This week’s Green Life Project action item is to begin your own garden!

Why should you start gardening?  How is it green?

1. Gardening cuts your consumption of foods shipped from far away!  The average that I keep hearing from locavore websites say that food travels is 1,500 miles from farm to plate.  That’s a lot of miles being driven by truck (if not boat or plane) for your consumption.  You can reduce how much is shipped for your benefit!
2. Gardening your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs cuts down on packaging!  You can bring it into your home in a basket, bowl, or colander, wash it, and use it!  You skip the boxes, the pallet the boxes get shipped on (which is usually shrink-wrapped in plastic), the small plastic wrapped, styrofoam, and  clamshell plastic containers, not to mention any chance of it ending up in a disposable bag on the off chance you forgot your reusable one!  Cut out all of that packaging for any of the items that you are able to grow for yourself!

We’ve discussed the giant flood of coal ash and sludge that flooded towns and rivers when their containment pond burst forth last December.  

I was recently browsing the National Resource Defense Council’s OnEarth website and came across video coverage of activists/researchers visiting the area in the aftermath to collect samples.

It’s a sad video and (spoiler!) near the end, the researchers/activists are escorted off of public waters by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) authorities, on land, by boat, and perhaps even the helicopter overhead belonged to the TVA.

Did you ever hear one word about it from a mainstream media outlet?  The coverage was a far cry from proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster.  Very little has been said and continuing coverage has been scant at best.  That’s right: what continuing coverage?

One of the worst environmental disasters since the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill and we aren’t hearing about it one bit.  I had to hear about it from The Nation, but most of us aren’t reading that.  The Exxon-Valdez spilled it’s load in 1989, when I was in Kindergarten, but I still remember wall-to-wall coverage in our media and can still hear Dan Rather covering the story.  

Your detergent doesn't have to be sickly blue like this one! Make the switch to something more natural!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their life in order to gradually green their lives.

||Week Nine||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to purchase a green laundry detergent.

Green Life Project is into full swing and if you’re following along, I hope that you’re implementing these changes on a week-by-week basis, taking advantage of a gradual process our articles are meant to guide you through toward a more sustainable life.

And we’re focusing mostly on very simple choices you can make — many of them done at the grocery store, where it’s an easy difference in decision.

What’s next up for us?  Well, we’ve concentrated so far mostly on consuming less, consuming smarter, and making less waste.  So for example, using a metal water bottle will cut down on the amount of waste you produce (or that produced on your behalf) and using recycled paper toilet paper helps reduce the number of trees that get cut down, processed, and used for your dirty deeds.

Similar to when we recommended a switch to a greener dish soap, now we’re recommending that you change to a more sustainable laundry detergent.  The guidelines for choosing a greener laundry detergent are similar to those we used for a more sustainable dish soap.  Back then, I had this to say:

In an effort to further green their business (and image), Google is now mowing the grass around their office property with, that’s right, goats!

According to their blog, for about the same price as their lawnmowing service, they now have a herd of about 200 goats graze for a week at a time courtesy of California Grazing.  Not only do they trim all the grass but fertilize it too, yeah, exactly how you’d think!

I have mentioned The Huffington Post’s Green News and Opinion Page when I recommended you begin following a green blog or two in the Green Life Project.

I follow this page pretty much everyday. Rarely do I not visit to hear what their broad array of writers has to say. At the very least, I usually leave having read or learned something new.

So as we finished up, “Earth Month,” (yes, whatever that means), I actually started feeling a little down on the Huffington Post’s Green Page. Why?

I don’t know. It could have been one too many posts about Michele Obama’s Garden (not that I don’t love that the Obamas are gardening outside of the White House). It only lasted a day, but the page seemed stale at about the middle of this past week. Admittedly, I visit back too often and really, they do a great job all the time.

Regardless, their page actually seemed to follow this “down period” with some grade A awesome content. Because I can’t write a full response to each of these but wanted our readers to see these gems, I’ll link to some of their articles here:

Joseph Romm: The Green FDR: Obama’s First 100 Days Make — And May Remake — History

Check out this awesome oil industry ad spoof!

Update: Exxon Mobil responds and AVAAZ speaks out