Green Options

Henry’s Farm, a local organic farm that brings a wide range of produce every week to my local farmer’s market, stirred the pot a bit lately when they asked shoppers to byob, or pay $0.25 for a biodegradable bag to tote their produce home.  BYOB?  It stands for Bring Your Own Bag.

It’s summer, and you are sitting outside on the Great Lawn of Central Park, listening to a concert in New York City.  You are surrounded by friends, you are enjoying a delicious picnic, and the music is great.  The only way to improve this event would be to devise a smarter way for you and the thousands of other people at the concert to dispose of the plastic cups they are using to drink beer, soda, and water.

Enter Emery Goossens and Evan Eichorn, two New York Univeristy college students. 

I admit, I am not an extreme recycler.  But I am trying to recycle more and encourage others to do the same.  It just takes a little creativity.

A few weeks ago, I helped my 9-year-old daughter host a lemonade stand to raise money for her teen-age baby sitter’s annual service trip to Costa Rica.  We sold lemonade and home-made rice crispy treats.  The recycling angle?  We asked everyone to give us back their plastic cup, and I brought them home, rinsed them out, and added them to my recycling pile.  So Sara (my daughter’s baby sitter) will head off to Costa Rica to help low-income women and children with a slightly smaller carbon footprint.

If you drive an SUV, the easiest way to cut your carbon footprint drastically is pretty clear: ditch the gas-guzzling monster.  But what do you do with a large car you no longer want?  Tune in to onefewer.com starting today, to find out.

Ryan Mickle spent $60,000 on his Range Rover Sport in 2006.  He loved driving it to work or to go hiking with friends.  But since moving to San Francisco recently, he finds his fossil fuel-emitting sidekick to be more of an albatross than a positive force in his life.  He could sell it, but that would not take the mean machine out of existence, just pass it on to someone else who would then assume Ryan’s carbon footprint.  Pushing it off a cliff seemed a little drastic (and sort of illegal).  Ryan created onefewer.com to spread the word about his SUV, now up for adoption, and ask readers:  what is the most Earth-friendly way for me to part company with this mechanical mistake?

As I mentioned in a previous post, more and more urban dwellers are growing their own produce.  As fuel prices rise, inflation sets in, and corn becomes scarce, starting and expanding a home garden becomes more than just a fun past-time; it offers an opportunity for food security.  Here’s how Pamela Price of Texas describes her garden:

A few months ago, I watched some members of my community prepare a garden in the alley behind their house. As of mid-July, they have created a veritable produce stand as raspberries, Swiss chard, peppers, and cucumbers are flourishing. Dinner, anyone?

We do. 

In the Great Lakes region that includes the upper Midwest and parts of southern Canada, we have the largest fresh water system on earth.  Did you want to start siphoning off our water and selling it to China?  Not so fast…

I am still waiting to hear back from a spokeswoman at the USDA to find out the answer to the question I posed last week: who is in charge of protecting us from crops affected by flood water? In the meantime, I got an alert from the Centers for Disease Control about contaminated water in Iowa.  I can tell you, dear reader, that while you may not want to eat food grown along flooded riverbeds, you most definitely do not want to walk in that water, particularly if you have open sores or cuts on your feet and legs.  Exposing a sore on your skin to contaminated water puts you at risk for a nasty infection.

Farming near a river bed is a great idea until it floods.  Soil near riverbeds tends to be more fertile, producing more abundant crops.  But when the river beds flood and drench contiguous farm land, the water can drag unwanted contaminants to the farmland, exposing health risks to anyone eating the crops from the flooded land.  What kinds of contaminants?  Anything in the flooded water: machine oil, sewage, garbage, medical waste, manure.

It’s not even summer on the calendar yet, and the temperature has already topped 100 degrees on several occasions in New York City. According to the Centers for Disease Control, global warming leads to more heat emergency days. In addition to the discomfort, increased need for air conditioning that strains the electrical grid in any region (remember the blackout of 2003?) and generalized lassitude that a lot of really hot days strung together brings, why are excess heat emergency days a big deal? For one simple public health reason: more people die.