Tuesday, 20 Nov 2001

Land of the Oil-free?

On Sept. 11, the "American way of life" came under attack. The attacks were horrific -- but, as Keith Schneider writes in a new article in Grist, they have led to an important and encouraging national dialogue about the consequences of our oil-dependent lifestyle. Schneider, a former New York Times correspondent, notes that one of the surprising outcomes of the tragedies has been the willingness of some conservatives to take seriously one of environmentalism's most important goals: the creation of a more energy-efficient, less resource-dependent way of life. Read it only on the Grist Magazine website.

Good Lovins

In our nation's capital, the Bush administration and Republican members of Congress are rattling the saber of national security and calling for domestic oil and gas drilling to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources. But in the pages of Grist, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute argue that the issue isn't foreign vs. domestic; it's about the architecture of the energy system. A good system makes large-scale failures impossible and local failures relatively harmless; it uses less energy more efficiently; and it relies on resources that are dispersed, diverse, and renewable. How would a really smart, secure energy infrastructure look? Read about it only on the Grist Magazine website.

Wood Picker

Eric Gellerman is making furniture out of old-growth Douglas fir, 150-year-old white oak, and Indonesian teak -- and getting kudos from environmentalists for doing so. Gellerman is cofounder of The Wooden Duck, a furniture store in Berkeley, Calif., that salvages wood to craft its wares. The environmental benefits range from the obvious -- the company doesn't depend on logging for its wood -- to the not-so-obvious: Much of the wood used by Gellerman and co. would otherwise end up in landfills. The company has dismantled everything from bleachers to railroad ties to make its furniture, and recently begun buying used South African products made from old-growth Doug fir that was shipped to Africa in the 1800s. Now the wood is coming home, where The Wooden Duck will pull it apart and turn it into some of the greenest furniture around.

Worse for the Tern

Here's another possible casualty of the war on terrorism: migrating birds. An Indian ornithologist announced today that more than 200 species of birds that migrate from central Asia to India every year could be adversely affected by chemicals in the bombs exploding in Afghanistan. Such birds, including the Siberian crane, the shoveller duck, the crested poacher, and the Arctic tern, begin their roughly 4,000 mile journey in late October or early November and stop at many wetlands in Afghanistan. Abrar Ahmed, a senior program officer with India's chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, said chemicals in the bombs may enter the birds' bodies, where they could disrupt breeding cycles, make egg shells thin and susceptible to early breakage, and affect the birds' ability to weather the long return trip in the spring.

Vitamin Sea

Could the answer to controlling global climate change lie in the ocean? Carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, is naturally absorbed into the ocean, where it does not affect atmospheric temperatures. Now some scientists and entrepreneurs want to artificially augment that process to increase carbon dioxide absorption and control global warming. In one plan, CO2 generated by power plants would be converted to liquid form and pumped into the depths of the sea. In another, scientists would fertilize the surface of the ocean to cause an algae bloom; the algae would then absorb carbon dioxide and, as the bloom died, sink to the ocean floor, trapping the CO2. But critics caution that excess CO2 could harm deep-sea creatures and have unknown other effects on ocean ecology. Sallie Chisholm, a scientist at MIT, is one of the skeptics: "It's like saying: 'What's so bad to adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? There's already CO2 in the atmosphere.'"