Nearly five years. Thousands of articles. *So many* comments. 

Today the current chapter of EcoSalon’s half-decade history closes – and we don’t know if we’ll be back. So we feel it’s important to say this:

Thank you.

We have always been, and we always shall be, in it for the discussion. We’ve treasured every time you took a moment out of your day to give us your thoughts – and we’ve loved it when you returned, again and again, to keep a discussion going (particularly when you were presenting us with compelling counter-arguments to what we’d published? Contrarianism? Bring it on). In short, we like your minds, and we’re inestimably grateful for all the times you’ve given us a piece of them.

Here, then, are seven posts where at least half the fun is in the comments.

Thanks again.

10 Reasons Never To Let Anyone You Love Near A McDonald’s

 7 Stupid Laws Against Women

The Conscious Case Against Veganism

Broke? 20 Fun Things To Do Without Spending A Dime

When Good Causes Go Wrong: 7 Utterly Outrageous PETA Stunts

Jesus, Enough With The Chicken

15 Best Foods To Boost Your Metabolism

Images: {christy b}, ralpe, keith011764, Mr. Theklan, striatic, iheartmacaroni and SMercury98.

The post Best Of EcoSalon: The Comment Meltdown Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Pigeons as art? At what price?

“Augmented reality” is going to be the next big thing in tech – but here’s an artist with a low-budget version: pigeon-painting.

Pigeons have a credibility problem. As a species, we increasingly hate on them (there’s even a technical term for fear of pigeons: peristerophobia). With nicknames including “sky rats” and “flying ashtrays,” their current-day status belies their importance in world history…and so it’s overdue for a makeover.

Berlin artists Julian Charriere and Julius von Bismarck decided to take this sentiment at face value.

…and paint the pigeons of Venice…

…all colors of the rainbow.

The aim was to try to make pigeons more attractive to the public in the most straightforward way possible. Fun way to raise awareness? Perhaps, but there’s the question of how it benefits the unwilling participants and their mating habits (unless they were painted in pairs?) – not to mention the fact that they’re suddenly far more visible to natural predators and pigeon haters alike…

How do you feel about it?

All images: Julian Charriere & Julius von Bismark, via design boom.

The post What Not To Wear: The Pigeon Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Our planet is changing, and the question to ask now is: how much?

From melting Arctic ice to sea level changes, the scientific evidence is piling up that global warming isn’t a distant threat – it’s all around us. We are now at the halfway mark in the 100-month predicted window of action to prevent a rise of 2 degrees Celsius, beyond which a climatic “domino effect” is likely to kick in, an increasing unpredictable reinforcing mechanism that is too complex for climate scientists to predict.

At this halfway point, the Guardian has turned to its columnists, its readers and to learned public figures to ask “what would you suggest we do next?” The answers, which can be accessed from an interactive splash-page, range from pragmatic acceptance to staunch support for hardline measures, from personal goals to yardsticks our governments must adhere to, it’s 50 pieces of fascinating, timely reading.

Access it here.

Image: http://heatherbuckley.co.uk

The post Call To Action: 50 Steps To Deal With A Changing World appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best/worst of crazy, this week at EcoSalon.

Vivienne Westwood, oh-so-reserved lady of A-list fashion, is on a mission – and that mission is getting us to buy less clothes. Yep.

Fancy tucking to dinner underwater, or in pitch darkness? Check out our roundup of 10 of the strangest restaurants in the world (as if food isn’t complicated enough on its own).

It’s been another good year for sexism, as this bumper crop of dumb-as-a-stick comments about women demonstrates.

Google Street View is now taking in views of the Great Barrier Reef (while it still can).

Finally, the really crazy news this week is…we’re up for sale. And that means we need your help. Want us to remain your favorite voice of slightly-less-madness in a sea of madness? Spread the word!

The post The Friday 5: The World’s Gone Freaking Mad Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Walking becomes a form of art.

Let’s say you’re the first environmental protection non-profit operating in a country with the largest market for cars in the whole world. Let’s say your country’s air pollution problems are getting out of control. Let’s say you want to hammer home the pollution-busting value of walking.

Let’s say you have gallons of  non-toxic, washable, quick-drying green paint.

