Dinner

I haven't had a burger in months. As we walked past Burgerville on the way to the hotel my taste buds began to salivate. What joy when a brief Internet search revealed Burgerville's sustainability mission. Local grass fed meat. Take a look at their receipt. Wish all restaurants printed receipts like this.

Next food destination? I must find out where the pedestrian with her pink Voodoo Donuts' box has been.

Malawi to roll out "fertilizer trees" project

*Fertilizer trees should increase productivity of maize crops in Malawi

Deogratias Mmana
23 March 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[BLANTYRE] Malawi will this year implement a 'fertilizer trees' project to reduce the amount of fertilizer needed by smallholder farmers.
Fertilizer trees are varieties of shrubs that capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil, a process known as nitrogen fixing. This restores nutrients and increases crop productivity — with potential to double or triple harvests.
The trees can be interplanted with crops for 1-3 years before being cut and left to decompose, providing fuel and more fertilizer.
Policymakers and agricultural scientists drew up plans for implementing the programme at a conference last month (13-16 February).
The project will target 200,000 farmers, representing ten per cent of the agricultural sector, and will start in August, according to Festus Akinnifesi, Malawi's senior tree scientist and country representative of the South African Development Community (SADC) and World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).
Akinnifesi says the farmers will receive free tree seeds, an information kit and training on the system and associated crop husbandry.

According to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN Millennium Project, fertilizer trees are among the most promising means for achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving global hunger by 2015.
There are four fertilizer tree systems, all of which are based on improved fallowing ― allowing soil to recover nutrients. Malawi will adopt all four systems depending on the type of land.
The first system is sequential planting of nitrogen-fixing trees such as Sesbania sesban and Tephrosia vogelli with maize, shortening the amount of time land needs to lie fallow. In the second, Gliricidia sepium is planted along with maize and coppiced ― heavily pruned ― during maize growth to prevent competition.
The third involves planting nitrogen-fixing trees a few weeks after maize to reduce competition between the plants. In the fourth, leaves of trees are used as fertilizer for vegetable crop production in the wetlands and maize production in the uplands.

More than 300,000 farmers are currently using fertilizer trees in five SADC countries — Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

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Related SciDev.Net articles: Think small for water management, say scientists 'Waste membrane' could help crops conserve water 'Gene deleting' tool could lead to safer GM crops Related links: World Agroforestry Centre South African Development Community Photo Credit: FAO

HELP the campaign for GMO labeling on food products

World Food Day: October 16, 2011

Help the campaign reach 1 million!

We need as many people as possible in the streets on October 16 with a goal of enlisting 1,000,000 people into the campaign for mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods. Join us by getting involved in a local Millions Against Monsanto World Food Day event.

Healthy Apps

iFit: 50 Coolest Fitness and Health Apps for the iPhone

For many individuals and staying in shape and getting healthy can be a bit of a challenge. The iPhone can help make it a little easier, however, with a wide range of apps that can help you track and stay informed about your health. From nutrition facts that let you know just how many calories are in that Big Mac to instructional fitness videos, there are numerous ways you can turn your iPhone into more than just a phone and let it help you keep yourself in tip top shape. Here are a few great applications that can let you integrate your iPhone into you or your patient’s health and fitness program.

Tracking

Keep yourself motivated and on track with these fitness programs that monitor your progress to a happier, healthier you.

1. iPhit Fitness Tracking: This program allows users to combine their Nike + iPod sensor kit with their iPhone to keep track of their walking or running progress.
2. MyNetDiary: Get access to this Web-based diet and exercise program right through your iPhone. You’ll be able to quickly jot down what you had for dinner or how long you worked out, even when you’re on the go.
3. Gyminee: Sign up for this fitness tracking site and use the iPhone-optimized version to keep track of your workouts and your daily nutrition.
4. iPhodometer: This Nike + alternative allows users to keep track of how many calories they are burning as they walk or run.
5. WeightDate: This application makes it easy to see how your weight is changing over time, whether it’s going up or down. The program also provides an average to let you see how you’re moving towards your goal over the long term.
6. Limeade: Limeade aims to help users get healthy by giving them an assessment and helping them to develop personalized fitness goals. Best of all, the site has a version optimized just for use with the iPhone.
7. SparkPeople: Create diet plans that concentrate on nutrition and focus on fitness training through SparkPeople on your iPhone.
8. FitReach: This program allows you to view your gym training for the day, track your diet and manage your weight goals, all from the iPhone interface.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 4 Travel

Travel/outdoors

30. Drinking Water -- 99 cents

Ditch bottled water while visiting Rome with Drinking Water, which maps out the position of more than 200 drinkable fountains.

