Home, green home

Professor, students write online DIY guide to sustainability

By Chris Lydgate

Pamplin Media Group, May 15, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / Pamplin Media Group

Deborah Tolman, co-author of “The Tolman Guide,” works in a yard in Northeast Portland. Her tips include using plants that don’t require a lot of water and recycling bottles by upending them and creating a garden path.

How can you harvest rainwater?

How many trees does it take to offset your commute?

Should you consider worms?

Keeping your household economical, efficient, and cheery has never been an easy task, but doing it in the era of global warming is enough to fluster an entire work gang of Martha Stewarts. From mowing the lawn to buying groceries, sometimes it seems as if every humdrum chore now must be subjected to a detailed carbon analysis.

Fortunately, help is on the way, in the form of a do-it-yourself primer, “The Tolman Guide to Green Living in Portland: Simple, Sustainable, and Affordable Practices.” The guide to going green was co-authored by Deborah Tolman, an adjunct geography professor at Portland State University, and two of her students, Michelle Lasley and Joe Parker.

The free guide, available online at www.tolmanguide.geog.pdx.edu, includes no fewer than 230 separate entries crammed with ideas on every sustainable topic imaginable.

Take, for example, that rusty old lawn mower sitting in your shed. Four-stroke lawn mowers are notorious polluters – operating one for an hour spews as many noxious chemicals into the air as driving a car for 100 miles.

To help you cut through the chaff, “The Tolman Guide” reviews a journal article (the classic “Exhaust Emissions from Four-stroke Lawn Mower Engines” in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association) and a piece from Mother Earth News magazine rating cordless electric mowers.

The entries are organized along elemental categories such as Water, Air, Soil, Energy, Food, and take the form of capsule reviews of books and articles, spiced along the way with helpful hints and local examples.

Tolman, the guide’s lead author, doesn’t exactly look like a typical geography professor. She arrived for a recent interview sporting a red baseball cap, a white cotton shirt, callused palms and fingernails browned with soil.

“I like to get down and dirty,” she grins.

Tolman earned her doctorate from PSU in 2004, writing her dissertation on the cobra lily, a carnivorous plant native to southern Oregon. A passionate gardener, she keeps a bucket of worms in her bedroom.

“Those worms consume half their own weight in scraps and newspaper every day,” she says. The odor? “It smells like rain on soil.”

Tolman hatched the idea for the guide two years ago while teaching a class in natural resource management at PSU. “I wanted to engage the students and get them to think beyond the classroom,” she says.

Over the next couple of years, dozens of geography students sifted through hundreds of textbooks, journals, newspapers, and magazines, hunting for useful tips and suggestions on green living.

Meanwhile, Tolman and her primary co-authors taught themselves how to use page design software and launched themselves into the merry business of online publishing. “It was a leap of faith,” Tolman says.

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