Friday, November 6, 2009
On the west side of New York Street sits a fairly standard, two-story white house, its cement porch planked by four three-foot tall brick pillars. Clusters of green bushes hug the 84-year-old house, a natural barrier to the large lawn that drowns the house in green during the summer. The closest house from the south, about 50 feet away from the front porch, peeks through a fence of shrubbery.
But as green as this plot of land is on the outside, it will be nothing compared with the inside once Simran Sethi is done with her improvements.
Sethi, associate professor of journalism, will spend the next year transforming her house into a sustainable home.
Simran Sethi, associate professor of journalism, is transforming her house into a “green” home. She will blog about her experience on Oprah.com.
And she’ll be writing about her experience on Oprah.com.
“This is my attempt to walk my talk and really figure out the best way to do it,” she said. “It’s my way of making myself a more authentic advocate of being more environmentally friendly.”
In her career, Sethi has written for the Huffington Post, won several journalism awards and appeared on “Oprah,” the “Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “Nightly News with Brian Williams.” She’s been labeled an “environmental messenger” as well as one of the world’s top 10 eco-heroes by the British newspaper the Independent.
From exposing the nutrition wasteland in some of America’s urban core to providing tips on green living, Sethi’s covered a multitude of environmental bases during her career. But Sethi said she wanted to try something new to help people know what really was cheaper, easier and more efficient about making a home more sustainable — not by reading reviews and asking around, but by experiencing it herself.
“I just hope people can know that I’m right there with them and they can really see that if I can do it, anybody can do it,” she said.
She’s already posted her first entry on Oprah’s Web site — “Greening the Green Girl” — where she talks about her new home and her plans for its greener future.
To start, she said, she’ll be dealing with the brown recluse infestation in her basement. From there, she’ll work on insulating the ceiling and preparing the house for the Kansas winter. After prepping the house for her move, which will include adding some color to the white-walled home with eco-friendly paints, she said she would go through the house, room by room, finding new and better ways to green her home.
In the spring, she will consider yard sharing — letting others without yards grow food on hers in exchange for a few tomatoes.
She said writing about these improvements would be educational to both herself and those who read her blog.
“I have never dealt with this stuff before,” she said. “I’ve talked about it, but actually doing it is going to be a totally humbling, messy, illuminating experience.”
Sethi said she pitched the idea as soon as she bought the house. She said the Oprah team had been asking her to write for the Web site since she appeared on the show for the third time in April.
She said the University’s decision to give her tenure played a factor in the idea for a “green home.” It allowed her to stay in Lawrence long enough to buy a house.
Barbara Barnett, interim associate dean of the William Allen White School of Journalism, said Sethi was an asset to the journalism faculty and to the students she taught.
“Simran is considered a national expert on environmentalism and how media communicate those issues,” Barnett said. “She’s a really creative person and the students benefit from that.”
One such student is Lauren Keith, Wichita senior, who took Sethi’s “Media and the Environment” class, which explored environmental journalism through the lens of food, last spring. She said Sethi opened her eyes to the world of professional blogging and helped her think of environmentalism not only as a journalist but as a consumer too.
“She shaped the questions I ask as a journalist and the way I approach stories,” Keith said. “People have to be able to relate to environmentalism through their pocketbooks.”
She said she was excited for Sethi’s new project with Oprah.
“I love that she’s talked about it for so long and now she has the opportunity to put these things into practice,” she said.
Tina Wood, Wichita senior, took Sethi’s class with Keith and is working with Sethi this semester as a student research assistant. Wood, who is an environmental studies major, said Sethi exposed her to areas of environmentalism she’d never thought of before, such as urban farming and local food systems.
“As a teacher, Simran is super knowledgeable and experienced,” she said. “Because I know her, I’ve become more aware of my own actions and developed the ability to sympathize rather than ridicule people’s reluctance to change.”
— Edited by an Jonathan Hermes
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Comments
hyperlocavore (anonymous) says...
Hey folks! Please consider hyperlocavore.com a free yard sharing community if you are looking to find people to grow with!
LizM
November 6, 2009 at 4:59 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )