Water, Water, Everywhere: $50 per gallon and up

Hey all.

Family stuff is happening these days, so I'm not able to keep up here as I once was, but I have been following the rapid approach of World Water Day, which occurs this Sunday, March 22. To that end, I thought I might link you all to some articles around the web that might give you a broader understanding of the problems involved in water rights and water availability throughout the world.

• CHILE: Why "Free-Market" Water Rights Just Don't Work
  An article about the water struggles in Quillaqua, Chile by The New York Times illustrates how badly wrong a water rights policy can go.
• CANADA: No Princes in the Water Rights Game Either
  Now, you'd think that a country with a fairly solid human rights record (in the main--I know no one's perfect) would be a little quicker to agree that clean water is a basic human right. Not so much. Luckily, you can tell the government just what you think of that.
• AFRICA: Coca Cola Equals Fresh Water?
  The Coca Cola Company has pledged $30 million dollars to fresh water projects in Africa. Now if they could just stop wasting the world's water by bottling it and shipping it across the globe.
• USA: We Solve Our Problems on Film
  The Environmental Protection Agency is running a contest for films that will inspire the nation's people to protect our lakes and wetlands.

For more information about water rights, check out:

• New American Dream, which is holding a webinar on water rights this coming Monday.
• This list from Business and Human Rights Resources which provides more links to more water info.
• FLOW: For the Love of Water is a documentary film on the global water crisis. It's available on Netflix, if you're like me and are too lazy to seek it out in a theater or rental store.

So that's it for today. Go drink a little tap water out of a real glass, would you?

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

Hey all!

Tuesday again, and I'm actually around to do my Do Something segment. I've been seeing a lot of ads for fundraising walks lately, so I thought they were the thing to focus on today. After all, a fundraising walk increases the sense of community within a culture, increases the walkers' health and well-being, and raises funds for important health-related causes. Here's a few near and dear to my heart:

• March of Dimes March for Babies
  The loss of an infant or unborn child is devastating for the entire family, and the discovery that a living child has a birth defect that will challenge her for the rest of her life is equally tragic. All too often, however, miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths are swept under the rug, and families raising children with birth defects are left to fend for themselves. Help the parents of all of these children by donating to a run in your area or by running yourself and raising money for the cause. March of Dimes started as a push to cure polio, but today, its reach is far wider. Infant and prenatal care affects us all, whether we have children or not.
• The Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk
  For years, the Susan G. Komen Foundation for a Cure has been doing fundraising walks to provide treatment for underserved communities and to fund research into new treatments and possible cures for breast cancer. Again, whether you know someone with breast cancer or not, it is a disease that the society as a whole is impacted by every day, monetarily, spiritually, and socially. And the chance to walk 60 miles in 3 days with a bunch of crazy cancer survivors? Priceless!
• American Lung Association Stair Climbs
  Got a free Sunday morning? Why not hike to the top of the Hancock Center in Chicago? Or the AON Center in LA? All to benefit a good cause, of course--lung disease research. No, the ALA isn't all about lung cancer. It's about asthma (which is heavily impacted by indoor air conditions and outdoor pollution) and allergies (which are impacted by chemical exposure and environmental damage) and various other lung diseases which are afflicting a greater and greater number of people every year. As a former smoker, I'm kind of attached to the ALA--they may have to save me from my past sins one day, so I'd better give them money now.
• AIDS Marathon
  The AIDS Marathon foundation will train you to run a marathon (or a half-marathon) and give you a chance to raise money for AIDS research and treatment at the same time. I admit I've never thought of running a marathon, and likely never will, but the idea, if you're game, is to train for it and run it for the AIDS research community.
• The Walk to Defeat ALS
  The ALS Association raises money for research into a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease). This disease is a particular cause for a friend of mine, so I sock away a little money in my budget to donate to the walk every year.

So, that's my list for the day. I have to set up my March for Babies site soon and start hitting all my friends up for a little money. It's amazing how much you can raise just by asking for five or ten dollars from a bunch of coworkers and friends.

Give it a try--you might earn a free t-shirt and sunny day of walking with a whole bunch of newly-met friends.

