A Week's Worth of Trash

AP Images

 

--Steve Proffitt

Dave Chameides is worried about waste. So he has been saving all his trash this year. In his basement.

We visited Dave early this year when he began stockpiling his refuse, and again, about half-way through to see how his basement - and his marriage - were doing.

Dave's project was personal - he wanted to learn how he could cut down on stuff that ends up in the landfill, or worse. But it's also public. He's kept a blog of his experiences. It's called 365 Day of Trash.

AP Images

Now that he's nearing the end of his experiment, he's inviting others to try it. Not for a year. Just for a week. All the details are at his blog, and if you try it, comment on your experiences here.

Oh, and Dave has a year's worth of recycling and waste minimization tips, including things you can do with, oh, hair that you trim off your head.

Here's a video of Dave Chameides showing off the handy stuff he keeps in his backpack - all things designed to lower his garbage footprint.

Tags: environment | recycling | waste

4:18 PM ET | 12-29-2008 | permalink

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Old School Farming

Courtesy Green Mountain College

 

--Steve Proffitt

Some students at Green Mountain College in Vermont are getting an unusual driving lesson. They're learning to handle a pair of 1800 pound oxen, pulling a traditional plow.

It's part of Green Mountain's sustainable agriculture project, and it's a lot of fun, too. On Monday's program, we hear from some of them, who say in spite of the fact that the animals are enormous and sport giant horns, they're actually very gentle.

Still, getting two tons of draft animal to bend to your will requires concentration, training and patience. The final exam consists of the students driving the team around the school's farm, turning left and right, and hollering the standard ox-driving commands - Whoa, Haw, and Gee. (You'll have to tune in to find out about that.)

Dr. Ken Mulder, the manager of the farm, notes that this is not an activity for agricultural students - anyone enrolled at the Liberal Arts college can volunteer to work on the farm.

"I think you would be hard pressed to find another liberal arts college at which students are learning how to drive oxen, organically grow thirty different kinds of fruits and vegetables, raise heritage breeds of livestock and poultry, harvest hay without tractors or diesel fuel, manage an off-the-grid greenhouse, butcher sheep, pigs and chickens, build high-tensile fencing, shear sheep, and produce their own honey, apple cider, pickles, eggs and (soon) milk."

And really, at the end of the day, driving a team of oxen is probably easier than parallel parking a hulking SUV.

Tags: agriculture | education | environment | farming | sustainability

10:10 AM ET | 12-26-2008 | permalink

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Make Love, Not Storms

Courtesy Weather Underground

--Nihar Patel

In trying to keep up with the news on Hurricane Ike, which is supposed to make landfall today on the Texas Gulf Coast, I was browsing the Houston Chronicle website and came across this oddity. The up-to-date hurricane tracking data they use is from a company named Weather Underground, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They also provide weather news to The Associated Press and other media organizations.

Of course, most people associate the name "Weather Underground" with the radical left group founded in 1969. What gives?

In an email the company co-founder, Jeff Masters, had this to say about the company name:

Hi, the company that became The Weather Underground grew out of an educational weather project with the same name that began in the early 1990s. Since the educational weather project and the original radical group The Weather Underground both got their start at the University of Michigan, the professor that supervised the educational project--Perry Samson--thought it would be an amusing tongue-in-cheek name for our small weather project. When the project became an amazingly successful one, and was spun off into a business, the name Weather Underground was kept.

Thanks, Jeff!

6:01 PM ET | 09-12-2008 | permalink

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Gustav Blows Through LA...and St. Paul...and Culver City

--Alex Chadwick

Labor Day--three years ago. I was sitting in our Culver City studios at NPR West, and the word was spreading that New Orleans was in real trouble. Hurricane Katrina had come and gone, but, a couple of days later, the surge of water was just beginning to really take down the levees. Trying to cover something like this is part tightrope act, part Rolodex. It's enormously complicated by the infrastructure damage--the phones go down; the power goes down; it's tough to file for the radio.

I reached my friend John Burnett, the NPR reporter who is normally based in Austin, TX. John had a working phone somehow, and he fed live reports to our show of the devastation that was truly beginning to emerge. It was riveting to hear.

We are fortunate that unlike Katrina--which grew bigger and stronger than most expected--Gustav seems to be turning out to be not as bad as was feared. It arrived on land as a Category Two storm, and pretty soon was downgraded to Category One.

That was still big enough to derail plans for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. We covered Senator McCain's hasty scramble to re-do his schedule, and decisions by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to forego their planned appearances. No one wanted to send any "we-weren't-paying-attention-to-Katrina" reminders. But that still left the problem of how to get storm coverage from the area.

We thought of trying to call some evacuees, and then reconsidered to go after some of the people who stayed behind. The Associated Press mentioned a conversation with a local man sipping whiskey and Diet Coke outside a place called Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. We found the number and called. The interview opened the show and we went back to them a couple of more times today.

At the end of he show I declared Johnny's the New Orleans news bureau for Day to Day.

The next time I get to the city, I'm going to stop in and buy them a round. You need help telling a hurricane story, and we got it there.

Tags: Alex Chadwick | Gustav | editorial notebook

4:00 PM ET | 09- 1-2008 | permalink

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Gustav Online Resources

Image courtesy the American Red Cross Flickr photostream

--Gary Dauphin

For those of you following news of Gustav's landfall at home, here's a list of online resources put together by Metblog's Sean Bonner:

http://neworleans.metblogs.com - The main New Orleans Metblogs site
http://gustav08.ning.com - Ning network about Gustav
http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08/ - Mobile info center
http://gustavpets.com/ - Pets and hurricane information
http://gustavwiki.com/wiki/ - A wiki for gustav information
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/27698339.html - The Advocate Gustav Link Page
http://www.2theadvocate.com/weather/maps/27670594.html Evacuation Contraflow maps
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at2.shtml?5day#content - Gustav tracking
https://asd.fema.gov/inter/nefrls/home.htm - National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System (NEFRLS)
http://www.fema.gov/hazard/hurricane/2008/gustav/index.shtm - FEMA official Gstav page
http://laughingsquid.com/hurricane-gustav-information-resources/ - Laughing Squid collection of resources
[full story]

[Tip of the hat to Boing Boing, which is also tracking how the web is reacting to Gustav.]

