Electronic Buffet

… The Homeless Garden Project is a 20-year-old success story that began as a small plot and a thousand donated herb plants tended by a few homeless men and women. It now employs 14 homeless trainees and provides weekly CSA shares to over 80 members of the Santa Cruz community. …

… The Homeless Garden Project is not a charity case. It grows beautiful organic produce to rival any small farm’s in the country — deep shades of purple and maroon and green and yellow in the rainbow chard rows, artichoke stalks as tall as a man, strawberries the size of crabapples, kale, broccoli, squash, lettuce, spinach, bok choi, lavender, wheat (they make pancake mix), and rows of cut flowers. It just so happens that homeless people, given a chance at gainful employment for up to three years, are the ones moving the plow, lining the irrigation tubes, harvesting the goods, learning job skills, and enjoying the satisfaction of responsibility and community.

→ full article at Grist

Barely a year old, the Windowfarms project is art come to life. First researched and developed in the South Williamsburg kitchen of co-founder Britta Riley and then later at the Eyebeam Labs, the project is popping up in art galleries and kitchens throughout the world. “It’s really about making it possible for anybody to grow food in an urban place,” says Riley.

With more than half the world’s population now living in urban spaces, it’s a solution that could provide much needed relief to “food deserts”—communities sorely lacking fresh produce. Using an open source methodology to work out kinks and create new releases, an online community of window farmers from Louisville to Stockholm are creating edible gardens in urban kitchens around the world. We talked to Riley about how this is done, exactly.

→ full article at GOOD

Urbanite is the perfect symbol for the new natural building movement, the new wave of building that incorporates natural, local, and recycled materials in place of high embodied energy, destructive, and ultimately unsustainable building practices.

Urbanite is the name for reclaimed, recycled concrete from the demolition of roads, buildings, and sidewalks. It is typically broken up by heavy machinery, and either thrown in ditches, the landfill, or is left sitting in giant yards or alongside roads.

→ full article at Sustainablog

In my blogathon post, I wrote about ten reasons why I choose to live without electricity in my house. Inspired by some of our readers’ comments, I offer this follow-up post to further explain my choice to build a home without electricity. Choosing to live in a home without electricity is one of the battles I’ve chosen to fight to live more ecologically. It’s a battle I consider to be one of the biggest steps towards a truly sustainable future.

→ full article at Sustainablog

As millions of people around the world observed Earth Hour last Saturday, March 27, a cement plant tucked against the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwestern Virginia turned off the lighting array on its 400-foot pre-heater tower — and has no intention of turning them back on.

Before plant managers at the Roanoke Cement Company in Troutville, Virginia, made the decision to switch off the lights almost 100 lights were visible from up to 13 miles away along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, a road that traverses high on the wooded slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The pre-heater tower now has just two prominent red lights to alert small aircrafts flying in the area. “We knew we would make the neighbors happy if we’d just shut the lights off at night,” said Kevin Baird, Plant Manager for Roanoke Cement Company. Baird said he follows the guiding energy principle that “the easiest way to save power is to not use it.”

→ full article at Celsias

Route 80 is an amazing American road. It stretches from New York City and the Atlantic ocean to San Francisco and the Pacific. I had the pleasure of traveling on this American road (our second longest) for 15 hours from New York to Iowa. Countless trucks. And two enduring images.

→ full article at Celsias

Teeny tiny particles could provide an answer to a massive problem: how to provide enough potable water to sustain the global population of human beings.  Researchers at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA have come up with one solution, a membrane made of  a specially engineered nanoscale material that can purify water with far greater energy efficiency than current technology.

Not that we really could drink our way out of climate change and rising sea levels, but a more energy efficient way to desalinate seawater could enable the world’s population to use the oceans as a source of potable water on a far greater scale than is currently done.

→ full article at CleanTechnica

Remember the white soul group on the Motown label, Rare Earth? If you do, sorry: this posting isn’t about them….

Nope, it’s about the fact that rare earth metals represent a unique problem — and opportunity — in the cleantech realm.

As PBS reported on “Newshour” a few months ago (transcript here), rare earth materials are important commodities essential to the production of many environmental technologies — from batteries to wind turbines to solar panels. Unfortunately, many of these materials are highly toxic and thus pose significant environmental hazards if mis-managed.

→ full article at Cleantech Blog

In their ever expanding drive to create a more sustainable military, the various branches of the U.S. armed forces have entered some interesting new territories, from wastewater recycling to weed-powered jet planes (okay so biofuel powered jet planes).  Now the U.S. Army Research Office has upped the ante with funding for a new technology that could drastically reduce the energy consumed by ceramics manufacturing.

At first glance the Army’s interest in ceramics may seem somewhat off base but in addition to its usefulness in the manufacture of coffee mugs, ceramic material plays a significant role in military equipment such as ceramic body armor and heat shields, as well as numerous other uses including insulators and spark plugs.

→ full article at CleanTechnica

Republicans in the armed forces are coming back with much greener views on energy than the Senators that represent the Red States they come from, or the media that serves Republicans. A VoteVets poll of returning Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, comprising mostly Republicans – only 20% were Democrats – mostly from the Red States in the South showed a strikingly stark chasm opening between vets and their Senators.

Asked “Do you favor or oppose a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that invests in clean, renewable energy sources in America and limits carbon pollution in the atmosphere?”

73% of vets voted “Aye”.

→ full article at CleanTechnica