It takes four travel writers to raise a village.

When Seattle-based Michelle Duffy met up with three friends for a coffee and a chat in 2008, she had no idea they were about to change the world. But if it weren’t for that fateful coffee, a village in Cambodia would not have a school and an entire village in India would not exist. That’s just for starters.

The four friends all happened to be travel writers – Michelle writes at Wandermom, Debbie Dubrow is the brains behind family travel blog Delicious Baby, Pam Mandel the eponymous nerd of Nerd’s Eye View and Beth Whitman the founder of Wanderlust and Lipstick.

“It was literally four friends having coffee,” Michelle recalls. “I think it was Debbie who originally said ‘why don’t we see if we can raise money using our blogs?'” That first year, the friends rounded up a few fellow travel writers to host some raffle prizes and raised $7,400 for Heifer International without too much effort. Thus Passports with Purpose was born.

Fast forward to this year and the stakes are somewhat higher. The goal is to raise $80,000 to build two libraries in Zambia with Room to Read. There are dozens of travel sites participating by hosting prizes – everything from a Kindle Fire (several, in fact) to bungee jumping in New Zealand. You have until midnight Seattle time on December 16 to enter the raffle for the prize of your choice by donating $10 at www.passportswithpurpose.org/donate. All proceeds, aside from PayPal fees, go directly to Room to Read.

In 2009 Passports with Purpose raised almost $30,000 to build a school – with a vegetable garden and other enhancements – in rural Cambodia. The school is now complete and Michelle visited earlier this year and wrote this post for Passports with Purpose. The kids previously would have finished school at fifth grade but can now go to eighth grade in their village, qualifying them for high school in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. “My husband and I were wondering why we needed a driver and why we couldn’t just show up without all the formalities,” Michelle says. “Then we got there and there was an honour guard of all the kids from smallest up to 15 years old and we realized that it was a really big deal. It impacted on a very visceral level because I never thought I could make that kind of difference to anybody’s life.”

In 2010, the tally was $64,128 for LAFTI to build a village in South India for people of the ex-untouchable caste. Beth has written about her visit to the village, which is currently under construction.

The four spend from February to May each year deciding which charity to work with. Since the four of them come from diverse backgrounds and represent a diverse bunch of travel bloggers, they try to select an organization that is not religious. They prefer to work in developing countries where the fundraising dollars can have a greater impact and they like to work for causes that focus on women and children. Room to Read has a focus on educating girls, which research suggests benefits wider society. “As bloggers, we’re people who like to read and people who like to write so Room to Read hits that sweet spot of something we love to do and bringing it to kids who would not have had the chance,” Michelle says. “I was totally shocked by the lack of education infrastructure in Laos when I traveled there and I know Pam has similar stories about Tanzania.”

You can personally make a difference by making a $10 donation in exchange for a raffle ticket for a prize of your choice. You can also spread the word to your networks – last year Facebook was the biggest referrer of traffic. Passports with Purpose is built on the back of $10 donations but since the second year there have been a few larger sponsors as well – in 2011, the sponsors are Round The World With Us, TravellersPoint, Home Away and Good2Go Travel Insurance.

“It’s brought home to me how much you can do as an individual, even if you can’t write a check like Bill Gates” Michelle says. “What I believe from being involved with Passports with Purpose is that… it’s more important to be involved, find a cause you’re passionate about and leverage your network. If you do that it can be life changing.”

Editors note: Writer Caitlin Fitzsimmons is a participating blogger in Passports with Purpose and hosting two prizes – accommodation at the beautiful MacCallum House Inn in Mendocino, California and a cookery workshop at Freestyle Escape on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia.

Images: Room to Read, Wandermom

The post Passports with Purpose: Fundraising Gets Inspiring appeared first on EcoSalon.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

These words, well known to most Australians, were penned over a century ago by poet Dorothea Mackellar at age 19. These days there is a scientific explanation for Australia’s infamous “droughts and flooding rains”.

It’s called the El Niño-La Niña effect – a weather phenomenon that affects other Pacific rim countries as well. El Niño brings the dry, hot weather and La Niña brings the rain – and plenty of it. It’s nothing new though scientists warn that climate change is likely to bring more extremes, making heat and droughts and floods more prevalent and more severe.

