at House hearing

Posted from the Daily Grist:

Think you've had a rough week? Imagine how the U.S. Interior Department feels. This week saw a heated House hearing in which activists and former officials testified about Interior's nasty habit of meddling with science. "This is an agency that seems focused on one goal: weakening the law by administrative fiat, and it is doing much of the work shrouded from public view," said Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). Witnesses including former Fish and Wildlife head Jamie Rappaport Clark said politics had led to manipulation of research relating to the Endangered Species Act, but Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett insisted the agency was establishing an accountability board and was shocked, shocked to find politics in its establishment. Amidst the hubbub, the official who inherited Interior's messed-up-beyond-belief oil and gas leases, Johnnie Burton, announced plans to resign. And agency head Dirk Kempthorne was found huddled in a corner, muttering, "TGIF, TGIF."

straight to the source: Casper Star Tribune, Noelle Straub, 10 May 2007

straight to the source: San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, Matthew Daly, 09 May 2007

straight to the source: The Guardian, Associated Press, H. Josef Hebert, 09 May 2007

Go Green Curbside Recycling in Manhattan

2007-05-04T10:06:00.000-05:00

Message from David Carter with K-State's Pollution Prevention Institute: Go Green Curbside Recycling is a new business in Manhattan. There are a couple of pick up options you can choose (see full post). Anyway, this new business makes it more convenient for Manhattan residents to recycle.

Contact Mandy Scholz, gogreencurbside@yahoo.com or 785-410-8010, for additional information or to register for the service.

Go Green Curbside Recycling

A simple, convenient way to recycle!

We can pick up your recyclables on a weekly basis or 2 x month.

Materials Accepted: newspapers, magazines, paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, aluminum, tin

How It Works: After you sign up, we will contact you to verify your start date. We will then deliver a recycling container and information about sorting the recyclables along with details about getting started.

Fees: 2 x month = $10/month (available for households with minimal recyclables)

Weekly = $15/month (additional fee for more than 2 containers)

*There is a $5 deposit for 18-gallon container

To sign up, Mail or Email the following information:

Your Name

Address

Contact Phone Number

Pick Up Option (2 x month or weekly)

Go Green Curbside Recycling

1228 Westloop Pl #215

Manhattan KS 66502

gogreencurbside@yahoo.com

785-410-8010

Gardening: I'll be gone for a while...

2007-05-03T13:51:00.000-05:00

Gardeners:

I will be gone starting tomorrow through next friday, then gone again saturday to monday/tuesday. I need help watering and planting while I'm away! It looks like it will be raining for a while, but probably about next thursday it will stop. So, I've already talked to Champion, and he is willing to be "in charge" while I'm gone. It shouldn't take but ~30 minutes to water the garden.

Also, I have bought two eggplants, 1 mint plant, a series of pepper plants, and two big bags of potatoes (red and irish cobbler). I've already talked most of this over with Kevin; the potatoes (one kind) get planted in the back, and the rest get planted somewhere outside the garden (next to the tree). Also, if people are motivated, the peppers, eggplants, and mint can be put in the ground. But please keep in mind that if they aren't planted, they need to be watered inside.

My roommate Jeff should be around, and as always, there's the key in the locker out back.....

thanks everybody,

~Sir Knabe

Buyer´s Guide

2007-05-03T01:53:00.000-05:00

The Buyer´s Guide has been a long stagnant project. At one point there were a handful of people ready to create it, but nothing ever came to fruition. Since then, I have been sort of housing it and thinking about it and wondering if it would ever happen.
For anyone without the background knowledge of this project, check out the website I created but never completed to help us organize:

I still do not know what to think about the whole project. I know that it definitely needs to be done. I know that it has lots of support in the way of plenty of people who would like to see it done and who may even be willing to help. However, the roadblock remains that we still do not know how to go about doing it. My biggest dilemma is that I want it to be dynamic, meaning that it will be user-driven, created, and edited. I think the best place for this type of thing is online in some sort of wiki-blog hybrid. Without the technical knowledge to create something on my own, I must resort to figuring everything out as I go along.

