TED Talk: Global Warming Mitigated by Cattle?

Global warming may be mitigated by the most unlikely of sources, cattle. How is this possible? How can this vilified creature be an ally in the fight against climate change? Seth Itzkan shows us how.

Seth is President of Planet-TECH Associates, a consultancy that investigates innovations for a regenerative future. He has consulted on trends and innovations for The Boston Foundation, The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and The US Census Bureau. Seth is a graduate of Tufts University College of Engineering and the University of Houston-Clear Lake Masters Program in Studies of Future. He works in Somerville, and recently spent six weeks at the Africa Center for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe.

A Solar Panel "Microbrewery"

Imagine what you might do if you could print your own solar panels.  That line was taken from an article published by NPR's Science Friday about Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein's Solar Pocket Factory.  

Described by the founders as a "microbrewery" for solar panels, the two inventors were able to raise over $70,000 from a Kickstarter campaign to get their project going.

Click here for the article and accompanying video.

Creating Green Conferences

Thanks to Mike Magoon at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) for passing along the webinar announcement below! The announcement is partly in response to a conversation with several BASS members on how to create green conferences with the help of the Internet -- the less people physically traveling to your conference, the greener it can be.  If the registration link below doesn't work for you, please click here.

Zakaria's "The New Oil and Gas Boom"

Today, I read Fareed Zakaria's recent column in Time magazine, titled "The New Oil and Gas Boom," which is also available here.

One point he made that I found intruiging was the following: "The environmental impact of the natural-gas boom is already clear—and positive. The U.S.’s greenhouse-gas emissions in 2011 were 9% lower than in 2007. That’s a larger drop than in the European Union, with all its focus on renewables. Why? A slow recovery and lagging demand is one answer. But the main reason is that natural gas is replacing coal everywhere as an energy source, and gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal."

Some food for thought in your sustainable efforts...

The Wonder Wash, Powerless Washer: Commentary and Review

For about a month now, my wife and I have been using the Wonder Wash to wash our clothes.  Unlike traditional powerless washers, the Wonder Wash does away with washboards and plungers in favor of a pressurized container that efficiently forces the detergent through your clothes enabling you to wash a load in approx. two minutes.

The video above illustrates the process of using the Wonder Wash from start to finish to get a feel for the length of time involved from loading to drying.  

Sustainable Waste Management at Stanley Middle School:

One of the standouts from the many fantastic presentations given at the Behavior Change for a Sustainable World conference at the beginning of the month came from Brian Cooper and his team at Stanley Middle School.  In his first year as a math teacher at Stanley Middle School, Brian Cooper found himself surrounded by collaborative and optimistic people who weren't afraid to ask questions and do some problem solving. A passionate group of 8th grade students met during their lunch break each week and created a plan to implement a new waste management system for the 1200 students on their campus. Realizing and utilizing their surrounding green infrastructure was critical for success.  They conducted a waste audit with EarthTeam, met with the community members of Sustainable Lafayette, took council from the county's WasteBusters, and learned from the practices of their friends at Joaquin Moraga Intermediate School.

More than 1500 pounds of food were collected for energy conversion during the final eight weeks of the 2011-2012 academic year.  Goals for 2012-2013 include sustaining the practice, making it more efficient, and providing more opportunities for students to reflect on the meaningfulness of the practice through concepts and metrics.

Please see the following video depicting their successful program.

Global Cooling? Implications for Sustainability Efforts.

According to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), an international team "has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings."  Their reconstruction is illustrated in the adjascent graph.

According to the article, the group  "used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling."

The authors also suggest that "the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."

While one study is hardly ever sufficient to change an entire scientific theory, this data raises an important issue to be considered by those in the sustainability community, viz., is "global warming" a necessary component of sustainability?

In my personal opinion, the answer is a resounding "no."  Sustainability efforts are justified regardless of whether global warming is a valid phenomenon.  Behaviorally speaking, people are much more motivated by short term consequences than by long term consequences.  In addition, when consequences are a cumulative product of macrobehavior -- that is, the behavior of many people acting concurrently over time, rather than the behavior of one particular individual -- those consequences are even less likely to change behavior.  Global warming, whether "real" or not, suffers from these behavioral shortcomings.

The philosophical foundation of behavior analysis is one of pragmatism.  It's functional contextualist underpinnings suggest that if the scientific enterprise and it's products are intimately tied to the verbal behavior of scientists acting in context, then "what is real" is unimportant and indeterminate because "reality" is relative to one's history of interacting with the world.  Rather, what we should focus on is "what changes behavior."  Thus, worrying about whether global warming is "really" happening is a non-issue.  While there are many individuals motivated by "global warming" there are many more who aren't and a sizable portion of those who are flat out skeptical.  

Alternatively, what most people do care about are the more immediate and tangible products of unsustainable behavior such as (a) pollution which can be seen, smelled, and felt, rising from factories and emitted from vehicles, (b) trash, which are eye sores on our sidewalks, rivers, and parks, and (c) chemical contaminants in our lakes, rivers, and water supply which impair our health.