Green living can be gorgeous living! Turn your house into an eco-home with Danny Seo! He’ll visit a company in Brooklyn that turns ordinary recyclables into bold and beautiful kitchen countertops and show off a smaller scale project you can do at home.

China's Three Gorges Dam is one step closer to being fully operational today. Chinese engineers blew up a temporary dam holding back the waters of the mighty Yangtzee River, allowing the river to reach its full height, more than 500 feet, behind the dam. The dam - a highly controversial project that has been many years in the making - will not be totally operational for three more years, but construction was completed last month.

Score another point for Portland, the king of green cities.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that sprawl is bad for the planet and density is good. Does that automatically mean living in a city is better for the environment than living in a suburban or rural area? Not necessarily. How environmentally sound your lifestyle is depends less on where you live than how you live.

'Urbs

Manhattan, in many ways, is green. Most people use mass transit or walk, rather than drive. Most also live in apartments, which can be heated and cooled more efficiently than houses. Virtually no one has lawns, so there's little need for fertilizers and pesticides. "By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world," David Owen wrote in the New Yorker, in a story extolling the enviro virtues of living in New York City, specifically in Manhattan. "The true challenge," the article said, "is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan." Because what's true about Manhattan is not necessarily true about urban areas in general.

I was just about to bite into a delicious chunk of tofu last night when one of my dining companions pointed at my chopsticks and told me they were destroying the planet. Chopsticks? Sure, they always seem wasteful to me, like those little wooden coffee stirrers that people use once to swirl the milk in and then throw away. But I'd assumed they were a byproduct of other timber uses, and had never really considered them before. Turns out disposable wooden chopsticks are a huge problem.

You're planning a vacation to a remote corner of the world, to see breathtaking scenery and wildlife. You want to take in as much as possible with minimal impact. And you want your money to go toward helping local communities continue to protect their natural resources. The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), an international nonprofit, "promotes responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people." That's ecotourism in a nutshell - in a protected rainforest in Brazil, for example, or a wildlife reserve in South Africa. So what could be wrong with this? Read on.

Sustainable business practices are fairly new on the fairways, but the golf industry, after years of bad publicity, public pressure, and dedicated activism, is slowly and voluntarily changing its ways. Here's the dope: first we'll give you the bad news and then move on to all the reasons golfers should be hopeful.