Green Options

State Joins North Dakota in Seeking Permission from Feds to Grow Hemp

The Hemp for Vermont Bill was allowed to become law by Governor Jim Hughes on May 29th, without his signature. The bill overwhelmingly passed both the House and Senate several months ago, setting the stage for Vermont’s entrance into the industrial hemp arena.The non-profit advocacy organization Vote Hemp made the announcement, saying the new law regulates growth of industrial hemp by Vermont farmers. The interest in Vermont is for using hemp in food products and bedding for some of the state’s 140,000 cows.

If you’ve read any of my submissions about hemp, you know I’m a staunch supporter of legalizing industrial hemp in this country.

It has many uses, but I’d never thought of decorative until seeing the story about the “Pastie Lady”. You want to publicize hemp and other natural resources, take a cue from 32 year old Jennifer Moss of Ojai, California.

That’s her on the left, decked out in a g-string, skirt and pasties, all made of hemp. Now, who could turn down a better reason for letting our farmers grow hemp, and establishing an infrastructure to produce such interesting clothing items?

Q: Some of my friends don’t seem to care as much about the environment as I do. How can get them to care?

A: I say stuff their tailpipes with potatoes and look menacingly at them. No, I’m only kidding. Your friends are probably really great people, and there are lots of great ways to encourage them to do well by the environment. It can even be fun.

Let’s imagine your neighbor and friend, Joe, has

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If you're a regular reader of Green Options (or even if you're not), it should be obvious that we're committed to providing you with a wide range of information and ideas on "greening the good life." We also want to make sure that we're giving you the information that will benefit you the most, so we've created a couple of ways that you can let us know what matters to you.

First, we're going to

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One of the toughest times of day to really kick the processed, chemical laden food habit is snack time.

Getting a craving for a snack midway through the afternoon can inevitably lead to buying some utterly disgusted product from Frito-Lay or Mars. Even those “natural” chips or organic cookies you got down at the co-op tend to have a bunch of unpronounceable ingredients listed on the package.

One way to avoid this is coming

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OK, so this one’s kind of a no-brainer, but it’s not something that people necessarily intuit on their own. For years, I proclaimed myself a dedicated environmentalist, and yet… every time allergy season rolled around, I would go out and purchase box upon box of “Ultra” tissues, or “lotioned” tissues, or “Super” tissues. All made from trees and going straight into the trash.

As much as I may try to simplify my life, I am fully aware that I will never be able to avoid deadlines, rushed meals, and the plain old mischigas of modern life. But so often it is these hectic evenings running from work to dinner to a Town Council meeting or crazed mornings trying to get in a run before the dentist appointment that cause me to slip up and eat something that

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Last week, in an effort to simplify my alcohol supply chain, a friend and I decided to try our hands at homebrewing beer. Given that there are very few (read: one) microbreweries out here in the California desert, most of my beer has to travel quite a long ways to reach me. Cutting down on carbon output from transportation is one of my motivating factors in homebrewing. In addition, it allows me

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Plastic shopping bags have become the bane of my existence. They are ubiquitous, everywhere you look. My work takes me far out into the desert, away from towns and people, and plastic shopping bags are far and away the most common source of trash. I've even seen cactus wren and packrats incorporating them into their nests! This madness must end!

Every morning over half of America wakes up to a cup of coffee. And most of us who drink coffee every day, we play it off like it’s no big deal. “I’m not addicted, I swear!” we claim very indignantly, offended at the thought of someone accusing us of such a thing. And yet every morning, without fail, we will stop at nothing until we get a cup of coffee into us.

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For years the idea of a traditionally dressed American has been in jeans and a t-shirt, all decked out in traditionally produced cotton. Cotton is the ubiquitous American (really, world-wide) clothing fiber, and like most things that we consume with reckless abandon, there are many quite serious problems associated with it. In particular, pesticides. The stats that are thrown around are that 10% of the world’s herbicides and 25% of

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