The environmental movement and rising awareness of global warming have sparked an interest in green living. People want to know what they can do to live sustainable lives. In this book, you will find an overview of global warming and environmental degradation of air, water, and soil; what sustainable living is and how to do it; how to cut down on carbon output (the cause of global warming) with alternative cars and fuels; and environmentally friendly home and lawn care products.

via The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Green Living | TSA Digest – Technology, Science & Automotive News.

Author, The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome

If U.S. housing is going to rebound long-term, we need to vanquish the car and stop encouraging sprawl.

First, let’s hasten the demise of the spurb, an ugly word I made up to describe sprawling, unwalkable urban-suburban areas that have no connection to public transportation and central cities.

The spurb’s time has long past. Future energy demands from the rest of the world mean higher energy prices down the road. We need homes where there are jobs, infrastructure and transportation.

If the housing bubble and bust has taught us anything, it’s probably a bad idea to build homes in the middle of nowhere, stretching along vast deserts and inland regions that are poorly served by highways. Americans are tired of wasting their lives in endless commutes.

Not only does driving everywhere waste our precious time, it ruins our health leading to heart disease, obesity, asthma and a host of other ailments. It’s bad for our individual well being and the health of the planet. Cars contribute to climate change and bad air.

As I’ve explored the extensive downside of the spurb in my book The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, I’ve also examined what we could do about it. I traveled from the San Francisco Bay to the tip of Florida to see what works and how we could re-invent the American home and community.

The first order of this revival is to reawaken our sense of the walkable neighborhood. They used to exist in every small town in America and every established city neighborhood. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, they still exist and are thriving.

A walkable neighborhood means situating amenities such as stores, dry cleaners, libraries, bakeries and restaurants within about a three-quarter-of- a-mile walk.   Not only can you abandon your car in these areas, you become healthier and start to know your neighbors. You look out for them and they look out for you.  You can’t do that in the freeway-choked suburbs of Los Angeles or the ring of overdeveloped towns surrounding Dallas. You’re shackled to your car, but hey, it’s the American Way, isn’t it?

While it’s too early to tell, walkable cities may hold their real-estate values better than car-dependent areas. According to the research of urbanologist Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, with each incremental increase in walkability, property values are likely to rise.

That bodes well for pedestrian heavens like Boston’s Back Bay, Portland’s Pearl District and Chicago’s Lincoln Park. It’s bad news for sprawl-infested, foreclosure-ridden places like Stockton, California, Southwest Florida and suburban Phoenix and Las Vegas.

That doesn’t mean that spurbs are doomed or cities will prevail when we work our way out of this bust a few years from now. Nearly every community can be rebuilt to accommodate light rail, pedestrians and bikes. Maybe when diesel buses are converted to fuel-cell/electric vehicles, they, too,  will make economic and environmental sense.

The key theme is to make communities more people-centric. The population is getting older, so this is a win-win situation. Design new communities around transit stops. Create pedestrian-only zones in suburbs and cities that ban cars.

Two of my favorite examples of  “people places” are the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, Virginia and the ramblas in Barcelona. The first is a celebration of public, private and sidewalk culture. You can walk to a movie, dining, an ice rink or municipal buildings. In the Spanish city, when my wife and I were vacationing a few years ago, we walked from our hotel in the middle of the city to the beach and downtown neighborhoods. It was several miles, but we didn’t have to cross a major highway and ate, shopped and people-watched the whole way with great delight.

Life on the other side of the housing bust can be livable, healthier, more economical and ecologically sound. Think of the money you would save by not having to own a car or two (or three). You would get more exercise and help local merchants, not gargantuan chain-store operators situated in mega-shopping districts. You could patronize farmer’s markets and get fresh food instead of worrying where your food came from and what pathogens it contained.

What will it take to ensure that the spurb mentality doesn’t take over again? Demand that Washington divert most of its transportation dollars (in the upcoming transportation bill) away from new highways and into public transit, high-speed rail, pedestrian and bike paths. Demand that local and regional planners build walkable communities with affordable, energy-efficient housing near where people actually work. That may require changes in zoning and building codes, but this is America, we were founded on the idea of building something better for everyone.

