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Gaea recently sent my family some samples of its extra-virgin olive oil to sample.  The premise of their operation is simple: grow great tasting olives, produce high quality olive oil, and offset their carbon emissions.

We’ve used the olive oil for a week or so, cooking with it (excellent flavor for meats and veggies) and using it in our recipes.  The verdict?  Delicious.  Whether you’re making a salad dressing, sauteing veggies or chicken – you can’t go wrong.

Gaea offers a variety of olive oils: Sitia-Crete, Kalamata, Organic, and several flavored versions.

There are also whole olives, tampenades, appetizers, roasted peppers, sundried tomatoes, grape leaves, and a line of sauces that I’d love to get my hands on.

Now, to the claim that Gaea is the “first extra virgin olive oil in the world to be certified carbon neutral”.  A google search turns up some smaller olive farms that have attempted to achieve similar carbon reductions and offsets.  I’m really not too worried who was the first to be certified, but I am interested in how Gaea achieves those claims:

Carbon or Greenhouse Gas offsetting is the funding of climate protection
projects by an individual or a company, such as GAEA, in order to
compensate for the carbon emissions it produces as a result from its
operations and/or products. GAEA calculated the amount of carbon
emissions produced per kg of olive oil and compensated it by funding
climate protection projects through the myclimate foundation.

Ok, so it’s through offsets, then.  Well what kind of offsets you ask?  Gaea provides the details in this brochure.

Let me get on my soapbox for a minute:  I am happy to see when companies are interested in reducing their environmental impact, though I wish that the website went into more detail about their carbon calculations.  I also wish that Gaea provided a description of the other methods that they are using to reduce their environmental impact.  Are they reducing fertilizers and pesticides?  Preventing soil erosion?  I have been and will continue to be skeptical about companies who pay for carbon offsets, do little to make real on-the-ground changes, and call their products climate neutral.  To be fair, I requested this information from the company and this is their response:

Gaea is leading the way in the international olive oil industry with their green ‘rev-oil-ution’ to reduce the environmental impact of their operations from cultivation to the shelves of the supermarket. Gaea is committed to preserving the Earth’s natural resources with our non-depletion policy on wild products, recycling policies, Integrated Crop Management and Organic Farming techniques. With a name that literally stands for ‘Mother Earth’, Gaea has been committed to environmental sustainability since its inception. Care and respect for the environment remains at the core of our company values.  This information can be found on the Gaea website at http://www.gaea.gr/1/gaeaStory2.html.

I’m not sure what “non-depletion policy on wild products” means, but it does sound like the company is attempting to minimize its environmental impact.  I do know that a more complete disclosure of their carbon emissions inventory and farming practices would go a long way for environmentally conscious consumers.

If you are in the market for some extra virgin olive oil, or Greek specialty products – Give Gaea a try!

I had a chance recently to review a DVD called Garbage Warrior (trailer above) which is about the gentleman who started the Earthship movement and some of the trials and tribulations he experienced while building his houses. It focuses too on his ideas and techniques for using trash materials (aluminum cans, plastic and glass bottles) to create low cost energy efficient housing.

The houses he builds are amazing. They are off the grid houses which are passive solar heated and have greenhouses for food production in them. They deal with their own sewage and they collect water from the roofs to use in the house. They essentially are a one stop house that can be built and then it will live on forever on it’s own devices. They stated on the DVD that with the passive solar design and the thermal mass they are able to keep the house comfortable in the winter with temperatures of 30 below zero. It’s amazing.

I was also amazed in the DVD when they went to assist with tsunami recovery. I won’t spoil that part of the movie, but it’s interesting.

I liked this DVD, although it barely started to quench my thirst for information about the building methods Mike uses. If you have a chance you should check out this movie. I noticed that its available through Netflix, or click over to the movie website and order up a copy. Then donate it to your local library so others can see it!

Now Mike, not all of us can build new Earthships. We need some tips on transitioning our current housing in-place!

Garbage Warrior website.

More info about Earthships.

The title of this book is Reinventing Collapse, and I have to say that’s exactly what this book manages to do. It’s a short book, so you could read it in just a few hours, but it is packed with information and “make you think” moments. Orlov’s unique perspective on American life engages the reader and opens your eyes to what life in America is like to an outsider. It also questions ideas and notions from the perspective of an outsider; things that a native American wouldn’t even think to question.

Without a doubt the most useful aspect of this book are the details of what the situation was like in Russia after their political collapse. This book is a tutorial on how the reader might modify their life in the future if (or when) America collapses.

If you get a chance check it out today. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

You can read more of Dmitry Orlov’s writings at Club Orlov, his blogspace. If you do a little searching you can also find his writings at Life After the Oil Crash and the website Surviving Peak Oil.

October must be product review month, because my mailbox has been bursting with good things to try out. Nutty Steph’s Vermont Granola is one of them. Delicious granola, trail mix and chocolate covered granola “Magic Chunks” arrived at our house and lasted about a week and a half. (Ok, ok, the chocolate covered granola lasted about 24 hours…) My wife likes putting her granola in her yogurt, and found that Nutty Steph’s held up. She isn’t as “nutty” as I am though. I liked the large nuts mixed in to Steph’s products. The were nice and fresh, and well roasted – not soggy like in some other granola. The trail mix gave me a healthy energy boost this afternoon.  

Steph has a great website that makes ordering easy.  How the crew describes themselves: snow warrior, grease car driving, organic oat toting, chocolate making, polite gossiping, community building, rambunctious NUTTY workers.

I think that this would be a great product for gift shops, coffee houses, and co-ops.  Give Nutty Steph’s a try, and let them know we sent you!

Nutty, Oaty Goodness Straight to my door.

I was given a sample of Clorox’s new dishwashing soap about 1 month ago.  We’ve been using it to clean our pots and pans and as a liquid hand soap in our kitchen (why have two containers on the counter?).  The results have been, well how can I say this, the same as our old non-environmentally friendly soap*.  But isn’t that the point?  Having the same dishwashing ability – without drying out our hands – and eliminating many of the chemicals that pollute our waste water.  Good for clorox.  Now if we could just get rid of the other 99% of the harmful chemicals that the company produces.

Siel from GreenLAGirl did a very thorough review of the benefits of this product.  I was glad to see what was eliminated, and what natural ingredients they were able to replace them with.

Two dishpan-hands up for this Clorox Green Works Dishwashing Soap.

*for the record, we bought a huge industrial sized container of dish soap from BJ’s when we moved into our house.  That was 4 1/2 years ago!  This thing must be refilling itself as we use it.  I swear.  

As I approach the inaugural anniversary of my switch from primarily a motorist to primarily a cyclist, I thought it would be fun to run a series of posts on cycling. Actually Eric has already gotten us started. The increase of the price at the pump and the growing movement to shrink carbon emissions means more people like us are making the switch to cycling.  And I suspect there are plenty of you out there who just need a little shove to get you off of the fence. Come on, take the red pill. Riding a bicycle is a lot of fun.

There are a lot of excuses people give for not riding a bike. One of the most common is that bikes can’t haul stuff. Well that excuse doesn’t really hold water. Enter the Xtracycle.

The frame extension that makes the Xtracycle so useful, called ‘The Free Radical’ was developed by Ross Evans more than a decade ago. With help from friend Kipchoge Spencer, their company now provides Xtracycle Sport Utility Bikes (S.U.B.s), conversion kits and all sorts of fun add-ons that can help you create a biking system to carry just about anything.

If you’re looking for an inspiring way to spend 20 minutes type “Xtracycle” into Google’s image search and check out all the crazy stuff people are hauling around on these bikes. Here, I did it for you. Better yet, swing by the Xtracycle website and click on “The Essence of the Bike Lifestyle.” It’s a short video without any voice over sales pitch- just music and a series of pictures of all the cool stuff you can do with an Xtracycle. Or check out Liz McGregor’s short film about these bikes called, “Selling the Revolution.”

As with any bike you can spend a lot or a little. I bought the $400 conversion kit and turned my old mountain bike into an Xtracycle about a month ago. I can say from experience that it is awesome. The conversion extended the rear wheel of my bike back about 15 inches making it very stable and the bike still handles really well. Now I can haul lots of stuff I never imagined I could move with a bike. It will hold an adult passenger or a pair of children and still has room for several bags of groceries. Last weekend I strapped my oldest daughter’s car seat to the Xtracycle’s snap deck and rode 6 miles to the farmers market where I bought a big watermelon, 2 cantaloupes, and the rest of our veggies for the week. The trip home was no problem.

One of the unexpected benefits is all the great conversations that have risen out of riding such a unique bike. Often when I arrive on my Xtra people start commenting and asking questions. It seems to really inspire people or at very least arouse bike-related curiosity.

I think most of what this country needs to foster a change in transportation is a change in mindset. That is, we need to think differently about how we get around.  I’m not big on the idea that new stuff is really what we need to address peak oil and climate change. But I do highly recommend the Xtracycle as a way to make cycling possible for most people regardless of what they need to take with them. It will change your mind about what’s possible on a bicycle and it might help change the minds of other people as well.

More on the Xtracycle.

Until recently I hadn’t really given much thought to the factory production lines that are our soft drink companies. While I have been making plenty of changes to my eating habits to reflect local foods, I hadn’t really stopped to think about where the soft drink comes from that I’m swigging out of a plastic glass or bottle.

But then I got my hands on a Soda Club to try, and I realized how simple it is to make a soft drink. I realized I could make them at home myself and cut out those cola companies. Even better, it’s far cheaper to do it that way. It may sound strange to say this, but I think it may even qualify as a local food item. Sure the concentrate comes from somewhere else, but the water is local and I’m making it myself.

Anyway, the real deal on this is that making your own soft drinks allows you to stop supporting the big cola companies and their huge factories. No more driving around concentrates, cans and bottles in nasty, dirty trucks. No more aluminum cans or plastic bottles to throw away or recycle. With the Soda Club you use the same bottles over and over, so it’s even more efficient than recycling something, which does still take a tremendous amount of energy. Yes the concentrate bottle and the carbon dioxide have to be shipped to your house, but that is certainly much less energy than is required to ship all the drinks around, mostly moving water anyway.

But, how does it work? Well, it’s simple. You can see the video instructions on their website, and it really works like that You fill up the bottle, pressurize it, add the drink mix and enjoy. 30 seconds and you have a nice liter of soda to drink.

I have two chief complaints with the machine:

1.) It makes it wayyyy too easy to obtain that cola you want to mix with something when you want a little drink.

2.) Their drinks are labeled as having either sugar or corn syrup. For those of us who don’t want corn syrup this makes it very hard to obtain the appropriate concentrate so that we aren’t taking in corn syrup. (Although the Gizmodo review says that they no longer use HFCS)

If you’ve got a few bucks and you can’t kick that soda habit you should give the Soda Club a try. It’s a nice little machine, and who knows, maybe we can break the cola duopoly.

Soda Club has their own ideas on how this product is environmental. You can see them here.

Gizmodo has a product review as well. Click here for it.

Update: Soda Club contacted me to inform me that their mixes no longer contain any corn syrup.  They just haven’t gotten new packaging yet.  This is good news for anyone avoiding corn syrup in their diet.

You might remember the Vectrix scooter as the battery operated plug in scooter that was scheduled to go on sale here in America this past summer. (Click here for a story)

LA Cityzine has test driven one and they were nice enough to put the story on the web.

From the article:

Then came the fun part. I purposely accelerated hard, and the scooter shot off. That baby�s got juice! The acceleration was much faster than I expected, more like a motorcycle than a scooter. Let me tell you that my last motorcycle was a Kawasaki 1000 Ninja (top speed: 170 MPH), and I�m used to fast machines. While the Vectrix is no race bike, it has plenty of power.

I recently had a chance to install a Power Cost Monitor at my house to test it out and see what I thought, and I can say it’s an interesting device. It was an extremely valuable tool to help me determine what appliances in my house use the most energy and it helped me determine what to replace, develop strategies for reducing my consumption and made my family painfully aware at their every move what their use of an appliance was costing us.

The Power Cost Monitor comes in two pieces. One you install on the meter to read your usage. This information is then transmitted into the house in very near real time (less than 15 second lag I’d say) and displayed on a monitor in the house, which is the second piece of the tool. You can set it up to display the usage in dollars or kilowatts used. It measures how much your current usage compares to your usage over time and it will work with normal charging schemes as well as off peak/on peak as well as others. I found it to be relatively simple to install, although the provided band to attach to the meter wasn’t large eough. (I could have purchased a band at the hardware store but why do that when you can use duct tape? Exactly.) I also had some trouble matching up my meter with the examples in the book. Mostly because my meter did not look like any of the examples in the book, but I was able to get it installed and working, although I think not 100% right because the usage didn’t match up the electric company’s bill. It seemed that most of these issues were specific to me or my meter, not to a deficiency in the product, well, except for the band being too small to get around the meter. The most interesting part of the whole installation was contacting the utility company to get my cost per Kwh to input them into the unit. They were not exactly forthcoming with that information, but I did get it.

Reducing our energy usage is a constant battle in my household. Ever since we moved into this house we continually upgrade items to reduce our energy usage, but yet we still aren’t satisfied. We were at a cross roads though. We couldn’t figure out what items were using all this energy each month. The power company said there wasn’t a problem with the meter (as if I believe them) and we feel like we do most things right. We have power strips on our entertainment items. We shut off the computer when it’s not in use. We rarely use our air. Our range, though electric, is only 3 years old. We assumed all along that the big energy hogs were the fridge and the water heater.

The Power Cost Monitor helped illustrate how right, and wrong, we were. We are right that the electric water heater uses a ton of energy when it runs. In fact, it would spike the power meter to 4x the baseline level when it kicked on. The range would kick it up anywhere from 3 to 5 times the baseline level, depending on what was being used. Unfortunately our fridge died before the meter was installed, thus robbing us of our chance to test it’s usage, but given that it died from old age I’d say it was also a problem. Knowing this information made me really regret some choices we’ve made in the past. We could have installed a gas range when we bought the house but we didn’t want to install a gas line. Given the cost difference, and knowing now how much energy our electric range uses, it would have paid itself back in just a few months. Ditto with the water heater. We’ve replaced that, but didn’t understand how much more electric energy is needed to heat.

Lucky for us we were able to test out the Power Cost Monitor and figure these things out. We have the time to make adjustments to our house to take advantage of this knowledge now. We can put away some funds to install a solar water heater next spring to take advantage of the free heat from the sun and keep the water heater from working for 7 or 8 months a year. We’ll also work diligently to save up the money to replace our range with a gas unit and install the piping for it. (The pilot light heat from a gas oven also works well as a dehydrator to help preserve food for the winter).

So, the net affect of the Power Cost Monitor? It was certainly a valuable piece of equipment to help us fine tune our energy usage and target weak areas. If you are having issues getting your electrical usage down to an acceptable level try one of these and see if you can spot the trouble areas. A couple of tweaks to your energy usage and it will pay for itself.

I was given the opportunity to review the book “A Slice of Organic Life” edited by Sheherazade Goldsmith, et al. I first noticed the book while perusing the local Borders bookstore. The bright colors and beautiful photos throughout make this “green your lifestyle” book stand out amongst a slew of others that have recently hit the shelves.

From the publisher:

 Featuring over 90 self-contained projects, from growing your own food
organically, cooking home-grown produce, keeping selected livestock,
and leading a more sustainable lifestyle, this down-to-earth, yet
practical guide is the perfect start for someone looking to go “green.”
The team of experts offer options for city dwellers with little space,
for those living in the suburbs with a bit of land, and for those who
have acres of land and no ideas on how to use them. The book includes a
foreword by Alice Waters.

---

The first section, No Need For a Yard, gives readers with limited space 28 different tips on ways they can make small changes in their lives. From growing your own salad and making flavored oils and vinegar, to cleaning without harmful chemicals to choosing natural diapers, this section has included many concrete ways that people new to the movement to reduce one’s environmental impact can get started. Even for readers like myself that may consider themselves beyond the novice stage of change, there are great tips to continue down an ecologically friendly path.

Here are a few passages that I found to be personally enlightening:

Given the hardwood floors that cover 75% of my home, (pg. 90) Use natural cleaners and polishes, gives recipes for both hardwood cleaner, and natural wood floor polish. One can make their own cleaner using liquid soap, vinegar, and strong brewed herbal tea in a bucket of hot water. The polish is a mixture of turpentine, beeswax, and essential oils, that is sparingly applied and buffed to a shine.

