September 15, 2007 by Julie.

Can anyone tell me what kind of bird this is? Mom? Bill? He flew into a big picture window where we were staying and was stunned for several minutes so he rested in my hand and let us pet him before he flew away…what a treat (I am thinking he is some kind of finch from his beak.)

Oh man, I’m late writing! sorry! Colorado is as bad (good!) as Vermont. lol. Sometimes, there is just so much amazing stuff going on that I forget to record. My apologies to those who might be thumbtacking our route on your giant map of the United States, but at least for CO you’ll only have to tack the Denver/Boulder area. We never strayed from there. There was so much to see/do/learn, had to break it down into two parts.

So here’s Part One: for two days, we stayed with wonderful friends outside of Denver, who agreed to foster 2 of the 3 Colorado Spruce Trees we got from Arbor Day Farm until they are big enough to give to someone who can give them a permanent home. Little girls Sidney and Riley helped us plant them in their sideyard - and named them the trees Jewel and Digger, respectively. (Since I was helping, there are no still photos for this, which is a shame because of the missed cuteness quotient. Just have to wait for the video, i guess…) We got lots of work done and got in some kid time which was just awesome. Ben and I went with them to Lakeside Amusement Park (built 1908) which looked like it had not changed since the 1950’s and where the wooden roller coaster was thrilling mostly because we had the feeling that the skeleton rails could shatter and send us flying at any moment. Truly, we had a wonderful time.

We were lucky to stay with more good friends for the next few days while we found ourselves deluged by the bounty of the Boulder green building community.

Stu Galvis, a real estate broker and all-around cool guy Mark met climate training with Al Gore, practically set up our entire day. He brought us to a “net-zero” house built by Eric Doub (founder, EcoFutures Building, Inc) from the ground up with a 5000 gallon water tank in its belly and solar thermal and arrays, and a yard of Xeriscaping - native plants that thrive under existing water and soil conditions to really save water! Then we saw two different existing houses in varying states of completion that were being retrofitted green. When finished, electricity from solar panels on both houses will be able to charge the owners’ converted plug-in Priuses (is that the correct plural? Prii?) overnight. [Note the really cool fossil in the polished cement countertop!]

The most gratifying part of the day came at the very end - a roundtable discussion about the future of Green Building facilitated by Stu, with Eric Peltier (green mortgage broker), Pete Chandler of Living Space (energy auditor), our green builder Eric Doub, and Norbert Klebl and Ben Apple of GEOS (an affordable “green community” in development). We can’t wait to bring you the whole discussion! In the meantime, check out the websites and tomorrow I will continue with Part II of Colorado…

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

September 14, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

We hit the pavement and joined a state-wide march to Re-Energize New Hampshire with carbon-free energy. This “non-political” event was filled with messages to and from the politicians who care about their survival in the New Hampshire primary season. Oh yes– it was also a lot of fun…

Just click here or the picture below to watch "YERTpod9: Voting With Your Feet in New Hampshire"

One of the most carbon captivating speakers at this event was author and environmental activist Bill MicKibben, who created the “StepItUp2007” event held nation-wide on April 14, 2007. People gathered in creative ways all over the country to demand that legislators adopt the following key climate priorities:

• Cut carbon dioxide 80% by 2050
• Conserve energy use 10% in 3 years
• No new coal-fired power plants
• Establish a Green Jobs Corps

YERT happily got a little time alone with Bill, who informed us that there will be a StepItUp2007 part 2 coming up soon, so mark your calendars for November 3rd and click here to find an event near you! (In his "spare" time, Bill writes great books, including one in the YERT mobile library: Deep Economy. Highly recommended!)

Supporters for most of the Democratic presidential candidates were also out in force at the rally, and we spoke with fans of Obama, Clinton, and Kucinich. We had a tough time finding supporters for Republican candidates, but we hope that they’ll come around with encouragement from groups like the Republicans for Environmental Protection. Who is our favorite candidate? We’re not sure yet, but with the help of sites like this one we hope to figure it out before long.

Enjoy the Road Show!

