It’s Easy Being Green

By now, just about everyone has heard about the mysterious dilemma plaguing our world’s pollinators.  Honey bees are dieing off in vast numbers and no one is truly quite sure why they’re vanishing.  Some scientists have started hypothesizing what is behind the drastic decline in bee populations.  Some have speculated cell phone signals, a virulent disease and even pollution as a cause.  Now one group of researchers is looking into the bee dilemma with a unique, grassroots approach:  The Great Sunflower Project.

The project is led by Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor at San Francisco State University.  LeBuhn says she’s interested in broad areas of conservation and the bee is one of her most interesting subjects.  If you sign up to help LeBuhn’s research project, they will send you a packet of wild sunflower seeds.  Once you plant them and have sunflowers, the researchers will email you a particular weekend that you are supposed to head out into your garden and watch your sunflowers.  Twice per month you will plant yourself in your yard so you can record how many bees visit your sunflowers within 30 minutes.  Then you record the data and send it back to the researchers.  The goal is to find out where exactly bees are in trouble and what areas don’t seem to be impacted by the mysterious death.

I think the project is a great way for anyone who understands the impacts of bees on our life.  It’s said that one out of every three bites of food has been visited by a native pollinator and if they totally disappear, we’ll be in some major trouble.  Just think about the things you can learn by participating in this research.  If you have children it would make for a great summer project, something for them to focus on come away with a feeling that they’re helping to make a difference too!  If you want to sign up, visit the Great Sunflower Project website and join the research.  Hopefully together we can make a difference!

Here’s four more tips showing you it really can be easy going green:

5. Adjust your home’s thermostat to be lower in winter and higher in summer. Learn how to heat and cool your home simply by venting windows at certain times of the day and when it’s cold, bundle up and put on your sweat pants!

6. Clean and replace dirty air filters in your home’s heating and cooling system. A dirty air filter can use 5-percent more energy while your a/c unit is running.

7. Replace the standard incandescent light bulbs in your home with the new compact fluorescent bulbs.

8. Help your water heater to be even more efficient by wrapping it with an insulating blanket specifically designed to go around your water heater.

Check back tomorrow for four more easy green living tips!

Five days and counting to Earth Day so enjoy the easy ways to go green tips I post as we head to the big celebration:

1. When it comes to doing the dishes with your dishwasher, use the energy-saving setting. If your dishwasher is older and doesn’t have one of those settings, just let the dishes air-dry. Don’t use the heated option.

2. Reduce the energy needed to wash your clothes by washing in cold or warm water, not hot. We do all of our laundry with cold water, sometimes warm if some stain treatment or sterilization is needed and we’ve never noticed a problem with our clothes!

3. To save on energy used to heat up hot water, turn your water heater down to about 120-degrees. I have to confess, that’s a hard one for us to stomach because we love our hot showers and baths!

4. As you replace appliances in your home, pick out on the best energy efficient appliances. A lot of new appliances carry the Energy Star label which tells you that particular appliance is designed to save you money. If you’d like to learn more about what appliances to look out for, head over to the Energy Star website.

Just less than six days away, people all around the world will celebrate our blue planet and share their mindfulness to protect our only home. Senator Gaylor Nelson, realizing that conservation was a much needed movement even in the 1960’s, persuaded President Kennedy to tour the nation. He spoke about conserving our precious resources and it began to get the country thinking. However, the Vietnam War was overshadowing the environmental movement at the time. Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations called “teach-ins” had spread like a wildfire to college campuses across the nation. Senator Nelson realized a similar mass demonstration could be just the key to get people thinking about their environment.

In September 1969, Senator Nelson announced that in the following spring, he would sponsor a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment and invited everyone to participate. Word of the demonstration spread and on April 22, 1970 Earth Day was born. Today many communities around the world put on Earth Day events and most calendars come marked with the “holiday” already on it. There might even be an Earth Day event going on in your neighborhood. Just follow the link to an Earth Day website where you can punch in your zip code and find out what’s planned for your area.

Over the next few days I’ll post some easy tips to help you go green and celebrate our Mother Earth.

There are thousands of sites spread across our globe where groundwater supplies have been contaminated due to dirty factories, military installations and the dumping of toxic waste.  These so-called superfund sites are left to sit until the expensive cleanup operation can get underway and have undoubtedly a harmful impact on our environment and supplies of drinking water.  But one scientist at Rice University has come up with an amazing solution, one that could leave at least part of our planet gleaming!

Chemical engineer Michael Wong developed a gold detergent that is amazing effective at cleaning up water contaminated with toxic waste.  No, this isn’t a hundred dollar bottle of soap that the likes of Paris Hilton would bathe in twice daily!  Typically cleanup of these sites containing the cancer causing chemicals TCE and PCE costs millions of dollars and it never really gets rid of the problem.  TCE is an industrial solvent used to clean greasy machinery and while it smells sweet, the after-affects are anything but.  The current cleanup method is simply a process that moves the chemicals to another spot.  The federal government has suggested that just to clean up the 1,400 military sites would cost $5 Billion.

Wong realized he could combine gold particles (molecule sized) with palladium (another metal) and sprinkle the resulting mixture over contaminated water.  What happened was pure genius!  The gold detergent broke down the TCE and PCE and turned them into a more eco-friendly gas, ethane, and chloride salt.  The gold detergent works about 100 times faster than the current groundwater cleanup method which involves pumping water through charcoal filters to remove the TCE and PCE.  Wong and his partners at Rice will now deploy the system at an actual cleanup site to see just how effective and cost-efficient their gold detergent can be.

I just wanted to take a minute to plug one of my favorite places to visit in Flagstaff, The Arboretum. They have more than 2,500 different species of plants that grow great here in the high altitude of northern Arizona and they have great collections of the native plants that grow here on the Colorado Plateau. I like to make a trip out there once or twice a year and see what all is going on. It’s quiet, peaceful and best of all they have a bunch of different demonstration gardens including a killer greenhouse. I envy the greenhouse because eventually I want one similar to it. Anyway, if you live in the area and are looking for a great volunteer opportunity, you should check out the Arboretum. They’re currently looking for volunteer docents to lead the daily tours of the garden. If you’re interested head over to their website to find out more on volunteering.

If you happen to be in the area and want to learn more about gardening with native plants of the Colorado Plateau, stop on in!

I’m glad to see this morning that the National Resources Defense Council has gained some ground in federal court against the White House and the Navy.  NRDC has gone to court against the government because of a decision by President Bush to allow the Navy to use high powered sonar equipment in a “no sonar zone”.  The zone is known to be the home of large groups of whales and several studies have shown the sonar in question can cause mass death in whales.  According to the NRDC, the high-intensity sound waves can travel vast stretches of the ocean and are so intense that marine mammals experience bleeding in their brain before they die.

In January, President Bush argued that the high powered sonar was vital for our nation’s military preparedness exercises and granted the Navy an exemption so they could ignore a court ruled injunction to stop the practices back on January 3rd.  U.S. District Judge Florence Marine Cooper released a 36 page ruling stating that the Navy must abide by a previous order which outlawed the sonar use in that particular area of the Pacific.  What’s even better, Cooper suggested our President’s attempt to go around the previous ruling was “constitutionally suspect”.

I’m glad Cooper made what seems like a sound ruling both in favor of our environment and in favor of the people who tried to stop it.  Our government, and our lame-duck President for that matter, need to learn they just can’t run around doing whatever they want.  The people are watching….power to the people!

The NRDC produced a really great 5 minute long video on this issue.  It’s called “Lethal Sounds” and is narrated by Pierce Brosnan.