Thursday, March 8, 2007

2nd post from Dr Rita Carson

From Dr. Rita Carson
Very nice to read your comment to my last post Dr. Lola Justice. You are the first environmental scientist who has e-mailed me from the Housing for Sustainable Living Project. That environmental greenhouse program sounds very interesting. I would love to hear more about it. My children Toby and Samantha have just gone to bed so I have some time to chat. I have been making some plans for planting in the green roof garden in the spring. I have started seedlings for a vegetable garden as I was thinking why not grow vegetables up there this year? This project you're working on has great scope. When you get to the point of discussing ideas e-mail me. I have found that the biggest difficulty on construction projects is getting the engineer to take the pollution issues seriously. I had a look at your contract and was delighted to see that minimizing environmental impact is written in. There are some great building products on the market now that are non-polluting. You should contact Dr. Stephanie Carson next, she'll help you with chosing products that are manufactured in plants that pay their workers a fair wage.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok man this site is really weird i dont get whats going on i was just surfing the web and i found this blog it creeps me out but what evs l8r

Anonymous said...

I have just finished doing homework with Sammy and Toby. I came across this quote:
“If it can be said, in the abstract, that the sun energized the planet, it was oil that now powered its human population, both in its familiar forms as fuel and in the proliferation of new petrochemical products. Oil emerged triumphant, the undisputed King, a monarch garbed in a dazzling array of plastics. He was generous to his loyal subjects, sharing his wealth to, and even beyond, the point of waste. His reign was a time of confidence, of growth, of expansion, of astonishing economic performance. His largesse transformed his kingdom, ushering in a new drive-in civilization. It was the Age of Hydrocarbon Man.”
-- Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991) quoted in History of Our People (Futures Books, 2015).
I guess the age of Hydrocarbon Man is over in 2020. But the quote got me thinking about what the world might have been like if we had not relied on oil so much in the last century? If we had got into energy conservation and renewable energy sources sooner would the world be a better place? What do you think?

Anonymous said...

Hi Rita,
I read your comment about oil in the twentieth century and I know what you mean. I was talking to a friend recently who works with communities in the mountains in Ecuador. She said there are relocated communities there that were expelled from there homelands because of a mining corporation. Apparently in the first decade of this century a mining corporation bought up land in their county without consulting them. The Ecuadorian constitution states that communities should be consulted about development and change that will impact upon them. The people objected to the mining when they found out about it but the corporation ignored their protestations. There was trouble between the people and the mining corporation. The mining corporation was rich and they had a lot of power. They used it to get the people moved out of their homeland. The people are very sad still to be removed from the place they and their families grew up. They relate to their homeland very strongly. Its easy to see why when you view pictures of it.
Steph. Lewis