Landlocked Ocean Love: Spread Word

In 2011, over nine million pounds of trash was collected along the world's shorelines, according to the Ocean Conservancy. This Saturday is International Coastal Cleanup Day and if you don't live near a coastline, it might be hard to imagine how you can lend a hand. Water-lovers of the inlands, don't fret — we'll show you how to help.

Tip #2: Spread the word.

You may not live near a coastline, but we're betting you have some friends or family who do. Encourage them to become a steward of the ocean. Activities for International Coastal Cleanup Day are planned nationwide and the more volunteers the merrier. There are plenty of options available, all they have to do is sign up to clean up. What if they can't find a location close by? Well, if they can't find a spot, encourage them to head to the beach anyway for a solo mission. If the satisfaction of picking up those pesky cigarette butts, plastic products, and other random trash isn't enough, at least they get to spend a day at the beach. Who knows, maybe encouraging others into action will inspire you to go on an outing of your own and join them at that beach.

--Photo by iStockphoto/Matauw

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Landlocked Ocean Love: Park Pick-up

In 2011, over nine million pounds of trash was collected along the world's shorelines, according to the Ocean Conservancy. This Saturday is International Coastal Cleanup Day and if you don't live near a coastline, it might be hard to imagine how you can lend a hand. Water-lovers of the inlands, don't fret — we'll show you how to help.  

Tip #1: Organize a park cleanup.

Everything from the inlands eventually works its way out to the coastline. So one of the best ways to show some ocean love is to keep the streets and parks of your own town as litter-free as possible. Contact your local city chamber and find out if there are any cleanups that you can join. If there's a river nearby, focus your efforts there and become a Sierra Club Water Sentinel.  If there aren't any local events planned, branch out on your own! If you spread the word to your friends, family, and neighbors chances are you'll get a lot of supporters. You can even put in the footwork and go door-to-door to get volunteers or create a Facebook event to organize your efforts. Either way, bringing together your community to clean up your area is a great way to keep that trash out of the gutter and out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

--Photo courtesy of istock/noticelj

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13-Year-Old Fights Big Plastic Bill

How old do you have to be to fight a massive, environment-destroying industry? Younger than you think.

Abby Goldberg, a 13-year-old from Grayslake, Ill., started a petition on Change.org to veto the "Plastic Bag Film and Recycling Act." The title of the bill sounds deceptively benign. What could be so bad about requiring more plastic bag recycling facilities? The problem is that it would take away the power of towns to implement their own strategies for reducing waste, including bans on bags. Why recycle plastic bags when towns can ban them altogether?

Goldberg's petition received over 170,000 signatures. Earlier this summer, she personally delivered the petition to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who vetoed the bill on Sunday.

According to a Change.org press release, Goldberg said, "I couldn’t sit by quietly while big plastic tried to push this bill through my state. . . I care too much about animals, our environment, and our future natural resources to be silent. That’s why I took action, and why I’m so thankful that Governor Quinn took a stand for the environment in vetoing this bill.”

--Image by iStockphoto/Matt_Brown

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Krislyn Placide is an editorial intern at Sierra going into her fourth year of journalism school at Northwestern University. When she's not updating the blog, she likes running through parks and eating her weight in watermelon.

Stray Dog Joins Cyclists on Race to Tibet

A shaggy little stray dog joined a team of cross-country cyclists and raced into the hearts of thousands of fans across China.

The group of cyclists was five days into a 1,700 kilometer race from Sichuan Province to Llasa, Tibet, when they spotted the ball of white fur lying in the sun on the side of National Highway 318.

One of the cyclists, 22-year-old Xiao Yong, tossed a chicken drumstick to the little canine and evidently struck up a bond, because she began to follow them.

After the dog ran alongside the team for a week, proving to be a "cyclist's best friend," they set up a blog that gained 40,000 followers. The story was featured on China.org, where the little dog has become an Internet sensation.

Over 20 days of treacherous mountain cycling, the dog they nicknamed Xiao Sa, or Little Sa, kept running. She ran 50 to 60 kilometers per day, climbing a dozen mountains over 13,000 feet. 

