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Archives
You Say Potato, I Say Environmental Deterioration
By Virginia Prescott on Tuesday, June 30, 2009.Re-branding is not such a subtle art. Remember when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"? Or when the scandalized Blackwater security firm ditched its name altogether and became "XE"?
Then there’s the field day the left had when the Bush administration announced its "enhanced interrogation" program, or how environmentalists jumped on Bush's Clear Skies Inititative as an evisceration of the Clean Air Act.
Now environmental PR firms are re-working their language to push people who are on the fence about climate change over to their way of thinking. A Pew study in January found that climate change ranks at #20 on a list of people's concerns. The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes.
As part of our Next Green Thing series, we’re turning to Jonathan Hiskes. He reports on climate politics for Grist and he recently detailed some of the new terminology being advised by the non-profit PR firm EcoAmerica and why that language is setting off peoples' truth detectors already.
Grist: It's Got A Ring To It, No?
New York Times: Seeking to Save the Planet with A Thesaurus
(Photo by Peter Beazley via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Damanhur: Laboratory for the Future of Humanity
By Virginia Prescott on Monday, June 29, 2009.
Damanhur is an intentional community nestled in the Italian Alps, a little north of Turin. Its 600 or so full-time residents live, work, eat and pray together.
Unlike some spartan eco-villages, people in Damanhur meditate in lavish underground temples with elaborate tunnels and hidden chambers. There they also record music made by plants, and believe they can leave their physcial bodies to travel along the astral plane using technology from the lost city of Atlantis.
Residents call Damanhur "a laboratory for the future of humanity." A three-part documentary on Damanhur is now screening on VBS TV, the free online TV channel of Vice magazine. We've invited the film’s director and producer, Santiago Stelley, to describe this unique social experiment.
VBS TV: Damanhur: Laboratory for the Future of Humanity
(Photo by Alex Jarvis via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Economics of Recycling
By Christine Parrish on Monday, June 29, 2009.
Over the past twenty years, recycling has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Now we can buy everything from tote bags to belt buckles made from the bottles and cans we put by the curb. But the economic downturn has put a dent in the industry. Items that once fetched hundreds of dollars per ton are selling for much less, leaving many recycling plants in the lurch.
Do insulating paints save energy?
By EarthTalk on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
EarthTalkTM
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine
The Greening of Hair Salons
By Amy Quinton on Thursday, June 25, 2009.New Hampshire has its first green hair salon.
Don’t worry; stylists won’t dye your hair green, unless you ask.
But a Dover hair salon is working to be the most environmentally-friendly salon in the state.
And as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton reports, it’s not an easy undertaking.
A Climate Crusader's Battle
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, June 25, 2009.
Dr. James Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and one of the world’s preeminent climatologists. His groundbreaking research has been published in top scientific journals and front page headlines.
More than thirty years ago, he created one of the early computer climate models and has used it to predict--with astounding accuracy--much of what has happened to global temperatures since.
In recent years, Dr. Hansen has gone from scientific stalwart to climate crusader, writing letters to world leaders, defying the Bush administration, attending rallies and publicly scolding the energy industry. He was arrested while protesting mountaintop mining in West Virginia on tuesday.
Elizabeth Kolbert profiled Dr. James Hansen in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, and we called Elizabeth Kolbert at her home in the Berkshires for more.
An abstract of Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of James Hansen in The New Yorker
(Photo by World Development Movement via Flickr/Creative Commons)
New Hampshire Receives $10M in Federal Energy Funding
By Kathryn Wells on Thursday, June 25, 2009.State efforts to boost the local economy and develop “green” industry got some help from the White House: the Department of Energy is sending the state $10 million to implement plans to create and retain jobs in energy efficiency and renewability.
NHPR's Kathryn Wells reports.
From Russia With Lumber
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, June 24, 2009.
Lumber for the poor? Here in the U.S., the unemployed masses have food stamps and welfare to fall back on when unemployment checks run out.
But in Russia, local governments are looking for more tangible ways to help out-of-work citizens make ends meet. They are handing out everything from free plots of land to discounted lumber in an effort to keep social unrest at bay.
Andrew Osborn, Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, wrote about these unusual subsidy programs in a recent edition of the paper and he joined us on the line from Moscow.
The Wall Street Journal: Russia, a Lumbering Giant, Asks: Care for Some Cut-Rate Logs?
(Photo by sarniebill1 via Flickr/Creative Commons)
The Possibilities of 'Smart Grid'
By Laura Knoy on Tuesday, June 23, 2009.It’s an idea that everyone’s talking about, when it comes to energy efficiency and yet it has no solid definition. Smart Grid includes capturing the five to fifteen percent of power that’s lost in the transmission of energy, but it also means better tracking of energy consumption, and the ability to adjust power production accordingly. We’ll learn more about Smart Grid... what it is, what are its challenges and what it could mean for New England.
Guests
- Clifton Below, commissioner for the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission
- George Gantz, senior vice president of Customer Services and Communications for Unitil Corporation
We'll also hear from
- Mitch Gross , Spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power
- Ray Gosney , Executive Vice President for the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative
Digital Dumping Grounds
By Virginia Prescott on Tuesday, June 23, 2009.
When containers of old computers first started arriving in West Africa a few years ago, the Ghanaian government welcomed them as donations. It soon became clear that as few as 50 percent of the donated computers were in working condition or showed any hope of being fixed.
Broken, discarded computers up in massive piles outside of Ghana’s most impoverished slums. There, children melt down toxic plastic casings to retrieve scraps of valuable metals inside. Emmy-award winning journalist Peter Klein and a team of grad students from the University of British Columbia traveled to Ghana, China, and India to find out where our used electronics end up. The result of their investigation airs this week on PBS's Frontline/World. Producer and correspondent Peter Klein joins us on the line to tell us more.
Watch the trailer for "Digital Dumping Ground":
(Photo by Vibek Raj Maurya via Flickr/Creative Commons)
