Teen Writers Take on Green Topics

The city-wide paper LA Youth took on a variety of green topics in their Sept. 2007 issue. Stories are on our role in global warming, ways to live a greener life, etc. The paper, now in its 20th year, is circulated to more than 400,000 readers throughout the city of Los Angeles. See the issue here.

CMAP's Summit on Climate Change

Last month CMAP, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, held a summit on innovation and integration. Various regional partners - from CNT's Peter Haas to Sadhu Johnston of the City to Adele Simmons of Metropolis 2020 presented on anticipated effects of climate change on the Chicago area as well as reactions. See the summit agenda - as well as most presentations -
here.

Story on all the little + the big things we can do

Chicago's RedEye had a nice story that lays out the little - as well as the big - things that we can all do to help reduce our carbon footprint. It's amazing how quickly green issues have risen in prominence in the public's eye, yet constant reminders of the ways that our own actions are relevant, like this piece, are very important. Reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, who has covered environmental issues for some time, explores home energy, flying, driving, eating meat, recycling, etc. "If everyone in Chicago [used reusable bags], it would eliminate 601 million bags and save 4,508 tons of waste from going to a landfill." And how about the newspaper industry itself? Interestingly, the 1,500 daily newspapers in the U.S. use about 9.2 million tons of paper - consuming more than the book, magazine and catalog sectors combined. Yet it turns out they're the most recycled paper product around - and newsprint itself contains an average of 32 percent recycled fiber. (Still, it's a great incentive for going digital!) Anyway, enterprising reporting!

Chicago Tribune Interviews Weisman

Today's Trib has an interview with author Alan Weisman. An excerpt from the story:
Among those interesting facts:

- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.

- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.

Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.

How long?

"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."

Provocative stuff, right?

What's Wrong with Environmentalists?

I recently discovered the thoughtful and incisive blog of Paul Botts of the Donnelley Foundation, at http://dot-org.blogspot.com. In a February posting he discusses how environmentalists have hurt their own cause by doing a poor job at communicating with broader society. In this
post, he discusses similarities between environmentalism and feminism - in terms of how the approach that seems to work at one point in the movement may not resonate for a later generation.

Is Walking (to work) Hard?

Harold Henderson's blog at the Chicago Reader has an interesting item on walking to work. Turns out that the 3 top towns in the U.S. of more than 5,000 people where over 1/2 the population walks to work are... military bases. See the posting here. The web site this is drawn from has lots of data to mine - http://www.city-data.com.