She was talking about the shelter’s surplus of kittens, a problem that animal shelters across the country face every summer. But lately, it seems that there have been more and more of the furry carnivores.

Ms. Gin blames global warming for the feline glut, and she’s not alone. The Humane Society has observed that kitten season, which usually starts in March and April, has been starting earlier and lasting longer.

The Kansas City infoZine quotes Nancy Peterson, manager of the Humane Society’s feral cat program, who explains how warmer weather sends female cats into heat: “The brain receives instructions to produce a hormone that basically initiates the heat cycle in a cat,” said Ms Peterson, “and those instructions are affected by the length of day and usually the rising temperatures of spring.” (more…)

As the Goracle put it:

Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the average American consumes about 920 killowat-hours of electricity per month.

So where, exactly, will all this energy come from? And how do we get it from there into our wall outlets?

That’s where my new favorite website comes in. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy, offers a wealth of data about America’s capacity for all kinds of nonfossil, nonnuclear energy solutions, including solar, wind, . (A big hat-tip to the Sietch Blog for directing me there.) (more…)

More than two dozen offshore wind farms have been proposed for cities up and down the East Coast and on the Great Lakes. But unlike those developer-driven plans, Hull’s effort was conceived internally. And while a much larger offshore wind project off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., 60 miles to the south, has spurred controversy, Hull’s residents are embracing wind power.

Indeed, the town’s move has little to do with being “green.”

“It’s all about lowering our electricity bill,” says longtime resident Suzanne White, who works at Weinberg’s Bakery, a gathering place for a group of retired men who discuss town news and politics. “It’s a positive thing because eventually we won’t be able to afford oil.”
That Hull, once a popular beach town, wants to rely on wind power is a sign that the industry is gaining mainstream acceptance.

“If it can be done here,” says Town Manager Philip Lemnios, “it can probably be replicated in a lot of other places.”

A 45 percent growth in wind power

Nationally, wind power has been on a tear. The industry grew 45 percent last year and is on track to surpass last year’s growth, according to the American Wind Energy Association, pending Congress’s decision whether to extend federal tax credits for alternative energy. Now with generators already up or slated to be built on the choicest wind locations in the United States, developers are looking increasingly offshore.
Western Europe, already short of land, moved to offshore wind farms 20 years ago. They now generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity. In the US, plans are just getting under way.

Hull has a few advantages in the race to build the first offshore wind farm on this side of the Atlantic. It owns its own electric utility. And it already has two wind turbines, one near a school and one on top of a landfill. They already power 1,000 homes and the town’s traffic lights, keeping the town’s electric bills about a third below those of surrounding communities.

“For eight years, we haven’t raised the rate – and that’s huge with the cost of fuel and everything going up constantly,” says Mr. Lemnios. “We have to make sure that going forward [the offshore project] is an economically sound venture, rather than just being green.”
Sipping coffee at the Seaside Diner, a fixture of downtown Hull where diners call out to each other by name, “Sonny” Bernstein says he’s proud of his town’s twin turbines.

In Cape Cod, residents did the opposite, vocally protesting a plan to install 130 offshore generators.

But after seven years of legal wrangling and regulatory delay, that project won a court ruling this month that the developer, Cape Wind Associates, says could lead to permits being issued by the end of this year.

Leave some windy places alone, some say

Back in Hull, not everybody is sold on the offshore solution. “I think that there should be places that are off-limits – places that remain free of man-made structures, even if they are particularly windy,” says town resident and environmentalist Samantha Woods.

The sound of the turbines can keep residents up at night, says William Amico, whose family owns a house close to the onshore turbine at Wind Mill Point. “In terms of the environment, it’s a great idea to reduce pollution, but they should be a little farther away from people,” he says.

Wetlands contain 771 tons of carbon dioxide and methane, said scientists gathered in the central western town of Cuiaba for a four-day wetlands-preservation conference hosted by the United Nations University and Brazil’s Federal University of Mato Grasso (UFMT). The world’s remaining wetlands hold about one-fifth of the world’s carbon, an amount equivalent to that currently in the atmosphere.

A UN University press release warns that continued destruction of these wetlands could unleash the stored carbon into the atmosphere:

If the decline of wetlands continues through human and climate change-related causes, scientists fear the release of carbon from these traditional sinks could compound the global warming problem significantly, says Prof. Paulo Speller, Rector of UFMT. Drained tropical swamp forests release an estimated 40 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. Drained peat bogs release some 2.5 to 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.

“We could call it the carbon bomb,” Paulo Teixeira of the Pantanal Regional Environment Program told Reuters. “It’s a very tricky situation.” (more…)

The findings seem to contradict the view, held by some, that national happiness levels are more or less fixed.

