"New Green Building Website!  For my ENTS capstone project I designed an educational website about green building, or sustainable design, at Carleton.  The site offers an introduction to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a summary of the green features of Carleton's own Cassat and Memorial Halls, personal ecological footprint calculators, and a list of excellent resources for further research.  Please take a minute to visit the new site!  Questions/feedback: nicky.bloom@gmail.com."

Site address:
http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/green_building/

I believe in hard work as much as the next guy, and dedication, and working for causes.  I believe it's very important to work for environmental issues, to work to change people's behaviors and attitudes towards things, frustrating as that effort may be.  But a little over a week ago I had a very special experience while hanging out of a tree in the Lower Carleton Aboretum.  The sentiment that experience inspired really kind of summed up a part how I feel about environmentalism, and the human relationship to the world in general.  I'm a big fan of quillback carp-suckers after my arb tree experience but I still can't shake the feeling that, when you look around, humans behavior makes us hardly distinguishable from a bunch of Cannon River carps.  Of course value is wholly subjective.  Obviously we'll just have to make the best of it either way.

The Sustainability Blog has been rather quiet through the first few weeks of Spring Term.  This is not because environmental news has been slow.  Rather, we have been busy planning a number of events and working on some important projects.  One of the completed events this term was Earth Week, which was rather a collection of a lot of different events from April 21th to 24th.  Check out some of the highlights here.

Musser won Green Wars, which ended in February, by reducing the dorm's February energy consumption by 26% over an average of the building's February energy consumption from 2004-2008.  Myers finished last, using 30% more energy than Musser's February average from the same period.  The Townhouses used the most kwh per student, at 171.7 kwh per student.

Two weekends ago 125 students (including 3 from Carleton) gathered at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa for the Midwest Real Food Challenge Summit. We built coalitions and strengthened our voice as students working for bold changes to our food system, most specifically within our college and university dining services. When asked whether our campuses were at most 10 miles from an industrial agribusiness cornfield, if not within one, almost every student raised a hand. From a wide array of specific interests and backgrounds, we came together around a common goal: real food.

Energy conservation continues to find its way into the headlines, recently it appeared on the cover of the March edition of National Geographic magazine.  The image on the cover is an infrared image of the outside of a two-story residential home.  With heat showing up as bright oranges, reds, and yellows in infrared it is easy to see this house is losing a great deal of energy through its roof and a few spots in the walls.  In the article, titled “Saving Energy: It Starts at Home,” writer Peter Miller records his and his family’s attempt to reduce their carbon emissions by 80% for one month.

I started thinking about the siscowet strain of lake trout the other night and couldn't stop.  There is something about that elusively pelagic fish that prods my imagination like few other species.  If humans have progressively economized their environments, the siscowet remains naggingly unquantifiable.  But while an attempt to place this fish can lead to sleepless nights, there is something in the siscowet that I prefer to the multi-billion dollar salmon fishery of neighboring Lake Michigan.

If you were sitting near a window around 12:45 during Thursday's snowstorm, you may have borne witness to a flash of lightning and prolonged rumble of thunder muffled by the blinding snowfall. Thundersnow is an extremely rare event: thought to occur in only 0.07 percent (7 of every 10000) snow storms, with 191 recorded in the last 30 years in the US, mostly in the mountains of the west and in the Great Lakes region.  While most thunderstorms can be heard for miles, the heavy snow that accompanies such storms muffles the tell tale crash, constricting the audible range to 1-2 km.

If you’ve spent any time in the Arb this winter, you’ve likely seen a dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). If not, you’ve undoubtedly heard one—a call often described as a high,  smacking ‘stip’ emerging from the ground below stands of dense vegetation.  One of the most common birds during the winter months in Minnesota, juncos are at first glance the least worthy of a column in the Carletonian—common, drab, begging for an yawn-inspiring article.

(Note: John Kraus has updated his February article about Trayless Dining at Carleton, and the updated version has been reposted here.)

According to Food for Thought (A Carleton student group), the Carleton dining halls produce about 2,700 pounds of food waste per day.  Colleges, in an attempt to reduce waste and save money, have experimented with various ways to reduce food waste.  Going to tray-less dining has generally shown a reduction in food waste of 25-30%; Hamline College recently implemented this step and expects to save $25,000 a year.  In the following article John Kraus ('10) outlines a well researched case for trayless dining at Carleton.

Way to go Canada!  I’m not sure if I’m just out of the loop, or if the next Olympics just hasn’t been publicized much yet, but the next Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 is going to be green.  You may be cynical, as I initially was, thinking this is just another case of “green washing,” but in fact the Vancouver Olympic Committee has developed an impressive and extensive website detailing their plans to make the next Winter Olympics sustainable, in many senses of the term. From building, to transportation to Aboriginal involvement and collaboration, the Vancouver Olympic Committee has identified sustainability issues and laid plans for addressing them.