AF: I want to add one of my favorites : if you start unplugging appliances that you are not using, you can also save electricity. I replaced my light bulbs and I unplugged all my chargers and stuff that I don’t need everyday and it reduced my electric bill by $30 a month, just by doing those two things.

EB: I don’t doubt that you can do that. You can put all those vampire power appliances, vampire power being a quite obvious term to know something that is sucking from you and giving you nothing in return. You can put all of those on little power strips and turn them off with the flick of a switch when you leave the house.

AF: Ed, what do you feel is the most important element of personal responsibility for the environment? Is it recycling, energy conservation, green building?

EB: It’s hard to pick. It’s like which is your favorite child? Buildings are big energy users, because they last so long, hopefully they last a long time, but over their life and most buildings have a very long life, they are going to use a lot of energy. They can use a fraction of that, if you build them right.

I can’t neglect the notion of transportation that’s an equally large and important one. Get out of your car as much as possible. If you have to be in a car, make sure it’s the most energy efficient and fuel efficient car. Can you it run on veggie oil? Can you get an electric car?

AF: What are some of your favorite green gadgets or tools?

EB: My favorite green gadget is my little solar charger. I have had them for years. Today, they are much better and more efficient. They open up like a fan that has several panels and they will actually charge your cell phone. There’s also a solar backpack that has an even larger panel if you want something larger that you could take camping and charge your cell phone, or even run your computer with it. Those are pretty good.

My solar oven is my number one favorite. I don’t know that it’s really a tool, but it is a cooking tool. I make all my soups, rice, beans, stews in that, boil my hot water or recipes out in the yard, all free energy from the sun.

AF: What’s your next Green Home Improvement project?

EB: It’s happening right now. I have been talking about how I took a 1936 energy inefficient house and made it very energy efficient or so I thought. Recently people with an infrared gun came by and I saw all the gaps in my home. I had put great insulation in the attic and in the walls but discovered there are spots that we missed.

There were other problems with the crawlspace in the house. I figured that since heat rises there wouldn’t be big problems with the floor. I was very wrong. I was hemorrhaging heat in the winter and cool in the summer from the crawlspace. The house was nearly an energy sieve, despite all my best efforts. That’s being enclosed as we speak. I also got a 95% energy efficient hot water heater from AO Smith that I am putting in right now and a new heating and air unit that is super energy efficient that will replace the old one.

AF: Oh, that’s so great. Now, somebody wants to know: for someone just transitioning into living green, what films and books do you recommend?

EB: I am going to be unabashedly self serving here. I have a book called, ‘Living Like Ed’ that’s (2/19/08) from Clarkson Potter, a division of Random House and it’s a very good how-to book. There are other good green books out there, I tell people to look in the Gaiam catalogue (or website) and see all the wonderful books that show you all about solar, about wind, about straw bale houses.

Subscribe to Earth Cinema Circle. The current offering is A Life Among Whales. Volume 2 has two films about food and growing food. One is a really fun little animated piece from the Sierra Club called ‘The True Cost of Food’. It’s got some really hard to hear facts as well as real wakeup call pieces of information in it. It just wakes up your mind. The next time you are in the grocery store, you think of things that you haven’t thought of before, knowing the outcome and what would be a smarter decision for our world. For instance shopping locally, if you see a sign that says, these peaches were grown right here, buy them.

Then there is another film that’s just beautiful and it called, ‘How to Save the World’ that is about biodynamic farming and Peter Proctor who is a New Zealand farmer who has reawakened this very old way to bring life back to the soil.

Ed Begley Jr. is hosting a new bi-monthly subscription based DVD club featuring films about the earth and our environment to your mailbox! www.earthcinemacircle.com

Arielle Ford is the co-founder of the highly successful Public Relations firm, The Ford Group best known for launching the careers of many bestselling self-help and spiritual authors. Arielle is the author of six books and is one of the founding partners of The Spiritual Cinema Circle.
www.fordsisters.com