Green

In which we advance some new thinking that could make torture far more environmentally friendly than it is today.

I couldn't make it to the event today, but the Center for a Better South rolled out their new environmental policy book today in Chapel Hill at Smith Middle School.

From bettersouth.org:

The book, Getting Greener: Progressive Environmental Ideas for the American South, offers 15 policy recommendations for state and local leaders and provides a dozen ideas for consumers on how they can be greener in everyday living without government action. The book is written by Arkansas law student L. Edward Moore of Little Rock.

The book is the second released by the Center. The first, released last Fall, offered recommendations for southern lawmakers to modernize tax codes in their states. The Center for a Better South is a non-partisan progressive think tank out of Charleston, SC.

The book is available free online at gettinggreener.info

I've been lucky enough to know Tim Toben for many, many years. He's a dedicated environmentalist, a community visionary, and very good friend. He's also going to be live-blogging with us this Friday. Hope you can come.

The best way to understand Tim is to follow a few links. For example, this interview in Treehugger does a great job describing his environmental work here in Orange County. Tim is the brains behind Greenbridge, a very cool green mixed-use development recently approved in downtown Chapel Hill.

You'll also be interested to know that he's pretty heavily involved in this campaign.

What else can I say? Tim started his own company way-back-when, established a bio-diesel operation on his land west of Carrboro, founded an organic farm with irrigation powered by solar and wind, moved hundreds of acres of forest into permanent conservation easements, and has a beautiful family.

If you want to get in some early questions, this is the place to do it. Any topic, of course, is fair game. Green building, conservation, the Chapel Hill Town Council, Bill McDonough, salt-water swimming pools, organic gardening, global warming, state energy policy, whatever suits you.

Please stop by on Friday morning to meet Tim. We'll start around 8 am.

I am new to the BlueNC site so for starters I will point to my blogs of recent times. I have several, all on blogspot.com. Some of the links are:

Politics in North Carolina
Trends in North Carolina
Keepin it green
News, views and more
Adventures in photos
-and-
Carolina's compass

These are jumping off points. After browsing through any of these check the links on the side under "Kindred blogs" or "My blogs" for more categories. I generally try to group similar topics under a given blog, thus the logic of having several.