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Pocket guides for the environmentally aware.

August 17, 2008 2:06 PM

Just when you were wondering, "How on earth (no pun intended) do I keep up with all the dos and don'ts that it takes to be a good steward of this planet?" comes a few nice pocket guides that you can print out and take with you (all .pdfs):

1) Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Fruit - From Foodnews.org, this handy-dandy guide reminds you which fruit needs washing and which ones don't. Better yet, which fruits should be organic to avoid pesticides altogether. #1 worst fruit for pesticides? The beloved Peach! argh....

2) PlasticPicks - From #1 to #7, learn which ones to avoid and which ones to recycle.

3) Top Five Synthetic Chemicals to Avoid - Parabens, Phthalates, Triclosan, Petrochemicals, & Coal Tar. Yuck! Read about where these chemicals appear in our daily diet of purchases, from hair dye to antibacterial agents, some causing cancer...Yuck!

4) Pocket Seafood Selector - From Best to OK to Worst Choices, learn which fish are filled with mercury, which are over fished, and which fish are farmed in environmentally harmful ways. Also available at the Monterey Bay Aquarium website.

Impress your friends at dinner! Score that winning point with your date! Turn your mom into an environmentalist! Save the Planet!

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Tags: pesticides, pocket guides, sustainable fishing, synthetic chemicals

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Cockroaches of the sea.

August 3, 2008 12:05 AM

In another sign of climate change and world-wide pollution, scientists are tracking a troubling trend - our oceans in which we bathe are being invaded by more and more jellyfish:

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.
From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

"These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, 'Look how badly you are treating me,'" said Dr. Josep-Maria Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

Indeed, the message these little critters are really sending is more like, "GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, HUMANS!"

How many other little signals do we need before we change our ways and stop damaging the planet? The call to, "Save the Planet," is really more like, "Save the Humans!"