07/29/13

Eco-Interview: Nick Conrad, The Green Suite

When was your organization founded? Please tell us a bit about its mission, goals…

I founded The Green Suite in 2012. At the Green Suite, our mission is to save the planet, one home at a time by offering affordable classes and DIY kits that promote a green lifestyle.

What is your educational background and what lead to creating this organization?

I have degrees in Theater and Marketing. I’ve always had a knack for building and design as well as a passion for the environment. I founded The Green Suite shortly after I completed work on my own solar power system and a hydroponic windowfarm. I learned most of what I needed to know from a few books, several YouTube videos, and lots of trial and error. I quickly realized there was an opportunity to run a business teaching others what I had learned. Within a few months I expanded the scope of my classes to include DIY Solar Energy, Hydroponic Windowfarming, as well as Zombie Survival Training. I also offer several products in my store, all of which are made from recycled materials.

What are some challenges you have faced and how did you deal with them?

Promotion and exposure have always been a challenge. With a new business it’s always hard at first but the first few months were brutal. I planned several classes but it was almost impossible to get people to register. I exchanged e-mails with several people interested but that was it. I decided I needed to cast a wider net. I tried several methods with limited results but what turned everything around was listing my classes on Dabble. Dabble.co is a great site that offers one-time classes at affordable prices. As soon as I signed up, my classes started selling and I starting getting tons of exposure. Dabble is also great because they make it easy for people to leave reviews about you and your classes.

What can people do to help? Donate, and contribute to your cause? Other ideas?

Spread the word and connect with me online. People in the Chicago area can join any of my Dabble classes, check my profile for the next session. For those not in Chicago stay tuned to The Green Suite Store for my digital classes that will be available soon.

How do you reach your targeted audience? Is it through your website, advertising or social media or another route? Which is most effective and why?

Almost all of my successful marketing has been via social media. Mostly through Twitter because there are so many awesome tools to help build an audience. Also Dabble was a perfect fit for my business because our demographics were exactly the same and they do a great job promoting classes on their site.

How do you keep the audience engaged over time?

If you want to keep an audience engaged you have to keep cranking out good content. I try to post as often as I can and maintain good quality. For me that’s usually between 3 and 5 posts a week.

Tell us about your events around the world and some of the campaigns you have started.

I was featured in a recent Chicago Sun-Times article about my Zombie Survival Classes in Chicago.

What is in the works for the future? What haven’t you yet tackled, but will want to do soon?

I have some big plans for 2013 one of which being my digital classes. They will be a downloadable version of all of my classes. They will come with a PDF outlining each session and a video.

To contact Nick Conrad and learn more about The Green Suite, click and follow:

Website: www.greenyoursuite.com

Facebook: http://on.fb.me/129BQXV

Twitter: @thegreensuite

Tumblr: http://thegreensuite.tumblr.com

Sun-Times Article: http://bit.ly/12g9fOj

04/27/13

The Benefits of Organic Lawn Fertilizers

Guest post by Philip Brown

Now-a-days, it is totally possible to care for your beautiful lawn organically. Organic lawn care is the practice of caring for your lawn and garden by using organic fertilizers. This becomes what is known as ‘sustainable’ lawn care. With environmental concerns for children, pets, and wildlife when trying to get rid of pests and weeds, there are beneficial ways to care for your lawn with organic lawn fertilizers. There are a few methods that one can try to maintain their lawn that are great for the environment:

Compost or compost tea:
Reduces the need for chemical fertilization and encourages healthy soil that allows turf to resist lawn pests.
Lawn aeration:
Helps in getting oxygen into the soil as soil gets depleted of nutrients and organic matter. It also helps reduce thatch and lessen soil compaction.
Rechargeable electric mulching mower:
Reduces the need for fertilization. It is quiet and inexpensive and environmentally friendly. The mulch and compost can be used together and raked over the aerated lawn, which invigorates the turf and strengthens and rebuilds weakened structures.
Corn gluten meal:
Beneficial in controlling stinkweed, black medick and shepherd’s purse. This is relatively new in organic lawn care.
Nematodes:
These are microscopic parasites that destroy insect pests, which you can spray on the lawn to control the crane fly, June beetle or Japanese beetle.