31. Geocaching Toolkit -- Free

Geocaching, the green outdoors game of hiding and seeking treasures, has caught on throughout the world. Geocaching Toolkit guides players between locations with clues involving puzzles, calculations and projecting a new waypoint using distances and bearings. Sometimes the calculations are easy, but this toolkit can help when calculations become tedious.

32. iLocate -- 99 cents

iLocate is a comprehensive searchable database of national and local parks, beaches, theme parks and amusement parks throughout the U.S. You'll find contact directions and details on each park.

33. Lonely Planet Travel Guides -- Prices begin at 99 cents

Lonely Planet Travel Guides are the guide of choice for many frugal and green travelers. Various apps provide paperless guides for both U.S. and international destinations. Some of the guides are buggy and need work, but Lonely Planet is working on updated versions. Tip: Read the reviews before buying.

34. Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds -- $2.99

The final word in bird guides comes to iPhone in a bigger and better format. The Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds allows you to view bird images, listen to recorded bird songs and calls, run a filtered search by species for your geographic area, and more. All information is taken from the latest edition of the best-selling Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 3 Dining Out

In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more green as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.


Dining out/Dining in

26. FoodMenus -- 99 cents

FoodMenus is a searchable, location-based database of over 100,000 menus from restaurants across the U.S. that helps you make smart eating choices before you hit a restaurant or order take-out. You also can save your favorite menus for offline use and share them with friends.

27. Green Sushi Selector -- 99 cents

Green Sushi Selector allows you to research whether the sushi fish you're about to buy comes from threatened species or has been caught or farmed in ways harmful to the environment. Fish are listed both by their Japanese and common-market names. Additional features include health alerts for mercury and PCBs, as well as dietary recommendations.

28. Seafood Watch -- Free

It's remarkable how little we know and are told about the seafood we eat. Seafood Watch, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, is a searchable guide to the quality and origination point of seafood at grocery stores and restaurants.

29. VegOut -- $2.99

Vegetarian offerings in many restaurants are often limited and boring. VegOut makes life a bit easier with the world's largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. Search listings by your exact location or a customized location when on the road.



Thanks to Coupon Sherpa for assembling this list.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 2

THE  BEST  SUSTAINABLE  APPS


In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more gree as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.


Transportation

14. CarCare -- $4.99

CarCare automatically calculates your gas mileage at the pump and reminds you when it's time to change the oil, rotate tires, get a wax or any other service you desire.

15. Carticipate -- Free

Hook up to a social network of folks who want to share rides. Just plug in your destination and Carticipate finds others in your social network headed in the same direction. You can hitch a ride or share your own vehicle.

16. GasBag -- Basic version Free; Pro version 99 cents

GasBag relies on a community of hundreds of thousands of users submitting prices across the U.S.,U.K. and Australia, with price updates delivered to your phone in real-time. You also can track your car's mileage and record details of gas purchases.

17. Green Gas Saver -- Free

Green Gas Saver tells you when you're accelerating or taking a turn too fast, which can hinder your gas mileage. The idea behind the app is to keep the ball in the center of the screen. When you accelerate too quickly, the diameter of the ball increases and an alarm will sound, indicating you're accelerating too quickly. Green Gas also keeps a running score so you can see how well you're driving in real time. A few weeks with this app and driving efficiently will become ingrained.

A Sustainable New Year - The Best Green Apps Part 1 Shopping

In honor of 2011, here are 50 eco-friendly apps, all found in the iTunes app store to help you be more gree as you shop, travel, transport, eat and much more.

Shop:

1. Animal-Free -- Free

Animal-Free is a pocket reference guide for many common and hidden animal ingredients. Whether you're vegan,vegetarian, part-time veg or simply trying to shop veg-friendly, this app by Symbiotic Software will help you make conscientious shopping decisions. New vegans will appreciate the list of commonly misunderstood or unfamiliar vegan ingredients that will help expand your dietary horizons.

