Earth Day on The Huffington Post

Paul Abrams: Mr. President: Time to Issue a Direct 'Call to Action' to Your Grassroots Supporters

2009-09-21T18:47:19Z

Great pitching will always beat great hitting, and vice versa. --Casey Stengel

Two months ago President Obama was strongly urged to get concrete about the health care reform package he wanted, to campaign actively and on television for support, to remind Democratic members of Congress that they face far more political danger in passing nothing or not much of anything than they do by banding together, to keep asking why Congress gets better health care more cheaply than the American people and... and... to make a direct call to action to his 13 million supporters.

He has done all of the above (with more, but as yet incomplete, concreteness about the reform he supports) except issue a direct call to action

The entire system is arrayed against reform. Most in Congress were there before President Obama was elected, and will be there after he leaves, so that any President's direct influence goes just so far. Our sorry system of campaign finance provides those making money off the current system the resources to buy the status quo. Human nature resists change; there is an old saying, "everyone favors progress; no one likes change".

As the Tobacco industry showed for decades after the Surgeon General concluded that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, all the entrenched political system needs is a small doubt to justify paralysis. Their line: the relationship between cigarette-smoking and lung cancer is "merely statistical", and they were correct because laboratory animals were not stupid enough to inhale tobacco, so the proof was the vastly increased incidence of lung cancer among cigarette smokers and the relationship to how much they smoked. Their tactic: provide then Majority Whip, now Minority Leader, John Boehner with checks he handed out to the on the House Floor. It worked.

The Republican yapping machines are entrenched, effective and incapable of being embarrassed by lies or hypocrisy. They throw everything at it, and pursue whatever seems to be sticking, even if it contradicts what they said in the preceding sentence. They are both for and against Medicare and for and against covering all seniors' needs under Medicare. If you want a position on Medicare that agrees with your own -- you can have it. For them, it is a matter of survival: if meaningful health care reform passes, the Republicans will be politically irrelevant for at least two generations.

During the 2008 primary and general election campaigns, candidate Obama reminded us that "we are the change". That is because he knew well the barriers to reform.

But, Mr. President, we will not be change if you do not call us to direct and specific action. Yes, I get emails from David Plouffe, and have met with DNC Chair Tim Kaine exhorting me to cough up cash to support the President's drive for health care reform so we can "show the Republicans by our fundraising by the Sept 30th deadline" that we mean business.

Instead, how about showing the nation we mean business by actually passing meaningful health care reform, and render the Republicans irrelevant for at least 2 generations?

Only you, Mr. President, can galvanize your supporters, and go over the heads of Congress to show them the army they face if they to do not deliver. Getting crowds "fired up and ready to go" is wonderful, but you have to ask the nation to do something specific.

My suggestion is an "Earth Day" type of event. People should organize in their cities to come out on the street all over the country on a particular Sunday to show they want healthcare reform, and they want it now. The tea-baggers had 70,000 demonstrators--we could get 7 million or even 17 million if you would lead the charge. Earth Day, without a President's exhortations, surfaced 20 million people who gave a damn about our planet, and even forced Richard Nixon to sign the major environmental legislation of our time.

Hint to the President: You will not get 7 million or even 700,000 people out in the public square to support the Baucus bill. That, alone, should tell you something.

A large number of your supporters are young -- the millennials. They are also the most active. To get them fired up to come out on a Sunday afternoon, focus on three numbers: 8%, 18% and 35%. Those represent the percentage of the average family's income health care premiums cost in 1999, 2009 and will cost in 2019, if we do not enact meaningful health care reform.

Or, to put it in words the Republicans have taught everyone to understand -- these premiums operate just like a tax, so that healthcare premium "taxes" on the middle class doubled under the disastrous Bush Administration, and will double again if we do not act. Rather than arguing with Stephanopoulos over the definition of tax, you should remind him and others that health care premiums are themselves a tax, and recite the percentages. The middle class is paying 18% of their income, today in 2009, for their health care.

The millennials will be paying 35% of their incomes on healthcare in a decade if we do not enact meaningful reform that improves outcomes and lowers costs.

But, Mr. President, if you do not issue a direct, nationwide call to action, your millions of supporters will remain largely inactive, bemused and frustrated by fringe fear tactics, and not become the change you told us during the campaign we were.

That is, Mr. President, it is time to go "all in" on health care reform. Having declared health care reform the defining mark of your Presidency, you have nothing to lose but defeat.

Brad Balfour: Q&A: Acclaimed Doc Director Robert Stone Reviews Our Earth Days

2009-09-03T09:49:53Z

In light of the on-going ecological crises we seem to face daily, it was not only a massive task that veteran doc director Robert Stone tackled by making his latest film, Earth Days, but it was crucial for a movie like this to have come out this summer (it debuted as the closing night film for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival).

