Green Options

Big news Planetsavekateers, I’m outta here.

I’m leaving Green Options and Planetsave, though not to join Tom and John in their fight against the thetans.

I would like to say it’s to spend more time with my family, but that just makes me sound like a scandal ridden Bush official.

While I probably will get to spend more time with my family now, I’m leaving the company to work on my green home project and a few other side projects. My tenure at Green Options and Planetsave has been one of the most interesting, exciting, and invigorating times I’ve had. It ranks as one of my favorite startups (out of my current total of four) and I’m walking away with a greatly expanded network of friends and contacts, a ton of great experience in green publishing, and an awesome project to jump to.

What would have been called “The GO Home Project” is coming with me. I am buying the entire project from Green Options and taking it independent. I’m still working on a name for it (send it on if you have a good one) and will be building a site for it once that’s nailed down, but we’ll be starting up right away on sheagunther.org.

The short of it is is that me and my family are moving into two tipis to live for a year before building the coolest greenest house on the planet. We have 52 acres in North Yarmouth, Maine; the leading green architect in the state; a partnership with Smart HomeOwner Magazine, and a whole lot of great energy pushing it forward. Both me and my wife Heather will be blogging about living in the tipis and I will be set up in a smaller third tipi as my office. I’m sure I’ll have many a five minute snowshoe commutes to work this winter. We’re going to do our best to create a guide and recorded history of our life and work so as to inspire others to do choose the same green building path.

It’s been a great past year building Green Options and past few months working on the new Planetsave, but I’m super excited about all the fun stuff I’ll be able to take on now that my time is freed up from GO/PS work.

Here’s a few places you’ll be able to follow along on my adventures…

- SheaGunther.org - This is my home site, where I started blogging before I knew what blogging was (back in 2001) and current home of Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur, the most kickass in-stasis eco-entrepreneur blog on the web. It’s been dormant since we launched Green Options but I’ll be doing a relaunch with a new theme in the next week or two. We’ll be blogging about living in the tipis and I’ll have a separate page for my links/musings drops . If you grew to like my blogs here on Planetsave, you’ll want to head over there.

- Treehugger- Graham Hill was kind enough to set up me up with a writing spot at Treehugger. I have to work out the exact details with their uber editor Michael but I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been a huge fan of Treehugger since back in the day (back in the day in the green blogosphere means two+ years ago) and have always wanted to write there. They have such a great group of editors, writers, and an amazing reach- about 25X more daily readers than what Green Options is pulling these days.

- Yet to be named website for the Green Home Project. We’ will be documenting the crap out of our experience building the coolest greenest house on the planet on our yet to be named website. Sheagunther.org is a good place to go to keep up while I figure out what this new thing will be called.

- Stumblegods.com- It’s not really officially launched yet, but my buddy Michael (editor and founder of Groovy Green, founder and publisher of Ecorazzi, chief editor guy at Ecotality Life) and I will be sharing our insights about the power of StumbleUpon at our new site Stumble Gods. Our thumbs move masses baby.

- Ecotality Life- I’ve been working as a consultant with the awesome and talented Brooke Lowry over at Ecotality on the relaunch of their blog. We’ll be getting Ecotality Life up in the next week, in the meantime check out the current site. Ecotality Life will be relaunched with a focus on green gadgets and green business and investing and should be a good read.

- Email: sheagunther@gmail.com, Skype: shea_gunther

It’s been rad, I’ll miss a lot of the people at Green Options and Planetsave. I’ve gotta give it up to my main man Jan, the founder of Planetsave (he sold it to Green Options this Spring and works on both GO and PS stuff) and pimp dad advertising sales guru man. HIC! He’ll be assisted by the talented Noelle d’Estries (Michael’s sister) who will bring her savvy news sense (have you seen the Green Report, that’s all her) and keen wit to the table trying to fill the void that my voluminous ego will leave behind.

Keep up the good fight. Keep on saving the world.

Get a load of this crap from Off Grid Editor Nick Rosen (the super secksay guy with smoldering good looks and a Miami Vice sense o’ style over there on the right)…

The new Eco-nazis bang the green drum but march to a dark tune. Take Ecorazzi for example - or should that be Econazzi? They go crazy every time a celebrity launches a new eco-lipstick, but forget to report on Hollywood’s poisoning of the planet. The sleazy web site is run by two dorks from Miami with about as much fashion sense as Osama bin Laden.

Rebecca Carter and Michael d’Estries could care less about the environment - they have seen a market gap and now they are busy serving it - green gossip about celebrities, and about as much moral content as a Submarine sandwich. According to locals insiders the pair have their eyes fixed on one thing - and its not the end of golbal warming -its the IPO of Econazi.

What is most sickning about their twee reportage is the implication that anyone who is not putting out some bullshit line of green product is somehow inferiro compared to the dreary parade of hapless celebrities they use to fill their pages. More later.

(Editor’s note: Nick, spell check is your friend. It’s “sickening” and “inferior”)

What a prickstar!

First, to claim that Michael and Rebecca don’t care about the environment is beyond absurd. I am good friends with both of them, hired them to come on board as writers at Green Options, and just had Michael as a guest out here in Maine for a few days. These two are are legit and green as you can get.

Michael works a full time job as an IT guy and has spent most of his free time in the two years I’ve known him working on his mini green publishing empire. He founded the highly esteemed green blog Groovy Green, is a regular and popular contributor to Green Options, is working on the new relaunch of the Ecotality Blog, and yes- happens to also run a fun little site with Rebecca called Ecorazzi that focuses on green celebrities.

Rebecca has equally strong green credentials. She’s been blogging at GreenerMiami for years now, runs green events and whatnot to build and support the local Miami and Florida green scene, and was the lone editor of the Green Tips o’ the Day on Green Options for the first five months of it’s life.

Ecorazzi is just one of their sites, the most poppy and fun. It’s an easy way into green for people who might first come at the site as a fan of celebrity gossip. I also bet it gets ten times as much traffic as Nick’s site. Nick Rosen, in addition to acting like a petulant child, is taking himself WAY too seriously here.

I give Nick credit for the contributions he’s made to the green world. His book “How to Live Off Grid” is a good one and up to now his blog hasn’t been bad. But this is just stupid. He is coming off like a right jerkass, maybe he’s doing it for the link bait? It worked with me, I’m giving him all sorts of links, the big schmomar that he is.

Or maybe he really is offended that anyone is taking a fun approach to green. It’s deadly serious business, this saving the world and all, but Nick- you need to lighten up buddy. Maybe you should spend a few nights ON the grid, a hot shower does wonders for the spirits.

I found this slightly juicy green news item over at Valleywag the other day. GigaOm, the well regarded tech blog, just introduced a new green tech site Earth2Tech. Om Malik, the founder and big cheese at GigaOm hired Adena DeMonte away from struggling tech mag Red Herring to run the site. I guess Om has poached a few other Red Herring writers (he used to write for them back in their golden days) and RH [...]

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