This being said, it is also very important, perhaps more important to have a paper copy. Megan brought back with her, from Greenfest in Chicago, a book that is a shopping guide for the worldly citizen. We all agreed that it provides an excellent model for the paper copy. This is a picture of the website, which is more a promotional device rather than the tool I imagine.

What do you think of this project? Do you have any ideas about how to do it? Do you want to help me with it?

I have a lot of knowledge for the guide, but I would really like to concentrate on trying to come up with a dynamic home for it online. Therefore, I would really like it if someone took charge of the paper version creation. This would allow me to focus on one task, rather than trying to swallow the whole project at once, which I suppose is what I have done up until now.

Most importantly though, I am looking for discussion and feedback...

Green Festival ThanksYou and Fun Results

2007-04-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to post the "thank you" that I believe 11 or 12 of us recieved! It was an awesome experience and I encourage everyone to check one out as soon as possible.

Thank you Chicago Green Festival Volunteers!
Without your support, enthusiasm and help the first Chicago Green Festivals would not have been possible! The entire Green Festival staff appreciates your flexibility, ingenuity and willingness to make Green Festival a huge success!
Here are some important numbers from this past weekend:
Green Team: 85% waste diversion
Congratulations Green Team, your hard work paid off! Thank you for helping us achieve high standards in our first year in Chicago! A special thanks to the volunteers who stayed late into the night/early morning on Sunday to finish up the greening process!
Attendees: 31,133
WOW! Thank you for assisting our attendees all weekend, and answering questions with a smile! We have had great feedback from our attendees about all of our volunteers.
Volunteers: 800
Thank you for showing up and working so hard all weekend long! Your commitment to Green Festivals makes it all possible.

On behalf of the entire Green Festival staff-THANK YOU!
We hope to work with you again in 2008!
-Seven Star Volunteer

Type the rest of your post here.

Green is SEXY!

2007-04-30T10:34:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine and an environmental/progressive group at University of Wisconsin- LaCrosse put together a calendar of taseful nude photos of "greens" doing environmental friendly things like recycling, gardening, biking, etc. It was called the "Green is Sexy" calendar and even included some faculty from the university. The calendar was sold around the city and sponsored by local area businesses including advertisements. Check it out

Type the rest of your post here.

Gardening Sunday 4-29-07 2:00 PM

2007-04-28T16:50:00.000-05:00

Everyone,

If you're interested, head over to these Deuce on sunday around 2, and we'll be working on the garden!

~Sir Knabe

Feedback

2007-04-26T01:01:00.000-05:00

Right along the lines of Ben´s comment here, this is Neil Postman (one of my absolute heroes, see here the book I have often referred to as the Bible), talking about technology and its implications. My response to Ben was an attempt to show how I was trying to solve a problem with the introduction of this new medium. One thing I may not have properly analyzed is the problems this introduction would produce. Another thing that Postman touches on that I am readily aware of and concerned about is the information overload. I know the internet does that, and I have always been concerned that the coblog would do that. My answer to this problem has always been a better structure, more organization, and more efficiency. This is precisely what web 2.0 offers. However, is that enough? Are we wholly missing the point?

Amazing

2007-04-24T11:38:00.000-05:00

Dr. Wesch Wins Rave Award!

Online Extras
feature: Behind the Scenes with Heroes Creator Tim Kring and Hiro himself, Masi Oka
To find the 22 innovators, instigators, and inventors to honor with a Rave Award this year, we started by looking for the most intriguing breakthroughs in the world today — then tracked down the individuals who made them happen. Each honoree told a unique story, but they tended to have one thing in common: Before changing the game in technology, business, or culture, they first changed themselves. There's the actor who became a politician (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the politician who became an entrepreneur (Arianna Huffington), not to mention an entrepreneur turned philanthropist (Paul Allen) and a philanthropist turned open source warrior (Mark Shuttleworth). The lesson seems obvious: Reinvent yourself, reinvent the world.