The film documents the history of environmental activism from its roots nearly four decades ago through the eyes of some of its key participants. To Stone, the modern ecological movement began with the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and is moving on to a new and hopeful phase today. To illustrate such a globe-spanning movement, Stone chose to focus on a small set of its crucial players and thinkers.Employing interviews, a strong historical reference and beautiful scenes of Earth's natural riches, Stone draws on his own personal commitment to the subject to propel his film forward.

Stone's witnesses includes former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; biologist Paul Ehrlich; Congressman Pete McCloskey; astronaut Rusty Schweickart; and Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, among others.

Q: Your film is at the center of all those films that covered the panorama of ecological issues; it looks at the roots of it all.

RS: A lot of what people are talking about are symptoms of a larger problem. What I tried to do is to step back and look at the root causes of it. All of what's going on now has a context and a back-story. If you just look at each of these little crises that these various films represent or book, it's almost like throwing paint at the wall. And what I'm trying to do is step back and put this all in context so you can understand what's going on now.

Q: It's almost like you're there at the core of it all and every other feature or story emanates out from here.

RS: Exactly. The root cause of all of it is that there's too many of us, and nobody talks about that anymore.

Q: How did you choose the specific people you focused on? There are a lot of others you could have used as well. Orville Schell is one who comes to mind but these people provide an interesting set of choices.

RS: A film dealing with a subject of this magnitude had to be grounded in personal narrative in order to work. So I wanted it to be personal stories that would carry the film forward. The fewer people you have the more personal the story's going to be. I thought nine people would be the maximum the film could carry.

There are three main characters in the film and the rest are sort of secondary. With each of them, their personal life stories mirror the journey of the film. You see them in their childhood and they undergo a personal change which mirrors the changes that happen in the society at large. Also, taken together they represent the different strands that came together to create the [environmental] movement. I wanted the film to be a personal story, not one where the subject dominated it and you just have this brief chorus going on, just interviewing experts. They're experts but it's also about their personal experiences.

Q: Were you conscious about environmental issues from an early age?

RS: My mom read [Rachel Carson's] Silent Spring to me when I was eight years old so that had a pretty profound effect on me. Then [the original] Earth Day absolutely was a big turning point. I grew up in a college town and was really exposed, even though I was a young kid, really exposed to the demonstrations against the war and the political activism. Though I wasn't really a part of it, I saw it.

When the environmental movement came along with Earth Day, it was like a children's crusade in some way--kids got involved and that was our revolution. Kids have a natural understanding about the environment and a fascination with nature in a way that grownups don't, I think. When you're a kid you're interested in animals and the world, so the environment is something that children immediately glom onto. I certainly did.

Q: You picked some of my cultural heroes; Stewart Brand has been here since The Whole Earth Catalog came out. It was like the internet on paper--"this is the coolest."

RS: It was. He ended up becoming a real pioneer of the internet, but that's been his whole thing from the beginning.

 Q: Former Arizona Congressman and, later Secretary of the Interior Udall (under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) was really fascinating. What was it about him and the others that you felt A) were really important to you, that focused you on them, and B) why did you think they'd still resonate to people now--for the historical context or because you want people to see the continuum culturally?

RS: Each of them plays a different role. Authors Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Meadows wrote two of the seminal books that had an enormous resonance in the culture and the whole debate. Though Rachel Carson's dead, she's in the film. Those three books: Silent Spring, The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth are the three seminal books, so those guys are in it.

Former astronaut [Russell Louis] "Rusty" Schweickart has an incredible story that's one of the great astronaut stories that's not been told. People know about the guys who landed on the moon but his is really remarkable. I'd met Rusty about 15 years ago and heard his story. I always was amazed by it and surprised that so few people knew about it.

Rusty's another example of why I chose my characters. He's a minor character in the film, but not only does he go up in space and have this amazing revelation, he comes back and puts it into practice and becomes the Commissioner of Energy for the State of California and does all these radical innovations with energy conservation. So all the characters reemerge throughout the film in different phases.

Q: I could talk to you all day about Stewart Brand. He is one of the most fascinating personalities in the world. The Whole Earth Catalog came out and changed everybody's thinking in this time when the movie starts.

RS: Yeah, that's one of my favorite people in the world. Stewart had a profound impact on me and the visual palate of the film. Originally, when I started delving into this and finding archival footage, the first thing we did was find news footage that covered the topics in the film. It became clear early on that that wasn't going to work visually for this film because a lot of what they're talking about is almost unfilmable.

The whole message Stewart's been putting forth for 40 or 50 years now is that technology can enhance our perception of the world and by enhancing our perception, is the only way we're going to get a grip on the problem. You have to understand the problem to perceive the problem before you can start to find solutions.

