Today was our second garden workday and our second attempt at tilling our plot. There was a problem with the tiller so the garden coordinator rented one to use for the day.

Cheyenne is a natural born gardener. She is really getting to a new, much more independent stage and she is eager to help in whatever way she can, sometimes too eager. Today she decided to be her Daddy’s assistant. She and Zach immediately grabbed shovels, headed to the woodpile and started shoveling woodchips into the wheelbarrows of the other gardeners to help make new paths. When she had enough of that she borrowed a child-sized wheelbarrow from an older child and started hauling woodchips to the paths. The very patient older boy assisted her in her efforts. She’s eager to learn and eager to help. I love it.

Isabella was not as excited. It was a very windy day and she was a little overtired. I decided that she could be my buddy for the day. While we waited for the tiller I put on her little gardening gloves, gave her a trowel and put her to work helping me fight the Creeping Charlie at the edge of our plot. Once she realized that I was going to let her play in the dirt and pick the purple flowers she cheered up a bit.

Bella and I chatted with our plot neighbor, a very nice woman named Elaine and her baby Elizabeth. Elaine helped me identify some plants in my garden that were useful. There was the patch of chives I recognized, but also quite a bit of dill, a patch of lemon balm and some sort of flower she described as looking like Einstein’s hair if it were dyed. I’m curious to see what that looks like.

Bella, Cheyenne and I ended up having brunch at the cafe next door to our garden while Zach did the tilling. I thought Cheyenne’s helpfulness might be slightly dangerous around the tiller and the girls were ready to eat. The cafe is a funky little locally owned place that Zach and I have been to before. I saved half my food to take to Zach for his lunch. Unfortunately Bella decided she wanted to grow Daddy some more biscuits and gravy, so she tried to plant them in our freshly tilled plot. She was kind of sad when she learned that not everything grows when you plant it in the ground.

We were about to leave when Zach began chatting with an older guy who apparently had just had a stroke. As he was not fully mobile yet, Zach offered to till his plot. As a thank you Lisa the garden coordinator gave us a really nice, sturdy tomato cage.

Our garden is now tilled and ready to plant. We’ll probably do that Monday as we are expecting severe thunderstorms tomorrow. Zach and Bella are planning to take a break from the garden that day, so Cheyenne and I will have some mom and daughter bonding time.

Last weekend, I attented a workshop on Holacracy given by Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison in New York. Holacracy is a radically new way for people in any kind of organization to work together. In my mind, it is the cutting edge of organizational structure and development. It transcends and includes the most common hierarchical structure of companies, which tends to stifle individual initiative, creativity and accountability and oftentimes works on the basis of fear. And at the same time it goes far beyond the democratic or consensus-driven model that an increasing number of organizations are trying to work with, which usually ends up being ineffective and frustrating in its focus on each individual involved rather than the goal of the organization they are involved in.

Holacracy is about getting things done faster and more effectively. Every person involved not only has a voice, but is called on to participate in full transparency, accountability and capacity towards the goal and vision of the organization.

The brainchild of Brian Robertson, who founded Ternary Software in Philadelphia in 2001 for the sole purpose of finding a better way for people to work together, Holacracy has now been brought to a point where it can be taught and used as a generally applicable system and is so far being promoted around the US, Australia and Europe.

Obviously there is a lot more to holacracy than can be learned in a weekend. But through a lot of practical exercises and a very clear structure, Tom and Brian managed to convey a good deal of the context and application of this practice.

As they took us through the material, many sacred cows of business wisdom got pushed off their pedestals and one aha experience followed another. In a certain kind of way, Holacracy follows a very human, almost intuitive logic. As Brian put it, it makes the implicit explicit, and in doing so frees up a lot of attention and energy.

Teams are organized into circles, each of which is a self-organizing unit pursuing its own goals, which are provided from higher-level teams. Circles include members from whatever parts of the organization can provide information relevant to the issues at hand. In this way, decisions are made with multiple perspectives in mind, from big-picture to detailed.

When these circles get together to tackle their goals, two major tenets are kept in mind:

1. The goal is a workable decision, not the best decision.
2. Any issue can be revisited at any time.

Together, these two ideas remove fear, allowing circles to proceed both logically and quickly, knowing that they can adjust course as needed. 

One of the most striking aspects to me was how this system of governance does not allow anyone to be special in it, be they the lowest or the highest ranking member of the organization. The methodology is so structured, the meetings and decision making processes so clearly defined, that the only way forward is into a very objective, impersonal space from which the next workable steps for the organization could emerge. It’s a way for people to get out of the way and allow the organization’s intent to come through.

For anyone used to endless discussions in order to find a perfect or best solution, in which everyone has to put in their two cents worth, worried about their job or their image, it was a real breath of fresh air. I could see the potential particularly for non-profits, where good intentions and real care can get completely bogged down by (inter)-personal struggles for influence and control.

Through years of experimentation, trials and errors, Brian seems to have come up with a governance and operational system that really does keep our egos, personal ambitions, and fears in a cage, as long as we stick to it. The result is an organizational practice that allows for swift and creative responses even for large organizatons in a world that is constantly changing faster.

Holacracy does demand a lot of those practising it and, if Ternary Software’s story is anything to go by, also produces extraordinary results.

(image by tanakawho via flickr)

My friends Nora and James introduced me to The Wire a few months ago, after which no one saw me for several weeks. I was completely transfixed by the story, which goes way beyond and much deeper than your typical police procedural show.

What really got me about the show was the way the characters struggled to fit into their contexts. In his commentary on the pilot episode, creator David Simon puts it this way:

It seems to be a cop show ... but we were trying to mask something different when we created this. This show is really about the American city and about how we live together, and it’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how regardless of what you’re committed to, whether about whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge, or a lawyer, you’re ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

The Wire doesn’t show us a simplistic black and white world—we see junkies who live by a junkie code of honor and others with no honor at all. We see gangsters who delight in “The Game” (the drug trade) and others who approach it as businessmen and others who participate simply because there’s nothing else for them to do, even though they can’t quite make it work. Same thing on the cops’ side—some love working cases, others are waiting for their retirement pensions to kick in, and others just like to kick around criminals.

Everyone’s in it for his (or her) own reasons, but it’s clear that one cannot play The Game without being altered by it. The police department and the drug family and the longshoreman’s union are not going to change for you. In each organization, there’s a chain of command, and either you follow it or you get your ass kicked.

Even though I have a much cushier job than anyone on the streets of West Baltimore, I can completely identify with this. Most of my working life has been a struggle to figure out where I end and the company I work for begins. How much “me” can I be and get away with it? I like to think that I’m not your typical corporate working stiff, but, really, is anyone BORN a corporate working stiff? Or are we molded in subtle and obvious ways to fit the corporation’s needs?

And what does a corporation need, anyway? In this day and age, businesses exist for one purpose only: to make money. That’s why it’s called “the bottom line.” By the definition of what a corporation is, nothing else matters. Grow or die is the creed, and stock price is the only metric to which any real attention is paid.

That definition has worked well enough up till now. But at this point in history, corporations and indeed all organizations are facing a huge crisis, the same one we’re all facing: environmental devastation. If we don’t have water to drink and air to breathe and arable land to live on, stock price doesn’t matter much. It’s clear we need to turn this boat around.

And it’s obvious that there’s money to be made in clean technologies, non-fossil-fuel-based energy, and green design. So then why is the turnaround effort taking so long? Why are so many businesses dragging their feet and clinging to the status quo?

The answer lies in the nature of organizations themselves. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the VISA you pull out of your wallet every day), describes the problems of the modern organization in his brilliant book One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization using the metaphor of “float.”

Back before checks were processed electronically, float referred to the period of time from which a check was written to the time when it was drawn on the issuer’s account. In addition to finance, float once existed in information (letters took a lot longer than email), science and technology (the time between a new discovery and its practical application has shrunk to almost nothing), and culture (new words and trends can sweep across continents in weeks). Here he discusses how float has almost completely disappeared from our lives:

Today the past is ever less predicted, the future ever less predictable, and the present scarcely exists at all. Everything is accelerating change, with one incredibly important exception. There has been no loss of institutional float.

Although their size and power have vastly increased, although we constantly tinker with their form, although we constantly change their labels, there has been no new, commonly accepted idea of organization since the concepts of corporation, nation-state, and university emerged, the newest of which is several centuries old.

Hock argues that organizations that rely on rigid hierarchies and heavy-handed advance planning, what he calls command and control organizations, are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the modern rate of change. There’s so much bureaucracy to wade through that, by the time the group has decided on a plan and moved towards implementing it, conditions will have changed to the point where the plan is irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that, in modern organizations, individual workers often have better and more up-to-date information than leaders do. Top-down management just doesn’t work in this environment.

Instead, he advocates more fluid structures that rely on members’ sovereignty and co-operation, a mixture of chaos and order he calls “chaordic.” Such organizations empower people to make decisions within a framework that is strong enough to keep hold of the mission and operating procedures, but flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing contexts.

Of course, in a group which respects the humanity and gifts of the people involved in it, the myopic focus on the economic bottom line is shifted to a broader focus on serving the needs of humanity and life in general. The idea is to enable organizations to fulfill their missions—when that is done correctly, the profit takes care of itself.

