The animal and human health benefits of taking prebiotics and probiotics, which nurture beneficial gut bacteria, mirror those organic farming practices that benefit soil micro-organisms essential to crop health and nutrient content. Both gut and soil bacteria are harmed by agrichemicals, antibiotics and GM (genetically modified) crops and foods.

As Hippocrates advised, ‘Let your medicine be your food, and your food be your medicine.’ Knowing what you are feeding yourself, your family, and your animal companions, and making informed choices in the market place, are responsible steps toward sound health care maintenance that will help lower your medical and veterinary expenditures. The basic currency of a Green economy as I see it is mindfulness. That includes the duty of care–for one’s own health, one’s animal companions, and the environment. The compass of a Green society is therefore compassion, the moral and legal expression of which is bioethics as detailed in my book Bringing Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society.

Though the gardening bug bites most people in spring, fall is an ideal time for planting and growing just about everywhere but the frigid north. The warm, sunny days and cool, often damp, nights are comfortable conditions for many garden crops as well as for people working outside. By the end of summer, many common pest insects and weeds have completed their life cycles for the year, so they’re less likely to plague gardens in the fall. Best of all, there’s a unique satisfaction you get from serving a little homegrown food on Thanksgiving.

Spinach isn’t the only vegetable that thrives in the fall. Lettuce, kale, mache, and most other salad greens grow best in cooler, shorter days. If you have a month or so before your average first frost (you can check the date in your area at http://www.farmersalmanac.com/weather/a/average_frost_dates), you’ll get a nice autumn harvest of string beans, broccoli, beets, carrots, radishes, cabbages and leeks – all of which survive light frost once they are mature.

To get the two-season harvest of spinach, plant the seeds directly in your garden when nighttime temperatures are consistently 65 degrees F or cooler. After they come up and have more than two sets of true leaves (not the pair of embryonic leaves that nearly all plants start with), you can snip them to add to your salad bowl. Be sure to always let at least one pair of leaves remain on each plant so they can continue photosynthesizing and producing new leaves. When your local weather forecast predicts a hard frost, pack straw or shredded leaves in the bed almost as deep as the spinach is tall. That is, you should be just able to see the spinach tops. Let them alone all winter – they’ll even survive under snow. On the first warm days of spring, pull back the mulch. As soon as you see the plants growing again, you can start harvesting and eating your homegrown weeks before the spring planters sow their seeds.

Learn more about gardening in fall at www.organicgardening.com.

Scott Meyer was Editor of Organic Gardening magazine and OrganicGardening.com from 2002-2009. He wrote/edited the chapter on gardening in the Whole Green Catalog.

Understanding the “life-cycle” of any consumable good offers a pretty accurate sense of how “green” it really is – basically, where things come from and what happens to them when we are done with them. There are 5 questions that you can ask about any product to check its pulse of “greenness” and what kind of impact or footprint it has and leaves behind – basically, how things are sourced, produced, used and disposed of.

1. What is it made of (renewable or nonrenewable materials)?
2. How is it made (the impact of manufacturing on people and the planet)?
3. How is it transported (how far and by what means)?
4. What is the impact and effect of use (how safe or harmful to humans and the ecosystem)?
5. What happens to it when we’re done with it (reusable or not, recyclable or not, biodegradable or not)?

These 5 questions will help you make greener choices for your home and lifestyle, whether for food, fuel, cleaning products, personal care products, clothing, paper or plastic, energy, mattresses, furniture, shower curtains, or dog toys. While you might not have a definitive answer to each question for every single product you purchase, with a spirit of adventure and curiosity, you can get a pretty good sense of where it falls on the scale for a life-cycle of eco-friendly greenness. One qualifying element to consider that applies to questions 4 and 5 is: How well is it made? That is, determining how long the product will last and/or how well it works. This qualifier is a key piece to overall sensible consumerism: quality over quantity, buy less stuff that’s made better and will last longer.

The greenest products are (1) made with renewable materials (natural materials that can be regenerated), (2) are produced with minimal impact (to the planet and people and with minimal energy and/or renewable energy), (3) are efficiently transported over minimal distances (produced as respectively close to home as possible – locally, regionally or domestically), (4) are nontoxic to humans and the immediate environment to use, and (5) can be reused, recycled, or will biodegrade with little to no environmental contamination.

