A new web service, Local Dirt, is out to make the connection between the local farmer and buyer more convenient. Say you’re looking for local peaches during the season. Local Dirt’s interface allows you to set search criteria based on location, product, and even venue (if you choose), and find a farmer from whom you can buy online. Sleep in on Saturday, get to the market late, and your peaches are still there… the service provides you with a purchase order to take to the vendor. Some of the farmers may even deliver…

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A new tool in Google Earth shows you the “effect” of climate change in your area.

Using Google Earth, you can look at climate effects under three different scenarios — 1) Confronting Climate Change — “with Al Gore”, 2) IPCC High Emissions Scenario, and 3) IPCC Low Emissions Scenario. Other new tools let you examine other aspects of climate change and how to adapt to climate change.

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Last week, the Internet celebrated its 40th birthday! Forty glorious years that saw not just the transition from ARPANet to the now popular Internet but also Web 2.0 and what not! The Internet has been a revolution–in the making! The Internet that we know of today has been around for a little over a decade. That is also the time period when awareness and action on the “global” climate crisis has been phenomenal. And the link, evident!

According to the Internet Governance Forum, Internet consumes up to one trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, amounting to around 5% of the world’s total electricity consumption. The ‘tools’ of the IT sector are also manufactured using metals of various kinds. So the question remains, can Internet really help solve the climate crisis? The answer, on behalf of a generation grown up with the Internet, a firm Yes!

Here are five ways how Internet is helping fight climate change:

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Although I have long been stalking Spoonflower (a fabric-on-demand printing service), checking out their Fabric of the Week, even subscribing to their promotional emails, I have never bought their services.

I have ideas, of course–fabric printed with the comic strip that my husband and I write, fabric printed with the rainbow patchwork pattern that I painstakingly piece together from a number of fabrics to make my crayon rolls, fabric printed with my pattern design for my dinosaur stuffies, etc. But these ideas have, so far, all remained in my head.

Until today, at least. Today I’m making at two of my design dreams reality. For free.

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GreenTalk Radio host Sean Daily talks with green blogger Paul Smith from TriplePundit.com and Ecopreneurist.com Triple Pundit is the new conversation place all about integrating people, planet, and profits into today’s businesses. Ecopreneurist covers the latest trends in building green, sustainable and socially responsible companies and products as well as offering advice, analysis and information for and about green entrepreneurs and companies targeting the LOHAS consumer.

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Newspapers and magazines play a part, but with their shrinking staffs, it’s a smaller role by the day. Blogs? Definitely, it’s where people with the freedom and foresight to look broader, more critically, think more bravely share what they’re observing, researching, and wanting your feedback on. Microblogging sites such as Twitter take the time frame even more immediate, currently breaking.

But, you may be asking, where do I find the time to go to all these sources? A fair question, one which a tool like Feedly handily integrates all together in one place, allowing for you to easily interact with both your information and the people talking about it.

The next question you may have is, how do I even find what I need to keep track of in the first place amongst all this big swirling pot of information? And how do I know what’s best?

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Although politicians themselves may be relative newcomers in the world of communicating in 140-character or less, those who write about and study politics aren’t. And that goes for those who favor environmental politics, too.

What is to follow is by no means an exhaustive list. I’ve also left out those accounts that only RSS feeds (while recognizing their value). I’ve certainly left off a few that belong here, but I encourage you to add them below. Remember, this is not necessarily a “Best of”, but rather a few of the eco-political twitterers I find value in. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

10 twitter users you should follow:

@emilygertz The lead blogger at change.org’s Stop Global Warming blog, Emily Gertz’s work is all over the interwebs, including powerhouses like WorldChanging, Scientific American, and Grist.

@forestpolicy Deane Rimerman keeps the Forest Policy Research website updated with news and commentary about, you guessed it, forest policy. Good stuff.

@ghoberg I first came across Prof. Hoberg while doing some research on Canadian forest policy in grad school. Though relatively new to the twitterverse, his tweets are insightful and have even given me a few story ideas.

@greenskeptic Blogging the new green economy as The Green Skeptic since 2004, Scott Anderson lends his expertise on cleantech and social-entrepreneurial ventures, along with updates on his hoops game.

@grist More than just a twitterfeed, the folks at Grist.org have developed a nice mix of links and conversational tweets on their twitterstream. While the content at Grist is not entirely politics, the content at Gristmill pretty much is — and it rocks.

