Steve Luxton

Our northern neighbors and transplants scoff at the Southern idea of winter: 40-degree temperatures. But neither we nor our houses are built for sub-zero temps, so in addition to breaking out the blankets, we need to prepare our homes for winter. To keep heating bills from chilling your bank account, prepare for winter by finding […]

One of the more popular green home products these days is the tankless water heater, which promises to reduce water and energy use. Besides wasting water and not lasting very long, conventional hot water heaters aren’t energy efficient. They have tanks that are warmed to a preselected temperature and work to constantly maintain that temperature. […]

Thoughtful, well-mannered and environmentally conscious children aren’t born, but made. Robert Gilman of the Context Institute addressed the issue in his quarterly journal. “Time is too short to give up on changing the hearts, minds and behaviors of today’s adultsbut it is foolish not to do everything possible to influence tomorrow’s adults.” And while there […]

It sounded great. Through the miracle of science we would take food crops, used cooking oils and animal fats that would otherwise be discarded and turn it all into fuel to run our cars and trucks. We’ll even give it a cool name … biofuels! And if we produce enough of this stuff we could […]

A truly “green” Army is a tough idea to wrap your brain around. After all, it’s a war machine, and a war machine destroys people and other living things, doesn’t it? The Army acknowledges as much in the Army Sustainability Report FY 2007: “To many outside the military community, the destructive methods used in Army […]

Data centers are energy hogs. In his blog, “The New Daedalus” (www.newdaedalus.com), infrastructure analyst Toby Considine suggests that “sustainable” and “IT” might not belong in the same sentence. The CIO Web site reported that data centers use an estimated 1.5 percent to 3 percent of the total electricity generated in the United States. It takes […]