Pensacola Max, having been roused from his sleep at the appointed hour on 2 February, 2011, did NOT see the shadow of his HAT OF PROGNOSTICATION on this wintr’y morn.

THEREFORE, let it be known that Pensacola Max, with his uncanny powers of seasonal knowledge, predicts AN EARLY SPRING to come to these fair parts.

So say us all, the handlers of Pensacola Max.

Most everyone with access to a computer and the internet takes water for granted. For us, it’s an inexpensive commodity, never more than a few steps away. We’re not forced to share a faucet with other families, or with an entire village. We never encounter a padlocked tap. Few of us have tasted genuinely unsafe water, much less carried it for miles from some far-away creek.

But a decade into the new century, over two billion people lack access to clean drinking water. It’s estimated that by the year 2030, over two-thirds of the world’s ballooning population will live without a regular supply of safe water. Meanwhile, land development, shifting climate, and pollution threatens the freshwater resources common to us all.

We’re getting to the end of World Water Week, a good time to step back a moment and give some thought to this most basic of human needs. Water isn’t a given, nor is its supply endless. Thinking about taking your water use more seriously? Here are 20 places to start.

Save water in your home

Pay attention to your water bill. Track your monthly use from statement to statement. Watch for spikes in consumption. These may indicate a hidden leak or plumbing problem.

Install flow-regulated shower heads. Standard shower heads pass up to five gallons per minute. Low-flow, aerator heads range from one-half to two gallons per minute without significantly changing the shower experience. Most can be installed in 15 minutes with basic tools.

Replace leaky toilet flaps and hardware. It’s easy to find out if you have a problem: Just put a few drops of food coloring in the tank, and see if it seeps into the bowl after a few minutes. This single tip can save up to a thousand gallons of water per month.

Repair dripping faucets. Indoor leaks are usually obvious, but don’t forget outside taps. While you’re at it, make sure water connections are tight at your washing machine and on refrigerator icemakers.

Give up bottled water. Bottled water is probably the biggest rip-off at your local grocery store. It’s expensive, wasteful and — contrary to popular belief — not any healthier than most tap water. In fact, a lot of bottled water is drawn directly from municipal systems. Read Five Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water.

Install a timer in your shower. Without changing any habits, make note of how long it usually takes from the time you turn on the water until you turn it off. Now reduce this by 60 seconds. You’ll save about 150 gallons a month.

Turn off the water when you brush. This sounds trivial, doesn’t it? But leaving the water running while brushing one’s teeth is a common — and wasteful — bad habit. Turning off the tap after wetting your brush can save over 2,500 gallons of water each year.

Go easy on the dishwasher. Most modern dishwashers in good repair clean just fine without pre-rinsing. Just scrape the plates before loading (and don’t forget to compost). If the dishwasher has a water-saving mode, use it. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, dishwashers use less energy and water than washing in the sink. Look for the ENERGY STAR label when replacing older appliances.

Save water outdoors

Use discarded cooking water in the garden. Did you have spaghetti for dinner? Rather than putting that nutrient-rich water down the drain, let it cool and take it out to the yard.

Build a rainbarrel. A ten-minute cloudburst sends enough water down your rain gutters to keep plants happy for weeks. All you need is a simple rainbarrel. Buy or build your own.

Add mulch to outdoor plant beds. Mulch holds water in the ground, reducing the amount of watering plants require. Cuts down on weeding and mowing, too.

Water your lawn on demand, not on a schedule. If grass has good color and springs back underfoot, it probably doesn’t need watering. As you work in the yard this spring, consider replacing thirsty plants with native and low-water varieties.

Save water in sneaky ways

Give up one meat-based meal per week. No, you needn’t become a vegetarian (although that’s great idea). But trimming one serving of meat can save up to 3,000 gallons of water every week. Why? Livestock production is incredibly water-wasteful. From feed to the water actually consumed by the animals, it takes thousands of gallons to put a single burger on your plate. Pollution from large-scale livestock farms is also one of the most significant water issues facing our growing world population.

Use recycled paper. We think of paper recycling as a way to save trees, but the real payoff is in saved water. It takes many more times the amount of water to produce paper from virgin pulp than to return recycled fiber to market.

