National Geographic and kids social networking site Imbee have teamed up to facilitate communication between tweens aged 8-14 by creating a world-conscious online community. The website, National Geographic Kids Group, will feature blogs, videos, music, images, chatting, eco-tips and e-mail targeted at kids who are concerned with the environment.

Betsy Scolnik, president of National Geographic Digital Media, said "There’s something powerful about giving kids the tools to express themselves and to share common interests such as a love of animals and the environment that National Geographic represents. We hope that by using the social-networking tools that imbee.com provides, kids who visit our National Geographic Kids site can connect with other kids online who are inspired to care about the planet and the people, places and animals on it, in a safe, kid-friendly way."

The site also features content on animal, plant, and insect life, geography, science, and culture, and is highly controlled and secure so that the site remains safe for children. There’s also updates from the National Geographic Kids Hands-On Explorer Challenge, which led a group of 15 kids to South Africa in August 2007, and features their blogs and photos.

Overall, this site still has room to grow, but it’s a safe alternative to the MySpace/Facebook phenomenon. I appreciated the overlapping content with National Geographic Kids–the latter’s got phenomenal green stuff for the tween set. It’s worth checking out if you’ve got a kid who loves the environment and the computer.

Getting your little ghosts and goblins ready for Halloween while attempting to minimize your impact might seem scarier than global warming, but it’s so simple: you’re probably already doing at least one of these things.

1. Use reusable candy-collecting bags. Simple, easy, and ensures that your large stash of candy won’t end up all over the street from a less-than-durable plastic bag. Avoid those plastic pumpkins, too. They’re made of petroleum, and you can only use them once a year.
2. Handing out treats for trick-or-treaters? They’ll get enough conventional candy from your other neighbors. Try healthier alternatives (for both kids and the planet) like honey sticks, fruit leather, granola bars, organic chocolate, or boxes of raisins. Avoid food altogether and give pencils, erasers, mini toothpastes, soy crayons, or stickers.
3. Don’t drive your kids around. I’m amazed at how many kids’ parents (even in Missouri’s mild October weather) drive them around the neighborhood. Part of the fun of trick or treating when I was young was the thrill of walking around the neighborhood at night. Save the gas and get your fill of the night air.
4. DIY your costumes. Avoid the plastic and vinyl monstrosities at the discount store and create your own from things at your house or secondhand stores. Your costumes will cost less, look better, and your kid won’t be one of seventeen Dora the Explorers or Thomas the Tank Engines you run into.
5. Use trick-or-treating as an opportunity for stewardship. After trick or treating, bring a separate bag for your kids to pick up the inevitable candy wrappers left by less-savvy munchkins.

In an age of conspicuous consumption, one thing I don’t feel guilty about is buying books. I love books: used, new, antique, paperbacks, hardcovers. You name it, I’ll probably read it, and if I like it, I’ll buy it. I love having a house full of books. And yes, I know: books are made of paper. Paper comes from trees, and I love trees, too. Live ones. So what’s an eco-conscious reader to do when the library and secondhand books can’t help you out?

Eco-Libris thinks it has the answer. Welcome to offsetting…for your books. Here’s how it works: for every new book you buy, you pay Eco-Libris to "balance" your books. They plant 1.3 trees for every balance you pay for. Buy ten books, pay for ten balances (at $1 each) and, within the next year, they will plant 13 trees to replace those cut down to provide the pages and covers of your books (the 13 is to account for trees that may not survive planting.) They send you a bookplate sticker with the Eco-Libris logo to put inside the cover of your offset book. Eco-Libris’ goal is to balance half a million books by 2008.

Eco-Libris has partnered with three non-profit conservation groups for their tree planting, which all happens in developing countries: RIPPLE Africa, The Alliance for International Reforestation, and Sustainable Harvest International which cover planting efforts in five Central American countries and Malawi. All three groups were selected for their collaboration and involvement with the communities in which they are planting.

Their website also has numerous facts and statistics on the publishing industry and its effort to go green which, if you know anything about publishing, is not that great. Eco-Libris provides a call-to-action for publishers to green up their act. One note: this is a for-profit company, if that matters to you. But the cost seems reasonable, and the groups they’re working with are all highly-recommended.

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.

Thriftiness isn’t really "new" or "green"; people have found ways to reuse scrap or discarded items for years. The pre-industrialization U.S. didn’t have what we call "trash." Every bit of scrap and waste from the home was remade, reused in some way, or sold to peddlers where it was eventually recycled. With the Industrial Revolution came more products to buy with new kinds of packaging, and trash as we know it was born.

Dave and Lillian Brummet’s Trash Talk is a book that aims to get back to minimizing waste and finding everyday uses for trash. Think of it as "Hints From Heloise" meets Mother Earth News. The introduction reminds readers that reduce, reuse, and recycle should be precluded by refuse — as in, refusing to buy items that generate a lot of waste. The book is divided into four sections: the first has ideas for reusing common household items (some not-so-common — who has a plethora of old oven racks hanging around?), and the second has plans for habits you can implement that follow the four Rs, like composting, or cutting open toiletries bottles to get all the product out. The third section focuses on tips and habits related to paper, and the brief fourth section gives statistics that remind the reader that the little things do add up.

