Taming the Too-Big House
by Elizabeth Lutyens

Feature story written for the web site of Intentional Design, an interior design and Feng Shui consulting firm. The full feature story can be read in its entirity on the Intentional Design web site, at: http://www.intentionaldesigner.com/taming.html.

With feng shui, less is much, much more
Nancy and Greg Forsythe bought their house in southeast Asheville for the view. For the five-acres of privacy. For the surrounding woods, a playground for their two German Shepherds. And they liked the rugged post-and-beam, mountain-lodge style of the house with its passive solar feature. After living there for six years and approaching retirement age, they considered moving from this 4,000-square-foot home and building a smaller one. The idea of "building green" was especially attractive to them, but they decided that they weren't up to the demands of composting toilets and wood-burning stoves. And they didn't see a setting anywhere that they liked as much as their own land.

The full story is available here, as a PDF file.

Reaching Further Than Out
by Elizabeth Lutyens

Feature story for an independent school magazine.

Five years ago, teachers at Nashoba Brooks decided to augment the school motto ("Work Hard, Play Fair, Be Kind") with two words that reflect the service learning component of the program: Reach Out.

Teacher and Reading Specialist Nancy Shippen embodies these two words. During the twelve years she has been at Nashoba Brooks, she has also been a prison outreach volunteer at MCI-Concord and MCI-Shirley. Now, as founder and Executive Director of Our Prison Neighbors and an experienced workshop facilitator in the Quaker-run Alternatives to Violence Project, she is reaching out even further. In July 2005, partly funded by a Grubb mini-sabbatical grant from Nashoba Brooks, she took the AVP workshop model to Africa.

The full story is available here, as a PDF file.

What He Brings to the Table
by Elizabeth Lutyens

Feature story for Warren Wilson College alumnae/i magazine.

"What we do about food is crucial, both for the quality of the next generation, our own American children, and children everywhere, and also for the quality of our responsible action in every field. It is intimately concerned with the whole problem of the pollution and exhaustion of our environment, with the danger that man may make this planet uninhabitable within a short century or so."

Margaret Mead's prophetic quote, from her 1970 essay, "The Changing Significance of Food," appeared seventeen years before the world got its first official definition of sustainability. Although the word "sustainable" has since been appropriated by everyone from Hollywood actors to hawkers of wrinkle cream, its early explication was a model of plainspeak: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The full story is available here, as a PDF file.