Mark, Julie, and Ben (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

P.S. And now for Breadcrumbs! If you want to learn more about the topics in this video, check out these three resources:

• Why no new coal-fired power plants? The answers may surprise you, in all the worst ways. We hate to share downers with you all, but please click here to find some extremely compelling reasons to halt new coal plants. A helpful discussion of the topic can also be found here at the Daily Kos.
• How can you determine the environmental position of a presidential candidate? Grist has taken a fun and detailed look at the candidates with an eco-eye, and we’re looking there to guide many of our eco-pinions.
• Climate change will certainly be on the agenda during the upcoming election, but how do you know if a candidate is serious about the issue? We’ve found that this chart created by the World Resources Institute is extremely handy at cutting through the talk. It visually compares the CO2 reductions mandated by various bills, and checks them against the range recommended by scientists to avoid the worst impacts of human-made global warming.
• We were tickled by the appearance of the PieMobile– a car shaped like a pie graph that dramatically illustrates the budget priorities. That’s right. You read correctly. A car shaped (and painted) to represent a U.S. Federal Budget pie chart. You have to see it to believe it, or at least check out this website. These folks make budget reform fun.

Posted in Events, Video | 3 Comments »

September 12, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

We have a special treat for you this week. During our visit to Maine we were hosted by a small, charming, and inspired intentional community of peace activisits at the Addams-Mellman House in Bath, Maine. On the morning of our departure, we filmed a conversation between the women present that day, and the result is a powerful exploration of the common ground between peace and sustainability, not to mention a bit of good feminine sense!

This video is long (44 minutes) and you’ll need Quicktime installed on your computer to watch it, but we believe it is well worth the effort. We also want to hear from you about whether you’d like to see more long videos from YERT, so speak up and write to us! Either way, we’ll have a snappy (and short) New Hampshire video coming very soon, so stay tuned for that one later this week…

Just click here or the picture below to watch "YERT Conversation 8.1: Peace and the Planet"

At Your Service,

Julie, Ben, and Mark (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

Posted in Video, Mark | No Comments »

September 10, 2007 by Julie.

If Omaha seemed a bit like an unloved yard, with tarp-covered rusty engine parts and the car up on blocks for years, surrounded by pieces of broken plastic toys extruding from the dirt next to a house with windows never washed and 3 questionably running cars in the drive; then Western Nebraska appeared as the brilliantly brazen wild field beyond, with blackberries, butterflies, barn swallows, sumac, centipedes and rattlesnakes, before real estate developers find it and cull its grasses and trees to build charmless subdivisions of identical paperboard houses with matching aluminum siding, concrete driveways and lawns of non-native bluegrass soaking in chemicals that kill those darned pests - native plants and critters.

Truly, we didn’t find much reason to venture forth from our homestay with sweet Judy Fili in Omaha. The two local natural food Coops no longer exist; They’ve been replaced by Wild Oats and Whole Foods, which is better than nothing i guess but there seems to be in Omaha no particular interest in organic food or buying local that we could see, and no particular push to recycle or “go green,” aside from an organic coffee shop and a natural food store next door to one another in Benson. Probably just as well since we had a lot of catching-up to do for YERT video of Maine. And a lot of cooking to use up the remainder of Mark’s corn! (I made corn chowder and Ben made frittatas.) Before we left, we interviewed Judy at home (after helping her start a compost pile in her backyard! YAY, Judy!) and caught a couple people on the street outside a coffee shop, who apologized to us that we would not find anything more interesting in Western Nebraska and said that we might as well just drive straight on through the rest of the state as fast as we can.

We thanked them but naturally couldn’t heed their advice! Though now called the corn-husker state, Nebraska used to be called the Tree Planter’s state and is the home of Arbor Day! Heading West with high hopes of planting trees, we landed for the night at a B&B Ben found online called Whispering Pines in Nebraska City, where Jeanna, the owner and hostess, stayed up late watching for us and offered us treats and lemonade when we arrived. It was a beautiful little place, with a wraparound porch, settees all around, well-kept garden with pond and resident bullfrog, huge beautiful pines and a hottub out back where we lay and looked up into a starry starry night before hitting the most sumptuous and comfortable bed I have lain in so far, with the softest linens. Ben stayed up in bed reading Nebraska magazine with his LED headlamp on. The next morning we woke to a gourmet breakfast of…what else? Corn frittatas. We had to laugh but Jeanna’s frittatas were delicious, with Asiago cheese, garlic and basil and served with fresh coffee, juice and homemade coffeecake. Mm-mm. I had a wonderful conversation with Dean, the groundskeeper (also Chair of the Chamber of Commerce of Nebraska City), a real salt of the earth guy who lost his farm years ago when interest rates soared skyhigh but who did what he could to get through it, and came out on the other side genuinely grateful for Life and hopeful for America’s future, with a commitment to honesty that I have seldom seen. Ben said that Dean’s handshake felt like his word. There was a couple visiting Jeanna from TX with their bicycles and their cat, and Stan, a C.S. Lewis expert with twinkly eyes and a powerful cologne, came to breakfast late and merrily joined the conversation. As we got ready to leave, full of good food and good chat, cards were passed around, and hearty hugs, and we got in Rachel Carson and waved bye for now to people who no longer seemed like strangers.

