Community Supported Agriculture is good. Literally. The Butler Bros joined a CSA, The Johnson’s Backyard Garden, to fuel our largely plant based diet. Much tastiness is being served in our offices thanks to the Johnson’s and all the members of our new CSA. Feels great to be investing locally and reaping the rewards. Considering that, on average, food travels 1200 miles before reaching our plates. CSA’s provide solutions for much more than hunger pains. Sample the abundance for yourself.
Q – How will the Congressional bailout positively impact me?
A – That depends on how you get to work Mr. Middle Class Small Business Owner.
Q – Well I ride my bike. I actually sold my car. So again what’s in the bailout for ME?
A - There’s this one thing I think you’ll like, you energy bar eating, bike riding hippie…hold on…(turning pages SFX)…Here it is. We call it Sec 211, “The transportation fringe benefit to bicycle commuters” and it goes a little something like this:
(i) QUALIFIED BICYCLE COMMUTING REIMBURSEMENT- The term `qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement means, with respect to any calendar year, any employer reimbursement during the 15-month period beginning with the first day of such calendar year for reasonable expenses incurred by the employee during such calendar year for the purchase of a bicycle and bicycle improvements, repair, and storage, if such bicycle is regularly used for travel between the employee’s residence and place of employment.
(ii) APPLICABLE ANNUAL LIMITATION- The term `applicable annual limitation means, with respect to any employee for any calendar year, the product of $20 multiplied by the number of qualified bicycle commuting months during such year.
(iii) QUALIFIED BICYCLE COMMUTING MONTH- The term `qualified bicycle commuting month means, with respect to any employee, any month during which such employee’
(I) regularly uses the bicycle for a substantial portion of the travel between the employee’s residence and place of employment, and
The Trail Foundation identity and theme which Butler Bros created look great on the foundation’s new site which launched today. Here’s a screen cap of the home page. Become a part of supporting what sustains your sanity and join The Trail Foundation today!
From vacant lots to market groceries, restaurants, and dinner tables, a movement is growing. Literally. And it’s turning squares of land in cities like New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago into organic fruits and vegetables. Boosted by city programs, planning and funding, joined with the ingenuity of ambitious farmers who want to figure out how to put these plots of land to a better use than the trash-riddled dumping grounds they have become, urban farming has boomed, and completely shifted the way citizens view vacant lots in their bustling cities … and what they can do with them.
Though such programs have taken nearly ten to fifteen years to really get off the ground, or into the ground, rather; the success with urban farming is finally garnering international recognition in cities like New York, where it is rustling up some attention from the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development. Urban farming is considered the future of sustainability, in a way. But it’s the variation in the type of farmers that makes this movement truly inspiring. Sometimes they are farmers from Jamaica. Sometimes they are high school students creating a program within their education’s boundaries. Other times, they are a group of families who grow the herbs they miss since moving to the States. It can grow out of an idea among neighbors and then burst into something in need of a full farmer’s market to handle all the goods available.
All you really need is a green thumb. And a patch of land.
Interested? Here’s a book to get you started.
Photo: Getty Images
Austin’s evolved grocer Whole Foods Market just announced the elimination of single-use plastic bags in all of its 270 stores in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Their goal is to be bag-free by Earth Day this year. That’s April 22, just under a hundred days from now.
The chain is going cold-turkey, quitting the ever-prevalent, never-recyclable plastic bag because “they don’t break down in our landfills, can harm nature by clogging waterways and endangering wildlife, and litter our roadsides, ” according to co-president and COO, A.C. Gallo. “We estimate we will keep 100 million new plastic grocery bags out of our environment between Earth Day and the end of this year alone.” Oh my. That’s a boat-load of bags.
The store will decrease plastic bag inventory, increase sales/distribution of reusable bags, while offering up to a ten-cent-refund to shoppers who bring their own bag or go without.
Baby steps by monster chains…somebody’s gotta start the ripple…
Austin, in recent years, has been working to try to counter its carbon footprint by utilizing alternative forms of energy, implementing successful car shares in town, and even trying to get rid of plastic bags in all grocery stores. The list goes on. There are initiatives everywhere to help put this city on the map as a leader in the green, sustainability movement.
