Lots of green sites appeared in Yahoo UK/Ireland's "Finds of the Year," a roundup of "the most interesting and innovative websites" of 2007. The majority of the Ethical category awards went to green sites, including two of my personal favorites The Nag (an Anti-Apathy project that "nags" members to make one green change a month) and Green Thing (a community whose members collect green, well, things by participating in that month's challenge) as well as Eat The Seasons (which encourages eating locally grown seasonal produce to cut down on food miles) and Trees for Cities (a London-based charity dedicated to planting trees in urban areas).
The Shopping category featured Nigel's EcoStore, a retail site devoted to green products, while the Charity category highlighted Together.com, a site with simple actions that readers can do to help the environment (a US site is coming soon) and 180 Degrees, an Adidas-sponsored interactive travelogue of two young British explorers attempting to travel from the North Pole to the South Pole using only the human and wind power of skis, bicycles, and sails to raise awareness about climate change. [via Treehugger]
While 180 Degrees might be the most ambitious, it's certainly not the only project that aims to bring firsthand experiences with climate change to the Web 2.0 audience. Explorer Will Steger recently completed a journey across Canada's Baffin Island where he stopped in Inuit villages to interview locals and document their experiences with climate change. A former high-school science teacher, Steger made sure his team uploaded podcasts and blog-style "dispatches" from the road to his website Global Warming 101 so that students could follow his progress from home. That's way cooler than the Voyage of the Mimi videos I had to watch in 6th grade. [via Treehugger]
Paul D. Miller, who journeyed across Antarctica to make field recordings of the sounds he heard there, is teaming up with DJ Spooky to raise awareness of climate change through art and new media. Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite, which is described as a "large scale multimedia performance work will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent," whose soundtrack will be made up entirely from Miller's recordings of surface of the ice. A video with more information is available here. [Thanks to Hammarsing for the tip]
Also in the news this week was Voltaic Systems' addition of the Generator, a solar-powered laptop carrying case and charger to their line of mobile solar bags. At $599, it's not cheap, but it will generate and store enough power to run a laptop after a day in direct sunlight - an indicator light in the handle shows you when the panels are charging. The fabric of the bag comes in 4 colors and is made from recycled soda bottles. [via Treehugger]
If you're on the road with your laptop and maybe a solar-powered cell phone charger and don't have time to open, read, sort, and recycle your mail, a service called Earth Class Mail will do it for you. Your mail is delivered to a P.O. Box, where Earth Class Mail scans all of your envelopes for you to browse online. You can then choose to have the envelope opened and scanned securely as a PDF, shredded, recycled, or forwarded to another person or location. The cost of the service runs from $9.95/month for a basic personal plan to $59.95/month for businesses (all plans also require a $25 setup fee) and is being touted as a simple way to manage postal mail from anywhere in the world. Plus, it saves you a trip to the local post office or recycling center. [via Mashable]
-Annalisa
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