This piece is one I started last year, but this year it includes all the recycling hotlines and energy resources, but it also has cool cultural resources like Urban Edibles (a way cool map of free food growing wild in the city) and a list of websites to check out including Inhabitat and Grist.org. Doing this for each city (Seattle, Twin Cities, Denver/Boulder, Silicon Valley/Santa Cruz, Berkeley/Oakland, and of course Portland) was a fascinating look at how these cities function–and don’t. Some don’t even have a clear hazardous waste disposal site for residents, or they do but no one ever picks up the phone. Portland is far and away the best at this online, but Berkeley has the EcoHaus resource center with a green hotline that you can call and ask anything about eco living. Anything!

Wondering about that peak in 2007? 2007 is when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award (it came out in 2006), it’s also the year he split the Nobel with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he was runner up for Time’s Person of the Year.

Take a look at 2004! I started writing about sustainable lifestyle choices at the end of 2006, but looking at this I wish I had started earlier.

Right now you may be thinking that ’sustainable’ has been used for a long time in other contexts, while ‘eco friendly’ and ‘green living’ are tied to the trend. Here are the previous terms with sustainability:

As expected. In this graph sustainability is likely getting a boost from the agricultural and business worlds, where corporations prefer the term. PepsiCo and Walmart issue Sustainability Reports, not Green Living Reports.

My personal blog: I Have No Idea What I Am Doing .com