Dallas, U.S.A. – With more than 500 exhibitors and a notable lineup of speakers, musicians and films, Earth Day Dallas ( EarthDayDallas.org ) brought more than 58,000 North Texans to Fair Park on April 21 and 22. For the second year in a row, the nonprofit organization hosted one of the nation’s largest Earth Day celebrations, inspiring individuals to be sustainable in the ways they think, work and live.

“Last year, we planted a seed in the minds of North Texans, and were thrilled to watch people latch onto the idea of every day environmentalism,” said Trammell S. Crow, founder of Earth Day Dallas, “This year, it was amazing to see the increase in participation, especially from exhibitors. In a time when other Earth Day festivals are downsizing, we were able to double the number of booths we had in 2011. From exhibitors to programming, we elevated every aspect of the event this year, making Earth Day Dallas a true Texas-sized celebration.”

To accommodate its growing presence, the festival moved from downtown Dallas to historic Fair Park, providing more than 600,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space. At the core of the event, the Eco Expo included a wide range of exhibitions by corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, government groups, hospitals and universities, demonstrating conservation at every level.

Additionally, the festival featured a variety of engagement and entertainment for the whole family, including:

• Former first lady, Mrs. Laura W. Bush
• A book signing and lecture by world renowned theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku
• Live music performances by Amos Lee, Ponderosa, Diego Garcia and The Honey Brothers
• Film screenings including documentary Cafeteria Man and a farm-to-school discussion panel with the film’s star, chef Tony Geraci
• Picnic for the Planet, the Nature Conservancy’s attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest simultaneous global picnic
• A 5K fun run, and much more!

Earth Day Dallas would not have been possible without the significant support from its 2012 partners including Walmart, KXAS-NBC-5, DART, Live Nation, SHFT, 1SolTech and many others.

With its foot firmly planted in Fair Park, Earth Day Dallas has already begun planning for next year’s event. For more information about Earth Day Dallas 2012 and updates on the 2013 event, visit EarthDayDallas.org.

Image Courtesy of   Earth Day Dallas

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Milwaukee, U.S.A. – In celebration of Earth Day, Johnson Controls, the global leader in delivering solutions that increase energy efficiency in buildings, released its Top Earth Day Champions list to highlight organizations saving the carbon equivalent of 45,000 acres of pine forests through energy efficiency and renewable energy projects at their facilities.

Carbon emissions from building energy use are predicted to grow faster than any other sector in the next 25 years, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, making building efficiency critically important for the protection of the environment.

“These organizations have already made significant environmental improvements while at the same time attacking energy waste and reducing operational costs,” said Dave Myers, president of Johnson Controls Building Efficiency. “We recognize those who have committed to making their organizations more sustainable, their facilities more efficient, and their occupants more comfortable. Importantly, each one of these projects will also have strong financial paybacks.”

Here are the 2012 Top Earth Day Champions and the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emissions they are saving annually through projects with Johnson Controls.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn. tops the list with its annual reduction of 49,135 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. In 2008, ORNL replaced a natural gas steam plant with a wood gasification biomass system, reducing its carbon footprint and cutting fossil fuel consumption by 80 percent.

The Champions earned a spot on the list by making their facilities more efficient using a variety of measures, including: utilizing building management systems to optimize energy and operational efficiency, installing distributed generation and renewable energy technology, using more efficient lighting, and updating heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Since January, 2000, Johnson Controls energy performance contracting projects have saved nearly 18 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to that saved by 3.5 million acres of pine forests, and generated savings of $6.5 billion in North America alone. With performance contracting, savings in energy consumption from facility upgrades pay for the project over the term of the contract.

If the savings are not realized, Johnson Controls pays the difference between the value of the measured and verified consumption and the guaranteed consumption under the contract.

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Washington, U.S.A. — As we approach Earth Day, it’s a good time to remember that energy efficiency can help “green” the planet while keeping more “green” in your wallet, says the Alliance to Save Energy.

Based on April data from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Alliance has calculated that the average U.S. household will spend about $2,100 on home energy this year.

“Consumers who experienced high winter heating bills and are already contending with spiraling gasoline prices are eager to spend less on home energy this spring and summer,” said Alliance President Kateri Callahan. “Energy efficiency not only significantly cuts home energy costs, it also increases indoor comfort.”

Top 10 [Simple Yet Effective] Home Energy Tips

To help U.S. consumers go green and save green, the Alliance offers this compilation of energy-saving tips:

The Alliance to Save Energy is a coalition of prominent business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders who promote the efficient and clean use of energy worldwide to benefit consumers, the environment, the economy, and national security.

