1.  Fly / Travel less - Flying is one of the greatest contributors to climate change.  Consider staying home for the holidays and/or encouraging your guests to carpool or take the train.  Offset your carbon emissions if flying is the only option.

2.  Leftover food - Take your Thanksgiving leftovers to a local shelter.  Or pass out turkey/tofurkey sandwiches to those in need the next day.  Not everyone experiences the joys of holiday leftovers!  Spread the wealth.

3.  Go easy on turkey, chicken, ham, etc. - Focus on eco-friendly vegetarian side dishes or organic meats.  Green Bean Casserole is where it’s at!

4.  Decorate with organic flowers, branches, and dried plants. Find a florist who recycles and uses local sources.

5.  Offer organic and local beverages. From apple cider to wine and beer, you have plenty of organic drinks to choose from.

6.  Ditch the Paper - Ditch the disposable dinnerware and use the real thing.  Cloth napkins are a nice touch.  Guests will be impressed!

7.  Autumn Leaves - Rake up your leaves and use them in your centerpiece decoration.  They also make excellent drink coasters!

8.  Soy Candles - Turn off the lights, and light up some all natural soy candles around your house.  Sets the mood while saving energy!

9.  Turn down the heat - More people in your house means more body heat.  You can turn down your thermostat a few degrees — nobody will notice, especially if they are filling up on warm food and wine.

10.  Avoid the Holiday Shopping - As Felicia stated in a previous blog post, consider giving “personal services” (i.e. baby sitting, car wash, house painting, etc.) this holiday season.  Avoid driving to the mall the day after Thanksgiving.

This month’s “National Geographic” magazine has an article on the multiple uses and controversies of the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California called “Reuniting a River”. It showcases several of the issues involved in water, power, irrigation, salmon, farming and the environment that we’re all trying to deal with here in the Northwest. The story is pretty dramatic. One of the things we at BEF are doing is trying to heal damaged rivers and their watersheds in cooperation with everyone impacted, so this story is relevant, even if the Klamath isn’t one of “our” watersheds.

No doubt the worldwide economic slowdown is having an impact everywhere. It’s a critical time for us all on a variety of fronts, and the “green” economy is not immune.

So for those of us who are as concerned with getting back below 350 as we are with getting back above 10,000, it’s particularly imperative that we be “glass half full” and redouble our efforts and focus our goals.

To that end, Angus had a great guest opinion piece in Monday’s Oregonian, Seizing our chance in the midst of crisis. Well worth the read if you have a moment.

For a look at the wider world view as politicians gear up for the next UN climate meeting in Poland next week, be sure to also read this piece which appeared in the New York Times on Monday, Slump May Limit Moves on Clean Energy.

From now until December 31st, all purchases of $160 or more of BEF Carbon Offsets will receive a FREE solar car kit . These solar car kits are one of the more popular activities that we provide to the students and teachers in our national Solar 4R Schools program to encourage students to build solar-powered cars of their own design and to demonstrate the importance of renewable energy. Now you can give this educational gift to others — It’s fun for the whole family!

Solar Car not your thing? Donate your car to our Solar 4R Schools program in an effort to promote clean energy to kids across our country.

In relation to Margie’s suggestion to wrap presents in brown paper sacks, my green Christmas tip is to use reusable fabric ribbons instead of stringy plastic ones.  

Ever since I was little my mother would decorate my family’s Christmas presents with pretty fabric ribbons instead of plastic pre-made bows that came in a bag.  The packages are always beautifully festive and my family reuses the ribbons every year.  To keep things from getting too redundant, my mother usually buys one or two new spools of ribbon the day after Christmas when they’re on clearance every year.

Not only does it save on cost, but it also prevents the extra waste that plastic ribbons and bows produce.

OK, I know this sounds dorky, but my grandmother used to collect all the Christmas paper after the present-opening pandemonium had subsided and store it for next year’s use.  She proudly stated that she never did have to buy paper to wrap presents.

But my mother one-upped her.  She always wrapped our Christmas presents in brown paper bags (no ribbon, no tape!).  I never knew whether it was part of her waste-elimination and reuse nature, or she was just too busy to do anything else!  But I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like a brown paper bag to make me salivate!

So what about wrapping a gift in a reusable canvas bag and give two gifts at the same time?

