Diamond-Cut Life

I’ve read that the average wedding in the U.S. costs $20,000. (I wonder how many fights ensue over getting it all paid off?) Portland’s green wedding of the year, that of our friends Noelle Studer and Eli Spevak, was long on community, short on materialism. The joy and vitality were palpable.
Here Eli and Noelle [...]

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Living here in Portland, Oregon, I’ve become aware that we have the highest percentage of hybrid cars of any city in the nation. I’ve also observed that Portland General Electric (PGE) has the largest renewable power program in the country. (Disclosure: I’m married to Thor Hinckley, the manager of that renewables program.)
The new piece is [...]

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The way we drive has a huge impact on our fuel consumption. The cool thing about saving money on gas by using less of it, from the diamond-cut perspective, is that we reduce our carbon emissions at the same time. And all of us would prefer to subsidize our own bank accounts rather than the [...]

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I’m looking today at a confluence of one of my favorite sports — running — and a worthy pursuit that I have done in the past — fundraising. An energetic woman named Linda Quirk at Run 7 On 7 is leading 300 others in running seven marathons on seven continents and raising pledges to [...]

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I got up before dawn this morning and went running at first light in Mount Tabor Park, near our house. Near a 100-foot tall Douglas Fir tree, I heard unusual scrabbling noises, so I stopped in my tracks to investigate.
I saw an adult raccoon spreadeagled on the tree at about waist height, looking over its [...]

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Guest post by award-winning journalist Colleen Kaleda:
My husband and I recently bought a 96 year old house in a close-in neighborhood of Northeast Portland. If our land could talk — oh what would it say? Perhaps that it wants to shed its excess pavement.

Our sidewalk still has hand-forged steel rings where horses used [...]

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Happy Fourth of July! It’s our nation’s birthday. I’ve posted Ideas for celebrating below, based on this basic life-principle we all tend to forget:
A nation starts its life in the beginning as land, as earth — before people arrived to populate it. And that land, the soil, water and things that grow on it, are [...]

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My friend from Santa Cruz, concerned about global warming as I am, asked for advice yesterday about the car purchase she needs to make.
It happens my husband Thor did lots of research recently about whether to buy a Prius or a Honda Civic hybrid. We chose the Honda, for reasons given here, but we use [...]

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The following is a guest post by Jim Meyer. Diamond-Cut Life welcomes your topical submissions. If you would like to write a guest post, please contact us.

Let’s get frank about the current pressures on the US lifestyle and environment as it’s been constructed up to now: A lot of people are getting [...]

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I was delighted to find this morning that Andrew Brown, the Oakland Athletics pitcher who was the subject of my recent post on cool commuting, wrote me in response. When he says some of his fellow A’s are now also using BART,  I’m impressed as always by how much we influence those around us with [...]

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