Photo: courtesy City of Sydney, Live Green house.
The sustainability demonstration showcase house was erected in a single day, when it first appeared as part of Sydney's
Art & About Festival last month. Now it's on the move again, this time as an exhibit for the City of Sydney's participation in Australian
National Recycling Week and other green community engagement events.
Designed by Terry Bail and Martin Urakawa from
Archology, the Live Green House uses a modular, interchangeable arrangement of low embodied energy plywood sheets. The house is prefabricated off-site allowing it to be assembled and disassembled by hand with just screws. The architects reckon their working prototype would perform real world service as a small home, shed, or artist retreat. ...
Vancouver Fashion Week, Fall 2009. Credit: Kris Krug, VFW
Vancouver Fashion Week is upon us (November 3-8) and we are happy to report that eco-fashion brands
Hawks Ave,
Lav & Kush,
Movement, Red Jade, and
Nate Organics will be representing green fashion on the runway. ...
Energy vampire. Image credit:
PeopleJam
I'm not one to dress up for Halloween, but I like to find creative ways to get on board with the spooky spirit of the holiday. If you're an energy activist like me, I think you'll enjoy these ideas:
Energy Vampires
When you sleep, when you eat, while you're hard at work, vampires lurk in the depths of your home. From morning to night they are sucking you dry.
It is called vampire power and to you it is wasted money. Energy vampires are the devices that use electricity even when they are turned off - like your home entertainment system, which can cost you up to $75 per year in vampire energy. Together energy vampires can account for up to 20 percent of your electric bill.
Give your neighbors a treat this Halloween and let them know they can improve their home's energy savings by identifying and unplugging energy vampires.
Just download this PDF, print copies, and include them with the treats you hand out, or place them strategically (in the bathroom, maybe?) at any Halloween parties you choose to haunt....
Eco-fashion boutique Kaight hosted Ecouterre.com launch party. Credit: Emma Grady
We celebrated the launch of eco-fashion website
Ecouterre at
Kaight in New York City last night. After perusing racks filled with emerging and independent designers--who use organic, recycled, and sustainable materials-- and catching up with
SDN's Marcus Hicks--who sadly was not wearing his
shoe pants--we chatted with
Jill Fehrenbacher,
Inhabitat editor-in-chief and Ecouterre publisher, about her favorite innovative fabrics--like solar photovoltaic technology embedded in weaves--and her top picks for green fashion designers and eco-fashion news. Click through for our interview with Jill. ...

Ken Robinson is one of the funniest speakers I have ever heard, while also delivering, between his one-liners, an important message about how our education system is designed to educate people out of their creativity. One would think it hard to get at standing ovation for a speech on that topic, but he did. Robinson begins with a startling statistic: test results for creative genius show that 97% of kindergarten kids are creative, down to around 10% by high school. ...

The
Creative Places + Spaces conference was billed as "one of the world's leading forums on creativity," and it has certainly lived up to that. The theme was the Collaborative City, and the outcome is hoped to be "guiding principles on what cities and communities need to do to foster creativity through collaboration."
Richard Florida, author of, most recently,
Who's your City, had a tough act to follow, speaking after the truly mindblowing Sir Ken Robinson. But he rose to the occasion, asking where creativity comes from.
Florida thinks great things are going to come out of the current "Great Reset." ...
Linda Loudermilk necklace and bamboo scarf. Image courtesy of Linda Loudermilk
Linda Loudermilk, one of our favorite Sustainable Designers-- we recently previewed her
Spring 2010 collection, here--is doing what she does best: highlighting environmental issues through fashion. This time she's taking on the water crisis with her "Water is a Human Right" campaign--can't you picture fellow
water advocate Jessica Biel in the bamboo scarf?...
Image via: Aussiboris on Flickr.com
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Did you hear that right? What does reversing the direction of your
ceiling fan have anything to do with time or temperatures? Plus, you can turn your heater down too, but who wants to turn the heater
down when temperatures are already falling? According to Hunter Fans, it can provide you with energy savings and a warmer home. And no, this isn't a Halloween trick....
Image via: Mike G. K. on Flickr.com
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California has long been on the forefront or cutting edge of green policies and initiatives. Not to say other cities and states aren't making a difference, but on sheer population alone California has a major impact on the rest of the nation and the globe based on what it decides to do.
Smaller cities and towns trying to do what major Californian cities do often have a hard time because they don't have the staff or resources.
Green Cities California aims to change all of that by providing everything a small (or large) town needs to get environmental regulations passed....
Image via: harthillsouth on Flickr.com
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We reported earlier this year that the US is planning on giving out stimulus funds for a
"Cash for...Refrigerators" program and now California is ready to launch their own.
The Sacramento Bee reports that California is hoping to get the three most notorious, clunky appliances off the streets and put cash back in consumers hands to purchase Energy Star efficient appliances. ...
Photo via Smashing Magazine.
Each year Americans spend billions of dollars on Halloween candy, costumes and other Halloween related décor-type items (over $3 billion was spent in 2006 alone). They're shelling out $20-50 a piece on
costumes and $10 and up on
bags of candy.
But, this year more-so than in years past, people have enhanced awareness of health issues like cancer, obesity, and diabetes rates, of environmental health, and this year less people have the luxury of spending their hard earned dollars on store-bought costumes so they're being forced to look elsewhere for their ghost and goblin attire.
All of that brings us to my five tips for throwing a
greener Halloween...in ways you may not have thought of.
...
photo: Matthew McDermott
It may have been alternating between heavy mist and outright downpour in Times Square for the
International Day of Climate Action, but that didn't really seem to dampen anyone's spirits. Several hundred people packed into the center of the New York's tourist-theater-consumerist world to rally around a single scientific data point. The really great part was the stream of photos coming in from other 350 events all around the world -- all of which were broadcast on the several electronic billboards -- quite a departure from the normal messaging in the vicinity.