Stunning Time-Lapse Photography of Yosemite

An amazing time-lapse photography video of Yosemite National Park is bringing international attention for photographer Shawn Reeder of Bishop, California.

The two-year project, Yosemite Range of Light, uses nearly 7,000 high-resolution still photos to create an inspiring vision of light and granite, capturing rolling cloud formations and the rainbow-lit waterfalls of Yosemite.

Reeder first came to Yosemite after winning a local waiter contest where he grew up in Maryland. First prize was a trip to Napa Valley wine-country, but the 18-year-old convinced the prize committee to offer a change of venue. Choosing Yosemite as his destination instead, he brought along his best friend, who happened to have a camera. . . .

Q & A with Garbology Author Ed Humes

Sierra magazine recently sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes to talk about his new book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (Avery, 2012).

SIERRA: Is there a way that we can change today's convenience mindset of disposable everything and come back to a society with less waste?

Edward Humes: J. Gordon Lippencott, the father of corporate branding, gave us the philosophical statement of what the economy would look like after WWII. It was based on getting people to violate their most basic instinct of survival — to be thrifty — and [embrace the idea] that it was a good thing to get rid of perfectly good usable products and replace them with something new. That was the core of this new economy of abundance. It’s an illusion that things will never run out. We are an experiment on waste as the driver of prosperity. 

Well, we do all seem to want to have the most up-to-date technologies. How can we change that?

With the up-to-date technology of days gone by, you could go to the store and buy a television set and bring it home and you could be assured that if something in it failed or some component was developed that was superior, it could be upgraded. There was a built-in longevity to a lot of our products that has gone away. We’ve accepted this idea that durable goods are no longer durable.

What is the most shocking thing that you discovered?

The whole idea that waste has become such a big part of our economy — that it is our top export. Scrap paper and scrap metal are our highest volume exports. We send more of that to China than anything else. They make stuff out of it and sell it back to us. That casts us in the role of China’s trash compacter.

The Art of "Vegan Taxidermy"

Aimée Baldwin's bird sculptures are as lifelike as the best models in a natural history museum. Yet they don't involve any loss of life or toxic preservatives.

Thus her name for them — "vegan taxidermy."

Baldwin, a 36-year-old sculptor in Berkeley, California, creates her stunningly detailed birds out of crepe paper, papier-mâché, and other low-tech art supplies.

Woodpeckers. Warblers. Great blue herons. . . . Every piece is one-of-a-kind. Baldwin spends from 10 to 80 hours on each one, depending on its size. 

Baldwin's love of nature began as a child. But she never applied it to her artistic work until about ten years ago, when a friend with an art supply store asked for help showing customers what they could create with a special line of heavy-duty German crepe paper.

The paper was traditionally used for paper flowers, and Baldwin started out making party favors.  But she was inevitably drawn to wildlife.

"I moved into birds because I like animals and creatures, and the paper works well for feathers," she said.

Baldwin builds her birds from a Styrofoam core, layered with papier-mâché. She adds wire for legs, "sculpting goo" for bills, and glass taxidermy eyes — the only part of the bird she doesn't make by hand.

Then she painstakingly paints and cuts the crepe paper for feathers.

But before all that, she studies her subjects. In photos, field guides and web sites.

And ideally, in the field.

"I'm definitely more inspired if I get out and see birds doing things," she said. "They don't sit still or let me get close. But I prefer to see live birds moving around. It says a lot about their personality."

World Financial Center Hangs Garbage Chandelier

In 2006, Canadian visual artist Katharine Harvey dreamed of creating an installation that exceeded the limits of her pocketbook. “I wanted to build a waterfall, and I wanted to make something big, but I didn’t have much of a budget at the time,” she said. She was in search of affordable materials that might resemble water when it occurred to her: plastics.
 
From that point onward, Harvey began to collect discarded plastic. She would go down the street with her car and pick up bottles and other packaging, which she would wash, de-label, and string together for a series of mesmerizing installations. Between projects, she stored her heap of materials in a friend’s barn, where they awaited future use.
 
