Green Daily

(Photo by Hearthsong.com)

It's high spring and green is sprouting all around. This is the time of year that so many of us city-dwellers envy our country -- or even suburban -- cousins who have a personal patch of green where they can cultivate flowers, tomatoes, and rabbit-bait like carrots and lettuce.

One of the gifts of the green movement has been an increase in Community Gardens. While not limited to urban settings, they can be a great resource for people who don't have any other way to get their hands dirty. You can visit the American Community Gardening Association website to find a community garden near you.

Volunteering at a local park is another way to get a gardening fix. With budget cuts at the state and local levels, parks that depend on government funding will need volunteers more than ever. VolunteerMatch.org can help you find a flower bed that needs mulching in Chicago, IL, or a monument that needs tending in Austin, TX.

If your green thumb is desperate for ownership despite a lack of land, how about a windowsill herb garden? If you have a sunny spot and enough space for a few pretty pots, you can get a kit that lets you grow herbs or flowers in a confined space. Or you can make your own, using anything from empty jars to yogurt containers, a bag of seeds and some potting soil.

We live in a time of strange bedfellows (see GOP ticket) and stranger duets (see Tony Bennett and Friends) but the recent teaming of hardcore rapper 50 Cent and gay icon Bette Midler may be the strangest yet.

Yes, their stories, talents and fans could not be any more different, but they do share some common ground- so they dug in it.

Every once in a while I think I'm getting so green, and then I notice how much trash our house has created in just one week. Or I can't figure out if it's better to get the non-organic but local strawberries, or buy organic ones that were flown in from God-knows-where.

The people behind GoGreen Online know that most of us are willing to go more green, but we don't know where or how to start. So they created an online resource center, with all of the "hows" along with all of the "whys" for five important areas:

• Energy
• Water
• Zero-waste
• Transportation
• Food

Even having the categories broken out like that makes me feel less overwhelmed. I can work with categories - compartmentalization is a busy person's friend!

It's just getting started - the site launched last week - but they hope to create a supportive and interactive community that bolsters the efforts of regular people to develop more eco-friendly practices.

Before you get bogged down in your next zero-waste attempt, or if you just wonder how the heck anyone can actually achieve zero-waste, visit GoGreen Online.

I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that a) you're not alone, and b) it's easier than you think, and c) there are lots of small changes you can make that will have a big impact!

If you're anything like me, you have this strange marriage of interests for the latest technology and the simplest of back-to-the-basics living. It's a strange combination that often confuses people, but rest assured that we're not alone.

The Sufficient Self forum is a wonderful community of like-minded people who are both forum-savvy and chocked full of down-home wit and wisdom. The topics range anywhere from how to save energy, to getting the most from your garden, to turning trash to treasure, to homeschooling your children. This forum was started by the same folks who brought us the BackYardChickens.com forums, so you know you're in good hands.

Green Bean Dreams had a great post this week about building community. It's all fine and dandy to do what we can in our own lives to reduce our impact, but at a certain point we need to reach out to others, to support each other and to build community. But building community...well, it's hard.

Some suggestions from Green Bean Dreams include planting a garden in your front yard, getting a carpool together for school, setting up a cocktail table in the cul de sac and putting together an email list for the neighborhood.

Here are some other ideas:

• Check out Meetup.com for environmental/green groups in your area.
  
• Conversation Cafe can hook you up with a structured group focused on hosting "open, respectful, public conversations."
• Explore the Holistic Moms Network.
  
• Work with your child's school to help green it.
• Host a Green Cleaning Party, sponsored by Women's Voices for the Earth.

How do you build your community? Please do share!

The new eco-friendly community powered by Ebay, WorldofGood.com, has put together a fascinating little quiz really designed to make you think about your everyday purchases and how exactly you're affecting this Earth when you buy.

Some of the answers to the quiz' questions might genuinely shock you. Take the quiz and then come back and tell me how you did before reading on -- warning spoilers ahead.

Every week we pick a theme to explore in more depth, and this week that theme is green community. To read all our posts related to this theme, click here.