In December I moved back to Australia after nearly seven years living abroad, first in London and then San Francisco. For the past few weeks I’ve been glued to the 24-hour news channel watching the Queensland flood crisis unfold, and then further flooding in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. While I’m safe and dry in Sydney, like many Australians, I have family and friends in Queensland. Thankfully they are all fine but thousands of others were not as lucky. We are use to “flooding rains” every so often, but the flood crisis in Queensland has been truly epic.

Three-quarters of Queensland has been declared a flood disaster zone. That is no small area – Queensland has a land mass twice the size of Texas or five times the size of the United Kingdom. Throughout the state, entire townships have been wiped out as rivers burst their banks or torrential downpours brought flash floods. In the south-eastern corner, the central business district and many suburbs of Brisbane – home to two million people – were submerged last week in the city’s worst flood since the 1970s.

Queensland grows a lot of Australia’s food but much of the produce was washed away where it lay in the fields, or sat rotting on stranded trucks. The cleanup, described by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh as of “post-war proportions”, will cost billions and economists are saying the destruction of farms and mines and tourist facilities could wipe one full percentage point off the national GDP.

The environmental cost is also huge. Large numbers of wild animals lost their lives in the floods. The floods carried away precious top soil and mixed it up with human debris and toxic chemicals, which has been dumped into waterways flowing to the southern states or out to sea. Much of it has blanketed the delicate eco-system of Great Barrier Reef, threatening the health of the coral reefs and other marine life. To prevent future floods, the state government is considering building more levees and dams to protect townships in flood zones.

Yet as bad as it’s been, I’ve never felt more proud to be an Australian. The human response has been fantastic. As I watched footage of people huddling on the roofs of their houses or clustered in evacuation centers, I recalled scenes from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Queensland floods were collectively bigger but in contrast to the New Orleans experience, government has played its part perfectly.

The response of the emergency services was highly effective and citizens were kept informed with clear, up-to-date information. Bligh, the state premier, gave televised press conferences every two hours for days and was on top of her game. She didn’t give the fine-sounding motherhood statements so beloved by politicians, instead delivering hard details about what had happened, what was happening and what was likely to happen. She did so without notes and usually without referring questions to the State Emergency Service or the police because she knew what was going on. The federal government also stepped in early, contributing Australian defense personnel to the crisis management and clean-up effort, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard announcing emergency welfare payments to people and businesses affected by the floods.

What impressed me most was the community spirit. We didn’t see scenes of looting but instead footage of people helping one another. Strangers came together to help move property to higher ground before it was claimed by flood waters. They turned out in their hundreds to stack sandbags in front of homes and shops in an effort to stave off the floodwaters. Our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, himself a Brisbane-ite, mucked in just like everyone else, wading through muddy flood waters with residents’ suitcases on his head.

It’s not all rosy, of course. The determination to rebuild towns on flood plains is misguided. We’re still clearing forest and mangroves. And the long history of flooding means that no one wants to look seriously about what climate scientists are telling us about our future. There were howls of outrage when Greens leader Bob Brown sensibly suggested some of the taxes on the super-profits of the mining industry be diverted to a fund to deal with future natural disasters. Despite all this, I feel that the Australian spirit rose to the occasion beautifully.

The outpouring of concern and offers of help from around the world has been moving. But the fact is that Australia is a first-world country with a well-prepared emergency response system and enough wealth to help our citizens cope with their losses and rebuild essential infrastructure. As terrible as the floods have been, it’s impressive that our death toll stands at just 20 people. (Of course my heart goes out to the families of those 20 people but it could have been so much worse). There’s no false pride when we say we can look after our own.

It’s Brazil that needs your help right now.

Image: Kingbob86, NASA Goddard Photo and Video

The post How the Queensland Floods Brought a Nation Together appeared first on EcoSalon.

Now I see them every day. In fact, as I type these words, there is one drinking sugar water from my feeder hanging on my balcony right outside the dining room. It’s perched on the rim rather than hovering but I can see its little head going back and forth as it drinks. The rational explanation for why I’m working at the dining table instead of in my home office is the ceiling fan above me. I suspect the real reason is that I get a better view of the birds from here. With the balcony doors open for the breeze, I can also hear them when they sing.

Oh look, now it seems to be preening its wings! So cute!

While we all know that you shouldn’t feed wild animals, for fear of upsetting the eco-system and encouraging dependency, this is one of the exceptions. Scientists say that hummingbirds need all the help they can get on their long migratory journeys. Urban areas have replaced much of their natural feeding grounds so having a feeder, or planting hummingbird-friendly flowers, help even that out. On a selfish level I’ll also admit that I get a lot of joy out of looking at them!

