According to a new study by Environmental Health Perspectives, biking instead of driving for trips under five miles turns out not only to be healthful, cleaner, more fun, etc.–it’s also apparently good for the economy to replace car trips with bike trips.
As a long-term bike fan (and sometime bike commuter all the way back to high school), I’m not surprised.
(via @undriving)
Fascinating article by Marc Stoiber on how Patagonia’s latest environmental initiatives tells customers not to buy what they don’t need, and to make what they do buy last forever. And if it doesn’t last forever, Patagonia will take it back and recycle it for you.
It may be counter to common logic, but Stoiber thinks this will increase sales, and tells why. And I agree, for reasons I cite in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—that caring and an envirnmental/soial justice agenda build fans and build the brand.
Patagonia is always a great company to watch and learn from, and this initiative does not surprise me.
With all the partisan conflict gridlocking Washington, it’s refreshing to read about a 16-year-old partnership between deep environmentalists and deep conservatives.
The “Green Scissors” project, with participation from the likes of Friends of the Earth on the environmental side and the Heartland Institute among the conservative groups, targets $380 billion in wasteful government spending that happens to also foster environmentally negative impact.
Among the programs suggested for the chopping block:
flashmob:“a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.” (Wikipedia)
For the year or so that I’ve been watching the occasional video of flashmobs gathering in public places to perform, I’ve wished I could be part of one. But I didn’t wish strongly enough to organize one.
All the videos I’ve been sent took places in major cities like Amsterdam and Philadelphia. I live in a very rural area whose biggest city (Springfield, MA) has a population of only 155,629. And yet, to make a flashmob, you only need a dozen or so people.
I think a lot of the allure of flashmobs is that for the most part, we live in a society where entertainment is provided, prepackaged. Until 1877 when Edison invented the phonograph, if you wanted to hear music, you gathered some friends with instruments and songbooks and made some. If you wanted a theater experience, you played charades. Public concerts outside of major cities were few and far between. Now, every tiny town has live music 20 or 30 nights a year, and many have music every weekend night all year long. We are, for the most part, deprived of the opportunity to not only make our own entertainment but perform it for others. The flashmob at the Holyoke Mall had one day’s notice, no rehearsal. Singers were to wear a solid color indicating their part (my alto wife wore green, other parts wore red or white)—and of course, many people who just happened to be there joined in the singing.
Thursday, I received an e-mail from the organizer of a local folk music sing-along: a flashmob would gather the following day to sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus at the food court of the largest shopping mall near us, the Holyoke Mall (halfway between our house and Springfield, in a town of 40,005). On a Friday night just before Christmas, it would certainly have an audience. Better still, it was organized by the local opera company; the singing would be worth hearing.
The next morning, my wife, D. Dina Friedman, who sings in a community chorus, got an e-mail about the event that went out to all the chorus members. This was looking better and better. And the timing was perfect; we could drop our son off for the final rehearsal of his school’s winter show, go sing, and be back at school in plenty of time to watch him perform.
The singing was magical. Sound coming from every corner of the large and crowded food court, and a few stunningly stellar voices rising above the crowd. It reminded me of the time more than 30 years ago that I happened to be out on a lawn at my college while the chorus was rehearsing for their upcoming tour, and they invited me to stand within their circle and be surrounded by beautiful sound.
What amazed me the most, though, was not the event, but the aftermath. By the time we returned home after Rafael’s show, when I went to post something on Twitter, I found links to at least two different videos, including this very high quality one posted on the Springfield newspaper’s site.
I sent the link around, and got a couple of “wish I was there” or “how did you find out?” responses. And then last night, I went to a different performance, more than 40 miles away from the shopping mall at a retreat center in a really remote area (it happens to be the most beautiful house I know, one I love to visit for this annual storytelling concert)—and at intermission, I heard people talking about the flashmob and wishing they had known ahead.
In other words, even without a big-city backdrop, this flashmob had an impact well beyond the borders of the food court. E-mail made the event possible; social media gave it permanent life. “And I say to myself/What a wonderful world.”
