sustainability

The Simple (Self-Sufficient) Life

jchatraw — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:05:54 -0400

This past weekend while hiking with my wife in the Sawtooth National Forest, I thought about what it must have been like for the pioneers to happen upon such majestic beauty in the wilderness areas of the Northwest. Life in these parts couldn't have been easy, for the incredible weather and sights we experienced on a late summer day eventually give way to a harsh summer. How did people survive? What did they do? I pondered.

How people survived in those days and the way they did it spoke volumes about the education of survival that everyone in that era received while exploring the territories of the burgeoning U.S. As I hiked, the notion that I could thrive in such elements--much less, survive--served as a stark reminder of the culture in which I now live. I'm not sure I would want to spend my summer chopping wood for the winter, but people did it for generations in these parts--and it was simply a way of life, a simpler life.

In his book The Self-Sufficient Life and how to Live it, author John Seymour writes the definitive handbook on how to become self-sufficient. (He even tells you how to make beer and wine!) It would be a necessary handguide for my own survival in a place as beautiful as the Sawtooths.

Here's what Seymour had to say about what's necessary to have a self-sufficient lifestyle in whatever setting you attempt it:

"If you really want to make a change in your lifestyle, then you are going to need help from others. And, what’s more, the bigger the spread of talents you can find, the better your self-sufficient lifestyle will become. It makes no sense, for example, to imagine you can milk a cow just for a single family. You will have far too much milk and far too much of a tie that means you can never take a day off. You are unlikely to have all the skills—to make clothes, shoes, furniture, buildings, pottery, and the like. But find others who can do these things and your life will become more interesting and much more comfortable.

"The logic does not simply apply to those who are working the rural idyll; it applies probably even more strongly to those of you who live in towns and want to make some important changes in how you live. Of course some of you will be able to take on community garden plots or make vegetable gardens, others will keep bees, chickens, or rabbits; some will be experts at bicycle repair, others will know of local farmers who produce organic food, then there will be those who enjoy making break, or beer, or wine. And so it goes on. Your challenge is to find such people and, having found them, to energize them and yourself to do things differently. By developing and using these different skills, you can make a richer, happier, and healthier lifestyle for you and your family. Yes, and even create more of your own entertainment, too—meeting socially for parties, music, walks, poetry readers, meals and visits."

Was Obama Right about Tires?

jchatraw — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:57:56 -0400

Addressing our dependence on foreign oil by "urging" Americans to make sure their tires are properly inflated is like trying to lasso a bucking bull with dental floss--it's doomed for failure. Despite Senator Barack Obama's good intentions becoming the full-on mockery of the Republican party, Obama is still right: properly inflated tires do save gas and money.

In Greg Horn's book "Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability," Horn takes a look at various ways we can all live a greener, eco-friendly lifestyle. And here's what he had to say about car maintenance:

Tune Your Car and Save.

If your car is in perfect running order, it will run more efficiently and your gas consumption will drop. Here are a few simple ways to boost gas milesage:
1. Check your tires weekly. Properly inflated tires can save 2 percent on gas consumption.
2. Get a tune-up and boost your miles per gallon by anywhere between 4 and 40 percent if your car has a serious problem, like a faulty oxygen sensor. Just replacing your air filter can increase your gas mileage by as much as 10 percent.
3. Take the roof rack off your car when you’re not using it and stop gas-guzzling wind drag.

Which College Is the Greenest?

scleaver — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0400

As if choosing a campus wasn’t hard enough, this year The Princeton Review is adding green ratings to some of their college guides. The green rating score is a composite of factors from building and transportation policies, recycling, food sourcing, and environmental courses offered.

Campuses have been going green for a while now. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education has a rating system for schools. The Worldwatch Institute outlines campus greening initiatives on its web site. And, the Sustainable Endowments Institute puts out the College Sustainability Report Card that grades 200 schools that have large endowments according to how they spend those endowments in ways that benefit the environment.