The report’s authors attribute rising world happiness to improved economies, greater democratization, and increased social tolerance in many nations. Along with material stability, freedom to live as one pleases is a major factor in subjective well-being, they say.

But the survey, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, also underscore that, beyond a certain point, material wealth doesn’t boost happiness. The United States, which ranked 16th and has the world’s largest economy, has largely stalled in happiness gains – this despite ever more buying power. Americans are now twice as rich as they were in 1950, but no happier, according to the survey.

Other rich countries, the United Kingdom and western Germany among them, show downward happiness trends. For psychologists and environmentalists alike, these observations prompt a profound question. Rich countries consume the lion’s share of world resources.

Overconsumption is a major factor in environmental degradation, global warming chief among them. Could a wrong-headed approach to seeking happiness, then, be exacerbating some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems? And could learning to be truly content help mitigate them?

In the past decade, a cadre of psychologists has directed its attention away from determining what’s wrong with the infirm toward quantifying what’s right with the healthy. They’ve christened this new field “positive psychology,” and what they’re discovering perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising. At the core, humans are social beings. While food and shelter are absolutely essential to well-being, once these basic needs are fulfilled, engagement with other human beings makes people happiest.

For Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the problem in the US is not consumption per se, but that as a society we consume in ways that don’t make us happy. He divides the pursuit of happiness into three categories: seeking positive emotion, or feeling good; engagement with others; and meaning, or participating in something larger than oneself.

People, he notes, are often happiest when helping other people, when engaged in “self-transcendent” activities. What does this mean? Rather than making a gift of the latest iPhone, buy someone dancing lessons, he says. Instead of taking a resort vacation, build a house with Habitat for Humanity.

“The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of meaning don’t habituate,” he says, whereas trying to feel good is like eating French vanilla ice cream: The first bite is fantastic; the tenth tastes like cardboard.

By definition, happiness is subjective. And yet, scientists find measurable differences in people who describe themselves as happy. They’re more productive at work. They learn more quickly. Strong social networks – a large predictor of happiness – also have health effects, researchers say.

One study found that belonging to clubs or societies cut in half members’ risk of dying during the following year. Another found that, when exposed to a cold virus, children with stronger social networks fell ill only one-quarter as often as those without.

For psychologists, social networks ex­­plain one of the seeming paradoxes of WVS findings: While relatively rich Den­­mark took the top spot, much less wealthy Puerto Rico and Colombia are second and third. In fact, relatively poor Lat­­in American countries often score high on WVS rankings. This may underline the value of community, family, and strong social institutions to well-being.

Scientists say this need for community may be a result of humanity’s long evolution in groups. Living together conferred an advantage, they say. In the hunter-gatherer world, relatedness, autonomy, curiosity, and competence – the very things that psychologists find make people happy – “had payoffs that were pretty clear,” says Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. “Aspiring for a lot of material goods is actually unhappiness-produ­cing,” he says. “People who value material good and wealth also are people who are treading more heavily on the earth – and not getting happier.”

High consumption fails to make us happy, and it comes at a cost. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2006 Living Planet Report, humanity’s ecological footprint now exceeds earth’s capacity to regenerate by about 25 percent.

Furthermore, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, North America accounts for 22 percent of this footprint. The US consumes twice what its land, air, and water can sustain. (By contrast, WWF calculates that Africa, with 13 percent of earth’s population, accounts for 7 percent of its footprint.) America’s outsize footprint results in part from its appetite for stuff – what psychologists now say is the wrong approach to lasting well-being.

“The pursuit of happiness can drive environmental degradation, but only a degraded type of happiness pursuit leads to that outcome,” says Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in an e-mail. “The standard western focus upon economic utility as the highest good (exemplified by the US) seems to encourage that kind of degraded pursuit.”

Worse, so-called “extrinsic” values (wealth, power, fame), as opposed to “intrinsic” values (adventure, engagement, meaning), seem to go hand-in-hand with more environmentally destructive behavior. Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has found that people who are more extrinsically oriented tend to ride bikes less, buy second-hand less, and recycle less. Nations with more individualistic and materialistic values also tend to be more ecologically destructive.

“The choice of sustainability is very consistent with a happier life,” Professor Kasser says. “Whereas the choice to live with materialistic [values] is a choice to be less happy.”

The idea that what’s good for humanity is also good for the planet is central to environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy.” His prescriptions for lowering carbon emissions – living closer together, relocalizing food production, consuming less – line up with what psychologists say promotes happiness.

In fact, although painful in the short term, high fuel prices may result in happier Americans in the long run, says Mr. McKib­ben. This year, Americans drove less than they did the year before – probably for the first time since the car was invented, he says. They also bought double the vegetable seeds this year compared with last. “These are signs of a new world,” he says by e-mail.