This time of year, we spend an astonishing amount of time dealing with food: harvesting from our garden, making salads, cooking, preserving, giving or occasionally selling surplus…but it is SO worth it!
Long before we had a garden of our own, I’ve been an advocate of local community food self-sufficiency. Not that a neighborhood or village would grow all its own food, but even the most urban could grow some vegetables and herbs, some berries.
Food is a basic necessity, and as such should be a right (ditto for drinkable water and health care, among other things). But in many poor communities, there are few gardens and not even any supermarkets. Rooftops, vacant lots, and even windowsills could change this—and in the process, empower residents, break down barriers, form friendships, save people money…and introduce folks to the absolute joy of eating fresh organic produce grown right where you are.
Yesterday, I made a batch of pure tomato sauce: no oil, no water, no herbs, no onions or garlic, just fresh ripe garden tomatoes, cooked in their own juice for several hours, until the sauce was about a third of the original volume, and had a flavor so royally rich you’d think it was made of 24-karat gold. Today, it was Dina’s night to cook. Earlier today, she went and got a couple of pounds of green beans out of the garden (along with another 40 full-size and 125 cherry tomatoes, enough corn for our lunch, celery, eggplant, edemame, zucchini, and I forget what else). She cooked the beans lightly for a few minutes in my super-intense tomato sauce and served them over couscous. WOW! Served with a salad of our own cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce from our local CSA farm, plus some Turkish olives and feta cheese, it was a fabulous dinner.
Today, I made another batch of that good sauce (most of which we’re freezing for the winter), a batch of zucchini pickles, and a batch of dried tomatoes. Dina processed the leeks for freezing. I confess, we’re putting in a couple of hours a day. It really helps that I work at home and that Dina doesn’t have to go teach at the university in the summer. Seems like every break I take from the computer I am dealing with food. But come January, when the produce you can buy is almost inedible, we will pull some of our bounty from the freezer or from the dried stash in the pantry, and we will enjoy locally grown meals almost as good as those we’re feasting on now.
It’s an experience that should be shared widely. I feel very sorry for those people who’ve never had a REAL fresh tomato. Comparing it to a supermarket tomato is like comparing a perfectly aged French triple-cream gourmet cheese with Velveeta.
And I feel grateful not only to live in a place where we can have a garden, but in a time when consciousness of local organic and fresh foods is high, and where food is helping people know their neighbors and boost their nutrition.
Yes, a tomato can change the world.
I just found out today is World Water Day, which you can read about at https://liveearth.org/en/liveearthblog/celebrate-world-water-day.
Water is something far too many of us take for granted, but I believe it will be one of the most important resource issues of the coming years—something that could actually dwarf oil in importance, over time. After all, we have many options to fuel our appliances, vehicles, factories, schools, and homes, among them solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, magnetism, flywheel power, etc. But without clean water, we die—end of story.
Water is so important that I devote 28 of the 111 tips in my e-book Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle to conserving and handling water.
I’ll give you one of those tips now, because it’s a really easy behavior to change and is one of the biggest residential wastes of water:
#60. Wet the toothbrush with a small trickle of water, and then turn the water off! Turn it back on to rinse the toothpaste off the brush at the end. A family of four could save hundreds of gallons every month just from this simple trick.
(You can get all 111 tips for the princely sum of $9.95 US).
We need to look at our “water finprint” just as hard as we look at our carbon footprint. Start saving today.
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year, the international day of action focuses on climate change.
I could write about climate change for days, but I’ll keep it simple. Here are some quick, easy, painless things you can do to lower your carbon footprint, and some of them will save you a nice pile of money this coming winter, too.
Need more tips? Spend a princely $9.95 on my e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.
I’m always looking for ways to keep stuff out of the trash, and I’ve been saying for years that we ought to collect and recycle the prodigious offerings of fur that our dog and cat leave around the house–that someone could spin it into yarn or stuff pillows out of them. But actually doing it was more than I wanted to bite off, so I either deposit the pet hair in the compost, put small quantities outside for birds to line their nests with, or (gasp!) throw it out.