The Winners
Television: The Creator
Tim Kring | Heroes
Education: The Detective
Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Ancestry-Based Curriculum
Business: The Mogul
J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter, Inc.
Science: The Cartographers
The Allen Brain Atlas
Print: The Storyteller
Brian K. Vaughan | Graphic Novelist
Games: The Fraggers
Cliff Bleszinski and Tim Sweeney | Gears of War and the Unreal Engine 3
Film: The Seer
Alfonso Cuarón | Director, Children of Men
Renegade: The Catalyst
Arianna Huffington | The Huffington Post
Music: The Synthesizer
Gregg Gillis | Girl Talk
Industrial Design: The Stylist
Walter de'Silva | Audi R8
Blogs: The Town Crier
Jen Chung | Gothamist
Medicine: The Code Doctors
K. S. Bhaskar, Maury Pepper, and Joseph Dal Molin | WorldVistA
Video: The Explainer
Michael Wesch | Digital Ethnographer
Technology: The Wizard of OS
Mark Shuttleworth | Ubuntu
Politics: The American
Arnold Schwarzenegger | Governor of California

Feedback

2007-04-23T00:24:00.000-05:00

Due to a lack of activity over the past week...

Due to a lack of activity it came to me that this would be as good a time as any to request feedback about the coblog. I appreciate the positive comments and feedback, but unfortunately for me, the negative is much more helpful. In order to make this forum a truly usable one, there must be creative and structural input from those using it. So, let me know what you think:

Is there anything about the coblog that frustrates you?

Is there something missing that would make you use it more?

Have you imagined any further possibilities or things that could be added?

Why do you think more people do not use it?

Why don´t you use it more?

Is there anything on the coblog that you do not understand?

Are there any terms or services that are unclear (rss, netvibes, flickr, jamendo, youtube, web 2.0, blog, coblog, blogger, wiki, widget, feed etc.)?

Do you have a vision for the coblog (what it is, what it can/could be)?

Garden update at the Deuce

2007-04-14T21:02:00.000-05:00

Gardeners:

Due to the bizarre inclement weather recently, I'm not sure that the few plants that are in the ground will survive. We still have some starter plants inside that are doing well, but we will need to discuss our options as to how to move on from here. We still have plenty of seeds, and we can always get plants that have been grown to a certain size, so we will have produce at some point!

I know things are busy this week for everyone, so let's meet next weekend on Sunday afternoon to try and see what needs to be done. We've already replanted some of the beans, but there will be plenty more to do!

~Sir Knabe

P.S. See previous posts for the address if you've never made it out before!

Animusic-Aqua Harp

2007-04-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

And this one.

Animusic-pipedreams

2007-04-13T09:51:00.000-05:00

Watch This!

Earth Week

2007-04-12T02:02:00.000-05:00

Celebrate Earth Week! Sponsored by Students for Environmental Action, Student Governing Association, Flint Hills Sierra Club, and Pathfinder.

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

Monday April 16~ Land and Water Day

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

FILMS Union 209:

Rising Waters 3-4:00pm; Through personal stories of Pacific Islanders, this film puts a human face on the international climate change debate. By showing the viewers the physical and cultural impacts caused by global warming.

True Cost of Food 4:05-4:20; Food issues are heavy. This animated video takes a light approach to explaining the hidden costs of mass-produced food and about alternatives that are kinder to the planet.

Storm in the Gulf 4:30-5; Shot pre and post Hurricane Katrina, this prescient documentary chronicles hundreds of Mississippi coast dwellers, unlikely allies all, who have banded together to expose and shame Governor Haley Barbour for selling the states most valued natural treasure to oil and natural gas companies for a series of campaign contributions.

Range Wars 5:05-5:35; In the West, the Bureau of Land Management has allowed increased drilling and drilling practices that are killing ranchers' cattle; this beautifully shot documentary follows a coalition of ranchers including Republicans and Bush supporters in New Mexico who are fighting back.

Bringing Down the Mountains 5:40-5:45; This short was produced by three Greensburg, Pennsylvania high school students and offers a succinct introduction to mountaintop removal mining and its effects and personal stories of those most affected by this type of mining.

EVENT: Vegetarian Cooking Workshop in the Derby Dining Center Lobby 5:00-6:30

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*

Tuesday April 17~ Alternative Transportation Day

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*

FILMS Union 209:

SUV City 3-3:15; A short satirical animated film about the absurdity of big SUVs. Some people might find it funnier than others as the underlying message about four common types of big-SUV buyers may ring true.

