The Green Parent

The countdown to 2009 is literally hours away.  This is the time to reflect on the year past and think about all of the cool things we can all do to make 2009 the greenest year ever?  Check out these eco-resolutions from greenies all over the country:


“My Eco-Resolution(s) for 2009 are to shop local and in season at my local farmers markets, to never use plastic bags, NEVER use Styrofoam cups, and try my hardest to use less paper! In this business it’s hard… but I’m going to do it!”

“I do resolve to always fill (with tap water; mine is Brita filtered) and carry my reusable bottle with me whenever I travel, and never buy another bottled water unless absolutely necessary!”


“This is the first year I am making eco-resolutions, and here they are:

1. Begin using the rain barrel I was given this year for my birthday
2. Start a compost pile
3. Never, ever bring another plastic shopping bag into my home
4. Find innovative ways to reuse items as much as possible
5. Switch over to using CFL bulbs throughout my house
6. Buy only what is absolutely necessary“

“I am a mom of two kids under 3.  My big resolution for 2009 is to completely stop using disposable diapers AND wipes.”


“The Wilkerson family’s 2009 goal is to reduce our carbon footprint / energy use by 10%.  We will complete our study by 12/22.  We will plant scrubs to off-set our carbon use.”

“Every year I make the same resolution: Throw out half of what I own and spend more time with my friends.”

So what’s your eco-resolution for 2009?

At a time when the Big Three are struggling, Ford is hoping to give its lineup an eco-boost with its new soybean car seats.  The seats were designed by a “mom-squad” of bioengineers who wanted to replace the 30 pounds of petroleum-based foam in a car’s seat backs, seat cushions, armrests, instrument panels and headliners. 

Ford’s new soy seats are composed of natural hemp and soybean fibers, and degrade within 90-120 days in a compost pile.  They are also 20-30% lighter than their traditional plastic counterparts, giving fuel economy a boost as well.  The car manufacturer first used soy foam seats on the 2008 Ford Mustang, and has since placed the seats in the Ford Expedition, F-150, Escape and Focus, as well as Mercury Mariner, Lincoln Navigator and Mazda Tribute. By the end of the 2009 model year, Ford plans to have soy seats in about one million vehicles. 

According to Ford’s website site:

“With soy foam in seats on one million vehicles planned, Ford expects to decrease its use of petroleum oil by one million pounds and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by five million pounds annually.”

What do you think of Ford’s latest effort to go green?

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, about 29 million Americans brought home a real, live Christmas tree in 2006. But that still pales in comparison to the 70% of Americans who prefer to set up an artificial tree.  So which is greener?  Here’s how to make sure your Christmas tree is eco-friendly:

The Green Parent Pick: Go get a real tree. Sure, it means cutting down a tree. But these days nearly all Christmas trees are grown on tree farms. So deforestation is not an issue and it is really no different than harvesting corn or any other crop. From a global warming perspective, sustainable tree farms actually provide a continued “sink” for carbon dioxide emissions. And real trees are not made from PVC plastics that are harmful to the planet. Just be selective about the tree farm you choose to buy from and look for one that does not use an excess of pesticides and other chemicals.

Green Parent Tip: Get the family together and head out to your local tree farm to cut your own Christmas tree. Surf over to EcoBusinessLinks to see if there is an organic tree farm in your area. When the holidays are over, toss your undecorated tree in the backyard to provide wildlife habitat or in the compost bin for next year’s mulch.

Live Trees: A live, potted Christmas trees may seem like a good option for Green Parents, however, you have to make sure that you live in an area where your tree will thrive once it is planted. In addition, live trees are truly not meant to endure the warm temperatures inside your home. So it’s best to either leave it outside or bring it in for only a few days during the season.

Green Parent Tip: If you really want a live tree, your best bet would be to find a suitable tree in your backyard, and decorate it (with eco-friendly decorations, of course) right where it stands.

Artificial trees: Artificial trees require the use of a significant amount of energy and petroleum-based (PVC) resources in their manufacture. In addition, most artificial trees today are manufactured in China, and are literally shipped halfway around the world to their destinations. And there are also some new concerns about residues of lead and other chemicals on artificial trees.

