When I talk to people about thinking sustainably, they inevitably ask for books to read, and although there are several books I love about sustainability, they’re all very specific to one area of sustainability. Want to read about food? Try Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, or the new Barbara Kingsolver book. Climate Change? How about The Weather Makers? Looking for the classics? Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold are a good starting place. But I haven’t yet found the primer, the comprehensive text that really gets into why humanity desperately needs to embrace a greener way of life.

The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine (Milkweed Editions, $18.00), just might be that book. A collection of thought-provoking essays selected and introduced by Barry Lopez, The Future of Nature includes writings by such heavy-hitters as Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and Derrick Jensen, all originally published in Orion, the seminal magazine covering the intersection of culture, nature, and the environment.

Released this past Thursday, the book is divided into six loosely-themed sections. Actions runs the gamut of activism, from small suburban grassroots efforts to stop construction on a SuperTarget store to bailing out direct-action activists in Appalachia. Refugees discusses those displaced by humanity’s interactions with the environment, giving a face to the faceless victims of climate change and the unending hunt for resources. Boundaries addresses the idea of the wilderness and our relationship with it. Reverence discusses how appreciation for nature, a love of and respect for it, is the essential guidepost for sustainable living. Monsters lays out just exactly what sorts of devastating things we’re doing to our only home, and Native leaves the reader with both hope and guidance for living in harmony with our ecosystem.

Highlighting both theory and practice of sustainable (and unsustainble) living, the causes of our ecological crises, and a vision for a lasting future, The Future of Nature provides a plethora of contexts for understanding just why we desperately need to change the way we live. Elegantly written and compiled, this book should be required reading for those interested in sustaining our future on Earth. The themes balance each other nicely; the reader understands the reality of the direness of humanity’s situation but is left with hope that good things are happening everywhere, those little pockets of positive change that will lead to a more balanced way of life. It immediately made me want to go read not only Orion, but every other piece of writing by this insightful group of writers.

The great outdoors and environmental sustainability have long gone hand in hand, and many outdoors-gear companies have been leaders in sustainable business practices. Patagonia, Keen, and Teko have been pioneers in producing gear that uses lower-impact materials (like organics) or recycled materials (like PET bottles). Now, outfitter super cooperative REI is getting into the act, incorporating more sustainable materials into their line of clothing.

"Our eco-sensitive offerings are the next step in our journey to reduce REI’s overall company environmental footprint," added Kelly Stone, REI Gear & Apparel director of sales and marketing. "As with every offering that carries our brand, REI’s eco-sensitive items deliver on our promise of functionality, quality and great style that our members and customers expect."

Utilizing organic cotton, hemp, bamboo, recycled PET, and organic wool, REI has created both men’s and women’s apparel that they believe meet standards for improved environmental performance. Men’s items range from organic cotton/recycled PET polyester cargo pants and t-shirts, to organic cotton hoodies, to recycled PET fleece parkas, jackets, and vests. The women’s line includes recycled PET fleece jackets, hemp/recycled PET skirts and pants, and organic cotton t-shirts & hats. REI plans to increase the amount of "eco-senstive" products offered in coming seasons.

This year, REI also implemented a labeling system that alerts customers to REI products that are eco-sensitive. Both items and signage in their retail stores easily identifies eco-sensitive production, and indicates what greener materials were used. REI’s website is refreshingly transparent. When listing their eco-senstive materials, they included pros and cons of each item, acknowledging that some "greener" materials come at a cost, whether that be financial or environmental. This allows consumers to make more informed decisions when purchasing clothing. REI’s commitment to stewardship and sustainability is evident from their annual stewardship report, which showcases their progressive commitment to becoming climate neutral by 2020, building green buildings, using paper more responsibly, and reducing waste and packaging.

Kelli says: My husband loves his Slickrock pants. They’re comfortable, affordable, versatile (suitable hiking AND teaching) and, best of all, a little more sustainable. Oh yeah, he says they have awesome pockets, too. I’ve got my eye on the decidedly un-hippie hemp skirt I mentioned above.

