fresh veggie salad slaw

It has occurred to me that while many folks believe that they can not afford to buy organic produce, everyone can certainly grow their own. (I also see the bit of extra money I spend to buy organic as my health insurance premium as my husband and I fall into the uninsured americans list.)

To illustrate that point I have taken on a new project this year. I am growing a garden using nothing but containers with veggie plants I’ve started from seeds. Then throughout  the growing season I will keep you updated here on my blog!

The bits for the seed starting table and light system

I am growing; 2 types of hot peppers, sweet peppers, eggplants and summer squashes, 5 types/sizes of tomatoes as well as tomatillos, carrots, cukes, onions and several herbs and edible flowers.

Ambitious right? I was so eager though and hopefully I haven’t bit off more than I can chew!

How I kept track of what's planted/growing where

About three weeks ago I started my seeds.  Just the veggies first but I already need to repot some of them which will free up my seed starter trays to plant the herbs now.

Up goes the front light reflector

I had The Hubster help me build my seed starting table and light stand. Is it not fabulous? The  4 foot by 2 foot folding table was discarded so cost me nothing. The APS seed starting trays I bought at Gardener’s Supply and were the most costly part of the whole endevour so far but will last for years and the light kit you can see, is made using cheap materials picked up at our local Lowes.

OOooooo, pretty lights!

I was able to find organic seed starter mix at my local Home Depot and we used two types of compact florescent bulbs – red and blue spectrum, to lure the seeds to sprout.

We have recycled a couple of cardboard boxes, covered one side with foil and surrounded the seed trays to reflect as much light as possible back at the seed trays. To insure a good start I have two moist heat heating pads under the seed trays as well.

Green!!!!!

I also bought 3 inch and 4 inch pots for the growing seedlings to move into , also from Gardener’s Suppy, made of composted cow doo that can be planted right into my containers outside when the time comes. I love that!

2010 Dawn Marie Kelly all rights reserved

The story: my fiance Adam is extremely busy with law school, so much so that a lot of our wedding planning is falling to me. Some might say that is the norm, but Adam is actually the kind of guy that wants to be involved and is really pretty adamant about some things- he has veto over all decisions I make, and he wanted to control the registry. Fine with me, considering I don’t cook at all (unless its baking, that I like), and I really don’t care what sheets we have as long as they are soft! But, when I was showing him some ideas I had about save the dates, he came up with a dozy- use vintage cards and send them to our guests! But, vintage postcards of Healdsburg, CA are very few! Thankfully, after some inspiration gleamed from Martha Stewart and a little research on my part, we had our solution:

Use a vintage postcard with a picture of Healdsburg CA purchased off of the web (circa 1910s).

Scan and print copies on recycled paper with soybased ink from a local green printer, Autumn Express

Stamp the front with a custom stamp from Paperwink (template from Martha Stewart)

And stamp the back with another custom made stamp by Paperwink (with another template by Martha Stewart), write in our information, and bam! our save the dates!

One of the craziest things I’m doing for this wedding is learning calligraphy. As some calligraphers can charge up to 4 dollars per address, that is a cost we just cannot afford! And as someone that works in non-profit fundraising, I know there is nothing nicer than receiving a hand addressed envelope/card. The compromise is that I have to do it myself.  You can see some of my more untidy scrawl above on this draft card, but just I plan on doing it correctly for my other save the dates. I’ll show you some examples later on!

So, what do you think???? The total cost was about $60. The hours it will take me to complete are numerous, but frankly, calligraphy relaxes me so I’m looking forward to it!

Thoughts? Will you buy, make, or even have save the dates?

Los Angeles divorce attorneys can be hired to provide full representation in court, or limited representation. Lawyers who are hired to provide limited representation assist in only specific parts of the divorce proceedings. How much representation each individual needs varies from person to person. In general, those looking to spend less on a lawyer will pay for less representation services. Collaborative attorneys are hired to work with the couple in order to reach a peaceable settlement. This occurs out of court and requires meeting to negotiate terms of the divorce. On the other hand, a Consulting attorney can help to develop a negotiation strategy, teach you how to present an argument in court. Some choose to handle their own divorces without any help from a lawyer. However, if there is a lot of property or children involved this becomes difficult for the individual.

