[Pretorian]

"How to be green and ruin your planet at the same time"

http://thesickearth.blogspot.com/

[Keith_McClary]

"Green" power sources are often ecologically destructive:
Hydro dams destroy habitat.
Windmills kill birds and bats.
Biofuels require cultivation of natural areas.

[Christina123]

Hi,
Eco-friendly is a term which means that a beneficial effect on environment or in simple words we can say that taking good care of the environment in which we live.

[vtsnowedin]

Reduce Reuse Recycle

Buying Throwaway Crap just doesn't have the same ring does it?


BTW, what the heck is a "Pop-spec" anyway?

Probably English for tootsie pops. or something similar. Variations in local usage such as pop vs soda vs coke depending on locality. I would think these would tend to blend away as we all watch each others TV and movies.

[Beery1]

The term "eco-friendly" is so overused that it is now meaningless.

I agree. When people tout natural gas, which is essentially methane - a greenhouse gas, as an eco-friendly fuel, we're very deep down the rabbit hole.

[Serial_Worrier]

The most eco-friendly thing for the earth is the extinction of H. Sapiens.

[SeaGypsy]

This team of scientists have been down in the Southern Ocean for a year, filming and researching at Macquarie Island nature sanctuary.
(Edit the most recent doc was just broadcast "The Wild Ones: the Edge of Nowhere)." This is a must see, the first time I have ever said that on this site. It will be free online in a few days. I will stick up a link when it comes available. The place has a royal penguin colony of 4 million in a single group. Spectacular. This is where much of "Happy Feet" was developed.

Macquarie Island is a tiny fragment of land between Tasmania and Antarctica in the Southern Ocean. Each Spring, thousands of sea birds and mammals converge on the island in order to leave the water and breed. This seasonal influx of life also makes Macquarie an oasis for biologists. With the creative application of technology, those scientists are gaining fascinating insight into the mysterious ocean-going lives of the island's seasonal visitors.

The island's natural history has been a magnet for scientists and for over 50 years Australia has operated a research station at the northern end of the island. The station is home to over 40 people over the summer and around 20 through winter. A wide variety of research is carried out on the island including biology, botany, auroral physics, meteorology and medical research.

Southern elephant seals are one of the longest monitored animals on the island. Elephant seals spend most of their lives at sea, but return to the same beaches each year to breed and moult.

While elephant seals are relatively well studied on land, their ocean going life is largely a mystery. To understand more about how elephant seals interact with their ocean environment, work from Macquarie Island is tracking individual seals when they leave the island to feed and measuring how deeply they dive and which areas of the Southern Ocean they're targeting.

What is known to date is that southern elephant seals are extraordinary ocean wanderers. Capable of diving to over 1500 metres in depth, staying submerged for up to 2 hours and swimming thousands of kilometres. Yet despite being masters of their ocean world, the numbers of elephant seals on Macquarie Island has steadily decreased over the past forty years. The exact reasons behind this decline are unclear, however the answer probably lies in how they feed in the Southern Ocean.

Royal penguins are also being tracked to understand more about their feeding behaviour. How and where the birds feed, what they eat and how much. This data is then compared against how successfully the birds breed over seasons.

Each year the penguins return to Macquarie Island to find the same nest sites and generally the same partner. But the marine environment that they depend upon to feed can vary greatly with natural events such as El Niño and potentially with human induced changes such as global warming and fishing. Understanding how the birds are affected by natural changes provides a valuable model for understanding how the birds will be affected by future human influenced changes.

Use the links on this page to find out more about Macquarie Island and its inhabitants.

This place was trashed by whalers and fur hunters, filled with rabbits, rendered down to the point where only a few dozen of each of the main species were left. Then the place was protected for 80 odd years. It is stunning. Absolutely confirms that nature left alone with minimal help (eradicating ferals & weeds mainly) does bounce back to an amazing extent.

http://www.abc.net.au/nature/island/ep1/default.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2011/s3218459.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2011/s3228206.htm

There are a bunch of vids on the same channel.

[Pretorian]

Hi,
Eco-friendly is a term which means that a beneficial effect on environment or in simple words we can say that taking good care of the environment in which we live.