However, if you are going to buy one tree that you are sure you will use and reuse year after year for the next few decades, the environmental damage caused by producing and shipping your tree would be minimal when averaged out over the lifespan of the tree. And just think of all the gas and energy you will save from year to year by not having to head out to the local Christmas tree farm.

Green Parent Tip: Purchase an artifical tree that is made in the U.S.A to minimize the pollution and resource consumption caused by shipping. (Check out ChristmasDepot and USChristmastree for aritificial trees that are 100% lead free and made in the U.S.A.) Reuse the same tree from year to year.

Feeling the pinch this holiday season?  Most of us are.  And sadly, one thing I’ve noticed this year is that the economy has brought holiday spirit to an all time low.  But if there is one thing we should all remember this holiday, its that you don’t need wads of cash to celebrate the joys of the season.  More often than not, its the simple, non-commercial gifts, that are most appreciated.  And these are gifts that come from the heart, not the pocketbook.  Need some ideas?  Here are some great green holiday gifts that won’t cost you a cent:

You’ve Got Talent

What’s your talent?  Can you sew? Shovel a driveway? Design a website? Cook a meal?  Everyone’s got a talent…and you can use yours to cross off names on your holiday gift list.  Write a poem for your grandma, give your sister-in-law a stack of redeemable babysitting coupons, or offer to walk you neighbor’s dog for a month.  The list of ideas is endless, but the key is to find a way to share your talents with those you love.  (Psst…that, by the way, is the true meaning behind the holidays!)

DIY IT

Handmade gifts are always welcome, especially in these rough economic times.  So instead of spending a stressful afternoon at the stores, stay home and bake a few batches of cookies or some warm yummy bread.  Sew some reusable tote bags…they make for an easy green gift, and you can raid your supply of old t-shirts and worn out clothes for the fabric.  Here are some more handmade holiday gift ideas:

Wrap Up Recipes

Decoupage Plate

Organic Play Dough

Garden Apron and Gloves

Potato Plastic Doll

Recycled Paper Notecards

Donate

You can still see to it that your favorite charities are remembered by searching or shopping at sites that donate with each click.  Surf over to GoodShop where you can choose from more than 800 shops, including some big names like  Target, Apple, Macy’s, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Petco.  GoodShop will donate up to 37% of the purchase price to your favorite charity.  Another option?  Let GoodSearch be your search engine and the site will donate one penny to a charity of your choosing with every click.

This post was my contribution to this month’s Green Moms Carnival.  Please be sure to check out all of the posts in this carnival for more ideas about going green for the holidays!

Air pollution drives me nuts.  You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, and unless it’s really bad, you can’t even smell it.  And unlike water pollution, you can’t even filter it out of your life.

So I was pretty disturbed to see this report that just came out from USA Today that took a look at the amout of air pollution that can be found around our children’s schools.  The report, entitled The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools, compared industrial pollution information collected by the Environmental Protection Agency with the location of the nation’s 128,000 schools to determine which schools had the highest exposure to toxic air pollutants.

So how clean is the air around your child’s school?  Check out the study’s interactive map and school finder to see where your school stands.

by Joyce Hinnefeld

A brief piece in the November 21 issue of The Week describes my novel In Hovering Flight as, among other things, a consideration of “the paradoxes of caring.” The more I’ve thought about that phrase the more apt it’s come to seem to me.

Addie and Tom, two of the novel’s central characters, care passionately about birds and about the natural world, and also about the work they do in connection with this passion for the environment—Tom as an ornithologist, Addie as a bird artist and, eventually, an environmental activist. They also care deeply about their daughter Scarlet, the book’s other important character. For Tom, there’s a healthy balance and a meaningful connection between his various loves. But for Addie, the people and things she cares about often seem at war with one another. When Scarlet is a baby, Addie finds it nearly impossible to get to her blind in the woods and sketch, much less do any painting. When Scarlet is older and more independent, Addie’s despair over overdevelopment and environmental degradation often pulls her away from her work. Later, her own declining health interferes. So there’s one paradox of caring: for the mother in this book, the various people and things she cares about seem to interfere with this other important thing, her work as an artist.

