waste

I've long meant to try Freecycle, a forum set up to facilitate people's giving things away rather than discarding them. Great idea, and as I move offices and change rooms at home I finally signed up for the western Mass group. Our old slow but working computers are far more popular than I ever dreamed, but I'm hoping the big old office desks will go! Two lessons: --There is a site called Freecycle.com (dot com not dot org) that tries to pull traffic --People use sob stories to get free [...]

Every day starts with water. No, I don't mean that kind of water. I'm thinking of the first glass of water I drink, and the water I fill the kettle with for my first pot of tea. (I could be content with locally grown food, I think, except that I would still have to have tea, real tea, camellia sinensis.) When I was first commissioned, in 1988, to write an ecology book, I knew virtually nothing about the subject and my friends were terrified for me. It didn't reassure them [...]