End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream 3:15-4:30 The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply.

French Fries to Go 4:45-5; a funny and hopeful short film that documents the origins of Telluride, Colorado’s Biodiesel project, and features cameos by Daryl Hannah, Dennis Weaver and Dr. Andrew Weil.

EVENTS: Free Bicycle Repairs! 11:00 am to 2:00 pm, Bosco Plaza, #inner tubes #break pads #gear oiling #gift certificates

Bicycle Rally! 6:00 pm, Bosco Plaza; signing petition to urge City/KSU to begin enforcing their Master Bicycle Plan; Group ride to City Hall at 6:30 to rally for more bicycle lanes.

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

Wednesday April 18~ Green Building Day

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

FILMS Union 209:

design: e² is a six parts documentary-style television series produced by PBS investigating sustainable living and green design from New York City to China. It is narrated by Brad Pitt.

Episode 1: The Green Apple 3-3:30

Episode 3: Green Machine 3:30-4:00

Episode 4: Gray to Green 4-4:30

Episode 5: China: From Red to Green 4:30-5

Episode 6: Deeper Shades of Green 5-5:30

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

Thursday April 19~ Energy Day

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

FILMS Union 209:

The Vineyard Energy Project 3-3:20; This film portrays Martha’s Vineyard’s successful effort to implement sustainable energy solutions through the use of solar power.

Power Shift 3:30-4; Narrated by Cameron Diaz. Power Shift explores the remarkable ways energy touches our daily lives. Meet activists from around the world and learn personal action steps you can take to reduce global warming.

Kilowatt Ours 4-4:45; Filmmaker Jeff Barrie takes viewers on a journey from the coal mines of West Virginia to the solar panel fields of Florida, as he discovers solutions to America's energy related problems.

Wind over Water 4:45-5:00; In November 2001, Cape Wind Associates of Boston announced plans for America’s first offshore wind farm—Almost immediately, a battle between environmentalists and residents on the Cape was born. Journalist Ole Tangen, Jr. was on hand to chronicle the fight in this fascinating documentary about land and the future of renewable energy.

EVENT: Kansas and Biofuels Lecture Series, 7:00 Kedzie 004. Featuring :

-Michael Woolverton, visiting professor in Agricultural Economics. Topic: Economic opportunities and impacts to Kansas.

-Ronald Madl, administrator of Grain Science and Industry. Topic: technologies of biofuel production.

-Jere White, executive director of the Kansas Corn Commission. Topic: corn production and information regarding new ethanol plant in Garnett, KS

-William Hargrove, director of KS Center for Agricultural Resources and the Environment (KCARE). Topic: environmental implications of biofuels.

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

Friday April 20~ Take Action! Day

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

FILM Union 209:

Earth to America 3-4:30: This hilarious special celebrates life on Earth by taking aim at one of our planet's most serious problems: global warming, featuring Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Tom Hanks, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and nearly a dozen others.

Stop by SEA’s table in the Union to see how YOU can save celebrate Earth Day Every Day!

Party at the Deuce

2007-04-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

Everybody,

My roommate and I are having a big birthday bash this weekend on Saturday. We'll be grilling food around 6 (bring your own stuff if you like), and we'll have a keg of Little Apple's Irish Amber. Come one over! I know it will be cold, but not to fear, we have a chimenae.

Address: 404 S. 18th St.
Time: Anytime after 6
When: Saturday 4-7-07

~Sir Knabe

Local Events for National and Global Youth Service Day and Earth Day

2007-04-06T13:28:00.000-05:00

Kansas State University, the city of Manhattan and surrounding communities will be offering activities for National and Global Youth Service Day and Earth Day. Below is a partial list of upcoming local events.

This national time of service will be April 20-22, but events in Manhattan and the area will be April 18-22. It is the first time K-State and the community have worked together to mobilize youth through service and education, demonstrating what young people can contribute as leaders in the community.

This year's theme, selected by young people, focuses on reducing solid waste, and various activities and service projects are planned. Area youth and community volunteers are encouraged to participate and can sign up by calling K-State's civic leadership program at 785-532-5701.

