The Green Life

Trendsetter: Singer-Songwriter Missy Higgins

After the success of her debut album, Sound of White, this husky-voiced Aussie stole away to a rural part of her homeland for six reflective months to write music under an open sky. Higgins -- one of Billboard’s ten greenest artists, along with Jack Johnson and Willie Nelson -- is a stalwart eco-warrior. Her tours are carbon-neutral, she’s a vegetarian, and she totes her trusty SIGG bottle wherever she goes. Her sophomore album, On a Clear Night, reveals a deep appreciation for the healthy abandon we achieve in the natural world, especially in freedom-cry tracks like “Going North” and “Steer.”
 
Q: You partnered with the Sierra Club to give away your hit single, “Where I Stood,” to benefit the 2% Solution campaign.
A: Being involved in that is great because it’s a really inspiring and realistic way of getting people to make a change, by doing it a tiny bit at a time -- just cutting two percent [of carbon emissions] a year. I think a lot of people panic because they think going green is going to take out all the pleasures of living… But it’s about taking a more realistic approach.

Q: Will you ever sing about environmental problems?
A: I’ve tried, but I can’t figure out a way to do it without sounding cliché. Some people protest through their music, and some have to do it through other means. Midnight Oil does it pretty well [through their music]. They’re big environmentalists.

Q: Is there an environmental issue particularly close to your heart?
A: The drought is so bad back home. I would love to know how farmers could adapt to global warming. Not enough farmers know how to handle what’s happening to them and it’s really sad to see. It’s devastating my country. The fires recently were impossible to control because the whole place is so dry.

Celebrity Chatter About Going Green

Ever wonder whether celebs who claim to be ecofriendly really walk the walk when fans aren't watching? We got the inside scoop on Adrian Grenier (who plays Vincent Chase on HBO's Entourage and hosts Planet Green's Alter Eco) from Grenier's Entourage costar Kevin Connolly:

"Adrian's really done his best to make Entourage as green a set as possible. For example, I'm a big hand-washer. I like to wash my hands all day, so when we go to the makeup trailer, Adrian makes me use one paper towel the whole day to dry my hands. After I dry my hands, I have to hang my paper towel, and I make sure he's watching! I'm like, 'Adrian, do you see this?' It's great! But really, at the end of the day, it's simple things. Like, I'll finish the water bottle and he'll just say, 'Refill it. What's the point of getting another one?'"

MORE GOOD LINES

"I'm hoping to get a greenish car. A green or a blue car at least, not just a normal car. And I'm a maniac about recycling. I'll pluck things out of the trash that have been erroneously thrown there that could be recycled." --Mira Sorvino

"It's not that the world's gonna die -- we just might not survive it. It might just shrug us off. So we need to be a lot more present... and responsible for ourselves." --Rosario Dawson

"I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise, what is there to defend?" --Robert Redford

"One thing that is missing from the environment is laughter. All of these environmental problems, you feel totally overwhelmed...I do everything for laughs. I thought that my Green Porno should make green fun and so maybe convert more people to it, because part of me is also turned off by the green speech because it's always so negative and it always fills me with great guilt." --Isabella Rossellini

--collected by Susan L. Hornik

Trendsetter: Brad Farmer, Wave Protector

Seventeen years after he imported surfing's sharpest environmental tool, the Surfrider Foundation, from America to his Australian homeland, Brad Farmer is returning the favor. He recently flew to California to help the Save the Waves Coalition launch a global version of his brainchild, National Surfing Reserves Australia, which has designated nearly a dozen Aussie surf spots as sacrosanct. The title transcends semantics: It adds a new layer of governmental protection, buttressing coastal zones threatened by wave-wrecking development proposals.

Q: Less than 1 percent of Americans surf regularly, while 14 percent of Australians do. Won't that make it tougher to create surf reserves in the United States?

A: Much tougher--unless you redefine the demographic reach. Anyone who engages in recreation in the intertidal zone is a surfer. Barack Obama is a surfer. Your mum walking the beach, she's a surfer. Suddenly you've multiplied your number from 3 million to 30 million.

Q: At a recent roundtable on this project, Mark Massara, the Sierra Club's Coastal Programs director (and a surfer), warned against emphasizing a surf spot's positive fiscal impact. A surfer might value a wave at $50 million, but a developer will argue that the jetty-protected marina he wants to build in its place will be worth twice that.

A: Massara is right. Natural coastal environments are beyond value. They're priceless, and they can't be replaced.

--interview by Steve Hawk

Study Finds GPS Navigation Systems Make Drivers More Efficient

A just-released study commissioned by Navteq, a leading provider of digital map data, shows that drivers using Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices drove fewer miles (actually, kilometers in this European study) and spent less time driving.

Conflict of interest? Perhaps. But the study, based on more than 2,000 individual trips, 20,000 kilometers (about 12,500 miles) of driving, and almost 500 hours on the road, found that drivers with GPS devices experienced a 12 percent increase in fuel efficiency, a nearly 2,500-kilometer (1,550-mile) drop in distance traveled per driver per year, and a per-driver average of more than 400 Euros ($530) in annual savings on fuel.

The study evaluated drivers with and without navigation systems, taking traffic into account, in the Dusseldorf and Munich metropolitan areas in Germany. No participants in the study had previously used a GPS navigation device. The study also revealed a learning curve, with bigger reductions in driving time and fuel consumption once drivers had familiarized themselves with the GPS systems.

