As ordinary, Brian and I did now not perform a little aspect terribly exciting or dramatic for Earth Day this yr. Even even though it fell on a Saturday this one year, our city determined to keep its neighborhood Earth Day birthday celebration on Sunday as a substitute?Probable to accommodate our big Orthodox Jewish populace, or probably so it wouldn't warfare with the Marches for Science taking area in Washington and Trenton. We've been doing the same vintage array of little things?Striking laundry on the road (although we needed to take it down while it started raining), buying domestically, and consuming domestic-grown produce (some of final three hundred and sixty five days's rhubarb for breakfast, and a salad of wintry weather lettuce that we planted final 12 months for dinner)?But nothing too important.
However, I have been pleased to read several news stories lately about other people in the world who are making major strides to help the environment. So in honor of Earth Day, I thought I'd share three stories about Earthlings who are doing their part to save their home planet.
Story #1: Changing the Pallet
Source: Haverford alumni magazine
As an ecofrugal person, I have kind of a conflicted attitude toward shipping pallets. On the one hand, I love them, because they make an incredibly useful source of virtually free building material. For example, our compost bin, which has served us well for seven years before finally starting to come to bits, is an ultra-simple box made of pallets recovered (with permission) from a building at Rutgers. And that's only the beginning of what you can build with pallet wood. I've seen tons of pictures online of gorgeous projects involving pallet wood, from a simple hanging shelf in this bathroom makeover to an entire pallet wall that makes a stunning focal point in a living room. There's a whole website, 101 Pallet Ideas, devoted exclusively to projects you can make from pallets—patio furniture, beds, sofas, and even entire buildings.
But on the same time, I apprehend that the fine motive pallets are loose and extensively to be had is because of the truth there are so a lot of them being discarded after simply one use. They reduce down bushes to make these items, ship them at some point of the u . S . With stuff on them, and then without a doubt throw them away because it's now not fee-powerful to ship them once more. Clearly, it is exceedingly wasteful, and salvaging a small percentage of the pallets for constructing functions isn't always sufficient to make it sustainable. From an ecofrugal attitude, it'd be an lousy lot better if there had been no longer so darn plenty of these objects being made and tossed within the first area.
So I come to be pleased to read in the Haverford alumni mag that my former classmate Adam Pener is now strolling a organisation whose sole cause is to make eco-friendlier delivery pallets out of corrugated cardboard. These matters are better than desired wooden pallets in numerous strategies. They weigh less (round 10 pounds, in comparison to a median of fifty for a wooden pallet), simply so they lighten the load of the vehicles that convey them, thus decreasing their carbon emissions. Also, it's smooth to make them in custom styles and sizes to % those cars more efficiently, so it takes fewer vehicles to haul the identical extent of products. They're made in huge part from recycled paper in location of virgin wooden. (The ones made with the aid of way of Adam's business enterprise, Green Ox, don't even use glue or staples.) And once they get to their destination, they can effortlessly be broken down and recycled, in place of going into landfills (besides for a small quantity that circulate into DIY fixtures and accessories). IKEA, my preferred inexperienced business, has already opted to trade its entire supply chain to cardboard pallets, and has thereby reduced truck journeys by 15 percent and reduce CO2 emissions with the aid of three hundred,000 metric lots.
The best real downside of the corrugated pallets is that they're not pretty as sturdy as timber. They can't hold very heavy devices, and they do not maintain up properly in the rain. So chances are, there will constantly be some wood pallets round for us tightwads to scavenge. But if all of the relaxation of them are product of cardboard, that is an exquisite component as a ways as I'm worried.
Story #2: An island of green
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
The cover story in last week's Christian Science Monitor Weekly is "An island of green: How a group of gritty farmers turned Samsø, Denmark, into a premier global model of renewable energy." Back in the 1970s, when the environmental movement was in its infancy, this little island tucked between Jutland and Zealand was entirely dependent on fossil fuels. But when word got out that Denmark was considering building its first nuclear power plant, a vegetable farmer named Søren Hermansen became concerned that Samsø would lose control over its electrical supply to a big, centralized utility. So, along with about 20 other families, he invested in a small wind turbine to power their farms.
