So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish! Publisher Shea Gunther Leaves EF to Try Out For The NBA

Goodbye EarthFirst.com readers. After 10 months of steering the Editorial Voice at EarthFirst.com, I’m leaving to become the new Eco Politics blogger at the soon to be launched Mother Nature Network, a green blog and media company founded by Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell and Atlanta adman Joel Babbit. (MNN is looking for College Correspondents, check out details here or here)

I’m really excited about the new gig, but will miss the platform I had here at EarthFirst.com as well as the regular cast of writers, readers, and regular commenters, both cool and rightwingtard.

I have to give some big props to EarthFirst.com’s lead writer Stephanie Rogers. She started writing for me in the Spring and soon proved to be a Human Awesome Content Machine. I would feed her links and a few sentences of editorial direction and she would churn out engaging, smart, readable gems of stories every time. She turned half page rants fired off by me in the middle of the night into 3,000 word essays that got people thinking, linking, digging, and talking. She’s one of the best I’ve worked with and I’m looking forward to getting into a position to hire her again.

A big thanks to my partners at EF, Jordan Heller and Michael Hoffman. They gave me the keys to the blog and let me run with it. I know that EarthFirst.com will come out of the current slump in the market stronger and more ready to take on the world under their leadership.

So long. Thanks for the all the fish.

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Rhubarb ftw.

EarthFirst.com Welcomes Cartoonist Jerry King to the Team, Let the Snarky Cartoony Madness Begin!

I’m really excited to welcome award winning cartoonist Jerry King on board with EarthFirst.com. Jerry has drawn toons in all sorts of well known mags and has thousands of greeting cards under his belt. He’ll be skewing his focus green for us here at EarthFirst.com and I’ll be bouncing ideas over to him when cartoonish things pop up in the news cycle.

We’ll carry Jerry’s green cartoon once a week in addition to a weekly caption contest.

Here’s EarthFirst.com’s Comix #1. Print this sucker out, it’ll be worth a few million bucks in 50 years (which will be worth about $.22 by then).

Thanks to my pal Yan over at Geeks Are Sexy for passing on Jerry’s contact info.

Dipping into the EarthFirst.com Archives for Green Sex Toys, Wind Powered Win, Miniguns, and Stupid Americans

Happy Sunday!

EarthFirst.com has been officially live since mid-May when we finally shook the ugly off and put up our current design, but I was writing daily for months before that. We didn’t have many readers at the time and used the space to work on our editorial voice.

I’ll be pulling out the old files from time to time to share a few good posts. This week we’ll be revisiting the archives for green sex toys, badass chain gun tree saws, idiot manchild CEOs, stupid Americans, and a whole lotta f-bombs.

Take a stroll down EF.com memory lane with us…

• 2,250 Minigun bullets to cut down a tree

• The hippies had it right- stop washing your hair!

• What’s better than a good wine buzz? A green wine buzz!

• Fsck Planet Earth. Fsck fsck fsck fsck fsck. But, you know, spelled with a u.

• Garbage, especially plastic, is choking the planet.

• This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention, but 18% of Americans are very, very stupid.

• How’s that GM stock doing Bob Lutz? Couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

• Break out the glass dildo and get your sexy green groove on chemical free! Yes, organic sex toys.

• OMFGFSMBBQ, do I want one of these all terrain transformer like badass super truck. Yeah, so it’d rip shit up, but damn, take a look at this thing!

Bad Idea: Hotlinking Image From Your Blog. Even Worse Idea: Hotlinking to Earthfirst.com From Your Blog

Everyone can relax. It turns out that Global Warming is a big hoax. We can all calm down and get back to our normal lives of driving Hummers and leaving the front door open in the winter.

I was a little worried there for a bit after hearing that the worlds scientific community had come to consensus on the fact that our world was heating up due to the massive amounts of CO2 and other nasties that we’ve been pumping into the air in earnest for the last few hundred years or two.

Imagine how relieved I was to read that Myck Kilcup, a homeschooled teenager who wants to be a history professor when he grows up, has figured out that Global Warming is a bunch of ‘hot air’. He knows because he’s been a ‘fierce fighter against the theory of “global warming”‘ and has written “lots of papers” about the subject. Plus, his dad thinks he is a “great thinker”, and you know that dads are never wrong.

