Search the Web and Plant a Tree with Swagbucks.com

How often do you use Google to search on line? If you’re a regular Web user, you might go there several times a day — maybe even a dozen or more. It’s convenient. It’s easy. But it’s an opportunity missed.

Swagbucks.com is a rewards-based search destination that provides users with the very same results you can get from Google and Ask. Give it a try. Go ahead, right now, if you like. Click on this link to Swagbucks.com and enter a search word or term, such as “Blue Planet Green Living.” (But don’t sign up till you read this full article; there’s a special offer below.) Then come back here to find out why you’ll want to use Swagbucks.com as your everyday search engine…

Notes from Iowa: We Are Gambling with Life Itself

As part of the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions held at colleges and universities across the U.S., the University of Iowa invited activists and experts to participate in panel discussions. Blue Planet Green Living was privileged participate on a panel with Andrew Saito, a student in the MFA program in Playwriting. After a short reading from an original play, Saito read the following essay to the audience. We found the images and the message so thoughtful, beautiful, and powerful that we asked him to share it with our readers.

Notes from Nepal: Cautions about Expanding Ecotourism

Ghale Gaun is an inviting village of about 200-300 people. It sits 2,075 meters above sea level in the remote mountains of Nepal inside the Annapurna Conservation Area. Ghale Gaun is becoming an increasingly popular ecotourism and village-tourism destination, attracting many national and international visitors. Previously, the major source of income of the village people was from international sources, as most of the young boys were involved in the armies of the United Kingdom and India. Because it is a very poor village, the prospect of creating a new income source is highly appealing to the residents.

Harming Environment Leads to Societal Collapse

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond addressed a crowd of about a thousand at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on February 3. Dr. Diamond, a professor of history at UCLA, held us in rapt attention while he talked about the subject of his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “That doesn’t seem like the most cheerful subject to write about,” he wryly pointed out, causing a fair amount of laughter among the crowd.

“The real question,” Diamond said, “is, why do some societies collapse, having failed to solve problems that other societies succeeded in solving?”