Discover(ing) Sustainability

File this in the bulging “hooray for us” drawer: UNH made The Princeton Review’s Green Honor Roll by receiving a perfect score on the Review’s new Green Rating of colleges. The Princeton Review collected data from 534 schools in the 2007 – 08 academic year to tally numerical scores from 60 to 99 that measure [...]

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When I heard that NH would be celebrating local food with a week dedicated to the cause – NH Eat Local Week, August 3-9 – I began to scheme. How could I, as UOS Food & Society Program Coordinator, help support the effort? Better yet, how could I coerce my coworkers into joining me? I [...]

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As winds, hail, tornados and rain whip their way around the region today, another wind of change is afoot:  a new state law supporting residential wind energy that got its start with innovative UNH student research. It all began in 2006, when then-UNH student Laura Carpenter and her fellow research team in Dept. of Political Science faculty [...]

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My husband likes to tell anyone who listens that bike commuting can save the world, simultaneously whacking carbon emissions, demolishing our nation’s obesity epidemic, and restoring civil engagement and neighborly relations. A recent run of news stories indicates that he might be right. Our local Foster’s Daily Democrat reports this morning on the increase in [...]

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It’s your media maven, doing a Friday afternoon scan of some interesting stories in sustainability. First up is this one from the Christian Science Monitor on the debut of the Princeton Review’s “Green Rating” in its popular college guides. The story takes a compelling look at sustainability as a “selling point” for colleges, noting that [...]

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For the rest of the summer, El and I will be telecommuting every Friday. This is our first day and so far everything has been excellent. We hope to write several blog entries over the upcoming weeks discussing various issues related to commuting and sustainability, so I thought I would start off with the obvious [...]

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With gas above $4/gallon, it’s a great time to start rethinking carpooling. GoLoco does just that. By combining a traditional ride board with a state of the art social networking Web site, GoLoco brings carpooling to the 21st century.  This spring a team of staff from University Transportation Services (UTS), Student Commuter Services, Campus Planning, and the University Office of Sustainability (UOS) brought GoLoco to UNH [...]

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Today’s USA Today features an article on how people are dealing the rising costs of food – creatively. From backyard gardening to bargain hunting to simplified cooking, people are finding strategies to cope with higher food costs while still eating healthily. But for some already employing these and other money saving strategies, higher food costs [...]

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This weekend, I gained some of the most sought-after wisdom in the universe of parents. I learned the Secret of Getting a Preschooler to Eat Something That Is Not Tan. Now, I’m not food purist. “No ice cream for breakfast” can be a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do directive. But I strive to keep those pre-lunch bowls of Cherry [...]

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With prices at the pump rising and the election year rhetoric heating up, a lot of the standard “urban myths” about what is causing this oil price spike and what could be done about it are flying. Just like the guys on Mythbusters, Robert Kaufmann of Boston University‘s Center for Energy & Environmental Studies in the Department of Geography & Environment (and my [...]

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