My hometown city of Seattle recently decided to stop buying bottled water, which is probably somewhat of a bane for the company that sold it to them, for $58,000 a year. Seattle mayor Greg Nickles said
“When you add up the tremendous environmental costs of disposable plastic bottles clogging our landfills, the better choice is crystal clear.”
How many of the 2 million plastic beverage bottles (the number used in the U.S. every five minutes) in this artwork are water bottles? You can see a zoom in on this image here and here .
Do you drink bottled water? I have a good friend from Australia who only drinks bottled water because she claims tap water isn’t safe. Whenever she visits, she simply won’t drink the tap water, and buys a lot of bottled water. I can understand this. Earlier this month, for instance, an Associated Press investigation found trace amounts of prescription and over the counter drugs in the water supplies of 41 million Americans in 24 major cities.
On the other hand, my friend Byron, also from Australia, argues the other direction
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David recently posted this comment in another thread:
I try to talk candidly with my daughters regarding the pitfalls and benefits of relationships. I try not to say either do or don’t have sex prior to marriage. I try to talk about consequences for doing something without a good understanding of why and what will happen after. When the girls watched the movie “Juno” that became a good opportunity for discussing the difficulty of dealing with teen pregnancy and the confused reasons people can come to that place.
Posted in Doing Life, Relationships, What can we do?, Women's Rights | 5 Comments »
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Consumer Consequences Poll
Thursday, February 28th, 2008Last November, we wrote about Consumer Consequences, a online game you can play which will give you an idea how your consumption levels match up with the planet’s resources. It takes about seven minutes to complete, and at the end it gives you a rating of how many earths we would need if everyone consumed at the same levels as you. In November, I was kind of bummed out to learn I was consuming 3.5 earths worth of energy, food, stuff, etc.
In the last 3 months, I’ve made a few relatively minor changes, and I’m yotta stoked to report that my consumption is now down to 2.3 earths.
If you pop over and play the game, let us know how you did. I promise no one will criticize you–if they do, I’ll just delete their comment =) (God I love that lovely all powerful blog host feeling =)
The things I worked on over the last 3 months were food and lighting and buying green. So I’ve been gradually switching to flourescent screw in light bulbs in the house. It works better for me anyway, since we’re in this ancient house with an ancient electrical system which kind of surges a little, and always makes the normal bulbs blow out really fast anyway. And I’ve been working on smaller food portions, and not driving so much, and less air travel. =) And buying just a few greener things–like greenish dish detergent and laundry detergent.
Share with us how you did, and what you have worked on, or plan to work on, to lower your consumption! And take part in the new poll on the sidebar!
Posted in Economics, Environmentalism, What can we do? | 19 Comments »
The Tension …
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008Craig recently commented in this thread
guess I just like the tension that gets created in me when I hang around people with opposing worldviews.
I loved this comment. I think it strongly touches on what we are trying to accomplish at Off the Map, and also on something we’re going to have to live into if we ever really want to MTWABP (make the world a better place)
What about you–do you like that tension? Do you lean into it, or away from it? Why? How? your comments? tell us a story, if you like =)
Posted in Interfaith Dialogue, Quote for the Day, What can we do? | 5 Comments »
The Super Bowl and Child Labor
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008Not a disconnect. The super bowl half time show is being sponsored by Bridgestone-Firestone, the American division of a corporation which had $25 Billion in revenues in 2006 (enough to pay for a full 6 weeks of the Iraq War, just as an aside). Why are they sponsoring the super bowl half time show? You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
1. So question number one is: If you or I watch the super bowl, with its multiple ads from Bridgestone-Firestone, are we thus … glorifying Bridgestone-Firestone? And by “glorifying” in this question, I mean “making more weighty, lending esteem, honor, profit, etc. to” That is, by watching the superbowl, are you giving away some of your power to Bridgestone- Firestone?
Emira Woods writes today at Allafrica.com about the ongoing use of child labor by Bridgestone-Firestone in Liberia, and the ongoing lawsuit regarding that child abuse. If you poke around the internet a bit, you’ll find that there’s quite a bit of eyewitness testimony to the horrible conditions at rubber tree plantations owned and operated by Bridgestone-Firestone in Liberia. I guess it’s probably fairly easy to take advantage of people who have the sort of widespread PTSD that Liberians without a doubt have to deal with after the years of really vicious, savage, horrifying civil war in that nation.