When I began thinking about what I might say about motherhood and the writing of In Hovering Flight, I thought, initially, that I would write about that term “hovering” in the title. “In hovering flight” is actually a phrase from Roger Tory Peterson’s description of the song of the bobolink in the fifth edition of his Birds of Eastern and Central North America (“Song, in hovering flight and quivering descent, ecstatic and bubbling, starting with low, reedy notes and rollicking upward”); these are lines that Scarlet, who grows up to be a poet, uses when she tries to convince her father that words are necessary to capture the beauty of bird song. But these days the term “hovering” is being used in another context, to refer to the overly protective (and damaging) involvement of so-called “helicopter parents.” In a review in the November 17 New Yorker Joan Acocella discusses several recent books on “the rise of overparenting”—or, “hothouse parenting,” or “death-grip parenting,” or, in Acocella’s terms, “hovering parenting.”

Isn’t it ironic, I imagined writing as I reflected on motherhood and my novel, that that word “hovering” appears in the title of my novel, where I deliberately set out to portray two parents who are the antithesis of smothering, overprotective parents. As an adult, Scarlet sees the debt she owes her parents, who have taught her to love and value her work, however little the world might value it—an important lesson for a young woman who aspires to a life as a poet. She describes a childhood and early adolescence of warmth and freedom, “everything as safe and sure as Eden.” And when she is ready to leave the nest, she flies north, to Maine, with the confidence that, surely, only a child of hands-off, anti-hovering parents like Addie and Tom could possess.

But of course that’s only telling part of the story. Actually, Scarlet leaves home before she has finished school, choosing to spend her last year of  high school at the home of her parents’ friend Cora—away from her mother’s despair over her work and over the planet’s decline, and also away from Addie’s increasingly public activism. And here I can see something else in what I was doing, in writing about Scarlet and Addie: I was exploring the possibility that a mother’s passion for her own work, or a mother’s own passions in general, might eventually alienate her from her own child.

My daughter Anna was three when I began working in earnest on In Hovering Flight. She was, in very real ways, my inspiration for the young Scarlet, and my memories of the elation, and also the profound exhaustion, that I felt during her first months were still vivid, and so shaped my writing about Addie’s first months with baby Scarlet. What I didn’t completely own up to in my initial thinking about this piece were the ways in which In Hovering Flight enacts my own personal paradox of caring: for my family (my daughter and husband, and now too my own aging parents), for my teaching, for my work as a writer. The effort to balance all of these is my struggle—and, I know, also my gift—every day. I hope for the ability to hold all of this together as gracefully as writer Scott Russell Sanders, who says in an interview published in the September 2008 Writer’s Chronicle

Like any writer, I struggle to preserve the mental space necessary for creative work. But I’m not willing to abandon the students and others who depend on me, I’m not willing to exploit my friends, and I’m not willing to sacrifice the people I love in order to produce a more nearly perfect book. So I go on struggling to make my imperfect art in the midst of relationships and responsibilities.

The Quakers say that work is love made visible. That’s what I wanted to give to all my characters: work that, for them, is their love, their deep caring—for life, for the planet, for one another—made visible. But I realize now that in having Addie struggle, and at certain points fail, in the effort to resolve the paradoxes of caring, I was being a bit more realistic. When you care that much, and for that many, it isn’t going to be easy—for you or for the ones you love.

Need a quick and easy green gift idea that will fit anyone on your gift list?  Why not try your hand at making your own eco-soap?  It’s a whole lot easier than you might think.  The awesome folks at Bramble Berry sent me this simple recipe:

Ingredients

Herbs (such as oatmeal, coffee, spirulina, or clay)

1 pound (16 ounces) Bramble Berry ‘melt and pour’ soap, organic base

1 ounce essential oil (such as lavender or eucalyptus)

Soap mold (or any kind of empty container such as an empty yogurt container, old tofu container, empty soy milk container, etc.)

Rubbing Alcohol

Making Soap

1. Prep your herbs and make sure they are the right size for gentle exfoliation. Sharp herbs may be too abrasive on the skin.
2. Cut the ‘melt and pour’ soap into 1 x 1″ cubes.
3. Using your microwave, heat the soap in 30-second increments until the soap is fully melted.
4. Add .25 ounces to .50 ounces of essential oil. Remember, if you use a yellow or orange colored fragrance, your soap base will look less clear and look more yellow/orange.
5. Mix in your herbs or additives. Stir until the herbs seem mostly suspended.
6. Pour your scented and herb’ed soap into the make-shift mold.

