DAVID HEYMANN
Professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin

In the summer of 1999, I received a call from Laura Bush. She and then-governor George Bush wanted a design for a house that would blend into the landscape of an extraordinary piece of land they had just purchased in Crawford, Texas. We talked at length about environmental systems, and Laura was clear at the outset that they wanted to do everything possible to protect the land. It is exceptionally beautiful, with deep bluffs, streams and stands of native live oak.

The house is designed to use a quarter to a third of the energy of a normal house its size. With some modification, it could run entirely off the grid. There are dozens of features that contribute,

ROCKY ANDERSON
Mayor of Salt Lake City

In Salt Lake City, we've been able to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in our municipal operations by 31 percent in four years. We've eliminated 143 cars from the city's light vehicle fleet, and replaced 41 SUVs with smaller, more efficient cars. By retrofitting all city and county buildings with compact fluorescent bulbs, we save the city $33,000 a year. We then invest one third of that in wind power, making Salt Lake City the state's largest purchaser of wind power. We also changed all the city's traffic lights from incandescent bulbs to LED lights, which saves about $50,000 a year in electricity while also reducing annual carbon emissions by 500 tons. Those are just a few small, easy changes that net

THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, PH.D.
President of H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and The Environment

The ocean's food chain is at risk
We were one of the first to call attention to the acidification of the oceans. The oceans take up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. A portion of that carbon gets turned into carbonic acid, so that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans become. The oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It's the most chilling change I've seen in my professional career. If it continues, tiny organisms at the base of the food chain will have their shells dissolve while the animals are still alive. It will

ANDY RUBEN
Vice President for Sustainability, Wal-Mart

New stores will use less energy
Hurricane Katrina was a big turning point for us. It showed us that we've got a role we can play that might be greater than we realized. Two years later, we have prototype stores-the first is in Kansas City, Mo. It uses LED lighting in the freezers, and a heating and cooling system without a fan. That store uses 20 percent less energy than a store we'd have opened in 2005. One product we're promoting heavily are compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. They account for only 5 percent of light-bulb sales, but at Wal-Mart we've been redoing our aisles to make CFLs more visible. Today 20 or 30 percent of the light-bulb aisles will be CFLs, mostly at eye

DAVID STANGIS
Director of Corporate Responsibility, Intel

Being green is just good business
As the largest chip manufacturer worldwide, Intel has been leading the area of environmental excellence for decades. For us, being green is just part of the way we do business. One thing that plays to our advantage is that our manufacturing process essentially gets refreshed every few years. We can anticipate that, so instead of having to retrofit facilities, we've applied a philosophy of design for environmental health and safety that projects eight to 10 years down the road. With each step we take in successive generations of the chip, we employ different manufacturing recipes every two years. So when we went from the eight-inch wafer to the 12-inch

Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

Europe is propping up an unsustainable industry in an extreme example of short-termism that our children will pay for
by George Monbiot

All over the world, protesters are engaged in a heroic battle with reality. They block roads, picket fuel depots, throw missiles and turn over cars in an effort to hold it at bay. The oil is running out and governments, they insist, must do something about it. When they've sorted it out, what about the fact that the days are getting shorter? What do we pay our taxes for?

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world's fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan, and demonstrating in scores of maritime

Published on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle

We Are Doomed! Sort Of!

Earth in crisis, food and water increasingly scarce, people freaking out. Should you join them?

by Mark Morford

It would be nice to think much of the ugliness is coming to an end.

It would be lovely to imagine the era of brutal Earth-mauling technologies, coal extraction and petroleum and industrial agriculture and strip mining and clear cutting and industrial fishing and all rest, all the more rapacious and unforgiving notions of how we exist on this planet are, after an era of unchecked capitalistic greed and waste and over-consumption right along with almost zero concern for consequences and the ethics of sustainability, finally moving toward

Rainwater harvesting with multiple barrels (http://www.kidsfromkanata.org/~kfk/files/rainbarrels.html)

I'm dependent on water and I'm hooked on barrels. With one installed, I just had to have more. I added another, and another. Now I have seven connected barrels. This system of barrels, pipes and fittings has a water holding capacity of 350 gallons. The potential capacity is limited only by space available. The system supplies all of our outdoor watering needs in the summer, spring and fall, and also feeds a solar shower which is regularly used once the weather warms up. This is a good system for anyone who wants to optimize save and use rainwater, but doesn't have the resources or inclination to install a cistern and pump.

