Welcome to the Third Carnival of Green Crafts!

Before we begin, let me just thank all of the crafters who participated in this month’s carnival for taking a weight off my mind. After reading all of these posts, I now have NO worries at all about landfill space anywhere in America. Seriously, y’all, crafters are obviously the solution to the trash problem. Go us!

Before we begin, a few administrative notes: We’re pleased as punch to announce that the fourth Carnival will be September 4th at Whip Up. Send in your posts via the carnival submission form today! For background information about the Carnival, please see the Carnival of Green Crafts home page. And in case you missed the previous editions, here are the first Carnival, here at Crafting A Green World, and the second Carnival, at BlogHer.

Thanks so much to all the crafters who shared their posts with us for this edition of the Carnival. Let’s dig in!

Eco-Friendly Materials

Tiny Decor gathered a list of the Top 10 Modern and Eco-friendly Fabric Sources on Etsy. You HAVE to see what she’s collected, there are some real knockouts.

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“More ways to spend time on the internet instead of working.” Probably true, but slightly too cheeky.

“More ways to spend time on the internet instead of crafting.” Again, probably true, or maybe I’m just projecting my personal issues?

How about: “These are cool, you should read them!”

Slightly dull, but honestly I’m a bit tired today and that may be as good as it gets. So without further ado, here are some of my personal favorite green craft blogs, big and small. Check out our blogroll for more, and feel free to add your suggestions in the comments!

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Launched a month and a half ago as part of the new EcoGeek blogging network, Wearing the Future is all about “straight talk as much as style, so you won’t have to worry about fluffy, PR-soaked, greenwashing nonsense.”

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with the blog’s chief editor and head writer, Kyeann Sayer (pronounced like “cayenne” pepper). As a long-time writer for Treehugger.com, Kyeann has an impressive media resume - she has been featured on CNN, MSN, I.D. Magazine, Domino, Spin, Outside, and Women’s Wear Daily … just to name a few.

In our lively conversation, Kyeann and I talk about the beginning of Wearing the Future, her favorite eco-fashion brands, personal style’s place in the world of green living and more - read on for all the juicy details!

Victoria Everman: How did you get connected with Hank Green of EcoGeek? Did the two of you come up with the idea for Wearing the Future together or was he on the look-out for an editor and writer already? 

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Right now, its founder and editor, Erik, is looking for someone (or, more likely, several people)  to take over the blog for him.  Green Bean is clearly a labor of love but Erik has announced that he has some big changes coming up that are going to take him away and he is not going to be able to keep GreenBean going by himself.  He writes, that, because of a new job,  he is “…relocating to Stuttgart, Germany for 6-12 months, then to New York City.   In addition to this, we’re expecting our first child in April.”

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A scuffle developed when residents tried to prevent trucks from unloading the rubbish, Xinhua said.

When Wei took out his cell phone to record the protest, more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes, Xinhua said. Wei was dead on arrival at a Tianmen hospital, the report said.

Xinhua is the official press agency of the People’s Republic of China.

Image courtesy of CNN.

This local blog first came to my attention via an article in the local paper about a University of Michigan medical student and his daughter who are operating a blog together that is encouraging people to eat vegetarian meals one day a week (on Wednesdays). The Vegetarian Wednesday blog began just this past summer. Originally founded by Josh Mugele and his daughter Eleanor, there are now a few other writers (relatives and med school classmates) who contribute to the blog as well.

“Vegetarian Wednesday started when my daughter wanted to become a vegetarian but couldn’t do it all at once (she loves her chicken nuggets). I told her I’d help her by doing it with her, and we’d start by becoming vegetarians one day a week. Thus was born Vegetarian Wednesday. She wants to become a vegetarian because she loves animals. I want to do it because it’s good for me and good for the planet. Did you know that the meat industry is one of the leading contributors to global warming in the world? Did you know that eating less meat lowers your weight and total cholesterol? Think of what we could do if we all stopped eating meat for just one day a week.

“The purpose of this blog is to encourage meat-eaters like me to make a difference in their health and in the health of the planet by trying to eat no meat one day each week. On this blog we can share recipes, stories about Vegetarian Wednesdays, and most of all spread the word.”

