Tag Archives: victoria

Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

by yaconsyruphelica Posted on June 10, 2020

With the nation’s eyes on ongoing protests for racial justice (not to mention a seemingly endless public health crisis), last week President Trump signed an executive order that would waive key requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The landmark 1970 law requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of proposed federal actions and projects, including the construction of major highways, airports, oil and gas drilling, and pipelines. Trump’s new executive order relaxes the law’s requirement that major new infrastructure and energy projects undergo environmental reviews to ensure they will not significantly harm the environment and nearby public. (Industry representatives often blame the environmental impact statements required by the law for the extensive delay of permit approvals.)

“From the beginning of my Administration, I have focused on reforming and streamlining an outdated regulatory system that has held back our economy with needless paperwork and costly delays,” Trump wrote in the executive order. “The need for continued progress in this streamlining effort is all the more acute now, due to the ongoing economic crisis.”

But the president’s desire to suppress the 50-year-old law long predates the coronavirus-fueled recession.

Early this year, the Trump administration announced plans to overhaul key elements of the law, including by limiting requests for community input prior project approval, disregarding project alternatives, and shortening the deadline for environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. Pollution-burdened communities have long leveraged NEPA as a defense mechanism to protect their health and the environment — examples include the fights against the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of the 710 freeway in Long Beach, California.

The new order promotes a quicker permit approval process on these kinds of projects by invoking a section of federal law that allows individual government agencies to use their own emergency authorities to bypass environmental requirements. Trump’s order weakens standard environmental review requirements not just in NEPA, but also in the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act.

Even before Trump declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality held two public hearings in Denver, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., to gather feedback on Trump’s initial proposal to overhaul NEPA in ways that would speed up projects and de-emphasize environmental reviews. Students, construction workers, university professors, and grassroots activists testified before a panel of expressionless White House officials, testifying that NEPA’s requirements are vital for their safety, health, and the environment.

Anthony Victoria Midence and other environmental advocates in California’s Inland Empire, a region that experiences some of the country’s worst smog, have united environmental and labor groups to fight a controversial airport expansion that the government’s own assessment shows would add one ton of pollution to the region’s air each day. The groups invoked NEPA to mount a legal challenge to the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval of the project’s permits. Trump’s new executive order would have stymied their efforts, according to Victoria Midence, who is the community director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, a local social justice group.

“It’s clear that the Trump administration is willing to sacrifice working people of color for the benefit of industry,” he told Grist. “This latest move by Trump further demonstrates that he does not care about black and brown lives.”

The new executive order comes on the heels of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalizing a rule last week that will make it much more difficult for states, tribes, and the public to protest or block pipelines and other projects that could pollute the air and water systems. The decision, which overturns a 50-year-old understanding of the Clean Water Act, would set a strict one-year deadline for states and tribes to approve or deny proposed projects such as pipelines, dams, or fossil fuel plants.

Trump also signed another executive order last month that allows several federal agency heads to weaken regulatory requirements “that may inhibit economic recovery.” The move prompted the EPA to alert the fossil fuel industry that it could suspend enforcement of certain environmental laws, including those that require the gathering of public input on projects and the monitoring of air pollution levels.

“We need to place people over profit,” Victoria Midence told Grist. “As we suffer through this pandemic with the fear that our lungs and heart are already compromised because of diesel pollution, Trump is removing perhaps the last protections we have to raise our voices and demand environmental justice.”

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Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

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The Birds of Pandemonium – Michele Raffin

by Myrna Posted on May 7, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Birds of Pandemonium

