Updated footprint and final current event

Well, I guess I was successful with a few of my goals (1. Reduce our energy bill; 2. Make sustainable purchasing decisions; 3. Reduce my water consumption; 4. Reduce my transportation needs). If I had to rank them in order of how successful I was at each one, I'd  say I did the best at reducing my water consumption and in making more sustainable purchase decisions. Our power bill, while never making it under $200, has definitely been reduced by keeping my heat off and my power strips turned off when not in use. My transportation needs were met by catching a ride with my roommate when he drives south.

At the beginning of the quarter, I found that I scored 5.21 Earths. 

Through my footprint reduction strategies, I was able to bring that down to 4.01 Earths, which is a start!

I was able to reduce my footprint in global acres from 202.26 to 155.66

The only thing that didn't really change was my pie chart showing the proportion of each impact category

Final Current Event: 

I recently finished reading The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert

This book was first brought to my attention when I saw John Stewart interview the author on The Daily Show, and my first thought was, "Oh, we're touching on similar topics in class!"

I purchased the book a few days later and then sped through it in the past two weeks.

It was very well written and very engaging, switching back and forth between the stories of Kolbert's research for the book and historical stories covering the development of the concept of extinction and the discovery of various fossils. The book was very eye opening. In the course of her research, Kolbert traveled around the globe, from a frog sanctuary in Peru to the reefs in the Southern Pacific to bat caves in upper New Jersey, talking to experts in various scientific fields. 

It was kind of a sad book too. There were many stories about disappearing fauna, such as the Golden Frog in Peru and the po'ouli, a bird endemic to Hawaii that has gone extinct in the wild, but survives on through frozen cells.

So there was this inherent sadness to the book, but also an uplifting hope; learning about the conservation efforts in progress in the Amazon and in America and in places all around the globe helped ease the inherent uncomfortableness of having the evidence of human cause mass extinction brought to light.

Current event 9

We've talked about how unsustainable palm oil actually was in class multiple times, so it was interesting to me to see this article on Triple Pundit addressing sustainability concerns of the popular cosmetics and candy ingredient.

Palm oil is sourced from forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, and harvesting practices haven't been the best in the past. Unilever had already committed to switching to a more sustainable sourcing plan, but other companies are now jumping on board. The Palm Oil Scorecard developed by the Union of Concerned Scientists lists the major companies that use palm oil in their products and identifies how committed each is to the sustainability initiative. Five companies total are fully committed to deforestation-free palm oil: Nestle, Unilever, Mondelez, L'Oreal, and Reckitt Benckiser. That is five out of 30 of the biggest companies that use palm oil, so clearly there's a lot of room for improvement, but the Palm Oil Scorecard is a very useful tool for transparency of sustainability initiatives.

Current event 8

There's a new wind farm coming to the Northwest coast. A Seattle company named Principle Power has just recently been approved to move forward on a lease of 15 square miles of federal waters off the coast of Oregon. Their formal plan is just waiting on final approval. 

The WindFloat Project is a series of wind turbines that will float offshore to capture the latent energy of strong winds off the coast. Principle Power already operates a prototype of their "Windfloat Project" off the coast of Portugal, which has been successful in delivering 8.4 gigawatt-hours of wind energy to the grid since its construction in 2011. 

Of course questions arise as to how these turbines could affect coastal ecosystems. I am optimistic though that they won't cause any major impacts, and will be a great source of renewable energy in the future.

Quote from the US Department of Interior 

"The West Coast holds an offshore capability of more than 800 gigawatts of wind energy potential, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is equivalent to more than three quarters of the nation’s entire power generation capacity. Total U.S. deepwater wind energy resource potential is estimated to be nearly 2,000 gigawatts."

New Current Event: Deforestation Patrol

The World Resources Institute and Google have teamed up along with 40 other businesses and government organizations to bring to life the Global Forest Watch. The GFW (for short) utilizes Google Maps to show deforestation in real-time, as well as providing the ability to display deforestation patterns over time. Using their map, a person is able to look all around the globe at how forest levels have either increased or decreased in any user-defined span of time from 2000 at the earliest to current.

These maps are intended to be used by businesses and consumers alike to track the integrity of sustainable logging claims. A business can check their supplier to make sure there is no over-consumption or illegal logging taking place. They are confident that this will help reduce global deforestation, based upon a similar forest mapping system utilized in Brazil to monitor illegal deforestation activity. Under that system, the rate of forest loss in Brazil has dropped by 70% since 2004.