Earth day was last week and it got me thinking about going green locally, and how we can help. SPS Habitat has a number of ways to help you reduce your footprint and help out a great cause.

* Cans for Habitat

Recycling is great, but it is even better when the money goes to building simple, decent, affordable and environmentally friendly houses. Just drop your aluminum cans off to one of our Can Collection Houses and we will do the rest. To date we have recycled over 2,500 pounds of cans!

• The ReStore 210 Thurston Ave NE Downtown Olympia
• Lincoln Elem. School 213 21st Ave SE Olympia, WA

http://www.spshabitat.org/aboutus/cans.html

* The ReStore

Our new and used building supply store in downtown Olympia is the perfect place to go to keep things out of the landfill. Shop or donate because both are important. Last year, with your help, they diverted more then 150 tons of usable items from Thurston Co. landfills. All proceeds cover the cost of our alfiliate, so each monitary donation goes that much farther.

www.spshabitat.org/ReStore

*Cars for Habitat

As gas prices rise we are all starting to look at how much we drive and how we can cut back. If you have an old car sitting around that doesn't do anything but cost money maybe you should donate it to Cars for Habitat. For every car donated SPS Habitat gets money, in fact in March two cars were donated in our name!

Lots of folks have decided to drive cars powered by biofuels, feeling good about the switch from fossil fuels and hoping the biofuel decision is an ethical and effective response to global warming, but the science is starting to accumulate indicating that biofuels are not an effective answer.

I know this may not be what a lot of people want to hear. And it's no doubt true that if you simply measure the gases at the tailpipe, it would appear that biofuels are cleaner than fossil fuels, but once you start measuring the complete environmental picture of biofuels, it turns out that biofuels are simply not green. I don't believe that ethanol, biodiesel and the other internal combustion options for loco-motion have any real merit.

The NYT carries a story today here that covers two papers recently published in the journal Science that includes the following:

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

If you want to read the articles themselves, not dumbed down through the NYT, you can go to the journal Science online here.

Hola OlyBlog Posse, Here is a snap from the CoO.

Now is a good time to be planting, and also a great time to mulch for the garden.

Food Not Lawns!

Think about coverting costly lawn into productive edible food garden for 2008.