Go Green

By John Sutter

A new green blogging community called Fresh Greens sprouted up last week. The site features 13 bloggers and is devoted to sustainability and environmental issues in the Oklahoma City area. Shauna Struby, president of Sustainable OKC, posted a blog this week on the challenges of finding local foods when you’re out on the road. (Burger King is ubiquitous, but local options are worth searching out, she writes.) You can find other blogs by Struby at Think Lady.

Twelve other bloggers will join her on the site, and it sounds like they come from a diverse and interesting backgrounds. One is a vice-president at Sonic who is new to the green movement. One is a new mom who will write about the challenges of going green with a newborn. Another is Jennifer Gooden (see video above), who was a co-founder of Sustainable OKC and works for the Homeless Alliance. Gooden said over lunch on Monday that she plans to write about social justice issues and how they intersect with environmentalism and energy efficiency. The blog hopes to have two new posts per week.

Struby said the goal of the Fresh Greens blog is to connect people in Oklahoma City who are interested in environmental issues. She sees the blog as a conversation — a forum for public debate. Too often, she said, people who are interested in environmental issues in Oklahoma operate in tight circles, not realizing that a bigger movement is afoot. For example, when Struby set up a Sustainable OKC booth at the recent Dave Matthews concert downtown, people kept stopping by and expressing great surprise that any environmental groups existed here, she said. She wants those people to get connected online.

What are your favorite blogs? Know of any other green blogs in Oklahoma? I’d like to know … considering a story for the paper about the topic. The most random I’ve seen, the Bulgar Bugle, is devoted entirely to getting more bulgar wheat into your diet … Hey, it is a local food, and who doesn’t like tabbouleh.

And if you haven’t seen the Blog Oklahoma network, it’s a cool place to find local bloggers on topics that interest you.

(photo by John Sutter: Makira National Park in northeast Madagascar is home to incredible biodiversity. You can see some of the forest near the park burning in the top right part of the image.)
By John Sutter

An Oklahoma State researcher has gotten lots of media attention for untangling the secrets of a tiny chameleon in Madagascar. Furcifer labordi lives a high-speed life that’s much more like the life of a plant or an insect than a reptile: it dies in a year, and spends much of that time trapped inside an egg.

It’s an all or nothing existence. The chameleon has one chance to mate. One chance to reproduce. It only has one season to survive. It operates like an annual plant, spreading its seed before dying off. That may be a survival technique, since the chameleons live in a harsh desert environment that would be tough to live through anyway.

Kris Karsten, the recent PhD graduate at OSU who did the research, told me the discovery shocked and excited him in part because it’s proof that humans know so very little about this planet of ours. People have known F. labordi existed for more than 100 years, Karsten said, but no one knew about its bizarre life style until just recently.

It’s that sentiment–the idea that so much of the world is unexplored, and everything we do know seems worthy of our reverence for its incredible complexity–that pushed me to move to Madagascar last summer.

The huge Indian Ocean island, just off the coast of Africa, is known for its incredible biological resources. Most species of chameleons in the world live only in Madagascar and nowhere else, to site just one example. The whole island, which has been on its own evolutionary track for millions of years, seems a Dr. Seussian adventure. There are beetles with periscoping necks, geckos that look exactly like tree leaves and palms that poke their fronds up in a perfect line. It’s wonderful and amazing. And, in some ways, tragic.

Much of Madagascar’s natural resources have been exploited, and conservationists say more than 80 percent of the island is now deforested. When you fly over the central highlands, you see why people call it the Red Island: the iron-rich red dirt is visible everywhere. But there aren’t simple causes or solutions. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on earth, and locals burn down the forest to plant rice paddies so they can feed their families. Or they plant a few cash crops, and sell them at market to get money for food. Environmental groups say the burning practices are unsustainable and are ruining the soil, but some locals say the burning is part of their culture. Foreign groups are trying to teach more sustainable farming practices. They seem to be catching on well in some areas, and are largely ignored in other places.
One thing seems clear about the burning practices: when an acre of land is lost in Madagascar, species could go extinct. I spent a couple of weeks in the northeast part of the island near a national park called Masoala. There, biologists say you can find species of orchids and palms that exist in one valley on one side of one mountain. Nowhere else. If those patches of forest go, so do the species.

As you’ll hear in the podcast, there’s reason to be optimistic that Malagasy people can come to benefit from their rich natural resources. As mentioned, there is a government effort to expand protected land. But environmental groups are also trying to get carbon credits for local people who will protect virgin forest or replant land that has been burned.

All that aside, I found Karsten’s perspective interesting and refreshing. He showed a true appreciation for how complex nature is. When we take a minute out of our days to look at how amazing the details of natural systems are — that we’re still discovering new life cycles in species we know about, and are finding species we’ve never heard of all the time — then it’s hard not to be kind of impressed.

(PS: You don’t have to go to Madagascar to get that feeling. Did you know Oklahoma has more ecoregions than almost any other state in the country?)

What would the world look like if everyone lived like me?  

This is the question that American Public Media is asking visitors to its sustainability page at publicradio.org.

And what a question it is!

If you follow the link above, you’ll find an interactive game called Consumer Consequences, which illustrates the impact of our lifestyles on the Earth. The game asks a series of questions about your lifestyle, including how many miles you drive per month, how much food you eat and how often you buy new items of clothing or shoes (yikes!).With every question you answer, the game provides information and tips on how you can improve your score. You can even create your own character to play the game, and your own neighborhood to play it in.

The impact of your lifestyle is then calculated in terms of how many Earths it would take if everyone lived as you do. You can compare your lifestyle with others and modify your answers to reduce your impact.

In an effort to encourage you to play the game, I will share my results: 

My character sported a top hat, a furrowed brow, a wedding dress and a very long handlebar moustache. I played in the downtown-looking neighborhood.

There are 4 people living in my household (OK, my parent’s household. I did just graduate from college, remember!). It is a single-family home that is 2000 to 2500 square feet. We live in Oklahoma, and I figured our gas and electricity costs are above the state average. We do turn off the lights in my house (my Dad makes me walk back up the stairs and turn out every light in my room if I forget) and close the doors, so I guess we try to conserve energy as often as possible. We probably throw out 2-3 garbage bags per week, and we recycle everything.  I drive (by myself) to work every day, but I do have a hybrid (if that counts for anything!). I don’t ever take the bus, train or fly anywhere. My car gets 60 miles per gallon (woot!) and I probably drive about 1000 miles per month. I don’t eat as much as the average person, but I do eat out a lot. I will admit, I have yet to get into the groove of buying locally grown and organic products. After this game, I definitely will be making a trip to the Farmer’s Market! The shopping habits are really what gets me in trouble. I can’t help it! I love to shop! 

Calculation: It would take almost 5 Earths to sustain my lifestyle if everyone lived like me! Yikes! This game is a huge wake-up call. My shopping and my eating habits were the worst on my list.

So there. I shared my embarrassing score. Now it’s your turn! 

I challenge everyone to play this game and share their Earth count here on the Go Green blog page. Leave me a comment and let me know what your results were and how you plan to change your lifestyle!

-Lisa