Michele Raffin

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


“Michele Raffin has made an important contribution to saving endangered birds, and her book is a fascinating and rarely seen glimpse behind the scenes. The joy she gets from her close relationships with these amazing animals and her outsized commitment to them comes through loud and clear in this engaging and joyful book.” —Dominick Dorsa, Curator of Birds, San Francisco Zoo Each morning at first light, Michele Raffin awakens to the bewitching music that heralds another day at Pandemonium Aviaries—a symphony that swells from the most vocal of over 350 avian throats representing over 40 species. “It knocks me out, every day,” she admits.  Pandemonium Aviaries is a conservation organization dedicated to saving and breeding birds at the edge of extinction, including some of the largest populations of rare species in the world. And their behavior is even more fascinating than their glorious plumage or their songs. They fall in love, they mourn, they rejoice, they sacrifice, they have a sense of humor, they feel jealous, they invent, plot, cope, and sometimes they murder each other. As Raffin says, “They teach us volumes about the interrelationships of humans and animals.” Their stories make up the heart of this book. There’s Sweetie, a tiny quail with an outsize personality; the inspiring Oscar, a Lady Gouldian finch who can’t fly but finds a way to reach the highest perches of his aviary to roost. The ecstatic reunion of a disabled Victoria crowned pigeon, Wing, and her brother, Coffee, is as wondrous as the silent kinship that develops between Amadeus, a one-legged turaco, and an autistic young visitor. Ultimately, The Birds of Pandemonium is about one woman’s crusade to save precious lives, bird by bird, and offers insights into how following a passion can transform not only oneself but also the world. “Delightful . . . full of wonderful accounts of bird behavior, demonstrating caring, learning, sociability, adaptability, and a will to live. Its appeal is ageless, her descriptions riveting, and her devotion to the birds remarkable.” — Joanna Burger, author of  The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship “A remarkable book. Reading about the birds of Pandemonium will make you laugh and cry; it will make you see more clearly the need to take care of our planet; and it will confirm that one person with a passion can make a difference.” —Jeff Corwin, nature conservationist and host, Animal Planet “ The Birds of Pandemonium touched me deeply . . . This book is about reconnecting with the nature of birds, and the nature of ourselves.”  —Jon Young, author of What the Robin Knows

Continued: 

The Birds of Pandemonium – Michele Raffin

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New Mexico: OK, fine, we’ll put science back in science standards.

by BernadineHelena Posted on October 19, 2017

The mayor of the coastal town of Rockport, Texas, said on Tuesday that the community will likely suffer permanent damage from the Category 4 storm.

It’s been nearly two months since Hurricane Harvey tore through Texas, leaving behind decimated buildings, torn-up infrastructure, and thousands of displaced people. While most national media attention focused on Houston, Rockport, population 10,645, suffered some of the hurricane’s worst wind and storm surge damage.

During a panel discussion in Victoria, Texas, Mayor Charles Wax said that approximately one-third of the town was destroyed in the hurricane, and a significant portion of that will be impossible to rebuild.

Only 300 of Rockport’s 1,300 businesses have reopened since the storm, 856 of Rockport’s 2,400 students have left the school district, and the town lost most of its trees in the storm. Disaster relief crews have cleared almost 800,000 cubic yards of vegetation felled by hurricane winds and rain. 

Wax, along with three other coastal Texas mayors coping with staggering devastation from the hurricane, said he has received more help from the state government than from FEMA. The agency is definitely spread a bit thin, it seems.

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New Mexico: OK, fine, we’ll put science back in science standards.

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A town hit hard by Hurricane Harvey may never fully recover.

by Heike2245hgux Posted on October 18, 2017

The mayor of the coastal town of Rockport, Texas, said on Tuesday that the community will likely suffer permanent damage from the Category 4 storm.

It’s been nearly two months since Hurricane Harvey tore through Texas, leaving behind decimated buildings, torn-up infrastructure, and thousands of displaced people. While most national media attention focused on Houston, Rockport, population 10,645, suffered some of the hurricane’s worst wind and storm surge damage.

During a panel discussion in Victoria, Texas, Mayor Charles Wax said that approximately one-third of the town was destroyed in the hurricane, and a significant portion of that will be impossible to rebuild.

Only 300 of Rockport’s 1,300 businesses have reopened since the storm, 856 of Rockport’s 2,400 students have left the school district, and the town lost most of its trees in the storm. Disaster relief crews have cleared almost 800,000 cubic yards of vegetation felled by hurricane winds and rain. 

Wax, along with three other coastal Texas mayors coping with staggering devastation from the hurricane, said he has received more help from the state government than from FEMA. The agency is definitely spread a bit thin, it seems.

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A town hit hard by Hurricane Harvey may never fully recover.