If you have any good links or observations, send them along.

12:09 PM ET | 09- 1-2008 | permalink

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Link Think: Still Number 1

Another day, another study detailing the twice-daily hell that passes for a commute in many California cities. As the LA Times' traffic blog Bottleneck reports:

Study finds California urban congestion still tops the nation
The Reason Foundation, the group that promotes libertarian values, just released its annual highway report. California, predictably, had the worst urban freeway congestion -- along with Minnesota and North Carolina -- but the 9th fewest deficient bridges. The state's urban freeways also ranked 48th in terms of their condition. Only New Jersey and Hawaii were worse in that category.

(A tip of the hat to LAist for that Bottleneck link.)

Bottleneck goes on to point out that 2-hour commutes and essentially unsusable roads can make for strange political bedfellows, the small-government libertarians at Reason apparently having been, well, driven to embrace the relatively bigger government implied by traffic solutions like congrestion pricing. "Although the Reason Foundation certainly has a distinct political viewpoint," Bottleneck notes, "there really isn't much politics in their report. The group is also a big proponent of congestion pricing, as are many other organizations across the political spectrum."

Some conservative activists (Grover Norquist, in particular) have long dreamt of a government so small it can be safely drowned in a bathtub, but California's unique mix of urban congestion and yearly confrontations with Mother Nature (earthquakes, mudslides, fires, marauding bears) make us a state where government will always need to be robust enough to enforce building codes and pick up debris. As one diarist at the Daily-Kos-style state political blog Calitics argues:

It really is remarkable what serious attention to building codes has done. Not too long ago yesterday's earthquake would have been a disaster - today it's a blip. California has recognized the problem, taken steps to constantly improve and innovate, and made sure that the regulations stayed stringent, so that developers would just have to find other means to reduce costs. The fact that the epicenter was around Chino Hills and Diamond Bar, relatively new areas with new buildings that were constructed according to the strictest building codes, was only a further testament to that. The after-action reports from the 1989 San Francisco quake and the 1994 Northridge quake were taken seriously and applied in this case. [full diary]

According to the Reason study, our earthquake-ready bridges are high on the nations list of "fewest deficient," and although that sounds (to my ear, at least) like praising someone for being the "least ugly," it's good news and proof that preparedness efforts are producing results. Now we only need to figure out how to keep paying for all of it:

Thousands of state workers were told to stay home Friday under an order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger aimed at cutting expenses for California's cash-strapped government, but a lawsuit filed by a union claims the governor is overstepping his authority. [Full story]

California's projected budget deficit will hit $22 billion this year, another #1 for us. Figures.

--Gary Dauphin

2:13 PM ET | 08- 1-2008 | permalink

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My First Earthquake

Someone suggested I write about my "first earthquake," (I've only been in LA for 3 years) but, fortunately, I have nothing to report about the shaking that hit the Los Angeles area July 29. It was my day off, I was walking down Beverly in Los Angeles' Historic Filipinotown district, and I actually didn't feel a thing. The only signs that anything was up were the lack of a voice signal on my cell and the plate glass in the local storefronts, which were undulating and vibrating like speaker cones.

Now that I think about it, my lazy, good-for-nothing cat and dog were lying flat on their sides when I left the house, laid low not by spooky vibes and premonitions, but by their own indolence. No warning whatsoever, no weird barking or meowing - nada, zip, zilch. After the quake, I did receive three, rock-n-roll-ish text messages (SMS runs on a separate network, and didn't clog after the quake the way voice networks did) from friends along the lines of "WELCOME TO LA, SON!!! YEAH!!!", this as if I had just inadvertently completed some arcane rite of passage. "I GUESS..." is what I texted back.

I won't call earthquakes the new welcome wagon, but I got off easy, as did the rest the of area. But what about you? How was your earthquake?

--Gary Dauphin

12:35 PM ET | 07-31-2008 | permalink

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Sustainable Dave

In typical teenager fashion, I used to roll my eyes when my mom washed the tin foil... or re-used sandwich bags... or hung our laundry on the line instead of using the clothes dryer. She isn't American, or at least she wasn't born here. She grew up in World War II-era England. So she conserved because, well, that's what she always did.

How quaint, I thought, how... Old Europe.

Everything old is new again. And now, guilty about being an over-consuming, wasteful American, I've adopted most of her ideas. Even this.

(I drew the line at knitting a sweater out of dog hair.)

Dave Chameides, though, has gone even further than my mom.

Continue reading "Sustainable Dave" »

12:14 PM ET | 07- 9-2008 | permalink

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The Serbian Taxi... of Gold!

Photo by Madeleine Brand, NPR

I don't think he'd be offended if I told you that my husband is a weirdo. Ok, maybe that's a bit strong. He's an iconoclast.

When we first moved out to LA from New York, he wanted to live in a shipping container. I thought maybe it would be a bit cramped. A bit freezing/boiling in the winter/summer. I was pregnant at the time, and not into experimental nesting. Of course, within a year, it would be uber-hip to have your home made out of shipping containers from here to China.

Continue reading "The Serbian Taxi... of Gold!" »

11:59 AM ET | 06-25-2008 | permalink

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