Because of its large population and rising divorce rate, Los Angeles family law is a popular concentration for aspiring lawyers.

With what seems like a surplus of family lawyers Los Angeles citizens should be careful when selecting a lawyer. It is not a good idea to just pick a name at random in the yellow pages. Although some may not want to go through the trouble of actually researching multiple lawyers in order to choose the best one, it is the only way to guarantee that he or she will get the right services for the best price. This is a very stressful time for all involved but it will become even more stressful later if a lawyer doesn’t provide the needed services. Most lawyers and law firms now have web pages describing their services and prices; this has made it significantly easier to find the lawyer that you need. ]]> http://dhfamilylaw.greenpress.com/los-angeles-family-law/the-facts-about-california-divorce-lawyers/feed/ 0 http://earthpolicy.greenpress.com/book-bytes/zero-carbon-buildings/ http://earthpolicy.greenpress.com/book-bytes/zero-carbon-buildings/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:47:48 +0000 earthpolicy 40.61

Lester R. Brown

The building sector is responsible for a large share of world electricity consumption and raw materials use. In the United States, buildings—commercial and residential—account for 72 percent of electricity use and 38 percent of CO₂ emissions. Worldwide, building construction accounts for 40 percent of materials use.

Because buildings last for 50–100 years or longer, it is often assumed that cutting carbon emissions in the building sector is a long-term process. But that is not the case. An energy retrofit of an older inefficient building can cut energy use and energy bills by 20–50 percent. The next step, shifting entirely to carbon-free electricity, either generated onsite or purchased, to heat, cool, and light the building completes the job. Presto! A zero-carbon operating building.

Some countries are taking bold steps. Notable among them is Germany, which as of January 2009 requires that all new buildings either get at least 15 percent of space and water heating from renewable energy or dramatically improve energy efficiency. Government financial support is available for owners of both new and existing buildings. In reality, once builders or home owners start to plan these installations, they will quickly see that in most cases it makes economic sense to go far beyond the minimal requirements.

There are already signs of progress in the United States, including provisions within the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act designed to stimulate the economy. Among other items, it provides for the weatherization of more than a million homes, beginning with an energy audit. A second part calls for the weatherization and retrofitting of a large share of the nation’s stock of public housing. A third component is the greening of government buildings by making them more energy-efficient and, wherever possible, installing devices such as rooftop solar water and space heaters and rooftop solar electric arrays.

In the private sector, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)—well known for its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and rating program—heads the field. This voluntary program has four certification levels—certified, silver, gold, and platinum. A LEED-certified building must meet minimal standards in environmental quality, materials use, energy efficiency, and water efficiency. LEED-certified buildings are attractive to buyers because they have lower operating costs, higher lease rates, and typically happier, healthier occupants than traditional buildings do.

The LEED certification standards for construction of new buildings were issued in 2000. In 2004 the USGBC also began certifying the interiors of commercial buildings and tenant improvements of existing buildings. And in 2007 it began issuing certification standards for home builders.

Looking at the LEED criteria provides insight into the many ways buildings can become more energy-efficient. The certification process for new buildings begins with site selection, and then moves on to energy efficiency, water efficiency, materials use, and indoor environmental quality. In site selection, points are awarded for proximity to public transport, such as subway, light rail, or bus lines. Beyond this, a higher rating depends on provision of bicycle racks and shower facilities for employees. New buildings must also maximize the exposure to daylight, with minimum daylight illumination for 75 percent of the occupied space. The use of renewable energy adds still more points.

Thus far LEED has certified 1,600 new buildings in the United States, with some 11,600 planned or under construction that have applied for certification. The commercial building space that has been certified or registered for certification approval totals 5 billion square feet of floor space, or some 115,000 acres (the equivalent of 115,000 football fields).