Hock proved that these are not pie-in-the-sky ideas, and that such an organization can thrive. VISA was founded on chaordic principles, and has been unbelievably successful, revolutionizing the financial services and information industries. Although Hock is not involved with or particularly proud of where VISA has ended up, there’s no denying the achievement of creating a completely new kind of organization and showing that it can prosper and even dominate the marketplace.

Dee’s book describes a vision for organizations co-operating and competing with each other to provide the best level of services to the marketplace in education, health care, every possible field. Organizations based on these chaordic principles honor people’s desires—to do good work, function as part of a team, and make their own informed decisions—and they also function at a very high level.

Think about it—a company that uses all of the gifts and skills of the people involved in it will automatically be more productive than one that requires employees to check themselves at the door. And when we bring all of ourselves to work, including the parts of us that want our kids and grandkids to have a nice functional planet to live on, we perform our jobs and make choices from a broader perspective.

A concept of institution that inspires instead of dominating, one that doesn’t require us to fundamentally change who we are, or pretend to be something we are not—this is The Game as it ought to be and must be played if we are to meet the challenges facing us.

Tomorrow we’ll hear from Uli about another exciting new organizational structure that unleashes not only the power of its members, but of the organization itself. Stay tuned!

Recently I was having a conversation with a young man in his early 20s in which I tried to explain the concept of selling out to him. Nowadays, calling someone a sell-out is almost a compliment—it means that you’re smart enough to make some money off your art—but 15 years ago or so, it meant that you had no integrity, that you cared so little about the meaning of your work that you had no qualms pimping it out to sell hair products or cars or whatever. The young man I explained this to giggled as though I were describing some quaint Victorian custom, but I was serious.

When I came of age, in the early 90s, we were ALL serious. My generation hated sell-outs because they epitomized the inauthenticity we hated in American culture and in ourselves. Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko put a happy face on greed, but a cursory look at contemporary history shows that much of the generation before us (the Baby Boomers) turned into the biggest sell-outs of all time. And I and most of my friends didn’t want any part of it. We hungered for meaning, but also felt powerless to escape the societal landscape we found ourselves in.  We grew up with both the threat of nuclear and environmental devastation and some of the worst sitcoms known to humanity—a recipe for growing a generation of cynics if I ever heard one.

It was different from the 60s, where righteous anger and blue-sky hippiedom ruled the day. Our malaise was more anti-social and hopeless, more ripped jeans and ugly flannels than hot pants and crazy colors. We smashed our guitars, but we did it with sarcasm, not rage. The 60s were about tearing down an old world and building a new one; the 90s were about looking for a job you knew you were going to hate before you’d even found it. Our possibilities felt very small, and we shrunk in response.

But something is changing now—I can feel it, and I’m sure you can, too. The conversation is shifting. Instead of seeing ourselves as helplessly adrift in a world too enormous to notice us, we are beginning to see ourselves and everything else as integral pieces of the big picture. And we see that every piece has a very real impact on the whole.

Why is this shift occurring? I think it’s a direct result of the snark that so may of us have indulged in for so long. After a while, irony gets old. Bitchiness gets boring. We start to realize that coming up with the most wickedly hilarious quip is not the end goal of life. We start to want something more.

The interesting thing to notice as this happens is that we are not giving up our evil sense of humor to do this. We are still cracking awful, dark jokes, but we’re doing it in the service of a new kind of determination. I won’t call it grim, because we are having fun and laughing a lot even as we behold the daunting tasks ahead. But we are approaching those tasks with our sleeves rolled up, even as we roll our eyes. Cynicism and optimism are learning to work together.

To me, this makes perfect sense. To get through the largest challenges humankind has ever faced, we are going to need some seriously black humor. Of course! Maybe The Smiths and Seinfeld and OJ were just there to prepare us for this. Or maybe we had to live in cynicism for a while so that we could learn its limitations and decide to go beyond it.

It occurs to me that in addition to providing a much-needed steam valve for frustration and fear, dark humor and critical thinking also play useful roles in helping us navigate the avalanche of green-flavored BS that’s coming down the mountain along with all the real, positive changes.

Whatever the reasons, ideas centered around optimism and responsibility are in bloom everywhere, from the millions-strong green blogosphere to green tips on the Today Show to the fact that we now see people carrying reusable grocery totes wherever we go. I certainly don’t operate under the delusion that grocery totes on their own are going to save the planet, but it is an emblem that things are changing. For all our grousing about the state of the world our parents left us, I can’t remember any of us grunge fans in the early 90s doing anything about it, even something as mundane as thinking ahead to bring our own bags to the grocery store. That would have struck us as way too eager, even if secretly we might’ve thought it was a good thing.

