“Women who wear high heels all the time and then walk without them walk completely differently than women who do not wear heels and they probably increase their risk for a whole host of injuries.” —
Heels shorten the Achilles tendon and change how your foot orients itself to the ground. That spells trouble once the heels come off, says Gretchen Reynolds. (via nprfreshair)
I knew there was a reason I don’t like heels…
(via nprfreshair)
Doing your own taxes easier than figuring out how to eat right?
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After two years of research, UCS found that the most important strategies for reducing a person’s carbon footprint are to change “what and how you drive, the energy you use at home, and what you eat.”
Those are answers we already knew. The vast majority of the green advice you’ll read? It’s irrelevant. There are four primary activities that dump carbon into the atmosphere: traveling from place to place, keeping buildings at pleasant temperatures, creating electricity, and raising animals for meat.
The rest of the green living pantheon—bamboo utensils, composting, eating local, reclaimed wood tables, organic cotton sheets—are nice gestures. And they often have other benefits: they might keep chemicals out of the water or provide a livelihood for local farmers. Many are also better than the alternatives they’re replacing. But when it comes to tackling climate change—not only the most dangerous environmental issue the world faces, but also a looming human rights problem—choosing these green products can only make a tiny difference.
” —GOOD magazine, of course.
YES YES and YES! It’s frustrating that the ‘green’ conversation has changed to bamboo utensils, which takes the focus off of REAL lifestyle changes that people are afraid to address head-on. For the love of god, read the rest, it’s good stuff.
(Source: GOOD)
Ultra-rare albino redwood trees completely lack the green pigment chlorophyll, which they need to live (by photosynthesizing nutrients from light). These plants are literally vampires. They are pale (everwhite instead of evergreen), and they survive by sucking the life from other trees.
These vampires remain attached to the roots of their healthy, normal, parent trees (coastal redwoods can reproduce asexually by sprouting new shoots from roots or stumps), and survive by sucking energy from them. They can keep this up for a century.
Only about 25 of these trees are known to exist around the world, eight of which are at Henry Cowell State Park in California, where rangers and researchers from Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz are studying them…
Urban growth, Uganda (1974-2008)
Check out the delta, the water is highly eutrophic.
Via Climate Nasa
(Source: humanscalecities)
“If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, “Here comes a pedestrian”?” — Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner paraphrased in an article by Tom Vanderbilt’s on Slate (via thegreenurbanist)
(via thegreenurbanist)
“Just keep in mind that Mars, and say, ‘How many SUVs, how many oil refineries are there on Mars?’ And yet, it’s the relationship to the sun that is affecting the climate on Mars.” — Televangelist Pat Robertson • Heaping dirt on fears of climate change by way of an odd suggestion — that because there are no SUVs on Mars, which shows some signs of ice cap melting, we therefore know that global warming isn’t our fault. At least, that’s what we took his argument to be. If that sounds a little strange to you, you’re not alone. Climate scientists have suggested that wobbles in the Martian orbit can account for this melting, one of many possible explanations that doesn’t aim to invalidate the climate research done here on Earth. source (via • follow)
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The Ocean Conservancy, which organizes an annual International Coastal Clean-Up, has published its results in the 2012 Trash Index. You’re not imagining it: as the global population swells, tankers continue to leak oil, and plastic water bottles continue to be our favorite way to drink tap water, the world’s beaches are getting dirtier.
Nearly 600,000 volunteers worked in multiple countries to pick up and record the over nine million pounds of trash listed in this report. Check out their trashy findings, download a helpful pocket guide to recycling and if you’re inclined, donate to help their efforts. And for the love of all things oceanic, if you smoke, find a better place than the ocean or ground to throw your cigarette butts (the number one piece of trash found on beaches)!
Image: Ocean Conservancy
(via crookedindifference)