Fall 2007 Newsletter
Dear Ecology Center members and friends,
This edition of the Ecology Center newsletter contains an update on our work, with ideas for building community, protecting the environment, and creating justice. The Ecology Center has provided free, non-commercial information to the public since 1969. We help people make informed choices about issues that affect them, others, and the planet. To this end, we make the EcoCalendar, the EcoDirectory, and this Newsletter accessible and free to all. Please support us and the services we provide by becoming a member of the Ecology Center. Visit our website at ecologycenter.org
Ecology Center programs and projects highlighted this issue:
- Our Annual Guide to an Eco-Friendlier Holiday Season
- How to Green an Event, from Bioneers to Your House Party
- End Junk Catalogs Easily with CatalogChoice
- Diary of a Recycling Operator: The Inside Scoop on Stopping Paper Waste
- Gardening Collaborative Makes School Lunches Healthier
- Terrain Magazine Nominated for Prestigious Utne Award
- EC Staff Member Awarded Koshland Civic Unity Fellowship
- Local, Fair, Affordable, and Green: Goods and Gifts from the EC Store & Market
1. Guide to an Eco-Friendlier Holiday Season
It may not always be evident, but the Winter holidays provide a great opportunity to celebrate thoughtfulness and environmental care. Typically, Americans throw away an additional 5 million tons of trash - 25% more than usual - between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. The extra helping of consumer goods, packaging, food waste, and Christmas trees takes a real toll. Paper and plastic packaging translates to cutting down trees and drilling for oil; more consumer goods means more fossil fuel energy is used for manufacture and for transport. But the holidays don't have to be a time of waste! Read our Guide for an Eco-Friendlier Holiday Season and find ideas to lighten your impact and improve the quality of your holidays. We offer helpful tips for: • Travel • Gift Giving • Christmas Trees • Meals and Food Service • Green Event Planning. More care, less landfills!
2. How to Green an Event, from Bioneers to Your House Party
Every October, thousands of people descend upon the Marin Conference Center to attend Bioneers. Bioneers is a convergence of scientific and social innovators who come to share visionary and practical models for restoring the earth and communities. For the past several years, the Ecology Center has partnered with Bioneers to help them “green” their annual conference. Read more and get ideas and links for greening your events.
3. Stop Junk Catalogs Easily with CatalogChoice
CatalogChoice, a fiscally sponsored project of the Ecology Center, can help you substantially reduce the amount of paper waste you generate by putting a stop to the unwanted catalogs you receive. The project was featured in a recent article in the New York Times and in less than two weeks, over 37,000 people signed up for the free service, opting out of 150,000 catalog titles. Its easy and free to use the service, you can sign up online. The project is a great fit with the Ecology Center and came to us because of our commitment to Zero Waste.
4. Diary of a Recycling Operator: The Inside Scoop on Stopping Paper Waste
By Sara Philips, Ecology Center recycling assistant
There is something to be said for less consumption, in the grand scheme of things. I am often reminded of a cartoon on recycling I saw a few years ago, wherein you see two neighbors putting out their materials on garbage morning. The first fellow is putting out bin after bin, and has quite an array of materials at his curb. But the second has just a single bin of bottles/cans, and then a small single bag of mixed paper. Maybe we can guess what they say to one another. Read more and find ways to eliminate junk mail.
5. Gardening Collaborative Makes School Lunches Healthier
By Beebo Turman, Project Director for the Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative.
The Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative has existed for ten years, mainly to support school, youth-training, and community gardens. By helping the school gardens, we got involved in the vision that many of us shared, which was to change the way the students were eating, the way they thought about food, and to expand their dietary choices. We formed the Child Nutrition Advisory Committee with the Superintendent of the school district and went about replacing the processed food the students were given at lunchtime with organic, fresh, and locally grown food. We are finally seeing a positive change in the student lunches, and its very exciting. Read more about the Collaborative’s work.
6. Terrain Magazine Nominated for Prestigious Utne Award
For the past eighteen years, Utne Reader has conducted what amounts to the Oscars for the independent press. This year, in Utne’s nineteenth annual event, Terrain magazine was nominated for best environmental coverage. Other nominees include E Magazine, Sierra, Orion, Audubon, and Earth Island Journal. The winner will be announced in Utne’s January-February 2008 issue.
