Sustainability Archive

A Woman Farmer’s Empowering Life Story

Atina Diffley and her husband MartinIf Atina Diffley’s life could be briefly expressed, it might be said that she has triumphed over adversity throughout the years. She overcame an abusive marriage. She and her second (and current) husband prevailed over the many odds against becoming successful organic farmers—long before its benefits were generally recognized. Together they managed to stop one of the world’s largest companies from running an oil pipeline directly across their land, and in doing so laid a successful defensive foundation for many organic farmers to come. And through the telling of her story in her new book, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, Atina is communicating her many practical, farming, and life lessons learned—with heart, depth, humor, and a true gift for words.

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Pollution Is Leading to Atmospheric Warming, Larger Clouds and Bigger Storms

via DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Thunder cloud. Photo by Tony CyphertPollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models.

Pollution strengthens thunderstorm clouds, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat -- especially at night, said lead author and climate researcher Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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Multiple Studies Find Wild Salmon Endangered by Farmed Salmon

Farm raised salmonA newly published collection of more than 20 studies by leading university scientists and government fishery researchers in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Russia and Japan provides mounting evidence that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat.

"The genetic effects of mixing hatchery fish with wild populations have been well-documented," says journal editor David Noakes from Oregon State University. "But until now the ecological effects were largely hypothetical. Now we know the problems are real and warrant more attention from fisheries managers."

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Meat Production Goes Local by Going Mobile

Guest post by Katherine Gustafson, via Yes! Magazine

Mobile Slaughter UnitBruce Dunlop was an engineer before he became a farmer on a picturesque island off the coast of Washington in 2002. This technical background turned out to serve him well in producing pork and lamb to sell from Lopez Island Farm. Faced with the financial and logistical difficulty of transporting his live animals 200 miles to the closest USDA-permitted slaughterhouse on the mainland—a trip that included a 45-minute ferry ride—he began designing the nation’s first mobile slaughterhouse, in cooperation with Washington State University extension and Lopez Community Land Trust.

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Recyclable “Fold Your Own” Furniture Made from Cardboard

A Paperpedic bedroomThe Karton Group in Australia has a new take on cardboard packaging. Instead of shipping furniture in cardboard, their furniture IS the cardboard. Imagine picking up a bedroom set for the cost of a typical end table—0r drawers, desks, chairs, even a children's play set. Aside from being appropriately inexpensive, all of Karton's products are completely recyclable.

Check out the video below of the assembly instructions for Karton's Paperpedic Bed—a system of cleverly folded cardboard panels which connect to form an incredibly strong and beautiful bed base. The Paperpedic Bed can morph from a cute single to a mega king-sized affair in minutes. With a load capacity of close to a ton, this paper bed sleeps 1-10 comfortably.

Perfect for students or people who frequently move, if this furniture gets too beat up, you can just fold it up, toss it in the recycle bin and get a new set.

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A New Documentary Calls Out Drinking Water’s Impending Demise

by Tara Lohan, via AlaterNet.org

Water level in Lake Mead. Photographer: Brandy RolinThe first voice you hear in the new documentary Last Call at the Oasis is Erin Brockovich's—the famed water justice advocate whom Julia Roberts portrayed on the big screen.

"Water is everything. The single most necessary element for any of us to sustain and live and thrive is water," says Brockovich as her voice plays over clips of water abundance—gushing rivers and streams. "I grew up in the midwest and I have a father who actually worked for industry ... he promised me in my lifetime that we would see water become more valuable than oil because there will be so little of it. I think that time is here."

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Organic Farmers with an Aversion to Waste

Bill and Karla ChambersMany of us today think about what we may be wasting, an awareness that leads us to recycling, composting and other such activities. But from the beginning, Bill and Karla Chambers operated their Stahlbush Island Farms—located in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley—with the idea that waste was intolerable. This thinking has guided virtually every aspect of their operations since the farms’ founding in 1985.

The doctrine of waste aversion has taken them in a unique direction: that of exclusively marketing their produce either frozen or canned. “Produce comes in and out of ripeness in a very short period of time,” Karla Chambers told Organic Connections. “For example, our Super Sweet Corn comes in and out of prime in three days. If you follow the fresh market, if corn or blueberries are coming out of Chile, it’s probably 15 days by the time the crop is picked. It goes to the packinghouse and gets loaded on a container for a shipment north. Then it goes into distribution, to the grocery store, and then sits in your home. Of course, we don’t eat it on day one; it can be many more days before we consume that fresh produce.

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Solar Windows: Turning Buildings into Energy Producers

by Dave Levitan, via Yale Environment 360

Imagine if all these glass surfaces were solar panelsIf you picture the glittering glass skyscrapers that dot America’s cities, it becomes clear why the idea of using that vast window space to generate solar power is gaining traction. In 2009 alone, 437 million square feet of windows were installed in non-residential buildings in the United States. That many square feet of standard solar panels would generate around 4 gigawatts of power, roughly the total installed solar capacity in the U.S. today.

