Taking a cue from 2muchexposition, I will be blogging every day this week. Nothing big, nothing profound, just a series of short entries to see if I can do it. With the amount of test and assignment marking I have to do over the next couple of weeks, this will indeed be a challenge. Tune in daily to see if I can keep it up, or if I royally fall on my face!

Ben & Jerry's ice cream is damn delicious, but also damn expensive. Janet and I have it only rarely because of this fact, and so it ends up being a real treat, something special. Dublin Mudslide, Chunky Monkey, yum. So yeah, I'm sitting here drooling on my keyboard while thinking about it, and sighing wistfully.

But ah! Tomorrow is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day!



Every year, B&J parlors give away free ice cream on one special day, and tomorrow is it! This year is the 30th anniversary of the very first Free Cone Day. Dude, giving away free ice cream for 30 years, that's pretty awesome.

You know what else is awesome? They don't use milk or cream treated with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH); their vanilla, chocolate, and coffee ice cream is made with cocoa powder, coffee and vanilla extracts that are Fair Trade Certified; for nine years they used the Eco–Pint, the unbleached paperboard pint container used to package their ice cream; and they've collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund and explorer Marc Cornelissen to open the Climate Change College.

Nice.

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute short film expertly written and narrated by Annie Leonard. It shows, through compelling detail and pointed animation, consumerism's incredible destructivity and toxicity, in all levels of the cradle-to-grave chain: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal. She also goes into all the hidden costs of the stuff we buy, which both corporations and advertising would like us to forget about.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Link (via Singapore-City-Zen).

The brilliant Stephen Fry on the global warming debate:

There is Response A. Type A believes the preponderance of established scientific evidence. Whether Type A believes it because they are equipped to do so, or whether they believe it because they are gullible, or whether they believe it because they are stupud, or whether they choose to/pretend to believe it because they are anti-progress, anti-capitalist, anti-global economy, communist, hippy or anarchist is neither here nor there. They believe or profess to believe that there is a pressing threat to the continuation of human life on this planet such as we have known it since the earliest civilizations began to build harbours and ports on the edges of the land. It’s a big deal.

Then there is Type B. Type Bs do not believe this. They think the evidence is wrong, misinterpreted, flawed, misrepresented, unconvincing, not to be acted upon. Type A will call Type Bs “deniers” which irritates them with that suggestion of holocaust denial, not to mention its accompaniment of that special whiff of sanctimonious self-righteous and political correctness that many Bs observe will always hang about your classic Type A. Type B believes the evidence is either manufactured, ignored or slanted. They believe that the whole eco industry and the thousands of academic departments which have sprung up have a vested interest in those alarm bells. They think it’s political correctness, a new orthodoxy, liberal, bossy and dishonest.

Finally there is Type C, the category into which Jim falls. Type C says: “I cannot possibly know. I hear this from one side and that from another. Both seem convinced, both seem to be marshalling impressive technical figures to their side. I cannot make a judgment.”

Obviously there are views that shade between the three categories but in essence you either believe, deny or sit on the fence.

The consequence of these responses runs something like this: A, the believer, will, or at least should, attempt to do something about the threat they believe in: I mean, look what’s at stake, how can they not? In his or her small way they should support green initiatives through the ballot box, attempt to leave less of a carbon footprint in their personal lives, make environmental restitution for jet travel and other apparently deleterious activities through carbon offset schemes and the like. All very baffling, bewildering, embarrassing, inadequate, shambling, liberal and possibly useless no doubt, but the planet’s in danger so surely, (wringing of hands) we should try? By planet, I mean planet-as-we-know-it, of course. It is obvious that the good old earth will carry on a-spinning whatever happens to its ozone layer and climate systems.

B meanwhile will carry on as if nothing is different, for as far as he is concerned, nothing is. Bs only wish they could survive long enough to see the smug self-righteous sorrowful smile wiped from A’s face when in a hundred years it is made plain that there never was any great threat to the climate, to the environment or the ecosystem and that at worst it was a conspiracy of anti-capitalists and at best a muddled, credulous screw up.

