Green Options

Exciting news from here in the Heartland: Six Midwestern governors and a Canadian premier have signed a climate change agreement that will increase renewable energy use, increase energy efficiency, and cut global warming emissions.

Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Wisconsin, and the Canadian province of Manitoba all signed onto the agreement at the Midwestern Governor’s Association (MGA) Energy Summit that was held in Milwaukee, WI earlier this month. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle (D) and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) co-chaired the summit. The governors of Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota signed on as observers to the process but did not commit to the accord.

So I’ve been snooping around the countless garden blogs that are out there and saw one about Xeriscaping—a term I thought had died about 20 years ago. Xeri—Greek word root meaning dry (same for Xerox, ‘cause they use dry toner to print). The article took the usual “10 tips” approach, and one had to do with “helping your soil.” Readers were encouraged to dump lots and lots of organic material into their beds to create a rich medium for their [...]

The best thing that can happen to your garden sounds a little like a zombie movie. I’m talking about little babies eating grown-ups. As they say in Hollywood, here’s the story treatment. Here in Santa Barbara, CA we’re so close to Hollywood, I’ll give it my best shot. And with the writers’ strike, maybe I can hone my craft…

Just before dawn, as an waning moon sets over the gnarled and twisted trees, a barely visible white oval, perched on a [...]

How many of you watered your lawn this week? Come on, raise your hands, don’t be shy. Good.

Bearing in mind that I’m writing from southern California, here’s your next question. If the average annual rainfall in Santa Barbara is between 18 and 21 inches, and we only received 6 this year, and a chicken gets on a train in Miami heading north at 60 mph into a 6 mph headwind, how long will it take to water your lawn [...]

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Wildfires aren’t usually on my radar, because I don’t live in a region that is much susceptible to them. But, in the past couple of weeks, everyone has become more aware of them. They have been widely across the news because of the number of serious wildfires in southern California recently. At the same time, recent news coverage has also looked at drought conditions which are being felt in Georgia

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Renewable energy is big, big, big: Josh just wrote about the world’s largest wind farm possibly going up in South Dakota (yahoo!), California could see the world’s largest solar power plant, and now Singapore is in the foray with landing the largest solar manufacturing facility the world’s ever seen.

A Norwegian company called Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) will build the complex, which will be completed in different stages to incorporate wafer,

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Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak may be the first mayor in the nation to drive a plug-in hybrid vehicle as his official city car.

Since he was first elected in 2002, Mayor Rybak’s official car has been a Toyota Prius. But the dramatically superior gas mileage of a plug-in hybrid vehicle prompted him to make the switch: he had his hybrid converted to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, from which he expects to get

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Sustainability is making its way into mainstream periodicals. It seems like almost every magazine in the past year has featured a "green" issue, some credible, some not. My friend just gave me the green issue of a magazine targeted at the marketing industry. So it’s no surprise that Edutopia, an education magazine for teachers and administrators published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, used sustainability as a theme for their

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Depending on whom you ask, emissions from air travel make up 2-6 percent of the planet’s total CO2 emissions (as a whole, the transportation sector makes up about a quarter of those emissions). But airlines in particular have been getting a bad rap among some in the environmental community because of it, and a recent conference of European airline industries debated how to brighten their image.

One British strategic communications firm argued that the airline

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For the first time ever, a U.S. regulatory agency denied a coal plant permit solely on the basis of its carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a main contributor to global warming.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) denied permits to two large, 700-megawatt plants proposed by Sunflower Electric Power. The plants would have cost about $3.6 billion and spewed 11 million tons of CO2 into the air each year. That’s almost

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recently, my husband and i purchased a man-powered lawn mower from Sunlawn…and it is the best thing we’ve spent our money on!  this mower not only keeps our yard looking great, but it is safe for my family & the environment because it is battery-operated & there is no harmful gas emission….as a bonus, it is quiet, so our neighbors appreciate it when we do weekend morning yard work!…this is a great product that everyone should look in to.