Home / treehugger.com rss archive / September-30-2007


West Coast Green wrapup
West Coast Green when they billed it as the biggest green building conference on this coast, they werent lying. It was huge an the lineup of speakers was excellent, though they only had about 4 tracks a day with at least 40 different sessions going on at the same time so there was no way to come even close to seeing everything....

DIY: Minimalist Gourd Birdhouse
If mod is your style but dropping $150 on a birdhouse doesn't do it for you, here's an awesome, green alternative. Courtesy of two straight lines comes this great DIY project: take a gourd, drill a hole in it, hollow it out, slap some no-VOC paint on it, add a branch and call it good. Inspired by this minimalist house at design*sponge, the gourd version offers a nice green upgrade to the polystyrene material -- would you want to live in a plastic house? Didn't think so -- and a really clever use of materials...

Ecuador Commits to Save teh Yasuni Rainforest
Photo credit: colonosAt the Clinton Global Initiative this week, Ecuador pledged to forgo the development of the country's largest oil reserve in the Amazon basin's most diverse rainforest located below Yasuni National Park, also home to the Tagaeri-Taromenani indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolationThe nation will be essentially kissing an estimated $4.6 million in oil revenues goodbye, making the commitment one of the most significant and ambit...

Quote of the Day: D.H. Lawrence on the Magnificence of Whales
Photo credit: tk_five_0 They say the sea is cold, but the sea containsthe hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urgeon and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killersthere they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!"D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), "Whales Weep Not"...

Solar Tree: New Street Lighting from Ross Lovegrove
Welsh uber-designer Ross Lovegrove has been dabbling in solar design for awhile -- his path & garden lighting and solar car prototype are just a few we've seen -- and now he's scaling it up to light a whole street. Solar Tree takes a page from its cellulose brethren, "growing" skyward to maximize solar exposure. The project, for the Museum for Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna, will debut on October 8 at Vienna Design Week. Hit the jump for more pics and the artists'...

Air New Zealand Biofuelling Through The High Skies
With flying being one of the greatest contributors to growing carbon emissions, airlines are scrambling to find ways to clean up their image carbon offsets, recycling, zero emissions targets but it is up to some scrutiny and debate as to whether these measures will be effective.Nevertheless, it shouldnt stop the airlines from trying. With New Zealands government declaring itself to actively become the worlds first carbon neutral nation with sustainability underpinning the

The TH Interview: Michael Ford, CEO of ChooseRenewables
ChooseRenewables, which formally launched earlier this week, features several personalized eco-tools - including the MyEnergy Analyst and MyWatts Renewables Estimator - which allow consumers to evaluate their carbon footprint and view location-based solar and wind energy solutions (which, unfortunately, rarely come cheap). In addition, consumers also...

Two Years Ago In TreeHugger: The $100 Laptop "Almost a Reality"
Just to show how things take so much longer than we expect, two years ago Collin wrote "Thanks to Nicholas Negroponte and the Media Lab at MIT, children in developing nations around the world will have access to technology.....The laptops will largely be powered by a side-mounted hand-crank, and can be juiced up with conventional electric current or batteries, when they're available"As we all know, it has had a troubled start; the crank is gone (it now is a pull cord) Yves Behar

Sunpark: Moving Forward on Canada's First Solar Park
Last year we covered the launch of Sunpark Corporation, an organization looking to build Canadas first solar park, and offering members of the public the opportunity to sponsor individual cells at CAN$25.00 per unit. Since our first post, it seems that the organization has been going from strength-to-strength, attracting an impressive list of major corporate sponsors. Most recently they have seen Climate Care (the Canadian AC supplier, not the UK-based offset company) making a donatio...

The Green Parent October/November: The Learning Special
Back in June we wrote about UK-based The Green Parent magazine and its intriguing sounding article on The Diary of a Pregnant Man, and our recent post about Ebays decision to ban the sale of used diapers was also prompted by a story in the magazines October/November issue. But diaper-related controversies are not the only interesting subject covered by this wide-ranging publication. Also included in the same issue are a series of informative articles on schooling options, from alt...

VIDEO S&WFF: Dream People of the Amazon
In the early 1990s the Amazonian Achuar tribe of southeastern Ecuador learned about the outside worlds desire for the oil under their territory. The elders of the tribe had been having similar, telling dreams and the interpretation was stunning: if the Achuar people were to defend themselves and the land from oil operations, they would need to seek alliances in the very world that was about to destroy them. The above clip from Dream People of the Amazon (US/Ecuador, 2005, Documen...