Despite a hectic week (nothing to do with Christmas, believe me!), I still read the news and found you a few things to read. I post more on Twitter and Facebook!

> A green roof, natural light and minimalistic design and furnishings attracted me to this Max Brunner home!

> Over the last several decades, woodstoves have gotten cleaner as far as emissions. Now the manufacturing process at Morsø in Denmark is more eco-friendly, too.

> Your zero energy home can supply all your energy needs AND charge your electric vehicle!

> Here are some excellent solutions in the design of a small, energy efficient house to maximize space and keep it from feeling too… well… small.

> Have you ever heard of an eco-hut? I hadn’t!

I went for a walk the other night with my 83 year old neighbor, who out-walks me, by the way. She is very outspoken and does not mince words. We got on the topic of climate change, natural resources, conservation and the ‘green movement’ (for lack of a better term).

She does not feel hopeful.

She feels there are too many people on the planet to offset her recycling, and water and electricity conservation. She wonders why she bothers doing those things, when our population is too great for our resources. Her point is: What’s the point?

In 1985, in Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management, I read that our resources could maintain 2% of the then current population. That meant 98% of the 4.85 billion people inhabiting the Earth had to die off for the planet to be in balance. Over-population.

Today we sport almost 7 billion people on the planet, and naturally, we have fewer resources than 25 years ago. As long as too many people are sucking up too few resources, the earth’s massive ecosystem will not be in balance.

So do our small, personal recycling and conservation efforts offset the imbalance between resources and the number of people on the earth? My neighbor thinks not. She feels her efforts are a waste of time. She does them, but wonders why.

A colleague of mine feels his efforts to educate people through his progressive website are for naught. When he digs up information such as Monsanto and BP donating money to The Nature Conservancy and Halliburton being named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in the Global Oil Services sector, he wants to give up.

He does not feel hopeful, obviously.

It’s frustrating to be working towards reducing CO2 emissions, cutting back on consumption, educating everyone around you, and feeling you’re making progress in restoring and maintaining the health of the Earth, only to find out that some big corporation has more sway than you do. Much more sway!

So do our efforts make a difference?

If several million individuals:

> recycle
> close lights in unused rooms
> drive less, carpool or cycle
> build or remodel energy efficient homes
> not fly
> bring reusable bags to the store
> turn down the thermostat
> buy local and organic food
> etc,

will their actions offset one dirty, underhanded, non-transparent, anti-environment corporation greasing the palm of a non-profit that is supposed to be protecting and conserving nature?

What are your thoughts?

There’s a little bit of everything this week! You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook to read the stuff I didn’t have room for!

> Now THIS is closer to my idea of being green – holistic and progressive! I think all new construction should have sustainable features, but I also believe that taking care of each other is eco-friendly. Here is a green school that serves the children in a poor neighborhood of Bogota.

> Speaking of holistic… We all know we are moving at warp speed with technology fueling us. We have news in our pockets on our phones before a newspaper every hears of it. We we can communicate 24/7 with friends and relatives around the world via Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Slowing down is good for your health, and good health is eco-friendly.

> I’ve always been astonished and horrified at the energy use and waste in hotels. Towels and sheets get washed after one use, toiletries are thrown away after one use, empty rooms are heated or cooled, breakfast food is tossed in the trash – I shudder as I write this, and I haven’t even mentioned water and electricity usage! I can travel and relax now, though, since some hotels are going green, and there is even a Green Hotels Association!

> Autumn is on its way. The days are shortening, the mornings are chilly. Your house needs some attention to get it through the winter!

> Reduce, reuse, recycle, and strive for zero waste. I couldn’t have said this better than my friend Julie Urluab at Taiga Company – ‘Zero waste maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption and ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace.’

As always, there is lots of information to share this week! You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook for the stuff I didn’t have room for here.

> My idea (for now) of rain harvesting is a bunch of buckets and 55-gallon trash cans lining the house under the roof. I use the water mostly for garden irrigation, but I have been known to dunk my head in it on a hot summer day. Someday I will get official with gutters and a cistern, and when I do, this item will come in handy.

> You don’t need LEED certification to live in an efficient, healthy home. You can, however, use their guidelines to make improvements. Start with an energy audit, and caulk and seal obvious leaks, then move up to larger items. Greening your home is not beautiful, until you get your utility bill. Here are five simple ways to get started.

