SOIL: Sasha Kramer (right)

Haiti is the poorest contry in the western hemisphere, it is estimated 80% of it’s population is living in poverty. An already bad situation has been made worse by the desertification of this small carribean country. In 1925, Haiti was lush, with 60% of its original forest covering the lands and mountainous regions. Since then, the population has cut down all but an estimated 2% of its original forest cover, and in the process has destroyed fertile farmland soils.

In a country where many struggle to feed themselves having fertile soil to grow food and crops is essential. A friend has written in about Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell two women who run a non-profit grop called SOIL in haiti. Their goal is to raise funds and teach haitiens how to build composting toilets. Composting toilest turn human waste into valuable fertilizer without the use of water or chemicals. And when built properly they omit few odors and can be quite safe.

By providing a natural source of fertilizer this allows SOIL to empower communities and help rebuild their ability to feed themselves and flourish. SOIL is a small non profit and they’re looking for help to continue their work.

Here is a quote from Sasha about their need for funding:

We know that times have been tough everywhere and certainly our organization has felt the pinch with donations dropping in response to the economic crisis.  We currently have enough money to continue to function through the month of April but with our rent coming due in early May and no vehicle we are still struggling to stay afloat. Our network has been so generous in the past and we are so grateful to all of you who have supported us over the past few years…you have made this work a reality and it is such an honor to be part of such a compassionate group of people.

More on composting toilets; in the west we aren’t as familiar with this concept but it has been proven safe and effective, there are experiments with composting toilets in some countries including Europe, Canada and the US. One example is the three-story C.K. Choi Building at the University of British Columbia (Canada), which contains 5 compost chambers with 12 toilets for 300 full-time employees.

Read more about SOIL in Haiti
Visit the SOIL homepage, they are in need of any donations you can spare
More about composting toilets

Free Flow Turbine

When someone says hydro power, most of us think large concrete structures holding back million of gallons of water to generate electricity. But what if there was another way to use a river’s natural currents to produce electricity? Possible without placing large concrete structures within a biosphere and disrupting the natural currents or water mass? Among solar panels, and wind turbines is another technology that has potential to generate power for cities adjacent to moving bodies of water: Free Flow Underwater Turbines.

Very simply, it works like a wind turbine along the bed of a river, but the blades are moved by a water current instead of by the wind. The turbine blades rotate slowly allowing fish to pass through safely with minimal environmental impact. One of the disadvantages of wind turbines are days when there is no wind or it’s not sufficient to generate power, not so with free flow turbines, since the current runs all day every day there is no period where the turbine is inactive.

Last year Ontario invested 2.2 million into the Cornwall Ontario River Energy project, it’s goal to develop 15MW of power as a demonstration of the feasibility and commercial viability of free flow underwater turbines.

More info on these unique turbines
Information about the C.O.R.E project in Ontario

King Corn

In King Corn Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are two Ivy league grads who after analyzing their hair samples discover that the carbon in their body is mostly made up of corn. They also discover that they are the first generation to potentially have a shorter life expectancy than the previous generation. Both of these issues are directly related to our diet and what we eat.

Determined to find out how corn has become such a staple of the American diet they move out to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. After convincing a farmer to lend them an acre of land they set out planting a crop. Little did they know planting and growing the crop would be the easy part, once their acre of corn ended up in the commercial grain system it was easier said than done tracking it’s progress as it was processed into other products.

Wanting to find out exactly what happens to all this corn lead them to examine the underbelly of American corn production. They begin by explaining why America in particular produces so much corn, how it’s subsidized and how the corn differs from the corn we eat at the dinner table.

They also discover how corn has seeped into every corner of the food supply, from artificial sweetners, to hamburgers, all of it corn. The fact that just about everything we eat is corn based has drastically altered our health, and not necessarily for the better.

Watch the trailer here

VBS.tv Video Series

We all know the problems plastics pose, their resource use as a petroleum and chemical product, the leeching of chemicals, and the problem with waste once the product they make up is no longer needed.

However one problem that isn’t as widely know is how everyday products are infiltrating our waterways slowly making their way into our Oceans and collecting in the north pacific. The most widely know of these spots is the North Pacific Gyre, aka the North Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Gyre is a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents in the norther pacific ocean. The area is an oceanic desert , filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and­ s­ailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It’s the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

VBS.tv has presented a 12 part documentary on the gyre, each episode lasting about 5 minutes give or take. It’s a little slow in the middle and there is some swearing but I think the message is what’s important and in the end they show the average person just what we are putting in our ocean.

Captain Charles Moore has dedicated himself to exposing the gyre and studying it effects. Towards the end he reflects on the gyre and what it says about us as a society, here are his thoughts:

Critical thinking it’s  a faculty that’s in danger in our present day society. We live in the happy consciousness era. We’re the strongest nation on earth (the US), globalization is inevitable, we’ve got more stuff, he who dies with the most toys wins.

