The Green Cardinal Initiative is a group of students, faculty, and staff at Saginaw Valley State University who are interested in creating a more sustainable future. This website allows students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members to sign up to be a Green Cardinal and to join in the conversation. Based on funding from the Allen Foundation, SVSU’s WIRED grant from the Department of Labor, and the SVSU Foundation we are working on several projects including, recycling waste from our Dining Services into organic fertilizer, creating sustainable hydroponics systems for inner city urban areas, developing renewable options for fossil fuels, Vermiponics, and raising environmental awareness on campus and throughout Mid-Michigan. Please join us by registering as a Green Cardinal !
Help us create a community garden in Saginaw this spring. The Green Cardinal Initiative, in collaboration with the Saginaw Community Foundation, the Saginaw County Youth Leadership Institute, the Saginaw Urban Food Initiative, and the Houghton-Jones Center, is constructing a community garden on a vacant lot on Tuscola Street in Saginaw. We need your help. If you or your student organization is available to help us out from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM on Friday, March 27 please keep reading. Our goal is to construct a series of raised bed gardens that are each capable of feeding one person. How many people can your group feed this summer? Click the "more" link below for all the details.
It's always the season to think about Green Culture. Items in the categories Faith, Politics and Art have caught our attention this winter.
Why was Rev. Rick Warren chosen to give a prayer at President Obama's inauguration in January 2009? One reason might be his leadership three years ago in the Evangelical Climate Initiative ,where along with 85 other Christian evangelical leaders (a number later grown to 260), he called for federal legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There was much opposition to this group's statement from evangelicals associated with the Bush administration like Rev. James (Focus on the Family) Dobson.
Some previous Green Culture columns have been based on stuff from the historical materials on power systems engineering that I inherited; I'm currently at work on a presentation for the Michigan Academy 2009 Meetings on these archives. Three clippings from decades past are instances of political propaganda.
An ad that ran in the Saturday Evening Post in the early- to mid-1950s asks HOW MUCH IS "PUBLIC POWER" COSTING THE PEOPLE OF YOUR STATE? Pictured are a workman in khakis and bow tie, a woman dressed for shopping, a businessman in linen summer suit and a woman with eyeglasses dressed for work, all looking at money in their wallets or purse. They are above a chart that lists the (then) forty-eight United States, with a figure in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars beside each. Those number were obtained "on the percentage of federal taxes collected in each state" for public electric power systems. The ad was placed by "America's Independent Electric Light and Power Companies", a private industry group.