Source: www.geograph.org.uk

There are many other organic fertilizers on the market that benefit lawn maintenance. Whether it is a small piece of personal land or a company or tourist attraction with lots of land to display and care for, caring for the lawn and maintaining it in ways that are beneficial to the environment and cost effective is great.

There are so many ways to care for one’s lawn. Just following these methods is a great and easy way to start caring for your lawn in an environmentally healthy way. Simple things, such as aeration and building compost, to use as organic fertilizer are the first steps. Having a rechargeable electric mulching mower to add grass clippings to the compost makes caring for the lawn and fertilizing it that much easier. Adding in things, like the corn gluten meal, to control weeds and nemotodes, as a natural insect control are also beneficial and eco-friendly. There are many advantages to organically taking care of your lawn, no matter what method you use.

Amgrow Organix Organic Fertilizer – photo by Doug Beckers

About the Author: Philip Brown is a lover of green, healthy lawns. A former lawn care services professional, Philip now spends his time sharing what he knows with others and blogging about it at The Lawn Enthusiast.

04/2/13

Climate Summer – Bicycling for the Better Future Project

This is a guest post by Rebecca Newman, who is a freshman at Ithaca College studying Environmental Sciences.

I will be biking through New England for the Better Future Project.

Climate Summer 2013 Dates: June 7th – August 16th, 2013

The Better Future Project is an organization that promotes communities to move beyond using fossil fuels. Climate Summer is a program through the Better Future Project where young adults ride exclusively by bicycle to various towns in New England.

In these towns we will try to make changes towards a cleaner world by educating and organizing events in each community. As a rider this summer I am very excited to have this unique opportunity to help people make more sustainable choices. For a long time I have been interested in the environment and specifically making the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Would you be willing to donate to this cause? Your donation helps fund the movement this summer and helps people to make more sustainable choices. You can follow our progress this summer by going to climatesummer.net

Also if you have any questions about the trip you can email me at rnewman1@ithaca.edu

To donate by check, you can make the check out to:

Better Future Project/OSI (please put Rebecca Newman in the notation section on the check!), and mail it to:

Open Space Institute/Better Future Project Citizen Action Program
c/o Nekenasoa Randresihaja
1350 Broadway, Suite 201
New York, NY 10018

To donate by credit card you can go to Climate Summer (please use Rebecca Newman for the “in honor of.”)

12/30/12

New Year's Thoughts: Can We Avoid the Environmental Cliff in 2013?

As I write this, Democrats and Republicans are attempting to hammer out a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. But as I look back on the environmental news of 2012, it seems to me that we are also heading for an environmental cliff.

At the start of 2012, I wouldn’t have believed that I would be in my kitchen offering coffee to a FEMA employee as a result of damage to our house due to Hurricane Sandy, not to mention discussing our situation with a flood insurance agent who had helped Hurricane Katrina victims. (Learning that put our problems in perspective.) We are still cleaning up and I will be surrounded by cardboard boxes and the smell of toxic floodwater for a long time to come. I’m sure Susan also wasn’t expecting to spend eight days in the dark with no power or heat.

Hurricane Sandy has at least brought the topic of global warming up again for public discussion. Remember when Mitt Romney joked at the Republican convention about the rising ocean? Turns out it wasn’t such a funny joke.

Meterologists may argue about whether Sandy was caused by global warming, but many scientists believe that global warming turned what might have been a really bad storm into a “super storm.” Yet there can be no argument that the melting of the arctic ice caps is due to global warming: The ice caps are melting at an unprecedented speed. So what? you say. The polar ice caps have melted faster in the last 20 years than in the past 10,000 years. When this ice melts, global sea levels rise; meltwater pools absorb heat from the sun that white ice would have reflected back into space. This accelerates climate change even more.

2012 was also notable for being a dustbowl year. The US experienced the worst drought in fifty years with 80 percent of arable and pasture land affected by the highest temperatures ever recorded.

Fifty years ago Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which began the environmental movement. Now this movement seems tired, as if nothing will rouse it, even the prospects of floods, droughts, melting ice caps, and hurricanes, not to mention disappearing animal species, and other environmental disasters.