On to plant some trees at Arbor Day Foundation and Farm! OK! This is a great place to go to learn about how and why trees are important. I highly recommend this place to anyone in any of the contiguous states who is looking for something interesting for their kids to see and learn about. It was great. We learned all about how Nebraska was replanted with trees, and got to see how the seedlings are cultivated and processed for shipping to members in other parts of the country. (Here is Kathy, giving us our Colorado Blue Spruce seedlings.) We went up in a giant treehouse, climbed through logs, imitated birdcalls and played the YERT theme on the giant marimba. We wanted to stay longer, there was much more to see, but alas, YERT time flies so after natural Apple icees and a shared piece of pie, we were off…to find a place Ben had read about in Nebraska magazine the night before: the Dancing Leaf Earthen Lodge, in Wellfleet, NE.

When we ran into heavy rain, darkening green skies and crazy lightning, we stopped at Sapp Bros to wait it out, and maybe get some food. Here we ran into our first major roadblock regarding trash. When we asked the waitress if she could “hold the paper” when bringing our meal, she told us it was “against the law” not to fold paper napkins with the silver. When I said we would go get ours out of the car, she said that that was against the law, too. “Against Nebraska law?” I asked. “No, the store. Just like you can’t bring in food from outside, same thing.” I was about to say it was most certainly NOT the same thing but Ben pulled my arm and said to let him handle her, cause i was turning red which he didn’t think was helping. I was getting peeved. We all ordered food that we could eat with our hands, while she looked nonplussed. Oh man did my stomach hurt after the white bread grilled cheese-product w/fries. (Totally NOT an environmental dinner choice - but there weren’t any on that menu.) Incidentally, she didn’t get any sweeter but she did say, “Good luck” as we paid our bill, with a smirk that hinted she didn’t expect us to find any, and that she’d be there if we needed any told you sos come July of ‘08. smile.

It was chilly and dark when we got to Dancing Leaf Lodge, and Les and Jan Hosick were up waiting for us with flashlights. We followed them down a path that wound away from the house through damp trees and brush, stopping only to look up and see a midnight sky glittering with a million bright stars, and the Milky Way, bright as the absent moon. “Wait till the mornin,” Jan said, “You people are in for a treat.” We bent down to walk through a long, low passageway and Jan pulled aside the cloth flap to reveal a warm round room with built-in benches, rosy candles in the firepit, bones and deerskins covering the dirt floor and a hole above us right to the sky. We had never seen anything like it. They left us, and we laid on the grassy roof for awhile stargazing, saw the most splendid shooting star with a long red tail of sparks, then bent back inside, doubled up deerskins and lay down to rest. Don’t think I slept for a minute - there was something that felt so amazing about being in this hut built as closely as possible to the hundreds of Native American earth homes found in archeological digs around the area. I haven’t the space here to tell all the things that we learned there but I will say that lying there imagining what it could be like to live totally off the land, and totally in community with people and with the natural world, I had a moment of thinking that we are capable of more than we know. Because we have already been there.

And I have to say, I hope that real estate developers keep on believing what most people in Omaha told us before we headed West - that there’s nothing to see in Nebraska West of Omaha and you might as well drive just as fast as you can till you hit Colorado. good Travels.

For more Nebraska YERT photos, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/julied.evans/Nebraska

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 2 Comments »

September 9, 2007 by Julie.

…Corn, soybeans, soybeans, corn…soybeans corncorncorn…

Certainly, there seemed to be an endless amount of these two commodities as we drove through Illinois, Iowa, into Nebraska. And since food seems plentiful and America says it wants to stop sucking from the teat of foreign oil, biomass fuels (biodiesel and ethanol) may, at first glance, appear to be a plausible solution. But are they, really?

