Category: Planet

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-qQ6g-gtYA[/youtube]

My friend, Brigitte Fortin, recently created this video, musing on the spiritual dimension of the environmental movement. It so perfectly captures my own feelings on this subject that I asked her blessing to post it here. The video is part of her graduate work in Environmental studies at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT.

Brigitte’s thesis is on spirituality and nature. As a social activist for many years, Brigitte saw that we can do and do and do, but unless we make fundamental internal shifts, then nothing will change. She is convinced that what’s inside of us is reflected outward. If we get our minds and hearts right, then we’ll have the right foundation to make big changes.

After Hurricane Katrina, she had a dream that she couldn’t shake. It told her more people are ready and open to the idea of embracing the spiritual dimension. This led her to working with plants and habitat restoration. The more she worked on the issues, the more she worked on herself. The path became clearer as she walked it, and teachers and fellow travelers have joined her along the way.

In her thesis research, she has been mining scientific writers to extract the pieces that do touch on spirituality. The more deeply she thought about what needs to happen, she realized it’s really a communications issue. Her work is a reinterpretation and a reiteration, coming from the heart. The western mindset has put everything on science, on the mental aspect. Looking at the Four Directions, which she references in this video, the mental is only one of four aspects. We are shortchanging our understanding if we leave out the physical, the emotional, or the spiritual.

Even the most conscious people are so entrained in their lifestyles that old habits are hard to break. Her advice is to follow the obvious, do the things that you know you need to do. Like taking that walk in the park instead of on a treadmill.

In our EcoBlueprint Home Study course , the fourth segment includes a whirlwind tour of going-green websites. As an information junkie, I’ve been keeping tabs on them for years. This has become a more and more difficult task recently, as Earth’s Immune System rolls into high gear.

The best of these websites helps us to get at the nagging questions: What is our budget – we hear a lot about what NOT to do to the environment. How are we to focus in on what TO do? What’s really going to make a difference? One of the first acts is to become better informed about the impact that we are actually having. Several online tools are out there now, but which ones are the most useful? Which ones will really help us set and reach our greening goals?

In answer, GOforChange is offering the Green Website Summer Adventure Tour , starting on July 15th. We’ll dig into some of the best tools that are out there: for increasing our awareness, helping us to conserve, and also to restore damaged ecosystems.

I’m particularly intrigued by tools that allow us to baseline and measure our impacts and even to track our progress. This sort of feedback is very helpful in keeping us on our path. It also allows us to adjust when things aren’t working, or to amp up if when we are comfortable with a strategy. . . we can do more of that, or move on to something a bit more challenging.

For you iPhone users, there are some cool applications now for getting green tips, such as Green Tip of the Day and The Green Book. There are others for tracking impacts, especially CO2 from transportation. You can set a yearly and monthly budget, then log in when you travel and it tracks your impact. As long as you are logging in your travel, you can see how you’re doing against your budget.

The tracking apps seem most useful for building your own awareness. You might do them religiously for a week or a month, to better understand your own patterns and impacts. The feedback could help you design alternative strategies. I recently downloaded a few others that have specific information, like which fruits and vegetables have heavier pesticide loads ; knowing that, you may choose to buy organic. There’s also an app that lets you find out what foods are in season wherever you are — and, to locate the farmer’s markets so you can go buy them.

On the Green Website Summer Adventure Tour, some of the sites we’ll visit will include Green Irene , Low Impact Living , Greenopolis , Be Green Now , Awakening the Dreamer , and Going Green Today .  Listen to a preview call and join us on July 15th!

Artist and educator Hugh Pocock sent us some very interesting information today. First, he has a solo show at the Contemporary Museum from May 22 through August 16, 2009. My 7-year-old son would adore the show’s title: "MY FOOD — MY POOP ." It’s a brilliant premise: Hugh weighed all the food and drink he took in and the waste he put out over the course of 63 days. Determining these weights and then calculating the differences between them would represent an approximate measurement of each day’s energy production.

He also kept a daily diary of his interactions, thoughts, and activities throughout the project.  Entries comment on the importance of the sun for all sources of energy, the role of fossil fuel usage in his daily life, and his body’s continuous cycle of energy transfer. It opened up questions like, "where does the energy go after it leaves my body?" I plan to go to the exhibit and report further. The thought that we contain sunlight reminded me of "Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight ," by Thom Hartmann. One of the first points he makes is that we are all made out of sunlight. "Everything you see alive around you is there because a plant somewhere was able to capture sunlight and store it."

Speaking of plants, Hugh is also teaching an urban farming course this summer at various locations throughout Baltimore. One of them is Participation Park , a 1/3-acre urban farm that was founded by artists in winter, 2007. Artists, being such hands-on people anyway, seem well-disposed to thoughtful engagement in such a deeply hopeful enterprise. The course’s blog currently has a lengthy piece with 10 things learned about compost, with gems like this: "Contrary to popular belief, just leaving waste in a big stupid pile does not magically transform it into dirt."

Three cheers for Hugh’s leadership in waking us up and making us more aware.

My husband, the Eagle Scout, came home from Target recently with literally a bucketful of plastic. The bucket ITSELF was plastic! It looked like he had won some kind of shopping spree contest. Everything you can fit into a laundry basket in five minutes. In addition to what you see here, there was also contact lens solution, which comes in a cardboard box, but the solution itself is in a plastic bottle that has a little plastic safety seal on it.

