“Prime Time For The Planet” is back! Tuesday nights at 9pm. Okay – so maybe being a TV junkie isn’t a “green” thing to do. Big Ideas for a Small Planet is such a great show, though! Last season on The Green started with Big Ideas and then went on to show the great series called It’s Not Easy Being Green (which Sundance has picked up the second season of from the BBC). They finished it off with a few episodes of the Sierra Club Chronicles.
So the evening always starts with one of their great shows and then has an interstitial show called “ECO BIZ” and “Ecoists.” That leads into great eco-documentaries. Tomorrow night will premiere “Garbage Warrior” which is an original Sundance doc. From the clip on Sundance, it looks like it follows an architect who builds “earth ships” in the desert – all from recycled materials. Tomorrow’s episode of Big Ideas for a Small Planet is all about alternative energies.
I’m kind of a TV whore, so I’m pysched to feed my problem with such well-done fantastic shows. I guess I’ll have to tape Bret Michaels Rock of Love II or whatever other crap is on. Thanks Sundance for making my week! It’s fanastic that the shows are starting on a day the Pittsburgh Penguins have an off day (oh yeah, I’m addicted to watching the Penguins, too).
My wife and I put the kids to bed at their normal bedtime, just this time we did it by candlelight. We weren’t as prepared for Earth Hour as we should have been. We ran around frantically looking for some candles. Finally we found enough to keep us seeing. Once the kids were in bed, we spent the hour talking and playing cards. I think that we need to have an “Earth Hour” more often. I’m a great example of letting the TV be our conversation piece. It’s not as bad when we’re watching quality programs from Sundance’s The Green or Discovery Health or the Science Channel…but I like horribly bad TV. If we’re watching good programs, we have in-depth conversations (and sometimes bitch sessions) about our passion for…[insert earth, health, food, future, climate, children, technology, etc. here]. Other times, I watch bad TV with no redeeming value, yet shutting out healthy conversation. I fully admit to my failures in this department. Perhaps a self-imposed Earth Hour more often would help…or just watch less horrendous TV?
I guess that DoTheGreenThing should have made March the “Lights Out” month instead of this past November. Tonight is the WWF (wildlife, not wrestling) sponsored Earth Hour. Earth hour is a worldwide initiative to “turn off the lights” in cities around the world for one (1) hour starting at 8pm (through 9pm) to heighten awareness about climate change and to inspire individuals, businesses and corporations to take practical action to reduce their carbon footprint. It is more of a symbolic gesture than an actual impact from one night. The hope is that it raises awareness to the greater cause. One person on the news likened it to the Boston Tea Party – sure that might be a little extreme, but any little bit helps. I’m actually glad to see that it has been on the news every night this week and on the radio here. Chicago happens to be one of the flagship cities around the world.
So what are you going to do in the dark? Are you going to have a candlelight dinner? Perhaps read a book? Lynn over at OrganicMania suggests enjoying some organic beer. Not a bad idea. I have some in the garage. I think I’m going to put on a straw hat, suspenders, make my wife call me Jebodiah, and pretend I’m Amish. They’re a pretty sustainable culture, right? The Do The Green Thing site had a great video in November that is after the jump. I encourage you to enjoy the video. Hrmmm…that video is giving me some ideas…
Big deal – another charity planting a friggin tree – dime a dozen (or is that greendimes a dozen? - yes – cheap horrible ecogeek joke). So you go to their site and buy a tree which will be planted in the Sebangau National Forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. You can feel good for helping reforest the planet. But wait, there’s more! If you’ve never used Google Earth, it’s a sweet program that you install on your computer (originally called Keyhole if you’re keeping score at home) – so slightly different from Google maps. People can give you files to open in Google Earth which will take you to a specific spot – KML files. So you buy a tree and the WWF gives you a KML file when the tree is planted so you can virtually watch the growth of the forest you helped create.
P.S. I have to apologize for the lack of posts this week. I’ve been down-and-out with the flu. Boo flu!
There are a series of GM Chevy commercials all featuring little kids. Most of them are promoting the Chevy Tahoe hybrid. My 7 year old daughter was watching one earlier today during a program we were watching. I had to tell her that they weren’t telling the full truth. She sees the kids and hears the message and believes every word. Apparently it’s the “green car of the year.” A gigantic SUV is the green car of the year? Is that rating from a made up organization from the GM gas guzzler lobby? We’re even told that hybrids dont’ have to be “tinsy weensy.” Then there is a Chevy commercial that just promotes Chevy. In that one, they flash a huge SUV and then tell us, “we believe a hybrid should fit the way you live, not the other way around.” I guess that sells to most Americans, but to me it’s just irksome. I know too much about consumerism. An SUV that gets 21mpg is an improvement, but it’s not the answer. It shouldn’t be the future. It is not fixing any of our worldly problems. I guess HGTV didn’t get that message, either. Anyway…enjoy some YouTube…
Deanna Glick, a blogger for the multi-blogger blog (that I happen to read religiously) Green Daily, is starting a project with her friends called The Neighborhood Garden Project. My wife, Kelly and I have been talking a lot about a home veggie garden and trying to plot our strategy. Around the time we were first discussing it, I emailed our local town government and inquired about a community garden. Nope – none exists. I didn’t think much about it again. This past Wednesday night, I went to Chicago Green Drinks where the topic was about farming and urban gardens. Then this morning I was watching The Sierra Club Chronicles and it was all about community gardens. Now I read about Deanna’s project. It must be a sign.