And C? The Jims of this world? Well they, of course, are functionally exactly the same as B. They do not know. Case isn’t proven, so why should they vote for massive changes to the way the world does business, massive alterations to the convenience and pleasures of our way of life, just on a 50/50 hunch?

Ah, but that’s the point. It’s what’s at stake that matters in a bet like this.

If B is wrong and there really is a threat of the kind A claims, then not doing anything about it will destroy human habitations, make extinct many species, and fundamentally alter our habitats around the planet.

But if A is wrong and actually there is no threat, then acting as if there was will have what consequences? It will have saved fuel bills all over the world, reduced noxious emissions which, even if one doesn’t believe in global warming, are unpleasant pollutants in anyone’s reckoning, and slowed down the day when we find that the fossil fuels have run out. Action would have given us more time to find alternatives. To be fair, it will also have slowed down world growth and inconvenienced all of us in our personal lives and if A Types do turn to have been wrong they may well owe the world an apology and it’ll be red faces (and a brake in the inexorable rise in world economic growth and fuel mineral use) all round.

But surely that’s a small price to pay for backing a losing horse when the stakes are the planet itself?

Link to the full "blessay," "Getting Overheated."

No, this isn't an entry for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, but it's certainly in the spirit of the book.

Loren Coleman at NewIndPress passes along the news of a carnivorous tree in Uppinangady, Mangalore, India that has developed a taste for cattle:

The cow was suddenly grabbed by the branches and pulled from the ground. The terrified cowherd ran to the village, and got Gowda and a band of villagers to the carnivorous tree.

Before the tree could have its meal, Anand Gowda and the villagers struck mortal blows to the branches that turned limp and the cow was rescued. Uppinangady range forest officer (RFO) Subramanya Rao said the tree was described as ‘pili mara’ (tiger tree) in native lingo.

Link (via Boing Boing).

Al Gore* has just won the Nobel Peace Prize! W00t! Go Al!

And the calls for him to change his mind about running for President in 2008 grow stronger...

I know that his life would be absolute hell for the months leading up to the election next year, but, dude, I would so vote for him.


*Gore actually shares the award with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

1. "The Great Plastic Bag Plague" by Tara Lohan at AlterNet. We are drowning in a sea of plastic bags, and some of the statistics here are just mindboggling: "The Algalita Marine Research Foundation learned that 'broken, degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton.' Which means, when birds and sea animals or looking for food -- more often, they are finding plastic."

2. the_flea_king introduces us to Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom at the exquisite new site Clockpunk.com (syndicated at dr_roundbottom). Jeremy has outdone himself once again with the presentation and content here, whish is just amazing, and pushes all of my geeksquee buttons.

3. "It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both" by Robert Newman at Guardian Unlimited (via willshetterly). This opinion piece is over a year old, but still an interesting and timely read. You'll have to decide for yourself if he's right.

4. MonkeyBrain Books is having a September two-for-one sale. "Buy any book direct from us through www.monkeybrainbooks.com at the regular price, and receive another book of equal or lesser value free of charge." And they take PayPal. The new Hal Duncan novella, Escape From Hell! is looking mighty tempting...

5. Keepon, the squashy yellow dancing robot, dances to Spoon's "Don't You Evah." Awesome. Cute dancing robots and music by Spoon; what more do you need?

Three years ago, a nuclear power plant near the Tennessee/North Carolina border apparently spilled uranium all over the place, and the event was hushed up in the name of national security. From the Houston Chronicle:

A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant — including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since 2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier of fuel to the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no fine.

[...]

Some 35 liters, or just over 9 gallons, of highly enriched uranium solution leaked from a transfer line into a protected glovebox and spilled onto the floor. The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid "running into a hallway" from under a door, according to one document.

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

"It is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the agency wrote.

"We don't want any security information out there that's going to help a terrorist," agency Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in a newly released transcript from a closed commission meeting May 30. But "that's entirely separate" from dealing with an event that could have killed a worker at the plant.

"The pendulum maybe swung too far," agreed Luis Reyes, the commission's executive director for operations. "We want to make sure we don't go the other way, but we need to come back to some reasonable middle point."

