wasn’t that good. 

The beginning seemed to take a while to introduce the problem

and later they didn’t show that much about the land itself that the NGO was going to buy and protect in the Amazon. 

the main guy / CEO kinda just seemed to want to ban nudity laws.

at least i saw the film, right.. add to my list of watched documentaries…

trailer.

////

however, I saw Public Sex, Private Lives @the roxie in SF on wednesday. a look into the lives of porn stars (featuring Lorelei Lee, Princess Donna, Isis Love). That was quite good. enjoyable with a few laughs. I recommend it. the trailer sucks, though. (thankfully i saw the trailer after the full film).

huh.. I didn’t know it was a kickstarter project.. glad it got funded and produced!

Walmart pleaded guilty to multiple counts of violating the Clean Water Act. The company also owned up to illegal dumping in two other federal cases, which were filed in Los Angeles and Kansas city , Missouri. In all, those guilty pleas add up to $81.6 million in fees.

“By improperly handling hazardous waste, pesticides, and other materials in violation of federal laws, Walmart put the public and the environment at risk and gained an unfair economic advantage over other companies,” Ignacia S. Moreno, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement…

As part of a plea agreement filed in California, Walmart was sentenced to pay a $40 million criminal fine and an additional $20 million that will fund various community service projects, including opening a $6 million Retail Compliance Assistance Center that will help retail stores across the nation learn how to properly handle hazardous waste.

sfweekly, 28.05.13.

awesome post by jacob mckean, the guy behind soon-to-exist Modern Times Brewery.

back their kickstarter campaign to unlock a $2400 donation to bikeSD!!

In 2008, the World Heath Organisation estimated that between the years 2000-2015, car accidents around the world would kill 20 million people and cause 200 million serious injuries. Cars, of course, also spew loads of pollution, which also kills people and causes all manner of health & environmental problems. That’s a lot of death and suffering for a transportation system that sucks to use.

Cars also make our cities much less interesting places to live. The density of cities like New York and San Francisco—which are far less car-dependent than San Diego—is precisely what makes them more vital and creative; sprawl is fundamentally stultifying.

Sprawl also chews up an insane amount of land, which should be criminal in a bioregion as singularly gorgeous as San Diego. Consider that one thousand people could comfortably live in a car-free town the size of an average commuter parking lot (with ample open space in the heart of it).

Modern Times exists to make extraordinary beer. But it’s also an actor in the life of this city. It has a responsibility to shape its own environment, to constructively engage with the city upon which it relies. One of the ways it will do that is by helping to transform San Diego into a better, more livable place.

San Diego should look like this:

Los Angeles (!)

And like this:

Paris

If that seems far-fetched, it shouldn’t. There’s no reason why San Diego can’t look like those pictures; it’s simply a matter of creating the will to transform strip malls and auto parks into human-scale buildings and car-free streets.

But’s it not just that San Diego should be the most gorgeous, walkable, sustainable city in the world; it should also preserve the unbelievably beautiful land that surrounds it. Due to an absence of vision and an excess of greed and laziness, huge swaths of San Diego County’s almost unimaginably stunning and irreplaceable land has been converted into a sea of asphalt.

This is what San Diego looks like without sprawl:

Laguna Mountains

And like this:

Mount Woodson

We should save as much of what remains as we can.

So that will be one of the social missions of Modern Times. If you think you can help, get in touch. Obviously we’re not going to be giving away cash anytime soon, but we’ll do what we can to leverage our beer and our space and our voice to help.

California’s signature environmental law needs to be reformed because NIMBYs are using it to block smart growth.

Parker Place provides a case study in how CEQA could be reformed.

Ali Kashani thought he had a sure thing. In 2008, the longtime Berkeley developer proposed to build one of the greenest housing projects in East Bay history. Kashani has long been an advocate for smart-growth development — dense housing and mixed-use projects built on major transit corridors in urban areas. And the architect that he commissioned for his smart-growth project in Berkeley designed it to meet LEED Platinum standards.

….In other words, the Parker Place project is a liberal environmentalist’s dream.

…But nothing’s ever a sure thing in Berkeley, a city that is home to some of the most vocal and stubborn anti-growth activists in the state. In November 2010, after the Berkeley City Council approved Parker Place, a small group of these activists sued to block the project, using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to do it. And now, more than four years after Kashani unveiled his proposal, it’s still tied up in litigation. “They really don’t like infill projects,” Kashani said, referring to how anti-growth activists view urban development. “And they’re holding up good projects that could be on the market.”

“The law has become so dysfunctional,” said Jennifer Hernandez, an attorney for the Holland & Knight firm and a Berkeley resident who advocates for broad reforms of CEQA. “To call this environmental protection anymore … it’s really about quality-of-life” issues.

The California Legislature has approved minor reforms to CEQA during the past decade in an effort to spur smart growth. But CEQA still allows anti-growth activists to pervert environmental law. For example, the group that sued to block Parker Place contended that the city’s environmental study was “inadequate,” essentially because the project involves the cleaning up of polluted soil and groundwater.

Yes, you read that right. A project that would not only help fight climate change, but also would clean up contaminated soil and groundwater in downtown Berkeley has been blocked in court thanks to a law that’s supposed to protect the environment.

read more: eastbayexpress, 13.03.13.

Bicycle boulevards save lives. Bioswales protect our environment. Both make Portland’s neighborhoods safer, cleaner and greener. And today, the Portland City Council will vote on making smart investments in both.

In 2007, I shepherded passage through Portland City Council of the nationally recognized Green Streets Plan. Green streets reduce the amount of rain that goes into Portland’s sewer and stormwater treatment system. They involve planted bioswales that are built on neighborhood streets where they slow or divert traffic. The upshot: Green streets manage stormwater runoff, reducing the need for expensive sewer expansions. 

They help prevent sewer backups. And they provide the infrastructure needed to calm traffic on quiet streets that serve as low-stress bicycle boulevards…

by Mayor Sam Adams. oregonlive 17.03.13.