River Gym (Image Source: ecofriend)
Currently clean and green living has caught my fancy. I try to read what people are doing to keep our environment clean. Sometimes I come across most amazing ideas. In this fitness conscious world most of us try to do our bit is to remain healthy. When an image of gym conjure up in our mind we often think of hi fi equipments and people sweating their extra calories out while huffing and puffing. But very few thought about the repetitive and controlled motions we make while exercising. The kinetic energy we all produce go waste. Architect Mitchell Joachim, along with Douglas Joachim, a personal trainer think of using the gym enthusiasts activities and convert it into electrical energy.
The best thing is River Gym will float on a sea. So you will not get bored by watching TV or listening music. You can watch the playing waves and scenic and calming beauty of sea. And your crunches, running on mills or weight training are producing enough electricity to drive the floating boat!
Good to see you posting again.
Nice to see you writing after a long hiatus, Alka.
Almost all green ideas are good, if only we applied them on a large enough scale (like European countries, I hear, are about to ban all sorts of light bulbs except halogens, LEDs and CFLs)… otherwise they just remain pretty fads.
But unless we stop the really large-scale destructive things we do first (like chopping down millions of acres of rain forest annually, and wasting millions of cubic metres of fresh water), and continuing to rely overwhelmingly on fossil fuels, none of these nice ideas are going to save us from massive and irreversible environmental damage for much longer…
agree with Suvro. this wastage is also country specific. like US wastes too much of fossil fuel (no/little public transport system) and we in India waste too much water (many studies shows that we use 10 times as much water than required in irrigation).
too me all this environment talk in media sometime looks farce (specially for indian middle class public). we anyway use very little water/fossil fuel.
compared to Indians, US consume 1000+ times more fossil fuel. so even if all india saves 20% on their fuel (which is big #, i must say), this will be saving of .02% overall globally.
same with water when compared between irrigation and average house hold use.
we must rationally avoid wastage of resources. i think this rational drive is missing from this “env save/green env” campaign and not going to benefit much.
(this river gym idea is also farce, i do not get how it is helping save environment. resources required to create such gym will out-strip small, i do not see any at all, benefit)
Alka, nice to see u back.
agree with Suvro. this wastage is also country specific. like US wastes too much of fossil fuel (no/little public transport system) and we in India waste too much water (many studies shows that we use 10 times as much water than required in irrigation).
too me all this environment talk in media sometime looks farce (specially for indian middle class public). we anyway use very little water/fossil fuel.
compared to Indians, US consume 1000+ times more fossil fuel. so even if all india saves 20% on their fuel (which is big #, i must say), this will be saving of .02% overall globally.
same with water when compared between irrigation and average house hold use.
we must rationally avoid wastage of resources. i think this rational drive is missing from this “env save/green env” campaign and not going to benefit much.
(this river gym idea is also farce, i do not get how it is helping save environment. resources required to create such gym will out-strip small, i do not see any at all, benefit)
Humm. I will try to be regular.
Its really nice to see that you care to read my posts and comment too. I think you are right in saying that what we can do on basic level. But what I am reading these days is people are taking their own initiative in bits and pieces. They can’t fight mighty nexus of oil lobby, industrialists and politicians. Then the next best course available is reduce your own carbon footprints.
Nilesh, what’s the link of your blog? I want to read it too. We know that most of the developed countries are consuming most of the resources but lets do our own little bit. Here I remember a Chinese proverb, “Don’t curse the darkness: light a candle.”
lighting a candle is like putting a 1 watt bulb instead of 40 watt bulb. 02% is going to take us nowhere (we can not make it to .03% and by seeing us saving, developed world is not going to start save). more ever we are underdeveloped and we need more resources. anyways i use minimal resources for me and can not waste even if i wanted to.. its habit inculcated by my parents and also i have been through (kind of) scarcity of water in my life.
i do not blog.
Great write-up cause in my language, I can not find much good source like this. I am a big believer in commenting on blogs to help the blog writers know that they’ve added something worthwhile to the world wide web!