Green Options

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Greens come in way more than one shade, so the folks at the Discovery Channel and TreeHugger are hoping to reach as many of them as they can through a new partner-based, 24/7 network dubbed Planet Green.

Calling itself the “first and only 24-hour eco-lifestyle television network,” Planet Green launches Wednesday, June 4. The synergy of the TV/Internet partnership promises to deliver a greater range and depth of green information than either medium could provide on its own, according to Eileen O’Neill, president and general manager of the Planet Green network.

I guess when diesel costs $4.29 a gallon, as it does here in Northern California, money really does grow on trees in the form of the diesel tree!  The Brazilian Copaifera langsdorfii can be tapped like a rubber tree, to yield natural diesel fuel.

Source: Treehugger 

Only mothers can sit around talking about their children’s diapers and toilet learning behaviors in “normal” conversation. Now they can add the presence of pesticides in their children’s eliminations to their discussions.

A new, peer-reviewed study has found in children’s urine and saliva organophosphates, a family of pesticides spawned by the creation nerve-gas in WWII. How did it get there? Conventionally grown food.

The study was conducted for a year on Mercer Island, Washington, involving 21 children from ages three to eleven. Amazingly, once the children switched to eating only organically-grown food, the presence of pesticides was eliminated from their body fluids in eight to 36 hours. Principal author of the study and Emory University professor Chensheng Lu explains:

Newspaper house in London

I have to admit, I am a mom who hugs trees. There’s even a black and white self-portrait of me hugging a cedar tree in my mother’s house. Since before my children were born, I have hiked to a sacred yew tree on my land, hugged it, and said my prayers several times a week.

Sometimes my children join in, sometimes they just explore the yew grove. Last winter, my hugging yew tree fell over after a great snow fall. I still hug it, and it is still alive, but I must lean over to hug my tree now.

My daughter can definitely relate to My Mom Hugs Trees, written by Robyn Ringgold and illustrated by Vidya Vasudevan. This rhyming book is the story of a mother that not only hugs trees, but she talks to plants, rescues bugs instead of killing them, plants seeds from the fruit they eat, asks the flowers if she can pick them, etc. OK, she’s a hippie!

After bedtime stories, Mom says good night to the moon and stars. “Good night, Moon. Good night, Stars. Thank you for your light from afar.

As you might imagine, the process of getting GO launched, running and successful has been a learning and growing experience for all of us here. We’ve all had our little victories, and made our mistakes along the way. We’ve discovered things about ourselves and each other, and in the case of our partner Shea Gunther, those discoveries have included a need to move in some different directions. Shea will be leaving his duties at

[...]

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.

I didn’t say it, the angry green trolls over at Green Rants did- Hugg 2.0 sucks.

Even an ugly baby is kinda huggable.

But not this one: the new Hugg 2.0. It’s the latest incarnation of the Digg-wannabe from Treehugger, now a proud member of the Discovery’s Planet Green network.

You’d think Treehugger’s new corporate masters would expect a little more polish for something they just laid out $10 million to acquire. Or perhaps they were in such a hurry to dump Hugg’s previous configuration — a buggy, spammy, neglected mess — that the new site’s sterile, Web 1.2 presentation didn’t matter.

Letting the inmates run the asylum

No to speak ill of the dead, but the original Hugg gave new meaning to the term user generated content — as in, set up the site and never touch it again. Its rickety Pligg underpinnings always felt as if they might fly apart at any moment; features (such as reporting problems to the administrator) were broken or yielded cryptic error messages; and its pages were loaded with blog spam touting high-performance automobiles, vacation packages, and pitches for multilevel marketing schemes. It was all wrapped in an eye-searing electric green color scheme that would leave a nasty afterimage if you stared at it too long. Which few people did, judging from its long and obvious decline in participation.

I started reading Treehugger in 2005, not too long after they launched and when I was first discovering blogs. I’ve been a daily reader ever since- it’s hard not to. They have some of the best writers on the web- a lot of of my favorite green bloggers are Treehuggers - and I’m a very big fan of founder Graham Hill. His vision has driven Treehugger into the top 25 blogs on the web [...]

TreeHugger teamed up with domino, a home style magazine, to present The Green List.

The cover feature celebrates 125 companies which have transformed home interiors to integrate green design and style.

The list includes earth friendly furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, rugs, and a spotlight on a few people, including TreeHugger's Graham Hill.

The criteria: