Green Living

Ahhh, the all-American, all-you-can-eat buffet. Nowhere else do we revel in our own waste with such joy. Overstuffed but determined to sample the cornucopia of desserts, I waited behind a woman at one last weekend. She was scrupulously carving "just a sliver" (as my grandma used to say) from a hefty wedge of chocolate cake. “Take the whole slice and leave the rest on your plate like everyone else,” commented a man nearby. Well, it would make the line move faster, I thought.

It looks like a house in The Shire, straight out of a Tolkien book, but this one's the real thing. It's a green-- literally--home in Wales, the product of four months of "mucking around" by freelance multitasker Simon Dale, his father-in-law, and whoever else happened to have a free moment to help. The point? To have fun. Oh yeah--and to live sustainably.

Looks like China isn't just going for the gold in athletic events--the host of the 2008 summer Olympics recently received LEED®-Gold certification from the United States Green Building Council for its Olympic Village, the temporary home to 17,000 athletes from around the globe.

I was reading Treehugger.com today and stumbled upon an article that appealed to my US Weekly/Gawker sensibilities: The seven celebrities who need a lesson in going green. Most of them were guilty of private jets, wanton air travel, and, in the fantastic case of Woody Harrelson, ordering a vegan belt and shoes to be flown from California to Cannes so he could keep up the eco-chic…

I used to work for an oil company.

In case you just did a double take: I used to work for an oil company. A small-ish one, based in the heart of Dallas, Texas (a town that unapologetically calls itself “Big D”). 

One of the best things about living in New York City is that I can breezily walk by 4 lanes of sardine-packed cars aggressively inching towards a one-lane merge and barely notice their plight. Luckily, I don't need a car to get where I'm going since I live in the second most walkable city in the U.S., according to rankings recently released by a web site called WalkScore.

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--My morning news diet usually consists of NPR, the BBC, and a little New York Times. There's usually some dire event in Zimbabwe or Gaza or, of late, the U.S. economy. This morning, though, I was surprised to hear that people of my ilk are having trouble finding love:

By "Tern" Jessica Leber--More than what we eat, we are what we toss away. Anthropologists, archeologists, and so-called “garbologists" who wade through society’s dumpsters and landfills have long known in garbage veritas. Could our truth in trash be all that’s left some day?

By "Tern" Jessica Leber--China is determined to show the world its greenest side during this summer's Olympics, and for good reason--no one wants athletes and tourists to choke their way through Beijing’s blanket of smog. What remains to be seen is whether the Games’ environmental ethos has spurred lasting improvements in one of the world’s most polluted cities or whether, instead, its pollution problems will be swept under the rug. 

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger: Today, for the first time ever, New Yorkers can feel the spray of a waterfall without so much as leaving the city.