In light of new permits in favor of uranium development at the rim of the grand canyon environmental groups have decided to trade the grand canyon for several other areas cited to have high biodiversity and breathtaking views, including Detroit’s old tiger stadium, Flint Michigan’s factories and Milwaukee.
Noted environmentalist Mr. Knox Browert is cited as saying, “The grand canyon is an ideal location for landfill such as the piles of radioactive waste associated with uranium mining. It’s up to 6,000 feet deep in places and 277 miles long.” When asked about analysis that went into the decision, he commented, “As environmentalists we have to pick our battles. Protecting the former Tiger stadium and Flint’s factories is a no brainer, but we had to think hard about Milwaukee. It came down to the fact that the art museum just reminds us of Sydney’s famous opera house and it IS by the waterfront, so we voted to trade in the Grand Canyon. I never really liked the Grand Canyon anyway. Most true environmentalists don’t. It’s just a line in the sand.”
Arizona’s tourist office agrees. Recent polls show nature tourists are unhappy with Arizona’s politics of late and many have black marked the state after its introduction of anti-immigration bill, SB1070, so Carlotta Purse, director of the office has hatched a plan, “we’re chasing after a new market — sacred landfill tourists — this brand of tourist will be interested in watching and smelling the accumulation of landfill and hazardous uranium tailings overtime.” Several artists have also stepped forward and expressed interest in documenting the sacred landfill in a long running time-lapsed recording. “At the rate we’re going,” notes Mr. Browert, we could fill it in 20 years and then move on to Yellowstone’s geysers. They’re so hot and bubbly they may just ingest the trash like a beast.”
BTW: this is a satire, (in case you didn’t catch that), but we aren’t too far off from it, inspired by AD and CS and MK and LFH (you know who you are).
I’m facing a moral and environmental dilemma and I’m not sure what to do.
Earlier today I was ready to march up to my landlord’s door, (let’s call him Russell) and um, and, yes I would…well, and my plan got stuck there at inception because what would I do?
Berate him for cutting squares of Styrofoam into rounded shapes with such abandon that the Styrofoam coated the backyard, making it look as if a fake snow had just fallen? Should I point out that it’s not good for his son to inhale Styrofoam? (Because, it wasn’t Russell, who cut the Styrofoam, but his 16 year old son, who regularly breathes in all of those tiny Styrofoam balls into his young body as he shapes piece after piece.) Was I to cry about my small garden patch that now has Styrofoam pieces littering it? Was I to hand him facts about Styrofoam (one word: TOXIC) and suggest Styrofoam alternatives? Then ask if I could borrow one of his (many!) tools to fix something? Hi you morally bankrupt Styrofoam spilling MONSTER, can I borrow your handy box of tools? Read More at Conducive Chronicle
OR Watch the video evidence here:
Google recently announced that in three years time the desktop will be obsolete. Perhaps we are just steps away from all memory stored outside of the Internet being obsolete? Why can’t I just plug my brain into the Internet and skip all of this gadgetry nonsense anyway?
We haven’t figured out how to do that yet, (though scientist are working on it) and until then we are plugged in through our technical interfaces like, laptops, iPhones and Palm’s etc…
In fact, we are so plugged in, that our brains are rewiring in very mysterious ways.
As Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan hand out lucrative bonuses worth millions there are men, woman and children living on the streets who have to beg for a dollar. The fact that one man is hailed as a leader because he has more greenbacks and the other derided as a failure because he has none, speaks to me as evidence that our monetary system and the values that give it power, is where the true failure lies. I don’t think we need “financial experts” to sniff out when something is in need of fixing, and local currencies might just be the answer. Read the rest of this entry »
If you scan the hive mind, blogs, twitter, facebook et al. there’s a deep sense of the public being wronged – whatever side you vote for, and what it boils down to is money.
The Supreme Court just sanctioned restrictions on corporate spending on federal campaigns, the very rich are getting even richer and throwing in a million dollar bonus on top, bailout money is disappearing through the cracks as we the people lose our homes, our jobs, our identity, as we are laid off, filing for bankruptcy, unable to afford health care or medical bills and it all comes down to money. Read the rest of this entry »
As Christmas rolls around the corner, the season of gift giving is upon us. Some savvy shoppers, observant friends, and those with the go-getter spirit unafraid of wielding long traffic hours and elbows in store fronts will find Christmas a zestful challenge.
Others will find it a claustrophobia of deja vu, a performance part that repeats yearly and still others will find the experience a happy medium.
Unlike previous years I find myself much more attracted to virtual gifts. My philosophy is that if I must send or receive a gift, it might as well be a gift that won’t cozy up to a landfill in the future. Also, stupid gifts (which I can unintentionally give in my last minute panic) in virtual worlds hold a certain pizazz they lack in the real world. For example, a “tripped out escalator” from Detroit is actually rather cool in VR, though the hard copy (glass snow-globe) will not likely capture the joy you were hoping for in person.
After a bit of searching I found a wealth of gift options that are virtual, always playful and sometimes meaningful.
Ning launched its virtual gifts this year, you can give to your friends on twitter with twesents and twitgiftly. Gifts in 3D targeted for iPhone users are now available, as are the old staples of virtual cards and flowers. My favorite gifts are on facebook. Yes, you can launch a rash of gift giving to your farmville neighbors and give disney gifts or plant gifts to your 400 friends until your credit runs out, but for those really really special friends I’m into facebook’s (newly expanded) gift area where you can give music, or charity gifts. Hit your causes app, go to gifts and you’ll fnd things like a Kiva piggy bank, or a WWF Panda or a cute puppy where the money goes to the Humane Society.