He's always been pro-technology when the rest of the movement was really anti-technology. He said, "Look, rockets can get us into space and that can allow us to view the world from above and get a new perspective on our place in the universe. Airplanes can lift us up in the sky. Stop-motion photography, you can look at a smokestack and it might seem rather benign; you speed it up 100 times and you see how awful that amount of pollution going into this tiny veneer of an atmosphere we have."

So we started using those simple visual techniques to not only visually depict what was being talked about, but also since so much of the film is about this change in perception that we had going from the '50s into the '70s, [it shows] a revolutionary change of perception about our relationship to the earth. So Stewart had a really profound impact on how the film actually ends up looking.

Q: You talk about pesticides, Carson and President Kennedy. How significant was the President in an environmental issue?

RS: It was hugely significant. Because she didn't have academic credentials, she was a scientist, a woman--a single woman--so at that time the pesticide industry went after her with a real concerted campaign to discredit her, calling her a hysterical woman, that she didn't know what she was talking about. They were trying to destroy the message by destroying the messenger.

Udall had given Kennedy a copy of Silent Spring. He read it and was very moved by it so he came out and publicly supported her and set up a scientific panel, a commission, to study what she had done. He ended up supporting her and backing all of her research. That really silenced the critics and it went on to become a huge international best seller. Carson and the book had a profound impact on starting the whole environmental movement.

Q: If it had been Al Gore instead of George Bush becoming President would there be a whole different perspective right now?

RS: It goes back to Reagan really. I don't think you can just blame Reagan as a person, it was a whole movement. Reagan was elected by an overwhelming majority of the American public; America adopted a very conservative ideology that was easy. It's very easy to say the magic hand of the marketplace is going to solve all of our problems because then you don't have to do anything.

Reagan basically said we can go back to a 1950s mentality and the marketplace will take care of things, and people bought into it. As Hunter Lovins says at the end of the film, "We lost 30 years. For 30 years there was absolutely no movement forward In fact there was movement backwards, and we're just now resetting the clock and getting back to where we were."

Q: Ironically, the marketplace has been the one area where there is some movement in that people are trying to come up with new technologies to try to get ahead. Even during that 30 year period.

RS: It wasn't a fair market; it wasn't a market, that's the thing. The free hand of the market actually will solve these problems if it's a real market. If when you buy a car, you're paying the full value of that car including the damage to the environment that went into making the car and all of the pollution that's going to come out of that car, that's the value of that car. If you pay that, if it's a real market, that will solve the problem. And that's where the environmental movement is going now.

Q: The irony is that if they had allowed proper market forces to allow for technological innovation, there would have been alternative energy sources years ago. But there's a sort of corporate totalitarianism; they're not free marketers; they're corporate socialists.

RS: That's absolutely true. That's addressed in the last part of the movie when Dennis Hayes talks about the solar entrepreneurs as being crushed by these giant corporations who wanted to control the power industry.

Q: Pete McCloskey was a sort of liberal to moderate Republican but I didn't realize he became a Democrat. It must have been fascinating to talk with him and see his cultural and personal evolution.

RS: It's not that he's changed, it's that the Republican Party just shifted so far to the right and completely abandoned all the principles of environmentalism that it founded. And he's not the only one, there are other people I interviewed that didn't make it into the film; I interviewed Russell Train who was Richard Nixon's environmental advisor and the second head of the EPA. He's a staunch Republican was a big supporter of George Bush Sr. and everything, but he voted for Obama and is just appalled by how the Republican Party has abandoned environmentalism.

He's like, "We started environmentalism, this was our cause." Talk about conservation, this is conservative. And this corporatism you mentioned, corporate socialism, is exactly what bothers them; that the Republican Party has just shifted into this craziness. Republican environmentalists have just abandoned the party in droves.

Q: It amazes me sometimes, how could a Republican think that environmentalism is bad? I don't get it. Did you figure it out?

RS: It got caught up in the culture wars, and the Left has some blame here as well in that what you saw happening in the '70s with that initial burst of legislative success coming out of Earth Day, is that these minor, marginal environmental organizations became huge, they moved to Washington, they became these giant Washington lobbying organizations doing battle with corporate lobbying organizations. And the American public outsourced their activism to these Washington groups and they lost because they were overwhelmed by bigger forces.

I see the same thing happening now, and that's a warning of the film. Right now, the current battle over climate change, all it is being debated by Washington lobbying organizations, and how much money can you put into The Left versus The Right? Who has got the most amount of money and the most clout?

As long as that's where the movement is going, it's a recipe for disaster. That's what happened in the 1970s. Right now you almost have a complete reversal of how things were then. In the early '70s, it was a grassroots movement, with the mass public demanding change on a political level. And in the late '70s, as it is today, it became more about scientists, environmental activists, and a segment of the political class who were leading the whole thing. But they'd lost the support of the mass public who didn't understand the problem.

I think you see the same thing today. So unless you get back to it being a grassroots movement, it will be like the recent climate change bill that passed by what, three votes in Congress? With Obama in power, and the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, everybody's talking about climate change, yet with everything that we know about it, it passed by only three votes? That's not good.

Q: We have the nuttiest strain of Republicans in power that we've ever had.

RS: That's true. The film addresses this moment in time where there was a big focus on the environmental movement about perceiving the larger problem. In the case in the environment, people can get their heads around the big issue, and it's not a Republican or a Democratic issue that we need to care for our planet and that we're all in the same boat here. That's a big picture thing; when you start to get into arguing about the minutiae and the details about how we get from point A to point B it becomes politically divisive. So I would hope the environmental movement could get back to focusing on the big picture and not the minutiae.

Q: Many politicians prefer to tackle other issues because they usually resolve those issues in a short time. In order to get elected you have to solve a certain issue. Do you think that's part of the problem?

RS: Yeah, they're not going to tackle long term issues unless they're forced to do so because there's no political advantage to tackling long term issues. So again, as long as it's a battle of lobbyists in Washington it's going to be a losing battle for environmentalists. And I think the lesson of that is clear by what happened in the late '70s.

Q: Do you think that movies like yours and these other ones will help on a grassroots level? Because they don't make the larger political issues, they give it a more personal connection.

RS: I hope so. I don't think anybody can say that documentaries don't make a difference anymore. An Inconvenient Truth undoubtedly made a difference. Some films do and some films don't. My film is designed to reach as wide an audience as possible and not be a polemic. It's an effort to put this whole thing into a larger context, so for anybody who wants to really understand the environmental movement now, [they have] to understand how we got here.

Robert Stone: Earth Days Probes the Roots of Environmentalism

2009-08-06T18:48:28Z

During the 1960's, the space program was focused on looking outwards, on moving away from the Earth, on exploring new worlds. And yet, surprisingly, its most profound and tangible legacy came not from looking forward but from looking backward, back at the Earth from the barrenness of space. The space program changed the world by providing us all with a good long collective look in the mirror, and things would never be the same.

I would argue that the environmental movement, which is a similarly forward looking enterprise, would be well served by taking a look back at itself, however briefly, if for no other reason than to understand where it came from, what it has accomplished, where it has stumbled, and why, given all we have long known about our pollution of the Earth's ecosystem, we have ended up in our current environmental predicament. As we search for and debate a proper roadmap out of the current crisis, a look back may prove more informative than speculating about the future. My new film Earth Days attempts to do just that by telling the forgotten back-story to both the current environmental movement and the current environmental crisis.

Each of us can perhaps trace our own Aha! moment when we began to more fully understand our relationship with the planet we live on and to see the world in different way. Mine came at age 1,1 attending a local event in New Jersey on the first Earth Day in 1970. Collectively, these moments, repeated by millions of us in millions of different ways, changed this country and indeed, the world, within the course of a single generation. This new understanding spread like a virus to the point where we now take it for granted that most people understand that we need to stop damaging the ecosystem, despite the raging debates about how best to achieve that goal. But how did this all get started and why have we not made more progress?

Earth Days is framed around the personal narratives of nine Americans who played key roles in awakening us to the environmental crisis and in giving birth to a political movement to confront it. Four key scenes in the film revolve around the personal revelations four of our main characters: Denis Hayes, Stewart Brand, Rusty Schweickart, and Hunter Lovins, as they each had their own Aha! moment and then went about sharing it with the world.

In January of 1965, a young American hitchhiker named Denis Hayes found himself in a desert in Namibia following a two-year trek around the world. He had what he describes as a vision in which he saw that the history of mankind had been artificially distorted in the past 150 years or so by the discovery of fossil fuels and our growing dependence upon it as the engine of modern civilization. Prior to the Industrial Revolution mankind depended, in one form or another, on solar energy. That's all there was. We had made a sort of Faustian bargain in tapping into fossil fuels from beneath the Earth, liberating us from our past, creating enormous wealth and power, but at the expense of a rapidly deteriorating global environment. Denis resolved to return home and dedicate his life to weaning us from our dependence on fossil fuels and to harness the renewable and sustainable energy from the sun. Five years later he organized the first Earth Day in 1970. He then went on to head the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute established by President Carter and has been one of the leading proponents of solar energy ever since.