These new scorecards aren’t going unnoticed. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, according to a Princeton Review survey, 60 percent of college applicants and their parents say that the green factor would affect their application decision. Proponents claim that going green, especially with buildings, could lower costs in the long run and fit into the leadership role of universities. But, others, like Richard Vedder at the American Enterprise Institute, are concerned that going green could raise already high costs.

Photo from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry Green Campus Initiative.

Green marketing meets Social networking.

jeannine — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:52:16 -0400

There is an interesting marriage occuring between green marketing and social networking, that looks to develop into a long and prosperous marriage.

The market for green, eco-conscious products, materials, homes and even holiday destinations is rapidly growing alongside the amount of better informed consumers, and finding these products is not as easy as one might think, obviously the more obscure your green desires are, the further from the mainstream market place they are.

Until now, the blanket media used by the small amount of corporate giants that manipulate not thousands, not millions, but billions of individuals acts as a very effective barrier between you and your green ideals. Now however, instead of going through the big in your face doors of the Obvious, getting lost in the never ending corridors of the mass produced mundane and ending up in the same unsatisfying place, you can enter into the cyber backyard where people are still talking to each other, and find personal recommendations and directions to backdoor urls.

This is great for small businesses, website owners and therefore web designers. Those whose marketing budget does not, and will likely never, match those of the all encompassing CEOS, can slip cheerfully to the front of the google qeue, just by putting in 'alot of social networking hours' being friendly , communicative and interested, introducing yourself to 'friends' and 'friends of friends' telling them about yourself, what you do and why you do it.

The internet has created an environment of social inhibition, you don't wait to be introduced, you introduce yourself; through blogging, video, joining like minded groups on like minded networks, saying Hi, not only to your niche circles, but to the millions of people visiting some of the busiest places on the web today.

The internet has a habit of mimmicking the real world, in big ways; global communication and the interconnectedness of all things, and in smaller ways; the highstreet,the superstore and the directory. Here, websites became your shop front, and visitors passed by...if you were lucky, or if you paid for them to? Now it's imitating the social domain; the swaree, the gathering, and the cafe. Your website is more like your business card and a word or two on a social networking site is like handing someone a friends telephone number scribbled on a scrap of paper.

So now there is a place for small but vital, world changing and important businesses, and eco conscious people to meet and exchange... and the propogation speed is fast and rambling, like planting strawberries in your vegetable patch, only to find that next season, they are popping up all over your herb and flower garden too.

Jeannine Lewis http://www.outtheredesign.com

Students Recycle and Reduce Garbage: Take It Or Leave It

akronheim — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Ithaca College Environmental Society (ICES) found it absurd during move-out time at the end of the academic year when the amount and quality of garbage sky rocketted. They found clothes, mini fridges, hangers, food, microwaves, working electronics, computers, you name it, they found it in the dumpsters at school.

So, they started Take It Or Leave It (TIOLI). They put large bins in every dorm room where students can leave things worth donating or selling. ICES members go around campus, pick up the stuff they want for themselves, donate food and clothes, and then store the school/dorm room supplies to sell at the beginning of nxt year.

It really reduces the waste from the campus at that time of year; a full tractor trailor gets used for sorting the stuff. Plus, you get free stuff for helping out, and it raises between $500-$1000 for the club that year. When I ived in the Boston University dorm in D.C. while interning for Greenpeace's Project Hot Seat, there was a collection for similar things in the basement. I took a purse and some noodles from down there. Everyone donated and much less waste was thrown out than could have been.

It is easy to get people to put their stuff in a different place when it is advertised. It's also easy to collect, take what you want, and donate and sell the rest. It is am amazing way to divert some stuff out of the waste stream into the re-use system and I think it should be implemented at every residential college/university. It just makes sense. And that picture is of me doing it freshmen year...I found a sweet halloween costume!

Want to find out more about recycling?

Recycling Tips: Did You Know You Cannot Recycle Messy Pizza Boxes?

The Benefits of Recycling: Let’s Talk Trash

Recycling the Looking Glass: When Garbage and Art Collide

Top 10 Recycling Resources

Recycled Record Snack Tray

The Benefits of Recycling Cardboard

The Art of Garbage

Reduce, Reuse… FREECYCLE

Recycle Those Electronics!

