GreenMark Public Relations®, Inc.

When the Nike Sports Complex expansion opens on the north side of town in early 2011, the traditionally English game of cricket will be among the organized sports played on a pitch located at the new field space.

“It is very exciting to see a cricket pitch included in the new Nike Sports Complex because Naperville residents, especially its youth, will benefit in a big way from the programs the park district will be able to offer at the facility,” says Sarti Krishnan, a Naperville Park District Cricket League participant. The community has one other cricket pitch, at Commissioners Park, 3704 111th St.

“The addition will enable the district to expand its nationally renowned and highly popular cricket league, which has seen overflow demand for the past three years,” Krishnan says.
Cricket is played with two teams of eleven players each. Although the play and rules are different, the basic concept of cricket is similar to baseball. Teams bat in successive innings and attempt to score runs, while the opposing team fields and attempts to bring an end to the batting team’s innings. After each team has batted an equal number of innings, the team with the most runs wins.

“Cricket teaches patience, teamwork and self-confidence,” Krishnan says. “As with many competitive sports, younger players benefit the most because of values the sport teaches early on. Children as young as 8 years old can start playing seriously. Many people play the game for recreational purposes well into their 60s.”

Several thousand people use the existing 25-acre Nike Sports Complex every year for organized play and recreation. With viable, active youth sports teams in the thriving
community, Naperville became desperate for recreational field space on the north side of town. Land adjacent to the existing Nike Sports Complex was purchased for expansion in 2007 because of its size, contiguous location and ease of accessibility.

Area youth athletic coaches say the planned addition of 20 acres of field play at the site will get even more kids involved in the community’s record-winning teams – and help maintain its tradition of producing great sports athletes.

With the planned expansion at Mill Street and Diehl and Bauer Roads nearly doubling the facility’s existing size, amenities also will include the district’s first lighted, synthetic turf field and multi-use fields for soccer, football and lacrosse, in addition to cricket. Lighted courts for tennis, basketball and volleyball as well as a playground, walking and bicycle trails also will be used by youth and community residents.

“Without regular practice, a player will fail to perform well and a team will not win consistently until it plays well together,” Krishnan says of cricket. “Regular practice that results in improvement in game performance will significantly increase one’s overall self-confidence. In addition to cricket, this multi-sport facility is very attractive for the range of recreational activities it provides.”

The Nike Sports Complex expansion is based on resident feedback during the acquisition process, at several public meetings and from recommendations contained in the Open Space and Recreation Master Plan. One of the first steps in the project’s development was installation of safety fencing and removal of trees and underbrush last fall. Engineering plans were developed and the park site received a positive recommendation from Plan Commission earlier this year, followed by City Council approval in April. Groundbreaking is planned for late June. An opening is targeted for early 2011.

For more information about the Nike Park Sports Complex expansion, call 630-848-5000 or visit www.napervilleparks.org. The Web site features news updates, a site plan and frequently asked questions about the project. Please visit the Web site to also learn about Naperville Park District and its numerous public programs, seasonal events and services.

Read more about the sports complex on Naperville Park District’s web site, here.

Everyone enjoys time for meditation. It’s healthy, calming, boosts metabolism and eases the anxious spirit. Why not carve out some time during your day and give it a try?Look how relaxed these people are and it’s not even lunch time yet!Why not meditate outside? No, not necessarily with a bunch of people around. That woman with the dark blonde hair not even doing it for real (totally peeking). We’re talking zen gardens.Robert Milani of Chalet recently spoke with Kelly Konrad on MakeItBetter.net about zen gardens on her fantastic article, ” Now and Zen: Meditation Space Just Steps Away” (read it here). Milani said “Meditation gardens can mean anything. We design a wide variety of spaces and outdoor rooms. With meditation, what comes to mind is something that is private. A place to meditate or pray.”Find a good outdoor space isolated by greenery (you may have to add some greens) and bring in some pretty, low-maintenance flowers. It could be that simple. Or be elaborate and create a garden wall, something to gaze at. Maybe add water - little babbling brook or an invigorating waterfall. Why not a bird bath?Why not check out Chalet’s web site for some more zen garden ideas like the image above?Meditation photo credit: Sarvodaya Shramada from Colombo, Sri Lanka, posted in Wikimedia Commons.

