Michael Prager

I flew last week, which undercuts whatever I intend to follow that up with in this post, since hopping cross-country certainly is among puts one among the most egregious petro-users. I went in the name of service, and blah blah blah, but still, worth noting for the benefit of cynics.

In a couple of airports I was in, I noticed a book store touting "eco-totes" as a sales come-on, either as a stand-alone or a get-one-free-with-purchase sorta deal. The message was, help the planet by buying something.

I'm back from Albuquerque, and mostly de-lagged. Thanks for still reading through two-travel-related gaps in posting.

While I was gone, I posted three dozen times or so on another blog, not operated by me, and I got more than a dozen comments from readers. It made me realize that a) I used to get comments on my other blog, and b) I have never gotten one on this one.

In an unusual fit of negativity, I opined recently that "they" would probably screw up the Waxman/Markey energy bill, and it appears to be struggling, either because I was right or because I contributed some bad juju to it.

I'm still catching up on events from the food-addiction summit over at fisherblue.com/blog, and tomorrow I'm leaving for another week away (I'll be blogging in a third place for that, and though I know it sounds beyond dorky, I can't say where). But I did want to get in this mention from Paul Eldrenkamp about an "insulation slam" that's being given by a handful of local contractors at 7:30 p.m. on May 14 at 3 Church St., Cambridge.

I've mentioned other times about preferring to have one blog instead of two, for all sorts of quotidian reasons, but foremostly in a symbolic way: I want to find a way to make my two issues — saving the planet and escaping the misery of obesity — be one. (It's the Buddhist's hot dog order: Make me one with everything.) When the subjects are, say, solar energy and food addiction, it's not readily apparent where the Venn overlap is.

It doesn't explain all of my absence, but I am indeed away, at an obesity conference on Bainbridge Island, Washington. I'm writing about it at my other blog, fisherblue.com/blog.

Congressman Ed Markey follows up his energy road show last Monday at MIT with an appearance tomorrow at Tufts. A school group, Environmental Consciousness Outreach, is hosting Earthfest: Focus the Nation from noon -4 p.m. on the Academic Quad. The event will include live music, free food, and speakers, including the directors of Environment America and Environment Massachusetts.

After a brief hiatus, another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet. They're "mini" not only because they're short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match. I met today's subject while writing about a green, urban in-fill property in Lawrence, Mass., and later hired him to help us plan an expansion at our house. 

JOHN ROSSI, 42, of Newburyport, Mass. 
Principal, Barendsen Rossi Collaborative, which does architecture, design, and industrial design

Why do you do this work? "Because I love solving problems."

Green epiphany: "In college, we read Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," and I realized at one point, 'oh my, this was written 30-40 years ago, and how much worse could it be now?' I’ve realized since that it isn’t all doom and gloomy, that there really is an opportunity here."

A sustainability practice you’ve taken on: "Raising kids who appreciate the earth and want to take care of it."

A position I've held consistently, and don't expect to change anytime soon, is that coal is evil shit, albeit a necessary evil until the day we can be rid of it. 

The primary reason I — and practically every thinking person without a financial tie to its mining, transporting, and burning — oppose coal is that its burning spews vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and I don't believe there'll ever be a valid way around that.