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,

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.