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Urban Gardening: Micro Food Producers

by MargheritaSallee Posted on July 26, 2016

In certain cities across the globe, urban gardening is beginning to take favor over Immaculately manicured green spaces. Image Credit: FreshStudio / Shutterstock

Cities face immense challenges when creating attractive green spaces for their inhabitants, striving to create beautiful, engaging public space while also walking the narrow tightrope of budget and resource allocation. Formerly, city landscaping meant well-tended flowerbeds and the immaculately manicured sprawling green lawn which has become a symbol of wealth and luxury. This type of public green space is attractive, but the truth is that it’s also incredibly wasteful.  And yet, a relatively new trend is taking root again — urban gardening in the form of cities being turned into micro food producers. But before we take a look at this movement, lets take a look at how wasteful the current landscaping status-quo is.

Statistics for municipal water use are tough to track down, but the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans use 9 billion gallons of water each and every day, simply to keep their personal outdoor landscapes looking green.
Add municipal water use to this already absurd number and we’re looking at a lot of water going to grow something just so we can cut in a week.

It’s not just the waste of these aesthetic landscapes, it’s also the financial cost borne by taxpayers. It can seem downright frivolous sometimes, prioritizing the installation and maintenance of giant expanses of grass or ornamental flower baskets instead of directing those funds toward improving the health and welfare of its citizens, instead. For ages it’s seemed like an either/or proposition, but a new trend in city planning may have found a way to elegantly balance both.

Urban gardening takes root

Urban gardening seeks to reclaim unused or ill-used public spaces and transform them into productive edible gardens which are open to the public or designed to benefit specific social service or non profit groups. Image Credit: Arina P Habich / Shutterstock

Urban agriculture is a unique way for cities to prioritize food over flowers, and a growing number of cities are embracing this concept wholeheartedly. Urban gardening seeks to reclaim unused or ill-used public spaces and transform them into productive edible gardens which are open to the public or designed to benefit specific social service or non profit groups. Some forms of urban gardening look to replace cement or vacant lots with vibrant growth while others try to reframe gardens from just looking good, to tasting good, too.

Wondering what these rich urban gardening projects look like? They truly are as diverse and unique as the vegetable varieties they grow — here are three great examples of urban gardening projects taking root in Europe and North America.

The Edible City

Andernach, Germany, is known as The Edible City, due to their commitment to planting fruits and vegetables on city land, rather than flowers. This initiative officially began in 2010, and has worked to transform over 86,000 square feet of city property into lush vegetable gardens filled with nutrient-rich fruits and vegetable. This urban gardening initiative has met with resounding success, due in large part to incredible community support and involvement. The creative minds behind the project keep community members engaged and interested by continually reinventing the program to feature different plants — planting hundreds of heirloom varieties of tomatoes one year for example, so the public could see and taste the differences between plant types — and constantly innovating and explaining the program.

This creative rethinking of public space wasn’t without its challenges, but an unexpected stumbling block described in an article about The Edible City was that the public was initially quite reluctant to pick the fruits and vegetables as they began to ripen.

The notion of private space and ownership is so deeply ingrained in our modern society that signs had to be put up encouraging people to help themselves to the bounty. In doing so, The Edible City is changing the urban landscape of Andernach but also reframing how its inhabitants think about and use public space.

The Edible Bus Stop

London, too, is seeking to transform public spaces through urban gardening with a collective called The Edible Bus Stop. Image Credit: The Edible Bus Stop (Instagram)

London, too, is seeking to transform public spaces through urban gardening with a collective called The Edible Bus Stop. Made up of landscape architects, garden designers, horticulturists, artists and activists, this group believes that “a brutal landscape makes for a brutal outlook, and that by taking responsibility for our urban environment, we can improve upon the experience of inner city living”.  As anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time within a major city can attest, this idea of a physical environment both reflecting and affecting one’s emotional state is absolutely spot on.

This group works to change drab, dull, and depressing urban spaces with bursts of color and fresh fruit and veggies. As the name would suggest, one of their first projects was to transform three bus stops along the number 322 bus route in London into edible gardens.

