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I’ve been blogging for several months now and I’m glad to have recieved the feedback I have.  I’ve enjoyed the experince and for that reason I’ve decided to take blogging to another level.  I’ll be self hosting my blog and that means you’ll see a lot more creativity in the design, functionality and layout of the new blog.

Check it out: www.SONofFIVErivers.com

Cheers

They went to Jail, I wrote a Letter!

So here’s the story, at the UN Climate Summit last month in Copenhagen.  A group of four managed to get into a dinner party where world leaders were dining with the Queen of Denmark and they held up a banner demanding they take action against global warming.  I’m a Greenpeace member, so I while these people went to jail I sent the letter below when the Executive Director Kumi Naidoo reached out and asked its members.

To:

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

Barack Obama, President of the United States

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

Faced with the unique opportunity to stop climate change in Copenhagen, world leaders offered instead an historic failure.  In sharp contrast, we and the world’s environment, hunger, and justice groups are mobilizing the largest movement civil society has ever witnessed, to demand a fair, ambitious, legally binding climate treaty.

I stand in solidarity with those who have taken non-violent direct action or committed peaceful acts of civil disobedience to demand climate justice. That includes the four Greenpeace activists who were detained without trial in Denmark for holding up banners at a head of state dinner. I have contributed to their action by supporting Greenpeace — financially, morally, or in my day to day life.  If the response of governments to the threat of climate change is going to be preventive detention of those likely to support or commit acts of civil disobedience, count me among the 15 million people you may need to round up.

I urge you to recognise that civil disobedience to demand action against so grave a threat is an act of community service.

Yours faithfully,

*********

Update:

The four activists have been released.

Break Through in Renewable Energy: VAWT

Vertical Axis Wind Turbines

Depletion of the Ozone Layer 1987

I was reading about CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) and how they impact our environemnt.   CFC is an organic compound that contains carbon, chlorine, and fluorine.  CFCs have been widely used as refrigerants, propellants (in aerosol applications), and solvents. The manufacture of such compounds is being phased out by theMontreal Protocol because they contribute to ozone depletion.

My quick research on the subject lead me to this video I found on You Tube talking about the depletion of the Ozone Layer in 1987.  Anyways I don’t want to start a rant, so I’ll let you watch this video if your interested.  Too bad we haven’t made stricter regulations for manufactures and other businesses alike.  It might be easier that way then to educate all the consumers…

Green Roofs are changing Architecture and Planning

Here is a great look at what is possible in the field of green roofs.

Many thanks and CREDIT to: Erik Christensen via Wikipedia, Credit: Alyson Hurt in Wikipedia, Credit: Vancouver Convention Centre, Credit: Green Roofs.org, Credit: Lloyd Alter, Toronto, Credit: Tree Hugger, Credit: Scott Torrance, Credit: Credit CPG Consultants via Greensource, Credit: Fred Ballerini (project biologist, green roof design and installation) Architect: Carver + Schicketanz, via Green Roofs for Healthy Cities

Green roofs are not new; they have been used for thousands of years because they helped insulate, thrived in the sun instead of rotting, and other than the increased structure, they were cheap as, well, the dirt that they were planted in. Then flat roofs came in and were covered in tar and asphalt, which needed a lot of maintenance. Engineers and architects didn’t worry much about them; nobody could see them. Roofs became parking lots for equipme

Sometimes they developed naturally and organically, like this rooftop garden in lower Manhattan that like Topsy, just grew. And grew, and eventually evolved from a New York roof garden into what they now call a Green Roof.

They are showing up everywhere, even when they don't quite fit the architectural idiom. The new green roof at the Vancouver Convention Centre is big and on its own a lovely thing. But an earlier phase of the Convention Centre, designed by Canadian great Eberhard Zeidler, was designed to be light, airy, and to create a dramatic profile reminiscent of sails. How does a green roof compare?

Oddball green roofs are also beginning to show up in oddball locations, like this one that looks like a putting green on the top deck of a cruise ship. It got special recognition this year at the Green Roof Awards for Excellence, which started its explantion with: Most people find the idea of a garden or lawn on a 15-storey building quite unusual. Now imagine a grassy playing field, 15-storeys up on the deck of an ocean-going cruise-ship.

Lisa Rapoport had an equally difficult challenge with the roof of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto; here were the fanciest tables in the high end restaurant on in the Daniel Liebskind addition, overlooking an ugly black tar roof with barely any structural capacity to hold the roof. She designed a complex and elegant sliver of a green roof that weighs barely three pounds per square foot, but will definitely improve the view.

Scott Torrance has even designed what might be called a temporary green roof; the tenant wanted one, but the landlord wanted to be sure it would or could go away. So it is all in planters and trays, sitting on top of the existing roof.

