Interesting Articles

I was reading the latest issue of National Geographic (March 2009) the other day and came across an interesting article. Well a couple different interesting articles. The first one is on page 61 and called "It Starts At Home". It's talking about saving energy. One family wanted to see if they could reduce their carbon emitions from their home by 80% for a month. According to the article (written by Peter Miller) the average household produces about 150lbs of carbon dioxide a day (driving a car is included in this). They cut back on everything-driving less, using eco/earth friendly lawn equipment, watching less tv, etc. The outcome of this was that they trimmed their emissions by twice as much as was their goal! Their efforts saved them nearly $200 on their electric bill. Who wouldn't like that? Some of their findings are:

*one gallon of gasoline adds 19.6lbs of CO2 to the atmosphere

*a kilo-watt hour of electricity in the U.S. produces 1.5lbs of CO2

*every 100 cubic feet of natual gas emits 12lbs of CO2

They plugged in their numbers to different charts (one provided by the EPA) and found that their carbon emissions were 30% higher than the average american household. They started off by emitting 54,273lbs/year (4522.75/month) and in the end of a month (this was a month long test) they had reduced their emissions to 70.5lbs a day...that's roughly 2,185.5lbs a month!!! That's a lot!!!

The article also pointed out that it's houses, not cars, that produce the most CO2 because of everything that's plugged in and just stays plugged in (like refrigerators, ovens, etc). Now while I can't unplug all my kitchen appliances, unplugging little things will help too. Things like cell phone chargers or radios and tvs when not in use. "If we turned off home computers when not in use we would cut their CO2 impact by 8.3 million tons a year, or 50%." That's huge!! I myself do not own a home computer (I rely on public computers and the ones at work-where I am now) to do anything online.

Anyone who wants to live a more ecofriendly life should read this article. It's very eye opening and some of the practices should be adopted by everyone. A simple one is just to rely on natural light during the day instead of using a lamp or open up windows and let some fresh air into the house in the spring and summer instead of running the air conditioner nonstop. One summer I had a one bedroom apartment on my own. I didn't use hardly any lamps and almost never ran my air conditioner. My computer was plugged in but not on unless in use and my tv was almost always on as was my video game system. Do you know what my electric bill averaged that summer? $20!! That's for an all electric place. I don't know how I managed to keep it so low but I did. That was much easier on my wallet.

The other two articles have nothing to do with being more ecofriendly but I found them interesting regardless. One is about the blue whale. I just found the sheer size of the creature to be like WOW. Imagine a city bus...now double it's length...that's the length of a blue whale! It's tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant. A newborn blue whale weighs about 3 tons but they gain 9lbs an hour!!! When they are fully grown they'll weigh 200 tons. It's the largest creature on earth and that's just like...WOW.

The other thing that interested me wasn't really an article. It's just like a paragraph in the back of the magazine about rats in India. I have family over there right now and this kind of shocked me. Apparently every 50 years or so there's a major outbreak of the rodent population in places like Mizoram and Bangladesh. There's a specific type of Bamboo that only flowers every 50 years and when it does it draws "tens of millions of hungry rats". Problem is once all the bamboo has been eaten the rats then move on to precious crops like rice which as I understand it is a staple in the Indian diet. In the 1950's the outbreak led to things like faminine and political upheaval. There was also some special on this last night on channel 20 (WFYI I think). The current outbreak (I think) subsided in 2008 and won't be back til around 2057. And we thought rats here in the states were bad...I can't imagine what it's like with all those rats over there!!!

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See this is the kind of stuff I want to write about. When writing articles I mean. My dream is to write fiction novels of course. But I'm interested in animals and our planets wellbeing as well. I'd love to contribute articles like these to publications like National Geographic. These are the kind of articles that get my attention-the ones about different animals, and healthy eating, and ecofriendly things. Perhaps I should start channeling my interest of these things into articles and then pitch those to different magazines.

This is another dream to add to my list of things I want to accomplish before I die: have atleast one article published in National Geographic.