Category Archive

NWEI is very excited to introduce our newest discussion guide: Just Below the Surface: Perspectives on the Gulf Coast Oil Spill.

Just Below the Surface is a one session discussion guide that explores the connections between Deepwater Horizon, energy policies and our lifestyles. The course offers an opportunity to reflect further on this historical event and the lessons it holds for us moving forward—individually and collectively.

The course is available for order now and it’s just $5.  Order today!

For a limited time, we’re offering a complimentary copy of Just Below the Surface with each order of Global Warming: Changing Co2urse.

Quite enjoyed this great article on simple living and wanted to share it.

For all our friends in the Tigard, Oregon area: the Tigard Whole Foods is featuring us as one of their “Change for Change” organizations from now through Earth Day.  If you’re shopping at the store and bring your own bags you can direct your bag refund to NWEI.  A nickel is donated to us for every reusable bag! It’s a quick and easy way to support NWEI.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re already interested in and/or committed to sustainable living. By “sustainable living,” I mean a lifestyle that values quality of life over quantity of possessions — a lifestyle that recognizes and honors, as Aldo Leopold put it, that each of us is “a member of a community of interdependent parts.”

But, you also might be like many of us who have found that ecological- and socially-conscious living can be surprisingly more difficult in rural communities than in urban contexts. The infrastructure simply doesn’t exist in most rural communities to accommodate the behaviors we have come to associate with sustainable living: commuting by public transportation and bike, recycling, and even buying from local farmers.

Take, for example, my hometown in rural southern Illinois, where there is absolutely no infrastructure for recycling, no public transportation, and local grocers sell produce from California and Chile instead of from local producers. While the local grocery store is within walking distance, and most children live less than a mile from their elementary schools, the main streets of town are devoid of sidewalks and bike lanes. Without sidewalks and crosswalks, crossing an intersection of two busy roads on foot is difficult and dangerous and not something most people feel comfortable doing– let alone letting their children do. So, even environmentally committed parents find that protecting their children from the very specific and immediate dangers of speeding traffic takes priority over protecting the Earth from the very nebulous and complex dangers of climate change.

When rural infrastructure doesn’t support sustainable choices (and actually discourages them), trying to act on a commitment to sustainable living can be difficult and disheartening. But, moving to the city to pursue a more sustainable lifestyle isn’t an option for most people. So, what’s an ecologically-minded person to do?

When I lived in a town of 7,000 people in Illinois, I found that there were actually many others who were asking themselves the same question. So, we started meeting at a local church and coming up with a plan to encourage sustainable behaviors in our community. In one year’s time, we found that we could accomplish quite a bit when working together:

• We started gathering recyclables at the church, and one of our group members would haul them away in his big truck once a week to the nearest recycler.
• We organized a carpool calendar so that we could coordinate carpools for those of us who commuted the forty miles into St. Louis several times a week.
• At the local youth center, we worked to install a community garden and mentor the children and teenagers on how to tend it.
• We purchased durable plates and silverware to be used instead of disposables at our church potlucks.
• We built bike racks and offered free classes on bicycle safety.
• For Earth Day, we organized a special public service in a city park and developed a handout that encouraged sustainable behaviors and helped people locate places to recycle and drop off household hazardous waste.

In short, we combined our resources, tools, and interests and offered them for the good of the community. And we encouraged and supported each other along the way.

Today, that small rural community has curbside recycling because they petitioned city hall for it. Before I moved to Portland, I was able to attend the first city hall meeting where the issue was considered. The room was overflowing with people I knew and people I had never seen. These people came from many different political persuasions, socioeconomic backgrounds and ideological contexts. Only one of them spoke to oppose the implementation of curbside recycling. The ordinance was passed unanimously in 2009.

Updates from my friends in the community about their sustainability endeavors continue to inspire and encourage me.

I offer this story as inspiration and encouragement to those of you in rural contexts, as well. Your actions toward a sustainable lifestyle might be very different than the ones I mentioned here. Maybe you’ll start a bulk foods co-op or local farmer’s market, or start cooking meals together, or start a plastic bag reduction campaign.

