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Hello, Taprootians!
In our thinking about how to celebrate Earth Day this year, we knew we wanted to offer incentives to folks who aren’t on green web hosts to move over and further green their projects/organizations. So we made an offer of a 30% discount for new clients today (enter: earthday2010 at sign-up if you’re interested.)
That didn’t feel balanced, however, as it didn’t honor the folks who have already taken action. In reward and thanks …

Here in the Pacific Northwest where rain falls from the sky with a near-comic regularity, nothing outs you as a n00b faster than using an umbrella. That opening whoosh of nylon inspires a smug Pavlovian eye-roll response from most of us in the great wet North. Here, a ‘light sprinkle’ is shorts weather, soldier — and don’t you forget it!
In a place of such liquid plenty it’s hard to fathom how precious a resource water is, and yet, according to the FAO, by 2025, 1 800 million people will …

If you’re anything like me, the last time you actually cracked open a phonebook, “social networking” required leaving your home and the “Blogosphere” was just a twinkle in the eye of the Intarweb. Yet, with the irritating faithfulness reserved only for those things in life you really wished would go away, the Phone Book appears, year after year, plastic-sheathed and anxious to be useless. To illustrate my point, I reference the picture that accompanies this article. This photo is of one of FOUR bins at Chad’s condo today. …

As a time traditionally known for its rampant excess, the winter holidays give us several opportunities to make healthier choices for our planet. Below we’ve listed just a few ideas to help you green your holiday!
1) Trim the Tree Responsibly!
We all know the scent of a real tree is one of the best parts of the holiday season, but the amount of energy it takes to grow, harvest and transport real trees each year can be a terrible weight on the environment. As well, faux trees, while re-usable, are …

If you’re like me and you get a little bit of macabre pleasure from things like picking at scabs or biting at hangnails, you are probably similarly amorous of those little cans of compressed air.  There’s something supremely satisfying about using them to clean your keyboards –waking sleeping dustbunnies with a surprise burst, sending bits of cracker and lint flying at incalculable speeds.  Good times, good times.
BUT, it’s not so much with the eco-friendly. Nor are many of the commercially-available computer cleaning supplies commonly available.  So how can you clean …

For those of us in the north, Summer has arrived – and with it comes the annual dilemma; How do we stay cool without wasting energy?
Of course, the most enjoyable way to stay cool would be to spend every summer afternoon lazing about in a river fed by snow melt that just happens to flow through our back yard — and for those of you who have this luxury, please email me your address and ready your guest room — but for the rest of us, with day jobs and …

So, you’re ethical – you bike to work a few days a week, compost your leftovers, contribute regularly to your local foodbank. Your business has a great recycling program, you turn your monitors off at night and use all-natural cleaning products. All-in-all, you feel pretty good about your footprint — as well you should! But there’s one more thing you may not have thought about; your web hosting!

A great many folks aren’t actually aware that such a thing as green web hosting is possible. And for those that are, the benefits of green hosting might be a bit of a mystery. This article aims to answer the question of why green web hosting is relevant to you, your website and the planet.

Taproot Green Web Hosting is the proud Internet home of the American Center for Sustainability — a Portland-area grassroots organization who has, thus far, distributed over 65,000 plants, free of charge, to local farms, gardeners and non-profit organizations in Oregon.
ACS’s ongoing mission is to faithfully steward their 120 acre farm (Rain Fire Ranch) in Sherman County, Oregon.  As an introduction to Oregon’s sustainability community in 2007, ACS sowed 15,000 seeds and distributed the starts to local gardeners.
In 2008, ACS raised the bar to 50,000 and distributed those free of charge …