I bought the feeder at the local hardware store last summer. My environmental principles meant that I forked out extra cash for a feeder made of metal and glass rather than plastic. Besides, I wanted only the best for my hummingbirds!

I also bought a bottle of formula to feed the hummingbirds. The idea was I’d mix one part of the red syrup with three parts of water. The information on the bottle indicated that this was the very best food for hummingbirds:

“Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that hummingbirds prefer sucrose to the monosacharides glucose or fructose. Knowing this, First Nature Nectar uses the finest food-grade sucrose and not less effective invert sugars found in other products. Not only is First Nature Nectar the easiest hummingbird food to use, it’s also the most healthy choice for these colorful visitors.”

Now I don’t doubt the quality of First Nature Nectar’s product and it definitely sounds superior to formulas that use glucose or fructose, which are less nutritious for the hummingbirds. But I now prefer to make my own, and here’s why.

My friend Kimberly saw my photos and alerted me to the fact that red dye may not be safe for hummingbirds. I did some research and it seems that while the issue is not fully resolved, there is enough convincing evidence that it should be avoided. Testing of the red dye (FDA #40) has shown no conclusive detrimental effect on human health, although it is banned in several European countries anyway. But hummingbirds are tiny creatures and they consume vast quantities of nectar, so the concentrations of red dye in the amounts they consume is quite large. I figure why give it to them if they don’t need it.

Ooh, a second hummingbird just flew in and was chased away by the first! … Sorry, I’m easily distracted …

My friend suggested that I make my own syrup by mixing one part white table sugar to four parts water. She suggested using boiling water to dissolve the sugar and cautioned against using hot tap water because of the possible bacterial content. Well, that seems awfully simple, right? Honestly, part me felt that I should trust the experts who made the syrup and I worried that white table sugar might be the wrong sort of sugar to mimic flower nectar. I told her that I’d heard sucrose was the best food for hummingbirds.

Silly me. Turns out, sucrose is the scientific term for white table sugar. So essentially I have been paying to buy a syrup made of table sugar but with the additives of potassium sorbate as a preservative and red food dye. If you Google this topic, you’ll find hundreds of helpful links – and not one suggests formula is really better.

The red dye is there to attract the hummingbirds, but my friend pointed out that the red flowers on the feeder attract them anyway. The fact that I bought a metal feeder also means that the lid and base are a nice reddish copper colour.

Since I switched to home-made syrup a week ago, the hummingbirds have been coming just as often, if not more often than before. I’m glad that I’m now feeding exactly them what they need – simple-carbohydrates to fuel their bug-hunting expeditions – without preservatives or dyes. And since one cup of sugar makes enough syrup to fill the feeder several times (I’m storing the excess in a closed container in the fridge), it’s likely that I’ll be saving money!

For all the talk of monosaccharides or sucrose, glucose and fructose on the label of the shop-bought syrup, the formula really is just sugar and water. Hold the dye.

Photo credits: Images are by the author Caitlin Fitzsimmons and used here with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Care of Hummingbirds: To Dye or Not to Dye appeared first on EcoSalon.

National parks are meant to be havens for plants and wildlife and places we humans can enjoy the beauty of the natural world and relax. But if you are an illegal pot farmer, they might just provide perfect cover for you to grow your drugs.

Yosemite National Park in California is the latest park authorities have found providing cover for marijuana entrepreneurs. This week, police found 3,657 marijuana plants in just one remote area. They are not revealing the exact location, but it was near Highway 140 near El Portal in the eastern part of Yosemite, on land belonging to the national park and Sierra National Forest. In the raid yesterday, they seized thousands of plants and processed marijuana valued at $14.6 million.

That’s quite a chunk of change – and it also means that quite a lot of land was used. While the trees would have remained intact to provide camouflage, it’s concerning to think about all the ground-level vegetation and fauna that was likely displaced by this. I also wonder whether the drug growers provided any extra water or fertiliser to the crops, which could disrupt the natural ecology. Our parks are fragile enough, with the eco-systems locked inside relatively small pockets of land and beset by climate change. The human impact is already great, with huge numbers of tourists visiting every year. The parks really don’t deserve to be used as cropping land as well.

