Some good and bad ideas

I wanted to give you these examples of smart things, the first three taken from Goleman's book Ecological Intelligence:

   

The Paris Metro’s new line uses old technology in a holistic way. The standard technology generates electricity from the friction produced when a train brakes and then uses this energy to boost the same train when it starts or accelerates. On the new line 14 the electricity all the trains make by braking is fed back into the power system so that any train can draw on it, reducing the energy needs of the line by 30%. 

FiberMark is a manufacturer of papers, packaging, and lots of related things. It has a paper mill in Brattleboro, Vermont.  where they switched from fuel oil to used cooking oils to power the factory’s turbines, drying papers, and heating the plant. This change reduced their fuel oil’s use by 75%, reduced emissions of sulphur dioxide & nitrous oxide, both cause of acid rain, and improved the air quality in the plant.

   

Goleman also wrote about plans for a plant to be located in South Bronx. The plant was designed to use recycled paper harvested from offices' recycling as its pulp stock, not that from trees. “There’s more paper fibre per acre in NYC than you can get from an acre in the Amazonas, “ says Jonathan Rose, who helped draw up the plans. “It’s in the recycling bin or the garbage.” Paper plants use huge amounts of water, so the site was chosen to be close to a sewage plant, the paper would be made using cleansed sewage water rather than devouring fresh water.  Before, NYC’s newspaper received their paper by truck from Maine or Canada. This journey will be avoided. “Why do we have pollution?” Rose asks. “Pollution is a sign of incomplete consumption – something being wasted. ..”       

In a recent paper I found a report on Urbee, a new car designed around energy use, minimising the use of fuel to help preserve nature. It's expected to use 1 gallon on 200 mi or 1.18 litre on 100 km. Great but there's a problem: design. What does it help to have a super fuel efficient car when it's so ugly nobody would want to buy it? Oh, there's another problem: With oil corporations controlling politics (at least in North America) how are you going to produce and market this car? 

There's still plenty of "un-smart" things though: The state of Washington considered launching a tax on everything "environmental" making life more costly for those who care about nature and live accordingly. How retarded!              

We were given a baby bedtime lotion by Johnson & Johnson. It claims that thanks to the release of "NaturalCalm" essences baby will fall asleep better. This NaturalCalm nonsense is a "patent pending blend of gentle and soothing aromas". Reading the ingredients list I could not figure out though where those come from. Apart from water, mineral oil and glycerine there's not an ingredient on the list that I understand. But it's got parfum in it, which could be anything. As a matter of fact the lotion smells so strongly I can't bear it. That's not for my baby.         

When you go to Europe look for Eosta

Let me write about food again because we all love eating.  Daniel Goleman writes in his book Ecological Intelligence about Eosta, Europe’s largest distributor to retailers of organic produce. I had not heard of them before but then again, when did I shop the last time in Europe ...  Anyway, Goleman spoke to Managing Director Volkert Engelsmann and found out that every product has a 3-digit code. This code will give the consumer details on the farmer and a profile of the farmer's operations when entered on www.natureandmore.com! That's pretty awesome, similar to our Organic Box which tells us the originating farm of every product. Engelsmann believes in the power of a transparent market place. - Knowing the background of a product wins more and more importance amongst Canadians too according to a new study. Instead of complaining to a company about their "bad" product (from sweatshops etc.) though Canadians simply don't buy it and find something else. I hope so.     

Back at Eosta, Engelsmann also says: “We serve an awareness elite, people who are concerned about health, the environment, social issues.” I don't like that "awareness elite". Dave & I think of ourselves more as hippies than an elite. We simply want to eat well and we are willing to spend a little bit more money on food, if that keeps crap off our table. We are not keen on picking up one of those Western diseases either. For Engelsmann the term elite justifies high prices that only the "high-income elite" (I made that up) can afford. Great for the farmer but only to the point where you have enough rich people to afford your food. The Organic Box always aims to pay a good price to the farmers too but once they are way better off then we are I am not sure I want to give them that extra money. Even buying organic food I do compare prices. If I can get my cereal at one organic store for $20 per kg and at the competition for $12 per kg, guess where I will buy.  

Back to Eosta again:  Products are rated by independent experts for healthiness, social qualities, and ecological impact. Environmental aspects include for example water consumption and composting. Eosta does a full Life Cycle Analysis on all greenhouse gas emissions throughout the supply chain, from farm to plate, supervised by Germany’s national certification agency. Eosta supports innovation to reduce methane, a greenhouse gas. The reason is simple: If you compost organic waste instead of adding it to the landfill, and keep turning it properly, it will not produce any methane. It will turn into a stable compost that increases soil fertility, which in return erases the use for mineral fertilizers, and increases the soil’s water holding quality (less runoff). Crops are also more pest resistant. Much to the contrary, nitrogen fertilizers popular in common farming cause greater yields but crops are more susceptible to pests. That's why farmers then need pesticides. Producing and applying conventional fertilizer contributes 16% of all greenhouse gases, especially nitrous oxide which is 300 times more aggressive than CO2.      

Also let's not forget that “most agriculture takes place near rivers and in deltas, where chemical fertilizer runoff causes eutrophication", meaning the growth of algae explodes, the water is depleted of oxygen and other forms of wildlife lose their habitat. Engelmann continues with, "The World Bank has financed a program to hire people to cut back the algae this causes before it chokes off the oxygen aquatic life need. But we said, instead of burning the algae and other alien vegetation, we’ll use it for compost and gradually replace the need for mineral fertilizers that cause the problem in the first place.”  Pretty good, eh. There's such a (seemingly) simple way of dealing with the damage our modern society creates. If only the made the farmer clean up the algae who used the fertilizers in the beginning - he might rethink his agricultural practices. Learning by doing - you are in for a lesson.

