The Iowa Source cover story on MUM’s SLC written by Linda Egenes
Building the Future: MUM’s Sustainable Living Center
New Zero-carbon Classroom Showcases Green Living
http://www.iowasource.com/fairfield/2010_11_slc.html
Sustainable Living Center: It Takes a Team to Go Green
http://www.iowasource.com/fairfield/2010_11_slc_team.html
I love it when you happen into a sustainability pocket while you’re traveling. Last summer my husband Tom and I were vacationing in Traverse City, Michigan, with our niece Carina. Here’s what I wrote in my journal about the trip.
July 21, 2010
We’ve swapped houses for the week with our friends Joe and Victoria, and feel like we’ve landed in heaven at their beautiful lake home.
My husband Tom and our niece Carina enjoy the outdoor ambiance of Wellington Street Market
They’ve left a flyer on the table for the Wellington Street Market, so we check it out. It’s at the eastern edge of the historic and charming Front Street area in Traverse City, just a block away from Lake Michigan. We know we are going to love this place when we pull up to a white clapboard house with a porch and two picnic tables under umbrellas in front. (Especially since we’ve just spent half an hour trying to track down a Thai restaurant, only to find ourselves in soul-less suburbia.) As Carina so aptly says, “You can eat in a strip mall any day, but when was the last time you had a chance to eat at the Wellington Street Market?”
It was when I am trying to figure out the vegetable portion of the meal to go with my Kurry Guru that I discover the true nature of this restaurant.
“We can’t serve Mattar Panir (peas and fresh cheese) yet because we’re just starting to get the local peas in,” the woman behind the counter says.
Jennifer Blakeslee, co-owner and chef at the Wellington Street Market
It turns out that the woman behind the counter is none other than Jennifer Blakeslee, the co-owner and chef, with Eric Patterson, of two sustainable and local food restaurants—this casual Wellington Street Market and the elegant Cook’s House a block away by the river. The two are also local celebrities, with their own cookbook (The Cook’s House) and liaisons with celebrity chef Mario Batali, the guy who wears the orange clogs and traveled with Gwyneth Paltrow through culinary Spain for their book, Spain: A Culinary Road Trip.
“Have you been to India?” Tom asks Jennifer, noting the abundance of Indian entrees on the menu. It turns out she’s been to some of the same places we’ve visited there, and she tells us about her amazing six-week trip, when she was the guest of Indian friends and was feted with three-hour feasts wherever she went.
“When they heard I was a chef they so generously laid out the food,” she says. “My biggest problem was getting into the kitchen, which is where I wanted to be. My gracious hosts considered it an insult, since I was their honored guest, but after a few days I made my way in.”
So at Jennifer’s recommendation, we order the spicy aloo gobi (cauliflower and peas) curry, along with the root vegetable salad, which consists of fresh local greens topped with roasted sweet potatoes and beets, dollops of goat cheese and a light olive oil and herb dressing. We eat under the picnic table with the umbrella and are divinely happy.
Jennifer also clues us into a Food for Thought festival of local and organic food vendors that we can attend, and it turns out Mariam, the helper behind the counter who serves our food, is friends with people we know from our hometown of Fairfield, Iowa.
I love making connections like this.
Mariam tells us about Oryana, a natural food market, and after a swim in Lake Michigan at a small, unpopulated beach that Jennifer directs us to via a quaint foot bridge that goes over the river and under the highway, we stock up on a few items there, including local yellow zucchini, local basil and local peas.
Back home Carina blends up a light, delicate pasta sauce of basil, blanched almond, sea salt and two cloves of garlic. It’s awesome on the pasta with crisp green Cerignola olives and sheep-milk feta, and when paired with the bright colors of yellow zucchini and green peas, we have a locally grown feast of our own.
Next food mission of our trip: pick local fruit and eat it. That shouldn’t be hard, being northern Michigan, the home of the best-tasting strawberries, cherries, blueberries and raspberries in the world. The cherry season just ended, so we’re banking on raspberries.
Web Marketing Can Save Energy & Resources
Last spring while setting up a series of book talks around Iowa, I started to question this fossil-fuel extravagant way to sell a few books—not to mention the cost of gas. Then my publisher fired off an email, “Create an online presence and market your book that way.”
Gulp. Even though I wrote website copy for a living, learning how to set up my own site felt daunting. But determined to finally enter the digital age, I attended a free Internet marketing seminar by three consultants based in Fairfield: Ellen Finkelstein, Phyllis Khare, and Lee Leffler.
From the tools and strategies they shared, I was able to create a blog and social media campaign to market my books—without driving my car or printing a single flyer. In other words, I suddenly went greener and reached a wider audience, too.
Green Marketing Mavens Ellen Finkelstein, Phyllis Khare, and Lee Leffler
Of course, virtually everyone who uses a computer is moving toward a paperless, greener business model. But some, such as Ellen, Phyllis and Lee, are forging ahead, using cutting-edge technologies to reduce the use of fossil fuels in a variety of ways: working at home to avoid a commute, training clients using webinars instead of traveling to on-site seminars, creating e-books and e-courses instead of paper-based products, and marketing their services using social media and email.
“The information economy is a paperless, green economy, if it’s structured correctly,” notes Lee, who calls herself “The Newsletter Gal” and writes e-newsletters, websites, and blogs for organizations such as the Miles of Hope Breast Cancer Foundation.
For Lee, establishing a green business was a lifelong dream. Inspired by Ralph Nader as a student, she founded a still-running eco-radio show in 1989, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she was finally able to realize her dream.
“Back then most businesses were still using paper newsletters and wasting trees,” says Lee. She positioned herself as a green entrepreneur, helping businesses market with e-newsletters to save resources. She joined Green America and landed a coveted spot in the Green America National Green Pages. Today she continues to pursue a green agenda, participating in a recycling program, running her website from carbon-neutral EcoHosting, offering sustainable living tips on her blog, and working from a home office to eliminate commuting.
Ellen Finkelstein found another way to switch to a paperless business model—by writing e-books. A best-selling technology author of numerous paperback titles such as AutoCAD 2010 & AutoCAD LT 2010 Bible and How to Do Everything with PowerPoint 2007, she has racked up combined sales of over 300,000 and seen her books translated into 14 different languages.
She wrote her first e-book two years ago because she wanted to reduce paper waste and create products that were more environmentally friendly.
“When you think of the trees used in paper books, the carbon fuels used in shipping, and the costs and energy involved in running a bricks-and-mortar publishing house, traditional publishing is a very 20th-century institution,” says Ellen. “I still update two of my print books each year, but I like the idea of having more editorial control with e-books, and by cutting out publishing and shipping costs, you retain a larger portion of the profits.”
Reducing Fossil Fuel Use
For Phyllis Khare, going greener came with a sudden career move. In the midst of a 12-year stint touring Iowa schools on the Iowa Arts Council roster as “Miss Phyllis,” a children’s music educator, she decided to take time off to indulge another passion: exploring web technologies. Today she has reduced her commute to a few steps—working from her home office as a consultant specializing in web design, Internet marketing, and social media.
“According to one survey, businesses using social media such as Facebook and Twitter reaped 24% more profits than those who used conventional, direct-mail advertising in 2010,” she says. “And the use of the earth’s resources is much less.”
Even though her clients are scattered around the country, Phyllis holds business meetings using video Skype and screen-sharing programs—and trains others to do the same. Ellen also uses webinars to train professionals to give presentations online.
“There’s a synergy of factors—saving money and saving the environment—that is creating a huge demand in online training instead of flying presenters long distances,” Ellen says. “And of course, this is a perfect situation for someone who lives in Iowa, to be able to train professionals anywhere in the world without leaving your home.”
(I wrote this article for April’s Iowa Source–you can view it online here)
Don’t miss a chance for a free Marketing Make-Over Sessions with Phyllis, Lee and Ellen on Tuesday, April 20 at 1:00pm
Event: Marketing Make-Over Sessions with Phyllis, Lee and Ellen
What: Informational Meeting
Start Time: Tuesday, April 20 at 1:00pm
End Time: Tuesday, April 20 at 2:00pm
Where: Fairfield Public Library
We’re spending the winter in Vero Beach, Florida, and while kayaking on the Indian River Lagoon, the intracoastal waterway that is home to one of the most diverse plant and animal populations in the world, I found out that many of the dolphins here have tummy aches because they are ingesting so many toxins from lawn run-off and industry waste.
So it was a wonderful coincidence when Justin and Kimberly McSweeny pulled up to the home we’re renting from our very green-conscious friends with an equipment trailer in tow. I knew I was going to like them the minute I saw their company name and tagline painted on the side of their trailer: Oasis Organics—Not Only Should Your Lawn be Green.
I can’t say I completely understood the slogan, but I got the drift. Justin and Kimberly are a man-and-wife team who tend lawn and landscape in the most environmentally safe way possible, so the Indian River Lagoon and the area’s drinking water can stay free of harmful chemicals. They look fresh and young and have the kind of organic fervor that I had in the 60s when I grew my own garden with college friends.
Justin started in the lawncare business 20 years ago when he was a chef by night and mowed lawns by day. (You could say eating organic has definitely given him lots of energy). He says he grew up in Maryland in the 70s and loved the local hippie yurts with gardens growing on them. He says the seeds of his interest in organic were sown then.
“About five years ago I started poking around the internet looking around for a more holistic perspective on lawn care and home landscaping,” he says. “I knew people up north were using healthier, organic pesticides and fertilizers, and that is always the first step, to wean yards and landscapes away from harmful petroleum products, which I call ‘Satan’s Pantry.’ But I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to create closed-circuit environments where you feed the organisms in the soil and the soil feeds healthy plants, eliminating the need for dumping gallons of fertilizer and pesticides on the lawns and landscape, even the organic kind. I wanted to use sustainability and permaculture techniques that are used on organic farms and transfer them to lawn and yard care.”
Justin didn’t find many people doing that, so he taught himself. Here he talks about his vision.
Listening to Justin, I’m learning new terms like xeriscaping, which is from the Greek, meaning “dry landscape.” In xeriscaping and xerogardening, you use plants that thrive in the local area without irrigation. It’s popular in Arizona and other desert areas areas, and could become more necessary as climate change renders other areas dry. Justin uses principles from xeriscaping, and encourages his clients to save on the environment and their water bills by switching to landscape plants and lawn grasses that thrive on rain water alone, but he’s not a purist about this. Nor is he a purist about using native habitat plants. He encourages his clients to use them, but is also open to using plants from Australia and other countries with similar climates, as long as they aren’t invasive.
“I don’t like to ram anything down anyone’s throat,” he says. “I like to show up, make people happy, and make sure their yard looks good. I give my clients options and explain how using plants that naturally thrive in this area can save so much money in water and helps the environment too.”
For those of you from Florida, check out this video, where Justin points out a number of native plants that require little water and need little pest control or fertilizers.
He also recommends getting away from water-and-fertilizer-thirsty lawn grasses. In our yard he’s working with the owners to switch to a more sustainable ground cover such as mimosa strigillosa. It’s a native wild flower with powder-pink blooms, much prettier than plain old grass. I’m looking forward to seeing it when we return next winter.
To contact Justin or Kimberly McSweeny, email them at oasisorganics@bellsouth.net.
Probably I’m way behind the eight-ball here, but I’d never really thought much about solar ovens before I visited my sister Cathy and her family in northern California last Labor Day weekend. Cathy took me to a dinner party at the home of Alice Friedemann and her husband, Jeffery Kahn, the webmaster at UC Berkeley. Alice is a freelance journalist specializing in energy and peak oil issues. She is also developing a cookbook on whole-grain cooking, and has experimented with using a manual grain grinder and solar ovens to make truly sustainable and awesome breads.
In this video she talks about using a solar oven. Alice bought hers but recommends building your own.
Alice says she’s still trying to figure out solar cooking. She thinks the plastic on her oven needs replacing and that may be creating less than stellar (solar?) results. But she feels it’s worth the effort because solar cooking is going to become more and more important in the future.
Besides learning about solar ovens that evening, we were treated to a sumptuous dinner featuring Alice’s homemade whole-grain flatbread along with beets, basil and Early Girl tomatoes from Jeffery’s amazing garden.
I was totally in awe of Alice and Jeffery’s gardening skills. First of all, the way things grow in sunny California, something like rosemary, found in Iowa as a small plant, grows as big as a tree. But it was more than the climate, it was super smart brains at work.
Check out this rather perfect apple tree that grows in Alice and Jeffery’s back yard. A neighbor grafted it with four different strains, so you stroll around the tree and find four types of apples, including Pink Lady and Misui.
According to Alice, most nurseries these days sell apple trees with more than one strain of apples grafted into them, but still, you seldom see such perfect looking trees in someone’s yard.
Says Alice, the trick to getting a lot of apples is to rigorously cut back the tree before spring (in California sometime in January or February) but not snipping off the buds that will produce apples. Later, you’ll get clusters of more than two, and you need to get rid of all but one or you’ll have very small apples and many will fall off in addition if you don’t, wasting the tree’s energy.
After dinner we peer through the telescope from Alice and Jeffery’s second-story balcony, and catch a rare glimpse of the Bay Bridge without any cars (closed for major repairs over Labor Day).
