Guests:

Nett Hart talks with us from Webster Farm Organic - Salad Days a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm.  Community Supported Agriculture is a way for the public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce.  By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become "members" (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA.   Nett talks to us about the benefits of CSA farming as well as organic farming.  Did you know that locally produced heirloom varietys of vegetables offer you more nutrition than conventional supermarket brands?  CSA's are not only great for our health, they also benefit the environment by supporting more sustainable agricultural practices.  Sign up for a CSA today!  It is fun to get a new basket of food each week knowing it was locally produced.

Master photographer, Sebastian Copeland, issues a global call for decisive measures to counteract global warming in his latest book Antarctica: A Call to Action, the sequel to his bestselling Antarctica: The Global Warning. Copeland’s awe-inspiring images of the frozen continent capture the beauty of the glaciers, biodiversity, and wild wide seas of the Drake Passage.  Not only is this book filled with spectacular photography, it also contains great steps that you (yes YOU) can make in your life to have less of an impact.  The are that Sebastian has visited will not be around very much longer unless we change our behavior.  Save the penguins!  Antarctica is actually more diverse than the Galapagos Islands and its ecosystem is on the brink of failure.  Enjoy the pictures and follow the steps in Sebastian's book!

Tips and Info:

Google Earth Plugin Maps Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Google Earth is always being used to newer, cooler purposes – you can explore underwater, learning about deforestation and even check out your friends homes.  Now some folks at Purdue have mapped the United States' carbon emissions, which you can see using the Google Earth browser plugin:

The high-resolution map, available HERE, shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons in residential and commercial areas by state, county or per capita.

Light Green Tip #1193

Get re-acquainted with your library. Your library card gives you free access to books, movies, and music - plus borrowing keeps paper and plastic out of production.

More than 3.1 billion books are purchased in the United States each year, and most are made using nonrecycled paper and petroleum-based inks.

I searched the Minneapolis library and found that you can get the Seinfeld season DVD's, Dave Matthews CD's, hundreds of magazine subscriptions and they even have a few hundred thousand books...

Dark Green Tip #981

If your printer's ink cartridge runs dry near the end of an important print job, remove the cartridge and run a hair dryer on it for two to three minutes. Then place the cartridge back into the printer and try again while it is still warm.

The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge.  When the cartridge is almost dead, the nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to flow will let more ink out of the nozzles.  The hair dryer trick can squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge after the printer declares it is empty.