I think that’s why I’m so gung-ho on this plastic thing, because it’s a symbol of the wrong direction we’re taking as a society as a whole. What is the promise of society? Descartes said there was such a thing as a social contract. That we give up our individual liberties to the society as a whole because it can liberate us greater than we could do by ourselves. Is that still the case? Are we getting the bang for the buck out of our society and our social institutions that we gave up our anarchistic tendencies for? We’re caught in the trade winds of our time, we can’t succeed from society, but we have to plant the seed of the future in the present.

Warning: this video series uses some coarse language.
Watch the VBS.tv series

More on the north pacific gyre:
Treehugger article on the gyre

Credit: markg6 via Flickr

Turns out the Amazon can not only absorb carbon it can also release large amounts of it as well. In fact it seems droughts can exacerbated this problem. Recent studies have found that a drought which took place in 2005 released large volumes of absorbed carbon back into the atmosphere. If global warming holds true this is bad news since extreme weahter such as droughts are predicted. Add on the fact that large areas are still being burnt for farm land and you have a two pronged problem.

Here are a few quotes from the CBC article:

A study involving nearly 70 scientists has found that the Amazon rainforest is surprisingly sensitive to drought and even a moderate drought can cause it to release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

To give a sense of just how much carbon has been released

The total impact of the drought, an extra five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, is greater than the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.

Read the full article here

SF Landfill Entrance

The city of San Francisco is one of the greenest cities in the US. (More on this coming in future posts.) So it’s not surprising to find that its landfill doesn’t fit the standard stereotype.  They are very careful to sort all incoming waste so that everything which can be recycled is, in addition, they also have strict policies on handling items such as electronics and chemicals.

If it stopped there you might think it wasn’t that impressive, however they have incorporated interpretive centers for visitors, green spaces and even artists in residence into their landfill. Have a look at Treehuggers’ photo gallery for details. It will make you think twice about what a landfill should be, and what role a landfill can play in helping to slow the environmental impact caused by our throw away society.

Visit the gallery on Treehugger.com

Mark Bittman

New York Times food columnist and author Mark Bittman is interviewed in this NPR radio show. In it he discusses his move to a healthier diet and how it impacts not only his health but also the planet.

Mark Bittman found himself at a cross roads, his health was suffering from extra weight and after consulting with his doctor he was told to shift to a more vegetable based diet. At the same time he also became more aware that our meat and process food centric diet was not only unhealthy but that we needed to change our views of food. After reading the UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” Mark discovered that 18% of all greenhouse gases are produced by industrial livestock production, therefore almost a fifth of all greenhouse gases are produced by eating meat, Second only to energy production.

With this knowledge he made positive changes that not only helped him loose weight and become healthier but also help reduce his carbon footprint.

Listen to the interview here
Amazon page for Mark’s Cookbook: Food Matters a Guide to Conscious Eating

Credit: Shrff14 via Flickr

With the amount of money we spend on bottled water we could bring fresh water to all the people in the world who need it. The American people, including most western nations, have been conned into thinking that bottled water is healthier than tap water. In fact the regulations for tap water in the US are much stiffer than for bottled water in most situations. The same is true of most western countries and as regulations pass in other parts of the world the same holds true there as well.

Bottled water costs about a thousand times as much as tap water. We complain about the higher prices of gasoline but we’ll pay even more for water that’s often inferior to what we can get from the tap.

And this doesn’t take into account the environmental impact from bottled water. Oil is used to produce the plastic bottles and even more oil and energy is consumed transporting and distributing a product that we can get from our taps for next to nothing per liter.

Bottled water is one of the easiest items to remove from your carbon footprint. Get a reusable canteen such as a sigg or kleen kanteen and open the tap. If you don’t like the taste of your water get a Brita pitcher and filter your water. While Brita filters have their own environmental issues, such as distribution and adding to landfills, they aren’t as significant as those presented by bottled water.

For more on bottled water and related issues follow the links below:
Treehugger: A world of reasons to ditch bottled water
Earth Policy Institute: Pouring Resources Down the Drain

Credit: D'arcy Norman via Flickr

Until a few years ago the Alberta Oil Sands were too expensive to develop. The oil industry had know about them for years but getting the oil it held out of the ground was costly. Eighty dollars a barrel changed that reality. Today these  boreal forests are being cut down so that the sand can be boiled and the oil extracted. It’s a process that uses an incredible amount of resources and leaves a pollution footprint that is difficult if not impossible to clean up.

This 15 part series (each part approx. 6 minutes) put on VBS.tv takes a hard look at the oil sands and it’s effect on the community that exists around it. What is an energy jewel in the eyes of Canada’s current political leaders, turns out to be a black eye for the environment and for all of us.

Warning: this video series uses some coarse language.

Watch the series here