I Am Still Alive

Mark Bittman on overfishing and farm-raised fish.

“These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many poor and not-so-poor people throughout the world. (And even by many American travelers who enjoy grilled sardines in England, fried anchovies in Spain, marinated mackerel in France and pickled or raw herring in Holland – though they mostly avoid them at home.)

But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back – dead – as “bycatch.”)

“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,” said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.”

Possibly a bit over the top – seemingly obssessed as he is with odor – but McIntosh makes good points and it’s a refreshing change of tone from the onslaught of (also great) TED talks we see everywhere.

In this talk I will speak in reference to my new book, “Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition.”

I consider that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem that faces us. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. Western societies and many others influenced by it have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and as part of it, the motivational manipulation of marketing.

The Bright Idea Shade is a project of the Eyebeam OpenLab, by Sustainability Action Group. We are converting all of our silver tipped incandescent bulbs into CFL bulbs (as they burn out.) The problem is a bare CFL bulb gives off very harsh light. So we set about designing a lampshade for the bulbs. We took several existing designs and customized the design to fit a CFL bulb, built it out of heat resistant photo diffuser material, found a diffuser material that could be laser cut, and built a laser cutter template.

The Bright Idea Shade is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

First came across Joel Tauber’s work in this most recent Log magazine – issue 12 (good issue by the way).

I have fallen in love with a tree in the middle of a gigantic parking lot. I cannot really explain how this happened, but love is a hard thing to explain. The tree is not something that most people notice, except as a source of shade for their cars. Yet, somehow – on a beautiful summer day in June 2005—I was drawn to the beauty of this forsaken California Sycamore tree, stuck in the middle of Rose Bowl parking lot K. I was touched by how lonely it was, and I was outraged by the many indignities it suffered.

Thinking about contrails after seeing air travel over a 24-hour period

The grounding of planes for three days in the United States after September 11, 2001 provided a rare opportunity for scientists to study the effects of contrails on climate forcing. Measurements showed that without contrails, the local diurnal temperature range (difference of day and night temperatures) was about 1 degree Celsius higher than immediately before.