Friday Green Links – 4/15
I spent waaay too much time this week looking through all the maps and charts in the Urban Land Institute report. Click all the way through to it to check them out yourself.
- Cost of Long Commute Offsets Suburbs’ Bargain Housing – Boston Globe. Exactly! And Cambridge has the absolutely lowest transportation cost of all cities in the Greater Boston area (including Boston itself).
- We Need Birth Control, Not Geoengineering – Grist. Good point. We support Population Services International, which provides contraceptives and other health care to people in developing countries.
- Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash – New York Times. When I think of burning trash I think of my parents doing it in a barrel. (Yes, it’s as bad as you imagine.) I had no idea how clean and efficient it could be.
- Genetically Engineered Crops Are More Environmentally Friendly than Organic Ones – Boston Globe. While this guy is way more combative than necessary, I kind of agree with him. At least, I’ve never read a compelling argument as to why everyone is so terrified of genetically modified food. The closest I’ve come is the fact that a lack of diversity in our food supply is bad, but that’s more of a factory-farm problem than a GMO-problem.
- Full List of the Products I Use in My Own House – The Good Human. I always love looking in other people’s medicine cabinets. And in this case it’s instructive.
- Ask Umbra on Birth Control, Single-Serve Coffee, and Sanitizing Countertops – Grist. She’s right: my IUD is pretty great.
- Which Veggie Burgers Were Made with Neurotoxin? – Mother Jones. Unnecessarily alarmist? Sure. Something to keep in mind? Probably. (Thanks, Jason!)
- Save on Ink, Lose on Paper – Pays to Live Green. As a print geek, I find this really amusing. Apparently Century Gothic font uses less ink.
- Recycling Drop-Off Center – CCTV. A video tour of Cambridge’s Recycling Drop-Off Center. I didn’t even know we could recycle some of these things.
Do these things keep getting longer and longer? Anyway, that’s all for this week. Remember to send along those interesting tidbits you find.
Posted: April 16th, 2010 under links.
Tags: links
Comments
Comment from Brenda Pike
Time April 18, 2010 at 10:44 pm
I see a lot of this being a problem with large corporations rather than the GMO stuff itself. Corporations are even trying to patent people’s genes just because they discovered them. Craziness.
And I totally agree with you on your second point. Even though we can grow enough food for everyone in the world, we don’t distribute it evenly, so how is this going to make a difference?
Comment from Erin aka Conscious Shopper
Time April 17, 2010 at 7:19 pm
I don’t know if you’re including this in the diversity argument against GMOs, but another problem with them is that the companies that create them hold the patent and therefore own the seeds. So farmers can’t save seeds, making them completely dependent on one company, which isn’t a financially good position to be in. Also, if an organic farmer was farming downwind of a GMO farmer and the GMO seeds blew over into the organic farmer’s land, he could lose his organic certification even though it was all nature’s fault.
As for that author’s argument that GMO crops yeild more and are therefore better than organics, conventional ag always makes that same argument that their method is the only one that can feed an ever growing world population, but so far conventional ag hasn’t fed the world, it’s only made Americans fat.
I haven’t been convinced that GMOs are all bad, but the way we’re doing them now is definitely screwed up. I’m more excited about other innovative farming techniques like aquaponics, roof gardens, and vertical gardens.