Water Coolers: Jonathan with a tip to save energy around the water cooler
Water coolers/heaters are ubiquitous in offices around the world. Nearly all of them are left on all night long when there's no point in keeping the hot water hot and the cold water cold. Jonathan explains that he uses an automatic power timer to save energy and reduce cost.
Fmr. Governor of VT, Madeleine Kunin Interviewed on KSRO
Fmr. Governor Madeleine M. Kunin interviewed about her book, Pearls, Politics, and Power on KRSO Morning News with David Wesley Page and Curtiss Kim
Wait until hot food has cooled down before putting it into the refrigerator.
Keep fridges and freezers well away from heat sources such as ovens, dishwashers, and washing machines, and out of direct sunlight. Try to keep your fridge and freezer full; they will use less
electricity. Refrigerators and freezers are never turned off and in an average home they are responsible for about one third of the total electricity bill.
Brown University, Smith-Buonanno Hall, 95 Cushing St., Providence RI
Elizabeth Henderson will speak at 7 pm on January 16th at Brown University, sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Rhode Island (NOFA-RI). Call (401) 884-5118 to learn more.
Worcester Vocational Technical High School, Worcester MA
Eliot Coleman will deliver the keynote speech at the annual winter conference of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Massachusetts (NOFA-Mass) on January 17th, 2009. Visit the NOFA-Mass website for more information.
Asilomar Conference Center, 800 Asilomar Avenue, Pacific Grove CA 93950
Woody Tasch will give both a plenary speech and a workshop on the topic of Slow Money at the Ecological Farming Association's annual conference in Pacific Grove, CA on Wednesday, January 21st at 8:00 pm and Friday, January 23rd from 2:00-3:30 pm, respectively. Visit the weblink above to learn more about the conference.
Asilomar Conference Center, 800 Asilomar Ave., Pacific Grove CA 93950
Gary Nabhan will give a workshop presentation on his book, Renewing America's Food Traditions, at the Ecological Farming Association's annual conference on Thursday, January 22nd at 4 pm. Visit the weblink above for a complete schedule and further information.
Woody Tasch will discuss his book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, at Nextspace in Santa Cruz, sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz, on January 22nd at 6:30 pm. Call 831-420-0710 to learn more.
It's sounding as though legislation to control greenhouse gas emissions is losing favor with the Administration-elect and with the Democrats in Congress, while health care reform is rapidly becoming the new favorite son. That might be a bad choice in the long run, if it means that Big Legislation is drained of all its resources [...]
If Joe the Plumber had his moment of fame allegedly representing the average working guy, Lily Ledbetter is going to go down in the history books as the woman who changed the lives of working women.
The U.S. House passed two related bills on Jan 9, 2009. The Lily Ledbetter Pay Restoration act would reverse a [...]
People get comfortable with, and inspired by, new ideas (such as water harvesting) when they experience working examples first hand. Your home site can present such an opportunity. Though a truly public site can maximize potential exposure, while sustaining privacy for yourself. Help turn a problem into a solution, and the idea can really take [...]
I'd been told, years ago when I was car shopping and thinking about getting a diesel, that one thing to be careful about is avoiding running out of fuel. In a diesel engine, moreso than a gasoline engine, the fuel line will fill with air bubbles if you drive all the way to empty, and [...]
For good reason, most attention is being focused on the war in the Gaza Strip. But under the cover of that narrow focus,
The only three Arab parties represented in the Israeli parliament vowed yesterday to fight a decision by the Central Elections Committee to bar them from running in next month's general election.
In an unprecedented [...]
"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through." - Jonathan Swift
After reading "The Neurontin Legacy — Marketing through Misinformation and Manipulation" in the January 8, 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, one may conclude that (1) America's prisons would be put to better use [...]
As America seeks ways to gain energy independence and combat global warming, we must be sure not to ignore the low-hanging fruit on the energy tree: energy conservation and energy efficiency.
As individuals, as businesses, and through our government, we must focus first and foremost on making our homes, businesses, and vehicles as efficient as possible.
While [...]
Arianna Huffington is calling for people to step up to Barack Obama's call to service by having each of us make our own personal commitment to working for the public good.
We as Americans got into our current mess because too many of us shirked our basic responsibilities as people living in a "free" country. Eleanor [...]
The "Eat the View" Petition asks President-elect Obama to plant a large organic food garden on the White House lawn, serving as a national model for local and sustainable food growing. There's still time to sign it before his inauguration (link below). They put in a victory garden like this at San Francisco City Hall [...]
The following was written for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) newsletter, at the request of Enid Wonnacott, Executive Director.
My involvement with NOFA began in 1975, when I helped organize a farmers market that is now in Newport, VT. "Local food for local Markets" was the primary approach at that time—it only took [...]
One thing I like about Ezra Klein's blog is his recurring pointers on how the boring stuff matters. The latest example: who is chair of which committee and who of which subcommittee, and so on. In this case, it's the chairs of the committees and subcommittees in the House that have the power to make [...]
It sounded on this morning's news like Russia and Ukraine might have worked out their differences, for the time being, and people in Eastern Europe can stop freezing to death, for the time being.
In the long run—I don't know what the geothermal possibilities are for the affected areas, but if they do have that as [...]
I wanted to title this post "Hayboxes and [the plural of thermos]" but since I don't know what that is, I didn't. But the point is not a linguistic one, the point is cooking with less energy. I think the Chelsea Green blog has mentioned haybox cookers previously. They've been around for a long time, [...]
