Riding with Strangers in Perth, West Oz

For around 6 months of the year, I am one of the sheep in business shirts you see entering their rectangular working receptacles in Perth CBD, Western Australia. Every morning traffic is backed up over the narrow bridge that crosses the river into the city.

I watch the people talking on their phones, picking their noses, and swearing at the cars in front of them as I look up from the book I'm enjoying on the bus. As I walk over the pedestrian overpass I see them circling the carparks and oneway streets looking for the ever dwindling parking space.

I feel a little bit smug as I calculate that parking for one day in the city is $12, while busfare is about $5. Nevermind the fuel and running costs of your average 6-cylinder family wagon.

Watching a bus pass me while walking down the terrace, I notice that it is running on gas not diesel, and I am reminded that the 30-40 other people on the bus with me have saved a heap of carbon monoxide being pumped into the air.

Cameron
Perth, WA

imdoingit... IN SUDAN!!!

Alissa took imdoingit to Sudan on her trip in late May to research issues such as:
-the lack of clean drinking water as the foremost health issue in Sudan
-the growing relationship between environmental degradation and conflict
-reforestation as a potential income stream for the country

Thanks to the Christie Comm Global Betterment Network!

see The Ripple Effect.

Green Living by Merry

A few things I do:

Live TV-Free
-save energy (big screen TVs can use more energy than a refrigerator)
-save money (no cable or electric bill)
-save your sanity

Bring my own water bottle
-less garbage, save money on buying water (next step is bringing my own
coffee mug)

Buy local food, in season
-supports local farmers, sustainable farming
-while specialty foods can cost more at the farmer's market, most in-season
produce costs just as much, if not less than the regular grocery store. And
buying local, even organic, and cooking at home is still cheaper than going
out to a restaurant.
-less transportation required to ship the goods
-fresher, healthier, tastes better

other stuff:
Use eco-friendly household products (check ingredient labels)
Line-dry laundry
Walk or ride bike whenever possible
Buy/sell used stuff (craigslist)
Share a small, fuel-efficient car
Go camping...enjoy the outdoors

Plus, I work for The Green Guide, so I'm always learning new ways to make a
difference. Check out www.thegreenguide.com ,
a huge resource for environmental health and green living information.

-Merry, Santa Barbara

Do Paperless Banking!

I would also like to share with you some of my little efforts on paper/trees saving...

Most banks are offering a "go paperless" option on getting your monthly statements.
I've gone paperless some time ago.
And what seems like "my little effort" seems huge when I think what HUGE savings there would be if LOTS of people also went paperless, only by not receiving their monthly statements in the mail.
Statements that they probably put away in a drawer or simply throw away without even looking at them as you can check everything online much faster.

GO PAPERLESS!

1. Improves our quality of life because we don't have to spend time organizing and trashing stuff.
2. Helps the environment because of obvious saving of trees
3. Increases the wealth ... of the banks system! Oh well... idealistically, someday it might come back to the customers somehow...

Susie Beadle

Living without a Car

Living without a car has improved my life. I have lived without a car for almost four years now. The initial reason for my transition from car dependence to freedom was financial. I could not afford to buy a car, pay for insurance, maintenance, or the increasing price of gasoline. After selling my car I realized that there are many other benefits to not owning a car, including minimizing my ecological foot print, feeling healthy and fit, and the exciting possibility of meeting a cute guy on the public transit system, or on a kayak!

Katiyana Williams

Good for the environment, maybe not so much for my health

Hey Comrades,

Not really sure how this works, but ...

I'm an American who's been living in working in Beijing, China for the past two years. For the past six months I've pretty much only been biking to and fro work, about a 40 minute trip each way. It's not a hard ride on Beijing's flat streets, but the pollution's really bad here most of the time. I hope to get a city mask soon that will filter out most of the pollution. Also, I'd like to make a map of Beijing showing some of my days' rides. When you bike to work, you pretty much have to keep biking for the rest of the day or else ditch your bike at some inconvenient spot that you'd have to go back to bikeless later on. So I end up biking to dinner, then a bar, then friends' house, then home. Sometimes I cover most of metropolitan Beijing in a day.

Anyway, I love not needing a car and where ever I decide to live in the future, that will be one of the first things I look for.

Cheers,
-Reid

Recycling Fetish

I work at an architecture firm that is filled with architects that are a part of the old school way of drafting on paper. This firm generates a huge amount of paper waste that many of the architects throw in the trash. My job as apprentice of this firm among other gopher work (gopher this gopher that) is to take out the one communal recycle box. As a dedicated environmentalist I also grab all paper that the architects have thrown in the trash and I relocate it to the proper receptacle. OCD? Yes a little, but more importantly I know that due to my efforts I have diverted tons of paper from the landfill to the local recycling center.

-Dominick

Greywater Garden

One thing I love is gardening. do as little work as possible, but give the soil some love, and either the right seeds or starters, and leave it go! Out in arid santa barbara, though, our gardens are artificial creations, illusions of a more temperate reality. So do we pipe in more water still from where it rightfully belongs? Why do we use culinary water, with all the energy intensive pumping and treating, to provide moisture from plants and soil with zero interest in mega-filtered, treated water? There's not much that's local about stealing water to keep food gardens not native to this climate.

So why not use greywater? When I wash dishes and rinse veggies, I use a ton of that culinary water, but it certainly doesn't need to be swept away to yet another energy intensive treatment facility. No, best would be to put that water to an appropriate use, and it seems to me that my little veggie garden is a perfect one. Save energy, save water, grow veggies. Here are my rules:

- Don't use chemical dishwash soap- I use oasis, designed to degrade to plant food

- Don't let the water sit for a long time, it needs to go straight to the soil!

So what I do, since I rent and am not a master of plumbing, is close the drain of the kitchen sink, wash my full batch of dishes, which about fills the sink. I use a 3 gallon bucket to transfer that water out to the garden. I don't do it every night, but every few days. By knowing that I'm not using any toxics, I have no problem putting the water in the garden, and with compost-rich soil in the garden, the extra nutrients of the greywater are getting eaten up by the soil microbes. I can't wait to eat some of those greens and tomatoes!

-Ed France

Raked Leaves

Don't trash your raked leaves.
They will become a wonderful fertilizer if you let them decompose on their own, even better if you give them a little booster, adding some manure, compost activators, whatever.

I save everything that can decompose and I get incredible results in just a few months.

1- you're recreating Mother Earth's natural process instead of just adding volume to dumps.
2- you don't have to spend your $$ in costly fertilizers.
3- your plants will respond by looking their best!

Susie

Featured in the SB Newspress

"I'm doing something about it" was featured in the Earth Day Sunday edition of the Santa Barbara Newspress. Thanks to journalist Karna Hughes for the awesome article!

-Kristian



From top: Santa Barbarans Logan Green, Ed France and Kristian Beadle represent the next generation of environmentalists. The three recent UCSB grads are close friends, and each is tackling a new venture that promotes sustainable living from a different angle.
COURTESY PHOTOS

Changing the world, one mouse-click at a time
KARNA HUGHES, NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

April 22, 2007 12:53 PM

They did their time in the trenches as campus activists, and now Santa Barbarans Logan Green, Ed France and Kristian Beadle are hoping to change the world at large, one mouse-click at a time.

The three recent UCSB grads are close friends in their mid-twenties, all veterans of the school's Environmental Affairs Board. Each is tackling a new venture that promotes sustainable living from a different angle.

Last weekend, over lemon mojitos made from neighborhood trees, they toasted the launch of two new Web sites during a party that reflected their Earth-conscious attitudes. Carpooling to the house up San Marcos Pass was mandatory. Recyclable cups were used only after biodegradables couldn't be found. And the mojitos were served in the lemons? husks. "The lemon itself is the perfect biodegradable cup," said Mr. Beadle, only half-jokingly.

Mr. Beadle's brainchild is the Web site ?I'm Doing Something About It,? www.imdoingit.org, which he's working on in collaboration with Mr. France. The roughest of the bunch, the site is still in beta testing. "We're just putting out some creativity and seeing what bounces back," said Mr. Beadle. But he hopes it will encourage people, particularly those who don't consider themselves activists, to begin thinking of creative, fun ways to green their lifestyle.

Its centerpiece is a "climate neutral bragboard," where people can post ideas about what they and others in their community are doing to help the environment. It also has a "Cali-calendar" for listing local sustainability events.

Mr. Beadle and Mr. France are also working peripherally with Lightning in a Bottle, the three-day green music fest that will be held at Live Oak Campground in May. They'll be coordinating the event's "greenest campsite" contest. And the pair is pitching in at this year's retreat for the Institute for Reverential Ecology at Joshua Tree, which is where they first met each other and mentor Phil Grant, five years ago.

For his part, Logan Green has designed www.zimride.com, a free Web site that helps people coordinate carpools and rideshares online. (For years, UCSB's Associated Students ran a ride board to help students hitch rides out of town, but it was discontinued a few years ago.)

Because it uses Facebook and other user profiles, people can learn more about their prospective rides. "So it's not such a gamble," said Mr. Green, a board member of MTD and longtime bus rider who doesn't own a car. "You have a little bit of reassurance and (a sense of) safety and connectedness to them."

Users are encouraged to upload their preferences, including smoking/non-smoking, music and driving speed, and a photograph of themselves. So far the site has 500 users. Most are based in Santa Barbara, but people from five other states across the country have logged on for rides in their areas.

And, finally, Ed France is one of about ten volunteers spearheading Bici Centro, a new Santa Barbara collective to help people learn how to repair their own bikes for free.

"It's really fun because it's actually part of a movement all throughout the state. Bike kitchens are sprouting up everywhere," said Mr. France, who runs the group's Web site, www.bicicentro.blogspot.com. Bici Centro supplies the tools, "mentor mechanics" and some used parts, while participants supply the bikes and the elbow grease.

So far, they've held two events at La Casa de la Raza, attracting between 30 to 50 bikers each time. Core members include Eddie Gonzalez, Erika Lindemann, Rafael Orozco, Joanna Kaufman and Josh Thompson, and they dream of one day securing a permanent facility.

(A separate effort, Bikestation Santa Barbara at the Granada Garage, will have its grand opening on May 1. The parking station, located at 1219 Anacapa St., will offer members basic tools to perform minor bike repairs, in addition to a shower and lockers, but no onsite mechanics.)

At least a hundred people commute to work on their bicycles in Santa Barbara every day, according to Mr. France, and "it's not the people wearing spandex: it's the folks who are laboring in the fields or biking out to the nurseries between Goleta and downtown," he said. "We really target the Latino community and the people who don't have the money to pay for a $70 or $80 repair at a shop."

A former chairman of UCSB's Environmental Affairs Board and former recycling coordinator for the city of Santa Barbara, Mr. France is aware of the project's environmental impact. The bike "is the sustainable means of transportation. . . It's completely non-polluting," he said.

Bici Centro's next event will be held May 13 from noon to 5 p.m. at La Casa de la Raza, 601 E. Montecito St.

At the Earth Day celebration in the Santa Barbara County Courthouse Sunken Garden today, Mr. Beadle and Mr. Green will both have tables with information about their Web sites, while Mr. France will be manning the table as outreach and development coordinator for the Citizen's Planning Foundation.

e-mail: khughes@newspress.com

Kombucha Botanica

Yeah, I’m doing something about it everyday when Kombucha Botanica is available around the San Francisco Bay area- a refreshing mircro-brewed health elixir. Not only is it a great source of probiotics that aid digestion, boosts the immune system and detoxifies the liver- see kombuchabotanica.com for more info- but the company contributes 1% of it net sales to environmental organizations and engages in Fair Trade commerce by sourcing ingredients that are Fair Trade Certified. Triple bottom line all the way! Kombucha Botanica is committed to improving the health of the individual, natural environment and community!

Adam Goodman
Founder & Chief Kombuchero
Kombucha Botanica
kombuchabotanica.com
Santa Cruz, CA

Walk the Talk

Photo is the beach where I live, the Peninsula de Marau, in Brazil.
I walk or bike it every day with the dogs. Probably 5-6 miles a day.

It doesn't help a lot. But every little bit helps. A few bits that score.......

* Exercise increases adrenal gland activity which in turn reduces food intake. For both dogs and me. Score 1
* Dogs sleep after exercise, which helps keep them awake at night. Discourages night prowlers. Score 2
* Walking is a good model for everyone. An alternate to driving, carbon emissions, repairs. Score 3
* Increases quality of life, health and life expectancy. Decreases doctor's bills. Feels good, too! Score 4
* Replaces for several hours the vacuuos distractions of modern life. Encourages thinking. Score 5

Walking seems, at first, boring. Then migrates into a healthy craving. And like the effects of the stroke of that apocryphal Amazon butterfly wing, it positively affects much more than we can know. In the individual, his community, and the world.

Bob
Peninsula de Marau, in Brazil.

Canvas Always Trumps Paper

"I'm doing something about it" every day when I go to
Trader Joes.. And yes, I do sometimes hit the market
daily... I have a few canvas bags of varying shapes
and sizes that I hang on my front door handle and keep
in my car, so that I always have my own vessil in
which to take home my goodies! If I somehow forget a
bag, I am not above stuffing my purse with said
purchases, or walking out of the store with goods in
my arms and a reciept precariously balancing on top.

