This past weekend was a celebration of human-powered machines. There was the Handmade Bicycle Show, the Worst Day of the Year Ride, and my first experience with snowshoeing!read more

Cob is becoming an increasingly popular method of natural building. Patrick Henneberry of Cobworks explains that 3/4 of the world lives in houses like this, so why shouldn't we? How satisfying it would be to live in house constructed mostly with ingredients from your own backyard!read more

To clean our houses and ourselves, we don’t need toxic brews of ingredients we can’t pronounce, emptying our wallets while polluting our own households and the greater natural environment. Instead we can use home remedies with simple combinations of baking soda, salt, water, vinegar, and/or lemon.read more

Nokia last week unveiled the first mobile phone made from 100% recycled material called ‘Remade’. For now, “Remade” is just a concept. Complete with metal casing made from recycled aluminium cans, and a rubber key pad from old car tyres this is certainly a step in the right direction to solving some of the issues of e-waste production.read more

In what some would call a bad part of northern Portland, Oregon, and what others call home by choice or necessity, a parent photographs a crosswalk especially dangerous to children, while another snaps a shot of a boarded up former school, which now serves by default as a playground and site of nightly gang violence. Yet another takes pictures of the inordinate number of fast-food, and other less-than-healthy, eating environments in her neighborhood. These parents are not simply preserving images for their children when grown-up, but are participating in a Photovoice project. They’ve been given cameras, and have been asked to visually document things in their neighborhood that they would like to see changed.read more

Everyone except the Coal Lobby should be thrilled to hear that the folks in Kansas recently rejected a coal-fired power plant on the simple basis the carbon dioxide emissions create health risks. In fact, the people who work for ABEC (pro-coal lobby) should be happy too, but they might be getting paid not to be.read more

Not only will you save money you would have spent on gas by simply implementing some of these tips, but you'll also be helping the environment. If you improve your gas mileage by only 3 miles per gallon, you'll be preventing over 3,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, not to mention all the other harmful chemicals produced by burning gasoline.read more

DHL puts its green foot forward as the first express shipping and logistics company to offer carbon neutral delivery service. The recently launched Go Green program is a value-added service that offsets the CO2 emissions caused by the transportation.read more

Food Roots is a co-op in Canada which is making local produce more readily available to the community. They gather produce from local farms and community gardens, and set up “pocket markets” to sell that produce. This way, farmers can spend time out in the field, while consumers can have access to their local and sustainable produce. read more

I have begun to notice a new conversation being had. It’s so new that I have been skirting around it for quite a while, without having the vocabulary for it. But then someone, after listening to me flounder for a while with much splashing and gasping, gave me the phrase I needed: “personal sustainability”. A new phrase, for a new paradigm.read more