Fight the Good Fight: Down with Invasives

If you read the Howard County Com­mis­sion report or, many of the pages on this site, you will have heard from us that we think plant­ing a tree is prob­a­bly the sin­gle great­est thing you could do to help our envi­ron­ment. Trees help us with clean air, clean water, shade trees in our yards help [more…]

Thank you to every­one who par­tic­i­pated in the 20 Minute Cleanup on May 13th! Peo­ple from all over Howard County got out­side picked up lit­ter and made Howard County cleaner and greener. Even the County Exec­u­tive got out there. By work­ing together we made a real dif­fer­ence! From email reports sent in, 1,055 peo­ple par­tic­i­pated! [more…]

A new pro­gram cre­ated to bring more trees to Howard County was an over­whelm­ing suc­cess with 2,010 trees reserved by res­i­dents in just 48 hours. County res­i­dents were allowed to apply for up to two free trees as part of the 2010 Trees in 2010 ini­tia­tive which began on Mon­day, March 22. The pro­gram was insti­tuted [more…]

As evi­denced by the County’s recent give-away, 2010 Trees in 2010, plant­ing trees is a high pri­or­ity for the County.  What is the return on invest­ment for such a pro­gram?  I’ll tell you…Trees: -          Remove car­bon diox­ide from the air and  pro­duce oxy­gen; -          Pro­vide food and habi­tat for wildlife; -          Inter­cept water, store some [more…]

The process for this Cli­mate Action Plan began in 2007. For his first exec­u­tive order of the year, County Exec­u­tive Ken Ulman signed the Mayor’s Cli­mate Pro­tec­tion Agree­ment. By sign­ing the agree­ment he was com­mit­ting Howard County to reduc­ing our green­house gas emis­sions oth­er­wise known as a car­bon foot print. As he said that day [more…]

It all started with Ash­leigh walk­ing her dog.  She was fed up with see­ing trash every­where she looked and decided to do some­thing about it.  A few emails and phone calls later, a com­mu­nity cleanup was on the agenda of the next neigh­bor­hood meet­ing in Cedar Villa Heights, a diverse com­mu­nity in Jes­sup.  A lot [more…]

So … a new blog huh?  Indeed the Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity will be oper­at­ing this Live­G­reen­Howard Blog to talk about envi­ron­men­tal issues through­out Howard County and the work to cre­ate a cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity through­out.  My name is Joshua Feld­mark – I am the Direc­tor of this Office and one of five writ­ers for [more…]

“What in the world is this?”  My hus­band asked as we opened our Com­mu­nity Sup­ported Agri­cul­ture (CSA) cooler to explore our weekly pro­duce share.  As we began search­ing for recipes online about what to do with this week’s unique item: kohlrabi (Do you cook it?  Eat it raw? What burst of fla­vor should we expect [more…]

Get on board and go green with Howard County! The new Green Cen­tral Sta­tion is your ticket to get­ting on the right track for pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment and our com­mu­nity. We’ve pulled all of our resources into one cen­tral loca­tion to help Howard County res­i­dents and busi­nesses access all the infor­ma­tion you need to be green. [more…]

The con­cept of an energy man­ager is elu­sive to most peo­ple.  Orga­ni­za­tions are exposed to the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties of energy use sim­ply by open­ing their doors in the morn­ing.  For starters, it is NOT sim­ply chas­ing after peo­ple to get them to turn lights off.  Energy rep­re­sents value that can be con­sumed, saved, invested, [more…]