Green Options

I’m coming to the conclusion pretty fast that just about every hotel will eventually be walking the talk when it comes to going green – though some are walking slowly while others are galloping as if there isn’t a minute to waste. While ecotourism continues to grow internationally, more American companies are grasping that going green can save some green too, which is also a point I make in ECOpreneuring.

A recent trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (to enter a few food items in our Wisconsin State Fair) found my family and I bedding down at the Hotel Metro, a boutique, high-rise luxury 63 room hotel that features numerous green aspects, from energy efficient lighting to a rooftop hot tub spa kept clean by using a salt-water system, rather than chlorine. Metro Hotel is the first Milwaukee hotel to be certified by Travel Green Wisconsin, racking up 67 points in total.

According to Richard Florida in his latest book, Who’s Your City?, the average American moves every seven years. “More than 40 million people relocate each year; 15 million make significant moves of more than 50 or 100 miles,” writes Florida. That’s a lot of carboard boxes, time and energy.

The implications for such a footloose society is further complicated by a staggering statistic: a roughly 50 percent divorce rate nationally, leading to multiple homes for what was once a single family home. Of course, second home ownership was also on the rise before the financial meltdown, increasing by 22 percent between 1995 and 2005, according to the Harvard University’s Joint Center on Housing Studies. Now we have two (or more) homes (to fill with stuff) only to later sell them, on average, every seven years.

Then when we age, we’re left with the quagmire of what to do with all our accumulated stuff. The solution for many, of course, is to jam it into self-storage lockers. Over the past two decades, self-storage has emerged as a $20 billion industry and comprises over 52,000 facilities, according to the Self Storage Association. In California, many people park their vehicles in their driveway or on the street not because of their famously great weather (no city snow removal), but because their garages are packed full of more stuff.

Florida points out that there are several key trends emerging:

Anyone who travels will eventually find themselves returning home with a hotel card key (or two), despite our well-intentioned interest to remember to leave it in the room or drop it by the front desk upon check out. Most are made of petroleum-based plastic.

But not the Green Earth Agri Card Keys made by USFI GreenWorks. It’s made of a durable, but completely biodegradable corn-based (or plant based) plastic, providing the same appearance and performance, but without the chemicals and waste. The product does, however, require industrial composting and not the backyard variety. Printing on the cards employs soy-based inks. The card is meant to be reusable, not to just be thrown away after one use. However, truth be told, millions of hotel card keys never find their way back to the front desk for reprogramming.  According to some in the industry, fewer than fifty percent are returned.  Some key cards get worn out and have to be replaced.

As I write about in ECOpreneuring, green businesses do not want to do less harm to the environment. They want to create products or services and operate in ways that make the world a better place. In much the same way as T.S. Designs re-invented the concept of printing on t-shirts using a completely ecologically safe process, USFI GreenWorks reinvented the form the cards take by creating the cards using plant-based plastics.  To the extend we can, we need to support these companies and push them to continue to innovate.

We’ve all heard of The Story of Stuff. But The Story of Sustainability?

This past weekend, we had the pleasure of hosting Dennis Paige, founder of Swiftdeer-Paige, at Inn Serendipity to share a program on storytelling with our community of friends and family. Awarded the 2008 Grassroots Conservation Leadership Award from the Audubon-Chicago Region and the Chicago Wilderness Habitat Project, Paige has been entertaining and teaching thousands of people about the most pressing ecological issues of our times while inspiring a more balanced relationship with the web of life through the craft of storytelling. He’s been at it since 1989.
Paige’s hour-long program was a reminder of how far we still need to go on our journey of creating a “Story of Sustainability” that most American’s can embrace, not just a few. Obviously, the present American story of never-ending growth, executive bonuses, consumer-based economy, and more jobs is not compatible with the long term sustainability of a finite planet – especially if you recognize that despite our technological know-how, two thirds of the planet’s human inhabitants still cannot drink a glass of safe water, for example.

Elements of a Great Story

According to Paige, the elements of a great story are imagination, believability and content. Our group of local friends, bed & breakfast guests and family members circled around Paige as he orchestrated various activities to help our group, who ranged in ages from 4 to 80, become better storytellers and understand this ancient art and craft of storytelling. In terms of the content, it’s all about the problem, resolution and moral of the story.

Okay.  So, the shopping spree may be over.  It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or listen to a TV station that doesn’t have a story about it.  Meanwhile, advertisers keep putting things on sale to get us spending again.  However, millions of Americans are waking up with a debt-hangover and have adopted a new mantra: living within our means.  For the sustainability of our planet, let’s hope it lasts.

Whether its because of the recession, high energy prices, an awareness of the trash building up in our landfills or oceans, or because we’re without a job or forced to go on regular “furcations” (furlow based, unpaid vacations) — the equivalent of a pay demotion — many Americans are adopting a Fruglity is Freedom lifestyle that remarkably similar to a sustainable lifestyle.  It’s beginning to change what we value and how we place value on values.

Here’s a few of the Frugality Rules:

•  Paying off credit debt and possibly cutting up credit cards (after paying them off)

Once upon a time, most Americans never had credit cards — even one.  Those who did, had a fixed interest rate.  But a lot has changed, with plastic being the method of preference for millions of Americans, most of whom have more than one credit card.  All the cards these days have variable rates and all sorts of fees, too.  So, when the Fed comes around to raise interest rates to head off inflation, get ready to pay more for what you bought on credit.

Most of us have heard about the slow food movement where we savor the taste of a place, know our farmers and sip the wine slowly, not gulp down a beer.
But what about Slow Money?

