photo: Recycled Surfboards

Surfers have always been known to have a connection with nature, they’re one on one with the planet every time they take to the waves. And it comes as no surprise that many surfers also consider themselves environmentalists. One such conscious surfer in Cocoa Beach, FL has found a new way to keep old surfboards from their former destiny at the landfill.

The Recycled Surfboard Art Program is turning used surfboards once headed for the landfill, into creative art that depicts Mother Earth at her best.

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Source: Treehugger

Interestingly, it is impossible for cancer to develop in an alkaline environment; this shows the importance of alkalinity in disease prevention.

G Living’s Brendan Brazier is one the world’s few professional athletes whose diet is 100 percent plant based. He’s a professional Ironman triathlete, bestselling author on performance nutrition, and the creator of an award-winning line of whole food nutritional products called Vega.

The following is our fifth excerpt from Brendan’s book “The Thrive Diet”, on sale now.

The balance of acid and alkaline within the body is referred to as pH (meaning “potential of hydrogen”), and measured on a scale ranging from pH 1 (the most acidic) to pH 14 (the most alkaline). A neutral or good pH balance is 7.35; maintaining this balance is vital. If the body’s pH drops, meaning our body has become too acidic, the likelihood of ailments rises sharply. An acidic environment within the body negatively affects health at the cellular level. It is not possible to be truly healthy when the body is in a constant state of acidosis (characterized by excessively high acid levels).

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Source: G Living

Instead of investing in solar cell architectures that require entirely new manufacturing processes, wouldn’t it be easiest to build on what we have? That’s part of the thinking behind a new type of silicon nanorod solar cell developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The nanorods are assembled into a “carpet” and embedded into a transparent polymer to make flexible solar cells that use only 1% of the material needed to make conventional silicon cells.

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Source: Inhabitat

The Associated Press is reporting this week that federal regulators under President Obama are taking the first steps toward regulating drugs in the nation’s drinking water supply — a problem first reported by science writer Elizabeth Royte in “Drugging Our Waters” in OnEarth’s Fall 2006 issue.

Royte tells the story of how this nation’s aging population and increasing reliance on pharmaceuticals — some elderly Americans take as many as 30 drugs a day, she writes, and prescription drug sales rose by an annual average of 11 percent between 2000 and 2005 — leads to more drugs making their way into our lakes, rivers and groundwater.

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Source: Scott Dodd, OnEarth.org/ Switchboard (NRDC)

Solar Power Makes Electricity Day and Night

One of the arguments often used to denegrate solar power is that they don’t work when it is cloudy or at night. But a new demonstration project in Hawaii proves this isn’t so. Keahole Solar Power has installed an array of Sopogy “Micro-scale Concentrating Solar Power Concentrators” at the Holaniku Solar Farm on Hawaii’s Big Island- a thousand solar collectors covering 3.8 acres, with a thermal energy of 2 megawatts.

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Source: Lloyd Alter (Toronto), TreeHugger