Did you see the recent article in the Portland Tribune on the Oregon Governor’s proposed cap and trade system? BEF’s president Angus Duncan is quoted in his capacity as the chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. The string of comments following the story includes people who don’t believe in climate change. How can they miss the melting glaciers and disappearing ice caps?

My family and I started a new tradition last year. We all participated in the Advent Conspiracy in order to get back to the real meaning of Christmas.  Advent Conspiracy is an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by substituting compassion for consumption. I don’t believe that giving of gifts is ‘bad’, but I do acknowledge that the commercialization of the holiday has gotten a little out of hand. So our family takes 25% of our Christmas budget that normally would have been spent on gifts and we donate it to Living Water International for the specific purpose of providing clean drinking water to those in dire need in rural Africa. It feels really good to give that gift!

This year we’re planning on including a lot of ‘personal services’ on our lists instead of ‘things’.  My sister and brother-in-law have ‘babysitting’ and ‘car washes’ on their list.  I’ve got ‘help painting my house’ on mine.  Ooooo, I hope Santa thinks I was good this year!

Sure it’s unconventional, but a company can be a tool for environmental change and make terrifically cool clothes, too. A few of us BEF’ers were fortunate to attend the Opportunity Green conference in Los Angeles last week. It was a really informative few days with an especially great keynote speech from one of our heroes, Rick Ridgeway from Patagonia. The conference put his speech up on their site, so I’ve included it here. It’s almost a half hour so let it load and settle in.

It also seemed like a good time to share with you, the world, a special recurring feature all of us here in the Portland BEF office enjoy regularly — Michele’s cooler-than-Kermit, green Patagonia jacket. She loves that jacket and wears it all the time. I personally also love that jacket and I am quite jealous of it–green with envy you might say.

I have my own green, weather-proof jacket for our many rainy days. Mine is from a solid, recreational clothing retailer based in Maine, and my jacket’s company, like all conscientious outdoor retailers, is committed to environmental stewardship, too. I love my jacket but it’s simply not quite as cool, or as bright, as Michele’s. See for yourself…

For the past two years I’ve volunteered for a local literacy program, helping kids in kindergarten and first grade who were struggling with their reading skills. I was able to select the school I volunteered at but, being new to Portland, I wasn’t familiar with or connected to any local schools. So I made my selection based on school name alone and chose a school that seemed to combine the two things closest to my heart- kids and environmental conservation. I started reading with kids at Sunnyside Environmental School and my eyes were opened to a whole new way of educating our children.

Naturally, the curricula at Sunnyside meets all the state standards for education but what is special is that it does so with a constant eye toward sustainability and social justice. These principles permeate everything they do at Sunnyside and they’re reflected in the kids, even the youngest among them.

This became obvious in the hour that I spent with my reading buddies each week. There were several hundred books from which the kids could choose, but it wasn’t uncommon for them to select books about animals or conservation. One day my reading pal, Trinity, a beautiful little first grader, asked me to read three books that she selected: Environments of Sharks, Legend of Martin Luther King and the Tragedy of the Exxon Valdez. That’s some pretty heavy reading for a six year old! But she seemed genuinely interested in each story and we had a great time talking about the messages that each held.

I was especially happy to talk with her about the Exxon Valdez oil spill since I was in Alaska shortly after the spill and observed the tragedy first hand. It was amazing how interested this little girl was in knowing about the animals and how some of them were rescued. We talked about how the oil seeped into the smallest crevices on the shore and about how the otters and waterfowl were drenched with the sticky sludge. We talked about how the accident happened and about the special people that took many months out of their lives to help in the clean-up effort. As she stroked the picture of the oil covered otter on the cover of the book and told me how sad it was, I knew that Sunnyside was doing a good thing.

There aren’t many schools out there that hold such a strong commitment to teaching kids about sustainability and environmental justice. Sunnyside is truly special. But there are a lot of ways that we can help our kids learn to respect the planet and become sensitive to the need to preserve, conserve and restore. Dan Chiras’ book, Eco-Kids: Raising Children Who Care for the Earth, is a great place for parents to start when it comes to teaching kids in a positive and inspiring way. (www.newsociety.com) There are also a whole host of kids’ games like Xeko, Family Pastimes and Beautiful Place that teach kids- even when they don’t know it!

So I guess my point is this…it’s never too early to start instilling the values of conservation, sustainability and social justice in our kids. In doing so, we will send them into the world well equipped to carry on the work that many of us have started.