2. CouponSherpa -- Free

Ditch the pounds of coupon pages cluttering your refrigerator and wallet. This mountain-climbing superhero provides hundreds of in-store mobile coupons to streamline your savings. CouponSherpa gives you access to the hottest deals on clothing, shoes, restaurants, electronics, travel, jewelry, sporting goods, books and more.

3. CraigsMobileList -- 99 cents

Is there anything greener than CraigsList? Yep, CraigsMobileList allows you to search, browse, post and respond to ads on your iPhone. You also can track items you need, are donating or selling. Version 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the original, including a groundbreaking housing-search interface.

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Tech

Getting Over Our Two-Year Itch

By DAVID POGUE

Published: December 31, 2010

Every year, we buy zillions of music players, digital cameras and cellphones — and then, a couple of years later, send them to the nearest trash bin. “New every two” isn’t just Verizon’s offer to sell you a new, discounted phone every 24 months; it also describes the average person’s consumption habits for cameras, phones and other gadgets.

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Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned the consumer, it’s hard to fulfill that pledge to recycle, at least when it comes to electronic gadgetry. The phrase “sustainable electronics manufacturing” is almost an oxymoron, like “humble actor.”

That’s because the electronics industry itself is built upon frequent renewal. The iPhone, iPod or iPad you buy today will be obsolete within a year. Every pocket camera model on sale today will no longer be sold six months from now. And Android phones — forget it. They seem to come out every Friday afternoon.

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Food

A Diet for an Invaded Planet: Invasive Species

Heads of State

By JAMES GORMAN

Published: December 31, 2010

There’s a new shift in the politics of food, not quite a movement yet, more of an eco-culinary frisson. But it may have staying power; the signs and portents are there. Vegans, freegans, locavores — meet the invasivores.

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Reuters

Tasty Menace: The lionfish, a destructive and prolific native of the Red Sea and the Indo-Pacific, invaded the Caribbean in the 1990s. Females can produce perhaps two million eggs a year.

Some divers in the Florida Keysrecently held a lionfish derby, the idea being to kill and eat lionfish, an invasive species. Local chefs cooperated by promoting the lionfish as a tasty entree. The idea drew editorial support from Andrew Revkinin a post on The Times’s Dot Earth blog in which he also mentioned an attempt by some fisheries biologists to rename the invading Asian carp “Kentucky tuna” to make it more appealing to diners. And the Utne Reader recently ran an article about Chicago chefs turning their attention to the same invasive fish.

The rumblings go further back, of course, as rumblings always do. The idea of eating kudzu and the recipes for it have been around for decades. More recently, at the beginning of 2009, a San Francisco blogger on matters ecological, animal and political, Rachel Kesel, posted a nicely turned argument for the “invasive species diet.”

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Food

Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One, or 6 Billion

 MARK BITTMAN

Published: December 31, 2010

“Revolutionary” diet books flood the market this time of year, promising a life changed permanently and for the better — yes, in just 10 to 30 days! — but, as everyone knows, the key to eating better begins with a diet of real food.

The problem is, real food is cooked by real people — you! — and real people are cooking less than ever before.We know why people don’t cook, or at least we think we do: they’re busy; they find “convenience” and restaurant foods more accessible than foods they cook themselves; they (incorrectly) believe that ready-to-eat foods are less expensive than those they cook themselves; they live in so-called food deserts and lack access to real food; and they were never taught to cook by their parents, making the trend self-perpetuating.

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Money

Heads of State

SUSTAINABLE MONEY

Why a Budget Is Like a Diet — Ineffective

By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

Published: December 31, 2010

What would you do if your wallet became harder to open as your spending approached or exceeded your budget? Would you think twice about where your money was going?

A product designer at M.I.T. who created a working prototype for such a wallet seems to think so, and he may be on to something. Part of the reason so many people spend too much, or fail to stick to self-imposed budgets, is because parting with our money has become an abstraction in our increasingly cashless society. Credit cards provide immediate gratification, but no immediate consequences. Plucking actual dollars from your pile of cash, research suggests, is more painful, and leads you to spend less.

To A Healthy New Year!

4 Top Health Care Phone Apps for Your Android

As a nurse, I feel good health should be part of everyone's New Year's resolution and plan to create a greener world. There are several reasons for this, which I some point I should detail in a blog post. But as you begin the New Year, consider these apps to help you become healthier.

