Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
By Catherine Girardeau
This coming Labor Day Weekend, San Francisco will celebrate the intersection of taste, sustainability and social justice that is the Slow Food movement. Non-profit educational organization Slow Food USA is throwing a four-day party they’re calling Slow Food Nation.
SFN’s Executive Director Anya Fernald hopes the debut event, expected to draw some 50,000 [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Agriculture · Business · Dining Out · Food · Food/Health
By Barbara Kessler
While some global warming activists despaired over Congress’ failure to launch the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act last week, the We Campaign (founded by Al Gore and comrades to promote action against global warming) forged ahead.
Tags: Activists/Authors · Energy/Water · Home/Garden · People/Projects
By Barbara Kessler
Wonder how the gray wolves are faring since they were “delisted” from protection under the Endangered Species Act? One of the three Rocky Mountain states with a significant gray wolf population, Idaho, is having meetings to determine the rules for the hunting of the wolves this fall.
[Read more →]Tags: Activists/Authors · Briefs · Wildlife
By Michele Chan Santos
On a quiet street in the tree-covered city of Rollingwood, a suburb of Austin, Texas, sits a house designed to epitomize everything technology and modern design can do to make a home environmentally friendly and safe for families with children.
Tags: Activists/Authors · Eco-kids · Energy/Water · Home Building · Model Projects
By Barbara Kessler
Green washers are taking consumers and taxpayers for a joy ride of deception that will have real costs, both environmentally and economically, if the companies aren’t exposed. So says Greenpeace, the venerable environmental watchdog group, which used Earth Day to unveil its new website against green washing, stopgreenwash.org. The website [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Activists/Authors · Briefs · Greener Businesses
Earth Day reverberated around the world on Sunday, with festivals from Tokyo to Barcelona to San Francisco. In the United States, the key urban festivals attracted crowds of thousands as entertainers blasted music in New York City’s Central Park, the Mall in Washington D.C. and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
But while the day was [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Celebrities/Politicians · Cities/States · Green Enthusiasts/Researchers · Model Projects
By John DeFore
Standing out in the current wave of books about the environment — dire jeremiads, thoughtful analyses, and green-leaning coffee-table books — is a compact but weighty tome that is largely uninterested in conveying to readers any kind of “the time is now!” urgency. Rather, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau released April [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Books/Online Media · Briefs
By Harriet Blake
You’ve just moved to town and somehow you still have too much stuff. The Salvation Army is about 20 minutes down the road. But perhaps there is someone closer who could use that antique desk or the comfy but well-worn recliner? And with the price of gas and all those carbon emissions, that [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Model Projects · Recycle & Reuse
By John DeFore
Fires that broke out Monday in Maltby, Washington, outside of Seattle, consumed three new luxury homes and damaged a fourth (firefighters were able to save the fifth). The culprits, if preliminary evidence is to be believed, consider themselves environmentalists.
Tags: Activists/Authors · Briefs · Headlines
By Shermakaye Bass
Austin, Texas, is known for its enthusiastic (some would say vehement) greenness, and these days, at least one arts organization is taking a strong eco-stance.
Photo: The Arthouce at the Jones Center
The Arthouse at the Jones Center is hosting “Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn,” a multi-prong installation by the roving American [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Cities/States · Food · Model Projects · Trees/Plants/Yard
By Bill Marvel
“The heavens show forth the glory of God,” the Psalmist declared, “and the firmament proclaims His handiwork.”
Ah, no longer. Unless you live in a remote desert or on a mountaintop, these days the heavens mostly show forth the operations of the local electric utility. And the firmament — when you can see [...]
Tags: Activists/Authors · Energy/Water · Home Improvements · Model Projects
By Shermakaye Bass
If you’ve heard the Lazy Environmentalist on Sirius Radio or have read the LE website or book, or have shopped at the Vivavi green-design showroom in Brooklyn, then you’ve more or less met Josh Dorfman, the man behind the movement.
He’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. And now it seems the pithy, practical naturalist [...]
By John DeFore
For a movie that explicitly addresses the perils of overconsumption, Pixar’s WALL*E is being used to promote an awful lot of consumer products.
One tie-in in particular is rankling Greenpeace. It seems that the lovable robot’s image has popped up on boxes of Kleenex, a product the activist group has criticized with a “Kleercut” campaign that asserts, “it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex” because the product’s manufacturer Kimberly-Clark “all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products.” (Among other things, they’re trying to get parents and teachers to reject the company’s tissues in classrooms.) [Read more →]
By John DeFore
Mitsubishi Electric announced Wednesday that it will quadruple its capability to produce solar cells, jumping from the 150 megawatts it currently produces each year to an annual 600MW capacity by 2012 — a more ambitious goal than its previously stated one to get to 500 MW by 2013. Current production levels are already triple what they were four years ago. [Read more →]
Residents of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area will again get a chance to trade in their pollution-emitting old clunker for a newer, less polluting car with the help of state money.
The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) reports that it has about $12 million for the second year of the AirCheckTexas Drive a Clean Machine campaign, which began taking applications in mid-August. [Read more →]
