I had the honor of meeting Patrick Jacobs in a workshop on grassroots strategies for addressing climate change and poverty, hosted by Green For All, held in Durban, South Africa at the United Nations Climate Negotiations last month. I was drawn to his story because he shared about how it is peach season right now in his community and how horrible this season can be because the peaches are toxic. I sat listening in horror, my hands over my face.

“If the children eat the peaches, they will get sick. To save the children we just all go out and gather them and put them in the bin. They are so dangerous for the children.” He paused. “ I know there are times when we can’t be there and the children will eat one.”

Jacobs’ lives less that one kilometer from a coal plant in South Africa that is using explosives to remove the coal from the land. This process produces toxic dust that has devastated his community. Jacobs traveled to the UN Climate Negotiations to make his community’s story heard.

What is your name, how old are you and where do you live?: 

Patrick Jacobs, 45 years old. Schoongezicht, South Africa.

Who do you live with?:

My sister and my sister’s children.

What do you do for work?:

I was a furnace operator but then I realized I must go further with my studies, so now I study human resources.

Tell me what issues your community is facing:

In our community, we are surrounded by three coal plants, we live 700 meters from a mine. Over the past few years they have started using explosives, above the ground, to get the coal out. This method creates a lot of dust and this dust, because of the explosives used, is toxic. The dust falls on our communities all day long. This dust has devastated my community and now, almost all people that live near the mine have lung disease. They used to get the coal from doing the explosions underground and we didn’t see this illness.

I suffer from lung disease and according from the doctors it has become tuberculosis. I wrote Anglo American, the American company that operates the mine, a letter explaining to them that I have developed lung disease and they wrote back and said they are investigating. That was in July and I haven’t heard anything else, I contact them often to follow up.

Are there benefits of the mines?:

The mines employ a lot of people in my community; but most of my friends who work there have lung disease.

What do you say to people who say, “I know there is pollution, but we need the jobs!”:

We don’t want these mines to stop operating; we just want them to stop operating with the explosives above ground because that method is killing us. The dust is very, very dangerous. It is not regular dust, it is much more dangerous. When people go on with their lives breathing this toxic dust they get sick. It is affecting so many people…so many children. As I am talking about this now there are three children in my neighborhood that have serious lung disease and are being treated in the hospital.

And we must buy all of our food from the store now because we cannot grow anything. The food we grow is contaminated.

Why did you come to United Nations Climate Negotiations, COP17?:

I came to COP17 for the people that live near the coalmines in my community. I hope to make the voices of those people heard here in Durban and hopefully Anglo American will stop with those explosions.

What work do you do on this issue and what motivates you to do it?:

I work in my community to raise awareness about the issue and to raise awareness around the world. I do it because I myself and a victim and now that I have studied more about the issue and now I understand it can be stopped. I learned a lot from an organization, Groundwork, that came to my community in 2007 to do community education. I now work to help the Anglo American Company realize that they need to get the coal in another way and stop using the explosives.

How can someone reading this article support you?:

Help convince the management of these coalmines to stop using these explosive methods above ground and creating this dust. The reason they can continue is because most of the community members aren’t educated on the issues and don’t stand up to the company. We need help by Americans and people around the world writing to Anglo and asking them to stop these explosions.

What are you hopeful for?

I am hopeful that Anglo American stops using the explosives.

No, what keeps you hopeful, what are the conversations you have with your family when you are feeling down and you need to be inspired to continue doing this work?

We live in fear there, we don’t have any other stories. That is what we talk about with our families, in our homes. That is the only story we have. We just worry about the people on our community and who is sick and who is going to get sick.

If you would like to support Patrick, please write to Anglo American asking them to please respond to Patrick Jacobs’ letter about his health and the their plant. (Include a copy of Patrick’s letter).

Please mail letter to:

Anglo American South Africa
P.O. Box 61587
Marshalltown, Johannesburg 2107

South Africa

I know it can be a lot to mail something internationally, but if you can, I think it will have an impact and I know Patrick will really appreciate it.

