Do You Occupy More Space Than You Need?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 6, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, September 6th, 2009Maybe it’s time to downsize. Because as Bernie Madoff can tell you, if you’re obsessed with living large, you can indeed end up in the big house.
Do you take up more space than you need? I’ve always lived a fairly simple life, but some missteps in the last year forced me to really downsize, and at the end of it all, frankly, I was happier. One thing I noticed as I shed a lot of belongings was that I had only kept many of them simply because I had a place to put them. Another thing I noticed was that with every box of knickknacks or piece of extra furniture I let go of, a place seemed to lighten up in my head. I had a palpable feeling of liberation, which got me thinking about all of my values. That little house info-graphic lower on the page shows how much more space we all occupy today as compared to 50 years ago. Do we need that extra space? An obsessive longing for wealth and a big house can, as Bernie Madoff can tell you, lead to a life in the big house . And a life fueled by consumption of goods, in my opinion, also leads to people’s actual bodies taking up more space than they should. To me, the debate about higher airfares for obese people is a no-brainer. Sure. Charge more for heavy people. And less for skinny people. In fact, do it by the pound; that’s how they charge for other shipping, and especially with today’s quality of service on airlines, that’s all they’re doing is shipping people, right? If you have a problem with this, consider donating some of your fat for fuel. Maybe they’ll give you a credit for reducing your “Carbon Fatprint”. But I digress. Simplifying your life is gratifying, and easier than you think. There are hundreds of books out there
How Green Are You?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 20, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, August 20th, 2009Take Some Simple Quizzes To Find Out
 This Guy Still Wins My Green Living Award |
I have a confession to make. This week I threw away two tuna cans, an egg carton, and a fruit juice bottle. In the trash. Not the recycle bin. The trash. I wouldn’t be confessing my sins like this, except I live in a small, allegedly progressive college town full of liberal elitist tree huggers and hippy co-op types. When I walked down the street this week, I carried a silent shame, convinced that they all somehow knew what I had done. Then I suddenly remembered that the liberal elitist treehuggers all drove BMW’s when they went to dinner at restaurants where they wasted half the meals, and if they did ask for a take out box, it was styrofoam, and they forgot and left it on the table ’cause they didn’t drink enough unfairly-traded coffee or evil Fiji water after getting drunk on wine that’s destroying the planet. So I felt better, but remained curious. Just how green am I really? Well, because of my poverty-inspired market-to-table and mass-transit oriented lifestyle, pretty darn green; just check out that crazy score below. So how green are you? Take some quizzes and find out. After reviewing about a dozen annoying Flash-based quizzes like this British Council How Green Are You quiz that seemed geared more toward making the publishers feel green about themselves, I found two that seemed to actually help you assess how green you are. The Low Impact Living Index (my results are below, a 23, thank you very much) asks some smart questions, and gives some fairly useful answers at the end. The Airhead Calculator was a little less detailed, but I discovered that I emitted 849 pounds of air pollution last month. Hmm. I had no idea I was so, um, emissive. So how green are you? Read the rest of this entry »
If Beef Is So Bad For Us, Why Are Aliens Always Stealing Our Cows?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 28, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009Some say you can’t beat the meat for nutrition. I disagree. To quote Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner: It’s not only irrational, it’s unsportsmanlike!
I haven’t been much of a meat eater for a long time, but I think I’m going to finally commit to a rule that will make me more or less vegetarian: I won’t eat it unless I kill it myself. When you take an objective look at eating meat, there’s virtually no rational reason to do it. Even if you don’t care about the brutality of “harvesting” it, it doesn’t offer nutrients that can’t be found elsewhere, it’s arguably unhealthy, it has multiple negative impacts on the environment including deforestation and habitat destruction, excessive water consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas production, and on top of all that, it contributes to starvation worldwide. Not a very good scorecard. I’m even finding it hard to justify eating fish; as I joked with a friend the other day: Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll be starving in 50 years. So why have I suddenly decided on the change in diet? It’s not really so sudden. I’ve avoided corn-centric food and gone light on meat proteins since the 80′s, because of Diet for a New America
Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Solves Peak Oil Problem
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 7, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Technology
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009It’s nice to know that while Detroit automakers go bankrupt, there’s still a market for $2.1 million cars
Let’s see. Buy a house? Or buy a car? If you happen to have $2.1 million laying around, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 might actually make this a difficult decision. I generally think of combustion engine vehicles as rather Luddite, but the inevitability of peak oil makes me feel like just funneling all the remaining petrol in the world into the 1001HP, 16-cylinder engine of this thing and burning it all up. With a 7-speed transmission and 4 turbochargers to get enough fuel and air into its monstrous 8.0 liter power-plant to keep it happy, the Veyron 16.4 has a top end of 253mph. But don’t get too excited about the idea that you can travel 253 miles away in an hour, because at its rate of fuel consumption at top speed, you’d theoretically have to refuel every 12 minutes. At least you’d look cool doing it though, partly because the car lowers to just 3.5 inches above the ground and automatically extends a rear spoiler, and partly because, well, c’mon. This thing is simply amazing to look at. In fact, I’d say more, but I keep drooling all over my keyboard. Check out this Wired.com piece for more photos and a description of what it’s like to drive the new Veyron; Bugatti didn’t offer us a test drive or a press tour for some reason. You can also configure your own with Bugatti’s configurator page. I was kind of partial to violet; the green option just didn’t look right somehow.
Best & Worst Green Celebrities
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on May 5, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Popular Media
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Aside from the Jolly Green Giant, which celebrities are really living green?
 Honourable Mention |
A friend of mine told me the other day about how U2 guitarist The Edge is putting celebrity residents of Malibu, CA in a tizzy by building five mansions on a local mountaintop for an estimated $15 million. Although The Edge claims the building project is taking a completely green approach, locals point out that this is irrelevant, as it will create a “permanently scarred mountainside” (I’m giving the “Best Headline of 2009 Award” to the Irish Tribune News for “Richest nimbys in US row with Edge over plans“). So this got me wondering: aside from the Jolly Green Giant and a few hot Sci-Fi chicks, which celebrities are really living green? Well, PETA has once again picked the sexiest vegetarians alive, Natalie Portman has a line of eco-friendly footwear, and a lot of celebs drive green cars. Let’s face it, it’s kind of a given that a celebity’s publicist will make sure that there a lots of green photo ops, like George Clooney posing with his Tango, but how green can you really be if you have to take jets, limos, and security teams with you everywhere you go? The Chicago Tribune has a slide show of not green celebrities, where we learn that Celine Dion, for instance, uses 18,000 gallons of water a day for a home she doesn’t live in, and Treehugger.com informs us that when Woody Harrelson forgets to pack his favorite vegan belt and shoes, he has them flown by jet to Cannes. Our pick for best green celebrity? Green Day’s partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council. You’ve gotta be a little punk to really be green.