I have decided to update the “series” (can you call 2 posts a series?) in the hopes that I will be more consistent about it. From now on, Wednesdays will be “Simple Ways Wednesdays” and will always have a post about how you (yes, even you) can be a little greener in your every day life. This plan is inspired by all the blogs I read who do a “Wordless Wednesdays” post where they post a picture of some sort with no words accompanying it.

While “Simple Ways Wednesdays” will not be wordless (sorry about that), they certainly won’t be worthless either.

So let’s begin with our first “Simple Ways Wednesday” post (Episode 3 in the Simple Ways Series - read episode 1 and episode 2, if you’d like).

Check the air in your car’s tires!

Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States (PDNPOTUS), recently was speaking about his plan for America’s Energy Policy and was asked by an attendee what he, himself could do. PDNPOTUS (Obama) responded that he could inflate his tires to the proper, recommended level.

Repuglicans, predictably, have begun to claim that Obama’s energy policy plan is just that, nothing else, and have apparently begun to send out and give away tire pressure gauges printed with “Obama’s Energy Plan” on them. Hats off to the humor there. But watch the video below on Obama’s response:

For any of you skeptics out there, here are a couple of links that confirm the validity of PDNPOTUS’s claim that 3-4% efficiency gains (and more oil saved than could be pumped from McCain’s oil fields) can be achieved by this simple step:

• The Obama Tire-Gauge Solution: No Joke
• Politifact Finds Obama’s Tire-Inflation ClaimTrue

Additionally (amusingly), During George H. W. Bush’s reign, tire inflation was something the REPUBLICANS were pushing! Read about the ad campaign of a past Bush administration. Oh, where did they lose their way!?!

So, if you happen to receive a tire inflation gauge mocking Mr. Obama, do yourself a favor and USE IT! It will save you a few bucks, reduce our pressure on momma Earth, and lower dependence on oil.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

Water traveling through the water table feeds a river at a steady, gradual rate.  If we route water directly to the river via pipes and sewers then that steady water flow turns into abrupt floods of water during even mild rain events followed by long dry spells between rain events.  Water levels oscillate between high and low making them become unstable with their banks looking like cliffs and trees falling over into the river. 

The ground and plant life on the surface act as filters for the water before it arrives to the river.  It reduces pollutants and turbidity.  The sewer lines provide a direct line to the river without this filter.  For example, runoff from a yard brings with it the phosphorus from fertilizer.  Concentrated phosphorus in a river creates algae blooms which alter the amount of sun and oxygen the water in the river gets, which kills plants and fish.

A rain garden is an attempt at putting that missing piece of the water cycle back.  Instead of diverting rainwater runoff from a roof to a sewer drain, you divert it to a rain garden where it soaks into the ground.  At its most basic a rain garden is a shallow basin with native plants planted in it. 

Site selection:  You want to find a spot that’s ten to fifteen feet away from your foundation.  You can test the absorption rate of the ground by digging an 18 inch hole in the ground.  Fill it with water once- after that’s soaked up fill it up again and if it soaks up within 24 hours then you don’t need to amend the site.  If it doesn’t soak up within 24 hours then you’ll want to mix sand and compost in. 

Site preparation:  First, figure out how big your rain garden should be.  This formula is what the City of Ann Arbor recommends:  Take the square footage of your roof, divide it by the number of downspouts, then take one fifth of that- the resulting number is the square footage your garden should be.  So, if you have a 1,000 sqft. roof with 2 downspouts then you need a 100 sqft. garden.  Mark out the border of your rain garden and then start digging.  The center of the garden should be 3 inches below the border of the garden.  To get the water to the garden you can extend your downspout, or dig a little trench to the rain garden. 

Plants:  Native plants are among the best plants for this job.  They have deep long roots that can help water find a path down to the water table.  The deep roots also help the mature plants survive periods of no rain.  You’ll need to pick plants that are accustomed to becoming temporarily flooded.  A few good candidates in Michigan are swamp milkweed, new england aster, blue flag iris, and big blue stem grass.  In natural settings most of these kinds of plants are found at the edges of ponds and streams. 

http://www.raingardens.org/Index.php

http://www.ewashtenaw.org/government/drain_commissioner/dc_webWaterQuality/rain_gardens/tour/raingardentour.html

Check out the post here.

