7gen Bloc

25 years ago today, Jimmy Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, better known as Superfund, creating the Federal government's program to clean up the nation's growing and out of control hazardous waste sites. Through the Superfund program, the EPA along with numerous other private groups and organizations cleaned up abandoned, accidentally spilled, or illegally dumped hazardous waste sites that posed a risk to current and future generation’s health and the environment.

Psssst. Over here… Look at this! Check it out… What do you see in the magic left hand column? It’s a new blinky button! For our new contest with Treehugger. Go ahead. Click it. (You know you want to.) It won’t bite. Then grab your video camera. Harness your creative muse. Wake up your inner Spielberg. Make a short mini-movie about the practical, easy, and inspired ways you’ve found to reduce your carbon emissions and make the planet a cooler place.

If you plan to while away any of your upcoming winter hours staring at the flickering flames of your video box, you should make sure you watch this when you do.

Special thanks to friend and customer Jack, who alerted us last night to a segment on yesterday’s Today Show about organic foods. As Jack noted in his e-mail to us, the 6-minute piece contained plenty of debatable points. I watched it last night and agree. I’d add that it also just about completely missed the boat on many of the most important aspects of organic food. In general, the segment felt more like sloppy fluffy filler than a serious news report seeking to actually inform the public. But here’s the kicker… Jack writes:

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Oakland Tribune about the little known effects that chemicals can have on human health. It's well worth checking out. Everybody knows that a big chemical exposure (or smaller exposures over time) can make cells go wiggy and turn cancerous. But there’s also a host of other things that chemicals do, and these don’t get much press even though I think they're as important as the carcinogenicity factor.

It was 6:10 on a hectic Wednesday night. I was at Spirit Dancer receiving a healing touch and getting my chakras aligned. It was difficult to sit in silence and meditate while my mind was occupied with thoughts of Laurie David’s speech at 6:30. I knew I would be late. After taking a moment to come back to reality, my friends and I rushed to Ira Allen Chapel to hear the speech. All of the seats were taken so we had to find room on the floor of the Campus Center Theatre to watch Laurie on the big screen.

As promised, my 1983 Mercedes diesel station wagon is now powered by pure vegetable oil. What’s so amazing is that you’d never know it. If anything my car now runs better than before. And even buying new vegetable oil I’m saving about a dollar a gallon over diesel. We’re still working on setting up the filtering system that will allow me to run on recycled (i.e. used) oil. At 30 miles to the gallon it emits about 25% of the CO2 of a Prius.