If you’re Jody Xiong, working with China’s Environmental Protection Foundation, you do this: paint a leafless tree onto a 7-meter wide, 12-meter long white canvas, and lay it over a pedestrian crossing on a busy city street. Next, lay paint-soaked sponges on either sidewalk, so every time a pedestrian crossed the street, they left a trail of green footprints across the canvas…

…making the tree bloom with color.

The symbolism is clear – the more you walk, the greener everything gets – and from its initial pilot on 7 main streets of Shanghai, that message was carried to 132 roads in 15 cities across China, with an estimated 3.92 million participants. A follow-up survey pointed to a sharp rise in eco-awareness in the targeted areas (and to underline the message further, one of the green-trodden canvases is now hanging in the Shanghai’s Zheng Da Museum of Modern Art).

Sometimes a lot of tiny steps can add up to one great big one.

Images: Bored Panda & DDB China

The post Chinese Environmentalists Fight Cars With Green Footprints appeared first on EcoSalon.

Panorama views of the sea floor FTW!

This, believe it or not, is an image from Google Street View.

What happened here? Appallingly bad driving? In fact it’s the result of a partnership between Street View and the Catlin Seaview Survey  – you can see the current collection here.

What’s the point of this? It’s designed to do two things – promote Google Maps, which is under pressure from its rivals (although not the beleaguered Apple Maps on iOS 6), and to promote the health of 71% of our planet. This month the Catlin Seaview Survey kicked off with two expeditions to sites along the 2,300km-long Great Barrier Reef & Coral Sea, taking images with specially designed 360-degree-view cameras to be stitched together into gorgeous Street View panoramas.

But there’s a serious side to the fun. These images are also designed to act as a snapshot record of the state of these reefs, so scientists can track changes in reef health. Those changes shouldn’t be long in coming, if studies from Brazil and the Caribbean are any indicators. Last chance to see? We sincerely hope not.

Image: jurvetson

The post Google Street View Goes Diving – And Here’s Why We Should Care appeared first on EcoSalon.

Your online shopping is costing more than you think.

Every year, more and more companies are shifting their business-critical systems and data online, into what has been nicknamed “the cloud” – and we’re just beginning to understand the real-world cost of doing that.

In an ideal world, the internet would be underpinned with technology running at peak efficiency. As a year-long study conducted by the New York Times has discovered, the world is far from ideal. The data centers (or servers) worldwide that are almost always kept running 24 hours a day – in line with the 24-hour nature of online business – consume some 30 billion watts of electricity – that’s 30 nuclear power plants, just to keep servers ticking over. In the United States, they account for an estimated 2% of the national electricity output.

There’s no doubt that this figure is going to rise. What’s appalling is that it really should be dropping.

The study found that up to 90% of the electricity reaching these servers was being wasted, mainly due to servers running flat-out around the clock and converting so much energy into excess heat. Furthermore, these servers require backups, usually running on diesel, and the study uncovered multiple examples of clean air regulation violations. Worse still, some of these servers will be doing nothing useful with the power they’re receiving – one sample of 333 servers in 2010 found more than half of them in a “comatose” state, while three-quarters of them were using less than 10% of their computational power.

And how’s this for a depressing summary?

In a typical data center, those losses combined with low utilization can mean that the energy wasted is as much as 30 times the amount of electricity used to carry out the basic purpose of the data center.

James Glanz, New York Times

In a world of business-critical redundancy hardware and the need to meet instantly scaled-up demand, does the world need to put up with such chronic inefficiency? Not so. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (which of course you’d expect to be championing computer efficiency) managed a 96.4% level of server utilization in July of this year, according to its director of operations. It did it by queuing tasks and making sure the servers were packed out with work throughout the day, rather than compensating for less efficient processor use with more energy-guzzling hardware.

The good news is that this is happening in an industry obsessed with innovation. Google, Facebook and Intel are extremely vocal about their efforts to streamline their power usage, improve server-cooling technology and a host of other features (for example, super-efficient cloud-based structures that would manage data for clients more efficiently than they could themselves) that would make a dent in their energy costs. If data center owners find that investing in efficiency can leads to greater running profits, this situation could be rectified in record time – but as one commenter notes, electricity is cheap, and wasting it to ensure uninterrupted service might be more profitable in the short term. If that’s the case, getting companies to clean up their act will get tricky.

For some people, though, it’s not the data centers that are the root of the problem:

“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”

Image: Server room at CERN – torkildr

All quotes: James Glanz, New York Times

The post Vampire Servers: The Energy Cost Of Business As Usual appeared first on EcoSalon.

