Things that go bump in the night (and need more attention)
March 1st, 2008
Some preacher wants to put up a sign on his roof. “Property rights”!
Well, well… the dusty West wasn’t always so dusty. In fact, humans in the past 2 centuries have made it 5 times more dusty than it used to be.
As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.
I don’t know how true this is. Have you been to a national park lately?! Then again, I was at the magnificent new John Day Fossil Beds visitor center (note: creationists beware!), and I was the only visitor all day.
Suburbanites getting (slightly) greener:
Last summer, Mr. Tidwell attended a picnic where, he said, a guest had brought a plate of kiwi fruit imported from New Zealand. “This very nonhippie, not-environmental-cliché-type woman I heard asking another person, ‘I wonder what the carbon budget of these kiwis are?’ ” he said. “I was just astonished.”
If the United States is ever to reduce its carbon emissions, suburbanites — that is, roughly half of all Americans, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution — are going to have to play a big role. And lately, they are trying.
The death and decay of an environment…
… sometimes beautiful?
After a few steps he stopped and pointed with pride at a stalk of dead fennel standing in a bed of moribund, wheat-colored joe-pye weed. “Normally, people who garden would have cut this back by now,” he said. “The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”
Animal rights activists versus the environment (again):
First we lost the Baiji. Now will we lose Bangladesh’s unique freshwater dolphins?
In a country where the wildlife population has been denuded because of over-crowding and pollution, dolphins provide visitors with a beautiful and memorable surprise.
But conservationists say they are increasingly concerned over the future of the country’s river dolphin population, some of which they warn may even be at risk of extinction.
They say that it is rapidly declining because of over-fishing, a shortage of prey, pollution and declining freshwater supplies.
The LEED system is a bunch of crap. Pretty much everyone knows that. LEED Platinum or Gold probably means that the occupant of said building is a corporation looking to greenwash its sins. But more worrisome is how the LEED system may actually lead to anti-environment choices. Indeed:
But the growth of green design renders the loopholes in LEED more serious than ever. The point system creates perverse incentives to design around the checklist rather than to build the greenest building possible. Consider the example of the University of Michigan architecture school, whose dean, Doug Kelbaugh, is a lifelong believer in green architecture. His school is embarking on a major addition to its facilities, but Kelbaugh told me he’s on the fence about going for LEED certification. The addition is planned for the roof of an existing building—the greenest site possible, given that heat will rise up through the floor and no new land will be used. But LEED gives points for water-efficient landscaping, so a rooftop project that by definition has no landscaping is already down two points out of a possible 69.
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2 Comments Add your own
1. JMG | March 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Here’s something that would go bump in a big way and needs a lot more attention — a plan to push sprawl even further out throughout the Mid-Willamette Valley by pumping $670 million into a new third bridge for cars in Salem, even as gas hurtles towards $4+ a gallon and Oregon’s economy melts down.
Read all about it: www.LOVESalem.ORg
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