Be smart about cotton. There’s a reason cotton is popular: it feels great, is easy to dye and manufacture, and is less expensive than many other organic fibers. It’s also one of our thirstiest crops (1.6 MB PDF download), accounting for 2.6 percent of all human water use. Worse yet, cotton is cultivated in some of the most arid and least-developed countries in the world. A single t-shirt accounts for over 700 gallons of water use. The solution? Buy clothes that last, repair damaged garments, consider alternate fabrics, and buy or give away used cotton clothing whenever practical.

Learn about water in the 21st century

Watch a documentary on modern water issues. Water is getting more attention from film producers. A couple recent documentaries of note: Flow, available at Netflix, and Tapped, now in current release. Annie Leonard, the person behind The Story of Stuff, has just waded into the topic of water. You can watch The Story of Bottled Water online for free.

Download National Geographic’s free water issue. The folks at National Geographic have produced an entire issue to celebrate World Water Week . It’s beautiful, it’s useful — and it’s free. All you need is Adobe Flash installed in your browser. Click here to get started.

Get involved

Attend a public meeting of your local water utility. You’ll usually find a schedule in your monthly water bill. Get involved with the quality of your community’s water services.

Look up your community’s most recent water tests. In the United States, you’ll find results for most water systems on the Environmental Protect Agency’s website. If your local system isn’t listed, call the utility and ask for their annual report.

Join a water advocacy group. There are dozens of quality non-profit organizations helping to educate about water issues and bring fresh water to the people who need it most. Here’s a list to get you started. Clean, safe water is the most pressing public health issue on the planet. It’s well worth your time, money, and efforts.

There’s one more thing you can do: Share this article with others. Email it to someone who might be interested; use the buttons near the top of the page and post it to Twitter or your Facebook page; or print and post it on your company bulletin board. Since EcoMinima is distributed under a Creative Commons license, you’re also free to republish its full text on a blog or MySpace page. All we ask is that you attribute the original source. Thanks!

This article originally appeared on More Minimal.

But the eco press does her no favors with articles such as Alanis Morissette on Green Tips for Rock Stars, published today by Planet Green. This is because there are no green rock stars, and pretending there could be such a thing trivializes both the environmental movement and the personal contributions of musicians working within an unsustainable industry.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

The Planet Green piece cherry-picks comments made by Morissette on a video segment over at Spin Earth. Jared Sagal asked the performer what musicians can do to help the environment.  Morissette replied, offhandedly, that her tour uses buses run which run on biodiesel, donates uneaten backstage food to local shelters, and favors rechargeable batteries. The performer went on to say that she tries to keep the lights switched off in her hotel room and uses towels until they’re good and nappy.

All of which sounds ridiculous. It’s not that these actions are a bad thing — quite the opposite. But in the context of a modern rock tour, worrying about laundering an extra towel or two is laughable when considered alongside the tons of waste generated by event concessions; the vast amounts of energy consumed by concert lighting, sound, and air conditioning; and the entire culture of consumption which surrounds any mass event. Morissette’s buses may be biofueled, but not the thousands of cars which brought people to the auditorium.

You have to be pretty deeply inside the green loop to ignore such obvious paradoxes. Most people aren’t, so when they see a celebrity stepping off a chartered jet to lecture about the necessity of reducing one’s carbon footprint, they just snicker. And the environmental movement gets a little smaller.

Beyond the cult of celebrity

The real environmental heroes aren’t the glitterati, and it’s time we stop appropriating their fame for the cause. The authentic champions of the earth are people like our grandparents, who knew how to repair clothing, grow some of their own food, and enjoy entertainment which didn’t involve a credit card and a day-long drive to some faraway venue. Real environmental heroes live modestly. They know that embracing simplicity — minimalism, if you prefer to call it that — is the real key to restoring environmental balance.

Reduce your consumption, and you are the true green rock star.

This article originally appeared on More Minimal.

This article originally appeared on More Minimal. It is reprinted here in archive form.

Today is Blog Action Day, the annual collective event which draws together thousands of websites and millions of readers around a single topic. This year’s discussion centers on climate change, which will also be front-and-center in Copenhagen this December as world leaders debate the next generation of binding international climate protocols.

The ramifications of climate change are sweeping, its causes have proven complex, and solutions will be grossly expensive. This made for emotional debate. But if the prevailing scientific opinion holds true — that human-generated carbon emissions are driving climate change — we’ll have to come to grips with a truth which is embarrassing as it is inconvenient:  We are literally shopping our planet to death.

Codewords for Consumerism

It’s the developed nations doing most of the polluting. According to a Pew Center study (PDF download), about 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emission come from the richest countries. That means people in developed nations are punching far beyond their weight in terms of population.

Add to this a significant percentage of the pollution from developing economies: Brazil, China, India, and Mexico. These are the industrial centers churning out all the inexpensive furnishings, cars, plasma TVs, appliances, computers, toys, tools, and clothing for the developed world. Virtually everything you buy in a big box discount store comes from one of these countries, and you are personally responsible for the carbon footprint of these products.

So the term “developed nations” is really code for “consumer societies.” Consumerism is the root of climate crisis.

Don’t wait for rescue

We can legislate. We can cap carbon emissions. Global problems require negotiated global solutions, so agreements such as the one which may come out of the Copenhagen conference are essential to establishing ground rules for progress.

But merely transferring the Sins of Emission from wealthy nations to poorer ones in trading schemes won’t produce the systematic change necessary to reduce actual greenhouse gas levels. Nor will new technologies — even if they could be developed, financed, and deployed quickly enough to make a difference.

What must happen is up to us. It requires that we rethink the way we live, and why it is that we in developed nations consume such a disproportionate share of the Earth’s resources.

Take action

The single most important thing we can do to help the planet and each other is to cease consuming thoughtlessly. We have to break free from the idea that if we want better lives for our children and grandchildren, they must have more stuff than we do, drive bigger cars, live in bigger houses, and eat richer foods.

There’s a difference between freedom from want and wanton excess. If we can’t return some balance to the way we conduct modern life, international concordats, conventions, and protocols won’t make a bit of difference.

Ready to get started on a simpler, healthier, greener way of living? Here are 10 places to begin:

• Buy things that last, and learn to take care of them
• Distribute non-essential possessions to people in need
• Learn to grow and prepare at least some of your own food
• Walk, ride a bike, or use public transportation whenever possible
• Consider moving closer to where you work
• Live in a home appropriately sized to the number of its occupants
• Eat less meat or go vegetarian
• Replace the chemicals in your life with natural, less toxic alternatives
• Reduce your energy and water use through discipline and efficient appliances
• Remember that of the Three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), Reduce matters most

What could you add to this list?

Checkout line image by Ville Säävuori / CC BY-SA 2.0

But it was the sort of pitch I look for: a modestly priced green product which could potentially save consumers some cash. It arrived in my inbox, as dozens do each week, with an offer of product for testing. I shot back a reply, and found my GreenWashBall was sitting on the front porch a week later. Would it live up to its claims?

Farewell to laundry detergent?

The GreenWashBall is presented as a replacement for laundry detergents. This seems like a good thing, given that the petroleum products, perfumes, and optical brighteners in conventional laundry detergents are sometimes irritating to people with chemical sensitivities. We already have enough unpronounceable substances in our daily lives — and who wouldn’t want to cross laundry soap off their weekly shopping list?

The ball itself is made of an unmarked, somewhat rubbery smelling green plastic. Rattling around inside are a handful of small round and cylindrical doodads the box describes as “powerful ceramics” designed to “break water into smaller pieces increasing its speed and penetration factor.” They are visible through a system of slots in the GreenWashBall’s sides.

The product literature goes on to make some fairly vague references to ions, pH levels, and eliminating chlorine in the wash water. These all sounded like something for more objective consideration. But first — let’s wash some laundry!

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Claims which seem too good to be true usually are, but I had several loads of dirty clothes on hand and nothing to lose. I picked a few particularly nasty towels, some socks, and my Golden Retriever’s favorite binky; set the water to warm; and tossed the GreenWashBall on top. I often line dry laundry. But it was raining, so I ran everything through the dryer and brought them to the kitchen table for a sniff test.

A surprise

The laundry was clean. Not just clean, in fact, but remarkably so. Everything smelled fresh without the benefit of perfumes or fabric softeners. The socks were a bit dull — we’re all used to whites with the benefits of artificial brighteners — but fit for wear. Ubu’s dog blanket was fur-free and ready for fresh slobber.

