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 John DeFore
Currently being passed around the blogosphere are a set of images that offer a refreshing change of pace for those who think of the Earth’s makeup as dully competing swaths of green, brown and blue. These photos, which offer startling contrasts and modernist geometries, don’t look quite real, and in a way [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Briefs · Media & Entertainment
By Nima Kapadia
Creating an alternative to the conventional, gasoline-powered lawn mower is “work of art” that has gotten the Neuton recognition at museums this summer.
Tags: Briefs · Greener Businesses · Lawn Maintenance · Media & Entertainment · Uncategorized
By Barbara Kessler
Polar bears, penguins and caribou are all facing an uncertain future as global warming melts their arctic climates.
Photo: Wendy Shattil/Bob Rozinski
If only they were the only species at risk. Tragically, these arctic animals have many cousins in similar straits in lower latitudes: From the American Crocodile to the Monarch Butterfly; the Green [...]
Tags: Media & Entertainment
By John DeFore
Call it a solution to a problem that has ceased to exist: Now that Netflix whisks DVDs to your mailbox and downloadable movies threaten to make all physical home video media obsolete, a company called Flexplay wants to sell movie lovers discs they throw away after a single viewing.
Tags: Briefs · Media & Entertainment · Recycle & Reuse
Photo: Copyright © 2008 Oceana
Longtime ocean advocate Ted Danson is pressing Canada to take a more active role in efforts to reduce fisheries subsidies.
By Shermakaye Bass
Celebrities trade on their celebrity and always have – sometimes in not so earth-friendly ways. But among the nobler echelons of Hollywood, Manhattan and London, renown is fuel for green [...]
By Barbara Kessler
ORLANDO — From the moment we clicked through the turnstiles at Walt Disney World, we morphed into rabid consumers, sopping up junk food like starving pirates and flitting from the rain forest to Neverland to the Haunted Mansion like Peter Pan on Red Bull. We rode every boat, hopped into every ride [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Media & Entertainment · Model Projects · SHOP GREEN
By John DeFore
“Despite claims to the contrary, products with zero environmental impact do not yet exist.”
With that sober introductory blurb begins the centerpiece of stylish architecture/design mag “Metropolis’s October issue, and it’s refreshing to get that kind of reality check in an age when many magazines seem a tad less skeptical of hype (described [...]
Tags: Briefs · GET INFORMED · Media & Entertainment
By John DeFore
As a part of their coverage of the sustainability beat, radio’s American Public Media has launched an online game called Consumer Consequences designed to help listeners put their individual use of natural resources in global perspective.
With its mix of kid-friendly touches (players start by picking cartoon-character avatars) and grown-up ones (you need to [...]
Tags: Briefs · Energy & Water · GET INFORMED · Media & Entertainment · Recycle & Reuse · YOUR HOME
By John DeFore
In an article this month titled “The Green Party,” Alexandra Jacobs considers the notion of eco-conscious entertaining and seems to conclude that it’s something only zealots and fools should attempt. She describes a friendly barbecue screeching to a halt over the host’s rejection of paper plates; she meets a man whose footprint-minimizing [...]
Tags: Briefs · Media & Entertainment
By Harriet L. Blake
In case you’ve missed it, it was Green Week all week (Nov. 4-10) at NBC Universal. The theme was “aimed at entertaining, informing and empowering Americans to lead greener lives,” according to the company’s website.
In keeping with this effort, the Today show has sent three of its anchors to the “ends of [...]
Tags: Briefs · Media & Entertainment
With co-founder Don Henley a longtime environmentalist, it was an easy decision by The Eagles to release their new CD Long Road Out of Eden in low-impact packaging. Perhaps not so simple was the band’s choice to sell its first studio album in 28 years exclusively at big box retailer Wal-Mart.
Wal-mart has long been criticized [...]
Tags: GET INSPIRED · Media & Entertainment · Model People · SHOP GREEN
World Watch, a Washington-based research group working for a sustainable society, celebrates 20 years of World Watch magazine this fall, with packages of articles and essays looking at a range of urgent issues. World Watch President Christopher Flavin looks back at an article he wrote in 1988 about global warming called “The Heat Is [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Media & Entertainment
In the race for top carbon emissions polluter, the United States is still Number One, but China is sprinting forward and could soon edge into the lead. The current Olympics host nation accounted for a “staggering 57 percent of the growth of emissions” worldwide this century, and will likely surpass the U.S. as the single biggest belcher of fossil fuel emissions sometime this year, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
The standings right now: The U.S. currently contributes 19.5 percent of global fossil fuel emissions compared with China’s 18.3 percent. [Read more →]
British Petroleum (BP) has announced plans to bring cellulosic ethanol to market in the U.S., through a 
partnership with bio-fuel developer Verenium, a company that makes biofuels from rice straw, sugarcane stalks, switchgrass and wood chips. The partnership could help speed the availability of lower cost, more environmentally friendly biofuels, according to an announcement by both companies this week. [Read more →]
By Tom Kessler
Almost 90 percent of the car shoppers who visit Kelley Blue Book’s Web site say they are concerned about the future of our environment, company research shows. Among survey respondents, 80 percent agreed that individuals should make lifestyle changes to help reduce CO2 emissions. And 75 percent of KBB shoppers reported that they have made changes to further the betterment of the environment. The most frequent lifestyle changes cited were:
