Mother Nature Network

I spent some time looking around a new site today, the Mother Nature Network. I enjoyed one of the featured articles on there titled 8 ways global warming can kill you. In that story was the picture below, which is of Seattle but without Puget Sound in the picture but rather a dry cracked wasteland. Some of the ways to die were from severe weather, high temperatures, poor air quality, etc. The most interesting one was by animal attack! By what animals, you ask? Bears and Jellyfish were specifically spotlighted.

The Mother Nature Network also has sections of their site that are about lifestyle, green tech, eco-biz, food & drink, home, transportation and family. Inside the food & drink section there was another area of interest for me, beer!

I will finish with one more of their slideshows, it was titled 7 unlikely things global warming could take away. Some of these were Florida, skiing and pasta, but the weirdest one was waffles and the scariest one was beer! Yikes, apparently hops and barley are sensitive crops that don't like rising temps.

Gulf Oil Spill Revisited

Today I read an article about the final amount of oil that was spilled this spring/summer in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the first postings I ever made to this blog was about previous major oil spills so I wanted to revisit that and see how 4 months have added a bit more to the context of this spill. At that time this was the list of the top oil spills:

1. The Gulf War = 360,000,000 gallons
2. Ixtoc 1 = 138,000,000 gallons
3. Atlantic Empress = 90,000,000 gallons
4. Nowruz Oil Spill = 80,000,000 gallons
5. Exxon Valdez = 10,800,000 gallons

In the article I linked above the oil spilled in the gulf this year was approximately 4.4 million barrels. Some of you may be wondering how to reconcile this barrel v. gallon question. One barrel of oil is equal to 42 gallons. I have no idea why the number of gallons is used in these measures above as well as practically every report of an oil spill I have ever heard but maybe it is because it makes it sound much bigger, maybe it is easier for people to conceptualize 138,000,000 gallon size milk cartons but filled with oil rather than milk, I just don't know the answer to that.

OK, I know all of you are waiting for this, since math is hard, I will do the calculation.....the grand total is 184,800,000 gallons of oil! Still much less than the deliberate destruction of oil infrastructure during the 80-88 gulf war but definitely in solid 2nd place and #1 for accidental spills.

Wind Powering America

Since I previously posted about the wind farm in the UK that just opened I did a little more looking around and I found this wonderful map below. This was on the US Department of Energy renewable energy website.
The more orange/red/purple the color is the better suited the area is for wind power. I look at those purple streaks in southeastern Wyoming and I remember going to college there, where the wind never, ever, ever stops blowing and this definitely makes sense to me!

Largest Wind Farm

I read this article this morning about the opening of the largest wind farm in the world. It is located off the coast of the UK and can produce a maximum of 300 MW of electricity. What I found most interesting about this is that the towers are 380 feet tall. I have seen wind power instillations in many places around the world and none of them seemed to be that tall. I admit that my perspective in each of those situations could have skewed my guess of height but anyway, these are pretty darn tall.

Park(ing) Day

Park(ing) Day is tomorrow, September 17th and is where metered parking spaces are taken over and transformed into additional mini public park space. The Park(ing) Day website is here and has more information about the worldwide program.

Here is the description of the overall event on their website:
"PARK(ing) Day is an annual, worldwide event that inspires city dwellers everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good."

A couple of picture examples are posted here but there are more on the Park(ing) Day site.
Here is more information about Park(ing) Day. Here is information about Park(ing) Day in Seattle.

Another brilliant picture example is below.

Urban Farm Hub

I just reviewed the posts for Enviro-Sustain of late and I found that there was little coherence between the posts so I figured, "Why start now?"

This posting is more at home with the posts I made in May and July about sustainable agriculture but the overall reach of Enviro-Sustain is broad and I enjoy that there is so much to learn about a number of topics.

Today I am posting about the Urban Farm Hub website. I was digging around a little more about city chickens, though I am far from being prepared to have any at home and I came across this site. They are an information resource for urban agriculture in the Puget Sound region.

They have 5 interesting sections to explore further and their logos below are linked directly to their pages within their site.

EcoFabulous

I wasn't sure what this site would be about when I initially clicked the link and waited the second or so for it to load. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this site covers areas that I have not covered at all yet on Enviro-Sustain. Sexy.Sustainable.Style. That is their slogan and part of their logo. This site has information on staying green but being fashionable, sleek and stylish in all aspects of life.

There is a home section as well as Beauty, Fashion, Kids, Lifestyle and even Guides to help get information on different topics.

I encourage you readers out there to drive down through the links on this site to find areas you enjoy or appreciate being Sexy, Sustainable and Stylish in.

I looked through the Home section and looked through the Pets topic area in particular.

Method

I am not always caught up on new things but I try to catch up quickly when I learn something new. Today, in a totally unrelated piece about what to buy and what not to buy at Target, I learned about Method cleaning products. Honestly, I rarely go to Target and it used to be quite close to where I lived, now it is considerably further and out of the way. I will probably try to find them at a few of the other retailers that they are available at.

To be honest we may have already had some of these products at our home as the shape of the bottle in the design logo above looks familiar.

They also have a blog that you can follow and it has fun and interesting posts. You can even join People Against Dirty if you want.

Energy Savers

Here is the Department of Energy website about Energy Savers. I learned a few interesting things on this site. One thing I learned was about shutting down computers when they are not in use. I have in the past always shut down my computer at home. Only recently have I begun to let it stay on but it is a new computer and has energy saving functions.

I also looked at the do-it-yourself home energy assessments. In the house we moved to last month it was in the upper 90s our first week. Since then it has cooled significantly and this week we are getting some more reliably cool and dreary weather, which I think will be a good time to take on part of this task.