It began with one small patch and one bus stop, but the effort quickly bloomed to other spaces as well. The Edible Bus stop group has now expanded their efforts into art installations (check out this fantastic “Roll Out the Barrows” installation, featuring colorful wheelbarrows filled with plants) and pocket gardens which add glimpses of rich green life in the most unexpected spaces.

O Canada

In another urban gardening success story, Victoria, British Columbia has taken advantage of its location in one of Canada’s most encouraging growing climates to transform part of a public square into a food-producing space. A post on the city’s website explains the initiative, stating,

For the third consecutive year, the City of Victoria is partnering with Our Place Society, whose staff, family members and volunteers will plant, maintain and harvest vegetables and herbs to make meals for its lunch program. Seedlings will be provided by the City and will include oregano, kale, rainbow chard, broccoli, basil, dill, red cabbage, cucumbers and tomatoes. Sunflowers will be planted to provide color and food in the garden. Existing plants in the edible garden include large artichoke, fig trees, goumi berries, chives, and thyme.

This is urban gardening with a cause — all the produce will be harvested and donated to the Our Place Society, an organization which serves the poor, disadvantaged and homeless population of the city. Veggies will be featured in their lunch program and meals will be seasoned with herbs from the garden as well. Participants in the program can assist with gardening and harvesting the herbs and vegetables, as well as enjoy the delicious (and nutritious) fruits and vegetables of their labors. The program is designed to connect community members through natural spaces while also raising awareness of food issues.

These initiatives featured in Andenach, London, and Victoria are only three of thousands of urban gardening projects growing around the globe. As issues of food scarcity, resource allocation, responsible water use and how to build vibrant and inclusive communities increases, I think -and hope – we’ll see an increase in these useful green spaces, too.

Feature image credit: LUMOimages / Shutterstock

About
Latest Posts

Madeleine Somerville

Madeleine Somerville is the author of

All You Need Is Less: An Eco-Friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity

. She is a writer, wanna-be hippie, and lover of soft cheeses. She lives in Edmonton, Canada with her daughter. You can also find Madeleine at her blog,

Sweet Madeleine

.

Latest posts by Madeleine Somerville (see all)

Urban Gardening: Micro Food Producers – July 26, 2016
Can This Recycling Bin Really Increase Recycling? – July 15, 2016
Is Online Shopping Really Environmentally-Friendly? – July 5, 2016

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Original article: 

Urban Gardening: Micro Food Producers

Posted in alo, ATTRA, Citizen, eco-friendly, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Urban Gardening: Micro Food Producers

Will This Bill End the War Between the Government and the Tech Community Over Encryption?

by fwxpar Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee will introduce a bill on Monday afternoon aiming to help solve the long-running fight between the government and the tech and privacy communities over encryption, which has made headlines recently thanks to the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

The bill, which will be introduced by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and is backed strongly by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), would create a commission of 16 experts with a range of backgrounds—from cryptographers and intelligence officials to privacy advocates and tech executives—to “examine the intersection of security and digital security and communications technology in a systematic, holistic way, and determine the implications for national security, public safety, data security, privacy, innovation, and American competitiveness in the global marketplace,” according to text of the legislation that was provided to Mother Jones.

It’s part of a larger push to have the government and private sector work together to create new ways to solve the impasse over encryption and other digital security issues. While the government wants to be able to access encrypted devices and messages when needed, tech companies and cryptographers have said there is simply no current way to create such a backdoor for the government without also potentially giving that same access to cybercriminals and hackers. Hillary Clinton has called for a “Manhattan-like project” to square that circle, with other presidential candidates calling for similar public-private cooperation.

McCaul and the commission’s backers hope the panel may find a new, previously undiscovered way to reconcile the legal and technical demands of the two sides, but there appears to be little idea of what that could be. In conversations with lawmakers, privacy advocates, national security lawyers, and technologists, none were able to offer Mother Jones any concrete notion of what a solution may look like. Many members of the technology and privacy communities also view calls for more cooperation and discussion as disingenuous. They argue the technical questions are settled, and that more talking won’t solve anything—but may produce bad legislation that harms security and privacy. “‘They say they can’t do it, but let’s pass the legislation to find out, and I bet they’ll figure out the solution after we’ve mandated it.’ That seems like a bad idea to me,” Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute told Motherboard last year.

Each party would get to nominate eight members of the commission, with each nominee coming from a different one of eight fields. Six of the slots would go to law enforcement and intelligence community representatives, with the other 10 given to tech business and economics experts along with two cryptographers and two members of the civil liberties community. The group would have a year to draft a final report, which would require the approval of 11 of the 16 members.

You can read the full text of the bill below:

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McCaul-Commission (PDF)

McCaul-Commission (Text)

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Will This Bill End the War Between the Government and the Tech Community Over Encryption?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Cyber, FF, Gandhi, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will This Bill End the War Between the Government and the Tech Community Over Encryption?

Scientists say we’re “super” good at killing stuff

by DeniseAlvarez Posted on August 21, 2015

Scientists say we’re “super” good at killing stuff

By on 21 Aug 2015commentsShare

Humans don’t really need another reason to feel like the greatest species on Earth, so far removed from nature that we can basically do whatever we want with it, but here’s one: Scientists in British Columbia have officially dubbed us “super predators.”

Before you pat yourself on the back, being a super predator isn’t as cool as it sounds. It’s kind of like being “master of Jager bombs” in college — a compliment to some, but really just another way of saying “most likely to be an obnoxious jerk at parties.” By “super predators,” Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria, and his colleagues mean that not only do we humans kill more animals than other predators, but we also kill more adult animals — a problem for species that want to, you know, survive.

Of course, that humans are savage beasts who like to hunt species to the point of extinction is no surprise, but this is the first time that scientists have looked at how the age of our prey differs from that of other predators. The team published their findings today in the journal Science. Here’s what they found:

Our global survey […] revealed that humans kill adult prey, the reproductive capital of populations, at much higher median rates than other predators (up to 14 times higher), with particularly intense exploitation of terrestrial carnivores and fishes. Given this competitive dominance, impacts on predators, and other unique predatory behavior, we suggest that humans function as an unsustainable “super predator,” which—unless additionally constrained by managers—will continue to alter ecological and evolutionary processes globally.

What Darimont and his colleagues are trying to say is that adults, especially in fish populations, tend to produce more progeny than younger individuals, and by targeting the big fish, we’re essentially hurting the fertility of the overall population. It would be more sustainable, they argue, to instead target younger individuals, many of whom likely wouldn’t survive until adulthood anyway.

Other predators go after those younger individuals because babies are weak, and even the fiercest lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) don’t have the same kind of advanced “killing technology” that we use. Hell, if we didn’t have all the fancy guns and fishing equipment that we do, we’d probably be going for more weaklings, too.

Ultimately, the researchers suggest that we try to emulate the behavior of other predators in order to maintain the same kind of sustainable balance that exists in the wild. Which is almost as funny as asking the master of Jager bombs to opt for a vodka cran. Don’t these scientists realize that we’re the college bros of the animal kingdom? JAGER BOMBS, JAGER BOMBS, JAGER BOMBS!

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Scientists say we’re “super” good at killing stuff

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Bitcoin’s Problem With Women

by RaymundMeekin Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the conversation going. Here’s a contribution from Felix Salmon, who, after years of blogging on finance and the economy for Reuters and other outlets, is now a senior editor at Fusion.

Nathaniel Popper’s new book, Digital Gold, is as close as you can get to being the definitive account of the history of Bitcoin. As its subtitle proclaims, the book tells the story of the “misfits” (the first generation of hacker-libertarians) and “millionaires” (the second generation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists) who were responsible for building Bitcoin, mining it, hyping it, and, in at least some cases, getting rich off it.

The tale is selective, of course: not everybody involved with Bitcoin talked to Popper, and the identity of Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains a mystery. But Popper did talk to most of the important people in the cryptocurrency crowd, and he tells me that he put real effort into trying “to find a woman who was involved in some substantive way.”

The result of that search? Zero. Nothing. Zilch. Popper’s book features no female principals at all: the sole role of women in the book is as wives and girlfriends.

