What can we learn from Will Ferrell about surviving in extreme environments? What's greener: The cork, the cap, or boxed wine? What do Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, and Owen Wilson know about going green? Today's Eco-Beat has the scoop on all the latest green news and tips.

Will Ferrell Goes Wild Nothing brings out Will's wild side like eating roasted caribou brains with Bear Grylls in Sweden's frozen north country. Watch Will learn how to survive and thrive -- and cry for mama -- in one of earth's extreme climates. Check out a teaser.

Green Winos: Cork or Cap? Even though 90% of cork is produced in Europe, it's still probably the greenest option out there. For one, using cork helps preserve Europe's sustainable, carbon-sequestering cork forests. Second, you can reuse corks to make sweet bulletin boards.

Museum's Cast Gives Green Tips Being star is tough when ruthless kid reporters from National Geographic Kids bombard you with questions about going green. Check out the cast of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian as they come up with practical green tips on the fly.

Mitsubishi Truck Month + Goats! What's Mitsubishi's idea of an economic recovery effort? In rural New Zealand, it's giving away a free goat with each truck. Goats, they explain, are "hardy, versatile units" like their trucks. Plus, goats are more effective weed controllers than toxic sprays. Hmmm.

Documenting the Garden Wars? These days, the popularity of urban gardening is exploding. A few years ago, however, LA led an effort to shut down a very impressive community farming effort. Luckily, filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy was there to catch it all on film.

Green in a Flash:

• Is GM going to be forced to axe the Volt?
• The US Navy saves 87% of electricity by switching their light bulbs.
• Small-scale wind turbines are selling like hot cakes in the US.

Want some help in picking out the perfect eco-wine to go with your organic hummus? Why is Jessica Alba auctioning off her used baby gear? Looking for ways to keep your Bonnaroo experience in harmony with the planet? Today's Eco-Beat has the scoop on all of the latest green news and tips.

Good News for Green Winos If you're like me, you've learned from experience that the wine aisle is not the best place to research green wines. Thankfully, the Sierra Club has teamed up with expert winos to select the 40 tastiest eco-friendly wines on the planet.

Celebrities Support Clean Water Auction Wanna score some movie star schwag while also helping provide sustainable, clean water for those who don't have access? One of the items is Jessica Alba's hand-me-down diaper bag "filled with baby goodies." That just doesn't sound right.

A Cleaner Greener Bonnaroo? OK, it's debatable whether the word clean could possibly apply to a four-day outdoor festival, but Bonnaroo organizers have set out to top their prior award-winning efforts. Check out this year's plan for optimum greenness.

The 48 Ton Photo-Op If you live in Manhattan, you might remember that horrifying Air Force One flyover from a few weeks ago. Yeah, well not only did it unnecessarily create a huge panic, but it was also a perfectly good waste of 48 tons of CO2.

Plastic Bags Are Arts and Crafts Fodder Can the ubiquitous plastic bag be the next hot homemade fashion item on the West Bank? Apparently, with just an iron and a handful of colorful plastic bags, Palestinian craft gurus are turning plastic bags into gardening gloves, purses, picture frames, etc.

Green in a Flash:

• San Francisco OKs a giant solar farm.
• Bust out the spandex, because this week is Bike to Work Week!
• Kansas approves a coal power plant as part of a "renewable energy bill," hmm.
  

If you are a wine lover and on a quest to be eco-friendly, you may have tried boxed wines, organic wines and local wines. How about wine from a LEED certified winery?

Cade Winery is working to be the first LEED Gold certified winery in Napa Valley and they are doing all sorts of things to get there. The buildings of the winery feature natural ventilation, there is a plug-in for electric cars, and bike racks and even a shower for cyclists who come for a tasting. The winery is also dedicated to keeping a portion of the land in a land trust so that there will be open space as part of the land usage.

Hopefully the wine is tasty and it will be a perfect option for a green wine.

[Via Green Building Elements]

It's no secret that I'm a fan of all of the great apes, and I like a nice glass (or three) of wine almost as much. So it was a pleasure to find out that now I can indulge my love of grapes, and apes with the Orangutan Outreach Red Apes Wine.

It's the perfect way to donate to a great charity!

Despite the name, Red Apes Wine comes in red and white flavors: five Chilean varietals -- sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and merlot -- plus a sparkling Spanish cava.

Orangutan Outreach teamed up with Custom Grapes to create the wines, which cost $19.99 per bottle. Seven dollars of each bottle goes directly to Orangutan Outreach's work to save and protect the endangered red apes in Indonesia.

You can buy the wines -- they make a great gift for the wine or animal lover in your life -- here from Grape Surfer, "America's Charity Wine Shop".

I love the group's suggestion that you plan a benefit around the wines, like a holding a wine-tasting event with proceeds benefiting great apes conservation.

