Heal Your Home

Co-op America, has created a great primer for making healthy environmental choices in your home. The section called "Heal Your Home" is broken down into Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom, Exterior, and Overall Health Homes and includes a glossary and additional related articles. You can browse the articles online HERE or download the entire thing as a PDF.

News Roundup

A bunch of recent-ish stories I've been meaning to post for a while...

Ode Magazine:

The ins and outs of Eco-Tourism

An overview of the friendlier, funnier "New Activism"

Earth-Friendly Fast-Food?

Christian Science Monitor:

Using bikes instead of trucks for transport.

Why organic farming is good for Africa

"Just how 'green' is that shirt?"

F*&@# Planet Earth!

A funny take on the truly lovely Planet Earth series (warning: contains NSFW language!)...


Thanks Leah! Via Current

ReThinking The Environment In The Carolinas

The Raleigh AIGA recently asked me to be one of the judges for a poster competition promoting environmentalism in North and South Carolina called: re|THINK. The 20 winning posters, selected by myself and 2 other judges, will be on display (and for sale) at the Designbox gallery in Raleigh, NC for the month of April, with an opening reception on April 4th. Even if you're not in the area you can preview all of the winning designs online now HERE.

The Sins of Greenwashing

If you're not familiar with the term Greenwashing, the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice has a great primer on this dastardly practice just for you: The Six Sins of Greenwashing.


Thanks Kara!

News Roundup

Some more recent articles worth reading in the Christian Science Monitor:

New Alternative Fuel: Chocolate!

Is Bioplastic a Viable Alternative to "Paper or Plastic"?

Person-To-Person Lending: Internet Based Microloans Helping Internationally.

Spotted In Hawaii part II: Protect The Cute Fish

I've seen warnings about dumping spray painted over sewer drains in several cities, but I've never seen one etched in stone! Kudos to the folks in Honolulu's Chinatown for going the extra mile to protect the ocean.

No More Paper Catalogs!

Catalog Choice is a free service that helps you get rid of unwanted catalogs in your mail. By utilizing customer codes that are printed on catalogs you can even get rid of ones that come in someone else's name to your address! Find out more and sign up HERE.

Free Wayfinding Graphics

I recently discovered that the classic wayfinding graphics, seen in most American airports and other transportation hubs, are available as free vector art from the AIGA.

The icons were developed by the AIGA in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation and were originally released in 1974 and added to in 1979. The entire set of symbols are Copyright Free(!) and can be downloaded HERE.

News Roundup

Sorry for the long quiet from me, I've got a bunch to post and hope to be updating more frequently in the coming weeks. First off some news clippings I've been collecting...

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Ethiopians tradmarking coffee to ensure Fair Trade.

Eating "green" at environmentally friendly restaurants.

Study finds White House manipulated climate science.

Africa begins banning plastic bags.

e-waste documentary

eDump is a documentary by Michael Zhao about the problem with electronic waste. It follows America's 2.6 million tons of annual e-waste as it travels to foreign countries for recycling and the pollution and health problems it causes along the way. This powerful short film can be watched in its entirety on Zhao's site HERE. Find out more about e-waste HERE.






Thanks Anne!

Compact Fluorescent Recycling

You now have another way to recycle your dead compact fluorescent light bulbs, you can take them with you to Ikea. The store's new program allows you to bring in any brand of CFLs thus preventing the toxic mercury within from ending up in landfills.

via EcoGeek

News Roundup

Several great articles have appeared in recent issues of the Christian Science Monitor:

Ugandan women improve their lives making paper beads.

Green roofs appearing on New York houses.

Trash ovens in Kenya save trees.

Reducing the racist disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing.

And from Mother Jones:

Chinese toy imports and the lack of U.S. safety regulations.
Which is followed by a short list of stories about the problems with a self-regulating industry including this gem:

HASBRO EASY-BAKE OVENS In 2006, Hasbro overhauled its iconic oven with a new design and heating system. By the following February, the company had to recall nearly 1 million ovens because children had suffered burns after getting their hands caught in them. Rather than taking the ovens back, Hasbro got the cpsc [consumer product safety commission] to sign off on an easier fix: It would send a repair kit to any consumer who requested it. The ovens were recalled again this July, after 77 kids had gotten burned; one five-year-old had to have a finger amputated. This time, consumers got to return their ovens—for a voucher, good only for another Hasbro product.

News Roundup

Getting caught up here from a very busy spell, I have lots to post, plus it's Blog Action Day so definitely want to get some environmental links out there. Here's a smattering to start you off...

From the Christian Science Monitor:
Amazon Farmers work with Corporations to Save the Forest
New Yorkers Using Biodiesel for Heating

From Ode Magazine:
Sesame Street working for Middle East Peace
Organic Agriculture CAN Feed The World
How Hospitals Make You Sick

From Mother Jones:
The Problem with Plastics (including a handy chart for your fridge)

Guerrilla Bag Activism

Morsbags is a UK based group that asks regular folks to form subversive activist "pods" to make and distribute...shopping bags! They provide a basic how-to for making a standard cloth bag, which you are then encouraged to distribute for free to shoppers at local stores as an alternative to using disposable grocery bags.

Thanks Mim!

Planting Peace

Planting Peace is a handy new resource from the folks at the Organic Consumers Association. It collects news stories about the intersection of the anti-war, environmental, and organic activist communities in an attempt to forge a better alliance between the groups.

Blog Action Day: October 15th

There a lot of talk about the power that bloggers wield, so the folks behind Blog Action Day decided to test it out. Their simple plan: to have as many bloggers as possible post about environmental issues on October 15th. Will it make a difference? Wait and see or participate and see. More info here.

Carbon Conscious Consumer

New American Dream wants you to become a Carbon Conscious Consumer. Their site posts monthly challenges (last month's was to eat one pound a week of local food) and lists the carbon emissions saved by the folks who pledge to participate. They're even offering eco-friendly prizes to folks who get the most people involved in the campaign. Find out more here.

Light Bulb Recycling

While more geared towards industrial users, LampRecycle.org is a good resource for information on recycling mercury-containing light bulbs (called "lamps" in the industry). This will be a growing concern as more folks use (and discard) compact florescent bulbs.
They recommend consumers use Earth911 to find local recycling facilities by zip code.

A billboard I don't hate?

This billboard for South African Nedbank actually has solar panels on it that generate electricity for the kitchens of a neighboring elementary school.

Full details and more pix at Houtlust.

EcoGeek

EcoGeek is nother excellent addition to the green blogging world. They compile green technology stories from across the blogosphere and also provide original articles like "Ask the EcoGeek".

Thanks Jessica!

Extreme Green Guerrilla

What do Extreme Green Guerrillas do? Eat roadkill and kill themselves at age 40 among other things. At least that's what Royal College of Art design student Michiko Nitta proposed as part of her graduate project dealing with the future of environmentalism. Get the full details along with diagrams and photos here.

(Shown left, a Rattit: a mutant hybrid of Rat and Rabbit that EGGs will enjoy eating)

via We Make Money Not Art

Making Waves

A new BBC documentary about Hawaii and the environment, called Message in the Waves, caused a city in England to ban plastic bags after resident and filmmaker Rebecca Hosking set up a screening. From a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, which follows the continued downfall of the cheap disposable plastic bag used by grocery stores (500 billion of which are used annually worldwide):

Dumbstruck by what she'd seen off the Hawaiian coast during her year-long filmmaking trip, Hosking set up a local screening of her film and invited the town's 43 shopkeepers to come see where plastic bags end up.

All but seven of them showed up. At the end of the viewing, held in a local hall, Hosking called for a show of hands in support of a voluntary ban on plastic bags. Every single hand went up. The rest of the town's shopkeepers quickly followed suit. On May 1, Modbury won bragging rights as the first plastic-bag-free town in Europe.

Read the entire article here.

Watch the trailer clips from the Message in the Waves here.

Those Pesky Trees

Stay Free! Daily points out the latest trend in outdoor advertising: cutting down trees to increase ad visibility...

The latest rash of tree deaths is in North Carolina, where about 50 trees have been killed in the past seven months.

To make matters worse, a bill proposed to combat the practice sets fines at $2,000, even though replacing 50 trees would cost the state over $607,100—over $12,000 per tree!

Get the details from Scenic America via their downloadable factsheet(PDF).