The last two paragraphs make me think that there lies the reason for the high prices - Eosta does an all-around-job which I much appreciate. The consumer might need to know all of this though to accept the high prices, and still have the money to pay for it. When a friend of ours joked he needed a mortgage to pay for his organic beef, I thought we simply eat vegetarian instead. And I for my part will keep comparing prices of organic products and chose the cheaper one, and keep receiving the Organic Box so I don't have to buy the not-so-fresh organic produce at our closest supermarket.  

Mistakes times 32

Here a paragraph out of Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence: "A great injustice of global warming is that the world’s poor will suffer most even though they contribute least to the cause. The habits of the rich most intensely fuel the planet’s global warming – and so the rich bear the greatest ethical burden to change. The one billion denizens of the developed world consume at a rate 32 times greater than the world’s poorest citizens. This vast share of humanity’s impact on the planet means a 32 times greater rate not just in using limited resources like oil, lumber and fish, but also in producing waste like greenhouse gases, plastics choking marine life, and a sea of other stuff moldering in land fills. With countries like China and India reaching for the life style of the world’s affluent this is completely unsustainable." 

I don't think the fact that the poorer peoples suffer more than the richer is new to you. But the 32 times is a horribly big figure that is probably not that well known. I sometimes think half of the rich folks are also 32 times more ignorant to the damage they do. Small (and often poor) island nations asking the rich countries to stop their bad habits so the islands don't sink in the process of rising sea levels has not changed much. The striving of countries like China and India to reach the living standard of the richest is scary to me but also shows that they have not learned anything, that they do not look critically enough at the way we live, that they do not realise how destructive for the society and environment this life style is. That's something quite typical in the human being I think. We want to make our own mistakes. learning by doing. The terrible aspect in the case of a whole nation making a mistake is though that those mistakes happen on a very big scale and are not easily if at all reversible. Once you chopped down the boreal or rain forest it's gone forever. Nobody is going to make the effort to replant and resettle the variety of plant and animal species that use to thrive there. We don't have the ingenuity to do this and we don't have the patience to wait for the results which is obviously going to take many generations. Money, as capitalist nations might think is the solutions to just about anything , is not going to help either. Yes, you can spend money on research, foreign aid, reforestation (mainly done for the lumber industry though) and who knows what but money can't buy an intact eco-system. The Metro newspaper did a survey and asked people which advice they'd give to the next generation. Besides flossing and sleep lots there were comments like look after the environment or care for the planet and even apologies saying sorry for the state of the planet we are passing on to you.  Great, but I still believe the importance of changing our life style has often not even reached our neighbours, these people next door to us. That's probably why I feel like slashing tires when I walk down a road with lots of (big) cars. So how is the next generation meant to score any better?  I suggest to add "ecology & environment" to every school's curriculum, right next to maths and reading. If it is not explained to the next generation early in age, before they develop bad habits, they will not be any better than us.                              

The pleasure of looking good

Sometimes it seems like everything in the European Union is over-regulated but when it comes to cosmetics/ toiletries I wished it was everywhere like in Europe. Dr. Daniel Goleman writes in his book Ecological Intelligence “How regulators think about toxicity makes a difference in what goes into the products we use.”

The European approach is “better-safe-than-sorry”, also called the precautionary principle. That means that as soon as European toxicologists suspect potential harm to human beings in a substance this substance is banned. Contrary, in the USA the approach is that a chemical with inherent toxicity might still be safe for use under normal or certain conditions, whatever that means. With other words, unless there is definite evidence that a substance severely harms you they do not bother taking it off the market. Proud to serve the industry, as usual. In the USA the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded in 1979. It immediately “ruled that the use of about 62,000 substances could continue without testing any of them, including some chemicals that were known to be harmful such as ethylbenzene.” Ethylbenzene is an industrial solvent that causes damage to the brain. Thirty years later the EPA has still not required testing for most of these substances.   

Back in Europe a program called REACH (registration, evaluation, authorization of chemicals) aims to test and evaluate tens of thousands of chemicals, not only those that were allowed to be used in everyday products by the EPA but also new ones that have come up since. “REACH will generate a new kind of periodic table, tabulating hazardousness rather than molecular structure.”  

Dr. Goleman points out that the number of man-made chemicals with potential danger to us is estimated at 104,000. This includes chemicals used in food as well as any non-food products we might be exposed to. He continues that of these chemicals “10,000 are used each year in volumes greater than 10 tons.” and “Only a fraction has been tested for toxicity in adults, let alone on fetuses or infants.”

The situation for cosmetics in Canada is similar to the USA. Imagine washing your face with substances used to clean roads and heavy duty factory equipment that’s soiled with oil and the likes. Frequently used harmful ingredients in cosmetics have been compiled into the dirty dozen list – for details check out:  http://www.thegreenguide.com/personal-care/dirty-dozen  

Do a quick check, if you got sunscreen handy: See if it’s got oxybenzone in it. This is the active agent that’s meant to protect your skin from the sun but it has also been suspected of having carcinogenic properties when exposed to sunlight.  

Last but not least the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association reckons “that more than 1000 flavouring ingredients may pose respiratory dangers to workers.” 

For information on cosmetics' safety go to Skin Deep http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/