Mud... In East Java a possible man made mud flow is creating an inland mud sea, at the University of Washington scientists spliced rabbit genes into a tree, and Enterprise Rent a Car tries to go green.   Read more...

Universal Book/Bookworm is an educational site updated every 1 or 2 weeks with new reports and news varieties. I thought this was an interesting thing people would want to read about, it has a LOT of political things so people interested in politics, this is a great site for you - the site is still under construction in some parts.

The site is: universalbook.googlepages.com   Read more...

Stephan Fayon is an agriculture and organic farming expert who directs Kokopelli India, an international seed savers association based in Auroville, South India. A resident of Auroville for the past twelve years, he directs several reforestation programs and runs a tree farm. He has planted 250,000 trees over the past ten years.   Read more...

The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA) have announced Listen! – International Day for Sharing Life Stories, an international celebration of life stories to take place on May 16th 2008. They are launching the project website, www.ausculti.org, to assist with information sharing and coordination of the campaign. The goal of the campaign is to gain broad recognition of May 16 as an annual day for sharing, listening to, and gathering the stories of people's lives.   Read more...

Obama gets voted Smogmaker of '07 by DeSmogBlog, hot bodies warm building, and Ctrl+Alt+Autos with three wheels. ZapRoot, helping you go green.   Read more...

The facility, located in an unelectrified town named Kapashia (Gazipur district), is part of a rural electrification project that aims to reach about 700,000 citizens through renewables.

The green power plant, the first ever its kind in Bangladesh, is a 250 kW biomass gasification facility that generates renewable electricity from abundant agricultural residues such as rice husks.   Read more...

For the past few years, Ode has been planting trees for new subscribers. Since we don't have someone in house with a degree in forestry management, we've been cooperating with Trees For the Future (www.treesftf.org). This nonprofit has been planting trees since the late 1980's long before the world learned about climate change.

We've been getting emails from our readers who were anxious to learn more about all those trees. Where are they? Can I see them? What is their impact?   Read more...

Specialized Bicycles partnered with Google and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to host the Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest for a pedal-powered solution to offset climate change. The winner, announced last week, designed a water filtering and transporting bike called the Aquaduct that addresses the needs of 1.1 million people in the world who don't have access to clean drinking water. Other inventions that were spawned from this contest were a pedal-powered laptop, corn grinder and mobile cinema.   Read more...

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School (www.tinkeringschool.com/blog), believes that kids need the freedom to explore. Tim Gill, the author of Ode's commentary "We don't need no supervision" would agree. Kids may find it harder to grow up if adults over-regulate their lives.   Read more...

Jack Davis, 11, says, "If you think there's a problem in the world, you don't wait for other people to fix it. You have to try to fix it yourself." Davis noticed that restaurants in his town in Florida were throwing out food that could be given to the homeless. Currently, restaurant owners don't give away their extra food in fear of being sued if homeless people were to get ill or develop food poisoning. Davis wants to reverse the law so that restaurant owners have some protection from such lawsuits.

More info: abcnews.go.com/WN/PersonOfWeek/Story?id=4123327&page=1   Read more...

Equal Exchange, the worker co-operative who helped pioneer Fair Trade food and beverages in the U.S., is now focusing in on children and education. Last year they introduced a new fundraising program to help both schools and farming communities around the world.

Instead of your regular book drive to help raise money for schools and groups, Equal Exchange offers a full line of Fair Trade products including chocolates, organic coffees, teas, cocoas, dried cranberries and roasted pecans.   Read more...

My friend just sent this to me. It's a scene you will probably never get to see, so take a moment and enjoy God at work at the North Pole. This is the sunset at the North Pole with the moon at its closest point. And, you also see the sun below the moon. An amazing photo and not one easily duplicated.   Read more...

The AeroCivic gets 95mpg and will kill any chances you have of getting a girlfriend, go green with the EPA & Google Earth map pollution, and "Clean Coal" wants you to celebrate good times!   Read more...

In 1994, the Socio Economic Development Trust (SEDT) succeeded in drawing some 11,000 dropouts in 220 villages in nine tehsils of the impoverished Parbhani district of Maharashtra back to school through unique village-level children's organizations called Bal Panchayats.

These groups of 12-30 children were trained initially to identify children who had dropped out of school and to convince the parents of these children to send them back to school. SEDT has found that this project would not be anywhere without the help of the children rallying their friends back to school.   Read more...

My husband and I are self employed artisan/craftsmen with a small family in Vermont. While we have very modest means, our hearts were touched in the country of Peru along the banks of the Amazon River by the natives inhabiting this depressed area.

In an effort to try to come up with a way to help bring clean water and improved quality of life to a seemingly neglected population, Eric & I came up with the idea to build a co-op style, eco-tourist, socially responsible, self sustaining, not-for-profit model in the form of a tourist lodge. If built, the lodge would bring tourists to this amazing area of this country to explore the Amazon River and the rainforest it shares with expert guides. They would stay in comfortable but extremely rustic, native constructed accommodations and share in local cultures.   Read more...

We recently have expanded our mission to protecting the honey bees and have launched www.beeguardian.org.

Whether you are interested in caring for bees or supporting those who can please visit us at www.beeguardian.org or email us at info@beeguardian.org.   Read more...