Okay, who's ready to try all six with me?

Typically Beaujolais Nouveau wines are released the Thursday prior to Thanksgiving, which means many bottles of the fruity French vino can be found scattered around the turkey covered and pie-laden countertops of whatever house I happen to be dining in.

This year the red wine is going green, thanks to Boisset and Georges Duboeuf.

First, a quick study: Beaujolais Nouveau is a fairly light red wine created from Gamay grapes. As you may have guessed, it is from the Beaujolais region of France.

I am not going all handmade for the holidays this year, but I am looking for quality handmade gifts I can give to fill in around the edges of store bought gifts. Some of my family members have agreed to swap handmade gifts with us, for others, I haven't even suggested it. We are also planning gifts of cookies, homemade bread and homemade jams and jellies for some of our friends.

I am not sure if I will attempt making wine at home, but this post on how to do it makes it seem pretty simple. All the homemade wine stories I have heard involve things exploding in the basement when they have over fermented. Of course, the other challenge is finding some organic grapes you want to use - I can usually only find red seedless.

According to the recipe you can also use apples or berries. Strawberry wine anyone? If I can find a good price on some organic fruit, I might give this a try since we have everything else we would need. I am definitely going to work on making some rosemary limoncello (or a mint lime version for mojitos) for gift giving. Who doesn't want a little tasty hooch in a mason jar for Christmas?

Whatever your plans, you'd better get started. There are 49 days left.

Labor Day is always a great time to do something new, take some time away from the daily grind and explore your local community. If 'local' includes the San Francisco Bay area than plan on a fantastic food and wine event this coming weekend. The Slow Food Nation '08: Come to the Table brings together biodynamic, organic, sustainable wines from around the country plus speakers, films, cooking demonstrations, concerts, tours, hikes and more. I happen to think exposure to a myriad of eco-friendly wines and fantastic food is a great way to spend the weekend -- and apparently so do a lot of others. The midday events are already sold-out but I believe you can still get your tickets online for the Saturday or Sunday evening tasting events. It's only $65 for a ticket to the taste pavilions -- $45 for the under 21 crowd.

[via Vinography]

Earlier this week, I wrote about Tyler Colman, otherwise known as Dr. Vino, and his conclusion that wine-in-a-box (or the more sophisticated "wine cube") was more environmentally friendly than wine in glass bottles, especially if your wine is traveling long distances due to the weight of the glass.

A reader wrote in a comment with a great question, "I can recycle my bottle easily, can those plastic bags the wine is actually in be recycled? Or will most of them end up in the ocean?"

Well, the president of the Glass Packaging Institute, Joseph Cattaneo, weighs in on that exact issue, in a letter to the editor in the New York Times. Cattaneo contends that glass bottles are greener than wine boxes. Cattaneo writes, "Calculating a carbon footprint based solely on trucking capacity is myopic and fails to consider the carbon costs for extraction and manufacturing." Cattaneo talks about all of the energy that goes into making a wine box, which, according to him is greater than that to make a glass bottle. And of course, going back to our reader's question, most communities recycle glass, unlike wine boxes.

Confused? I am. Maybe the answer is to try to drink wine that is as local as possible, and go with the glass bottle.

Traditionally, wines that come with a screw-top have carried the stigma of being cheap and inferior -- probably because most of them were freakin' terrible. These days, more respectable wine-makers are turning their back on the cork. While their marketing departments say that the screw-top protects both taste and the environment, many green-types think the switch is little more than a greenwashed cost-cutting measure.

According to Treehugger, corks allow a tiny amount of air to seep into most bottles. Up to 10% of these bottles get "corked" (i.e. go sour) because to the inconsistency of the old-school method. Losing 1/10th of your product due to faulty packaging seems pretty wasteful. Others contend that amount of wine lost is more like 1-2%, and that the renewable cork forests of Europe contain one of the world's highest levels of forest biodiversity -- like the Spanish wolf. Restrict their usefulness, they say, and these forests will get plowed under by developers.

One thing's for sure, this could be bad news for the makers of those high-tech corkscrews.

[via Treehugger]

Obviously drugs -- even the legal ones -- aren't very good for you, and most will get you arrested (or worse), but rumor has it that some people still take them anyway. So, with that in mind, the least you can do is work towards a more sustainable habit. To see all the substances we've covered in this series, see our Guide to Green Green Drug Use.

Picnics in the park are one of the joys of summertime. And a little al fresco wine is just the thing to make a good day great. But what about the empties?

Of course, you can recycle wine bottles, but if you're anything like my friends (not me, just my friends, I swear) you can go through a lot of pinot grigio in an afternoon, resulting in a correspondingly large number of glass bottles to schlep to the nearest recycling center.