Tip: Don’t fill your make-shift soap mold all the way up. It helps for easy release to fill 85% of the way to the top and not the entire way.

7. Do one finishing touch of rubbing alcohol to finish off your soap and give it a nice smooth surface.
8. Wait for the soap to harden, pop or unwrap the soap out of the mold, wrap soap with saran wrap, label and enjoy the compliments you get!

‘Tis the season for the winter holidays. In my house, this is the time of year when we deck the halls, talk about the nativity story, play the dreidel game, set up the kinara, decorate the tree, and whip up the eco-friendly menorah.

No, I haven’t lost my mind.  Much to my daughters’ dismay, we don’t actually celebrate ALL of the winter holidays (ie, they don’t get to double dip for presents.)  But we do observe as many different holidays as possible so that my girls can understand the traditions we share together as a family as well as the traditions of people all over the world.

In this spirit of fellowship, I was very excited to come across a beautiful book that talks about the different ways that love and lights are celebrated at this time of year.  Winter’s Eve: Love and Lights by Lisa Sferlazza Johnson takes children on a journey around the world as they learn about Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, as well as Los Posados, Diwali, and more. The book is published by Positive Spin Press, a publishing company that aims to help children learn about the world they live in in a positive way.  And it’s just got a great message of love, family, and connectedness that’s appropriate no matter what winter holiday you celebrate.

Blog post for Parent Bloggers Network.

There’s still time to enter to win a Weatherproofing Kit from Niagara Conservation.  Click here to enter.

Weatherproofing 101: Doors

by Mark Furst, Grading Spaces

Most issues with doors are due to gasket problems, either missing pieces or the door itself being poorly adjusted and not hitting the gasket right. A common leak point is at the top corners where the vertical and horizontal gaskets don’t meet up accurately and leaves a gap. Often, I find that the latch of the door isl oose and I’m not able to pull the door tight up to the gasket. Sometimes this assembly can be simply tightened, other times it makes sense just to install a new latching mechanism as cheaper latches tend to loosen up internally. Cats and dogs can be hard on a gasket if they claw at it. A simple fix I have done to my own back door is to stick a foam strip to the door that hits the existing gasket and seals up any voids in it. This is simpler and cheaper than replacing the gasket itself, just make sure not to use a foam that is too stiff to allow the door to close properly.

The threshold at the bottom of the door is an area that often leaks. Many quality doors have adjustable thresholds that can be raised or lowered to touch the door and create a seal, but is sometimes not adjusted after installation. If the door does not have this, the fix can be a bit more involved. Simply sticking a gasket to the bottom of the door will fail quickly. Usually the best fix is to install a sweep strip on the inside of the door that touches the back of the threshold. These usually have oval slots so you can slope the sweep to accommodate for doors that were installed out of square, or a floor that’s not level.

If the gasket at the bottom of the door is failing, sometimes the culprit is the hinges and their attachment to the framing itself. With the door open, push on the edge of the door towards the hinges. IF there is any movement, the hinges screws need to be tightened. Sometimes inexperienced door installers will not run a screw through the hinge and jamb (frame) and then on into the framing which holds the door in place much more securely than the screws only in the jamb. Occasionally, the screws will be stripped out and need replacing. Getting the next screw size up usually can work, just make sure that the screw head will fit flush into the hinge or else it will not allow the door to close completely.

Sometimes I find an interior door being used as an exterior one. This will be very inefficient, both thermally (it will be uninsulated) and airwise (gaskets will, typically, not be adequate) and if you have this, I would recommend replacement rather than trying to fix it up. The best exterior steel or fiberglass doors can be very efficient with R values up to R15, which is comparable to the walls into which they are installed.

As with windows, the area around the unit can be as leaky as the unit itself. Check the gap between the jamb and the framing. It should be filled with low expansion foam to prevent air movement.

This winter I am weatherproofing my house from top to bottom in an effort to save energy and stretch dollars.  My first task…the windows.  Care to join me? As a little added incentive, I’m giving away 5 Weatherproofing Kits from Niagara Conservation to help you get started (keep reading to find out how to win!!)

Weatherproofing 101: Windows

by Mark Furst, Grading Spaces

Photo by PM22

And the winners are:

Here are your random numbers:

9
7
16
24
4

Timestamp: 2008-12-05 18:06:29 UTC

Congrats and thanks to all for entering!