It’s clear that the authors walk the walk: many of the tips are reuse ideas that I hadn’t heard of, and their extensive gardening background was surprisingly helpful. The home garden seemed to be a playground for reuse. And, again, this seems to be more for the crunchier crowd — it definitely had the vibe of Mother Earth News as opposed to Real Simple. That doesn’t mean that it was packed full of radical ideas; most of the tips and habits are pretty practical for those who are in the process of going green. But there were a few that I know would cause the light-greenest of readers to drop the book and never look back.

There are issues with the text. The editing leaves something to be desired; I don’t know if the format of the book was the best way to present the information. The second section just seemed a catchall for random green-living ideas. Why is there a whole chapter about picking up trash while going on walks in a book marketed as "an inspirational guide to saving time and money through better waste an resource management?" I don’t think there’s really enough material here for a book like this: there’s a lot of unfocused information that, while interesting, didn’t really have a lot to do with solid waste reduction. And for $19.99, you’d think you get a lot more out of a paperback than 190 pages with a lot of white space.

All in all, the book is worth a read, but not a purchase. You’d be better off checking it out from your library, if you can find it.

When giving your kids, "the talk", it always helps to have a book as back-up. It justifies your broaching a sensitive, potentially uncomfortable topic like…global warming. And although conservation and environmentalism is a topic for all ages, those children in pre-adolescence are just about ready to hear about the big guns of climate change. Three recent children’s books broach the topic of climate change to your middle-grades children (ages 9-12); two were penned by celebrities of the green world.

Following on the heels of the successful An Inconvenient Truth of almost the same name, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming (Penguin Young Readers, $23.00), aims to present the same ideas from the documentary to a younger audience. The text of this book is excellent: it simplifies the ideas of the original film without talking down to young readers.

An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming (Scholastic $15.99) aims to educate kids about why global warming is happening, how it is affecting our planet, and what kids can do to protect our earth. The book is packed with gorgeous photos, graphs and charts, making it accessible to visual learners, and little jokes scattered throughout the pages might be amusing to adults, as well. The Guide is even printed with soy ink on 100% FSC-certified, post-consumer recycled paper.

Finally, Gas Trees and Car Turds (Fulcrum, $16.95), written by Kirk R. Johnson, curator or the Denver Natural History museum, and illustrated by Colorado naturalist Mary Ann Bonnell, is a quick read that breaks down the science behind global warming and carbon dioxide so that children can understand it. While not as high-profile as the other two books, it does focus on explaining carbon dioxide as an invisible something that connects almost everything.

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.

My husband and I went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail for ten days this summer, and we started off eating various energy bars because they were light and provided quick energy. However, we quickly grew tired of convincing ourselves that we actually liked eating them. I’ve never been a fan of bars: to me, they always seem like pathetic versions of what they claim to be. Chocolate-chip cookie dough? Cookies and Cream? Raspberry Strudel? Yeah, right. I’m friends with chocolate-chip cookie dough, sir, and your "bar" is not him.

I wish I had known about infant company Matisse & Jack’s before my trip. They’ve created two bake-at-home energy bar mixes using real ingredients that I could actually identify. I was initially going to review both the chocolate chip version and the cranberry walnut version, but my dog got ahold of the former before I could, which was a disappointment, but I forged ahead with the cranberry walnut

The directions seriously couldn’t be easier: combine the dry mix with three options of wet ingredients (original, dairy-free, or less sweet). I opted for "original", which involved applesauce and yogurt. I stirred it all together with a spatula, spread the batter in a 8"x8" pan, and baked for approximately 30 minutes. While baking, the bars filled my kitchen with a pleasant cinnamon smell.

After the allotted baking time, I couldn’t resist cutting a corner off and tasting it while it was still warm. I was pleasantly surprised. The cranberries, dehydrated in the dry mix, plumped up, and little chunks of walnut, oatmeal, and flaxseeds provided great texture. The bars were sweet, but not even close to overpowering. In fact, these sweet treats didn’t taste like energy bars, but more an oatmeal muffin or a scone. They were moist, yet held together without the extreme chewiness of some energy bars. I really, really liked them. In fact, I had to remind myself that these were supposed to be energy bars, not bakery-fresh treats.

The box recommends toasting lightly if you are into something a little drier. I had another bar the following morning, and it was perfect for a quick, healthy breakfast on the go. That’s probably what I would use these for: baking a pan during a busy week to serve as my breakfast. The bars provide a good dose of fiber, protein. and Omega-3s without a lot of calories (180 per bar).

Matisse & Jack’s are also committed to the environment. In fact, the idea for the mix came from the fact that there are virtually no energy bars on the market that aren’t individually packaged. The mix comes packaged in a 100% recycled (65% post-consumer) paperboard box, and although the mix is inside a plastic pouch for now, the company is working on developing a corn-based, biodegradable replacement. 30% of their ingredients, by weight, are certified organic, and M&J’s is looking to increase that number as well.

