Perpetually with one foot in the future, Japan recently brought on board a team of companies and researchers for what has got to be the most astro-ambitious project of the 21st century: the Space Solar Power System (SSPS).

The SSPS project, which Japan hopes to become fully realized as soon as 2030, will put into orbit giant solar panels just outside Earth’s atmosphere to gather the sun’s energy and beam it down to us in the form of lasers or microwaves. In the absence of clouds or that pesky ozone layer, solar energy can be over five times stronger in space than on Earth and according to the report from PhysOrg, Japan has been dead serious about this project since 1998.

Just a svelte island floating in the eastern Pacific, Japan depends on oil imports to run much of its machinery. If SSPS becomes a reality, Japan estimates the electricity produced will be six times cheaper than current in-country costs. “We’re aiming to produce stable, cheap power and hydrogen at a target price of 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour,” research scientist Hiroaki Suzuki was quoted saying in the Scientific American.

But powerful lasers beaming down from space don’t exactly inspire confidence in the court of public opinion and the very twilight zone nature of the SSPS project has got all the science and technology blogs aflutter. Tonic admits that the plan “sounds so very far-flung and fanciful,” while Tech.Blorge refers to it as “as a nod to science fiction.”

And while Matador is committed to greener living (hey, we sent one of our MatadorU students to take on the No Impact Week Challenge), we’re reserving opinion until the 2020 test launch.

Around this time last year, Matador published this article about US commitment to renewable energy, though it is clear that, much like as with cell phones and robot girlfriends, the Japanese have outpaced all others once again.

What do you think about a giant laser beaming super concentrated solar energy down from outer space? Share your thoughts with us!

A wind farm in Scotland; Photo: beltzner

Last month, I drove from New York to Boston.

Along the way, I noticed a couple wind turbines dotting the landscape, their blades turning slowly in the coastal breeze. I wondered how much energy they produce.

According to this 2006 Boston Globe article, a single modern-day windmill generates a lot more energy than I thought: One turbine is capable of powering an entire town’s streetlights and traffic lights.

Wind turbines haven’t taken off in the U.S. yet, but it’s hard to understand why with news like this: wind farms in Spain generate more than 50% of the country’s electricity needs.

In fact, the total output of Spain’s wind farms exceeds the energy generation capacity of 11 nuclear power plants.

If this is the case in Spain, which takes third place in the top 10 list of countries using wind power, then imagine what’s going on in Denmark, which claims the top spot on that list. It gained that position, says TIME journalist Bryan Walsh, because it had the “political and public will to decide that it wanted to be a leader.”

With the conversation about the imminence of peak oil intensifying, maybe it’s time for other countries to exercise that same kind of will to explore the power of wind energy.

Community Connection:

Learn more about peak oil in these articles:

What Cuba Taught Us About Peak Oil

Interview with Derek Wallace from OrganicReform.org

Photo: mamaloco

Let’s keep this short and sweet.

The world’s honeybee population is declining.

No one knows exactly why.

More research is needed to determine the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder.

Haagen-Dazs, which sources ingredients that are pollinated by honeybees, has donated half a million dollars to honeybee research over the past two years, and launched an awareness campaign intended to get consumers involved in saving the honeybees.

There are a few different ways you can take action, but one step you can take right now is to use your Twitter account to raise money for honeybee research.

For every tweet that’s marked with the hashtag #HelpHoneyBees between now and 11:59 PM EST tomorrow night, Haagen-Dazs will donate $1.00 to research efforts at the University of California, Davis.

Learn more about the “twitcause” here.

Photo: Lisa Brewster

The latest twitstorm blew through the travel writing universe over the weekend, leaving the blogosphere breathless–but certainly not speechless–over the quantity and quality of mudslinging that can be done in 140 characters.

I daresay the majority of us following the #followmeatsea hashtag on Saturday and Sunday didn’t give a damn about the spa treatments, fruity drinks, or lavish meals that bloggers on the Princess Cruise Twitter press trip were enjoying and then thumb-diddling about online. I mean, really: who wants to hear about someone else’s free trip while they’re sitting at home up north, slogging away at work? I’m just saying.

As several of us following the twitstorm admitted, we couldn’t look away. Some colleagues even suggested we all go make some popcorn and pull up a virtual chair in this online theater.

