Shower Mother Earth and your sweetie with love on Valentine’s Day! For a green take on the traditional Valentine’s Day celebration, gift your sweetie with some fair-trade chocolate, VeriFlora-certified sustainably grown flowers, or vintage jewelry (or jewelry certified as being sourced in an environmentally and socially responsible way). Eat your romantic dinner at a restaurant that serves organic, locally grown food. And make sure you send e-cards or ones made from recycled paper.
For a non-consumer Valentine’s Day, find fun activities to do together instead of buying things for each other. Cook a nice dinner together, volunteer as a couple, go on a winter nature hike, give each other foot rubs or back rubs or . . . you know where this suggestion is headed.
Favorite Green Websites
If you have no special someone to snuggle up with on a chilly February night, then snuggle up with your laptop and check out some cool green websites and blogs that I’ve enjoyed visiting.
Mother Nature Network
At Mother Nature Network, find a daily green news roundup and lots of green bloggers writing about cooking, kids, technology, business, and more!
Wasted Food
In the U.S we waste an obscene amount. You should stop wasting it. So should everyone else. To find out why, how, and lots of other interesting facts, visit Jonathan Bloom’s blog.
The 100-Mile Diet
One day Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decided to eat food grown only within 100 miles of where they lived. It wasn’t easy—they lost a lot of weight and ate a lot of potatoes. Ultimately, they struggled through and found success eating a delicious diet of fresh, locally grown food. They also wrote a book and started a website complete with a blog and useful tips to help you source your own local food. I’m not sure if they gained back the weight or not.
The Urban Homesteader
Who says you have to live in the middle of nowhere to be a homesteader? This family raises over 6,000 pounds of food, plus chickens, ducks, and goats, on one-fifth of an acre right by a freeway in Pasadena, CA.
Mother Earth News
An oldie but goodie, Mother Earth News has been in print for longer than I’ve been alive! And now they’re online. From bread recipes to do-it-yourself solar home heating, I never fail to find interesting articles on this site.
Zero Net Impact
Colin Beavin, his wife Michelle, and their toddler attempted to live for one year in NYC with zero net impact. They ate locally, pedaled around the city on a rickshaw, and even went without toilet paper! Though the one-year experiment is over, Colin continues to live a low-impact life and blog about it. My favorite entries are still the ones from the no-impact year, so if you visit this site make sure you check out the archives.
The Consumer Advocate
Katy Wolk-Stanley lives the good life in Portland, Oregon, while buying nothing new, and blogs about it in humorous fashion. I especially enjoy her love letters—to her library, to tap water, to her long-lasting cast iron skillet.
Treehugger
This site is divided into three sections: Get Informed, Interact, and Take Action. The green guides you can find in the third section of the site are my favorite. If you want to know how to have a green barbeque, do a green bathroom renovation, or have a green Halloween, this site has a guide for you!
The Crunchy Chicken
In addition to irreverently blogging about her own green living experiences and offering useful advice and tips, Crunchy Chicken offers fun eco-challenges like the No Waste Week, the Eat Local Month, the Use No Toilet Paper Challenge (!?), etc.
Choosing Voluntary Simplicity
Though this blog is not focused directly on green living, environmentally sound life choices are part of the simple and sustainable life that Shirley and her family lead. Her over-all approach to life is inspiring to me as I try to make my own life sustainable on every level.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
And last but not least make sure you check out the new Iowa Source Green Living Blog! Scroll down our home page to see Sarah’s new Green Living blog: "It’s Not Easy Being Green."
Visit the index for more articles on green living.