Author Archives: MyraWetter

Cool Ghouls’ Trippy Goodness

by MyraWetter Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Cool Ghouls
Animal Races
Empty Cellar

Courtesy of Empty Cellar Records

Fire up the incense, dust off those love beads, and reconnect the strobe light: The San Francisco band Cool Ghouls has a fine new album of trippy goodness. Fusing glistening folk melodies, jangly, psychedelia-tinged guitars, and woozy vocals evoking the search for a higher state, Animal Races dares to echo long-ago greats like Jefferson Airplane and Arthur Lee’s Love, but never feels nostalgic. There’s a refreshing rough edge to the quartet that suggests they’re making it up as they go, not following some dusty recipe book. Should you be so inclined, there’s armchair philosophizing in such mesmerizing tunes as the title track and “Time Capsule,” but simply surfing the Ghouls’ sublime waves of sound is a delicious pleasure for its own sake.

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Cool Ghouls’ Trippy Goodness

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Surprise: Biodegradable plastic bags usually aren’t

by MyraWetter Posted on November 1, 2014

Surprise: Biodegradable plastic bags usually aren’t

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31 Oct 2014 8:47 PM

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Surprise: Biodegradable plastic bags usually aren’t

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Reducing waste is hard. Who really knows what packaging is safe to recycle or compost when labeling standards are weak, companies regularly get away with green fraud, and seemingly every city has a different sorting game to play with bins? Straightforward rules and enforceable standardization would certainly go a long way toward clearing things up.

Even with the confusion, most people agree plastic bags suck. Perhaps sensing that we’re finally catching on, plastic bag makers have unleashed the greenwashers to make tiny changes to their product (like add a little metal) and then make up stories about how the “new” bags just disappear like magic.

In 2010, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposed some recommendations for environmental marketing claims. Since then, the market-regulating agency has actually started actively eradicating eco-bullshit.

Last year, the FTC cracked down on unsubstantiated claims of “biodegradable” and “compostable” bags. The Guardian’s Circular Economy series updates us on the latest distorted marketing word, “oxodegradable”:

Last month, the FTC sent warning letters to 15 additional marketers, informing them that their claims “may be deceptive”. The FTC also requested “competent and reliable scientific evidence proving that their bags will biodegrade as advertised”. This time, the term of offense is “oxodegradable”, implying the bag will break down in time when exposed to oxygen.

Though the names of the companies have not been released by the FTC, all are said to market traditional plastic products that have been amended with additives –metals, typically – intended to break the bags down in the presence of oxygen. As many bags are dumped in the low-oxygen environment of a landfill, the FTC has said those advertised benefits are dubious.

More to the point, isn’t the goal of making biodegradable products that they don’t have to go in a landfill at all? Food scraps are super biodegradable, and that’s why they go in the green bin or a compost pile. Biodegrading into nutritious soil in the landfill is worthless.

In the Guardian piece, sustainable manufacturing expert Joseph Greene, a professor at California State University, Chico, points out that “oxodegradable” should be amended to “oxofragmentable” to be more accurate.

Plastics just break into smaller and smaller pieces. Chemically, they haven’t been broken down into anything less hazardous. In fact, if these plastic bags disintegrate in the ocean, they’ll surely be just about the right size for small animals to mistake them for plankton.

The plastic bag industry shouldn’t feel too threatened by the trend toward BYOBag to the grocery store: We still sack up our produce and bulk items in 100 billion plastic bags a year. States and cities are launching plastic bag bans left and right, but those are baby steps at best. Even when cities “ban” plastic bags, what do shoppers put their fruits and veggies in? Plastic bags. To make a real dent, we may have to wait for Plastic Bag Ban 2.0 — a rule that applies to more than the checkout line.

Source:
Feds warn plastic bag makers over misleading biodegradable claim

, The Guardian.

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Surprise: Biodegradable plastic bags usually aren’t

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The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

by MyraWetter Posted on August 6, 2014

The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

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On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said we’ll likely use up our annual budget for fighting wildfires by the end of August, months before the fiscal year ends in October.

As apocalyptic as the fires that have raged in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho this year may seem, it isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves in this lamentable spot. In fact, it’s the seventh time we’ve burned through the budget over the past twelve years. And yet, the budget has stayed the same.

Which means that we’ve had to dip into the funds reserved for preventing fires. Which, along with climate change, means that we’re seeing bigger and bigger fires. Which means that fires end up costing more to put out. Which means … well, you get the picture. We’re creating a feedback loop that only serves to screw us over.

Given that wildfires are predicted to get bigger and badder, if we don’t rethink the budget now, that cycle will only intensify.

From Vox:

There are a couple of reasons why wildfires might be growing. Poor forest management has arguably played a role. In some areas, managers have suppressed smaller fires to protect nearby homes and let brush build up — making the forests more susceptible to massive blazes. Inadequate budgets are another big factor.

But the researchers noted that global warming is also a likely culprit, not least because wildfires are growing in virtually every region in the West.

“The really amazing thing is that we don’t just see an increase in one or two regions,” lead author Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told me in May. “We’re seeing it almost everywhere — in the mountain regions, in the Southwest. That tells us that something bigger is going on, and that thing appears to be climate change.”

But, as Grist’s Greg Hanscom wrote, “it’s more than just climate change that’s stoking these flames.”

More than a century of logging turned forests that were built to survive fires into tinderboxes of small, tightly packed trees. And many of our fire fighting efforts have only exacerbated the problem by allowing the fuels to build up further. Add a few hots days, a spark, and a little wind, and all hell breaks loose.

Given the rising costs of managing fires, Obama and some members of Congress have proposed that we prioritize preventing fires over extinguishing them. One thing is sure: If we don’t properly budget and manage our forests now, we’re only borrowing from our future.


Source
The US Forest Service is running out of money to fight wildfires, Vox

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

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