Cutting Back on Junk Mail
Have you ever imagined the amount of paper that is used by companies to send out flyers, catalogs, and solicitations to millions of homes across the country? On a daily basis?
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 44 percent of all junk mail is thrown away without being opened. This amounts to 4 million tons of waste each year. And this doesn’t even account for the waste phone books — and duplicate phone books — generate. With three to five different directories delivered to each residence per year, about 8 lb of paper, the amount of waste staggers the mind.
You can put a halt to both junk mail and telephone books from being delivered to your residence, and here’s how:
Go to the Direct Marketing Association’s website (dmachoice.org) and submit a request to opt-out from thousands of direct mailers. You’ll be able to discontinue delivery of catalogs, credit offers, and magazine offers, among other types of mailings.
To opt out of phone book delivery, you’ll need to call the individual organizations that generate the directories:
Verizon (Superpages/Idearc): (800) 888-8448 (option 2)
AT&T/Yellow Pages (SBC/Bell South): (800) 848-8000 (option 1); for Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Texas call (800) 792-2665
Yellow Book: (800) 373-3280
Dex Yellow Pages: (877) 243-8339
Recommended reading: Inhabitat.com: GREEN RANT: Stop Sending Me Phone Books!
EarthTalk: Nuclear Waste on Native American Lands; and Carbon “Nanotubes” in Batteries
Dear EarthTalk: Some time ago there were issues with Native American tribes storing nuclear waste on their land, something that was both unhealthy to the communities and caused considerable controversy among tribal leaders. Where is this issue today? — M. Spenser, via e-mail
Native tribes across the American West have been and continue to be subjected to significant amounts of radioactive and otherwise hazardous waste as a result of living near nuclear test sites, uranium mines, power plants and toxic waste dumps.
And in some cases tribes are actually hosting hazardous waste on their sovereign reservations — which are not subject to the same environmental and health standards as U.S. land — in order to generate revenues. Native American advocates argue that siting such waste on or near reservations is an “environmental justice” problem, given that twice as many Native families live below the poverty line than other sectors of U.S. society and often have few if any options for generating income.
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Brain Surgery Leads to Greater Spirituality
Patients who underwent brain surgery for tumor removal in the posterior parietal cortex experienced increased states of self-transcendence, which is identified as an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical world and sense of self and helps one to feel more at one with the universe as a whole.
The posterior parietal cortex is the part of the brain that maintains a sense of one’s physical body and it’s also been linked to meditation and prayer. Removal of tumors in this particular area of the brain caused patients to experience selective damage, which reduces activity and disrupts the sense of self, subsequently leading to increased feelings of transcendence from the reality of the here and now.
To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumors to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumors from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumors removed from the frontal regions of the brain. [Nature] Urgesi also notes that electrically stimulating the temporoparietal junction — an area near the posterior parietal cortex — is known to induce out-of-body experiences, which also involve a breakdown in someone’s representation of their physical self and their environment. [NewScientist]
“Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and crank new age people,” says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. “This is the first really close-up study on spirituality. We’re dealing with a complex phenomenon that’s close to the essence of being human.” [Nature]