The blog includes a number of recipes for a variety of vegetarian dishes, as well as some (very brief) reviews of vegetarian dishes by an actual 9-year-old (ranging from “No way,” for zucchini and mushroom enchiladas to “I love tofu. Tofu’s great,” for a simple General Tso’s Tofu recipe). Beyond the recipes there are also discussions of related topics connected to overall reduction of lifestyle impact to reviews of books and movies such as The Omnivore’s Dillemma and The 11th Hour. There are also discussions about restaurants (some local, some national chains) as they are connected to vegetarian eating.

Certainly this isn’t the first time anyone has considered partial vegetarianism, either as a step towards embracing vegetarian eating completely (as the daughter is doing), or just to push themselves to eat lower on the food chain and to eat a healthier diet (as the father is doing). My own family did something like this a couple years ago (though not so regularly or as organized as this is) when we had a share of vegetables each week from a local CSA farm (community-supported agriculture). Even when it is done in a haphazard fashion, you will most likely find yourself trying new things and increasing the variety of your meals. We’ve kind of let that idea slip lately, but perhaps this will be the inspiration for us to restart that ourselves.

Just taking a break from eating meat for one day a week reduces your consumption by about 15%. And Vegetarian Wednesday offers a list of other benefits to not eating meat:

• It fights global warming.
• You’ll get your daily vitamins at least one day a week.
• It makes you look better.
• It’ll make you feel better.
• It cuts back on the killing of animals.
• It reduces our reliance on foreign oil.
• Chicks (or dudes) will dig you.

If you are looking for a community to support you in a partially vegetarian lifestyle, this seems like it might be the place for you. It’s very much an experiment rather than a soapbox for these writers. It’s vegetarianism for the rest of us. Vegetarians who can also say, “But pork chops taste so good!”

Link: Vegetarian Wednesday

In October, Gaiam Community will launch it’s blog, and, judging from their plans, it will quickly attain the status of a "must-read." They’ve already lined up yoga guru Rodney Yee, and Gaiam Real Goods founder John Schaeffer to write for it. In fact, the only thing they don’t have is a name. Rather than hand that task over to the marketing department, they’ve decided to hold a contest.

The "Name Our Blog" contest will end on September 16th, so start thinking quickly. They’re looking for a name that "will encompass the spirit of all the subjects we cover here in the Gaiam Community — and be clever and unique too!" The winning entrant will receive a $250 Gaiam.com gift certificate; five runners up will receive $50 gift certificates.

We’re happy to give the Gaiam Community a plug, and encourage you to enter the contest. And we’re looking forward to the blog itself…

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson are an example of the new media- independent, grassroots reporters and news. The couple runs Ryan is Hungry, a videoblog that interviews and features green gurus, tips, and information. They look for “stories that don’t get covered in the mainstream media worlds of television and newspapers,” and they bring that news to us.

Their medium, video, is powerful and far reaching, and the Internet, limitless. Their message is environmental and technological activism. From a quick browse through the site, I learned about an ecological shipping container hotel, clothing swaps, permaculture gardens, and underground supper clubs. This video blog is delivering culture! That’s the new media.

Ryanne and Jay also run Node 101 an open source video blogging (vlogging) collaborative project, for teaching and spreading the technology worldwide. In their words, “the goal of Node 101 is to teach media literacy as a life skill and to change the current media landscape from being a lecture to being a conversation.”

Resources such as Node 101 make vlogging and blogging easy and have opened the “the conversation” to virtually everyone. You no longer need technical expertise to run your own blog or even vlog site; just a computer, a digital camera, and some motivation. I started my blog in, literally, five minutes and instantly I was a published author. A few weeks later, I joined Green Options, a group blogging site. If you are writing or videoing beyond a personal diary, and sharing on the Internet, you are the new media.

Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, and BBC no longer decide what is newsworthy. We do, and the networks are scrambling to keep up. The Washington Post featured a series of articles about how the spread of cell phones with cameras and other digital technology are making journalists out of average citizens worldwide. Their site (as do most on-line news sites) even features citizen bloggers in addition to staff reporters.