The twitstorm was about this: A travel blogger following the hashtag from home raised the issue of the environmental impact of cruise ships. Unfortunately, her phrasing was charged with a certain holier-than-thou tone. What ensued was an hours-long joust of keyboards between said blogger and the bloggers on the cruise, tempered with an occasional observation from those of us on the sidelines.

Before long, the whole exchange–which could have been an excellent opportunity for thoughtful discussion–devolved into a mutually defensive and embarrassingly immature display in which each party clearly wanted to have the final say.

In the midst of the storm, a couple of bloggers on the trip declared they’d speak to cruise ship representatives in order to provide a definitive answer about the environmental impact of cruise liners. They tweeted about their 5.5 hour tour of the ship, remarked about the GPFs (gallons per flush) of cruise toilets (”better than home!”), and insisted that “NO SOLID WASTE [read: poop] goes off a cruise ship!” Princess even, reportedly, “turns its old cooking oil into biofuel.”

Some onlookers were content, saying they “can’t wait to hear the REAL enivronmental facts” from the bloggers who were determined to resolve the matter once and for all.

All of which is well and good, I guess, but the whole exchange leaves me with a few questions:

*Is a 5.5 hour tour of the cruise ship led by people who clearly have a stake in presenting the ship in the best light really going to produce compelling evidence about the “REAL environmental impact” of cruising?

*Were any of the bloggers on the trip concerned about the environmental impact of cruise liners before the issue was raised by someone who wasn’t on the trip?

*Should travel writers care, ultimately, about their own environmental impact?

*And if the answer to that question is yes, how do we figure out what our true environmental impact is?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m not opposed to press trips. I’m not envious of the bloggers on this trip–I’ve never been interested in going on a cruise. I wouldn’t have been the least bit interested in #followmeatsea if it hadn’t turned into a disturbing yet fascinating real-time case study about the intersection of comped travel, social media, and environmental issues. Were any of the bloggers on this trip concerned about the environmental footprint of the trip before they eagerly signed on to cruise around the Caribbean on Princess’ dime?

Should travel writers care about their environmental impact? Should travelers?

My own opinion is an unequivocal yes. What’s yours? I hope you’ll share it–politely, please–in the comments.

Community Connection:

Missed the other recent twitstorm about travel writing ethics? You can read all about it here.

Photo: jsgphoto

And once the bottle is open, you know what to do.

Once you’re finished, you can recycle the bottle or get creative. Here are 10 ways to reuse wine bottles:

1. Turn it into a candle holder.
Every cheesy Italian restaurant you’ve ever visited has the red and white checked oilcloth, topped with a Chianti bottle that’s living its second life as a candle holder. This DIY project requires zero skills: buy a taper candle, shove it in the bottle. There, that was easy.

2. Use it as a flower vase.
This one falls into the super-easy category, too. Scrape off the label (soak in warm, soapy water first) and voila, you have a ready made vase, perfect for a single long-stemmed flower, like a Gerber daisy.

3. Make a dish soap dispenser.
All you need to do for this project is buy a pour spout and pop it into the bottle’s mouth. You can buy a pour stop at any kitchen supply store.

4. Store olive oil, vinegar, simple syrup, or salad dressing.
If you buy a couple of those pour spouts, you can reuse your wine bottles for all sorts of kitchen purposes.

5. Create a garden path.
If you’ve got lots of old wine bottles, you can turn them upside down and “plant” them in the dirt to turn them into a pretty garden path.

Photo: Francisco Collazo

6. Make some windchimes.
Wine bottles can be melted and flattened into wind chimes. The Flat Bottle Company can take your bottles and flatten them, giving the bottles new life.

7. Let it water plants.
Fill the bottle, tip it upside down, and stick it into your potted plants at an angle. The slow drop will keep your plants hydrated.

8. Channel your creative side.
Turn a bunch of bottles into a folk art piece, like this curious bottle tree, found in a garden in Mississippi.

9. Make a lamp.
Using the wine bottle as a base, buy a lamp kit and turn the bottle into a DIY light source.

10. And don’t throw out the corks!
You can make bulletin boards and photo holders out of the corks.

Community Connection:

Reduce, reuse, recycle. What about upcycling? Learn all about it here.

Photo: Tulane Public Relations

In fact, you hold much more influence over your school now then you did when you were a student on campus.

