Local business helping a local business.

The Animal Healing Center at 1228 Vega St off W. Morena Ph#619-276-5900 purchased some Ultra Touch Cotton Blue Jean Insulation from Olive Branch.

Beth, Keith, Rex and Rex’s mom are shown here outside the center. The feeling was quiet, peaceful, clean, and loving. Thank you Beth Weingardt and the Animal Healing Center we appreciate your business.

Lisa, co-owner Olive Branch

http://www.socalwatersmart.com/

Look for this symbol on the left side of the above website. This represents how much rebate money for high-efficiency toilets is left. We at Olive Branch want our customers to take full advantage of the benefits offered when making a purchase. We appreciate your business and we work hard so you can rest assured your best interest is in mind.

Olive Branch wants to be around for a long time. We see our business as an investment of passion to identify safe, healthy, and beautiful materials to remodel and build with.

Lisa, co-owner Olive Branch

green behavior

What makes us go green? As a behavioral scientist, I am excited to see research that begins to answer this questions. As with most research questions, however, research studies typically provoke more questions than they answer. We don't exactly know why we engage in green behavior, but we are getting an idea of what things might make us behave "more green."

A few things we've learned about what might promote people to recycle:

(1) Being reminded helps a lot.
A study in a university setting showed that just by posting signs to remind individuals to recycle (in proximity to a convenient way to do it), recycling increased by 29%.

(2) If we get feedback on how we're doing, it helps a lot.
In another university setting, as a result of just posting the number of aluminum cans recycled the previous week, recycling increased by 65%.

(3) Making recycling fun can help a LOT.
This is not a published study, but it is definitely my favorite.  Just by making bottle and can recycling a game, this recycling unit was used 100 times in one night compared to a neighboring unit being used 2 times.   http://bit.ly/5kcgKx 

(4) If we think others are doing it, we'll do it too!

A really interesting study conducted in a hotel showed that the little signs asking guests to save water definitely make a difference in promoting towel re-use.  Moreover, a sign telling guests that 75% of the other guests are reusing towels helped even more.  And even more interesting?  A sign telling guests that other guests that stayed in the specific room they were staying in was even more influential.  That's right, for some reason, when the guests knew that other guests that had stayed in their same room were towel re-users, they were more likely to reuse themselves.

As a follow-up, there is a study in progress to evaluate whether individuals will be more inclined to save water and energy if their residential use bills give them the numbers about how much their neighbors are saving.

Humans are interesting animals, aren't we?

Bright Green Future and MoveSD

Last weekend I made it up to the UCSD campus in La Jolla for the afternoon session on the second day of the Bright Green Future Conference. All afternoon speakers from a wide variety of fields gave short, presentations, providing a lot of information and insight in to the current state of the green development in San Diego. For example there was Bill Powers from the Sierra Club's Smart Energy Solutions Campaign who wants to put solar panels on every building for distributed energy production, rather than investing in more costly transmission lines from centralized sources outside the county. Joel Pointon from SDGE discussed how fortunate San Diego is to be the first city in the country to receive Nissan's plug-in electric car, the Leaf, as well as an infrastructure of charging stations to support it. We should also thank Richard V. Anthony for helping to bring us recycling with Zero Waste San Diego, and we should all support him with his next goal of a city wide composting service, COOL2012.

All of the speakers were engaging and together showed the breadth of sustainable initiatives in San Diego, but one in particular that captured my attention was the presentation from Alan Hoffman from Move SD. For the past five years this non-profit has been working to bring quick, effective, and affordable mass transit to San Diego that is collectively referred to as their FAST plan. This is especially appealing to me since I don't own a car. Because it is cheaper, the weather is always perfect, I live in the city, and I'd rather not contribute to a costly and harmful addiction to oil, I either walk, bike, or take the bus to get where I'm going.

So far not owning or driving a car hasn't had much of an impact on my life. Most everything I need is within a couple miles, but there are the occasional trips that remind me why not having a car in San Diego can be such a hassle. Taking the bus from North Park to La Jolla was one of these trips. Two buses and one transfer is not that hard to manage, but the hour and a half spent on those buses compared to what would have been a 20 minute car ride demonstrates the inefficiency of San Diego mass transit. Research from Move SD shows how although currently the trolley lines look great, they do a remarkably poor job of connecting areas of dense residential and commercial.

(http://www.movesandiego.org/pdf/FASTPlanFlyer090416.pdf)

Their vision for San Diego is modeled after Brisbane, Australia which uses dedicated bus roads called quickways to keep the buses out of regular traffic and always moving. Under this model there are fewer transfers, fewer stops (more express routes), and shorter wait times due to high frequency of buses. This network besides being faster than the current bus or trolley system would also be based upon researched commuting patterns, so it would be more accessible , direct, and get people closer to their destinations. Increased public transit efficiency also gets more cars off the road, improving traffic for those still driving. Even more remarkable is that the FAST plan would cost less than what SANDAG's Regional Transportation Plan has already budgeted.

The detail of research and planning Move SD has done on this project may be the most impressive thing about it. They give the impression of almost being ready to simply hand over the blueprints to the city. I hope the city is listening, and that sooner rather than later we can see some implementation of FAST. How long will it take me then to get to UCSD for the next Bright Green Future Conference? I can't say for sure, but I hope it will be enough to convince at least a few more people to leave the car in the driveway.