Regardless of where we came from, though, I couldn’t be happier to see this curious blend of optimism, responsibility, and hilarity arrive on the scene. One incredible example of this is the Greenzo episode of 30 Rock that aired last year during NBC’s Green Week of programming (choose Episode 205 in the 30 Rock link). Tina Fey and her cohorts are able to hold two competing ideas in their heads at the same time: the real need for change, and the fact that many of us (especially lots of big, status-quo-loving corporations) seem to want a green halo more than we want that real change.

Transforming our world will not be possible with either pie-in-the-sky optimism or dead-eyed cynicism. We need to think both critically and in terms of possibilities to make this jump to a future that works for everyone. For my part, I’m proud that, after years of being called shiftless, apathetic, and cynical, my generation seems to be taking the lead and using our powers of snark for good instead of evil.

Today has been amazingly beautiful in New York, and I’m finally home from my work and fun-related travels, so I took the opportunity to finally get my little container garden started (with the assistance and expertise of our green-thumbed webmaster). First goal on this month’s challenge: check! In these pots will someday soon be lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, cilantro, onions, and beets (my new favorite food).

Are you growing anything this year? If you are, or if you want to get inspired to do so, check out FreedomGardens.org, a gorgeous new social networking and resource site for home gardeners started by the urban permaculture pioneers at PathtoFreedom.com. I rent, so I’m not sure how close I can get to total yard liberation, but I’m darn sure gonna try. Once I get my worm compost bin started, I’ll have the whole circle of life going up in here y’all! So exciting!!

According to the USDA, up to 40% of the food bought in America is thrown out instead of eaten. With food being the #3 item in most households’ expenses (behind housing and transportation), this amounts to an incredible waste of time (in shopping and preparation) and money (spent on purchasing, transport, and refrigeration).

This doesn’t even take into account the environmental havoc of food waste. When food is trashed, so is the packaging it came in, as well as all the resources that went into producing and transporting it to the end consumer. And when millions go to bed hungry each night, squandering so much just seems wrong. Second Harvest, the food bank network, estimates that if we recovered even 5% of the food wasted each year, that would be enough to feed 14 million people.

There’s also the fact that, when we eat out, we tend to splurge more. Anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows that the way they make everything taste so good is by adding approximately a pound of butter to every serving. I certainly don’t have anything against butter (quite the contrary!) but it’s good to know what’s in your food so you don’t get too out of hand. I know that when I eat out, it often comes from a place of “Oh, I’m tired, I deserve a treat,” and even if there is a salad on the menu, the french fries are more likely to get my vote.

So ... this month’s challenge is to look at our behaviors around food—wasting it, eating too much of it, buying it unconsciously—and turn them around. Most of us have some destructive food habits ... maybe you mean to shop at the farmers’ market for local organic produce, but you end up at the grocery store buying plastic wrapped boxes of stuff from God knows where. Or maybe you keep meaning to start your compost pile, but you never quite get around to it. Or perhaps, like me, you lazily succumb to the siren song of delivered pizza when you have perfectly good veggies and leftovers languishing in your fridge.

I’m hoping that with a little group support, we can conquer these bad habits and replace them with healthier ones. My goals are to

• get composting started at home
• get a few veggies growing in my backyard, and
• most importantly, resist take-out and all the attendant packaging in favor of preparing healthy and yummy meals at home.

This last one is going to be rough for me—I live alone, and as Stella pointed out in an earlier comment, it’s sometimes difficult to get motivated to cook a meal and clean up after it when it’s just me. Also, my neighborhood has literally hundreds of amazing restaurants, almost all of which deliver! But it’s something I need to do. Especially since, most of the delivery food I get comes in plastic containers that can’t be recycled as part of New York City’s curbside pickup program.

Also, why on Earth would I want to spend $6 on a cup of lentil soup from Pret a Manger, delicious as it is, when I can make a huge pot of it at home for less than half that cost?

So ... my first steps this weekend are to get some veggies in the soil, make a meal plan, and do my shopping for the week at the farmers’ market and the Park Slope Food Co-op.

What are some food behaviors you’d like to tackle this month?

Fifteen years ago, Nick Rosen wanted to buy a little holiday home, and the most affordable option was a little shepherd’s hut up in the mountains.

“I found it was a really good way of life,” he told me in an interview last month, “that allowed me to unplug from the system and develop myself rather than worrying about work. I found something which had all sorts of benefits and seemingly no negatives. It’s cheap or free, it’s good for the environment, and it’s good for my soul. And for all those reasons, I want to recommend it to other people.”

I found Nick’s story fascinating. A journalist, former professor, and long-time environmental campaigner, he now fills his days talking to people about living off-grid and providing them with the real support and information they need to make it work, via his website, Off-grid.net and a guidebook he has written, How to Live Off-Grid.

“This idea that you could wake up in a little cabin, light a few candles, light the woodburning stove, go out and chop some wood, seems like some sort of romantic dream that if you actually had to do it, up close, would be cold and full of spiders. But in fact when you get there, it really is just as romantic as the dream.”

My only experience with off-grid living was a week spent with a friend at a cabin in the West Virginia mountains. Each morning I’d wake up and get the woodburning stove going, trek up the hill to the pump to get water, and come back down to make coffee and fry eggs for our breakfast. Afternoons were filled with writing and reading, evenings with guitar playing and conversation and oil lamps. I found it incredibly satisfying.

Of course, chopping wood and carrying water are slower than stopping at Starbucks, and when you have to be on the subway at 8:30 am, not very practical. But what if your expenses were low enough that you could support yourself without going to work?

Going off-grid doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it certainly does to me. And there are benefits beyond simple enjoyment of being intimately involved in the details of taking care of one’s own needs.

“I’m not trying to argue that this is for everybody, and I’m not trying to tell everyone in America that they should go off-grid. But I am trying to say that it would be very good for the country if a few million households were off the grid. It would be good in terms of helping the environment, reducing energy consumption, reducing water consumption,” Nick says.

“And there’s also another important reason which is resilience. Everyone’s talking about energy security at the moment, the price of gas is going up, there’s food rationing just beginning with rice at least in America, and the idea that there could be a few million people who were self-sufficient for energy and possibly for food as well actually would make the country as a whole stronger. So there are actually good national reasons why it’s a good idea to go off-grid.”

Nick’s thoughts on going off-grid struck me as pragmatic as well as profound. As the world gets more top-heavy with bureaucracy, his tactic of working to change laws so that people can more easily take their destinies and livelihoods into their own hands makes a great deal of sense.

I also appreciated his language, filled with words like “possibility” and “decentralization” and “community.” You’ll notice he doesn’t talk about hunkering down in a bunker and waiting for the apocalypse. The model he presents—households working together in community to share resources, challenges, and information—is nothing less than the 21st century update of the pioneer concept.

Have a listen to my interview with him and check out his amazingly informative website and let us know what you think. Could you go off the grid? Why or why not? I think I could, but not in Brooklyn. :)

In a previous life, I made and sold handbags crafted out of old album covers. It was a lot of fun—I loved trolling flea markets and thrift shops and the best record store in the world for the grooviest covers. I also got to use crazy ribbons and cords and different beautiful papers—everything from Chinese newspapers to the sleeves of the records themselves, if they looked cool enough. Punching holes, affixing grommets, and gluing on trim were all very meditative activities, and besides being a good time, I also got paid. I even sold Liberace bags at the Liberace museum!

After a few years, I got burnt out on it—how many Madonna purses can one girl make?—but I still adore making new stuff out of old stuff, and I love trolling indie-crafting mega-site Etsy to see what other crafty kids are making out of old junk. Seeing all the ingenious creations out there makes me happy, because there’s a lot of good stuff in the trash. Add a bit of creative brilliance and elbow grease, and you end up with some insanely wonderful items.

Today I’d like to share some of my favorite things made out of other things, via Etsy. What are some of your favorites?

A necklace made out of an old album!

A notebook made out of 3 1/2” floppys!

Earrings made out of old Lite Brite pieces!

More earrings, made out of Nintendo NES cartridges!

Cufflinks made out of old payphone keys!

Baby booties made out of Ramen noodle packaging!

Underwear made out of an old Chicago Bulls t-shirt!

Windchimes made out of dollheads and lots of other awesomely creepy stuff!

Searching Etsy with the word “recycled” brings back almost 2000 pages of results, so I’m gonna stop there before I blow out our webhost and my credit card. Have you seen any junk transformed into artwork lately? Let us know in the comments ...

On April 1st, we embarked on our mission to bring positive environmental stories and essays to your browser or newsreader every week day. So far, the response has been great and all of us are heartened by the diverse, thoughtful, solutions-oriented community that is starting to form here. I’ve already learned so much from the articles and comments, not to mention from editing the site itself. It’s truly a beautiful thing to watch our fellowship grow.

Today I’d like to highlight some of my favorite articles from the last seven weeks. From participating in democracy and deciding to reach beyond “sustainability,” from cooking with kids to hitting the brick wall of realizing the enormity of the task ahead of us, we have covered a lot of ground, and we will continue to do so. But one thing will always remain constant: our commitment to falling in love with the future enough to take responsibility for making it clean, just, and beautiful.

Conducting nature, or why sustainability is not enough lays out The Sunny Way’s entire reason for being. Responsibility, happiness, and love shows us how to discern what’s real and the importance of commitment.

