- Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s day, Americans throw away a million extra tons of garbage each week, including holiday wrapping and packaging.

- Robert Lilienfield, co-author of the book Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are, notes that if every family reused just 2 feet [0.6 meter] of holiday ribbon, the 38,000 miles of ribbon saved could tie a bow around the entire planet.

I work for Campus Life at Cornell as Student Sustainability Director, and one of the things I do for my job is send out weekly emails with sustainability tips to the staff. Here’s one of my recent ones:

TIPS:

1. Instead of giving more items to people, consider giving a more personal gift such as tickets to an event, a coupon for a free night/day of babysitting or gourmet meal, or donating to a charity in someone’s name:
   1. Oxfamamericaunwrapped.com invites donors to “buy,” for example, a sheep ($45), building tools ($25) or the planting of 50 trees ($30) as a way to support Oxfam’s programs in developing countries (the recipient gets a card with a photo, not an actual sheep).
   2. Go to http://www.treehugger.com/giftguide/ for a very extensive guide to the best affordable, low- environmental impact, and fun gifts.
2. Wrap presents in posters, decorated grocery-store bags or pages from glossy fashion magazines. Or put a small present in a beautiful scarf and make the wrapping part of the gift. If you love traditional wrapping paper, buy the recycled versions from sites like fishlipspaperdesigns.com and paporganics .com ($4.99 for two 24- by 36-inch sheets).
3. And if you do go to the mall, don’t forget to bring your own reusable bags! Keep some in the trunk of your car in case you forget (also handy for grocery shopping).

I recently went to the mall carrying my big canvas bag…I felt a little strange, especially since I think salespeople thought I would shoplift with my large bag. But it turned out to be really nice because I had lots of space for my Sigg bottle, and it felt good every time I told the cashier “No Thanks” to a bag.

Happy Holidays!

This article, compiled by blog writer Andrew C. Revkin, exemplifies this idea in regards to new green policy.

A couple of my favorite ideas by people include:

1. A science advisory board

   “President-elect Obama has much on his plate, but I would encourage him to establish a high-level Science Advisory Board and to make clear to those around him, including members of Congress, that science, not politics, would inform his decision-making in every appropriate area of concern. This nation can no longer afford either voodoo economics or voodoo science if we are to retain our leadership in the 21st century.”

2. A Green New Deal

   “I would ask President Obama to combine economic recovery and a new energy agenda (renewable energy, alternative transportation infrastructure, energy efficiency, smart grid and smart land use) into a Green New Deal. Several economists, for example 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, are talking about the need for a Keynesian type fiscal stimulus akin to F.D.R.’s New Deal. And others are talking about the need to make it green.”

What are your ideas on how the environment can play a more important political and economic role?

Other programs run by the Green Resource Hub volunteers include in-home gatherings to show energy efficiency in the home with power monitoring devices, and workshops on consumer education of what green goods are worth buying, and which can be made easily at home such as cleaning products.

I’m looking forward to seeing this calendar fill up with events. There are already many in Ithaca, and many more in the surrounding areas. The GRH also accepts suggestions of other events not listed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this calendar grows fast. Non-profit organizations such as this one are going to be increasingly popular as prices for consumer good increase while demand for alternative options soars also. There are so many programs, products, and people touting all things green, but without any guidance it is difficult for the general public to know which are simply scams and which are truly looking at a more sustainable future. I’m glad to see a resource hub which can help consumers find the answers they need towards living better.

The website for the Green Resource Hub is: http://www.greenresourcehub.org and a link to their calendar is available from there.

So Ithaca’s Cyclovia is a much smaller scale version of this. Each Saturday at 10:00am, bikers meet at DeWitt park downtown and as a group, they bike to the farmer’s market. This week I joined in among the small crowd for an easy going bike ride to the market. While it was a lot slower than my general pace (there were small children biking with us so we went slow), it was fun to take over one small piece of Ithaca and ride safely. I really hope that this group grows every week, and reaches a mass large enough that cars have to just drive slowly behind the bikers.

The problem with cars and bikes coexisting, is that in most places, there are not adequate bike paths. A real bike path needs to allow for bikers to move swiftly along a road, while not interfering with traffic, but still able to turn onto other roads when they need to. Ithaca doesn’t have bike paths that allow that though. This causes a problem because most people bike much slower than cars want to go. In the city, it is really pointless for a car to scoot past a bike, because it usually results in waiting at the next red light or stop sign anyway – but that is how it happens.

