Especially During Holidays Let’s face it, once the Holiday eating season is upon us, who can resist the seasonal delights? All year long we yearn for mouthwatering holiday foods. My sister’s Figgie pudding (with hard sauce) is my real weakness. It actually hijacks my brain cells to indulge. Going into the Holiday Eating Season, I practice Conscious Eating by being aware of my blood sugar fluctuations, and not “starving-to-binge” by missing meals just to take on more calories later. Approaching a big feast with an empty stomach just makes me heap my first plate full and (fill my dessert stomach too early) before the second plate arrives. Finally, it’s how…
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Green Resolutions for a Green Revolution
I want to be able to look young people in the eye and say that their future was worth making some changes to my personal actions.
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The Snowpants Rule
My mind reeled me back across the decades to packaging up my son and his brother in hats, boots, mittens, and snow pants to be protected from the harsh, Vermont winter.
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Just Enough
“…..we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. ” — – Dwight D. Eisenhow One beneficial consequence that comes from things getting uncomfortable is that it forces change. That is true whether you get a cramp from sleeping in a funny position, or when the recycling market collapsed after China no longer accepted the world’s discarded plastics. As uncomfortable and distressing as it is not to be able to recycle as we did before, we are now forced to acknowledge all that stuff we bring into our homes.…
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Changing Direction
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” — Thomas Paine, from the introduction to Common Sense. For more than 200, years we have accepted the burning of fossil fuels as the way to power our rapidly changing modern world. For more than 100 years, we have accepted the gasoline-powered car for personal mobility. For more 70 years, we have accepted crop hybridization, chemical fertilizers and herbicides as the means to feed our exploding population. For more than 60,…
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Resilience Today
Resilience is a frequent topic of conversation these days, especially after a major catastrophe or when planning for some future disaster. The Cascadia subduction zone earthquake comes to mind for the latter. We talk about the need for resilience in our personal lives, in our organizations, in our businesses, and in our city, state, and federal governments. We talk a lot about resilience, which is a good thing, since history has proven the value of human resilience. However, there may be another side to resilience that is not discussed An op-ed piece by Parul Sehgal in the December 1, 2015 issue of the New York Times Magazine, opens with the…
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Why We Should Worship the Ground We Walk On
It’s one of nature’s most perfect contradictions: a substance that is ubiquitous but unseen; humble but essential; surprisingly strong but profoundly fragile. It nurtures life and death; undergirds cities, forests, and oceans; and feeds all terrestrial life on Earth. It is a substance few people understand and most take for granted. Yet, it is arguably one of Earth’s most critical natural resources – and humans, quite literally, owe to it their very existence. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the air we breathe, humanity depends upon the dirt beneath our feet. Gardeners understand this intuitively; to them, the saying “cherish the soil” is gospel. But…
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The Urban Homestead
Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City BY KELLY COYNE & ERIK KNUTZEN This celebrated, essential handbook shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips, and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics. Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. By growing our own food…
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Unsavory Truth
How the Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat. BY MARION NESTLE REVIEWED BY KEN CONDLIFF If you are interested in learning more about our commercial food chain, the Unsavory Truth will be of interest to you. If you want to know more about who is attempting to influence the commercial food chain, this book is a must-read. Too many consumers take for granted that food just appears on a store shelf, has some claims on the front of the packaging (natural, healthy, simple, etc.), and so appears to be healthy – but don’t really understand the backstory behind the product claims. In the book, Marion Nestle has…
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The JUNK FOOD Effect
A new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
