Green Options

I’ve been up till all hours, saving the planet on our street.

Lauren Child gives us a taste of “How to be an Ecowarrior” with her charming book, What Planet are You From, Clarice Bean?

I gotta admit, for a mom, I got turned on to Lauren Child mighty late.  Late, as in, the beloved characters Charlie and Lola first appeared in 2000.  I had my first child in 2005.  And we [...]

There is a film out called Pants Exposed, which looks at the lingerie or “knicker” industry for what it really is. Aside from having the models strip on the runway, rather than wear unethical undies, they show not only the bad, but also the good, sharing their best picks for ethical knicker materials too.

“It’s Digg for Green.” When you first access hugg.com’s homepage, that’s the message that pops up by its logo. Unfortunately, the user generated database of green articles never caught on like Digg, and as of next Monday, November 17th, it will not be accepting new submissions. At the end of this year, Hugg.com will be closed for good.

At the top of  Hugg.com’s homepage is a message that says “Please Read”:

On November 17th, 2008, Hugg will no longer accept new submissions or registrations. Hugg will remain publicly viewable until the end of the year, at which time Hugg.com will be closed. The Hugg.com domain will be directed towards a new feature on the TreeHugger forums where participants will be able to post and comment on interesting green links (coming soon). We welcome you to the thriving community at the TreeHugger forums and hope you’ll join us now to carry on the discussion. Go ahead and poke around on the forums - we think you’ll like it and enjoy conversing with such a diverse group of intelligent, passionate people!

We would like to express our gratitude and appreciation to the many Hugg users who have poured time and energy into providing the community with tons of great content. Unfortunately, due to increasing maintenance costs, we can no longer provide Hugg with the resources it needs to continue.

So what happened?

Before being ‘green’ became fashionable, and terms like ‘eco-chic’ were coined, being environmentally conscious was synonymous with words like ‘granola’ and ‘treehugger,’ generalizing the eco-conscious crowd as a free-spirited-Birkenstock-wearing-Grateful-Dead-loving bunch of Liberal hippies chanting ‘Peace, man.’

But being green has definitely gone mainstream, and from celebs like Julia Louis-Dreyfus with her lavish, multi-million dollar solar-powered home, to Pierce Brosnan, aptly named the ‘Best Dressed Environmentalist’ by the Sustainable Style Foundation, the stereotype of the gritty, unkempt nature wanderer that once dominated the category no longer applies.

Recently, MSN posted a list of the ‘Top 14 Green Celebrities,’ which contained some long-time environmental advocates and a few surprising new additions, all echoing a commitment to championing this important cause through various initiatives like Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary film about global warming, the 11th Hour, featuring interviews with green leaders and a companion website where everyone can sign up to take action in their local communities, and George Clooney’s Oil Change, a campaign aimed at ending America’s independence on oil.  

Even though I spend a lot of time championing the outdoors as the ultimate green play time, greening kids’ minds with environmental stewardship happens online daily.

From greening your electronics to green gaming and havens for the budding naturalist, there are plenty of online to offline bridges to walk if you put on the right hiking shoes.

I love kid-lit and fabulous tree tales like A Forest of Stories and The Giving Tree is still my favorite book of all time…but paper free, online media like Dizzywood’s virtual world of collaborative play prove eco-literacy can transpire on a screen too…In Web 2.0 live-chat, 3-D immersive, fun!

Last week at the massive Virtual Worlds Expo in L.A., Dizzywood’s virtual critters and cuties turned some heads learning that kids’ reforestation efforts online enabled 15,000 REAL trees to be planted off line, thanks to their eco-partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation! Created for preteens 8-12 and Privo  Safety Seal tested with accolades out the wazoo, Dizzywood is thankfully, NOT an anomaly…Check out these OTHER eco-positive picks that prove green media is not an oxymoron!

Future Marine Biologist? Future Environmental Engineer? Future Eco-Savior? Earth Warrior? EcoKid? Planet Patrol? Green Teen? Captain Crunch? ECP readers and Idea hamsters rev your brainpower to gear up for a FREE baby “Treehugger” onesie/tee!

These fun GirlMogul.com tees are a refreshing alternative to the rampant retail ‘pink think’ and “So Sexy So Soon” flash-n-trash that’s predominant in Packaging Girlhood as of late.

GirlMogul’s aspirational identity-wear offers positive personas that are Shaping Youth in favorable ways… I’m sold!

“We believe in encouraging girls’ dreams. You won’t find any princess messages here; just positive, encouraging messages…Future Leader of the Free World, Future CEO, Future Zoologist, Future Brain Surgeon”…

Quite a refreshing change from the snarky tidbits of consumerist tripe with the ‘shop ‘til you drop’ mentality I’ve come across with back to school shopping lately, eh?! Seems like they could use a few more eco-focused nudges toward going green, so I contacted founder Andrea Stein to pitch her the idea of encouraging ECP readers to create the phrase THEY’D most like to see on a tee-shirt…Here’s our mini-interview:

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.