Sustainablog

Fellow Green Options blogger, Sam Aola Ooko, recently related that there has been a reconciliation of religion and evolution.

As written in that EcoWorldly blog post — St. Charles Darwin Unveiled: Catholics, Anglicans Finally Agreed on Evolution — it seems that the Vatican and the Church of England have decided that there is a place in the world for both beliefs, that Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and religious faith can coexist peacefully.

I’m fascinated.

I can understand, for example, the Christian view that the premise of evolution is faulty and can’t align with the belief that God created the Earth. Science says Earth dates billions of years back. The stories of the Bible say, “Oh, no it dih-n’t!” Read the rest of this entry »

“For any viewer who has been camping, a tent may not sound like the most… comfortable living option.  On the other hand, it has some real benefits to my mission to live sustainably!

…Inhabiting it uses no energy–neither heating nor cooling is an issue.  While it might seem like it at first, a tent is not just a summer option…  Look like cramped quarters?

Well, it’s big enough to sleep in and to store my clothes in.  And that’s all I need.  It means I will be spending more time outside, in nature…

Plus, unlike in an apartment, I have the ability to develop my home in unlimited ways!  Stay tuned for later episodes that show how I modify and enhance my living space to be more and more manageable, including temperature control, comfort and additional amenties.”

Dear Readers,

Sust Enable was my dearest fantasy.  Sust Enable meant that I would solve the entire world’s problem of environmental sustainability all by myself.  In an urban setting and with no money.  What’s more, I’d do so while producing a film about it!  Take that, thousands of years of environmental degradation!

For those of you who have followed my tumultuous three-month sustainable living experiment through my blog posts here at Sustainablog, you may think the quoted text above is a strange thing to say, or even bizarrely humorous.  Indeed it is.  Above is the exact wording of my original script to the Sust Enable episode on Shelter, last updated sometime in May.  As I sit in the video editing suite listening over my previously recorded voiceover, I cannot help but laugh out loud at the absurd, unsubstantiated statements I am making.  But these are sour laughs.

Because once, I believed these statements were true.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick trivia question: What’s the second verse to “The Farmer in the Dell”? Anybody? Here you go:

The farmer takes a wife,
The farmer takes a wife,
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife.

Talk about stale lyrics in dire need of an update. As women make up the largest and fastest growing group buying new farms today, we should be teaching kids something more like:

“The wife took over the farm.
To the land she did no harm,
Hi-ho, times change, you know, These chicks can really grow.”

Consider Iowa farmer, Denise O’Brien, chief song lyric rewriter and female farmer stereotype smasher extraordinaire. For the past twenty years she has led the charge of organizing and promoting the voice and face of women in agriculture and is founder of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. “Finally, the tides are starting to turn for women farmers as policies start to change,” explains O’Brien. “But it should have happened a long time ago and there’s still much we as women, from growers to grocery shoppers, can do to create a healthy food system for future generations.”

O’Brien racks up a history of seeing opportunity in crisis. Read the rest of this entry »

Dearest Sustainablog!

Thank you for welcoming me back after an extended hiatus travelling our great American countryside.  Burned out from the stresses of the Sust Enable project, my partner Scott and I took off for the great wilds of U.S. National Parks in early August.  I haven’t written a blog since, as my adventures swept me far from the reaches of the Internet, for the most part.  Now I am back in Pittsburgh, not living sustainably, yet still reeling from the life lessons reaped from the past four months.

I anticipated having a slew of breathtaking photographs to offer you, alongside commentary from the trip in which I reflected on our often-severed connection with nature, and the deep wisdom such a connection provides.  Instead, one night while we camped in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, our video and digital camera were stolen from the glovebox of Scott’s car.  In the middle of a peaceful campsite, in which the sense of goodwill invoked a dozen campers to leave their car doors unlocked that night, a band of thiefs took advantage, slipped in after dark, and robbed a handful of people… not only of material possessions, but of their precious trip memories.

I wept inconsolably when I learned that the camera which held our trip photographs had been taken from us.  I cared little for the money-cost of these items, but I couldn’t stop hurting from the void that the thief left in me–having robbed me of the potential for life-long memories.