Every college and university wants to keep alumni happy; they’re crucial to building and sustaining a school’s endowment. But even if you’ve never contributed a dime to your alma mater’s annual fund, you can still let them know your future support is dependent upon them demonstrating their commitment to the environment.

Here are five steps you can take as an alum to help your alma mater go green:

1. Request that all communications be paperless.
How many letters do you receive each year asking you for money? Let your alma mater know that you won’t even consider making a contribution if you continue to receive requests through the mail. Call your alumni relations office and request that future communications be sent via email. If you do plan to make a contribution, ask if it’s possible to do so electronically.

2. Designate your contributions for green initiatives.
Most schools permit alumni to designate how their contribution will be earmarked. If you want to send a message about your environmental values to your alma mater, let them know that your contribution should be applied toward the construction of green dorms or a scholarship for a student studying environmental science.

3. Praise positive steps.
University administrators are like anyone else: they like acknowledgment of their good work. If your alma mater, like mine, is really taking the lead on environmental stewardship, send the president a letter and let him or her know how proud you are of their leadership.

4. Offer your skills.
Alumni who want to stay involved in their alma mater often serve on alumni boards, help organize reunions, or maybe even mentor current students. But your involvement doesn’t have to be limited to these activities. If you have a unique skill set, offer it to your school. Know how to install solar panels? Plan and plant a garden? Talk with your alumni office about how you might be able to give back by sharing what you know.

5. Stay in touch.
Keep up with the environmental and sustainability projects your alma mater is implementing. Check your school’s website or alumni magazine or newspaper to learn about current and planned projects.

Community Connection:

Still a student? Check out five ways you can help your school go green here.

Hey guys, let’s get rid of those trays! Photo: Totsie14

Earlier this week, I received a copy of the alumni magazine from my undergrad alma mater, Emory University.

Believe it or not, it’s always an interesting read, and it’s often packed with inspiring stories. This issue included a handful of articles about some programs that students and staff have implemented to expand environmental awareness on campus and in the Atlanta community while reducing the university’s carbon footprint.

These projects seemed pretty adaptable, and set me to thinking about how they could be replicated on other campuses. Here are five ways you can help your college go green if you’re a student. Tomorrow, I’ll offer five ways you can help your college go green if you’re an alum.

Current students can:

1. Talk with the campus dining director about trayless eating…
When I was an undergrad, students would crowd their trays with an entree plate, a bread plate, a salad bowl, a soup bowl, a glass, and a dessert dish. They’d eat too much (remember the freshman 15?), waste too much, and generate a lot of plates to wash.

Consider this: The dining hall introduced a trayless system in January. Throughout the spring semester, students had to carry their plates individually to the table and, when finished, to the wash area.

The result? A 14,587-pound reduction in food waste compared to the same period a year earlier. Water consumption also decreased significantly, as there were no trays that needed to be washed.

There’s no data about students’ waistlines, however.

2. And while you’re at it, talk to them about composting.
Though food waste declines when a trayless serving system is introduced, plenty of food is still thrown out. As an alternative, ask if it’s possible for the dining hall to set up a disposal area where uneaten food can be collected in preparation for composting.

3. Advocate for a campus garden.
At Emory, the overall sustainability goal is to purchase 75% local or sustainably grown food by 2015. That’s a good goal, but what if the food was ultra local… as in, on-campus local?

Take a look at your college’s or university’s academic programs. Is there a department or course where planning and growing a garden might fit into the curriculum? Emory has just launched a degree program in the field of sustainable development… growing an on-campus garden seems like a natural fit, and one that converts classroom theory into community-based practice.

4. Advocate for greener transportation.
This is especially important at large universities with spread out campuses. If your school offers shuttle buses, how are they fueled? Could they be hydrogen run or converted to vegetable oil engines?

These may seem like big changes–and they are–but a university is the perfect place for students to get hands-on experience. Convince university officials that your school should be an incubator for sustainable practices.

5. Advocate for degree programs that bridge the theory-practice gap.
As I mentioned above, Emory has just announced a new degree program in sustainable development. It’s only one of 10 universities in the United States that offers such a degree.

Combining classroom teaching with in-the-field experiences in agriculture, policy-making, health care, engineering, management, environmental science, education, and nutrition, this seems like a practical degree that won’t leave you wondering why you accumulated so much debt. Talk with the dean of your division to see if similar programs are on the drawing board at your school.

