Kate Wing's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Can it, Sony

2008-03-12T16:34:36Z

Dear Sony credit card services,

Thanks so much for sending me this great can with your latest unsolicited credit card offer! It's true, I was ignoring those blah envelopes you usually send but how could I just toss this in the bin? For one thing, I can't because it's not recyclable. It's not a real aluminum can, but one of those Pringles-style foil-fused-to-cardboard deals where the only metal is on the ends.

The top warns me to "use caution when opening" as those metal edges are sharp. Perhaps a subtle reminder of the danger of too much debt? Clever, Sony. Inside is a small glossy flier for the new card, so delicate that it could never survive the journey to my mailbox in an envelope. But now it's safe -- safely tucked into my mixed paper bin. Sadly, there were no potato chips.

You know, Sony, we don't consider getting new credit cards often in this household. Lucky for us, you've helped us make a more informed decision by showing us where our interest charges would go if we took you up on your offer. Fake can ads. I'm off to buy my mailman a cup of coffee and some ibuprofren.

--Kate

I'd like to thank the Academy...

2008-02-12T00:17:41Z

[I'm posting this on behalf of Darby Hoover, NRDC's "greening big events" specialist, who couldn't be with us tonight due to her problems getting a visa -- Kate]

I'd like to thank the Academy, and my colleagues at NRDC, and everyone else who participated in this historic endeavor, the inaugural greening initiative of the 50th Annual GRAMMY Awards. For an event so large and influential, even small steps along the greener path make a huge difference in reducing environmental impacts - and some of the steps the GRAMMYs took this year were even bigger than we had anticipated. We couldn't have done this without Megan and David and Neil and everyone else at the Recording Academy who worked tirelessly on this initiative, as did Thea and her colleagues at Cossette Productions, and Jennifer and Sam and the other great people at the STAPLES Center.

A very special thanks goes to Thomas and the other folks at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for making sure the telecast and afterparty were powered by renewable energy. Thanks to Jessica for heading the team of volunteers who posted recycling bins all over the STAPLES Center, and Allen for his incredible vision and passion, and Petra and Lisa and everyone else at NRDC who helped pull this together. Thanks to - wait, don't start the music yet - all the staff and vendors and everyone involved in this production who worked to make their piece of the event a little greener, from the flex-fuel and hybrid cars to the organic food to the recycled content toilet paper.

I know it's time for me to stop, but I don't want to leave anyone out because this kind of giant undertaking is really a sum of all the small steps taken by a lot of different people working individually - and laying groundwork to build on in the future. So please read more about the first-ever Green the GRAMMYs initiative and thank you for listening.

The perfect gift for your future bar pilot

2007-12-07T22:43:50Z

Spotted at the JFK airport gift shop. Kids, avoid a misconduct charge by practicing now to avoid those pesky bridges!

Tell us your oil spill story

2007-12-04T05:07:56Z

Today we're inviting our California activists and members to tell us their experiences with the Cosco Busan spill. Thousands of volunteers have now scrubbed the beaches with hair mats, helped rescue oiled birds, and gone to great lengths to protect the Bay's wildlife. Now that the hearings are over and the crabbers are back on the water, it's time for us policy folks to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We want to know what you saw and what you think should be done. We have some of our own ideas already, but let's hear yours. Ready? Go!

Images of the Oil Spill

2007-11-21T17:52:51Z

Two great animations of the Cosco Busan oil spill:

The Ocean Conservancy put together a video from NOAA's simulation of how the oil moved through the bay, hour by hour. Listen to the dulcet tones of Mr. Warner Chabot and watch what a difference an hour makes.
Watch the Cosco Busan (the little red arrow) hit the bridge after taking a very strange path for a ship that's supposed to be exiting the bay. Note that they didn't take it to the closest available pier.

Back to poring through the law, looking for ways to fix the system.

A real tar heel

2007-11-09T23:40:19Z

When the signs say "OIL SPILL-BEACH CLOSED" this is why. I was heading back from Sacramento when I saw the signs up at the Albany bulb. I'd heard oil had made it east to the Berkeley marina so I stopped at the thin stretch of beach that runs along I-80 just north of Emeryville. I had on my nice meeting clothes, so I put my shoes by one of the tar spots for perspective. I saw about a dozen this size scattered along the beach, and as the tide was on its way out, shorebirds were gathered in the shallow water.

This is what my feet looked like afterwards. I was walking carefully between the visible patches, but couldn't avoid the oil altogether. It's these dispersed drops that get tangled up in the wrack of seaweed on the beach, seep into the sand, and sneak their way into the food chain. Luckily, my feet can handle a good scrubbing with Lava soap. Not so much a striped bass.