When Amy wrote about green magazines, she mentioned GOOD as being one of her favorites. I, too, a self-described magazine junkie, am a big fan of GOOD since it’s inception last year. With all the depressing news out there on any given day, GOOD always reaffirms my faith in humanity. Its focus is, like its name implies, good stuff: those things that are making our world a little bit better, and when I’m feeling down about what’s going on around me, GOOD usually perks me up. It’s a rare magazine that doesn’t need an annual "green" issue: sustainability has been a priority since the magazine was founded.

The latest issue (Sept/Oct 07) is no exception. The issue, which commemorates their one-year anniversary, focuses on design solutions. A topic I covered a while back, green schools, gets a feature nod from Eva Steele-Saccio. Steele-Saccio highlights different schools’ efforts to reduce their footprint and become more energy efficient, and acknowledges that there are benefits beyond energy savings: "Green schools create a healthy atmosphere for learning that has measurable results. The combination of natural light, fresh air, open plans, and multi-use facilities that encourage community involvement has helped student test scores rise by 20% and reduced asthma rates by 39%."

There’s also a feature about a village in England that launched a community effort to reduce their carbon footprint, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral village in the U.K. GOOD’s product reviews almost always include items produced with sustainability in mind, and in this issue, they create a proposal for better CFL packaging: create a package that can be used to ship burned-out bulbs back to the producer for proper disposal. There’s also a profile of Rogan Gregory, founder of clothing company Loomstate, who was virtually responsible for bringing organic cotton to the fashion industry though his work with Loomstate, and his other two companies, Rogan and Edun

Even subscribing to GOOD can make you feel good: 100% of your $20 subscription costs goes to your choice of twelve charities, including the World Wildlife Fund and Oceana. Good is printed on 30% recycled post-consumer paper that is EcoLogic certified, and 100% offset by projects Good is actually involved in.

The September/October issue of GOOD is on newsstands now.

By implementing easy green practices like composting and recycling, my husband and I quit taking huge bags of trash out to the dumpster in the alley a long time ago. We had a stockpile of evil plastic grocery bags that we used for the bathroom and kitchen trash, but we quit getting our groceries in plastic bags a long time ago. When the stockpile ran out, we needed a green alternative to buying trash bags.

For a while, we used a brand of corn-based trash bags purchased at our local green general store, but, truth be told, they were flimsy and couldn’t hold much weight, even when I double-bagged. When I used the smaller kind to line the compost mini-bin under the sink, I found myself a bag that broke down a little too quickly, leaving me with a bio-mess.

It was a catch-22 when Portland’s Trellis Earth sent me a sample pack of their corn-based biodegradable bags to review. Simply put, this bag blows the other bag I was using out of the water. It comes in a variety of sizes, from small enough for a few pieces of fruit to 33-gallon commercial trash bags, and it’s remarkably sturdy–so much so that I easily carried out the entire contents of my cat’s litter box to the dumpster with no stretching or straining on the part of the bag. In fact, I’d test the strength of their 33-gallon bags against any traditional plastic trash bag. They also have a shopping-bag with handles, identical in size and shape
to the pesky plastic bags you see blowing in the wind for businesses to use in lieu of traditional petroleum-based bags.

What’s the catch? It’s not widely-available in consumer-sized quantities. Trellis Earth only markets its biodegradable bags, take-out containers, and cutlery in bulk quantities, making them a viable options to businesses and resellers, but their resell base seems limited. Minor catch #2: although the bags are compostable (they’re breaking down just fine in my backyard pile), the company’s FAQ warns that the bags aren’t great for building soil.

How can you get your hands on some Trellis Earth bags? You could buy in bulk (it’s not inconceivable if you are used to buying large quantities of things) Ask your local green store to stock up by giving them Trellis Earth’s website, which will get them in touch with the company. They can resell you bags, or they could purchase shopping bags for use in their store. Either way, you’re putting less plastic in landfills.

For many families, it’s the time of year when back to school is growing closer and closer. When shopping for school supplies, it’s important to keep greener options in mind. From paper to pencils, from lunch bags to book bags, there are products out there that leave a lighter footprint on the earth.