The field is open to those who want to play. The traditional media is looking for writers to cover events as serious as the presidential primaries. Public relations firms seek coverage for their projects. Opportunity for sharing what is news to you abounds. Site aggregators such as Hugg, Digg, and Stumble offer additional exposure to the self-published. I had a post end up on FARK and it received over 4,000 views in two days. It is that easy.

Sure, a blog post is not always the same as a news story, but it is the way we are communicating. It is raising media awareness and changing the ways we exchange ideas and information. We are learning from each other and our ideas are spreading like wildfire. Governments can’t contain our enthusiasm and the balance of control is shifting. Follow Jay and Ryanne’s lead: be the media. They’ll even teach us how.

As many of you know, Green Options is not my first foray into the world of green blogging: I started sustainablog in 2003, and have written for Treehugger for about 14 months. Since Green Options launched, I've had to curtail my blogging a bit — I cut back on my Treehugger schedule, and put sustainable on hiatus at the end of May.

Things change, though, and during a recent discussion with TH founder Graham Hill about the direction and success of Green Options, we decided that it was a good time for me to "call it a day" as a TH contributor. I've got nothing but respect and admiration for the folks at Treehugger, and thoroughly enjoyed my time writing for them. But, it is time to move on… I've got plenty to handle here!

At the same time, a blogger blogs… and I'm definitely a blogger at heart. So, I've decided that the split from Treehugger means it's a good time to get sustainablog going again. I also looked at the calendar and realized that tomorrow, July 10th, is sustainablog's fourth anniversary. So, to celebrate that anniversary, I'm relaunching sustainablog. While I should probably wait until tomorrow, I'm just too excited… my baby comes out of hiatus tonight.

Please come by, say "Hi," and let me know what you think. I'll keep my writing at sustainablog largely separate from the work I do here — maybe an occasional cross post, but, otherwise, I won't be "GO's Senior Editor and Content Director" there. Rather, I'll go back to where I started: a passionate student of and advocate for sustainability in all of its myriad forms. I can't wait…

Most of us have a fairly narrow view of what it means to recycle: we gather materials (aluminum, paper, glass, plastic) in blue bins and either leave them on the curb for a pick-up service, or take them to a drop-off point. British site How Do I Recycle This? takes a much broader view of the concept — essentially merging reuse and recycling — and provides a forum where users can submit there own ideas for getting more use out of items that most of us would throw away without a second thought.

If you don't live in Great Britan, don't let the UK URL, or location of publishers Louisa Parrry and John Leach, put you off: there's very little in this blog's many posts that applies only to Brits or Europeans. Furthermore, don't expect the tried and true reuse projects that many of us did when we were kids (i.e., making bird feeders out of milk cartons) — the range of materials and recycling/reuse ideas at How Do I Recycle This? is quite eclectic. Some of the more unusual items:

• Foam pizza/garlic bread bases
• Tablet/pill blister packs
• Shed pet hair
• Dead electric razors
• Old potatoes

Parry and Leach post new items on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and users are welcome to submit suggestions (whether they've successfully reused or recycled them item themselves or not).

The most impressive aspect of the site is its focus on harnessing the ideas of its users: Parry and Leach do offer their own suggestions when they have them, but every post is geared towards gathering ideas from readers. This is Green Web 2.0 in a pretty pure form: anyone can contribute their "authority" on the subject. While some items require an explanation of regulations for safe disposal (i.e. CFLs), the majority of the "trash" listed on the site encourages a free and creative exploration reuse possibilities.

"How Do I Recycle This?" has been online since April, 2006, and appears to have recently grown in its offerings — as recently as April, most posts appeared at the end of the month. I have no doubt, though, that the site's readership will keep it in "junk" that can find a better place than the trash can or landfill. The publishers have also launched a companion site, Compost This, that's a bit more directive, but still very useful.

We've been thrilled by the recent pick up in blog comments and discussions going on at Green Options: we're glad many of you feel comfortable participating in discussions here. Ninety-nine percent of those comment have been constructive, thoughtful and informed. The other one percent… well, we're making some changes to address spam (which has picked up also) and uncivil behavior.

