Just as I have little understanding of boredom, I also never find myself needing an activity while experiencing nature beyond hiking and observing; however, children are a different breed. They sometimes need help focusing their energy.  Author Jennifer Ward provides 52 outdoor activities.  From “Playground for Poets” to “Five Fine Forts”, the summer boredom crisis is solved (and these activities are limited to warm summer months).  Furthermore, these games and projects are designed for children ages 8-12.  Here’s an example:

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The United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced yesterday that over the next three years it is ploughing $11 million into research projects to develop advanced batteries for electric cars.  The projects are also in line to benefit from a whopping $19 million in further support from the private sector.

A total of seven cutting-edge projects will focus on improving battery material performance and developing the manufacturing processes to produce them.  The ultimate aim is to reduce the cost of batteries for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), one of the main financial barriers to more widespread uptake.

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Earlier this week, the China Huaneng Group started building China’s largest ever solar power plant, a massive 166 Megawatt (MW) facility in the southern province of Yunnan.

The project, costing a total of 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion), is scheduled to commence operations in 2010. According to the China Electricity Council, the company intends to expand its capacity for solar, wind and other clean energy projects to an impressive 10,000 MW by the end of the same year.

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The weather is getting colder, and we have a handmade holiday on our minds! Handmade gifts have heart, are better for the environment, and, if you opt to buy, it supports independent artists! Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be posting about recycled gifts you can make yourself and great handmade finds for sale.

A mason jar full of cookie mix is a pretty traditional handmade Christmas gift. This project gives the idea a green face lift using a delicious vegan cookie recipe. Cutting back on eggs and dairy can help folks lower their carbon footprints by avoiding these animal products. The recipe in this project is based on my favorite chocolate chip cookies: Happy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies. These things are foolproof, and no one ever suspects that they’re vegan. It’s a great way to help folks see that vegan baking can have delicious results!

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Endangered US animal and plant species are in danger of losing vital legal protection designed to prevent them from extinction.

The outgoing Bush administration is proposing to rush through legislation that will remove the right of government experts to ensure that dams, highways and other big infrastructure projects don’t pose an unacceptable threat to fragile plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Crucially, the regulations must be approved by Friday if they are to come into effect before President-elect Obama’s swearing-in ceremony on January 20th.

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The weather is getting colder, and we have a handmade holiday on our minds! Handmade gifts have heart, are better for the environment, and, if you opt to buy, it supports independent artists! Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be posting about recycled gifts you can make yourself and great handmade finds for sale.

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The weather is getting colder, and we have a handmade holiday on our minds! Handmade gifts have heart, are better for the environment, and, if you opt to buy, it supports independent artists! Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be posting about recycled gifts you can make yourself and great handmade finds for sale.

So you’re getting those handmade gifts together, and you’re wondering about green gift-wrap ideas! A pretty basket or other reusable container gives your present a little personality while reducing waste. Fabric gift bags are easy to make and encourage the recipient to reuse the wrapping, instead of tossing it in the trash. The following tutorial is on making a bag for a bottle of wine, but you can change the dimensions to match whatever you’re giving!

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The weather is getting colder, and we have a handmade holiday on our minds! Handmade gifts have heart, are better for the environment, and, if you opt to buy, it supports independent artists! Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be posting about recycled gifts you can make yourself and great handmade finds for sale.

A bottle of wine makes a great hostess gift for holiday parties, but the wine industry is far from green. Between the fertilizer used to grow the grapes, fossil fuels to run farm equipment, bottling, and shipping processes, it takes a lot to get that wine from the vineyard to the package store. Instead, you can pick up organic grapes or berries and make your own with a custom, upcycled labels! Details after the jump!

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For most of us, the winter solstice will be Dec. 22nd. There are so many ways to approach this pivotal moment in earth’s year: astronomically, historically, agriculturally, religiously/comparative religiously, anthropologically. For example, hundreds of years before Stonehenge, there was Newgrange – a massive structure in Ireland that captures the beam of the rising sun on the winter solstice. And this year, for the first time, you can view this event live via webcast!

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If you aren’t already familiar with it, Instructables is a website that offers step-by-step instructions on creating all kinds of DIY projects, ranging from relatively easy crafts to complicated robotics projects. While they are focusing on green projects for this current contest, they regularly have all manner of do-it-yourself projects. The site’s focus is on not just making things, but on showing other people how to make the cool things you have made, and how you did it.

There are many green projects on the Instructables site, beyond those that are already entries in the current ‘Go Green’ contest. Anything that you can create, and more importantly, that you can show someone else how to create, is a candidate for this contest:

"You can reuse vintage floppies, make your own cloth grocery bags, build some recycled modular shelving, a sun jar, a solar heater, or a wind generator. Move onto solar energy, worm compost, or even ditch your car for an electric bike!
Need more ideas? Check out TreeHugger’s great list of simple ways to Go Green, and the green coverage on PopSci.

"So, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle, and rebuild, then show us what you are doing to make your life a little bit greener!"

The contest is open through August 19, 2007. If you have submitted an entry to the contest, be sure to let us know about it in the comments.

After the competition results are announced, we are planning to feature some of the most appealing finalists as part of our Weekly DIY series here on Green Options. The top prize winner is going to be featured in a brief write-up in Popular Science magazine. But we are going to offer our own Green Options highlights and a bit more coverage to some of the most intriguing projects we see, as well.

We've created a submission form for Weekly DIY suggestions, and we invite you to send us an overview of your project. Ryan will go through submissions on a regular basis, and pick the best of the bunch. If we choose your project, Ryan will get in touch for details and photos. We'll then feature the project under your byline: you'll be the Weekly DIY guest blogger of the week.

No project is too big or small: as long as it helps people "green the good life," we're interested. We look forward to your submissions, and, as always, thank you for participating in the Green Options community!