Clean and Green
Clean and green are action words. Nothing stays clean forever, so you have to keep cleaning it. Take midnight dumpers, for instance. Every now and then one or another of our less socially-motivated fellow citizens decides to break the law and dump a pickup truck sized pile of roofing or other waste on the side of the road. If they're not caught, the city or neighbors have to clean it up. Generations of wonderful volunteers have worked their hearts out cleaning up after the dummies. I say find them, fine them, make them clean it up, and publicize them for being bad citizens - maybe that would make for a cleaner Hazelwood.
And how about the businesses that leave behind pollution that stays long after they are gone, like the lead smelter that was at the corner of Path Way and Gloster Street? It closed it's doors some fifty years ago; isn't it about time we stepped up to the plate and cleaned up that mess? Since lead is a pollutant which is now spread throughout our world (though concentrated at certain sites), there has long been discussion of both the cleaning and the greening possibilities for that particular pollutant. Levels of this poison could be reduced from our local environment by: removing it from a site of concentration to the extent possible; covering lead-contaminated soils with organic matter such as wood chips (to make it less likely to come into contact with anyone); and/or adding healthy soil with complex communities of microbes and plants and animals (which make lead less biologically available). So here we could combine cleaning with greening by making wider use of our organic waste streams to both remediate our neighborhoods and literally green them up with more plants.
Among many green technologies being ramped up in the world today are facilities which feed the pollutant carbon dioxide (which by now everybody knows we've way too much of) to algae in fermentation vessels of various shapes which make use of artificial and natural sunlight in greenhouse-like structures. As climate change highlights the need to both drastically reduce our output of CO2 and sequester (absorb) CO2 already in the environment via various processes such as growing algae and other plants, the economics of the situation will create a market demand for any process that either uses this pollutant as an input or lessens the need for it to be produced.
I'm convinced the key to the future happiness for our species is waking up to the beauty and importance of the rest of the living world.
Jim McCue
And how about the businesses that leave behind pollution that stays long after they are gone, like the lead smelter that was at the corner of Path Way and Gloster Street? It closed it's doors some fifty years ago; isn't it about time we stepped up to the plate and cleaned up that mess? Since lead is a pollutant which is now spread throughout our world (though concentrated at certain sites), there has long been discussion of both the cleaning and the greening possibilities for that particular pollutant. Levels of this poison could be reduced from our local environment by: removing it from a site of concentration to the extent possible; covering lead-contaminated soils with organic matter such as wood chips (to make it less likely to come into contact with anyone); and/or adding healthy soil with complex communities of microbes and plants and animals (which make lead less biologically available). So here we could combine cleaning with greening by making wider use of our organic waste streams to both remediate our neighborhoods and literally green them up with more plants.
Among many green technologies being ramped up in the world today are facilities which feed the pollutant carbon dioxide (which by now everybody knows we've way too much of) to algae in fermentation vessels of various shapes which make use of artificial and natural sunlight in greenhouse-like structures. As climate change highlights the need to both drastically reduce our output of CO2 and sequester (absorb) CO2 already in the environment via various processes such as growing algae and other plants, the economics of the situation will create a market demand for any process that either uses this pollutant as an input or lessens the need for it to be produced.
I'm convinced the key to the future happiness for our species is waking up to the beauty and importance of the rest of the living world.
Jim McCue
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 4:05 PM
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