Lifehacker has a great post this week with ten easy ways to live greener.

Among them:

• Bring your own coffee cup to coffee shops
• Put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat
• Reduce red meat, which is very inefficient to produce.

There are lots of good additions in the comments as well!

I love mouthwash for those times when I want a fresh mouth but am too lazy or rushed to brush my teeth.  But commercial mouthwashes feel like they’re burning my mouth, and who knows what kind of chemicals are in them — in my part of the world, at least, they don’t list any ingredients.

So I decided to make my own.  I just mixed up my second batch after a small first experiment, and I’m loving the results.

Here’s what I used: ...read more

GreenAscension.com stands on the shoulders of giants; we built this site entirely using open-source software: ...read more

I got this list of quotes on leadership in an email from my wonderful mother. Many of them are terrific and insightful: ...read more

All of the various elements that will make up Green Ascension are starting to come together: graphics, website modules, products, and written content.

It’s always great to see a dream come to life!

Yesterday, the team got together for our very first video conference. Well, we tried to, but technical difficulties meant that only Ornesha and I actually got to see each other! Regardless, it was fun and exciting to speak together in real-time, and firm up some of our goals and visions for this business.

We all seem to be committed to building this business out of solid gold, from the ground up. It’s going to be an amazing process to watch it take on a life of its own, as we launch a whole community of online Green Ascenders!

I feel very blessed to be a part of this new venture, with a wonderful team of co-creators.

Lately I’ve been looking into the demographics of the green marketplace, and the results are pretty interesting. I thought I’d share them here with you.

Most ’green’ consumers tend to be:

• early adopters (i.e. they are the first to try new things)
• between 25 and 45 in age
• more likely to be female than male
• well educated
• financially secure
• self-empowered
• solution-based
• information junkies - they read, watch and listen to more media than any other group
• willing to pay 20% more for a similar product that is produced in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way.

At the same time, most green consumers want their environmentally-friendly choices to be easy, without having to make any major changes to their lifestyle. ...read more

If you have a spare ¾ of an hour, this video does a terrific job of explaining the true nature of money, debt, and the banking system.

Money isn’t real – it’s just a concept based on numbers that are stored in bank computers. Banks have the amazing power to create money, by loaning many times more of it than they actually have.

The video is made in an easy-to-absorb animated style, with an amusingly anarchistic tone. Definitely recommended if you have any interest in bringing an understanding of monetary systems into your world-view.

This is a precious video from Gangaji: