July 31, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

Good evening! Good morning! We have a new video ready for watching: “YERTpod 3: Ask Uncle Sam.”

Just click here or the picture below to watch “YERTpod3: Ask Uncle Sam”

With Ben dressed as Uncle Sam, YERT took to the streets on the 4th of July, hoping to connect with Americans of all ages. We failed miserably! We found Americans solely between the ages of 5 and 12, but we also found that those kids flocked to Ben. And they had way more than 6 minutes of eco “insights” to share, so we took all the scraps off the cutting room floor and assembled them into an Extended Remix, to be revealed soon!

YERTfully Yours,

Julie, Mark, and Ben (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

Posted in Video | 1 Comment »

July 31, 2007 by Julie.

This just in!

My sister-in-law, Heather, just wrote with some interesting news, which she has agreed to let me share here. I don’t know how many cities are dealing with the issue of rainwater overflooding sewage but we ran across a similar concern today in Portland, ME, while talking to City Councilmen Dave Marshall and Kevin Donaghue, so let’s put it out there.
excerpt from Heather’s letter:

Tony put new gutters on the house! Now, we just need to get the downspouts on. Our old downspouts were directly connected to the Louisville sewer, which is no longer code! Basically, the sewer system in Louisville is very old. Of the 3,500 miles of sewer pipe, approximately 500 miles are over 100 years old, and much in need of repair. The big issue, though, is that when our sewage overflows (which happens plenty), it all overflows into streams/ponds/rivers/etc. That’s why it is no longer code for a house downspout (from the gutters) to go directly into the sewer line.
Can you imagine all the houses in Louisville with rainwater landing on all the roofs going directly into the sewers?! That’s a lot of rainwater! It’s a problem for MSD, and for the environment. All of that rainwater encourages the sewers to overflow, which pollute our streams/rivers. It’s a violation of the Clean Water Act, which aims for all bodies of water to be swimmable and fishable by 2024. 2024 gives us some time to work on it before the major fines kick in, but polluted waters until then make for an unhealthy and even dangerous situation. In the Louisville area, we are encouraged not to touch stream/river water until at least 2 days after any rain (so I guess that means that the sewage is overflowing a little everytime it rains).
One of the steps that Project WIN (”Waterway Improvements Now”) is taking is to encourage people to disconnect downspouts from the sewer & redirect them into your yard or a rain barrel (hence, the free rain barrel from the Metropolitan Sewer District). Rain barrels are particularly great because you can save the water for a dry time and water your plants/yard with it. So a rain barrel not only prevents run-off/overflow pollution, it reduces the amount of water we need to use from our spigots (which I’m sure saves both water and energy).
So, rainbarrels have started to pop up around the city. Tony and I kept saying we wanted one, but they are so expensive! Cheapest is approximately $100. But they go up to approx $300, and I’d say somewhere in the middle (about $150) is average). However, last week on Thursday in search of a local vendor, I was inspired to google “rain barrels Louisville, KY” and wouldn’t you know it - MSD was giving them away for free! First come, first serve on Saturday from 9am-11:30. (The next day, they message had already disappeared from the website!) So, on Saturday, I arrived at MSD at 9:15am, and there were already approximately 80 cars in front of me! Yikes. I waited about 50 minutes (which stinks - here we are trying to get the rainbarrels to help the environment and they make us line up our cars and idle instead of getting out and standing in a line), and when it was my turn, there were only 8 rain barrels left! Luckily, I got mine and took it home. It’s blue. (I thought we should paint clouds on it, but Tony was thinking we should paint fish on it). Now, we can catch all of the rainwater that falls on our roof and save it to water our plants with! And it was free! Hooray! Still, I think I’d like to buy a second one. But at least I got the first free. Tony is setting it up today, I think. I only wish that Mimi had been home so that she could have gotten one too! (only one per household).

BTW: The Louisville MSD site says that Louisville is not alone in its sewer conditions and problems; that many other cities are facing this problem also.

So, there we have it, from the Louisvillian’s mouth. I, for one, had no idea that most of Louisville’s houses were set up to drain directly into the sewers from their rooftops, so it’s definitely news to me. Many thanks to Heather for the update!!! P.S. Send us a photo of the rainbarrel, will ya? and i will add here…

alright, signing off from Portland, ME

julie

For more info about this project in Louisville, you can visit www.msdlouky.org/projectwin/index.htm

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 2 Comments »

July 29, 2007 by Julie.