Back to Basics—RRR

Picking Up Garbage TVs and Recycling as Art

Knight Rider Recycled—Reborn With Green Twist!

Recycling Your Garbage: Where Does it All Go?

Wide-Eyed Wonder

jchatraw — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:07:08 -0400

Barbara Kingsolver's works of fiction do much to inspire the reader's imagination and provoke contemplative thought regarding heady subject matters. She makes you feel deeply and seeks to help you understand the protagonist's plight in each story. In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kingsolver finds herself in the middle of a moral delimma, which she responds to by moving from Arizona to Virginia to grow their own food and live off their 20-acre family farm.

With Kingsolver's resume of best-selling books, she could very easily choose to live however she pleased. But with the same conviction she writes with regarding deep questions in life, she demonstrates in this book that there's plenty of substance to her style.

Check out this green nugget from her book explaining her family's reason for moving:

"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations. True fact. Fossil fuels were consumed for the food's transport, refrigeration, and processing, with the obvious environmental consequences. The option of getting our household's food from close to home, in Tucson, seemed no better to us. The Sonoran desert historically offered to humans baked dirt as a construction material, and for eats, a corn-and-beans diet organized around late summer monsoons, garnished in spring with cactus fruits and wild tubers. The Hohokam and Pima were the last people to live on that land without creating an environmental overdraft. When the Spaniards arrived, they didn't rush to take up the Hohokam diet craze. Instead they set about working up a monumental debt: planting orange trees and alfalfa, digging wells for irrigation, withdrawing millions more gallons from the water table each year than a dozen inches of annual rainfall could ever restore. Arizona is still an agricultural state. Even after the population boom of the mid-nineties, 85 percent of the state's water still went to thirsty crops like cotton, alfalfa, citrus and pecan trees. Mild winters offer the opportunity to create an artificial endless summer, as long as we can conjure up water and sustain a chemically induced illusion of topsoil."

New Book Explores the Key to Sustainable Living

jchatraw — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Chicken Little and his cohorts in mass hysteria earned the attention of other animals because they were the only ones predicting the sky was falling. There used to just be Al Gore and a couple of scientists telling anyone who would listen that the planet can't sustain our way of life. While not everyone has taken the message to heart, there's hardly a soul left to tell. In fact, the message is so roaring that after a while you don't even notice it that much. Doom and gloom voices turn me into an apathetic Foxy Loxy.

But James Gustave Speth's new book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability brings hope amidst the dire warnings. Yes, we all need a good warning, but hopelessness breeds apathy--and Speth adroitly addresses the issues as he presents a viable solution. We need more books like his.

Check out this green nugget from Speth's book:

"Growth is traditionally measured as an increase in Gross Domestic Product, and GDP growth is what is meant by growth here. It has given much of the world remarkable material progress—progress in the things that economies can produce and money can buy—but this prosperity has been and is being purchased at a huge environmental cost. ...

"What the environment cares about, moreover, is not the rate of growth but the total loading. These loadings—for example, the amount of fish harvested—were already huge in 1980, so that even modest growth per decade produces large increases in environmental impacts—impacts that were already too large. By 2004, the world was consuming annually 369 million tons of paper products, 275 million tons of meat, and 9 trillion tons of fossil fuels (in oil equivalent). Freshwater for human use was being withdrawn from natural supplies of about a thousand cubic miles a year.

"Behind these numbers is the phenomenon of exponential expansion. A dominant feature of modern activity is its exponential growth. A thing grows linearly when it increases by the same quantity over a given time. If college tuition goes up three thousand dollars a year, the increase is linear. A thing grows exponentially when it increases in proportion to what is already there. If college tuition goes up 5 percent a year, the increase is exponential. The modern economy tends to grow exponentially because a portion of each year's output is invested to produce even more output. The amount invested is related to the amount of the economic activity. ... The economic system does not work when it comes to protecting environmental resources, and the political system does not work when it comes to correcting the economic system."