And what kind of goods or merchandise that might be?

[spot5050]

"Eco-friendly product" and "Eco-friendly fuel" are for the most part oxymorons. The most eco-friendly product is the one you avoid buying and the most eco-friendly fuel is the fuel you avoid burning.
The most eco-friendly mode of transportation is proximity.

Love that. And memorable...

>>The most eco-friendly product is the one you avoid buying

>>the most eco-friendly fuel is the fuel you avoid burning

[The Practician]

Heres an Essay I wrote on the subject about a month ago. Kinda long and nothing new to most here I'm sure, but it is going to be included in the course pack(ring bound collection of example essays and learning material) for my instructors English class, making it my first pseudo-published piece of writing.

Soylent ‘Green’
It is almost impossible these days to go anywhere without running into an advertisement for some kind of product that purports to be sustainable, environmentally friendly, or simply ‘green’. This kind of marketing is applied to an incredible variety of consumer goods, with everything from toilet paper to Toyotas getting the green treatment. Some of these products are produced more sustainably or are less harmful to the environment than alternative products, but that does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Paradoxically, many products eligible to be marketed as sustainable owe that fact to the existence of an unsustainable alternative. It is not well understood, but meeting the demands of our economic system, not concern for the environment, is the driving force behind most green marketing. If we want to protect the environment, consuming products marketed as green may actually be doing more harm than good.
The most obvious way a supposedly green product can fail to live up to it’s billing is by being incredibly bad for the environment, but slightly less so than it’s competitors. This is commonly referred to as green washing, and has become increasingly common as marketers seek to capture the dollars of eco-conscious consumers. At its worst, green washing can be used to market products that may actually be worse for the environment than the traditional alternative, but are superior in one crucial, easily marketable way. This is how the manufacturers of certain cheap plastic mops that require toxic disposable replacement pad refills are permitted to claim they are environmentally friendly: it is because they use less water than traditional mops. At the pricier end of the consumer goods spectrum, consider the hybrid or electric vehicle. Hybrids, we all know, get impressive miles per gallon and have lower emissions compared to conventional vehicles, and pure electrics, rare as they are, don’t use fossil fuels at all. These are the facts we know, and we know them because we dutifully read the tasteful fold out ‘advertising feature’ nestled in between the beautiful nature photographs in the latest issue of National Geographic. What these adds unsurprisingly fail to mention is that hybrids need almost the exact same environmentally destructive infrastructure as conventional vehicles for their manufacture and use, in addition to the rare and expensive materials, such as platinum, required in the manufacture of their batteries. They may not need to stop in at the gas station quite as often, but that fact is little more than statistical noise when measuring their full environmental impact. While it may be a great way to sell products, the only thing green washing cleans is our conscience.
Not all products marketed as green are examples of green washing on the level of a disposable, battery powered mop or full size SUV hybrid. Often, for what is usually only a modest premium, consumers have the option to choose sustainably sourced, high quality goods over cheaper alternatives. These are goods that can withstand the often rigorous scrutiny of respected organizations that are in the business of determining whether or not a product is environmentally sound. Because these goods are only a bit more expensive, many people assume that if only everyone was to switch to sustainably harvested fish, lumber, or energy , all would be well in the world. What people generally fail to grasp is that most sustainable industries are dependent on their much larger unsustainable counterparts to maintain their low prices, and would not scale effectively to meet market demand at a price most people could afford to pay without a significant reduction in their standard of living. Consider the example of Oceanwise(TM) , a sustainable seafood certification body which with anyone who has eaten at a local restaurant with a decent seafood selection should be familiar. Assuming that any Oceanwise(TM) certified seafood really is sustainably sourced, and doesn’t appear to add more than a few dolllars to our dinner bill, it should make sense from an environmental standpoint to increase demand for sustainable seafood. This view, however, ignores the reality that for these low intensity fisheries to exist, the much greater portion of demand must be met by overfishing as yet still abundant species, like tuna or salmon. If all major fisheries were to be conducted sustainably, there is little doubt canned tuna, if it was available at all, would be priced closer to caviar than to cat food, and we would all be eating a great deal less delicious smoked salmon. This is just one example, but there are few, if any, industries that have a sustainable offshoot that could scale to meet current demand. If we did limit our consumption to what could be produced by sustainable methods, the environment would undoubtedly be better off. For some reason though, nobody is running for public office on a platform of higher prices, less jobs, and lower material standards of living. The problem, it turns out, is not that we are not operating our economy sustainably, but that it cannot be operated sustainably at all.
