I try to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle. There are lots of “green” things I do regularly, such as recycling anything I can, growing my own vegetables and using my bike instead of the car for many journeys. However, when it comes to things I do only occasionally, such as buying new stuff for my [...]

I just returned from a late winter mountaineering trip to Durango, Colorado where snow abounds and the locale’s high-desert-arid ways were seasonally hidden from sight.  And though my main focus was simply to make it off of the high peaks in one piece, I couldn’t help but aim my attention to the sheer amount of [...]

I have to admit that I’m not sure I’d want fake grass in my own backyard.  But, in a recent twist of reason, I’ve started to warm up to the notion.  Though I couldn’t imagine taking a midday nap in a meadow of green plastic fibers, there are applications that warrant its use.  And, no, [...]

Ask ten different landscapers how they would install a single irrigation system and you would get ten different answers.  So how is anyone supposed to know how to set up what is essentially, in the desert Southwest, the lifeblood of a landscape?  Though it is probably easier to explain what not to do, the following [...]

Can we all just agree that less material putrefying in landfills across this country would be a good thing?  Great.  So now that we’ve gotten over that hurdle, we can tackle the big, ugly and almost completely closeted fact that we are essentially being buried in a dearth of debris.  There are over thirty-five hundred [...]

A few years ago, I slept at a campsite next to a trailer running an obnoxiously loud diesel-powered generators all night long. If AMP’s silent, solar-powered portable generator had been around, I may have gotten a full night’s sleep. The silent, all-weather generator is installed in a trailer with photovoltaic solar panels on its roof.
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Fear not, unemployed masses: you may have a career in the wind energy industry ahead of you. According to a recent prediction from the Global Wind Energy Council, 1 million people will be employed in the wind industry by 2010, and up to 3 million people could have wind energy jobs by 2050. 400,000 people [...]

Yesterday, IST Energy released the world’s first compact, mobile waste-to energy system: the GEM (Green Energy Machine). The slick-looking device converts trash into pellets that are in turn converted into electricity and gas heat. 95 percent of daily consumer waste can be dumped into the machine, including paper, plastic, wood, food, and agricultural materials.
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Believe it or not, even though the desert Southwest is best known for its intense heat and parching aridity, the cold is always in the back of my mind.  When I consider plant material, I try to choose plants that won’t need to be babied.  That’s easier said than done, of course, when even some [...]

A new year, a new solar cell efficiency record is broken. German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems have built a solar cell with 41.1% efficiency, besting the previous record of 40.8% efficiency set by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The three-layer gallium-indium-phosphide, gallium-indium-arsenide, and germanium cell broke the record when [...]