Green Options

“We need solutions at the speed of business,” says Hunter Lovins, author, speaker and founder of Natural Capital Solutions in the Naturally Successful DVD, produced by Arnold Creek Productions, Inc., known for its award-winning videos on sustainability used by organizations around the world.

Naturally Successful is an expertly assembled compilation of inspiring interviews of the leading visionaries giving a voice to the emerging green ECOnomy and the businesses that are in the business of remaking the world for the better. The release of this video couldn’t be better timed as millions of Americans explore ways to prosper despite the economic downturn.

“Build your business around your calling,” continues Lovins, who like the many leaders featured in the DVD, recognize opportunities for enterprising ecopreneurs to solve the most pressing problems now facing us, turning some profits in the process while achieving a happier, more fulfilling life. “We’re not in a sprint. We’re in a marathon to save the world…What is it that you love to do? How do you make a business of it?” asks Lovins.

To grasp the scale of the sustainability movement afoot and harness ideas to guide your green business, this 78 minute DVD offers insights on what being an ecopreneur is all about with a focus on building a values-driven business, providing meaningful leadership, achieving results beyond profits, serving customers, thinking long-term, seizing opportunities in new and existing markets, creating a thriving business and embracing a new type of commerce that seeks to make the world a better place. Interviews are woven together like a well-made life raft for anyone setting out to launch a green business that thrives with a triple bottom line.

The power of the pen, when used irresponsibly, serves not to illuminate and progress human discourse, but to confuse and stifle it. Christopher Booker’s article does a disservice to climate skeptics and climate activists alike.

Christopher Booker’s article, “The world has never seen such freezing heat,” published yesterday in the UK’s Telegraph, attempts to come across as a shocking exposé of a blunder big enough potentially to bring climate change science to its knees. It falls considerably short. Instead, the writing is simply the latest in a series of posts designed to push the author’s own personal opinion against renewable energy and climate change action. This may be of little surprise as Mr. Booker has previously summed up climate change as “chicanery.”

Unfortunately, the credibility of Mr. Booker’s article as a rational piece of scientific journalism falls apart as early as the first paragraph under the weight of his personal bias. Moreover, the writing is so riddled with logical fallacies that the article actually does an injustice to the “climate skeptics” whose arguments it seeks to support.

In the future, there will be no green building as green building will be the norm. It will be like asking an architect to design a “structurally sound” building. To us and many others that equates to a future no brainer. Until then, with many people unaware of the benefits or even the basics of Green building, then books like Green Building 101: A Basic Guide to Building and Remodeling [...]

Editor’s note: John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist, the authors of Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, are both contributors to sustainablog and other GO Media network blogs. Despite our relationship, I was excited about their new book, and agreed to write a review. I’ll try not to let me relationship with John and Lisa get in the way of a fair and impartial assessment.

Ditch high-paying (and high-stress) corporate careers for a Wisconsin farm house, a more sustainable lifestyle, a portfolio of small businesses, and much less money. Sound idyllic to some… and crazy to others. As I noted in my review of their earlier book, Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life, John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist made the jump from Chicago ad executives to rural bed and breakfast owners… and have never looked back. Their newest book, ECOpreneuring, focuses on how they continue to bring in income while creating a life centered on home, family, and environmental restoration, and provides guidance for others that want to recenter their careers and lifestyles around their environmental values.

Already, you should be able to tell that this is no ordinary business book — in fact, I’m not even sure I’d call it a “business book.” ECOpreneuring contains plenty of advice on starting a small, eco-conscious business, but the authors focus primarily on how entrepreneurial efforts can incorporate values and priorities beyond the bottom line. Lifestyle choices trump profit motives, but neither have to be sacrificed in order to create meaning and income.

Imagine houses with six feet-thick seaweed roofs, deep-nestled and hand-carved cave homes, and pigeon-harboring huts made of mud. Sounds a little unreal, huh? Well, this and more is all vividly documented in Built By Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, a most inspiring bit of natural building eye candy I recently had the fortune of stumbling upon. Built by Hand is a hardcover collection of photographs of traditional buildings of all styles across the globe.

If you weren’t already appalled by the house design atrocity known as the McMansion, Built By Hand will make you pine ever harder for more intimate, natural, sensible, and green home designs that can be found all over the world, still being built by indigenous peoples and sometimes mimicked by enterprising, modern day natural home builders.

Go take a look at the adhesives you use in your crafting. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

Back? Ok, good.