For their part, psychologists are advocating that policymakers use indicators other than the Gross National Product (GNP) to make decisions. What’s the purpose of an economy, they ask, if not to enhance the well-being of its citizenry?

“It’s become ‘growth for growth’s sake,’ ” says Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-Being at the New Econ­­omics Foundation (NEF) in London. “It’s got its own internal logic, but it’s not serving humanity. So why are we doing it?”

Bhutan uses Gross National Happiness as a measure of its success. Although small and undeveloped, the largely Buddhist nation is the happiest in Asia, according to BusinessWeek.

Psychologists also have specific recommendations to promote national happiness, based on their findings about what makes people happy. Insecurity fosters a materialistic approach to life, they say. Policies that combat insecurity – universal healthcare, say, or good, affordable education – promote happiness. Many link social policies like these to Scandinavian nations’ consistently high happiness rankings.

Kasser has more ideas: Limit – and tax – advertising, he says. To promote consumption, ads foster insecurity, he says. That hinders self-acceptance, which is another predictor of lasting well-being.

NEF’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), meanwhile, has developed a new measure of a nation’s success. How efficiently does it generate happiness? HPI takes a country’s happiness and average life span and divides it by its ecological impact to measure how much it spent in achieving its well-being. On this scale, the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanatu comes in first place, Colombia second. Germany is twice as efficient at producing happiness as the US, which ranks 150th by that measure. Russia, with its low happiness scores and relatively low life expectancy, is 178th. And Zimbabwe, plagued by poverty and political turmoil, is the least efficient at producing happiness on Earth.

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessur­vey.org. Happy Plan­­et Index: www.happyplanetindex.org

Kicking off the list at number 10 is Aquaman, who is universally derided for having not one useful power. And it only gets worse: Captain Planet, the blue-skinned, green-mulleted, red-booty-short-wearing character cooked up by Ted Turner in 1990, makes an appearance at number 7. Further up the list, we get Beast Boy and Animal Man, two DC Comics characters whose only abilities are to mimic those of animals (and who understandably have some affinity for them).

And topping the list at number 1 is – get this – Wonder Man.

The list does include some legitimate superheroes, but for all the wrong reasons. Superman comes in at number 8 because he saved a kitten once in 2000. There’s no mention that Clark Kent is a vegetarian in “Superman: Birthright,” no small feat for a guy raised on a farm in Kansas. And Batman is ranked number 5 because his cape is made of pleather. Fair enough, but I suspect his ranking will plummet when the folks at PETA see “Dark Knight,” in which the Caped Crusader shows little compassion toward several Rottweilers sicced on him. (more…)

The Seattle-based Walkscore.com uses Google Maps to calculate your neighborhood’s proximity to nearby amenities. The closer a shop, restaurant, school, or park is to where you live, the more points the neighborhood gets.

According to this algorithm, the 10 most walkable cities are:

1. San Francisco
2. New York
3. Boston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Seattle
7. Washington
8. Long Beach, Calif.
9. Los Angeles
10. Portland, Ore. (more…)

]]> http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/how-walkable-is-your-city/feed/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/israel-hamas-standoff-deepens-water-woes/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/israel-hamas-standoff-deepens-water-woes/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:20:06 +0000 editorial http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/israel-hamas-standoff-deepens-water-woes/ Five hundred yards south from where hundreds of children play in the water next to this refugee camp, a pipe spills 20 million liters of raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea each day.

Between 105 and 120 million liters of sewage are generated daily in Gaza. Of that, only 20 million liters are fully treated, while another 40 million liters are partially treated. The rest flows raw into the sea, storm drains, and a massive landfill north of Gaza City, which spans 4.3 million square feet. The resulting pollution has sullied not only the seawater, but also the aquifer below Gaza, causing a severe shortage of potable water and putting the population at risk for a range of illnesses.

Untreated water is by no means the only pollutant in Gaza. “If there is a stronger word than catastrophe, I would use that word,” says Nader Al Khateeb, the Palestinian director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, an environmental group working in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, while describing the overall environmental situation in the Gaza Strip.

Much of this environmental deterioration can be attributed to Gaza’s dilapidated water and sewage infrastructure, which has been further undermined by attacks and fuel blockades resulting from the standoff between Israel and the Hamas government. While the recent ceasefire has provided an opportunity for work on damaged facilities to resume, there’s mounting concern that Israeli water supplies are vulnerable to cross-border contamination.

