Living green is the new fashion, and anyone who’s anyone is doing it. It’s the little black dress and the semiformal sport jacket: a must-have for every wardrobe. There are organic beauty supplies, chemical-free cleaners, hormone-free dairy products and energy saving light bulbs readily available in a market near you. Even gas and car companies have caved in to the green revolution: Chevron is putting out large funds to advertise its multiple new clean energy sources, and you can play its Energyville game at willyoujoinus.com, where you must power a large city while being environmentally sound. The game isn’t going to win any awards in the fun category, but it gives you a good idea about what available energy resources can provide. Another example is GM’s Chevrolet, which offers vehicles that run on ethanol, biodiesel and, for shorter commutes, electricity.

        This fashionable green suit wasn’t stitched out of boredom or financial advancement (okay, po$ibly a bit of the latter); it was created out of necessity. Some people and companies are doing more than others, but what’s up with those who aren’t doing anything at all? If I am talking about you, my best advice is to start wiping your waste-making bum with the proverbial green cloth, my friend, because you are already behind in both resource conservation and fashion sense.

        You could follow the example of a couple I met while visiting St. Benedicts and St. Johns Universities in Minnesota. They are taking on the 100-mile diet: Everything they eat (with the exception of a few staples) comes from within one hundred miles of where they live. The average piece of food travels 1500 miles before it reaches your plate, consuming more energy in production and transit than the calories its worth! That’s right, your food eats more than you do. Turns out, people all over the state of Vermont are taking up a similar diet to become Localvores, according to Vermont Commons Monthly, and only eating locally grown food. The results? Small Vermont farmers are flourishing, seeing their incomes peak and demand increasing; Vermonters feel more connected with their food and the people who grow it, all the while doing a great thing for the earth. This diet craze is catching on everywhere, and for information on how to do it where you live, visit www.eatlocalchallenge.com and 100milediet.org.

        Another great example comes from Barron, Wisconsin, where we attended the Holstein Breeders Breakfast, a sort of cow beauty pageant, and learned about a sustainable energy system enacted on the host farm. It starts with a silo of rapeseed, which is connected to a machine that crushes the seed and extracts its liquid, or canola oil. The oil is used as fuel to run the farm’s recently converted tractors and transport semis, and the same machine takes the leftover seed husks and packs them into feed for the farm animals. In essence, there is little to no waste, and the vehicles have much better emission ratings. The nearby town of Blaire has adopted a similar system, which has turned this three-bar town upside-down. The oil the farmers produce is sold to local restaurants for cooking, which is used and then collected by Coulee Cooperative and sold back to farmers to fuel their vehicles. This cycle has greatly improved the local economy of this former cow town, which was severely damaged due to centralized dairy production.

        BioTour recently ran across an eco village in Fairfield, Iowa. Each of the houses in this friendly neighborhood has been constructed to use one-tenth the energy of the average U.S. home. Because of this reduction, renewable resources power all of the home’s energy needs: Solar voltaics and wind for electricity and solar energy for heat. Amazing right? This idea is spreading like the 100-mile diet, and people are building biodomes all over the country. This isn’t a bad Pauly Shore movie, these are spacious and attractive homes that most would gladly inhabit.

        Besides these incredibly replicable designs of sustainable living, we’ve come across schools fighting energy conservation wars, local and organic foods finding their way into school cafeterias, compost piles behind college dorms, high school kids petitioning for lower energy emissions, even vegans in Wisconsin. These examples should serve as microcosms for how humans across the planet should live. It’s easy to put on paper, but with aid from government and neighboring communities, we can overcome the challenges that arise and bring these designs into reality.

        Our global environmental situation is so dire that we need to be thinking broader and doing more: Why not more tight-nit communities where we can live, work and shop? Why not more vast and efficient public transportation? Why not increase the number of local farms who won’t have to raise prices to compete with food grown by corporations? And what the hell happened to the electric car? 

All these changes come with democratic action, and more discussion of this will arrive in my future blogs.

        Green is my favorite color. Really, I’m a redhead, it just works. But the New Green is a fashion everyone can wear, so let’s hope it spreads faster than wildfires in California, floods in Mexico and drought in the southeast, because like it or not, these have all been the consequences of its delayed runway show. And Hollywood, let’s make sure this is one outfit that doesn’t go out of style.

There’s more where this came from, stay tuned and in touch: www.BioTour.org