To Carbon Offset or Not To Carbon Offset

I've been debating the merits of carbon offsets and whether they are really helping to encourage greener living, or just encouraging people to throw money at a problem rather than acting differently (especially as I have been reviewing green hosting options). So I was happy to discover an article about just this topic in the current issue of Mother Jones (May/June), "Practical Values: Paying for My Hot Air" :

Because air travel is my biggest vice, I started by plugging a year's worth of flights into various online travel calculators. The cost of redemption for 34,000 air miles: $168, according to NativeEnergy; $160.89 per MyClimate; or $64.95 on TerraPass. When I added up my total carbon footprint (air travel, auto, and home energy), the price tags ranged from $180 to $408 per year. Why would anyone spend $408 when she could choose a $180 offset instead?

"As a tendency, the cheaper the program, the more likely it is that the quality is not very good," says Wolfgang Strasdas, who recently completed a study on carbon offsets for the International Ecotourism Society. Strasdas judged carbon-offset companies on three main factors: how credible they are, how they spend your money, and how they calculate emissions. The latter accounts for the major discrepancies in price, especially regarding air travel.

Read the entire article (along with a handy carbon offset comparison chart) here.

Murdered in Mexico

My friend Nash sent me this note about a friend of hers who was murdered while helping to protect forests in Mexico. Please be sure to visit the petition she mentions at the end:

From february to the begining of may I was in charge of a project for the Greenpeace forest campaign. This project took me to the forest every weekend, I worked with several volunteers as well as with a group of indigenous people from one of the communities there, people who are aware of the importance of the forest for all of us, that have been working denouncing illegal loggers as well as developing susteinable projects to preserve their forests. We were compiling data for a scientific study on the impact of deforestation. The work was hard but it was good work and we made very close bonds with them. Last may 15th, one of our indigenous partners Aldo Zamora was killed by illegal loggers and his brother Misael who also worked with us was injured. You can imagine my shock and pain, and for all of us who worked with him. We know who the killers are but til today they´re still free.

So I ask you to get into this link and sign, so we can keep pressuring tha mexican goverment to capture the killers:

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/archives/2007/05/activist_murdered_in_mexicao.html

Image: Aldo and Misael

WiserEarth

WiserEarth is a new community-driven resource on non-profits & NGOs. It functions both as a directory of and forum for international organizations working on social and environmental issues. The site was created by the Natural Capital Institute, which is also working on a business oriented companion called WiserBusiness.

File Under Greenwashing: Shell's CO2 Flowers

Shell's new "green" campaign features an image of a flower spewing factory and claims that they're doing their part for the environment by recycling waste products (like diverting CO2 to grow flowers) under the tagline "Don't throw anything away. There is no away." But Friends of The Earth Europe, beg to differ and have filed complaints in several countries claiming the ads are misleading, noting among other things that Shell "uses less than 0.5% of it's waste CO2 to grow flowers". You can read the full complaint here (PDF).


Thanks Mim!
Details via Environmental Leader

Green Hosting

For the first time in many years I need to find a new web host for one of my websites and I decided to review the socially conscious options. Happily it turns out there are a lot of green hosting services these days. I've listed a bunch of folks I found below. The hard part now is deciding whom to use (which is definitely better than having no options at all).

FYI most hosts that call themselves green have offset their energy consumption with pollution credits (also called going "carbon neutral") via businesses like green-e; AISO is the one exception I've found so far.

• Acorn Host is woman owned.
• Affordable Internet Services Online has actual solar panels (which you can watch via webcam).
• DreamHost is a hugely popular mainstream hosting service that is employee owned.
• Sustainable Websites gives you access to green marketing articles.
• ThinkHost will plant a tree for you.

I still haven't decided where to go do if you have any recommendations for any of them them or know of any others to check out please share your thoughts.

UPDATE
Thanks to scoid who pointed us to Ecologee.net, which has already done the hard work for us. The site tracks hosts that are using actual renewable energy (not credits) and is working to create an entirely "green internet"!

World Without Oil

What will the world be like when we run out of oil? Find out in real-time in the alternate reality of World Without Oil. The site records the stories of average citizens that are dealing with the 2007 oil crisis which began with a price spike on April 30th and led to current gas prices of $5.56 a gallon and a 7% shortfall. Add your own story via images, audio, video and/or text here.

On Vacation(s)

My company and I are taking a holiday starting tomorrow. For a week and a half we'll be happily away from phones and computers. My sister Mica graciously agreed to take the reins and serve as guest editor here at Another Limited Rebellion blog while I'm away, so unless you're heading out on vacation as well, definitely keep checking back with us daily!