But for me, the key to living more sustainably in a rural area was building relationships and finding a way to connect: with others’ values, resources, talents, and interests. Those connections provide thought-provoking conversations, support, encouragement, and a belief in our ability to actually “be the change we want to see in the world.” Being connected to a community in this way sustained me by enriching my life and allowing me to see what it really means to be an active “member of a community of interdependent parts.”

The winter edition of our print newsletter, also titled EarthMatters, is here.  Click the icon to download an electronic copy of our newsletter. Inside you’ll find the powerful “Beyond Oil: Nature and Adaptation” piece by David Gessner, information about our upcoming 2011 conference, and much more. We hope you enjoy this edition of EarthMatters!

The holiday season is upon us again.  The holiday season is a two-sided coin for many people–on the one hand, there are family traditions we look forward to, favorite holiday songs that instill cheer every time we hear them, and fun parties and social events that are a time to share with friends and family. On the flip side of the coin, there is the pressure to bestow gifts upon friends and family, commercial pressures, busy stores and holiday crowds to contend with, and the inevitable holiday rush–it can be enough to make anyone question their holiday spirit at times.

It doesn’t have to be this way though–we can opt out of commercialized, materialistic holidays and commit to a simplified holiday season.  What would a simplified holiday season look like? Well, it will look a little different for everyone–but it doesn’t have to mean holidays devoid of gift-giving or tradition.  There are many ways to instill some “voluntary simplicity” in your celebrations, and in the process take back some of your precious time, money and energy (not to mention lessening your impact on our environment).

Here are a few ideas to consider if you, like many other people, are looking for ways to simplify gift giving this holiday season:

Simple Gift Giving:

Consider giving homemade gifts–everything from canned goods to baked items to meals that can be easily frozen and cooked later make excellent gifts, and you can use the time you’re saving by avoiding the time-consuming shopping process to create your homemade presents. Some of our favorite homemade gift ideas include: family recipe books adorned with family photos, homemade jams and salsas, and homemade soaps and candles.

Give gifts of time–if you have a skill to share, consider offering it as a gift to a friend or family member (perhaps create a little coupon book that can be wrapped); offer your babysitting, pet-sitting or house-sitting services; or help someone green their home by offering to help them set up a compost system or rain barrels.

Experience gifts–instead of giving material gifts, consider giving your loved ones “experience gifts” like theater or concert tickets or an annual membership to a museum so that they can check out exhibits for the entire year. Restaurant gift certificates are another great idea too–perhaps treat your loved ones to a meal they’ll remember long after the holidays.

Charitable gifts– many organizations (including NWEI) offer gift memberships, or the opportunity to donate in honor of a friend or family member. Consider making a donation to an organization as a gift for a loved one this year.

Further reading:

If you’d like to learn more about voluntary simplicity check out NWEI’s Voluntary Simplicity program. For an entire book on simplifying the holidays (Christmas specifically but many of the suggestions can be carried over to other holidays too), check out Simplify Your Christmas by Elaine St. James. For info on simplifying the holidays with kids, check out this blog post from PBS.

Add your suggestions to the comments:

If you have ideas to share on how you have successfully simplified the holidays, we’d love to hear them! Add your suggestions to the comments, or join the discussion our our Facebook page.

By Mike Mercer, Executive Director of the Northwest Earth Institute, originally posted on SustainableIndustries.com on September 14, 2010

With great regularity, employee engagement is touted as the key to shifting sustainability from its place in the silo of facilities, “green teams” and the committed few, to fully integrated into day-to-day operations.   In response, we educate our employees about sustainability, hold Earth Day events, provide volunteer opportunities to restore wetlands and put up signage to encourage more sustainable behaviors.

With all this effort, are the majority of our employees exhibiting any substantially different behaviors?   I suspect not.  If we were to survey our employees relative to their stated values and behaviors, it is likely their response would be similar to the results of a 2010 Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies study.  A sampling of these results demonstrates the significant gap between what people say is important and what they actually do: “The Say–Do Gap.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.