Link (via Grist).

I'm not sure how long this has been on the Apple website, but Steve Jobs has written and posted a detailed report on the company's environmental practices, called "A Greener Apple." He talks about removing toxic chemicals from the various electronics and housings that make up Apple's products, as well as their aggressive recycling efforts. He also compares Apple's practices with Dell and HP, making it seem as if Apple comes out on top.

I haven't done the legwork, but I am curious about non-biased research into this. I'd heard previously that Apple was actually on the low end of corporate electronic environmental practices, and so this information is a pleasant surprise (if true).

Although I have to say that when my iBook battery was recalled earlier this year (because of heat issues), I went to the Apple store at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, and it took several minutes to explain to the clerk why I was returning the old battery to be recycled, and another several minutes to confirm that they actually did such a thing. He was surprised that I would want to recycle the battery, since I'd gotten a replacement in the mail, and I wondered afterward if it was actually recycled or if he decided not to bother with all the paperwork and effort and just throw it in the bin.

Just an anecdotal example, but if what Jobs says is true, Apple also needs to educate their store employees about this as well.

There has been much talk in the news lately of the advantages of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) versus traditional incandescent lights. They draw far less power, emit the same amount (or more) of light, and last ten times longer. In terms of energy efficiency, it's almost a gimme; your energy bills are lower, and you don't have to replace them nearly as often. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (it's never gets less surreal the more I type that phrase) has even contemplated banning incandescents in his state and switching everyone over to CFLs.

However, what many of these reports haven't focused on are the environmental impacts of CFLs. It's true that they save a lot of energy, which means we don't have to expend as much fossil fuel to generate the power to light them, but mercury, a toxic substance, is used in its manufacture. From Wikipedia:

Fluorescent lamps (light bulbs) work by passing electricity through mercury vapor, which in turn produces ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light is then absorbed by a phosphorus coating inside the lamp, causing it to glow, or fluoresce. While the heat generated by fluorescent lamps is much less than its incandescent counterpart, efficiencies are still lost in generating the ultraviolet light and converting this light into visible light. In addition, mercury is detrimental to health, and should the lamp break, exposure to the substance can be hazardous.

As Janet sez: "One compact florescent bulb contains about 4 mg of mercury. [...] Half a gram of mercury (the amount in a traditional thermometer) in a 10-acre lake would warrant a fish advisory. One gram in a 20-acre lake will render all its fish unsafe for consumption for a year."

Now, this doesn't mean that we should abandon CFLs altogether, but that we must be mindful of how we dispose of them. You shouldn't just toss them in the trash, because when they reach landfills or dumps, the glass will shatter and contaminate the area with mercury. One CFL bulb may not do a lot of damage, but if everyone starts using them, all that accumulated mercury could absorb into the soil or the groundwater (or vaporize into the air) and cause both environmental and human health problems.

Wikipedia again:

Mercury damages the central nervous system, endocrine system, kidneys, and other organs, and adversely affects the mouth, gums, and teeth. Exposure over long periods of time or heavy exposure to mercury vapor can result in brain damage and ultimately death. Mercury and its compounds are particularly toxic to fetuses and infants. Women who have been exposed to mercury in pregnancy have sometimes given birth to children with serious birth defects (see Minamata disease).

Some of the toxic effects of mercury are reversible, either through specific therapy or through natural elimination of the metal after exposure has been discontinued. However, heavy or prolonged exposure can do irreversible damage, particularly in fetuses, infants, and young children. Exposure to certain highly toxic compounds of mercury such as dimethylmercury can be fatal within hours or less.

So proper disposal is incredibly important. Here's what the EPA recommends (PDF):

Like paint, batteries, thermostats, and other hazardous household items, CFLs should be disposed of properly. Do not throw CFLs away in your household garbage if better disposal options exist. To find out what to do, first check Earth911.org, where you can find disposal options by using your zip code or by calling 1-877-EARTH911 for local disposal options. Another option is to check directly with your local waste management agency for recycling options and disposal guidelines in your community. Additional information is available at LampRecycle.org. Finally, IKEA stores take back used CFLs, and other retailers are currently exploring take-back programs.