> Get prepared for when the economy picks back up. There will be a demand for workers in sustainable fields. Here’s a projection on green jobs for the next ten years.

> I love beer. What I have been drinking for the last ten years or so is Fat Tire, one of several brews of New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado. New Belgium is one of the most sustainable businesses in the US. Serendipity that I like their beer AND they are green! Here are four other eco-friendly craft breweries, and be sure to read the comments for even more.

> Consumption is evil. We need to cut back and do without every new gadget that comes along, repurpose what we have, and recycle what we don’t need anymore. Check out this list of anti-consumers, and get inspired to live a simpler life.

> It wouldn’t be a recap without a green building! This comes from the Draw-Your-Own-Conclusions Department. Being green, to me, is holistic. It’s a lifestyle, a complete way of living, including appreciating nature, taking care of each other, and staying healthy. The largest cosmetic company in Brazil is embarking on a country-wide green building project. They are creating places for thousands of employees, sales people, consultants and contractors to meet, have trainings, stay and feel at home. The buildings are efficient modulars, which I love. What I don’t love is that (and I hope we all know this by now!), cosmetics are loaded with toxic ingredients, including lead and other heavy metals. So how green is this company? To me, not very. You can build green all you want, but if your product is toxic, it means little. Is this greenwash, hypocrisy, or just lack of education? Draw your own conclusions.

It’s time for a short break for me! Company has come to town – seven women I have not seen since high school graduation in 1972! The last thing I want to worry about these next few days while we have an amazing reunion (and recovery days afterward!) is posting to this blog, Twitter and Facebook. I’ll be back next week with a couple guest posts and hopefully some writing of my own.

I have gone back to school to be a Residential Planner. It will expand my real estate business, but it’s very time-consuming. And I miss getting up and writing in the morning! I have a few weeks off from school, so I hope to get caught up with desert verde, too, and bring you some original writing.

Meanwhile, go through the drop-downs in the navigation menu at the top of the page, and read Eco-living Tips, the Solar Building Series, and facts and news about Eco Building. Check out the Nature Quotes and Book selections, and visit the ads on the right side of the page to help keep this blog alive! There is lots to see while I’m gone a few days!

(This is a guest post from Roy Gayhart, originally posted on his blog at Whole Solar, a Women Owned Small Business, which is part of an affiliated group of wholesale distributors and manufacturer’s representatives who share a passion for solar energy.)

I just got through listening to President Obama’s speech about the BP Oil Spill. When I wrote the blog What the BP Gulf Oil Spill Means to BP Solar in May, who could have imagined we’d be where we are now? Around that time government officials were estimating that oil was leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day (a five-fold increase from initial estimates). A few days after that blog was written, NPR began reporting that the spill rate could be closer to 70,000 barrels per day. That set off a controversy, with BP’s COO disputing the NPR oilspill estimates. A month later, a US scientific team has fixed the estimates of the oil spill rate at between 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

We are in day 57, with no end in sight. We’ve gone from “the largest oil spill in American history” to the “worst environmental disaster in American history.” We continue to hear about the chaotic manner in which BP has handled the crisis. We’ve gone from what was described in that earlier blog to the realization that the BP spill was turning the gulf into a dead zone.

In the earlier post that I’m updating here, I explored the branding repercussions affecting BP Solar. Since then, I as able to access a talk given by a BP Group Vice President of Marketing on April 26, 2001 at The CNN Fortune Time Global Marketing Forum in Rome, Italy. Her talk was titled “Branding in the 21st Century; A BP Perspective.” She points out BP at that time was “a company made up of 100,000 people thrown together as a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions. Almost overnight the new BP became:

> One of the biggest companies in the world with over 100,000 employees worldwide
> The largest oil and natural gas producer in the US and UK
> The largest non-OPEC oil producer in the world
> The world’s largest solar company
> And a company with more than 28,000 service stations world-wide.”

In somewhat of a sad foretelling manner she stated: “I believe at the end of the day, the strongest brands still result from powerful emotional connections that companies are able to make with the general population.” She went on to identify three themes that identify “what people expect, and demand, from great brands:

> Great brands deliver not what a company makes, but what customers need.
> Great brands make a positive impact in people’s lives.
> Great brands demonstrate alignment between external words and internal actions.”

Fast-forward from 2001 to 2010 – I’m reading articles titled You Don’t Trust BP? It’s Too Late, BP and Big Oil: Shut Down America’s Greenwashing Machine and Americans Don’t Care if BP Goes Bankrupt Paying for Oil Spill, Poll Shows. Somehow I doubt this was the branding goal BP had in mind.