According to the preliminary findings of a study conducted in May and June by the World Health Organization (WHO), seven of 30 seawater areas sampled in Gaza are now contaminated with either human or animal feces, or both. In the contaminated areas, tests registered levels of bacteria two to five times greater than the amount deemed safe, says Mahmoud Daher, WHO’s national health officer for Gaza.
Due to sewage seeping into the ground, the aquifer beneath Gaza, which provides water for drinking and washing, is now so polluted with nitrates that only 10 percent currently meets WHO standards for safety, adds Monther Shoblak, the director of the World Bank-funded Gaza Emergency Water Project.

“If I would use WHO standards to supply the people here with water, no one would drink,” says Mr. Shoblak.

Gaza’s water problems stem from the territory’s dilapidated water and waste infrastructure. According to the United Nations, 60 percent of

Gazans have access to water in their homes every other day for four to six hours while 15 percent have access only once a week, for the same amount of time.

The lack of running water has motivated Gazans to dig at least 4,000 illegal wells in the past two years, adds Shoblak. The illegal wells, dug directly into the aquifer, have drained it at some places below the water table of the sea, leaving the aquifer salinated and unusable even for washing and cooking. Einav Shimron Grinboim, a spokeswoman for Israel’s Health Ministry, said in a statement that Israel is “worried concerning this problematic situation.”

Pollution was severely exacerbated by the Israeli bombing of Gaza’s power plant two years ago. The siege laid on Gaza for the past year, during which fuel imports were limited, also prevented facilities maintenance.

The Hamas government says the lack of power and fuel prevents the operation of the waste water treatment facilities at full capacity. But Israel counters that there is sufficient power and fuel and that Hamas simply has higher priorities than protecting the health of its citizens.

Both Israeli and Palestinian authorities say that during the siege, the raw metals, plastics, and spare parts needed to maintain Gaza’s sewage and plumbing infrastructure and waste-water treatment centers were prohibited from entering Gaza due to Israeli concerns that they would be used to manufacture rockets. Three additional treatment centers, funded by international donors, were not developed for the same reason.

Since the beginning of the cease-fire on June 19, however, materials for the facilities have started arriving in Gaza. This has led to decreased levels of contamination of the partially treated sewage flowing into the sea, from a biological oxygen demand level of between 70 and 100 milligrams from January to June to a current level of between 60 and 70 milligrams. WHO standards call for a level of between 35 to 50 milligrams.

Despite minor improvements, environmentalists in Israel are worried that the contamination of shared sea and underground water systems means that Israelis may soon have water pollution problems of their own. So far, tests on the groundwater and seawater in southern Israel have not revealed any significant pollution. But Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, says it is only a matter of time.

“Sewage knows no borders,” he adds. “We see both the Palestinians and the Israelis shooting themselves in the foot.”

]]> http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/israel-hamas-standoff-deepens-water-woes/feed/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/the-bright-green-blog-on-the-air/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/the-bright-green-blog-on-the-air/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:58:18 +0000 Eoin http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/the-bright-green-blog-on-the-air/ On Friday morning, I could be heard on WCCM’s “Chowder in the Morning” in Salem, N.H., talking about Al Gore’s energy challenge and a recent Pew survey that found that America is deeply divided over climate change.

My portion of the audio is not great, and on top of that I say “um” a lot, but it’s worth listening to for just for the sharp and funny host, Arnie Arneson, whose mind works about three times as fast as my own.

You can listen to us here, I come on at about 40 minutes in, or two-thirds of the way through. Before that, you can hear the Monitor’s religion reporter, Jane Lampman, discussing the legal battle over real estate in the factious Episcopal Church.

]]> http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/the-bright-green-blog-on-the-air/feed/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/should-we-relocate-species-threatened-by-climate-change/ http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/should-we-relocate-species-threatened-by-climate-change/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:40:04 +0000 Eoin http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/21/should-we-relocate-species-threatened-by-climate-change/ A group of scientists has suggested that species threatened with extinction by climate change should be moved to other parts of the world where they could survive.

Writing in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, an international team of conservation scientists from Australia, Britain, and the United States argued that species may not be able to relocate themselves before climate change destroys their habitat.

The authors suggest that “assisted migration” may be necessary for the survival of these species.

“When I first brought up this idea some 10 years ago in conservation meetings, most people were horrified,” said University of Texas at Austin Prof. Camille Parmesan, one of the paper’s authors, in a UT press release. “But now, as the reality of global warming sinks in, and species are already becoming endangered and even going extinct because of climate change, I’m seeing a new willingness in the conservation community to at least talk about the possibility of helping out species by moving them around.”

For many conservationists, this proposal flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Humanity’s record of introducing nonnative species into ecosystems – intentionally and otherwise – has not been good. Some transplanted species do not survive; many others survive too well, driving out native plants and animals. (more…)

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