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 Two||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to begin reading a green blog!

This week's Green Life Project action item is to begin reading and following an environmentally-focused blog!

I know definitively that you read blogs or news sites on occasion that have a, “green,” or, “environmental,” theme to it, because you are reading one right now!  But in order to move forward with this transformation in your life, I recommend beginning to follow some websites, and I’ll list a few here with some explanation for why I think they are important.

For you to become immersed in this essential movement toward sustainable living, you’re going to need one of the most crucial ingredient to your success: information!  So pick a site, and start following it!!!

Keeping well-informed of simple little actions you can take to improve

Did your latest tomato purchase support slave labor?

Imagine biting into a juicy slice of tomato. Think about the seeds, the flesh, the slippery skin — and that unmistakable flavor! Yum!

I had tomatoes in my salad tonight and they were central to tying together the mix of greens, avocado, onion, and spices. But when I ate them, I had not a thought that a slave may have picked the tomatoes I enjoyed.

Here on Earthascope, we talk mostly about the environment, but I want to focus your attention on this issue not only because the manner in which we consume food is a large part of our envirohuman impact, but also because we care about social justice.

Tomatoes Picked By Slaves

I clicked over for what I thought would be a quick trip to thenation.com (The Nation’s website), but I found myself intrigued by

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 One||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to go out and purchase a reusable metal water bottle.

Using a metal water bottle is Green Life Project's first action item.

Yes, I know many of you probably have already done this, so I hope this is not too ho-hum for you…  Hear me out!

I also know many have not taken this easy step, and it is one of the simplest, so it makes a great first step!  It also saves money and helps toward improving one’s envirohuman impact immediately!

Reusable water bottles save a lot of energy because the water you drink from the tap is much more efficient to use than having bottles of water shipped from across the country (or, in some cases, the world).  Just think, if one were drinking an average of two bottles per day, that equals 730 bottles each year for just one person!  That’s about thirty 24-pack cases of water, which is about a pallet load of water — just for you!

And that’s a lot of money, too!  Think how much one case of water costs and how much lugging them around isn’t all that fun, either.  Storing them in the closet or pantry.  Keeping the fridge stocked.  A $10-$20 water bottle will pay for itself qui

You can make a green calendar to begin charting your progress!

Yesterday, I wrote about our new upcoming series, Green Life Project, in which a weekly article will direct readers to adopt another green option in their lives, meaning small product or habit changes to make their lives more sustainable.

This week-by-week guide is supposed to be an easier tool to use in moving toward greener living than if you were to attempt to make all of the changes we outline in a matter of a few weeks. You’ll be able to ease yourself slowly into greener living, following a simple guide of steps to take each week.

But now, I would like to help you to not only keep track of the changes you are making, but to find inspiration in being able to look back at your progress.  For this purpose, a written or typed journal might work.  I personally blog about my own changes, and much of what I write about is my own journey toward more sustainable living.  But blogging is not for everyone and even a typical journal may not be the best method for

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.

||All posts from this series are listed below.||

I just spent a relaxing weekend in beautiful Holland, Michigan, and felt very inspired by both some of the gorgeous natural landscape I saw and the conversations I had with new friends.

Inspired to do what?  Well, live a greener life.

Yeah, but that’s so very vague, and who isn’t trying to live greener?

Okay, I get it, we’re all in this together, and a great many of us are trying to do our part.  But that’s why I am announcing a series of posts!

Here is yet another new series to look forward to here on Earthascope!  This is the, “Green Life Project,” series.

What’s the point of this series?

Green Life Project posts will be published weekly and will concentrate on

I’m happy to announce a new series of posts coming up soon here on Earthascope!  It’s title is, “Toxic Brew”.

“Toxic Brew,” is a series of articles, each outlining a different chemical or substance that is adding to environmental degradation in one manner or another.

The title says it all, and the point here is that not only are we putting many drugs and chemicals into our water and soil, but we often have little way of knowing what the result of the mixture, the toxic brew, of these substances will be, as well as to what long-term exposure, even in trace amounts, might lead.

Most articles will feature something from everyday household products and others will discuss industrial chemicals or byproducts.  We will tell you what they are, where they come from, how they are harmful, which products to avoid, and alternatives to these products.

This is a series of posts I have wanted to begin for a while, so that as I learn about different toxic substances, some of them well-known, others, not so much, I can help readers to be better informed consumers.

Here’s an issue that has not gotten nearly enough press: toxic sludge left over from coal polluting our water and soil.  I read about this in an article in The Nation from last week.