The area's National and Global Youth Service Day kickoff will be 9:30 a.m. Friday, April 20, in Manhattan's City Park, Poyntz Avenue and 11th Street. The kickoff will celebrate and recognize youth for their community leadership and volunteer efforts. A proclamation by the city of Manhattan will be read, buttons will be distributed and special thanks will be given to the youth of Manhattan.

Projects and events planned in the area include:

* April 18-22, Onaga Community Development Project, Leisure Land Playground. Recognizing a need for a safe playground to serve Havensville, Onaga and Wheaton. Students in grades K-8 and community members have designed and will construct a handicap-accessible playground. Volunteers are needed each day from 8 a.m. to dark and will work with youth and community members. All supplies and food will be provided. Transportation also will be provided by K-State civic leadership. To participate or for more information, call civic leadership at 532-5701.

* April 20, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Respond, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Manhattan's City Park. Events include displays, educational materials and activities to help youth make environmentally aware decisions. Waste Management will display trucks and have staff available to talk about how to reduce waste and what happens to trash once it is picked up. K-State students, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity's ReStore in Manhattan will ask youth to help decorate doors for display at the Manhattan Town Center. The doors will be auctioned as part of ReStore's grand opening Saturday, May 5. Howie's Recycling will show what recyclable items look like, and Manhattan's Sunset Zoo will be promoting its Go Green Initiative for schools, classrooms and businesses. To be a part of the day's activities, contact AmeriCorps and Lynda Bachelor at 785-532-7607.

* Saturday, April 21, Olsburg community clean up, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Olsburg, a Kansas PRIDE community, will be participating in the Keep Kansas Clean So Our PRIDE Can Be Seen campaign. Volunteers will be cleaning up Osburg's local park by picking up debris, cultivating plant beds, rebuilding horseshoe pits and painting various structures. Volunteers are needed and transportation will be provided by K-State civic leadership, 532-5701.

* April 21, Willie's Fun Zone, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., K-State indoor practice facility. As part of K-State's Fan Fest, K-State students will encourage youth to "practice" football drills, dress up in football gear and get to know how staying physically fit is vital to overall health. To volunteer, call Jennifer Pollard at 785-532-7933.

* April 21, Revitalize the Trails, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The youth board of the Manhattan Community Foundation, Youth Impacting Community, is inviting all Manhattan-area high school students to participate in this communitywide effort to revitalize the trails and parks throughout Manhattan. Youth Impacting Community will coordinate the efforts of area youth organizations and interested youth as they work with the Manhattan Parks and Recreation Department. All high school-age youth are welcome, and organizations are encouraged to participate as a group-building activity. For more information or to receive a participation packet, call the Manhattan Community Foundation office at 785-587-8995.

* April 21, "It's All About Three: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" trike-a-thon, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., K-State indoor practice facility. The K-State Leadership Studies and Programs Ambassadors will sponsor tricycle races for registered teams and tricycle relays for youth focusing on reducing solid waste. The team entry fee is $30 and all tricycles need to be decorated with recyclable materials. The elimination competition begins at 3:30 p.m. Prizes will be given to the winner of the races and for the best decorated tricycle. Youth tricycle relays take place throughout the day and encourage youth to reuse, restore and recycle. To enter, contact Ella Todd at 785-770-2329.

* Sunday, April 22, Helping Fish Habitat, 9 a.m. to noon, Tuttle Creek Reservoir. The Tuttle Creek Association is looking for volunteers to help set up a man-made fish habitat in the reservoir. Transportation will be provided to the site and lunch will be provided afterward. For more information, contact K-State civic leadership at 532-5701.

* April 22, Earth Day at the Zoo, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Manhattan's Sunset Zoo. In conjunction with the zoo's annual Earth Day celebration, youth will be promoting the expansion of the zoo's Go Green Initiative, a recycling project, to include schools, classrooms, businesses and other organizations. The public will be encouraged to become "green" and experience how big tasks can become small when we work together. For more information, contact Rachel Soash at 785-587-2737.

Food Fight: the 2007 Farm Bill

2007-04-06T10:42:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting article about the role of legislation in determining our food and farm policy in the U.S. The essay is published as part of "Thinking outside the Lunchbox", an ongoing series of essays connected to the Center for Ecoliteracy's Rethinking School Lunch program.

