Endangered Przewalski’s horses. Those at a zoo in Bulgaria will enjoy a post-holiday treat of old Christmas trees. Photo by Mike Bowler via Flickr.
Though the holiday lights are still up on many houses, the first week of the new year means it’s time to drag your Christmas tree out to the curb or to the nearest drop-off center to be recycled (or “treecycled”) into compost or mulch. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from Mail online
When Brighton council advertised for volunteer shepherds they never imagined that they would get hundreds of applicants. It’s not the greatest job description: no pay, lots of walking on quite steep, uneven slopes, duty in all kinds of weather including the winter and checking fences.
But the idea struck a chord and now the first of the group of 80 trained urban shepherds is out on the downs (fields of grasslands) checking the sheep to make sure they are healthy and not…Read the full story on TreeHugger
There’s no band in history with more iconic album covers than Pink Floyd, and there’s perhaps no more iconic album cover than that of the band’s 1977 album Animals. The photo, with that big inflatable pig soaring between the towers, has become something of a cultural symbol and still conjures notions as surreal as the album it represents. While the acid-soaked 70s and Pink Floyd may be confined to memories from a bygone era, the factory from that album cover still stands. But, just as classic rockRead the full story on TreeHugger
Birdbath Bakery has been called New York’s most sustainable bakery. Photo via Birdbath Bakery
You don’t have to be named the greenest in the world like Freiburg, Germany or smashed by a tornado in order to earn a green renovation like Greensburg, Kansas to be a community fi…Read the full story on TreeHugger
During the Copenhagen conference the Yes Men had some fun at the expense of Canada, creating a fake website, inventing press secretary Felix Charlebois, and promising a 40 percent reduction in emissions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The Canadian Prime Minister is not known for his sense of humour, and was not amused; Instead, Environment Canada went after the host of the parody website and demanded that it be taken down.
Germany’s Serverloft did not ask for a warrant or anything else, it just shut them down, along with 4500 other websites that were in the same block of IP addresses, just to be extra safe. Now the Yes Men are outraged….Read the full story on TreeHugger
Images from Kane Cunningham
It looks glorious but you wouldn’t want to own this house on a stunning cliff overlooking the sea. Three houses have already had to be demolished on safety grounds because the land is slipping away and this one is the next to go. It’s a 200ft. plunge to the bottom.
Artist Kane Cunningham has paid £3,000 for the doomed bungalow and intends to document and film its slow demise, including its last sunrise. He said “It’s the perfect site-specific installation — a stark reminder of lost dreams, financial disaste…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo via Flickr
California’s renewable energy providers and utilities are pushing to meet their state’s 2020 deadline of providing at least 30 percent of the state’s energy from renewable resources. But as the demand rises and the deadline approaches, it’s proving hard to raise the necessary capital to start the massive projects needed to provide clean and green energy. One project, scheduled to break ground in the Mojave Desert, is now being challenged after green groups objected to its site, home to several dozen endangered turtles. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Credit: jmussuto via Flickr.
It’s January, a time when many people realize their daily planner has run out of pages. Time to buy another refill from the store. Twelve months of the popular FranklinCovey pages will set you back $25 or more. That company and others offer recycled paper products for planning. Or, maybe this could be the year that you go virtual, or mobile, when it comes to planning your daily tasks at work and home. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Images from the Times
Last week Banksy, the successful graffiti artist turned millionaire and darling of art collectors, popped up with 4 new murals on the Regent’s Canal in London. One was a hard hitting graphic protest against global warming. But he also had three other pieces along the same route; one a picture of a man painting over some graffiti and another of a rat and another of a boy fishing.
It turns out Banksy’s graffiti clean up picture was really cleaning up hi…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from himalayantours.com
Train travel is the way of the future: clean, environmental, fast and easy. Now you can even take one to the remote and magical kingdom of Bhutan. Known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon, it is one of those small countries in the Himalayas that seems lost in time; they had no roads or telephones until 1960 and no television until 1999.
Now they are going to have their first railway: an 11-mile (18km) link between India and Bhutan. Their first steps into the modern world. It’s all very political, of course, with India worried ab…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo: Imagine Surfboards
Imagine make surfboards from a 100% recycled, (and recyclable*) polystyrene foam they call, very informatively, B-XP3. Apparently this particular foam, besides being made as a waterproof extrusion, off-gasses 50% less volatile organic compounds (VOCs), during manufacture, than standard polyurethane (PU) surfboard blanks.
