A word cloud of this week's eKos diary titles:
Welcome to the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for green diaries and series.
Beneath the fold you will find announcements, today's eco-diary roundup, news, a letter from WarrenS (he has many), and our environmental pic of the day.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter!
Today's editor: patrickz
Announcements
Upcoming Diaries
ECSTASY today @ 1 PM EDT by rb137
I'm going to talk about conscious consuming and taking action toward regulating conflict metals can impact the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I will give a brief description of the issues at hand, and will offer suggestions for action.
There are many other eco-series, some of which should be posting today:
(All times Eastern!)
Magnifico has a series on the Gulf Oil Disaster and RLMiller has SeaScum - on the reaction to the Oilpocalypse by some pretty horrible politicians. Crashing Vor has been writing about the impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf Coast.
To advertise in this space, e-mail your user handle, diary title, posting time, and a little blurb to ekos350atgmaildotcom.
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Today's eco-diaries:
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Yesterday's diaries:
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Listed diaries do not necessarily represent the views of the eKos editors and rangers.
Note: We will be keeping an archive of the listed diaries. You can access it here.
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News and Notes
Gibbs: Time for energy bill is ‘more ripe’ than ever from The Hill
While Senator Lindsey Graham pouts, Kerry and Lieberman are rolling out their version of climate legislation this Wednesday. It appears that the White House is on board:
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Friday disputed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) claim that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill should prompt a pause in efforts to advance energy and climate legislation.
Gibbs noted that gasoline prices -- which typically rise with the onset of summer -- will create a “very public impetus” for legislation. Gibbs also told reporters that the spill shows that “with what you see is going on in the Gulf, you understand that drilling and drilling alone isn’t going to solve our energy problems.”
“So I think, quite honestly, the time is . . . more ripe than it ever, in all honesty, has been,” Gibbs said.
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New Study Ranks Countries on Environmental Impact from Science Daily
Environmental impact by nation. Darker greys denote larger impact, and worst twenty nations are labeled. Top is proportional to available resources, and bottom is in absolute terms.
A new study looking at global environmental impact of nations has been published:
In absolute global terms, the 10 countries with the worst environmental impact are (in order, worst first): Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru.
The indicators used were natural forest loss, habitat conversion, fisheries and other marine captures, fertiliser use, water pollution, carbon emissions from land use and species threat.
The conclusions drawn from the study are not what Republicans (or Bjorn Lomborg) want to hear:
"We correlated rankings against three socio-economic variables (human population size, gross national income and governance quality) and found that total wealth was the most important explanatory variable - the richer a country, the greater its average environmental impact," Professor Bradshaw said.
There was no evidence to support the popular idea that environmental degradation plateaus or declines past a certain threshold of per capital wealth (known as the Kuznets curve hypothesis).
"There is a theory that as wealth increases, nations have more access to clean technology and become more environmentally aware so that the environmental impact starts to decline. This wasn't supported," he said.
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Coral and Global Warming: Diversity in Some Coral Populations May Affect Their Survival from Science Daily
Reef scenic by CasaDeQueso
Coral reefs support abundant biodiversity and provide ecosystem services like coastline protection and fisheries. Sadly, they are disappearing due to human activities. The causes are numerous, but global warming is likely to be the biggest threat. A new study investigates how the species of symbiotic algae effects coral resilience:
Corals form symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae in order to survive. The algae provide the corals with nutrients and energy, while the corals provide the algae with nutrients and a place to live. According to the scientists, this delicate symbiosis is sensitive to changes in the environment, and especially to changes in temperature. "A change in sea-surface temperature of just a few degrees above the summer high or below the winter low can cause many coral-algal symbioses to break down and the algae to be expelled," said Mark Warner, an associate professor of marine biosciences at the University of Delaware and one of the team's leaders. This process is known as bleaching because it leaves behind the translucent animal tissue and the white skeleton underneath.
The scientists -- which include Todd LaJeunesse, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State University, and Hector Reyes-Bonilla, a professor at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur -- found that corals harboring certain species of symbiotic algae survived a severe cold-water event that took place in 2008 in the Gulf of California (eastern Pacific Ocean), while corals harboring a different species of algae died.
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A Letter from WarrenS:
WarrenS made a New Year's Resolution to write a letter advocating climate action every day. The result is over one hundred letters to congresspeople, newspapers, President Obama, and more. Warren has even been published in the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Before we get to today's piece, Warren has an important message:
To anyone who feels like writing a letter...
...please (please!) visit my site. Find a letter or letters that suit your taste. There's music, too, not to mention India photoblogging and a bunch of other good stuff (like a funny piece about hippies).
Rearrange the sentences, reverse the order of the clauses, substitute some synonyms, tweak some analogies and call it yours.
That's how I write mine; the actual work of finding and presenting the information is done for the most part by e-kossacks like A Siegel, RL Miller, Patrickz, DWG and many others. I steal their stuff, mess with it a little bit, and sign my name to it.
As Brahms said, "Mediocre composers plagiarize. Great composers steal." Dare to be great! Steal my stuff!
In today's letter, WarrenS praises the Washington Post for a recent editorial, while admonishing them for past op-eds (see A Siegel's diary):
The Post is to be commended for its editorial rebuking the Virginia Attorney General for his anti-science demagoguery. Ken Cuccinelli’s bogus crusade against climate scientists will undermine the reputation of the state’s many excellent universities, along with making it much more difficult for them to recruit professors and students. And, of course, as you correctly note, Cuccinelli has “declared war on reality.”
It’s good to see the Washington Post siding with science, which has been taking quite a beating recently. Unacknowledged in your editorial is the fact that the Post has been extremely active in confusing the debate over the validity of climate science, publishing the misleading and deceptive work of people like George Will, Bjorn Lomborg, Sarah Palin, Robert Samuelson, and Dana Milbank, among others. Dare we hope for a change in the Post’s editorial approach to the gravest existential threat humanity has ever faced — or is Friday’s editorial just a cameo appearance by actual reality-based thinking?
WarrenS
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Environmental Pic of the Day
Recycled mobile phones and cans by Phil Greaney
Today's photo highlights the Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet public art project:
Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet, is a public art exhibition designed to raise awareness of solutions to climate change. Cool Globes grew out of a commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, and was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2006. Since that time, Cool Globes premiered in Chicago and went on tour across the country from Washington DC to San Francisco, San Diego, Sundance, Los Angeles and Houston. In the fall of 2009, Cool Globes opened the first international exhibit in Copenhagen. We currently have globes on display at Science World in Vancouver, and are planning exhibits in Geneva and Marseilles. It is our hope that the millions of people who have experienced the exhibit, leave with a vast array of solutions to climate change, and with one clear message....we can solve this.
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About eKos
The Idea
This project was inspired by the Earth Day @ DKos Blogathon. In case you missed it, we had 31 participating environmental diaries, all of which were linked to in the Mothership. During the event we had several requests for an eco-mothership diary series in the mould of the Earth Day effort.
The Mission
eKos is all about promoting community eco-diaries. Daily Kos already showcases several series, but sometimes the work of dedicated green diarists pass off the recent diary list hardly noticed. Our goal is to make these diaries more accessible. In the process we hope to build community and bring in a broader audience to the exceptional environmental writing here at DK.
eKos Schedule
For now, look for us M-W-F-Su in the AM.
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If you want a diary included in the list, please let us know by leaving a comment. We'll do our best to search out green diaries, but are bound to miss a few. For eKos to live up to it's full potential, eco-diarists will need to post a link to the mothership at the end of their diary. This will provide readers with easy access to other recent environmental diaries.
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