In the neighborhood where I live, the streets are fairly quiet and the homes are quite old, most of which were built around the 1930's and 40's. Some of my neighbors have been here for many years and are generally kind, reasonable people. For these reasons, I consider myself lucky, especially when it comes to neighborly relations.

Keeping friendly with your neighbors is much more than just a social activity, it can benefit you in terms of those times when you might need help with anything at all. Frequently, neighbors will trade services with each other, such as mowing the lawn for an elderly neighbor or consolidating grocery visits or carpooling. Last year, my neighbor and I traded "goods"; I gave him eggs from my chickens and he gave me produce from his garden. Being neighborly is something that, in my opinion, we as a culture have drifted away from, and it's nice to realize how helpful we can all be to one another.

Every week we pick a theme to explore in more depth, and this week that theme is green community. To read all our posts related to this theme, click here.

Leave it to Oberlin College to create a sustainable dorm that students actually think is - well, kinda cool. The house, nicknamed "SEED" for Student Experiment in Ecological Design, is one of several that have appeared at colleges like Middlebury in Vermont and Morehouse in Atlanta (or, "Hotlanta," as the kids tend to call it, which is quite fitting in the era of global warming).

The students moved into SEED last September, and they do things like record their shower times on dry erase boards, and share one large fridge instead of having several with only a few items in them. They also study together in one big room to conserve electricity, lowered the thermostat in the winter (to the dismay of some), unplug their appliances and eschew tv watching.

Every week we pick a theme to explore in more depth, and this week that theme is green community. To read all our posts related to this theme, click here.

What a novel idea. People giving their unwanted stuff away to local people who could actually use it. Sure, we've talked about Freecycle before on GreenDaily, but with this week's community theme, what better time than now to remind you of this wonderful service.

Along with this concept is the Cheapcycle network, which operates relatively the same way, except you usually pay yard-sale prices for the items. With both of these networks, you simply join an email list and the latest offers will come to your inbox for you to peruse at your leisure.

Etiquette is very important in lists like these. You can't just ask people for a brand new iPhone or a 60 GB iPod, they will run you off with pitchforks. But as long as you follow their general, common-sense rules, you'll be fine. It's all about give and take, not greed!

Every week we pick a theme to explore in more depth, and this week that theme is green community. To read all our posts related to this theme, click here.

Summer is fast approaching and wanderlust descends on the masses. Instead of checking for cheap flights out of town, why not peruse the community section of you local craigslist site? Within that table, click on "rideshare" and check out where your neighbors are headed.

The romance of hitting the open road with only a few belongings at the mercy of the elements and your companion is an American phenomenon and has become a lot more appealing as gas prices continue to rise. A quick perusal of craiglist reveals people looking to tag along on a trip or those looking for company. The rideshares vary from cross country treks to just a few towns over.

Re:Vision, an online community of people dedicated to re-thinking urban space to encourage sustainability, is hosting a new competition that seeks concepts on how to turn a run-down urban block into "a thriving mixed-use area that centers on the family and supports local sustainable businesses."

Reps from the site will then meet the community's leaders, and the result will ideally spawn similar transformations in other neighborhoods. Re:Vision asks competitors to consider green building and sustainable techniques wherever the design allows.

The project sounds fun and new and innovative, but those characteristics mean nothing if the targeted community isn't receptive to change. I'm also wary of projects like these that focus on completely re-vamping a single urban block into some designer's idea of what is hip and trendy, under the guise of creating an eco-friendly spot. It seems that these design competitions are not so much for the community's benefit as they are for the designers themselves, and the notches they can tack onto their belts.

A community could probably benefit more long-term from instituting smaller, long-term changes, like community compost heaps or gardens, than they could from one huge transformation. Change can be good and much needed, but it needs to be introduced in manageable amounts and should benefit the greatest amount of people (or the largest amount of land).

Perhaps the winning idea will make more sense when combined with the winning ideas of Re:Vision's other contests (with names like Re:Route, Re:Store, and Re:Construct). But right now, it all seems a little too conceptual to actually be put into practice.