After deleting a ton of spam yesterday, I asked our developers to turn on moderation for comments submitted by users not registered at GO. This does not mean that you won't be able to add your voice to the discussion without becoming a member; rather, it means that those comments will have to be approved before appearing on the site. The content team will be checking the moderation queue frequently, so it shouldn't be too long before your comment appears.

On the issue of civility: let's face it — people find it way too easy to be rude or obnoxious online. We're not speaking face-to-face; we probably haven't even met the person with whom we're having a conversation. From our perspective, though, knock-down, drag-out flame wars add nothing to a given debate, and certainly don't add any value to Green Options. So, feel free to engage in spirited argument, but, if an exchange devolves to name-calling, insults, obscenity directed at another user, etc., we will remove those comments (or, if we're feeling cheeky, we'll disemvowel them). We don't want to stifle discussion; rather, we want to encourage it. We believe that a community is built by people who treat each other with courtesy, even when they disagree. We want all GO users to know that they can offer their opinions and knowledge without being bullied, insulted or otherwise mistreated.

We value your participation at Green Options, and are always interested in your ideas for making the site the place you want to discuss sustainability and green living. Let us know if you have questions or concerns.

Cleveland, Ohio doesn't get a lot of respect. It's been the butt of countless jokes, an environmental scapegoat, the "City whose river caught on fire," and a symbol for the declining cities of the "Rust Belt" of the American midwest.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't a green heart in the Cleveland area. Even a city in the middle of the rust belt can be a center for "Think Globally - Act Locally." In fact, I've recently found that the Cleveland area has a vibrant local/regional blog at Green City Blue Lake, covering the local and regional scene from a green perspective. GCBL arose out of an earlier site called EcoCity Cleveland, which remains online as an archive with a wealth of information still available in its pages, but is no longer actively supported.

Recent content on the Green City Blue Lake site ranges from articles about alternative energy policy to articles about local wildlife to a recent decision by county commissioners to demolish an existing landmark office tower rather than rehabilitating it.

It's an excellent example of a regional interest blog. GCBL aims to be a hub for sustainability with a broad list of objectives including creating a regional agenda for sustainability, focusing on "11 areas of practice – water, energy, economy and sustainable business, regional food systems, land and conservation, transportation, green building and neighborhood development, health, arts, education, and spirit." The site also seeks to "Promote a positive GreenCityBlueLake identity for Cleveland and the region — a new image that will make the outside world see us differently and will make us break out of our tired, Rust-Belt mindsets and imagine new futures."

Even though the preceeding EcoCity Cleveland site, which led to GCBL, is no longer actively being updated, it still also contains a wealth of good information. Some of it is local, but much of it is widely applicable, and it is another resource that ought to be bookmarked.

The only thing I could think of to ask for is a link to other, similar regional blogs (such as one closer to my own community) or a clearinghouse site that could direct people to appropriately local blogs for their particular regional interests. I'm not aware of anything of its kind in my area, but I'm going to start looking. I'd also be very interested in gathering a list of regional interest blogs (post 'em in the comments below, if you like). Some of this might be less interesting to you if you don't live in Cleveland, or if you don't live in a region that is similar to the Cleveland area. But even if you are in a completely different part of the country (or outside the US entirely), I think this is still a good example to look at to see how a regional blog might be organized.

Let's see if a network of these sites can be organized. Rather than coming from a top-down organization, if local, regional blogs like this include links to other blogs with a similar approach, the connections will grow and it will be possible to find regional information on sustainability across the country.

• A Los Angeles-area resident to cover the many green things happening there.
• A "green teen" — an active and passionate pre-teen to teenager who can cover green activities and development by/for that age group.
• A "green senior" — replace "pre-teen" and "teenager" with "senior citizen" or "elder" in the above description.
• A green entrepreneur — Amy's doing great with the wide world of green business; now we want to add an "insider" to the mix. We'd prefer someone who's running a business, not just thinking about one.
• UPDATE: One more… I knew something wasn't right here! We're also looking for a writer to jump into Ryan Thibodaux's Red, Green and Blue spot — a progressive environmentalist who likes to argue politics… and does it well. Ryan's not leaving… just moving on to other areas.
• Another UPDATE: We'd also like a Chicago-based writer… just too much good stuff going on there…

We'd want each of these writers to contribute weekly at a minimum. While each writer at GO has a primary "beat," there's always room for branching out.