There is also a great DIY section on (pg. 68) Using safer pest controls at home, which gives a host of ways to control insects from ants to mosquitos. There are step by step instructions for making your own flea collars, as well as homemade fly paper.

The second section expands on ideas for those who have a small yard or a terrace to work with. This section has plenty of ideas for starting a garden, planting fruit trees, and building a worm composter. A passage on eco-friendly building materials and the hazardous chemicals that lie in MDF and other “traditional” materials was introductory, but beneficial.

A project that I would definitely like to try is making milk paint, by mixing casein powder (a by-product of milk) and water, with natural pigment powder to create a safe and chemical free paint product. Seems like it would be a great choice for breathing new life into an old table or piece of furniture. (You can find this recipe on pg. 132.)

A section on growing your own tea plants, and steeping your own organic tea appealed to my wife and I, as we had planted lemon balm and chamomile seeds last year, and are reaping the benefits this year. This passage tells the appropriate time to harvest the tea, as well as the naturopathic uses of the brews (pg. 170).

The final section: Yard, Community Garden, or Field, goes into more time and energy intensive projects. Here there are passages on keeping chickens, geese, honeybees, or (for the more adventurous) pigs. The section on keeping chickens is thorough enough to cover determining which breeds to raise, raising chicks, and discussing the required hen house or chicken tractor. At a mere six pages though, I’d imagine that it would be best to use the included directory to find more information on the subject.

[as an aside, the directory provides a wealth of weblinks for more information on topics included in the book, as well as other titles to look for at your local library or bookstore]

Other passages cover making preserves, growing apple trees, and preserving fresh fruit to enjoy out of season. The section on storing apples and citrus fruits was informative. Wrapped in newspaper, and stored in a cool dry area, mid season apples will last for 4-5 weeks, and late season apples can be stored up to eight months. A great tip for those bushels of apples that make their way home from apple picking. Citrus fruits, for our southern latitude readers, can be stored in paper-lined boxes, covered with sand for up to two months.

Mixed in to the larger projects in this section are gems like “Making Freshly Churned Butter”, “Making a Simple Goat’s Cheese”, and “Growing Companion Plants” – a guide for attracting pollinators, and repelling unwanted pests and plant diseases.

As someone who is striving to reduce my environmental impact, I found the topics covered were diverse enough to give ideas to many well-informed readers, while being an excellent introduction to those just warming to the idea. The book is very easy on the eyes, with intermittent spreads of beautiful photos. It is the kind of book that anyone who likes Martha Stewart would love. Consider it this year as a holiday gift for your wife, mother, or special someone that is considering making changes in their lives for the better.

That said, I do have to critiques of the book, the first is the wide-ranging use of fonts in the book. Perhaps it is just me, but switching fonts each paragraph and page turn is a little distracting. I like things simple and straight forward, and given the smoothly designed layout of the pictures, using multiple fonts per page doesn’t seem to gel with the flow of the book. The second is the lack of a explanation of the amount of time and effort is required to take on flocks of chickens, geese, goats, and other farm animals. Yes there are brief mentions of the labor involved, but I feel that a more rigorous warning should have been given to those considering taking on the care of animals. To me the decision on whether to get a goat or two should not come lightly, after considering what to do with a glut of summer tomatoes. I imagine the author’s intent is not to belittle the decision, but to open readers minds to the idea of stepping outside of their normal bounds. This book doesn’t purport to be “Country Wisdom & Know-How – Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land” – my favorite A to Z desk reference, but aims to show:

 …that the joys of eating seasonally, growing your own food, keeping bees, making compost, or keeping chickens are real, that being more conscientious isn’t about giving up things. On the contrary, it’s about rediscovering the simple pleasures of life. Each of the chapters provides simple ideas and examples of how we can lessen our impact on the world and improve the quality of our lives. Some of the topics may seem insignificant, but it’s impossible to exagerate the value of acting together. We all need to ear, for instance, and so the tiniest change in the way we eat will have profound and wide-ranging implications.

Again this is a wonderful introductory book, with many great tips. It can be read straight through, but I found myself reading a few sections at night and falling asleep to dreams of fresh compote, safely clean floors, and a wonderful herb garden.