Bamboo is a great sustainable fiber which can be used for just about anything. We're talking about underwear, laptops, car door interiors, and car exterior body panels... okay, wait just a darn minute here. If the above video of the “BamGoo” car designed from the students at Kyoto University is anything of what we can expect to see from a bamboo reinforced vehicle exterior, then count me out!

Image source: Albany Aerial Photos

You've heard of both national newspapers and glossy magazines hosting a green issue. Well, now Middlebury College is getting in on the act with a special issue of The Middlebury Campus. All content, cartoons, articles and ads are on environmentally-related topics.

For the issue, writers reached out to environmental thinkers to pen Op-Ed pieces, and got staff writers to discuss issues like organic food, environmental art and sustainable design. In addition, actual development and editing of the paper was all done using computers instead of paper. Distribution of the paper around campus was all done via foot-power and offsets were purchased from Native Energy to cover the trip from the printer to campus. But, the budding journalists did not stop there. They used the production of this green issue to learn more about their craft, its impact on the environment and the importance of news media going green.

Photo Credit: Dan Bush, McFall

It has been a rocky year for many in 2008. With an ailing economy, viral job loss, busted mortgages, roller coaster oil prices and stock markets, and a grim forecast , it is easy to neglect the good news. But the good news is the same as the bad news, depending on how you look at it or phrase it:

Read further for 7 bad AND good news events of 2008

Recent Comment by dan : "Number 3 is no good...." [read]

Image source: Amazing Grass

Recently I sampled several Superfood products from Amazing Grass. Superfood - those green, vitamin-packed food and drinks that look like someone just cut a swatch out of your front lawn, juiced it and served it up to you in a glass. Amazing Grass now offers several handy nutrition bars and mixes to blend in drinks, all claiming to give lots of health benefits with few or no downsides. This holiday season I sat around with a few family members (eco-friendly and not-so-eco-friendly alike) and sampled the items. This is what we had to say:

Image: GETTY

Mistletoe Growth as an Indicator of Toxic Metal Contamination
Just in time for the Christmas season, the Julius-Kühn Institute, aka the German Federal Research Center for Cultivated Plants, brings us these interesting tidings: there's more going on under the mistletoe than just kissing. Scientists at JKI suggest that the amount of toxic metal contamination in soils can be known by looking at how much mistletoe is growing on the trees above.

photo: DeSmogblog.com

Like "fighting your way through a junkyard that is 20 miles long . . . blindfolded" is how 44-year-old eco-adventurer Todd Carmichael describes his recent trek across Antarctica to the South Pole. The temperature was a mere 35 degrees below zero and white outs were common.

Some mountaintops removed for mining, photo courtesy of the NY Times

You’ve got to love all these “Midnight Rules” that keep popping up—whether it’s the lifting of poultry farm regulations, or the latest egregious legislation: a repealing of the stream buffer zone rule, which has prevented surface coal mining from taking place a scant 100 feet from flowing streams since 1983. Yes, as we reported earlier, the EPA overturned this vital law, acting against the advice of some of its own scientists. The rule's elimination will likely lead to serious environmental hazards like more mountaintop removal mining.

But the environmental organizations in Kentucky—including Kentucky Waterways Alliance, the Sierra Club, and Earthjustice—won’t let this midnight rule go quietly into the night.

Image courtesy of the Sietch

In the first week of its existence, the Facebook group Trees Have Rights Too has apparently attracted some 2,100 new members—all who share the ambition of urging the United Nations to create a Bill of Planetary Rights. We’ve hit on Polly Higgins’s general Trees Have Rights Campaign as a worthy cause and it appears the Facebook component has taken root (ahem) with equal success.

The group points to the fact that every Christmas season, around 6 million Christmas trees are disposed of—some that are recycled, and most that hit the landfill—in order to highlight a seasonal relevancy to their mission.