We have discovered from our constant search of the internet and numerous interviews that there are several deep issues to examine. Americans have to consider not only energy independence, jobs, and health and security of a nation, but also the possible ramifications of biomass production on the entire planet: possible continued destruction of environmental ecosystems, as well as increased pesticide use and contamination of groundwater, soil degradation and erosion, worsening World Hunger (due to less grain coming from America), missed opportunities to research/perfect/use the truly renewable resources, like wind and solar (whose infrastructures are NOT being subsidized like farming) and, possibly the most important consequence of all, extreme water deficit due to irrigation AND processing of biofuels themselves. It’s a lot to wrap our heads around.

That said, YERT certainly could not miss the opportunity to visit biomass research and production facilities as we traveled through Iowa, to get more sides of the story. We started at Iowa Energy Center’s BECON (Biomass Energy Conversion) Facility, an Iowa State affiliate which researches cellulosic biomass processes, technologies and biochemicals (from agricultural waste) instead of petrochemicals (petroleum byproducts) for energy. Keith Kutz talked with us a little bit about the different kinds of projects going on in the facility and helped me think of some abc’s that could be made into ethanol (a= apples, b=beer, c=corn, d=dairy, etc - re: this interesting website my brother, David, sent me.) Keith even agreed to take on our several bags of cornshuck compost for his own personal compost pile. (It’s a good thing, too, as Rachel Carson was truly starting to smell like a brewery. Thank you, Keith, for saving us from making our own silage!)

Next we moved on down the road to meet Robert Anex, also an Iowa State affiliate, who is working on developing strains of crops to discover what may prove the most useful for biomass energy production. Ben and Mark interviewed him next to another small recovered prairie, while i was given the grand tour by Robert’s small son, Braden, who walked me around the park in its entirety, and explained to me that No, that is NOT a hybrid hardy lime on that tree, in fact, that is a black walnut in its green casing. (Thank you, Braden.) We followed Robert to a plot of land reserved for experimental crops. There were all kinds of different corn and soybean crops, some foreign tall grasses being studied for hardiness, yield, energy production and their natural resistance to American pests, some other plants chosen to fix nitrogen in the soil underneath corn crops, and some of the mightiest mosquitos I have seen since Denali National Park in Alaska. Holy hemoglobin goblins, i had to get in the car and shut the door.

Robert sent us on to Lincoln Way Ethanol Plant. We were welcomed by Randy Retleff and given a tour of the entire facility by John Fadler, a modest and generous fair-haired fellow who made us put on hardhats and goggles and basically showed us all the pieces of the plant, explaining to us how they all work and what they do… We did ask John some questions about some of the issues re: turning food-to-fuel. He basically hopes that biofuel is the wave of the future, and that his company is providing jobs and income to farmers, as well as an answer to America’s dependence on oil. To his credit, his information is coming from a pretty high source - our government supports the infrastructure for ethanol plants and biofuel farms through subsidies and is mandating that its own fleet change over to biomass renewables. Also, frankly, John works for a living, and his living is turning corn into fuel.

One of the most thought-provoking essays I’ve read on the controversy is Lester Brown’s address to the Senate this year entitled Biofuel Blunder. (Please do read!) He believes that the future of America as a stable country may very well depend on our understanding these complex issues, and learning how to balance the basic necessities of Life: food, water, and shelter, with the amenities to which we have become accustomed as a culture: refrigeration, artificial light, heat, air conditioning, plastic, fast cars, perfectly manufactured chemlawns, airplanes, computers, TV dinners, technology, giant bigbox stores, “disposable” everything…

The fact is that every one of the conveniences that we enjoy - every car, every light that gets turned on, every gameboy, every diaper, every plastic fork, every computer…came from this Earth. Every one. We keep taking and taking, to make more and more STUFF, but are we putting anything back? These are largely not renewable resources we are using. We have always known that in time they would run out. This is the first time in human history that scientists are beginning to believe that we are using up the planet and that, if we continue to use the earth’s resources the way we are currently using them, we will run out much sooner than later.

So? I used to think that if we ran out of oil, or coal, or natural gas, that would be alright because the government would finally have to focus its attention (= Money) on truly renewable fuel - energy from the sun and wind - and we would be forced to live in harmony with nature. However, the terrifying question that haunts me lately is: by the time we have run out of oil, coal, and gas, will we also be facing the fact that we are running out of water? What happens when a country starts running out of water? What happens if the people living in Arizona can no longer get water from Colorado? What happens to Vegas, Santa Fe, Silver City?

