» 2008 » August

The future rests on the soil beneath our feet.

On a warm September day, farmers from all over the state gather around the enormous machines. Combines, balers, rippers, cultivators, diskers, tractors of every variety—all can be found at the annual Wisconsin Farm Technology Days show. But the stars of the show are the great harvesters, looming over the crowd. They have names like hot rods—the Claas Jaguar 970, the Krone BiG X 1000—and are painted with colors bright as fireworks. The machines weigh 15 tons apiece and have tires tall as a tall man. When I visited Wisconsin Farm Technology Days last year, John Deere was letting visitors test its 8530 tractor, an electromechanical marvel so sophisticated that I had no idea how to operate it. Not to worry: The tractor drove itself, navigating by satellite. I sat high and happy in the air-conditioned bridge, while beneath my feet vast wheels rolled over the earth.

Source: ngm.nationalgeographic.com/…

LS » Who knew that the subject of dirt could be so interesting.

Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world’s bad soils. “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root,” Lal says. “In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.”

Branded! How the ‘Certification Revolution’ is Transforming Global Corporations

Wouldn’t it be, like, awesome if we could shop our way to a better world, where production is green and workers are fairly treated, by just buying stuff from good companies and shunning the bad ones?

This seductive thought was running through my head last month in a Main Street, Vancouver, furniture warehouse as I stroked the spectacular grain of a $1,200, 12-foot solid teak patio table.

I gingerly opened the manufacturer’s tag and learned that the wood originated in “teak plantations managed by the Indonesian government and worked by local people in a way that ensures sustainability of this renewable resource.” Sounds good!

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » The article is of course worth reading from a conscious consumer point-of-view, but mostly I just wanted to be able to put this hilarious picture (from the archives of Adbusters) of Tiger “Nike” Woods on my website.

Coal? Natural gas? Nuke? We can wipe them all off the drawing board by using current energy more efficiently. Are you listening, Washington?

Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.

Well, that’s pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it’s able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Hey politicians, wrap your heads around that inversion of logic, a few easy policy changes can get this ship pointed in the right direction again.