Terrain has been through a lot of changes lately: it recently became a free publication, distributed from the Bay Area up to Eureka, and a couple issues ago we added a full-color cover, raising our page count by four and our beauty factor by plenty! Our circulation reflected the changes, rocketing up by a factor of twenty. These are all markers by which to judge a publication’s health—but the Utne nomination connotes something even more important. Our stories are reaching new readers with each issue, both in Northern California, our coverage area, and nationally, through reprints of articles in other magazines and on the web—and people are noticing. Terrain breaks new ground in every issue, and readership is expanding quickly. The Utne nomination signals our growing impact. Read Terrain online.
7. Ecology Center Staff Member Awarded Koshland Civic Unity Fellowship
Gerardo Marin, Co-Manager of our food justice program, Farm Fresh Choice, has been selected by the San Francisco Foundation's Koshland Program Fellowship to serve as one of 8 community leaders focusing on increasing civic unity and engagement in West Berkeley. For the last two years with his Co-Manager Tiffany Golden, Gerardo has provided critical leadership and has developed key partnerships in addressing chronic disease disparities through cultural empowerment, youth training and mentorship, and increasing access to local healthful fresh foods in low income communities of color in south and west Berkeley. This award recognizes his efforts and success and reinforces his commitment to this work and to working in close collaboration with the other fellows over the next five years. Together the fellows will receive leadership training to develop their collaborative muscle and will be the stewards of $300,000 to be spent to improve life in west Berkeley.
8. Local, Fair, Affordable, Green: Goods and Gifts from the EC Store & Fair
Environmental sustainability, fair trade, economic justice, local production, affordability… can these things come together in one place? Absolutely! In the Ecology Center store, we find and support small producers who are dedicated to these practices. It’s exciting for us to be able to buy from small, local, sustainable producers, like Grateful Body, and Filthy Farmgirl soaps, both of whom make wonderful natural personal care and skin care products locally in the East Bay. Wooden toys, organic cotton t-shirts and baby clothes, hemp bags, and wallets…. and so much recycled glass! Some of our glassware is more re-used than recycled – our Green Glass vendor takes bottles and tranforms them into tumblers and goblets. Our Tree–Blocks vendor buys their wood from fruit tree farmers, who are then able to buy new trees to re-start their orchard production, a process that would often otherwise be financially unattainable. Come on in and ask about the stories behind our products – we didn’t have room to tell them all. (Candles made by beekeepers, salves made in rural Washington State with wild crafted and organic ingredients… the list goes on!)
Our Holiday hours are 11-6 Tuesday – Saturday, and starting Sunday, November 18th, we’ll be open Sundays from 12-5. Please come in and see our selection of sustainable gifts, books, and home and garden products!
Another great opportunity to shop for holiday gifts, the Berkeley Farmers' Market Holiday Crafts Fair will be held on Saturdays, December 8, 15, and 22. You can support local craftspeople and find beautiful and practical handmade gifts. The fair is located next to the Saturday Berkeley Farmers' Market and also features continuous live music. Proceeds benefit the Ecology Center’s work. Visit the EcoCalendar for details.
Did you know that you can call us with your environmental questions? Our Info Desk staff will give you referrals and provide information to help you make sound ecological choices. Email erc@ecologycenter.org or give us a call at 510-548-2220 x233. To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a note to newsletter@ecologycenter.org. This newsletter can also be found online at http://ecologycenter.org/newsletter/20071115.html.
The Ecology Center is a membership organization providing environmental information and direct services to promote sustainable living and a healthy, socially just world. Please support this community resource for the environment by becoming a member or making a donation. Support our work on-line at http://www.ecologycenter.org/donate/
[Photo credits: child in raincoat by Jessica Roberts, orange slices by Elizabeth West, mushrooms by Srini G, frog by Pete Baer, lemons and limes by Jim Moran, redwood cathedral by Scott Glovsky, recycling bin by Demos, garden bed by Josh Hough, compost station by Ari Moore.]