On the surface, Blue Planet Run sounds like an innovative event supporting an important cause. Basically, it’s a long run covering “15,200 miles, across 16 countries and 4 continents, 24 hours a day for 95 days” intended to bring attention to the fact that 1/6 of people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water.

The presenting sponsor funding Blue Planet Run: Dow Chemical.

Dow’s latest greenwashing tactic is so absurd as to be funny. Dow Chemical’s disgusting environmental record’s well known; a brief scan of its Wikepedia entry outlines only a few of the many environmental disasters the company has caused. Dow’s the 11th top corporate air polluter in the US.

And Dow’s in fact a major polluter of water! Earlier this month, Dow Chemical finally agreed to clean up a major dioxin contamination it created in and around the Tittabawassee River near Dow’s manufacturing plant in Midland.

Blue Planet Run’s sponsorship page touts Dow’s “commitment to addressing some of the most pressing challenges faced by humankind.” Is this for real?

Of course I want well-meaning organizations and nonprofits to get the money to do their work. I just find it both shocking and depressing that some nonprofits get their funds at the cost of greenwashing the very companies that continue to create the problems that the nonprofits are trying to solve.

Tags: water, blueplanetrun, dow, dowchemical

3 Comments | Email this post

A twice-weekly sharing of eco-shwag.

This post is for last Friday. A whole buncha CDs came in the BlogHer conference shwag bag — including a lot of music to listen to while online:

“Beats for Bloggers” is a compilation of 14 songs related to work — from Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” to Michael Jackson’s “Working Day and Night” to Frank Sinatra singing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” — put together by a company promoting a job search engine. I got 2 copies, for some reason.

“The Sound of Web Search” — aka “search music” — is basically music inspired by internet searches — “an experiment to make fun and art out of the Internet search experience.” Performed by a group called hakia, the music’s mostly spoken word over light music, some inspired by computer sounds –

Suffice to say I listen to different music while I blog and search. But for those who’ve always wanted to listen to Donna Summer while at the computer, lemme know! Comment or email by Thursday; drawing happens Friday. US addresses only.

4 Comments | Email this post

Thank you to everyone who wrote me about Blackle — basically turning Google pages black to save energy.

However, I won’t be Blackling. Neither will green LA girl get a goth-themed makeover.

Blackle was inspired by an ecoIron post, which argued that turning Google search pages black would save 750 megawatt-hours of energy a year. Thus, Blackle was born and written and emailed about all over the place.

But as Carl Bialik, “the numbers guy” at WSJ, has noted, the energy savings happen only on older CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors, not on LCD (liquid crystal display) screens. Carl contacted an EnergyStar dude for further tests; that guy reported “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor.”

Is anyone reading green LA girl on a CRT? Then Blackle yourself, grandma. I’m on an LCD screen, and I’m guessing most of you are too.

Beyond lack of actual eco benefit, the main reason I’m not Blackling’s cuz my eyes, like most people’s, don’t like white text on black background. Text is for reading, not for squinting at. I mean, turning off the computer would save even more energy, but then I couldn’t read the text altogether….

However, if someone comes up with Graygle — which would actually match nicely with green LA girl’s color scheme, I might go for it.

Tags: crt, lcd, blackle, energy

9 Comments | Email this post

A twice-weekly sharing of eco-shwag.

Due to the trip to Chicago and all, I totally forgot to do freebies last week — So I’m having two today!

The first — a USB flash drive, this time from AOL Body with a 128 MB capacity.

I say yet another cuz it feels like I’m getting a lot of random memory sticks from companies. This one came in the BlogHer shwag bag.

Comment or email by Thursday to get in the drawing, which happens Friday. US addresses only.

11 Comments | Email this post

>> If you have ugly graffiti on your block, you have no one to blame but yrself. LA City Council Prez Eric Garcetti’s advice on getting involved has just 4 points — including taking charge of your block to turn it graffiti free.

>> Turn worn jeans into a a cheeky pair of pot holders. I wanna try this, but need to borrow a sewing machine first.

>> Californian home-owners: Get solar panels already. Rebates and loans’re there for your taking, and “Santa Monica County offers plain old grants for buildings meeting certain renewable-energy criteria.” Ok — Santa Monica’s not a county, but you get Umbra’s point. Check out Solar Santa Monica.

>> American Direct Mail ironically wants no solicitors. Photo documentation of the junk mail company’s office in Burbank by David Markland.

0 Comments | Email this post

Your turn to help me –

The June goal was to read 30 books which was kinda fun, and my goal this month was to drink somewhat less, which was somewhat of a success as evidenced by the stickers, despite all the drinking at BlogHer….

Now I’m picking a goal for August.

What’s your goal?

6 Comments | Email this post

>> Need more blogging material? go green. Summer writes not one, not two, but three detailed, photo-illustrated posts to fully cover how she greened one night out. (image from BTC Elements)

>> Friends offer friends full feeds. Not only will you be less annoying, you’ll also gain readers and clickthroughs. If you don’t know what a feed is, go here first.

0 Comments | Email this post

I got to try out a few organic restaurants — like Crust and The Chicago Diner — but couldn’t make it to most of them.

Thus a list of places I hope to visit next time — which’ll hopefully be helpful to any green LA girl readers planning to travel to Chicago — Feel free to add your eco-recommendation in the comments.

Butterfly Social Club. 726 W. Grand Ave. 312.666.1695. Organic cocktails, from Goji Kombucha Cider to Funky Budda’s Margarita.

Green Zebra. 1460 W. Chicago Ave. 312.243.7100. A higher-end, well-known vegetarian restaurant in Chicago.