Myck doesn’t let verifiable fact get in his way and has figured out that the planet has gone through this all warming before in the High Middle Ages when all of a sudden there was a lot more food to go around.

Isn’t that awesome news! Instead of looking at the possibly destruction of our world (at least the parts that allow us to live comfy lives) due to our shortsighted use of fossil fuels, we’re looking at a booming harvest (and maybe an Inquisition or two)! Kick ass! Bring on the High Middle Ages Redux!

Thank the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster that the world has mental giants like Myck Kilcup to think for us, otherwise we’d all end up as slaves to Al Gore and his army of Carbon Trading Evil Doer Greenies.

(Lesson to be learned here: Don’t hotlink to EarthFirst.com photos, especially if you’re some asshat teen with a stupid theory on Global Warming. See Myck’s blog and the hotlinked photo while it’s up. If Myck gets around to taking the photo down you can see a full sized screenie by clicking the thumbnail there on the left)

EarthFirst.com is Getting It’s Party Groove On Tonight With The Sierra Club and Lightbulbs for Leadership

We’ve written about the Sierra Club’s Lightbulbs to Leadership campaign a couple of times but wanted to do something more tangible to help them bring awareness to the cause.

So we’re joining a few tens of thousands of people throwing a party tonight to bring people together to speak up about the necessary action we need to take to fight Global Warming. We’re so excited that we’re actually throwing two parties- the EarthFirst.com (mid)West crew will be throwing down the green groove in Chicago and I’ll be having an East Coast party in my backyard tipi here in Maine (as seen in a rave I recently threw in it in the photo above). Our friends at Ecorazzi are joining in on the fun with a party in Miami.

The premise of the Lightbulbs to Leadership campaign is that changing our lightbulbs is not enough. It’s a great small step that We The People are taking, but isn’t enough to really turn things around. For that we need our politicians and leaders to get in line and start getting some laws in place to drive change.

So we’ll be focusing on how people can take real action in prodding politicians to action. We’ll be talking about Global Warming, the need for higher fuel efficiency standards, investments in Green Jobs, cutting worldwide emissions, and then capping it all off with some good ol’ fashion letter writing. There will be a conference call with Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope and Green for All President (and EarthFirst.com’s #2 Hottest Guy in Green) Van Jones thrown in the middle for good measure.

Check out the video we shot earlier this week:

Find a House Party near you over at Lightbulbs to Leadership and get out tonight to help save the world from ourselves.

Link [Lightbulbs to Leadership]

Photo credit: Flickr user pokpok313

EarthFirst.com Keeps the Hotness Train Rolling: The 25 Hottest Girls In Green (#16-20)

EarthFirst.com is taking one of the most popular internet memes and turning it on its head–instead of a roster of starlets that drove hybrids, what if we introduced you to 25 beautiful women who had real environmental credibility? We’ll be posting five new faces every day this week; you can catch up on 25-21 here, or continue on below. Without further adieu, I give you the 25 Hottest Girls in Green, #16-20.

20. Simran Sethi

SImran is currently holding an endowed chair at the University of Kansas, where she teaches about the intersection of journalism and the environment, but that’s not the only thing she’s done to get on this list. If you’ve ever taken a glance at Treehugger, then you’ve seen some of her work–Simran was a co-creator, hosted, and oversaw all video and audio content on what quickly became the largest environmental website int he world. She’s also hosed forums with such luminaries as Al Gore, and has been making documentary films since graduating Smith College in 1992.

19. Summer Bowen

Summer Bowen is another Treehugger contributor–they’re spread across this list like Kudzu in the deep south–and the founder of BTC Elements, an online retailer for sustainable products that are free of sweatshop labor. She’s a Berkeley grad, and was educated in social justice and environmental education, two fields that clearly influenced the foundation of BTC.

18. Melissa Etheridge

This cancer survivor and LIve Earth performer has taken using stardom to campaign for change to a new level. Her webiste has green tips, sure, but the concert tour fleet is powered by biodiesel? And have you seen this stirring call to action on stage? This is how celebrities should act.

