Use less cement if you can!

From Hippy Shopper
Global carbon dioxide emissions from the cement industry are greater than the entire aviation industry.
Lime mortar and plaster are the environmentally alternative to cement and their use is growing in ecological new builds. Calch Ty-Mawr Lime in Brecon, Wales is the Welsh Centre for Traditional and Ecological Building - basically they're experts in the use of lime as a building material. So if you are planning a green build, why not do our planet a favour and consider lime.

Offset your CO2 emissions

We all know that we are generating too much CO2 and that it is contributing hugely to global warming. Well now a clever site has set up to allow us to pay into projects that offset our emissions. It is a great idea and very affordable. For instance I am flying to India in April, my being on that flight will generate 2.03 tonnes of CO2, the cost to offset this is £15.22 - not too bad! That money is used to fund solar energy schemes, or tree planting, or many other CO2 negative projects, carefully calculated to equate to my impact. Plus you can do the same for your car use, your home heating, all sorts of things. This is a very worthwhile project and I urge you to use it.... Happy off-setting.

Coverflow

If you use iTunes for music on your Mac, then you have GOT to check out coverflow. It is FREE (for now) and takes you back to that wonderful old feeling of sifting through your LPs

check it out at http://www.steelskies.com/

It is worth bearing in mind that although coverflow looks for album art online, it seems to work MUCH better if you have already embedded the cover art into iTunes.
There is a free tool for doing this called Fetch Art...

You can get that from http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12083

For people like me who have a lot of world music it is worth bearing in mind that if your iTunes library contains unusual characters (such as arabic or Greek or accented characters that are not part of the European lexicon) the program will fall over. This isn't a problem, you just need to note where it has stopped, force quit, rectify the problem in iTunes and relaunch Fetch Art. - or alternatively clean up your iTunes library in advance.

Great article on Rothko

from the Guardian:

Feeding fury

Mark Rothko was an unknown abstract expressionist when he won a plum commission - to provide paintings for New York's swankiest restaurant. So why did he pull out and give them to the Tate?

Guerilla Gardening

Guerilla Gardening is a new phenomenon where people take the greening of their cities into their own hands.
Getting together and planting stuff in those areas that have effectively been abandoned by local councils.
If you live in a City and want to make it a bit prettier, check it out. It will take next to no time to do and will make a difference.

The Sky sail goes into commercial use...

This is great news... and could transform the ways goods are moved at sea.

Beluga Group has become the first shipping firm worldwide to sign a contract to furnish a modern diesel freighter with sail power--in this case Sky Sail: a super-sized kite which pulls the ship across the seas. The idea has been around for a while, and poo-pahed just about as long (see the comments even after Sky Sails won the Aichi World Expo Eco-tech award, as reported in Treehugger Sky Sails Promise). But now it will become reality.

Plant a tree for free

from Treehugger:
Fill out a form on Milliken’s Web site, and the carpet manufacturer will plant a tree.
Single-handedly, you can inspire physical labor out on one of the manufacturer’s 138,000 acres of forest.

Why is there no tax on aviation fuel?

It seems ridiculous to me that there is no tax on aviation fuel. Flying is one of the most environmentally polluting things that any of us can do, yet I can quite easily fly back to the UK for £3. Frankly this creates a financial incentive to fly. as such it is morally wrong, and the only way to reduce air travel is to tax aviation fuel at a comparable rate to automotive fuel. Of course this is not going to happen while the Bush government is in power, but we can but push for it in the EU.

see the following from Treehugger for a true idea of the real environmental costs of flying.

Air Travel and Climate Change: Take the Train

One transatlantic flight for a family of four creates more CO2 than that family generates domestically in an entire year.(source) Because of this manytravelerss are turning their backs on flying and going overland. While this is easier in Europe with shorter distances and better train networks, it is still an option- even driving 12,000 miles creates less CO2.

In the UK you can buy green power for the same price as regular grid power

from Treehugger:
Whether they know if or not, folks in the U.K. can buy green power at rates guaranteed to match what they pay for conventional power from their local utility. The power will come from wind turbines scattered around the country, all built by the company Ecotricity. They call themselves the largest independent green electricity supplier in Europe.

Green Building or Green washing - hard to tell!

Architecture firm MVRDV has designed a unique housing complex for Liuzhou, China. The location of the project is a valley where the eroding mountain face will be enveloped by a series of staggered boxed structures that will leave pockets of vegetation. A wetland or constructed pond will support be created in the valley, to support both vegetation and housing at its edge. MVRDV advocates some overlap between cities and the countryside.