I wish we had these vehicles in the U.S. Imagine how many kids and young-at-heart would be dashing to go to work or school in one of these!

According to Allen Yu of Asia's Perfect 10 blog, the Jeepney is the most popular modes of transport in the Philippines. Originally produced for the U.S. Military, these vehicles have been transformed to fit up to twenty people at a time and are painted in a bright rainbow of colors designed to grab the attention of potential passengers. Some Jeepneys are even adorned with chrome hood ornaments, airhorns, religious icons and flashing multicolored lights.   Read more...

ZapRoot 019: Olsen Gremlins
Frito Lay tries to go green, PTR isn't what gave you that rash, and the Olsen twins slaughter small animals.   Read more...

Street Yoga, founded by Mark Lilly, offers yoga and wellness classes to homeless and sheltered youth in Portland, Oregon.   Read more...

In the barrios of Guayaquil, Ecuador an amazing transformation is taking place. Through the efforts of one woman, rival gangs have formed truces, turned in their weapons and have started working together to rebuild the community.   Read more...

This is a brand new book by Gary Hirschberg.The founder of Stoneyfield Farm Yogurt (now a $300-million division of Dannon S.A.) relates the story of how a ghastly Disneyworld exhibit by Kraft inspired him to launch a wildly successful triple-bottom-line company in the mid-1970s. The book is as much a practical hands-on guide for entrepreneurs as it is an inspiration to remind us of what's possible.   Read more...

This week Academy Fellow Lester R. Brown published Plan B: 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization. He believes the world's situation to be as dire as the subtitle suggests. But he also lays out a specific plan to pull us back from the brink of extinction.

"The world faces many environmental trends of disruption and decline," he says, "including rising temperatures and spreading water shortage. In addition to these looming threats, we face the peaking of oil, annual population growth of 70 million, a widening global economic divide, and a growing list of failing states. The scale and complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent."   Read more...

I just read a great blog post by Ryan Norbauer on 43Folders called "Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work." It is definitely something that all you overachievers might find interesting...among everyone else for that matter.

Ryan takes the stance that achievement, particularly over-achievement, might not be the key to happiness and may cause more stress and more work in the long run.   Read more...

I just read that article about giving access to computers to homeless vagrant children in India. It was fascinating, and reminded me of the book "Diamond Age" by Neil Stephenson. I'm seeing it come true. No telling how far this can go, but it should be good.   Read more...

At the end of January, thousands of people all over the world will march, speak, celebrate, and dialogue in villages, rural zones, and urban centers, in the context of hundreds of decentralized self-organized actions. They will mobilize over a one-week period in January, culminating in a Global Day of Mobilisation and Action on the 26th to show that another world is possible.

At the same period, the "old" world will meet in Davos for the World Economic Forum, bringing together its economists, experts, ideologies and techniques that produce violence, exploitation, exclusion, poverty, hunger and ecological disaster, depriving people of human rights and our Earth of its resources.   Read more...

I recently started a new venture, New Experience Nonprofit Services LLC (www.newexperiencenps.com), with somewhat of a new twist. My goal is to bring together the experience and wisdom of older professionals, in the form of Experience Councils, for the good of the nonprofit community, especially small to medium sized nonprofits who often do not have access to high priced consultants. Experience Council members are paid for their services and can determine their own availability. I am looking for individuals who might be interested in working as Experience Council members. If you or someone you know is interested in sharing wisdom with the nonprofit sector, please contact me at visit www.newexperiencenps.com and fill out an Experience Council application or contact me directly at l.favier@newexperiencenps.com.   Read more...

I just stumbled upon a blog post from Chennai Metroblogging. They posted a blog about the recent Mylapore Festival in India that sparked my interest.

Mylapore Festival, an annual feature in Chennai in the month of January is sponsored by Sundaram Finance and organised by Mr Vincent D'Souza of Mylapore Times. This year the festival took place from January 3rd to 6th. The 4 day festival comprises of concerts in Parks at Mylapore, Folk Dance, Kolam contest, heritage walks, Kokkalikattai Aattam and so on.   Read more...

Globally Minded is a fair trade, green business, working with producers in Guatemala to design and market beautiful, handcrafted jewelry (www.globallyminded.com). We are passionate about making a difference in the lives of the poor through equitable trading relationships and supporting the education of children in Guatemala with our profits (www.globallymindedworks.org).

Thank you for uniting with us to make life better for all.   Read more...

Carbon Copy posts a 90 second award winning film shot in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township; The film "touches on daily township life in South Africa and how solar energy could be utilised to uplift the poor in a sustainable way."   Read more...

Next time you hit the slopes, consider checking the Green Resort Guide, compiled by the Ski Club of Great Britain, to see if your favorite ski resort is doing their part to preserve the environment.

The Ski Club of Great Britain hopes to drive up standards in the industry by highlighting the resorts that are doing a lot to help preserve the environment, as well as those that aren't doing much at all.   Read more...

Chris Kilham is not only the man who introduced me to sushi food, back in 2002, but also to the job title of "Medicine Hunter." He is one.

Kilham is an ethnobotanist who distrusts drugs companies and has more faith in plants and herbs. And so he travels remote jungles in search for plants that can heal. He must have one of the coolest jobs in the world.   Read more...