It Was Tuesday Yesterday--DO SOMETHING!

Sorry I didn't get a chance to post this yesterday--stuff going on here. In fact, I may be relatively erratic for the next few weeks, as changes at home are taking up an increasing amount of time.

Anyway, in following along with my Tuesday segment from last week and my rant on packaging from Monday, I give you three things you can do to reduce packaging.

• Write a letter to your favorite online or mail order company. Most of them have a support, complaint, or question address. Be very courteous, but let them know how you think they're doing on their use of packaging. I had a company send me something yesterday that was simply the piece of clothing I ordered--without a plastic bag or more than one small tag--stuffed in a mailing envelope. They're going to get the flipside of the "Why, Amazon!? Why!?" comment that will be sent out today as well.
• Let your broccoli roam free. Reusable grocery bags are all the rage, I know, and I'm sure many of you use them (if not, pick a few up, they're stronger than the paper or plastic disposable ones), but there's another use of plastic bags that a lot of people don't think about: most people bag their bulk vegetables in clear plastic bags in the produce section. If you're not comfortable with placing the vegetables and fruit in your cart without a bag because grocery carts are, you know, kind of gross, try putting them all in one of your handy-dandy reusable bags until you get to the checkout. You can wash them very, very well at home and still save an awful lot of plastic by not bagging them before you buy.
• Cook at home. Ah, the ultimate in package reduction. If you have time to cook one meal, you can probably cook two more at the same time by sharing heating time and veggie prep cutting time. Then you can dump them all in reusable containers, stick them in freezer and fridge, and eat away for a few days without making any more packaging waste. I once did an experiment and found that one meal at Subway for my family actually produced more non-recyclable waste than one home-cooked chicken and potatoes meal. Ouch.

So there you go, your DO SOMETHING for the week.

See you later!

Because Really, What's Better than a Fuzzy Animal?

So, tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and no doubt there will be a million stuffed animals given out in an attempt to make girlfriends and wives and even boyfriends and husbands feel loved and special. The cute factor can't be beat.

And, you know, yay for that. I'm all for cute! But there are real animals out there, too. So, in honor of our fuzzy friends (and enemies--and those who aren't fuzzy at all, in fact), I give you 5 things you can do to help an animal...

1. Adopt an animal from your local zoo.
No, I don't mean take one home, I mean donate money to help defray the costs of feeding and caring for the animal (mine this year is a meerkat!). This usually doesn't cost a huge amount, and you sometimes get a stuffed animal or something to remind you of your gift. Two things, though, from someone who, admittedly, has really mixed feelings about zoos:

• make sure the price of the adoption is considerably more than the probable price of the swag they send you, because there's nothing more annoying than realizing that, of the $100 you just donated, $50 of it went to the adorable stuffed animal and tote and framed portrait and everything else they sent you.
• check out the zoo and its history of animal care, animal death, and animal management. Animal management includes partnerships with other zoos for the purpose of preservation, building and enclosure design that helps improve the social and mental well-being of the animals, and psychological work that is done to make sure the animals don't develop zoocosis (think the penguin in Happy Feet).

2. Deliver some food to your local shelter.
One of my cats was extremely ill a couple of years ago, and was put on prescription food. When her health started to improve, she stopped eating the wet prescription food altogether, leaving me with half a case of the stuff. So I dropped by our local no-kill shelter and gave it to them. They couldn't have been more appreciative! Now, with my vet's blessing, I buy a case of that when I bring one of the cats in for medical work and drop the food by the shelter on my way home.

Animal shelters often work on shoestring budgets--and the burden on them is getting worse in this economy, since many people are losing their homes and are being forced to abandon their animals to find places that will rent to them. And animals come in with all kinds of medical conditions that the shelters treat the best way they know how. So maybe think about making it easier for them, if you can, by donating something concrete. Yes, they need money--God knows!--but sometimes what they need, right that moment, is a case of kidney food.

