Then, in 2010, she was hired to prepare a feasibility study for a would-be agricultural incubator – a place for new farmers to train and share resources. Williams interviewed growers in and around the tiny hamlet of Athens, New York, where her parents owned a home, and heard the same complaint: Small farms with relatively low volumes of less-than-perfect produce found it impossible to win contracts from major retailers, and challenging to build a base of individual consumers.

WHEN newly minted Mayor Michael A. Nutter took office in January 2008, he pledged in his inaugural address to make Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the greenest city in America by 2015. His strategy for getting the job done included a top-down redesign of city government and installing a team of deputy mayors to oversee various departments and coordinate work between them.

Technology, networking and old-fashioned footwork are just a few tools for successful grassroots activist success. When Sandra Steingraber received a call for help from an organization attempting to block expansion of a hazardous waste dump that sits on the border of their Illinois town of Peoria, she rolled up her shirt sleeves. The author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, Steingraber was no stranger to the devastating effects of toxic chemicals.

Since 1999, gardeners have experienced serious problems with herbicides that do not readily break down in compost. Residential lawn trimmings, hay and straw, municipal green waste, and cow and horse manure are all common compost ingredients that have become vectors for delivering unwanted chemicals, causing plant damage in home gardens. The offending active ingredients—the part of an herbicide that actually kills weeds—include clopyralid, aninopyralid, and the newest, aminocyclopyrachlor. This last is now attracting attention as the active ingredient in DuPont’s brand-named Imprelis.

“A lot of tax code is written specifically for farmers,” says CPA Andy McCarty, who specializes in agricultural accounting at Badgerland Financial in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. “It’s one of the ways our government tries to make food affordable.” But not every tax preparer grasps the finer points of Publication 225, the Farmer’s Tax Guide, and Form 1040, Schedule F, Profit or Loss From Farming. McCarty advises working with an agency that truly understands farm taxes, preferably one affiliated with Farm Credit, a network of government-sponsored financial-services institutions. Alternatively, your local cooperative extension can steer you toward an expert.

I still cultivate softnecks (Allium sativum ssp. sativum), in part because the bulbs can be stored for up to 12 months, giving me a marketable crop year-round. But it’s hardneck garlic (A. sativum ssp. ophioscorodon) that excites my chef-customers: The cloves have a complex, wild-garlic flavor, and the scapes, or central stems, can be used like supercharged scallions in salads, soups, and stir-fries.

About four percent of plant species have adapted to lower CO2 levels, most of them subtropical grasses such as sorghum, corn and millet. However, most plants—including marijuana—still feel deprived of the optimal CO2 levels they were born into. Ziska's research suggests plants feeling deprived will benefit from rising CO2 levels because they haven't yet adapted to the lower levels. His own and other scientists’ work indicates the medicinal qualities of these plants may be bolstered by global warming.

When London made its bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, not only was “sustainability” front and center, equally paramount was leaving a legacy of public benefits to help justify the nearly $18 billion price tag. Both were also critical to London winning the right to host the games, which marks both the first time a city has done so three times (1908, 1948 and 2012) and the first time the carbon footprint (e.g. environmental impact) of the games will be mapped out start to finish.

When institutions and large companies put their dining service needs out for bid, they may request that proposals spell out upfront how programs will help clients reduce their carbon footprint and improve their overall environmental stature in the community. That is not a bad strategy, says John Turenne, president and founder of Sustainable Food Systems and former director and executive chef at Yale Sustainable Dining.

Full Circle India shares our journey to document the pioneering environmental work of Amrita University, the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and the Amritapuri ashram in southern India. These educational/healing institutions and spiritual centers have transformed their own environmental challenges into solutions and valuable resources and are now sharing that knowledge with the greater Indian community and beyond.

If you ever have to travel by car from Springfield to Ava in Missouri, you’d best be advised not to follow Mapquest. Especially in the dark. Unless you like roller coasters.Ava is home to just about every fast-food restaurant under the Ozark Mountain sun and a Super 8 Motel that appears to be the accommodation of choice for farmers, gardeners, artisans and performers migrating from as far away as Australia to an annual garden show a few miles down the road in Mansfield. Well, not quite Mansfield

Based on Passive House (Passivhaus) architectural principles developed in Germany in the 1950s, the home of the future has a rich past in Europe, where more than 20,000 residential dwellings, schools, offices and other buildings use the technology, according to Passivhaus Trust, a nonprofit promoting the design in the United Kingdom. The concept can be applied to any climate, and about 37,000 passive houses have been built worldwide, according to the trust.

C.F. Martin & Co. understands the consequences of unsustainable forestry. The over harvesting of old-growth Adirondack spruce led the guitar industry to make the switch to Sitka spruce. Strong, light and deeply resonant, spruce offers the perfect tone wood for guitar tops. The industry has never accounted for more than a sliver of the overall wood supply — 150 to 200 giant logs supply the whole North American guitar market for a year. And most of Sealaska's wood gets exported to Asia as lumber for construction. But old-growth timbers, some more than 250 years old, provide the tight-grained, cosmetically flawless guitar tops desired by customers. There is simply no substitute for spruce, Martin said.