apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Is this going to be faux-green crap written by people with no scientific knowledge of what 'green' really means?

Search is over. The job is mine. I offset the carbon dioxide emissions of my occasional air travel with flower box plantings.

You forgot to add something about chemicals being icky, Rick.

faux-green! l like that. Good name for a blog.

Actually, as with everything at AT we are a mixture of passionate amateurs and professionals, with an emphasis on making sense of all the noise out there.

AT Green will do just that: make sense of what "green" means within the walls of your home, which is your most important place.

This is what I was born to do. Not even kidding.

Maxwell, can the position be filled by someone not living in NY?

this is my dream job - but i'm too inexperienced with blogs. ;-( maybe next time...

I agree with SomeSteff's first post.

I find it laughable, for example, that the people pushing CFLs are probably the same ones who couldn't possibly bear to use their offices' flourescent lights, and brought in their own incandescent lamps. Apparently the health-food-industrial-complex propagandized them into thinking that the rapid flickering would block their Qi or something. But now that flourescent is trendy, there's no mention of that.

No bumper-sticker driven "green" please.

Stratos-
I'll jump in and answer for Maxwell here...thanks for asking - the editor does not need to be based in NY

i think i would be great at this job. i'm not a faux-green, i actually studied environmental science in grad school, i work in an enviro-job now, and i'm a semi-computer nerd (which means i taught myself photoshop and illustrator).
i think i'll apply....

Thank you very much site. I have enjoyed it almost daily for over a year now and have learned so much about "homemaking" (if you will).

I also appreciate the green products and issues you have made us aware of, however, I would like to issue a word of caution about a blog dedicated just to environmental issues: the best thing one can do for the environment is to significantly reduce consumerism. Not a popular position, but I think few would argue with the logic of it.

I wonder if having a "green" blog connected to a design blog that constantly introduces new products might look a little shallow at best, hypocritical at worst.

I completely agree(n) with ringo, people forget that the first two of the three Rs are reduce and reuse....

Well actually there's a lot of room for a green design blog to help people do exactly that.

I am constantly adding new furniture to my place, and I don't buy any of it. I scavenge, put in a lot of thought and sweat, and make other people's trash into new looks for my apartment.

While it's true that there's lots of faux green out there (and also true that Maxwell is way too often seduced by cute plastic kitschy consumer goods!) I say credit AptTherapy with a sincere attempt to be green. And when sincerity goes astray, then constructive criticism that is clear and well-argued will surely gain an ear in this forum.

Myself, I've been toying with the idea of writing occasional short pieces on environmental issues where my own recent learning might be instructive to others, and with a daily blogger here, there will be opportunities to contribute.

You know, it's so nice to see people critically calling things faux-green. Not. Any effort to conserve and support the environment should be applauded and encouraged. Not everyone has to go 150% green instantly, all the time.

I think the idea is a great one and might give exposure to some green ideas that will foster discussion, research, and an attempt by many to change even a small part of how they live. Good job AT!

Alan-propaganda or not, from a lighting design perspective, recent advances in compact fluorescents ARE different from the flickering overheads of old. For the good ones a) the human eye can't detect a flicker and b) they come in a range of color temperatures, including the same as incandescents.

AT: great plan! the more green info out there the better. And I second the suggestion that there be an emphasis on ideas that don't increase consumption, e.g., creative re-purposing of items we already have, etc.

I absolutely welcome more green at AT! I have kind of been withing, though, that the greening would be incorporated throughout the content of the site, not just in one section. I know you guys try to do that when you can, but you blog plenty of things (admittedley very pretty things!) that are very ungreen. It seems like there could be a bit of a disconnect here... however I realize we are all doing what we can to tackle this crisis, and I welcome your efforts.

There are sooo many blogs and websites dedicated to all things green these days...

I'm all for 'green' - my life/career is green building but I really wish AT didn't require a dedicated site for green in the home. Green isn't a special site. Green isn't a trend to jump onto. Green is just how we live. It's mixed in with the plastic-y cool stuff in life - why not on AT dot com?

Alan - I second brooklino's response to you. People like you genuinely puzzle me. Are you seriously saying you can't tell the difference between the old office fluorescent tubes and the newer CFLs? Granted, some CFLs are just as bad with the flickering.... but maybe you should compare a few others. Just yesterday, I was chatting with some cashiers at two large, windowless fluorescently lit stores (the containter store, bed bath and beyond), and each of them complained about the lights. (No, I did not bring it up.) They say they feel drained and tense from being under them all day.

AT - I'm behind ringo and edgertor and bklynb's comments above. Seems to me a Green AT site will detract from the rest of the sites - On the one hand, green posts have fit in quite nicely into your current organizational design. So will the other sites be un-green-focused? Or will there constantly be pressure to make everything green (because of the disconnect between consuming unnecessary goods and trying to leave less of a footprint)? Seems to me you could keep the green posts appearing as they do throughout AT, without compromising your commitment to being green. And while I heartily agree with Maxwell that your home "is your most important place", the individual's home is not the most important place for making a difference environmentally (see helloat's comment on the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser post, and also see that thread for some indication of what I fear you can expect more of when you add an AT Green site).

I love the idea of an AT writer focused on "green." But I agree with the comments that it should be integrated into the rest of AT, not in its own separate section. The best way to be green is to incorporate it into everyday life.

Brooklino & Sea --

The issue with flourescents that had so many people bringing their own incandescents into their offices had nothing to do with *visible* flickering. That only happens when they're broken. The theory (right or wrong, I don't know) is that flourescent technology involves cycling on and off so quickly that it's not visible, but still causes constant dilation and contraction of the pupils, hence the tiredness. I haven't read any claims that today's flourescents work differently.

The color of the light has nothing to do with it. I personally like the older colder color of flourescents, because my decor taste runs to "cold modern" bright saturated colors and white-white, and I plan to use dimmable CFLs throughout my new apartment. Daylight spectrum makes sense visually and possibly has better health implications. But faking the already unnatural spectrum of incandescents is somewhat mystifying to me; I suppose after 125 years or so people have grown used to that spectrum being "real" even though it's not.

The mercury aspect of flourescents is being dismissed stupidly as a minor problem -- "just bring the dead lights to a recycling center". Not in the world of the real, not for the overwhelming majority of people. You're going to see lots of CFLs going to dumps, breaking on the way, and lots of mercury entering the ecosystem. For me, that's worrisome in the same category as nuclear waste and the very dirty (heavy metals) manufacturing process of photovoltaic panels.

Just a quick note on the AT Green plan...

We want to continue adding green content across all seven of the existing AT sites, so the new site will actually feed in posts from all of the sites regularly with additional specific content being written just for the green site by the editor or editors we find during this search.

The idea is to step up the green everywhere AND give it a central home as well.

Alan:

The reason the mercury aspect of CFLs is a "minor problem" is because the amount of mercury they contain is far, far less than the huge amounts of mercury they will remove from the environment by reducing the consumption of electricity from coal, which produces mercury. Overall, there's a net reduction of mercury with CFL bulbs, at least if any of your power comes from coal.

AT, get your green on!
Infusing AT with green info/produces/services is the best way to get folks to green up their act. Education and willingness to change are key.

I think a separate place makes sense. I have a baby, so I check out The Nursery; I cook for my family every day of the week, so I check out The Kitchen; I have a computer and some media, so I check out Home Tech. It's the same idea. I integrate low-impact living everywhere I can (my baby wears hand-me-downs and cloth diapers, I do countertop composting, I belong to the Park Slope Food Coop), but I still think it will work well to have a dedicated area while still folding it in to the regular content as Janel said.

deoxy, thanks for clarifying that. I always forget that many powerplants burn coal. Here near NY it's mostly everything else.