If you're even just barely paying attention to green topics these days, you have at least heard about LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. But I'd wager you haven't yet heard about Regreen, which was unveiled only last month. You could think of Regreen as "LEED for home renovations and design," if not for several big reasons that you can't.

Like who cares, but I happened to notice as I was opening this window that it's my 300th post. And it's about ... someone else's posts. Worldchanging.com has had a couple of good ones in the past couple of days: Alex Steffen wonders about the freebies that are available to the energy-efficient, and cites as an example the Freeaire system for refrigeration units.

The story I had in the Globe real estate section a while back on the PowerHouse Enterprises home in Lawrence led to one I had yesterday, about a home nearing completion in Westport that hopes to rely mostly on ground-source heat pumps and a wind turbine for its utility needs. If you know of any other homes that oughta be written about, please be in touch.

This morning's newspapers bring interesting troika of news tidbits, and I don't know where to start. At the very top of the Times is a report on its right track/wrong track poll, which reached a nadir, or zenith, of 81 percent thinking we're on the wrong track, a more extreme opinion than at any time since the poll was undertaken in the early '90s. (Thank you, Mr. President.) With a result like that, and with the landscape in general littered with broken dreams and promises, one could easily conclude we're headed for disaster. 

It's a snippet from the Tom Waits song, "Ol' 55," and for the second time inside a year, it comes to mind to as a means to express. Yesterday, I finally did something. For way too long, I thought about acting in defense of the planet, and perhaps would engage people in conversation about it — and even then, "hectoring" them would too often have been a better description — but my actions lagged far behind.

It would be pretty laughable if the folks behind this weekend’s Down 2 Earth consumer expo were driving Hummers to and from the show, leaving the lights on all night and the heat on all day at their palatial Boylston Street suites. But no, organizers say they’ve tried to practice what they’re presenting tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday at the Hynes Convention Center. Here’s some of what they’re doing:

In Colorado, it's illegal to harvest rainwater, because someone downstream owns the rights to that which falls from the sky.

In California, almost 20 percent of electricity goes to the treatment and delivery of water.

Nationally, public water systems use 50 Billion killowatt-hours of electricity to operate.

I'm still a green neophyte, so I can't wax eloquent about Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, who has popped up on my radar a couple of times in short order. But E.O. Wilson, whose imprimatur I'll accept on any topic, says this...

I wouldn't have thought to match these two spots for comparison, or the others contained therein, but that's what makes this "Globalist Quiz" question in Sunday's Globe interesting... 

It was a sure bet that the headlines on Earl Butz's obit this week would focus on the racial slur that torpedoed his public life, and it was in every one I saw. But Butz, agriculture secretary under Nixon and Ford in the '70s, was perhaps one of the most influential figures in 20th century America, although not exactly in a salutary way. He blessed, and hastened, the demise of the family farm, for example, stating baldly and  unapologetically that farming was now the domain of corporations, and the family farmer would just have to get used to it.