The first barrel

By Bruce Friedrich

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages - along with an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants - vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without further ado are PETA's picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the

"The global effects of meat consumption don't stop on land. Agriculture also requires water consumption, and animal agriculture is no exception. Animal production consumes an amount of water roughly equivalent to all other uses of water in the United States combined. Besides grains, animals need water to survive and grow until they are slaughtered. One pound of beef requires an input of approximately 2500 gallons of water, whereas a pound of soy requires 250 gallons of water and a pound of wheat only 25 gallons. Meat production is inefficient as it requires the consumption of an extensive amount of resources over many months and years before becoming a usable food product. With the water used to produce a single hamburger, you could take a

Published on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
It's the Meat-Eating, Stupid
by Bill Berry

How's this for a timely quote: "(It) was the year I decided to find out why people were hungry in the world. The experts were telling us that the population problem was the cause of scarcity. The truth was, we were feeding a third of the world's grain to livestock, and with little return."

That was Frances Moore Lappe, author of "Diet for a Small Planet." The year was 1968.

Since then, meat consumption around the world has risen exponentially. As with our thirst for oil, Americans lead the way when it comes to chomping animal flesh, and by a long shot. As the public dialogue reels over the question of food vs. fuel, it's a

Technology provides us with some answers to the environmental challenges we are facing. Hybrid technologies have recently made it to the auto market, promising more fuel efficient transportation and less greenhouse emissions. Hydrogen fuels are a very promising alternative to the dirty energies we are using today. Ultra-clean and unlimited, it is the fuel of the future.

Renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, wind and thermal energies and future renewables we can't imagine yet, promise to someday replace the dirty energy coal burning power plants used throughout the world today, maybe sooner than later for the residential communities.

Although technological advancement does have promises, it does not and will not get us out of

Sustainability? I don't believe there is such a thing anymore. If we were to sustain our current rates of consumption, habitat destruction, emissions, etc. the Earth's biosphere will collapse within a century.

The concept of sustainability at this point is flawed. It is now not a matter of "sustainability", it is a matter of retreat. We need to drastically reduce consumption, drastically reduce emissions, halt all critical habitat destruction, reduce an exponentially growing human population, end industrial pollution, end the expense of war in both monetarily and human life, and educate the world.

We need to rebuild a vast network of environmental habitats linked continuously throughout continents. We need to dive headlong into clean

Our consumerism is not on a future collision course with the biosphere, it collided the day consumerism was defined and implemented as the economic standard and unit of measure for success. The theory and practice itself is based off a system that is so obviously unsustainable that a grade school student has enough knowledge to label it foolish and ignorant.

We have collided as a species with our only home and are in the process of following through. Sustainability will become our new measuring tool but only in the sense that it dances in relation to consumption. We need to look at our planet and life a different way. Everything we need to survive and flourish is abundantly available to us as long as we work within the confines of common

"Given that we sit atop the food chain, nothing preys on us so there's nothing to stop our growth."

This is simply a major fallacy of our very ecologically fallacious culture. There is NO ‘top' to the food chain!

In fact, evolutionary tendency is from carnivorous to omnivorous where we see some plant eating capabilities, to exclusive plant eating capabilities and then further specialization (such as the bovine specialized stomach) adding an ability to digest much more commonly available foodstuffs, grasses.

If one looks with an accurate ecological lens, one sees that ecology itself moves towards dietary specializations that can support great herds, meaning larger and larger population numbers... and it turns out, these greater numbers are