Such potential is leading engineers and entrepreneurs to more intensively explore the idea of turning windows into solar-power producers. Solar windows, a subset of the growing field known as building-integrated photovoltaics, are based on the concept that a window doesn’t need to be 100 percent transparent, and a solar panel doesn’t need to be 100 percent opaque. Several ways currently exist to turn a window into a power-generating device, from thin-film silicon, to dye-sensitized solar cells, to tiny organic cells.

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Is the Chesapeake Bay Environment Henpecked by the Chicken Industry?

by Tom Laskaway, via Grist.org

Chesapeake Bay dead zoneThe Gulf of Mexico dead zone seems to get all the attention. Yes, this low-oxygen area that forms every year in the waters surrounding the Mississippi Delta is the largest dead zone—currently around the size of Massachusetts—but it’s not the only one in U.S. waters.

The Chesapeake Bay has a dead zone, too. In fact, it covered a third of the Chesapeake last year and continues to grow. And last month, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science gave the Bay a D+ in its annual “health report card.”

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Vermont Legislature Votes to Ban Fracking

via Environmental News Service

Fracking operation in North Dakota (Photo by Robert Johnson) MONTPELIER, Vermont, May 8, 2012 (ENS) — Vermont is about to become the first U.S. state to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

The Vermont House of Representatives voted 103-36 Friday [May 4, 2012] to approve a conference committee report calling for the ban. The report reconciles differences with a bill banning the practice passed by the state Senate last week.

The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, who is expected to sign it into law.

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Going Wild to Counter Bee Colony Collapse

by Enrique Gili, via Grist.org

BeehiveIn 2009, lifelong beekeeper Dan Harvey faced an existential crisis when he lost 
much of his honeybee stock to colony collapse disorder (CCD). So the former Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran did what came naturally: He took to the deep dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, searching for answers to his predicament.

Harvey began by hunting for wild and feral bees living near his home in Port Angeles, Wash. (These bees have escaped from commercial colonies and find refuge in the tall timber and glens enveloping the Olympic Peninsula). For years, he crossbred the feral bees he captured with honeybees in order to produce hybridized hives that would be well-suited to the dank climes of the temperate rainforest region.

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Farmers Markets Are Expanding Online

by Katherine Gustafson, via Yes! Magazine

CSA delivery basketsIt isn’t always easy finding fresh, high-quality food in this country. Supermarkets with their long, complex supply chains usually offer unripe or subpar produce that leaves a lot to be desired. But the usual alternative methods of provision have distinct limitations. Luckily, technology provides one great answer to this dilemma, opening up an important new avenue for small-scale producers to connect to customers.

Only local farms can deliver the very freshest produce. But while the common methods of providing this bounty to consumers—community supported agriculture (CSA) plans and farmers’ markets—are essential components of a revitalizing fresh-food sector, they don’t always provide a sufficiently flexible or robust shopping experience.

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NSF Study Shows Plant Diversity Is Key to Productive Crops

National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cedar Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in MinnesotaVegetation, such as a patch of prairie or a forest stand, is more productive in the long run when more plant species are present, results of a new study show.

The long-term study of plant biodiversity found that each species plays a role in maintaining a productive ecosystem, especially when a long time horizon is considered.

The research found that every additional species in a plot contributed to a gradual increase in both soil fertility and biomass production over a 14-year period.

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A Climate Scientist Decides to Fight Back

by Michael Mann, via Yale Environment 360

Melting Artic sea iceAs scientists, we are used to having our work questioned.

Anyone who has ever attended a scientific meeting knows that scientists are hardest on themselves. When we present a new research paper at a conference, colleagues often interrupt us with sharp, pointed questions. Those questions are asked in good faith, in an attempt to make our work better and advance scientific knowledge.

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The Folly of Big Agriculture Fighting Nature

by Verlyn Klinkenborg, via Yale Environment 360

Corn field. Photo by by fishhawk, via FlickrIn its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers—big farmers—will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying.

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Improving Solar Panel Efficiency by Imitating Leaves

via Princeton University, Engineering School

Microscopic folds increase the power output and durability of solar cells. Credit: Frank WojciechowskiTaking their cue from the humble leaf, researchers have used microscopic folds on the surface of photovoltaic material to significantly increase the power output of flexible, low-cost solar cells.

The team, led by scientists from Princeton University, reported online April 22 in the journal Nature Photonics that the folds resulted in a 47 percent increase in electricity generation. Yueh-Lin (Lynn) Loo, the principal investigator, said the finely calibrated folds on the surface of the panels channel light waves and increase the photovoltaic material's exposure to light.

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2,4-D—The Pesticide that Scares Even Conventional Farmers

by Tom Laskayway, via Grist.org

Aircraft spraying Agent Orange in VietnamA new coalition is trying to throw sand in the gears of industrial agriculture’s chemical treadmill. And this one just may have what it takes to slow it down. I’m referring to the fight over USDA approval for Dow AgroScience’s new genetically modified corn seeds (brand name “Enlist”), which are resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D.