There are nasty consequences of this. If you are a woman involved with Bitcoin, you are invariably going to get treated like an outsider. As Victoria Turk says, “it seems that the only Bitcoin community that particularly welcomes female participation is the NSFW subreddit r/GirlsGoneBitcoin,” which is basically a site where women get paid in cryptocurrency to pose nude. Or look at Arianna Simpson’s enraging account of what it’s like to be a woman at a Bitcoin meetup:

The person who actually suggested the event to Ryan was another young woman (the only other woman at the event), a VC who was in town from San Francisco and was interested in checking it out for the first time. The aforementioned groper knew Ryan vaguely from other Bitcoin events, and greeted their arrival with a warm “Oh, nice to see you! I see you brought your girlfriend this time.” When the two of them try to point out that a) they are not together and b) she was actually the one who had brought him, they are cut off with a swift “Sure, sure, I just wanted to see what the dynamic was between you two.” Apparently that’s code for “checking if you’re ok with my hitting on her,” as that’s exactly what he proceeds to do.

Men make up an estimated 96% of the Bitcoin community, which means that if Bitcoin does end up succeeding, as its adherents think it will, and if the people who own Bitcoin see their holdings soar in value, then all of the profits will end up going to what Brett Scott calls the “crypto-patriarchy.” Not many men, to be sure: as Charlie Stross says, the degree of inequality in the Bitcoin economy “is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia.” But it’s not many men, and effectively zero women.

Popper doesn’t dwell on the almost complete absence of women in the Bitcoin story—in fact, he doesn’t mention it at all in his book. And the Bitcoin elite themselves aren’t doing much introspection on the topic. (We still have Bitcoin developers like the one in Simpson’s article saying things like “women don’t care about cryptocurrencies.”) But the gender gap is a bigger problem than Bitcoiners realize. Unless and until women can be brought into the Bitcoin fold, broader adoption is simply not going to happen.

If you talk about Bitcoin with the people who use it, the language they use is always about technology and finance. Bitcoiners tend to think in terms of how things work, rather than how they’re used in the real world. Buying and selling Bitcoin is still much more difficult than it should be, despite many years of development, which implies that people aren’t concentrating enough on real-world ease-of-use.

In general, people buy Bitcoin for one of three reasons: because they’re speculating on its future value, because they are doing something illegal, or because they have ideological reasons for doing so. But if there’s ever going to be broad adoption of Bitcoin technology, it will need to be appealing to law-abiding people who neither know nor care what the blockchain is, and who have no particular beef whatsoever with fiat currencies.

That’s a product design job, and frankly, it’s a product design job well-suited for women who aren’t approaching the problem while grinding the ideological axes so widely held inside the Bitcoin community. As one woman involved with Bitcoin put it to me, “Money is a political issue for Bitcoiners. It’s a human issue for everybody else.”

Right now, Bitcoin is almost purpose-built for the $582 billion international remittances market, where women are half of the senders, and two-thirds of the recipients. And while there is no shortage of Bitcoin-based remittance products out there, none of them seem to be designing for real-world use cases. The developers are solving technical problems, and ignoring the much bigger and more important human problems.

Let’s say you wanted to build a mobile savings app in sub-Saharan African. If you asked male Bitcoin developers to build such a thing for a target audience of young African girls, they might have talked about how to maximize the amount of money saved. But, working on the ground in South Africa, the Praekelt Foundation came from a different perspective. Apps like these aren’t really about maximizing savings, so much as they’re about empowerment. If you can build a product for girls that ratifies their identity and individuality and gives them self-esteem, then you’re creating something much more valuable than a few dollars’ worth of savings: you’re keeping them in school, and you’re keeping them healthy, and you’re helping them to not get pregnant. That’s the kind of way that cryptocurrencies could change the world. The problem is that the men in Popper’s book just don’t think that way.

Bitcoin boosters like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have an interesting reaction when people criticize Bitcoin on the grounds that the community is just male nerds. Yes, they say, it is—just like the Internet was, 20 years ago. In other words, far from treating the homogeneity of Bitcoin as a problem, they treat it as being auspicious. And, so far at least, there’s no evidence that they’re really attempting to fix the problem.

