May 26th, 2013 
Eric Wilson 
When my wife and I decided to move closer to her family and leave Colorado, it was an immensely difficult decision. In fact, it was so hard we couldn’t let go of our condo to sell it. It was our first home as a married couple and where we brought both of our sons home [...]
Posted in Behavior, Conservation, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed, Sustainability 
Tags: Colorado, Denver, Los Angeles, Water, Water Conservation 
No Comments » May 22nd, 2013 Stephen Wade 
People are funny, stubborn creatures sometimes. Even as evidence continues to pile up, habits persist. No matter one’s values or decision making process, it is hard to see how biking isn’t the preferred method of transportation. Biking is healthy. A thirty minute bike commute burns 300 calories, reduces heart disease risk by 50%, helps the [...]
Posted in Behavior, Featured Posts, Sustainability, Transportation Tags: Bicycles, Environment, Public Health, Stephen Wade No Comments » May 12th, 2013 Eric Wilson 
I was in Denver for 26 hours a few months ago and had to rent a car. If there had been light rail from the airport, maybe I could’ve pulled it off, but I had a series of meetings, including one in Boulder, so car rental it was. Anyway, I choose the cheapest model, figuring [...]
May 8th, 2013 Eric Wilson 
My wife and I recently ended a 5-month long home search. Our parameters were a bit tight. Between budget and location, we automatically discounted a number of homes. We have one car and wanted to keep it that way for sustainability reasons (financial and environmental). We looked for a place close to the bus line [...]
April 28th, 2013 Eric Wilson 
I feel like everywhere I look these days, all I see is excessive consumption, even when it’s not necessarily the case. On the bus, the person sitting next to me reads a magazine and my mind goes directly to the paper needed to produce it. The next step in my thinking is a tablet and [...]
Posted in Behavior, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed, Sustainability Tags: Cars, Keystone Pipeline, Prius No Comments » April 21st, 2013 Stephen Wade 
What does it mean to be green? In the modern era, its meaning has evolved from Rachel Carson’s documentation of pollution in Silent Spring, Teddy Roosevelt and and John Muir’s founding of the National Parks, and Henry David Thoreau’s solitary musings in Walden to a more complex, integrated, consumption-based, and urban meaning exhibited by Al [...]
April 16th, 2013 Eric Wilson 
Let me start by saying I am not a prophet and do not pretend to be one. However, my recent nightmare is causing me to rethink this. My father is a psychiatrist and my sister is a physician, though more public health oriented. The former likes to analyze dreams and the latter happened to be [...]
Posted in Behavior, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed, Sustainability Tags: Center for Sustainable Initiatives No Comments » April 14th, 2013 Eric Wilson 
As a follow up to a recent post about toaster ovens and toasters, I’ve come across another troublesome kitchen appliance, the dishwasher. I love the dishwasher. Well, I love the idea of it; not when it comes to resource consumption (water, detergent, materials to build), but from a pure convenience standpoint. Here’s the problem, it [...]
Posted in Behavior, Conservation, Energy Efficiency, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed Tags: Tiny Homes, Water, Water Conservation No Comments » March 31st, 2013 Eric Wilson 
I recently read Alan Weisman’s Gaviotas on the bus. Numerous tweets resulted from the first few chapters and now this post. Weisman relates the story of how the 1973 oil embargo and ensuing energy crisis played a crucial role in the attention heaped upon Gaviotas, a settlement in the llanos (savannah) of Colombia. The town [...]
March 20th, 2013 Stephen Wade 
I love Ann Arbor, MI. There, I said it. As an urban planner from a large urban metropolitan region like Washington, DC, I am a little ashamed to say that. But after living in Charlottesville, VA for a couple of years, I had an inkling that I couldn’t shake. Now that I’m back in a [...]
Posted in Featured Posts Tags: Ann Arbor, college towns, livability, quality of life, Stephen Wade No Comments »
