The New Entry Sustainable Farming Project has devised a fresh way to expand arable land in Massachusetts — by seeking to put former farmland that was subverted by subdividing back into production.

Yes, of course, they put houses onto those farm plots, but in cases of low-density lots, small-scale farming — enough to make a profit — is still possible. Read more »

Yes, readers, you have a right to be confused. The name on the blog is "Sustainably," but pretty much everything I write these days is on food, food policy, obesity, and addiction. As I've written before, there are parallels, but even so, what happened to the sustainability stuff?

And then comes a post like this one, after at least a couple of dozen "off-topic" posts! But I'm just going to live with the dissonance for now, and figure out what to do later. So, anyway... Read more »

NESEA's 2009 Green Buildings Open House will return the first Saturday in October, which falls on the 3d this year, and I highly recommend it. Last year, G. and I went out to western Mass. and toured five or six great places, and then had the chance to follow up with a couple of other places on a second trip. A lot is happening out there. Read more »

In my opinion, Cuba will be a bad example of anything for the foreseeable future, and perhaps as long as I live. It has been exploited by dictators and superpowers for decades, and, and the resulting distortions are all the more intense because it is an island, and a small island at that. Read more »

A position I've held consistently, and don't expect to change anytime soon, is that coal is evil shit, albeit a necessary evil until the day we can be rid of it. 

The primary reason I — and practically every thinking person without a financial tie to its mining, transporting, and burning — oppose coal is that its burning spews vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and I don't believe there'll ever be a valid way around that. Read more »

Under the influence of Michael Pollan and others, I've written previously about how we've lost the connection between the food we eat and the world that produces it.

I don't know which should strike you as more absurd, that such a disconnect could occur, or that I could be the one mentioning it, again — I'm suburban all the way, a middling house-plant grower at best, and until recently, didn't even understand what other people meant by having a connection to the land.

Photo by Seth Itzkan

And yet, here I am again, brought along this time by Jim Laurie, whom I heard speak Tuesday night at Redbones BBQ in Somerville, which I take pain to mention because they've been strong community supporters as long as they've been around. On Tuesday, they hosted the Mass. Climate Action Network, serving grass-fed beef donated by Chestnut Farms of Hardwick. Read more »

Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres (and listed as a "green hero" to the right — follow those links to see how she got there), is one of the speakers at MIT's Sustainability Summit April 24.

According to a release, the point of the summit is to explore we can transition to a sustainable world. Read more »

I first learned about the future and promise of LEDs at a Las Vegas trade show maybe six or seven years ago. I asked how long it might be before they were ready for the marketplace, and they told me, "three to five years."

Last year, when AIA came to Boston, I stopped by the Philips Color Kinetics booth and asked the same question, among others, and the answer was, "three to five years."  Read more »

I haven't written on biomimicry since GreenBuild, I don't think, but the Guardian has a story from one of its frontiers this morning, even though the story does not use the word. Read more »

The Times has a story this morning about how various entities — California utlities, midwestern colleges, etc. — are using the competitive instinct to enlist energy savers. Read more »