Over the next 15 years, he grew steadily more interested in environmental issues. He studied environmental science at college and started farming organically. And when, in 1997, the Danish government announced a competition for communities within the country to become energy independent in the space of 10 years, Hermansen convinced his fundamentally conservative fellow farmers to take up the challenge. Instead of talking in lofty terms about saving the earth, he focused on the practical benefits: the income from leasing their land for wind turbines, the jobs that would be created laying district heating pipes, the improved market value of a better-insulated house. Samsø built a network of wind turbines under community control, along with district heating plants to replace inefficient, individual oil heaters. Today, the island produces all its own energy and actually exports $3 million worth of energy each year. Its overall carbon footprint is negative 3.7 tons. By 2030, it aims to eliminate all fossil fuel use entirely.
Of course, Samsø is just one little community, with a population of "3,750 people and a few sheep." No matter how green it is, one tiny island is probably not going to make that big a dent in the world's overall energy use. But to me, Samsø's success is a proof of concept. It proves that energy independence is possible—and moreover, that it's possible using only technologies that are already available today. Hermansen acknowledges that the same systems that work for Samsø probably wouldn't work in a larger city, because cities have such complex infrastructure—but they could still draw on the same technologies to incorporate green projects throughout the city, "rooftop solar on this block and urban gardening on this one."
What's most encouraging to me is not just how much Samsø has achieved, but how quickly it made the transition. It went from a single wind turbine to a fully energy-independent community in the space of just ten years. This gives me hope that, when the perils of climate change finally becomes impossible for the world at large to ignore, it won't be too late to set ourselves on a sustainable path. If they could do it there, I think there's hope even for the USA.
Story #3: Bipartisan climate change solution is already in existence
Source: The Daily Targum
The final piece of positive environmental news came from an unlikely source: the Daily Targum, the official student-run newspaper of Rutgers University. I say it's unlikely because most of the stories in the Targum are, well, not exactly shining examples of journalistic achievement. It's not the material that's the problem; it's the writing. Apparently most of the students who work for the paper have never been taught even the most basic principles of how to organize a story, such as leading with a sentence that answers the five "W" questions: Who did What, When, Where and Why? Often, I'll be halfway into a story before I manage to figure out what it's actually about.
So I was both surprised and delighted to come across an editorial on the Targum's opinion page that actually made a well-constructed, well-reasoned, well-supported argument in clear, lucid prose. The author, Connor O'Brien, a second-year economics major, starts out by arguing that most of the stories about climate change in the mainstream media center around a false choice: save the earth or protect the economy. He then points out that there already exists a solution, endorsed by American leaders from both parties, that can curb carbon emissions without harming us financially: "a revenue-neutral carbon tax." The basic idea, as he succinctly explains, is to build the environmental costs of carbon emissions into their actual costs in dollar terms. Polluters would pay for each ton of CO2 they produce, giving them a strong incentive to reduce their emissions in whatever way they can. And the cash raised by the tax would go straight back to the taxpayers, effectively putting the money consumers would have to spend on higher-priced goods and services right back into their pockets.
O'Brien acknowledges that the "toxic politics" in the USA remain an obstacle to passing this eminently sensible plan. Many prominent Republicans, eager to reject anything that Democrats favor, have rejected the whole idea of global warming as nothing but a hoax (while remaining a little vague on the subject of who started this hoax, and what they had to gain by going to such vast lengths to sustain it, manufacturing reams of data and co-opting 97% of the scientists on the planet). But the fact that there is a solution that could work, and that is compelling enough to attract supporters among Republicans as well as Democrats, is at least an encouraging sign.
In short, all three of these stories express the same basic idea: change is possible. Just because things have always been done in a destructive way, that doesn't mean they always will be. With folks like Adam Pener, Søren Hermansen, and Connor O'Brien on the job—along with the countless others who marched on Washington today to stand up for reality-based policy—there may be hope for our little planet yet.
