The Simplest Things Can Make a Huge Impact on the Planet

By SHARYN ALFONSI
April 22, 2008

It wasn’t that long ago that cutting out litter was considered cutting edge. Today, it takes a little more to be green, though not that much.

(PhotoDisc )

You can ditch your tie and save the environment. Japan swapped suits for open collars one summer, as offices eased up on arctic-level air conditioning. The result? The country cut an estimated 79,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Airing your not-so-dirty laundry can also make an impact. Over a lifetime of laundering, one T-shirt can send 9 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. But if you use warm water instead of hot water and hang your clothing on a clothesline, you’ll cut the carbon dioxide by 90 percent.

Flip your fleece. Outdoor outfitter Patagonia will recycle any of your old fleece, which they melt to make new fabric and clothes.

Remember to switch off your computer. Don’t just use a screensaver, which doesn’t save energy. Shutting off your computer will reduce its carbon emissions by 83 percent.

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Massey’s Outfitters recently worked with Patagonia to fund re-development of an urban, light-rail corridor into a city-wide bike trail.

Known locally (in New Orleans) as the Lafitte Corridor, the plan is to deploy a bike trail from near Lake Pontchartrain to the French Quarter, cutting across a wide variety of commercial, industrial, and residential areas.

Together with Patagonia, Massey’s donated $5,000 to two groups associated with the project; Urban Conservancy and FOLC.

ABOUT URBAN CONSERVANCY: Urban neighborhoods provide diversity, community, cultural activities and amenities in pedestrian friendly environments. Urban neighborhoods should provide choices for how we live our lives. They should maintain a human scale and allow for a range of transportation options.

ABOUT FOLC: The Friends of Lafitte Corridor seeks to preserve the open space of the Lafitte Corridor from the French Quarter to Canal Boulevard by advocating and facilitating the creation of a greenway with bicycling and pedestrian paths linking neighborhoods, cultural features, historic sites, retail areas and public spaces. 

JAPANESE “Yakuza” gangsters have launched a campaign of intimidation to force a media blackout on the furore surrounding the country’s killing of dolphins and whales, it was claimed yesterday.

Australian surfer Dave Rastovich attracted world headlines after he and conservationists including actress Isabel Lucas travelled to the Japanese fishing village of Taiji last year to protest at its annual dolphin kill.

Rastovich, the global face of surfwear giant Billabong Australia’s environmental campaigns, said the multi-billion dollar Japanese surf industry had been experiencing the “heat” for his anti-whaling activities.

He said he had been told of intimidation from Yakuza thugs - the feared Japanese mafia - who had been visiting Japanese surf shops in search of the outspoken activist.

Activists … Isabel Lucas, Dave Rastovich and his wife Hannah Fraser.

“These are the goons from the fishing industry who are visiting surf stores intimidating people and threatening to punish them financially,” Rastovich said.

“People are feeling it. They are washing their hands of us. They don’t feel safe”.

Rastovich, from northern NSW, is a professional “free surfer” - paid six figures for photos and video shoots rather than competitions - essentially to “live the life”. He enjoys a celebrity following in Japan.

Surfwear companies - keen to distance themselves from the controversy - have threatened to cancel advertising contracts with Japanese surf magazines that promote Rastavich’s anti-whaling stance, sources in the industry have claimed.

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Fancy your own swath of rainforest or snow-capped peak? From Britain to Botswana, the Philippines to Patagonia, there is an explosion of individuals, charities, even billionaire financiers buying up vast areas of land in the name of protecting environments. But is private ownership the way to save them? John Vidal reports

US millionaire conservationist Douglas Tompkins, who owns several million acres in Patagonia. Photograph: Leo Beca/Reuters

Click! I have just bought 10 sq cm of rainforest for a few pennies on the net. Click click! That’s 0.2 sq ft of Patagonia coastline saved from mining. Click click click! A friend has just given me as a present 1 sq m of the Palmyra atoll, wherever that is.

Saving the world’s most beautiful and ecologically important places just got much cheaper and easier. Hundreds of websites run by charities, trusts, and individuals now invite people to buy up forest, field and mountain to save it from destruction and climate change at the click of a mouse. And why stop at pennies? The World Land Trust, whose patron is Sir David Attenborough, invites you to buy a whole acre of Indian elephant corridor for £50, or 2,000m2 of the Chaco Pantanal in Brazil for £25. WLT supporters have bought 350,000 acres in Britain since 1989 - an area half the size of Derbyshire.

If you have really deep pockets, conservation gets even easier. John Eliasch, the Swedish-born businessman chosen by Gordon Brown to be his forest advisor, bought himself 400,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest for £8m in 2006 and now asks supporters to help him buy up tracts of Brazil and Ecuador. His charity, Cool Earth, is asking £70 an acre, and in one year it claims to have bought 32,000 acres - to howls of disapproval from the Brazilian government, which says Eliasch is an “eco-colonialist” and that Brazilians can look after their own forests.

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