Posted in What can we do?, liberia | 9 Comments »Read the rest of this news item »
The Davos Question
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008I learned today about the Davos Question:
“What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.
Apparently the world’s top leaders meet every year at World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss how to make the world a better place. This year’s meeting took place Jan 24-27 (Just last week). You tube users were invited to upload videos with their answers to the Davos Question, and some of their videos were screened at plenary sessions at the World Economic Forum. And then world leaders responded with their own videos. So you can follow it all over at the Davos Question Youtube Channel.
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Iowa Caucuses, and ONE.org’s “on the record”
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008As you are no doubt aware, today is the first in the nation caucus, the beginning of the United States’ primary election cycle for the 2008 presidential election.
Here are the results from our own little poll, which has been running for a little while now over in the right sidebar:
The question: If the primary election were held today, who would you vote for?
There were a total of 28 votes. They broke down like this:
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The Dark Side of Christmas
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007Yes, I know, Christmas is some 22 days away. As in “Only 22 shopping days left.”
A few years ago I heard one of my favorite preachers, Dave Sellers, preach a Christmas sermon which I’ve remembered all these years (which is saying something, as far as most sermons go). It was about the dark side of Christmas. He talked about how we focus on baby Jesus at Christmas–the whole 3 wise men, camels, sheep, angels, shepherds, stable, etc. But what we don’t realize is this other darker thing that was happening. It’s from Revelation 12 (hang with me here. I know people can get pretty freaking wierd with John’s Revelation).
Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.
So how about that? A dragon hanging around in the birthing room to gobble up baby Jesus the moment he’s born? That’s not so happy or pretty, is it? And then what about 2 year old Jesus? His existence is implicit in the mass murder of a bunch of 2 year old babies, ’bout to be toddlers. From Matthew
Herod, when he realized that the scholars had tricked him, flew into a rage. He commanded the murder of every little boy two years old and under who lived in Bethlehem and its surrounding hills.
Posted in What can we do? | 24 Comments »
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Dark for Darfur and Buy Nothing Day
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007With the insanity of the holidays approaching, we want to promote some ideas for reducing consumerism during this consumer driven season of the year.
Dark for Darfur has a calculator for the electricity costs for outdoor christmas light displays. They are encouraging us to consider doing without these displays, and instead donating corresponding dollar savings to address the insanity in Darfur.
Buy Nothing Day is encouraging us to undertake a 24 hour buying moratorium on November 23 in the United States (the infamous Day after Thanksgiving/busiest shopping day of the year) and on November 24 internationally.
- If you buy into either of of these ideas–why not leave a comment and let us know.
- And/or share your thoughts/reactions.
- And definitely please let us know if you decide to sign on with one of these campaigns *because* we featured it here on JaC.
- What are *your* ideas for fighting the insane consumerism of the holiday season?
Personally, for Christmas, I’m asking people to consider buying me something from the World Vision gift catalog–or if they must buy me a personal gift, keep the cost under $20.
Posted in What can we do? | No Comments »
How many planets are you consuming?
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007So recently I found this little exercise from public radio called consumer consequences. It’s a sort of a game you play where you enter various data about yourself, like how much you drive your car, how many miles per gallon it gets, how much you fly every year, how much food you eat, of which types, how much garbage you throw out every week, how much you use public transport, how much your electric bill is on average, and so forth. Then it gives you an estimate of how many earths we’d need if everyone were consuming at the same level as you.
I was kind of bummed ’cause I got rated at 3.5 planets. Yikes. But I don’t think it took certain thinks into account–like what percentage of my food comes from food sources that would otherwise be thrown in the garbage (like dumpstering or gleaning). Ah well.
If you play, why not come back here and leave a comment about how many planetus worth of consumption you are engaging in, and how you felt about it. And any ideas you have for reducing consumption. It took me about 12 minutes.
Posted in Economics, Environmentalism, What can we do? | 10 Comments »