In a culture weighted down with stuff, in some cases virtual exchange makes sense and if you choose charity giving, it can meaningfully contribute to those truly in need.
The search for the perfect vegan pair of boots began innocently, I had two rules: 1) No dagger heels so I can actually walk, 2) My boots must be vegan.
The second rule is where everything went wrong. The confounding inability to find attractive vegan shoes is an experience I’ve encountered before, which has in the past caused me to cheat. Yes, I bought mainstream leather based shoes. I don’t feel good about it, not because I morally object to humans wearing leather shoes but because I morally object to the way that we produce our goods that derive especially from animals. This is my little activism, which actually has remarkable results. Check this out:
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
That sure beats a protest in my mind. You can read the full article at Alternet, that lays out how abstaining from meat one day a week can help save the world. (Maybe that’s too much to ask?? Save the world or a Big Mac, reduce CO2 or another steak…hard choices in life).
But this blog is about the very important woes of vegan shoe shopping, not a crusade to rescue our environment. Let me go back to early this year where after a google search I landed on Vegan Chic, a shop with very cute goods, so cute that checked back intermittently to see if their “green corduroy” boots would be restocked (they only had size 5). I even
emailed and to no avail, size 5 is it. So with much gusto, I moved on to About.com and branched out systematically from there. First stop was Vegan Wares the Melbourne, Australia based shop that holds the title as the very place that I bought my first ever vegan shoes — cute yet classic and black (see photo).
My second stop was Ethical Wares, but they don’t have much, then on to Zappos where you can narrow your search by “vegetarian” which gives you about 20 pair of unappealing shoes. I find myself having this weird flash of a very Eco conscious Paris Hilton exclaiming, “Like, Oh my God, why aren’t there any cute vegan boots? I should so start my own unique line.” So, Paris wasn’t quite up to it, but thank goodness Natalie Portman is! If you can shell out $300ish for shoes errr these are definitely cute.
I then find an article championing the break throughs in vegetarian footwear and berate myself for being so picky, then more determined, zip through all of the links in the article (well many until I became frustrated) only to find that it’s mainly cool urban footwear. This is very good, but I want more. I envision a world of organic vegan and vegetarian slow food ma an pa restaurants on every corner, with shoe shops where men that smell like polish fix your shoes that last for a decade before they wear out. I have great dreams that include beautiful vegan boots.
And the fact that I’m actually sitting here and typing this gives me pause. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who could write about fashion nor as someone who would want to, but it feels like so much more. As the world around us is disfigured into a place inhospitable to supporting life, every single choice we make matters more than ever. As we sit in our homes wondering, what can I do — little me, to combat the big BIG problems of the world there are simple steps that glare in front of us that require that we only live by the rule, if the action springs from a place of love then do it, if not don’t.
And so my search for vegan shoes is an action sprung from love, which is in this case a vision of a world where animals aren’t shoved in crowded cages and fed steroids and grain so that I can have 25 pairs of cute leather shoes to match any outfit. Is that so radical?
I searched on Moo Shoes, which also has a great selection of boots of course they didn’t have the ones that I wanted in my size. I then surfed onto Vegetarian Shoes and found the right ones for me!! Hooray! But, I still haven’t bought them because the shop is in the UK and I find that somewhat off that these boots, which are made in Portugal, then shipped to the UK, would then ship to the US. Sigh…the search continues.
With the financial crisis gaining momentum — I imagine it like a sandstorm that devours the jobs into its vortex while kicking dirt in our eyes — there is that small silver lining at the edge of the storm; we have the great opportunity to remake our financial system into one that is holistic and ready for the challenges we face today. We can implement a financial philosophy that considers happiness in it’s calculation like Bhutan, the first country to not only calculate GNP but GNH – gross national happiness into it’s development activities. Taking this idea further we can build on penetrating works like “Small is beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered” and remember that we need an economics that “is not afraid to discuss spirit and conscience, moral purpose and the meaning of life, an economics that aims to educate and elevate people, not merely to measure their low-grade behavior.” We also have the opportunity to account for the great value nature provides for us to live and be healthy on this planet, an idea that may finally be getting its due as “a range of international institutions, including the World Bank and the United Nations, are now in the process of designing ambitious new programmes” that take this idea into account.
On the flip side, the idea that we must figure out how to monetize the meaning of life or the value of a tree or a forest seems still a little off to me — a step in the right direction for now, but still a little off. How do we quantify what bees do for us let alone figure out how to monetize some of our favorite services like facebook, youtube, google earth and twitter. (The smart CEO’s of these companies have still not figured that out). People will only click on your ads:
so many times.
It makes me wonder if a second economy could flower next to the current one. Couldn’t we, as Stephenie Meyer’s alien’s do in “The Host” exist without money? If everyone knew where true value lay, wouldn’t we cease to need it anymore? I know this won’t happen but I wonder if our financial crisis won’t see the flower of trade and exchange working more vigorously along side our cool and distant plastic that we swipe which is tied to numbers that we get in exchange for our energy.
We’ll see? Out of every dark period, there follows rebirth and new life. Lets craft, together, something beautiful.
“Our Kinship with Earth must be maintained, otherwise we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out” – Terry Tempest Williams -
In light of new permits in favor of uranium development at the rim of the grand canyon environmental groups have decided to trade the grand canyon for several other areas cited to have high biodiversity and breathtaking views, including Detroit’s old tiger stadium, Flint Michigan’s factories and Milwaukee.
