Ladielizzie of Green Is The New Black, a green blogger in the UK’s West Midlands, has great things to say about an unusual new book, Leo Hickman’s A Life Stripped Bare.   Leo, a journalist for The Guardian, was challenged to live a “more ethical lifestyle,” and even had three “ethical auditors” to examine every aspect of his (and his family’s) life.  It was a world-changing experience, and one that he chronicles with wit and insight, all the way from cleaning his bathroom with lemon juice and bicarb to receiving ecoballs in the mail, getting worms, and following his garbage all the way down the Thames just to see where it ends up.  “It’s all highly entertaining and enlightening,” Ladielizzie tells us.  Well worth the read…

Wildside Musing’s Creating “Wildside” As Home is an ongoing attempt to live the green life in the suburbs – in how this family builds, cooks, lives, shops, and travels. They offer some great insights and practical recommendations, too, including a library of useful books, like Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces.

When the Price family talks about the Rhythm of Life, they really mean it. This is a family that’s passionate about rhythm in every sense of the word, including the building and collecting of drums, a stack of spiritual books that both surprising and enlightening, and set after set of really wonderful pictures that show you what a personal passion for life is all about. Here’s a family it’s really worth getting to know…

“Manufacturing” as a concept has earned a rotten reputation in the U.S. But the idea of building things is as old as humanity, and for a couple of centuries the United State built the best things in the world. There are number of socially concerned, mindful engineers and businesspeople who think we can do it again — and do it right, in a way that is supporting of the environment, intellectually elegant, and socioally responsible (big ideas!)

This movement goes under the rubric of “Lean Manufacturing” or even “Lean Thinking”. To quote LeanBlog, “One way of defining lean has two parts:

1. Eliminate waste and non-value-added activity (NVA)

2. Have respect for people”

The term began to Toyota, with their unique approach to design and management; now it’s an actual movement…with plenty of intelligent and insightful bogs that explore the field. Some of the best include LeanBlog, Got Boondoggle?, Evolving Excellence (from the editors of Superfactory, a Lean-thinking publication), and Seth Godin’s Blog. Seth is a writer and marketing consultant who’s a major proponent of ‘lean’ thinking and just plain common sense, as well as the author of the wonderfully named All Marketers are Liars (I can say them, I’m a marketer!).

“Lean” is just getting beginning to attract attention on the ‘real’ world. These are great places to start learning — and leaning — yourself.

Home Schooling is an extraordinarily personal (and persaonalized) approach to educating your kids…but how does it work on a practical, day-to-day basis? Anna Noack-Brown’s Kindleseed is an inspiring “digial journal” of the homeschooling process, with great pictures of trips to everything from bee farms to glass factories, entries that show how a simple trip to the Farmer’s Market can become a spelling lesson, and a huge array of resources and links, all offered with a gentle and loving point of view.

Lisa Ayres believes in water conservation. She’s passionate about spreading the word, though education, innovation, marketing…and blogging. Water Conservation with Rain Barrels and More is a great place to discover how water consumption can work, with links, commentaries, and insight from somebody who lives water conservations 24/7.

As we’re all trying to make intelligent decisions about major purchases in general, a hybrid car seems like an obviously mindful alternative…and I’ve heard repeatedly that there are TAX benefits as well as good value (and good values) to be gained. What I didn’t know until greenr told me is that the tax benefits are temporary. This well-built little site gives frequent updates on living simple and smart — news and solutions on everything from wind power to hybrids to peak oil to renewable energy sources and more.

Greenr is the one who told me that the IRS tax credits are still in effect — contrary to some recent reports— but that after t he 60,000th hybrid is sold by your model’s manufacturer, the credit value starts getting reduced rapidly. As an example, 41,779 Toyota/Lexus hybrids have already been sold, so time is running out (and the discounts aren’t small — they’re in the $2,000 - $3,000 range).s

Norene’s Five Percentt is a gentle, thoughtful and useful site where San Franciscan Norene tracks her slow and well-meaning conversion to sustainable living. But she’s also put together a long list of really wonderful “calculators” — web sites that, with just a little prompting, will do everything from measure your footprint to tell you the level of waste caused by gourmet coffee cups to ten things in between. A whole new way of looking at: Carbon Use, Coffee Cup Waste, Commute Cost, Commute Impactm Ecological Footprint, Energy Star Savings, Energy Usage Impact, Greenhouse Gas, Home Energy Saver, Paper Grade Comparison, * Personal Transportation Impact, Pesticides in Food, Recycling Habits Impact, Tuna Safety, Water Usage Impact. An unexpcted but effective way make your life matter.

Sometimes the title is enough to get you interested all by itself, and A Suburban Treehugger certailnly caught my attention.. And when that’s followed by a description like “A feminist writer and pantheist Pagan on the path to self-sufficiency and sustainable living”…you gotta read on. Turns out that Kate West of Puget Sound really is all of the above, and offers great advice for becoming an activist, biodiesel fuel, and a great spot for free trade coffee. And she does it all in a personal and even charming way.

Ideal Bite is a blog community with a clear mission: to create a sustainable economy, and have fun doing it. You can find smart, easy-to-absorb and actually useful posts on everything from ethical investing and genetically modified oranisms to the ethics of buying soda…and enthusiastic recommendations on things like Lavera Sun Screen, an all- natural sun screen with an SPF of 20 that actually WORKS.

Now here’s a blogger who is truly committed and connected to green business. A marketing expert, a green business consultant, a committed participant of his own, Ivan’s clearly one of the “connectors” — somebody who knows everybody, and can hook you up pronto. How can you NOT like a guy whose three guiding principles are “hire smarter than yourself” , to simply “leave things better than when you found them”, and “design ecstatic experiences”…and who titles enthusiastic coverage of a recent green biz networking event as “One time, at Wine Camp” …

Evelyn Rodriguez is one of those people you just have to meet sometime. She was clearly born to blog, and we are the beneficiaries. Even her blog bio is intriguing: “I feel equally at home in Silicon Valley (also known as Santa Clara County, California, USA) speaking geek, pitching a venture capitalist, meditating in Marin County at a breathwork workshop, in Guatemala studying the language and living with a local family, or chatting with Nicholas the Vietnam vet vagabonding in the parking lot behind the local coffee shop.” Her Crossroads and Dispatches blog covers everything from day-to-day life in Marin County to her experience as a survivor of the Thailand tsunami to the joys and challenges of meditation in the modern Silicon Valley. She goes places, she does things, she reads books and articles, and finds wonderful, rich products and places that you wish you had found. In just the last few entires of May, you’ll find an appreciation of the luscious products of Fiori Chocolatiers (and their lovely blog), a recommendation to try the little-known coffees of Barefoot Coffee Roasters and a contemplation on, of all things, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Art.” And that’s only the beginning.

An amazing woman with a remarkable amount of important and fascinating stuff to say.