The ADN's AK Root Cellar Blog and Recycling & Renewables Rap Blogs

The Anchorage Daily News, as one of the features of their widening on-line presence, has two blogs under the Community Blogs heading, that should be considered Progressive Alaska Blogs.

I've tried to keep the blogs listed here under that category limited to blogs which address issues important to progressives in more than one geographical area of the state. Two of these appear to qualify.

Kevin Harun and Nick Moe, both employees of the Municipality of Anchorage, have put together the Recycling & Renewables Rap Blog. Kevin is a full-blown innovator wherever he goes. While running the Alaska Center for the Environment, he turned that organization into a very credible, multi-faceted agency for empowerment, education and progress. I listened to Kevin talk about how he's directing the "greening" of the MOA, when he spoke at the Step It UP! Conference late last year.

Recycling & Renewables Rap Blog has a lot of entries by Kevin and Nick, and the comments contain information on dealing with recycling issues that can prove useful to people all over the state.


AK Root Cellar Blog is being run by Kim Sollien, a whiz kid out of Alaska Pacific University's sustainable Development program, who helped bring the Bioneers Conference to Anchorage for the first time, back in 2004.

Kim describes the premise of the blog thusly:

This blog is for those of you who would like to add more local foods to your diet, meet local farmers, learn new recipes based on seasonal eating and preserving the summer harvest. Food is political too, so here you can learn about and influence local and national agriculture issues, and participate in helping to rebuild the Alaska food system. May each of you chew happily and wisely.

There aren't nearly as many entries at the Root Cellar as there are at the recycling blog. That's bound to change soon. And the discussion topics are informative. The most recent is about how to possibly get Full Circle Farms in Carnation, Washington, to develop partnerships with local organic food producers. I'm all for that.

Judy and I grow a lot of our own vegetables, can a lot of fruit. New crops of arugula and meusclin came up yesterday. So Kim's subject stuff is dear to us both.

carrots from our garden yesterday. We keep them in very slightly damp sand over the winter, out in a cool corner of my shop. They taste better in mid-March than anything you can buy in a store in August.