Published on October 21st, 2008
Cow Power - Energy Happens
The U.S. Forest Service announced that it will enroll its Rutland, Vermont office in the Central Vermont Public Service Cow Power ™ program.
We’ve written before here on EcoLocalizer on the potential of “cow power” as a source of biogas for electrical generation and as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Created in 2004, The Central Vermont Public Service Cow Power™ program is Vermont’s largest volunteer alternative energy program and the nation’s first direct farmer-to-consumer renewable energy plan.
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Published on October 8th, 2008
I can’t be the only one wondering what I’d do if the bottom really drops out of the economy and we’re all left to fend for ourselves. And the best answer I keep coming to is farming, as in growing my own — and others’ — food.
Well, it turns out farming has already come to the rescue of at least one local economy, as Marian Burros reports in a New York Times article titled, “Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town.”
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Published on August 19th, 2008
Sometimes, you come across a Website that’s just so full of great, inspiring and exciting information, you can’t get enough of it. That’s what happened when I came upon the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index, a database of entries into the annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge to solve “humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.”
The challenge, launched last year, honored its first winner this past June: a plan for a “Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia,” submitted by John Todd, a research professor at the University of Vermont and founder and president of Oceans Arks International. And just last month, the institute unveiled its Idea Index, which provides details on entries in every area from community and energy to transportation and water. It’s too much to take in all at once, so today, let’s look at some of the innovative ideas in one area alone: food.
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Published on May 22nd, 2008
Vermont author, scholar and activist Bill McKibben sees the climate change challenge like this: we have 18 months — just 18 months — to pound a single number into the world’s collective head.
350.
350. That’s the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in parts per million, we need to achieve if we hope to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate and our civilization. The challenge here is that CO2 concentrations have already climbed to 387 parts per million and rose by 2.14 ppm, the highest rate of increase yet, in 2007.
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Published on May 19th, 2008
I’ve recently witnessed a few scenes of life after peak oil, and it isn’t necessarily the Apocalypse.
In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.
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