Speaking of which here are some links to eco-vacation resources for those of you who want to plan summer getaways from an environmental perspective...

The International Ecotourism Society - Promoting environmental travel. Their global conference is happening in Oslo, Norway right now.

The National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations - Tons of well researched info.

Responsible Travel - Ecotourist holiday packages for folks in the US, UK, EU, and Australia.

Bulungula Lodge - Accredited Fair Trade tourist destination in South Aftica (shown left).

The above links were found accompanying this article on Geotourism in Ode Magazine.

Real Costs: The Plug-In

Dare you add the Real Costs plug-in to your browser (assuming it's Firefox) and discover the CO2 emissions reality of your travel plans? Right now it works with Orbitz, Delta, and United, but future versions will work with car direction, car rental and shipping sites. Download it and start cringing today.

via StayFree!

Car-Free America

Car-free zones and times are on the rise in the US (though mostly centered around existing public spaces like parks) according to a recent Christian Science Monitor article:

• New York is proposing to shut down perimeter roads of Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park all summer long.

• Atlanta plans to transform 53 acres of blighted, unused land into new bike-friendly green space.

• Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

"Cities across America are increasingly declaring that parks are for people, not cars, ... and closing roads within parks is one result of that," says Ben Welle with The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, in Washington.

Resistance can be fierce at first, he and others say, because of worries about traffic congestion, parking problems, and loss of visitors for businesses and museums. But studies are showing that traffic problems can be minimized, shops and museums get more visitors, and residents begin to cherish their where-the-action-is location.

Read the entire article here.

Ethanol Is Not Green

A recent report from Stanford University concludes that the much hyped corn based Ethanol is not only NOT a "clean-burning" eco-fuel, but that in the long run it may cause more deaths than traditional gasoline. According to Mark Z. Jacobson, the scientist that conducted the research:

"In our study, E85 increased ozone-related mortalities in the United States by about 200 deaths per year compared to gasoline, with about 120 of those deaths occurring in Los Angeles," Jacobson said. "These mortality rates represent an increase of about 4 percent in the U.S. and 9 percent in Los Angeles above the projected ozone-related death rates for gasoline-fueled vehicles in 2020."

Read more about the report's conclusions here.

Pledge to Live a One Planet Life

This Earth Day Care2 asks you to pledge to live a One Planet Life...

Hearst Gets Greener

Hearst made quite a statement last year with the opening of it's entirely green NYC headquarters.
This week they have announced a new consumer website which will be entirely focused on earth-friendly living called The Daily Green (link).

The Daily Green will be a one-stop Web destination where the fast-growing community of green consumers can find each other and everything they need to know to embrace a more energy-conscious, natural foods-oriented and environment-friendly lifestyle.

The Daily Green will feature daily eco-tips; the day’s key national and international environmental news; advice on how to enjoy a more sustainable life with smart energy and product choices; delicious recipes for meals and school lunches that are more hormone- and pesticide-free, compassionately raised and “as local-as-available”; and ideas for creating a more toxin-free home. While content will be an important element of The Daily Green, it is the community of followers of the green movement that will inform the sensibility of the site. For example, Weird Weather Watch, a user-generated photoblog of climate change snapped by backyard environmentalists and camera phone climatologists will be an important feature, as will user-submitted recipes and tips. In addition, the site will give a voice to the leaders of the country’s most important environmental organizations through blog postings and site links.

The beta version will launch on Earth Day, April 22 2007. Check back here for further investigation at that time!

Until then you can go read
more about the Hearst Tower (Link)

Environmentalism for Girls

The new website The Big Green Purse, created by writer and socially conscious marketer Diane MacEachern, is attempting to make the world a better place by focusing on women's shopping habits noting that "women spend $.85 of every dollar in the marketplace."

National Day of Climate Action: April 14, 2007

Just a few more days to prepare for the Step It Up 2007 National Day of Climate Action, which is this Saturday, April 14th.

To find out how to get involved in actions happening near you go here.

41 dollars = 41 Pounds

The group 41 Pounds wants to help the environment by helping you eliminate junk mail from your life. For $41 dollars the group, which donates 1/3 of the amount to environmental charities, estimates the average American gets 41 pounds of junk mail a year and that their service can eliminate about 90% of it for at least 5 years. Find out more here.

via idUnited, thanks Nev!

Solar Powered Bible

I'm at a bit of a loss on this solar powered