It didn't take long before green roofs started seriously influencing the architecture itself. Renzo Piano's museum, located in the middle of a park, is covered with glorious hills of green roof that are among its most dramatic features. The green roof defines the building; No architect would have designed it that way if it was asphalt or EPDM. More at Jaymi's tour: A Trip to the California Academy of Sciences (Slideshow)

When one of the Giants of Architecture, Kenzo Tange, designs your university and puts in a 200 acre park as the "green lungs" of the campus, what do you do? The designer,Hoong Be Lok of CPG decided to make a "non-building building" that would allow it build on the central green space "without taking away from it." It is a lovely green roof, but nobody can call it a "non-building building", it is as real as any other building on campus unless you work for Google Maps. Would Kenzo Tange have approved? Or are green roofs being used to put a new green sheen on projects that might otherwise have been more problematic to get approved? More: With Green Roof, Nanyang University School of Art Tries to Disappear

Green roofs were originally thought of as a technology that reduces heat island effect, helped manage stormwater and improved air quality. Perhaps to everyone's surprise, they have turned into planning tools to help put buildings where no building has gone before, are radically changing the architectural form of buildings, the way architects present buildings (see the rash of aerial perspectives-who ever showed rooftops before?) and the respective roles of architects and landscape architects. Like this 2009 award winner, a guest house and garage 200 yards away from the Pacific ocean, they can help produce great architecture and they can help hide bad or inappropriately sited architecture. Let's just be vigilant to ensure that they are not misused and brought into disrepute by using them as excuses to put buildings in places they shouldn't be, just because they are green. More: Are Green Roofs the New Mirrored Glass?

Lights without Light Pollution

I consider my self an amateur astronomer,  so I was pleseantly surprised when I read this in a newsletter from my local electricty supplier, BC Hydro.  (and Yes I’m susbscribed to the online newsletters of my Gas & Electricty suppliers, doesn’t it just make sense?)  Enjoy the article & some pictures I found:

Astronomers big on Power Smart’s battle against light pollution

Rob Klovance
bchydro.com

Detail of a photo of the Pelican Nebula taken by John McDonald through a telescope at Astronomy Hill near Victoria in 2007. (W.J. McDonald photo)

It took a trip to Saltspring Island for amateur astronomer John McDonald’s grandkids from Vancouver to see the milky way for the first time. But for McDonald, it’s the story of a group of visiting Tokyo schoolkids that hammers home the allure of the elusive dark sky.

“These kids were staying at a fairly dark place up island,” says McDonald, a retiree who lives in Victoria. “Someone took them out at night to show them the milky way… and they couldn’t’ get them to go back in.

“These kids had never seen a star except the sun.”

McDonald and other B.C. star-gazers couldn’t be happier to hear that BC Hydro Power Smart has launched a campaign to fight light pollution that includes rebates on flat lens streetlight products. To them, the need is significant and the timing is perfect – the United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, an initiative that coincides with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the telescope.

It’s not just about dark skies

And if you’re thinking that an astronomer’s battle against light pollution is just a tad self-serving, think again. Before we start talking about the stars, McDonald has already dealt with a laundry list of light pollution costs – wasted energy, wasted money, dangerous glare for drivers and detrimental effects on wildlife, including birds and fish.

“I think most of us are very keenly aware of the fact we’re using up energy, and that there’s a cost to it,” says McDonald, fresh off a trip to Costa Rica in which he shot a mind-blowing time-lapse video of the sky throughout the night. “And the amount of energy that is wasted in lighting up the bottoms of clouds and sending light off into space to do nothing is a considerable expense. It’s billions of dollars in North America.”

Our ‘addiction’  to light

Most of us think that the brighter the outdoor lighting, the better. McDonald thinks that attitude is a byproduct of growing up in an age here in B.C. where “hydro power has been basically a free service”. He speaks of us being addicted to light while largely ignoring the costs of that addiction.

In 1996, at the request of the US Congress, the National Institute of Justice conducted a landmark assessment of crime and violence in the United States. The study found little research to support the idea of “brighter-is-safer”, and even suggested that in some circumstances poorly designed illumination might actually increase personal vulnerability.

“There’s nothing worse than having somebody with motion security lighting,” says another astronomer, Paul Greenhalgh of Abbotsford. “To me it’s not security at all, it’s illumination. The day that a streetlight walks into court and testifies that this guy did what he did – that he stole that car – is the day I’ll eat my telescope.”

A billion bucks in wasted energy

Inefficient and excessive night lighting causes significant loss of energy globally. In North America, the energy wasted in illuminating the sky is estimated at a billion dollars. Good, clean outdoor lighting improves visibility, safety, and a sense of security, while minimizing energy use, operating costs, and ugly, dazzling glare.

