Tournament Round 1, Match 3 - (3) Paperless Living vs. (6) Wildlife Conservation

(3) Paperless Living vs. (6) Wildlife Conservation. Let's do it!

Paperless Living

Aaaaaaaand in the red corner, weighing in at 0 pounds is the featherweight champion of the world!!! Paperless Living!!!! Should be pretty self-explanatory. If you still have questions, you can see me after class at my office hours.

Impact on the Environment (6/15):
Most people, when they first hear 'Paperless Living' think that it's a pretty good thing for the environment. While I'm not going to argue with that idea, it's really not as good for the environment as you might think. A whole lot of the paper being used today comes either from recycled post-consumer product or from sustainably managed tree farms (there's a better word for that which is escaping me right now). And let's not even get into the extra electricity that's needed to manage all of the computers that are needed to replace that paper.

Practicality (3/10):
Trying to be completely paperless is almost impossible with our current technology. Let's say I notice that I drank the last little bit of milk out of the milk jug and I want my roommate to pick up some more from the store. I'm going to leave a Post-It Note somewhere, not go out and buy an iPhone and stick that to the front of the fridge. Right now, it's not going to happen. In fact, paper usage increased as computers became more popular, so Paperless Living may be a trend that doesn't catch on for some time.

Sustainability (9/10):
I've got to say, for all the crap I've been giving Paperless Living so far, it would be really really easy to maintain if we ever got to that point. If we find a good way to ditch paper, people will stop buying printers and then the constant temptation to print driving directions will ease up a bit.

Awesomeness (5/10):
I guess it's okay... It saves my car from being cluttered with directions to everywhere I've been in the past few years, but really, you don't see a whole lot of commercials with celebrities talking about how cool their lives are now they don't have a printer at home.

User Input (0/5):
Get those comments in, everyone!

Wildlife Conservation

Wildlife Conservation is pretty similar to Wetland Conservation except that this can cover not only places such as forests, but specific animals and types of plants. That and it's easier to turn a forest into a park than it is to turn a wetland into one.

Impact on the Environment (10/15):
Over the years, countless species have been saved from the brink of extinction by Wildlife Conservation efforts. But more importantly, cities are hotter on average than forests because the sunlight is absorbed by blacktop and concrete and all those good things as opposed to trees and plants that don't absorb heat. And even more importantly, trees and plants take in all the carbon dioxide that we have nothing better to do with than pump into the air and into the oceans.

Practicality (4/10):
Until someone can come up with a feasible way to live in tree houses, we need space for houses and movie theaters and candy shops and factories that manufacture tree houses. This is similar to Wetland Conservation, so check that one out for more.

Sustainability (9/10):
Even more than wetlands, forests will regrow the second we turn our backs for too long. I've always seen it as nature's just biding its time until we kill ourselves off or leave the planet and then it will all grow right back. For more on this idea, watch the show 'Life After People' or read the book 'The World Without Us.' As long as we don't cut down all the trees, we don't need to do much before it all bounces right back.

Awesomeness (8/10):
Forests are awesome. There's no denying that. And I have seen commercials with celebrities talking about how we should protect the Wildlife.

User Input (1/5):
On behalf of the Buckeye Trail, Wildlife Conservation gets a bonus point!

Alright, let's tally those scores!

Paperless Living: 23
Wildlife Conservation: 32

Congrats, Wildlife Conservation! You've pulled off the first upset of the Tournament! And you've beaten the most overrated concept yet! Tune in next time for the conclusion of the first round of the Green Practices Region with the match up of (2) Reducing/Reusing and (7) Energy Star Rating.

Green Tip #77: Stop Using Drugs

Yay! I'm back from vacation! Let me tell you, the best cure for writer's block is just to take a week off. I swear, I had some good ideas for Green Tips an hour after I posted the entry on Friday and I was so mad I'd have to hang on to the ideas for an entire week. So without further ado, let me finish dusting off my keyboard and let's go!

Today's Green Tip is one that you may have heard before from environmentalists. But this one is kind of like Green Tip #19: Cut Down on Shower Use. While there may be very obvious environmental benefits from doing it (saving water), The Impractical Green Resource isn't about doing what's obvious. It's about looking deeper, below the oily skin of environmental issues to the environmental subcutaneous adipose layer of humorous solutions to those issues. You see, it isn't until you get down below the papillary region, composed of loose areolar connective tissue, that you see the solution is made of cell types such as fibroblasts, macrophages and adipocytes. You know, in an environmentally metaphoric way.

Obscure and irrelevant metaphors aside, I think this overly medical metaphor for the environmental problems we face leads very well into Green Tip #77. Stop Using Drugs. No, I don't mean you need to stop smoking pot. After all, marijuana turns carbon dioxide into oxygen just like every other plant. No, I'm talking about FDA approved drugs like the ones you get from drugstores and pharmacies and Wal-Mart and that guy that stands outside the public library downtown who's always talking on his bluetooth. At least I think he's on his bluetooth. He's always talking to someone, but I never see a phone in his hand...