This is yet another reason why governments shouldn’t even think about closing state parks to balance the budget. Just because you don’t maintain and patrol an area of land, doesn’t mean the land isn’t still there. There are responsibilities that go with owning land. (That doesn’t mean we should sell it off, either – it belongs to the people.)

It’s all a natural consequence of the lunacy of keeping marijuana illegal. I’m no pothead, but it is clear to me that legalization is the only sensible policy. Let’s bring pot growing out into the open, away from our national parks. Let’s give our farmers another cash crop to help them keep their heads above water. And let’s rescue our states from imminent bankruptcy by giving them a juicy new tax to fill their coffers. As an obvious side benefit, we’ll also reduce crime and the onerous demands on our legal and prison systems.

We’ll soon see if progress in the cards: California is about to vote on Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana.

Image: Glennwilliamspdx

The post How Pot Farms are Invading our National Parks appeared first on EcoSalon.

The New York Times reports that federal regulators rejected the idea of mandating egg farmers to vaccinate their hens against salmonella, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to support such a stance (hat tip to The Daily Beast for the link). The vaccination would have only cost a penny per dozen eggs and was introduced in Britain a decade ago, with resounding success.

Given the serious consequences of salmonella and the low cost of vaccination, this seems like a sensible precaution. However, it’s far from the root cause of the problem.

To me the most shocking thing about this outbreak is that we’re talking about a recall of more than half a billion eggs from just two producers in Iowa. Half a billion eggs; two producers. Doesn’t that seem wrong?

The egg producers in question have been linked to a string of past abuses, ranging from environmental to worker rights, according to a Democracy Now story I heard on PBS Radio this week. (Unfortunately, there’s no link online yet). It seems to me that salmonella is the natural outcome of factory farming – producing eggs in a relentlessly profit-driven industrial environment. A vaccine would reduce salmonella, and that would be a darn good thing, but it wouldn’t fix all the other problems associated with battery egg farming, from chicken welfare to water contamination to worker safety. Europe has already banned battery egg farms and California is now doing the same. But perhaps Iowa is the state that really needs to act?

Small-scale free-range or organic egg farming is far less likely to foster the environment for outbreaks like this. And if an outbreak does occur, the resulting recall would involve thousands of eggs, not half a billion.

To me, the moral of the story is clear: Cheap food makes you ill.

Photo credit: Boiled egg photo by Craig Hatfield on Flickr, licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons.

The post Bad Eggs: Why the Salmonella Outbreak Was Preventable appeared first on EcoSalon.

The Australian people have spoken, and they said “meh”.

In case you missed it, there was a federal election in Australia on Saturday and it was an important one. Aussies love a good election and there are usually sausage sizzles and cake stalls down at the polling booths. With only 20 million people, Australians vote by hand and the counting is also done by hand with volunteer scrutineers from all parties overseeing the process. There are no hanging chads in an Australian election and Aussies usually know the results the very same night.

Not this time. For the first time since World War 2, Australia is in limbo and the only confirmed winners are the Greens.

Australians didn’t like what they saw on either side of the political fence. In the words of The Guardian: “A choice between one party that persists in throwing away its advantages and another that persists in ignoring critical issues is not much of a choice.”

The candidates and issues

The incumbent was Julia Gillard, Australia’s first ever female Prime Minister. Her party is the centre-left Australian Labor Party, which held the most seats in the Australian House of Representatives by a decent majority before last Saturday. The previous Prime Minister was Kevin Rudd from the same party, who won the 2007 election. The trouble is that his own party turned on him two months ago and Gillard took the leadership and became Prime Minister. She almost immediately called an election to legitimise her power.

As Prime Minister, Rudd belatedly signed Australia up to the Kyoto Protocol, tried hard to get a proper climate change deal in Copenhagen and tried twice but failed to get a carbon emissions trading scheme through parliament. He also wanted to introduce a special tax on super-profits in the mining industry. He wasn’t deep green, but he was certainly progressive.

You can imagine Gillard caused some excitement as the first female PM. She is also unmarried with a common-law husband, is child-free and is an atheist. But any gender advantage soon evaporated, as people resented the way she knifed the elected Prime Minister.

For environmentalists, Gillard was disappointingly weak. She dropped the mining tax under pressure from the mining industry and right-wing media commentators on talk-back radio and in the press. On climate change, she said that, if re-elected, she would convene an assembly of ordinary Australians to decide what to do. Quite what was meant by “ordinary Australians” was unclear. At any rate, Australia already has an assembly to help it decide on important issues – it’s called parliament.