This is part of biotech’s “superweed” strategy, by which they hope to address the fact that farmers across the country are facing an onslaught of weeds impervious to the most popular herbicide in use, Monsanto’s glyphosate or RoundUp (and in some cases impervious to machetes as well!). Of course, this is a problem of the industry’s own making. It was overuse of glyphosate caused by the market dominance of Monsanto’s set of glyphosate-resistant genetically engineered seeds that put farmers in this fix in the first place.

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Professor David Montgomery: Our Disappearing Dirt

Professor David Montgomery: Our Disappearing Dirt

by Anna Soref

Global warming, polluted water and air, vanishing rainforests and animal species—our plates are full of worry for the environment. Yet a growing movement wants our attention, concern and action focused on something right under our feet—dirt. Why? We’ve lost about one-third of the world’s topsoil and most of that loss has taken place in the last 50 years.

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Joel Salatin: Life Lessons from a Farmer

Joel Salatin: Life Lessons from a Farmer

by Bruce Boyers

Joel Salatin—farmer, author, featured speaker, and the subject of several documentaries—has spent his life learning from nature how a food system is supposed to function, and putting it into practice at his Polyface Farm. Then, raising his eyes up from his tractor, he has wondered how average citizens, having no connection to the sources of their food and possessing no food security whatsoever, could possibly think they could go on this way.

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Chef Michel Nischan: Serving the Underserved

Chef Michel Nischan: Serving the Underserved

by Anna Soref

It’s not everybody who could turn down a request from the late Paul Newman to open a restaurant, especially if that someone were a passionate chef. But for Michel Nischan, when that offer was made, the time wasn’t right; he was too busy helping nonprofits and socially responsible businesses make the world a better place. Yup, he turned down what most would see as a dream job with a dream partner to continue doing the right thing.

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Are Plastics in the Oceans Being Hidden by the Winds?

by Nancy Gohring, University of Washington

Pieces of plastic debris found in the oceans are smaller than many people think. Most are measured in millimeters. Sea Education Association While working on a research sailboat gliding over glassy seas in the Pacific Ocean, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski noticed something new: The water was littered with confetti-size pieces of plastic debris, until the moment the wind picked up and most of the particles disappeared.

After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. That meant that decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said.

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The Evolution of Green Roofs

by Lorena Galliot, via PhysOrg.com

Chicago City Hall roofGreen roofs—rooftops covered with a layer of vegetation—are getting a lot of credit for providing environmental benefits. They have been found to reduce storm water runoff from buildings, conserve energy by moderating rooftop temperatures, restore fragile ecosystems and beautify urban spaces. From Toronto to New York, cities are investing billions in green infrastructure programs that rely on this kind of technology and ongoing research is helping refine its application.

Researchers are now looking at how the types of vegetation used in affect their functioning. To date, many designers have used sedum—a genus of low-growing succulent plants that hold water in their leaves—to cover rooftops. Sedum, also known as stonecrop, is found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and has been favored for its hardiness, shallow root systems and low maintenance requirements.

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Liquid Batteries: Rethinking Our Power Grid

Donald Sadoway. Photo: M. Scott BrauerDonald Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, has earned a crescendo of recognition this year for his pioneering work on an entirely new type of battery, one based on floating layers of high-temperature molten metal and salt.

The battery could provide electricity storage on a scale useful to major electric utilities—allowing them to store energy whenever it’s available and cheap, and then pump it back into the grid when it’s most needed. Such storage capability could be the key to making intermittent sources of power—such as sun, wind and tides—a reliable part of the world’s energy supply.

The innovative approach earned Sadoway a coveted spot at this year’s TED talks; a video of his remarks [below] garnered more than 440,000 views in its first three weeks online.

What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage—so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap."

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Source: MIT News Office

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The Motorcycle Reinvented—Electrtic and Untippable

Lit Motors C1Lit Motors CEO Daniel Kim decided to reinvent the motorcycle as we know it today. His idea? To design and manufacture a fully enclosed, two-wheeled motorcycle that runs purely on battery power. Check out the C1-concept vehicle and its patented gyroscopic stability technology that helps prevent it from tipping over.

With a projected range of 200 miles and a top speed of 120 mhp, this vehicle has real practical uses in mind.

Lit Motors calls the C1 "The world’s first gyroscopically stabilized rolling smart phone. This vehicle combines the efficiency and freedom of a motorcycle with the safety and convenience of a car. Offering the alternated to alternatives on an exciting and safe platform, the C-1 transforms your daily commute into something to look forward to."

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Is There a Link Between the Growth of Autism and Environmental Poisons?

by Eleanor J. Bader, via AlterNet.org

Landfills contain massive amounts of environmental contaminationIf horror is your genre, environmental writer Brita Belli’s The Autism Puzzle, is the book for you. Her terrifying look at the chemicals we eat, drink and breathe is guaranteed to make your hair stand on end.

We should thank her for it.

Statistics released earlier this spring by the Centers for Disease Control revealed that one in 88 U.S. born toddlers has an autism spectral disorder—from the less severe Asperger’s Syndrome to the so-called classical form of the ailment. Worse, it’s not just a North American phenomenon; Belli also reports a 57 percent spike in Asia and Europe.

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