There are three types of light pollution:

• Light trespass, which occurs when light crosses property lines. Poor outdoor lighting shines onto neighbours’ properties and into bedroom windows, reducing privacy, hindering sleep, and giving the area an unattractive look.
• Glare, which comes from an overly bright source of light compared to background lighting levels. Glare  is light that beams directly from a lamp into your eye. It serves no purpose and hampers the vision of pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. If you can see the bright lamp from a distance, it’s a bad light. With a good light, you see lit ground instead of the dazzling lamp.
• Sky glow, which spills upward from urbanized areas and blocks the view of the stars

If we were to think of lamps as taps and leaking light rays as drops of water, we would never tolerate it. But, we seldom think about the impact of light pollution.

Reducing light pollution has a variety of benefits, including energy savings and helping eliminate light exposure that disrupts sleep cycles, causes fatigue and strains the immune system.

What we can do to help

Greenhalgh’s Fraser Valley Astronomers Society has successfully lobbied the City of Abbotsford to apply a new policy to streetlighting. All new streetlamps in the city will be fitted with full cutoff lighting, which all but eliminates light not central to the task of lighting the street. And all existing lamps will be retrofitted with full cutoffs as part of their ongoing maintainence cycle.

Power Smart is out to remind people that we all have the power to help reduce light pollution and save energy and money, both with the lighting choices we make at home and the choices we make at our businesses.

Here’s a short list of things we can do:

• Assess your requirements. Ask yourself if the lighting is really needed. If so, determine what area has to be lit, how much illumination is needed, and when is the lighting required.
• Adopt “part-night lighting” by turning off non-essential lights after midnight. You save energy and money.
• Install timers or motion sensors to turn your security lighting on only when needed. You save energy and money.
• Adjust your security and outdoor lights so that they do not trespass into your neighbours’ house. Casting light onto adjacent areas is a waste of energy
• Direct light where it is needed. Use lights that shield the lamp and direct the light down rather than out and away.
• Avoid glare. A luminaire that emits a concentrated beam of light offers better visibility than one that shines light in all directions. In certain cases, glare can compromise safety.
• Choose the most efficient lamps. Certain types of lamps consume less energy than others with the same light output. Choose lamps with a high lamp efficacy such as CFLs.
• Choose the right luminaire. Light directed towards the sky does not improve night vision.
• Choose luminaires that have a flat lens and a shield that completely shades the upper surface of the lamp or are classified as cut off and full cutoff by IESNA (Illumination Engineering Society of North America). The lamps sit back further in these luminaires causing the light to be cast down rather than out to the side. Therefore light cannot escape above 90 degrees horizontal plane. You can even install the lights under balconies and eaves.
  

How BC Hydro is fighting light pollution

BC Hydro is doing its part to reduce light pollution and help its customers save energy and money. Some of BC Hydro’s initiatives that help customers reduce light pollution and save energy include:

• In-store instant discounts on ENERGY STAR light fixtures and ENERGY STAR Specialty CFL lamps. These lamps use up to 75% less energy than regular incandescent lamps.
  Mail in rebates for the purchase of ENERGY STAR CFL lamps.
• Funding for studies to determine how municipalities can use adaptive street lighting to reduce street lighting levels without impacting safety. This will help municipalities dim their street lights by up to 50% during low traffic periods.
• Incentives for business customers to install lighting controls such as timers and occupancy sensors to turn of lights when lighting is not required.
• Incentives for municipalities and businesses to install ornamental streetlights with high efficiency lamps with flat lenses. The fully-shielded flat-lens lamps do an equally good job of illuminating the road by directing the light to where it is needed without sending light up into the sky or out into your eyes. The ground and roadway will be well illuminated. And, because no light is wasted, a lower wattage lamp can be used to illuminate the desired area.
• Technical and financial assistance to customers who plan to reduce their lighting energy consumption by re-designing their lighting and de-lamping to reduce over illumination.
• Lighting design tools and financial incentives for developers and builders of new buildings.
• Funding for energy managers who target energy efficiency measures at customers’ facilities.
• Training and development opportunities on energy conservation for businesses and their employees.

Source: BC Hydro

Other Cool Links:

Our Vanishing Night (National Geographic article)

Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (Vancouver)

International Astronomy Day, HR MacMillan Space Centre, Vancouver

The Sky Tonight (Diagram of constellations in current evening sky, Vancouver)

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too has the suburban way of life become embedded in the American consciousness.
Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream.
But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life. With brutal honesty and a touch of irony, The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply. World Oil Peak and the inevitable decline of fossil fuels are upon us now, some scientists and policy makers argue in this documentary.
The consequences of inaction in the face of this global crisis are enormous. What does Oil Peak mean for North America? As energy prices skyrocket in the coming years, how will the populations of suburbia react to the collapse of their dream? Are today’s suburbs destined to become the slums of tomorrow? And what can be done NOW, individually and collectively, to avoid The End of Suburbia ?