We didn’t. We stayed for dinner at our hosts house in the deep woods of Maine, so we were late getting to
Portland, and Rev. Ben. Shambaugh at St. Luke’s Cathedral.
Many thanks to the Reverend for waiting! Because of his kindness we have holed ourselves up inside a little church rec room and camped out for the night. Unfortunately camping doesn’t always = sleeping for me. Knees and bones got to hurting bad. I left the boys in search of softer pastures and found a little sofa which i could not stretch out on fully but which was at least cushioned…must find a better way to do this tonight…can’t afford not to rest…

My Ben and I took a walk to the shore to the most-photographed lighthouse in the United States. (As you can see, Ben’s homage includes fruit!)

Today we are going to talk to some kids, give them a little slideshow of our trip so far - it’s summer so there is no telling how many will actually be here - and then our noses will go pretty much immediately back to the grindstone to capture, log, account, edit…

signing off for now,
little worker bees

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 29, 2007 by Julie.

You might not know this but it is our constitutional right to mint our own money. What? yeah, totally.

YERT just spent a day in Great Barrington, Mass, where we visited the EF Schumacher Society and learned all about a local currency called Berkshares. Ten local banks redeem or exchange these beautiful bills and over a hundred stores take them as payment for services and goods. $10 federal gets you $12 Berkshares. That’s a %10 discount for shopping locally!

Berkshares started out as a way for the community to support new small businesses who weren’t traditionally “bankable,” (ie: a woman made delectable goat cheese in her kitchen that became very popular but when she wanted to expand she couldn’t get a bank loan. She had no credit and the banks didn’t see goats as viable income. The community stepped in to help, giving her cash that she could repay in time, through Berkshares).

After little over a year, there are over a million Berkshares in circulation ( I now have $2) and more are being minted. Some shop owners are more willing to accept them than others. Steve Carlotta takes them unequivocably at his photo shop. He sees it as accepting a discount now that he won’t have to pay later in 30%, 40%, 50% off when stuff hasn’t moved off of the shelves.

Ben and I were most impressed by the unique and innovative design. Mark appreciates their simplicity, and ease of use. The bills are, quite frankly, beautiful. The front of each bill shows a person of note in the history of the area, like Norman Rockwell and WE Dubois, and the back of each note is art by a contemporary local artist. If only all money looked this lovely.

Susan Witt of the EF Schumacher Society says that they are only on step 13 of 50 in making Berkshares a substantial part of the community economy but she feels like, with a little more support from the good people of Great Barrington, Berkshares will thrive and grow to make the local economy even stronger. We will definitely be back to use our last $2.

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 27, 2007 by Julie.

…And now, for the other side. Look closely at the horizon in the first photo by Morton Mitchell Larod (from Flickr’s creative commons page - 2nd photo by “phault”) and you may get an idea of what visitors will see from the shores that look onto Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts if CapeWind’s development plan gets the green light.

We learned that opponents’ biggest concern with the proposed plant is that the developers may not study deeply enough to truly assess all of the impacts and risks- environmental (including effects on sealife and bird and whale migrations), economic (including commercial fishing, tourism, and transportation issue for airlines and ferryboats), and safety (possible damage to due collisions with wind turbines by vessels using the shipping canal). The risk of accidents may seem low but the impact of such an accident could be devastating.

Interestingly, the water just around the land masses is still state-protected sanctuary but the inner bay is now Federal water. Additionally, as this would be United States’ first offshore windfarm, the Federal Government is only now drawing up the rules and regulations for this kind of development, at the same time that CapeWind is seeking their permit. The federal standards will come up for public hearing so hopefully experts and citizens will weigh in and the regulations will be agreeable to both proponents of CapeWind power and supporters of conserving the natural beauty of Nantucket Sound.

“It’s a complex issue,” says Save Our Sound director, Charles Vinick, who admits that visual aesthetic is a consideration for those trying to save the Bay from development. The pristine ocean view “drives our economy and nurtures our souls here.” He went on to agree that, while we all want clean energy, he feels that there just hasn’t been enough study about the true impacts of a windfarm in Nantucket Sound, or about possible alternative locations for the CapeWind project, to warrant granting the location. Germany has a windfarm in development now in deeper water and which, at 12 miles out, will not impact the view of the horizon.

Maybe our government can find a way to subsidize building of deeper water offshore windfarms so that we can have our view and wind energy too?

just a thought…

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 26, 2007 by Julie.

