The Green Light

By nature, magazines can’t always walk the walk. We can offer up suggestions, tips and stories about conservation, sustainability and green-ness. We can be printed on recycled paper, printed with soy-based ink and ask our readers to recycle us after they read us. Still, we increase the amount of waste being tossed into landfills and we consume enormous amounts of energy in our production, manufacturing, printing and shipping.

So, for Yellow Scene’s 2010 Green Issue, we opted to go 100 percent waste free, putting our carbon footprint where our mouths are. From a local filmmaker who’s looking to put himself out of business to local green experts’ tips for your home and office, our eco-minded issue is as green as they come (minus the electricity used to keep our computers chugging). Also, check out YS associate editor Lacy Boggs’ “Ho Hos at Home,” in which she makes processed foods from scratch, and a sneak peak of Spring Leaf, Boulder’s zero-energy model home.

Everybody’s Water—A sprinkler repair man isn’t the first person you’d think of to be a champion of saving water, but this filmmaker defies all the stereotypes.

Ho Hos at Home—Is an organic toaster pastry really that much different—or better—than a regular Pop-Tart? It was a question I started to ask when I saw a recipe for homemade Pop-Tarts. Maybe that was the answer: homemade treats instead of fabricated and chemicalized food. But would it even come close to the real thing? We decided to find out.

Eating Your Greens—The eco-revolution is changing the way we dine out, and Boulder County restaurants are on the forefront of the revolution.

Home Sweet Net-Zero-Energy Home—Spring Leaf is a net-zero energy infill housing project that is like no other in the county and probably even in the country.

The Green Thang— These days, it’s hard to know what’s truly green and what’s been “greenwashed” to seem greener than it really is. It makes shopping with a conscience challenging to say the least. Luckily, we’ve been able to find a few products that are both super-cool and truly eco-friendly that would be great as gifts or just additions to your greenie lifestyle.

Growing Green Kids — Saving the world is hard work. But your kids can learn a greener way of life before they even learn to say “carbon emissions.” If you play your cards right and teach them the right lessons in the right way, sustainability will become second nature to them.

Greenovators — Once upon a time, merely recycling your pop cans and newspapers put you into an elite class of people who were going to save the planet, not to mention the whales. There was a time when simply not littering made you ecologically superior. Those days are long gone.

Farm Fresh — A new generation of Boulder County residents is returning to the area’s farming roots, and they are a whole new breed of farmer.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea — The must sublime scene in the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove is not the dramatic and heart-wrenching footage that the film leads up to with every frame. It’s a scene in which the filmmakers and their team of elite activists infiltrate the hills around Taiji, Japan, at night to place an entire movie studio’s worth of specialized hidden cameras to secretly record the slaughter of hundreds of dolphins the following day. Out in the bay, the animals spend their last night in an area hemmed in by nets to prevent their escape. From high atop one of the hills, a cameraman uses a high-tech thermal imaging camera of the sort used by the military to look down on the water. The dolphins can be seen as slim gray forms just below the surface of the water, swimming in a clockwise circle, like a swirl of commas.

The Defender of Food — For me, the revolution started in January of 2007 when I read a feature article in The New York Times Magazine called “Unhappy Meals.”