3. Give money to an animal rights group you believe in.
Okay. I admit it--this is a wildly controversial subject for a whole lot of people. Greenpeace, PETA, Sea Shepherd... there are a lot of groups out there who have their supporters and their detractors and I can't tell you who to donate to. I can tell you that places like World Wildlife Fund and the others mentioned are out there for the business of saving habitats and animals. And that's a very good thing. Just remember, the money isn't worth it if you don't agree with the group's philosophy.

4. Give time to your local animal groups.
This is a very inexpensive way of giving back. Often it's what I used to call muck work (yes, I occasionally mucked stalls at a stables). If you're not into cleaning out litter boxes and shoveling dog runs, find out if there's something else you can volunteer to do. Many places are happy to have people who have experience with smaller infants or have had kittens or puppies before--it takes very little to train these people up to take care of the newborn animals they sometimes acquire.

5. Go walk a dog!
If you happen to have a neighbor who's maybe not around as much as he could be or who has trouble getting around at all, offer to walk his dog once in a while. If you have a neighbor with mobility or agility problems who happens to have a cat, ask if he'd like some help with the more bendy-stretchy things involved in pet care. If you've got a car and your neighbor doesn't, think about offering to drive him and his pet to the vet for physicals. Having an animal has been shown to be very beneficial to the human spirit (and blood pressure), but it's sometimes hard on the knees. Granted, for us introverts, this might be asking too much, but if you're outgoing enough and willing, you might find a very good friend--and the owner might learn to like you, too!

So, that's all! Have a great weekend--a great three-day-weekend if you're one of those lucky buggers who has Monday off!

Not so crazy after all

When I was a young adult and CD burners were first becoming a fad (yes, I'm old), I was out with my father for dinner one night and I told him I'd had this great idea: What if there were "jukeboxes" in music stores. Each could have a computer screen where you could pick a bunch of songs--any song, any artist--and have the computer cut the disc for you right there? You'd buy a token at the checkout and would walk out with your very own mixdisc!

That will never happen, said my father. First off, how popular would that really be? Yes, kids like making mixtapes, but it'd take a whole lot of them to make that a going proposition. Then there's the problem of royalties. The music companies would demand enough royalties to pay their expenses, and that on top of the CD Jukebox company's expenses would make the final product too expensive for anyone to want to buy.

So I gave up the dream, but a few years later, the iTunes store made history doing just what I had planned.

Why tell you of my missed shot at billions? Because Kali pointed me to this post of hers about an idea for greener and more accessible healthcare--a post whose last paragraph started with "This idea may be implausible but that is not my point."

It's actually not implausible at all. Go read the post--the idea is completely solid and has a lot of the same talking points that Al Gore makes: don't put people out of business by making the world greener, put people to business at the job of making the world greener.

In the Philippines, mass transit consists, in part, of "Jeepneys"--hop-on-hop-off diesel-fueled, brightly colored buses. Jeepneys create an unbelievable amount of heavy-particle pollution. So someone thought that it would be cool if there was a jeepney that was electric--no smog! Better yet, the thought continued, what if the electricity used to power this E-Jeepney was generated by creating biofuel from organic waste?

That'll never happen, I'm sure some people said, and yet... the E-Jeepneys were made. But no one will ever use them, others probably said, and yet it took very little time for them to be approved and used.

The US Veteran's Affairs Administration has come to the startlingly logical conclusion that it's often difficult for rural veterans to travel the hundreds of miles it might take to get to the doctor. So why not bring the doctor to them. The National Health Care for the Homeless Council advocates mobile clinics to reach urbanites who wouldn't normally see doctors. Would an electric mobile medical van (let's call it an EMMV for now) in every county be something these groups might think of getting behind?

And wouldn't making these EMMVs be killing an awful lot of very troublesome birds with one very efficient stone? There are jobs to be had--retrofitting the factories that once made RVs or whatnot, hiring back the people who used to work there to build these new vehicles, providing training for community clinic workers in healthcare, and hiring those clinic workers to provide care. There are environmental benefits--even if the vehicles aren't alternatively powered, they will still cut down on the number of miles traveled. Assume ten people needing healthcare in a ten-mile radius. If they each have to drive a hundred miles to get it, then by driving one van a hundred miles into their area, you've shaved 900 miles off the trip. And of course, people who can get regular healthcare are diagnosed and treated faster, which costs less, which brings it all back to the economic side of things.