Tagged as Eco Boards, these planks are also laminated with a stretch bamboo cloth, instead of the usual fibreglass….Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from the Guardian
It’s a world flight record even though it only lasted 26.1 seconds. Not your usual record, because it’s origami, and it was achieved by the president of the Japan Origami Plane Association. Takuo Toda just missed matching his personal best of 27.9 seconds, but that one was with a plane that had been made with tape.
This was one was made strictly in keeping with traditional rules of the ancient Japanese art; only one sheet of paper was folded by hand, with no scissors or glue….Read the full story on TreeHugger
TreeHugger previously suggested that air travel was going to be so miserable, that we would all be treated like Cyrus the Virus in Con Air, strapped to our seats in orange jumpsuits, that people might just stop doing it, in our post Is Air Travel Now More Trouble Than It’s Worth? Perhaps it won’t be as bad as we said. The TSA and the Department of Homeland Security are now saying that the previous guidelines were not supposed to be public (but everyone from Gizmodo to travel journalists everywhere got copies…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Planning to spend more time in nature come 2010? Credit: Ralph Hockens, CC
Are you starting a local, vegan, or meatless weekday diet next year? Are you curbing your carbon emissions by offsetting your frequent flier miles or quitting your travel habit all together? Committing to mass transit, carpooling, or bicycling for your commute to work? Converting the house to geothermal or installing solar panels by next year? Planning to plant 100 trees or enjoy nature more? Prove it! We want to see photos and/or tweets of your green New Year’s resolutions for our next readers’ slid…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from mail on line
There is something so irresistible about these vegetable “foodscapes”. Examining the detail and the ingenuity can provide endless minutes (surely not hours) of fun. The Houses of Parliament are built from asparagus, green beans and runner beans, mixed with baby sweetcorn to depict the intricate stonework. Look out for the watermelon dome.
This depiction of London’s skyline took three weeks and used 26 different types of fruit and vegetables. Carl Warn…Read the full story on TreeHugger
”Fraction of a Kolmogorov spectrum of different time scales as a function of the number of interconnected wind plants. Interconnecting four or five wind plants achieves the majority of the reduction of wind power’s variability.” Image credit:Draft paper; The Variability of Interconnected Wind Plants (pdf)
Warren Katzenstein, Emily Fertig, and Jay Apt of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center have release…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image: Bicycle Design
Bicycle Design is always trawling up remarkable cycle oddities. This one, the work of UK artist Ben Wilson, is modeled off the kids toys Ben remembers from youth. Though more art than daily mule, ARTIKCAR is steered by leaning the body. It was conceived for a parade masterminded by Walk the Plank, a UK “creative force of artists,…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from 1000 Awesome Things
In the midst of the holiday celebrations it’s nice to remind yourself of the pleasures to be had from small things. 1000 Awesome Things to Celebrate is just a pause for a moment , a time to smile when you recognise some of life’s little joys again.
Things like sleeping in your own bed after a long trip, being able to carry all the groceries from the car in one swoop, the feeling of brushing your teeth with a new toothbrush. These funny and slightly sarcastic awesome things are part of a charming website, 1000 Awesome Things…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Halliburton frac fluid on a tractor trailer near Buffalo, PA, The Haliburton Loophole. Image credit:Marcellus-Shale.us
Groundwater, invisible, and ordinarily slower than a snail, rushes movement of the spillings and drillings of man when bedrock cracks are opened wider, and held that way through hydraulic fracturing or “fracing”. Extraction of natural gas held tightly in Marcellus Shale rock, thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, has until now been a hydraulic smash-and-grab operation. Gas wells are punched deep into the earth; layers of ro…Read the full story on TreeHugger
There are reasons for urban cyclists to welcome electric cars - they are smaller, their exhaust stinks less than gas-burning autos or not at all, and drivers of EVs might just have a sensibility tuned into sharing the road (though this isn’t a certainty).
On the other side of the coin, however, from Green Car Advisors, comes a report on Amsterdamers worried that the local Dutch municipal plan to support electric cars with free power and a big subsidy for the next two years prejudices the bicyc…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image from Do the Green Thing
For those of you in the last throes of Christmas shopping, here’s the answer to what you could get the remaining few on your list, and it is available on Amazon, oops, Amazero.com. As the description says, buy Nothing: it’s “Compact, lightweight and easy to carry, incredibly durable, fits into your briefcase and co-ordinates with everything in your wardrobe.”