The first things to remember is to reuse items you already own that are still good. If last year’s backpack is in good shape, choose to reuse instead of buying a new one. Same goes for lunch bags, binders, pencil bags, and rulers. If you must buy something new, choose vinyl-free items to eliminate the dioxins involved when using PVC. Companies like Rawganique and Ecolution are producing hemp bags, recycled rubber, and recycled plastic bags. Gecko Traders has fair-trade pencil bags made from recyled rice and feed bags from Asia. And I did a post about waste-free lunches back in February, where I highly recommended LaptopLunches cute bento boxes. ReusableBags has a plethora of awesome reusable lunch bags.

When buying paper goods, always look for recycled notebooks with a high post-consumer waste percentage. For school-aged kids, there is recycled construction paper, and Mead makes recycled-content spiral notebooks, as does Ampad Office Max and Office Depot sell recycled printer paper, and New Leaf Paper company sells a wide variety of recycled printer and notebook paper. For grown-up notebook junkies (like myself) Boulder, Colorado stationary company Vickerey has several gorgeous notebooks made of recycled or tree-free paper. 3-M makes a variety of recycled Post-Its and Rebinder makes recycled binders.

Did you know most crayons are made from petroleum? Fortunately, Prang makes 85% soybean oil crayons. There are also recycled-rubber refillable Wheely’s Pens, recycled plastic pens, pencils made from recycled denim, Paper Mate has recycled pencils, and ForestChoice makes pencils certified by the FSC.

For more green school supplies, check out The Green Office.

My problem with The Lazy Environmentalist, green radio host Josh Dorfman's self-proclaimed "guide to easy, stylish, green living" isn't that it lacks information. It's actually a quite comprehensive guide to supporting green companies. I dog-eared multiple pages so I could visit websites of the companies in which I was interested. But it's not so much a guide to green living as it's a guide to green buying. I guess the tone set forth from the brief introduction rubbed me the wrong way:

These innovators make it easy for us to integrate environmental awareness into our lives. They understand that while so many of us are concerned about the environment, we don't always have the time, energy, or inclination to do something about it.

I only wish this was written in a less-than-serious voice. In my mind, if you don't have the "time, energy, or inclination" to do something about the environment, than you can hardly classify yourself as an environmentalist. You are looking to alleviate guilt for your conspicuous consumption, a culture of consumption that is devastating our planet. It's exactly the "culture of convenience" that's waging all-out war on our resources. Consider this passage from the chapter on cars:

There really is something for everyone–even those who drive Hummers, the most colossal of all urban assault vehicles…By offsetting the carbon dioxide emissions spewing from your car's tailpipe, TerraPass offers Hummer drivers eco-salvation.

Eco-salvation for Hummer drivers? A little too, oh, oxymoronic, for my tastes. Lazy is definitely geared towards a more high-end clientele, despite it's mention of Wal-Mart as an organic clothing retailer (Yeah, I know what you are thinking…I can't trust them quite yet, either).

Stepping off of my soapbox, for those of us who do have time, energy, and inclination to do something to lighten our footprint still have to buy goods and services, and Lazy provides a well-laid, well-written plan to finding greener versions of those goods and services. If you have to spend money, you might as well spend it on more sustainable products, right?

There are 22 chapters focusing on different products and services, from home furnishing to energy providers to media outlets (what, no shout out for Green Options?) Each chapter begins with a narrative insight into what practices these eco-companies are establishing to go green, then lists several companies, along with their websites and a brief description of what their business does or produces. Reading about different design innovations companies are using was fascinating (BraveSpace's hollow bamboo tables, anyone?), and I'll definitely check out many of the websites listed. If I'm going to save the planet, though, I've got better things to do.

Is there a more eco-friendly way to package milk besides plastic jugs and gable-top cartons? A UK company seems to think so. Greenbottle is a new two-part milk packaging system that was recently test-piloted in Asda supermarkets during a one-week trial. The bottles quickly sold out.