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s office building for its 100 staff members near Annapolis, Maryland, was the first to earn a LEED platinum rating. Among its features are a ground-source heat pump for heating and cooling, a rooftop solar water heater, and sleekly designed composting toilets that produce a rich humus used to fertilize the landscape surrounding the building.

Toyota’s North American headquarters in California, which houses 2,000 employees, has a LEED gold rating and is distinguished by a large solar facility that provides much of its electricity. Waterless urinals and rainwater recycling enable it to operate with 94 percent less water than a conventionally designed building of the same size. Less water use also means less energy use.

A 60-story office building with a gold rating being built in Chicago will use river water to cool the building in summer, and the rooftop will be covered with plants to reduce runoff and heat loss. Energy-conserving measures will save the owner $800,000 a year in energy bills. The principal tenant, Kirkland and Ellis LLP, a Chicago-based law firm, insisted that the building be gold-certified.

The state of California commissioned Capital E, a green building consulting firm, to analyze the economics of 33 LEED-certified buildings in the state. The study concluded that certification raised construction costs by $4 per square foot but that because operating costs as well as employee absenteeism and turnover were lower and productivity was higher than in other buildings, the standard- and silver-certified buildings earned a profit over the first 20 years of $49 per square foot, and the gold- and platinum-certified buildings earned $67 per square foot.

In 2002 a global version of the USGBC, the World Green Building Council, was formed. As of spring 2009 it included Green Building Councils in 14 countries, including Brazil, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Eight other countries—ranging from Spain to Viet Nam—are working to meet the prerequisites for membership. Among the current members, India ranks second in certification after the United States, with 292 million square feet of LEED-certified floor space, followed by China (287 million) and Canada (257 million).

Beyond greening new buildings, there are numerous efforts to make older structures more efficient. In 2007, the Clinton Foundation announced an Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program, a project of the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI). In cooperation with C40, a large-cities climate leadership group, this program brings together financial institutions and some of the world’s largest energy service and technology companies to work with cities to retrofit buildings, reducing their energy use by up to 50 percent. The energy service companies—including Johnson Controls and Honeywell—committed to provide building owners with contractual “performance guarantees” assuring the energy savings and maximum costs of the retrofit project. At the launch of this program, former President Bill Clinton pointed out that banks and energy service companies would make money, building owners would save money, and carbon emissions would fall.

In April 2009, the owners of New York’s Empire State Building announced plans to retrofit the 2.6 million square feet of office space in the nearly 80-year-old 102-story building, thereby reducing its energy use by nearly 40 percent. The resulting energy savings of $4.4 million a year is expected to recover the retrofitting costs in three years.

Beyond these voluntary measures, government-designed building codes that set minimal standards for building energy efficiency are highly effective. In the United States this has been dramatically demonstrated in differences between California and the country as a whole in housing energy efficiency. Between 1975 and 2002, residential energy use per person dropped 16 percent in the country as a whole. But in California, which has stringent building codes, it dropped by 40 percent. The bottom line is that there is an enormous potential for reducing energy use in buildings in the United States and, indeed, the world.

Adapted from Chapter 4, “Stabilizing Climate: An Energy Efficiency Revolution,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

I recently received an email from a group calling themselves: Adopt The Sky Organization. They are a group committed to cleaning the air quality up for us and our children and our children’s children.

This email read as follows:

• Eric Husband wrote:

Sick of breathing dirty air?

We just launched a new kind of eco website for Earthjustice, an
environmental group.

adoptthesky.org

It could be nice content for your Ecogeek but if all you do is sign
the petition and adopt the sky, that would be great too. It’s free.

Adoptthesky.org lets visitors demand cleaner air by adopting a square
mile of sky over the US. They can add a personal message that floats in their adopted sky. All sigantures will be delivered this fall to the EPA, where they are now debating new ozone limits.

