Sometimes we just want to watch a good movie. And a short movie is better than no movie at all. PS: No models were actually harmed in the making of this film. Cheers.
art meets ocean
2
Tag Archives: eco-friendly
don’t reuse that water bottle
Dear Water Bottle, We’ve had a beautiful romance, but I’m breaking up with you. It’s simple, really: I’ve learned that you’re a slow poison, and that just doesn’t work for me. In my quest to compost and recycle more I have been studying the various plastics in my life, which until now, I’ve considered a convenience. Well, an evil convenience, but still. Oh Plastic, you have made my life easier, but the fact remains that when the landfills are overloaded and when the Pacific Island of Trash manages finally to put us in a collective gasping choke-hold, I will have no one to blame but myself.
Here are five everyday plastics and why I need to rethink them:
#1 : The most commonly used plastic and can be found in microwavable food trays, water and juice bottles. This plastic absorbs bacteria and should not be reused.
#2: A stiff plastic used in toys, plastic lumber, picnic tables, detergent, household cleaner and shampoo bottles. This plastic is nearly neutral and can be recycled to make detergent bottles, floor tiles, pens.
#3: PVC is a soft, flexible plastic used to make teething rings, toys, cooking oil bottles clear food packaging, mouthwash bottles. Sometimes called “the poison plastic,” it contains phalates that interfere with hormonal development.
#6: Polystyrene is used to make disposable cups and plates, egg cartons, take-out containers. This material leaches styrene, a carcinogen, into food (especially when microwaved) and should be avoided.
#7: Polycarbonates are used to make baby bottles, sippy cups, three and five gallon water jugs. Contains bisphenol (BPA), which migrate especially if heated, and has been linked to heart disease. BPA, is a xenoestrogen, a known ednocrine disruptor.
So you see Water Bottle, it’s over. You and your extended family are simply toxic and I’m done with you. Now that I know, I will recycle your ilk whenever possible and avoid the worst of you when I can.
Ciao, baby.
Bee Serious
And Then There Were None
A recent text conversation between my husband and I went something like this:
First of all, ignore the typos. I blame the smartphone. It gets a little too involved. Second, there were not enough of those little crying emoticon thingees to portray the appropriate degree of sadness, despair, and outright terror I felt about the bee situation. The honey bees, our fuzzy four-winged friends responsible for pollination of about 70% of the foods we eat are dying by degrees and we, seemingly, are powerless to stop it. The story with the wild honeybees is this: READ MORE HERE…
kiss a frog
Have you kissed a frog lately and thanked it? If not, this is your chance because May is National Wetlands Month.
“Wait…what?”you say. “What the heck is National Wetlands Month?”
Funny you should ask. You see, the federal government recognizes the beauty, the raw power, and the undeniable necessity of wetlands, not because of the commercial development value, but because of their intrinsic and strategic value in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
Wetlands have three distinct parameters that earn them the title. First, they are water-saturated and can always be wet, like swamps, marshes, bogs and coastal wetlands, or seasonally wet, resulting from winter snow melt, and occurring in forested or wooded or open areas that collect standing water, and sometimes dry like ephemeral pools or streams which reemerge after a rain event and dry out with the sun until the next rain event. Second, their soils are hydric meaning that at least for some part of the year the soils will be immersed in water. Thirdly, they have more than less hydrophytic vegetation which simply means that this type of plant thrives in a water environment. Unless it’s an obvious wetland like a marsh or bog or coastal plain, a bit of scientific investigation is necessary to make a wetlands determination as it’s not always apparent to the naked eye. Permits are required to build in wetlands as well as avoidance and minimization of the planned disturbance and mitigation for whatever amount of wetlands are converted to uplands. It’s a bit of a complicated process, but with the federal government’s “no net loss”of wetlands policy, a crucial one.
Why, gosh darn it, are these mosquito-infested swamps so important? Well, wetlands act like a sponge. They control flooding, filter pollutants, and buffer storm surges like nobody’s business. The Mississippi Delta which is practically one huge wetland has over 40% of the wetlands in the lower 48 states and has lost over 1,900 square miles since the 1930’s. About two football fields worth of wetlands are lost every hour. It used to be that 50 miles of wetlands separated New Orleans from the next hurricane, but no more. Now storm surges and big winds have their way with her.
Philadelphia, was also a big wetland when the colonists first settled, but they ditched and drained their way to what is now known as Center City Philadelphia. The problem is not necessarily the conversion of wetlands. Many port towns around the coasts of our country were once inundated with wetlands and are now bustling metropolises rather than said mosquito-filled swamps, but overdevelopment, such as in the Florida Keyes and surrounding environs, has resulted in life out of balance. As coastal cities continue to build out, or develop their barrier islands beyond holding capacity, the 100-year storm which now seems to happen every five or ten years will continue to pound what used to be only shoreline, but is now littered with million dollar homes.