Designed by Martin Myerscough from Framlingham, Suffolk, the bottle consists of a pulped recycled cardboard outer (think cardboard egg cartons) and a corn-based bioplastic bag liner. After the milk is gone, the bioplastic bag can be removed and composted, and the outer shell can be recycled or composted.

The UK produces over 3 million metric tons of plastic waste each year, of which only 7% is recycled. The vast majority of plastic ends up in landfills.

During the test run, the milk in Greenbottle's jugs cost the same as milk in traditional containers, although the packaging cost the company 30% more to produce, although they expect that margin to drop significantly as the packaging's distribution expands.

Bill McKibben's highly successful Step It Up campaign may have overshadowed the release of his latest book Deep Economy, which probably overshadowed the recent paperback re-release of one of McKibben's earlier books, 1995's Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Luckily, this second edition of Hope (Milkweed Editions), largely in part because of a new afterword by McKibben, remains relevant, and, like its title says, hopeful.

The book discusses, in four sections, pockets of civilization that can give us hope for sustainable communities and environments. McKibben starts with arguably the driest section, chronicling the regrowth of wildlife in New England despite our best efforts to completely destroy it. Although the most tedious of the book, I found this section full of promise because it reminded me that in our quest to "save the environment", we are really saving humanity: the earth will continue to bounce back long after we're gone.

The second two sections discuss two local solutions to global problems in the communities of Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India. In the first, ambitious city planners in Curitiba use practical, yet ingenious solutions to the city's problems to create a sustainable city where people's desires are met, no matter what their income, and residents feel a strong sense of community. For example, Curitiba's favelas, or slums, were constantly overwhelmed with trash piling up. Local officials started a program where residents of the favelas could exchange bags of gathered trash for equal-weight bags of food purchased, by the city, from local farmers who had a surplus. A model public-transportation system, based on buses owned by private companies, but with fares and routes dictated by the city, had, in twenty years, grown from 25,000 riders per day, to 1.5 million. City planners changed much of the downtown business district into pedestrian-only areas.

Kerala's story was different, but no less remarkable. In a region where people survived on, at the time of first publication, $330 per year, life expectancies were equal to those of Americans, there was virtually 100% literacy, and education was a community priority, for adults and children alike. Keralites have been able to avoid the abject poverty that pervades much India, due to their leaders committing to putting people first, and breaking down socioeconomic barriers such as race, class, and gender through community commitment to problem solving.

The stories of these communities are so completely intriguing, mainly because of their innovative, yet practical approaches to solving problems that also plague us here in America. It indicated to me the glaring ethnocentrism that we sometimes demonstrate when it comes to looking outside our own country for answers to problems.

The final original section of the book covers McKibben's reflections on the first three, although I found the afterword much more fascinating, as McKibben reflects on the original text ten years later. Were Curitiba and Kerala able to sustain the successes they had achieved? How have NAFTA, the WTO, and 9/11 affected sustainability? Are we doomed, or does hope still exist? McKibben doesn't have all the answers, but I was left with hope that those answers are out there, waiting for us to discover them.

Knitting and crocheting have experienced a renewed popularity as a new generation of crafters embrace their needles and yarn. As a knitter myself, I love heading to my local yarn store (LYS) to check out the beautiful multicolored skeins.

The big question for an eco-friendly knitter is this: what kinds of yarn leave the lightest footprint? Many knitters steer away from acrylic for various performance reasons, but synthetic yarns are also bad for the earth, since they are made from petroleum. Vegans object to using wool, and, although great for many heirloom projects, are just not as sustainable as some of the newer options. Industrially-produced cotton brings with it a slew of environmental problems, including water and soil pollution.

Until recently, my LYS only had earth-toned organic cotton, which was beautiful for a baby blanket, but didn't allow for enough variety for a range of projects. Is there anything else out there that will allow me to make awesome crafts in a greener way?

