For my last birthday, I received a big, old box of fancy handmade soaps and lotions as a present from my mom. She lives in New Bedford, Mass., and is big into the local arts and crafts scene, as she was a crafter herself my whole childhood. This luscious ...

Anyone who knows Ryanne knows she’s extremely thrifty when it comes to utilities. Growing up in the cold winters of New England taught her to keep that thermostat to a minimum or else when spring rolls around, you’ll be in heating bill debt. Living in California allows us to keep ...

We’ve been composting in our homemade worm bin for five months now. Through trials and tribulations, we’ve learned a lot about the right environment for worms! In fact we experimented so much that we managed to decimate our entire worm population. *Sigh*. Master composter and Freshtopia diva Barb Finnin ...

The book Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart has been a good touchstone for the new green movement. Ideas like zero waste and designing products that have an almost infinite life cycle were crystalized with it’s publication. Many times during RyanIsHungry interviews, this book ...

A few months ago we did a story about California’s primary utility company, PG&E’s, Let’s Green This City campaign. The green posters were all over the city of San Francisco. Our initial reaction was, “Cool! A corporate utility company is actually talking green!” These posters suggested many things ...

Nikki Martinez and Oren Jaffe started EcoTuesday as a chill networking event for Green business folk to interact with each other. Structure is the key to networking success at EcoTuesday. The event opens with speakers from various green backgrounds - a good topic to spark conversations later. Next, everyone ...

We’ve been thinking a lot about how much trash comes in and out of our apartment. We recycle and compost a lot of stuff, but some things, like plastic wrappings, just have no where to go but the garbage. Thinking on a more micro level, we are trying to analyze ...

We are constantly bombarded with images and advertising pushing us to buy more, buy better, buy often. What happens when we stop buying so much and start making?

You might recognize Wendy Tremayne from our Green Acre Series on RyanIsHungry. Wendy founded Swap-O-Rama-Rama as a way to break out the consumer cycle of shopping for clothes. Utilizing the abundance that just a few people’s closets can bare, adding a little creativity with fancy sewing machines ...

It’s not every day you get to hack your dinner with an anarchist, computer whiz, chef — unless you are one like Marc Powell. We had the pleasure of attending a Unicorn Precinct 13 Supper Club and hanging out for a bit before the cooking frenzy. Marc shares ...

Marc Powell is an anarchist, hacker chef who opens his kitchen up to strangers and friends every Thursday to cook up some amazing hacked food creations. Attending a food hacking supper club is a mind-expanding experience that teaches folks not to be afraid of experimenting with your cuisine. ...

A beautiful day in the park, a free homemade meal, some free clothes and books. What could be better? The Really Really Free Market, as opposed to the not-so-free Free Market, breaks down the myth of scarcity and encourages us to take advantage of the abundance all around ...

The Solar Living Institute, home of Real Goods (one of the first Green Catalogs), is like a big, green playground. The 12-acre plot was developed as a demonstration site for renewable and clean technologies like solar and wind power, green building and permaculture. We were excited to be ...

Continuing our time with Sunny Johnson of WildFoodPlants.com, we explore her past experiences eating ultra local foods for a year, why she started blogging and vlogging and her outlook on what the future hold for humans and the earth together. We love Sunny’s videoblog — check it out to ...

What if the price of gasoline spiked to $10 a gallon? What if we couldn’t get all the food we needed trucked into the supermarket like we’re used to? Plant enthusiast, wild food harvester and videoblogger Sunny Johnson of WildFoodPlants.com, shows us that there are abundant, nutritional foods available ...

Many people strive for the freedom that working for themselves and freelancing brings. You can work odd hours in your pajamas at home, travel to exotic locales but still be on the job, not have to clock in at an office. After the initial exhilaration of being independent cools a ...

Have you ever cooked with a non-stick skillet and had the non-stick surface flake off after a few months? That super slick surface is made up of many harmful chemicals that should absolutely not be eaten! What’s the alternative to cheap-o, toxic frying pans? Your grandma’s grandma had the secret ...

San Francisco’s Department of the Environment is leading the initiative to fully redesign Treasure Island, a 400-acre human-made island in the San Francisco Bay. Originally built for The World’s Fair in 1939, it’s been used as a movie studio, a naval base and now for residential housing. By ...

Can you tell that we’re into our worm bin? As you saw in our last worm bin update, our bin had been getting a little sludgy and unproductive. Jay went online and found a source to buy red wigglers for cheap so we could bump up the composting production ...

Siel, aka Green LA Girl, has been blogging about her personal experiences with green since 2005. Using her blog as a journal, a conduit and a clearinghouse for practical green information and advice, she urges her fellow Los Angelites (and beyond) to think critically about the choices they make. ...

We’re constantly thinking about sustainability - in the environment we live in, as well as in the way we work and produce media. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization trying to change the way people use copyright and licensing for media and intellectual property. Instead of the traditional “all rights reserved” model for distributing works, Creative Commons continues to educate creators about the advantages that come with the “some rights reserved” model.

Your bathroom is a sacred place where you clean your body inside and out (literally). What better way to treat yourself than to green it up a bit? There are so many little things that can be done to make sure that every thing coming in (water, soap, humans) and ...

Ivan Storck runs his businesses, Sustainable Marketing and Sustainble Websites, out of Citizen Space, one of several co-working spaces cropping up in San Francisco. As a small business owner in the valley of tech giants, Ivan is working to create a community of creative and green ...

Kevin Bayuk rents an apartment in the Haight Ashbury district of San Fransicso. He also grows a large amount of his own food, actively composts, raises ducks and captures rainwater - total urban permaculture. One might think you need to own a large plot of land in the country ...

Keith (aka Skeeter) is living totally off the grid. Starting with a raw plot of land, he built his house from scratch, dug a well, created a solar power system and is completely responsible for all his waste. Keith is a good example of someone who got tired of paying ...