If your local waste management agency offers no other disposal options except your household garbage, place the CFL in a plastic bag and seal it before putting it in the trash. If your waste agency incinerates its garbage, you should search a wider geographic area for proper disposal options. Never send a CFL or other mercury-containing product to an incinerator.

ENERGY STAR qualified CFLs have a two-year warranty. If the bulb fails within the warranty period, return it to your retailer.

Now, that may seem like an awful lot of work, especially if you're a lazy bastard like me. So what do you do? If you want to do the environmentally right thing, and also save money, what's your option?

Enter the LED light bulb.

It's true that LED bulbs are expensive right now (just as CFLs were when they first came on the market), but the following is a good cost analysis between a 60-watt incandescent bulb (what most of us are using now) and a 2-watt LED bulb, both of which put out approximately the same amount of lumens (figures provided by C. Crane):

Life Span (how long will the light bulb last?)
Incan.: 1,000 hours (41 days)
LED: up to 60,000 hours (2500 days, or 6.8 years)

Number of bulbs used over 60,000 hour period
Incan.: 60
LED: 1

Bulb Cost (per 60,000 hours)
Incan.: $40.20 (60 bulbs at 67¢ each)
LED: $34.95

Electricity Usage (kWh of electricity used over 60,000 hours)
Incan.: 3600 kW
LED: 120 kWh

Cost of Electricity (60,000 hours at 10¢ per kWh)
Incan.: $360.00
LED: $12.00

Total Cost (after 60,000 hours)
Incan.: $400.20
LED: $46.95

Money saved by installing one LED Light Bulb: $353.25

This is a no-brainer, folks.

The up-front cost is admittedly more expensive, but you save a mighty pantload of money after that. You're using far less energy, and the bulb lasts 60 times longer (other sources indicate that it may be as much as 100 times longer). Even comparing LEDs to CFLs, you've a six to ten times more efficient light source, and you don't even have to worry about dealing with the mercury in CFL bulbs.

We really need to start pushing LED bulbs more, and pressuring the media to take a bigger look at the technology. Earlier in the year, I reported that Mayor Charles Meeker of my hometown of Raleigh, NC has announced plans to slowly replace incandescent bulbs across the city with LEDs after a pilot project in a downtown parking garage resulted in a 40% reduction of power (via Boing Boing). With Raleigh as a model, we can soon light the entire country in LEDs, and do much to save the environment in the process.

Three from BlueGreenBlog (aka bluegreenplanet):

Ice Mass Snaps Free From Canada's Arctic
Scientists are pointing at climate change and are alarmed at its unexpected speed.

Making Carbon Trading a Fair Trade
How does carbon trading/offsetting work, and is it really sustainable? It's a piece discussing monoculture tree plantations (and it sounds like they're using species which are genetically modified and/or non-native to the area).

More Dangerous than Smoking? Death by Soda
OK, ignore the over-scary title, although the article has some surprising facts (I had had no idea that half of US woman between the ages of 20-39 were overweight or obese). It's been said before that a can of soda contains sweeteners the equivalent of at least 10 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup. (If you make your own coffee in the mornings, think of putting that in your cup everyday!) Running to artificial sweeteners isn't the answer either, as those bring another area of health concern.

Parallax Press was founded in 1986, "following a suggestion by Vietnamese Zen teacher and poet Thich Nhat Hanh, [and] is the publishing division of Unified Buddhist Church, Inc., dedicated to publishing books and tapes on socially engaged Buddhism." Many of their titles involve Buddhist approaches to subjects such as death and dying, terrorism, mindfulness and public service, politics, war, and social change. These are things in which I've recently taken an interest, and it is heartening to see so much of it being put into a Buddhist context.