Today, I discovered someone has actually been running a business making yarn out of pet hair, since 2001, and has a long waiting list for the product.. Yee-haw!
But VIP Fibers‘ market isn’t me; it’s people who want quality yarn from their own pet and are willing to pay to get the yarn made. Since I would never actually use the yarn, I’ll have to keep on searching.
While you’re reading this, I’m on my way back from the California desert. I’m actually writing it before I depart, from my home in Massachusetts where there’s plenty of water. But going to the desert, where water is taken for granted, always makes me reflect on how profligate we are with water, and how sorry we’ll be about that a couple of decades down the road.
Yes, I believe that within my children’s lifetime, the price of water will soar, its availability will decrease, and we’ll have a serious resource crisis. Actually more serious than the oil crisis. There are plenty of energy substitutes for oil; we can easily generate the power we need from clean, renewable sources: sun, wind, water, and especially a complete rethinking of what is possible in the way of energy conservation. Reading people like Amory Lovins makes me aware that as a society, we could easily reduce our energy consumption by 80 percent or so, without any negative impact on quality of life.
Water is not nearly as replaceable as oil. Human beings, other animals, and all the plants we rely on directly or indirectly for food need sources of clean water, and the supply is not infinite. So it’s incumbent on us not to squander the good water we have, through waste or pollution.
The good news: like oil, water use could be sharply curtailed without any negative impact on lifestyle. I estimate that I probably use no more than 1/10 as much water as the average American–and I’ve met people who use 1/10 as much as I do. I’m not suggesting you collect buckets of rainwater and use them to flush your toilet, as one woman I talked to recently is doing. But I do suggest you look at the obvious places where you’re running water harder and longer than you need to.
Here’s one simple, totally painless example: if you’re like most Americans, when you brush your teeth, you turn the water on (often full-force) and let it run for three minutes or so while you brush. When I brush my teeth, I do it like this: Wet the toothbrush with a small trickle of water, and then turn the water off! Turn it back on to rinse the toothpaste off the brush at the end. So instead of several gallons each time, I consume a couple of ounces of water.
Want to know more? 28 of the 111 conservation tips (yeah, I snuck in a bonus tip) in my e-book, Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, are about saving water.
When a lot of people think of crowd-sourcing–harnessing the network of common wisdom–they probably think first of Wikipedia, which is written by its users. But Wikipedia, and Wikis in general, are only the most visible piece of an amazing phenomenon that dates back to the earliest days of the Net. Maybe eight or ten years ago, I was interviewed in some publication about how to get support and problems-solving for free or very low cost. And I described, among other things, how I got technical support from my then-most-current social media strategy: e-mail discussion groups.
It’s usually easy to find an informed and intelligent group of people who are delighted to answer your question. Online communities have been solving people’s problems for several decades. The form keeps evolving–from BBSs to -L listservs to yahoogroups, and now, to communities like Twitter, groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. But just as TV did not replace radio and radio did not replace print, this is an additive process; the old ways still work.
Just today, I ran into a problem with my home phone somehow forwarding to my business line. I didn’t set this up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. So I posted on Twitter, and a few minutes later, I had the answer. But I also have an issue with Amazon.com’s Advantage program, and I won’t look for the answer on Twitter or Facebook. I’m going to be asking on the two yahoogroups publishing discussion lists I follow. I expect I’ll find the answer. Knowing which audience makes sense for which kinds of questions makes a difference. And it also makes a difference if you consistently provide value to others within the community; people will be much more helpful if you’re seen as one of the “good guys.”
So…with all this free consulting (not to mention free information on the Web, already posted)…why do people still need consultants? Simple: Responses on social networks are typically off-the-cuff, general advice that may or may not be relevant to a specific situation. Even if someone spends 20 or 30 minutes answering a question, that person doesn’t know your specific situation, and won’t be expected to go into depth. In fact, social networks are an excellent way to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about, so that when people do need to go deeper, they turn to you.
Yes, this really works; I’ve actually built my business on it. And just as an example of the free-to-fee model, I’ve given you the skeleton here. If you want to know the nuts and bolt, I have various infoproducts that can help, including my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.