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Friday, October 23, 2009

Motel Santa Barbara...

carbon pawprints...

I was watching Motel Hell the other night and it was good for a laugh or two..the idea of harvesting humans and turning them into baloney seemed pretty sustainable to me..the only part of the movie I could not comprehend was when old western TV great Rory Calhoun (!) turned down the sexual advances of a young naked beautiful blonde woman (Nina Axelrod)..she screamed passionately "take me" after he had saved her from drowning and Rory just stood there like a dummy and told her to put her clothes back on!!
so this brings me to another story about being green..a story by Helena Sung..
TIME TO EAT THE DOG??
Do you consider yourself a "green" person? Y'know, using canvas shopping bags, compact flourescent lightbulbs, etc.? Well apparently, that's not good enough! Those actions are "largely cosmetic," New Zealand architecture professor Brenda Vale tells Celsias.com. In "Time to Eat the Dog?: A Real Guide to Sustainable Living," Brenda and her husband Robert Vale, architects who concentrate on sustainable living, propose an unsavory idea: if you are going to keep pets, make sure they are edible so as to reduce the carbon footprint of the animals you keep.For the less environmentally-literate, a "carbon footprint" is the amount of greenhouse gases we produce while driving, flying, eating, etc., which contribute to climate change, or global warming. "Sustainable living" refers to efforts to reduce consumption of natural resources and the production of greenhouse gases by "altering methods of transportation, energy consumption and diet.""If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda tells The Dominion Post. Studying the amount of land and energy it takes to make the dog food your pet eats every year, the Vales found that a dog's carbon pawprint was twice that of a Toyota Land Cruiser being driven 6,213 miles a year. A cat's eco pawprint was "slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf," and keeping two hamsters is the same as owning a plasma TV.Are the Vales suggesting we eat our cats and dogs? Not exactly, they say, admitting that the title of their book was a "shock tactic." "We are not advocating eating anyone's pet cat or dog, [but] there is certainly some truth in the fact that if we have edible pets like chickens for their eggs and meat, and rabbits and pigs, we will be compensating for the impact of other things on our environment," Brenda Vale tells The Dominion Post.Not surprisingly, the Vales do not own any dogs or cats. Curious about your own carbon footprint? Check out the Carbon Footprint Calculator at The Nature Conservancy website. You'll note it doesn't inquire about the number and type of pets in your household.
Meat's meat, and a man's gotta eat.

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