Please let me know by e-mail if you do and I will make sure Patrick knows:
heather@millionpersonproject.org

Want to save money and energy? Check out these easy ways to do it. Don’t forget to enter our $25 gas card giveaway!

1. Turning down your thermostat by one degree can cut 8% of your fuel bill.
2. An energy-efficient washing machine will use one-third less electricity for each wash, which could save you more than the cost of the appliance.
3. If every household replaced one roll of regular toilet paper with one recycled post-consumer waste roll, 424,000 trees would be saved.
4. Every three months, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild the nation ’s commercial air fleet.
5. The energy saved from one recycled aluminum can will operate a television for three hours.
6. The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle will light a 100-watt light bulb for four hours.
7. Recycling a glass bottle also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
8. Recycling and reusing the material in “tin” cans reduces energy use by 74%, air pollution by 85%, solid waste by 95% & water pollution by 76%.
9. It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday edition of the New York Times.
10. The amount of wood & paper Americans throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years.
11. If Americans recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save 25 million trees a year.
12. Producing one ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, 3 cubic yards of landfill space & 7,000 gallons of water. It also reduces air pollutants by 60 pounds, saves 390 gallons of oil & conserves 4200 kilowatt hours of energy – enough to heat a home for half a year.

[Green in BKLYN]

Almost exactly one year to the day that the oil spill in the Gulf began, young activists took over a BP gas station in D.C. last weekend. This wasn’t your usual protest- people gathered to throw a beach party at a BP gas station.  LaShunda Campbell was at the angry demonstration, along with more than 1,000 others.

“The idea behind this protest was ‘you flood our beaches, so now we will flood your stores!’” LaShunda said.

The idea for the flashmob originated following calls that threatened to shut down the EPA and the public embarrassment that came after watching one of our congressmen publicly apologize to BP, following the 86-day oil spill. Since the disaster, some have complained that they can no longer have beach parties on the Gulf Coast, so they thought that they would bring their party to BP instead.

Over the weekend, Power Shift, the bi-annual environmental training conference, brought more than 10,000 kids to Capitol Hill. Their presence ignited a lot of fury about the Obama administration’s inability to pass a comprehensive climate change bill.

The BP oil spill. Nuclear disaster in Japan. The #GasIsTooDamnHigh.

These news stories have come and gone from the front pages of our newspapers, but their long-lasting effects on our environment are here to stay. For many of us, they are a bitter reminder that we need to invest in more sustainable and clean forms of energy. Environmental causes are not just Al Gore’s pet project anymore: the devastating effects of global warming and corporate irresponsibility are becoming too intense to ignore.

That’s why more than 10,000 young people descended on Washington D.C. this past weekend to lobby for clean energy for Power Shift 2011. The conference set a record as the largest gathering of grassroots organizers in history.

Power Shift started in 2007 as a training program for green organizers. The attendees strategized new ways to combat global warming and environmental degradation through political action. Since then, the bi-annual event has grown to bring thousands of concerned young people to not just talk about the problems, but start working toward solutions.

Check out The League’s photo slideshow @PowerShift11:

For some reason, I am willing to bet the producers at FoxNews.com weren’t expecting to get such an articulate African American Muslim man. Check about Ib’s book Green Deen.

This is a bit of a mystery. On New Year’s eve just before midnight, 5,000 birds fell from the sky in Beebe Arkansas, 40 miles northeast of Little Rock. Most of the birds that were found were red-winged blackbirds and starlings.

Birds often get found dead after strong lightning or hail storms. Even though a storm passed through Arkansas earlier on Friday, the cause of death could not have been from the storms because the birds would have been found dead during and right after the storm. Officials also speculated that New Years fireworks could have startled the birds.

