Your Share - December 2009

EarthShare Publishes Green Holiday Gift Guide

This Green Holidays Gift Guide will help you find the greenest, most local, least wasteful gifts here in the Northwest!

During the holiday season, most of us yearn for relaxed, meaningful times with friends and family. But all too often we end up in a harried frenzy of shopping, cooking, wrapping and doing. Wanting to please the people we love, we buy things.

Things in boxes. Things with bows. Things with bells and whistles. Almost always, things with lots of wrapping and wasted paper and resources. The commercial aspects of the season tend to take over and we end up buying things even when we are unsure that they will be wanted.

The average American family buys and wraps 30 presents each holiday season, generating heaps of wrapping and packaging waste. Garbage collectors pick up 25% more trash in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year than they do during the rest of the year. For example, in Lane County, Oregon, a family of four makes nearly a half ton of waste during the holidays. Cruise the Green Gift Guide>

Saving the Salmon: Columbia Riverkeepers

Memories of the Columbia River with vigorous wild salmon runs don't seem so far fetch when looking at a 121-pound salmon.

Why don't they get this big anymore?

While toxic pollutants receive more attention, Columbia Riverkeepers has proof that rising water temperatures is another reason. Continue>

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