Archive for February, 2009
The Greenbar Toolbar Helps with Green Information Overload
Want to subscribe to my RSS feed? Just click on the link. Also, check out the SITEMAP as an easy way to see what all is here!
I’ve been playing around for a while with the Greenbar toolbar. In a nutshell, I highly recommend it for keeping up with green news of all sorts; I expect to use it daily. You can download it at http://www.greenbartoolbar.com/
Here it is in my Firefox browser; it’s also available for IE.
I think the best parts of the Greenbar are the dropdown lists of blogs, sites, and feeds. Read the rest of this entry »
Our Top 25 Bestselling Books on Green Home Building
My husband Kelly has a massive website on all aspects of natural building, greenhomebuilding.com and a smaller one, earthbagbuilding.com. The other day I got curious what the most popular books on green home building were, so I downloaded the stats for four years of what had sold on Amazon through his sites. Here they are, in the order of popularity, and the links take you to Amazon. #25 is a major favorite of mine, and not just because our earthbag house is in it. I used to be a librarian and I do love doing book lists!
1.Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series)
2.The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book Read the rest of this entry »
Wild Goose QiGong with Dr. Bingkun Hu
Wild Goose QiGong is an easily learned form of this ancient Chinese art. I know it’s easily learned, because I’ve been learning it from DVDs. It’s helped my flexibility tremendously and has made other, more subtle improvements in my well-being also. Simple living includes taking care of our bodies, in my view, to do what we can to avoid the suffering and stress that illness can bring. Or to put that more positively, the better our energy, the better our quality of life.
About six months ago, my sister-in-law Alexandra came to visit us for a few weeks. She brought us this DVD:
Global Warming, Cordwainer Smith, and Prehistory
Why do global warming, Cordwainer Smith, and the study of prehistory end up in the same title? Because my husband and I use the latter two topics to cope with the stress of thinking about global climate change and its effects on our earth.
Chances are you have never heard of Cordwainer Smith. He was a science fiction writer who died over 40 years ago. He had a bizarre and visionary way of writing which has influenced the direction of science fiction in several ways. He was also my father.
Simple Green Living: Finding Good Websites
Where can you go around the web to find good information on simple green living? One of my projects here on this site is to review other websites, and over time I intend to have quite a list.
Now that green is finally fashionable, there are a lot of websites trying to take advantage of the latest trend. You won’t find those listed here. I am looking for websites on simple living and/or green living that provide useful information. Fine with me if they sell products too – hey, I link to Amazon every time I mention a good book! – but to be listed here, the sites have to be ones worth surfing to in their own right.
I’ll start today with a couple of the sites of my husband, Kelly Hart.
How to Use Twitter for Greening the Earth
Want to do something to help the earth? Try Twitter! It’s a social networking website which anyone can join for free, and many thousands of people and businesses have. You can find people who share your interests and communicate with them via 140-character posts. You wouldn’t think you could say much in a tweet, as these posts are called, but you really can, by shortening urls and writing succinctly.
Still, I was on Twitter for over a year, just tweeting now and then, before I realized its power. I just used it casually, in connection with my interest in dog training. But recently I decided to see if it could help me do more in greening the earth. I have found many other people on Twitter who share this interest. They comment and pass along links to informative websites; I didn’t sleep well after reading too many of those articles late one evening, but overall I am greatly encouraged to connect with so many people around the world who care and think about what’s going on with our planet. For example, here’s a story about how twitter beat the mainstream media on an environmental disaster in Tennessee.