The fundamental problem of purchasing goods marketed as green or sustainable as an act of environmentalism is the fact that we can’t consume our way to a healthier planet. This is a simple, common sense concept to understand, and one that takes a considerable effort of mental gymnastics to refute. Nonetheless, it is completely at odds with the fundamental structure of our modern economy, a fact that is apparently not very well understood these days by consumers or even mainstream environmental scientists. People talk about concepts like sustainable growth, but not much consideration of whether such ideals are even possible to achieve, or even make sense. The forget, or have never learnt, one of the most basic laws of nature: nothing grows forever. The only environmentally friendly consumption is not really consumption at all, but the scavenging, recycling and refurbishing of existing goods to the maximum possible extent. Hemp jeans may, in fact, be produced more sustainably than cotton ones, but we are already producing more jeans of the cotton variety than we need, and they can be patched or purchased used for far less money than buying a new pair. Discarding functional, older appliances and replacing them new ones, regardless of how energy efficient the new ones are, is an equally dubious practice. The problem is not so much that our appliances use a lot of kilowatts, but that almost all are designed and manufactured with an intended service life of just a few years, usually less than a decade, after which they are usually just thrown away. Often, there are government subsidized programs that encourage such behavior, such as popular ones where consumers are given a modest cash payment to junk their older vehicles. Unfortunately these programs are often just thinly veiled subsidies for the auto industry, designed to dry up the used market and thereby force people to purchase new vehicles. From an environmental standpoint, this is unacceptable and unsustainable. A person can have a more effective positive impact on the environment by avoiding new manufactured goods altogether whenever possible, making do or doing without. This kind of action is absolutely terrible for the economy, but that’s the whole point. Only by undermining industry’s demand on the natural world can we reduce our personal demand on it.
In our daily lives, we are constantly being bombarded with marketing messages, from the federal government to chemical companies, encouraging us to go green by purchasing the latest eco-friendly product. often, the motives behind these messages are less than altruistic, and are in the service of products that aren’t green at all. Even when these messages are rooted in an earnest concern for the environment, they often belie an unrealistic understanding of how the natural world and human economy interact. Even ostensibly sustainable products and industries can represent false hopes and dead ends due to issues of scalability. If consumers are truly concerned about how their actions impact the environment, they should be consuming less, not consuming ‘better’. Ultimately the only way we can hope to work toward a sustainable economy is by abandoning our self image as consumers, not just unthinkingly purchasing the latest fashions in green living.

[spot5050]

You two are so pure. I am getting all dewey-eyed and . . . lubricated

Thanks. I'm hoping to have NeoPeasant's babies shortly.

[spot5050]

You two are so pure. I am getting all dewey-eyed and . . . lubricated

Thanks. I'm hoping to have NeoPeasant's babies shortly.

I get cynical snarky (and occasionally sloshed) and my comment was a bit off color. I really do appreciate your comments and response. thanks.

lol, I do the same sometimes, especially the sloshed thing <g>

[radon]

Very good essay, btw.

[spot5050]

eco-friendly is not having children.

Why?

[SeaGypsy]

Hybrids, we all know, get impressive miles per gallon and have lower emissions compared to conventional vehicles, and pure electrics, rare as they are, don’t use fossil fuels at all.

Wrong. Unless you are getting your electricity from somewhere else than burning fossil fuels. Even nukes use heaps of fossil fuels to extract and process. The cars themselves are highly energy intensive to build. This sentence undermines the entire essay.

[spot5050]

eco-friendly is not having children.

Why?

You don't seriously believe that humankind is God's Gift to the World? Maybe the Devil's Plague.

No I don't believe that humankind is God's gift to the world. I don't believe that we are the Devil's Plague.

You're on the moonshine again aren't you pstarr.