sustaiNYC

The Story

This is a reblog covering NYC’s sustainability scene.

It’s called a “reblog” because it’ll be heavy on the excerpting and linking, and relatively light on the original content. There’s no shortage of great content on local environmental and sustainability issues–through other blogs, mainstream media outlets, newsletters, listservs, and so on–but the sundry sources are scattered all around the web. sustaiNYC was started to help bring the highlights all to one place. Here’s how it was described by one of the creators to a friend and advisor in a recent email:

But to the point–I’m looking to start a local sustainability-type blog. There’s a ton of info/blogs/newsleters/feeds out there from a bunch of different aspects of this movement–livable streets, local food, environmental justice, green building, clean energy, politics, etcetcetc–oh yeah, and events), but there’s no real single feed of all this information. What matters to the eco-conscious NYer on a day to day basis. So I guess I’m aiming to help fill that void. The thing is–I don’t really want to write a ton of content, b/c I’m already swamped and there’s already so much solid content out there. So I’m looking to do a sort of “reblog” deal, where I can excerpt and repost (and comment upon, when the urge strikes) the highlights–the stuff that’ll be most interesting to a bit more general audience. People who are interested in what’s happening in the local “green scene,” but don’t have the time, energy, or wherewithal to dig too deep. Since I’m already spending a couple hours every morning trying to stay on top of it all, I figure why not put the most crucial stuff in one place and make it easier for others to follow along.

The Cast

sustaiNYC was started by Ben Jervey and Naveen Selvadurai. Ben is the writer-reporter-info gatherer and Naveen makes it all appear on your screen.

Ben is pretty well embedded in the local sustainability scene, having written a book about green living in NYC, and having close friends and colleagues in all sorts of orgs and businesses and such doing good work in the field. The reblog was born out of his frustration of working in print media, where publishing timelines can’t easily keep up with a field as dynamic and rapidly developing as this one.

For similar reasons, he has started (with some friends) an online directory of environmentally and socially responsible businesses and organizations called Evolvist.com, which you should definitely go check out if you’re looking for anything at all–from farmers markets to fair trade coffee, from solar installers to sweatshop-free sneakers, from biodiesel pumps to biodynamic wines.

Naveen is a developer responsible for many, many things. You should look at his website, or check his blog.

Contact

We’d love to hear what you think of this here reblog. To do so, drop us a line at: ben (at) greenappleguide.com. We promise to do our best to reply to everyone, but we can’t in good conscience make any promises, as there are only so many hours in the day.

The Underwriter

This reblog is made financially possible by the good folks at Green Apple Cleaners, although if they had it their way you wouldn’t even be reading that. David Kistner, founder of Green Apple Cleaners, has been pressing me to start something like this for over a year now. I finally relented, and he offered to foot the bill for all the costs for starting and running this blog and the associated Big Green Newsletter (an events-focused email that I’ve been sending out somewhat sporadically since the book’s release way back in January of 2006).

I suppose it’s important to make the distinction here that I won’t be paid by Green Apple Cleaners for any regular work that I do on the blog and newsletter, and that they are simply providing the means to actually, technically run the site and distribution services. If it seems that I’m being unnecessarily cautious and specific about this, it’s because I want people to understand that on those occasions that I do sing the praises of CO2 dry cleaning and GAC’s services, or talk up some event they’re involved with, it really is because I think it’s 100% awesome, and not because I’m on the dole.