Posts by — casandra

Ireland’s eco-minister Dublin - Political chaos of the most creative kind in Eire, where the ruling coalition is being kept in power by the Green Party. The country, one of the worst hit by the credit crunch, is in the midst of a fullscale. 1930s-style economic collapse.

Now state-run Anglo Irish Bank could become a symbol of a new Irish society by transforming into a low-cost green bank, it was claimed today.

The radical plan would see the nationalised lender throw off its close ties with property developers to offer cheaper mortgages for eco-friendly homes as part of the price for Green Party support.

John Gormley, Environment Minister and Green Party leader, backed the proposal from research body the Comhar Sustainable Development Council claiming it would signal a shift in attitudes. (more…)

African windpowered base station A cellphone companies trade body has launched a major program to take base stations off-grid. By 2012 up to 50% of new off-grid base stations in the developing world could be powered by renewable energy. And researchers are coming up with innovative solutions that will spread way beyond their niche. The GSM Association (GSMA) launched the Green Power for Mobile programme with the goal of helping the mobile industry use renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, or sustainable biofuel, to power 118,000 new and existing off-grid base stations in developing countries by 2012. (more…)

Dandelion…yummm!

If you go down to the woods today . . . be prepared to find them heaving with proto-hunter-and-gatherer types, not to mention the occasional itinerant film crew, crashing though the undergrowth in search of nuts, fungi and Wordsworth’s “lurking berries, ripe and red”, or snuffling out edible plants, herbs, bark and roots, along with the occasional trapped rabbit, in a kind of gonzo rustic rite of passage. Free food has become the most precious commodity of all.

Although mushroom-picking has long been a serious weekend pursuit elsewhere in Europe, the occasional blackberry ramble has tended to be about as far as most of us go in our back-to-nature moments. (more…)

Think of the rent you’ll save

If you ever wanted to go from London to Australia but didn’t fancy flying, you are in luck. There is now a bus service, and the inaugural journey has reached its destination after an epic three month voyage. reports Travelgood.com, an ethical travel web site.

OzBus provides people wishing to travel from London to Sydney with an alternative to flying, up to a point — the service does include one flight – from East Timor to Darwin in Australia. (more…)

Sunrise industry

While the solar industry as a whole remains small–less than 1% of electricity in the U.S.–it’s exploding — growing an average of 42% annually since 2002. Industry leaders, most based in Japan and Germany, are ramping up production, as are Chinese manufacturers like Suntech, whose founder and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi, is one of China’s richest men. Big companies, including BP, General Electric, Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp, and Shell, all want to grow their solar businesses. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, venture capital investors like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, entrepreneur Bill Gross, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are backing startups that claim they will revolutionize the industry. (more…)

The Lenin of renewables.

Mike Reynolds is a contradictory fellow. He’s so accustomed to being the rebel architect that he can’t quite come to terms with the fact that the world has now caught up with him. Thirty years ago he invented houses built out of scrap – mainly old tyres, rammed with earth, that form the basic building blocks of his now-famous earthships. A new film tells us all we want to know about his travelling caravanserai of builders and bodgers that sally forth from his native Taos, New Mexico, to build earthships around the world .
“Garbage Warrior, by British Director Oliver Hodge, is the story of Mike’s single-minded campaign to have his building techniques taken up across the world. When I met him a few years ago near Valencia, he had just arrived on an expenses only trip to mastermind the building of one of his Earthships on an unpromising hilltop for an impecunious couple.

We can’t bring you the new film, but here is a cheap video download of an old one about Earthships, , from Amazon.Mike’s dream homes are literally built with beer cans, tires and bottles- the by-products of modern consumption. He believes that a house is a self-sustaining natural machine that can be one with the earth.
Having first built homes out of beer cans alone, he believes that progress evolves through mistakes—if the government could allow atomic bomb testing in his state, he claims, accommodations should be made for experimental housing. However, the state government did not share his vision until he donned a tie and learned to function within the system.
He believes that life as we know it will disappear within decades as cities (“dangerous areas of chaos that can’t support themselves any longer”) (more…)

Click to buy from
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When a rechargeable battery goes dead on one of your gadgets, you can usually plug in a charger and bring it back to life. If those batteries are AA or AAA cells, you can even buy nonrechargeable ones to keep you going until the old cells are charged up again. But what if you’re out where there are no AC outlets and no stores?

One solution is to tuck your dead batteries into a GaiaM solar battery charger, only $20, and leave it in the sun. The charger uses solar power to recharge a pair of AA or AAA cells.

Click the link above to go over to the GaiaM web site and buy the charger. (more…)

Recent Forecasts from the World Future Society for 2006 and beyond

Some things never change

* Urban heating waves will get hotter and last longer. Large urban centers like Chicago and Paris will experience an average of 25% more heat waves a year in the twenty-first century compared with the twentieth, according to the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. And those heat waves will last, on average, nine days longer. (more…)

Eco-balls reduce laundry cost by 75% Eco-balls are a way of doing the washing without using detergent or soap. If you live off-grid that means you can reuse water more easily, and if you live on the grid, it means you are adding less to the world’s pollution especially water pollution, while saving a bit of money. And yes, they do really work. We were sent a free sample by Insight EcoStore in Brighton, and so far have used them in 30 washes with no ill effects on the clothes or the machine. The clothes come out softer than with fabric softeners and there’s none of that yucky sludge to clear out of our washing machine. They are less sparklingly white, but we are not worried about that. No more hassle and expense of carting bulky powders and liquids home from the market! (more…)