Cool. We just got the link to our radio interview with Tim Palucka, which aired last night on the Allegheny Front program on WYEP FM 91.3. It’s our first interview together and includes one of our awesome kid interviews on the waterfront in Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

Posted in Events, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 25, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

Welcome to the exciting world of COAL! We have finished our first true “on the road” pod, filmed and edited AFTER we hit the road on July 4. This one covers our adventures through Pennsylvania, where we chose to take a closer look at all things coal. Highlights from the video pod include:

• A real live coal miner
• A visit to Centralia, PA (You don’t want to miss this place!)
• An orange stream
• All sorts of coal facts

Just click here or the picture below to watch “Pennsylvania Coal”

We chose to take a look at coal in PA because the state is the fourth largest coal producer in the country, and the visible signs of mining surrounded us as we traveled through the state: The occasional mini mountain of coal tailings. Telltale signs of acid mine drainage from nearby mines. Local towns celebrating a rich history of coal mining.Our brains are hurting from all the coal-related websites that we scoured to assemble this little ditty. That effort has turned into quite a trail of websites, so if you’d like to follow our brightest breadcrumbs, we recommend the following:

• We nearly fell out of my chair when I heard Terry Gross interview Jeff Goodell on “Fresh Air.” Goodell wrote a book called Dirty Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, and the radio discussion gets into all sorts of juicy coal issues, including basic coal facts, the role of coal in the upcoming presidential election, and even coal-to-liquid technology (CTL). You can listen to this thorough and often surprising discussion at the NPR website, here.
• The National Resource Defense Council has created a compelling document, “Coal in a Changing Climate,” that summarizes the effects of coal on our environment. Very quotable.
• The American Coal Foundation offers a variety of interesting facts from an industry perspective, helping us achieve a bit of balance with all the eco-oriented resources out there. We found this page to be a handy starting point.

There is much more where this all came from, so if you want extra detail, let us know! If you want less, let us know! Don’t forget that this is YOUR road trip, and this won’t be the last time we touch on coal.

We hope you enjoy the show…

With YERTful Enthusiasm,

Ben, Mark, and Julie - Your YERT Team

team@yert.com

P.S. This video also includes our very own calculation about the pounds of carbon dioxide from coal per person per year in the United States. We’ll reveal our methods here for the sake of transparency– please keep us honest by double-checking our numbers! Working from this website, we determined that one short ton of coal produces 2.86 short tons of carbon dioxide. (This data is based on a somewhat conservative estimate estimate of 78% for the average coal carbon content in the U.S.) The Illinois State Geological Survey (website) states that each person in the United States consumes nearly 4 tons of coal per year (the actual number is closer to 3.8, but we used “nearly 4″ for consistency with our footage). If you multiply 4 by 2.86, you get 11.44 tons of carbon dioxide. (This is slightly more than the actual number, 3.8, which yields a final product of 10.9.) For the sake of consistency we stuck with 4, resulting in a rounded value of “over 11″ in the video. We hope this clears up any confusion!

P.P.S. And, just in case you can’t read our footnotes in the video, here is a full-text version:

1. American Coal Foundation, “Fast Facts about Coal.” July 24 2007,
http://www.teachcoal.org/aboutcoal/articles/fastfacts.html

2. Illinois State Geological Survey,
http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/maps-data-pub/publications/geobits/geobit12.shtml
3. Energy Information Administration, Quarterly Coal Report,
January-April 1994, DOE/EIA-0121(94/Q1) (Washington, DC, August 1994), pp. 1-8.
Carbon Dioxide Emission Factors for Coal
by B.D. Hong and E. R. Slatick
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html
and
Footnote #2
(4 tons/yr x 2.86 ton CO2 / ton coal = 11.44 tons CO2/yr.)

4. Interview - “Jeff Goodell: Big Coal’s Dirty Secrets” -
NPR’s Fresh Air from WHYY, June 21, 2007.
Full audio recording available at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11254947
5. Ibid

Posted in Video | 4 Comments »

July 24, 2007 by Julie.

Ben in the morn with milk from glass bottles that we were able to return to Whole Foods for full deposit of $4.50! Crescent Ridge Dairy! Only garbage we made from this shopping trip were the rings off the plastic bottle caps!