17. Victoria Everman

Victoria, who runs the aptly-named Victoria-E.com as a personal website, green blog, and front for her modeling and freelance writing careers (she’s busy), is an Indiana farm girl turned San Francisco powerhouse. In addition to modeling and her freelance career, she’s also available on All Green Magazine, Building Green TV and Greenopia. She’s also been involved in the GreenMUA project, connecting green makeup cosmetic companies to makeup artists.

16. Kimberly Jordan Allen

Kim is one of several wirters on this list that have contributed to Eco Chick, an environmental site focused on catering to a demographic that it defines as not “men or moms.” She also has had her work featured in E-The Environmental Magazine repeatedly, and is an avid outdoorswoman and conservationist.

EarthFirst.com is looking (staring?) at the hottest environmentally friendly women all week–be sure to come back tomorrow for #15-11 and follow along all week as we slave away to find the Top 25 Hottest Girls in Green! Don’t worry Ladies, we have the Top 25 Hottest Guys in Green coming up next week.

EarthFirst.com Proudly Presents The 25 Hottest Girls In Green (#21-25)

They’re one of the most widespread formats on the internet: countdown lists of hot women. They can be related to any number of things; sports, politics, music videos–but I’ve always thought the ones related to the environment were kind of weak. While some trolls like to assail the quality of the women on the list, or brilliantly proclaim that they wouldn’t kick somebody out of bed for eating crackers, it’s always been odd to me that the green lists didn’t seem to actually require any environmental cred, leaving us a bunch of starlets who own hybrids. There’s so much more than that, though, and here’s the start of a list of 25 beautiful women who work daily to make the planet a better place. We’ll kick out five a day for you all this week, so tune back in tomorrow for #16-20.

(Publisher’s note: Don’t worry ladies, we haven’t forgotten you. Our very own Stephanie Rogers will be looking at the 25 Hottest Guys in Green starting next week.)

25. Leona Johansson

Of course this list would decry starlets, and then start with a porn star. Of course, Leona is no ordinary porn star; she’s effectively laid claim to the title of “world’s first eco-porn star” by first doing the deed with her boyfriend Tommy Hol Ellingsen onstage at a music festival, and then launching “Fuck for Forest,” (link very, very NSFW, in case you didn’t know) a not for profit organization that’s raising money, leading activism, and creating awareness…through porn.

24. Siel Siel

Siel is the face behind Green LA Girl, which is about as close as you’ll get to one-stop environmental info for those of you lucky enough to call the land of the pacific sun and warm air home. A freelancer and graduate student in a PhD program for creative writing, she’s also leading a car-less life, a bold eco-step in one of the most congested cities in America.

23. Dr. Heidi Cullen

Dr. Cullen is the Weather Channel’s chief climatologist, and has consistently advocated for the green movement– she’s appeared on Treehugger Radio, served as a “Convenient Truths” video judge for the Discovery Channel-powered website, and most importantly, penned a letter to the American Meteorological Society called “Junk Controversy, Not Junk Science” calling on them to no longer recognize any meteorologist that didn’t understand the threat of climate change. This of course, sent conservatives into an uncontrolled rage, and made Heidi the 23rd hottest environmentalist.

22. Laurie David

Laurie is a trustee on the National Resources Defense Council, and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, but those aren’t her most famous contribution to the environment. Ms. David also produced An Inconvenient Truth, maybe the biggest single piece of global warming awareness ever undertaken. She’s led an online march against global warming, has been named Glamour’s woman of the year, and has produced a multitude of small projects about global warming, including TBS’ Earth To America. And she’s hot.

21. Alicia Silverstone

Remember when I assailed lists of starlets that own hybrids? Alicia is always on them, but with very good cause–she’s been a vegan since 1998, and was elected “sexiest female vegetarian” by PETA in 2004. The actress is an outspoken advocate for the environment and animal rights, appearing in a series of ads for PETA, setting up a pet sanctuary in Los Angeles, and, yes, driving a hybird. Of course, more importantly, she’s taken the step to make every part of her life as environmentally friendly as possible–even her dog is a vegan.

EarthFirst.com is looking (staring?) at the hottest environmentally friendly women all week–be sure to come back tomorrow for 1#6-20 and follow along all week as we hammer out the Top 25 Hottest Girls in Green!