Trendsetter: Swimmer Christopher Swain

Christopher Swain, the first person to swim the length of the Columbia River (more than 1,200 miles), is a passionate guy. And not just about his sport, but about rivers and oceans too, and about teaching people why it's important to keep them clean. In April, Swain, who has also swum the Hudson and Charles Rivers (315 and 80 miles, respectively), will attempt to swim more than 1,000 miles from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C.

Q: How do your swims raise awareness of clean-water issues?

A: If you're in the business of conservation, you've got a responsibility to get outside. You're not doing your job if you don't. It's not about e-mail blasts. It's about what you can go out there and experience and come back and testify to. If you look at the people who've really done anything--John Muir, David Brower, Rachel Carson--you can feel it in their writing. Your credibility is going to come from your experience.

Q: Do you worry that the water's toxicity will affect you?

A: Yeah, so I manage my risk. I hardly eat seafood to avoid accumulating mercury. I go to a clinic to test for PCBs, I wear goggles and earplugs, I gargle hydrogen peroxide, I don't swim near pipes, and I'm judicious about not swimming within three days of rain to avoid runoff. I've gotten rashes and had my lymph nodes swell up to golf-ball size from swimming through sewage.

First Dog Will Enjoy the Green Life

The vote is still out for the much-anticipated White House dog breed, but Michelle Obama told People magazine she's stumping for a Portuguese water dog. With daughters Sasha and Malia so excitedto bring the pooch home, it's also noteworthy that the Obamas stand committed to taking the time to find a rescue dog.

Early names "Frank" and "Moose" received a presidential veto, but when the yet-to-be-named pup arrives in April, it'll reside in a swank, eco-friendly house created by Sustainable Pet Design. The Summa Canum (Latin for "top dog") has walls built with reclaimed lumber from our seventh president Andrew Jackson's estate and is painted with nontoxic zero-VOC paint and varnish. The stately Greek columns will support a green roof to be planted by the girls themselves.

Future plans include adding solar panels and radiant floor heating, but that will be after the Summa Canum is delivered to the White House by singer and environmental advocate Neil Young in his super-efficient LincVolt. Not too shabby.

--Jordana Fyne

Tween and Green

Disney Channel darling Miley Cyrus traded her hand-me-down Porsche (it was her mom's) for a shiny black Prius and a sassy green platform. In "Wake Up America," the latest single off her album Breakout, 16-year-old Cyrus lends her pop power to drum up environmental awareness, singing:

Everything I read
Global warming, going green
I don't know what all this means
But it seems to be saying
Wake up America
We're all in this together
It's our home so let's take care of it

Sure, artistic merit is debatable, but her good intentions and tremendous influence certainly are not. With Forbes's "World's Most Powerful Celebrities" list ranking her higher than Donald Trump and George Lucas, if Miley Cyrus says, "Let's take care of the earth," you can be sure thousands of impressionable teens will be listening.

--Jordana Fyne

Green Clubbin'

Nightclubs with a green conscience are sprouting up in major cities. San Francisco's successful Temple nightclub has expanded into an "eco-conscious 'edu-tainment' complex." Which begs the question: Can you really go wrong with some alcohol, strategically placed LED lighting and sustainable bamboo walls? At least that's what owner Jon Bakhshi is asking by opening his new nightclub, Greenhouse, in New York City's SoHo district (Green Inc). It'll be the first club of its kind to seek LEED certification and is a 6,000-square-foot, bilevel venue furnished with recycled or recyclable materials and equipped with low-flow toilets, waterless urinals and an HVAC system.

Trendsetter: Chef Karen Jurgensen

Chef Karen Jurgensen learned the tools of her trade--creative, seasonal cooking--in rural Washington (where her grandmother taught her how to forage) and in Seattle's forward-thinking restaurants and catering kitchens in the 1980s. She now advocates for local food in restaurants and teaches chefs, culinary students, and average folks how to craft seasonal menus. You can get a taste of her cuisine by trying this seasonal dish, or  the recipes in the recently released Chefs on the Farm (Mountaineers Books).

Q: How did you get into cooking with local ingredients?
A: In restaurants, you don’t follow recipes all that often—you find inspiration in what’s available. It’s much more flexible, which is what you need to run a seasonal kitchen.

Morgan Freeman, Fixer

"People on every coast in the world are our neighbors, and we have to find ways to help them be prepared for what will come when storms hit."

You know him as Red in The Shawshank Redemption, Lucius Fox in the Batman movies, and maybe even as God in last summer's box-office dud Evan Almighty. But Oscar-winner Morgan Freeman is a man who acts far beyond Hollywood. Sierra spoke with him about PlanIt Now, a nonprofit he founded after Hurricane Ivan hit Grenada in 2004. Initially called the Grenada Relief Fund, the group--which has partnered with the Sierra Club to encourage disaster preparedness--now works to help people in the Gulf Coast and Caribbean ready their families and businesses for big storms.

SIERRA: Hurricane Ivan was not the first disaster to strike a vulnerable community. What compelled you to do something about this one?

Morgan Freeman: I got a call from friends in Grenada. They were worried about the people on the other side of the island who were struggling to get water, food, and medical attention because of the mud slides and other issues. In the weeks that followed, people there were sick and dehydrated and losing weight fast--and relief was slow. I had to try to help.