Mindfulness in the Marketplace, edited by Allan Hunt Badiner, was a book that Janet picked up at Dechen Collections (a Tibetan store in downtown Raleigh where we've also bought Thubten Chodron's books Open Heart, Clear Mind and How to Free Your Mind (although the store sells much more than books)). The subtitle is "Compassionate Responses to Consumerism" and is an incredible anthology of essays from Buddhist experts in the fields of physics and systems theory, cultural history, evolutionary theory, business administration, social and political activism, eco-philosophy, comparative economics, and religious studies, as well as noted monks and scholars such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and Stephen Batchelor.

Much of the book discusses the more general aspects, causes, and effects of Western consumerism, and is informative in itself, but the pieces that really stand out are the ones that get to you personally, such as John Robbins' essay "Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?" that talks about the slave trade within Ivory Coast cocoa farms:

A 2001 inquiry into the cocoa sources used by 200 major chocolate manufacturers found significant differences between companies. The $13 billion U.S. chocolate industry is heavily dominated by just two firms -- Hershey's and M&M Mars -- who between them control two-thirds of the market. Unfortunately, both of these companies fall into the category of those companies who use large amounts of Ivory Coast cocoa, and whose products are almost certainly produced in part by slavery.

[...]

M&M Mars and Hershey Foods Corp. are not alone. Other companies whose chocolate is almost certainly tainted with child slavery include: ADM Cocoa, Ben & Jerry's, Cadbury Ltd., Chocolates by Bernard Callebaut, Fowler's Chocolate, Godiva, Guittard Chocolate Company, Kraft, Nestle, See's Candies, The Chocolate Vault, and Toblerone. While most of these companies have issued condemnations of slavery, and expressed a great deal of moral outrage that it exists in the industry, they each have acknowledged that they use Ivory Coast cocoa and so have no grounds to ensure consumers that their products are slavery-free.

[...]

There are in fact many chocolate companies who only use cocoa that has definitively not been produced with slave labor. These companies include Clif Bar, Cloud Nine, Dagoba Organic Chocolate Company, Denman Island Chocolate, Gardners Candies, Green and Black's, Kailua Candy Company, Koppers Chocolate, L.A. Burdick Chocolates, Montezuma's Chocolates, Newman's Own Organics, Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company, Rapunzel Pure Organics, and The Endangered Species Chocolate Company. At present, no organic cocoa beans are coming from Ivory Coast, so organic chocolate is unlikely to be tainted by slavery.

I am admittedly a chocoholic, so this was news that hit me to my core. We've recently begun only buying organic chocolate anyway (both Dagoba and Newman's Own are delicious), but it pains me to think that my previous consumption of Peanut M&M's, Reese's Cups, Cadbury Creme Eggs, and a dozen other types of chocolate may have helped to perpetuate an industry in which other human beings are owned for their labor.

Four-fifths of the book is devoted to the world's problems and social ills, pointing out the fact that these things exist and continue the cycle of suffering, but the last section begins to look at solutions: living simply and sustainably, reducing the dependence on material goods, being mindful of where our food comes from, voting with your dollars, etc. It reminds us that the issues affecting the world may be huge, but that because we are all connected, small differences in the way we live can lead to global change.

The fire in Apex is extinguished, and they've been doing testing since yesterday; CDC, EPA and DENR (Dept of Environment and Natural Resources) have tested both the air and water quality and say that outside of the immediate area of the fire there are no raised levels of VOCs or organophosphates or chlorine or HCl or other nasty stuff detected, though they continue to test just to make sure. They've said nothing about dioxins. FEMA has been nowhere near here, which is probably a relief. They're pumping water out of the runoff ponds and streams and continually testing it. They've even started letting Apex residents slowly return to their homes (though if I lived there, I'd still stay away until an absolute all-clear was announced). The town leaders kept reporting in to the media yesterday from an area just outside the evacuation zone (actually, really close to Apex HS, where I taught a year ago), and I'm positive that if they felt threatened at all by exposure, they wouldn't have stayed so close.

However, it is important to stay vigilant and keep on top of this thing. I'm sure that the agencies that CTE (my desk job) deals with everyday are swarming all over this to make sure the environment is not adversely affected; ironically, it's probably better that this happened within 15 miles of Raleigh, since so many environmental state agencies are located here. And also, because this was a chemical fire, there were a lot of different experts, from chemists to toxicologists to climatologists, involved in the discourse.

