Dr. Ravi Gupta thinks hospitals need to become a lot more environmentally friendly.
Hospitals and outpatient practices use a lot of energy and waste a lot of materials. Doctors tend to be focused on patient care rather than caring for the environment. Hopefully, that is starting to change.
Dr. Gupta, a physician practicing hospital medicine in Virginia, had been so bothered by the lack of an environmental policy at the his job that he did something: he developed and a plan to make the hospital system where he works greener and he helped implement it.
Will Allen, former pro basketball player, founded Growing Power to help low-income people in Milwaukee and Chicago grow their own food locally.
He will now have an extra $500,000 to help his efforts.
Hurricane Ike battered Texas, causing untold damage for millions of home-owners in Houston and Galveston. But some people in Chicago had a pretty bad weekend, too.
After raining all day on September 13 and 14, the Windy City became the flooded city. The far-reaching tendrils of the hurricane dumped 9 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Roads and basements became water logged. The Chicago River overflowed in some parts, leading to the evacuation of about 300 homes. Flooding in Northwest Indiana led to the closure of Interstate 90.
If you are an American reading this post, you probably emit 10,000 pounds of carbon ever year into the environment. Would you like to improve that statistic? Then join the power of 10.
This grass-roots organization is based on a simple idea: it encourages individuals to reduce carbon emissions by 2,000 pounds each year and then tell 10 people how they can do the same thing. These 10 people tell ten more, and so on, so the effort expands exponentially.
It’s a bang-up baseball season here in the Windy City. With both the Cubs and the Sox in first place (hopefully my writing this won’t jinx my home teams), everyone is talking about baseball almost as much as we are talking about our favorite son (Obama) and attendance at the ballparks is at capacity. Adding to all the excitement, US Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox is hitting home runs with its recycling effort.
After leaving Ontario last month, we drove to Lake Placid, NY, to spend several days enjoying the lakes and mountains of upstate New York. We looked forward to a little hiking, maybe a few lake swims, but nothing really prepared us for the excitement of totally compostable toilets.
I did not drive at all on Monday.
If you live in New York City, London, Paris, or on Mackinac Island, and you either have access to a great subway system or cars are banned from your small island, going for 24 hours without driving is not a big deal. But here in Chicagoland, despite a decent public transportation system, driving is a way of life. So I decided to spend a day without getting into my car or any other car, and see how I would fare.
Why is it so easy to be green in Canada?
I spent the first night of my summer vacation in a bed-and-breakfast in Toronto with my family. (Yes, I blogged while on vacation. That’s what happens when free wireless is available everywhere and you have obsessive-compulsive disorder.) We drove from Chicago in our Toyota Camry. It’s not exactly a Prius, but while averaging about 30 MPG, we had a smaller carbon footprint than we would if the three of us traveled by plane. We brought most of our own meals and snacks in reusable containers, printed out travel and maps on previously used paper, and reused our water bottles. So we thought we were being green. But a morning walk around Toronto made us feel only light green, at best.
Thursday night was Barack Obama’s night, and when he delivered his magnificent capstone speech, he hit one out of the ballpark with the bases loaded.
But former Vice President Al Gore was on fire.
My husband and I are quite pleased with our brand-new king size mattress. It’s firm, yet comfy, and because we also indulged in some new down pillows, we are sleeping much better these days. But what should we do with the old mattress? I know the mattress delivery company removes it, but I am sure that they just send it to a landfill. I would like to dispose of our [...]