Hopleaf Bar. 5148 N. Clark St. 773.334.9851. Lotsa beer, organic wine, and organic meat options — plus a nice array of vegetarian dishes to choose from.

Lula Cafe 2537 N. Kedzie Blvd. 773.489.9554. Seasonal, organic, local produce at a cafe in Logan Square.

Unrelated to food and drinks: The Working Bikes Co-Op sounds like the best place to buy a bike. The kids here fix up donated bikes, donating some to countries where bikes’re scarce and selling others cheaply in its Chicago store. 1125 S. Western Ave. 312.421.5048.

Tags: chicago, restaurant, bar, bike, bicycle, workingbikes

0 Comments | Email this post

Blogs’re about interactivity, so the closing keynote by Elizabeth Edwards — 58-year-old attorney, blogger and wife of presidential candidate John Edwards — was not a speech but a chat.

Which meant bloggers got to ask a lot of questions — and got what seemed like very frank answers from Elizabeth.

For ex: One woman — who rambled a bit about how she writes about reclaiming the F word (faith) asked Elizabeth about how her faith impacts her political views.

Elizabeth said that she’s a methodist, but that she doesn’t believe in an intervening god — as in she doesn’t believe in praying to make shit happen (though she didn’t say shit, and she did say she’s appreciative for the people who pray for her). Instead, she believes in a set of general guidelines for living one’s life.

But Elizabeth emphasized that she believes in living according to those guidelines NOT because of the promise of “eternal life” but because “that’s what’s right.”

If Elizabeth’s answer was the answer most religious people gave, I wouldn’t think of religion as such a dogmatic, painful, and generally harmful blight on society.

Elizabeth was careful to separate her own views from her husband’s views — saying that she’d support gay marriage, even while John Edwards only supports civil unions.

And Elizabeth elaborated on her widely-reported comment that John Edwards would do more for women’s issues than Hillary Clinton would. “I just think that we need someone to lead in an aggressive way,” she said, and quickly pointed to “truly universal healthcare.” Saying that Hillary is “not in the right place on this issue,” because “the position she takes is we have cost saving programs” which would reduce cost of insurance and make it more widely available but not actually provide insurance for all. “The national will is here — what we need is leadership,” Elizabeth said, and specifically pointed to the fact that John Edwards has been honest about the fact that there are “sacrifices were going to have to make to get there” — namely raising taxes on those making more than 200K. “I’ve been disappointed that she’s been unwilling to say that,” Elizabeth said about Hillary.

Many of the questions from the general crowd had to do with healthcare and education — from the availability of childcare and elder care to getting young people involved politically. To the former, Elizabeth pointed to importance to making these occupations more attractive via financial incentives; to the latter, she spoke to the importance to making young people feel they aren’t in a vacuum, that they can hear an echo from the work they do.

On media consolidation, Elizabeth said she doesn’t want the Rupert Murdoch “to be the gatekeeper of the information that comes to the American people.” She elaborated later to say that she wasn’t speaking about Murdoch specifically — though she finds him “problematic” — but to the fact that any one person’s voice should be heard so loudly. “I agree with me all the time,” she said jokingly, “and I still don’t think I should be the sieve through which all the information should come to you.”

Then she came and partied with us at the Chicago Children’s Museum, and I got to ask her about her and John’s eco-activism –

Tags: elizabethedwards, blogher07, chicago, god, religion

3 Comments | Email this post

So at the Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I got a free phone card.

It wasn’t a traditional phone card, though it was wallet sized. There were actually a bunch of them, next to a sign encouraging you to take one, with this inscription: “A found photograph opened a new lead. The latest details were left on a voice message at 312.397.3856.”

So take one I did. This card, titled An Expiring ending II, is part of Mario Garcia Torres’s (with Murtaza Roashan) multi-part, multi-medium piece — all based on trying to find a mysterious One Hotel depicted in a photo taken by an artist called Alighiero Boetti back in the 70s.

So I called the number, and got this message:

As you might have imagined, or already know, the film was never shot. Today, the One Hotel building has still not been found. Maybe it was indeed destroyed around 1981, but the story does not end here. The disappearance of the hotel building now has become less important, as the actual existence of it now becomes blurry. The image you are now holding became incredibly important. According to the photographer journalist M… (can’t make out), this image, which was recently seen in his deteriorating archive, was taken sometime between 1973 and 1975, when the One Hotel was supposedly in operation. The hotel was located in a depicted building. If you look closely, you can see the Aziz Supermarket, then the space where the hotel was, and next the pharmacy, both places present in Alighiero’s photo of the hotel. I now wonder if Alighiero went to Kabul later than 1971, as it has been written. Or perhaps it was all a construction of the artist, or maybe the sign on the hotel building was installed later. I’m now as confused as I was when I started looking for the building. In any case, if not photographic documentation, I did talk to someone in the neighborhood who remembered there was some twins that managed the One Hotel. Presently, I still refuse to believe that Alighiero’s story in Kabul never happened.

Then I got back to the net and found this artblog post by libby, who uncannily covered the exact pieces I planned to write about. I mean, the exhibit was a decent size, yet we both took pics and notes on the exact same pieces. Odd –

Thus some of my pics are below, but I encourage you to visit libby’s post for commentary –

Front: Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), Thomas Schutte; back: Short Cut, Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset.

Front: Abraham Cruz-Villegas, Rond Point; Back: Stefan Bruggemann, Explanations

Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Until September 2, 2007.

Tags: mca, chicago, museumofcontemporaryart, art, museum,

0 Comments | Email this post