How many wetlands do we need to control flooding, keep pollutants out of our rivers and streams, and help blunt the surge of rising winds and tides? It’s a fact specific, case-by-case analysis, but as climate change forces sea levels to rise, I’d hazard a guess that we’re reaching critical mass in some of the more densely populated coastal areas, for example, the Jersey Shore. Maybe a few more acres of wetlands wouldn’t have stopped Hurricane Sandy, but they would have cut down way down on the property damage. As the sea levels rise, wetlands have become more important than ever. Insurance companies are keenly aware of this —pun intended —sea change, and have started charging more for policies on climate-threatened properties. Some are even suing municipalities to pay for the cost of global warming such as Farmers Insurance Co. did with some Chicago-area governments in a landmark class action suit filed on May 2, 2014 (Illinois Farmers Insurance Co. v. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago District, et al., Case No. 14CH06608, in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois).
By the way, about the frog: they are extremely important to the balance of the ecosystem since they eat bugs, filter our drinking water (tadpoles), and are themselves a source of food for other species, as well as the source of many medical advances for humans. Plus they make the most rockin’music! Unfortunately, they’ve been on the decline for the last 50 years with fewer numbers and more mutations because of a variety of things, but degrading water quality, habitat loss and overuse of pesticides are a few of the major ones. Frogs are to the ecosystem like the canary is to the coal mine. Their death is the first indication that there’s a problem and where frogs go, humans will follow.
We can’t all have beach front property, not at great public and personal cost, but we can all enjoy the beach. What is it the Buddha said? Everything in moderation? So for National Wetlands Month, go ahead and build that dream vacation home, but build it on a upland so tomorrow our kids will still have a frog or two left to kiss.
earth day (h)
WINTER [notes from montana]
“It was early September and I was driving, literally, to the last road in the United States, a gravel-and-dirt road that paralleled the Canadian border, up in Montana’s Purcell Mountains. It was like going into battle, or falling in love, or walking from a wonderful dream, or falling into one: wading into cold water on a fall day.” – Rick Bass, Winter
Can Rick Bass help it if his Soul’s been on a nature walkabout for all of his life? In Winter [notes from montana], Bass’s wandering spirit is alive and well and living in the Yaak Valley in Montana without electricity, without heat, other than the wood-fired variety, and without much contact with civilization… To read more of this post, go here…
earth day (g)
For thousands of years, we’ve used and reused the same water as the dinosaurs, Galileo, Genghis Kahn, and Jesus. Until now. Now the water is chock full of contaminants that the ancients didn’t even know how to pronounce. That’s because Mama Nature doesn’t know how to remove radionuclides, usually held safely within the earth’s crust, and other chemicals found in the fracking wastewater that’s slowly making its way into Her rivers, lakes, and streams. Until now, we’d been sipping the same stuff as Adam and Eve. Until now.
Enjoy an excerpt from THE QUALITY OF LIGHT:
She died that night. Doc attended the funeral along with dozens and dozens of ranchers and their families all come to pay their respects to this great woman, one of the “stickers” whose family had come in the late-1800s during the first boom and bust era of timbering and mining and oil and construction and who had stayed on to make a living. They worked the land for what it would produce – cattle. So when the time came and they asked if anyone wanted to say anything on behalf of this fine woman, Doc’s hand raised itself, his body stood up, and he took over the funeral.
“Twila’s great-grandfather was thrilled when the first oil men knocked on his door with a check and a promise. They may not have tamed the harsh out of the land, but at least they made it more hospitable. They built roads and paid well, and the ranchers loved them. That was the heyday when oil flowed like free love out of those great big underground reservoirs. Sweet gas, they called it. Back then a whisper could’ve coaxed that oil out of the ground.” To read more of this post, click here…
earth day (e)
Ten Things to Help SAVE THE PLANET
It’s Earth Day, and you know what that means — Mom’s Birthday! Not your biological mother, but the Mother of Us All. Since it’s a holiday, we won’t dwell on all the intractable environmental problems that could potentially derail us as a species. We’ll save that discussion for another day. Instead, as a tribute to Mother Earth in all her, well, earthiness, here are ten things you can do to assure She makes it to Her next birthday and a few million after that.
1. Think globally. Act locally.
2. Eat organic.
3. Conserve water, and drink more water, too.
4. Walk more. Bike more. Drive less.
5. Plant a tree or a pesticide-free garden (but not a rose garden; too much fertilizer).
6. Sing. Yes, believe it or not. The planet is made up of sound so show your appreciation and join in Her song.
7. Become consciously aware. Every moment spent rooted in the present is one more you won’t miss. Enjoy it to the fullest.
8. Buy products that have a smaller environmental and carbon footprint, i.e. it’s okay if you can’t afford a Prius. Start small. Buying food sans excessive packaging that would end up in a landfill is perhaps just as important.
9. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Not just bottles and cans, but clothes, shoes, appliances, electronics, whatever you can.
10. Most importantly — vote with your wallet. As consumers, we hold tremendous sway over the products appearing on the shelves in our local markets. If you don’t like them, don’t buy them. And if you really don’t like them, vote with your feet and walk to another store!
Over the next few months we’ll talk more about these things individually, but for now, Happy Earth Day.
