A friend spied us in the Metrowest Daily News....

One of the best parts about being a journalist is you get asked — hell, you get paid — to explore subjects you might not have looked into otherwise. The best case in point for me is my story on the smart grid that is (finally) available online at emagazine.com.

You can approach sustainability from a number of directions, and for the current issue of Boston Home magazine, I came at it from two of them.

I spoke with three product providers that make their products with the ethics of recycle and reuse, and all three are in New England, making their use locally more sustainable than the same or similar goods from, say, Fiji.

It's a single-page presentation.

I got an awful lot of help from family, friends, and former colleagues to come up with a list of worthwhile websites regarding Boston. I also got to meet a lot of interesting writers and partisans of one stripe or another. Click through to see the Globe Magazine story.

I have a story on the state of green building in Greater Boston in the current issue of GreenSource magazine, commissioned on the occasion of GreenBuild, the US Green Building Council's national convention. As many as 30,000 builders, developers, architects and other green partisans are expected at the Convention and Exposition Center next Wednesday through Friday (Nov. 19-21).

I recently got to meet a couple of inspired, committed people who are putting their environmental concerns and principles into deep, broad effect across their pursuits.

Sajed Kamal teaches about sustainability at Brandeis, but has traveled the globe — including in his native India and in his childhood home of Bangladesh — to aid renewable energy projects. He's got a small solar cell installed on his window sill and has almost a half-dozen solar cookers around his apartment. He led two solar installations in the Fenway, where he lives.

I've mentioned previously a story I wrote about electric bikes for E, the Environmental Magazine, and though it has been available to subscribers for more than a week, it's now available electronically as well. I commend it to you, but duh, I wrote it, y'know?

Link.

My first story for Design New England magazine is on the newsstands now, in the July/August issue.

Here's what the page looks like (you can click on it and be taken to a readable version on the magazine's website):

My first book review in several years appears in this morning's Living/Arts section. The book is "World Made By Hand," by James Howard Kunstler, whom I'm heard on a panel before the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association show in March.

What he brings most to the page, in my opinion, is a deeply explored vision of how the world will or may change as the result of the changing energy landscape. In the novel, a scenario of this new world, there are very few spices, for example, not even pepper, because it is grown overseas.