GreenerPolitics

from badvista.fsf.org

When you turn on your computer, you’re making a political statement. If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the statement you’re making is that transnational corporations should control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed.

–New Internationalist Magazine Nov. 2006

In January and February of this year, the Green Party and Greenpeace issued warnings about the tremendous threat posed to the environment by the disposable computer mentality promoted in Microsoft’s $500-million Windows Vista marketing campaign. Vista’s steep hardware requirements mean that to use it, most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill and buy a new one.

While these environmental consequences alone are sufficient reason for many to reject Vista, the disposable computer mentality is a symptom of a larger problem—one that should concern all social activists. That problem is the dependency of activists on software owned and exclusively controlled by entities that design their software in ways directly opposed to grassroots social change. No matter what kind of specific change they are working for in society, activists need the freedom to organize and communicate. Yet each time an activist turns on a Vista computer, she is nominating Microsoft and Big Media as exclusive gatekeepers to this freedom.

Read the rest of the article. 

When it comes to being Greener, if you’re not on the cutting edge of technology and innovation, then you might miss the boat. For example, I thought I knew everything there was to know about material efficiency, cradle to cradle manufacturing – all that stuff. And then in waltzes in Tim Antoniuk with a revolutionary idea: if we can maximize the desireability of the objects we use, then we will reduce the chances of throwing it away.

In fact, his ideas would be great entries into the Buckminster Fuller Challenge: a $100,000 prize for the best idea that enables us to live sustainably. I interview Elizabeth Thompson of the Buckminster Fuller Institute about this prize as well as the legacy that Bucky Fuller has left behind.

For those unfamiliar with Buckminster Fuller, here is a short excerpt courtesy of Wikkipedia:

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet optimistic about humanity’s future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the “technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life”, his analysis of the condition of “Spaceship Earth” led him to conclude that at a certain point in the 1970s humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed.

Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. “Selfishness”, he declared, “is unnecessary and…unrationalizable…War is obsolete…”

“As the Tree grows, the river flows
and life continues to thrive….” -Debra J. Stiles

by Arden Bonokovski

So Mark asked me if I knew anything about how the wonderful willow is able to clean up so many of our messes in nature….

Here is what I have found out. Willows are an excellent candidate for this work as they have deeper root systems that the typical grassy plants used in eco-restoration, so they are able to detoxify much deeper soil than the typical species. Willows are able to do so because they are resistant to heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, zinc, nickel, lead and iron. They are also desirable candidates as the vastness of the genus means that different species of willow are native to most continents, making it easy to find a species of willow suitable for any area. So far it is known that willows are able to detoxify environments in four ways: phytoremediation, phytodegradation, phytostabilization, and rhizofiltration.

Phytoremediation is the extraction of heavy metals from soil through the uptake of the toxin by the roots of the willow followed by the translocation of the toxin to the above ground organs of the plant. The high biomass of a willow tree or shrub allows for a large uptake of the heavy metals.

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William McDonough, the author of the book, Cradle to Cradle, challenges us to create the sustainable economy.  These two clips from the video ‘The Next Industrial Revolution’ hold the keys to our future: positive, hopeful, creative and challenging.

This first video is a taste of the the thesis of the the longer video, which is 45 minutes long. The thesis of this video is the fundamental thesis of creating a sustainable society: how do we love all the children of all species for all time,

From CBC.ca

San Francisco has become the first city in North America to ban the use of traditional plastic grocery bags, a step that municipal leaders hope will spread across the country.

Passed Tuesday by the city’s board of supervisors, the law prohibits large grocery stores and drugstores from using non-recyclable and non-biodegradable plastic bags made from petroleum products.

Supermarkets will have six months to comply while drugstores will have up to one year.

The city legislator who introduced the bill, Ross Mirkarimi, said that up to 200 million plastic bags are used each year in the city of roughly 740,000 people.

It’s estimated a traditional plastic bag takes 1,000 years to dissolve.

“The first order of conservation is reduction and what we want to do is reduce the non-recyclable plastic bag,” Mirkarimi said.

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