Judith Lewis’s Posts

• Teaching green

  Lessons from Burning Man 2007 5

  Posted 2 years, 2 months ago

  A man in a hardhat just dropped off his chicken for me to mind -- a Japanese Silkie who watched me with one surprisingly smart eye as I typed this post. I reassured her I was a vegetarian, and she seemed to relax. After a few minutes, the man in the hardhat returned, thanked me, and said he was off to find a blowdryer so he could give the little hen a bath. Playa dust has coated her feathers.

  If it had been Monday, I might have thought this strange. But it's… Read More

• 'If you were really green, you would have walked here'

  Is Burning Man living up to its Green Man intentions? 3

  Posted 2 years, 2 months ago

  The headline refers to a sign that appears as you drive (or as I drove, in a huge white pickup truck) into the Playa at five miles an hour, and it's not a bad summary of the enviro discussion here at Burning Man. How can you really be green at an event you have to drive hundreds of miles to, mostly through desert, with all your heavy crap in the car? Where will all those plastic water bottles end up? Is there such thing as a petroleum-free camp? What about all those Zip Ties, the preferred technology for securing dome… Read More

• Was it arson, or just bad neon?

  Wildfire breaks out at Burning Man 0

  Posted 2 years, 2 months ago

  Strange fires are happening everywhere: California, Europe, and Burning Man.

  Somehow, this morning, the giant effigy at the center of Black Rock City -- the site of the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert -- went up in flames this morning at 3 a.m. This is the "Man" I'm talking about, the one that burns at the end of the event on Saturday. The neon -- and this year, for the first time ever, solar-powered -- creature that you orient yourself with to find your way home ... he's gone.

  Read More

• Desert Flowers

  Legendary Burning Man festival gets an eco-conscience 11

  Posted 2 years, 3 months ago

  Armen Zeitounian leads the way up the staircase of the house he's living in, a two-story colonial nestled in the smoggy hills north of Los Angeles, complete with a view and a pool and a black Ford Explorer in the driveway. In a room on the top floor, a two-by-six-inch plank, painted white, protrudes about five feet through a hole halfway up the wall; in the next room, the other half of the plank emerges, painted black.

  "It's called the No-See-Saw," Zeitounian says. "It's a play on perception and psychological issues. Who are you trusting when you sit down? You… Read More

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Judith Lewis’s Recent Comments

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  As long as the president-elect's reading Grist

  Can you tell him that appointing Larry Summers as Secretary of the Treasury is a terrible idea?

  Summers was the guy behind the Summers memo, advising we dump our toxic waste on developing countries, where people don't really live long enough to get cancer.

  As for the RFK, Jr. rumors: I got the idea he was mostly floating them himself. But given that the EPA's biggest failing is enforcement of existing law, and Kennedy's got a long history of litigating for enforcement, I think he'd be great. On More EPA speculation posted 1 year ago 3 Responses

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  Yo, Wolverine!

  Where'd I say "solar power is more ecologically destructive than nuclear"? I said it has a bigger footprint per megawatt. That's all. Which it does. On the actual land, I mean.
  On BLM contemplates two-year moratorium on solar power plant construction in the West posted 1 year, 4 months ago 68 Responses

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  Solar in the Mojave

  This decision is politically motivated, industry-friendly crap. Clearly, the Bush administration doesn't give a rat's ass about the bighorn sheep and desert tortoise solar projects might impact. They just want to defeat solar. I'm sure that's true.

  But that doesn't mean large-scale solar projects tread lightly on the land. Talk to the people at the Wildlands Conservancy, or the Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, and they'll tell you about the threat of renewable energy projects tearing up their carefully protected habitat. Beyond just the projects themselves, there's the transmission that has to be built to carry that power to the cities. Try having a picnic under a 500-kilovolt transmission tower, buzzing like 5 billion bees.

  S. David Freeman, a Los Angeles energy expert and former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, refers in his new book on energy to the "wasteland of the Mojave" serving as our renewable energy "goldmine." That's the kind of attitude that pisses people off in the Mojave, which includes Joshua Tree National Park, by the way. It's not a wasteland at all, but a vibrant ecosystem teeming with life. Teeming. A lot of that life is endangered, and some renewable projects could literally wipe it out.

  Compared to nuclear, solar has a massive footprint per megawatt. Sorry, but it just does, lifecycle and all. It can be responsibly sited in the desert, but only if the utilities and solar providers work with conservationists when they decide where to build. Otherwise, it's just going to be another long, green-on-green battle, one that the planet's well-funded opponents can play to their advantage. As we have seen.

  And in the meantime, turn off your lights when you're not using them. There's no energy nirvana.On BLM contemplates two-year moratorium on solar power plant construction in the West posted 1 year, 4 months ago 68 Responses

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  It's almost axiomatic

  From where I sit in Venice, California, 20 miles down the coast from the nearest fire, there's hardly a human missing the climate-wildfire link. Sure, we get fires out here, but not fires like these, and we get drought, but this is off the hook. If you eavesdrop in restaurants, listen to the radio (even mainstream news radio, KFWB) or walk on the beach (where the air sucks, by the way), you hear, "this is climate change, isn't it?"

  The fire season started dreadfully early -- this is the third major incident since last May; half the Los Padres National Forest seems to have gone up in flams (that fire, the Zaca Fire, burned for well over month). Plus, there've been fires happening all over the world, all summer -- Greece, Croatia, the Canary Islands, Australia.) It's pretty hard to miss the fact that this is beyond the usual stuff.

  Now we got to figure out how we can get these people to actually do something about it . . .

  Hope your San Diegans are okay. On Global warming and the California wildfires posted 2 years ago 8 Responses

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  Conspicuous Sustainable Seafood Consumption

  Yeah, but with the analog version of the seafood guide you can sit at a sushi bar and open it up and look at it, in plain view of everyone sitting around you. And you can say, "Oh, look, honey! Halibut's okay -- it's not full of mercury and its habitat is okay, too! Chilean Sea Bass -- bad, bad, bad. Tuna? Well, I don't know -- how is it caught?"

  You can also carry a few of them in your purse or wallet, so you can hand them out to fellow patrons who get curious. I've seen people give out copies at parties.On Evaluating seafood choices just became a lot easier posted 2 years, 1 month ago 12 Responses