Now that I'm involved in a lot of environmental causes, I receive some eco-friendly catalogs. My favorite one is called VivaTerra, which sells a lot of home decor items. Most of the items are made from natural or recycled products, like reclaimed lumber or recycled aluminum and glass. As I was looking at the catalog, I saw a reference to NativeEnergy.com. This organization promotes wind power, including wind turbines on Native American reservations. They also have a program called CoolWatts, which I found really interesting. Here in Indiana, renewable energy is only about 1-2% of the energy mix, while coal supplies more than half of the state's power. This leaves one with few choices if one wants to use say, wind power. NativeEnergy.com provides another option. With the CoolWatts program, you can purchase renewable energy credits in an amount equal to the average number of kilowatts a home uses in one year. The credits are then used for wind power, where it is available. So, even if there is no wind power option available in your neck of the woods, you can still offset your own carbon footprint a little by promoting wind power usage (and a real market for wind power) in other areas. I think this would be a great idea for a gift for someone interested in alternative energy. There are some other sites, such as one for adopting a windmill; I'm going to look into that as well, maybe even as a class project for one of our local schools. I like the idea of being able to do something to encourage wind power use, even if our utilities in Indiana aren't moving in that direction yet.