The main opposition was Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative party that in Australia is confusingly called the Liberal Party. Abbott is the opposite of Gillard in his personal life. He once trained as a Catholic priest and is married with daughters whom he apparently advises to protect their “precious gift” of virginity. He is deeply socially conservative and has described himself as “not entirely comfortable” with gay people. Trivia: a fitness buff, he’s known as the “Budgie Smuggler” for wearing Speedo swim briefs on the beach.

Abbott doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change. He ran a negative, but effective, campaign and drummed up a lot of hysteria about illegal immigrants, known in Australia as “boat people” after the rickety boats they use to cross the Indian Ocean.

The election result

So… it seems that Australians decided to vote for “none of the above”. In Australia, voting is compulsory as it’s considered not just a civil right but also a civil responsibility. (Though what you do with the ballot paper is your own business.)

A record number of people voting for independents and minor parties. The Australian Greens saw a huge swing toward them, picking up over 13% of the vote. They won a seat in the Lower House in a general election for the first time ever – the seat of Melbourne in, er, Melbourne. And in the Senate it looks like they’ve increased their numbers from five to nine and will hold the balance of power in their own right. Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, shown below, is calling it a “greenslide”.

What next?

While Gillard is still caretaker PM, we still don’t know who will be the Prime Minister of Australia by the end of the week. Neither Abbott’s Liberal-National Coalition nor Gillard’s Labor Party have the 76 seats they need to govern in their own right. In fact, it looks like they might wind up with exactly 73 seats each, making the choice even more difficult.

Both Gillard and Abbott need the support of the Green and independent members of parliament to form government. The Green MP for Melbourne has said he won’t support Abbott but the independents, who may or may not vote together, are waiting for counting to be completed.

There are echoes of the UK election earlier this year, when both the Conservative and Labour parties failed to win an out-right majority. The Liberal Democrats held the balance of power and eventually went into coalition with the Conservatives. However, this is somewhat different – a minority government that operates with support of independents is not the same as a formal coalition of two parties. And the four MPs not from the major parties are all quite different from one another.

Whoever does manage to scrounge together a majority in the House and form a government will still need the cooperation of the Greens in the Senate to get their agenda through. The quid pro quo for that might be more meaningful action on environmental issues, such as climate change and water management.

Follow the Australian election on Twitter by looking up the hashtag #ausvotes.

Image: linh_rom

The post Australian Election Delivers ‘Greenslide’ but Outcome in Limbo appeared first on EcoSalon.

I’ve been watching the growing condemnation of BP from all sides of the political spectrum and it’s making me mad as hell!

Now, don’t get me wrong – BP is no friend of mine. Some days I can’t bear to read the news coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, let alone look at the heart-wrenching images of oil-coated wildlife. It’s about to get worse with Tropical Storm Bonnie likely to spread the oil and migratory birds starting to fly south for winter, many of them via the Gulf.

There is no doubt that BP’s behavior has been appalling. It was evidently lax in its safety standards, it repeatedly attempted to play down the amount of oil gushing from the well, some of the comments by senior executives have been downright thoughtless, and its eagerness to find new places to drill before it’s fixed this problem is nothing short of obscene.

But here’s the truth: BP is no better or worse in its environmental or ethical practices than any other big oil company. Right now, BP is being made a scape-goat and that suits all the other oil companies just fine.

Right-wing darling Sarah Palin of “drill baby, drill” fame has bashed BP as a “foreign company”. Meanwhile President Obama and other government officials insist on calling it British Petroleum, when the company’s official name is BP and has been for more than a decade. Last I checked Britain and the United States were allies and being based in Britain wasn’t a corporate crime. Anyway, BP is a multinational and 39 percent of it is owned by Americans, with six Americans on the board of directors. It’s a slick trick.

Then there’s the whole brouhaha over BP’s latest deal in Libya and whether BP is responsible for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. It’s a fact that the U.S. and Europe don’t see eye to eye over Libya – I’m not about to defend the regime, but public perception of Libya is a whole lot worse in the US than it is across the pond. I don’t think BP has a particularly moral stance vis-à-vis Libya, but then oil companies are not usually known for their moral stances, are they? The Libya affair pales into insignificance next to Shell’s crimes in the Niger Delta. Or should we call it Royal Dutch Shell? Nor is it as dangerous for the world as U.S.-based Exxon Mobil pumping millions of dollars into spurious climate denial research.

