Um, Don’t You Know When You Are Going To Shock The Monkey?

Ben Lee’s “Song for the Divine Mother of the Universe” gets loaned to a top drawer ad agency producing on a World Wildlife Fund brief (via TDW): humans send a monkey to space (as we so often like to do) and it comes back decades later to find his home in tatters and his masters gone. Pretty impactful stuff (and much better than the gratuitous Peter Gabriel headline).

Whitening Clouds With Sea Salt Might Postpone Climate Change

A few months ago I posted a few thoughts on several inventive last ditch efforts scientific solutions to the many coalescing problems currently screwing the planet. Some bordered on the humorously bizarre, while others had more than just a slight whiff of feasibility. Tonight I’m particularly digging this one, which sees mankind building 2000 robotic yachts to inject a super fine spray of sea salt from the oceans into maritime stratocumulus clouds. Read more

Vancouver’s 2.5 Hectare “Living Roof” Mimics BC Grasslands…

Landscape architect Bruce Hemstock takes filmmaker Dave Budge on an explanatory tour of the living roof on top of the new Vancouver Convention Centre. Pretty amazing…

Trailer For Upcoming Green Film “No Impact Man” Released…

…and it looks like a total keeper. It’s a doc that follows New York City writer/historian Colin Beavan and his family as they try to change their lifestyles so as to have no net impact on the planet. Read more

Green Sushi Peer Pressure

We’ve seen the power of collective, issue-driven capitalism in the form of product and services boycotts before, but this particular tack is new to me. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this post I found over at Happy Frog this morning…

Okay, picture this: It’s dinnertime and you are standing in front of your empty refrigerator. Suddenly, you are bowled over by an intense craving for fresh tuna sashimi and a crispy dynamite roll. Scratching your head, you remember that the reason you’ve been staying clear of sushi is that all the joints near you serve unsustainably farmed fish. What’s a eco-conscious sashimi lover to do?

Enter Pod Mob. A group of your environmentally-focused neighbours have rallied around the task of convincing a West End Vancouver sushi restaurant to go green. Here’s what the people want:

- At least ONE Ocean Wise certified item on the menu
- At least ONE Green Table practice in place in the restaurant (composting, recycling, energy reduction, etc.)
- Ocean Wise labelling in the restaurant

The highest bid to commit their one day Pod Mob revenue towards greening their business further.
Emily from 3rdwhale.com, is (as we speak) finding out which restaurant is up for the challenge. Once the winner is announced, it is up to YOU Vancouver to show up to support the restaurant’s incredible efforts to go green.

The date is set! Thursday, November 20th, 2008.

Get your sushi appetites going now…and we’ll let you know where you can go for SUSTAINABLE SUSHI on THURSDAY, NOV. 20, 2008.

Stay tuned Vancouver…

I’m all for it, though it does strum the same nerve ending that the foie gras fanatics used to twang in me, if only a little. I think it’s really cool that they’re incentivising the whole thing, promising to bowl over the participating restaurant with their business, but since we’re talking about sustainability, how sustainable would that effort be? Is it a promise that they can really keep?

For sushi restaurant owners in Vancouver, the competition is fiercely price-driven, which might be something that is lost on these well-intentioned eco-nauts. If the restaurateur would pay up for fresh, locally line-caught and sustainable fish, their menus prices would have to jump considerably, no? And the eco-nauts, they’d visit just once or twice, right?

I think these people are totally on the right track and I don’t want to pooh-pooh their efforts, but I wonder if the end game for the restaurants is uncertain enough for them to make what would probably be a rather expensive commitment in exchange for a one-off room full of net-savvy back patters (appreciate them for their verve though I most certainly do).

As of this morning, I don’t have any better ideas…

The Guiltless T-Bones of 2022

Tired of angry hippies accosting you when you go into your favourite dining establishment? Sick of hearing about how delicious animals had to die just so you could feed yourself? Frustrated that despite your best efforts you can’t make everything you eat taste like bacon?

The time has come, people, and the revolution is starting.

New Harvest, an organization devoted to the creation of cultured meat products, has been formed to rescue all of us who just can’t bear to eat anything that ‘has a face’. The group’s founder, Jason Methany, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, has been following in the footsteps of NASA and the Dutch government who’ve have been working on bringing us our favourite meats without the messy cleanup and moral hang-ups.

Leaving all the science to the geeks, I skimmed the website and besides all the mumbo jumbo on building a better planet the only real hangup was that it uses stem cells. Which is good, because if they ever decided to make cultured “people meat” it would be illegal. But imagine if they did, and it was really good?

Soylent Green, baby. Soylent Green!