Seven Generational Ruminations

Silent Forest is a documentary about proposed deployment of genetically modified trees into forests. The documentary makes a warning that the pollen from these trees will intermingle with the pollen from other trees and dangers will result. Maybe this is fearism speaking but there are principles involved here which are being violated. The forests do provide a vital benefit to all the species of the world, because to a large extent the forests are the lungs of the earth. Without plant life converting carbon dioxide back to oxygen, we'd all be suffocating to death.

I am pleased to announce that I am now associated with examiner.com covering Green Transportation. This is a blogging job in that examiner.com is a group blog site covering a huge range of topics. I am happy that examiner.com has several people writing about 'Green' issues.

Washing the clothes is one of those core required energy and resource intensive things we do. Modern washing machines use a lot of water and electricity, as well as chemicals (laundry detergent) that may be creating unwanted environmental effects.

Today I received a proxy vote solicitation. Since I own many different stock investments I routinely get these and put them almost immediately in the recycling. The proxy votes usually seem futile. Typically they only allow you to vote on a slate of board members and maybe one or two other things like compensation packages or increasing the number of shares or other equally uninspiring questions to vote on.

See: http://www.youtube.com/homeproject and http://www.home-2009.com/

GoodPlanet Fundation : http://www.goodplanet.org/en

The TTXGP is a Grand Prix race featuring zero emission motorcycles. It's first run was today, June 12, 2009, as part of the overall TT races on the Isle of Man. The TT races have existed for over 100 years and is a 37 mile course spread out over the island. It's a very demanding race that has long been a proving ground for advancing motorcycle technology. For the first time electric motorcycles are competing on the race course with an eye to using this venue to advance the state of the art of zero emission vehicles.

There are lots of known solutions to the negative effects of the technologies currently being used. Unfortunately there are several kinds of resistance to deploying the known better technologies. For instance the purveyors of existing technologies would feel threatened by new green technologies, and try to fight against adoption. One of the patterns I see are comments about a technology saying approximately "that's not really green because of <fill in the blank>".

Normally I write about technology but the recent murder of Dr. Tiller is on my mind. Since I don't own or watch TV, I get secondhand the things said by various TV news hosts such as Bill O'Reilly. Repeatedly I see them quoted saying the most outlandish hateful untolerant things about specific people. In Why is Tiller's alleged killer doing press conferences? O'Reilly calls Dr. Tiller "Tiller the Killer" and expresses a hope to kill Dr. Tiller.

Lately I've been looking at Urban Farming and Locavore websites and am thinking about food safety issues. A Locavore loves locally grown food so much they actively gardening and distributing food locally. An Urban Farm is, well, farming activity in an urban setting. It wasn't so long ago that cities had farming activity within city borders, unlike today where farms are far away.

I think most people aren't aware of the full cost of filling the tank on their car. Do they ponder the environmental disasters which go along with drilling for, transporting, refining and using oil? Fossil oil is full of nasty poisonous chemicals and the whole process from well to wheel involves releasing those nasty poisonous chemicals into the environment. Some are released at the well, some during transport, some during refining, and some during use. It's poisoning us all. But there are some places which are more poisoned than others.