Now I feel inspired to make my own solar oven, but will have to wait until spring as the sun is at too much of an angle now. Will let you know how that goes.
For free directions to make your own solar cooker go to
http://www.solarcooking.org/plans/
Additional links on Alice Friedemann
It’s a warm December day in Iowa—the kind where you can stand outside for hours and not feel cold. I’m on my bike, headed to the southern edge of the greenhouses on the Maharishi University of Management (M.U.M.) campus. I’m humming a happy song because today at lunch I happened to run into Alex Kachan, a faculty member in the M.U.M. sustainable living department. He’s teaching a course in natural beekeeping and invited me to observe the students as they open the hives to feed the bees.
Of course I have a vague idea of the importance of bees and their fragile existence on this earth. They are crucially important to us, since they pollinate about one-third of our food crops (including our livestock’s food, as alfalfa and clover and more), yet they are dying now in vast numbers due to decades of manipulative management and environmental stress, which some call the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder. And I have read something about biodynamic beekeeping theory, in which the beekeepers maintain a peaceful, nonviolent mindset and behavior (practical hive management) resulting in no need to wear protective gear when they open the hives. The bees on the M.U.M. campus are not yet certified biodynamic, but the faculty are working toward that.
“Biodynamic beekeeping is more spiritual in its approach,” Alex Kachan explains. “It recognizes that bee hives are an organism rather than a machine with interchangeable parts. Everything the beekeeper does aims to enhance the well-being of the bees, rather than focusing on how much they can produce as a kind of honey factory.”
Alex Kachen and I stand behind a bee hive.
When I arrive at the spot behind the campus greenhouses, the eight students are sitting quietly behind the hive. No one is wearing protective clothing. With Alex Kachan’s gentle guidance, they take turns mixing organic sugar and spring water and a little sea salt in a large bucket. Already scout bees from the three hives are buzzing around the bucket of sugary goo, but the students are unperturbed. Alex says they should make the mixture in a spot farther away from the hive next time.
In talking to the students later, away from the bees, I find out that most of them are majoring in sustainable living, such as Sondra Cladwell, who owns a small sheep farm with her husband in New Mexico and plans to keep bees there. She loves bees. Last time, a bee took a liking to her and crawled on her arm for twenty minutes, like a pet.
Justin Saving traveled to Fairfield on a David Lynch Visitors Weekend and decided to enroll. “I’m a Kansas City boy,” he tells me. “My interest in organic agriculture started with my interest in organic foods. I used organic foods to lose 100 pounds. While looking into the sources of the organic foods I was eating, I found out that you don’t always know where they come from, and they’re also expensive. That’s when I decided I wanted to grow my own.”
Victor Castillo says he and his girlfriend, also a sustainable living major, found out about the university’s programs on its website, and are delighted with the loft they rent downtown Fairfield for 1/10 the price it would cost them in New Jersey. They are serious about their plans to establish two sustainable farms, one in Dominican Republic, where their parents have already purchased land, and one in Maines. “I think people are going to need local food sources to survive in the future,” he says quietly.
These students all practice the Transcendental Meditation technique twice a day to reduce mental and physical stress, and so do I, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m relaxed enough to be a biodynamic beekeeper. Seeing how the bees react will be a kind of test.
When it’s time to open the first hive, I panic. “What if I’m not calm enough?” I blurt out. I’m seeing visions of tearing through the forest surrounded by a swarm of bees. “We’ll take a moment to settle down before opening the hive,” Alex reassures me.
Sondra gently moves bees out of the way while Viktor prepares to pour the liquid syrup into the hive.
Finally, after a few minutes of quiet, the time has come. Josh Wilson pries open the first hive. I move into a better position to take a picture, but Sondra warns me not to stand in front of the entrance, where the bees come and go from the hive. The aggressive guard bees could attack you if you step too close to the entrance. But no one gets stung, even when the students take turns prying the covers off the other two hives. In one hive, the bees are collected in the exact spot where the students have to pour the liquid food, so Sondra gently nudges them out with a stick so they won’t drown.
Josh talks quietly to the bees as they buzz around his unprotected face and arms. He calls them “girls.” I learn that not just the queen but all the worker bees are female. One of the male students jokes, “Otherwise, nothing would get done.”
These bees were purchased a year ago from California, and were originally fed with genetically modified corn syrup. But bees live for a short time (except for the queen bee), between three weeks and three months.
“So these bees have actually been born on our campus,” says Alex. “Bees are sensitive barometers. They sense the environment, and we are very lucky to have a calm feeling here. I think the bees feel that.”
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