I was particularly taken by the towels. They were dramatically softer and fluffier than after a conventional wash. Perhaps the GreenWashBall wasn’t greenwash, after all.

Over the next several days, I did more loads: jeans, t-shirts, underwear, and a set of all-cotton sheets. In every case, the fabrics were clean and good-smelling, with superior loft.

Twitter weighs in

At Lighter Footstep, we’re fortunate to maintain an active Twitter stream with almost two thousand eco-conscious followers. At the beginning of the GreenWashBall test, i thought it might be fun to conduct our experiment “live” and pass along the results in real time.

As my skepticism yielded to surprise, the questions started rolling in: What kind of plastic is the GreenWashBall made from? What’s inside? How does it really work? It was time to become more objective about what could be happening here.

Examining GreenWashBall’s key claims

We’ll start with GreenWashBall’s stated benefits, as listed on a small pamphlet which accompanies each unit:

• [By eliminating detergents] You elimate allergic risks linked to detergent residues on your clothes and linen.
• GreenWashBall safeguards your linen from bleaching and oxidization caused by chlorine diluted water. Fabric remains elastic.
• GreenWashBall has an anti-bacterial effect.
• Due to its efficiency, there is no need to add any bleaching or other additive to your detergent.

Yes, eliminating detergent improves the lot of those irritated by commercial laundry ingredients. There’s certainly no downside in reducing chemical exposure, even for those of us who tolerate cleaning products.

The amount of chlorine in tap water is generally minute, and it’s difficult to imagine it has much effect on modern fabric dyes. Since GreenWashBall doesn’t list its active ingredients, it’s tough to judge how it removes chlorine from water — if it does so at all.

GreenWashBall’s claim of anti-bacterial action is more troubling. While the product website hints of “remote infared rays emitted by GreenWashBall” (whatever those might be), the company’s lack of specifics make it impossible to verify disinfectant action short of lab testing. That isn’t to say it’s not happening: silver, for instance, has true antimicrobial properties. It is at least within the realm of possibility that silver might be contained somewhere in GreenWashBall’s mysterious contents. But the company should do a much better job of substantiating its benefit in this area, particularly in view of a specific health claim made on the GreenWashBall website:

[The] GREENWASHBALL eliminates pathogen germs in the water of your washing machine, giving clean and healthy linen. GREENWASHBALL has an antibacterial effect and eliminates bad odors.

Customers expecting GreenWashBall to contribute to the reduction of things such as fecal coliforms deserve a more detailed explanation of how this product is effective.

So why was the laundry clean?

My testing was unscientific, so I’m not saying that GreenWashBall doesn’t work. But I can think of at least one reason my clothes came out clean: I washed them. In detergent.

While we generally think of detergents in terms of the stuff we buy at the store, any compound used for cleaning is a detergent. That includes water — it suspends dirt until it can be rinsed away. Warm water introduces a surfactant effect, dissolving dirt and oils. We’re strongly conditioned by advertising to believe laundry cannot be cleaned except through the introduction of soaps and foaming agents.

We’re also accustomed to baking commercial detergents into our fabrics as they dry. That’s why our clothing smells of perfume after the wash, and how optical brighteners are still able to do their job. The added loft and softness I noticed in my laundry was probably due to the absence of detergent residue.

Just for fun, I did a final load of laundry similar to that of the first batch. Using nothing but warm water, the results seemed identical to those with the GreenWashBall. Lesson learned. We can probably save money and turn out better quality laundry by reducing the amount of detergents we use.

And the GreenWashBall has a way to go if it intends to live down its name.

NOTE: The wording attributed here to the GreeWashBall’s marketing reflects that current at the time of the article’s original publication (November, 2008).

More Reading:

Consider Earth-Friendly, Cruelty-Free Clothing (Lighter Footstep)
Laundry Ball (Wikipedia)

I spend most of my day writing and editing Green websites.

So I tend to bump into a lot of folks from the environmental crowd. Inevitably, these days, the topic of conversation turns to fuel prices. The last few months have turned us all into armchair energy analysts. We can tell you the daily closing price of light, sweet crude; we notice every hiccup in the production line; and there’s endless speculation about what instability in Nigeria or a hurricane strike on Gulf oil platforms might do to summer prices.