In Getting kids excited about cooking and What we can do about kids and commercialism, Stella points to new (and old!) ways of being with our children that encourage them to take an active role in the world around them, in everyday actions and in learning to think critically.

In Mass Power Shift: Ain’t democracy grand? Uli shares her experiences in lobbying the Massachusetts State Legislature to adopt stronger climate change measures. She also tells us about the amazing Avory Lovins and his talk on Winning the Oil Endgame.

City girl Rena learns about lots of different kinds of eggs in An imperfect dozen. In On purists, she also points out the ugly side of sharing one’s knowledge and discusses how to avoid the purist trap.

We address why we must stop fighting America’s Culture War in Sitting out the Culture War, and our mixed results in our first attempts in The 11th Hour and Megan’s Earth Day debacle.

And in our first podcast, Anatole shares the story of Global Generation and the amazing work they are doing with urban kids in London to connect them to the environment in which they live.

Matt, Jen, and Stella tell us all about the pleasures of old stuff; Fawn describes for us how her busy family of 4 produces less than one bag of trash a week; and Victoria does the math on how much trash she has diverted from the landfill over 13 years of composting—over a ton! Astounding.

Finally, Rich shares some great videos from Al Gore and James Brown to get us on our feet and moving.

Thanks for joining us so far, and I hope you’ll jump in and join the conversation. I can’t wait to see how it unfolds, can you?

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of meeting Ben, Julie, and Mark, three intrepid souls who have spent the last 10 months traveling around the United States and covering positive environmental stories as documented on their website, Your Environmental Road Trip. By July 4, 2008, they will have visited all 50 states! The culmination of their work will be a feature-length documentary about their travels and the amazing people and projects they encountered along the way, along with a short video for each state.

I met them at a party in Brooklyn the weekend before Earth Day, which they elected to spend in New York City. Over hummus and peanut butter brownies, we got to know each other and spent several watery early spring hours talking about everything from my brother and sister-in-law’s restaurant (where Ben has eaten—small world!) to permaculture in Tennessee (where we also had mutual friends) to pioneers in Idaho who put the rest of us to shame by living in warm, well-appointed and comfortable caves.

Mark, Ben, and Julie impressed me not only with their stamina and determination, but also with their outlook, which is very Sunny Way-esque. With their combination of hilarity, positivity, and realism, they are spreading the good news that we can make a better future and in fact already are!

I can’t wait to see their documentary! In the meantime, have some fun watching their short videos and reading their blog entries.

A little light entertainment as we head into the weekend. Happy sunshine-bottling gnomes battle gloomy swamp-dwellers in this cartoon from 1935. (via Fed by Birds)

Have a good weekend, everyone!

I have never seen a plant sale like the Friends School Plant Sale. It was like a cross between a plant sale and ticket sales for a hot rock concert. The sale started at 11:00AM and my friend Martha, her baby and I arrived at the State Fair grounds by 9:00AM, by no means the first to arrive. We brought my bike trailer/double stroller to hold the plants. We walked up to the entrance and were given wristbands with a group number. “You are Blue 10,” the lady told us. “Plan to be back here around 11:15 to be admitted with your group.”

We hung around with all the other excited would-be plant buyers for two surprisingly fast-moving hours eating fair food, chatting and admiring the interesting contraptions people had brought to hold their plants. There were wagons with milk crates held on by bungee cords, homemade carts and even a tri-level PVC contraption with sleds for shelves. These people meant business!

Before long the man with the bullhorn ordered the Blue 10s “into the chute.” We would be the next group allowed to enter the building.

The sale was worth the wait. The entire Minnesota State Fair grandstand was filled with plants of every type. There were perennials, annuals, native plants, grasses, bushes and shrubs, herbs and vegetables. Martha and I were primarily focused on vegetables, herbs and shrubs, so we stuck to those areas.

I was like a kid in a candy store. My mom had sent me $100 to spend on plants, so I was feeling free with the money. They had aisles of tomatoes, peppers and basil and odd herbs and vegetables I had never heard of. Martha and I decided to split a few packages of things we wanted to experiment with.

In the end we left with a cartload of plants. I got three kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, three kinds of basil, lavender, thyme, rosemary, pineapple mint, orange mint, tarragon, epazote, oregano, sorrel, ground cherries and an unusual purple Asian herb I had never heard of before. It’s supposed to taste kind of like cinnamon. They recommended it for spring rolls, which I love to make. I may be forgetting something, but that was the bulk of it. The best part is that I didn’t spend anywhere near the entire $100 I had to spend.

This is definitely going to be a tradition from now on.