Part of what's been so frustrating about all this is that we still don't know the actual chemicals involved in the fire. EQ made up some bullshit answer when asked (something like, "We drew up an inventory and submitted it to the state; you just have to find it."). However, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board is arriving today, so we should find out soon.

I returned home yesterday evening, still worried but not as panicked as before. (And frankly, Peanut was my canary in the coal mine; if anything nasty had been in the air, she would have shown signs of it first. She was a little grumpy during the day because I was interrupting her regular snooze time, but was back to her old normal bitey self last night and this morning.) Again, I was both upwind and upstream from all the nastiness. Peanut and I are both fine. As are my parents and Neli, their pet rabbit.

I'll keep monitoring the information on this and letting y'all know.

Some of you may have heard about the chemical explosion that happened in Apex, NC, and I just want to let everyone know that I and my parents (and our pets) are fine and safe.

I was awakened this morning at 4:45 a.m. by a phone call from Janet's mother. Janet had apparently been checking DailyKos and saw an entry on the explosion and massive fire at EQ Industrial Services, which is just under 15 miles from where I live in Raleigh. EQ is an industrial waste temporary storage facility, where barrels of toxic substances and volatile organic compounds are stored before being transferred to a more permanent location. Eesh. I didn't even know this place was nearby. Around 10:00 last night, there was a fire at the facility, which led to some monster explosions that released a two-hundred-foot plume of smoke in the area, composed of incinerated industrial waste, from paints to solvents, and chemicals such as chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, sulfur and fertilizer. 16,000 Apex residents were evacuated from the area.

And so Janet, being 3,000 miles away, naturally freaked out and called me to tell me about the situation and tell me to get out of there.

After turning on the TV and listening horrified at the situation, I tried calling my parents. No answer. They don't have a landline, just cell phones, and they weren't answering. I rung up my sister to find out if she knew of another number I could reach them at (scaring the hell out of her in the process), and she didn't. I called over and over, getting more and more anxious as I watched the news. I started packing a bag. There are only a few times in my life when I've felt truly panicked, and this was defintely one. I threw together a weekend bag with clothes and toiletries, and grabbed my iBook and novel notebooks in case I wouldn't be able to return for a few days. I packed this all in the car, as well as Peanut in her cage, and roared off to Cary and my parents' apartment.

This was just before 7 a.m.

I got to their place in record time, and rang the doorbell and pounded on their front door until my mother, bleary-eyed, opened up. I told her about the explosion and its proximity, and suggested we get the hell out of Dodge (well, not in those words). She woke my dad up and I explained the situation to him as well. I turned on the TV and we watched the reports coming in. The only people that had been affected so far had been the police and firefighters first on the scene, and many of them were later treated and released from the hospital. About that time, it started raining hard, in both Cary and Apex. My parents tried to calm me down and logically talk about the situation; their apartment is about 8 miles from the evacuated area, but the plume was still confined to the Apex area. Toxicologists, environmental engineers, climatologists and experts from both NC State and Duke were interviewed by the local stations, and they all seemed to be under the impression that this would not affect the Raleigh area. The meterologists repeated the fact that the winds would blow the cloud to the south and west, away from us. Still, I wasn't comfortable staying there.

So my parents got cleaned up, packed a suitcase, and got the rabbit cage ready to go. Janet caught me on the cell phone and I told her we were leaving soon. We packed their car, and headed north and east, away from Apex. Breakfast was at a Bojangle's on the other side of Raleigh, and afterward we drove to the nearby Triangle Town Center to find some free wi-fi so that I could at least input my midterm grades; the closest thing was paid wireless at Barnes & Noble.

It looks now as if we are relatively okay. The heavy rains effectively scrubbed the air of particulates and washed it all to the ground. The winds are still blowing things away from us, and the resultant groundwater contamination will affect those south of Apex, since that is the direction of flow. While it absolutely, completely utterly sucks for the people of Apex and its southern neighbors, it appears that we're relatively okay. I'm still keeping track of news reports, and if it looks like things get worse, I'll head even further out of town. Although it doesn't seem to be the need right now.