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

Since that time, through no true, particular goals or specific work on my part, environmentastic! has reached a pretty crazy milestone, in my mind: more than 4000 unique visitors in one month (nearly 125,000 hits), exceeding the bandwidth limits I had set for it when I initially created the hosting account (2GB transfer). I upped the bandwidth limit and went to look at my stats:

Exciting, eh? In celebration of this accomplishment, I would like to point out the post that has been bringing in the most traffic: Green Mutual Fund Providers. I had no idea that this post would bring in the kind of traffic it has, and it is still the most often read post on the blog, even though it was posted back on March 11th of 2008. Other posts that discuss similar issues as the above are pretty well-read:

Two Ways to Invest Responsibly

and

Socially Responsible Investing (SRI)

But the Green Mutual Funds Providers post is by far the most read - and is the number two google result for the search phrase: “green mutual funds.”

So since this is a celebration of environmentastic!’s success thus far in its existence, I would like to extend the information I have provided to people about SRI and offer you, my beloved readers, the following gift:

I am going to start researching potential investments in the stock market from an SRI perspective. For a limited time, I will post them here on environmentastic! for your enjoyment and, hopefully, to your retirement and investment benefit! But that’s only part of the gift:

The REALLY exciting part of my gift to you, readers, is that I would like to research and recommend (or not) companies that YOU would like to know more about. So let ‘er rip in the comments! Let me know what investments you think might be good options, and I’ll do some research and make a recommendation!

Keep in mind that I am not an investment adviser professionally, nor am I an expert, but I have a layman’s interest in investing, as well as a passion for and knowledge about the environment and social issues - in other words, “You could do worse.”

Anybody who comments with suggestions of companies to research will also be offered a discount on environmentastic!’s upcoming quarterly investment newsletter… for a limited time, anyway!

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

First, a little history on TerraCycle. The company was founded by Tom Szaky in 2001, while he was a student at Princeton. TerraCycle’s first product was a natural fertilizer made out of worm poop - and that product is still the core product of the company. Szaky got the idea while he was visiting friends during college, and he noticed that they were making compost for their - ahem - “herb” garden.

Ultimately, Szaky dropped out of Princeton to run the business - whose product consisted of liquefied worm poop bottled in used bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. TerraCycle actually uses what most people and companies consider waste at every level of their manufacturing, from the product itself (worm poop) to the bottles it is packaged in (discarded soda pop bottles), to the packaging that the product is shipped in (misprinted or otherwise unusable cardboard boxes), to even the spray mechanisms themselves (overruns or discards - did you know that companies throw away thousands of perfectly functional spray heads if a bottle design is slightly changed? TerraCycle uses these discards!)!

Without going into terrible, boring detail (I love this stuff, but I know you, my readers, may not), TerraCycle has great information about basic economics and how the law of supply and demand has worked against the planet since the beginning of the industrial era. But instead of tearing down what big business has always done (profit motive overriding social and environmental benefit), TerraCycle shows how, with a little creativity, the tradeoff between profit and the environment can be made into an illusion. It’s called the triple-bottom-line (profit, social, & environmental), and it is the idea that TerraCycle uses to base its business model off of. Quite successfully, I might add.

Suffice it to say that TerraCycle is taking what most people consider garbage, trash, or waste, and turning it into something useful again, which it can then sell for a profit. This keeps garbage out of the landfill and provides material for manufacturing that is free, nearly free, or even sometimes less than free (less than free? Wha…? Look on TerraCycle’s website to find out)! This allows them to sell an environmentally-superior product at the same or sometimes even cheaper prices than conventional alternatives. Amazing!

So what’s this Kraft deal? TerraCycle needs to get supplies from somewhere, right? In the early days, the company’s founders would “liberate” plastic bottles from recycling containers in the middle of the night…. But today, the company does something a little more socially responsible (and a little less “illegal”) - they pay schools and other organizations to collect stuff for them! Check out the left side of their website to see what their “Bottle Brigade” has turned into - schools and other organizations can now collect cookie wrappers, drink pouches, energy bar wrappers, yogurt containers, even wine corks, in addition to bottles.

