Green Options

How many of the environmental education initiatives that you know of were started by teachers, parents, or non-profit organizations? That’s typical: from artistic approaches to rainwater harvesting to solar boat building, most efforts at teaching kids about environmental issues start with adults. But students often come up with their own programs, too, and the President’s Environmental Youth Awards aims to highlight those efforts that start with schoolkids.

Started in 1971 by the EPA, this awards program “…recognizes young people across America for projects which demonstrate their commitment to the environment.” Awards are given for one project in each of the EPA’s ten regions. After 38 years, the winning projects have run the gamut — everything from peer environmental education to recycling efforts to wetlands restoration. Recent winners have included

The Green Books Project in Lewisville, NC: Student Cory Adkins saw textbooks being thrown away at his school, and started his program to sell these books… and use the funds generated to support recycling in his community.

Have trouble getting up early on Saturday morning to get to the farmers market? Yeah, me too. And while more supermarkets are featuring more selections of local food on their shelves and in their stalls, there’s nothing quite like that straight-from-the-farm produce. What’s a late sleeper to do?

A new web service, Local Dirt, is out to make the connection between the local farmer and buyer more convenient. Say you’re looking for local peaches during the season. Local Dirt’s interface allows you to set search criteria based on location, product, and even venue (if you choose), and find a farmer from whom you can buy online. Sleep in on Saturday, get to the market late, and your peaches are still there… the service provides you with a purchase order to take to the vendor. Some of the farmers may even deliver…

Picture a bowling alley, and you likely come up with images of tacky shoes, greasy food, and lots and lots of beer bottles. Energy efficiency, reuse and recycling, and local food probably don’t come to mind at all — we’re talking about The Big Lebowski, not Garbage Warrior. Brooklyn Bowl, which opened in July in New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood, is out to change those associations, though. On Tuesday, the bowling center, music venue, and restaurant got a boost in those efforts from the U.S. Green Building Council, which awarded Brooklyn Bowl LEED certification.

So, what’s does it take to get a bowling alley certified as a green building?
Bamboo lanes? Organic cotton bowling shirts? Low-VOC antiseptic spray for the rented shoes? Nope… Brooklyn Bowl took practical steps to create a chic entertainment venue with a low impact.

Editor’s note: This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally-friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on the Eco-Libris website.

Thinking about giving gardening a try? While the traditional growing season has ended in most parts of the US for this year, it’s not too early to start planning for next Spring. You may want to check out books on starting a backyard garden, and there are plenty of them out there. You may also want to find some of the books that offer suggestions and recipes for the produce you grow. And, if you need encouragement to grow organically, there are still more books on that subject.

If you want a book that covers all three of those areas, though, your choices get much more limited. Janette Haase’s From Seed to Table: A Practical Guide to Eating and Growing Green* not only provides readers with gardening instructions and tips, recipes and menus, and essays on the environmental issues surrounding agriculture and food production, but does so in a month-by-month structure that gives you the information you need when you need it.

Ray Anderson’s epiphany about his own role in environmental destruction after reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce has taken on mythic status in the fifteen years since. The “spear in the chest moment” he experienced transformed Anderson into a leader in sustainable thought and practice within American industry, and his company, Interface, Inc. (which manufacture modular floor covering primarily for business and institutional customers) is now recognized as a model of transformation. Named a “Hero of the Planet” by Time magazine in 2007, Anderson is constantly sought out for speeches, interviews, and even documentary film appearances (THE CORPORATION, and the new SO RIGHT SO SMART)

In September, Anderson (with Robin White) published his second book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Planet - Doing Business by Respecting the Earth. This wide-ranging work not only tells Interface’s story in detail, but also provides a blueprint for how a large, well-established company can literally reinvent itself as both a profitable enterprise and a business that learns to operate in harmony with natural systems.

The word “confessions” in the title is very appropriate: Anderson is very frank about Interface’s successes and setbacks in its climb up “Mt. Sustainability” (a phrase he coined). He also discusses the efforts of other companies, and makes bold, and hopeful, cases for environmental and social responsibility as pillars of successful business strategy in the 21st century. The book is an engaging and thoughtful read for business people, environmental activists, and consumers concerned about the impact of industry on the planet’s future.

Buying your first home is both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. Imagine the heightening of both of those emotions if you choose to 1) buy an older house full of character, and 2) jump right into green updates and renovations upon purchase. You’ll then have a good sense of what journalist, professor, and good friend of sustainablog Simran Sethi is going through right now… she recently purchased an 84-year-old home in her adopted home town of Lawrence, KS. Unlike the rest of us, though, Simran’s inviting the world in to watch the process of greening her new house: on Monday, she posted the first entry on a new blog at Oprah.com.

Home renovation isn’t a task for the feint of heart, and Simran readily admits that her own hands-on experience is limited:

Industrial hemp may be one of the most versatile and environmentally benign crops out there, but because of its relationship to marijuana, the cultivation of this crop has been banned in the United States since the late thirties. Last week, a group of farmers, along with David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, staged a protest in front of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, DC, and were promptly arrested for planting hemp seeds on the agency’s front lawn.

What were you thinking about on September 16, 2008? Green business ideas probably weren’t at the top of the list… September 15 was the day that Lehman Brothers went belly up, and you were probably more focused on your portfolio and savings. As such, Tim Sanders’ book Saving the World at Work (released on - you guessed it - September 16) got buried under talk of a second Great Depression.

Sanders and publisher Doubleday decided to give the book another go, and relaunched it on September 16th of this year. I’m glad they did: while the title led me to believe I was going to be reading another “how to” book on greening the workplace (which is not a bad thing), Sanders goes well beyond tips on saving paper and electricity. There are ideas for “greening” a company, but Sanders contextualizes these action steps within an examination of the “triple bottom line,” and a broader “Responsibility Revolution”: “…a broad-based movement of people and companies taking a disruptive approach to making a difference - contributing to our quality of life, locally and globally, for current and future generations.”

When dermatologist June Irwin first stood up in 1985 to speak at a Hudson, Quebec, town council meeting about the potential link between synthetic lawn pesticide and herbicide use and human and animal illnesses, she was written off as a flake. Irwin persisted, though, attending “every single town meeting in Hudson for six consecutive years - each time reading aloud a different letter with new observations and facts.” Eventually, she got her message across, and Hudson (population 5000) became the first town in North America to ban the use of these chemicals.

Do you remember RecycleBank, the Philadelphia-based company that rewarded customers for recycling? I thought that was a great idea, and I’ve got a similar response to Earth Aid’s new rewards program for energy savings. Rolled out earlier this month in Washington, DC, Earth Aid offers a program to track your energy use and savings, and then to “pay” you for those savings through reward points that can be redeemed at partner companies.

In its press release for the launch of the rewards program, the company claims that its program “…creates a virtuous circle of local businesses providing incentives for households to save energy, and households re-circulating their savings on their utility bills into local businesses - benefiting both the local environment and the local economy.” All of this is on top of money actually saved by consumers cutting their energy use…