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 Julie Bonnin
There are many reasons to grow your own food, and recent unresolved food safety concerns about summer favorites like tomatoes and cilantro, the official herb of Tex-Mex cooking – are likely to have more folks cultivating an interest in growing edible plants.
Herbs are the perfect entry-level plant for first-time food growers. Given [...]
Tags: Food · Organics · Trees & Plants
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
If you’ve been wondering about all the buzz over honeybees, here is some food for thought – or rather some thought about food: Bees play a role in one out of every three bites of food Americans eat.
Pollinators, mainly bees, but also butterflies, songbirds and even bats, perform such a critical function [...]
Tags: Food · Headlines · Model Projects · Nation · Trees & Plants · Wildlife
By Julie Bonnin
The last thing many homeowners may be thinking about when they yank the plug on their gas-powered lawnmower is their contribution to global warming and poor air quality.
Photo: Clean Air Gardening
Brill rotary mower
But as more and more people attempt to lessen the environmental footprint they leave behind, one of the first [...]
Tags: Lawn Maintenance · YOUR YARD
Photo: Susanne Miller / USFWS
By Barbara Kessler
The polar bear will be granted “threatened” status under the Endangered Species Act, the Bush Administration announced today, because the Arctic ice the animal needs to survive is shrinking and scientific projections show it will jeopardize the polar bear’s survival prospects for decades to come. But the decision, [...]
[Read more →]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 John DeFore
Are polar bears in danger of extinction? U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland wants to know, and has given the Bush administration two more weeks to find out.
Judge Wilken said today that the administration had no legitimate reason for failing to meet a January 9 deadline (one year after the bear was [...]
By Shermakaye Bass
and Barbara Kessler
There’s no doubt that community gardens, a tradition that first surfaced in the United States in the early 1900’s, are at the grassroots of today’s urban “buy local/grow local” movement. But today, in places as diverse as New York City and Madison, Wisc., community gardens are also a socio-cultural [...]
Tags: Food · Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Model Projects · Organics · Trees & Plants
By John DeFore
While it may not be an answer to the mysterious collapse of certain honeybee colonies, researchers at the University of Virginia have identified one unusual threat to the continued well-being of pollinating insects and the flowers they love: Air pollution, they report in the journal Atmospheric Environment, is killing the scent of flowers.
Using [...]
Tags: Briefs · Food · Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Trees & Plants
By John DeFore
They claim not to have been inspired by anybody in particular, but it’s hard to imagine that childhood Disney ballads of Johnny Appleseed weren’t lurking somewhere in Grant Gardner’s and Matt Cortina’s heads when they decided, sitting in a New Jersey coffee shop in December of 2006, to travel the breadth [...]
Tags: Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Nation · Trees & Plants
By Barbara Kessler
After nine years, Mary Bakatsa’s garden is bearing fruit…and vegetables…and flowers…and herbs. It is a chorus of life, and supports more activity than even Mary imagined when she started gardening nearly 20 years ago with a few potted herbs.
Along with her flowers and veggies, which grow side by side, she has [...]
Tags: Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Organics · Trees & Plants · Xeriscape & Water
By Barbara Kessler
Mary Bakatsa is “organic all the way” in her sprawling Austin garden. But that doesn’t mean she simply avoids pesticides and blithely sits back to watch. Organic gardening is more proactive and veteran gardener Bakatsa runs dozens of schemes to nudge nature in the right direction. She places certain plants near others [...]
Tags: Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Organics · Xeriscape & Water
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:
