The Sustainable Future

Vermiculture: Apartment composting with worms

One of the downsides of living in an apartment is a lack of yard space to compost food scraps. Well, fear not! All is not lost. All you need is a plastic bin, a drill, some shredded paper, and a bucketload of red wrigglers (that is, worms).

Add your food scraps and voila! In a matter of weeks you've got compost fit for a king's (or queen's) garden. Give it to your green thumb friends. Use it on your plants. Whatever you do with it, it's better than adding your food scraps to our ever-expanding landfills.

Here's an excellent video giving you a vermiculture how-to.

If you want to dig even deeper (pun intended, though probably not terribly funny), here are a couple articles for you to read:

Cheap and easy worm bin

Composting with red worms

Off the shelf worm bin (pdf file)

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Going car-free: How much would you save?

I really admire people who have decided to go car-free. I wish I could say that I am so committed to sustainability that I'm going to do that myself - but the reality is I just don't see it happening any time soon.

But for those who are considering it, there are some definite upsides. Gary at PukeGreen is doing a series of posts on reasons for going car-free. The first one today is on something near and dear to most of our hearts - you save bucketloads of money.

The savings of not having a car can be substantial. Gary outlines the money he saves every year by being car-free.

How much money would you save? It's an exercise worth doing even if you don't realistically see yourself giving up your car, just so you can be aware.

[via GroovyGreen]

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Ecorazzi: Green celebrity gossip

I'm not much for reading the latest celebrity gossip. In fact, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that when it comes to the latest celebrity "news," I simply don't care. It doesn't interest me in the slightest.

But Michael d'Estries at Groovy Green and Rebecca Carter at greenerMIAMI have started a new celebrity blog that actually caught my attention - ecorazzi, your source for all the green celebrity gossip you can eat.

I may not care who's dating whom, who was seen where, or who's wearing what, but if we can tap into our cultural obsession with celebrities to raise awareness on green issues, then I say let the gossip begin!

[via Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur]

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Reconnecting with the consequences

"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
- Joseph Campbell

One of the things that seems very obvious to me is how much of our challenge with sustainability is related to our near complete disconnect with the end result of our decisions on how to live.

For example, when we go to the store and buy a tidily wrapped steak, it would never occur the majority of us to think about what it really took for that steak to get there, or the impact that taking cattle from birth all the way to the dinner table has in terms of energy consumption and environmental degradation. It's just a steak. And it tastes good. And that's that. The same holds true for any number of decisions we make on a daily basis.

As a culture, we're utterly removed from the consequences of anything we do. Turning on a light takes power. That energy has to be generated somehow. How? What impact is flipping that switch really having?

Even if we know intellectually that the choices we make have consequences, it's still hard to really make those consequences personally relevant. It's a little like turning on the news and seeing some disaster half a world a way, saying, "Oh my goodness, how dreadful - those poor people," then turning it off and going about the rest of our life. We get that  it's bad, but there's no real personal impact.

This isn't a, "and here's the solution" post. Just pointing out one of the big challenges we have. We're out of step with nature. We have to figure out how to reconnect with the consequences of our decisions, and make it personal again.

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