With Thanksgiving comes Black Friday, which is followed by the unending barrage of advertisements that ramp up every year around the Holiday season. Limited time offers, buy one get one deals, life-changing sales… we’re all familiar with the commercialization of the holidays. All this pressure can suck us into the over-consumption loop of buying too …
Barnard Brook Stabilization Project For several years the bank behind Sustainable Woodstock’s Community Garden at Billings Farm has been eroding and slumping into Barnard Brook. This area, like the rest of Woodstock, was hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene, which only intensified the erosion. The bank is now being “undercut” by Barnard Brook; as the …
Gratitude to the People & Communities We Serve Sustainable Woodstock’s focus on community resilience in response to global climate change is catalyzed by the pressing need to ensure that residents of Woodstock, the surrounding towns and the Upper Valley region are able to find sustenance, health and safety—the necessities that individuals and communities need to …
Bicycles are on the rise. Worldwide, bicycles already outnumber cars by 2 to 1 and are the most common form of transportation. The number of people who drive bicycles in Asia, alone, is twice as large as the number of all people who drive cars worldwide. During rush hour in many Asian cities there are …
In the mid-1970s, one of the transformative books read by millions worldwide was Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. On Earth Day 2021—marking the 50th anniversary of this seminal book—Sustainable Woodstock and Pentangle Arts hosted Ms. Lappé for a live, virtually-broadcast talk during which she said she was originally inspired to write her …
So far this hurricane season there have been nine named tropical storms to hit the US. Four of them strengthened into hurricanes, and two reached major hurricane intensity (category 3 or higher). Most recently Hurricane Ian, one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the United States, struck the Florida coast and caused mass devastation. …
Local Food for Sustainable Living Winnie the Pooh had it just about right: Find the honey tree in your own backyard and eat to your belly’s content. Of course, what with bee stings and rabbit-sized jars of honey, getting his fill wasn’t easy. But as time went by, Pooh ate so much honey that he …
Indigenous Peoples’ Day has come and gone, and Thanksgiving week is on the horizon. Now come the days of lesser light when, in Abenaki tradition, Penibagos, the Leaf Falling Moon, will be followed by Pebonkas, the Winter Maker. Fallen leaves will crunch underfoot when hunters stalk the woodlands and fields. How longstanding is the tradition …
Did you know that the average home has enough air leakage to add up to a two-foot square hole? This means that, when combined, all those cracks and leaks add up to the equivalent of leaving a window open in your house all winter long! This is a problem when it comes to paying the …
As if there aren’t already enough scams and deceptive marketing techniques to watch out for, environmentally-minded consumers have another pitfall to keep in mind: greenwashing. “Greenwashing,” coined in the 1980s in an essay by environmentalist Jay Westerveld, is when a company markets their services or products as more sustainable than they truly are. This practice misleads …
