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 just discovered Child’s books last year starting with I Will Not Ever, NEVER Eat a Tomato. Because the 3yo loves all the vegetables in the whole wide world, it was a bit tricky for him to understand.

Clarice Bean, as you might already know, is a witty, intelligent, precocious child.  Perhaps like the one you have in your own home?

In What Planet, she works on a report with Robert Granger (”I mainly like to ignore him”) about the environment (”which is nature, really). Ugh.  He wants to see who can move faster: snails or worms. She jut wants to make it to class on time.

Then the news hits that a tree on Navarino Street is to be chopped down. Her brother Kurt becomes an ecowarrior and camps out in the beloved tree with his girl friend.  Clarice and friends make signs…

Free the Tree!

…because it rhymes. They have a picnic up there, with no meat, because Kurt won’t eat anything with legs or feathers.

In the end, Clarice is just like a child you might know: she took action that was bigger than herself, gave cute commentary on the goings-on of her family, and learned about activism in the greater world. Or maybe she didn’t.  Maybe she just enjoyed hanging out in a tree with her family. Isn’t that enough?

Here’s a cool printout you can use to teach kids about eco-activism.

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.

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“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?

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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.  

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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!

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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:

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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.

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Source: Treehugger 

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:

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Source:  Treehugger 

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.

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For details on what Shea will be doing with his time in the near future, you can read his farewell note on PlanetSave. We’re sure that he’ll bring energy, enthusiasm and insight to all of these projects. And we look forward to reading his contributions to TH.

Join us in wishing Shea farewell and good luck — GO won’t be the same without him.

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.

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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.

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Happy birthday Treehugger!

Huzzah!

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:

Products had to be made from materials that are rapidly renewable (such as fast-growing bamboo), responsibly grown (wood from a socially and environmentally managed forest, for example), reusable (can be recycled after use) and/or biodegradable (able to be safely returned to the soil). Bonus points were given for durability (well-built things that won't have to be replaced frequently). No off-gassing (materials and finishes that can pollute the air inside your home) was allowed. We embraced relativity (a Prius may be better than a fuel-gulping SUV, but it's still pretty dirty compared to a totally electric car or, for that matter, a bicycle) and gave gold stars for good manufacturing practices (such as wind-powered factories and fair labor conditions). And last but not least, we decided that vintage counts!

Find the full Green List at TreeHugger and more green features at domino.