Conscious Choice Seattle: Greener and Greener

April 2006 | From the Editor

Greener and Greener

By Bob Condor

With all apologies to Kermit the Frog, it is getting easier and easier to be green. This month’s issue proves the point.

“It only seems natural—along with greens and apples—that our brew should be pesticide free too,” writes Ritzy Ryciak in one of our cover report stories about organic beer. “Since it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it, it goes without saying that, as usual, the Northwest is playing an impressive trail-blazing role.”

Ritzy and our art director Rich Huston took a ride down to Olympia to sample the wares at Fish Brewing Co. and, more importantly, understand just why that brewery is compelled to make organic ale that has become its top seller.

Their discovery is that going organic is more than taste, farmer support and planet kindness (as if that is not enough). Sometimes going organic is a way to change the future and heal the past.

Writer Traci Hukill writes the other “green” beer story, covering the national tread toward organic brew and reporting that Anheuser-Busch is considering a move to at least one organic brand. Her research turned up five organic beer makers in the Pacific Northwest and another nine in California. That’s nearly triple what the whole rest of the country can offer in the way of green beer.

Along with the Fish Brewing story, Traci’s research showed Elliott Bay Brewery Pub here in Seattle switched to organic barley in early 2005.

“The market is already getting hip to organic beer,” she writes. “The public has steadily warmed to organic goods over the last decade, buying them up at an increase of about 20 percent a year since 1997. If the Organic Trade Association is to be believed, by 2025 the average American household will spend 14 percent of its budget on organic products.”
Including, of course, beer, Traci adds.

Building small is another method to being green, which is only fitting since April is the month that celebrates Earth Day. Jordan E. Rosenfeld’s report on “tiny houses”—with insights from the Seattle-based Cottage Company builders—makes a strong argument that saving raw materials in the construction phase leaves the gentlest footprint on the Earth. She highlights builders who are putting up homes as tiny—and this is tiny—as 100 square. In towns like Kirkland, Redmond and the Whidbey Island waterfront town of Langley, Cottage Company’s Jim Soules and Linda Pruitt are supervising homes between 700 square feet (one-bedroom) and 1,700 square feet (three bedrooms). They economize space but not quality in the vein of conserving our precious natural resources.

“I had a very interesting conversation recently with a guy in the tech world,” says Linda Pruitt, co-owner of Cottage Company. “He was explaining that in the early days of big computers and little storage that every keystroke counted. You had to be more astute and efficient. Now software developers have all the storage space they need. People can afford to be sloppy, he said. [The urge to build bigger houses] is the same idea.”

Bastyr University has gone greener themselves in recent weeks. Our Choice News section reports on the opening of the new Bastyr Center for Natural Health, about seven blocks south of its former location but years ahead in terms of green-building touches, including sustainable cork and linoleum flooring, low-VOC adhesives and paints and an comprehensive air-quality plan.

“From the beginning, we wanted a beautiful yet functional teaching clinic that would serve patients, students and faculty and be an asset to the community,” says Dr. Jamey Wallace, director of the clinic. “Our dreams have come true. Students will receive their training in the crown jewel of natural medicine clinical education. And patients will find a healing environment in a state-of-the-art facility.”

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