I believe this is just a cover up of some stupid experiment. If fireworks were the cause, millions of birds would be found every fourth of July all across America. Hopefully, there is nothing in the air that will start killing all species.

The dead birds will be shipped to the Livestock and Poultry Commission and the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin to find out the true cause of death of these birds.

If a picture says a thousand words, then a video must say a million. This latest Gulf of Mexico fiasco may spell big problems for President Obama by the end of his first term. When certain media and rightwing pundits first begin criticizing the President and comparing his response to the oil spill in the gulf, with that of President Bush’s to Katrina, I dismissed it as mere politics. However, as the oil spill becomes increasingly more devastating by the day, I am starting to believe that this may very well be Obama’s dark cloud that looms over him, throughout the remainder of his first term in office.

This is a stark presumption, I know, but it’s one that I conceded to only after hearing Purdue Professor Steve Wereley reveal a more damning estimate on the amount of oil that he believes is spewing into the gulf each day. Using a technique called particle image velocimetry, Wereley and other scientific minds have been able to analyze a tape that BP released on Tuesday, and calculated, what they claim is a more precise projection of oil leaked in the gulf per day. Initially, the US Coast Guard had estimated that the compromised rig was leaking up to 5,000 barrels per day, but estimates using the aforementioned practice upped that number to around 70,000 barrels, and that’s modestly speaking. This is a startling realization if it is true, and more than likely it is, being that the scientist say that this technique has a 99% rate of accuracy (when conducted properly).

Obama, oh boy, I foresee many forthcoming problems on your hand. While some may argue that the President has done his best to manage the situation. I respond by saying that sometimes a little more than our best is required. I mean, why in heavens name is the federal government still allowing BP to call the shots, when it comes to this oil spill? It makes no sense. Yes, I agree that this conglomerate should be made to clean up their own mess, but since they’re clearly not capable of doing so in a timely manner, I for one believe that our government should act with all deliberate speed to use whatever resources we can to resolve the problem, and that we should just stick BP with the bill at the end of the day. I’m sure that a company that profited a little more than two and half billion dollars in recent quarters can pick up the tab, and that they can definitely do more than what’s being asked of them to do now.

Check out the disturbing video after the jump!

Source: BP video from May 11 showing oil and gas streaming from the Deepwater Horizon well.

That’s right women, you saw it here! If you want to help with the Gulf, cut your hair. Now I know that seems outrageous but apparently, just as hair has the ability to absorb the oils released from our skin it can do the same for the oil in the ocean. Check out this link for more details!

Hey all,

So I figure that this is something that’s really interesting! I have given a lot of thought about the 3 fossil fuel disasters over the past 2 weeks and what is really interesting is that these came at a time when climate legislation is supposed to be the top of the list of priorities for the Senate! I think it is now the appointed time for the environmental movement to stand up and really fight for what is needed: One, safer working conditions and two, climate legislation that does not include off shore drilling, coal or natural gas! Especially since the companies can’t even keep their workers safe! Well, I hope everyone is now calling their senators and telling them that they need to pass a strong climate bill without “clean” coal, drilling and natural gas!  Let’s also keep the families of the 11 lost on the oil rig in our thoughts and prayers as it is a shame that we have to lose valuable lives in order to truly understand the need to kick the dirty energy habit!

Hey ya’ll, I caught this blog off the Checktheweather.net site! If you really want know what Obama should do check out Kari Fulton’s Thoughts on checktheweather.net and read the BP Press Release. You’d be shocked at their arrogance!!!!

In ten years of environmentally-motivated vegetarianism, I’ve had a lot of conversations about my choice with a wide range of non-vegetarians, some with valid arguments against it and some whose views are not so impressive (and plenty who just really, really like bacon). A common argument among the less, er, “bright” anti-vegetarians has been “if everyone stopped eating meat, what would happen to all the domesticated cows?”

I expect this sort of argument from the riff raff , but I never thought someone with the title of “Professor” would be quite that inane. But in this month’s edition of Foreign Policy Magazine, Professor Robert Paarlberg argues that organic farming is a bad idea because “To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold.”

Five times as many cows! They’ll terrorize the populace! I can’t believe I have to say this, but nobody is expecting all farms to go organic at once. The point of the slow food movement is that our food systems need to be gradually restructured in a way that makes basic, intuitive sense, so we’re no longer wasting energy and decreasing food quality by shipping our vegetables thousands of miles for no good reason. So don’t freak out about impending doom via cow attack, just keep buying local.

P.S. I realize Paarlberg’s argument is a bit more complex than that one bit of idiocy, but it’s a long article full of inaccuracies, half-truths and general misunderstanding of the slow food movement, and I haven’t got all day.

Anthony (Van) Jones, who resigned as an environmental policy adviser to the Obama administration after coming under fire from conservatives for past statements and political activities, has been named as a visiting fellow at Princeton University for the coming academic year. A statement being released by the university today says that Mr. Jones will be a distinguished visiting fellow at both its Center for African American Studies and its Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, and that he will teach a course on race, ecology, and the environment during the spring 2011 semester. Mr. Jones, a 1993 graduate of Yale Law School and co-founder of three advocacy organizations, served as a special adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality from March to September of 2009. He left the position after being attacked for publicly using a crude insult in reference to Republicans, signing a petition that questioned whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and having past connections to a radical Bay Area group with Marxist origins.

Check out Gillian Caldwell from 1Sky chopping it up with Obama about clean coal. This is an awesome exchange.

Just hopped off a video announcement from Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and definitely a top pick on the short list of D.C. insiders who are really taking their title/mission to heart.

On what is coincidentally (purely surely) the first day of the international COP15 summit, the EPA announces that their thorough (musta been really thorough) analysis of all the available facts leads to one simple conclusion: greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.”

There’s more:

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

Great talking point from Mrs. Jackson and my instinct thinks she’s legit. When asked on the call about the timing of the EPA’s announcement, when House reps have indicated no movement on environmnetal legislation until early Spring (months from now), Lisa Jackson said the EPA did not want to wait to get the ball rolling and hoped that Congress would “follow the ball.”

Translation: watch out, world. Apparently it’s not a pre-requisite of American political power to actually lose total touch with the land and your people!

Keep it up, Mrs. Jackson.

This is a few days old i.e. another epoch in internetz time but I bet when society crashes and we burn our laptops for plastic scented warmth, we’ll kill for the chance to one more snarky blog post, to tag one more pic of the person we were before Nature takes our headphones off and smacks us back to the Ice Age.

By which I mean, is anyone really surprised that not only do we have to confront the awesome, shame-on-us specter of global destruction as a simple truth – we are consuming the world, will we do anything about it? – but also as a classic opportunity for government conspiracy, what we don’t know will kill us, of course the Man is savvy to the fact that famine and hedonism are mutually exclusive and you’ll catch more of us flies if you act like the honey is gonna flowwwww forever.

Turns out “[t]he world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit,” with the United States quite specifically called out for encouraging a false representation of 1.) how much oil is undiscovered [how do they know?!] and 2.) how much we’ve got left in our fields.

Consensus is growing that this roller coaster we call Life™ is already over the hump, we’re hurtling down hill to a NEW epoch the people at the Center for Egregiously Named Memetics call Peak Oil. When you hit Peak Oil, your oil production enters a phase called “terminal decline….” yeah, it looks kinda like this:

Now, I for one am sure the proud business and government leaders of the United States didn’t want to lie about the world’s oil reserves, no, that’s illogical! I’m sure it was a minor lie, really just a fib, that snowballed into a conspiracy, it was out of their hands – really – and now that the truth is out, wow, we can get right down to those “New Energy Solutions” that sound just so neat.

I don’t know about yall, but I say let’s burn it while we got it. It’s a cold Friday in Brooklyn, the leaves are off the trees…you know what would cheer me up?

(Sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island)

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
a tale of some gruesome shit,
about what happens when you load some trash
atop a mighty ship.

In all seriousness, what you’re about to hear is absolutely disgusting. Roughly 1000 miles north of Hawaii, islands are developing from the trash and waste that humans generate. These islands are created by objects such as toothbrushes and bottle caps that have accumulated in the ocean over the course of modern history. Trash accumulates in these islands, it seems, due to ocean gyres – “an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.”

And how big are these islands? Roughly, double the size of Texas. We think. See, there’s a big problem. Scientists don’t really have a way as of yet to determine how big it is, or if there are others like it. It’s not quite as fabled as the Loch Ness Monster, but at least as dangerous. Plastic, a core element of these trash islands, takes in toxins such as DDT “like a sponge”. Sea creatures eat it and it becomes a huge wrench in the food chain.

So what are people doing to reverse this? Good question. Cleanup groups are developing creative ways to get rid of the trash that has developed in these islands. One of these efforts has the goal of turning the plastic from these islands into diesel fuel. All the groups agree with one factor though: this trash is getting stinky and we’ve gotta do something about it.

Check out more about the tropical trash islands over at the New York Times.

Like many kids of the modern age, I’ve been told to ‘keep it safe’ and use safe sex practices. I can remember the awkward experience of “getting the talk” from my parents too. Hearing your mom say the word diaphragm is just plain weird. Hey, let’s face it, nobody wants to get a disease or be confronted with an accidental pregnancy.

But now, there’s another reason to play it safe: the environment.

According to a recent report, contraception in all forms is key to preventing climate change. The reasoning behind it is simple: climate change is linked to population growth, but in 40 of the world’s poorest countries, women do not have access to birth control. The report states that over 200 million women want to have access to condoms or other methods but can’t get them.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind, next time you’re at the drug store, picking up your chosen birth control method. You’re not just protecting yourself – you’re protecting our world. And that’s an ‘extended pleasure’ we can all get down with.

Lets say you drive a hybrid car, bring your own mug to Starbucks, and always turn the lights off when you leave a room. Why? To save the environment? To conserve energy? Or is it really just to be like everyone else?

According to a study conducted by a professor at Arizona State University, people are more likely to “go green” if they think other people are doing it. He compared the results of hotel-bathroom signs asking guests to reuse towels. The signs stated….  1.) Do it for the environment. 2.) Cooperate with the hotel/Be our partner in this cause.  3.) The majority of guests in the hotel reused towels at least once during their stay.  4.) The majority of guests “in this room” reuse their towels.

The final two signs produced a significant increase in the amount of towels that were reused. Is this really much of a surprise? Of course, we don’t want to ADMIT to being followers… But who really wants to be the only eco-Unfriendly neighbor on the block? So come on and go green….everyone else is doing it.

We’re always hearing about how the human race harms the environment. Between flying on airplanes that emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide, cranking up the air conditioning during the summer and turning on every light in our homes so our neighbors think we’ve got a lot of friends over, Americans tend to burn a lot of energy.

But one person can’t make a HUGE difference, right? WRONG. Find out how your individual lifestyle and consumption habits affect our environment and what steps you can take to reduce your ecological footprint.

The quiz is actually REALLY fun and so easy to do but the answers are shocking. It surprised me how big my footprint is and made me realize I’ve gotta take better actions to take care of our planet!

How big is your footprint? Take the quiz to find out!

Here’s your GTFO MOMENT of the day:

According to a recent report published by New Scientist, the economic downturn may be doing good work for the climate. Before you call bullshiz on it, check out some of the connections the report, released by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, has found:

• CO2 emissions have grown at a slower rate this year than in recent years as “fossil fuel consumption decreased globally for the first time since 1992″
• Biofuels counted for 2.5 percent of global fuel consumption this year, as developing nations start to embrace them.

Definitely provides some food for thought.