Michael Prager

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. 

I'm at the Seaport World Trade Center again this morning — "again" because I spent the day here yesterday, and because this was the site of NESEA's Building Energy '08 a couple of weeks ago. The occasion this week is ResDesign, the annual residential design and construction show sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects. Halfway through, I'm finding it somewhat less thrilling the BE'08, almost certainly a reflection of my interests, rather than their programming.

I know practically nothing about Roslindale Green and Clean, but in pursuit of a story I'm doing for the Globe magazine, I saw a listing for its fourth annual Green Garden Exchange this weekend. The theme of the show, which is Saturday from 11-2, is Green Living, Creating a Sustainable Community.

I will not get there, but their list of topics makes me wish I could: Lawns without pesticides, CSAs, recycling and composting, plants for urban gardeners, growing vegetables and herbs in containers, etc.

The event is at 10 Birch St.

So now the three days of Down:2:Earth are done, and I've got plenty to share — more than I think I will have the bandwidth for. It wasn't as bad as the information bulge that resulted from BE'08, which I'm still trying to work through, but then again, d2e wasn't nearly as monumental. Nevertheless, it is a credit to the show that there is more to report on than there is time to report on.

Numbers have no meaning until we attach it: 365 days, the 747, 1-20-09. So far, I wouldn't say 350 has been tagged, but the environmental writer — and, increasingly, activist — Bill McKibben and some compatriots intend to change that.

Who could not like this, via Boing Boing? An artist has fashioned animals from discarded plastic bags and affixed them to subway grates. When trains whoosh by underneath, the force of air breathes life into the animals, and then they relax again until the next burst.

I can't cite a source, but I remember "learning" when I was a kid that an early-20th-century Farmer's Almanac predicted that soon enough, the streets would be made impassable by all the horseshit from all the horse-drawn carriages. What the writer didn't envision, of course, that an unseen development would change the course of everything.

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.

Long time readers will recall a post headlined "Tent blogging" from my trip this summer, when of course I couldn't post without signal, but I could write in a tent, and hey, what a world, y'know? So now I'm convention center blogging, at Down 2 Earth, the consumer-focused green living show this weekend in Boston. And here, they have signal, and I can post immediately.

So how does it feel from your side of the transaction. So far, I mean?