In 1966, a young hipster named Stewart Brand dropped 100 micrograms of LSD while sitting on a rooftop in San Francisco and hallucinated that he was looking down at the Earth from outer space. At that time no spacecraft had sent back more than a few photos of the Earth's horizon. Stewart believed that if everyone on Earth could see the whole planet floating in space that it would profoundly alter their perception of the fragility of the ecosystem and our need to care for it and preserve it. To realize his vision he set about campaigning NASA and officials of the Soviet Union to release a photograph of the whole Earth. The following year, he established the Whole Earth Catalog (the Sears Catalog of the back-to-the-land movement) and forged a photo of the whole Earth on it's cover by taking a picture of the sky using a fish-eye lens. The placeholder he created for lack of a genuine photograph proved to be remarkably similar to the actual photo of the earth that was first beamed back to Earth on Christmas Eve 1968 by Apollo 8. The photograph of the whole Earth from space became the iconic image of the new environmental movement and the most reproduced image in American history. Just as Stewart had predicted, seeing the Earth from space did indeed change the world.

In March of 1969, an American astronaut named Rusty Schweickart was orbiting the Earth, making the first test flight of the lunar module that would later be used to land on the moon. A technical glitch led him to be stranded during his space walk for about 5 minutes in complete radio silence. During this time Rusty, floating in space looking back at the Earth, had a revelation about the history of life on the planet and his role in pushing the boundaries of life beyond the confines of the Earth. He recognized that while the Earth had given birth to life and nurtured it, now it was our turn to nurture and care for Mother Earth. His "revelation" was, in a sense, the next logical step from what Stewart had predicted and what Denis had dreamed. Rusty returned to Earth with a determination to help bring about a sustainable and harmonious relationship between the planet and ourselves. In the late 1970's he put his passion into practice by becoming the head of the California Energy Commission, and is now in the business of tracking so-called "killer asteroids" that could damage or destroy life on Earth.

On April 22, 1970, the largest demonstration in American history took place as 20 million people, organized by Denis Hayes, took to the streets to demand a cleaner environment. One of those demonstrators was a California anti-war activist and college student named Hunter Sheldon (who is known today as Hunter Lovins). She planted a tree that day and witnessed what she perceived to be the beginnings of a new and powerful political movement that could truly change the world. From that day forth, she began to devote herself to building an environmentally sustainable society. A few years later, Hunter became dismayed to see that this new movement was meeting such fierce opposition as it tried to cajole and regulate the natural human impulse for greed and self-interest. She resolved to try to work with polluters rather than against them, and to get them to see that sustainability could be both individually profitable and socially beneficial. It's an approach that is now the basis of "Cap and Trade" and other more recent efforts to solve our environmental problems.

Beginning in 1980, a backlash against the environmental movement took root and America embarked on a 30-year experiment in allowing imbalanced market forces and unregulated cartels to determine the fate of our ecosystem. We are just now emerging from this period that Hunter Lovins describes near the end of my film as "the lost 30 years."

If going forward the environmental movement is to avoid some of the mistakes of the past it needs to know its history. It also needs to build on its many successes, the most important of which was the creation one of the greatest bottom up grassroots movements in history. It upended the political establishment of the day and pushed through the most sweeping set of environmental legislation in our nations history during the early to mid 1970's (and signed into law by President Nixon who was no friend to the environment). Following those successes the environmental movement became more top down oriented, led by large lobbying groups in Washington in a pitched political battles with even larger corporate lobbying groups. The result was a 30-year long stalemate in which little or nothing was done to advance us towards creating a more sustainable society. The movement was stopped in its tracks. The lesson, it seems to me, is that progress along these lines must be seen as a political necessity to those in positions of power. When the public loses the ability to perceive the problem, when only scientists and environmental activists truly understand what's at stake and are out there working for change, the battle is all but lost.

Earth Days is not a polemic on the issues of the moment. It is a film that reflects on how far we've come and how much further we need to go. And as the old saying goes, those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it.

Earth Days opens theatrically in New York on August 14; LA on August 21; and nationally in select cities in September. For more information please visit http://www.earthdaysmovie.com/

Make Your Own Natural Mosquito Repellent

2009-06-18T13:21:26Z

Since the 1999 appearance of mosquito-borne West Nile virus in North America, it's more important than ever to keep these pests at bay. You can outsmart mosquitoes with this homemade, Earth-friendly solution.

Libraries Save Money And Other Resources

2009-06-18T08:52:18Z

Instead of buying small mountains of books, CDs, DVDs and even magazines that you barely use, check materials out of your neighborhood library, or relax inside the quiet halls and browse on site.

9 Simple Ways Going Green Saves You Green

2009-06-17T14:01:02Z

It's not all about deprivation, though. EcoSalon has loads of great ideas for how to save pennies and the planet without compromising on style.

Some simple ideas that will save you money and help the planet include:

Greener Showering Tips: How To Save Money And Energy (VIDEO)

2009-06-16T08:03:20Z

Grist's Umbra Fisk offers up advice on greening your shower routine. Shower with friends! Turn the shower off when you soap up! Well, doing both of those would probably increase the awkwardness. It might be kind of like when you're at a party and everybody's having a conversation and then the music sort of eerily drops out.

