Comments Rudmin the Green has made

  • double standard (i.e. oil'n'gas)

    This is strangely ironic, considering that the desert of the Four Corners area is scarred every few hundred feet with one road after another, for servicing oil and gas wells.  How could solar
    installations have more impact than that?  This decision smells of a spiteful double standard.On Feds freeze new solar projects on public land, pending review posted 1 year, 5 months ago 26 Responses

  • "organic" a puzzling word

    One thing that has long puzzled me is that the same word (organic) is used for 1) volatile carbon-based, often synthetic, often carcinogenic, chemicals (i.e. "organic chemistry"), AND 2) healthy products that DON'T use such chemicals!

    How did that ever come about?

    Does anybody know the history of the use of the term "organic"?

    And does anyone have any suggestions for a better term--one less confusing!--that could be used instead?

    I just heard on a weekend NPR radio show that the Chinese are confused by the word, but they are well aware that Americans are crazy about "organic" products.On Umbra on organic vs. natural foods posted 1 year, 8 months ago 10 Responses

  • oops...

    I don't like the way my "tone" appears in the above comments. (If a moderator is reading this, please remove my two above comments. Thanks!)
    I guess I agree with all you pro-composters afterall. Just, please don't burn me in efiggy if I take a calculated shortcut and stick an apple core in some landscaping mulch. I guess that is composting right?On Umbra on tossing food waste posted 2 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses

  • one more thing...

    I forgot to say...The whole reason I feel that this whole thing is pretty negligible is, think how much material is dropped by trees all the time, much of which takes a long time to bio-degrade. Pinecones...nuts...leaves...bark...branches...so what's a measly apple core in the whole scheme of things? It's completely natural to have dried bits of plant material laying around on the ground. Please!On Umbra on tossing food waste posted 2 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses

  • bio-degradables in the bushes

    I am finding that I disagree with most of you on this issue! (Hope this doesn't make me a sociopath or a public enemy...) It's just that, I fear that the most zealous of us "greenies" might end up tying ourselves down with so much petty fuss over minutia that we impede ourselves from accomplishing things that truly make a difference. I mean, I myself have gone through phases where I became a really sanctimonious "greener-than-thou" puritan over truly negligible things...and ended up putting my life in such a bind that I then had to resort to desperate measures--like extra driving--just to catch up at work or school and pay the bills! I do believe there is a place for common sense over apple cores and banana peels. Think before you throw. Of course you don't want to throw it beside a highway and attract deer to become roadkill and endanger drivers! But if you're walking through campus, what's wrong with stubbing your toe into some mulch, dropping an apple core in it, and covering it back over? Or throwing the core on a roof so a bird can pick at it? C'mon, let's not become our own saboteurs. There's important things to deal with, like driving less (or not at all), saving energy, or pressuring politicians to give renewable energy a fair and fighting chance...(I could go on and on, but I've wasted enough time talking about banana peels!)On Umbra on tossing food waste posted 2 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses

  • paying for China's retrofit

    You have made a "should" statement about a moral/ethical imperative. There are a lot of things we perhaps "should" do, but do they ever happen? If we add up the cost all our "should"s, the question becomes "Can" we? So we end up deciding what we "will" do, which may well be based on what we ultimately "must" do.

    The sustainability of BOTH China AND the U.S. is in the "must" category, I would say. At least if we don't want to turn Earth into Venus or Mars. Therefore, we need to do what WILL work, for both countries. How could we ever pay for China's green overhaul, if we don't pull it off in our smaller country first?

    So our first priority is to set the example.
    And that opens up an interesting opportunity...
    Americans are the consumer kings of the world. We create the demands for products, and China rushes to fill our demand. So if we demand solar panels, windmills, buses, trains, bicycles, and small-scale farming tools...China will make them!
    And then they'll be available to the Chinese, to complete their green retrofit more inexpensively.

    I guess you would call this green-supply side economics.

    I'm not an economist, so I'm sure there's some kind of Achilles heel in my hypothesis. Perhaps somebody smart can point it out.On That you won't hear in the mainstream media posted 2 years, 5 months ago 18 Responses