In this post, I expressed my great hope at soon being able to build and move into the most energy-efficient home on earth: the earthship. But that was before I knew about the Monolithic Dome. As you can see by the video, the Monolithic Dome is not nearly as energy efficient as an earthship. It [...]
Green home
Most Americans’ idea of a dream home is something like a large mini-mansion with six bedrooms, six full baths and four living areas. (What a way to save money!) Not mine. I want to live in an earthship. An earthship is made of rammed earth tires (tires filled with packed dirt) with solar panels on [...]
For those of us who are really into the level of healthy living known as “green”, finding an eco-friendly pillow can be a challenge. One of the biggest challenges is that not only do we want it to be free of unsustainable materials, but comfortable as well. The greatest ideal for such a pillow is [...]
Under the heading of ways to save money…I have a laundry quandry. A few years ago, before I was really into green and trying to buy only natural and/or sustainable materials, I bought this nylon laundry basket from a home department store. It isn’t your typical plastic basket, but a deep nylon cylinder held up [...]
For the sake of green living, I thought I was doing pretty well in developing a green kitchen. Here are just a few things I’ve done to make my kitchen a healthier, more energy-efficient place to be: Got rid of all non-stick cookware (okay, I have two Teflon cake pans and two Teflons bread pans, [...]
Much ado is made these days about compact flourescent light bulbs. They are said to last eight to fifteen times as long as incandescent bulbs (the non-eco friendly kind you grew up with) and use much less power, producing significantly less of the greenhouse gases than the incandescents put into the air. They also only [...]
As a resident of one of the nicer neighborhoods in a middle-class suburb, I would like to give kudos to my neighbors who not only maintain their own lawns, but also use a broom to clean up afterward. Whether they do it consciously or not, they are making the greener (and more economical) choice. I [...]
…reduce, reuse, recycle! When I was teaching in the inner city, I was continually annoyed at how wasteful my students were. It didn’t matter how old they were. Fifth graders destroyed puzzle boxes as quickly as my Kindergartners, and every year I had to take each class through intensive training on why we put waste [...]
The concept of fair trade is simple. Producers in developing nations are paid fair market value for their goods, thus helping them to achieve economic stability and self-sufficiency. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? People should be paid well for the work they do and receive a living wage. However, since the inception of the Industrial Revolution–especially [...]
I first started line-drying my laundry when my son, Benjamin, was about 20 months old. It was the “green” thing to do, I knew. So twice a week, I would lug the basket outside and hang our laundry up on the makeshift clotheslines that my husband had put up for me. I thought I would [...]