Pam Lazos
4.22.14
Link
“I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place Read more
earth day (c)
Throughout time, godparents have been an important, often undervalued resource in the raising of children, providing nurturing counsel and emotional sustenance to their charges. Maybe they didn’t grow us, but they provided strength, love, and an alternative point of view, the ally in our evolutionary corner, always ready to step in when needed. Even the Mother of us All could benefit from having one. Lucky for Her then that there was Rachel Carson, and lucky for us.
If Edward Abbey was the godfather of the modern environmental movement, then Rachel Carson was the godmother. When she penned Silent Spring, first published in 1962, Carson probably had no idea that it would be one of the most influential books of the modern environmental movement. Read More Here…
coming up for air
Close your eyes. Take a deep, slow breath. Feel your lungs swell with air. Notice how your chest expands gently and as you exhale, sense the relaxation of your body. Your lungs pump oxygen into the bloodstream, which flows faithfully throughout the body and when that sweet rush of oxygen reaches the brain, you are instantly calmer, more relaxed. Most days, we don’t think about the breath. And still, a breath, consciously observed, has the power to regulate the temperature of the body. It brings clarity of the mind. It releases tension, It quiets the ego. Some would even say that it is not you or me doing the breathing, but the act of taking in and releasing air, is God breathing Us.
THE WOOD FOR THE TREES (2)
Some of the oldest living organisms on earth are trees. Giant sequoias, for example, can live as long as 2,500 years while some bristlecone pines can live up to 5,000 years. The numbers vary, but let’s just say for simplicity’s sake that a mature tree, i.e., older than a mid-range teenager, consumes about 48 lbs of CO2/yr. (Some accounts are much higher for you skeptics.) The key to this is mature since a prepubescent tree simply doesn’t carry its weight. It’s simple math. CO2 in, oxygen out, but cut 18 million acres off the face of the earth and the numbers skew, the math gets wonky. Saplings start out perky enough, sucking in a bit of CO2, letting out a bit of oxygen, a tree’s waste product (who said it wasn’t a symbiotic world), but it’s not until the tree reaches 100 or 125 that it really hits its stride, exhaling wads of the life-giving stuff each year, chowing down on carbon dioxide like it was candy. The fact is, older trees outperform younger trees by an incredibly wide margin and the older the tree, the more CO2 it can take in because this is one instance where size does matter. So while it’s all cool and hip to plant a tree every time you cut one down, don’t expect the payoff to be that meaningful for awhile. (Please don’t read this and have your take away message be that we shouldn’t be planting trees. We absolutely should and must be, but keep in mind the delayed rate of return.)
Only about half of the world’s tropical forests are still standing. While trees as a whole give the world a great big oxygen boost, the destruction of the same trees to make way for crops — think slash and burn of swaths — doesn’t just deprive us of that oxygen, but contributes to greenhouse gasses because: a) we’re burning them, and b) they’re releasing the carbon they were holding. All tolled, it’s somewhere in the range of a 12-17% carbon increase. Something else trees do is hold water in their roots and then slowly release it into the atmosphere, contributing to the amount of water vapor in the air much like your houseplants release moisture into your home during the dry winter. Amazingly, in the Amazon Basin, about half of the water in the ecosystem is held within the plant life. Without trees, we have deserts.
The writer Aldous Huxley said facts don’t cease to exist simply because we ignore them. About 18 million acres of forest are lost each year to logging for firewood, or pulp and paper, for raising beef cattle, and for growing cash rich crops such as soy, palm oil, and coffee, the latter three of which leave behind poor soil conditions since none of their root systems holds the ground well. All of this results in increased erosion, flooding and a decline in local water quality due to runoff. It takes about 2,000 gallons of water to raise a single pound of beef plus acres of cleared forests to make way for pastureland. Beef is neither ecologically nor agriculturally efficient, and too much is bad for your heart, so why are we eating so much? (Notice I didn’t say “it”, but “much.”) Should we continue cutting down old growth forests to make amazingly beautiful furniture, continue to eat large quantities of beef, continue to grow crops such as soy or palm oil (not the good fat, BTW) to use in our unending supply of processed foods, shampoos (sodium laureth sulfate and stearic acid are derived from palm oil), and cleaning products, continue to log forests for paper, and sadly, firewood, or should we check ourselves and stop living in what is probably the most unsustainable manner since the ruling class of ancient Rome, unless you’re a Kardashian or had a hand in constructing just about anything in Dubai. Shall we ignore the facts?
Approximately 70% of the world’s species, plants and animals alike, live in forests. What happens to those species when the forests are all gone. I think it’s more than speculation to say they’ll go the way of the dinosaur and man as a species will be right behind them. Where I live in Central Pennsylvania, the richest unirrigated farmland in the country is being plowed under for brand new, upper-end housing developments. We all need a place to live, yes, but couldn’t it be a revitalized brownfield instead of the rich, fertile farmland that gave my part of the world its acclaim? I wonder about all the critters living in and around the edges of those farm fields, in the small patches of woods, in the little nooks and crannies and burrows. Where will those little guys go when the tractors arrive? It’s not like they can call a realtor and get a trade-in on read the rest here
persephone's step-sisters 