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Modern farming practices such as conservation tillage and no-till farming are responsible for significant environmental benefits often overlooked by Earth Day observers.

With no-till, farmers plant crops and control weeds without turning the soil. This method decreases erosion, reduces fuel use and improves water quality. In addition to the environmental benefits, no-till empowers farmers to grow more crops and feed more people than was possible 42 years ago when Earth Day first originated.

In the 1970s, a revolution in agriculture began when farmers started converting from conventional, intensive tillage systems to a system more in tune with nature. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that soil erosion from U.S. cropland declined more than 40 percent between 1982 and 2007, thanks in part to no-till and conservation tillage practices. These modern farming practices were made possible in part by the use of atrazine, an herbicide that can manage many different types of weeds under a wide variety of conditions.

“Atrazine’s reliable performance gave farmers the confidence they could control weeds without tillage,” said Richard Fawcett, Ph.D., former agronomy professor at Iowa State University who is now an agricultural consultant.

No-till allows farmers to grow crops year after year without disturbing the soil, thus increasing the soil’s amount of organic matter and decreasing erosion, according to a study by Fawcett.

“While plowing has benefits, it leaves soil loosened and susceptible to significant erosion, ultimately polluting air with fuel burned in the plow equipment and contaminating water with sediment run-off,” said Fawcett. “No-till fields also provide a healthier habitat for wildlife.”

But this farming technique depends on the ability to control weeds, demonstrating the importance of the 50-year-old herbicide atrazine.

According to Paul D. Mitchell, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, more than one-third of U.S. cropland devoted to major crops such as corn and soybeans uses no-till systems. Farmers are applying atrazine on about half of no-till corn acres. Mitchell’s research also found atrazine enables farmers to save as much as 28-million gallons of diesel fuel per year, equaling more than 600-million pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Earth Day started as a campaign to raise awareness of environmental issues.

“But many of the campaign elements ignore the environmentally friendly and earth-saving methods farmers use in their day-to-day operations,” said David C. Bridges, Ph.D., president of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Ga. ”It is important to recognize the role of farmers and modern agricultural technologies in protecting wildlife, saving habitats and keeping our waters clean.”

Bridges, Mitchell and Fawcett are among a group of five academic researchers who recently studied the benefits of atrazine. Key findings include:

• Atrazine enables growers to use conservation tillage and other best-management practices, which contribute to a reduction in soil erosion in corn and sorghum.
• Atrazine and its sister triazine herbicides prevent up to 85 million metric tons of soil erosion per year – enough to fill more than 3 million dump trucks.
• Atrazine and the other triazines help reduce emissions by up to 280,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
• Conservation tillage and no-till farming reduce agricultural diesel fuel use by more than 18-million gallons per year and annual carbon-dioxide emissions by more than 180,000 metric tons.

Syngenta, the principal registrant for atrazine, provided resources and support for the research. The papers are part of a broad assessment by Syngenta to examine the value of atrazine in today’s agricultural economy.

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Universe Day is an annual event that starts each December 31st at noon and runs until noon on January 1st. Universe Day seeks to pick up where Earth Day leaves off and to effectively solve our planet’s evolutionary problems from a universe evolutionary perspective.

“Universe Day is similar to Earth Day in that individuals and organizations all over the planet are encouraged to self-organize their own events to forward the Universe Day message. Universe Day is a no-ownership, no-egos, get-the-message-out-now event. Imitate it, adapt it, improve it. Steal it, even, if it hastens the spread of its message,” says Lawrence Wollersheim, Director of the Universe Institute and one of the founders of Universe Day.

The message behind Universe Day is derived in part from the wisdom of Albert Einstein, who said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” As many are aware, the challenges we now face on a planetary scale – such as radically increasing temperatures, nuclear and traditional wars, pollution, environmental degradation, lack of sustainability and a troubled global economy – have serious consequences.

Rather than allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed by these challenges, however, we can, as Einstein suggests, adopt an entirely new way of thinking. Such is the impetus behind Universe Day: to expand our approach to these issues by adopting the much broader Universe Evolutionary Worldview.

“The progressive evolution of the universe as a whole system is the power that sustains our physical existence – both personal and planetary. We are embedded in the unstoppable flow of the evolutionary process, which is the most dominant factor in all of life and in everything around us,” says Wollersheim.

“Recent innovations in cosmology and evolutionary biology have revealed more about the evolution of life and the cosmos in the last twenty years than in all the previous eras of human history combined, and our ability to accumulate more of this essential knowledge is accelerating. Humanity is now capable of understanding the full evolutionary scope of the biggest playing field there is – the universe.”

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