-Andrew
andrew@olivebranchgbs.com

Natural Step

Recently I read Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns can Change to Sustainable Practices, and I was very impressed. In the book they provide a framework for what a sustainable society or community should be and the methods needed to achieve that goal. Developed by scientists in Sweden, the Natural Step is essentially four simple rules that become guidelines for developing sustainable solutions. Already many municipalities throughout Sweden and several major corporations have successfully adopted these strategies with universally positive results.
The four rules are simply this:

To become a sustainable society we must...
1. eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of substances extracted from the Earth's crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels)
2. eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of chemicals and compounds produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT )
3. eliminate our contribution to the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes (for example, over-harvesting forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat); and
4. eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on).
(taken from: http://www.naturalstep.org/en/faq)


I think there is so much to like about this. First, it's simple and to the point. It removes all the details that can stir people away, thinking it is too large of an issue to tackle, and gets to what is absolutely essential to sustainable living. Secondly, there is no real political or ideological spin that can drive people apart, since these four principals are derived from facts everyone can agree on. Finally, due to its simplicity it is highly scalable, from the choices an individual makes in his or her home to the actions of communities, businesses, states, or even nations.

The book has some great examples of how the Natural Step has been applied and what other communities can learn from these cases, or you can learn more about them on their website www.naturalstep.org. Maybe the most important lesson to take from this organization is not their specific framework, but that change is possible. For many of us it may seem that becoming a sustainable society is an impossibility and that in order for us to live and grow we must always take at the expense of the Earth. The communities who have followed the Natural Step or other examples like it around the world have proven this notion false and have shown that living in concert with the environment is a goal all of us can achieve.

-Andrew

compost passion

As I posted in an earlier blog, we started composting as a result of not using plastic liners in our trash.  I am in love with the compost.  I haven't even used it for anything yet, but the rich, dark, heavily scented and alive mulch just brings me a tiny bit of joy!  As with others who are starting to compost, it's been a process as I learned how to adjust the recipe to discourage flies, reduce unpleasant odors and encourage decomposition at a reasonable rate.  

What I'm noticing now, is that I'm not alone in my passion for the compost.  Anyone I've met that has a compost talks about it with a serious emotional attachment.  For example, a good friend of mine in northern Cal wrote a few months ago complaining about her frustration with not being able to find a compost bin.  She then wrote recently with the following note:  "I found a bin about a week after my rant to you about not being able to find a bin locally. You can bet I've let the city (and anyone else who would listen) know about that. After trial and error, last month I turned out a beautiful batch of rich crumbly compost and put it in the garden. This morning as I drank my cup of tea in the backyard - while admiring my plants and enjoying the activity of birds, squirrels and a lizard - I thought of you and Lisa.  I had to write and say hi. I hope you are doing well!"  Can't you just feel the magic of the compost?  And the websites, blogs, and compost classes are further testament to the attraction of composting.  I speculate it's the connection with nature, like gardening, only much easier.  The transformation of our personal garbage to nutrient-rich and life-giving planting material is really amazing if not downright miraculous. 

Try this experiment:  ask others about their compost.  I guarantee they will talk as long as you like and give you all the details of their tiniest contributions to their bins along with blow-by-blow histories of how they arrived at their current compost recipe with an energy and excitement of sports fans whose team won the national championship.  And truthfully, I'm about a 1000 times more interested in the compost!

lynn, co-owner Olive Branch  

Farming in Downtown San Diego

This past Saturday my roommate and I decided to head downtown and lend a hand at San Diego City College's urban farm. As a collaboration between the college, San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, San Diego High School, and Garfield High School the farm that was once a small patch of campus lawn in the summer of 2008 is now a productive farm that serves as a classroom, an example of local sustainable agriculture, and a source of fresh vegetables for city dwellers who stop by its farm stand every Tuesday morning.

For several hours Saturday morning myself and a few other volunteers, helped prepare a cover crop on one of the farms lower terraces. This crop will not be harvested, but instead the wheat and lima beans we planted will be cut down to feed the soil and make it more fertile for the next planting. It was a unique experience turning soil, watering, laying seed and compost for a lifelong city-dweller like myself, and even more odd that I had to go downtown rather than out in to the country to do it.

I hope that soon changes though and that City College's curious patch of agriculture surrounded by skyscrapers becomes the norm not an oddity. By farming locally in urban centers, and doing so organically we can simultaneously reduce our use of oil (for transportation and fertilization of food), reduce our waste through composting, and increase our self-sufficiency in case of disasters or emergencies that limit external supplies. Thankfully I think it may be a growing trend. San Diego Roots sponsors several projects around the county that you can read about here. There is also Greensgrow in Philadelphia, which is a great example of brownfield reclamation. Finally we can all learn something from Cuba where the fall of the Soviet Union coupled with trade embargoes forced the development of urban organoponicos to fight food shortages.

Down the street from Olive Branch is an empty, fenced-in lot. I walk by it often and think that maybe there's opportunity in that lot for North Park's very own urban farm. Until that happens though, City College's farm is a great example of what is possible.

-Andrew