Your Official Guide to Greening Anything...

Julia — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:55:30 -0400

GreenYour.com is your guide to a greener, well, EVERYTHING!

Whatever is in your life that you want to revamp or renew, GreenYour.com can tell you exactly how to do that.

They have organized there site into three parts: facts, actionable tips, and fabulous products, all of which make up the 3 steps toward greening anything from you shower, to your jeans, to your refrigerator.

There are thousands of pages to the site, and the results are quite accurate.

So, get going on greening YOUR life!

Two College Students to Cycle Across US, Planting 1 Million Trees

akronheim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

What are you doing this summer? I'm going to hang out in LA and work at some silly job until my Green Corps position starts in August. But, that does not exactly compare to what these two college students are doing...they are riding their bikes across the country and planting one million trees! Grant Gardner from Virginia Tech, and Matt Cortina from Rutgers University, will be planting the trees with schools, organizations and communities in the 56 towns in which they will be stopping. It's a relatively common thing to bike across America, and to plant a bunch of trees, but I think these two have a serious insight into a healthy, sustainable movement that could really take off.

Grant and Matt founded Planting America Inc .a non-profit organization a little over a year ago in order to fund and/or create large scale environmental projects across the United States and promote active, earth-friendly lifestyles, more sustainable transportation and environmental stewardship. This 4200 mile journey across the country will be the kick off event for the organization. They're getting plenty of press including CBS and NPR, as well as working with two award-winning filmmakers to make a documentary about the trip and the overall message of environmental maintenance and social responsibility.

You can go to their website: www.plantingamerica.org, and donate, get educated about their campaigns, see their trip itinerary, and even get Free Tree Seeds! Or you can read about them at: http://11thhouraction.com, the website from the film The 11th Hour which is going on a campus screening tour including Ithaca College, Earth Day, at 7:30pm (shameless plug yet again...) But, maybe if people keep seeing films like this and hearing about Grant and Matt types, more campaigns and films will pop up all over the place...so keep spreading the word!

The Aroma of Green

jchatraw — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

Ever since I was 11 years old, I've held daily showering as a high value. I came to that decision when I went to Disney World that summer and spent sweltering July days standing in line with people who didn't share that same value. But as I've re-evaluated my footprint on this planet, I've found myself asking those tough questions, like "Is showering daily really good for the earth?" Most people who come into daily contact with me would probably scream, "You showering is good for all of the earth's inhabitants."

Sometimes, it's healthy to consider such questions and how the daily habits of our culture have impacted the earth. In Wake Up and Smell the Planet: The Non-Pompous, Non-Preachy Grist Guide to Greening Your Day, authors Brangien Davis and Katharine Wroth propose simple ways we can actually do something. It's fun, pithy and practical.

Here's a green nugget from the book ... and the answer to my all-consuming question about showering:

"Most people consider bathing a fairly crucial part of the daily routine. But for those who worry about global water resources gurgling down the drain, the mere prospect of washing up can be a downer. Very few bathers have the time, space, or stamina to limit water usage to barrel-collected rainwater heated in solar sacks. Which means many of you are left standing on the bathmat, shivering in your skivvies, wondering which wastes less water—a shower or a bath?

"The answer will vary depending on how long your showers are, how many gallons rain down from your showerhead each minute, how big your bathtub is, and how high you fill it when you soak. But tuck this into your robe pocket: a five-minute shower uses about a third as much water as a full bath. Whichever route you choose, there are simple things you can do to ensure your bathing experience is as water-friendly as a sea turtle:

Fix any leaks around the faucet or showerhead (even small trickles add up to gallons of water wasted per week)
Buy aerators for all of your faucets. these are mesh faucet ends that can cut the gallons-per-minute water usage by up to 40%. (They are easy to attach, but they may need occasional rising when clogged.)
Get a low-flow showerhead, easily installable by even a tepidly intrepid person. You'll cut your water usage from about 5 gallons a minute to 2.5 gallons a minute."