Going Green, Portland Bill Lascher Going Green, Portland Bill Lascher

New rankings beg question: what makes Portland sustainable?

Can our ability to live healthily, prosperously and durably over multiple generations (my rough definition of sustainability) be gauged by simply totaling up new construction and how many gizmos it features, dollars spent, and the new kilowatt-hour reducing technology we build? Or should our analysis be a little more complex? Should we explore our actual behaviors, i.e., the actual effectiveness of the programs we incent, the way our buildings - LEED or not - get used and the type of demands we place on our power grid? Wouldn't that be the real measure of sustainability?

My un-scientific, un-journalistic assumption is that Portland would probably end up pretty far ahead on that sort of scale as well, but we -- everyone, but particularly journalists reporting on the environment -- might be well served by asking these sort of questions.

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Going Green Bill Lascher Going Green Bill Lascher

Want some coffee with your water?

Now I have a whole new reason for the landscape of my mind to be ravaged by battles over the choice of green tea and coffee: Thanks to Peter Gordon, I've just learned the Economist posted an item Feb. 25 showing it takes nearly 10 times as much water to brew a cup of coffee as it does a cup of tea, including the water used in farming, packaging and other processes. The data is pretty amazing, and shows just how much water we require for so many other products as well.

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