Finally, we'd like to build a pool of young, hungry journalists (or journalism students in their 3rd or 4th year) that would be interested in doing longer-form pieces… perhaps even some investigative journalism. We anticipate publishing pieces like these monthly, but would be willing to do it more often for the right stories.

Think you might be the right person for one of these positions? Email me, or send me a private message — please note the position for which you're applying in the subject line. Please introduce yourself, and submit or point to a few writing samples. You don't have to have previous blogging experience, but some knowledge of web publishing software is always a plus.

All of these are independent contractor positions. We pay per post/article, and have just implemented a bonus structure for writers.

Editor's note: Liam Rattray is one of Green Options' "rock star" interns. Liam and fellow intern Ryan Thibodaux (also one of our writers) were instrumental in getting Green Options launched on time!

Web 2.0 is the essential buzzword, everyone knows it, but not many people know what it actually is. Even industry specialists disagree over the definition of "Web 2.0", but most foresee it changing the way people interact with the internet and each other. This short post on Web 2.0 is centered around the visionary YouTube video entitled "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us" (5 min) by Michael Wesch an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Kansas State University. If you haven't seen this video, zip on over to it using the good old fashioned hypertext link provided. In the time it takes you to watch this video 542 new blogs will have just been created throughout the world.

Now that you've experienced the wonder that is YouTube, I'll explain what Michael Wesch has brought up. The traditional form of written communication is text unilinearly printed on paper. This medium was, and still is in some podunk parts of society, used to convey one persons or a group of persons thoughts to a reader. It was terribly inefficient and multiple drafts of one document had to be written in order to achieve a copy that didn't have mistakes or parts that the author wished to move about.

In comes the digital age and bang! correctional fluid with the stroke of a button and the ability to move about pages of text with the twitch of a mouse. Computer text editing with applications like Open Office (much like Microsoft Office but $100s cheaper through the power of open-source) made writing and editing much faster and flexible. With this new technology scientists managed to exploit the idea of hypertext, an idea from the late 40s that envisioned a system that could automatically follow any citation in any document, and with the World Wide Web users could use hyper-textual links like those in this document to zoom around text in multiple directions.

These new documents were coded in a computer language called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, that allowed users to insert links and add formatting much like text editors allow you to do. However, HTML had many drawbacks because the language was used to define only the structure of the content of what you wrote, which meant that computers were unable to separate form from content easily.

In the late 90s a new language, XML or Extensible Markup Language, was developed. XML allows our documents information to be categorized and analyzed by computers by using tags, just as links are tags, to identify key parts like the title of the document and a simple description of it. XML has become the backbone of Web 2.0 and is what most Web 2.0 applications, or interactive websites, use to convey information.

Web 2.0 utilizes HTML and XML among many other internet and computer technologies to facilitate the movement of content online so that users can more easily collaborate and share information with others. This capability is utilized by a "second generation" of websites including social networking sites like Myspace that allow users to interact and keep in touch with friends online, social bookmarking sites like digg that allow users to share interesting links, wikis like Wikipedia that allow users to collaborate on and publish articles, applications like Google documents that allow you to do collaborative word and spreadsheet processing, podcasts that allow you to create, share, and consume independent original content, rss feeds that allow you to keep track of published works by organizations and individuals, and folksonomies like Flickr that allow you to classify an item, like a photograph or website, with a series of tags to create a massive user database of terms that describe an item. The creation of all of this content has been even more streamlined with the invention of the blog. Blogs allow people, just like you, to write and publish whatever they wish online using simple online applications like WordPress that allow you to publish a website without ever touching code. To do this with video is called vlogging. Database technologies, the languages that transfer information between them, and most importantly- you, the user and creator and consumer of content are what is driving this new internet paradigm.

The real benefit of Web 2.0 is that all of these web applications allow you to tap into the collective intelligence of millions of people. Ever hear that two heads are better than one? Web 2.0 is that taken to the extreme!

