There’s no shortage of news stories, blogs and online resources aimed at helping people go green, but sometimes the best way to learn new habits is to watch someone else in action.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the recent eco-stars across the U.S. whom I’ve discovered in my daily wanderings across the Web:
- Duncan Campbell, who’s gone without a refrigerator for three years now and relies on only a small chest freezer for some food storage (He was one of several people recently profiled in a New York Times article titled, “Dumping the Refrigerator for a Greener Planet”). Campbell relies mostly on easy-to-store foods like grains and beans, grows a lot of his own food in his backyard garden in Columbus, Ohio, and recently began canning some of the surplus for later use;
- Ohio farmer Gene Logsdon, whose 30-year-old book, “Small-Scale Grain Raising,” is being resurrected this spring by eco-publisher Chelsea Green. The publishing house describes Logsdon’s work as “the definitive book on how to grow, thresh, process, and use grains in the amounts that matter to a family”;
- Author Elizabeth Rogers, who recently unveiled a new Website — Shift Your Habit — that lets you know exactly how much money you can save by taking various go-green actions. One recent “Daily Shift” noted that the average household could save $70 a year (and cut waste by 40 pounds) by switching from paper napkins to reusable cloth napkins;
- Handy-guy Mike Turner of South Carolina, whose Website — Aerocivic — offers a step-by-step guide for super-charging your car’s fuel-efficiency. He oughta know how: at a cost of only $400, Turner modified his 1992 Honda Civic CX to bring his highway-speed mileage to a whopping 95 miles per gallon.
LEDs are being used increasingly commonly for aquarium lighting. Particular for reef aquariums, LED lights provide an efficient light source with less heat output to help maintain optimal aquarium temperatures. LED-based aquarium fixtures also have the advantage of being manually adjustable to produce a specific color-spectrum for ideal coloration of corals, fish, and invertebrates while optimizing photosynethically active radiation (PAR) which increases growth and sustainability of photosynthetic life such as corals, anemones, clams, and macroalgae. These fixtures can be electronically programmed in order to simulate various lighting conditions throughout the day, reflecting phases of the sun and moon for a dynamic reef experience. LED fixtures typically cost up to five times as much as similarly rated fluorescent or high-intensity discharge lighting designed for reef aquariums and are not as high output to date.