So, again I ask, where does this put BP Solar? There hasn’t been a lot of press on BP Solar since the the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Distaster. Renewable Energy World tells us:

BP Solar With over 35 years of experience and installations in over 160 countries, BP Solar is one of the world’s largest solar companies and has manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Spain, India, and China.

As I wrote in the earlier blog, Home Depot has exclusively carried the BP Solar brand. Since I wrote that last blog, Home Depot in California has thrown out all of its long-time loyal solar installers and replaced them with Solar City. Perhaps this is a play to replace a tarnished brand with the Solar City brand. In any event, anyone buying solar panels at a California Home Depot will get BP Solar AND Solar City. This might apply in Home Depot Warehouses outside of California as well. Will it work for Home Depot, Solar City and BP Solar? I guess we continue to wait and see.

It’s called a pen. It’s like a printer, hooked straight to my brain. Dale Dauten

When I think sustainability, I think big. I think houses, energy, solar, green building materials and post-construction waste. I don’t fret about most small things, like toothbrushes, but I do fret about disposable pens.

I write a lot. I write with a pen on paper. I know that is foreign to many of you, but, hey, call me old school. It won’t be the first time!

My pen stash seems to run out pretty fast, and when it does, I realize how many I have put in the landfill over the years. I cringe each time I make that toss into the trash and have tried lots of alternatives – fountain pens, refillable pens, cartridge pens, pencils. You name it, I have written with it. I suppose a pencil is the greenest as far as end-use waste, but its manufacture? Not so sure.

At Inhabitat yesterday, I found a pen that is 98% biodegradable! This is my answer! Everything but the ball and nib are biodegradable and non-toxic. The packaging is even recycled material, and the manufacturing company, Harbec, is one of the most sustainable in the US.

If I can toss a pen into the compost pile instead of the landfill, I will have that much less guilt about writing! What a great day that will be! These pens are ready to ship on April 30. I will get some and let you know how it works out.

I can also get notebooks made of 100% recycled post-consumer waste! I have hit pay dirt, and the guilt is washing away………

(Nan’s Note: Yeah! This sounds great to me! This shows, too, that ‘green’ is not just about energy. It’s about decentralizing and supporting your neighbors. Technology is great, but we are so global, we forget we have a local world. That is where our sustainable efforts should begin – at home.)

By Leanne Tobias

What’s in store for green buildings and green business in 2010? Here are my predictions for the year’s emerging trends.

Retrofits – The mainstreaming of LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (LEED-EBOM) — which requires compliance with EPA’s Energy Star program — gives property owners…

Energy Efficiency – As in 2009, operating cost efficiency remains an imperative for…

Alternative Energy – The use of the 30 percent investment tax credit for alternative energy should…

Localism/Regionalism – I’m also seeing reports that community or regional brands (as opposed to national or multi-national chains) are the hottest…

Greener Agriculture and Cityscapes – Localism/regionalism, when applied to the food chain, translates into…

Read the ends to those sentences at Greenbiz.com, and check out these books:

    

]]> http://desertverde.com/2010/01/14/strong-forecasts-for-green-business-and-building-in-2010/feed/ 0 http://desertverde.com/2010/01/12/sustainable-consumption-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/ http://desertverde.com/2010/01/12/sustainable-consumption-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:54:55 +0000 nan http://desertverde.com/?p=841

(Nan’s Note: “The need to develop new consumption patterns is the mother of all innovation challenges. The race to dematerialize is on.” That was all I needed to read to convince me to post this article!

Consumers and businesses need to work in tandem to reduce waste. Corporations are making strides in waste reduction, but if consumers became more eco-conscious, it would double up the efforts of the business world.

Simplify! Consume less! Way less! Your planet and future generations depend on it!)

By Aron Cramer

With climate negotiations reaching an inconclusive end in Copenhagen, the action swings back from national governments and the intergovernmental process to you and me.

For many years, the idea of sustainable consumption has been embraced by NGOs and others, but widely shunned by business.

This is changing fast. Not only that, the signs of growing interest are coming from unlikely locations.

Find out where and what the solutions are in this article from Greenbiz.com – another on of my favorites for green business news.

]]> http://desertverde.com/2010/01/12/sustainable-consumption-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/feed/ 0