Forty miles north of San Francisco, on the site of a former industrial park, work is underway on the ambitious new Sonoma Mountain Village, a 200-acre development that aims to be truly sustainable. The development is America’s first to be certified as a “One Planet Community,” part of an effort to build healthy and sustainable neighborhoods in the UK, US and Canada.

Essay: As the world faces economic turmoil, cleaner energy can create jobs and reignite global growth.

If you're one of those people hoping to change the world in 2009, writer Mark Bittman says you can start by changing what you eat. In his new book, Food Matters, The New York Times food columnist writes about the environmental impact of industrial farming — and how individuals can make a difference by cutting down on the amount of animal products they consume.

As much as we all would like to profess that we are above the material nature of the holidays, we at Worldchanging Headquarters must admit that we wouldn’t mind having a few useful presents this season: an innovative new book, a subscription to our favorite magazine, helpful tools for the kitchen, or even a slightly lopsided, handmade scarf. And from this list, we created the Worldchanging Holiday Gift Guide.

Optimism is a political act. Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another.

I just finished putting together the first three prototypes of the emissions sensing device I'm helping design for Engineers Without Borders. The idea is to sense CO, CO2, and particulate matter levels near indoor cook stoves so the stoves can be modified

Open-source knowledge base speeds discovery, research and networking with more than 110 best practice documents and a secure directory of participating government officials from over 450 cities, counties and US states.

"The 11th Hour picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off by drawing the connections between seemingly disparate environmental and humanitarian issues (global warming, deforestation, poverty, globalization, etc.) and defining the space where the viewer

Around 85 percent of all the buildings that will exist in New York City in 25 years are already standing. 80 percent of the city's greenhouse gas pollution is created by building energy use. So however advanced green building methods become, however energ

Globalization has tended to move heavy polluting industries offshore, away from Europe and North America, and to places like China and Brazil. We still consume the lion's share of the goods these nations manufacture, but the carbon is emitted there, not h

Here, then, are some of the books that have tweaked our thinking in the last couple years (of course, we think highly of our own book as well)

As we've noted before, there is a strong relationship between environmental crises and social instability. Similarly, developing world communities with healthy environments and sound practices (from farming sustainably to building greenbelts) often see fa

A call to action for all worldchanging people everywhere.