Is Slow Food the New Organic?

Last week Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement offended sustainable food advocates in the Bay Area by declaring that the food at the Ferry Farmer's Market was boutique-y and prohibitively expensive. Here's the report from the SF Chronicle. Needless to say, this didn't make local farmers, like Steve Sando, of Rancho Gordo, very happy.

In case you haven't been following it, in the last year slow food and local eating as gotten a lot of coverage. The idea is to fight the negative environmental and health consequences of industrialized farming and fast food by returning to traditional local foods and local cuisines. Local food advocates believe that eating locally is even more important for the environment than eating organically, because transporting food over vast distances uses huge amounts of energy and produces correspondingly huge amounts of pollution.

Luckily, the Grand Dame of California's own local food movement, Alice Waters managed to smooth everything over. She points out that it costs more to produce high quality (often organic) local food. Others around the blogosphere have been attempting "The Pennywise Local Food Challenge," to combat the widespread view that eating local is unrealistic because local foods are expensive and difficult to find.

If you are interested in eating more local food, you might start at 100 Mile Diet, by finding you local "foodshed." Eat Local has lots of useful resources for the Portland area and at Slow Food USA you can look for local Slow Food chapters in your part of the West.


(photo by Annette Pedrosian of Daily-Craft (who visited the farmer's
market this week), used under a Creative Commons license)

Green homes are nothing new

I love this article from The New York Times Magazine about 200-year-old houses. An excerpt:

If by “green architecture” we mean buildings designed to exist in harmony with environmental conditions, to conserve fuel and regulate temperature by “natural” means, then it is easy to forget that this did not begin with the invention of solar panels, photovoltaic cells and LEED certification. Americans have been experimenting, adapting and reshaping their architecture to suit their local environment since the very beginning.

(photo of Monticello by Jason Eusebi, used under a Creative Commons license)

Seville builds awesome solar tower

And by awesome, I mean awe-inspiring. Check out this BBC video.



(as seen at Inhabitat)

Previous Featured Blogs

May 2007:



We love green LA girl for the diversity of green living options she shares with her readers. Check out her blog, and then read her posts at BlogHer, where she's a new contributing editor.

Covering California's BIke Commute Week

Here at Green West we believe in sustainable solutions that work with our lives, that improve our quality of life and the environment. If you live close enough, biking or walking to work or for errands can be a truly win-win solution. Moving under your own power provides you with exercise, reduces your gasoline bill, and cuts down on air pollution. A recent article in The Washington Post outlined the health dangers of commuting by car, namely increased pressure on your spine, psychological stress, and decreased time for exercise. These effects are often difficult to attribute to your commute because they develop of a period of decades and so might be mistaken for the consequences of aging. Enviroblog points out that air pollution arguably kills more people in California that auto accidents, particularly kids that live near freeways.

















(photo by Richard Mason)

Luckily, the blogosphere has been filled with useful tips and local resources to help with bicycle commuting, since last week was the 13th Annual California Bike Commute Week, sponsored by The California Bicycle Coalition. Green Living Online offers tips for a spring bicycle tuneup, especially useful for those of us who aren't hardcore enough to bicycle through the winter rains and snow. Anna, of bitchinspin, recommends BikeRoWave, in Berkeley to East Bay bicyclists who don't feel up to doing their own tuneups. LAist provides a photo essay of the ups and downs of Bike to Work Day in LA. Green LA girl points to the Transit Authorities website which gives tips on combining biking with transit.

If you live someplace a little less flat than LA you might want a little help from a hydrogen bike. Another interesting idea is a solar powered bike, created by Canadian entrepreneur, Peter Sandler. Electrical bikes have been around for a number of years, so there are lots of options out there. The folks at Optibike claim to make the finest electric bike in the world and I tend to believe them since folks in Boulder have some of the most challenging terrain in the world.

If you missed Bike Commute Week or aren't in a position to by a $5000 electric bicycle, you can still get out on weekends for a leisurely trip. Or get crazy and participate on June 9th in World Naked Bike Ride, pointed out to us by Chris at Beer Activist.

Green news round-up

More companies are publishing sustainability reports, says SocialFunds.com.

Scandinavians love their bicycles. Via Gristmill. Point of honor mentioned in the article: Green West's home town is the only city to have earned platinum status from Bicycle Friendly Community.

From Treehugger: A black-screen version of Google, dubbed Blackle, might save 750 Megawatt-hours per year. Blackle isn't a product of Google itself, but it uses Google's search engine--and provides only the search engine, not all of Google's tools. Wouldn't it be terrific if Google provided an alternative, lower-energy version of its complete suite of tools for those of you who can stare at a black screen all day without getting depressed?

Environmental Design+Construction Magazine provides details of the Bronx Zoo's "Eco-Restrooms". Do you know of any similar facilities in the western U.S.?

America's Best Inns and Suites are now offering "eco-rooms."