What made me really take notice of this is – I had just been teaching a 4-week course called "Your EcoBlueprint ." In the third week, we played with the Plastic Tracker, which is an audit worksheet to build awareness of the amount and kinds of plastic that comes into our lives. Where they come from, what their purpose is, and what we do with them after we’ve used them. Read through this post to find out how you can win a copy of the Plastic Tracker to try for yourself.

In the fourth class, we talked a bit about the experience of using the plastic tracker. How surprised we were to learn just how much of this stuff is in our lives. For those of us who think of ourselves as fairly environmentally aware, this can be a real revelation. Continued

I recently posed this question on several LinkedIn green groups and was surprised to get so many answers with a wide range of opinions. Most of them advocated systemic expressions of sustainability: green business, policy and regulation, economic incentives, standards, strategic planning, and simple common sense. A few mentioned awareness-building: education, marketing campaigns ("green is good"), and mission statements. The rest championed tools like directories, handbooks, and websites. One outlier suggested that sometimes the answer is just in a state of mind.

In the spirit of Ken Wilber and Integral , in one sense they are all right. Just not 100% right, to the exclusion of the others. I found it intriguing that the majority of them oriented towards systems, technologies, and policy, and only one touched on the metaphysical. Yet, consciousness of our innermost motivations, values, and beliefs is critical to the success of any greening initiative, whether personal or organizational.

As we make the transition from short-term, fear- and anxiety-based motivations to more long-term, optimistic and effective motivations, it’s important to bring greater consciousness to what’s behind our behaviors. Shining the light of awareness on how and whether our needs are being met can be transforming.

At GOforChange, we believe strongly that eco-friendly strategies are far better at meeting the full range of our needs than tired, wasteful consumerism. We are designing a process to help people bring that awareness to their own lives, called Your EcoBlueprint . One clear benefit is that it eliminates the mismatch between people’s "shoulds" and their actual behavior, giving them a fresh perspective on which green strategies actually work for them. Your EcoBlueprint is as unique as your fingerprint!

We invite you to give us your thoughts and feedback. What are the struggles or challenges you have with making green a priority? Is big-picture visioning a distraction from necessary action, or a helpful North Star? How are you negotiating the glut of information out there? We would love to hear stories of your ah-hah moments, successes, roadblocks, and your favorite awareness practices! Drop us a line through the contact page, or comment here.

In the vein of our recent posts about food (one of our favorite topics here!), I wanted to write a little follow-up from my kitchen. The debate over HR875 and other such bills is certainly food for thought. The fact that Monsanto is able to sue farmers in the U.S. for having unwanted genetically-engineered seeds on their land — that blew there from other fields, thereby contaminating heirloom seeds — is nothing short of alarming. What if we just pause and imagine a better path forward?

What’s most important for a healthy crop is the biodiversity of the soil and microorganisms that produce it in the first place. Over the past few years, I’ve read success stories of a natural fertilizer business called Terra Cycle which uses the age-old genius of worms to compost waste and turn "worm tea" into a sought-after consumer product. The good news is, this isn’t rocket science. This stuff can be made for free inside your own home; that is, if you aren’t squeamish about some squishy worms.

I have a compost bin in my kitchen with about 500 to 1,000 worms inside eating my junk mail and food scraps. The particular bin I bought has a drainage spout, so that when there is heavy moisture content the extra water can simply drain to the bottom, be collected in a bottle, and fed to my house plants. The above picture displays the awesome power of worm tea. I had never fed my Money Tree worm tea before, but after only two servings and a couple of days’ growth, you can see the obvious difference this stuff makes. The water and nutrients shot up to the top leaves and what was similar to the bottom leaves only days ago is now a shimmering forest green (actually much shinier and green in real life!). Now, let’s see if some actual money starts growing. . . .

See our calender for composting workshops.

Treehugger article about Terracycle.

Here is a staggering thought. According to the EPA, in 2005, only 345,000 to 379,000 tons of electronics were recycled out of approximately 1.9 to 2.2 million tons of unwanted electronics. This means that a huge percentage is going to the landfill which will eventually contaminate ground water. There are a whole host of ways to recycle every electronic you have with local, national and international resources. Here in Baltimore my top choice is dropping off your unwanted tech products to CDM-eCycling . I wrote a post about them a couple months ago and I can tell you without a doubt they provide a service that is improving the environment, and helping the local economy. If you find it hard to make the trip over to Washington Blvd. please contact us at info@goforchange.com. I will accept anything that will fit in my Honda Civic and make the trip for you. I have been inspired to do this by seeing Jennifer Baichwal documentary about Edward Burtynsky work called Manufactured Landscapes and reading and watching videos about the struggles of many Chinese that have our e-waste dumped on their soil and sorted under absolutely horrendous conditions. It’s a cycle of production that is destroying the cycle of life. Please, find a responsible e-waste recycler in your state here or visit Basel Action Newtwork website. "BAN is the world’s only organization focused on confronting the global environmental injustice and economic inefficiency of toxic trade and its devastating impacts."

Other things you can do:

1. Find out what companies have a take back program here.

2. Get payed for your electronics by this guy in Denver, CO at BuyMyTronics.com

3. U.S. Staples store will charge you $10, to recycle your used computers, monitors, laptops, and desktop printers, faxes and all–in–ones. Smaller computer accessories such as keyboards, mice, and speakers are accepted at no charge. In addition, you can recycle batteries, PDAs, pagers, digital cameras, and chargers. They will give you $3 in a gift certificate toward new ink for certain ink cartridges. Others, they will just recycle for free.

4. Check back soon for more information