The lack of women in Bitcoin isn’t just an issue of equality. It’s a fundamental weakness of the currency itself. As long as the Bitcoin community is dominated by men geeking out about the blockchain, it’s never going to be able to make the human connections that are required for widespread adoption. Right now, the best that anybody can hope for (and no one’s holding their breath even for this) is that a handful of female geeks might be welcomed into the clique of male geeks who are working on Bitcoin-related projects.

But even if that happens, it’s not even close to being sufficient. Bitcoin, at its core, is an attempt to solve big socioeconomic problems through technology. So long as it remains an overwhelmingly male domain, it’s going to continue to concentrate on the economic problems, while missing the big social problems. Which means that it’s going to continue going nowhere.

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Bitcoin’s Problem With Women

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These Popular Clothing Brands Are Cleaning Up Their Chinese Factories

by AveryReasoner Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s well known that the outsourcing of clothing manufacturing to countries with low wages and weak regulations has led to exploitative labor conditions. But many foreign apparel factories also create environmental problems. The industrial processes used to make our jeans and sweatshirts require loads of water, dirty energy, and chemicals, which often get dumped into the rivers and air surrounding factories in developing countries. Almost 20 percent of the world’s industrial water pollution comes from the textile industry, and China’s textile factories, which produce half of the clothes bought in the United States, emit 3 billion tons of soot a year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

But a few basic (and often profitable) changes in a factory’s manufacturing process can go a long way in cutting down pollution. That’s the takeaway from Clean by Design, a new alliance between NRDC, major clothing brands—including Target, Levi’s, Gap, and H&M—and Chinese textile manufacturing experts.

Starting in 2013, 33 mills in the cities of Guangzhou and Shaoxing participated in a pilot program that focused on improving efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of producing textiles. The results, released in a report today, are impressive.

NRDC

The 33 mills reduced coal consumption by 61,000 tons and chemical consumption by 400 tons. They saved 36 million kilowatts of electricity and 3 million tons of water (the production of one tee shirt takes about 700 gallons, or 90 pounds, of water). While mills often needed to invest in capital up front, they saw an average of $440,000 in savings per mill—a total of $14.7 million—mostly returned to them within a year.

How did they accomplish all this? Below are some of the measures that were implemented:

Upgrading metering systems to monitor water, steam, and electricity use (and identify waste)

Implementing condensation collection during the steam-heavy dying process

Increasing water reuse after cooling and rinsing (some clothes get rinsed as many as 8 times; the final rinses often leave behind clean water)

Investing in equipment for recovering heat from hot water used for dying and rinsing, and from machines

Stopping up steam and compressed air leakage to increase energy efficiency

Improving insulation on pipes, boilers, drying cylinders, dye vats, and steam valves to prevent wasted energy

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These Popular Clothing Brands Are Cleaning Up Their Chinese Factories

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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

by ShelliMcWilliam Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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While speaking out against a proposed bill in Ohio that aims to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, Rep. Teresa Fedor (D-Toledo) revealed on Wednesday she had been raped during her time in the military and chose to have an abortion.

“You don’t respect my reason, my rape, my abortion, and I guarantee you there are other women who should stand up with me and be courageous enough to speak that voice,” Fedor said before the state senate. “What you’re doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.”

Her testimony comes just weeks after an Arizona lawmaker shared details about her own abortion, which she had after being sexually assaulted by a male relative when she was a young girl. In a later editorial for Cosmopolitan, Rep. Victoria Steele said that while she was glad to have spoken out and share her story during the legislative debate, she resented the fact that “women have to tell their deepest, darkest traumas in public” in order for lawmakers to grasp how dangerous such anti-abortion bills were to women and their health.

In Fedor’s case, not only did she feel she had to share her trauma with her colleagues, at one point she was forced to pause and address the fact a man appeared to be laughing at her while she spoke.

“I see people laughing and I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “And it happens to be a man who is laughing. But this is serious business right now and I’m speaking for all the women in the state of Ohio who didn’t get the opportunity to be in front of that committee and make this statement.”

Ohio’s House Bill 69 eventually passed with a 55-40 vote. The legislation now goes to the senate, and if passed, will make it a fifth-degree felony and result in up to $2,500 and possible jail time for doctors who perform the abortions.

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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

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