The Ramsay Home Project started out as a blog from a family building its own green home from scratch; it’s now become much more than that – a great resource for anyone even thinking about taking on that particular challenge.  Recently the Ramsay folks pointed towards another “great home building blog” Paso Straw Bale Construction Blog, “In the year 2000 I started straw bale dream house that would be ecologically sound, environmentally friendly, and a place to finally call home,” Lesliehm says.  “In choosing Dave Exline/Three Little Pigs Construction, I ventured into house building hell.  This is the story of the building of that house. The story of what happens when you trust someone you should not. The story of bad decisions, poor quality work, and lack of accountability. The story of what it takes to salvage what was once thought unsalvagable.”  Sadly typical, home-buildilng-types tell us…but this one has a happy ending.

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…

Easy Ways to Save the World is a fine collection of practical tips and products that make green living not only possible, but pleasant. Matthew’s info-packed site includes personal recommendations and advice on a wide range of products, like the Ban Beater, a home gray-water system that helps you recycle water quickly and easily.

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.

Rob J. Hopkins’ Transition Culture is an “evolving exploration into the head, heart, and hands of energy descent,” and among his many fascinating topics is spreading the word about the cob house. As one of Rob’s rec, The Cob Cottage Company, explains, “Cob building uses hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw – a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. Cob is easy to learn and inexpensive to build. Because there are no forms, ramming, cement or rectilinear bricks, cob lends itself to organic shapes: curved walls, arches and niches. Earth homes are cool in summer, warm in winter. Cob’s resistance to rain and cold makes it ideally suited to cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, and to desert conditions.” Rob also recommends The Handsculpted House by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael G. Smith. It’s “the most compassionate, human and grounded book on building in print. It was the first book I read on building that completely resonated with my thinking on how construction should be about so much more that just shelter making. Buildings, the authors argued, should be so beautiful that they make grown men cry. Amen to that (and the colour photos in the middle are testament to cob’s ability to do just that).

Curt Rosengren calls himself a “passion catalyst”, and that’s a term that ThisNext understands well: someone who allows each of us to find and live their passion. He also blogs two or three different places, including The Sustainable Future, where he gives insighs on living a green life that’s both fulfilling and practical. Much of the advice is the simple stuff that we all forget: using the library instead of buying magazines, finally getting the low-flow showerheads and – as shown here – insalling occupancy sensors that automatically turn off lights when there are no humans at home. It’s good, solid advice (and mostly stuff we all should have done already).

Tim Willard of The Future is Green stands apart from many other ‘green news’ blogs in one very good way: he is relentlessly positive. In just the last few days, he’s summarized and referred to articles about new processes to make cheaper ethanol, how the demand for organic food is now so great it’s outstripping supply, that California is about to build the largest solar power plant in the world, about breakthroughs in using the tides to generate powers, and the remarkable concept, touted by the city’s mayor, that Chicago should become the world’s greenest city.

Whenever we feel weighed down by the bad news from every quarter, this blog reminds us of the inevitable: the future MUST be green (or there may not be a future at all).

Photo credit: Mike Gustafson 

You’d think that a blog with as serious a name as Organic Researcher would be focused rounding up all the newest  facts, figures, advances and scientific data supporting an organic lifestyle.  And that’s exactly what this blog by Matt Reed of the UK is, covering everything from big food companies in small communities, the end of McDonalds in the UK (!), new info on organic milk, and insights on what to eat, what to read, and how to get involved. 

But Matt also has a sense of humor, and when he came across this on-line video The Meatrix, he said, “ts back, its brilliant, you’ve just got to love it,”  And you do…

Josh Dorfman is the founder and CEO of Vivavi, Inc., a megapopular green design shopping site…but he’s much more.  He also has a XM Satellite Radio show on green living and maintains a lively blog, The Lazy Environmentalist, that promos the radio show and provides a zillion links to eco-entrepreneurs, green companies, eco-thinkers and much, much more.  A great way to get and stay corrected in a multitude of media.

Tracy Stokes is one busy leader of the green. Not only did she have the highly popular TreehuggerMom blog, she also co-founded Little Green House (which we’ve mentioned before) and is co-founder of Eco Street, a packed-tight informational blog that gives you a hundred tips a day (it seems) on green living. Just a scan of the last few entries tells you about Treeflights.com, where you can have a tree planted in a Welsh forest for every plane flight you take, a great new book from Mark Batty publishing on Green Design, and EcoSystem, a next-generation energy-efficient PC from Jinglehorse. Not to mention a list of links to other green websites that’s awesome in its length and depth. Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with Tracy…but it’s always well worth trying.

Justin Thomas blogs on the pre-eminent green news site, Treehugger and edits Metaefficient.com. In both places, he crystallizes the thisnext concept of aligning what you think, feel, and believe with what you buy, use, and enjoy (and recommend to freinds.) He’s a wellspring of great product choices, including these three seasonal contributions: a cooler that can run on a 12-volt battery and uses just 24 watts…a Pivot Lantern, powered by 20 LEDs that can run for up to 3 days on 3 “D” batteries…and a battery-powered fan — one of the longest-lasting ones available — battery powered fan available that . It runs on 8 “D” sized batteries, lasts 24 hours, and folds flat.:Wait a second: sustainable, appropriate technology at a reasoanble price that also looks great? Amazing…