More when I have it.

It got into the upper 90s F today (almost 37C), and tomorrow we should hit 100F (38C). Our plants outside are wilting. Our aircon consumption has gone up. I saw a cat on the sidewalk burst into flames. (Okay, maybe not the last one.)



(This image shamelessly pilfered from Scott Westerfeld, who adapted it from Global Warming Art.)

Alternet has a two-part series by Stan Cox on the effects air conditioning has had on the environment and the American mindset in the last fifty years, especially in the South. It's fascinating writing, and I'm intensely aware of this issue, as I live in the South, and am also currently visiting a country that also depends on aircon to do, well, anything.

Part One: "Air-conditioning: Our Cross to Bear"
Part Two: "America's Air-Conditioned Nightmare"

Also, yay for the US Supreme Court. It's a small step, but it's a good one.

Janet and I just got back from seeing An Inconvenient Truth at the Colony Theater, and I'm still reeling from it. It's one of the most cohesive, thrilling, understandable and frightening presentations of the facts about global warming.

Roger Ebert was right: you absolutely owe it to yourself to see this film. If you care at all about this world on which we live, you need to see this film. If you plan to live for fifty more years, you need to see this film. If you consider yourself any kind of responsible human being at all, you need to see this film.

Find a theater near you that is playing An Inconvenient Truth, then go see the film. It's too important to miss. Then take action to prevent the situation from becoming worse, and to help things to start getting better. As Gore says in the film, Americans can do anything, including healing the hole in the ozone layer. As the worst offender in producing greenhouse gas emissions, we can do something about global warming as well.

marrael is extremely close to her goal at BlueGreen Planet regarding both artwork and programming, and I imagine that the site will offically go live sometime this month. However, she's only gotten 44% of the poetry and prose that she would like. So, in order to help add some textual diversity to the site, please consider submitting your words. Just think, someone could be sending an e-card containing a poem or (very) short story of yours. I know that quite a few writers read this journal, and this is a good chance to get some exposure for your work, and to be a part of a very cool project. But it can only be done if you contribute, so please, go do so.

(And feel free to use the banner above to link to the website, though we ask that you use your own bandwidth to host it.)

Last night, Janet and I attended a class at Whole Foods about "Creating a Green Home." We don't yet own a home (and I'm not quite sure when we'll take that step), but Janet has been interested a lot in this stuff, and has gotten me thinking more about it as well. The talk was led by Jonathon Roberts (whose company I have utterly forgotten this morning, but I'll post a link to it when I remember), who talked about growing up extremely sensitive to chemicals and to environmental conditions. He was diagnosed with ADD and intense allergies, and was doped up on drugs to help out with it for the first twenty years of his life. Then he met his wife and started learning about both eating healthier and being aware of the chemicals that saturate our lives (a startling parallel to my own life, though I wasn't nearly as chemically-sensitive as he was).

The thrust of his talk was about Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), which I have dealt with in my job at CTE through studies in car exhaust, but would never have thought existed in everyday items. It all boils down to the fact that so many of our building materials are constructed with petroleum-based chemicals (including formaldehyde) in order to preserve the material and keep out mold and mildew. But those chemicals don't stay in the material. They continually outgas into the air, a process where they seep out of your house paint, plywood bookshelves, plush carpeting, stain-resistant furniture or vinyl flooring, and end up in the surrounding air, and consequently into your lungs. These are chemicals that can cause innumerable health problems, including flu-like symptoms, lethargy, and even cancer. And we're breathing this stuff in every day. When you inhale that "new car smell," you're taking it in by the bucketload.

This is called indoor air pollution, which is often much worse than the stuff outside.

So Roberts talked about ways that you could reduce your exposure to these VOCs. He talked about paints and sealers that actually seal the chemicals into the products so that they won't leach out. There are natural woods (such as cork and bamboo) that last much longer than other types of flooring or countertops, and are vastly more sustainable and environmentally friendly. A specific type of cotton insulation made from recycled blue jeans can be used instead of the fiberglass stuff.

