Tag: Sustainability
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Compost Bin 2.0
A little over a year ago I built my first compost bin and while it worked okay and was cheap to construct, it had several disadvantages. I diverted 16 months worth of food scraps and several trash cans of leaves from the landfill. The biggest problem with the bin was the fact that it did…
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Navigating Sustainable Choices in Modern Life
Every so often someone challenges me on why I care so much about being sustainable. If I don’t have or plan on having children why do I try to hard to reduce waste, conserve energy, and overall create a smaller impact on the environment? What does it matter to me that the next generation has…
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Sustainable Living: 2021 Green Resolutions
It has been a year since I started down a path to creating a more sustainable household. Some choices have been easy and others more difficult. It has not been perfect and I am nowhere near a zero waste household, but I do feel I have eliminated a lot of extra waste just by spending…
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Sustainable Gift Giving
It was around this time last year that I started to rethink my routines, decisions, and actions, realizing the way I was living was not all that sustainable. I had composted when I lived in Minneapolis because the city made it easy, built some rain gardens and rain barrels, and have been recycling since college,…
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The New Localism
Book Review As politics has become nationalized in recent years, problem solving has become localized, a trend termed new localism. New localism is governance founded on collaboration, not coercion; diverse networks, not just elected officials; and iterative problem solving, not rigid and prescriptive approaches. Cities (the local level) are an ideal test bed for new…
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Regenerative Farming
This past week I watched two great documentaries that changed the way I think about farming. Having grown up in Nebraska and spent a lot of time driving around rural areas, my idea of farming was spring planting, fall harvest, cows brought in to graze the fields in the winter, then starting the cycle over.…
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Mitigating Climate Change through Preservation
This week I spent my days in virtual sessions for the PastForward conference hosted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. While I’m not a fan of virtual conferences, like most people, I was excited to see this conference go virtual because it gave me the opportunity to attend for the first time. This years…
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Inherent Sustainability of Old Buildings
In recent years preservation has been recognized as a “recycling program of historic proportions.” And when you stop to consider, it is actually a good description. Saving old buildings helps retain history, identity, beauty, and connections to our past, but in terms of sustainability saving old buildings excels at recycling and reusing embodied energy. Many…
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Cultural Heritage’s Role in Climate Action
In the summer of 2019 the Climate Change and Heritage Working Group of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) released The Future of Our Pasts: Engaging cultural heritage in climate action. ICOMOS, a non-governmental international organization, is a leader in protecting monuments and sites making their recognition of the impact of climate change…
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Green Metropolis
Book Review Last week I had a long car ride and spent the majority of it listening to Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen. The expansive title is a pretty good description of what the book is about. Over the course of six…
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The Planning Lady 