The new law on the table is actually a new constitution–not the kind of thing we generally go in for up here in the states, but so far polls show the Ecuadorians are into it, 56% to 23%. While this might initially sound like the latest in Latin American radicalism, a lawyer from the US, Thomas Linzey, is behind the proposal. He says the upshot will be that it will be possible to sue for damages to an ecosystem if the ecosystem isn’t on your property.

Not only is this non-anthropocentric, which isn’t that new (PETA is non-anthropocentric), it’s non-animal-centric. Actually, non-life-centric.

Image: flickr/pingnews

This is nice, and represents part of Apple’s response to Greenpeace’s longstanding complaints against its mediocre enviro record. (This is one of their anti-Apple posters). But it does raise a couple questions: first of all, isn’t the most impactful thing about iPods that they keep coming out with new models? So that you don’t hold on to your expensive piece of electronics for more than a year?

Second, containing “easily recyclable materials” isn’t the same as “recyclable.” I don’t know about the recycling chart in your city, but in mine, chrome things don’t appear to go into the blue bin. Somewhere at MIT, consciencious students may be disassembling iPods before they throw them out, dividing their components into tiny recyclable and non-recyclable piles. But I bet most of those easily recyclable materials aren’t getting recycled. Unless they’re being passed on to parents, homeless people, etc when a new model comes out.

Image: Greenpeace

I mean, look at her. That is the smile of the demonically possessed. More substantively, she is typical of Alaskan Republicans in that she’s a staunch ally of big oil. She supports drilling in ANWR, and generally comes down in favor of letting energy companies run pipelines wherever they want. They in turn have contributed generously to her campaigns.

She has apparently already caused Hurricane Gustav, which, according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has orchestrated a relatively orderly evacuation, looks to be a worse storm than Katrina.

Image: flickr/Thomas Roche 

The danger of bringing it up is that Obama needs more than anything else not to look like an elitist. He’s not going to win as the next Al Gore. High gas prices have been putting a lot of middle-class voters in the pro-drilliing, anti-conservation column lately. A speech that failed to make environmentalism a central issue would be sad but understandable. The Machiavellian in me kind of hopes he runs away from global warming until he gets elected.

Image: flickr/zenobia_joy

There are free bikes downtown, some new wind power facilities. Green key-cards at the hotels. But more important, really, was the fact that Hillary dedicated one of the only substantive portions of her speech (most of it was ‘we made 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling, which changed that ceiling into a mosaic of caring, and Harriet Tubman said you’ve got to keep banging your head through that mosaic etc etc’) to talk about green-collar jobs.

That speech did make a little worried  about party unity though. I mean, everybody is praising it as a great speech, but wasn’t it kind of, I am great, I laid waste in the primary, I proved something, and oh yeah, vote for Barack? Because while he may not be a woman, like me, the man is at least black, like Harriet Tubman?

Image: flickr/Jeffrey Beall

It’s kind of cool to see the Democratic party is able to cast itself as the pragmatist, non-ideological one now. The No More Drama party.

Obama’s VP pick, Sen. Joe Biden, gave an interview to Grist this weekend where he flashed his green cred. He was one of the first congressmen to introduce a climate change bill, back in the ’80s. If he can sell his native Pennsylvania on the green-collar jobs concept, and play attack dog on McCain’s greenwashing, he’ll be earning his keep.

Image: flickr/World Economic Forum

Anderson took the city to court a couple years ago arguing that cars will always vastly outnumber bikes in the city, and that pledging space to bikes space necessarily reduces space for cars, causing traffic jams and thereby raising emissions. He won; the state forced the city to write up an environmental impact report, and the initiative is still stalled.

Meanwhile, cyclists protest, and Anderson blogs about how cyclists are like Islamist terrorists. Mike Judge take note.  

Image: flickr/MoBikeFed

Atlanta’s trees are so famous that when Sir Elton John cut an album that was kind of about Atlanta he called it Peachtree Road. Tom Wolfe described Atlanta’s trees as the city’s saving grace in that other famous carpetbagger’s tribute, A Man in Full. “People loved living under them,” he wrote.

No matter. Apparently the arborist in question, Tom Coffin, enforced local tree-preservation law too vigorously for the city’s taste; he complained about how none of the other arborists bothered imposing fines on developers who cut down trees and was out the next week.

It’s hard to imagine a worse PR move for a city whose most widely known non-peachtree features are Outkast and the headquarters of Coca-Cola. Especially because Coffin actually looks exactly like the Lorax. Fluffy beard and sad, paternal eyes and everything.

Image: flickr/cogdogblog 

People wrote in with insults, bad suggestions (fill it with concrete, throw it in the ocean and maybe it will become a reef), and some less insane ones (find a way to donate it to people in a poor remote village somewhere who will use it efficiently, as a transport vehicle). Even if you hate PR stunts, this one poses a legit question: what are we going to do with our many, various, increasingly hated, polluting machines, given that throwing them away or burning them is so counterproductive?My suggestion (probably already voiced by somebody): take off the wheels, gut them, and turn them into stationary dwellings for homeless people, in sprawling cities where there is space for fields of dead SUVs. Which would admittedly create conglomerations resembling vast, drugs-afflicted trailer parks without toilets, yes. Let’s see you do better. Image: flickr/Kevin Saff