Earth Hour afterthoughts (discovery of Michael Bluejay, who “I love”)
I sent the following to our ENAW listserv & others, including a couple of environmentalists last night, after spending an hour by candlelight with my pets. [I think it was a joke that Michael Bluejay posted something on his bio page about the people who love him. I'm guessing it has to do with people trying to raise the search engine rankings on their own sites. Nevertheless, after looking at his sites, I can honestly say "I love Michael Bluejay", because I was happy to find his sites, and especially surprised to find his vegan pages that were an added bonus to the topics I was originally looking for.]
In the spirit of tonight’s “Earth Hour”, somehow I found this site, looking at how much energy/cost various appliances use, originally wondering if it is worthwhile to turn off my computer when I’m not using it. After looking around at the various appliance pages (and it’s amazing how much energy is saved by washing clothes in cold water compared to hot http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/laundry.html !) I found a little blurb on the refrigerator page, which linked to another section of his site….
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/refrigerators.html
“Don’t put hot foods in the fridge? Food safety experts say you should refrigerate hot food to prevent
contamination. But that doesn’t mean you have to refrigerate them immediately. The USDA says to refrigerate within
two hours of preparation (or one hour if the room temp is above 90∞). One to two hours of cooling off time will
definitely make your refrigerator work less. It’s a tradeoff — the sooner you refrigerate the safer the food, but the
more energy you use. Of course, meat and dairy foods are most susceptible to contamination, which is yet another
reason to not eat meat and dairy in the first place. Vegan foods are much safer.”
“Vegan” in that last sentence links to:
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/eat.html
And then, that site has many pages. The “Why Veg?” page
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/why.html starts out with this:
Why be vegetarian?
There are so many good reasons for being vegetarian (health, animals, the environment) that a better question might be, “Why NOT be vegetarian?” When you can easily…
ï significantly improve your health,
ï dramatically [reduce?] your environmental footprint,
ï and greatly reduce the suffering of animals…we might ask instead, “What’s stopping you?”
Of course, the decision about whether to become a vegetarian is a matter of personal choice. But we think that if more peope [sic] really knew how bad meat is (for them, the planet, and the animals), more people would make the choice to go meatless. This page is a starting point is [sic] seeing if this is a choice you agree with. Below are some details about the main reasons people go veg.
That page goes on to discuss many advantages for improving your health, saving the environment & preventing cruelty to animals. And this page http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/environment.html has a lot of info on the impact of animal agriculture on the environment — energy use & Global Warming, water & land issues. I’ve seen some of this before, but maybe seeing the graphs made it easier to visualize.
Enjoy both sites. I found them to be very informative.
P.S. This morning I was happy to see that the Green Lent blog featured the Beef and the environment post with a graph & link to Michael’s ‘Why going meatless saves the planet’ page.
Tags: Earth Hour, Lent, Michael Bluejay