It was created by Green Thing, a not-for-profit public service and a clever website that inspires people to lead a greener life. It’s goal is Read the full story on TreeHugger
From the Climate Pilgrims’ march through Copenhagen to the world’s largest climate change demonstration, a lot happened this week in green. Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people assembled in Christiansborg Slotsplads and marched to the Bella Center to demand strong action on climate change; we rounded up the best and worst of 2009 in our decade in review, and on the lighter side, readers’ sent in photos of their rescue animals for our weekly slideshow. Find out what else happened in the world of green this week in our photo roundup of most popular, most important, and most oddball stories. And if you missed it, view…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Santa’s workshop photo by undeadbit via Flickr
Daily flights to see Santa Claus will now produce fewer emissions. Ho. Ho. Ho. No kidding. Isn’t that a nice gift to the planet? A total of 35 planes soar in each direction to and from the UK and the Arctic Circle during the peak period of the holiday season. It adds up. Yes, instead of heading to Harrods to ask Santa for Christmas presents, some English children prefer sitting in his lap in Lapland. Now their parents can feel a little less guilty.
…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo via Flickr
My Senator, Diane Feinstein of California, has penned a blog in the Huffington Post calling on Congress to ban BPA — short for bisphenol A, the ubiquitous component of plastics that has been linked to infertility and cancer. Feinstein authored the Ban Poisonous Additives (BPA) Act of 2009, which would eliminate the use of BPA from all food and beverage containers….Read the full story on TreeHugger
What in Hell on Earth Just Happened
By the time the world learned of President Obama’s announcement about a “meaningful” agreement to close these climate talks, called the “Copenhagen Accord,” Santa-in-chief was already on his Air Force One sleigh. And not a moment too soon.
By the wee hours of Saturday morning, as African negotiators were leading an uproar over the accord and civil society groups were protesting outside, it was still unclear which other countries were willing to…Read the full story on TreeHugger
President Obama offered the Copenhagen summit a curt, no-nonsense out-laying of the challenges still facing the conference but no new commitments. Following an impromptu meeting between Obama and 20 heads of state (Canada was absent) and a testy, rousing address by Brazilian President Lula de Silva, Obama’s speech sounded tones of impatience over continued sticking points like China’s transparency and the decades-long process, and urgency over the crisis. It was met with silent stares across the Bella Center, where some hoped the President would deliver a breakthrough to this turgid drama, like a deus ex machina…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image via Engadget
Last week we discussed how magazine publishers are teaming up to take magazines digital. In that discussion, we took a look at one possible magazine e-reader device. But of course, now that magazines are sure to go digital - and since e-readers will also be Read the full story on TreeHugger
ForestEthics reckon that American mailboxes are inundated with more than 100,000,000,000 pieces of junk mail annually. Such is the volume of US junk mail that it amounts to 33% of all mail delivered. Worldwide. Yet 44% is said to go in the bin unopened. What a monumental waste of resources.
And a precious resources at that. Over 100 million carbon storing trees need to be felled to satisfy this American mailbox madness. Each year. ForestEthics say that many trees would be like clearcutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park three times a year. So you can see why they might be moved to point the finger at …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photos: David Virtue website
Taking nature and his love of the sailing as his inspiration David Virtue handcrafts rings and pendants, with themes and emblems drawn from the great outdoors, such as leaves, waves, deserts, sunrises, yachts, etc. He works mostly in 14 and 18 karat gold, which he sources from a environmentally responsible refiner, who process recycled gold scrap. David’s rings of which there are about 55 varying styles, are therefore cast with 100% recycled gold.
David Virtue has been perfecting his craft for the past 35 years or so. His rings taper from front to back for increased comfort. He believes h…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photos: From Wend magazine - Winter 2009-2010
We’re big fans of Wend Magazine. It’s immerses its readers in the wild outdoor environments, in diverse cultural environments, and in the broader environmental challenges facing the planet. Wend is a travel magazine, sure, but it takes the path less travelled. It goes by foot, bicycle, ski, canoe, sail and other more environmentally benign, yet exciting and engaging means of transport.
Last week it decided to take another largely untrammeled trail, with an announcement that its digital version of the magazine for Free. No cost. Zilch. Nada, Zero….Read the full story on TreeHugger
