Flash Mob against Plastic Bottles

Oh, if only all of our individual environmental actions could get this sort of response.

Clever video that will help you practice your French and that really deserves an award for its social and environmental commentary. Watch it. Share it. Recycle it.

(Thanks to Kaca for sending it my way. )

Don't forget: our next film night is this Thursday at 7pm in CAS B-36 where we'll be showing the documentary Home. Come at 645 for delicious vegan pizza (saying a lot coming from a carnivore) from Allston's Peace o' Pie.

15 Random Things you Can Do to Promote Positive Environmental Change

1. Write to the US Post Office and tell them that a 12-inch long receipt for a book of stamps is wasteful and ask them to improve.

2. Find an environmental blog and write comments on several of its posts. Share its cool posts on your Facebook page.

3. Combat the disinformation promoted by the Koch brothers by supporting the work of Robert Greenwald.

4. Write to the Giving Pledge and thank the billionaires for giving their wealth to philanthropic causes (seriously). Ask them to support ways to improve the lives of the global poor (who live in resource-rich countries) and ways to reduce the consumption of the global rich (who live in comparatively resource-poor countries). While you’re at it, ask them to support programs that will educate women, because educated women have fewer children and we desperately need to halt our rapid population growth. (The site seems to be mostly for media inquiries, but hey if millions of people wrote in with their suggestions, maybe some of that would get communicated to those with the big wallets.)

5. Write to your congressperson and ask him/her to introduce legislation that will add one dollar to all US income taxes. Propose that the $130 million dollars raised be used to protect watersheds, protect national parks and the land around them, and to educate citizens on the importance of biodiversity.

6. Support Planned Parenthood.

7. Volunteer to be a distributor to the Endangered Species Condom Project

8. Write op-eds for religious newspapers and magazines and tell them to promote birth control. It’s going to be a lot easier to sustain seven billion people than nine billion, which is the projection for mid-century.

9. Change all your bills to e-bills.

10. Research some plant-a-tree for a dollar sites and plant ten trees. Or twenty. Summarize your research for some environmental blogs or Facebook pages.

11. Support the in-progress documentary, Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth. Let’s face it, the planet is finite and unlimited growth is unsustainable.

12. Calculate your ecological footprint and pledge to reduce it.

13. Find an eco-hero and publicize his/her work.

14. Join the Ecolympics. Get your friends to join. Like us on Facebook, comment on our blogs posts. Share them. Come on our nature walk, come to our cooking class, and come to our film nights. Check our calendar for events.

15. Write to us with other suggestions for our next installment of random ways to promote positive environmental change.

A plague of frogs -- and other invasive species

If you're been reading at all about biodiversity loss, you know that there are five main causes to the present crisis, all of which are human-induced: habitat fragmentation, pollution, over-exploitation, introduction of invasive species and climate change. You may know that the dodo didn't go extinct because it was poorly adapted to its environment on the island of Mauritius; it went extinct because it was over-hunted by sailors and because the introduced rats, pigs, dogs and cats ate its eggs, which were laid on the ground.

Here's a list of 10 other species introductions that have gone awry, a reminder that we really don't understand ecosystems very well.

Five Reasons to Join the Ecolympics

The title says it all. We've got a challenge for you -- join us! Let's all become more aware of our consumptive habits and reduce our footprint on the environment. Check it out below and then go to our webpage and sign-up. You'll be competing for Team Earth -- and maybe you'll win a prize!

Ecolympics Film Night II: Crude

In case I don't have time to say more about the film, I want to at least post the trailer. Voted by the National Board of Review as one of the top five documentaries of 2009, Crude tells "the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion "Amazon Chernobyl" lawsuit pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against the US oil giant Chevron."

Continued from the film jacket: "Winner of 19 International Awards, Crude takes you inside a riveting, high stakes drama steeped in global politics, the environmental movement, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, multinational corporate power, and rapidly disappearing indigenous cultures."

We're showing this documentary tomorrow, March 24 at 7pm in CAS B-36.
Please come at 645 pm to enjoy some vegan pizza.

The trailer is below:

Guess the Endangered Species II

The pictured species is a species of wild goat that is found in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indian, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They flock together in groups of nine females and their young while the males are solitary. They were formerly prized as an elusive and difficult game animal to hunt in British India, it is now hunted in several countries for the supposed medicinal qualities of its horns. There are now approximately 2500 mature individuals and the numbers have declined 20% in two generations.

The species is:


Answer to come next week.

Last week’s species was the margay, which barely beat out the Mexican bobcat for top place in the poll. It is remarkably similar in appearance and closely related to the ocelot. The other animals in the list were all also endangered. The vaquita is a porpoise. Thanks for playing!

The Last Lions

Imagine Africa without lions. Unthinkable. It's like imagining the ocean without whales, the arctic without polar bears, or the Antarctic without penguins. Sadly, this could become a reality. Though the lion is not listed as endangered yet, its numbers are plummeting rapidly enough to cause alarm. In the past century, the lion population has decreased from about 100,000 to around 23,000. (Some estimates have the lion population as high as 400,000 a century ago, and up to 40,000 today.) They have already become extinct in 26 countries and have a population of greater than 1000 in only 7 countries.

This month, several wildlife conservation groups, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Born Free USA petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to have the lion listed under the Endangered Species Act. But wait. Lions don't live in the US, they live in Africa -- how could they be listed in the USA?

Answer: the groups leading the petition point out that between 1999 and 2008, Americans imported 4,021 lion trophies. In fact, this country is the largest importer of lion trophies and lion parts in the world. Placing lions on the endangered species list would prohibit the import of lion trophies. Though lions are also suffering from the typical problems threatening species today -- habitat destruction due to human encroachment and clearing land for agriculture -- halting the lion hunt would clearly help their situation. The US could then become a leader in protecting lions, though here are no wild lions in this country.

If you want to see lions in action, catch the National Geographic feature film, The Last Lions, now in theatres. It aint The Lion King, that's for sure. In the film, Ma Di Tao, the mother of three cubs, loses her mate and must protect and raise her cubs herself. The cineamatographers got some riveting footage of Africa at its wildest as we watch a compelling and suspenseful narrative unfold. Between asking myself how on Earth they captured these amazing scenes, I was always wondering what was going to happen next. As another reviewer said, this is definitely nature red tooth and claw. Though there's some anthropomorphizing in the narration (Jeremy Irons), and I could have done without the flashbacks and the slo-mo, the drama overcomes these minor quibbles.

There's a note in the credits about how you can cause an uproar to protect lions and I have to say, the items are rather minimal. Donate a few bucks here, share the story, etc. I hope they update the items to say that we should pressure the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list lions on the Endangered Species Act. Now that would be causing an upoar.