7gen Bloc

Lara’s post about our weekend in NOLA reminds me that Sheila, Our Grande Dame of Donational Doings, has lately been feeding me her own tales of altruism in action, and they’re well worth a recap. It’s great to be able to give deserving causes some much-needed help and to make smiles grow as fundamental part of doing business. After all, companies and individuals who fail to give something back to the communities that make their successes possible really can’t be considered a success at all. With that in mind…

As representatives of Seventh Generation, Sarah Thompson and I went to New Orleans this Earth Day for the culmination of One Ton Tree, our Eco-llaboration with Seed Collective, Replant New Orleans and City Year. We spent Earth Day digging holes and planting trees to help replace the 50,000 that were taken by Hurricane Katrina.

We’re getting worried about the bees. And not just about the bees but about what the bees are trying to tell us. If you haven’t heard, honeybees are mysteriously disappearing. Whole colonies just vanishing like some apian Roanoke. It’s deeply weird. All the worker bees in a hive fly off for a day’s work and never return. No bodies. No clues. No bees.

April 21, 2007, New York, NY― Success breeds uncertainty. One might think of success as a confirmation of the path one has chosen to travel down. A sign of well made choices or an affirmation that one is headed in the right direction. Yet, there is no right direction, only the making of the direction you have chosen or have happened upon at that particular moment in time. This is something I am prone to forget.

It’s Earth Day. That annual rite of spring where everyone becomes an environmentalist for at least a moment or two. For those of us who prefer to wear the label year-round (and increasingly that’s most of us), it’s a fitting occasion to pause for a moment, get out the imaginary camera, and take a virtual snapshot of sorts of today’s moment in time.

When people ask me how I spend my days as a writer who largely works out of his home, my joke has always been that I really just sit around the house all day smoking cigars and watching Oprah in my boxers. So it’s more than a little ironic to have actually just finished watching Oprah (albeit fully dressed and sans cigar) as part of my official duties. Oprah is alright in my book. She stood up to the Texas beef boys

Rumor has it that Oprah will be sniffing our toilet bowl cleaner this afternoon. Wednesday, she taped an Earth Day segment that covers "green cleaning." Guided through the ins and outs of the world of non-toxic housekeeping by Simran Sethi (recently highlighted in Vanity Fair for her work with Treehugger and the Sundance Channel), Oprah saw fit to celebrate Earth Day by teaching her millions of loyal viewers that green cleaning is essential to a healthy home and a safer planet.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mark Gunther, Fortune Magazine’s top “green” reporter, for a series of conversations organized by Net-Impact, a group of several thousand MBA’s committed to making business more responsible. Check out Mark’s thoughts on the conversation in his blog post "Seventh Generation’s Long Journey"

Well, you never know what to expect next from Wal-Mart. Today, they announced a new “Live Better Index” in an e-mail:

It’s official! The Convenient Truths Contest is at its end, and moments ago the winners were announced to the world. Here’s the lowdown from Treehugger's Jeff McIntire-Strasburg