This is an interview conducted over the phone with Jane Riddford, who is the founder of Global Generation, a London-based charity. I have known and been friends with Jane since 2004 when we were both students of Andrew Cohen, a modern day spiritual teacher. At the time I knew what she was doing was cool, but I didn’t realize that it is really the future of humanity—a global world, with global citizens, each with something worth living for, working together. So a few years on, I thought it would make perfect sense to do a interview with her for the Sunny Way as we share this same desire.

The focus of Global Generation is helping kids, teenagers, and young people to understand that nature is a part of who they already are. For many of these kids growing up in London, nature is almost completely alien to them, and just reconnecting helped them have a deeper connection to themselves and what it really means to be human today.

From there the program links ecology in to society using practical experiences. The kids plant, grow, spend time in the countryside, green up city buildings, and work to bring nature back into the city. All of this brings them a hands-on knowledge of the interconnection of our urban and rural landscapes, as well as a grounded understanding of their place as part of the whole.

Global Generation itself represents the next generation of organization, always changing, reconfiguring and working out what works now, not what worked last month. Jane told me its ultimate objective is to not exist anymore because then everyone will be living and expressing it! To some that may sound idealistic but to me it sounds like an objective worthy of truly inspiring the next generation of emerging adults.

The Sunny Way would like to say Go Jane!

Following are some quotes to whet your appetite. You can download the entire interview here, and click on through to the Global Generation website for more information.

“The biggest thing was these different groups of kids all being together, there were all these activities we do but for me when they suddenly they stop and go ‘oh wow its really quiet here’, or seeing the sun go down, which is like watching the earth turn. The most important thing is getting a bigger view, and that it is cool to care, care for oneself, care for each other and care for the planet.”

“By degrees we evolved the concept of living roofs into a living building, the idea of bringing life into a office building, and having kids to do that. Then we started to notice bringing kids into a business environment. What they started to realize was this wasn’t school this was real life. Also having kids in the environment, we got people working in the building it brought out a sense of responsibility in them and animated some kind of consciousness in the whole situation.”

“We’ve seen rapid change in 6 months, very cynical, very ‘Whatever’ teenage girls ... it was a big shock to them. With no electricity no curling tongs, we had to work really hard, but then somehow by the end of the 4 days we knew a bubble had burst, but we didn’t know where it was gonna lead, and thought we were being very idealistic ... then a week later the most challenging of the group, suddenly the penny dropped and she saw we weren’t asking her to be a tree hugger! It was important to have that experience, she got it and understood her experience, why we had taken them out, and how it translates into a office building in the middle of London, and what businesses are doing, and I remember her suddenly turning to me and saying ‘Jane you’ve got to shout about this! You’ve gotta get the message out!’”

One of the challenges I am facing in the wake of my recent move is to balance my desire for aesthetically pleasing surroundings with my concern for the environment. I don’t want to go out and buy a lot of new stuff just to decorate my space, but I want my house to look like a home.

One of my big “needs” at the house, decoratively speaking, is artwork. This place has a lot more wall space so the artwork I had at the old place wasn’t really enough here. I’m trying to come up with secondhand and handmade solutions instead of going out and buying all new artwork. Here is what I have found so far.

I found this in the basement and I love it. My mom says it is the only needlework project she has ever finished. I believe it is older than I am.

I found this black and white drawing of a tree at a thrift shop for $10. It really struck me. I already had the grillwork piece and the gargoyles on the desk were in the basement. Incidentally, the desk originally came from a neighbor’s garage sale when I was about 8 years old. It was school bus yellow and hideous, but a little black paint cleaned it right up. I need to find some lovely old books for the gargoyles to hold up.

My grandma bought these from a street artist in Paris in the 1960s. These are some of those fabulous pieces that have a story behind them. In the early 60s, my grandma and grandpa decided to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris. Back then traveling by plane was a big deal (at least to them) and my grandma was nervous, so she had a couple of White Russians to calm her nerves, and a little more alcohol on the flight. She got to Paris feeling pretty tipsy and immediately went to the hotel to have dinner, with wine, of course. Anyway, to make a long story short the wine flowed freely the whole trip and she doesn’t even remember how she got these paintings. This is especially funny to me, as I don’t recall ever seeing my grandma have more than half a glass of wine with a holiday dinner. I eventually plan to reframe these. I’m not really into the cheap diploma-style frames they are in.

First of all, please ignore the wall patching behind the pictures. We are planning to paint this room, but it hasn’t made it to the top of the to-do list yet. This dresser and chair belonged to my grandma. The larger painting came from my church’s garage sale and cost $1. I bought the smaller pictures from a street artist in Quebec City when I was in middle school. The frames originally belonged to one of my grandparents.

