7th Gen Blog

By some accounts, last weekend's Earth Hour was the largest voluntary action for the environment in history. Nearly 6,500 cities and towns in 150 countries went dark to send a message about the need for change. It was a huge success, but now the lights are back on, and they're illuminating a key question: What's next on the home front?

Having lived in Vermont for twenty years and enjoyed the natural beauty of the surrounding mountains and Lake Champlain, my husband and I started thinking about installing a wind turbine at our house. We had tried very hard to lead a holistic and sustainable lifestyle and were wondering what else we could do to help offset the carbon footprint of a house that was larger than what we should be living in.

Meat or something vaguely like it has been making headlines as reports of "pink slime" relieve the nation of its collective appetite. But the real and far bigger story where meat is concerned isn't what we're eating, it's what we're not eating. Here's how you can (and why you should want to) serve up some meatlessness for you and yours.

They are known as the three Rs, the holy trinity of sustainability that asks us to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. I would now like to suggest a fourth R: Rot.

It may sounds strange, but rot is a crucial part of maintaining a low-impact home. Rot means composting, the art of creating nutrient-rich fertilizer from kitchen scraps, yard trimmings, and other organic wastes. Composting takes these materials out of our trash cans and returns them to the Earth where they're needed.