The simple ideas people have can span every facet of life and reach into every corner of the world. The Solar Electric Light Fund in California thought it would be great if African farms out in far rural areas had solar electricity to pump water to irrigate their crops. Now, they just thought it would make pumping the water easier, because diesel gennies are expensive and dirty and so is the fuel they use. But that one small idea is making the air healthier (no more diesel generators running the water pumps), the economy healthier (no more paying for that diesel), and the people healthier (no more smog and more food). One little idea is currently packing one heck of a punch and benefiting every aspect of life in that little corner of rural Africa.

So never say "it'll never happen," "it's not plausible," "it's not feasible..." Instead, research the possibilities and if you can, give a little monetary push to those who do things you think can make a difference (even if you don't believe they'll really sell). If you have a great idea, tell the president. Write a letter to a hospital in your area, suggesting that mobile, affordable, green, socially-conscious healthcare is a good, politically expedient idea. Go to your local homeless clinic and figure out what you can do to help. Figure out if your idea indeed is plausible. People everyday are designing and building their own ideas of the future--how do you think I got the Mac I'm typing on right now?

The more people with real, green, responsible, plausible ideas that are actually implemented, the more this world of ours changes for the better. So don't keep a "crazy idea" to yourself. You may not lose out on millions, like I did with my CD Jukebox, but you might not get your one chance to save the world, either.

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

Yes, I'm actually starting a feature! A "segment," if you will. Every Tuesday (hopefully), I'll be posting a few ideas of things you can do to help the world. Some will be letter-writing campaigns or donation opportunities and some will be little things that you can do at home to try to step a bit more lightly.

Here's the list for this week:

• Call on the International Community to Help Protect the People of the Democratic Republic of Congo
  The situation in Congo is dire--send a message to the international community that the time to act is now. You need to sign up as a member of Amnesty International to send the letter, but AI is a wonderful source of information globally and well worth joining. The call to action has recipients named from the previous administration here in the US, but it will actually get to the proper people. (And don't worry, AI won't send you a million emails--or indeed, any at all if that's your wish.)
• Do Something Useful with Those Empty Bottles
  If you do have empty water bottles around (try not to, but if you do), there's a great way to reuse them that doesn't involve washing them and drinking out of them again (which may or may not cause more chemicals to leak out of them). Fill them with cold water and stick them in the back of your fridge. Air in a fridge rushes out when you open the door, and the warm air that replaces it has to be chilled all over again, using energy. Cold things, on the other hand, stay cold when you open the door (if you don't leave the door open all day). The more stuff in your fridge, the less air in your fridge, the less your fridge has to work.
• Help Improve Education through Small-Scale Donation
  Because of the lack of public school funding in the US, teachers often end up spending a distressing percentage of their incomes buying simple yet needed supplies for their classrooms. Donors Choose is a website designed to provide targeted funds to targeted classrooms. Teachers write up grant proposals and donors choose which program to give their money to. It's a fantastic way to give a gift to a friend, by the way. My best friend got a donation made in her name to a school in her area, which made it both very personal and very conscious. No gift wrapping, no fuss, no overhead. Just a teacher who now has the books she needed to help further her students' educations.

That's all for today! Have a good one--and do something!

"I live on that high horse"

So, after I wrote my article on e-waste, I was helping one of my co-workers with a problem on her machine. Our computers here are pretty old, and I spend a great deal of my time trying to keep them all going. She and I were lamenting that computers today are just not designed to last. It's a functional attempt (conscious or not) to create a spend-and-toss culture. (More on that later.)

"Not to get on my high horse," she began, to which I immediately returned, "I live on that high horse."

And really, is that the problem? What I mean to say is that there are an awful lot of us "green types" out here saying things that, really, the people reading us have already heard. And already agree with--or they've already stopped reading our writing because they don't agree with us. So, am I just sitting up here on my high horse and not getting down on the ground and working through the mud? Is that useful?--to have a person standing up there and saying "this is what everyone should do"?

