How Much Carbon Do You Produce?

About Carbon Offsets:

Fact - We all emit carbon dioxide emissions when we drive, fly, use electricity, or generate waste.

Solution - Now you can actually invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects that reduce carbon emissions. So on the one hand, you produce, and on the other, you reduce.

We, The Mountain Fund, have teamed-up with our partner Sustainable Travel International, and have added a carbon calculator and offset program to our website. Please check it out and use it often. You'll feel a whole lot better about your own actions to combat global warming. It starts with you.

Calculate your personal Carbon Offset HERE.

Save our Surf, Snow, and H2o for Future Generations

The Mountain Fund's partner, Save Our Snow Foundation, is on a mission to calculate, reduce, and offset greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, while also producing local alternative energy, and stimulating economic development for the outdoor sports industry.

Snow not only provides the medium for recreation in summer and winter sports, but also provides three quarters of the world's drinking water, irrigation for agriculture, and the key for life on our entire planet.

Hot dog super-skier Alision Gannett founded Save our Snow and has created a web site with tons of timely and useful information for ways we can reduce energy consumption and the resulting carbon release that comes from it.

Did you know...
+ The average home produces 12 tons (2,400 lbs.) of Carbon for heating and cooling.
+ An average car (20 MPG) -produces 6 tons (12,000 lbs.) of Carbon a year.
+ A medium flight round trip - 2.5 hours or 800 miles - produces 1.2 tons (2,400 lbs.) of Carbon.

You can take action! Buy renewable energy. Buy local, organic foods, clothing and products. Use Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs. Carpool, buy a hybrid or switch to biodiesel. Get an energy audit.

More about this foundation HERE.

How Green is Your Gear?

Check out Sustainable Travel's GREEN List...

Outdoor equipment and clothing is enormously popular. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, 161.6 million Americans age 16 and up participated in at least one outdoor activity in 2005.

Unfortunately, many of these products are produced through intensive energy and resource use, under oppressive labor conditions or with harmful toxic materials.
For example, the EPA recently stated that Teflon is a likely human carcinogen, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, which is widely-used in outdoor equipment, releases carcinogenic dioxin and is considered a health hazard from production through disposal.

The good news is that a growing number of companies have incorporated sustainable practices into their operations and are producing environmentally friendly products.

Sustainable Travel International, STI, has published a Green Gear Guide. The products described in the guide are produced using resource efficient, recycled, renewable, and or recyclable materials, and are offered by distributors that gain fair prices for the local producers of their goods, allowing you to enjoy the outdoors in a more eco-friendly manner.

We encourage you not to buy less, but buy better this summer. Remember corporations respond to consumer demand, so vote with your dollars!

Leave The World a Better Place...

One of the first partners we had at The Mountain Fund was Sustainable Travel International. We think they're an awesome organization and a few minutes spent on their web site will convince you of that.

Their mission is to promote sustainable development and eco-friendly travel by providing programs that help travelers and travel-related companies protect the environmental, socio-cultural and economic needs of the places they visit, and the planet at large. While many parts of the world have taken a leadership role in creating and promoting sustainable travel and tourism initiatives, such as tourism certification and carbon-offset programs, similar programs are virtually non-existent in North America and many developing countries. They aim to change that.

STI's current priorities include:
· Provide educational resources to travelers and travel providers, and assist them in making positive contributions to environmental conservation and socio- cultural sustainability.

·Develop, adopt, and market sustainable tourism standards and practices through the "Sustainable Tourism Eco-Certification Program" (STEP)

· Enable and support the use of "MyClimate" carbon offset tickets, enabling travelers and travel providers to offset their climate impacts from air and land travel.

Sustainable Travel International now offers "MyClimate", a unique service that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Through the "MyClimate" program, travelers, corporations, travel service providers, and academic institutions can take concrete action to fight climate change by investing in WWF-certified carbon offset projects that help to neutralize the negative impacts of their air and ground travel. Concern about the impacts of travel and tourism on the environment and local cultures has increased in recent years. In the US alone, nearly 55.1 million people express a preference for unique and culturally authentic travel experiences that protect and preserve the ecological and cultural environment.

Click HERE to visit their website.

Mountain Fund Staffer Featured on Yahoo's Hot Zone

Jul 04, 2007 -- Christine Egger read a story about a boy trapped in a troubled life. Then she did something remarkable. She helped set him free.

More Than Talk-

After reading our story (Hot Zone's) about Yubaraj Khakada, a Nepalese teenage boy who dropped out of school to support his family as a parking attendant in Katmandu, Hot Zone reader and Mountain Fund staffer Christine Egger made it her personal mission to find a way to get him off the streets and back into school.

She reached out to other Hot Zone readers and through partnerships with the online philanthropy group GiveMeaning and the anti-poverty organization Mountain Fund she created a program which has already raised more than $7,500.

Christine has been relentless in her efforts to create sustainable assistance for Yubaraj. The program not only has put him back in school but may also expand to help other children from his village.

Christine visited Yubaraj in Nepal in March and sent us the following letter and photographs. We thank her for this wonderful example of commitment, perseverance and success in helping to change the life of another.
Dear Hot Zone Team,

"In February we wrote to let you know we were ready to enroll Yubaraj in school and were hoping to raise the funds we needed to do that. It is such a thrill to tell you that we reached that goal and Yubaraj is now a full- time student!!!!"

"The enclosed photos were taken in early March, when I had the chance to meet Yubaraj and our volunteers in Katmandu. It was thrilling, and surreal, to be actually talking with Yubaraj after thinking about him every day for almost a year!"

"We gathered at the Mountain Fund office just a few blocks from where Yubaraj had been parking motorcycles last year."

"Yubaraj gave the immediate impression of being just a really nice kid, incredibly grateful for what we were doing, and more than a little overwhelmed by it all. Aid workers Basu Gnawali, Scott MacLennan, Puskar Gurung, Sudhir Lama, and Phurbu Thokra were there too. Each of them have played a key role in this project and it was just wonderful to be able to see them with Yubaraj and to be able to say thank you in person for everything they'd done."

"Dinesh Wagle was there, too. He's the Nepali journalist and blogger who was with Kevin Sites when they met Yubaraj last May. Yubaraj was really happy to see Dinesh again and you should have seen the HUGE smile on Dinesh's face - he was obviously thrilled for Yubaraj that the Hot Zone article had had such an impact on his life."

"While we talked, Dinesh helped us explain to Yubaraj how all of this support for his education had come together. Yubaraj knew that his conversation with Kevin Sites had started a chain reaction, but he hadn't really understood just how many people had been affected by his story and how the Internet had connected all of them."

"We explained that the people who were helping him weren't wealthy or extraordinary, but that many people were giving what they could so that together we're able to support his education."

"Several people had written messages to Yubaraj on the GiveMeaning site, and we had them translated into Nepali so he could read their words of encouragement as he began the work of preparing for school."

Read the rest of the story and see the pictures HERE.

About The Mountain Fund -

Our mission is to organize grassroots non-profit and non-governmental organizations from a diversity of disciplines, and to support and coordinate these organizations' efforts to eliminate poverty, its causes and symptoms, in developing mountain communities.

Website: http://www.mountainfund.org

The Mountain Fund
Scott MacLennan
email: mtnfund@mountainfund.org
phone: 800-743-1929