What’s in the dust in your home? There may be insect fragments, lead dust, pesticides, pollen, dust mites, animal dander, hair, human skin flakes, fungal spores or cigarette ash.
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Radon: If Only It Smelled Like Sulphur
Portland, Vancouver, Salem, and points between have a radon issue--one that has been here for thousands of years--and one that is not going away.
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8 Ways to Reduce Your Water Waste
Water is wasted waiting for the shower or sink to warm up, on the slow leak you have in the toilet bowl that you never knew about and from sprinkling your lawn every day.
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10 Suggestions to Detox Your Car
Months of scouring the marketplace and test-driving vehicles reminded me of just how many chemicals most people use in the maintenance and upkeep of their vehicles. Here are 10 ways to detox your car based on my new book, Weekend Wonder Detox
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Where Did My Interest Go?
It’s painfully obvious to more and more Americans that the interest from their bank accounts, money market funds, and other fixed income investments has plummeted in recent years.
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Big Money Against GMO Labeling
And So It Begins. The big money pours in against GMO labeling. This is what came in my mail on Saturday, and so I decided to take a closer look.
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Green Collar Jobs
We are on the verge of technological breakthroughs that promise stimulating new careers and may transform old occupational niches.
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Black Soldier Flies or Me and My ‘Maggots’
I love compost. Specifically, my compost, the product of backyard alchemy. I fuss, fidget, adjust and probably take as much pride in rolling the finished product through my fingers as I do picking the vegetables that grow so healthily in my garden.
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Radon, an Invisible, Odorless Northwest Issue
Portland and Vancouver have a radon issue– one that has been here for thousands of years–and it is not going to go away. The soil in the Willamette Valley, much of Clark County, and the Columbia River Gorge has a granite component, Ice Age material brought down the Columbia River from Montana repeatedly between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the Missoula Floods. It is found as sand, gravel, cobblestones, even boulders. This granite, mixed into the upper layers of our soil, contains uranium, which breaks down naturally over time and produces radon gas. Invisible and with no smell, radon is drawn upward into our homes (regardless of architectural style,…
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Place-based Education: Connecting Classroom and Community
Something’s Happening Here As you stroll down the halls of your neighborhood school at nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, you notice that something is different. Many of the classrooms are empty; the students are not in their places with bright, shiny faces. Where are they? In the town woodlot, a forester teaches tenth graders to determine which trees should be marked for an upcoming thinning project. Downtown, a group of middle school students are collecting water samples in an urban stream to determine if there’s enough dissolved oxygen to support reintroduced trout. Out through the windows, you can see children sitting on benches writing poems. Down the way, a…
