“Hands off the Arctic, go beyond oil!”

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Day 2 @ Greenpeace *happy dance*
I am now interning with Greenpeace

Civil disobedience at its best.


!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!


Its no secret that Greenpeace is known for their civil disobedience. So when I found out that Greenpeace activist were hanging from an oil rig in the Arctic demanding Cairn Energy to "pack up and go home", I was more amused than surprised. I love it!

So apparently, the activist had to flee Danish navy commandos to get to the rig where they then suspended their selves into the air using ropes to hang from the rig. They are said to have enough supplies to stay suspended for several days.

If they are able to halt the drilling for just a short time, Cairn Energy will struggle to meet a tight deadline to complete its exploration before winter ice conditions force it to abandon the search for oil off Greenland until next year.

by gp_espy via Twitpic edited by James Greenpeace UK

They are already doing the hard part. Do YOUR part! Which is pretty simple and easy.


!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!
!!Tell Cairn Energy to get out of the Arctic!!

PARSONS "REDUSE.REUSE.RECONSTRUCT"

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I am utterly in love with Parsons. I'm currently in the application process for their environmental studies program. I love how they are able to mix my major in environmental studies with fashion. Students in the Association in Applied Science program were given a project to design clothes leaving zero waste and using sustainable materials for their designs. Here are a few things these brilliant students came up with.









photo credits; treehugger.com

SIERRA'S TOP "COOLEST GREEN SCHOOLS"

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Did your school make the cut?

1. Green Mountain College (Poultney, Vermont)
2. Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania)
3. Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)
4. University of Washington (Seattle, Washington)
5. Stanford University (Palo Alto, California)
6. University of California, Irvine (Irvine, California)
7. Northland College (Ashland, Wisconsin)
8. Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
9. College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, Maine)
10. Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts)
11. University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, California)
11. [TIE] Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vermont)
13. University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, Colorado)
14. Warren Wilson College (Asheville, North Carolina)
15. University California, San Diego (San Diego, California)
16. University of California, Davis (Davis, California)
16. [TIE] University of Vermont (Burlington, Vermont)
18. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
19. New York University (New York, New York)
20. Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia)

FORGET A MINI-VAN !

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This will be my ride of choice. ;-)

A WEEKEND WITHOUT OIL!!!!

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"A Weekend Without Oil"
Its a goal to curb 1,000,000 gallons of oil!!



SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!

• Walk or ride your bike: Avoid using cars and if you must, always try to carpool. Transportation accounts for 40 percent of our petroleum consumption and is easily one of the biggest areas we need to improve upon.
• Enjoy the outdoors: Avoid buying new sporting equipment, since oil makes up nearly 25% of rubber. Footballs or basketballs, for example, can last for many years and used equipment is often just as good and will reduce demand for oil needed to make new rubber.
• Use reusable bags: Avoid disposable plastic. Plastic bags are a huge waste for very little benefit. Nearly 10 percent of U.S. oil consumption, approximately 2 million barrels a day, is used to make plastic products alone.
• Be conscious about what you eat that weekend: You can reduce oil demand by changing your diet to eat less meat, more local foods that require less transportation and organic food, which doesn't use petro-based fertilizers.
• Don't buy new make-up that weekend: The majority of cosmetics are petroleum-based, including lip gloss, face powder, nail polish, and more. So avoid buying new make-up products this weekend and research the brands when you purchase in the future.
• Drink tap water: Avoid beverages bottled in disposable plastic, they make up nearly 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year, so get a reusable bottle and fill it up.
• Make your electronic gadgets last: Avoid buying new electronics. Electronics take a lot of oil to produce and the gadgets you already have can last much longer than the rate at which new ones are released.
• Go to the movies or stream them on Hulu: Avoid buying new DVDs/Blu-Rays, as oil is a key ingredient in their production, packaging and shipping.
• Skip buying new clothes that weekend: Swap clothes with friends or check out the local vintage store. The less new clothes you buy the less oil is used in the manufacturing process and transportation.
• Head to your local library or read online: Avoid using a printer and buying printed material including daily newspapers. Printing doesn't just waste paper, nearly 100,000 gallons of ink each day is used on daily newspapers alone.

SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!
SIGN UP HERE!!

WHAT A WONDERFUL IDEA!

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UK has a wonderful pay as you throw system. It's like "eureka!". This is an attempt to get consumers to decrease trash while increasing recycling.

Check this out
This is a microchip in their trash cans that weigh's the amount of trash thrown away. Then bins weight the trash and the microchip shows where the trash came from. So when the garbage collectors come, they then charge the residents by the amount weighed. Don't like it? RECYCLE!!

And yes, this IS in America also. Some Maine communities are also practicing this "pay as you throw" system. I personally believe this should be a world wide effort.

"Pay as you throw" will obviously lessen the amount of re-usable trash being sent to the landfill. Most states landfills are so full that they are having to pay other states to except their trash. Even some parts of Canada has to pay the US to accept their trash.

In Maine, residents have cut their trash to 50% from the PAYT and the town's recycling rate grew to 150% in one month! With this, the town saves money and ultimately, the tax payers also.

WILL SEAFOOD BE SAFE?

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The "sniff" test.


I told you in a previous post about how they are checking seafood for oil. To refresh your memory, basically all they do is sniff for oil.

But have no fear, environmentalists are here!!

Prominent environmental groups are calling for better testing. The Natural Resource Defense Council has sent letter to the Food and Drug Administration(FDA) asking them to;

• Ensure that there is comprehensive monitoring of seafood contamination.
• Ensure public disclosure of all seafood monitoring data and methods.
• Ensure that fishery re-opening criteria protect the most vulnerable populations, including children, pregnant women and subsistence fishing communities.

What would you do without us? =)

GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS

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THOUGHT OF THE DAY

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When you think about it; its not about saving the environment per se. The planet will always be here. The environment will eventually renew itself, millions of years later.

Its more-so about saving us from ourselves. After all, we need the environment. The environment doesn't need us.

When we pollute and destroy the environment, all we are doing is essentially hurting ourselves.

• We pollute the water that we need to drink in order to survive.
• We pollute the air that we need to survive.
• We destroy the land that we need to grow our food.

Amongst other things.

So eventually, people will destroy their selves as an effect to destroying the environment to the point of it being non-livable for us. Then the planet can efficiently renew itself. When the virus(people) is gone.

Or we can start now. Help better the environment. Lower our impact on the environment. Stop while we are ahead. It's going to take the most but it's worth it.

Wake up world.




Food for thought

TRUE LIFE: AVATAR HOME TREE

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GREED vs NATURE

“What happens in the film is what is happening here,” said Chief Arara of the Brazilian Arara tribe

I knew it! I knew the movie Avatar was an environmental movie. It was all about loving and respecting your planet or who they called, their mother. We call our environment "Mother Nature". They were extremely attached to their planet as they should be.

"The reason I made the film is to connect people back to the wonders of nature which we've lost with technology. Nature fights back - as we see, it melts ice," said Cameron

When I saw the "spirits" floating through the air, I immediately thought of huge dandelions.
That .. or jelly fish.

The Na'vi didn't destroy anything on their Earth. They were even biologically connected to the Earth. They called every creature/animal their brothers and sisters. That is how in tune they were with their planet. How awesome is that?

Their world, Pandora, looked like an untouched Amazon.

They even called Earth a "dying planet". Trueness!


Even More ..
The director James Cameron is following up this movie with an environmental campaign, The Hometree Initiative which has already planted 1 million trees !!*cheers*

"We don't need some new machine that sucks up CO2 and puts it in the earth. We already have one. It's called a tree," said Cameron, on Earth Day

James Cameron's Avatar was inspired by his visit to the Amazon of Brazil. He now has made it his personal mission to save this beautiful forest from destruction. The Brazilian government has plans to build the huge Belo Monte dam which would flood 100 square miles of the Amazon and dry up 60 miles of the Xingu River.

“The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” Cameron expressed to more than 70 indigenous people.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

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“An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.)

BOOM!!
Take that! Take that!