...

The resounding call for climate action that capped a
series of talks in Beijing this week between the US and China didn't come from top officials, but from a more unusual constituent: young Beijingers.
The city's celebration of the 350.org
International Day of Climate Action began, appropriately, with a parade of bicycles. A sharp contrast to the city's big National Day parade on October 1st, the band of hundreds of young citizens, expats and NGO workers climbed on their two-wheelers -- and in some cases, one-wheelers -- and plied their way through the center of the city to a carnival at the Natural History Museum. ...
Schoolchildren in the Maldives form a giant '350' in the lead up to October 24th. Credit: 350.org
What are
you doing today for the
International Day of Climate Action, this Saturday, October, 24, 2009? Plan an awareness-raising, pollution-reducing event? Organize a climate-discussion with a meal made from locally grown food? Did you host a teach-in at the town library and wear an
organic cotton 350 t-shirt? Prove it! TreeHugger writers will be sending in their photos from around the globe, and we want to see yours for our first Writers/
Readers slideshow in celebration of the
International Day of Climate Action. Click through for details and see the potential for your photo in today's
Readers' Home Improvement Photos . ...
U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman makes a home more energy efficient. Image credit:
U.S. Department of Energy Digital Photo Archive.
You might think next week's major holiday is Halloween, but 'round the Sierra Club offices we're a bit nerdier. You see, we're excited about Friday, October 30th:
National Weatherization Day.
On National Weatherization Day, created by the U.S. Department of Energy, cities will be hosting events to highlight services and organizations that help people to make their homes more energy efficient. Across the country, federal recovery funds are helping people weatherize their homes for winter, creating jobs, and reducing energy waste.
It all relates to Halloween on a number of levels, really. Think about how many energy "vampires" there are in your home or office (devices that still suck energy even when not on), or think about how much less scary your energy bills can be if you weatherize your home. Did you know that the average family can save $350 a year on their utility bills after a retrofit? So it makes sense to us to tie the two holidays together....

If you've been to, or lived in, New York City you are likely familiar with the city's ubiquitous bodegas. They are generally characterized by an ample selection of pork rinds, blaring salsa music and round-the-clock hours. The bodega has never been a bastion for greenness, but a pop-up shop called Boho Bodega wants to change that.
Running in conjunction with the CMJ Music Festival from October 20-25th, the Boho Bodega has had and will have free
events and parties to promote and showcase the shop's organic and
fair trade vendors like Organic India Tea and Green Forest paper products. All of the proceeds of goods sold will go to the Council on the Environment of New York City (CENYC), who runs the
city's farmers markets among other things. According to a press release by MakeMakes, the firm that conceived the project, the point of the shop isn't to turn a profit, but to "instill a new reality by placing green foods, beverages and products in the universal everyday format of the urban corner store, deconstructing the common misconception that green is only available to the white collar hippie."...
all photos courtesy 350.org
The first images from the
International Day of Climate Action are coming in from New Zealand via the folks over at
350.org.
"Here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, we're ahead of the world timewise, but we are absolutely united with the world on this most incredible of days. Because on this day we are joined by 4548 events and actions in 174 countries around the world, making this the biggest day of international action the world has ever seen!"...
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