And, back to the point I am chewing on today, What happens to any and all biofuel farms that need water for irrigation and facilities which need massive amounts of water for processing? There are very few industrial processes that don’t use great amounts of water, and what about clean water to drink? Will individuals and companies be fighting over water? I hate to end a blog with a nightmare but these are the kinds of things that have been keeping me up at night and part of why i left my life for this trip in the first place.

Posted in Travelog, Issues, Julie | 1 Comment »

September 4, 2007 by Ben.

Dear YERTians,

Ah, Maine! Haunt of Stephen King! Alaska of the Northeast! Land without billboards! (Seriously, they don’t have billboards - it’s kind of awesome.)

We traveled to Maine and what we found on the lips of many of its citizens was…water, water everywhere - and not just because it was 95 degrees in August. From Portland to Augusta to Fryeburg we found that Mainers (or is it Mainiacs?) care a “lattah” ’bout their “wattah.” Heck, we even stayed in a town called Bath for cryin’ out loud (though it’s known more for building naval destroyers than for any tub of water).

Just click here or on the picture to enjoy "YERTpod8: Lattah Wattah in Maine"

Groups such as the Natural Resources Council of Maine are working hard to clean up rivers like the Androscoggin - a body of water once so polluted by paper mills and other industry that thirty-five years ago, when it was considered “too thick to paddle and too thin to plow,” it inspired Maine native, Edmund S. Muskie, to write what would become our nation’s Clean Water Act. Meanwhile, Jim Wilfong (a former Maine legislator, President Clinton’s SBA Assistant Administrator for International Trade, and the founder of H2O For ME) is busy making sure that corporations like Nestlé (owner of Poland Spring bottled water among countless others) play fair with Maine in their rush to suck out groundwater, mark it up by several thousand percent, and sell it to thirsty Americans who don’t realize that bottled water is often less regulated than tap water.

It’s no wonder that a state so full of character and irony is home to some of the most pristine AND polluted water in the country. The next time we crack open a $2 bottle of essentially free water, we’ll just hope that those water-bottling corporations know which is which.

All Wet for Now,

Ben, Mark, and Julie (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

PS - If all this chat about water has WETted your appetite for more info, here are some Breadcrumbs to dive into!

• Here’s an excellent link to the issue of water privatization around the world and one to the dangers of the bottled water phenomenon.
• H2O for ME has an interesting blog that explores water rights issues in Maine. Excerpt from blog: “For centuries, we have always believed that the water belonged to all of us, to all the citizens of Maine. When we began fighting the clean water battles 30 - 40 years ago, here in Maine and around the country, we were not focused on bulk water extractions, some of which are managed by a large transnational water cartel. They saw something that we took for granted. Our clean water was free and large profits were for the taking as long as the citizens of Maine were asleep. We are no longer asleep and we can protect our water and share in the benefits of our investments.” And here’s a good article summarizing the issue in Maine.
• Dioxins, one of the wonderful “perks” found in rivers near paper mills in Maine and elsewhere, are just tons of fun. Besides being persistent toxins that bioaccumulate, they cause all kinds of fabulous illnesses, disorders, and mutations. Pollutants like dioxins are part of what make people feel the need to buy bottled water. And where do nearly all our bottled-water bottles go when we’re done with them? You guessed it - landfills and incinerators (or the ocean where, according to the UN, on average “over 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of ocean today. In the Central Pacific, there are up to 6 pounds of marine litter to every pound of plankton”). And when you incinerate plastic you get…dioxins. Ah the circle of life.
• If paying $35 a case for ordinary bottled water seems ridiculous, here’s a website that offers a little something “extra” for the fleecing. H2Om water with intention (not to be confused with H2O for Maine) has, according to their website, “revolutionized the bottled water industry by creating the world’s first vibrationally charged, interactive bottled water…Infused with the power of positive energy through words, music, colors, symbols and you. Each bottle of H2Om promotes positive thinking and positive energy for people and the planet. Our trademark slogan “Think it while you Drink it” inspires you to use the positive words on the label as the driving force in creating your intention.” Another slogan might be “Think it…costs a whopping $1.50 and produces unnecessary plastic waste…while you Drink it.” While H2Om’s heart may be in the right place, we at YERT have instead decided just to recite some Dr. Phil around the tap as we fill up our reusable canteens. Generally, it seems to work well, although last week Ben accidentally charged Julie and Mark’s water with a combination of low self-esteem, mild schizophrenia, and a predilection for jellybeans. Thankfully, all have made a full recovery.