Oil in the bay

2007-11-09T20:21:39Z

By now, everyone out here is abuzz with the news that the Cosco Busan struck one of the support stanchions of the Bay Bridge on Wednesday and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Ideally, that buzz would have accompanied a fast response to the spill itself on Weds, but many folks are disappointed with the Coast Guard and the private contractors the state uses to do emergency response.

Thursday we heard from fishermen that their boats were coming in with broad black stripes of oily fuel along the waterline. The tides and currents in the bay are so complex and vary with the winds that keeping track of the oil has been difficult, and it's shown up in surprising places. A few pieces of information I've picked up:

For Bay Area residents, if you find an oiled bird, call the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at 1-877-823-6926. There's also a flickr group for photos of the spill
SFSU has used data from various parts of the Coastal Ocean Monitoring System to model the possible trajectory of the spill. This is a fairly large Quicktime file.
It's not just birds but fish as well. With a low estimate for this year's herring population, oil in Richardson Bay could wipe out the fish and the fishery, due to start next month. Dungeness crab boats may vote to start their fishery late and fishermen are worried about the impact of the toxic oil on baby crabs in the bay.
As the SF Chronicle found out, the international maritime laws make it very hard to track down who actually owns the ship and thus who might be responsible. COSCO Container Lines Americas ("Experience/Quality/Service: that's what makes COSCO your choice of carriers') now states on its home page that the spill ships was not ownerd or operated by any of its carriers. You can change a ship's name, flag, and ownership with a few strokes of a pen, which is a long-standing problem for prosecuting illegal fishing, not to mention oil spills. William Langeweische's book "The Outlaw Sea" is an excellent read on the no man's land of big ships on the high seas.

Finally, just as with other natural disasters, the take-home lesson is to be prepared. Which does make me want to sing that song about Boy Scouts, but here we're talking not only about getting booms in the water faster bit also keeping the oceans healthy so they can survive events like oils spills. It's one thing to have a population of 100,000 herring when disaster strikes, and another altogether to have only 2,000 fish.

It already is portable

2007-08-27T18:03:15Z

My office neighbor is the talented Darby Hoover, who you may know from seat 12, Row 48 at last year's Oscars where she went to make them less wasteful. Do not blame her if they were not funny or short enough, she didn't get on that committee. On Friday, I heard her muffled laughs and shouts of amazement as Chris Colin interviewed her for this piece about why tubes of Neosporin now come in tiny plastic "travel totes". Apparently, Johnson & Johnson thought thethree inch tubes weren't portable enough and moms were losing them in their oversized handbags.

Maybe Heather can comment on this, but the moms I know either carry full on first-aid kits or they're using bags with so many tiny pockets that a little red pouch isn't really going to be the deciding factor in digging out a tube of neosporin. The explosion of stuff that comes with having kids is not improved by encasing said stuff in more stuff, especially flimsy, petroleum-sucking plastic stuff, much less those vicious hard clamshell cases tough enough to have spawned their own side industry of stuff--tools to open hard plastic clamshell cases. I agree with Colin here, if we could get the clever minds of marketers at J&J to work on reducing stuff and making stuff work better, we could probably be running our computers on avocado rinds. Mmmm....avocados...

Murky waters getting murkier

2007-08-24T01:10:58Z

I try to keep up on the news but sometimes things do slip by. Still, I was surprised to see in the Aug. 23rd edition of NOAA's "FishNews" a reference to a report released nearly a month earlier on the poor state of U.S. estuaries. Here's the forecast:

The report predicts that conditions in 65 percent of the nation's estuaries are likely to worsen in the next decade, while only 20 percent will improve.

That's two thirds of the coastal waters where fish spawn in the eelgrass and oysters and mussels cling to rocks and you and your dog and canoe are paddling about that are still on the road to ruin. More algal blooms, more dead zones, and fewer places where you'ld want to swim. Not very pretty. And this is a government report.

When I poked around in the news archives, I only found two outlets that picked up the release: the Indiana Prairie Farmer and Sportfishing Magazine. Since poor farming practices are considered to be a major cause of nutrient pollution, it was nice to see the story get some play in the mid-west. Sportfishermen are on the receiving end, since estuaries are usually good places to wet a line, so I'd expect them to pick up on this (plus that Doug Olander is pretty sharp).

Has it gotten so bad that even in a slow news period we can't stand to hear the real news about our estuaries? Sure, there's some pollution already in the pipeline by way of rivers and streams that we can't clean up. But this is actually one of the more tractable ocean problems and it's something you can help fix at home. Don't overfertilize your plants or your lawn, use permeable surfaces like gravel and stones instead of asphalt or cement, and work in your neighborhood to help stormwater go into the soil and not into drains, streams, or bays. This is a trend that needs to be reversed.