Here's a list of some great Web 2.0 sites to get you started:

Social Networking: for the building and maintaining of online and offline social networks between friends, family, and work-mates. For a full list go here.

Myspace- the classic general social networking site

Facebook- originally for students, but now everyone!

LinkedIn- for business professionals

Stumbleupon- social networking for surfing the web

Care2- social networking for green living and activism

Social Bookmarking: used to share and recommend online bookmarks

Del.icio.us- allows you to publish all of your bookmarks in a simple list, the bookmarking standard

Newsvine- social bookmarking for news

Digg- one of the larger bookmarking sites used primarily for technology related topics

Technorati- social bookmarking for blogs

Reddit- a simple social bookmarking site

Hugg- bookmarking for green living and environmental news

Stumbleupon- is also used for bookmarking

Metafilter- really good stuff.

Wiki: "is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration." -Wikipedia. Wikis can be found on almost every topic here.

Wikipedia- a very comprehensive encyclopedia

Appropedia- green wiki

Intellipedia- a wiki that the US intelligence community uses…I couldn't find the link (imagine that…!)

And, of course, Green Options' own Green Life Guide 

Podcasts: a media file, video or audio, that is distributed by a subscription, typically via RSS feeds, for playback on televisions, computers, or portable media players. News, special interests, television shows, and movies can all be found through podcasts. They can be found on every imaginable subject through these directories.

Media Sharing: websites that allow the free movement of media

Flickr- for photographs

YouTube- for video

OurMedia- for grassroots media and news

RSS Feeds: subscriptions that allow you to automatically collect websites, articles, podcasts, and other media by using a RSS Aggregator like these

Netvibes- a fantastic online aggregator, as well as a thousand other things

Shrook- the free desktop aggregator for Macs

Bloglines- an online aggregator for blog subscriptions

AggCompare- a directory of other aggregators

Having trouble thinking of a topic for your 250-500 word column? That's probably not because there's not enough material out there; rather, there may be too much! Nothing's off limits: our personal habits and quirks, the statements of politicians and/or activists, or even the statements and actions of green critics are all fair game. We're looking for light humor vs. biting satire; poking fun vs. roasting over the coals.

February 1st, the contest deadline, is getting close — one week from today. Send your submissions to lighterside@greenoptions.com.

When we launch, we want to publish 8-10 quality blog posts per day that inform and enlighten our readers about the wide world of green living. Our bloggers do have areas of focus, but there's lots of room for branching out.

We're looking for writers with a lively style, and a command of the facts on their chosen topics. We want writers who can communicate sometimes complex ideas to readers who may be fairly new to green ideas. Experience, particularly with online writing and/or blogging, is good, but not necessary: we're certainly willing to nurture the right person. The main requirements are solid writing abilities, and the ability to communicate your passion about the green life. We will pay you for your efforts.

Interested? Questions? Email or private message me. Quill pen not required.

UPDATE: Wow! Thanks to all of you that have expressed interest in blogging for us — and I do mean all of you! I'm in the process of responding to inquiries — if you haven't heard from me yet, you will.  Because we've received many excellent inquiries, I'm going to close this offer for now.  I'm sure, though, that we'll be looking for writers again in the near future.

Also, if you're interested in contributing entries to the Green Living Wiki, please feel free to contact me. 

I'm very excited about the group of writers we've brought on board for the blog. All them are people you'll likely recognize from around the green blogosphere, and we're grateful that they've agreed to join us. Our writers, and their areas of focus, are:

• Rebecca Carter — Tip of the Day editor
• Maria Surma Manka — national renewable energy
• Michael d'Estries — the world of green
• Preston Koerner — green building and architecture
• Ryan Thibodaux — green politics
• Wendy Strgar – green love (yes, you read that right…)
• Mark Brandon — socially-responsible and sustainable investment
• Patrick Chen — green business
• Clayton Cornell – biofuels and sustainable agriculture

It's an impressive group, and we'll putting them right to work — check the blog every weekday, and on the weekends, also. You'll find stories, tips, innovations and developments covering the wide world of green living. We believe we'll be moving quickly into the ranks of top green blogs.

Thank you for your help! We're glad you're here.