This quick and painless 15 question quiz will shine an LED light on your environmental personality. Do you think you are a Planetsaver? Find out below.
1. Cycle:
a.motor b.bi c.water
2. Take:
a.more b.a seat c.action
3. Vehicle:
a.SUV b.C-A-R c.B-U-S
4. Media:
a.TV b.radio c.book/mags
5. Bikes:
a.for kids b.for exercise c.for most trips
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Americans eat lots of meat. So much so that livestock is now one of the leading contributors to global warming, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions as measured in a carbon dioxide equivalent.
A recent United Nations report concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s transportation systems — that means all of the globe’s cars, trucks, planes and ships combined.
Kathy Preston poses an important question for meat-eating Americans concerned about the effects of global warming: what are the effects of going vegetarian for just one day? Here are her astounding statistics about how going vegetarian for a single day can help prevent global warming:
Do you want to limit the amount of trash you produce and help make your backyard soil healthy and productive? One of the easiest solutions to these problems is to compost your food waste. It requires little personal energy, and you will benefit from the rich compost resulting from the breakdown of your kitchen scraps.
The only thing you really need to do is create a suitable bin for your soon-to-be compost. There are alternatives to the overpriced, plastic compost containers that some garden supply stores hawk to customers. You can make your own using recycled shipping pallets for less than $20, or even free if you have some of the few necessary supplies.
As a former teacher of students with autism, a current and lifelong fear-er of cancer, and an avid environmentalist, I always saw a link between these three “interests” of mine. Many types of cancer can be/have been linked to the various environmental toxins introduced into our environment by major polluting industries (plastics, chemical, coal, oil, to name a few major offenders).
Yet, with autism, the link has long been mentioned, studied, and brushed aside due to lack of evidence. I’d imagine that if you had a line chart with three lines, one for the rate of environmental toxins 1900 to present, and the other two with the rate of cancer and autism cases during that same time, the three lines would ride the same “hockey stick curve”.
A startling new WWF study has revealed that people living in Hong Kong currently use twice as many resources as residents in China, more than double the sustainable level.
To feed the vibrant city’s massive demand for natural resources, and absorb the CO2 emitted, residents need an area of land and sea larger than 250 Hong Kong’s, an incredible seven-fold increase since 1965.
According to Mathis Wackernagel, Executive Director of the Global Footprint Network, “Although small geographically, Hong Kong not only has significant resource demands, but it also has an over-proportional influence on the world.
This holiday season, you can save a cloud forest, adopt a tiger and remove 1 ton of CO2. Although none of it will fit in a box or under the tree, Changing the Present makes all these things possible by giving consumers access to a variety of charitable initiatives so that they can give the gift of hope, health and happiness for a world in need.
Some perks include not having to go near a crowded mall, finding something for everyone on your list, and no lines, returns or exchanges. Best of all, you’ll be making a tangible difference in the world with the cause of your choice, and it’s something that will last long after the latest retail trends fizzle out.
Changing the Present features more than 1,500 meaningful charitable gifts that users can browse by cause or nonprofit to find the perfect gift for friends or their own charitable giving.
Building on a commitment to changing the social norm when it comes to gift giving, and seeking to spark positive change in the world, Robert Tolmach, CEO of WellGood LLC, spearheaded the team that implemented this important effort, and was kind enough to share more details about the program with me in a one-on-one chat about the future of giving.
This is the resume I was using about two months ago:
[Editor's Note: This is Part 3 of Michael's search for an entry-level job within an environmentally-focused non-profit or NGO]
Make sure to read my last update on my job search if you missed it. On a whim, I ended up speaking on camera to a college newspaper writer in Chicago about my troubles finding a job that meets my qualifications.
Life is funny—that interview ended up leading me to a seriously useful job resource. I had agreed to the interview because I felt bad for the journalist, who seemed to be struggling to get responses. But the video wound up on the internet, where Wendy Freeman, the director of career advising at Evergreen State College, stumbled across it. Excited to help with a search for a green job, she contacted me quickly.
She recommended that I focus my search on the east coast, specifically the Washington DC area, and said that she will work with me until I find a job that fits me perfectly. She has been a wealth of knowledge and information that could help anyone else in a similar situation to mine.
Hello, again! I left off last week with my arrival in Chicago after graduating college and traveling the country. I was unsure how to get started looking for any sort of green job and was regretting that fact that I never interned anywhere in college. I haven’t had the best luck so far, and I hope others can learn from my mistakes.
In this day and age of highly processed, artificial ingredient-infested “food products”, fermentation offers a beautifully simple, healthy, and delicious alternative to preserving some of our favorite foods. Fermentation is a natural food preservation process typically requiring nothing more than very simple ingredients and time. Many popular, everyday foods would not exist without magical fermentation processes: sauerkraut, cheese, yogurt, miso, soy sauce, beer, and wine, just to name a few.
Fermentation not only preserves food, it makes food more nutritious and digestible, and the practice has spanned thousands of years. (Just one example: over 1000 years ago, Icelandic Vikings transformed milk cultured with rennet into skyr, a kind of thick yogurt-like cheese for later consumption.) It is a transformation made possible by bacteria and fungi. (I like to call it “controlled rotting”). For example: Salt some cabbage and throw it in a crock in the corner of your kitchen, and within a few weeks you’ll have delicious, aromatic sauerkraut, the result of a magical lactic acid fermentation.
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