Community Connection:

Thinking about studying abroad? Look for a university that embodies sustainable environmental and social practices. Here are seven countries where graduate school is a fraction of US costs.

Photo: *Andrew

It’s a ruling that sets a powerful precedent.

Judge Michael Burton, the justice who ruled last year that Al Gore’s climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was “political and partisan,” ruled in a separate case earlier this week that:

“[A] belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

The ruling was made in the case of Tim Nicholson, the former director of sustainability for a British property firm. Nicholson was fired in 2008 due, according to his claim, to his “philosophical belief about climate change and the environment.” Nicholson had protested the activities of firm executives who made decisions that not only weren’t green… they were downright ridiculous. In one instance, Nicholson told the judge, an employee was dispatched to take a flight from London to Ireland simply to deliver a Blackberry to another employee who had forgotten it, leaving it behind in the London office.

In court, Nicholson’s former employer tried to argue that “green views [are] political and based on science, as opposed to religious or philosophical in nature.” Because religion deals with matters that cannot be proven and because climate change can be substantiated, Nicholson’s views should not be considered religious, the company argued.

Their argument fell flat, though, as Judge Burton ruled in Nicholson’s favor.

The ruling is significant because it may establish precedents for significant, positive policy changes in British corporations… though it may also encourage more litigation. In its analysis of the case, the Telegraph explained:

“The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.”

If that’s what it takes to get climate change on corporate agendas, though, it might not be such a bad thing.

Community Connection:

The international conference on climate change is scheduled to take place in Copenhagen next month. Keep visiting Change- we’ll have a correspondent at the conference who will be filing daily dispatches.

Photo: ctenophore

Well, this is a depressing way to start your Thursday.

As if the news of glacial melt and polar bear deaths wasn’t enough to make you want to crawl into a hole until the environmental apocalypse has come and gone, here’s a stunner:

Scientists now believe that coral reef destruction is so accelerated that it’s impossible to save these living underwater ecosystems.

According to this article from the BBC, the only intervention believed viable at this point is to collect reef samples and freeze them for posterity. Should we get our act together on climate change and help restabilize the oceans’ temperatures, then, the reasoning goes, the cryogenized coral can be reintroduced to sea beds.

All the more reason why the world’s superpowers need to start walking the walk on climate change at next month’s Copenhagen summit.

Community Connection:

Members of the Matador community are active in coral reef protection and restoration. Check out the organizational profile of the Reef Doctor, an environmental conservation and activist group based in Madagascar that’s dedicated to conserving coral reefs through local education and community-based environmental projects.

Feature photo: 826 Chicago; Photo above by author

Late this afternoon, Media Bistro reported that Dave Eggers’ most recent book, Zeitoun, has been optioned by Jonathan Demme to be adapted for the big screen.

Zeitoun, a non-fiction account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, recounts how the eponymous protagonist remained in New Orleans during the epic hurricane and his efforts to help neighbors and strangers after the levees broke. But the otherwise feel good story about Zeitoun’s belief that God might have selected him to witness the aftermath of Katrina and to provide whatever help he could turns, as Salon.com summarized, into a “a quasi-legal bureaucratic nightmare that resembles a Kafka story but is all too real.”

Eggers, whose previous book What Is the What? was about Sudanese refugees, learned of Zeitoun’s story and became interested in converting it into narrative form, while working on his Voices of Witness project, an oral history program that “depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them.”

Demme, for his part, had not only been moved by Eggers’ books; he had also witnessed firsthand the physical and psychological destruction of New Orleans while working on the documentary series, “Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward.” Connecting through mutual friends, Demme let Eggers know he wanted to adapt Zeitoun for film.

Eggers agreed to Demme’s proposal and has reportedly donated all of his option money to the Zeitoun Foundation, the mission of which is to help rebuild New Orleans and protect human rights across the United States.

You can read an excerpt of Zeitoun here or learn more about Eggers here. To learn more about Mr. Zeitoun, check out this video:

Community Connection:

New Orleans still needs volunteers. Read my suggestions about the six best volunteer opportunities in the Crescent City here. Still need a reason to visit NOLA? Here are 10 to get you packin’.