Learn to create stunning container gardens, plant with style, cook season’s bountyChalet, an award-winning landscape, nursery and garden center on Chicago’s North Shore, presents a free lecture and workshop series on seasonal gardening and garden design topics from June 3 through July 16, 2010. Lectures, which often include slide presentations and demonstrations, are held at the Chalet Education Center, 3132 Lake Ave., Wilmette, Ill., on Thursdays, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. and repeated Fridays, 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.The schedule for mostly free summer education events are as follows:June 10 and 11: Don’t Forget the Summer Flowering ShrubsFlowering shrubs are wonderful additions to the landscape as specimen plants and members of mixed borders. Learn the favorite summer flowering shrubs of Jennifer Brennan, Chalet’s Horticulture Information Specialist. See slides and enjoy a walk through the nursery to get a personal introduction to these excellent showpieces for summer. Free. No registration required.June 17 and 18: Roy Diblik Presents … Right Plant in the Right Place with StyleSustainable perennial gardens do not need to look “wild and wooly.” Selecting the right plant for your garden is the key to its longevity in that “right place.” Roy Diblik, owner of Northwind Perennial Farm, will teach you how to use plants to create your own unique garden style. By using his trademarked concept of “Know Maintenance,” you can create a garden that you will enjoy because of its continuous beauty and unique characteristics. Free. No registration required.June 25 and 25: Butterfly Gardening with FreyaFreya Wellin, Chalet’s perennial buyer, has been busy raising butterflies! She will teach you about the life cycle of these special creatures and the host plants they need to sustain life. Even at summer’s peak, there is still time to add elements to attract butterflies to your garden. Free. No registration required.No classes July 1 and 2 due to holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!July 8 and 9: How to Water ProperlyA Chalet expert will discuss why correct watering is the most critical factor in the survival of our garden plants. Many of the problems diagnosed by Chalet’s experts aredue to inadequate watering techniques. Free. No registration required.July 15 and 16: Dave Esau Presents … Cooking with Your Summer HarvestDave Esau, chef and owner of Dave’s Specialty Foods (www.davespecialtyfoods.com), will demonstrate how to creatively use the harvest from your garden (or the farmers’ market). Esau was trained in France, has worked at Le Titi de Paris, Charlie Trotter’s and The American Club in Kohler, Wis., the only Five-Diamond resort in the Midwest. Enjoy the sights, fragrances and tastes at this fun demonstration. Free. No registration required.Lectures are free with no registration required. Tapes or DVD’s of each lecture can be rented for $3 for three nights. For questions about the series, contact Brennan at 847-256-0561, ext. 225, or jenniferb@chaletnursery.com.The goal of Chalet’s public education series, offered since 1997, is to provide timely, current and accurate horticultural information as a public service. The series reaches 3,000 adults and 700 children annually and regularly attracts industry leaders as guest lecturers. Education seminars are led by Brennan, who has a degree in ornamental horticulture and is an Illinois Certified Nursery Professional. The company’s Education Center and online resources offer tips and ideas on a broad range of subjects, from lawn care and pest control to caring for roses and creating a vertical garden.Click here to visit Chalet’s web site for more information.

Chalet’s new Plant Finder web-based tool enables gardeners to search for just the right plant and create a customized needs list for their home landscape. (Give it a try)Search for plants using specific keywords or from a series of search parameters, such as characteristics, landscape attribution, ornamental features and site conditions. The database then prunes through 7,800 trees, shrubs, ground-covers, roses, perennials, ornamental grasses and ferns to find the plant you’re looking for.Let’s give it a try! I went through and specified some features. I’m not too picky, though. I wanted a perennial for rock garden application that maybe attracted bees (the big fuzzy ones are okay). I also wanted it to peak in late spring, so I can sit outside and look at it before it gets too hot. I didn’t specify color and shade, but I would prefer something that could grow in a partially shaded area, fragrance being a bonus.Here was my first result:Autumn joy stonecrop! These dense broccoli flowers are exactly what I had in mind for my imaginary rock garden.What kind of plant are you looking for?Try Chalet’s Plant Finder.