Getting out of the traffic jam that was and continues to be the defining suburban experience will also give you more of the commodity you can’t replace – your time.  How much is your time worth in your present lifestyle? Let your elected officials know now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John F. Wasik has won 18 journalism awards, including several from the National Press Club, for consumer and business journalism. His Merchant of Power was praised by Studs Terkel and well reviewed by the New York Times. Wasik is a financial columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of 11 other books. He has appeared on such national media as NBC, NPR, and PBS.

For an interview with the author or a media review copy, contact: Yvette Romero, yromero1@bloomberg.net, 212-617-8617.

To contact the author, johnwasik@gmail.com or 312-246-1121.

Published by Bloomberg Press  June 2009

978-1-57660-320-8 • 224 pages • 6″ x 9″ • hardcover

$24.95 US • $27.95 CAN

Available now on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com.

Follow news of this book on my blog dailywombat.blogspot.com and my website www.johnwasik.com. New blogs and sites coming soon! I’m also available to speak on this subject.

Did you know a person is able to survive 1 month without food, 1 week without water but only 5 minutes without air? Make sure it is clean!!

Help kids get the picture on healthy air with this new coloring book from our correspondent Denise Robinette, founder of The Healthy Living Foundation. Denise will be at the South Florida Green Living Fair this weekend, along with our friends from Pizza Fuzion. Say “Hi!: for us!

Thousands of rabbit bodies have been shipped from Stockholm to a plant in central Sweden. There the carcasses are burned as fuel to provide heat for homes.

via Sweden’s furry, alternative fuel source: Burning bunnies | L.A. Unleashed | Los Angeles Times.

Here’s a note from Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, posted at WhiteHouse.gov, about her experiences at the Society of Environmental Journalist’s conference in Madison. I attended the conference, and, since she said one of the challenges she faces is helping the public to understand the environmental issues we face and how to address them, I gave Ms. Sutley my books and offered to help get the message across in any way I can.

Last week, I joined Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle for a tour of the Crave Brothers Farm and Dairy in Waterloo, WI.

The brothers power their farm and cheese factory using an anaerobic digestion system, which turns organic waste into fuel, and cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions.  When the process is finished, there is even enough power left over to heat the surrounding homes in the Waterloo area!

The tour reiterated some of the issues we had discussed that day at the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference in Madison, WI. In the morning, I had participated in a panel entitled “Countdown to Copenhagen” and after the tour, I returned to the conference and spoke with Secretary Vilsack on a panel entitled “Meet Your New Bosses” about the Obama Administration’s environmental policy goals.

Sustainability in America’s Dairyland | Obama Chronicles.

Planet Green: Why is it so important to green your business in the first place?

Trish Riley: Our planet is in trouble, and businesses have the collective power to turn the tide on the environmental disaster we’ve created. If businesses don’t become sustainable, we don’t stand a chance.

Read more: New Idiot’s Guide Simplifies the Equation: Green Business = Sustainable Planet, Bigger Bottom Line (Interview with Trish Riley) : Planet Green.

Wasik shares his perspective in The Huffington Post today:

Let’s start with a massive program to build decent, affordable and green housing. I’m not talking about dehumanizing public housing projects, but providing grants to private builders to make homes that are energy-efficient and produce their own power in human-scale, walkable communities. Provide some healthy tax credits for those who build on vacant lots or who tear down abandoned buildings. The most-generous breaks should go to those builders who work in the most distressed urban areas and create the most energy-stingy houses…

The American Dream as we know it was not sustainable. A new American Dream can be affordable, ecologically sound and socially beneficial. The price of this vision isn’t cheap, but we can’t afford to watch our dreams go up in smoke.

John F. Wasik: The American Dream is Leaving the Station.

I had the pleasure to meet John in June when we were both fellows in a National Press Foundation program on retirement.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Greening Your Business authors, Trish Riley and Heather Gadonniex, have written the guide to raise the issues on Green and Sustainability and to show how businesses can profitably be more Green.

Click here to download the interview mp3: The 3 Moments – Trish Riley and Heather Gadonniex (Greening Your Business (Complete Idiot’s Guide)) – The 3 Moments – podcast interviews.

• The full text of the 1,400-page Waxman-Markey bill, including all amendments.
• The complete transcripts of the four-day markup by the full House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
• A transcript of the three-hour full House floor debate of June 26, 2009 (preceding the House vote).
• The vote count for HR 2454

The Climate Bill: A Field Guide to HR 2454 | The Phoenix Sun.