Anyway, the argument that many hippies has is that drugs like that are all synthetically made and could be bad for the water system if we dispose of them and they get into water works. I don't care about all that stuff. I've been to Cleveland during the 80's. I know we're putting much, much worse stuff in the water than Aspirin.

No, I'm more worried about the bureaucracy of the drug industry. Grab the nearest magazine to you. I'll wait a second.






Okay, got it? Now I can't vouch for every magazine that exists in the world, but if it's a popular one, you can probably find at least a few ads for drugs in there. If you've got an AARP magazine or a golf magazine, you've probably got some Lipitor ads in there. Good Housekeeping or Woman's Day? Most likely Boniva. Seventeen? Probably Prozac or Alli. Playboy or Maxim? Um... most likely Viagra. But you get the point. There are brand name drugs for just about every gender, race, age group, lifestyle, hair color, whatever. I'm not complaining about this. It is keeping my girlfriend employed, after all.

No, what bothers me about drugs is right in front of you. What's the one thing you notice about all the drug ads in magazines? Here's a hint: flip the page. The FDA mandates that drug ads have to be obscenely detailed and list every possible thing about the drug. Think of how much paper is wasted every year just from all those stupid warnings and side effects! I mean, what if every ad for McDonald's had to feature a 2 page write up of all the health complications you could get from eating a Big Mac? (Read more here if you're really really bored. I mean curious.)

And what about the drug commercials on TV? It seems like the normal 30 second drug ad only has time to say the name of the drug and then they list side effects for 28 seconds. Either that or they go all out and buy a minute long ad. Maybe I need some Ritalin or something, but I don't have the patience to sit through something like that. Think of all the electricity that's wasted every day just on drug ads.

So I guess I'm not saying don't take drugs at all. After all, there are generics that *SPOILER ALERT* are exactly the same as brand name drugs (and cost 1/10 of the price). If we only buy generics that don't advertise, we could save countless trees and electricity. So do your part for the environment and do the American thing (go with the really cheap option). Mother Nature will thank you.

Green Tip #72: Drop Out of College

Recently, there was a controversy at the University of Toledo (not really a controversy, but the school newspaper tried to make it one) about how the IT department has decided to set a print limit of 1200 pages per semester for each student in the computer labs. At first, I was happy about this because I realized that this would save a lot of paper in the long run. But then I saw in the paper that people were upset at how low this limit was compared to their unlimited pages they had before. And that got me thinking about how many pages 1200 actually is. I mean really, are these students printing out their own personal copies of War and Peace? (By the way, War and Peace is 1475 pages in the 2006 paperback edition so maybe they're upset they're not going to find out what happens in the last 275 pages.)

I've spent quite a few semesters in college, so I know how much stuff a person can print in the course of a few months. I can tell you that it's less than 1200 pages a semester (9600 over the course of an average college career) but it's still a whole lot of paper. That got me thinking about how maybe college is really bad for the environment. I mean, all that paper (up to 2400 pages per year x 23000 students = 55,200,000 pages per year in the University of Toledo's case) really adds up.

And it's not just paper from the computer labs. There's the notes from class that the instructor prints out and don't even get me started on the textbooks! So much paper all used for a couple of months and then thrown away or (hopefully) recycled.

So let's all drop out of college! And there's a bonus to it all! If none of us have college degrees, then we won't get jobs in offices. Who do you think uses more paper per year? An accountant or a mechanic? Jobs that need college degrees use much more paper than jobs that only need a high school education. And that's a fact. Or at least that's a fact that my brain tells me is probably right.

PS Count Rostov dies near the end of War and Peace, in case you were wondering.

Green Tip #25: Be Illiterate

Hey everyone, sorry for the post so late in the day on Tuesday. I was having a hard time getting motivated. And I'd rather give you a good post later in the day than a thrown together post up in time for you to read during the day.

So, as you can see from the title of this post, I'm entirely sure that all of you reading this are not doing a good job of following Green Tip #25. Before I get into scolding you for not following my advice, let me explain the logic behind this tip.

Okay, here's the chain of logic that I followed. I was trying to think of some way of reducing the amount of paper that people use. Everything I was coming up with (Don't use the restroom to avoid using toilet paper, don't go to school to avoid getting handouts and textbooks, don't have a job to avoid getting paper money, etc.) didn't seem to accomplish the goal on a grand enough scheme. So then I started going deeper. Almost philosophical about paper, really. What is the purpose of paper? Why does paper even exist in the first place? And I came up with the conclusion that paper is mostly used to share and store information mostly in the form of text.

So following that train of thought I came to the realization that all forms of information sharing, from little slips of paper they use for fortunes in fortune cookies to the energy used on computer screen that reading this blog uses, puts some strain on the earth's natural resources.

So stop sharing information. Unless you're just talking to someone or using sign language, you shouldn't be sharing information without feeling a deep horrible feeling of guilt for sucking the earth dry. Now, I know that you can't unlearn the ability to read, but just try it for a while. I'm sure if you don't read anything for a few years, you'll start to forget things.

Now, I know I'm being sort of conceited by saying this, but just think... this Green Tip is going to be the last thing that you will ever read.

Stay strong, Mother Nature will thank you in the long run!