In late April, the Naperville City Council voted to approve the expansion of the Nike Sports Complex. This expansion will add around 20 acres to the park, doubling its size. Additions include a lighted, synthetic turf field; fields for soccer, football and lacrosse; lighted tennis, basketball and volleyball courts; a playground; walking and bicycle trails; and a cricket pitch.The annexed property was purchased by the Park District in 2007 and the space was badly needed by local sports teams because of limited facilities on the north side of the city.Ground breaking on the expansion begins this summer.Click here to read about the unique military history of the land upon which the Nike Sports Complex is located.

This question was proposed by The Chief Engineer on April 2nd (see article). At initial consideration, it might not seem like a big deal, but the answer will not only affect the facility or business being questioned, but also the local environment and community - for years and years. Now take into consideration every other facility being asked the same question and expected to answer for their costs. To put this into new perspective, the world will need to invest one trillion dollars annually in conservation technologies to meet demand over the next twenty years.Recently,  several northeaster Illinois counties have considered aggressive conservation initiatives to ensure adequate water supply over the above time period and beyond. According to Inc. magazine in 2008, water managers in  36 states predict significant supply shortfalls in the decade ahead, reason being for aging infrastructures, inadequate treatment facilities and contamination issues.So how do facility mangers find the tools to gauge the impact of water use on environmental and operational costs? One solution might be Earthwise Environmental’s online cost calculator.Know how your facility can conserve water and energy, cut costs and create a safer environment. Calculations show before and after totals with the implementation of eSolutions, which eliminates hazardous chemical treatments, minimizes water use and reuses water to conserve waste. This application provides facilities with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) points in water conservation and innovative technology categories.Read more about eSolutions on Earthwise Environmental’s web site, here.

GreenMarkers are doing all kinds of things to welcome spring.  Marketing Associate Beth Burdin chairs her park district’s Greening Advisory Committee which just held their first-ever burn of a native planted area.  One volunteer brought marshmallows.  Yum!

Read more about the spring cleaning here:

http://blogs.pioneerlocal.com/oakpark365/2010/03/march_19_2010_-_lindberg_burn.html

Somehow I was in the dark about Earth Hour being Saturday, March 27. Until I had read earlier that day about Sydney, Australia turning off its lights, I had no idea the event was to take place locally only a few hours later. Unfortunately, I don’t live in a region where I can step out on my balcony and look over a darkened city, showing somber respect for the environment and the fragile, yet powerful hold we as humans have over its fate. In truth, looking outside my window you’d see the lights, sights and sounds of a small, expanding town.

What I really wanted to do was to sit on my front porch with a candle, to see neighbors outside doing the same, to gaze at the stars and reflect on the magnitude of our existence. This romantic idea was soon washed away by a brief, but hard swept storm followed by a chilly temperature drop. Alas, during Earth Hour, I was forced to stay indoors.

Around 8:30, my girlfriend and I scrambled to turn off all the lights, the computers, the television and anything else whirring, blinking and glowing. It was 8:40 by the time we finished, but we vowed to make up for lost time by making our Earth Hour last until 9:40.

Matt reading during Earth Hour 2010

We decided to light some candles and read in the living room. I read my book, she read hers. I don’t quite know how to explain the strange phenomena when reading by candle light, an urge to read something scary. I put down my book and pulled out that famous collection by Alvin Schwartz, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” We read the one about the dead guy walking through a town, not realizing his demise until he read about his funeral in the newspaper; the one about the group of fishermen who take refuge in a spooky house with the big, green face. After a few stories, the darkness around us settled in and the apartment, though only dark for 30 minutes or so, became rather creepy.

