I posted about All Saints’ Green Festival on April 6th a couple days ago and today this article was posted on azcentral.com.

Church leaders and their congregations are increasingly becoming God’s green soldiers.

And the Easter season is an appropriate time for churches to marry spirituality and ecology.

“There is something inside us that responds to the Earth coming alive this time of year,” said Doug Bland, chairman of the Earth Care Commission with the Arizona Ecumenical Council. “It’s also a time when we face our own failings and sins. And as we look around us, we can see our role in the destruction of the planet.”
Parishioners are being asked to embrace environmentalism in a variety of ways. Members of Community Christian Church in Tempe are encouraged to go outside and reflect on Scripture surrounded by nature. Churches in Arizona’s Episcopal Diocese have formed green teams that conduct energy audits of individual churches. At First United Methodist Church in Tempe, the most recent adult Bible-study topic was “Taking Care of God’s Earth.”

Full story at azcentral.com

Earth Hour

Enjoy a day of powerful presentations designed to educate and promote green living practices and environmental insights for the way we work, play and live. Top experts in various dimensions of “Green Living” headline this unique conference.

 

• 6 Extraordinary Speakers
• Book Signings with Authors
• Delicious Lunch Included
• Raffle for Great Green Prizes
• Eco-Friendly Vendors
• Green Living Resources

The conference will feature renowned speakers: Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden (over 35,000 copies sold), Brad Lancaster, author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands (and will have his newly released Volume 2 available), Greg Peterson from Your Guide to Green and the Urban Farm, as well as many more top-level experts within the fields of GREEN Living!

Conference is Mar 3rd 9am to 5pm at the Phoenix Zoo Stonehouse Pavilion.
$44 per person if you register by April 1st. $55 after that.
You must register to attend, no walk-ins. Space is limited.

Get the full scoop at the Green Living Conference website.

We all like stuff, gadgets, gizmos, tools, whatever, but whenever we buy something new it’s creating demand for more stuff to be produced. Why create this demand when you can get lots of great stuff for free? Many of us also have quite a bit of old junk (to us) that we need to get rid of. Most of it isn’t anything we’re going to sell, but we still hold on to it. Turns out there are some great websites out there to help us find free stuff and to give us a place to give away our stuff.

Freecycle is a great website to go to find free stuff and to give stuff away for free. Once there you just search for a group near you and get signed up on the mailing list. The lists are Yahoo groups so they’re very easy and probably somewhat familiar to a lot of people. Once you’re signed up you can receive emails with all the stuff people are giving away or you can just check the group whenever there is something specific you need. The Phoenix group connects you to over 13,000 people and Tucson over 9,000 people, so there a lot of people giving away free stuff and looking for free stuff in Arizona.

Paper Back Swap - No need to buy new books, you can swap books with someone else. All you have to do is pay for postage.

Swap a CD - Similar to Paper Back Swap, but you pay .50 cents for each CD you order.

Re Use AZ is much like Freecycle except geared more towards business and construction. There you will find construction, landscaping materials, and much more. Unlike Freecycle everything is listed on the website, so no need to sign on to a group list.

What other sites are out there to help with this? Lets us know!

Earthships, cleaning toxic waste with mushrooms, and dumpster diving. Actually the first two are really cool and there are some really nice looking Earthships out there, and cleaning up toxic waste with mushrooms is ingenious. Dumpster diving is definitely too extreme for me. Read all about these over at Mental Floss.