Colin Beavan decided to see what one man could do if he got off his high horse and put his money where his mouth was. He became No Impact Man. Two women started thinking about what it would take to meet Monbiot's requirement of 94% resource use reduction and tried to see if they could do it. They started a movement called Riot for Austerity.

I've mentioned them before. I've also mentioned that I'm very much not them.

Am I, however, a person who has the strength of my conviction to get off my high horse and do something? Increasingly, yes. And also really, really no. I don't throw away things I could recycle, mostly, and yet I am known by name and drink at the local Starbuck's. I use reusable containers to take food to work, even going so far as to bring cutlery, but I go out to eat more often than I should and while I cringe at the plastic wrap and plastic bag and styrofoam, I still eat the food. I send off e-letters to my government officials about various things, but you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to go to a school board meeting and open my mouth.

I wish my high horse was a little shorter. I wish I had the courage of conviction to walk all the way to work (it's only three miles, which, really, not as far as all us modern people seem to think it is) or to eat only local food or to never buy something new if I can find it used.

I know, however, that I am not that super. I'm not No Impact Man. I am, however, a lot more like the rest of the world than I am different.

Colin had a post recently about prioritizing resource use to improve lives and it's not so much the article itself that interests me, as the comments. If you read through them all (and there are quite a few), you notice a conversation that goes on about the fact that we (the greenies) are not going to convince "other people--normal people" to give up their TVs and DVDs and iPods and Starbuck's and whatnot. In fact, we're just preaching to the choir and using only the choir to obtain data on what people really need to be happy.

It's a fair point. I have friends who live for their special television shows--hell, there are shows I absolutely will not miss myself; shows I must immediately jump on the internet to discuss the second the credits roll. I am not the only person I know who needs--needs--Starbuck's in the morning. Starbuck's. No substitutions.

The point of trying to change the world is that you need to change it in such a way that most of the people more or less don't hate it. For instance, television. It's never going away--at least not until we find an even cooler way of telling those stories. So instead of saying "oh my God, TV is wrong--it's a horrible resource-wasting beast!" (unless of course, you think that), maybe saying "okay, so, we have TV. Maybe we could find a better way of powering it? One that didn't send miles and miles coal trains to the power plant to make tons and tons of CO2."

I was going to follow that example with "Or fast food giants..." but I actually think fast food giants are slowly killing a great swath of the population and a good bit of the planet right along with them, so I don't really have much of an argument. Also, given that I'm one of the people being slowly killed (though much more slowly than I used to be), perhaps I'm not the best one to address that problem.

So instead I'm going to ask a similar question to Colin's: If there is something resource-using that you can't live without, how could it be made just a little bit less resource-using?

I'll go first. I really, really, really love watching television. However, perhaps I could put the television on its own separate plug so that I could keep the DVD and VCR and such unplugged and non-resource-using the vast majority of the time. And of course, I could unplug the TV before I go to bed at night and before I leave for work in the morning.

And maybe I could write that four hundredth letter to my local electric company to see if they can finally offer me a little bit of clean energy?

EXTRA EXTRA: Healthcare in the United States

I don't usually blog twice in one day, but Kali, over at Mother Earth Health, had an article that had math. You know me--I like math. Numbers are good.

Unless, of course, they're not. For instance, Kali came up with a figure from the Institute of Medicine saying that 60 people every day die in the US from lack of healthcare. That's a pretty horrifying number, in fact.

President Obama wants to give Americans universal healthcare by the end of his first (and hopefully not last) term. Which is a great idea, but how exactly would that happen? Well, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a writer on healthcare issues, took a look at some other countries and how they got universal healthcare. According to his thought processes, two good ideas would be mandating private insurance for all, with heavy subsidies for the poor, or expanding the VA medical system to include non-veterans.

While they both sound like viable plans, there are problems with privatized healthcare and the VA Health Administration has had a heck of a lot of horror stories told about it, though it looks like things are looking up at the VA.

What can we do?

Learn as much as you can. I've given this link before, but I'll give it again: www.DividedWeFail.org. It's the AARP website for action on healthcare issues, and it's got a lot of great information. Also, Universal Health Care Action Network is a great resource and a fine place to start if you want to get involved.

And I really hope we all want to get involved.