Like I said, Kelly and I have been talking about our forthcoming veggie garden for the past few months. We have the usual perennials and shrubs now, but nothing edible. I’ve had the itch for a long time and I think the past year of her reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and other eco-books has convinced her that it’s time to take action. We had a CSA membership last year, but didn’t like it much. This year, we decided in addition to our own garden, we’ll use the money we spent weekly on the CSA and combine that with what we spent at the farmer’s market to spend more at the local farmer’s market getting greens we want to eat, yet still helping out and eating locally.
I grew up on a small farm - I guess you could call it a hobby farm. It wasn’t out livelyhood or anything, but it was a lot bigger than the 1/3 acre that I live on now. We always had a very large garden with fresh vegetables. I didn’t fully appreciate what I had back then. We were locavores on the 100 yard diet. We ate pork, beef, and a slew of vegetables all raised within 100 yards of the house (and even drank goat’s milk instead of cow’s since we had a goat to milk). Although I moved away from that environment when I was 15yrs old, it makes me the resident farmer expert (even if I’m far from it). To be honest, we’ll be relying on the little I know paired with projects such as The Neighborhood Garden Project and Katie & Chris over at Gardenpunks (and probably friends and family…and of course…Google).
The Neighborhood Garden Project is really intriguing. It almost reminds me of EcoMoms that has been getting so much attention lately. There are womens clubs, moms clubs, gourmet dinner clubs, bridge clubs and so on. Now there is a group of women neighbors starting their own micro-garden club together. It’s not your typical garden club where you learn about plants at a monthly meeting and have a plant sale. It’s a hands-on social club. Deanna and her neighbors are starting a small community garden right in her own backyard – literally in on her property. From the video, the project is in it’s infancy with the garden just starting out. It’s going to be exciting watching her progress (and hopefully my own progress).
In some urban cities of the country, there are eco-terrorists – or “green guerrillas” who go to a vacant lot under darkness and plant a garden. All of these ideas are very intriguing to me. Behind my house there is a large dry retention basin. Just beyond that is a stretch of land that has been on the city drawings to be a road since the 1970’s. It’s still sitting there vacant. Just weeds. Should I contact the village and ask permission or just start growing stuff there? What if I just scattered seeds there and see what grows naturally? Hrmm… so much to ponder. Good luck with your new club, Deanna. I hope you start a trend!
I care about peak oil and I like sexy women. So I want to thank La Marguerite for bringing this video to my attention. All kidding aside, the video is very informative and worth checking out. Enjoy Cassandra!
Happy St Patrick’s Day! It was a bit of a struggle of what to write about on St Patrick’s Day. So I started doing some digging around and found this wonderful project called the Cloughjordan Eco Village. Constuction on the village began on Earth Day 2007 on the 67 acre farm the group purchased. Here’s the village map.
The Village aims could generally come under the following headings [via TheVillage.ie]:
Human Scale:-
A place that can down-size the institutions that provide housing, food, waste disposal, transportation, health care, education, social interaction and democracy, and contain these systems in a community where direct human involvement in the institutions is promoted.
A fully featured settlement:-
The Village will provide as many of the services and products required by the residents itself. To this end a critical mass of about 132 households plus the existing population of Cloughjordan can allow for a fully featured settlement.
Human activities that are harmlessly integrated into the natural world : -
The Village will be designed around a permaculture concept that looks to nature for the models and structures of a living system
A place supportive to healthy human development:-
This is a balanced and integrated development to all facets of human life, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual
A community that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future: -
This is the cornerstone of sustainable development. If what we do today can be seen to have adverse effects down the line then we must cease. The Village must be viable for the next generation, so therefore it must offer to that generation a place that they can also sustain.
You know that my posts aren’t complete without a video, so here ya go:
Water is something we all take for granted, yet over an estimated 1 billion people worldwide have no access to safe drinking water. Nearly 6,000 children die each day from water-related illnesses. This is where the UNICEF Tap Project comes in. For the next week, March 16-22, restaurants will invite their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free. For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days. March 22 also just happens to be World Water Day.
People can survive without oil. We can’t without water. Blood will be shed a thousand times over due to water issues in the coming years. That is pretty much a given. Here in America, there are major water shortages underway in the arid west and also recently in the Georgia region. For those of us who don’t even think twice about wasting water, we need to think beyond our borders and help change lives as much as possible. Okay – I’m getting off my soap box now.
“Prime Time For The Planet” is back! Tuesday nights at 9pm. Okay – so maybe being a TV junkie isn’t a “green” thing to do. Big Ideas for a Small Planet is such a great show, though! Last season on The Green started with Big Ideas and then went on to show the great series called It’s Not Easy Being Green (which Sundance has picked up the second season of from the BBC). They finished it off with a few episodes of the Sierra Club Chronicles.
Deanna Glick
Happy St Patrick’s Day! It was a bit of a struggle of what to write about on St Patrick’s Day. So I started doing some digging around and found this wonderful project called the 