Except that you'd also be naked and soapy with your friends.

OK, take it away, Umbra:

Save Money And The Planet: Play Locally

2009-06-12T15:28:54Z

More than 38 million Americans planned to travel 50 miles or more on a recent three-day holiday weekend, and 84 percent planned to travel by car, according to AAA's annual survey. More planned to travel this year than last, even though the cost to travelers rose reaching a household average of nearly $600.

Don't be average. Play local.

How to Fix a Broken Zipper: Make Those Clothes Last

2009-06-12T09:10:25Z

How to repair a broken zipper. Sometimes the teeth on a zipper don't line up right, causing the zipper to catch. At this point, most people will get rid of the entire garment. What a shame, because this is such an easy fix! Follow these basic instructions to easily fix your zipper.

LA LAWN: City To Pay People To Lose Grass

2009-06-11T13:04:28Z

Fast on the heels of the new watering ordinances that took effect June 1, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has begun a cash-for-grass program. Single-family homes served by the DWP will be eligible to receive $1 for every square foot of turf that they replace with less thirsty alternatives.

Green Father's Day Gift Guide: Green His Gadgets And Grooming

2009-06-11T09:15:36Z

3. Charge it.

Give your gadget-gizmo daddio a slim little Solio Hybrid Charger ($80-$170, depending on battery capacity) to recharge his cell phone, MP3 player, digital camera, and all the other electronic stuff he manages to cram into his pockets - all with stored-up power from the sun (free power - woo-hoo!) or the socket. Give it.

5 Ways To Fight Toxic Soil In Your Kitchen Garden

2009-06-11T08:35:01Z

Truthfully, most of us living in cities will at least find some small trace of lead due to the once sizable use of lead-based paint, lead gasoline and industrial emissions in our areas. Even though lead materials are now banned and highly regulated, their remnants still exist in our soil and are loosely monitored.

Read more: Food, Kitchen Gardens, Green Living, Giy, Green News

Color Your Own Eco-Speakers: Green Art Rocks!

2009-06-10T16:33:49Z

It takes surprisingly little to house a functional speaker - make-it-yourself fold-out cardboard box set really is enough to do the trick. On top of being highly portable and sustainable, the blank brown slates of the sides of these boxes provide creative color-your-own surfaces.

The Best Home Composters Money Can Buy

2009-06-10T13:05:29Z

I resent having to do on my own what any green-minded city should do for me. But this year, urbanites across the States are hitting the mud patch: Michelle Obama's mucking around her organic garden, and it's a big eat-at-home, grow-your-own year for budget-conscious entertainers. So I'm hopping on the bandwagon by shopping for a no-fuss, urban-friendly composter.

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer Dives Into Urban Gardening (VIDEO)

2009-06-09T08:18:43Z

Contessa Brewer: MSNBC anchor and enthusiastic urban farming neophyte.

She wanted to learn how to grow her own food, so she took a crack at it and had an experience familiar to many of us (or at least me):

So last year, I decided to try my hand at "urban farming," which really means growing your own food, even if you live in the city. I started with a basil plant and used its leaves twice before it died.

In my quest to change a brown thumb for green, I learned all kinds of things about urban farming. You can grow vertical gardens that take up less space, than traditional vegetable gardens.

Here, she gets really ambitious and tries to make her own compost bin!

WATCH:

Contessa also reported on a working urban farm in Washington, D.C.:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Keep it up, Contessa! I bet you get a whole season's food out of your garden before I successfully grow a vegetable.

Best White House Kitchen Garden Tour Ever (VIDEO)

2009-06-08T17:28:20Z

Ryan Howard, of the Philadelphia Phillies, just got the best-ever tour of the White House kitchen garden. White House chef Sam Kass showed Howard around and then started pulling green things out of the ground for the freshest veggie tasting possible.

Howard approved!

WATCH:

LED Lights: The Bright Green Future

2009-06-08T07:51:08Z

LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting. Unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. And while fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which requires special disposal, LED bulbs contain no toxic elements, and last so long that disposal is not much of an issue.

3 Easy Steps to Making Bread At Home

2009-06-05T08:51:17Z

The following is a guest post by Chelsea Green's Makenna Goodman:

Contrary to the plethora of diets in the universe, there are still millions of people who haven't gone gluten-free. Bread is still the staple food in the average diet, and probably always will be. I predict it makes a comeback among trendy people, much like the frosted cupcake. (Anyone agree that cupcakes all of a sudden became hip? I mean, for a while there it was like every party had Vampire Weekend and cupcakes.) But it's expensive to buy the good loaves, and most affordable store-bought varieties are high in processed sugar and bleach. So it's worth it—both economically and yummily—to learn how to make your own bread, and it's not hard.

