Recently in Green living Category

Despite efforts to encourage the use of smaller cars, Americans still seem to like their larger ones:

President Barack Obama's White House has unveiled new fuel-efficiency rules that will push auto companies into making more small cars and General Motors and Chrysler -- both heavily associated with large vehicles -- have sunk into bankruptcy.

But don't expect many dents in the Sport Utility Vehicle fan club.

Cities like Houston, where driving is at the heart of the daily routine, are proof of the American love affair with the big car. [...]

For many Americans, the choice between buying an SUV or a fuel-efficient hybrid seems to be about meeting family demands of carpools and soccer games.

"There's still an SUV market in Texas," said Michael Wolf, a salesman at Sterling McCall Toyota, beside a bustling highway where 20,000 people commute to Houston from the suburb of Sugar Land every day. "There are all those families with two and three kids down in Sugar Land."

Now, I don't think having two or three children automatically means you need an SUV, though in our family it does mean a minivan. When the girls were younger, we found out that you can't put three car seats in the back seat of a sedan; even when we didn't need car seats anymore we did need room for kids plus groceries or luggage.

But I've heard from a family with four young children, and I know of families with five or more--and more and more they're feeling like not only the push for smaller cars, but environmental practices in general, are leaving them far behind.

Growing up in a large family, I learned a lot of environmentally-friendly habits without even knowing it. Clothing was handed down from child to child; toys were purchased in smaller quantities and shared with everybody; waste, whether of food or of materials or supplies or even of things like toilet paper or electricity (yes, Dad, I listened!) was strongly discouraged, on the basis of the financial, if not the environmental, impact of such practices. Frivolous consumerism in general was something we just didn't do--we ate out less frequently than other families, my mom planned her shopping trips instead of running to the store on a near-daily basis, and we practiced thrift and frugality before we even knew what those words meant.

Today, though, families with more than two or three children are increasingly being made to feel as though they're automatically penalized by some of the green efforts out there. Large families already know they're counter-cultural, and they deal with hostility and derision from strangers every time they go out in public as a family; but now they're being treated like polluters just because they have more than the culturally acceptable number of children.

Keep reading:

Heads up, NYC readers! Nate writes from the city to inform me of a wonderful event going on Tuesday night:

The Peace of Wild Things (April 22, 8pm - Christ and St. Stephens Church 120 W. 69th St) An Earth Day celebration of farmer/poet Wendell Berry.

Berry lives, writes and farms in north Kentucky. His poetry contains poignant and timely themes of nature and the self, faith, war, politics and memory. This concert highlights composers who have been inspired by Berry's words adding passion and beauty to his elegant statements. The performers are Emily Albrink, soprano; Steven Ebel, tenor; Wilson Southerland, piano; with violinist Mitchell Johnson and cellist Malina Rauschenfels. Featured composers are Ben Yarmolinsky, Forrest Pierce and Scott Gendel with world premieres by Steven Ebel, William George and Larry Nickel. ($20) www.newmusicnewyork.com.

Tickets are $20 at the door for each event or For reservations, call (917) 991 5648 or email newmusicnewyork@aol.com. This is the first of three concerts in the New Music New York 2008 Festival Season a $40 season pass will be available at this concert for more info on the other concert, please see www.newmusicnewyork.com.

Go! And if you're planning on going, maybe you'll want to mention it in the comboxes so y'all can meet up if you like. Wish I could be there.

God bless B'rer Douthat for leading a charge against those horrible compact fluorescent lightbulbs. How I hate them! They give off pale, headache-imparting light that basically reminds one of salamander vomit. I'm going to have to stockpile regular bulbs like my mom stockpiled classic Coke once the Coca-Cola company announced its ill-fated New Coke.

Naturally, Ross sees the political potential in an anti-CFL campaign:

Fortunately, there's no way the American people will stand for this. The tree of liberty must be refreshed by the excess mercury from compact fluorescent light bulbs! Maybe this will be the issue that catapults a Huckabee-Jindal ticket into the White House in 2012 ...

Oh, I am so on board...

Frank Furedi, the left-wing English writer, cautions us to calm the heck down:

Public figures appear to have lost the capacity to reassure or lead people. Instead, they frequently opt for evoking frightening futuristic scenarios where the line between fiction and reality become unclear. In every respect, the sensibility that underpins public debate today can be described as a ‘crisis of nerve’. This crisis over the future coexists with a powerful sense of disorientation about the status and worth of the human species itself. Increasingly, humanity is represented as the biggest problem on the planet, rather than as the harbinger of a better future.

In response to the growing influence of misanthropy, Pope Benedict XVI, in his message for World Peace Day on 1 January 2008, felt the need to remind his audience that ‘respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man’. That the Pope felt it was necessary to remind people of the unique status of the human species is telling indeed; it shows that we really do live in an era when most leaders find it difficult to believe in anything other than a scary future, and where it takes a Pope to remind them that humans are actually quite special.

One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. Take the global credit crunch unleashed by the sub-prime home loan crisis this year for instance.

In terms of its material impact, this was arguably the most significant event of the year. After more than a decade of economic stability, the world economy faces the threat of a major recession with important implications for people’s lives. This threat may not make an exciting plot for a sci-fi movie, but it has a direct bearing on the quality of life of millions of people. It also raises important questions about an economic system that is so heavily reliant on using fictitious capital to reproduce itself. Unfortunately, however, today’s future-frightened public debate about economics seems more interested in finding ways to transform capitalism into a carbon-free, green-leaning system than in discussing the steps we need to take to minimise the destructive impact of a global recession on people’s lives and aspirations.

Pope Benedict is not on the climate-change bandwagon, saying that policy should be made on sound science, not pseudo-religious environmentalist beliefs. That's hard to disagree with, but is the scientific consensus on climate change really all that unsound? Really?