The least green products are (1) made from nonrenewable materials, (2) are highly polluting and energy-intensive to produce, (3) are shipped from other coasts, countries, or continents, (4) are toxic to use, and (5) persistently pollute the environment or end up in the landfill.

As with most things, this is not a back-and-white exercise. You will not be quizzed at the end of this reading because there’s a learning curve to weigh and balance the pros and cons of a product and it takes a little practice to get the hang of it. If you were being graded, I’ll give you a hint: On the bell curve, most products fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum relative to other products of the same design. It’s a sliding scale with shades of green and a forest of possibility.

• Cork cup sleeves – very cool. Very green, stylish even. Cork is plentiful, so no reason to burn hands with hot cups.
• Fuji EnviroMax Batteries – eco-respectful, high-performance, landfill friendly, only at Target for now.
• Pentel’s Recycology writing instruments. Widely available pens, pencils, markers, at least 50% recycled content, keen pricing.
• Imago Associates – rebuilt, re-tooled, sometimes redesigned old office furniture that is given new, clever looks, by a company that is keeping tons of stuff out of landfills and in offices.
• “I am a paper paper clip.” You read right. These paper clips are made from wood pulp.
• Stride by AllSteel – Smart design, all new, all green furniture from a longtime industry leader. It’s a new line, to mesh with the times. Want more updates? Once monthly (sometimes more often), I’ll update the green office gear blog at this address.

Probably this is a bit much for small and home businesses but reviewing Ricoh’s touchpoints serves as a a good reminder of what matters when it comes to greener document management: Use energy efficient equipment (printers, scanner, faxes). Be mindful about ink/toner recycling. Don’t buy new equipment without knowing the manufacturer’s end of life recycling commitments. All simple, yes – but Ricoh helps put these concepts front of mind.

The smart folks at Ames True Temper® know a legend in the making when they see one, and offer a near-perfect twin of the fabled Monster Maul. The Lickety Splitter, Model 1131500, is a twelve-pound splitting maul featuring the same wide, triangular head, 32-inch steel handle, and even the bright red paint job of the Monster Maul. A search for retailers online pulled up prices from $35 to over $90, so shop around. You can find the Lickety Splitter on the Ames Web site. The site has a convenient store finder.

As we noted in the Whole Green Catalog (page 226), Samsung was already marketing three green phones, two with cases fabricated of bioplastic, which is based on such common plants as corn. The advantages of bioplastics are that about 80% of it is recyclable; it contains none of those alarming pollutants like PVCs and flame retardant chemicals; in the manufacturing process, it also reduces the company’s carbon footprint. The major drawback of those three phones, the E200, the W510, and the F268 is that they are sold only in Europe, Korea, and China, respectively. No more. Now with the mid-August sale date of the Reclaim, Samsung joins the Green Game in the United States.

This is a step up for the cell-phone industry, which—although most major companies operate and promote recycling programs (returned phones usually get donated to charitable organizations here and abroad)—still struggles with consumers who reportedly toss something on the order of 100 million discard phones a year into landfills.

The Reclaim’s other eco-appropriate features include the fact that the packaging is made from recycled materials and printed with soy inks. Its charger is efficient, with a top Energy Star rating. No paper manual comes with the phone; a manual is only available online. It does come with industry-standard features: a full QWERTY slide-out keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera with zoom, stereo Bluetooth 2.0, expandable storage, and numerous green apps.

The phone is available now for use on the Sprint network, at such major retailers as Radio Shack, Best Buy, and Walmart. And speaking of green good news: List price of the Reclaim is $49.99, and of that, when bought from Sprint, two dollars will be donated to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program to support conservation of natural habitats in America.

There are lots of good splitting mauls on the market. In general, look for a splitting maul with an overall length of about 34 to 36 inches, which for someone of average height is about the right length for a wide, powerful swing. Traditionalists like their hickory handles, but fiberglass handles are far more durable. (One wag reports that he converted to fiberglass after breaking so many wooden handles that his wife suggested that he just buy a truckload of handles and burn those instead of firewood.) A handle guard is a nice feature that protects the handle immediately below the head from overstrikes. Mauls that feature a sledge on the side of the head opposite the blade are handy for driving a splitting wedge when you encounter a really tough piece of wood that you just can’t split with your maul alone.

