Green Options

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:

Editor’s note: We’ve done quite a bit of republishing lately here at sustainablog.  I’m grateful to all of those who have agreed to let us use their content, and wanted to add one more to the mix: Simran Sethi’s “post-Earth Day manifesto” from last week’s Huffington Post.

“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Gwendolyn Brooks

Dave Lowenstein and Gwendolyn Brooks hooked me. Just over two years ago, I was contemplating my stay in Lawrence, Kansas and sorting out future plans. The circumstances that brought me there weren’t going to keep me there. All my work was in New York and Los Angeles. I had no compelling reason to stay. Then I walked by a mural.

The mural, replete with brilliant images of incredible African-American artists connected to Kansas, is the backdrop for Lawrence’s Saturday Farmers’ Market. But that particular Sunday was scorching hot and downtown was a ghost town. The one car parked in front of the colorful wall at 9th and New Hampshire featured a bumper sticker demanding a living wage for Lawrence. I got up close to the words. I took a photo of the bumper sticker. In that sticky, solitary, epiphanic moment, everything became clear. I wanted to stay in this small town in a flat state, because of our magnitude and bond.

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post Here’s a peek at pork.

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

Simran Sethi and Sarah Smarsh are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things.They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Here’s the low-down on how we’re quenching our thirst.

We’ve been seduced by the beverage industry into believing only they can quench our thirst with colored, caffeinated, vitaminized, electrolyted water. We have become so parched that we can’t walk down the street without toting a single-use plastic bottle touting the magical effects of its water source.

Apparently, Kabbalah Water will heal us and Bling Water will define us. At the Bling H20 website, Bling Water “creator” Kevin Boyd describes noticing on Hollywood studio lots that “you could tell a lot about a person by the bottled water they carried.” First of all, didn’t god create water? Secondly, the water is bottled in Dandridge, Tennessee - since when is Southern Tennessee a spring of L.A. status? Yes, Dandrige’s water ranks very highly on EPA’s water quality index, but why are we spending so much money ($40 for Bling’s “Go Green” 750ml bottle) on cross-continental water instead of cleaning up our local waterways? Tinseltown’s water is so polluted with run-off and industrial contamination that perhaps water by way of Tennessee does make sense.

Here’s what the less blingy among us do:

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Here’s a sneak peek on sneakers.

With ye olde cobbler long dead (re-soling Jesus’s Birkenstocks in forgotten profession heaven) and cheap production methods shortening the lives of shoes, Americans have gotten into the habit of pitching worn out (or simply undesired) kicks and buying new ones. Shoe-shopping has become something of a fetish, a joke, an emblem of the spoiled housewife who fills her emotional void with Italian suede.

We could go into Manolos, but we’ll focus here on sporty treads, not just to stay on-topic but because they account for a third of the U.S. shoes market.

The production of athletic shoes is infamously shady, from a human rights perspective. Historically, manufacturing giants such as Nike have followed cheap labor, exploiting workers in developing countries so that they might enjoy enormous profit margins. (Nike has really turned itself around in recent years, however, and is now one of the greener players on the field.)

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post.

Who doesn’t feel better after a yoga class? Yoga is the union of the body, mind and spirit.It stabilizes the nervous system, decreases blood pressure, increases flexibility and endurance, and opens you up in ways that you may not have imagined.

Simran used to be a yoga teacher. She loves the practice even though she hasn’t spent much time on her mat lately. (“Yoga on the inside, baby!”) Sarah gets her yoga on every week and knows it does her body good.

But, as any student knows, the real practice starts when you walk out the door. That’s also where the rubber hits the road and your practice takes its toll on the environment.

Oh brother, that again? Yes, my dear yogin, that.

Simran Sethi and Sarah Smarsh are writing a series on the surprising journeys of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Here’s a sneak peek at the desk you threw away.

How can a mahogany desk, made of slow-growing hard wood plundered from the Amazon, be eco-friendly?

When it’s re-used.

Often, the greenest consumer route is not buying new products made with Earth-friendly methods but rather scoring used products made with traditional, possibly heinous methods. Reduce, reuse, then recycle.

This rule of thumb certainly applies to office furniture. Unlike energy-consuming products such as appliances, furniture is somewhat innocuous to the environment during that period between factory and landfill known as “in use.” The impacts on indoor air quality, however, are like Britney: Not that innocent.

As I mentioned last week, I headed over to Kansas City last Thursday to attend the fundraiser for Greensburg GreenTown, a non-profit supporting Greensburg, Kansas’ efforts to rebuild green after a tornado leveled the town last May. Despite ugly weather, the ballroom at the Scarritt Building was packed for both the world premiere of the Sundance Channel’s web series The Good Fight, and a panel discussion with Greentown director Daniel Wallach, and BNIM Architects‘ urban planner Stephen Hardy. Among the crowd were a number of Greensburg residents, and the event, while informative and eye-opening, served largely as a celebration of these people’s tenacity and foresight in choosing to rebuild their community with an eye towards a future of economic, cultural and environmental sustainability.

First up was Simran Sethi of Sundance’s The Green, who’s become a passionate advocate for Greensburg’s resurgence. In introducing the first five episodes of The Good Fight (which all focus on Greensburg), she not only lauded the people who she’s come to know in making the “webisodes,” but also noted that the town is hardly a hotbed of radical environmentalism: Greensburg was a town of 1400 people when the tornado struck, and, like many mid-American small communities, had been in decline for several decades. The population had shrunk, the per capita income was below the Kansas average, and young Greensburgians were generally looking for a way out. She heard plenty of disdainful comments about “treehuggers,” and several people had told her that they just didn’t believe global warming is a reality.

To follow up on Shirley’s post about The Good Fight… next week, the Kansas City chapter of AIGA will hold a fundraiser for Greensburg, Kansas’ efforts to rebuild (and rebuild green at that). According to the organization’s web site:

Simran Sethi, host of the Sundance Channel’s The Green will moderate a panel on the green redesign of tornado devastated Greensburg, KS. The green salon will feature BNIM Architects’ urban planner, Stephen Hardy and Greentown director, Daniel Wallach. The Sundance Channel will screen segments from The Good Fight Series.

Calling all EcoLocalizers: if you’ve been working to solve an environmental problem in your part of the U.S., The Sundance Channel wants to hear from you.

Starting on Earth Day (Tuesday, April 22), Sundance will present a new Web series called The Good Fight. Hosted by Indian-born activist, author and TV producer Simran Sethi, the online series is aimed at building awareness of the environmental justice movement and at highlighting local heroes in various environmental causes.

The devastation you see above is what’s left of Greensburg, Kansas, after one of the largest tornadoes in history ravaged the town of 1,500 the evening of May 4, 2007. The EF5 twister claimed at least 11 lives in Greensburg, and injured 60 or more.

Simran Sethi, award-winning environmental journalist featured on the Sundance Channel and sundancechannel.com, is documenting Greensburg’s recovery as a “Green City” with her new series The Good Fight. [...]