The fact that a less than an hour earlier, a place whirring and whizzing, bright as the day could so quickly be foreboding simply by cutting some of the power is a strange sort of paradox and something of a repercussion to 21st century living habits. Our dependency on modern energy is a deeper issue for another day, but it led to an interesting conversation while we waited out the rest of Earth Hour that night.

We had three large candles going and, for a time, a flashlight. It was pointed out that burning these manufactured candles and eventually discarding (even recycling) their glass containers consumes large amounts of energy. The battery in the flashlight would be one of the worst things disposed of in a landfill. Compared to a single light bulb, all of which costs about half a penny on the monthly electric bill, we were probably consuming more energy in our recognition efforts.

Regardless of whether or not we actually helped the environment in this year’s Earth Hour, it gave us pause to think about the value of resources, to participate in the global event and an excuse to read scary stories with candles. It was a highlight to an otherwise ordinary weekend and, for an hour, made the world seem smaller and more connected. Searching Earth Hour 2010 on Flickr, it’s refreshing to see others and particularly cities who’d gotten involved, hopefully inciting a positive change on a larger and more substantial scale. I know Earth Hour takes place at the end of every March, but would it really be too much to ask if we moved it to, say, late June? If only so I could live out that romantic plan of sitting on the porch and gazing up at the stars.

Karen Barnes at GreenBiz recently posed a very interesting article about Millenials (people between the ages of 18-24) and their habits and attitudes about being green. Here’s the link:

http://greenbiz.com/blog/2010/03/08/truth-about-millennials

Being on the older end of this age group (a ripened 24-year old), and the youngest team member at GreenMark PR, I feel I should weigh in on these impressions with some personal experience.To summarize, Barnes writes that attitudes outweigh habits, though the newest collective group into the “real-world” is generally positive towards adopting a greener lifestyle. True, true and true. Here’s another thing: practical cynicism. This is mostly a result of graduating high-school and college during an economic recession and hyper-partisan politics. Though I’ve grown up in Chicago, I currently live in a college town in Western Kentucky. It’s a beautiful, rural region. I am within a 15-minute drive from a large, well-attended national park. Public transportation is offered to the students, though many ride their bikes or walk (I walk to campus when the weather’s nice). There is no city-authorized recycling service, but we have some green entrepreneurs who will pick up your paper and plastic for a reasonable fee. The place I work during the day, the NPR-affiliate, WKMS, uses this service. So, there’s some context for the environment in which I live.

On the topic of green attitudes, almost everyone I’ve spoken with agrees that practical legislation must be passed, that drilling in national wildlife reserves is wrong, that solar and wind are the future of energy, that their next car will have some kind of fuel-efficiency or hybrid aspect, that they do at least something to conserve energy even if its as little as bringing their own canvas bags to the grocery store.The report suggests that attitudes outweigh behavior, or that young people will talk but not walk. I take some issue with the “walk” being weighed by our purchasing power. It’s true, people in this age bracket don’t have as much expendable income at the moment. But what’s also true, is that, given the financial circumstances of the country, Millenials are being led to give greater consideration to the route of their dollar.

I’ve written several times in this blog that being green doesn’t mean spending money on new cars and fancy light-bulbs. In truth, I drive a clunker. It’s a car almost 15 years old and the back end is busted. It drives like a bull out of the gate and, while I don’t drive it very far or very often, it’s not the greenest car on the road. But if I were to get a new car, a Prius hybrid, what then would happen to my still functional clunker? Would someone else drive it around? Would it sit and rust and leak chemicals in a junkyard? Buying a new car would not only be a huge expense, it would also not be the greenest option. Millenials are aware of this, despite the efforts of advertisers, who try very hard to convince you that you need to spend a little more to save the planet.

