As a long time supporter of education and employee engagement around sustainability through the many discussion courses offered by the Northwest Earth Institute, we are proud to continue our support of NWEI as a sponsor and corporate participant of EcoChallenge 2010.

The NWEI EcoChallenge is like Apples to Apples with a little twist. You are your own judge and decide from among predetermined categories (the red apples), including Water Conservation, Energy Efficiency, Sustainable Food Options,Alternative Transportation, Trash Reduction or Choose Your Own.  The EcoChallenge (the green apple card) is anything that challenges you to live a more sustainable life. The choice could be just a simple, small adjustment or a wildly creative and extreme departure to your daily routine that you do for two weeks (October 1-15) – again you are the judge.

You could choose to build a better relationship with the food you eat by shopping local and organic. Keeping with our apples theme, you could pick organic apples at a local farm and make homemade apple crisp to share with your family and friends.  You could choose to turn that patch of your yard that you don’t know what to do with into a garden and grow some of your own fruits and veggies (or if space is an issue, turn your windowsill into an herb gardenand have a limitless supply of mint). Looking for inspiration? The NWEI staff has some creative ideas.

Learn more.

Our bodies, like our planet, are 30% solid and 70% water.  Plainly, water is what we’re made of.  Someone said that in the first 5 minutes of the documentary that Upstream screened here at Leftbank on Tuesday night.  I straddled the line between horrified despair and hopeful inspiration the whole time.  Transfixed and transformed. 

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Buried in the 75 messages waiting in my email inbox yesterday morning, I unearthed this bit of news about large grocery retailers staging lookalike farmers markets in select locations, regardless of the actual source of the produce being sold. It seems supermarkets have figured out that freshness, taste and traceability of food from farm to table matter to people. It also seems that supermarkets are looking to take advantage of the hard work farmers, market managers and community supporters have invested in building the modern local food movement over the past half century.

On the one hand, this development indicates the conversation about food security and sustainability is really going somewhere if the industrial food system is taking notice and capitalizing on the integrity of the term farmers market. On the other hand, this makes a whole lot of us who work in the world of local food and sustainable agriculture stinkin’ mad. Farmers markets are just that - places of commerce where farmers sell directly to the produce loving public, not big grocery store chains with big marketing budgets. Don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise.

Please join us at the brewery September 24th from 4:30 - 9 pm for a special bottle release party featuring our newest beer which we’ve left nameless and style-less and open to the interpretation of the thinking man yobs.  Local beer writer and enthusiast Abe Goldman-Armstrong will be in charge of the record player all night playing classic punk records before this beer gets lost in the supermarket.

In addition to this latest release we will be pouring a single cask firkin of our Four with an addition of juiced rhubarb grown by our good friend Ron Boesl. Look for other special taps and snacks as well. Also available will be a limited run of new t-shirts featuring the bottle artwork:

Next Tuesday Upstream is hosting a casual happy hour screening of an amazing new film at the Leftbank, and Alex of Upright has graciously agreed to open his tasting room the hour before. Come hang out with your neighbors!

The Latino Network’s deep dedication to their work springs from a core belief in the right of all people to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect their lives and the lives of their families.

In order to achieve this participation, they work tirelessly to strengthen community voice, cultivate financial, educational, and leadership skills, and build trusting, supportive relationships between community members and among service organizations.

At Context Partners we design strategies that allow you to leverage your community to drive the future of your organization. Working directly with our partners we lead them through a method of learning about who their community is and then collectively design a strategy to leverage their unique power.

When does less equal more? When you’re talking about garbage, for one. At Portland Farmers Market, we are serious about sustainability and the fact that less waste generated at our markets means more resources for the generations to come. This year, with generous support from the City of Portland, we launched our EverGreen initiative, a comprehensive waste reduction plan designed to address this crucial issue. Read more here about how we are doing so far.

See you at the market!

(Photo courtesy of PFM volunteer and food blogger Allison Jones)

We are rolling through the Portland Farmers Market high season with hardly a breath between markets. The harvest is here in splendid abundance, the farmers are tired from long days (and nights) of labor, and Portlanders are awash in the edible rewards of backyard gardens and local farmers’ markets. Everyone, from the bees to the squirrels, is hard at work with an eye towards the cooler, darker days of fall.

Before the rains arrive though, we’d like to spend a little more time reveling in the peppers, melons, tomatoes, stone fruit and squashes of the full summer sun. An easy way to do that is by enjoying a humble workhorse of the vegetable world: zucchini. By virtue of its easygoing nature and prolific production, zukes are omnipresent this time of year and under appreciated by (almost) all the food lovers we encounter. One exception to the zucchini naysayers crowd is PFM volunteer Nicolette Smith. She has lately been singing the praises of zucchini on our blog. Check out what she has to say and see if you aren’t newly converted!

See you at the market!

I’m working hard to teach my littles about riding bikes. And sharing. Right now the people at Lloyd TMA are thinking a lot about bikes and sharing, too. In fact, they want your feedback about a bike sharing program in the district. In their words:

Bike share systems provide short-term bike rental through a series of automated bike kiosks. Paying members check out a bike to ride short distances and then return it to any other kiosk in the system. Rates are set to encourage short-term use and quick turnover. Bike sharing increases mobility by providing an additional, flexible transportation mode. It has the potential to introduce new people to urban bicycling, reduce peak-hour pressure on transit, decrease automobile trips, and improve livability.

Those are some lovely potential outcomes. Is a bike sharing program something you’d like to see in the neighborhood? Something you’d use? Take a 2-minute survey and tell TMA what you think.