Perhaps before the New Year begins, we need a reminder of why we need to make the environment a priority. Here’s a BBC One video a Frogs Are Green friend sent us. We all need to get re-inspired to help save our beautiful world:

Some of information/ideas in this post came from The Independent (UK) article: Review of the Environment 2012: In the Eye of the Storm

09/9/12

Presidential Campaign 2012: Where Do Romney and Obama Stand on Environmental Issues

Like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter saga, climate change has been the issue “that shall not be named”– mostly a political no-show in the presidential campaign.—Christian Science Monitor, September 7, 2012

At Frogs Are Green, we’ve been following the presidential campaign and trying to get a handle on where candidates Governor Romney and President Obama stand on climate change and other environmental issues. Unfortunately, these issues have become a political “third rail,” as Andrew Winston of the Harvard Business Review wrote in a recent Bloomberg.com post.

Over the years protecting the environment seems to have acquired the reputation as being “lefty” and anti-business, which is odd to those of us who there at the very beginning of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It used to be a bi-partisan issue.

When Susan and I were growing up near New York City in the 1960s, a layer of smelly yellowish-brown smog hung over the city. The Hudson River was full of raw sewage and toxic contamination. But because of public outrage from both sides of the political fence, the smog is gone and people catch fish in the river. And, yes, it involved regulations on businesses that were firmly enforced by William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the EPA—a Republican.

: courtesy of timeoutkids.com

These days there seems to be a widespread feeling that because the economy is doing so poorly, we can’t talk about the environment—we have more important things to worry about. That is a shortsighted approach. As Winston argues in the Bloomberg.com post:

[T}ackling climate change is the smartest thing we can do for both our public health and our private sector. Reducing carbon emissions from our power plants, cars, and factories cleans the air and saves a lot of money. At the macro level, the burning of coal alone costs the U.S. about $350 billion per year in health (asthma, heart attacks, and so on) and pollution costs. At the micro level, from companies down to households, the opportunities to get lean and save money are vast.

While the U.S. remains wishy-washy about dealing with climate change, according to Winston, Germany is quickly moving its electric grid to renewables and China is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to energy efficiency and much more to the clean economy in general.

I watched Mitt Romney make a joke about climate change in his speech at the Republican convention. He got a standing ovation. Personally, I found that extremely depressing. I also watched President Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention, and while he at least mentioned climate change, tackling the environmental issues certainly wasn’t a major part of his agenda.

At Frogs Are Green, we don’t think the problems associated with climate change are a partisan issue: they affect all of us and future generations on earth.

It’s not a joke.

04/17/12

Earth Day 2012: Plant a Tree!

This Earth Day, our theme is simple: Plant a tree. We were inspired by a recent op-ed by Jim Robbins in the New York Times: “Why Trees Matter. “And we were also inspired by the beauty of the springtime trees around us.

In the NY Times piece, Robbins explains how trees are at the forefront of climate change. Hot, drier weather is stressing, and often killing, trees worldwide. The examples he cites include some of North America’s most ancient trees, the alpine bristlecone forests, which are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. Prolonged droughts have killed more than five million urban shade trees last year. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

And yet, trees perform essential functions that we don’t always appreciate. Here are a few Robbins highlights:

Through photosynthesis, trees turn sunlight into food for insects, wildlife, and people (apple or pear anyone?), as well as create wood for fuel, furniture, and homes. Trees contribute to our emotional well being by providing beauty in our surroundings and much needed shade.
When tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to successfully bring back depleted fish and oyster stocks.
Trees release beneficial chemicals that seems to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. Aspirin’s active ingredient, for example, comes from willows.
Trees are the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays.

Plant a Tree

I live in one of the most densely populated cities in the U.S. Some years ago, I planted a small tree (about a foot high, purchased from a nursery) in our backyard with my sons. The tree is now about 20 feet high and we enjoy watching the leaves change each fall and the birds hanging out on the branches.

No matter where you live, you can plant a tree.

Even if you live in an apartment and don’t have a back yard, you might be able to find a tree-planting initiative in your city. New York City, for example, has an initiative called MillionTreesNYC, in which volunteers plant trees or adopt trees and care for them after they’re planted.

View of Empire State Building, at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken. Photo by Mary Jo Rhodes.

And, of course, our amphibian friends need trees, especially those arboreal frogs in the Hylidae family, many of which live in tropical and temperate forests.

For more information (including information about where to buy tree seedlings), see the Arbor Day Foundation.

Happy Earth Day!

Frogs Are Green

Environmental Organization Helping to Bring Awareness About Frog Decline Around The World

Category Archives: Environmental Health