Sea Change: Entertained by life without television
Imagine inviting a guest to your house who seems – at first – charismatic and endlessly entertaining, able to expound on topics from current events and sports to history and world travel. Before long,...
View ArticleSea Change: No idle habit is a win-win-win
The easiest paths to sustainability offer multiple benefits – helping the environment while benefiting health and finances. Businesses refer to the “triple bottom line” when choosing options that...
View ArticleSea Change: Investors take a chance to plant seeds in Maine’s food economy
If you’re fortunate enough to have some savings, what’s a sustainable way to invest that nest egg? The ready answer is often socially responsible investment (SRI) funds – which typically screen their...
View ArticleSea Change: Unplug to recharge yourself
Are we all secretly proud of our capacity to multitask – conversing, texting and walking (or worse, driving!) – all while listening to music? Captivated by the limitless potential of e-connectivity, we...
View ArticleSea Change: Polluting plastic microbeads one of the worst ideas ever
Imagine if someone had proposed this idea in a public forum 25 years ago: “Let’s start having microscopic plastic bits in products like facial scrubs. They’ll wash down drains, slide past wastewater...
View ArticleSea Change: A dog and an aunt teach wisdom of living with less stuff
A cousin well into her empty-nest years acknowledged that she finds herself increasingly focused on “reducing inventory.” Despite being at a different life stage, I knew just what she meant. For years,...
View ArticleSea Change: Enduring mud season strengthens roots in Maine
In the muddy-puddle depths of April, winter’s white has turned road-sand brown while summer’s uplifting palette is still a mirage. If I were ever to fall out of love with Maine, it would be in this...
View ArticleSea Change: Dirty-fuel divestment a rising moral choice
When Holly Zadra suggested that Pittsfield’s First Universalist Church divest its holdings in fossil-fuel corporations, she recalls that church councilors responded with awkward silence “as if I’d said...
View ArticleSea Change: Food is the next recycling challenge
Only in a land of plenty like ours could this staggering statistic be true: 40 percent of food goes uneaten – most of it tossed in landfills or torched in incinerators. The social and ecological costs...
View ArticleSea Change: Lasting impact of Land for Maine’s Future overshadows politics
When Land for Maine’s Future began in 1987, I had a front-row seat – working at the State Planning Office, where the program was housed. New state programs don’t typically generate much spectator...
View ArticleSea Change: Time for clothes-drying to fly free from the energy guzzler
We have a tyrannosaurus in our laundry area. You may not realize it, but you probably do too. This voracious eater from another era sits in a white metal box perched atop the washing machine. Clothes...
View ArticleSea Change: Road to fuel economy is long, slow
It seemed at first like a reasonable expectation. Looking to replace a 16-year-old car, I assumed that comparable vehicles – bought new or lightly used – would have markedly higher fuel efficiency....
View ArticleSea Change: Challenge of climate change presents opportunity for new energy
Around the time NASA announced that Earth had just experienced the hottest first five months of any year on record, 300-plus business owners, civic leaders and scientists gathered at an Envision Maine...
View ArticleSea Change: Maine’s tourism industry offers environment-friendly options
I set out this week to write about how easy it is to travel more sustainably by patronizing businesses that do right by the environment. But to my surprise, it still takes effort in Vacationland to...
View ArticleSea Change: For more Maine towns, it’s clear as day that solar makes sense
“A bold reworking of energy systems… is now necessary and much more affordable. That could make for a very different world.” Bill McKibben, “Power to the People” in The New Yorker (June 29, 2015)...
View ArticleSea Change: Hasten the transition to renewable power
Massachusetts residents typically come up to enjoy Vacationland, but there’s one arena in which their home state holds more attractions: renewable energy. The clean-energy landscape in Massachusetts...
View ArticleSea Change: A surefire way to reduce waste? Buy less in the first place
There’s nothing quite like a camping trip to remind you just how many disposables have crept into your life, even when you thought you were being vigilant. You pare down to essentials for a time, with...
View ArticleSea Change: Family defies quasi-food confusion and chooses real sustenance
In many places around the globe, the injunction to “eat real food” would be met with quizzical looks. What else would or could a person eat? But in America, the menu of synthetic options grows daily,...
View ArticleArtists in Maine make climate change personal
“I sing now like the North American brown thrasher, who at one point in its song orchestrates four different notes: one grieves, another frets, a third prays, but a fourth celebrates.” GREG DELANTY, IN...
View ArticlePaying with credit cards can be a bad, unsustainable habit
When a gas pump rejected my credit card, I assumed its card reader was broken. Later that afternoon, another store clerk returned my card unused and told me, “It may be shut down for a fraud...
View Article