I’ve been playing around for a while with the Greenbar toolbar. In a nutshell, I highly recommend it for keeping up with green news of all sorts; I expect to use it daily. You can download it at http://www.greenbartoolbar.com/

Here it is in my Firefox browser; it’s also available for IE.

I think the best parts of the Greenbar are the dropdown lists of blogs, sites, and feeds. Read the rest >>>

Where can you go around the web to find good information on simple green living? One of my projects here on this site is to review other websites, and over time I intend to have quite a list.

Now that green is finally fashionable, there are a lot of websites trying to take advantage of the latest trend. You won’t find those listed here. I am looking for websites on simple living and/or green living that provide useful information. Fine with me if they sell products too – hey, I link to Amazon every time I mention a good book! – but to be listed here, the sites have to be ones worth surfing to in their own right.

I’ll start today with a couple of the sites of my husband, Kelly Hart.

[1] Greenhomebuilding.com Read the rest >>>

Can you save enough money or power to bother with by replacing your older appliances with newer energy-efficient versions? After all, no large appliances are all that cheap, so there will be your out-of-pocket cost right away. If you are starting from scratch and building a new home or doing a major remodel, then it makes sense to choose the most energy-efficient appliances you can. But what about for the rest of us? Read the rest >>>

My husband Kelly and our close friend Peter Rice, with some help from me, built an earthbag home in Crestone, Colorado. We used thousands of bags meant to hold rice but they had been misprinted and we got them as seconds. Into them we put scoria — small volcanic rocks commonly used on lawns in dry climates. They are great insulation. We plastered the house, inside and out, with papercrete, Read the rest >>>