Take it from someone who normally hates energy bars: these aren’t your typical bar. They’re awesome, and I would absolutely make them again. They’re available online from M&J’s website, and and select supermarkets in Northern California and British Columbia.

If you are a brown-bagger (or stylish, reusable bagger), you know that sometimes packing your lunch can be a pain. It’s hard enough for me to make it out the door each morning fully dressed, let alone with a decent meal for later on. It’s easy to fall into a culinary rut that leaves you bored with the same old sandwich. How can you pack an eco-friendly, tasty lunch that is healthy and affordable? It’s easier than you would think. Here are some tips for lunches that will keep both kids and adults happy.

1. Avoid individually-packaged foods. You pay more for the convenience, create more packaging, and, unless you’re eating little packets of carrots or apple slices, are probably eating something processed. Invest in a variety of reusable containers in different sizes so you can buy in bulk, which eliminates packaging waste and saves you money. Do I have to tell you to avoid these?
2. I can’t stress this enough: farmers markets. Raw fruits and veggies, particularly locally-grown, in-season produce, is usually a zero-waste choice that’s completely healthy. Carrots and celery are old standbys, but what about sugar-snap peas, radishes, edamame, cucumber rounds, jicama, cherry potatoes, or bell pepper rings? Peaches, plums, kiwis, cherries, and berries are a sweet treat, and frozen grapes are an awesome twist. Add a dip, such as peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, salsa, hummus, or low-fat dressing, to keep things interesting. Kids love dipping things. Why, I do not know.
3. Put it on a pita. Or a tortilla. Or naan. Tortillas keep longer than regular bread, and can break up the monotony of a normal PB&J or ham and cheese. Wait, what about mini-bagels? Or flatbread? There’s a whole world of bread-like possibilities.
4. What about chips? There are low-fat, whole grain tortilla chips and pita chips, or you can make your own. Hummus, salsa, baba ghanoush, bean dip, or tapenade all work with chips in a lunch.
5. I love salads, but I hate how the dressing gets the lettuce soggy by lunch time. Check out this bad boy, that keeps the dressing separate from the salad in one container. Speaking of salad, translate your favorite salad into a wrap. Try chicken caesar, caprese, or spinach and walnuts.
6. For adults with access to a microwave, soup is a sometimes-forgotten lunchtime food that can provide an almost-endless variety of flavors. Trader Joe’s has a particularly wide selection, and I have yet to be disappointed by any of their concoctions (Roasted Red Pepper is my favorite). Add some crusty bread leftover from last night’s dinner and a piece of fruit, and you have a pretty tempting spread. Your local deli probably sells pints or quarts of soup to take home if you’ve got a local favorite.

Bottom line: lunch doesn’t have to be monotonous, unhealthy, or trash-producing. With little thought before your grocery shopping, you can have delicious, nutritious meals that leave a lighter footprint.

What do you think? What are your favorite packable lunches? Leave your comment below.

MTV just released information about the 20th (yes, 20th!) season of granddaddy of reality television shows, The Real World, and looks like RW will revisit the city of its second season, Los Angeles (more specifically, Hollywood).

What’s this got to do with the environment? Well, MTV is claiming that this season will have a green slant. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the show, The Real World films seven strangers who "live together and have their lives taped" in cities in the U.S. and around the globe. The Real World: Hollywood has already been cast, will start filming this fall, and will air sometime after the New Year.

The newest Real World house (which are, as a rule, large and lavish) is going to be built using eco-friendly building principles. According to a press release issued by MTV, "The Real World house will include everything from solar energy solutions to bamboo flooring, recycled glass counters, some sustainable furniture and recycled vintage decor, Energy Star appliances, a solar heated swimming pool and energy efficient lighting." Bunim-Murray Productions, the longtime producer of the series, claims that it is trying to green up its production practices through energy-efficiency and carbon offsetting. In addition, eco-friendly products and practices will be promoted throughout the series, so viewers can be introduced to a greener way of life along with the cast members, and MTV will showcase things viewers can do to lessen their environmental footprint. There was no word whether or not MTV plans on replacing the typical house SUVs with hybrids, flex-fuel, or biodiesel vehicles, nor whether the job assigned to the casts will have an environmental focus.

I’m a big fan of reality television (don’t judge!), but The Real World lost its luster right around the Las Vegas season, when the focus shifted from documenting the lives of dynamic young people, to a MTV-sponsored booze and sexfest for pretty twentysomethings who aspire to…film more reality television. Will this Real World house really be green, or is this a case of greenwashing? I can’t imagine the typical Real World castmember of the past seven or eight years getting stoked about sustainability, in between dancing on bars, hooking up, and avoiding actual real jobs. But maybe, just maybe, the visibility of green practices, however small they may be, just might raise some consciousness among the MTV set. However, the possible juxtaposition of a green Real World with that tribute-to-all-excesses My Super Sweet Sixteen might just be too ironic for me. Will the "Green World" be as green as The Real World is real?