Hawaii is updating its energy strategy. The Rocky Mountain Institute reports:

New renewable energy projects are underway on three islands. On Maui, a 20-megawatt windfarm became operational in 2006 and a major wind developer is pursuing another 30-megawatt windfarm. On the Island of Hawaii, a new 10-megawatt windfarm was added in 2005 while another windfarm has retired about 7 megawatts in older units and is repowering with 20 megawatts of capacity. On Oahu, HECO has announced its intention to build a new nominal 100-megawatt combustion turbine peaking unit to be fueled by biofuels. Hawaii's agricultural history and climate make it an ideal location for the production of biofuels, which can not only reduce Hawaii's dependence on oil but also bolster the state's agricultural sector and economy.

You can watch a video on some ways the new California Academy of Sciences' building is taking the environment into account. Among the impressive stats: the roof will feature a million native plants.


(photo by Gerald Yuvallos and used under a Creative Commons license)

Green Options shows us how to get rid of mosquitoes without using pesticides.

Constructed wetlands don't work as well as the real thing. Well, duh.

Is being green too expensive for even the middle class?

(photo by Rob Lee, used under a Creative Commons license.)

This past Sunday, Jeff Opdyke penned his "Love & Money" column for the Wall Street Journal on "The (Too) High Price of Being Green." Opdyke's lament about the high buy-in costs of going green around the house struck a chord with this suburban mama:

I know I risk angering a lot of people in the green movement who argue that environmentalism is about doing right by the environment, not your wallet. It's about thinking broadly, about the future we're passing on to our children. It's about the planet's survival.

Philosophically, I'm with you. But philosophy doesn't pay my bills.

It's one thing for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to rework his Hummer to run on zero-emission hydrogen. For him—for many high-profile celebrities now painting themselves green—it isn't a financial inconvenience. In fact, it could help them financially if it boosts their careers.

But it makes a huge difference for the average family to dump thousands of extra dollars into a hybrid vehicle. After all, when you're trying to save for retirement and your kids' college tuition, when you're trying to pay off the mortgage, the car note and student loans, when you're swamped by the everyday costs of life, green sometimes just means a deeper shade of red in your checkbook.

If the WSJ link above converts to a subscribers-only page, you can find the entire column republished at Green Envy, whose author takes issue with some of Opdyke's calculations and reasoning.

Treehugger suggests less expensive, everyday ways to live greenly. An excerpt:

The most environmentally conscious acts are often the cheapest. Like putting on a sweater rather than turning on, or up, the heating. Compact fluoro lighting saves money in the longer term. Owning and using a bicycle for city travel instead of a car. Catching public transit instead of paying a car's loan, insurance, maintenance, fuel, registration, etc. Buying secondhand, preloved goods, in lieu of new resource-intensive stryofoam wrapped or blister pack clad goods. Taking holidays locally rather than flying off to seemingly exotic locales (why fly to the Maldives if you can overland to Baja?) Placing a brick or weighted bottle into your toilet cistern, so it flushes less drinking water down the drain. Buying direct from farmers markets before visiting the supermarket. Reducing meat consumption, in favour of vegetables, fruit, grains and legumes. Not buying wasteful ‘packaged’ water, but refilling your own bottle with (the often more pure) tap water. Volunteering for your local conservation or environment group.

Drawing on the new Yahoo! Green portal, Trent of The Simple Dollar lists more "ways that going green saves a ton of money".

What about you? What's your best tip for saving money while making the greatest pro-environment impact?

Questions about sustainability of recycled architecture

Container residence (and photo) by LOT-EK

There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments of this post at Inhabitat and at Archinect about repurposing shipping containers as housing construction materials. Some folks find the resulting homes ugly; others suspect they're unsustainable. You can learn about other container projects at Brand Avenue. Check out the articles and join the conversation.

Of course, you need not live in a shipping container in order to live in repurposed housing. Recycled housing has a long history in the West. Take, for example, the case of three or four emergency shacks from the 1906 San Francisco quake that were combined into a single home, or, in a more extreme case, earthships, whose residents pledge to live very lightly on the earth:

Earthships are built from eco-friendly and recycled materials. Photo by Sproston Green.

Would you live in a repurposed container? An earthship? If you're not willing or able to go to such extremes, in what ways might you use recycled materials in your own home?

Yahoo! goes green

This week Yahoo! debuted its Yahoo! Green portal. The site's key feature is a tool that asks visitors to pledge to take simple actions, such as buying 100% recycled paper or inflating their cars' tires, and then calculates for them by how many tons of carbon dioxide they will reduce their carbon footprint. It's an eye-opening tool, as the tons add up quickly.


But does Yahoo! walk the talk? It appears to be trying to do so. Yahoo! provides this information on its environmental services, most of which are pretty bland--a way to search for green goods or buy eco-friendly cars, for example--but way down at the bottom of the page we learn that Yahoo! is going carbon-neutral. And that's a good thing, because Yahoo! apparently uses a lot of energy. On its carbon-neutral page, the company claims that "Yahoo! going carbon neutral in 2007 is like shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, like pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year."

Yahoo! also provides employee incentives for greener commuting:

Some of the services that we provide to our employees include shuttles equipped with Wi-Fi that connect with local transit stations in San Francisco and the East Bay, 25% transit subsidies, bicycle racks and lockers, showers, carpool matching, preferred parking for carpool and vanpools, 25% vanpool subsidies, and a monthly rewards program for employees who come to work without driving alone.