Now I don’t really care if people want to say bad things about BP. The public anger is more than justified. What I do care about is that demonizing BP makes it easier for the other oil giants to get away with their evil-doing. They don’t even need to throw their hands up and say “don’t blame us, it’s all BP’s fault,” because we’re doing it for them.

Already, the Obama Administration has been unable to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, after an appeals court judge branded the decision “arbitrary.” Arbitrary? Really? Does the judge truly think the decision was random or capricious? I would call it “sensible” myself. But then Obama did rather back himself into a corner by announcing an expansion to offshore oil drilling right before the BP disaster struck.

As difficult as it may be, we need to remember that Big Oil is the true enemy, not just BP. It’s the oil industry at large that is responsible for the mess in the Niger Delta, the oil pipeline explosion in China earlier last week, and the leaky oil tanker that ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in April.

Off-shore drilling is inherently risky. It’s a miracle of modern engineering and human ingenuity that we’re able to do it at all. And when things go wrong, we’re at the mercy of natural forces and there’s not a whole lot we can do. It’s lunacy to even consider doing it somewhere remote, cold and pristine like the Alaskan wilderness, even if the waters are shallower. I don’t care if it’s not BP at the rig – I don’t trust Shell any more.

Public support for offshore drilling has eroded since the BP oil disaster. No wonder, after seeing shocking evidence of just how badly things can go wrong. What’s astonishing is that it’s still supported by the majority of those polled. And there’s a good chance that allowing BP to take all the blame while other oil companies go scot-free, could mean this trend is reversed and public support for offshore drilling once again continues to rise.

We need to end off-shore drilling for all oil companies, not just point fingers at BP. And if we don’t want to be dependent on foreign oil, well then that seems a good reason to wean ourselves off it altogether. How about we build windmills, invest in electric cars, move to sustainable farming methods and ditch the plastic addiction? Can we do it? Yes, we can!

Image: Fibonacci Blue

The post Scape-Goating BP Lets Big Oil Off Scot-Free appeared first on EcoSalon.

What if I told you that most of what you think you know about electric cars is probably wrong?

Until this week, my idea of an electric vehicle was a small car for city driving. I was vaguely aware of the work Tesla was doing with electric sports cars, but the teeny-tiny Smart Car was the image that sprang most readily to mind. (Probably because they are super-cute, like the adorable blue number our editor-in-chief Sara Ost gads about in).

But a trip to Better Place’s global headquarters in Palo Alto, California soon changed my mind. The start-up is not in this business to play around the fringes – their goal is nothing less than taking all the world’s vehicles off oil. Shai Agassi, the global chief executive, put it this way: “We can plug a single well in the Gulf of Mexico but to really stop it happening again we need to hit further down on the whole supply chain. Our exploration and production process is not drilling holes in the ground, it’s signing contracts with battery manufacturers – and 100 percent of the time that we look for a battery, we find it.”

Electric car at a charge point.

Better Place doesn’t actually make or sell cars – they provide the infrastructure to keep electric cars on the road. The idea is a bit like a cell phone contract where the mobile operator provides a subsidized handset in return for a monthly subscription. Better Place plans to cover the cost of the battery – the most expensive component in an electric car – and the motorist will pay a monthly fee to recharge or replace the batteries. The customer would get a charging station installed at both home or work so the hours of recharging necessary can be done while the car is parked. For trips over 100 miles (160km), they would need immediate range extension and can simply pull up to a battery-swapping station and get a new battery free of charge. Trials with taxis in Tokyo have refined the battery swapping manoeuvres to 59 seconds.

Better Place is betting that it’s not the light city driving that presents the greatest opportunity for the electric vehicle industry. Convincing heavy motorists to switch is both bigger business and a greater environmental gain. And as oil prices go up and battery prices come down, it’s the people who commute long distances or drive around and around the outer suburbs of the major cities who would benefit most from going electric. The best part is that Better Place is committed to using renewable energy and having a big customer like this could really galvanize the power companies to invest in renewables.