Must I list off all the reasons why homemade bread is far tastier than store-bought? Not to mention it's better for you—and you know what's in it (no nasty preservatives or bleach which are more common than you might think, even in all-natural brands.) And for those interested in the eco-friendly aspects, baking your own bread saves a trip to the grocery store. I'll share with you my favorite recipe, which I originally got from Mark Bittman, and redesigned as my own. Which means, less scientific. Slacker bread, if you will, for the baker on the go. All you need is a simple supply of flour, water, salt, and yeast.

3 Easy Steps to Making The Best Bread Ever

Combine 4 cups unbleached, white flour, 1 teaspoon baking yeast, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1.5 cups water. Mush around in a bowl until it forms a shaggy dough ball. Use your hands; don't be afraid! Let sit, covered with a piece of foil or plastic, for three hours (save the foil to re-use the next time you bake bread.)

Once it's risen, form into a round ball (using a little bit of loose flour on your hands, as it can be sticky) and plop on an un-greased baking sheet (with the smoothest side facing up). Take a sharp knife and make 3 decorative slashes on the top (to allow air to escape, and to look profesh.) Put in 450 degree preheated oven for twenty minutes, then lower to 350 for another thirty. I put a ceramic dish of water in the oven, too, which makes the bread crusty on the outside, soft on the inside.

Once the bread is ready, it'll look browned and if you tap the bottom it should sound hollow. Let sit on the countertop until it cools. Remember: don't cut it until cooled, because the inside of the loaf is still cooking even while outside of the oven. Serve with butter and honey, or jam, or whatever…

Making bread is addictive! The next step is building your own masonry bread oven, which you can do with friends on the weekend, either on your lawn or in your community garden. Daniel Wing and the late Alan Scott, authors of The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens, provide expert advice on baking bread and building masonry ovens. Wing, for example, travels around in a gypsy bread oven wagon of his own construction, baking loaves at parties. This could be you!

Green Tips For Beachgoers: How To Stay Safe And Have Fun

2009-06-04T08:22:22Z

Hello, beach season!

I saw someone wearing board shorts and carrying a styrofoam beach cooler -- not as ubiquitous as they used to be, maybe -- and it made me realize that we needed to get ourselves green and ready for the beach.

IS YOUR BEACH CLEAN?

Planet Green says that the first thing to be aware of is how safe the beach itself is. Use the EPA's beach data to see if your beach is monitored and safe.

GREEN YOUR 'SCREEN

If you can stay away from chemicals and preservatives, you're doing everybody a favor. When comparing sunscreens, see which ones have loads of ingredients you can't pronounce or wouldn't recognize as a plant and put those back on the shelf. Planet Green warns against parabens (ingredients that end in "paraben") and chemicals like oxybenzone. Grist tested out seven green sunscreen brands for your benefit.

GREEN SWIMWEAR

There are a lot of options out there -- just search "green swimwear" and you'll see -- but it's one of those categories that really tries to take financial advantage of the aspiring greenie. So Ideal Bite recommends skinny dipping to cut down on the materials and shipping involved in making any new products. Great idea, but if you're a bit shy (or don't want to be responsible for using a whole body's worth of green sunscreen every time you take a dip), another option would be to make sure the suit you have lasts a long time, so you don't have to buy new ones all the time.

THINK AHEAD

Don't buy the styrofoam cooler. Come on. Just don't.

Get yourself a nice, reusable cooler that will be your beach buddy for many seaside forays to come. And just remember to do all of the great stuff at the beach that you do at home: reduce, reuse recycle. Happy beachgoing!

Easy Green Changes You Can Make With Your Roommates

2009-06-03T16:58:13Z

If your household is already one that has weekly or monthly meetings, than putting a discussion of water and energy use on the docket won't be so difficult. But if this is a new thing for your roomies, you'll probably have to finagle your roommates and/or family members into showing up. Tell them it's a meeting about saving money. And don't forget to provide eco-friendly snacks for all.

Read more: Green Living, Green Tips, Giy, Green News

Greener Shaving Now! Do Away With Disposables (VIDEO)

2009-06-02T08:26:09Z

How green is your grooming routine? Shaving is one place where a lot of Americans end up wasting a lot of water -- and other stuff.

Grist's Umbra says it's time to get over the disposable razors because they're wasteful and make you look cheap.

For her full report, watch below:

Vintage Slides Reused In One-Of-A-Kind Handbags

2009-06-02T08:22:47Z

Comprised of high-quality materials all around, the slides that are used in each unique bag have been gathered and grouped by all kinds of themes including regional collections, specific trips and world tours. Customers can also send in their own slides to have a personalized, customized one-of-a-kind bag created for them. Each slide is individually vacuum-sealed off-site to ensure an archival seal and shipped back for sale.