But lately with the price of gas rising, people are talking about other ways of getting around, and riding bicycles as a group to also support the farmer’s market will help push Ithaca towards a more sustainable lifestyle. So, please, join the group and bike to the farmer’s market next week!

ITHACA — Cornell University President David Skorton spoke Tuesday night to an audience of almost 70 community members about how the university he heads is trying to be a good neighbor — and a good steward of the planet.

In an Earth Day speech in Ithaca High School’s Kulp Auditorium to members of local service-based organizations such as the Kiwanis Club and Lions Club, Skorton outlined some of the university’s efforts to become a more sustainable and open institution.

“I want … to look at some of the broader challenges we face as a university and the impact they may have on the community,” he said. “The focus of our education is dependent on a bilateral partnership with the community.”

The event was coordinated by the Ithaca Rotary Club, a service-based organization of which Skorton is an honorary member.

Foremost in his speech was the creation of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, which will focus research and education on energy use, environmental problems, and economic development issues such as poverty alleviation. The school has allocated $10 million in seed money for the project.

Skorton said Cornell Dining supports local agriculture by purchasing 33 percent of its produce from local and regional sources, and the campus is working to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality with a 10-year plan to reduce campus energy use by 20 percent from its 2000 levels.

“Local food is very relevant to Earth Day to reduce transportation needs and by contributing to the Upstate economy,” he said.

In his address, he mentioned the university’s master plan that will promote sustainable campus development in areas such as transportation and construction, and spoke about the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s recent establishment of a program with five full-time positions dedicated to environmental education.

Cornell’s employment of almost 2,000 faculty members is also a boon to the local economy, Skorton said.

“Faculty members and their campus colleagues contribute significantly to the community,” he said. “They and their families buy houses and rent apartments … and their research can lead to the development of new businesses within our community.”

When the controversial Lake Source Cooling project came up, Skorton said Cornell was working with the community to alleviate concerns about a project that saves the university from significant extra energy costs and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

“We all recognize that Cayuga Lake is an essential asset to our community and region,” he said, noting that Cornell faculty members are working to develop a better system for monitoring the project’s effect on the lake.

Though he acknowledged that Cornell’s campus is energy intensive, in part because of the creation of a number of new science research labs, he characterized new building projects as an investment in the future and discussed the ways the school is seeking to limit usage and save energy.

“Energy conservation and achieving climate neutrality are also high priorities at Cornell,” Skorton said.

He said the short term energy costs to new research labs and an expanding campus will pay off in the future.

“We’re educating people who will develop technologies that will lead to greater energy efficiency,” he said. “We want to have a leadership in sustainability education.”

Skorton, called himself a “cheerleader” for the university.

During a question and answer session at the end of his talk, the president offered his business card to those whose questions he could not answer, and promised to make sure their requests were heard, offering to sit down and have coffee with one audience member.

Dale Flinn, president of the Ithaca Rotary Club, said Skorton’s willingness to be open to ideas is essential for the community to be able to work with the university.

“Finding the right person to talk to is the hardest part of working with Cornell,” Flinn said. “Finding those connections is key.”

CAROLINE — Foot soldiers in the fight for an energy independent community talked up bright ideas about saving energy and handed out reusable cloth bags stuffed with an efficient compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) to each of Caroline’s 1,400 households Saturday.

Approximately 90 volunteers from Cornell University, Ithaca College and the surrounding communities walked, biked, drove and even rode horses around Caroline, distributing the bulbs with a friendly message: help make the town a model for other rural communities seeking to control their energy costs.

“We’re trying to take energy independence into our own hands,” said Dominic Frongillo, a council member in the Town of Caroline, deputy supervisor, and a member of Energy Independent Caroline, the group behind the distribution. “This is our future.”

The project was funded by a $5,000 grant written with money from the Cornell Community Partnership Board, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and an anonymous local donor. The colorful cloth bags were made by Sew Green, an Ithaca-based sustainable sewing group.

Frongillo said he and the other residents are taking sustainability into their own hands because the federal government isn’t.

