The intern (who I think from this point on can be called “john”… as cute as the name “the intern” is, it’s a little inpersonal, or something) and I went to see WALL-E. I loved it to death, it was super cute (like the intern..err john. i think i might stick to the intern…for now) but I couldn’t stop trying to think about what the other movie I had recently seen was… that I loved because it also had an environmental tone to it.

The cool think about WALL-E is not only did it cater to the crazy environmental degradation that’s happening around us, but also had this huge anti-captialistic “look how disgusting consumption and laziness can get” idea behind it - which I totally dug. Woo! Lets turn all the kids into Marxist eco-lobbiests!

Anyway - I FINALLY thought of the movie but not after thinking of the wrong one many times. Other good kids environment movies:

1. Furn Gully… cutest thing ever “i’ve been brain fried electrified!” aaah hahaha. Cutest.
2. Free Willy … sort of, the whale is all captivated and stuff. You know.
3. The Lorax … by far my second favorite Dr. Seuss book - the first obviously being Oh The Places You’ll Go, generally when you have a book literally memorized from front to back it’s because you love it to pieces. The Lorax is pretty much just as good as Oh The Places, though. Mostly because of it’s meaning.
4. Ice Age 2 … the place melts and shit
5. Once Upon A Forest
6. HootAND finally …the one I was thinking of:
7. Happy Feet! … I can’t believe I couldn’t think of it for THAT long, and it only came to me JUST now… literally weeks later.

And you know what should really be brought back for kids enjoyment? Captian Planet. (he’s the hero! gotta take pollution down to zero!) Fo’ realz.

1/2 of America’s land…80% of it’s fresh water… 17% of fossil fules go to what? Producing food. The most energy intensive product? Meat, yo. The higher up you go from plant to beast, the worse it gets. Cows eat seven times more grain than Americans do - … seven times MORE people could eat, if the cows weren’t eating it…. and its all for those $50 steaks.

HOW MUCH ENERGY (IN CALORIES) IS REQUIRED TO MAKE A SINGLE CALORIE OF MEAT?
(from the September 2003 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)
Lamb: 57 calories (~ 29 if pasture fed only)
Beef: 40 calories (~20 if pasture fed only)
Pigs: 14 calories
Turkeys: 10 calories
Broiler chickens: 4 calories

…So I don’t really eat a lot of meat.

I got telling someone about this today. …Then I started to rant a little bit, and my rant veered a little bit more than usual into the actual production of all processed foods. … Anything that’s been processed, sugar filled, packaged and shipped is just as bad for the environment as the aforementioned meat products. … So really, if I’m going to get all “environmental” not only do I need to not eat meat, but I need to eat local… unpackaged… organic food. … wtf.

I have issues with the organic food chains though. I think it’s all a disgusting scam to get hippies to spend too much money on something that helps so little that it doesn’t even matter. So we won’t be doing that. And local foods? Really the only time you can get “local” food in Guelph is Saturday morning. So if I don’t stock up, I’ve got issues. And if it’s a bad weekend at the farmer’s market, or if I …ya know, go to Toronto like I do every weekend, then I don’t get any. So there’s issues with that too.

So how do people eat, and ruin the environment less? …Americans and Canadians eat something like 3800 calories a day. What do people actually need? If I remember correctly something like 2000 - 2600 depending on your body type and gender. Which brings me to my real issue.

Beer.

I like it. A lot. but it’s processed, and full of calories. To brew a single liter of beer takes:

around 8 litres of water, huge amounts of mains power and gas, vast stores of barley and, mostly, the importation of packaging materials like glass bottles and labels from overseas

eek!

What’s my solution? I’ll continue to not eat meat, that’s fine. I can handle that. …I’ll try not to buy too much of the packaged and processed crap, but I can’t promise anything too drastic changing there. I’ll even cut back on like cheese or something. As for beer? I’ll stick with steam whistle! Local and delicious and environmentally aware. Although it will be hard to steer away from strongbow. so. stupidly. delicious. >< mmm.

But you know, this only furthers my argument that we should stop serving so much alcohol in bars. It would be better for the environment. And we could turn all the bars into the new one that is fuled by people dancing. …And just sell XTC. Then they’ll dance more! And won’t drink beer! And won’t eat meat because they won’t want to eat anything! Then, not only will everyone stop eating meat so that we can stop doing horribley embarassing things to cows (like collecting all their farts on their backs) but everyone in the world will be SO happy. And we’ll all love each other and listen to techno.

And then everyone would sparkle and shine various colors like this:

It seems as though anyone with any sort of science background is scurrying around trying to solve the problem of global warming. Recently some (almost) geoengineers proposed a “solution” that would just make matters worse. It’s an idea that really makes me think that real and professional scientists should be left to coming up with ideas for solving global warming. Their idea? Clouding the atmosphere up with man made aerosol particles. Now, they do admit that it would deplete the ozone in “some” regions, mostly the North and South pole thus turning those regions into irradiated dead zones. But to them it seems like a pretty fair trade off to them.

These aerosol particles that would be added to our atmosphere would in theory reflect sunlight away from the earth thus cooling the planet. But when you consider that for a second… instead of investing money into long term life changing solutions we’re going to (or are proposed to) add more chemicals to our atmosphere that would shift weather patters, deplete our ozone to the point where areas of our Earth would be considered “dead zones” and it seems like such a scheme would cost a gigantic amount of money. And logically - when they STOP shoving all of it into the environment or something faults in the process we’d all be screwed.

Playing with the Earth like this is just crazy. We’ve seen time and time again the playing around with nature is rarely, if ever, a good thing. When it comes to the ozone there is so much that we don’t understand and so much that we’re still discovering. Where would geoengineers even get an idea like this? In 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo erupted and released sulfur into the atmosphere there was a direct correlation with the temperature decreasing.