In Which Urban Beekeeping Looks Like A Religous Experience (PHOTO)

2009-06-01T17:23:41Z

NEW YORK: An urban beekeeper inspects part of her colony of Italian honeybees on the roof of her Brooklyn building May 30, 2009 in New York City. Beekeeping is a growing phenomenon among environmentally-conscious urban dwellers in cities nationwide, and practioners cite the health benefits of natural honey as well as the boon to gardening that bees provide by pollination. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

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Lose The Dryer, Save The Money

2009-05-29T14:57:16Z

Guest post by Chelsea Green's Makenna Goodman:

Behold the classic domestic duos of the past: Ricki and Lucy. Ozzie and Harriet. Bennifer. Tom and Jerry. Bush and Cheney. And most important of all, not to mention the most seriously detrimental to human society—um, make that second most serious—the washer and the dryer. Readers may doubt the importance of separating the latter, but a divorce must be arranged. The dryer, as it were, is an energy-sucking, money-vaporizing, obsolete object that has served its last purpose. Feel free to recycle it, make better use of it, or fill it with water and use as a pleasant place for baby ducks to frolic in your yard. But seriously, if you want to save money this summer, you may have to part with your Maytag and those handy Bounce^TM sheets, and embrace other ways to dry your clothes.

According to Stephen and Rebekah Hren, authors of The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit, throwing out your dryer is a wicked way to save money this summer.

Electric clothes dryers are a colossal waste of energy. They often draw around 6,000 watts. Six thousand! This is more than a typical heat pump or electric water heater, usually thought of as the hogs of the household. Simply put, you should not use this appliance. Gas dryers are more efficient because they use no electric-resistant heat, but they can still draw around 720 watts. That's a lot, equivalent to about 60 compact fluorescents (not to mention the energy of the gas). You should plan on getting rid of electric heat dryers and hopefully gas-fired dryers as well if your climate allows.
Solar clothes drying shows this energy source at its finest. It's a great example of simplicity combined with effectiveness. Hang up something wet in the sun, come back in a few hours, and voilà, it's dry, clean, and fresh smelling. Like everything, having the proper tools to access this resource goes a very long way in making sure it's effective and easy to do. Some of this depends on your climate and your own personal habits. We realize some parts of the country have very little sun in the winter, but if you set aside a bit of room, even in a closet or a spare bedroom, clothes hung on racks will dry fairly quickly in a heated house.

Just for the record, I am not an eco-psycho. I am a recent convert to the drying rack, and I choose to keep it covered in wet clothes, by a breezy window facing the sun. Actually, to be honest, I was sort of forced to shun the electric dryer—my boyfriend won't let me turn the damn thing on. He's a better man than I, with weightier morals. So yesterday while he was out of town, I cheated. I gathered together a bundle of cut-offs, sweatpants, and dirty socks and thought, Oh yes. Now's my time. I'm gonna get my clothes real warm and dry. But as I began to open our dryer (which I'm about to get rid of), I caught sight of the indoor drying rack, waiting in the sun. I remembered the last batch of laundry, and how it smelled like clean grass. I thought of my electric bill. About my rapidly depleting checking account. The choice, in the end, is actually pretty obvious, and after a couple times using solar drying techniques (clotheslines included), my lazy reflex wore off. I now see it as meditating and investing in my solvent future. Out it goes!

Here are some tips on solar drying from the Hrens. Try these at home!

Retractable clothesline: An excellent tool for the space-constrained. These come in a variety of lengths and are very simple to install indoors or out. Consider putting these inside near a passive solar wall. The sun will dry the clothes and raise the humidity of the room in wintertime, making it more comfortable inside.

Indoor drying rack: Avoid the cheaper models, as they can fall apart rather quickly. These are generally collapsible and can stand alone or be wall-mounted. I recommend having at least two. Being able to place these in sun or near a woodstove will greatly speed up drying time in the winter.

Outdoor drying rack: If you've got the room outdoors, a permanent outdoor rack is a very effective method for drying clothes, even when the temperatures barely get above freezing. It requires some time to mount properly, but it should function well for decades.

Clothespins: These are a necessity and come in two varieties: split or spring. Determine your preference and make sure you have plenty. Hanging clothes from pins rather than folding them over the line greatly speeds drying time and greatly reduces the odds that any clothing will fall off and get dirty. Folding clothes generally means two sides of the clothing are not exposed to the air at all. This more than doubles drying times.

Makenna Goodman works and blogs for Chelsea Green Publishing, a leading community providing books and dialogue on the politics and practice of sustainable living.

15 Ways To Eat More Local Food

2009-05-29T08:45:30Z

Cook One Local Meal Per Week

Try cooking one new dish each week using local and seasonal ingredients and keep track of the ones you, your friends and family like the most.

Summer, when so much food is being harvested, is easier than other seasons. Here's some help with the rest of the calendar: