by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
Presented by Robert Redford, The Green is a major initiative to bring green issues into the mainstream by educating the public about conservation across the board in an entertaining way. The series is interactive with its website on SundanceChannel.com and presents ordinary people who have done amazing things to change the public’s perception that green means latter-day hippies in tie-dye shirts living off the grid.
Each show in the series features people who have pursued conservation as a way of saving money and improving their quality of life–solid mainstream rationalizations for the greening of America. Presented by Robert Redford, a long time advocate of eco-conservation and hosted by award winning journalist, Simian Sethi and community advocate, MacArthur Fellow, Majora Carter.
In one episode, an engineer who decided he would try vegetable oil in his diesel powered pick-up truck is featured. He experimented by using a simple valve that cut off his diesel feed to his engine. He then filled a reservoir with cooking oil and started his truck. It ran just as well on the oil as it did on diesel. So, he decided to develop a conversion kit for diesel engines to run any vegetable oil from a special heated tank, with an alternative of using diesel as a backup.
As he perfected his conversion system, suddenly he had more orders than he could fill, and people were lining up to get his conversion kit installed. All he had to do was go by restaurants that fed their cooking oil into a tank and drain off the oil to use as fuel for his and his customer’s diesels.
To prove his oil conversion works, he set up demonstrations in the form of a cookout, frying chickens in oil, offering free chicken to anyone, then using the chicken oil to fuel his truck. People were amazed and saw how easy it was to convert their diesel powered cars or trucks into using cooking oil, which they could get free, with little effort. The end game was driving for free using cooking oil. Each demonstration he made believers out of the onlookers.
In the same episode, they interviewed a couple who actually acquired diesel powered vehicles for people who wanted to use bio-diesel as fuel. Bio-diesel is made from corn or other grain products and is mixed with diesel. The couple started a cooperative of people who could call them up and they would dispatch a bio-diesel tanker to their location to fill up their tank.
From their original idea, they had formed a profitable business and were helping the environment at the same time. They’re not weirdos or hippies–just middle-class folks interested in helping to spread the green message and make a profit, simultaneously.
In another episode, a couple wanted to find an environmentally friendly house that used no electricity from the grid. Not surprisingly, they couldn’t find one. So they designed their own home from the foundation up to be the ultimate green house, completely off the grid. The house had many innovations which included the building materials themselves. Natural sunlight lit the house during the day, with florescent bulbs at night.
More significantly, all the power for the home came from solar panels on the roof. The design was so successful, other people had heard about it and wanted the couple to build them the same house. They saw a business opportunity, and with the help of an industrial house builder, they manufactured the house in modules. They shipped them to the site and connected them together on an already built foundation. So everybody won, including the environment, saving tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.
The entire series can be viewed with iTunes for $1.99 each episode with full screen HD quality–well worth the fee. Or, one can view the series every Tuesday on Sundance Channel at 9:00 pm EST. The whole point of the series is to overcome the prejudices of the American public that perceive the green movement in a negative light.
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