In Woody Tasch’s visionary book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green, 2008), he breaks from the grow-big-and-go-global-fast mode of industrial capitalism and industrial agriculture by providing a remarkable synthesis of the writings, ideas and practices from such authorities on the subject of soil, agriculture, community and commerce as Wendell Berry, Eliot Coleman, Gene Logsdon, Gary Snyder, E.F. Schumacher, Paul Hawken and David Suzuki – calling for and sharing examples of a new economy whereby capitalism creates and sustains life, not destroys it.

Tasch’s observation: “As it circulates the globe with ever accelerating speed, money is sucking the oxygen out of the air, the fertility out of the soil and the culture out of local communities.”

“In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations,” continues Tasch. “What is, in the farmer’s field, a struggle between economics and ecology becomes, in the investor’s mind, a struggle between quantity and quality, portfolios and possibilities, numbers and words.” Tasch goes on to document the widespread loss of topsoil and erosion of fertile land, noting that roughly a third of all farmland in the world has been degraded since World War II. “There is another kind of erosion at work here: erosion of social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our place in the scheme of things.”

Expertly woven together like the rich tapestry of biological life abundant in a mere teaspoon of soil, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money tugs at our yearning to be connected to the land, to the soil and to the great food it can provide. It also explores our relationship to money and all the things it can, and cannot, buy.

This past July 4th some friends and I headed south from our farm to visit the new EcoGrove I Wind Farm in Lena, Illinois, located in Stephenson County (in the northwestern part of the state).

The creation of the EcoGrove I Wind Farm was precipitated by the State of Illinois adopting a Renewable Energy Standard that required the state to generate at least 25 percent of its power from renewable energy sources by 2025. Cleaner air, using an abundant and renewable energy source, and providing various community benefits make wind farm development likely to continue, at least until more Americans change our energy-intensive ways.  From my perspective, however, energy independence is more about breaking free from our fossil fuel addictions to coal, natural gas and oil rather than simply securing domestic sources of energy that are polluting and/or add more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The $200 million EcoGrove I Wind Farm is owned and operated by the sustainability-focused business Acciona Energy North America; its parent company is Acciona S.A., headquartered in Spain. EcoEnergy LLC and The Morse Group managed various aspects of the planning, mapping, permitting, engineering and interconnections for the project.

The EcoGrove 1 Project comprises 67 turbines spread across about eight thousand acres to create a 100 megawatt (MW) wind farm capable of powering over 25,000 homes. Thirty of the 67 Acciona turbines were manufactured in West Branch, Iowa, with the rest coming from Spain. The energy produced is sold to ComEd (Exelon Corporation) which then directs the energy where needed. An additional two phases are planned.

“The upper Midwest has tremendous wind energy potential and EcoGrove is one great step toward harnessing that potential.” said Kimberly L. Smith, Vice President Construction and O&M Services, Acciona Energy North America.
Below are of the few of the benefits in more detail, though our group was blown away by their sleek design of the blades and the way they towered over the emerging cornfields in early summer.

As my wife and I write about in ECOpreneuring, if good health is important – and it should be for everyone – then a regular exercise routine along with eating right becomes a feature in our sustainable lifestyle, whether you walk around the block, do yoga or work out three times a week at a local YMCA like we do.  Or go for a hike in the woods instead of watching more TV.

Remember the last time you had the flu or a lingering cold? Get much done? When we’re healthy, we take our good health for granted. Despite what our politicians and healthcare providers might suggest, good healthcare does not necessarily provide good health. Our lifestyle and daily habits contribute to feeling great just about every day of the year.

Some companies provide a good healthcare plan when it comes to physician access and medical coverage. But what does that matter when the stress-filled, unhealthy environment in a cubicle – with no access to the outdoors and fresh air – ends up giving us poor health? The American healthcare system is great – perhaps the best in the world – if we crashed in our car. It’s designed for treatment, not prevention. It’s a healthcare system based on the poor health of relatively well-off people who can pay (by credit or otherwise) for the services it provides.

Given all the debate on a national healthcare plan offered by the United States, below are a few promising trends many people are discovering.

Like millions of Americans, we’re celebrating July 4th, Independence Day.

However, we’re celebrating this national holiday by focusing on the many aspects of our life that, in various ways, have led us to quite a different vision for a sustainable tomorrow – complete with local, renewable energy and lots of delicious meals harvested within ten miles of where we live – if not from our own kitchen garden.  Sometimes we even celebrate July 4th with a rainbow.

Here’s how our Independence Day is different — and yours can be too:

•  Be energy independent by generating all our power with renewable energy systems.
For a vast portion of the United States, there is enough solar and wind energy to completely meet our needs right where we live.  True, adopting renewable energy will require an investment either personally or for your business if you work from home.  But with present Federal tax credits and many state incentives, the time couldn’t be better.  We completely power our Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast and Farm with solar electric and wind turbine systems.  In fact, we overproduce renewable energy to the tune of about 4,000 kWhs (kilowatt hours) a year.  We share the surplus with our neighbors.

There’s an electric car revolution underway in sleepy Browntown, Wisconsin, population 252.

More than six Sebring-Vanguard CitiCars, many zipping down the country roads in southwestern Wisconsin, are registered to owners in this small town – most to Phil Welty and one to myself.  They come in red, yellow and several other colors and look like a wedge of cheese, but they’re all completely powered by electric motors.  It’s estimated that as few as 600 CitiCars are still on the road in the U.S. with less than 3,000 manufactured by Sebring-Vanguard between 1974 and 1976 during the last energy crisis.

“When I first saw the CitiCars back in the 1970s, it was the only all-electric car on the market,” recalls Phil Welty,  “The same problem exists today as in the 1970s, like high fuel prices and our marriage to foreign oil.  I’ve always wanted to bring one back from the junkyard and restore it to fully operable condition.”  Not content with just one, he has two CitiCars on the road, using his other cars for parts.