I play soccer in a large park in the eastern part of Salamanca. West of the park are the train tracks and on the other side of the tracks is a large elementary school, immediately east of the park is a nearly 100 year-old ammonium fertilizer plant. Map here

The plant’s smoke stacks are pretty short since the plant was built way before that part of town had anyone living there. This means the smoke doesn’t travel all that far from the plant.  The lucky thing for the students and park users is that the winds blow the smoke south, not west (generally). This is bad news for the soccer field that is just a little bit further south of the plant. My Air Pollution professor explained how he used to play on that field when he was younger and how you would get mild rashes or slight chemical burns from the grass. He said now practically no one uses that park. If the wind blew to the west, my park would not be nearly as healthy and breathing would be a lot more difficult when playing soccer. Knowing whether or not you live near a large source of air pollution is very important, but knowing the wind patterns in your area is important too.

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Soccer in Spain is kind of a big deal. Rivalries here are pretty huge, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona is like Yankees vs. Red Sox but with more Catalunyan separatist pride, so it’s a much more political statement here. As I’ve been trying to get into Spanish culture I’ve been watching a bunch of matches and I can’t help but notice the shear amount of energy related advertisements on the side lines. I have seen solar power company ads and ads encouraging people to turn down their thermostats. That’s a pretty powerful message to have where everyone can see it.

I hear PETA tried to get a Go Veg ad to air during the Super Bowl but it was pulled due to highly sexual content. Feelings towards PETA and objectification of women aside, the idea of having a Go Veg ad during the most watched sporting event in the US is pretty cool. I doubt many fans would put down their hotdog, but it could get people thinking more about it. When people start thinking about what they’re eating, that’s when they start cutting down on meat. After all there are a bunch of good reasons, and the idea of eating meat is a little creepy.

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It’s called a clothes line. What you do is you connect a piece of string between two points so that it is taught and then you put wet clothing on it. This can be done inside or outside and it saves you a bunch of money as well as lowering your carbon footprint since you don’t need the materials for a dryer or the energy that it takes to run the machine. There are also a bunch of other advantages to your clothing by line (for example your clothing won’t shrink).

I don’t know the official figures about Spanish clothes line use but anecdotal evidence suggests that a majority of Spaniards use them, my host mother is no exception. It’s a bit cold outside so it takes a while for everything to dry and there is only so much space on the line so you the load size is kind of small but that’s fine with me since it lowers my carbon footprint. It’s funny how higher energy prices are leading us back to simpler times and back to devices we used to use for hundreds of years and the whole thing about the simplest solution is often the best one.

From Madrid to Salamanca

The trip has been pretty uneventful, nothing too eco/energy related to remark on except the usual thing about how trains are amazing ways to get around. But I did notice this as an East Coaster. The amount of sprawl here is next to nothing. The only time you see buildings are when you come across a town. The rest of the way is grass, hills, rocks and trees…I want to say that it’s an open canopy savannah. Part of the density may be caused by the seemingly inhospitable terrain in western Spain but a big part is that these cities were build before the car so they are built on a human scale (unlike some American cities I could name). Living on a human scale is vital to a sustainable future because a city if a city’s lifeblood is cars, its pulse will stop after Peak Oil.

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Photo credit: Mossaiq

Where you live determines many things about who you are. Whether it is your quality of education, cultural awareness or general health, it’s all about location location location. Being green is no exception. Currently I am visiting Madrid, and I keep wondering to myself “how easy it for the citizens to be green?” It is Southern Europe after all so we know they use less gas, electricity and water than we do in the US, which is mainly caused by much higher prices of those commodities here and that the region has serious issues with droughts in the summer. But the whole story is not explained by price. After all, I am a tourist who doesn’t pay any utilities here, but I am still being green(er) than usual because of the Madrid infrastructure.

First off, Madrid actually has a city-wide recycling system unlike Philadelphia, New York and Washington DC (all places I’ve called home at one point or another). There are giant recycling bins dotted throughout the city, clearly labeled so even a foreigner like myself whose Spanish is not the best, can understand. I have seen them in every stage of varying stages of overflowing to nearly empty, but the key thing is that they are being used and used correctly. I’m not sure what the residential recycling system is yet, what kind of things they take or even if there is one, but it’s only my second night here.

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