Green

Eco-Cycling

You already take your bike to work and around town so how much more eco friendly can you be? Well Mauro Hernandez and Bill Holloway say significantly. They are known for their furniture designs at Masterworks wood and Design; however, they are now making bikes out of "urban lumber". What is urban lumber? It is the decaying trees found in cities as well as the timber salvaged from fences and homes. They are taking the infrastructure created and dismantled by people and using it to make transportation in an incredibly environmentally conscious way. Not only are they using salvaged wood but also they apply the environmentally friendly seals and stains by hand so as not to release pollutants that spraying would. Don't think these bicycles are any more fragile than your normal bike,

We were very fortunate to be a part of creating a new oasis in form of a new community garden called Frog Alley in Delray Beach, FL just a few blocks from where my family and I attend church at St. Paul's on South Swinton Avenue. It was at St. Paul's that I met Jeannie Fernsworth, a passionate advocate of community gardens and the grown locally movement who never misses an opportunity to share her passion for community gardens and to enlist others in her cause to build more of them in Palm Beach County.

I have been inspired by how many people and organizations came together to create this beautiful garden. The Delray Chamber of Commerce got involved and the Delray Garden Center donated labor and materials. The real champions of the project were Pablo de Real and Ashley Moore. Both worked countless hours, coordinated dozens of volunteers, managed the local permitting process and put their backs into the manual work of constructing planting beds, moving soil and more. Pablo is committed

During the month of August I went to Seattle for the American Community Garden Association annual meeting. It was a reaffirming meeting with lots of helpful workshop information about how to be a better community gardener, how to work with the city, how to work with limited resources, and how to work with our neighbors.

People all over the country seem to have the same issues and some of the same answers, but it was the creative, fresh approaches that gave everyone at the conference a "WOW, why didn't I think of that?" More on that later.

The keynote speaker at the conference was a Muckleshoot Native American woman named Valerie Segrest. She stayed true to herself and delivered with an intelligent dry humor. She talked about how her tribe lived on a mountain plateau between the Green and White Rivers.

I failed to comprehend why she didn't say she lived near Seattle, which was named for an American Indian Chief. V

Wildlife conservation is a topic of importance today. We are making many changes in our lives to be more 'green'. Whether it is the shampoo we choose, riding our bike to work or taking shorter showers, there are many 'green' options to help minimize our negative impact on our environment. Finding the balance between the ever evolving human developments and maintaining nature's habitats is a difficult and pressing responsibility that organizations all over the world work to navigate every day.

Ecoducts are one of the many solutions that help to bridge that balance. They're structures that allow wildlife to cross man-made barriers, such as highways, safely. Habitat fragmentation, the division or separation of natural habitats by human development, is a threat to wildlife and these ecoducts allow the connection or reconnection of habitats that have been separated by our infrastructures.

There

We are all engaged in problem solving solutions to support a more gentle harmonious approach to living with nature. It is grassroots without the water guzzling grass, it is down home dirt without the dust of old ways of doing things and it is plain folk doing extraordinary things.