How to recycle batteries

May 17, 2010 by Jeanne Bonner · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Recycling 

MNN logo smallHey y’all, check out a piece that I wrote for Mother Nature Network on how to recycle batteries.

You can find it here.

I’m sure you know all about Mother Nature Network, but just in case, I heard someone describe it over the weekend as the CNN.com for the environment. It’s a cool site!

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Fur trappers: The real pro-animal activists

February 8, 2010 by Ken Edelstein · Leave a Comment
Filed under: BLOG de KEN 
'Fur is Green' model, brought to you by the Fur Council of Canada.

'Fur is Green' model, brought to you by the Fur Council of Canada.

You gotta love the moxie of the Fur Council of Canada’s “Fur is Green” campaign:

“Like leather, suede and shearling,” the council says, “fur is a natural product, a true gift of nature.”  The council explains that trappers are actually the ones who believe in animal welfare. It accuses animal rights groups of “‘staging’ horrible videos to fuel their fund-raising drives.”
This is one of five stranger-than-the-Yes-Men moments in marketing described in yet another brilliant column I wrote for the Mother Nature Network.
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Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009

January 2, 2010 by Ken Edelstein · Leave a Comment
Filed under: MEDIA/TECH 

t was a banner year for myth making about climate change. Despite mounting evidence that temperatures are rising, the deniers’ camp spun bigger, better and more believable tall tales than ever before.

And those stories worked like a charm in 2009. Amplified by broadcast bloviators and a compliant mainstream media, advocates for burying our collective head in the sand convinced millions of Americans that climate change isn’t happening, isn’t caused by people, or wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.

Here are five of the top 10 tall tales in the 2009 climate change denier’s storybook.

Read the rest of my Media Mayhem column on climate change tall tales at the Mother Nature Network.

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Driving around in circles

December 14, 2009 by Ken Edelstein · Leave a Comment
Filed under: SMART GROWTH 

Smooth. Clean. Comfortable. Finally, a ride that says, “I am one with the planet.”

The Studebaker EcoSurfer. The green dream of automobiles. It’s got everything you asked for: power, size and a smooth ride.

Best of all, the EcoSurfer will stop global warming. By combining our advanced hydrogen-cell/lithium-battery/water-vapor fuel technology and an innovative carbon trading agreement with the Amazonia Timber Co., we’ve designed an automobile that plants three trees for every mile you travel.
You’ve worked hard to save the planet. Now you deserve to save it in style.
***
If only the EcoSurfer were coming off production lines today. My friend David Goldberg calls that “the silver bullet” approach to solving our transportation problems.
Well, not the EcoSurfer part. That’s my little embellishment. Goldberg, communications director for an advocacy group called Smart Growth America, was talking about the American tendency to seek transportation solutions by modernizing two things we already have: Cars and the highways we drive them on.
The popular media refers to the phenomenon as “America’s love affair with the automobile.” But terming it romantic obscures the extent to which the affair is based on years of marketing, as well as a shotgun marriage arranged by government policies that force people to use cars to get anywhere.
It’s as if our lover wasn’t who we thought she was, but someone we’ve been manipulated to believe is real. And, now, when it’s obvious that we need to be dating the field — trains, trolleys, bikes and sidewalks — Big Daddy’s telling us we’re not allowed to go out with anyone else.
Read the rest of this week’s Media Mayhem column at Mother Nature Network.
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Much a-flu about something

November 4, 2009 by Ken Edelstein · Leave a Comment
Filed under: MEDIA/TECH 

Here’s this week’s Media Mayhem column on the Mother Nature Network.

Let’s pretend your brain is an advanced computer. It’s designed to process information efficiently — unless the inputs wildly contradict each other. Too many contradictions will cause the computer to malfunction.
As an experiment, let’s put that logic machine of yours in front a TV. At the same time, we’ll tune the radio to a broadcast-bloviation station that advertises itself as a “news” source.

Now, let’s see what happens when you suck up information on, say, the swine flu.

To read the rest, go to the Mother Nature Network.

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Limbaugh’s fatwa against NYT’s Revkin

November 3, 2009 by Ken Edelstein · 1 Comment
Filed under: MEDIA/TECH 

In the midst of my wife having a baby (!!!!), I forgot to post last week’s Media Mayhem column from the Mother Nature Network:

Powerful media personalities seem to be shouting “off with their heads” a bit often. Tsk, tsk. Where’s all the rage coming from?

First, Cokie Roberts suggests that we take filmmaker Roman Polanski “out and shoot him.” Then, Rush Limbaugh suggests that New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin “go kill yourself.”
Limbaugh’s anger is understandable. The king of talk radio still was smarting over his rejection by the National Football League. We all know how it feels not be allowed to buy a football team.
Limbaugh had been hoping to purchase a big piece of the St. Louis Rams. But the NFL owners — a well-known cabal of socialist billionaires — wouldn’t share the ball with him. They based their snub on the Limbaugh’s history of “divisive comments on race” (don’t you dare call him racist!). It didn’t help that a bunch of NFL players said they wouldn’t play for him.

This was a terrible injustice. Here’s Rush Limbaugh, your ordinary hardworking American earning $50 million a year, and he won’t be allowed to crack the whip …

To read the rest of this edge-of-your-seat column, click to the Mother Nature Network.

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I am ‘an *** for defending’ Al Gore

June 22, 2009 by Ken Edelstein · Leave a Comment
Filed under: MEDIA/TECH 

With the help of Al Gore, I finally made the big time!

Not just one asterisk, not just two — I’m a three asterisk kinda guy.

This is because I wrote a column for the Mother Nature network in which Gore responded to questions about his finances (the transcript of his responses is here).

The first commenter wrote this: “al gore is a crook. and you are an *** for defending him.” An ***! Maybe, this is just MNN’s way of cleaning up the language.

Oh, please, please, please. Puhrty please. Go to this week’s Media Mayhem column and comment there. Maybe if you do, I will earn my fourth asterisk.

Here’s the lead of the column:

If you want to scare people, you need a bogeyman.
For the assortment of politicians, lobbyists, provocateurs and media personalities who are trying to convince us we shouldn’t do anything about climate change, that bogeyman is Al Gore.
Maybe, the former vice president’s manner draws this kind of thing upon him. An Inconvenient Truth was a startling comeback for the losing presidential candidate. You can’t get much higher kudos than an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize.
But Gore’s kind of geeky for a pop-culture icon. He’s stiff and stentorian – at least in his public image, not the first guy you’d want to drink a beer with. He’s the opposite of the smooth “Teflon” politicians — Reagan, Clinton, Obama — whose charisma causes sticky questions to slide off of their backs with no damage.

For the rest of the column, go to the Mother Nature Network.

This post was first published on Cult Of Green.

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