Between the hassle factor (must. resist. urge. to. dump. bottles. in. regular. trash!) and the clumsy drunk factor, you have many opportunities for ungreen actions.

Three Thieves and Bandit Wine to the rescue! It's wine in a box, but this is a whole new level of box-ness.

Over the counter

Recreational drugs

The Quick List:

Over the counter

• Aspirin
• Ibuprofen
• For kids
• Burn remedies
• Bug repellent
• Herbal remedies

Recreational

• Heroin
• Crack and cocaine
• Beer, wine and vodka
• Hallucinogens
• Kava Kava, Morning Glory, and Nitrous Oxide
• Meth: the planet and your body
• Cigarettes
• Green drug trafficking

A few decades from now, Brits could be washing down their fish and chips with a glass of fine Luton Merlot. In a new book, The Winelands of Britain: Past, Present and Prospective, Professor Richard Selley predicts that global warming could soon permit the growing of varieties of grapes that currently don't thrive in the cool British climate.

Historically, certain types of wine grapes adapted to cool weather have been planted in the UK to make wines like Riesling. However, a potential rise in average temperature of 5C by 2080 would open the door to production of wines such as Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, which at present are mostly grown in environments like Chile or southern France.

In his book, Selley discusses the history of viniculture in Britain and suggests that southern parts of the British Isles could soon be suited not only for "hot" varieties of grape, but tropical fruits such as currants and sultanas. Whether that's a reasonable trade-off against fiercer storms, flooding, and increased failure of more temperate crops will remain to be seen.

via [The Telegraph]

It bothers me every time I crack open a bottle of wine that I throw the cork away. It just seems like an item that should be recyclable. Or at least reusable. Turns out it is. In more ways than I thought possible. There are web sites, such as Just Corks, devoted to selling items that give wine corks another life as bulletin boards or wreaths. One of our other bloggers wrote about this idea and more a while back. But I came across some more innovative ideas submitted by readers to Thrifty Fun that I thought were worth sharing as well. Here are my five favorite posts from that site on how to reuse wine corks (you get bonus ideas as some contain more than one way to reuse corks!):

• "For the garden cut them into tiny pieces, unless you have a chipper or blender to run them through. Put them into the garden. They are great for absorbing and holding moisture for your plants."
• "For a craft project for kids, use the cork as the "body" of a stick figure made with pipe cleaners. Take some of the "fuzz" off the ends and stick them into the cork. You can use a cork cut in half for the head. It lets the kids be very creative with the rest of them, adding things like clothes and accessories."
• "Wine corks can be placed in a simple picture frame with a wood backing, glued in - in rows or a pattern and it makes a great hot plate or serving tray."
• "Take old bottles, fill with herbs, green and red peppers fruits, etc. fill bottle with vinegar and cork. Corks can also be lined up and glued around a picture frame, put in a decorative jar, glued on the backs of doors for doorstops, cut into slices for placing under tabletop glass, glued under chair legs."
• "I'm using champagne corks to hold place cards and table numbers at my wedding. Just make a small slit in the top, slide in the cardstock and it makes for a beautiful, but simple place card holder. And it's so much cheaper than buying them in the store."

[via Thrifty Fun]

Yes, I know they're tiny and seem insignificant, but after you finish that bottle of Pinot, corks go on the landfill just like other hard-to-recycle doodads. But they don't have to - keep them around and use 'em like this:

• Stick pins, nails or earrings in them for safe keeping


• Insert an eye hook into one end, tie ribbon to it, and - voila! - cheap tree ornaments for the wine lover in your life

• With some hot glue and a stiff backing, you can turn your corks into a rockin' DIY bulletin board

• Save the bottle, too, and make your own bath salts. When you're finished with the salt recipe, use a funnel to slide the salts into the clean wine bottle, and fasten with the cork. Tie some ribbon around it, and it's a cute hostess/Mom's Day gift.

• Chop them into circles and use them to even out wonky table legs, make furniture slide more easily, or protect wooden floors from scratches.

And just for fun, check out Terramia for a fun gallery of cork-intensive craft projects.

Tyler Colman, of Dr. Vino.com, in a piece in the New York Times, writes about wine's carbon footprint. That's right, even your wine has a carbon footprint, and according to Colman, it might be bigger than you think.

According to Colman, the difference between organically- and conventionally- grown grapes is relatively small in terms of carbon intensity. It's the journey that your wine takes from the winery to the shop that is the issue.

For example, a Napa Valley wine in a glass bottle emits 2.6 pounds of carbon dioxide during its production and transportation from Napa to San Francisco. But take that same wine and send it to the East Coast, and you're looking at 5.7 pounds of carbon emissions; ship it by air and its carbon footprint quadruples. Why? The glass bottle weight contributes of course, so alternative packaging can help a bit.

But what's the best answer according to Colman? Drink locally-produced wine. Easy enough!