Food Fight: The 2007 Farm Bill

By Dan Imhoff

Every five years, Congress revisits and passes a massive but little understood legislation known as the Farm Bill. This year will be one of those years, and if things play out the way they're headed, this could become the most scrutinized food and farm policy debate in recent history. Originally conceived as an emergency bailout for millions of farmers and unemployed during the dark times of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the Farm Bill has snowballed into one of the most — if not the most — significant forces affecting food, farming, and land use in the United States. In a country consecrated to private property rights and free market ideals, it might seem hard to fathom that a single legislation could wield such far-reaching influence. But to a large extent, the Farm Bill determines what sort of foods we Americans eat (and how they taste and how much they cost), which crops are grown under what conditions, and, ultimately, whether we're properly nourished or not.

Why the Farm Bill Matters

If you pay taxes, care about the nutritional value of school lunches, or worry about biodiversity or the loss of farmland and open space, you have a personal stake in the tens of billions of dollars committed annually to agriculture and food policies. If you're concerned about escalating federal budget deficits, the fate of family farmers, a food system dominated by corporations and commodities, conditions of immigrant farm workers, the state of the country's woodlands, or the marginalization of locally raised organic food and grass-fed meat and dairy products, you should pay attention to the Farm Bill. The dozens of other reasons the Farm Bill is critical to our land, our bodies, and our children's future include:

* The twilight of the cheap oil age and onset of unpredictable climatic conditions;
* Looming water shortages and crashing fish populations;
* Broken rural economies;
* Euphoria over corn and soybean expansion for biofuels;
* Escalating medical and economic costs of child and adult obesity;
* Record payouts to corporate farms that aren't even losing money;
* Over 35 million Americans, half of them children, who don't get enough to eat.

"The farm policies we design now will likely determine whether we will continue to have a sustainable food system in the future," writes longtime North Dakota organic farmer and food activist Fred Kirschenmann, in the introduction to Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill. Although the economic challenges of modern agriculture may seem abstract to many urban and suburban residents, he argues, "an enlightened food and farm policy is of considerable consequence to every citizen on the planet." We all do have to eat, after all.

What Is the Farm Bill?

The Farm Bill is essentially a $90 billion tax bill for food, feed, fiber, and, more recently, fuel. Each bill receives a formal name, such as the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (a.k.a. "Freedom to Farm"), but more often each act is simply referred to as "the Farm Bill."

While many people equate its programs and subsidies with assistance for struggling family farmers, the Farm Bill actually has two primary thrusts: (1) Food stamps, school lunch, and other nutrition programs account for 50 percent of current spending — an average of $44 billion per year between 2000 and 2006. (2) Income and price supports for a number of storable commodity crops combine for another 35 percent of spending. In addition, the Farm Bill funds a range of other program "titles," including conservation and environment, forestry, renewable energy, research, and rural development.

For decades, Farm Bill negotiations have been dominated by a tag team of two powerful interest groups. The "farm bloc" (representatives from commodity states along with the agribusiness lobby) has orchestrated a quid pro quo with the antihunger caucus (urban representatives aligned with hunger advocacy groups). As a result, ever-increasing payments have been successfully directed toward surplus commodity production and the livestock feedlot industry. In return, the Farm Bill's desperately needed hunger safety net programs have survived relatively unscathed.

Who Gets the Money?

For the simplest answer, one might twist a line from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, "It's the commodity groups, stupid." Thanks to a growing number of nongovernmental, governmental, and mass media resources, following the Farm Bill money trail is not that difficult. (Excellent places to start include Environmental Working Group, Oxfam International, Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) According to the Congressional Research Service, 84 percent of commodity support spending goes to the production of just five crops: corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans. Half of that money currently goes to just seven states that produce most of those commodities. The richest ten percent of farm-subsidy recipients (many of whom are corporations and absentee landowners who can hardly be classified as "actively engaged" in growing crops) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

A few other broad brushstrokes:

* Almost 50 percent of all commodity subsidies went to 5 percent of eligible farmers in 2005;
* Subsidies help the largest farms to acquire the best land and squeeze out smaller growers;
* The growth rate for jobs trailed the national average in nearly two-thirds of counties receiving heavy subsidies between 2000 and 2003, according to a recent report.