“Things are going so slow to address climate change,” Frongillo said. “I came back from the (United Nations) Climate Change Conference in Bali and realized it’s up to us. We’re the leaders we’re looking for.”

Collectively, Frongillo said the project could save residents $70,000 in energy bills and reduce carbon emissions by more than 800,000 pounds over the bulbs’ lifetimes. The town has already made strides to decrease its energy impact. In 2005 it became the second municipality in the state to purchase wind power for 100 percent of its electricity use.

The volunteers who handled the distribution Saturday set out with smiles as they went door-to-door to greet their neighbors, some who were tanning or working on a new front walk.

Megan O’Rourke, a Caroline resident and Cornell graduate student, said she remembered the neighborhood route from Halloween trick-or-treating, and enjoyed the chance to introduce herself to other residents

“I like to meet the neighbors, and share information about energy conservation with them,” she said.

Another volunteer, Anne Stork, a lecturer of biology at Ithaca College, said she thought the project was more about energy efficiency education than free light bulbs.

“Today’s really about awareness,” she said.

Although some residents had already installed CFLs, like Edward Prouty of Buffalo Road, most received the free bulb with surprise and interest, especially when they found out the CFLs use only about 25 percent of the electricity that normal incandescent bulbs suck up.

Prouty, a 73-year-old who hasn’t retired yet, said the spiral-shaped bulbs he’s installed have saved him money, even though they initially cost more to buy.

“They last a lot longer, so how are they more expensive?” he said. “I tell everyone. The only thing wrong with these things is we get infested with lady bugs, and these catch a lot of them.”

For some volunteers, the day was also a chance to show how to conserve energy in other ways. Her saddlebags filled with light bulbs, Caroline resident JoAnne Guarino and her daughter Cassie rode their two Palo Fino horses from house to house in an unusual statement about alternative transportation.

“Horses are energy efficient, they don’t use gas, and I think people need to start thinking about different ways to save energy and different modes of transportation, whether it’s taking your horse, your bike, or walking,” she said. Her steed whinnied appreciatively.

Ithaca College student Serena Weckel said she volunteered because she wants to change the notion that rural communities are backward.

“Sometimes I feel like they get left out,” she said. “They’re employing their own sustainable ways, and people just don’t know it.”

As the earth warms up, the human race must also speed up its alternative energy technologies to increase its efficiency, at least according to Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.

“The fact that the earth is warming up is not a matter of debate,” Chu told a crowd last night at the 2008 Hans Bethe lecture. The debate, according to Chu, is about whether or not the climate change is due to humans, which he believes research strongly suggests is true. Either way, temperature fluctuations are much more rapid than predicted and have far-reaching consequences.

Improved calculations show that in the first half of the century, California will lose about 26 percent of the snow packed in the Sierra.

“If you’re down by 25 percent for two or three years in a row, it’s a disaster. This is forever,”emphasized Chu.

Similar environmental scenarios are reflected around the world, which he believes merit increased public knowledge and attention.

A professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu holds “an astonishing corpus of work” of “extraordinary breadth,” according to Peter Lepage, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who introduced the Nobel laureate. Chu is very important in advising the nation and government on energy issues.

Chu described himself as a bureaucrat, which is “going pretty low,” he lamented, but he felt that if he could “encourage intellectual horsepower to work on energy, that would be a good thing.”

While advances in sustainable energy will require technological developments, it will take much more that just that to implement energy conservation practices, according to Chu.

“[Change] will require international cooperation. Free market forces aren’t going to do this,” Chu said. “What you really need is a combination of fiscal policies and regulations [which] has to be international and above all you need to put a price on carbon without any loopholes … It has to be a meaningful cost.”

Chu also outlined several energy conserving technologies that LBNL as well as other members of the scientific community are developing. One relatively simple solution LBNL is working on with United Technologies involves generating a “smart building” with amenities such as automatic shading to conserve and reuse energy in a coherent manner, similar to the way hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius work.

In order to make such buildings a reality, however, Chu emphasized the need for policies such as documents that tell homebuyers how energy-efficient a home is. Otherwise, he explained, landlords, homeowners and businesses will have little incentive to adopt these monetarily costly developments. Such regulations, however, are difficult to implement.

“Berkeley is very, very progressive, but even the mayor there is afraid there will be a riot [if such a policy is adopted],” said Chu.

Wind power, however, has been extremely successful and costs have decreased by an order of magnitude. Other renewable energy sources, including solar power, hydropower, geothermal and bio-mass, are another realm that has yet to be fully exploited.

“Currently renewable energy is about seven percent of our energy usage. It’s only a small sliver,” said Chu.

Other possible energy conserving technologies Chu mentioned included storing energy by compressing air into a cave, using polyethylene oxide and polystyrene in lithium-ion laptop batteries to decrease their decay and growing plants that can be converted into transportation fuel.

Feedstock grasses and switchgrass, which are easily grown, can potentially be converted into fuel, but efficiency is the key that is still lacking, since the lignin and cellulose of plants are designed to resist degradation, according to Chu. By sequencing the DNA of microbes within termites that break down cellulose, LBNL scientists hope to discover how to synthetically create an efficient process to produce fuel.

“I really appreciated the specific things about the research at LBNL, but I thought the lecture was broad, maybe too broad, not controversial enough, but … I listen to hundreds of lectures on this topic,” said Shawn Reeves, ’97.

The range of information covered during the lecture reflects Chu’s own breadth of knowledge.

“The lecture was very good. He packed a lot into it,” said Prof. Henry Tye, physics and chairperson of the Bethe Lecture Committee. “Choosing him was a no-brainer.”

Undergraduate and graduate Cornell students, professors and members of the community crowded the Schwartz Auditorium in Rockefeller Hall to hear Chu speak.

“I wanted to know what new developments there are for 2008. We’ve come a long way and I’m very impressed to see them,” said Sarah Iams grad.

While development is continual, Chu ended his talk by stressing that “the world can and will prevail over these challenges” and that aside from this world, “there is nowhere else to go.”

You can build a better light bulb – one that uses less electricity and saves money – but how do you get people to use it?

Environmentalists from Cornell University, Ithaca and the nearby town of Caroline are betting that if you deliver a free compact fluorescent bulb to each person’s door, tucked into a reusable fabric bag, people will see the light.

On April 19, a team of more than 100 volunteers on bikes, on foot and in cars plan to deliver the bulbs to all 1,400 households in the town of Caroline, a sprawling, rural community in Tompkins County.

<!– if (parseFloat(navigator.appVersion) == 0) { document.write(”); } –>”We’re trying to show how a small, rural town can take matters into our own hands and say: This is up to us. Our international leaders and national leaders are not moving fast enough to protect our future,” said Dominic Frongillo, a Caroline town board member.

A Cornell junior from Pompey, Shawn Lindabury, wrote a grant that helped fund the project, which is aimed at increasing awareness about how people can live greener lives.

“A lot of people aren’t aware of the benefits of these bulbs,” Lindabury said. “We’re saying, hey, you can save $55 over the course of the lifetime of the light bulb and help reduce energy use in Caroline.”

The town of Caroline has about 55 people per square mile – the city of Syracuse has 10 times more per mile – but it has plenty of people interested in conservation. They started Energy Independent Caroline, an advisory group to the town that raised money so the town government could pay extra to buy electricity generated by wind power. It also has the lofty goal of getting the town to produce its own energy rather than buy it from utility companies.

“We have at least eight households that have renewable energy and at least a couple live completely off the grid,” said Frongillo, a member of Energy Independent Caroline who was also a youth delegate to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in December.

Teaming up on this environmental experiment is SewGreen, a group based in Ithaca that promotes sewing as a part of sustainability. It is recruiting people to make the 1,400 bags needed for the project.

At first, the bags were an afterthought – a way to deliver bulbs without using disposable plastic bags, but making the bags has turned into a community activity with a life of its own.

“People are putting so much effort into it,” said Wendy Skinner, coordinator of SewGreen. “The bags are beautiful and they’re all different. People chose fun fabrics with plaids, stripes and colors.”

About 600 bags have been made so far. A two-day sew-in held in mid-March attracted 20 people who turned out 180 bags. Another sew-in is scheduled for Saturday.

“It was like a big party,” Skinner said. “Several people said how unusual it was to sew in a group since sewing is thought to be a contemplative, individual activity.”