I went for a test drive while I was out at the Better Place office – the car I drove was a Nissan that looked perfectly ordinary except for the blue Better Place decal on the exterior. (This was a prototype but Nissan is bringing out a real electric vehicle in 2013 and so are other auto makers such as Mercedes and BMW. Meanwhile, China is making heavy investments in research and development and is close to bringing out an electric car that retails for less than $8,000 new) .

Battery swapping in operation.

After I managed to get it to start, I found it surprisingly zippy – it had especially great acceleration up hills. It was probably better than the majority of cars I’ve driven – and I’ve sampled my fair share of rental cars since getting my driving license earlier this year. If the infrastructure were taken care of, I would not hesitate to use a car like this to commute from San Francisco to the South Bay or vice versa, or for longer road trips down to Los Angeles or up to Portland. Sadly it’s not yet an option. Better Place is rolling out in Israel at the end of this year, followed by Denmark and Australia, which being continental size is a test case for the U.S. Hawaii and California will come online some time in 2012.

Of course, Better Place is not the only game in town – the US state of Washington is currently building an electric highway and there have been talks about extending it all the way down the West Coast through Oregon and California. But I do like the idea of not paying for the battery and simply paying a monthly fee and not worrying about usage charges.

We humans spend billions of dollars globally refilling our cars with a refined version of the very stuff that is currently gushing non-stop into the Gulf of Mexico, causing the biggest environmental disaster the United States has ever known. Australia alone, with a population a tenth the size of the U.S. and half that of California, spends $25 AUS million a year.

I lived 33 years of my life – in Sydney and London – without a car or driving licence. Within six months of moving to California, I was licensed. Within a year, my husband and I bought our first car – a second-hand Toyota Prius. The fuel efficiency is great but I’m already looking forward to the day when I don’t have to worry about that at all. Hopefully if fleet owners buy the cars in 2013, they’ll be available on the secondhand market by 2015 or so.

This will probably happen first in Europe, where gas prices are high and governments have tax incentives to buy electric rather than regular cars. But I’ve no doubt it will eventually happen everywhere and I can’t wait.

Photos courtesy of Better Place

The post Better Place Offers New Vision of the Electric Car appeared first on EcoSalon.

From 2015, all eggs in California will be sunny side up – at least for the chickens.

State Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a new law that makes California a cage-free state for chickens by 2015. The bill, which was backed by the Humane Society of the United States, will mean that all shell (whole) eggs sold in California must come from hens that can stand up, lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs without touching one another or the sides of an enclosure.

This is a huge win for chickens in the United States. Free-range eggs are the norm in Europe and in fact, the European Union has banned battery cages from 2012 onward. But in the U.S. and Canada, a whopping 98 percent of eggs come from battery hens, according to the book The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. The life of a battery hen is no life at all – Nobel Prize winner Dr Konrad Lorenz describes it as “torture”.

Hopefully given the size of California, with around 40 million citizens, this new law could galvanize other states into action. It might even shame McDonald’s into doing the right thing – the chain earlier this year rejected a proposal to buy a mere five percent of its eggs from cage-free sources.

Whether you like your eggs scrambled or poached, this can only be good news. I for one always buy free-range eggs at home but I’ll feel so much better ordering egg dishes on a restaurant menu once this law is in place. And even if you are vegan, or simply don’t care for eggs, it’s still good news for the chickens. Time for a collective squawk of joy?

Image: woodleywonderworks

The post California: Good Eggs, After All appeared first on EcoSalon.

I grew up in sunny Australia where it was, and still is, normal to hang your wet laundry out to dry on an outdoors clothes line. With the luxury of space and a warm climate, most Australians either do not have a tumble dryer at all or regard it as a back-up for emergencies only. Rich or poor, city or country, culturally this is how things are commonly done.

In my mid twenties, I moved to London. Suddenly I had neither space, nor climate, on my side. My partner and I lived in one-bedroom apartments for nearly five years, with no outdoor space. As is common in London, the apartments came furnished with a front-loading washing machine in the kitchen. I had no experience with drying clothes inside in a confined space, so I might have been tempted to use a dryer had one been provided.

But none of the four London apartments we lived in came with a dryer. And it seemed that no one I knew in London had one either. Of course, tumble dryers do exist in Britain – and they are a big contributor to the nation’s greenhouse gases – but they are certainly not ubiquitous. We looked around and saw that people got by with indoor folding clothes racks and by putting clothes on the central heating radiators, backs of chairs or stair rails, so that’s what we did too. For bigger items such as sheets, we hung them over the backs of doors. My family in Scotland had a clothes pulley installed above the stairs – a clever device where an indoors clothes line is raised or lowered with a pulley system – but we never had this luxury as a renter.