And here are two pictures of our host’s pumpkin plants, all planted at exactly the same time. Guess which ones were supplemented with completely organic fertilizer? If you guessed the ones in the pot, give yourself a high five and then head over to Whole Foods to get some for yourself. But don’t eat it.

Oh how encouraging, people! I love not making trash!!!
Also, so far, our composted leftovers have not had to travel with us for anymore than 3 days. This is better than we hoped! Aunt Lyn had a compost pile in her sideyard, Willie DeCamp totally started a compost behind his house with our refuse, and now in Winchester, Mass, we realize that Whole Foods has a compost bin at the customer service desk. Beautiful.

I have to say that Whole Foods is coming out a glowing advocate for Sustainability in every way. I know that some people take issue with large chains, as do I, but I see Whole Foods supporting local food (esp milk and produce), supporting every kind of household recycling (including batteries and bags from other stores), rewarding the use of cloth/reusable bags, and now providing a place where customers can bring their organic waste to be returned to energy. Last post I wrote about greengrocer, Steve, giving us old bananas for free but I notice that all of their employees smile and offer help and seem generally happy. Yesterday’s cashiers let us weigh our own tupperware before adding ground peanut butter from the bulk bins, so we wouldn’t have to use the little plastic bags. The Bakery lady smiled as we walked away from the counter with a warm loaf of bread in our hot little hands, no paper, no nothing. I wrapped it in cloth when we got home, marveling at the way our efforts are buoyed by such agreeable humans.

Not just at Whole Foods, either. In our no-trash campaign, we have been aided in every single restaurant. Today’s pizza man gave us our pizza on the metal cooking plate (this is getting to be common for us), and rinsed out my water jug before filling it in the tap! The ladies where we had lunch handed us our sandwich wraps right over the sneezeguard, again with no paper or anything. Unfortunately, the ladies couldn’t figure out how to make my wrap stay together without paper so they remade it twice, and the offending broken slathered pitas hit the trash before I could say, AACK! which was far more wasteful than i had anticipated as I had no tupperware to catch the mistake. Pretty sure that’s the same lesson I keep learning - Don’t forget the supplies: tupperware, sealable mug, utensils, hanky, bandana, chicobag. They all fit in my little backpack. I just didn’t bring it.

Hey I really want to encourage any one out there who might consider trying to make less waste in their life - don’t be shy about letting people know what you are doing, and do it with a smile. But don’t do it unless you mean it cause people will help you. And they’ll hold you to it

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 24, 2007 by Mark.

YERTians!

This morning we’re on our way to the Hull wind energy facility along the coast of Massachusetts near Boston. We’ll be exploring wind energy and its relative popularity with the locals in this state. I’ve heard that coastal waters are a great place for wind turbines, but beaches traditionally have all sorts of NIMBY restrictions, so it’ll get interesting. Energy or pristine views? Can we have both? We’ll dig into it all this week and share it with you in our MA video pod.

In the meantime, we’ve been assembling our first “on the road” video pod, focusing on coal in Pennsylvania. You’ll see it up later today, after we get back from our day’s excursion. Stay tuned!

With the Wind,

Mark

Posted in Travelog, Mark | 3 Comments »

July 21, 2007 by Mark.

Yeah, as Julie mentioned in her blog entry today, I found a tick on my hip! Sweet! Actually, not very sweet. I wish I hadn’t found a tick on me, but if it is already there I’d rather find it than not. I admit that I certainly felt “paler than normal” as I proceeded to perform microsurgery on myself to remove it. Fortunately we had all sorts of first-aid equipment on hand in our traveling hybrid home, but it still didn’t help me get the tick head out with the body. Lovely. Scalpel, anybody? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you consider it, we didn’t have a scalpel available at the time, but with a little diligence I believe I got the whole bug out.

Now I sit back and wait for death to arrive, right? Take a spin on the tick-wheel-of-fortune?

Well, maybe not. But I really have no idea. I’m not much of a tick expert. I’ll spend my day off tomorrow reading up on ticks and their fearsome kin, then probably send off my tick for lab analysis and keep an eye out for the vast array of symptoms listed in WebMD.com. Some say that if you get the tick out within 24 hours of attachment then it is unlikely that you’ll receive an infection from the tick. I think I beat the deadline, but I’m gonna find out first hand soon enough. And, heck, what would an Environmental Road Trip be without an occasional dramatic brush with nature? It would be a BERT: Boring Environmental Road Trip. And we can’t have that! Stay tuned…

Posted in Travelog, Mark | 5 Comments »