Many of the young people I know are either vegetarian or have heard Michael Pollan speak for five minutes and realize that Americans eat way too much meat. This is an area of being green that is both intriguing and off-putting to many. In my own joy of cooking, I’ve discovered that my best recipes just so happen to be vegetarian ones (I make a mean curry). But I’m not above an occasional hamburger, either. We are very much aware of the obesity epidemic, large portion sizes and attributed diseases. Being aware is the first step, doing something about it is more or less optional, but I give this time.Okay, so I work for GreenMark PR, I read GreenBiz and I listen to NPR. Am I an exception to the majority of Millenials? Perhaps. But of those who I observe on a daily basis and of those whom with I interact online, via social media sites, I can generally agree with Barnes in saying that the green outlook for my generation is fairly positive. Of course, there’s always the stubborn and the naysayers, but to them I say the grass is greener on my side.

Last month, February 2010, Greener World Media, Inc. held the “State of Green Business 2010″ event. Unfortunately, we could not attend, but we were there in spirit. We promise. Instead, I picked up a copy of the Cliff Notes from their web site, a fantastic report summarizing 2009 and presenting some outlook for 2010. Look for it on their web site, www.greenbiz.com.

“We’re still here”

A simple quote, but it couldn’t be more accurate to describe the state of green business after a very tough 2009. As was the case for most businesses, GreenMark PR included, 2009 was tasking, but we too can proudly say “we’re still here.” In some cases, a recession can actually be good for a business, provided it has the endurance. Similar to one’s personal finances, it demands that we consider what’s important enough to keep and what can be eliminated. This is obvious, of course, it’s simply a matter of trimming the fat. Luckily, folks and businesses who practice green, sustainable living are already quite lean. It’s in our nature to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” And, while the three R’s may come with much adjustment for some folks, may they also consider a greener way of living. Riding a bike to work suddenly doesn’t seem so bad if it means saving money. Once it becomes routine and once the fresh air becomes addicting, maybe it could become a green habit worth keeping once the economy turns around. That’s just one simple example of, well, just pick any green solution.

This puts green business who are lucky enough to still be around in a pretty good place in 2010 and in the future. The report uses some interesting statistics to back up these ideas, namely, “Four out of five people said they were still buying green products and services, even in the midst of the recession.”In tough financial times, people usually tend to focus more on their immediate surroundings, rather than the greater good. Monumental tasks like climate change, fossil fuel reduction, wind and solar power, world hunger, etc. are not going to be the primary concern of the average citizen. Unfortunately, this may always be the case unless the average citizen recognizes a clear cost incentive. In other words, people will live green if they can save (or make) some green.

According to the State of Green Business report, large companies have found cost incentives for adopting greener ways of producing their products, like the recent move by Coca-Cola to produce their plastic bottles with a percentage of bio-degradable vegetable product. IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes, Sony, Best Buy and Nike have begun contributing patents to the public domain and Creative Commons, allowing other green innovators to collaborate with the intellectual property. These movements will create a nice “trickle-down” effect that will eventually hit the average citizen.

GreenMark PR is no stranger to the world of LEED Certification. One of our clients, The Green Exchange, is an LEED-certified green marketplace in Chicago. The report cites GreenerBuildings.com, which says the “floor area registered and certified by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED green building rating system in 2009 is estimated to grow by over 40% compared to last year’s totals, for a cumulative total of over 7 billion square feet worldwide since the standard was launched in 2000.” This is excellent news, of course, resulting in thousands of jobs and millions of happier people in cities across the country in the years to come. The report says, “By 2030, the annual gasoline savings from LEED-certified green buildings are expected to equal current U.S. imports from the Middle East.”

Is it all just dandy, then? Will green living become commonplace rather than a fringe effort? Not every aspect of green reported well in 2009. A good two-thirds of this report focuses on specific areas of green business that are either “swimming,” “treading,” or “sinking.” It’s quite interesting to read that while the areas of energy efficiency, water intensity and green IT thrive; employee telecommuting, carbon intensity and E-waste are getting water-logged.In some upcoming blog posts, I’ll look into some of the areas that are thriving and why such is the case. I’ll describe some of the information presented in this report and do some research of my own, too.

In the mean time, please take a look at the report mentioned here in this blog at www.greenbiz.com. All of the quotes used in this post are from their fantastic report and so I’ll give credit where credit is due. The report, titled “State of Green Business 2010″ is copyrighted 2010 by Greener World Media, Inc.