Austin officials grinned ear to ear while announcing our city’s first (and only the nation’s eighteenth) hybrid plug-in school bus, to begin taking kids to and from school this year. Designed by IC Corporation, the state-of-the-art bus will get approximately twelve miles to the gallon (that’s double what the diesel bad boys get these days) which will help decrease emissions, while increasing fuel efficiency.
And it’s such a cool bus, too. When the bus driver brakes, stored energy that would normally be lost will be converted into electric power that recharges the lead-acid batteries. In addition, as a “plug-in,” the vehicle charges its batteries with standard electric power while not in use. Not only that, but every child who rides this bus will gain an important lesson that saving natural resources is very important, and every single action during the day can be examined for its effect on the environment. Including their ride to school.
Wow. I didn’t even know what the “grid” was before I attended Wednesday’s CleanTx Forum on electric vehicles, and I even consider myself somewhat of a tree-hugging environmentalist. (Who knew?) The grid, as I learned, is the term used to define the entire power grid, into which all electric automobiles can be plugged and charged, consisting of generators, transmission lines, transformers, and customer loads of energy (ie. on-board battery).
The beauty of this grid is that not only can it provide your electric vehicle energy at peak charging times, but when your vehicle is cold chilling, in a parking lot, plugged into the grid, the energy from your vehicle can be used to put viable energy back into the cycle. Clean technology is amazing. And so up-and-coming.
But, what I really learned yesterday, among finger foods and the kind of engineer-types who look like batty old college professors, was that there is still just so much to learn about the electric vehicle. Clean technology is this abyss of opportunity and possibility, with loads of acronyms (I’ll go over those later), and ways in which the energy can be generated, stored, or sent back into the grid. It really felt as if the presenters, though knowledgeable and well-learned in their areas of expertise, had no choice but to allow leeway for the evolution of technology to change the whole game-plan, nearly every week.
Speaking of the evolution of clean technology, check out our previous blog about EEStor’s technological advancement utilizing ultracapacitors, which would need about 10 minutes to charge enough for 500 miles of travel. (All above vehicles rely on 4-5 hours of charge for approximately 30-100 miles). I asked the symposium about EEStor’s patent. Their unanimous answer: We’ll believe it when we see it. (Even caught a spitty, aggressive earful from an Austin Energy worker about how such technology “just isn’t possible. It can’t be possible.” Wow. I wonder how EEStor landed a patent for the impossible?)
Breaking the Code:
EV: Electric Vehicle (Der.); PHEV: Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (such as the white Prius above); RE-EV: Range-Extended Electric Vehicles; FCV: Fuel Cell Vehicles.
City Council Member Lee Leffingwell of Austin is attempting to ban plastic bag distribution at large stores to help reduce the environmental hazards these non-biodegradable, light as a feather grocery bags cause. Leffingwell estimates 1,400 TONS of plastic bags end up in the Austin landfill each year causing build up and blockage of waterways. 4 out of every 5 bags taken from the grocery store is plastic and since these small things never go away, they become a big problem. Cutting down our forests is an alternative but not really a better solution either. Some local grocery stores are enticing customers to reuse bags with small money compensation. Both Whole Foods and Wheatsville Coop give customers 5 cents for every bag they bring in to reuse. Both of these stores as well as Randalls also sell reusable canvas shopping bags similar to the one shown above.
Marty and I have talked quite a bit about how biking to work is the silver bullet solution for so many of the “problems” facing our country today. Here is a list of things a simple cycle to work checks off:
1. reducing your carbon footprint
2. reducing our dependence on foreign oil
3. reducing traffic congestion
4. reducing the need for a bypass later in life
Marty believes full time bicycle commuters should receive massive tax breaks. I wouldn’t disagree with that based on my proclivity to pedal places. Instead of waiting for the government to catch up with our big ideas we’ve decided to act locally, very locally. Hence forth every time one our own bikes to work they will also count a five dollar contribution from us into their IRA. Helmets are mandatory, spandex is optional.