@kgrandia Kevin Grandia is the Managing Editor of DeSmogBlog and also Director of New Media for Hoggan and Associates in Vancouver, Canada. When he’s not clearing the PR pollution that hovers around climate debate, he’s tweeting about politics, society and life. Never mundane.

@revkin Andrew Revkin is a long time science writer for the New York Times and leads their Dot Earth blog in addition to his print duties. His tweets often offer little snippets of what he is currently writing/researching (thus giving his followers a taste of what they can expect in tomorrow’s Times).

@sheagunther Green Options co-founder and mainstay on the green blogosphere, Shea Gunther is now blogging at Mother Nature News; a project that is already garnering considerable attention.

@sustainablog Jeff Mcintre-Strasburg has been blogging at sustainablog since 2003, which I think is right around the time Guttenberg invented the blog. Co-founder and former Senior Editor at Green Options, Jeff has a PhD in English and more than once been my go-to guy when I get caught in a grammatic pickle.

@YaleE360 With some of the most respected thinkers and doers in science and the environment, the  YaleE360 website hit the ground running with some of the most thought-provoking environmental journalism on the net when it launched in the Summer of 2008.

Of course you can follow us on twitter at @redgreenandblue; or me, Tim Hurst, at @ecopolitologist, where I tweet about environmental politics and cleantech from my Green Options and ecopolitology work, along with other links I find worthy of sharing and the occasional personal tweets and twitpics.

Now it’s your turn. Who do you follow on twitter for environmental politics (broadly defined). Maybe people should be following you, that’s cool too, just tell us. Now’s your chance.

Image: carrotcreative via flickr

h/t to sciencemag via talking points memo.

Image: ugenro on flickr.

On Wednesday, Al Gore threw his considerable support behind a new social venture that aims to secure the .eco domain name. Dot Eco LLC’s founders say that by financing environmental initiatives with a positive impact on the environment, the new domain will be much more than a trendy label.

Founded by Fred Krueger and Clark Landry in 2008, the new social venture’s charter states that profits from .eco registration fees will be used to fund scientific initiatives and research in climate change, ocean analysis, and economic policy, among others.

“We fully support Dot Eco LLC in its efforts to secure the .eco top level domain through the ICANN application process and look forward to working with Dot Eco LLC to promote .eco,” said Gore. Speaking on behalf of the Alliance for Climate Protection, Gore said “This is a truly exciting opportunity for the environmental movement and for the internet as a whole.”

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True, some of the proposed Federal spending will be devoted to the “green economy,” providing a boost to renewable energy production, energy efficient construction and more fuel efficient transportation.  But the ecopreneurs my wife and I interviewed for our ECOpreneuring book have discovered that the “triple bottom line” approach to running an enterprise is more resilient to economic (or ecological) shocks — like the ones occurring around the world at an accelerating pace.

For example, take Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, or SPUD for short, founded by ecopreneur David Van Seters.  Already North America’s largest online organic home grocer, SPUD merged with Organic Express and Westside Organics in 2008. With the amalgamation, SPUD now serves four major U.S. west coast markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.

In these times of change and challenges, we need success stories.  Here’s the story of SPUD founder David Van Seters, adapted from ECOpreneuring:

Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, or SPUD, is no ordinary delivery service. First, they promote organic food with free home delivery. Second, they sell food grown or produced by local or regional farmers, whenever possible. Their business model intersects the double-digit growth in organic food and the buy-local movement, while reducing carbon emissions and urban congestion through their resource-efficient delivery service. Topping it off, SPUD harnesses the Internet to offer customers the opportunity to customize their orders with a guarantee of satisfaction.

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In a chilling precedent for economics bloggers around the globe, a South Korean economics blogger was arrested, and charged with “Spreading false economic information on the internet.” If convicted, the Korean economics blogger, could serve 5 years in jail.

Apparently “Minerva”, the internet pseudonym for the arrested Mr. Park aka “economic president of the internet”, gained a large following by accurately predicting the financial collapse.  “Minerva” went too far and committed a crime, according to the judge and reported by the Associated Press, by claiming on an internet discussion board that the South Korean government ” had ordered major financial institutions and trade businesses not to purchase U.S. dollars.”  His posting “affected foreign exchange markets and the nation’s credibility,” said the judge.
At this time it is impossible to verify whether the accusations are accurate, in any case Mr. Park pleaded not guilty to all charges at his court hearing on Saturday, and is receiving wide spread support in the Korean Blogosphere.

