Eco Weddings Gifts That Celebrate Love Not Stuff

When Gary Myer and Dana Gail celebrated their honeymoon at Casita Colibri, a vacation rental in Sedona, Az their wedding was part of one of the hottest trends on the planet, green weddings.

In addition to going easy on mother nature and themselves by renting a healthy vacation home, I was so inspired by what they wrote to their guests about their nonmaterial wedding gifts I thought I'd share it.

Our Alternative Registry mentions gifts we'd most welcome. You'll see some of these gifts don't come in boxes. It would be a gift to us if you:

· Make a donation to Verde Valley Sanctuary or the Nature Conservancy
· Offset the carbon for your trip to Sedona
· Give us a used item from our list—reused from a yard sale or secondhand store
· Something creative of your own choosing that reflects this is a celebration of love, not stuff.

The greatest gift is your presence in our lives and at our wedding.

Feel free to share your eco wedding and anniversary celebration tips. Watch for my article about eco-weddings in the June issue of Four Corners Magazine.

Photo by Edward Randolph.

Every Day is Earth Day

Did you know: that using Facebook for one year adds almost 2,000 pounds of carbon to your personal footprint?

As a gift to Mother Earth on her special day, GenGreenLife.com has teamed up with Cooler Inc. to offset the carbon equivalent of an entire day of using Facebook for each person that adds this app! So share it with your friends and help us exceed our goal of gathering 20,000 people to offset 100,000 pounds of carbon on Earth Day.

To add Every Day is Earth Day to your Facebook profile, click here: <"a href=http://apps.facebook.com/gengreenearthday http://apps.facebook.com/gengreenearthday

Let's Get The U.S. Back To Work

If you haven't felt the effects of the 3.5 million jobs lost in this recession you've probably comforted someone who has. Just one million of those jobs were lost in the last two months. While it may not havethe perfect answers, Recovery.gov is a means of taking immediate action to address the hemmoraging and the website will show us how the money is being used. If you haven't learned about the plan, please check it out at this link.

Green Fixes for the Economy

Bold solutions from the green economy are the antidote to the broken economy—and can repair the damage and create a world that works for all.

Everyone now understands that the economy is broken. What our members and readers have known for years— that the economy is not working for people and the planet—is now playing out on Wall Street and Main Street every day.

While many name the mortgage and credit-default-swap crises as culprits, they are only the most recent results of an economy with fatal design flaws. These design defects range from a dependence on growth, consumerism, and the structure of money to the short-term focus of today’s markets, and policy goals that are focused on growing Gross National Product. Yet, when GNP growth includes a whole set of “bads”—from sweatshop labor to manufacturing toxic chemicals—every dollar of GNP growth actually reduces wellbeing for people and the planet.

Taken together, these fatal flaws systematically create economic injustice, poverty, and environmental crises.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The green economy offers solutions that are the antidote to the current breakdown. Click here to read more on the Green America blog.

Wandering But Not Lost

More highlights from the Green Biz Conference with Seth Goldman (Honest Tea), Van Jones (The Green Collar Economy), Paul Ray (Cultural Creatives), The Ruckus Society, Better World Books, and Roxanne Quimby (Burt's Bees):

-Coming soon to this blog, guest bloggers from the conference like Eric Aragon, left (that's me, far right), and other bloggers offering savings at nurturing camps, resorts and vacation rentals plus advice on greenovating your home.

-Forget "green," consumers want the focus on "me" AND "we." As in, save my money AND the planet--protect my health AND mother earth's. Green is a cause many consumers don't identify with, but "responsibility" is what they want from businesses, products and services. Source: Joel Makower's latest research, Green World Media, Inc.

Is Green Travel Disappearing?

Will travelers be looking for green lodging given our global financial woes?

The shrinking economy has some saying green was just a fad we can no longer afford. Travel writer, Paul Mansfield of Telegraph Media says, "It would be nice to think that the economic shock will usher in a period of sustainable travel. But my bet is that green will suddenly no longer be fashionable, as people demand the right to spend their limited money as they wish. Expect the term "green" to disappear overnight from many brochures.

And business travelers may be quick to abandon sustainable practices. Commenting on the results of a recent Business Travel World survey which shows a whopping 76% of CFOs plan to cut travel, editor in chief, Betty Low, said: “’Green’ initiatives seem to be disappearing from the corporate landscape as quickly as they arrived. Only last year companies were at pains to publicise their environmental policies which could include anything from using environmentally friendly taxi companies to sustainable sourcing. Since the onset of the credit crunch, however, many of those same companies are becoming increasingly concerned about their own sustainability and consequently such policies seem to have moved down the agenda.”

But TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel community, recently announced contradicting findings. The results of its annual travel trends survey of more than 3,000 U.S. travelers show travelers appear to be going lean and green by visiting national parks, hiking, and engaging in adventure activities. A greater amount of Americans said they will be environmentally conscious in their travel decisions in 2009, and more plan to visit eco-friendly hotels in the coming year.

The green trend may be evident in their choice of transportation -- 22 percent said they'll go biking while on vacation this year, compared to 13 percent, last year. Forty-seven percent of travelers plan to go hiking this year, up from 43 percent, last year. Read more about the TripAdvisor survey results…

Readers of this blog also contradict that green is vanishing. They still plan to travel green according to the survey we ran in October. The majority, 91.8 percent said that all other things being equal, they would make the socially responsible choice or "go green even in tough times."

And being green is still what Eco Luxury prospects and guests report is the best feature of our properties. Findings indicate a need to clarify that when we say "luxury," we mean taking it easy, not stuff. But otherwise, respondents say going green hasn't vanished in a haze of economic self-preservation. In fact, taking care of the planet may be the very path to take to care for ourselves.