Calorie Counter

The first app is a very cool calorie counter that goes far beyond any mobile calorie counter that I’ve ever seen. On the Android Market, it is simply called Calorie Counter.  The application lets you look up just about any food imaginable in order to learn the calorie and nutritional content. Obviously, having such convenient access to nutritional information will help you make much better informed food choices, and of course it will greatly improve your eating habits.

This app has every method of searching you could think of, including areas for general food, popular and supermarket brands, restaurant chains and even the ability to scan the barcode on food packages and instantly get information on its nutritional content. The application goes even further than just serving as a reference. You can keep a calorie log in the form of a “food diary,” you can keep track of how and when you exercise, and of course it helps you to track your weight over time so that you can monitor your progress.

A Sustainable New Year - Sustainable Love

It’s the day after New Year’s— broken your resolutions yet? No guilt necessary. After all, it’s hard enough to make it through a day, never mind a year, of good intentions. The problem is often with the resolutions themselves: Stay financially upright. Be loving to your spouse. Eat better. Recycle. Easy to say, but hard to do. So here, a guide on making those resolutions stick — and keeping the guilt at bay.

The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: December 31, 2010

A lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage. Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons.

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Heads of State

The Week in Review’s guide to a healthier, happier 2011.

Tara Parker-Pope on Love

Tara Siegel Bernard on Money

Mark Bittman on Food

James Gorman on Invasivores

David Pogue on Tech

Graphic

Overlap = Happy?

Related

• Well Blog: The Sustainable Marriage Quiz (December 31, 2010)

But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying. In short, they want a sustainable marriage.

“The things that make a marriage last have more to do with communication skills, mental health, social support, stress — those are the things that allow it to last or not,” says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor who directs theInterpersonal Relationships Laboratory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “But those things don’t necessarily make it meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual.”

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?

Not anymore. For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? (Take the full quiz measuring self-expansion.)

While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships, Dr. Lewandowski says.

“If you’re seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position,” he explains. “And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.”

The concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat them to new experiences, like a weekend away. But self-expansion isn’t just about exotic experiences. Individuals experience personal growth through their partners in big and small ways. It happens when they introduce new friends, or casually talk about a new restaurant or a fascinating story in the news.

The effect of self-expansion is particularly pronounced when people first fall in love. Inresearch at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 325 undergraduate students were given questionnaires five times over 10 weeks. They were asked, “Who are you today?” and given three minutes to describe themselves. They were also asked about recent experiences, including whether they had fallen in love.

After students reported falling in love, they used more varied words in their self-descriptions. The new relationships had literally broadened the way they looked at themselves.

“You go from being a stranger to including this person in the self, so you suddenly have all of these social roles and identities you didn’t have before,” explains Dr. Aron, who co-authored the research. “When people fall in love that happens rapidly, and it’s very exhilarating.”

Over time, the personal gains from lasting relationships are often subtle. Having a partner who is funny or creative adds something new to someone who isn’t. A partner who is an active community volunteer creates new social opportunities for a spouse who spends long hours at work.

Additional research suggests that spouses eventually adopt the traits of the other — and become slower to distinguish differences between them, or slower to remember which skills belong to which spouse.

In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them.

People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner. When the trait described only one person, the answer came more slowly. The delay was measured in milliseconds, but nonetheless suggested that when individuals were particularly close to someone, their brains were slower to distinguish between their traits and those of their spouses.

“It’s easy to answer those questions if you’re both the same,” Dr. Lewandowski explains. “But if it’s just true of you and not of me, then I have to sort it out. It happens very quickly, but I have to ask myself, ‘Is that me or is that you?’ ”

It’s not that these couples lost themselves in the marriage; instead, they grew in it. Activities, traits and behaviors that had not been part of their identity before the relationship were now an essential part of how they experienced life.

All of this can be highly predictive for a couple’s long-term happiness. One scale designed by Dr. Aron and colleagues depicts seven pairs of circles. The first set is side by side. With each new set, the circles begin to overlap until they are nearly on top of one another. Couples choose the set of circles that best represents their relationship. In a 2009 report in the journal Psychological Science, people bored in their marriages were more likely to choose the more separate circles. Partners involved in novel and interesting experiences together were more likely to pick one of the overlapping circles and less likely to report boredom. “People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 2, 2011, on page WK4 of the New York edition.