We heard throughout the last presidential campaign the term, “clean coal,” and its, “clean coal technology” comrade, but we didn’t hear about the, “toxic sludge,” or the large pools of water and coal remnants that are held in pools the industry self-regulates (read: fails to regulate).  We didn’t hear about how they leak and are not built to protect neighboring residents from the flood described in the article.  Nor how when the sludge dries up, the toxins can then become airborne, as if they were spewed from the spokestack.

I had heard about large amounts of coal sludge flooding into a town and its water supply, but only bits of the story, and the magnitude of the disaster didn’t strike me at the time.  The failed wall of the inadequately designed lagoon wall was one of many of the timebombs we have, as a society, allowed to back up on us.  Failing infrastructure is bad enough.  Flooding is worse.  Flooding a town with a toxic sludge of coal ash (containing arsenic and mercury, among other known toxic substances) and water is just horrible.  And it happened in Kingston, Tennessee, a few days before Christmas of 2008.

Let’s be clear, that we’re not talking about a bit of seepage.  According to The Nation article I read, that happens all the time; the holding lagoons are generally unlined and are prone to leaks.  Even though the EPA regulates such toxins as mercury and arsenic, it does not regulate coal ash, or its storage.

To be sure, this was not a minor leak:

On December 22 an earthen dike collapsed, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of the muddy waste, which knocked houses off foundations and poured into the Tennessee River basin, which feeds municipal drinking-water systems.

“I’m going green!”

We hear about it everyday, in some manner or another: going green!  And many of us would like to truly, “go green,” to, “live a greener lifestyle,” and, “help the environment,” but what does all of that jargon mean?  Are we just buying relatively “greener” products just to feel better about ourselves, yet still falling short of, “green”?  Is it just a slogan?

A Spectrum, a Gradient, a Continuum, if you will…

Greener living belongs on a spectrum: it’s all but impossible to not produce some waste, some pollution, and some environmental damage; call it “original environmental sin” or what have you, but at the end of the day, we all are polluters.  But how do we react? 

I just read an article about new software, made available for free through Microsoft, the nonprofit Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and Verdiem, a startup.  It sounds great, especially when you look at some of the statistics they provide.

This type of application is extremely valuable to someone trying to improve his envirohuman impact, because the product is free, it saves you electricity (meaning less carbon spewed into our atmosphere), and it saves you money in the process.  Did you know that you could even extend the life of your PC?

The program is called Edison and installation is simple by downloading the program at: Verdiem, Microsoft, or Climate Savers.

If a user sets the software to put the machine in a “deep sleep” mode after a few minutes of not hitting a keystroke, the hard drive powers down and the PC sips just 5 percent of its normal energy consumption.

Even though most would probably give themselves ten or fifteen minutes, this program will let you decide how long, and putting your computer into a deep sleep more quickly or less so is up to you (yes, sleep modes are already available and I’m not sure if standard sleep mode takes the PC down to the same 5 percent).

Also,

Half of all electricity consumed by a standard PC is wasted, according to environmental and industry studies.

And because the software is being provided for free, any of the power savings are, well, free as well.  The article estimates that users could save $20 to $95 per PC per year, and any money in your pocket in a down economy is of course welcome.

Especially for this case, it’s just another simple way that you can improve your envirohuman impact and actually save some money at the same time.  Doing well by doing good, nothing to argue with there!

Read the entire story here.

Today, Al Gore had his moment.  Perhaps bigger than his Nobel Peace Prize, Gore gave a speech today that may be his crowning achievement: leading the country he was denied the chance to lead.  Whether you think he deserved to lead or not, he was denied the chance.

Today, Gore enthusiastically endorsed the idea that the United States can and should change our economy over to completely renewable sources of carbon-free sources of energy within ten years.  Can’t be done?  Try landing on the moon in ten years’ time!

Gore compared the challenge to the one John F. Kennedy announced thirty-nine years ago to land on the moon.  To summarize the main point of this speech:

He said the United States and the rest of the world were facing unprecedented problems, including growing demand for electricity, dangerous changes in the climate driven largely by emissions of carbon dioxide and political instability in regions that produce much of the world’s oil.

He continued:

“When we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges — the economic, environmental and national security crises,” Mr. Gore said. “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”

I love to see Mr. Gore using both his political and environmental credibility to shift the debate from short-term half-measures to, “let’s fix this problem in the next decade,” kind of thinking.  That is important for the next President to be able to tackle this problem head on–that is to say that having the debate moved toward fixing the problem soon rather than allowing the energy industry to drag its feet.

One last point: Gore matched up the idea of taxing carbon use with the idea that one would cut payroll taxes.  That sounds like a plan many can believe in, because it would tax people’s income less while keeping government revenue (needed to pay the bills!) from decreasing.  Gore said we need to be taxing what we burn rather than what we earn.