dysnomia.us

earth day or whatever

I guess Earth Day is still a good idea- raising awareness, building commitment and all that. But it’s also an excuse for corporate greenwashing and for token actions that don’t mean much without the other 364 days of the year. Maybe it’s time to start promoting Earth Night again:

• Spooked oilpatch posts $500K reward
• Pipeline bombers probably local: expert

Joosse is convinced the attacks are being carried out by someone who lives in the area, but said it’s difficult to say whether it’s a single individual or a “small tightly knit group.”

“Even if it is an individual,” said Joosse, “there are other people who know about this person and are complicit in helping, if only through their silence.”

Residents blocked oil and gas vehicles on a road running through the community of Kelly Lake last summer, an event Joosse said was a precursor to the explosions.

Joosse said the blockade was an illustration of “widespread community support for civil disobedience, and a widespread sentiment of frustration” by locals angry over what they see as the destruction of their land.

This one makes a little less sense. I can understand the poetic justice of attacking a polluter with pollution, but I can’t see a lot of activist types actually doing it. Not to mention that dumping 1200 pounds of waste seems like a big enough task to make security difficult. Curiously, I seem to remember a similar story from the Connecticut area in the last couple of months. I’m going to look around for that again.

• Eco-Terror Threat: Connecticut DEP Finds Chemical ‘Of Concern’ At Wood-Burning Plant Site

The search for contaminants began Tuesday, when DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy got a letter claiming to be from the group of environmental activists called Earth First. The letter, which also had been mailed to Plainfield Renewable Energy and the Norwich Bulletin newspaper, claimed that Earth First dumped substances at the site of PRE’s planned plant near Norwich, Mill Brook and Tarbox roads.

Saying PRE is “guilty of plotting to commit crimes against the environment,” the letter-writer stated that they dumped 1,200 pounds of substances in six locations on the 27-acre property — “the same pollution that PRE intends to dump on their neighbors.” The letter lists the following chemicals: “Lead Mercury Asbestos Toluene Benzene Perchloroethylene and Creosote.”

Here are a couple of less-intense things we could do. This is a pretty decent argument for cities like Portland to reconsider their attraction to streetcars and light rail, and build a bus system that works better than what we have now and is more flexible than the rail we want (by way of Jack Bog):

• Get On the Bus

And here’s a notion of how to make bikes more attractive to Americans:

• What we talk about when we talk about city bikes

This may all seem a bit much compared to the bicycles we’re used to, but consider the North American equivalent to the city bike: the private automobile. Just think of how silly it would be if you had to carry your groceries on your back when you used a car to get somewhere. Or if you wanted to go out at night, but your lights had run out of batteries. Would you buy a car that didn’t come eqiupped with lights to begin with, requiring you to buy separate lights that you had to attach yourself? What if a car rusted into uselessness if parked outside in the winter? Cars, like city bikes, are designed for practical transportation.

And some dismal science from the sea:

• Overfishing Means Marine Animals Are Starving: Report
• Ocean Dead Zones Likely To Expand: Increasing Carbon Dioxide And Decreasing Oxygen Make It Harder For Deep-sea Animals To Breath

(picture and link by way of Treehugger)

politics, crime, collapse and space

This story hasn’t gotten much play. It may fizzle, it may explode, but it’s bound to be interesting either way. Maybe it’ll even work. It’s certainly going to be closely watched by many people, although not the American media:

• Saudi monarch credited with ‘radical, fundamental changes’

Worried about the collapse of civilization? Concerned that Kyoto is too little, too late? Overwhelmed by feelings of doom and gloom? Here’s a new take on the standard story of humans consuming themselves to death:

• Easter Island’s Controversial Collapse: More To The Story Than Deforestation?

“Societies don’t just go into a tailspin and self-destruct,” says Stevenson, an archaeologist at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “They can and do adapt, and they emerge in new ways. The key is to put more back into the system than is taken out.”

While evidence suggests the Rapa Nui people cut down 6,000,000 trees in 300 years, for example, they were also developing new technological and agricultural practices along the way—such as fertilization techniques to restore the health of the soil and rock gardens to protect the plants. As a result, every rock on Easter Island has probably been moved three or four times, Stevenson said.

What they don’t say is that it’s any fun to live through this sort of adjustment. I wouldn’t take it as an excuse to let things go to shit.

Here’s someone with some political courage. It’ll be interesting to see who attacks him for this:

• Holder: U.S. a ‘nation of cowards’ on race discussions

How does all this stimulus money affect things I care about?

• Stimulus Bill Is a Step Forward for Pedestrians, Cyclists & Cities
• Compromise on stimulus bill gives NASA $1 billion
• Extra NASA funds: An initial step towards gap reduction options/extension

Tales of crime:

• Woman uses headlock, wedgie to thwart burglary
• Goat breaks into home, eats cake

Things that fall from the sky:

• Lights in the sky meteors, not space junk
• Jersey City UFO mystery solved: It’s another flying ‘tooth’

And things that go up into the sky:

• NASA and ESA Prioritize Outer Planet Missions