All of these new fangled attempts at cooling the planet are getting out of control.

There’s the man-made volcano that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space “sun shade” made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet’s temperature. The forest of ugly artificial “trees” that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the “Geritol solution,” named after a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement with extra iron — in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

All of this time, energy and money is being poured into these ridiculous attempts at using science to cool the planet, when really humanity would be better of pursing changes within their industrial, economic and home lifestyles. All of these crazy ideas could lead to disastrous weather patterns, cloudy skies through which we’d never see the sun again, droughts and famine. Changes on Earth take millions of years for a reason, we can’t just start dumping tonnes of sulfur on the planet and expect everything to be okay… we certainly can’t expect things to be better after such an act.

Do hot chix digging things really make it more appealing to those who like hot ladies? … I don’t think this ad has really made any sort of new treehugger men out there. It’s probably a little bit sexist too, right? … Probably. …But I don’t even care any more. Like with P.E.T.A’s “Milk gone wild” campaign…  It did exactly what it was supposed to do, no? It attracted attention, any publicity is good publicity sort of deal.

I’m just really curious if HotChixDig actually gets people to convert to things. I myself am not even 1/2 as attracted to women as I would need to be to test the effectiveness of the site.

Honestly - some of the stuff is pretty clever.

And I’m pretty sure that if I were shopping for lightbulbs and saw the following picture used as an ad, I’d buy the lightbulb. (But of course every “feminist” out there would scream and be all like “STOP USING MY BODY TO SELL SHIT!” … you’re hot. get over it.) 

…Maybe I’m more attracted to women then I thought I was. I have the urge to go buy an environmentally friendly light bulb. Shit son.

In all reality - the girls are doing their part for the environment, objectifying their bodies or not. Woo! Good on ‘em. I hope they don’t let all those boobie hating feminists shut them up. The only complaint I have is they knock Canada in the “about me” section of their blog. There ain’t nothing wrong with Canada!!!

I hate that living modestly is starting to be equated with disregarding the comforts that we’ve been given… instead of a noble and earth saving way of life.

I have a group of friends who all live together. In a maximum 6 person house (4 “real” bedrooms) there are 13 people. They have no television, only a couple of them have a computer, when I go over there are rarely lights on and they in no way went out of their way to buy new furniture or anything for the house. On top of these smaller things they also bike around – no one owns a car – cook together with vegan, organic, dumpster dived food and they run the house on grey water.

Just a quick summary for those who don’t know – dumpster diving is when you take food out of a dumpster to eat it. A lot of people get a little grossed out by this thought however having worked in a grocery store I assure you there is more than plenty of completely fresh and fine food being thrown out. Before knowing people who dumpstered I often thought “why would those dumpsters be locked???” but now I know that for whatever reason some grocery stores don’t want people stealing their garbage.

Grey water is essentially just reusing water. Most houses that are being built in Guelph are already implementing grey water systems directly into the house by connecting washing machine water to toilets. Said friends put the plug in during a shower and use shower water to flush toilets. And to be honest – the toilets don’t get flushed that often anyway.

For me, this would be an almost impossible way of living. I hate being cold, they never have the heater one. I live on my computer, they don’t have internet. I drink a liter of milk a day, they never drink milk. I will never will with a roommate ever again in my entire life unless I’m getting married, they live with 12 other people. It takes a lot of dedication and passion for the environmental movement to live this kind of lifestyle.

When I told my brother and a friend of mine about this they had the same reaction “that’s disgusting”. … I said that you would just have to get used it, but then they corrected me. Neither meant that it was physically disgusting, but that it was disgusting to see people choosing to live like “the poor”. They felt as though this was a mockery to people who couldn’t afford food, who couldn’t afford to live with just one family in a house and who couldn’t afford to keep their hydro on. Instead you have a household of by no means rich, but by no mean poor… group of kids who are choosing to not work and live like that. They choose to eat “garbage”, to be cold and to stay in the dark.

I brushed it off at the time, but it is now one thing that has been running through my head day in and day out. The only reason grocery stores throw out “almost” expired food is because if they lower the price people won’t buy the higher priced food - so they just keep it until it doesn’t make sense to sell it at the same price point and then toss out the perfectly good food.

Granted, dumpstering started out as a way to beat economic struggling but soon became a haven for “freeganism” (those who want to escape the consumerist life and culture) so it is backpacking off something poor people WERE doing. But with grey water… 50 - 80% of all residential water waste is from grey water.

Is what they are doing inherently wrong because they’re not taking advantage of all that is available to them? Or is it noble because they are not adhering to an overly comfortable lifestyle knowing what damage it does to the world.

I personally take the latter – I think that if you’re going to live in guilt or if you know that what you’re doing is wrong for the world and wrong socially then you just flat out shouldn’t do it. Sure, my friends aren’t taking advantage of a lot of “comforts” that are available to them, but they can also say that they are contributing less to huge problems. Continuing to simply “enjoy” and frivolously go about life without considering the impact that this “comfortable” life is doing is far more of a disgusting way to live than to try and do something about it.

If everyone here in Canada (or anywhere, really…) lived like that we’d have way less water waste, more food to distribute to the actual poor, we would create less of a carbon footprint in general and we’d be more in touch with the “real world” as opposed to being consumed in television and internet.

I can understand that people who have grown up in Canada or “western” life styles wouldn’t be comfortable living like my friends. However, unless you’re able to say that you are helping or lowering your over all impact on the world as much as they are – you should just shut your mouth. Living like that is a choice, it is not a mockery of people who can’t afford more “comfort” it is a choice to do the right thing for the world.