Life Before Google January 31, 2008

Just a quick note because so much is going on – what with Miachal Pollan on a book tour, the New York Times reporting on the climate impact of eating meat, and Seventh Generation CEO Jerrffey Hollender’s excellent commenatry on the Clorox purchase of Burt’s Bees.
 I am catching up on all these current events and have found some exceptional new blogs. I still remember a time when I was buried in micro-film trying to get this kind of information. But now, POOF! If I can think of it, I can find it in seconds! I will list them below and add them to my blog log so you can reference them any time.

TreeHugger – International environmental reporting:

http://www.treehugger.com/

The Inspired Protagonist – Seventh Generation musings on corporate responsibility:

http://www.inspiredprotagonist.com/ 

GroovyGreen – Eco-living and news in the modern world:

http://www.groovygreen.com/groove/

Remember folks, why on earth would you bother to get a cake if you didn’t plan on eating it too.

The Human Toll November 17, 2007

A few post ago I mentioned the ethical implications of climate change. First of all the expression “climate change,” is a misnomer in my opinion (as is “global warming”). To say the climate is changing makes it sound like we’ll have time to adapt, and gives one the sense that change is inevitable, and might be good in the long run. To say we have global warming lends itself to offering the false hope of respite from blizzards and the promise of longer growing seasons.

Not so. 

As the Gulf Stream warms up we can expect stronger, more frequent, and more destructive storms. If climate change was simply a matter of redistributing our agricultural landscape and moving inland, we have the technology to deal with it. We know that. What climate change means is more Hurricane Katrina’s. More droughts. More heat waves, mud slides, floods, ice storms – none of these are things we can control and adapt to. As I type, the headlines are posting the latest death toll from the cyclone in Bangladesh. In just the past six weeks there have been disaster category floods in Mexico Nicaragua, and the Congo. So far in 2007 there have been a hundred of natural disasters world wide.

You can view the list here:  http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc110?OpenForm 

Climate change is everyone’s problem, and buying more green consumer goods is not going to fix it. Our consumption has  exceeded any measure of sustainability, and the human cost includes the 15,000 people who died in the European heat waves, the 1,800 people that died in Hurricane Katrina, the 1,100 and counting in Bangladesh, the 50,000 left homeless from Sri Lanka floods.