Go On-Line or Outdoors for Environmental Advice : Log on to ‘The Green Connection’ or dig these organic gardening seminars.
Today, Earthwatch has two lifestyle ideas for the environmentally minded. One is for the indoor-type of environmentalist, the other for the outdoor-type.
Reese Martin, a Ventura resident who works for The Gas Co., keeps up with environmental business news via his computer at his office in Oxnard. An external affairs manager for the local energy utility, he has joined the reported half a million computer users worldwide who regularly go “on-line” for various kinds of environmental information, according to a report from Carnegie Mellon University.
The specific place on the information highway that Martin visits almost daily--during his lunch hour--is The Green Connection.
It’s a Santa Monica-based service, available on the Prodigy computer network, that the computer trade press has dubbed the “electronic forum for the business of the environment.” Launched only last fall, this particular corner of environmental cyberspace already has 15,000 business folk participating.
This is not a bunch of tree-huggers masquerading as practical people. To hear Martin describe the experience, connecting up is more like visiting a seminar at the Harvard Business School.
According to Martin, on the environmental aspects of marketing, investing, building and legal compliance, “I have access to people throughout the nation. It amazes me the amount of time you can save. I’ve gotten gems of answers in minutes it would have taken me three hours to research.”
But unlike the notoriously dog-eat-dog atmosphere of an actual biz school, “people are surprisingly polite,” he said. “There are healthy disagreements between (people of) various shades of green. But I’m always getting information I would (otherwise) have to pay for--from people I would never have found otherwise.”
Computer-equipped residents with a specific interest in agricultural business might want to check out the The Green Connection’s offerings aimed at commercial growers. The electronic “topic moderator,” or on-line expert, for this part of the service is a respected San Joaquin Valley grower, Ed Davis of S&E; Organic Farms.
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Now here’s the lifestyle tip for the environmentalist who goes outdoors just for the love of it.
A weekly series of organic gardening seminars will begin at noon on Sunday at the Ojai Community Demonstration Garden next to City Hall. The instructor, Akiva Werbalowsky, has a master’s degree in Education from UC Santa Barbara, enriched by his experiences as a staff member at the gardens and mansion Thomas Jefferson designed at Monticello in Virginia.
The 18 sessions, which will run through October, will cover medicinal herbs, nutrition-per-square foot, decorations, natural pest-management, heirloom seeds and composting. Tools and supplies will be provided.
In discussing these events with Werbalowsky, I discovered that there’s a realm where his favorite topic, composting, and my favorite topic, recycling, come together. It seems that all sorts of recyclables can also be composted. For instance, he composts paper plates and cereal boxes--if they aren’t the kind that have been dipped in plastic.
He also acquainted me with a few lessons he learned while working at Jefferson’s estate--which is, to my mind, the most beautiful man-made thing on American soil. The lessons are embodied in some letters the author of the Declaration of Independence had written in retirement.
“I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and then not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet. . . . No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”
That kind of thinking--and living--might explain why, in an era when most men died in their 40s, Jefferson lived twice as long.
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* FYI: To subscribe to “The Green Connection,” a computer on-line service priced at $36 a year, aimed at the business community and covering manufacturing, distribution, services and consultation, call (800) PRODIGY Ext. 141. For information about the 18 organic gardening seminars beginning this Sunday in Ojai and running through October, at a cost of $95, call 646-1542.
