Results tagged “sustainability”

During the long Q&A session after his Seattle Arts and Lectures talk, Gary Snyder was asked about climate change and everyone in Benaroya Hall mentally leaned in to hear. "I don't worry about it," said Snyder, taking the opportunity to mention that he thought about climate change in chunks of geologic time, 200 million years or so. There used to be palm trees in Greenland, he pointed out, and while we Pleistocene refugees may be freaked out at losing our glaciers, it's fair to say the world has warmed up more than this before.

While Nike and Starbucks get applause for their leadership in sustainability--especially Nike, which joined Johnson & Johnson in publicly scolding the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its opposition to global warming legislation--Sightline wonders why Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing aren't putting their lobbying efforts where their corporate climate policies are. "Google has," says Sightline's Fahey, twisting the green knife (our italics), and linking to a video of Google's Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, testifying to Congress. Her point is, "Standing on the sidelines of the debate in the state legislatures and in Congress can be as damaging as standing in the way."

For a while we were nursing the small hope that Peter Steinbrueck might make Mayor Nickels' rerun election interesting, but Joni Balter at the Times has snatched that from us: "Steinbrueck will be spending the first of the next four years in Cambridge, Mass. He landed a prestigious urban design fellowship at Harvard University, as he says, 'researching the politics, principles and plan for urban sustainability of U.S. cities.''' What is it with Harvard stealing our mayors, anyway? (H/t to Publicola)

After a massively successful 21-year run, the Northwest Flower & Garden Show--the third largest flower and garden show in North America--is calling it quits.

Your old ride may be more eco than you know. Microsoft's green guru Rob Bernard crunched the numbers and found that a 2001 Volvo was the most energy efficient vehicle for him to drive. Take that, Prius pious. Businesses can now get the company's carbon calculatin' dashboard which is cool, but you'd think that first they'd find a way to let more employees work from home. Oops, did we just type that?

Danny Westneat has 50 percent of a good column in the Seattle Times about adapting our hyperconsumptive ways to something we can all live with. But he tries to hang it on the "hypermiler" hook, a buzzword which "means going to extremes—in changing your habits as well as your technology—so you can max out your gas mileage."

SWEDISH SUGAR POP: Swedish songstress Lykke Li returns to Seattle to vamp and stamp and otherwise sex up her blend of hook-tastic bubblegum and Euro-artsong. Here's her video for her single "Little Bit," but we warn you that after listening to it, you will fall deeply in love with the very next person you see. That only lasts about 15 minutes, but trust us, it can get awkward. High-energy Britpop/electronica group Friendly Fires opens. This is definitely a dance-friendly evening.

While we were in Iceland last week, we had the thrill of paying $7.50/gal for diesel, which means a half tank for our Land Cruiser rental pegged the needle at $75. That helps us keep this news from AAA in perspective: the average price of a gallon of gas in Washington is $3.13. It's dropped 63 cents the past month, thanks in part to people not buying the stuff because it costs too much. But Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry has just put up a post talking about how this volatility in price isn't helping us set a firm course away from oil addiction.

Sightline's Alan Durning has a good post on the connection between spikes in gas prices and recessions. It's very topical on a day that the Dow exhibited tremendous volatility, gaining 936 points. Our economic pulse is shocky, and Durning argues that at least in part its because high oil prices "sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the US economy" the last five years. It's this economic suffocation--not just from gas at the pump, but from jumps in manufacturing and shipping costs--that's led people to fail to pay all those mortgages they could barely afford. Meet the pit bull of vicious circles.

This story reminds us of a line from The Beatles' "Taxman". The fact that it's illegal to collect too much rain that falls on your property because of state water laws seems just as ridiculous as the idea of the government taxing your feet to walk. But these are strange times, friends, because in Washington, the rain that falls is property of the state and up to them to regulate.

In one of those mysterious black-is-white, up-is-down occurrences, Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council's Richard Conlin have in unison agreed to push for a $0.20 per paper-or-plastic bag fee at grocery and convenience stores and drugstores. While we're still trying to figure out what the vision is, we're aware that paying for bags bugs the hell out of a lot of people.

For the first time in Seattlest's life, we're actually bemoaning the fact that we don't have any tank tops in our closet. Heck, this is probably the first time we've ever thought about not owning a tank top. Not having one puts a serious crimp in our plans to go to Sustainable Capitol Hill's Tank Tops to Totes this Saturday at Stitches on Capitol Hill. (We don't think Sustainable Capitol Hill has a Web site. If they do, we can't find it.)

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.

While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the good fight isn't all economic upside. We're going to have to do more with less.