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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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." 

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.

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.

One of the best parts about being a journalist is you get asked — hell, you get paid — to explore subjects you might not have looked into otherwise. The best case in point for me is my story on the smart grid that is (finally) available online at emagazine.com.