Thanks for your consideration,

Eric Husband

Adopt The Sky Program states, 4.5 million U.S. children have asthma. 14 million school days are missed each year because children are too sick. There are even days when the air is too toxic for kids and adults with sensitive lungs to go outside.

On June 21, 2007, the EPA proposed stronger limits on smog in our air. But doctors and scientists say the new limits don’t go far enough. And now powerful polluters are pushing back, trying to stop any change. Here’s your chance to make your voice heard. Adopt a square mile of sky over the U.S. and sign the petition to demand clean air now.

You too can take part in this mission by signing your name to a petition to “clean up the air.”

Planet2B Green has signed up and has adopted the sky over, Georgia and Wisconsin and the signing of this petition has been added to the petitions Adopt The Sky will deliver to the EPA.

If you are not convinced that it is a good idea to eliminate PVCs from your company, school and home, here is some information and links to more information.

Health

No other plastic contains or releases as many dangerous chemicals. These include dioxins, phthalates, vinyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, lead, cadmium, and organotins. There’s no safe way to
manufacture, use or dispose of PVC products

In You and your food. As a persistent bioaccumulative toxin (PBT), it does not breakdown rapidly and travels around the globe, accumulating in fatty tissue and concentrating as it goes up the food chain. Dioxins from Louisiana manufacturing plants migrate on the winds and concentrate in Great Lakes fish. Dioxins are even found in hazardous concentrations in the tissues of whales and polar bears and in Inuit mother’s breast milk. The dioxin exposure of the average American already poses a calculated risk of cancer of greater than 1 in 1,000 – thousands of times greater than the usual standard for acceptable risk. Really scary is that dioxins concentrate in breast milk to the point that human infants now receive high doses, orders of magnitude greater than those of the average adult.

air polution near plants: In Mossville, Louisiana, air monitoring conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1999 showed concentrations of vinyl chloride more than 120 times higher than the ambient air standard.

working in plant: Studies have documented links between working in vinyl chloride production facilities and the increased likelihood of developing diseases including angiosarcoma of the liver, a rare form of liver cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, lymphomas, leukemia, and liver cirrhosis.

Links to more information

Healthy Building Network

EPA Enforcement

Campaign for Safe Healthy Consumer Products

Wikipedia’s entry

Vinyl Industry Sites. The industry claims all this is nonsense and it is perfectly safe to work in the plants, live near them and use their products.

Vinyl Institute

PVC.org

Most plastics can only be recycled once as the metal catalysts they contain break down, contaminating and degrading it, affecting the material’s recyclability. Organic catalysts such as are being worked with at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, leave no residue, can break down the plastic’s polymers to their original state and are cheap to produce.

Also, organic catalysts break down plastic at room temperature – a much lover level than currently possible, where higher temperatures and greater energy are required.

This breakthrough could allow plastics to b recycled over and over in the future.

In Saudi Arabia, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology is working with IBM and Stanford to establish a pilot recycling program for PET (the common plastic used in drink bottles, identified as #1 plastic) using the organic catalysts.

This development, if realized, could have exciting new applications, including for healthcare, particularly in drug delivery devices and replacing synthetic computer materials with greener alternatives.

via kickstarter.com

Posted via web from TweetingDonal’s Temporary Insanities

A small shrimp-like creature under the Antarctic ice, as seen in a NASA video from December 2009 (AP Photo/NASA)

In a surprise discovery, a NASA team has found life 600 feet below an Antarctic ice sheet, where it’s been presumed no life could exist.

After lowering a video camera below the Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, the team was stunned to see a shrimp-like creature come swimming into view and attach itself to the cable.  The scientists were further amazed when they pulled up a tentacle believed to be from a foot-long  jellyfish.

In an environment with no perceivable light or obvious food source, scientists are faced with an enigma with the appearance of the three-inch long orange  Lyssianasid amphipod, a distant relative to shrimp.

According to a story by Seth Borenstein, this amazing and exciting find presents many questions to scientists.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday.

This is an exciting glimpse of marine life and habitat we know so little about. Time for scientists to reevaluate their thinking about what they think they know.