4000 organizations signed up in 2007 to collect bottles and other material through this program. TerraCycle’s cost (to pay for shipping the collection boxes to schools and then back to the company, full) was $40 to $50 thousand PER MONTH! Corporate sponsorships help pay for this cost, allowing companies like Kraft to help control their impact on the environment not only from a manufacturing perspective, but also on the other end of the product’s life-cycle! Kraft is making the news right now because they are the #1 food and beverage manufacturer in North America, but the original sponsor of this project for TerraCycle was Honest Tea, whose co-founder Seth Goldman is good friends with TerraCycle’s Tom Szaky.

TerraCycle will accept any packaging, regardless of brand (Kraft and other sponsors are committed regardless of which manufacturer’s waste is collected). TerraCycle is focused on diverting waste from the stream, so the company makes its products out of material from any brand. Not that there isn’t enough from Kraft alone - 597 million packages of Oreo and Chips Ahoy are manufactured every year. Yes, thats 597 million plastic packages in our landfills, littering our streets, and floating around in our rivers and oceans. TerraCycle would like to take a chunk of that mess away.

So look for TerraCycle’s products next time you need a fertilizer or glass cleaner, or trash can, or planter, or any of several products they offer! Or sign up your school to help raise money for programs that get the short shrift, like theatre and arts and music education. This will all help TerraCycle solve manufacturers’ waste problems, solve the world’s landfill problem, and support schools and other organizations.

All while offering eco-friendly products without the eco-friendly premium.

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

One of the recommendations I remember most was about student housing. As a Resident Advisor, I was very interested in this aspect of a campus’s eco-footprint, and the suggestions was incredibly simple: change out incandescent light bulbs for new-fangled compact fluorescents in dorm-rooms and classrooms, and anywhere energy-sucking incandescents could be found.

Today, I think that’s a no-brainer, but I’ll bet there are still lots and lots of colleges and other schools that have not done even this simple step. Shame on them.

Something I hadn’t thought about, though - at least from a specifically environmental perspective - is the relative environmental impact of e-learning compared to conventional college courses.

I received an email from new blogger Ruth Sylvia in early May about a post she had just recently finished about this very subject - Online Learning is Green - and I marked it to come back to later, when I had more time. It was then promptly lost in the black hole of information that is my email (currently set at more then 700 unread emails in my inbox - most of which are trash, I’m sure).

I’ve been trying to reduce the info-sucking quotient of my inbox by digging through and cleaning up, and today I happened by Ruth’s email once again. I took the time to read the above article, and I liked the idea the online learning is more environmentally-friendly than traditional learning. My campus specifically was probably 75% commuter students, meaning that thise learners drove to campus every day, and then drove back home after classes were over. Traffic, parking, and pollution heavy. More then once I feared for my life when crossing the street or walking to the business school building, which was not on campus “proper,” but located in the surrounding city.

I’d never talk down traditional education; I think that College campuses are by far one of the more beautiful, well-cared, picturesque communities in any neighborhood that is lucky enough to have one located in or near it. But in lieu of commuting to a physical campus, if you are unwilling or unable to live on campus as a student, may I suggest looking into online courses? Save yourself some money on gas, and help save the Earth every day you don’t drive in!

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

With all that in mind, below you will find screenshots of the new wordpress templates that I have decided are an option for environmentastic! to change to. At the bottom of this post, you will find a survey asking which of the templates you, my readers, prefer.

Please take a look at each of the options below and then vote for your favorite. You will also notice options for environmentastic! to keep it’s current template, or to take none of the templates. I am debating having a template designed specifically for environmentastic!, but I’m a poor (read cheap) schlub who isn’t making enough money to justify paying a designer just yet… but that will be changing very soon.

Now that that is out of the way - here are the contenders:

OPTION 1 (above - Click to enlarge)

OPTION 2 (above - Click to enlarge)

OPTION 3 (above - Click to enlarge)

OPTION 4 - (above - click to enlarge)

OPTION 5 (above - Click to enlarge)

OPTION 6 (above - Click to enlarge)

Please vote - this is another way for the important people (all of you) to have a little say about what you read and how you read it! Plus - I’m horrible at making decisions…

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

If you vote for “none of the above,” please let me know of any good wordpress designers you know by leaving a comment. If you like more than one - pick the one you like best, but leave a comment telling me which other ones you approve of as well. Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for your input!

