Seen on Clay’s CHOWDER.

Coal accounts for between 53-59% of our electricity here in the united states (where we use on average 3 times as much per person than do citizens of europe, whom themselves use twice the worldwide average). Remember also, that coal power accounts for 25% of the country’s water use, not including that water which is polluted in the process of getting the coal out of the gound.

Politicians will often point to the nearly 300 billion tons of recoverable coal we have as a nation. They say that it’s enough to last about 300 years, but they ignore that this is how we have to get it. I say we try to use some different sources, and cut back on our use in the first place.

It’s continually shocking, how much this man pays attention to what’s good around him, and tries to make it better.

Cell Phones, 2007, partial detail. 60×100″ Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Chris Jordan ‘runs the numbers’ for us, in two art exhibitions with digitally manipulated photographs like the one above. His goal is to begin to give us a kind of visceral understanding of the statistics we so often see regarding the amount of waste we create. More info in his TED talk:

Beautiful and disturbing photography of the evidence of our pollution from around the world here.

As promised: Shai Agassi of Better Place.

It’s important to remember, and continue to hold dear: raw materials come from some place. It’s easy to place faith in the invention and innovation of science and industry, but harder to temper that enthusiasm with the facts that resources matter. Lithium is an excellent solution, with a lot of flexibility, but it’s not perfect. In any case, unless our move to electric cars and better battery technology is coupled with a move to new models of product use (see the next post, concerning Shai Agassi and Better Place), including service rentals, and hyper-recycling / up-cycling, our already unstable economic relationship to natural resources will be no better off that it is at present.

One very heartening fact of the potential lithium boon for Bolivia is the force and foresight of Evo Morales. Assuming (as the video points out) he doesn’t go too far, he may strike an incredible blow against the conventional practices of western companies’ use of developing nations’ resources. But then, that’s a lesson he and his countrymen have learned well.

The South Central Farm was one of the biggest and most important community farms in the United States which sadly (like so many things) was quashed to be replaced by warehouses because the warehouses would make more money for the city than the garden.

All the garden did was help the community by providing purpose, food and healthy interaction. A real community. A really sad story.

We ought to have gardens and public spaces for gardening and farming in every city.

Find a screening here.

Informative piece on Fair Trade Labeling from Katarzyna Kijek in Warsaw.

I grew up in the mountains, and spent a lot of time alone in the forest. As a result, I suspect, I have always been keenly aware of trees, and always had an awe-struck respect for them. I find few things more emotionally effecting than, on my frequent train trips to Vancouver, the fields of incredible numbers of felled trees at the various logging operations along the train line. I can only hope that the logging in question is FSC certified, but even if so, it would be of little consolation. And regardless, there is something so shocking and disrespectful to me in the act of cutting down a tree that even the seemingly responsible stewardship of some organizations appears inconsequential.

To kill a being which might well have been alive for many hundreds of years, or as in many cases of the logging industry’s past: trees of many thousands of years in age . . . to kill these beings is to me indicative of the near-zero reverence many humans give to nature, akin to the massacre of countless bison on this continent in the early-to-mid 1800s.

(above: 19 men on a tree stump, and two men standing with a mountain of bison skulls.)

Somehow though, cutting down trees seems more perverse than killing animals or even humans (as the early settlers of Australia would hunt Aboriginals for sport (I’ll spare you those images)). Perhaps this perversion i interpret is because of how fundamental trees are to the life sustaining powers of the earth. It is nearly literally as if we chose in our early industrial history to slowly cut out our lungs, using the material to house and heat ourselves. Surely trees were unmatched as a cheap, readily available resource for powering trains, and building furniture, as well as houses, and indeed: whole cities even into the early 20th century. Cheap, and perhaps only considered a unchecked resource, because of an economy which systematically devalues nature. I wonder sometimes if our growth and advances were truly worth the losses.

Incidentally, concern for the loss of trees / nature to industry is no new idea, as the following quote illustrates:

One thing is sure, the Earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on an unprecedented scale.  We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.

—Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Roman Theologian. 200 B.C.E

Concurrent with Tertullianus’ writing, 2 centuries before the birth of Christ, fig trees in the the land now called Israel were planted. Some of these trees still exist, and under some, we can still sit. From some of these trees, we can still gather fruit. These trees are treasures, a part of our cultural and environmental heritage, and reminders of the scales on which the Earth reckons time. This is all the more amazing considering that merely 10% of the forests and trees now present on our planet are of this ‘old growth,’ as we call it. Which is a shame, especially because they are now understood to capture carbon from our atmosphere at a much greater rate than any newer forests. (It is believed that the old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. of A and in Russia account for up to 20% of the total global carbon sequestration.)

Obviously the early loggers in our country didn’t realize the extent of the damage they were causing to the planet, they lacked the ecological framework by which to understand their actions. But it’s hard to forgive them their ignorance. And I readily admit an element of hypocrisy in my derision of the early zealousness of the industry, as an artist and musician, woods are one of the most delightful, beautiful materials to use. It is only with a bitter sweetness that i enjoy my many guitars and piano. At times the experience borders on shame, in fact.

Still, it certainly seems at present that better choices can be made for a good many of our uses for wood, as an industrial material. And while it at least can be said that using trees for art is a semi-noble pursuit, rather than burning it as fuel and for heat, it is a shallow excuse at best.

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