You can show your support for Mr. Park, by sending a message to the Honorable Ambassador of the Republic of Korea Lee Tae-sik, and demand that his government immediately release Mr. Park and respect free speech on the internet.  You can also help to keep the internet free, by supporting the premier internet watchdog group, the “Electronic Frontier Foundation” with a much needed donation.

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[Editor's note: In a recent piece about the Poznan climate talks and their existence in the virtual world of 'Second Life' I ended with a plea for more information; a plea answered by journalist Richard Elen.]

Green Options readers are probably not the only people who will be struck by the irony of an intended attendee at the Poznan Climate Talks being unable to leave Stansted Airport on his decidedly anti-environmental RyanAir flight because of climate protestors closing the runway. In many ways, flying to an environmental conference makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I was always very conscious, in attending the UN Climate Negotiations in the run-up to Kyoto (which were often held in Geneva) that flying to conferences was a bad idea. Even driving there, or best of all going by train where possible, was exacerbating a problem we were there to try to do something about.

In those days, some 15 years ago, however, there were few other options. Video conferencing existed but it required going to a specially-equipped location and cost a lot of money. You were limited to one small group making a presentation to another small group. And while the Internet made it much easier to get information out of a conference, it did not initially help you a great deal to get in.

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And maybe someone can tell me more about Second Life, how you use it, and how it might be used in the setting of environmental politics.

Companies who miss the importance of the social media ship may actually risk the same fate as companies who thought the Internet was a fad. That sounds extreme, but over half the nation is already on a social network. They upload photos and videos or share shopping reviews. Customers are changing how they want companies to interact with them. The more that happens, the more companies will be left in the dust.

Since many if not most companies only have a hazy idea of how social media works and why in the world they should jump into the fray, some are slow to take the plunge. This is perhaps less true of new and old media companies. You can find Ecopreneurist and Green Options on Twitter, along with the New York Times, CNN and The BBC.

Besides Twitter, there are of course a whole host of ways to reach out to your customers and engage them on a one-to-one basis. There is Facebook and Myspace as well as a fast growing selection of newer sites. There are blogs and blogger networks, as well as, shopping social networking sites. There are community forums for a variety of topics and there are media sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube.

All of these should be considered for a social media campaign, but not all should be used. Why? This depends a lot on the company and product.

For example, as a social media marketing consultant, I focus on green products and on women’s products. I know the Mommy and female blogger and The Mommy and female social media market. I know the green market. What tools they use and where one can find green consumers. I recommend tools that make sense for my clients. Not all of the tools that Liz Strauss or Jeff Pulver suggest do that, though I follow and admire them both, but they often serve different markets.

One thing on which we all agree, though is Twitter. Though less than 2 years old, Twitter is rapidly becoming the go to place for both questions and answers. Have a question on organic food? Direct message @WholeFoods, an early and excellent user of social media. Follow Seventh Generation and find updates answers on a variety of green topics.

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Their beefs is that they cannot be found on online maps.

Apart from the fact, as stated by Mary Spence, president of the British Cartographic Society, that online maps missed out on important or key points of interest such as centuries old cathedrals, royal castles and other stately homes, they were also effectively diminishing from national consciousness the British sense of nationhood.

You see, monuments that describe the British pride like Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about 3.2 kilometers west of Amesbury and 13 kilometers north of Salisbury, should be found on any serious map. But it is not referenced on Google Map for instance.

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Not only does your web site offer you a chance to market your company, it’s also an opportunity to exercise your commitment to sustainability. One way to green your marketing is to make the web your primary advertising focus. Through e-mail newsletters, online ads, and promoting your domain name on all company correspondence, you can drive traffic to your web site and cover a lot of marketing ground without having to waste paper. Focusing your advertising efforts on the internet means less printed advertising, which means less paper waste and fewer pollutants released (the printing process and ink pigments create a lot of them).

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One of my favorite things about using the internet to promote my business is that it’s green and inexpensive (if not free). So online marketing and social networking is a great way to get your name out there without using any paper or creating any trash. A good way to start your foray into the world of online marketing is to first establish a web site for your business. This will often be your potential customers’ first impression of your company, so it will be an important investment in both time and money. Once you have a web site, networking through social media sites is a great way to promote it and drive traffic to your site. Online marketing is a strategy that’s becoming more and more popular among entrepreneurs, and thankfully it is one with minimal impact on the planet.

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