Memories surely live on in one’s mind… but as an avid student of the sciences, psychology easily reminds me that minds distort experiences.  I was hoping to use the photographs from our trip as a guideline for revisiting the feelings and sights that this wonderful trip stirred in me.  That hope is gone now, exchanged for a fleeting handful of cash to another.

And so, in the middle of my meditations on how the entire human race might be unified if we each and all had the opportunity to pause in the arms of nature’s bounty… I was sharply reminded with a single malicious act… that we have much further to go before then. Read the rest of this entry »

Flipping through pages of the Internet the other day I ran across a group in Boulder, Colo., who moved their home goods via their bikes — furniture, appliances, everything.

I know they aren’t the only ones ever to have done it. (I searched a little more.) So now I’m curious to know how common this is among the bike commuting, Earth-loving crowd.

My first thought upon seeing the string of photographs documenting the day was, “WTF?” And I mean that in the best way, because pretty soon after I thought, “That is so awesome!”

They put out the word, calling interested bike mover helpers and 11 showed up. I can only imagine the comradery, the exercise, the fun. They made four trips to get the whole apartment’s worth of life moved. Read the rest of this entry »

Upcycling, a phrase coined by Cradle to Cradle authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart, is the act of creating useful products from waste materials.  You’ve probably seen several upcycled products on the market today–reusable bags are often made from old plastic bags, t-shirts, or other upcycled materials.  TerraCycle is now upcycling many products, including juice pouches and cookie wrappers.  Among design junkies, craftsters, and green folks, upcycling is the latest challenge to combat climate change.  My only gripe is I keep seeing the same upcycling ideas–the aforementioned reusable bags, the old t-shirt revamp–and they’ve been done.  Fortunately, places like Ready Made Magazine and Instructables continue to facilitate new upcycled products.  Here are six creative, practical upcycling projects that, with a little time and skill, you can do at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post Here’s a peek at pork.

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I moved from my Chicago apartment to a Wisconsin farm, I traded convenience for countryside. No more quick runs to the mini mart store at the end of the urban block for a missing ingredient. With civilization now a fifteen minute drive away, I’ve evolved to have all the necessities to do anything from feeding a round of B&B guests to whipping up multiple pear pies.

So here’s the simplest route to sustainability: keep a stocked pantry. Save money, time and fossil fuel – not to mention upping nutritional value — by dining chez you. Maybe not as sexy an eco initiative as backpacks with PV panels, but keeping an organized, stocked pantry goes a long way in creating a self-reliant, green kitchen and household.

Stocking the pantry saves time and money – two non-renewable resources and drains on greening our lifestyle. With a little planning and organization, your pantry will never let you down. I recently gushed about my pantry passion in an article for Hobby Farm Home magazine, going into more detail on stocking the kitchen.

Here’s a few starter tips: Read the rest of this entry »

After reading Simran Sethi and Sarah Smarsh’s post about $40 Bling bottled water (I am still praying that is just a big joke), you may well want to run to your tap and chug down a few glasses of nice, cheap tap water.

But not so fast, my thrifty water-loving friend–if you live in the city or otherwise have access to municipal treated water. While the clear fluid coming out of your faucet is H2O just like the stuff in that naughty $40 plastic bottle, it may have a few things added to the H’s and O’s that could be more costly than any plastic bottle.

Unfortunately, municipal water treatment nowadays means more than just water cleansed of poop, pee, and various other nasty bits of stuff in order to make for a potable potation coming out of your tap. And what municipalities put into the water could be as unhealthy for the planet as they are for you.

Probably the most infamous introduction to municipal water is fluoride. Way back in the 1940s, fluoride found its way into American water systems after scientists discovered that people who ingested fluoride-treated water apparently had less instances of tooth decay. And ever since, fluoride treatment has been standard practice in municipalities worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea of a little farm in a big city sounds daunting to some, impossible to others, but to bloggers who are reclaiming their bit of city green space and saying no to Big Farm, self-reliance is not only possible, but the preferred way to live a rich and rewarding life.  A small movement of people are eschewing the outsourcing of their everyday needs and are choosing, instead, to produce as much of what they need at home, transforming tiny plots of land into thriving gardens, raising chickens and goats for eggs and milk, canning, preserving, cheesemaking, soapmaking, and any other project on which Mother Earth News has advice.  And, in true 21st century form, they’re blogging about it. Read the rest of this entry »