I found these trays at the citywide garage sale last summer for $6. I love them. I also love my dining room table, which I got for $20 at a garage sale in Pasadena. It’s sturdy, kid friendly and simple.

Finally I am planning on making three pieces of needlework for the walls.

I am not finished with it yet, but I think this peacock embroidery piece is going to be stunning in my kitchen. It needs a fantastic frame, so I am keeping my eyes peeled for one. I have a lot of faith that the right frame will find its way to me if I look hard enough.

My mom started this crewelwork wall hanging when she was pregnant with me thirty years ago. I am determined to finish it. Eventually it will grace my entryway, just above the shoe bench. I love the idea of having a thirty-year mother-daughter embroidery project.

Finally, I need a large piece of art to go above the library table in the living room. I have a huge wood frame, but nothing to put in it. My current plan is to buy some canvas and freehand embroider a large, swirly, whimsical tree in red thread. It will be fast and easy, but add a lot of drama and interest for very little money.

We are a Midwest, middle-class family of 4 (one adult, three school age kids) with 2 cats that produces less than a 13 gallon trash (kitchen size) bag of waste for the landfill per week.

We haven’t always done this well in diverting our trash from permanent waste storage facilities, and there is always room for improvement, but here is what we are doing now:

Our community curb side recycling program takes 1 & 2 plastics, paper and chipboard, tin and aluminum and clear glass right from our front yard. The cost of this is included in our regular trash service, whether we use it or not. A few years back, I discovered that my mom’s community curb side recycling program will also take plastics 3-10 and colored glass. So now we save those in a box in the basement until we visit her or she drives up for a kid’s music program.

Most of our kitchen waste can be composted, as we have few meat scraps. With the busyness of caring for a young family, I have always been a lazy composter. I have a large tub (a repurposed Tupperware cake storage/transport container) that sits on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. During meal preparation, or as the kids are clearing their plates after a meal, food scraps get put there. Refrigerating it keeps it from attracting bugs or giving off odors until it gets full and one of us takes it out to the compost bin in the back yard.

Here, my laziness continues. I have read the appropriate percentages of lawn clippings to food waste and how often to turn the pile, etc., but I have determined that this is for the compost bin of people impatient for their black dirt. I’m in no hurry. I just keeping piling my food scraps on top, occasionally toss on a few weeds from the yard when I can convince the kids to pull them, and in a year or two or three-Voila! Dirt. My compost bin (came with the house) is cleverly designed with little doors at the bottom, so dirt can be removed from the lowest portion of the bin without disturbing the garbage on top.

When I bought this house five years ago, the former owners left some presents for me: empty paint cans (in case I wanted to touch up the walls before I chose my own colors), a kitchen counter portion left over from a remodel, a storage cabinet 5 feet tall made of scraps of lumber, and also a set of used tires. All of these things I was able to freecycle. As I have remodeled the house, I also found homes for the used carpet on freecycle. The unused radiators went to the scrap metal recycling place.

With three growing kids, there is a continual flow of new and used clothes through the house. I generally limit all of us to a week’s worth of clothes for each season. This keeps purchasing costs down and it makes it difficult for laundry to pile too high. I have identified a recipient for the outgrown clothes from each child. My daughter’s clothes go to a woman at work whose daughter is a year younger and about the same proportions as mine. My youngest son’s clothes go to a different woman at work whose youngest son is slender and can’t wear the hand-me downs from his two big older brothers. We generally try on last year’s clothes at the start of a new season. What doesn’t fit gets bagged up and taken to its new owner.

I have also worked on reducing what comes into the house. We rarely eat out, so don’t have the difficult-to-recycle food containers from restaurants to dispose of. For gift-giving occasions, I request an experience-gift or gift cards. (Last year, I got the 3 day loan of a convertible sports car from a friend! Way too fun, but totally impractical—I had to make three trips to get the kids home from Tae Kwon Do lessons.)

The kids like getting stuff, but they outgrow toys like they do clothes. This summer, we are going to have a toy garage sale. They can keep the money from whatever they sell and get something more to their current tastes. When I think about acquiring something new, I often ask myself, “How am I going to get rid of this when I am done with it?”

We take cloth or string bags when we go shopping. I reuse school supplies as much as possible. In fact, I have sent the same unopened box of watercolors to the same elementary school for 4 years and 3 kids! I take my lunch to work in an insulated container and eat up the leftovers- no waste there.

As I find a ways to reduce what goes into our trash can, I explain to the kids what to do with each item and the reason behind it. They have been composting apple cores and bread crusts since they could open the refrigerator door. I noticed last night as my 12 year old finished up a poster-board presentation for school that he picked up the paper scraps and put them in the recycle bin without any reminder from me. It’s not a big deal—it’s just what we do.