The power of transformation, this week at EcoSalon.

This week, we loved seeing how…

• Kale (described by Organic Authority as “the new beef” because of its rich nutritional value) can be turned into crunchy, tasty kale chips.
• Heather Ross can turn print design into an entirely new philosophy on DIY creativity.
• Solar panels don’t have to be ugly, clunky eyesores, as these 5 entirely natural-looking designs demonstrate.
• A brown paper bag could be transformed into a $290 “fashion statement.“
• The staple elements of your favorite dishes can be creatively swapped-out with some of the unlikeliest ingredients  lurking at the back of your pantry.

The post The Friday 5: From This Into That Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

A new climate era is here.

If you wanted more proof of climate change (Really? More proof? Really?) then this picture should shut you up for good.

This month, the sea ice around the Arctic shrank to its lowest extent since records began, beating the previous record-breaking minimum (in 2007) by a truly worrying extent.

Every year the ice at the top of our world spreads and withdraws in a largely predictable way according to the seasons and influenced by all sorts of factors including sea currents, wind patterns and, of course, temperature. In 2007 the summertime extent of sea ice reached a new minimum of 4.17 million km². On the 26th of August this year the ice again shrank down to this level – and kept going. On the 16th of September the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado recorded arctic ice coverage at 3.41 million km² – the lowest since records began. (The yellow line denotes the extent of the average minimum over the last 30 years).

It’s difficult to grasp the scale of this but picture about a dozen United Kingdoms lined up side by side: that’s how much more sea ice has vanished beyond the average amount left at the end the summer over the past 30 years.

 – David Shukman, Science Editor, BBC News

So what’s going on here, since Antarctic sea ice levels are remaining relatively stable? Simple – it seems that arctic ice is proving a reliable gauge of the way our planet is warming up, while the Antarctic is proving slower to respond. And what will happen next? Nobody can say for sure, although it seems likely that atmospheric disruptions will follow, along the lines of the jet stream displacement that has been causing unusually poor weather across Northern Europe all summer and gave the UK its wettest June for over a century.  It also seems like that so-called “extreme weather” events become more commonplace.

Our northern ice-cap, a permanent feature for all of human history, could be well on the way to becoming a seasonal feature – and our world is visibly changing. Welcome to a new climate era.

Image: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio, via New Scientist.

The post 30 Years of Lost Sea Ice in Arctic is Equivalent to a Dozen United Kingdoms appeared first on EcoSalon.

Walmart? It’s complicated.

As we noted yesterday, privately-owned solar panels are hot right now – and since they’re as cost-saving as they are trendy, you’d expect big business to be falling over itself to use them. You’d be right, too. A report from the Solar Energy Industries Association lists the top 20 companies by solar power capacity – and right at the top? Walmart.

Hmm.

Here’s an example of why lists never tell the full story. We’ve been keeping an eye on the mixed grocery bag that is Walmart for a number of years now – for example, wrinkling our brows over its patchy record on supporting and promoting women in business (Externally? Yup. Internally? Not so much). Grist, Treehugger and Mother Jones have all uncovered causes for deep, deep concern amidst the sustainability rhetoric. Walmart: it’s complicated.

The company’s success since 1960 is astonishing to behold, and it’s smart enough to know that being vocal about improving is the way to keep the critics under control. Topping a list of solar-powered companies won’t hurt their credibility by any means.  But does this list indicate they’re the greenest of them all? Alas, it’s not that simple. As Ariel Schwartz notes at Fast Co.EXIST, Walmart is at the top because it’s the largest retailer in the world, and consequently has more roof-space & more money to spend on cost-saving photovoltaic technology. A better way to spot the real top dog is to look at proportions. In terms of solar power units per store, IKEA wipes the shop floor with the competition with a whopping 79%.

Walmart currently generates just 2% of its power needs through renewable sources. Thanks to its size, that’s still a huge amount of power not coming from conventional supplies, and that’s a very good thing indeed. It’s also a showcase for the commercial viability of solar technology – even if Walmart were doing it just to save money. Whatever their motivations, they’re championing private solar power on a whopping scale, and we’ll certainly raise a glass to that.

Image: Roof of Las Vegas Walmart (Walmart Stores).

The post Walmart Collects More Solar Power Than Anyone Else – Why? appeared first on EcoSalon.