At Trader Joes, they are used to people bringing their
own bags, and actually encourage them to do so. When
you bring your own bag, they give you a raffle ticket
for a monthly drawing for free stuff... however, when
I try my "oh, I don't need a bag" line at the local
Ralphs, I often receive curious looks and perhaps a
bit of perplexion from the bagger. It always makes me
smile ;-)

I have gotten so used to never getting a paper bag at
grocery store, that I feel confused when I see someone
accept one.

One last bonus is that I do not have a drawer full of
paper and plastic bags, but have a doorhandle
decorated with really cute canvas ones!

So... that is how "I am doing something about it"!

Krista- Santa Barbara

Freeloading can be green

For the last 2 years I've avoided expensive rent prices in the town of Santa Barbara, CA, by living 20 minutes away on the top of an 1,800 ft mountain pass (keep in mind that SB is nearly at sea level). Considering that SB now hosts some of the most expensive gas prices in the nation, which are on the rise as summer approaches, and my social and business life exists in town, the commute prices almost equate to the difference in rent. On top of that my four banger subaru is starting to fall apart after 130,000 miles of carbon farting. I've suggested installing a cable car from the corner of State and Carrillo to the top of 154 but the city didn't like my idea for asthetic reasons. WTF. If Chamonix has the Telepherique why can't I have my own form of public transportation here in Santa Barbara? Plus, it would be good for tourism and I'd be able to host more parties promoting green stuff. Alright, I'll stop now. As an alternative, I've resorted to making some personal changes. Not only am I looking to move down into town so I can commute by bike, in the meantime I will be freeloading off Ed and Kristian, the founders of Imdoingit, and parking my carcass on their couch for the nights that I leave town late, only to drive back early the next morning. As a result, my personal carbon footprint and gas expenditures decrease, and Ed and Kristian are graced with my presence as I help myself to their breakfast supplies. Thanks guys, I'll make it up to you when I buy my eco-dome condo on the Riviera.

Malcolm - Santa Barbara

Car-free, Bike-rich

Being car-free saves me money:
~$50/month on insurance
~$60/month on gas
~$50/month on repairs & maintenance
Not to mention the cost of the car and depreciation.

I bought a really nice, used mountain bike on craigslist for $250. I ride to work everyday, sometimes a 8 minute ride, sometimes a 20 minute ride, depending what office I have to go to. I was lucky enough to find a job close to where I live.

I get there feeling refreshed in the morning - on warm days I might get sweaty, but I'll change into a different set of clothes. The PR/marketing CEO doesn't seem to mind; in fact, she thinks it's great that I ride. The trip is even better on the way home - doing exercise gets me out of the "funk" of working all day. It's a two birds, one stone type of deal: exercise and transportation at the same time.

The bus system in Santa Barbara works really well, my bike goes on the bus rack in front, and I can get anywhere in town. Schedules are available at www.sbmtd.gov.

The major downside of not having a car is flexibility. I can't go surfing or visit the ladies whenever I want to; and I can only take 2 canvas bags worth of shopping at a time (balanced on the handlebars - I need to get a rack!). But the bike keeps me fit, and forces me to carpool with my friends when I want to hit the beach. And as for the ladies, well... that forces them to come to me :)

Imdoingit Lauch

The idea came to me while I was doing the dishes: a tshirt that said "I'm doing something about it."

It's fashionable to complain about the problems in the world - some people say governments aren't doing enough to remedy them, others scapegoat the corporations or the upper class. The solutions, however, start at the individual level. "I'm doing something about it" is a statement of personal empowerment.

Recognize a problem? If you're doing something about it, let others know. This mentality can apply to anything, but imdoingit focuses on improving our Triple Bottom Line. Do your actions 1. help the environment, 2. improve quality of life, and 3. increase wealth? If so, all of us need to know about it!

About the tshirt: it is made in the USA from 100% organic cotton, ordered from Royal Apparel. The logo design was dreamed up by local artist Katie Rummel. The tshirts were brought to reality by Earl from TableSalt Screenprinting, down on Anacapa Street in Santa Barbara. We're selling them for $15, which just covers our costs. Order them from www.imdoingit.org. Thanks for your support!

The idea came to me while I was doing the dishes. After 2 months, with varying degrees of perseverance and luck, it had materialized. Your dreams can too.