Monthly Archive July 31, 2006

GreenSprings Natural Cemetery

Life is filled with choices. Many of them are daily, some are monumental, others take us in new directions. We use our decision-making skills to forecast positive end-results for our own lives and the people around us. Choices, however, are not limited to the mortal coil–we can also make choices now that will decide our impact on the planet well after we’re gone.

I’m not talking about wills or trust funds, but more your organic relationship with the planet. In the United States, most people lean towards traditional burial: a nice casket, flowers, tombstone, concrete vault, and a small plot. We intentionally exit the planet in much the same way we lived on it; above nature. People readily embrace the notion of ‘dust-to-dust’, but then fail to let that very act occur. Do you believe that air tight vault with the air tight coffin is going to preserve your body? And what the hell are you preserving it for? Is it vanity? Is it fear? Are you thinking that someone might open you back up one day and you’ll be embarrassed by what they see? Since most of the world believes the human body is simply a container for something larger (think: soul), why worry about what happens to it? Why spend thousands on beautiful wood that’s placed in the ground? Why bother with expensive accessories and adorations?

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How Starbucks Could Have Saved The World?

Starbucks talks the talk but can they walk the walk?  “Beginning to use post-consumer recycled-content hot-beverage cups is an important milestone for Starbucks in addressing the environmental impact associated with our paper-buying practices,” said Jim Donald, Starbucks chief executive officer.

Yesterday I listened to a four-minute radio story about the new Starbucks coffee cup.  Apparently as the company became successful in the 1990’s, more and more customers developed a wasteful habit known as double cupping.  Customers started using a second paper cup to keep the hot liquid in the first paper cup from burning their hands.  It sounds like a simple solution to the problem of carrying around a scalding hot beverage.   The practice however instantly doubled the amount of waste created by drinking Starbucks coffee not to mention the additional trees and energy necessary to make all those second cups.  The company began looking for an environmentally sensitive solution back in 1996.  It came up with a sleeve made from 60% post consumer recycled paper.  However, the hunt for the prefect coffee cup continued.

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America’s Big Fat Oil Problem?

Why is America trying to treat its oil dependence problem like it is trying to solve its weight problem?

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Americans are getting fat. This is not breaking news. I myself could spare to shed a few pounds. As I began the endeavor to lose weight and get in better physical shape, I began to see the corollaries between how the American public attempts to shed pounds and the way that we are trying to solve our dependency on oil.

First off, lets look our “oil addiction”. We are addicted to oil and its derivatives: gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc., as much as we are addicted to corn and all its derivatives: corn chips, cereals, and the vast amounts of high fructose corn syrup hidden in our foods. Both are very abundant in the US. Gasoline may be expensive, but it is highly available. We have built our society around the excess availability of both food and oil products. Many areas, we know, cannot be accessed without a vehicle now, and one can find very few towns who have not been afflicted by the homogenizing effect of fast food restaurants and national food brands.

Many great minds have written recently on the energy crisis and the obesity epidemic that faces our nation, lets just stipulate that.

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