Meet The Green Team

Always passionate, mostly sarcastic and sometimes irreverent, Diana Prichard is a rural-living Freelance Writer whose sum of parts are sometimes hard to reconcile. An environmentalist since early childhood — when the word environmentalist meant nothing to her or most anyone else — the small hobby farm she lives on with her husband and two daughters is a fluid exercise in exploring self-sustainability and providing resources to the local community.

She is most passionate about green, local and homegrown foodstuffs and writes a column, Handmade Food, for Try Handmade to that tune. When she's not doing chores or working you can often find her rambling on her personal blog at Diana Prichard dot com, sharing her random thoughts via her Twitter stream and wasting copious amounts of time on Facebook. She looks forward to seeing you there!

A bit of a gypsy, Shannon, has lived in Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, New York, New Mexico, Texas and now resides in Rhode Island with her son, and husband and their flock of chickens. In college she jumped from literature to environmental education landing in the field of geology at Hampshire College in MA. She studied some of the oldest rocks in the US for her master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. If she doesn’t have rocks in her pockets, she has rocks in her head! Currently, she strives to live a sustainable and enjoyable life on a couple acres where she gardens, tends to children in her nature-based daycare and is starting to write a book. Her interests include growing things, creating things, nurturing health, holiness and happiness for all things with life. She writes about her experiences on her blog and looks forward to meeting you on the trail; catching butterflies and watching the clouds drift overhead.

Anne lives, works, and grows her garden in western Michigan. While the garden is sadly a very small plot, she has plants in pots and boxes all over the house and has almost fully converted her flat roof to grow just a bit more every year. This may prove a challenge this summer with her toddler "helping out." She uses compost to improve her soil quality and grows a plethora of tomatoes for canning and making the best salsa in town. For the past three years Anne has been working as the children's music director for a local church and loves to sing, dance, and teach kids how to worship God through music. Sewing is both her hobby and a handy way to give green gifts to her friends. She's been trying to cook more healthfully for herself and her family, and loves finding new ways every day to live a greener, more economical lifestyle. Her blog, A Little Bit Crazy, is 2 parts "mommy" and 1 part "everything else under the sun."

Born a tree hugger and lover of the outdoors, Amy Whitley is a children's wilderness safety instructor for her county’s Search and Rescue unit, a freelance writer, and the mother of three kids in rural Oregon. The first to admit she’s learning as she goes with this whole green movement, she‘s replacing the plastic in her house one Klean Kanteen at a time, switching to cloth as each pack of paper napkins run out, and trying her best to remember to actually bring the reusable bags with her to the grocery store. Implementing her background in creative writing and editing, Amy blogs about family life and parenting at The Never-True Tales and reviews great places to travel with children at Pitstops for Kids.

Amber Strocel lives in Metro Vancouver, Canada with her husband Jon, preschooler Hannah and toddler Jacob. Her children are the catalysts for her journey into green living. Like many moms, she wants her children to inherit a better world to live in. Until this year Amber spent 10 years working as an engineer, and is now in the process of deciding what she really wants to be when she grows up. Living sustainably is playing a big part as she explores her dreams and re-crafts her lifestyle. Many eco-friendly choices like gardening, living more simply and reducing consumption are also personally fulfilling and money saving. They afford her an opportunity to spend time with her kids and teach them how to appreciate the little things in life. When she's not growing vast quantities of cucumbers or baking bread Amber does a lot of writing at Strocel.com. She also enjoys sewing, knitting, and eating far too much chocolate. (Fair trade and organic, of course!)

Bess Ulrich lives in beautiful Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with her Hubby, preschooler Danae, and brute toddler Caedon. A lover of variety and to-do lists, she has her hand in many ventures, including non-profit fundraising and event-planning, administrating a sports club, writing, puppy-training, leading a church connection group with her husband, and updating their 1852 farmhouse that they moved into in 2009. When she’s not pregnant (baby #3 is due in March 2010), Bess is passionate about running and exercise. She also enjoys baking healthful treats and finding ways to live frugally, simply, and naturally. While somewhat new to being eco-friendly, she looks forward to finally planting a new garden in the spring and learning more about living a bit greener. She blogs at See Bess Run, where you can read about anything from family and life adventures to product reviews and occasional giveaways.

Marizela is a science geek. She is also a wife, artist, and tour guide at The Butterfly Farm in St. Thomas, VI. She writes often on her blog Potspoon! and if you need to know where on earth she got the name for her site, just know that living in the Caribbean has rubbed off on her vocabulary as well. Her website is predominately science news for people who hate science with occasional debates about controversial issues in science today. Being a biology student (eternally it seems), she definitely is a bit of a tree-hugger. Her husband accuses her of smelling like bark occasionally and she sometimes gets mistaken for a tree by her dog. Science writing allows her to not only teach people about science, but bring up issues that many don't get to read about. Science is doing some interesting things, especially with regard to "green" technologies, and Mimi is happy to help keep you informed.

Lisa is a stay at home wife, photographer, and writer living in a small not so eco-friendly town in Oklahoma. While always having an interest in the environment, Lisa didn’t become truly green until she became sick from Fibromyalgia and started searching for ways to get better. After learning how toxic the products she was using were, she quickly started looking for natural alternatives. One thing led to another and now she is the family hippie, doing things like getting her favorite local restaurant to stock organic vodka, joining her local recycling coalition, and driving her husband crazy by reading every label and telling him why he shouldn’t eat the things he loves. In hopes of sharing her love for the environment with others and saving her husband from having to listen to her talk for hours on end about going green, she started her blog Retro Housewife Goes Green. She now writes for a few sites, all about environmental issues. Even with her online outlets she still drives her husband, family, and friends nuts with all her "knowledge" about the environment.

Jennifer Smith is a mom of three, wife of one, and a full time ecopreneur. She owns and writes for Eco-Office Gals, a green Virtual Assistant company. After spending ten years in the real world as an Administrative Assistant and feeling the resistance of moving toward a paperless office, she decided the only way to go paperless was to have no one to answer to! In her desire to go paperless, "going green" came with. Her love of internet research and the desire to learn brought the desire to teach other small businesses how to go green.