Sustainable Me: Green Tips and Terms for the Environmentally Conscious. In March of 2008 PointsWestGroup.com merged a passion for the sustainable lifestyle and the former real estate web site re-opened as YourEcoTeam.com with seven pages to assist clients in "greening" both their homes and lifestyles. As a Realtor-"Eco-Broker" with value-added green pages on my web site my goal was to help clients make sustainable choices when purchasing or marketing a home. In recent months, my site has become YellowPagesForGreenStuff.com and has a mission of helping visitors to make economically sound, energy saving, and environmentally sustainable choices in their lives. To use a natural analogy, first the hobby web site, the "worm," then the expanded "Yellow Pages" type format (cocoon), and in the future you will see the www.EarthKnot.org (butterfly) emerge as a searchable, socially interactive site. The traffic on the site has dramatically increased from March 2008 to the present with over 1,500,000 hits in the past two years. In addition to increased traffic, there are now over 40 pages with thousands of links to green. Meanwhile, a new book, "Sustainable Me: Green Tips and Terms for the Environmentally Conscious" is being published as in print and digitally to encourage and guide readers to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Become a More "Sustainable You" as this volume shares: How to effectively reuse, reduce, and recycle Organic nourishment, gardening, and storage suggestions Indoor Environment assessments for home and office Energy saving techniques Landscape and garden care instructions Holistic and Wellness insights Practical sustainable tips Green glossary terms Sustainable reading list Charitable opportunities with "green" non-profits Charts to help you fight pollution and become more organic
My journey is an interesting one. Growing up in rural North Carolina I saw life from a different perspective: Raised by parents who taught me to respect the environment and to live a sustainable lifestyle. We lived on a small organic farm where we grew our own food, preserved it after harvest, and shared its bounty with friends and neighbors. In 1982, while looking for house plan ideas, I saw a magazine with articles on passive solar heating and earth-bermed houses. I remember the contractor saying to me, "So, you want me to build a basement with a roof on it and a glass wall all along the south side, right?" Several months later the environmentally sustainable, energy efficient home was built in central North Carolina. In March, 2008 I segued my real estate website with its value-added "green" pages into YourEcoTeam.com, a "Yellow Pages for Green Stuff" site which will become EarthKnot.org in 2014, a searchable, socially interactive site to connect sustainable businesses with environmentally conscious consumers