What about the Food Pyramid?

Very little of the agriculture we subsidize is directly edible, at least by humans. Out of the hundreds and even thousands of plant and animal species that have been cultivated for human use, the Farm Bill favors just four primary groups: food grains, feed grains, oilseeds, and upland cotton. Most are either fed to cattle in confinement or processed into oils, flours, starches, sugars, industrial food additives, and, increasingly biofuels.

It only takes a stroll down the supermarket aisles to understand how Farm Bill dollars flow into the country's food chain. A dollar buys hundreds of more calories in the snack food, cereal, or soda aisles than it does in the produce section. Why? Because the Farm Bill favors the mega-production of corn (resulting in cheap high-fructose corn syrup) and soybeans rather than regional supplies of fresh carrots, healthy fruits, and nuts. Unfortunately, eating a diet high in calories doesn't necessarily ensure that one is well-fed — even if that food is cheap.

While the USDA's Food Pyramid emphasizes the nutritional advantages of five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, Farm Bill funding for diversified row crop and orchard farming remains relatively disconnected from the balanced, healthy diet that professional nutritionists endorse. Meanwhile, most consumer food dollars spent in farm country end up leaving the region because our agricultural areas have effectively become "food deserts." There is at least one simple solution to this. Farm and food subsidy programs could be realigned to support the federal dietary guidelines and reoriented toward food chains that produce and distribute locally grown, healthy foods.

A Food and Farm Bill for the 21st Century?

The silver lining is that Americans actually do have a substantially large food and farm policy program to debate. Conditions for change have perhaps never been better, as market dynamics and public awareness rapidly align to create uncertainty about farm politics as usual. Indeed, the Farm Bill matters because it can actually serve as the economic engine driving small-scale entrepreneurship, on-farm research, species protection, nutritional assistance, school lunches made from scratch, regional development, and habitat restoration, to name just a few.

Our challenge is not to abolish government supports altogether, but to ensure that those subsidies we do choose to legislate actually serve as valuable investments in the country's future and allow us to live up to our obligations in the global community. How we get there is still to be determined. But most observers agree that the era of massive giveaways to corporations and surplus commodity producers must yield to policies that reward stewardship, promote healthy diets, secure regional economies, and do no harm to family farms or hungry kids and their families.

"Today, because so few realize that we citizens have a dog in this fight," writes Michael Pollan in his excellent foreword to Food Fight, "our legislators feel free to leave the debate over the Farm Bill to the farm states, very often trading their votes on agricultural policy for votes on issues that matter more to their constituents. But nothing could do more to reform America's food system, and by doing so, improve the condition of America's environment and public health, than if the rest of us were to weigh in."

© 2007 Daniel Imhoff

Dan Imhoff is the author and publisher of numerous books, including Farming with the Wild (Sierra Club Books, 2003), Paper or Plastic (Sierra Club Books, 2005), Building with Vision (University of California Press, 2001), and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature (University of California Press, 2006). His most recent book, Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill (Foreword by Michael Pollan and Introduction by Fred Kirschenmann) was released by the University of California Press in February 2007.

This essay is part of Thinking outside the Lunchbox, an ongoing series of essays connected to the Center for Ecoliteracy's Rethinking School Lunch program. Read all the essays at www.ecoliteracy.org .

	Freshman
	Sophomore
	Junior
	Senior
	Graduate Student

	Boyd
	Ford
	Goodnow
	Haymaker
	Marlatt
	Moore
	Putnam
	Smurthwaite
	Van Zile
	West

	Every trash room
	Odd floor trash rooms
	Your residence hall's basement
	Your residence hall's lobby
	Outdoor bins
	I would not recycle if facilities were available

	1	2	3	4
5.1 Newspaper
5.2 Magazines
5.3 Computer/Office/Notebook Paper
5.4 Aluminum Cans
5.5 Plastic Bottles
5.6 Cardboard

	1	2	3	4	5
7.1 How much extra money would you be willing to pay per year in your housing bill for a recycling program?

	Yes
	No