My family is a great bunch of people, with characters ranging the gamut - including a three-year-old cousin who already knows the hot names in politics! We generally eat, talk, pick on each other, and play cards when we get the opportunity, and holidays are always a good excuse to do so…

This particular gathering, we were playing Hearts - our old fallback - somewhat in memory of my grandmother who passed away last fall. If you are unfamiliar with Hearts, the goal is to have the LEAST points at the end of the game, which is reached when the person with the MOST points reaches 100 of them. Each heart is worth one point, and the queen of spades is worth 13 points, for a total of 26 points given per hand. If someone “takes them all,” meaning that one player gets all the hearts AND the “bitch” (queen of spades), that player gets NO points for the hand, and ALL OTHER players get 26 points added to their total.

During this game, I happened to be dealt a pretty good hand, and decided that I would try to “Take them all.” Usually, the other players catch on to what you are doing before the hand is over and “feed” a heart to someone else or even take one themselves to stop you from succeeding. When it was obvious that I was attempting to take them all, one of my cousins made a comment that that is far out of character for me… I usually let the game go on around me and take as few hearts as possible. I believe the statement was something along the lines of “balls dropping” or “growing a set” - leave it to my family to be so eloquent - but it struck a chord with me for some reason.

What I realized is that it’s not just cards with me - life is going on around me all the time and I don’t participate to my potential. Hearts was just one example of me “playing not to lose.” What I realized that day was that I need to start “playing to win!” And so I made a decision that day to do so.

What does this have to do with the environment, you ask? EVERYTHING. And nothing. It means I want you as my readers to know what my goals are with environmentastic! and my life as it relates to environmentastic! It means I want to announce to the world my expectations and my goals and my dreams, and I want you - my readers - to help hold me to them! Not to say that they may not change a little goal-for-goal, but that the end-point will probably be pretty static.

So here goes (stated in present tense in case the universe is listening - for you Secret fans!):

environmentastic! sets the standard for environmental blogs. It is the highest trafficked and most successful eco-site in the history of the internet.

environmentastic! boasts the world’s largest eco-directory, direct competition to DMOZ, except specifically for the environmental community.

environmentastic! is the first stop for consumers looking for eco-friendly alternatives to their conventional products; it is the internet’s most comprehensive vertical search portal for eco-friendly products, services, and ideas worldwide.

environmentastic! has the largest and most active eco-forum community on the web.

environmentastic! has grown and expanded into brick and mortar stores, offering a range of eco-friendly products using the Wal-Mart / Target / Meijer retail model - bringing eco-friendly products directly to consumers so consumers don’t have to seek and search to find what they need and want to be as green as possible.

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

So there you have it. I’m putting it out for all the world to see and judge me by. I’ll be taking you along for the ride, readers, so I hope you’re ready. While environmentastic! will never be a “make-money-online” blog, don’t be surprised to see some reviews of what I’m doing or have done and how successful it was / is. Whether or not I reach any or all of the above goals, the real, true, and major underlying theme is that I want to be running my own business - one that makes a difference for people and the Earth in the long run.

I want the freedom to work on my own schedule and from wherever I would like. I’m already tired of working on someone else’s schedule - and I’ve had jobs that have been pretty flexible in that manner - but I’m still tired of it. And with the success that Raconteur Theatre is seeing, I’m excited to keep moving and make something larger and better out of the fine foundation that I feel environmentastic! has become!

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

It’s time! Please come out to see After the Afterglow - Raconteur Theatre’s debut production!

• Trailers: see our videos! http://raconteurtheatre.com/index.html
• Tickets: please purchase tickets in advance at http://raconteurtheatre.com/tickets.html
• Info about the show: http://raconteurtheatre.com/currentshow.html

More info is below. Thank you to all of you who have already purchased tickets- see you at the show!

Performance Dates:
8 p.m. - Thursday, May 29
8 p.m. - Friday, May 30
8 p.m. - Saturday, May 31
2 p.m. - Sunday, June 1
8 p.m. - Thursday, June 5
8 p.m. - Friday, June 6
8 p.m. - Saturday, June 7
2 p.m. - Sunday, June 8
8 p.m. - Thursday, June 12
8 p.m. - Friday, June 13
8 p.m. - Saturday, June 14

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Keep up with Raconteur Theatre Company at http://raconteurtheatre.com