Electric Car song

Some of you might have seen this already, but it’s too cute not to share. It’s the animated music video to the new song “Electric Car” by indie band They Might Be Giants. It’s from their new album “Here Comes Science”, which is aimed at kids. But I’m seriously thinking of buying it anyway

Vegetarian week

Grilled chili mushrooms with squash, beans and potatoes

It’s Vegetarian Week again! If you’ve been meaning to help the environment out a bit more, why not Pledge to Try Veg? Every person who signs the pledge means that a dollar will be donated to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to help protect it from climate change.

I’m giving it a go this week, with the “eat vegetarian for the week” option. Other choices include trying a vegetarian meal (if you don’t normally do that) or having a vegetarian meal with a non-vegetarian friend (if you’re already meat-free).

We’ve talked before about the environmental destruction caused by cattle and sheep farming . And unless you’re getting your meat source from small, sustainable farms, there’s a good chance the animals aren’t being treated humanely.

The thing that’s made going part-time vego easier for me has been getting a few really good vegetarian cook books. Having new and exciting recipes to try is fun and much more satisfying than cooking your usual “meat & 3 veg” meals but leaving out the meat.

This weekend I picked up a copy of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. Bittman is a food writer for the New York Times, and believes that although the majority of people probably won’t become fully vegetarian, the days of “all meat, all the time” are over. So he’s come up with simple, great recipes that anyone can use to get the hang of vegetarian cooking.

Overall, the book is most similar to Stephanie Alexander’s encyclopedic The Cook’s Companion, sorted by ingredient with lots of suggestions for variations. The recipes I want to try are the Tuscan-style white beans, the corn fritters, and maybe the grilled watermelon when the weather’s a bit warmer here.

If you’re not in the market for a new cookbook, I can thoroughly recommend Taste.com.au’s vegetarian recipes. Over 66 pages of stuff to try, you’re bound to find something you like!

Fresh green links

Lots going on at the climate summit and G20 financial crisis summit in New York this week. If you’ve seen a good round-up of all the events there, please let me know in the comments. The shortest yet most accurate summary I’ve seen so far came from David Waskow, spokesperson for Oxfam International: “Everyone played nice at the climate summit tea party, but only Japan and China showed up with cake.” (via jhiskes on Twitter)

Logging at Brown Mountain. Photo credit: The Age

Black harvest – clearfelling in one of Victoria’s rainforests has come to a temporary halt due to legal action by Environment East Gippsland. The judge in the case compared pictures of the logged areas to pictures of the Somme battlefield in World War I. More pictures over at Peter Campbell’s blog. The injunction on logging will last long enough to investigate whether it will pose a threat to the endangered animals living in the area. After seeing these photos, I don’t think any animal could survive there.

The greatest advertising trick of all time – Enviroblog has a preview trailer for the documentary Tapped, about the bottled water industry. Well worth a look.

350.org slideshow – a free slideshow (Powerpoint presentation) that you can use for your green community group. It’s got places for you to insert info about your local efforts, after an explanation of the urgency of climate change and how there’s a global movement forming. Could be very useful for anyone doing presentations in the lead-up to the Copenhagen meeting.

Flowerdale: building it back green

Builditback.org

As Australians gear up for another hot, dry summer, some communities are still trying to rebuild what they lost in the bushfires earlier this year. It must be awful to have lost all you own, and have to start again. But it also gives the chance for renewal.

One place that’s been leading the way in rebuilding is Flowerdale, a small town in Victoria hard-hit by the firestorm, and then left alone for days with no emergency services crew sent to help them out. But they’re taking the opportunity to make sustainable choices as they rebuild, hoping to prevent climate change from making their already dry bushland more of a tinderbox.

With the help of Green Cross Australia, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Alternative Technology Association, they’ve set up a building resource centre. Information is available to everyone about how to build energy-efficient, water-efficient and safe homes as they rebuild their lives. Habitat for Humanity is providing small, sustainable homes for people on low incomes, using volunteer labour. There are talks and experts able to help them make practical decisions as they go along.

But it’s not just for people building homes in Flowerdale. The information is free to anyone at builditback.org, a rather good collection of links about financing, site preparation and construction, as well as sustainable choices and safety and prevention.

A lot of the information has been pulled together by people working to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the Build It Back Green group. I think it’s great to see technology helping people in similar situations get in touch to share ideas, and to see people making the best of a bad situation.

If you’re interested in helping out, check out the Green Cross Australia Build It Back Green pages, and see if there’s anything you can do to provide info or some volunteer hours to Flowerdale.

Gorgon gas field

Photo credit: abc.net.au

The Gorgon gas project is going ahead: it’s a billion-dollar gas mine, drilled into the North-West sea floor, with the product pumped to Barrow Island (a Class-A nature reserve) so it can be compressed to a liquid and exported.

Barrow Island is like Australia’s version of the Galapagos islands. It’s home to 15 mammals, 7 marine mammals, 110 bird species, 54 species of reptile and 1 species of frog. 25 of these animals, including the burrowing bettong (also known as the boodie) and the Barrow Island euro, are unique to the island.

Wilma at O2WA linked to a rather good article, Gorgon: 20 burning questions last week. It gives quite a lot of useful facts about the project, but I think it raises even more questions.

• Why did the project go ahead even though the Environmental Protection Agency opposed the project on the basis that it’ll destroy the habits of endangered species and introduce exotic species to a Class-A nature reserve?
• Why is it so important to sell off our natural, non-renewable resources for the profit of foreign CEOs and shareholders?
• What’s the environmental impact of all the fly-in, fly-out workers?
• Why must the processing plants be built on a Class-A nature reserve instead of on the mainland where they won’t do as much damage? Given that Chrevron alone is spending $43 billion on the project, would it have hurt to spend a little extra to pump the gas a bit further?
• Why are they claiming that it’ll be low-impact mining based on the fact that they’ll be pumping a third of the CO2 emissions they’ll create under the ground of a Class-A nature reserve? Geosequestration is still experimental technology – can’t they experiment somewhere less fragile?
• Why were the corporate deals completed before the environmental approval was given?

It’s like Chevron is determined not just to have the gas but to cause as much damage as possible – every decision they’ve made is environmental vandalism. Apparently our state and federal politicians have dollar signs in their eyes, and no thought for our unique home.

I sincerely hope that there’s more to Western Australia’s future than merely being a quarry, but I’m not seeing any evidence that this is going to happen. Given the weak response to the recent oil spill up north which affects tens of thousands of animals and is one of Australia’s top 3 worst oil spills, I don’t have much faith in the environmental responsibility of the fossil fuel industry.