Splitting mauls come in a variety of weights, and weight is a key consideration. If you can handle a heavy maul, it will strike a round of firewood with greater authority than a light maul will. But heavy mauls are more tiring to use, and a maul so heavy that you can’t swing it fast and accurately is likely to be less efficient than a light maul swung quickly and well. A maul with a relatively light, six-pound head is good choice for splitting relatively soft woods, such as fir, pine, and aspen. Most home wood splitters find that an eight-pounder is better for hardwoods, such as white oak, hickory, and black birch. There are many exceptions, however. Some straight-grained hardwoods, like northern red oak, white birch, and chestnut oak, are typically easy to split, and a six-pound maul will handle them just fine if you have a fast swing. Big-diameter rounds are almost always harder to split than smaller ones, long pieces are harder to split than short ones, and knotty wood is harder to split than relatively knot-free wood. Select your splitting maul based on the kind and size of the wood you expect to split most often, and on the maul weight with which you’re most comfortable.

So why heat with firewood? A pioneering study released by the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) in 2003, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Firewood Production Systems,” modeled the greenhouse gas emissions from wood fuel and compared it to the emissions resulting from the use of other fuels. The study considered not just the emissions from the burning of the fuel, but also the emissions created by the supply chain that converts the raw fuel at its source into useful energy at its eventual destination. The conclusion: Burning firewood results in lower greenhouse gas emissions than coal, natural gas, coke, fuel oil, or electricity generated from fossil fuels. And not just a little lower. The AGO study found that in the likeliest scenarios for firewood collected and harvested from native forests and woodlands, wood-burning results in about one-third to one-tenth of the greenhouse gases released by the use of natural gas, the next-cleanest fuel considered in the study.

Firewood is a renewable resource. We can grow trees, but when we use that last barrel of crude, there won’t be any more. The harvesting of trees for firewood, done as part of a sensible forest-management plan, can improve the overall health of a forest not degrade it, reduce the danger of wildfire, and promote biodiversity. And firewood is relatively cheap. For example, in my area (southern New England), a hundred gallons of fuel oil at this writing costs about $240. It should yield about 12 to 13 million BTUs of actual heat in your home, depending on the efficiency of your heating system. A cord of hardwood, cut and split, currently costs about $225 delivered (it’s only about $100 a cord if you buy whole logs and cut and split them yourself), and should yield about 15 to 16 million BTUs, again depending on the efficiency of your system. And wood heat much cheaper if you cut your own. My firewood permit on the watershed property of a local utility company will cost me $40 next year, and I’ll then pay $25 per cord for the five cords I’ll need for the year. I’ll also spend a little more than a hundred bucks on chainsaw parts and maintenance, miscellaneous tools and tarps, chain lubricant, and gas for the saw and the pickup. Altogether, it costs me about $275 to keep my home warm and cozy through a New England winter. Yes, it takes time and sweat, but I’m a middle-aged guy who sits in front of a computer screen most of the day, and I need the exercise.

You have to burn wood right to make all of this work for you and the environment. Wood needs to be fairly dry to burn well and to keep those precious BTUs from literally going up in smoke. About 20 to 25 percent moisture by weight is about right for firewood. Most wood when cut or collected in the forest will start out with a moisture content of about 45 to 50 percent by weight. Your wood needs time and proper storage for drying. Winter and early spring are the best seasons to put up firewood for next winter. Stack it outside, off the ground (recycled wood pallets work great), and in a sunny place. If you live in a damp climate, cover the top of the stack to keep the rain off, but leave the sides of the stack open so the moisture can escape as the wood dries. Even if you buy your firewood cut and split, get it early in the year. No matter what the newspaper ad says about “seasoned” firewood, it’s almost always delivered too wet to burn well.

You’ll need a good woodstove. Open fireplaces are amazingly inefficient, typically providing only about 10 percent of the heat from your firewood as warmth in your home. The other 90 percent goes up the chimney. Modern woodstoves and fireplace inserts will typically provide between 65 and 80 percent efficiency, and are designed to burn cleanly and with very little smoke—provided that your wood is properly dried!