Six years later, many of those same materials can be found hanging in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in Manhattan. This April, on the eve of Earth Day, Harvey and four assistants hung 450 pounds of water bottles, salad boxes, toy packaging, and egg cartons above the Garden’s marble staircase. Taken together, these materials do not resemble trash; they resemble a shimmering chandelier.
 
The chandelier, originally installed at Toronto’s Brookfield Place, is framed perfectly by the architecture of the Winter Garden. “It’s the best placement I’ve ever had for a piece I’ve done in a public space,” Harvey said. “It’s placed in the middle of the staircase, and people can practically walk above it, or in the middle of it, or further down.” Harvey also noted that the chandelier is “made out of transparent materials, which have an interesting relationship to the glass ceiling in the winter garden. There are all these interrelations between the transparency of the piece and the glass. The lighting is fantastic.”

Ma Jun Maps the Environmental Crisis in China

Ma Jun is one of China's leading environmental activists and the director of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) in Beijing. He was awarded the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize for exposing water and air pollution violations throughout China, using Internet-accessible maps. He has also successfully challenged large companies like Apple and Wal-Mart to restructure their global supply chains.

SIERRA: I read that in Beijing, there is only smog when residents are allowed to use their heaters.

Ma Jun: It's actually called the "heating season." But then the smog becomes even worse, yes.

How long have you lived there?

I was born in the coastal city, Qingdao, but I grew up in Beijing, actually. That's where I started doing my environmental work. I started with my first job in the media, which afforded me to travel in different parts of China. And I was struck by some of the environmental degradation, especially of our water resources. There were shortages, pollution, and river eco-systems were being destroyed. I put what I saw into this book [China's Water Crisis, in 1999] and that got me started in what I'm doing now.

How did you start working with the online water and air pollution maps?

I'd been trying to look for solutions to our environmental challenge and came to the conclusion that the barrier to our environmental protection is not the lack of technology, or even money — it's the lack of motivation. Motivation should come from law enforcement or court litigation, but in China, it's still very difficult. I decided we needed public participation, but the public needed to be informed before getting involved. With that in mind, I decided to create these databases to provide easy access.

Were you afraid of putting that information online?

Yes, well, data is still considered to be quite sensitive in my country. We needed to handle that quite consciously, so we made a compromise: at first, we compiled mostly government-sourced information. See, China in recent years has made some progress in environmental transparency. The government started disclosing some of its monitoring data, but it's still bits and bits here and there. It's very difficult for people to access this stuff. So what we were doing, through relentless data gathering, was putting it all together on a searchable platform, so everyone could utilize the data. Of course, the government would to check what's going on, but once they realized that our data is based on their own monitoring, it became somewhat easier for them to accept.

Earthships Could Transform Philadelphia

More than 40,000 vacant lots, many piled high with illegally dumped tires, blight the city of Philadelphia. High unemployment and crime rates discourage many residents, but not Rashida Ali-Campbell, director of the non-profit, LoveLovingLove, Inc.

In Philadelphia's empty lots and abandoned, decaying buildings (approximately 75,000), Ali-
Campbell sees hope and unlimited possibilities. Her mission is to open a school for low-income residents to learn sustainable building techniques. She plans to bring the first urban Earthship to Philadelphia.  

Earthships are the brain-child of architect and inventor Michael Reynolds. His 40-year-old company creates 100 percent self-sustained buildings with a process he calls "Earthship Biotecture" and he has created thousands of them all over the planet. His life-changing projects have brought hope to communities in Europe, Africa, the Netherlands, and Haiti. (For videos click here)

These homes heat and cool themselves, produce wind and solar electricity, grow their own fruits and vegetables, (many even have a catfish pond and a chicken coop providing fresh eggs) they collect and sterilize water and maintain their own sewage system. This small greenhouse (pictured, above), is only a taste of Earthship Biotecture. A two-bedroom home can support a family of four without them ever having to go to the grocery store and their utility bill would be less than $100 per year.