Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A search engine that plants trees

Ecocho.com is eco-friendly search engine which plants five trees for every 1000searches made on its website. Ecocho uses Yahoo’s search technology to power searches made on their site and the resulting trees are purchased from advertising revenue generated on the site.

Ecocho has planted 6,571 trees at the time of posting this message. I know this. because I have made the ecocho search engine the home page on my computer.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Green-STEP: Making a difference to the environment

Green-STEP is one major break through in my personal life. With the help from like minded friends and my own resolve to make a difference to the environment I created a web site titled Green-STEP. I invite readers of this blog community to our web-site. And let me tell you that the moment you pledge yourselves to these or any other green measures in your own lives, then this becomes your own web site!
Recently Green-STEP organised an awareness program on plastic bags/covers pollution problem in Malleswaram, Bangalore on 6th Dec 2008. This event was covered by an article appearing in 'THE HINDU' newspaper dated 16th Dec 2008. On seeing the response/results, for once I feel I have been in action in my own life.
'STEP' stands for 'Sharing Thoughtful Environmental-friendy Practices'. In green-STEP website we have shared information on how each one of us as individuals can take simple but powerful 'ACTIONS' to make a difference to our environment. To give you an idea about Green-STEP, it talks about following issues:-
1) Urgent need to switch to cloth bags and avoid the highly polluting Plastic Bags.
2) Reduce, Reuse and if both are not possible then recycle! Be it plastics, paper, glass, steel, aluminium, brass, copper, etc., We must recycle all these and more, even if we can afford the world cannot afford such resource wastages.
3) In case you use an automobile, read how you can save fuel by reducing the virtual capacity of your fuel tank. Save fast depleting resources of mother earth at the same time add to your own bank balance:-)
4) Never drive your bike or car all alone. Drop some one on the way from a bus stand or auto stand. What does one loose by dropping some one on the way? Nothing! But what we gain is huge, we can arrest the maddening addition of vehicles to our city roads which is infact strangulating the smooth movement for the current road users. Unless we do something to this exponential addition of vehicles to our city roads, sooner are later we will definitely hit a wall and we will not even know what hit us!

There can be many more simple and effective green-STEPS which the readers of this blog may be aware and may want to share with the entire world. Do write in to me on sriram.greenstep@gmail.com and also feel free to tell me what you feel about these green-STEPs spoken about in this web site.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

A rakhi for trees; vriksha bandhan

The Taru Bandhan ritual being practised in the tribal heartland of Jharkhand has helped restore and conserve hundreds of acres of forestland, writes Moushumi Basu, a Jharkhand-based journalist.

The decade-old ritual was the initiative of a village school teacher Mahadev Mahato from Dudhmatia in Hazaribagh district. In her article Moushmi Basu reckoned that Mahato has helped restore nearly 25,000 acres of forestland - “For the natives of Jharkhand, the forest is an inseparable part of their life; why not include trees as part of our family and rituals,”. Palamau, Dhanbad, Chatra, Koderma and Hazaribagh are some of the districts that have taken the initiative in propagating this unique “green tradition”. Read the full article...