http://www.sierraclub.org/sier…
7 of the 162 Sierra Club “Green Schools” were in MA, in order of standing:
Harvard 16
UMass Amherst 27
BU 88
Hampshire 89
Mount Holyoke 124
Worcester Polytechnic 125
Suffolk University 148
It was the seventh year the Sierra Club has asked colleges and universities to fill out their questionnaire. According to one source, MIT didn’t participate.
Continue reading Sierra Club Green Schools in MassachusettsEveryone should watch this video and sign this petition.
Continue reading President Obama, Pardon Chelsea Manning!The following is a rush transcript by Common Dreams of the statement made by Pfc. Bradley Manning as read by David Coombs at a press conference on Wednesday following the announcement of his 35-year prison sentence by a military court:
The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
Continue reading ‘Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society’
This greenhouse at the former historic Fisherville Mill in South Grafton, Massachusetts, sits on the banks of a canal by the Blackstone River. It is cleaning stormwater runoff and water contaminated by #6 fuel oil, also known as Bunker C oil, which leaked from underground tanks. At the end of the process, 95% of the hydrocarbons are removed without the application of chemicals, using only ecological design.
The Blackstone River can rightfully claim to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the USA as in 1790, Samuel Slater built the first water-powered spinning mill in America for Moses Brown, a founder of Brown University, in Pawtucket, RI using the Blackstone River as a power source. By October 7, 1828, the Blackstone Canal from Providence, RI to Worcester, MA was completed and became the original industrial corridor of the United States. Some say the Blackstone was the hardest working river of 19th century America with its water powering factories all along its length.
Perhaps now it will become an example of 21st century American technology that uses ecological systems thinking to clean up the wastes industrial development has left in its wake.
Continue reading Canal Restorer to River Restorer?Let me make it clear that I appreciate Senator Ron Wyden’s willingness to raise the issues surrounding the US surveillance state, albeit quite obliquely until Edward Snowden risked his life to put the details on the table.
In a fascinating interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Wyden contorts logic in defense of compliance with the classification rules that determine what can and can not be discussed, and pats himself on the back for getting certain things declassified, including statements about an important FISA court ruling (but not the ruling itself). He then goes on to say that while the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has now admitted that the national security apparatus has violated FISA court orders on bulk phone record collection, “I’ll tell your viewers that those violations are significantly more troubling than the government has stated.”
Continue reading Sen. Wyden riding the fenceToday an injustice was perpetrated on a brave young soul, Bradley Manning, whose courageous act of whistleblowing revealed untold truths about the US war machine. Prosecuting him under the Espionage Act despite his guilty pleas for leaking information was a government attempt to “intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future,” according to Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. In other words, the injustice perpetrated against Manning was perpetrated against all of us, stifling truth, justice, and democracy in one fell swoop. Send a message to our latest War President and shameful Nobel Peace Prize laureate by signing the petition to award Manning the Nobel Peace Prize. For special coverage of the verdict from Democracy Now! click here.
Continue reading I am Bradley Manninghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?
A clear PET plastic bottle can help disinfect water.
6 hours of sunlight’s UV-radiation kills diarrhoea-causing pathogens in water making it safer to drink.
A clear bottle full of water and a little bleach can become a solar skylight, providing the equivalent of a 50w incandescent light to a windowless shack.
Cut the bottom off a clear plastic bottle to make a mini-greenhouse, a hot cap, to protect seedlings from frost.
Surround that bottle hot cap with a circle of other bottles full of water for solar heat storage to extend the growing season.
Here’s a bottle inside a bottle inside a bottle to heat water in the innermost bottle
and a variation of this design using a clear bottle, a dark can full of water, and a set of reflectors.
They illustrate the essentials of solar thermal energy:
light reflects
dark gets hot
clear keeps the wind out
With that knowledge you can move, concentrate, and store energy.
This clear plastic water heater is much larger and more practical for household use. It is made almost entirely from recycled packaging waste.
You can make a window out of plastic bottles, too,
and a south-facing window is already a solar collector.
But that’s another story.
previously published at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2…
Continue reading Sixpack of Solar: How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?The World Meteorological Organization recently released their Global Climate Report: Decade of Extremes ( pdf alert: http://library.wmo.int/pmb_ged… and video at http://youtu.be/qSz7U0C0bsY ) looking at general weather patterns decade by decade from 1881 to 2010.
“…it is worth noting the very large increase (more than 2 000 per cent) in the loss of life from heatwaves, particularly during the unprecedented extreme heat events that affected Europe in the summer of 2003 and the Russian Federation in the summer of 2010. On the other hand, there were fewer deaths due to storms and floods in 2001-2010 compared to 1991-2000, with decreases of 16 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively, thanks, in good part, to better early warning systems and increased preparedness.”
2,300% increase in casualties from heatwaves
189% increase from cold snaps
in the 2001 to 2010 decade.
On June 25, the world’s largest solar ship, the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar (http://www.planetsolar.org), was docked in Boston and hosted a symposium on water and climate change, “From the Alps to the Atlantic.” This 35 meter by 23 meter catamaran is currently on the DeepWater expedition, harvesting data from the Gulf Stream after a maiden voyage around the world on the equator. From Boston she is bound for St John’s, Newfoundland, Reykjavik, Iceland and finally Bergen, Norway. After the transatlantic DeepWater expedition, the PlanetSolar will work with the Waste Free Oceans Foundation (http://www.wastefreeoceans.eu) to clean up European waters. The research team from University of Geneva is headed by Professor Martin Beniston and consists of climatologists, physicists, and biologists.
The PlanetSolar has 512m2 of PV cells and the largest civilian mobile battery in the world providing 20 kW of electricity, 17kW for two 60kW electric motors, with 3 kW for life on board, for an average speed of 5 knots and a maximum speed of 14 knots. The PlanetSolar is a traveling experiment laboratory and sampling station working on water issues around the world with room for a crew of nine.
The symposium included talks on the global water cycle including river systems (http://www.globalrivers.org), glaciers and mountain water resources (http://www.acqwa.ch), ocean ecology, acidification, phytoplankton and zooplankton biology, and other issues.
Last week, I wrote about the need to get to the bottom of one critical question, “whether Obama’s statements are intentionally obtuse and misleading, or just an outright lie.” I think the answer of this question will ultimately determine the fate of the Obama Administration, and whether or not he will finish his term. Knowing that Edward Snowden’s application of sunlight to the NSA’s unconstitutional spying apparatus has more revelations to come, it appears to me that the public is beginning to wise up to the “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” Sadly, as a U.S. Senator, Al Franken — the author of that book and its critique of the right-wing punditocracy — has taken to defending the lies and the lying liars who tell them when they are told by Democrats.
But a spied-upon United States public (not to mention a spied-upon European Union) does not take kindly to liars or their apologists, and the Democrats are alienating both their friends and enemies. The first casualty of this growing scandal will clearly be the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who outright lied to Congress back in March:
Continue reading Drip. Drip. Drip. Obama’s Watergate in dribs and drabs.