tips

Thanksgiving is one of the easiest holidays to green up. With the focus on giving thanks rather than gifts, we honor not only our family and friends but Nature's bounty, too.

1. Simplify the day.
   Celebrate being with those you love. Don't overdo the cooking - and savor whatever you make. Linger over dessert, play games, watch football or a favorite movie, take a walk. Revive special traditions from the past and create new ones you can turn to next Thanksgiving, and the holiday after that.

2. Decorate with boughs and berries.
   There's no need to buy fancy Thanksgiving decorations. Head out to your yard with a pair of shears and find tree branches, bush stems loaded with berries, flowers whose seed heads have dried on the stem, and flowering grasses to fill tall vases, hollowed out pumpkins, and autumnal baskets.

3. Let there be light.
   Illuminate your table with candles of varying heights and widths. Use votives in small glasses or carved sugar pumpkins.

4. Serve locally grown food.
   Even in colder, northern climates, farmers markets are still selling locally grown greens, potatoes, apples, pears, spices, breads, and cheeses. You'll find lots of good recipes for ...

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As I flew over the Peruvian rainforest, I kept a lookout for flames. I'd heard that, despite international outrage over the loss of millions of acres of trees, the Amazon basin was still going up in smoke. Now I'd come to see for myself, and it didn't take long. Out the window of the small LAN-Peru jet I was taking from Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado, a bustling frontier town perched on a tributary of the Amazon, I saw a tall grey column billowing up from the ground 19,000 feet below.

Not everything was on fire - because much of it had already been burned and cleared. A patchwork of thin, pale green rectangles intermingled with darker, bubbly patches that indicated intact forest. But I couldn't help but worry that the amount of forest left serves more like an invitation to clearcutters than a deterrent.

Oscar, my guide for the next four days, confirmed that that was the case. As we boarded a long, narrow motor boat for our five-hour trip into the wilds that host the Heath River Wildlife Center, the rainforest specialist noted that fires and clearcuts remain the biggest threat facing the region known for serving as the "globe's lungs."

"Why is the forest being cleared?" I asked, thinking the answer was linked to consumer demand for mahogany, teak and other exotic woods.

Oscar acknowledged that logging is a major problem. But, he said ...

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If you have a car, stop whatever you're doing and go check the air pressure of your vehicle's tires.

Apart from keeping your car in park, pumping up your tires to their proper "PSI" - pounds per square inch - is the fastest, cheapest way to reduce the amount of gasoline you use. Tires have a tendency to lose pressure over time or when the weather changes substantially; a car driving on underinflated tires needs more gas to move. You can gain 3.3% in fuel efficiency by inflating your tires. And with gasoline costing over $4/per gallon, every 3.3% gain means money in your pocket.

That gain also affords an immediate way to increase our supply of oil. As Barack Obama has noted in his vision for an energy independent America, if we all pumped up our tires to their proper PSI, the U.S. could easily gain from conservation (i.e., using less fuel) three times as much oil as we could reap from far more costly and environmentally dangerous off-shore oil drilling. And that oil is available TODAY, not ten or twenty years hence - the time it takes to develop oil fields and convert petroleum into gasoline ...

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Presumably, you're not the kind of person who would take a big pile of money out to your driveway and set it on fire, just to watch it burn. But when you burn gasoline, that's essentially what you're doing. And with gasoline prices now bouncing around $4 a gallon, that pile of money you're burning is getting a whole lot bigger.

Big Green Purse lists ten ways you can conserve gas today and save at least $20-$50 every month at the pump. But you can save even more by taking the Drive Smarter Challenge, a new initiative from the Alliance to Save Energy.

What's terrific about the Challenge is that it puts you in the driver's seat – literally. The website simulates you driving, then suggests up to six fuel-efficiency actions you can easily take. If you do (or say you plan to), the website immediately calculates your savings in money, gasoline, and greenhouse gas emissions. ...

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