The Trailer:

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

State of the Village Report: The World as a Village of 1000

If the world were a village of 1000 people:

• 584 would be Asians
• 123 would be Africans
• 95 would be East and West Europeans
• 84 Latin Americans
• 55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
• 52 North Americans
• 6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:

• 165 people would speak Mandarin
• 86 would speak English
• 83 Hindi/Urdu
• 64 Spanish
• 58 Russian
• 37 Arabic

That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.

In the village there would be:

• 300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
• 175 Moslems
• 128 Hindus
• 55 Buddhists
• 47 Animists
• 210 all other religons (including atheists)

• One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
• Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
• Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
• Each year 28 babies would be born.
• Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from cancer. Two of the deaths would be to babies born within the year.
• One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
• With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the next year would be 1018.

In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.

• Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one automobile).
• About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
• Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.

The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of which:

• 700 acres is cropland
• 1400 acres pasture
• 1900 acres woodland
• 2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.

The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable. The village would allocate 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland — that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer running off this land would cause pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.

If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village’s total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.

The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether the 100 can learn to get along together, and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical bungling, and if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.

(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.)

Links worth checking out:

Doctors Per 1000 People

If the World was a Village of 100

If the World were a Village of 100

The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the differences in the world.
There are many types of reports that use the Earth’s population reduced to 100 people, especially in the Internet. Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

The text that originated this webmovie was published on May 29, 1990 with the title “State of the Village Report”, and it was written by Donella Meadows, who passed away in February 2000. Nowadays Sustainability Institute, through Donella’s Foundation, carries on her ideas and projects.

IF THE WORLD WERE A VILLAGE OF 100 PEOPLE

In the world today, more than 6 billion people live.
If this world were shrunk to the size of a village of 100 people, what would it look like?

59 would be Asian
14 would be American (North, Central and South)
14 would be African
12 would be European
1 would be from the South Pacific

50 would be women, 50 would be men
30 would be children, 70 would be adults.
70 would be nonwhite, 30 would be white
90 would be heterosexual, 10 would be homosexual

33 would be Christians
21 would be Moslems
15 would be Hindus
6 would be Buddhists
5 would be Animists
6 would believe in other religions
14 would be without any religion or atheist.

15 would speak Chinese, Mandarin
7 English
6 Hindi
6 Spanish
5 Russian
4 Arabic
3 Bengali
3 Portuguese
The other would speak Indonesian, Japanese,
German, French, or some other language.

In such a village with so many sorts of folks, it would be very important to learn to understand people different from yourself and to accept others as they are. Of the 100 people in this village:

20 are underonurished
1 is dying of starvation, while 15 are overweight.
Of the wealth in this village, 6 people own 59% (all of them from the United States), 74 people own 39%, and 20 people share the remaining 2%.
Of the energy of this village, 20 people consume 80%, and 80 people share the remaining 20%.
20 have no clean, safe water to drink.
56 have access to sanitation
15 adults are illiterate.
1 has an university degree.
7 have computers.

In one year, 1 person in the village will die, but in the same year, 2 babies will be born, so that at the year’s end the number of villagers will be 101.

If you do not live in fear of death by bombardment, armed attack, landmines, or of rape or kidnapping by armed groups, then you are more fortunate than 20, who do.

If you can speak and act according to your faith and your conscience without harassment, imprisonment, torture or death, then you are more fortunate than 48, who can not.

If you have money in the bank, money in your wallet and spare change somewhere around the house, then you are among the richest 8.

If you can read this message, that means you are probably lucky!

(The statistics were derived from Donella Meadows “State of the Village Report” first published in 1990)

“The Original Report“

Be Inspired:14 Year Old Powers his own Home!

Let me introduce you to William Kamkwamba who, despite having no formal education or training, recently engineered and built a windmill to power his house.

After having to drop out of school due to lack of funds, William Kamkwamba decided to learn as much as he could from books that had been donated to his primary school’s library. One of the books detailed how to build a windmill that generated enough electricity.

With much trial and error, some local materials, and an investment of about 16 dollars, William constructed a windmill that could generate enough energy for 4 light bulbs and two radios.  While a few bulbs might sound insignificant to us… the difference changed William’s family’s life entirely. Instead of using expensive paraffin candles, which produce smoke and irritate the eyes, William and his family now use the energy generated by the wind to light up their house. He even went as far to hook up a car battery to use as a backup in case of a non-windy day.

He’s accepting donations to on his website to help pay for his education and he also wants to develop a windmill  to generate enough power to irrigate his village.  This is a very inspiring story!