Planet Green -- Greensburg

I've had Planet Green on quite a bit this summer. Formerly the Discovery Home channel, it went to almost total green-themed programming at the beginning of June this year. My favorite show so far is Greensburg, a documentary about the town in Kansas wiped out by a tornado, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the aftermath of the storm, this little town decides to rebuild to the highest green standards.

This is reality programing that is actually real! There are no exotic sets or challenges other than what the tornado wrought. It is fascinating to watch the community pull together. Key players include the city manager, the mayor, high school students, families and business people who step into the camera's eye and tell their stories in front of a background of utter devastation.

A citizens' committee attends a huge green building and construction expo in Chicago. Three of the high school students are chosen to attend as well, and we get to see their wide eyes and growing enthusiasm as they learn about green building advantages and costs. One young man , Taylor Schmidt, lost his grandfather in the tornado's destruction. His narration is particularly arresting, as he expresses his love for the town and its history. Before the tornado, he could not wait to leave the little town. But as he becomes involved in the political process of incorporating green standards into rebuilding the town, his vision for the future changes dramatically, He wants to stay in Greensburg to eventually raise a family of his own. He gets that the green movement is going to make a world of difference in the quality of his generation's life span.

The show airs a new episode every Sunday night. In Episode four, the town prepared for its first Christmas season after the tornado. Episode five is next, and you can undoubtedly catch up with the series as Planet Green repeats programming a lot. Extra webisodes are available online.

If you haven't checked out Planet Green (Channel 156 in the local Warner Cable scheme of things here in Akron). Greensburg is the place to start. Some enviro-bloggers are heavily down on Planet Green. Check out Crunchy Chicken's post and especially all the comments that follow. Lots of those folks are way ahead in terms of greening their lives, living without plastic bags, shampoo, and television and a whole host of other toxic commodities that infest our world. I'm glad for them, but not nearly as far along on the path.

I look to people like No Impact Man, Beth of Fake Plastic Fish and the guy keeping his garbage in his basement for a whole year to see how much he consumes -- and of course Crunchy Chicken whose every post is a manifesto to try yet another way to reduce, reuse and recycle complete with practical instructions included -- as inspiration. The things they learn on their green quests are invaluable and some of their practices are things I can attempt, but probably not all at once!

Here in the "heart of it all" Ohio, most folks are still mindlessly stuck in old habits. This is how slowly we progress: when I started the Village Green blog, I wrote to the local food market chain, Acme, to see if they would either make their plastic bags blue so they could be used to put recyclables out for the city trash collection or at least provide a place where customers could return the bags for recycling. Researching plastic bags lead me to pictures of dead animals who choked on plastic bags and to sites that promoted using cloth bags for shopping. I began to change a habit, training myself to take cloth bags every time I shop, which lead to all kinds of interesting experiences at the grocery store where clerks looked at me as if I were from another planet.

Three years later and now Acme not only provides a collection bin for recycling plastic bags, they also sell reusable cloth bags to encourage customers to bring their own bags. Progress, you might think, but just stand in line and note how many people are using cloth bags. The only one I ever see using them is me! At least the clerks are no longer astonished by my acts of plastic bag refusal. Giant Eagle and Buehlers also now sell cloth shopping bags. Now if they only gave a discount like Mustard Seed does -- five cents for every reusable shopping bag you bring to checkout -- we might start to change more habits.

The point I'm getting to is this -- Planet Green is a means to reach the unenlightened television viewing masses who were all brought up to seek out convenience regardless of environmental impact. They don't have a clue that we are choking on the fumes of convenience. Planet Green, while not a perfectly pure vision, has some information that is useful and that is presented in entertaining forms. This is a good thing!

I will be reviewing more Planet Green shows as the summer goes on. Stay tuned!

Looking for Spring

No school today. Our building didn't have heat. What rotten luck -- another rehearsal vanishes from the diminishing schedule.




Rather than stress about it, I decided to head off into the cold sunshine -- with faithful Oberon the huskador retriever at my side -- to see if I could find some signs of spring.

When I was a kid, I had my own spring ritual. There would come a day in March when the snows were receding and the sky looked blue enough with sun poking through NE Ohio clouds, that lured me out in search of harbingers. I had my own secret place, in the wilds of Granger township that I visited every year, a wooded dell beside Granger lake beyond the cow pasture with no houses in sight. There I looked for trillium, bloodroot, and jack in the pulpit.

That old cow pasture is now full of McMansions, while the lake is surrounded by condominiums, and I doubt my favorite wild flowers reside there these days. But the sky above Akron had that look today, so we went for a long walk along the west shoreline of Summit Lake. Above you can see the waterfowl skirting the ice, our one resident blue heron is a long-necked speck in the upper right corner. Our first sign of spring!

Last year's vegetation, like an old grass skirt, edged the lake, providing a camouflage for ugliness on view once we got to the shoreline itself. There the hideous sights revealed themselves -- plastics on parade:














All manner of plastic refuse bobbed against the shore: plastic cups, packaging, food containers, and bags proudly displaying their various brands of consumables from diapers to cheap white bread.
















I duly photographed as many items as I could before my hands grew numb with the cold. No bit of shoreline was left unmarked by human consumerism. We found a traffic cone, a plastic garbage bin, milk jugs, a tricycle, and various tires:

It was all too depressing. We had to watch our step along the grassy edge of the lake, as many people walk their dogs there, but don't bother to pick up the poop and dispose of it properly. What would it take to have a couple of Doggie Dooleys installed along the lake, I wondered to myself? And maybe even some public trash cans would help motivate the humans who visit here to dispose of their trash in places other than the lake.

Upon arrival home, I looked about for some more positive signs of spring. Brushing aside a winter coat of dried leaves, I found the following green bits working their way toward spring.

March 21st cannot get here fast enough for me!

Ireland taxes plastic shopping bags -- when will we?

The Irish, in a matter of five years, have rid themselves of the plastic shopping bag habit, according to a NYT story:

"In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog."

In Akron, it is socially uncomfortable and often times weird to ask your supermarket bagger to use customer provided cloth bags. Only yesterday, at the Giant Eagle on Waterloo Rd, this shopper handed over two cloth bags to the clerk before emptying my cart of purchases, telling her that I brought my own shopping bags. The clerk's attention was all on the handsome young bagger, who was relating a long involved story to her. Once my cart was empty, I turned -- only to see that the bagger was loading my goods into plastic bags while my own cloth bags lay there in front of him, all empty from neglect.

"Hey, I don't want plastic bags -- I asked you to use my own cloth bags!" I said, and then -- I really couldn't help myself -- my teacher voice came out in full force: "Perhaps if you hadn't been talking so much you would have heard my request."

The clerk looked guilty and the bagger looked pissed, but he emptied the plastic bags and packed my cloth ones, while I calmly commented that plastic bags were harmful to the environment.

I want Akron to be a plastic bag free zone. Join with me and write your local council person. Maybe we should go for Summit County instead as most of the major shopping districts lie outside of the city limits. What do you think?