Sorry, I stay away from top 10 lists–but I thought I’d share some tips for how you can be more eco-friendly while you are on the road. You probably already have them in your home or office!
Earth Hour will occur Saturday, March 27, between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. local time around the world. Some may scoff and say it’s a fad: but in my opinion, it’s more important and meaningful than Earth Day. Here’s why. Throughout 137 countries and countless towns and cities, the lights will go off for one [...]
Wow. Two weeks ago I posted a short film I did with Patrick Benson on LA’s tenuous relationship with water. And as I often do weekly, I posted the link to most of the LinkedIn groups to which I belong. From a bird’s eye view, the results were interesting: I think few actually watched the [...]
Los Angeles and water sure have a sordid history together. Of course there’s the 1974 movie, Chinatown, that sums up the backroom deals and violence that worked to bring water to a thirsty and ambitious Southern California. Now we are on the verge of another chapter in the “water wars,” as years of drought, increasing [...]
Last week I was in Aptos, California, visiting my parents for Christmas. They have lived in Aptos (just east of Santa Cruz) for over 12 years, yet until last Saturday, I was completely clueless about a treasure two miles from their home: The Forest of Nisene Marks, a California State Park. For forty years, [...]
Halloween holds a special place in my heart—my birthday is close to the holiday, so growing up, my mother often had very creative ideas for my Halloween-themed birthday parties . . . I remember one birthday party where we made individual caramel apples, using licorice, of course, for those 70s moustaches. Years later, in my [...]
My dear friend in Ottawa announced several weeks back—on Facebook—that she had bought a dual flush toilet. I remember seeing these all over East Asia, especially in Korea and Japan. It makes sense, right? Smaller flush for #1, and well, a bigger flush. That’s actually how I figured out the Chinese characters for “big” and [...]
I recently had a discussion with like-minded folks where we bantered about what it meant to be “green.” It’s gone from fringe to fashion, activist to academic, from mocked to a true movement. Growing up, the debate had always been so polarized. Remember the spotted owl controversy of the early 1990s? Then there was the [...]
Like millions of American boys, I spent a few years in Boy Scouts. I wasn’t a fan: I made some friends, but I found many of the adult leaders sanctimonious windbags, I hate the fascist youth uniforms, and disagreed with some of the indoctrination in the Scout handbooks. I admit I use the term “boy [...]
Who would have thought South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford would become the latest joke on the talking head shows? Isn’t it bizarre that he took off for a few days, his wife didn’t know where he was (didn’t anyone learn from John Edwards?), and that he went away on Father’s Day? Oh yeah, not to mention hiking on [...]
I’ve always believed the debate over green technology and alternative fuels should focus on the technology and fuel used on the back-end, not on “exotic” or “sexy” products such as hybrid cars. So much of the basic manufacturing and processing of materials that we use in our daily lives use a lot of energy. (more…)