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In an effort to aid people in keeping track of their energy use, Google and several utility companies throughout the U.S., India and Canada are getting together to launch a new program that will bring smart meters and the Google PowerMeter gadget into residences and business. For those of you that are unsure of what a smart meter is, it helps identify electricity consumption in more detail than your average run of the mill meter. It can also communicate that information via a network back to the local utility company for billing purposes. Google PowerMeter has made it possible to view your electric consumption with a secure gadget, the product is still being worked on and with fingers crossed it should be on the market later this year.

With the Google PowerMeter Gadget you will be able to determine how much it costs to leave your T.V. on, what uses the most power in your home and keep track of the energy efficiency within your home.  By keeping track of the energy consumption in your home, you will be able to make more informed decisions on how to become more energy efficient.

Keep your eyes peeled; this new tool should be available soon.

~Wind

Nearly everyone has heard of the repercussions from eating certain types of fish due to the mercury contamination.  How pregnant woman and young children should stay away from fish, as mercury is a neurotoxin.  It attacks and attempts to destroy the nervous system, the spinal cord and the brain.  During the first several years of human life, a child’s brain is developing rapidly; exposure to mercury can inhibit development causing possible mental retardation, cerebral palsy and many other complications.

There are two main contributors to mercury pollution; they are chlorine chemical plants and good ol’ fashioned coal-fired power plants!  The process of extracting chlorine from salt uses huge amounts of mercury each year.  Many of the more modern chlorine plants are using a cleaner technology; however, seven of the older plants continue to use mercury.  There is nearly 200 tons of mercury kept at these plants at all times and nearly every year these plants have admitted to ‘losing’ dozens of tons of mercury during the extracting process.  Where this mercury goes still remains a mystery to both the plant and the Environmental protection agency (EPA)!

Coal is naturally contaminated with mercury and during the burning process 50 tons of mercury is released into the air annually. Pollution control devices could be installed, however, during 2004 the Bush Administration proposed a plan that would put an end to the EPA considering emissions that are produced by coal fire plants to be considered hazardous, and would consider the emissions released to be just your basic average pollutants.  Therefore, power plant emissions are unregulated.

Other sources of mercury emissions are gold production, smelting and cement production.  Recently the EPA is proposing to reduce the mercury emissions from Portland cement kilns, which is a big step towards cleaning up the environment and perhaps making it safe to eat fish again. The fact that the EPA is starting with the cement kilns could mean that maybe it will only be a matter of time before they make their way to coal fired plants.

Spreading the word

~Wind

When we speak about becoming self-sustained, we are speaking about relying solely upon ourselves for all of our needs.  This idea doesn’t just revolve around harvesting our own vegetables, getting “off the grid” or learning to bake our own bread and make our own cheese, it means “all of our needs”. This includes ridding ourselves of the waste that we as humans tend to make.  Sure we can reduce, re-use and recycle, we can burn our garbage, and we can even turn our food waste into compost to feed our gardens, but what about a composting toilet?

A composting toilet is like a little tiny ecosystem that will recycle human excrement. It will actually safely contain the excrement while microorganisms turn it into humus for you to return back to the soil. The composting toilet uses very little water, unlike the toilets that we use now.  A “normal” toilet uses almost 5 gallons of drinking water to every ounce or so of waste, which accounts for over 30% of our household water used only for flushing the toilet.

As long as these “humanure toilets” are operated correctly they can be clean, odor-free, environmentally friendly, provide fertilizer for your garden and use less water.  So, what do you think? Would you go this far to become self-sustained?

~Wind

I have always thought that ants were a very cool species!  Every ant in the colony has it’s own special job, whether it’s workers that gather food and work to insure the survival of the colony, the queen who lays back and spits out babies all day or the males that make sure that the queen does her job (wink, wink), each ant is so busy doing their own “thing” that I really enjoy watching these little guys!

The Leaf Cutter Ants are especially cool. They live in the warmer climates in Central America and are named after the precise way that they cut the leaves from the trees. Oddly enough; they don’t use the leaves as a food source, they grind the leaves and use them a fertilizer for the fungus that they eat. The males in the leaf cutter ant colony are called drones, their particular job is to mate with queen, eat and die.

One species of Leaf Cutter Ants, the Mycocepurus Smithii, has been found recently and consists ONLY of females. They are located in the Amazon and have evolved into a species that reproduces through cloning, as their reproductive organs have almost completely disappeared. There are two very unique circumstances that occur because of the lack of males within the colony.  The lack of males provides the females with more energy to create elaborate forms of ant agriculture, however the down side is that since the colony are all clones of the queen ant, if a virus kills one ant it can just as easily wipe out an entire colony.

So, what this means is that, through evolution, this species can survive without males altogether! hmmm…I wonder who’s going to fix their cars?

~Wind