Written by Michael A. Weber
Published on November 18th, 2008
[Editor's Note: This is Part 3 of Michael's search for an entry-level job within an environmentally-focused non-profit or NGO]
Make sure to read my last update on my job search if you missed it. On a whim, I ended up speaking on camera to a college newspaper writer in Chicago about my troubles finding a job that meets my qualifications.
Life is funny—that interview ended up leading me to a seriously useful job resource. I had agreed to the interview because I felt bad for the journalist, who seemed to be struggling to get responses. But the video wound up on the internet, where Wendy Freeman, the director of career advising at Evergreen State College, stumbled across it. Excited to help with a search for a green job, she contacted me quickly.
She recommended that I focus my search on the east coast, specifically the Washington DC area, and said that she will work with me until I find a job that fits me perfectly. She has been a wealth of knowledge and information that could help anyone else in a similar situation to mine.
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Written by Michael A. Weber
Published on November 5th, 2008
Hello, again! I left off last week with my arrival in Chicago after graduating college and traveling the country. I was unsure how to get started looking for any sort of green job and was regretting that fact that I never interned anywhere in college. I haven’t had the best luck so far, and I hope others can learn from my mistakes.
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Written by Brian Liloia
Published on October 28th, 2008
In this day and age of highly processed, artificial ingredient-infested “food products”, fermentation offers a beautifully simple, healthy, and delicious alternative to preserving some of our favorite foods. Fermentation is a natural food preservation process typically requiring nothing more than very simple ingredients and time. Many popular, everyday foods would not exist without magical fermentation processes: sauerkraut, cheese, yogurt, miso, soy sauce, beer, and wine, just to name a few.
Fermentation not only preserves food, it makes food more nutritious and digestible, and the practice has spanned thousands of years. (Just one example: over 1000 years ago, Icelandic Vikings transformed milk cultured with rennet into skyr, a kind of thick yogurt-like cheese for later consumption.) It is a transformation made possible by bacteria and fungi. (I like to call it “controlled rotting”). For example: Salt some cabbage and throw it in a crock in the corner of your kitchen, and within a few weeks you’ll have delicious, aromatic sauerkraut, the result of a magical lactic acid fermentation.
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Written by Meg Hamill
Published on October 12th, 2008
Tacked on last minute to the $700 billion bailout, bicycle commuters across the nation will be eligible for for a tax benefit that is already available to both train & bus commuters.
After $700 billion of our American tax dollars just went to bail out private banks, it’s a small relief that some laws were squeezed into that deal, with the sole purpose of benefiting people and the planet.
Starting January 1st, those who commute via bicycle to work are eligible to receive $20.00 per month in tax-free reimbursements from their employer. The reimbursement is meant to defray the costs of owning and operating a bike. Employers can deduct this expense from their federal taxes. Read the rest of this entry »
Written by Brian Liloia
Published on October 9th, 2008
If you’re excited by the possibility of cutting back on your home energy consumption and saving a few precious dollars on your energy bill, let me introduce you to the idea of hot box cooking.
A simple hot box provides a wise solution to preparing meals without the excessive use of your stovetop or oven. You can make a hot box (also called a “hay box”) for free, with very simple and recycled materials that you probably already have lying around your house, or with stuff that you can easily hunt down.
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Written by Meg Hamill
Published on October 6th, 2008
Across the country, cities are passing new laws to allow backyard chickens.
Cities across the country have shown new leniency in the urban chicken arena. Ann Arbor, Michigan, South Portland, Maine and Fort Collins Colorado, have all voted in the past year to allow backyard chickens. They join the growing number of U.S. cities to make legal the raising of poultry in the backyard.
Illegal or not, city chicken flocks are more popular than ever.
“It’s no longer something kinky or interesting,” said Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network. “The ‘chicken underground’ has really spread so widely and has so much support.”
Though some worry that backyard chickens might carry and transmit avian flu, advocates of urban chicken farming claim that farming poultry on a small scale presents less of a risk of disease than large-scale production.
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Written by Zachary Shahan
Published on June 22nd, 2008
Where does environmental degradation start?
It starts with our unnatural inclination to want more than we need.
And where does this want come from?
It comes from the idea of self.
It comes from the feeling of self.
It comes from the experience that we are an individual, separate from everything else.
It comes from the belief and the understanding and the experience that we are not One with everything and everyone in this Creation.
So, naturally, with this as our root, we want more: we want to load this self with all the food, acquisitions, honor, experiences, and influence that we can.
And where does it lead us?
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