What is the one thing that they probably have in common? Does it say somewhere “use in well ventilated area” or some similar warning? Well, that warning often accompanies many of the glue and adhesive products found on the shelf at the crafting supply store and in crafters’ homes. That warning is there because of the chemicals used in the adhesives. Chemicals that, if inhaled in concentrated amounts, can be bad for you, hence the “well ventilated” part.

EcoGlue is a new white craft glue that claims eco-friendly properties. It contains less than 1% of volatile organic compounds or VOCs, has virtually no hazardous air pollutants, contains no animal derivatives and does not carry a “well ventilated” warning on its label. In fact its packaging is made from 100% recycled content and carries a “non-toxic” stamp.

I got the chance to try out this new glue and ran it through some simple and highly unscientific tests to see if it the eco-friendly label still meant quality adhesive or if it was just some watered down glue.

Last week the editors at Green Options asked me if I wanted to write a review of Woogi World. “Uh, okay, I haven’t written a hatchet piece an ages.” was my unenthusiastic reply.

Here’s the deal in my house. My kids get 30 minutes of media; it can be a TV show or some computer time. I’ll give them longer for a movie when we watch together or an hour or more when they’re playing with pictures or Garage Band, but really, leaving my kids parked in front of the computer on a glorious summer day is not my idea of time well spent.

With all that being said, this review may surprise you.

Editor’s Note: This was a joint effort between Managing Editor Clayton Cornell and Editorial Intern Orion Kubow. Apparently it takes two editors to screw in a lightbulb, er vacuum…

Earlier this month, Eureka was kind enough to send us a review sample of their “green” vacuum: the EnviroVac. Vacuuming isn’t something you’d think of as a real energy efficient, but Eureka’s model does a good job of making the domestic cleaning process a little bit greener.

EnviroVac: GreenWashing or Real Deal?

Here are the major talking points that Eureka says qualifies it as a “green” vacuum:

1. The vacuum’s 8-amp motor uses 33% less energy than the 12-amp motor used in most upright vacuums. (That’s 960 watts per hour on an 8-amp motor, compared to 1,440 watts per hour on a 12 amp motor).
2. If 1/4 of US homes switched to the EviroVac, it would save 6.25 million kilowatt hours of energy per year, which, in terms of CO2 emissions is roughly equivalent to removing 855 cars off the road.

FAST TRACK DETOX DIET: A BOOK REVIEW

One of the more challenging genetic attributes I inherited from my beautiful mother was a tendency to gain weight easily – and NOT lose it quite as easily. I watched her struggle constantly with various diets and nutritional fads. There never was ONE thing that really worked or helped her maintain her ideal weight or health.

I swore I would never ‘diet’ and I didn’t until a few years ago. When we were publishing Relevant Times, I had the privilege of interviewing Ann Louise Gittleman about a new book she had coming out at that time – Super Nutrition for Women. I was quite impressed with her, so when she came out with the Fat Flush Plan a few years ago, despite it’s sort of faddish title, I got the book and it made wonderful sense. It seemed like a highly intelligent, nutritional and scientific approach to healthy eating and weight loss and maintenance.

I had also been suffering from fibromyalgia (or so the doctors told me), and I had always noticed that whenever I did anything to support and cleanse my liver, I felt better. Liver health, being one important element of Gittleman’s Fat Flush Plan. So, for the first time in my life, I embarked on a ‘diet’ and was amazed by the results. Not only did I lose weight, but nearly all the fibromyalgia symptoms disappeared. She was on to something. However, it is not the easiest nutritional regimen to maintain. Some principals I have maintained for at least 4 years, but . . .

I recently came across an online game called “Design Your Dream Home” on the Green Is Universal website. I was shocked by what I found and how bad the game really was. I prefer to focus on the positive aspects of green building, but this strikes me as so misguided that I could not let it pass unremarked.

Whoever designed this game has no understanding of real green building in any meaningful sense. Instead of providing any insight or education about green building, the game reduces design of a green house to nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks. “Choose the climate construction materials and energy sources and see how green you can be.” The oversimplification this presents is a huge disservice to visitors to the site who play the game.

There’s a review of this book that goes by the title “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” and curiosity got the better of me to get to know how I have personally impacted on the future of our planet.

But then it has been around with us since just before Earth Day 1990. A lot of water have since passed under the bridge. Save the forests; there is a website and a rave blog too: 50 Simple Things.

Eco-friendly shopping, for instance, may be fashionable, but critics have argued it won’t reduce global warming. What has been the role of the Green Movement in ecological modernization?

Since the early 1980s, green as a political ideology championing ecological and environmental goals, has given the face of the Green movement a newer look, but not without the usual controversies: global warming, biofuels, or “agro-fuels” in more fluent eco-speak, solar-powered future, etc.