We told you so

There’s a certain amount of gloating, too. I suppose this is to be expected: environmentalists have known for years that nothing would be done to prepare our energy future until prices justified the research and development of renewables. Now — almost 25 years after the Arab Oil Embargo — the chickens have finally come home to roost. A lot of Greens are cheering on the price of oil as if it were the hometown football team.

Which is unfortunate, since gloating rarely wins hearts and minds. It’s not as if the general public doesn’t already nurse a long-held suspicion that environmentalists value wildlife and wilderness over people. Ignoring the pain caused by high energy prices — particularly to the working class — is neither compassionate nor pragmatic.

Unintended consequences

Sure, high fuel prices have really lit a fire under the alternative energy industry. Venture capitalusts are funding small energy startups with the enthusiasm of the DotCom boom. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies floating around for industrial-scale power and fuels development, and even the oil companies are broadening their portfolios to include safe renewable bets, such as windpower and solar.

But those who are cheerleading the price of oil are also rooting on environmental compromises we’ve so far been unwilling to make. Take, for example, the European utilities who have been deeply committed to cleaner-burning natural gas over the past couple decades. With natural gas tracking oil prices and coal remaining — for the time being — a relative energy bargain, big Euro utilities are flipping to coal. That’s right: hyper-dirty, carbon dioxide-producing coal. Just as we were getting serious about greenhouse emissions and air quality.

Not unsurprisingly, high oil prices have led to renewed calls for drilling, both offshore and in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While even a crash drilling program wouldn’t have the slighest effect on prices at the pump, recent polls show overwhelming public support for new exploration. It will be politically difficult for Greens to put the brakes on drilling, despite its futility and environmental downside.

The Moonbat Factor

Before An Inconvenient Truth made it possible to talk about the environment again, Greens were on the ropes. The environmental movement was generally viewed as a bunch of effete, Birkenstock-clad moonbeams who care more for snail darters than people. Rejoicing over oil prices while the cost of gasoline chews up grocery budgets plays to these old prejudices. It’s the fast track to popular irrelevance.

In any case, we’ve already reached the tipping point: even if energy prices crest over the next few months, the swing to meaningful alternative energy solutions is already being carried by its own momentum. It’s time to stifle the Green gloating and help people through the transition to come.

I just got a note that the segment is scheduled to air Monday.

The topic is whether the environmental movement has become preoccupied with global warming. It’s based, at least in part, on a piece I wrote for Lighter Footstep last June: Five Things that Are Worse than Global Warming. I published it on the day of the Live Earth concerts, and it ended up being one of Lighter Footstep’s most read (and most controversial) articles.

Neda interviewed me for the better part of a half hour, and I expect the finished piece will only be three to five minutes. That means the bulk of what I had to say will remain on NPR’s virtual cutting floor. We’ll have to see what ends up actually making it on-air.

Lighter Footstep is primarily about personal approaches to Green Living, so we don’t directly address climate change that often. But the position I took with Neda is that the global warming issue was a real sea change for the environmental movement. Before An Inconvenient Truth came out, U.S. environmentalists were deeply demoralized after six years of being largely dismissed by the current administration. Within a matter of months, everything turned around. People are actually talking about the environment again, and you can’t walk into a store or turn on the television without seeing an unprecedented variety of green products and services.

The downside to all this attention to global warming is that other issues — some related, some not — are getting the cold shoulder. People are pretty quick to wonder how much carbon dioxide comes out of an automobile tailpipe or the stacks of some coal-burning power plant, forgetting entirely the tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and an alphabet soup of known carcinogens which find their way into our food and lungs each year. In terms of time line, the most pressing environmental issues probably have to do with water and energy. Our oceans are under increasing pressure from pollution and overfishing; deforestation is advancing at an alarming pace; and we have yet to fully address the ultimate environmental threat: nuclear weapons.

It’s a complex web of problems. We’ll see how the segment turns out. You can track down your local NPR station here. NPR also makes streaming audio available from their website.

I’d like to thank Neda for having me on, and WUWF — our NPR affiliate here in Pensacola — for so courteously proving me with studio time.

Streaming audio of the Morning Edition feature is now available here.