Fortunately, eco-friendly fibers have exploded in the past few months. Some, like the organic cotton, take an existing fiber and green it up. However, a whole new crop of yarns are being produced using normally cast-off materials. South West Trading Company, of Tempe, AZ, makes yarns and fibers from soy, corn, bamboo, even milk and shrimp and crab shell fibers. Their SoySilk fiber is created from byproducts of tofu production (and is produced in a variety of decidedly non-earth tone hues). Bamboo (which, because of it's rapid rate of growth, is a popular green knitting needle choice) produces a soft fiber often compared to silk or cashmere. Hemp yarn is also gaining popularity beyond the granola-set of knitters, and recycled silk, spun from old saris by women in Nepal, is a unique fiber to work with. Most of these yarns can be found at Yarn Market.

But why shop online? If your LYS doesn't stock green yarns, just ask. Most will stock it if people will request it. At the very least, they'll order it for you. After I bought up most of the organic cotton at my LYS (hey, it was a bigger blanket than I had planned) I was pleased to find that not only did my store start stocking a much wider variety of eco-friendly yarns, but they even sponsored an event to promote their new lines.

Recycling is probably one of the most widely-practiced, common-knowledge, things you can do to live a greener life. There are now over 9,000 curbside recycling programs nationwide. However, myths still surround the actual benefits of recycling and the rationale for the need for recycling in general.

Myth: We are already recycling what we can.
Fact: Hardly. Although recycling has grown tremendously in the past thirty years, we should be able to recycle as much as 80% of our what currently goes into our landfills. Half of landfill contents is good old paper–easily recyclable.

Myth: We are not running out of "room" for our trash, so landfill space is not a problem.
Fact: In many areas of the country, there is plenty of room for trash. Not so in some heavily-populated areas of the East Coast, where landfill space issues have translated into higher landfill costs. Landfill space could be used for other things than trash, like the natural habitats landfills often displace.

Myth: It takes just as much energy to recycle as it does to produce "virgin" materials.
Fact: When comparing the impact of recycled vs. raw, you must compare the impact over the life cycle of the product. It almost universally uses less energy to recycle waste into materials than it is to produce the same materials from raw resources. More energy is needed to extract, process, and transport raw materials than is needed for collection, processing, and remanufacturing of recycled products. For example, aluminum production saves 95% of energy costs when the aluminum is recycled as opposed to produced with raw materials

Myth: It's okay to throw something away if its biodegradable.
Fact: The breakdown of organic material in a landfill is largely anaerobic. It can take hundreds of years for "biodegradable" items to truly break down, if at all. Research by William Rathje, author of Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbage, has shown that newspapers have been found intact and readable from as early as the 1960s.

Myth: Recycling is not cost-effective for communities.
Fact: It may not be profitable, but neither is typical waste-management, unless you are Tony Soprano. It's fascinating that in many communities, people pay for their trash through fees and taxes, but most places don't have (and would probably never think of charging) a recycling fee. Plus, since comprehensive recycling programs are fairly new, efficiency can only increase as the industry matures. Cities of all sizes, including Seattle, Cincinnati, San Jose, Portland and Austin are reporting per-ton recycling costs that are lower than per-ton garbage collection and disposal costs. This doesn't even acknowledge the economic benefits of the recycling industry to communities.

Myth: Recycling is no cleaner than landfills.
Fact: Using recycled materials instead of raw results in a net reduction in ten major categories of air pollutants and eight major categories of water quality indicators and water pollutants. Using recovered/recycled materials also generates less solid waste than using virgin products. Landfills also produce large amounts of leachate (trash juice, if you will) that must be treated by municipal sewage treatment plants, and landfills and incinerators produce a huge amount of greenhouse gases such as methane.

Kelli says: Seriously, even if we "have" the space, do we want more of our common areas taken for…trash? Take one visit to a landfill during a typical workday and see just how much trash is vomited out of the constant stream of trucks…trust me, you'll see the value of recycling. Personally, conservation starts at home; by avoiding waste to begin with, composting, and reusing. However, I like how my college town of Kirksville, MO promoted recycling: free curbside service for as much as you put out, but you only get one free bag of non-recyclables per week–you have to pay for ever bag after that.