As a proud Chicagoan I’m thrilled with today’s announcement that we’re the U.S. contender for the 2016 Olympics (yes, summer). With Chicago’s new reputation as a green city, complete with its own Chicago Standard for green building, I’m very curious about what the environmental issues will be. It would be wonderful if Chicago used this platform to do everything as eco-friendly as possible, much like London is doing for 2012. The new building construction should practice recycling and reuse. Carbon offsets should be purchased for energy consumption. The city’s public transportation system is fairly comprehensive, but is lacking in one of the neighborhoods where a key stadium is to be built so they need to figure that out, etc. I know that an environmental impact study was part of the bid, and I’m sure the City is working on these details already. I’m looking forward to their being made public.  Go Chicago!

World Shutdown Day is tomorrow—can you do it? Advertised as one of the “biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet”, the idea is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day. What will happen if we all participate? If we really do keep off the computers for 24 hours tomorrow, all Emails will go unanswered, and blogs won’t be updated. During lunch breaks, people might talk to their co-workers or go for a walk outside, or buy a newspaper. At home, computer games will cease and instead we will have lunch together and talk about the world. And then read a book in the afternoon. But the real issue is how addicted are we all to our computers? On the Shutdown Day site at last glance, the running tally is 51,635 claiming that they CAN go without computers, whilst 8,075 have admitted they cannot. The site, in 13 different languages, charts people’s reactions from around the world on what they will do instead… National differences abound: in the UK: masturbation, playing the piano, Canada: smoke dope, hang out with my family, the U.S.: read one of those flappy things with the paper screens and from Sri Lanka: this is a disaster. Some of the YouTube responses are quite clever such as one depicting the smashing of computers. But never mind that, the question is: can treehuggers do it? :: Shut Down Day via :: PFSK

Originally
from TreeHugger

reBlogged

on Mar 23, 2007, 7:14AM
Originally from TreeHugger on March 23, 2007, 12:14pm