Who were my role models in public life? Long before I knew I would run for office some day, I admired a woman from South Africa, Helen Suzman, whose lone voice spoke out against apartheid in the all white Parliament. She died a few days ago at the age of 91.
Why was I drawn to [...]
Stan Cox picks up the baton as it passes from Herve Kempf to David Holmgren. In his recent How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth, Kempf argues that the tippy-top of the economic elite weild such disproportionate power and influence over the shape of the economy, and over patterns of consumption, that it is their [...]
I was briefly in Gaza in 1998. My connections are pretty slight, really as thin as a hair, but still, I have a little bit of a personal picture in my mind of what a small part of it looked like back when there was still some vague hope for the peace process. The current [...]
Happy New Year, everyone. It's time to get your spuds! Remember last year, when energy and food costs were rising exponentially? Vegetable seed companies in the U.S. experienced a 35-40 percent increase in demand for vegetable seeds from home gardeners, while demand in the UK spiked by 60 percent. Now, gas prices have given us [...]
The headlines have been unrelentingly gloomy in 2008 except for November 4, the day of national euphoria when Barack Obama became President-elect.
Seven weeks after the election, and almost three weeks before the inauguration, conversations still brighten up when his name is mentioned. It seems everyone is going to the inauguration-either in body or in spirit.
But [...]
Social networks will become a critical media for marketers and advertisers.
Of course, many professionals in marketing and advertising can bear witness to the massive changes that have overtaken traditional media. Network TV viewership is down. Cable is crowded with repetitive pitches for products like Snuggie and ShamWow. Newspaper and magazine circulation is so bad that [...]
I am positively giddy. This rotten economy is going to do something that all the well-meaning progressive programs (and/or faith-based for that matter!) could not. As the money stream slows to a trickle for most families, the idea of luxury will change. And yes, the kids will whine about it. But, this is a good [...]
It is good, it is appropriate that we use the left side of our brain to study markets and industry segments and capital flows, to measure risk and return, to mete out liquidity and diversification and various instruments designed ...
Submitted by dpacheco on January 16, 2009 12:45 AM
Rob Hopkins was definitely on to something when he founded the Transition Network and authored the essential primer The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Transition towns are popping up all over the world. Something about the movement's positive, pro-active approach to the multiple crises facing our generation appeals to environmentally- and civic-minded folks sick of the gloom and doom prognostications of the traditional environmentalist movement.
But nobody said figuring out how to create self-sufficient local communities resilient enough to survive in a post-petroleum, climate change-scarred world would ...
Riki Ott’s book Not One Drop is a history of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, told from the perspective of those most affected by it. Cutting through the cloak of willful deception, public relations campaigns and skewed, corporate-sponsored science, it finally exposes the truth about Exxon Valdez’s devastating effects on the city of Cordova, Alaska, the fishing community ...
Submitted by dpacheco on January 15, 2009 11:09 AM
An Open Letter
Dear The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,
On Monday night, you aired a truly genius segment starring Jason Jones in which you skewered TV news' gasbag pundits for being belligerent, petty, uninformed, and childish. Right on.
I'm all for exposing hypocrisy and idiocy in the media, and nobody does it better than you guys. But did you have to pick on Chelsea Green's own Robert Kuttner (who appears at 4:07) for calling ...
Submitted by dpacheco on January 15, 2009 04:46 AM
Blogging at WorldChanging.org, author Paul Loeb looks at his $5000 furnace and sees how this one humble appliance could change America's economic and environmental landscape for generations to come. It doesn't even have to be difficult.
Change starts with putting stimulus money directly in the hands of those who need it, incentivizing clean, renewable energy technology, which would stimulate American jobs while reducing the demand for dwindling oil supplies and reducing carbon emissions.
Like most Americans, I’m guarding my dollars, but when my furnace died during Seattle’s coldest winter in decades, I ...
Submitted by dpacheco on January 14, 2009 09:46 PM
Vintage Books' The Nation Guide to the Nation is basically a compendium (Don't you just love that word? Compendium?) of the Left in America. With beautiful original illustrations by Ed Koren, it's a must for every farmers-market-shopping, This-American-Life-listening, Al-Gore-voting, over-complicated-coffee-buying, Prius-driving, smokeless-Hammacher-Schlemmer-bong-coveting Blue-stater on your shopping list.
From the press release:
Ready to celebrate the election of Barack Obama? Why not give a toast at the left-leaning bar in your area? Or maybe you'd prefer a cup of coffee from the local café where they serve up both fair trade beans and an activism-oriented message. ...
Submitted by jsmcdougall on January 14, 2009 03:46 PM
The Transition Movement takes a different approach to creating a sustainable world than the methods of conventional environmentalism. It focuses on the positive progress we could make if we take collective action, instead of the destruction that would occur if we don't. I would argue the Transition Movement is a more evolved form of environmentalism.
In his book, The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, author Rob Hopkins details what he sees to be the major differences:
Conventional Environmentalism
The Transition Approach
Individual ...
Submitted by dpacheco on January 14, 2009 09:35 AM
Every now and then, we at ChelseaGreen.com will get a question from a reader that, well, just stumps us. We'll dissect the head-scratcher, research, debate, and finally, just before full-blown panic and its inevitable counterpart, violence, set in, one of us will step back from the abyss and remember that we can just contact one of our expert authors. Crisis averted, we rest easy in the knowledge that we've held our demons at bay, just one more day.
I have been researching the potential for establishing a commercial venture growing table grapes in greenhouses on ...
