sustainable living

Sustainable living,

Any sane person realizes that we are seriously polluting the air, water and land of our world. Is recycling your newspapers and driving slower really going to change that? In word -No! Here are 12 essential reads for surviving the 21st Century from some of the greatest thinkers of sustainable living.

This event draws thousands of people every year for a weekend of green education, community building, and inspiring speakers. For five bucks you can take your pick from over 50 workshops and learn about local food, sustainable agriculture and green living from hundreds of exhibitors.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.—Henry David Thoreau

Totally off the grid!

MUM’s Sustainable Living Center — the “ultimate" green building

CopperWiki is a collaborative platform to share information, create awareness and offer choices for leading a balanced and sustainable life. It will focus on local practices, green and organic living, traditional knowledge, scientific research, and global issues at regional level.

The BioTour recently stopped on the Arizona State University campus to show off their waste veggie oil burning bus and to promote the idea of sustainability. The following is a synopsis of their visit and how the bus runs on the waste oil.

Live in a suburb and feel no connection to your community? You're not alone. Some people are turning to cohousing to bring community back to their lives and to feel connected to a place. Many of these communities also incorporate sustainable living into their developments.

In this short documentary, we take an in-depth look at the everyday life and times of a member of a sustainable community, Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

Now teenagers can spend their summer vacation growing organic fruits and vegetables, setting up a water harvesting systems, creating habitats for threatened species, brewing biodiesel, making and using compost, and living in structures that tread lightly on the earth's natural resources.

Green roofs reduce heating and cooling loads on a building, reduce stormwater run off, filter pollutants and heavy metals out of rainwater, and filter pollutants and CO2 out of the air. And they can be beautiful too! Check out these pictures of mega-greenroofs from around the world! 

This is an amazing video about a family in California that uses 90% of there urban backyard to grow all the food they need to survive, and enhancing a sustainable lifestyle.

It's both primitive and high-tech all at once. It's called an "ecovillage" – sort of a settlement based on the belief it actually "is" easy being green. Fox News travels to an ecovillage in northeast Missouri to see whether it's a nice place to visit or if you'd really want to live there.

The zeroHouse generates all of its own electric power and can collect 2700 gallons of rain for water.

An article on how cooperative living allows greater connection and reduces your environmental impact. Examples of communities from all over the US including Earthaven, Sowing Circle, and Winslow Cohousing.

A useful round-up of links with a focus on sustainable living sites - in particular forums/communities, blogs and green products.

PASADENA - For Jules Dervaes and his three adult children, each branch sagging with fleshy eggplant and every lick of sun-generated energy are small steps along the "path to freedom."

Laboring full time at their urban homestead in Northwest Pasadena, the Dervaeses cook up their own biodiesel fuel in their garage, while outside, pygmy goats trim their lawn and provide fertilizer.

The family has invested seven years of ingenuity, sweat and sacrifice decoupling from the status quo and connecting to the world at large.

While intergovernmental negotiations hobble forward and political parties snipe, the rest of us can make an impact in practical, every day ways to live green and live smarter. Here are fifty things (more than fifty, I counted) to do without a ton of money or scientific expertise to green up your contribution to life on earth. It turns out that our own homes (well, everyone's own homes combined) account for more than 30% of resource use, pollution and carbon load.

Wallpaper* magazine has been championing an eco conscious lifestyle for quite a while now. Their latest thing was to feature five "urban farms" around the world in this month's issue. There are three behind the scenes videos for http://www.wallpaper.com which talk about the farm project in Munster. It may help educate some people out there about the merits of sustainable living - it can be stylish and achievable :)