Stories Published in Green Living

Culture & Sustainability

Green Living, August 2019

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Our Future Homes & Offices

Green Living, September 2020

The way we work in the office, how we live at home, how we interact with family, friends and our neighbors: COVID-19 has changed our lives. The pandemic has forced us to socially distance from those we do not know and even distance ourselves from those we do. Many of us who are older began our careers in cubicled environments built by the individualist post-World War II ideal: a womblike space all ours to produce and achieve on our own spunk and merit. The technological culture of connectivity then forged a collegial environment of open spaces for collaboration and sharing. The pandemic has changed this, at least for a while, to larger cubicle spaces and smaller shared ones. We Zoom together; before we roomed together. Staying more at home, we have looked to home gyms and expanded offices and home-at-school spaces for the children. Not traveling, we are spending more money for upgrades or even buying new homes. We want, says one of the contributors, Zen.

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Father’s Day 2020: What Dad Gave Me

Green Living, June 2020

2020 is a year of sadness and celebration, too. While all of us find different paths to meet the demands of a pandemic, we can also thank those who have helped make us aware and prepared. So, for Father’s Day, we asked 10 neighbors to recall what their dads gave them in terms of eco-sensitivity. We switched it : not providing a list of gifts to acquire for dad but a list of his gifts to us. Elizabeth Walton’s dad, Jerry, took her to Lake Erie for summer vacations, and Randy Schilling’s dad, Fritz, to Turkey Creek in Merrillville, Indiana, near Chicago: “We saw robins and woodpeckers. We saw muskrats swimming in the water. We saw snakes slithering in the grass. We saw squirrels climbing up trees chasing each other.” And Andy McCain’s dad, John, spent time with him in Cornville, north of Phoenix, at the getaway home for the late senator’s family: “Whenever anyone visited, he would go on and on about the trees on the property, especially the cottonwoods and the sycamores.”

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Joan Fudala: Scottsdale’s Historian

Green Living, August 2020

For more than three decades, Scottsdale’s Joan Fudala has served Scottsdale and the Valley as author, communications executive, author, lecturer, preservation advocate, historical consultant and member of numerous commissions, committees and nonprofits. In nominating her for a 2020 Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Award, Scottsdale architect Douglas B. Sydnor, FAIA, wrote: “Joan Fudala has effectively promoted and created a public awareness of our history in the greater Scottsdale area; contributed to our understanding of Scottsdale’s historic people, places and events; and executed research and publishing projects that celebrate our vast historical resources.” Congratulations, Joan, for keeping that history vibrant.

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Earth Day And the EPA Celebrate 50 Years

Green Living, April 2020

Discussing the coincidence of the 50th anniversary of EPA with the first Earth Day in 1970 was the agency’s administrator for District 9, serving the West from San Francisco, John Busterud, and Professor Noah Sachs at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia. The professor wryly noted, “The EPA is often called the federal agency no one likes to be the head of because it’s a punching bag for every interest, from the left to the right.” For sure, it’s been politically influenced over the years, and administrators with varying commitments to environmental responsibility have led it. Still, the agency has improved our lives, with cleaner air and waterways, a Superfund to remediate the mess we’ve made for more than a century and a robust recycling system, which now employs 757,000 people who receive $36.6 billion in annual wages. When EPA was founded in 1970, the national recycling rate was less than 10 percent. Today that has more than tripled to about 35 percent.

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