It is a theme on TreeHugger that living walkable communities and dense cities use less energy per capita, and that the auto-centric suburb is perhaps the worst of all planning models if we want to reduce our energy and particularly our oil consumption. But do people really want to live in high density apartments if they have the choice? A new Canadian study indicates that for a number of reasons, more and more people do.
Where did it all go wrong? When did we, as a society, decide the economy trumps all, including the very environment that makes human life, and in-turn our ‘benevolent’ system of trade possible? Was it a gradual shift or did it happen overnight? In either case here we are. I think Bill McKibben, the author […]
Seriously? The sad truth is we are voluntarily exposing ourselves to some very nasty chemicals everyday simply by ‘freshening’ up our homes, cars and workspaces. ‘Air fresheners’ are mostly a mixture of volatile toxic chemicals and neurotoxins including benzene, formaldehyde, naphthalene, toluene, xylene, acetone, benzaldehyde, methylene chloride … just to name a few. Your probably […]
We need to break our insatiable appetite for bottled water. The U.S. guzzled back almost 50 billion bottles of it last year, up from just over 3 billion in 1997. That’s over 1500 bottles every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Think about it … these are just numbers for the […]
… Overfishing was recognized as one of the world’s greatest and most immediate environmental problems in 2002, when it was first demonstrated that global catches of wild fish had peaked around 1989 and have since been in decline …
Overfishing. It’s one of those issues we hear about but don’t quite understand. It seems like every time I go to a restaurant or to a supermarket they have seafood available. When I go to the St Lawrence Market in Toronto the place is packed with seafood. So what gives? Well the truth is we as humans are superb fisherman with advanced fishing techniques and have worked diligently to eradicate the planet of marine life.
Ok. That was bit of a stretch. I don’t believe our goal is to eradicate all life in the oceans, but we are doing it just the same. We have all heard of the collapse of the Atlantic Cod fisheries in the North Atlantic in the 1990’s. Tragic yes. And now as we are moving into 2011, almost 20 years after the moratorium on cod, the fishery has not recovered. They are now predicting total extinction of this species in the not too distant future. Crazy considering the fish in this area were so abundant at the turn of the 20th century you could catch them with your bare hands. Literally.
The sad truth is this fishery is not the only casualty in the battle between man and the oceans, countless other species are being decimated at unsustainable rates…..sea bass, grouper, haddock, halibut, marlin, blue-fin tuna, salmon, sharks, sturgeon, shrimp, lobster…. just to name a few. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 70% of marine fish species are on the brink of collapse due to overfishing. Now don’t be fooled by the promise of fish farming, it is not a viable solution and farmed fish should be on your AVOID list. Fish farming not only introduces diseases to the fish and surrounding waterways due to overcrowding, but also introduces loads of antibiotics to control these diseases. Couple that with the fact it takes roughly 2-3lbs of smaller fish used as food to produce 1lbs of farmed fish and you can see right way this is not a sustainable practice.
What can you do?
So the first and most important thing you can do is to pay attention to what seafood you are eating and always ask where it is from, the exact species, and whether it is wild or farmed. To help you, here is a list of fish to consume and fish to avoid:
The standard incandescent bulb — what we typically think of as a “basic light bulb” — is a pretty inefficient piece of technology, wasting 90 to 98% of its electrical use as heat rather than useful light. Much better are fluorescents, including the now-ubiquitous compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which are roughly 75% more efficient for […]
When talking about the amount of carbon dioxide we as humans are pumping into the atmosphere the numbers are so vast it is hard to wrap your head around it. For example, in 2007 the U.S. pumped a staggering 5.8 billion (5,838,381,000) metric tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere (second only to China). So what […]
Green-wash (green’wash’, -wôsh’) – verb: the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service. Green is all the rage right now, and big business is cashing in, and the sad truth is the vast majority of money is spent on convincing us their […]
I currently live and work in a suburb just north of Toronto. We have a descent sized cookie-cutter house, in a all-to-common sprawled subdivision. We have a nice plot of land. It is the “ideal” spot to live and raise a family, isn’t it? My wife and I both have a car as this is […]