Now in California, our rental home comes with a washing machine and a dryer on top. This is normal around these parts, despite the relatively warm climate and the fact that many houses have backyards. But my drying habits have stayed with me and knowing what I know now, I am not prepared to start using a tumble dryer for my clothes. Firstly, they are tremendous energy vampires – one of the most power-hungry appliances in the home. By not using a dryer I am saving money and helping the planet. Secondly, dryers are rough on your clothes and even garments that are marked as safe for the dryer will not last as long if dried this way regularly. Finally, I now know that drying your clothes naturally is really very easy, no matter the space or the climate. I might only have a two-bedroom cottage and no outdoor clothes line but if I can do it in a one-bedroom apartment, I can certainly do it in my comparatively spacious California home.

I’ve been asked to share with you some of my tricks and tips from a lifetime of doing laundry. I’m not some Martha Stewart wannabe and these are not amazing revelations that will come as news to anyone who has experience with natural clothes drying. Also, I’m not trying to lecture you about how to live your life but simply telling you what I do at home. Perhaps it will help!

My Set-Up

Obviously every home and family is different but this is our current set-up.

We have floor space in the laundry room, which gets reasonable sunlight, so we have a folding clothes rack here. It’s a wonderful luxury for us to actually have a laundry room, since we generally had the rack in the living room when we lived in London. We dry dress pants, jeans, skirts and towels (done in a separate load of course) by hanging them on the rack. Most clothes only take a day or so to dry. Jeans can take longer and may need turning over after a day to ensure air can circulate around the waistband. On an outdoor line we would hang jeans upside down and not fold them over at all, but our clothes rack is not high enough for this.

We also use the rack to peg out underwear and socks. The pegs are not strictly necessary but they do prevent the clothes falling on the floor and they allow more surface area to be exposed to air. I always sort the socks and hang them out as a pair, so they can be put away more easily and I can hunt for missing socks straight away.

We have a curtain rail in the bathroom. This was not installed especially for this purpose but since it’s there, we use it. A clothes rail on wheels would serve the same purpose if you have a convenient place to put it. We generally put shirts and t-shirts and dresses on a coat hanger and hang them on the rail in the bathroom. That way they can be transferred straight to the wardrobe when dry and, except for formal wear, they often do not require ironing.

We hang sheets over the backs of doors. It looks a bit messy but it’s one day once every few weeks (we have several sheet sets) so it’s not a big deal. I do miss an outdoor clothes line for this.

There are only two of us at present and of course this makes things easier because the laundry loads are smaller than a larger family. However, I think the biggest factor is habits and space. Based on my experience growing up and that of other families in Australia and Europe, I believe if I had an outdoor clothes line or a clothes pulley or space for several drying racks, then I could easily accommodate family-size laundry loads.

Hanging out clothes takes about five minutes so I don’t regard it as a significant amount of work. It’s not an unpleasant chore, it’s just about being in the habit of doing it this way. We might find it difficult to cope with the increased laundry with a family but only because we have a small home. We would probably want to move somewhere bigger when and if we have children anyway, for many reasons besides the demands of laundry.

Do what works for you and don’t be afraid to improvise. Even if you can’t eliminate dryer usage altogether, cutting down would benefit the environment and your wallet.

Tips

• The most important thing when you are hanging out clothes to dry is to shake them out so they are straight. Don’t hang out a shirt with the arm bunched up inside itself or it will dry crushed.
• Outside, I like to fold t-shirts over the line and peg them on the seam under the arms so the peg marks do not show. Inside, I usually put them on a hanger, like the shirts, to save space on the rack.
• The more surface area exposed to the air, the faster the clothes will dry. If you need clothes to dry quickly, peg them upside down with no doubling over. The rack has more limitations in this regard than an outdoor clothes line or pulley because it is lower to the ground.
• Hang socks in pairs. This makes it easier to sort the dry laundry and reduces missing sock syndrome.
• If you are low on pegs, you can share one peg between the edges of two different items of clothing. Any difference in drying time is marginal.

Images: alessandraelle, Living in Monrovia, bigwibble6

The post Eco Laundry Drying Secrets Revealed appeared first on EcoSalon.