I was afraid at the beginning that the talk would be nothing but a sales pitch for his company, but he hardly mentioned it at all. He talked about the ways you could "green" your home, but didn't claim that his company was the only source of those products. It was a cool way to come at the subject, to raise awareness of the issues and not put pressure on the attendees to buy buy buy, and that hopefully when people are ready to make these changes that they'll look to his company and others for the solutions.

I'm sure Janet will post more about this (and in more detail) sometime soon. When she does I'll link to it here. It was an interesting talk, and I'm glad we went, even if we may not need the information for a few years.

[UPDATE: The company is called EcoSolution, and their website is thisaway.]

Dear Mr. President,

I know you're probably bummed out that only 10% of the nation's population actually watched you deliver the State of the Union the other night. I mean, you took a shower, put on makeup, and had your staff polish your rhetoric into something the American people would buy (or at least that was the plan). You only deliver this speech once a year, so it should have been important, right? I mean, the SuperBowl only happens once a year as well, and man, look at their numbers.

So 90% of the country decided that they didn't want to hear what you had to say. They didn't care that you've put a red line through half of the most promising medical research strategies in general, and about 90% of the strategies for tackling the most serious degenerative diseases we suffer from. That's got to hurt. But you know what, I have some good news for you.

Remember how you justified going to war in Iraq by stating that they had weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam Hussein was all hot on the trigger to shoot them into our cities? I'm not sure if you can remember that far back, what with the damage done to your brain by all that cocaine you used to snort. It's okay, I'll walk you through it. Anyway, wow, was it ever a surprise to find out that there were no big nasty weapons over there. That must have really sucked, huh? But you recovered quickly, saying that no no, the reason we were over there was to depose Saddam, yeah that's it, because he's a tyrant and stuff, and I bet you had to bite your cheek to keep from giggling. You repeated it over and over, and constantly tried to link him to al Qaeda, and kept mentioned 9/11, and didn't even worry yourself over the pesky lack of WMDs anymore. Eurasia, Eastasia, it's all the same, right?

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Joseph Goebbels said that, and hell, if it was good enough for the Nazis, it was good enough for you.

But like I said, I've got some great news for you, Georgie-boy. We actually have found weapons of mass destruction. Isn't that great? You can go back to using that talking point again. The people using them that will harm the American public aren't in Iraq, unfortunately, or Syria, or Iran, or anywhere in the Middle East. But that's okay, because they're much closer, and therefore easier to deal with.

These egregious offenders, these people doing harm to our citizens, are actually right in our own backyard.

Yep, that's right. It's the U.S. Army.

An October 2005 special report in the Newport News Daily Press revealed that "the Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste -- either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels" (emphasis mine).

And this happened right off the shores of the United States.

A drop of nerve agent can kill within a minute. When released in the ocean, it lasts up to six weeks, killing every organism it touches before breaking down into its nonlethal chemical components.

Mustard gas can be fatal. When exposed to seawater, it forms a concentrated, encrusted gel that lasts for at least five years, rolling around on the ocean floor, killing or contaminating sea life.

Sea-dumped chemical weapons might be slowly leaking from decades of saltwater corrosion, resulting in a time-delayed release of deadly chemicals over the next 100 years and an unforeseeable environmental effect. Steel corrodes at different rates, depending on the water depth, ocean temperature and thickness of the shells.

The report even provides a map (I know how much you like pictures rather than words), showing the dump sites in the waters circling the country, off the coasts of Alaska, California, Florida, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Hawai'i, and in the Gulf of Mexico.

I mean, isn't this wonderful, George? Now you have a confirmed enemy that has used weapons of mass destruction to pollute the waters surrounding our homeland, getting into the marine life and consequently into our food supply, poisoning dolphins and whales that beach themselves on our shores.

You may have even eaten seafood contaminated by mustard gas, or VX, or arsenic, or Lewisite. To think that weapons of mass destruction may have made it all the way to your dinner table.

The course is clear. You know what to do.

Right?

Yrs,

JEL