20 images that have us falling in love (again) with Mother Ocean.

We love the ocean. We swim in it, we sail on it, explore and swing lazily in hammocks alongside it. We recently wrote about 10 ocean conservation groups that are going above and beyond preserving that which we love. So for this World Oceans Week, while those groups are out protecting, we thought we’d show you 20 ways you can fall in love with the ocean again.

We are completely smitten.

Pu’uiki Beach Park, Honolulu Hawaii

Ocean City, New Jersey

Florianópolis, Brazil

Port Campbell, Victoria, Australia

Shipwreck, Miami, Florida

Morro Bay, California

Ceide Fields, Ireland

Steamers Lane, Santa Cruz, California

Underwater Cave, Fiji

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean…

Oregon Coast

Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts

Coral Reef, Bermuda

“Jaws,” Maui Hawaii

Festival of Sails, Brisbane, Australia

Amalfi Coast, Italy

Ba-Ria Vung Tau, Vietnam

Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve, Oregon

San Agustinillo, Mexico

Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse, Maine

Top Image: Sawyer Glacier, Alaska

The post 20 Inspiring Images of Our Beautiful Oceans appeared first on EcoSalon.

Portland, Maine-based design house Angela Adams sources the wildly-changing landscape of its environs for its collection of richly textured and colored hand-tufted rugs. Seasonal shifts and the mercurial ocean are among several themes inspired by the sometimes rough-hewn qualities of Maine during any season, which are then pelted into two-dimensional representations.

Representations that could just as easily find a space on a wall, in a garden or on a dock. However, like the earthiness that inspires much of Adams’ collection, these creations are meant to be trudged and sat upon. And forever admired.

Materials include 100% New Zealand wool and cotton canvas backing. For more of the lush, artisanal collection, visit the company website.

Look for Lustables at EcoSalon and submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

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Musicians realize they can use their stage appeal for a greater green good.

As more and more musicians realize the power of song and their influence over devoted followers, a handful have begun to use the stage as a pulpit to proclaim the wonders of living consciously.

Adam Gardner, Guster guitarist and vocalist and co-founder of Portland, Maine based Reverb (an organization dedicated to assisting touring artists by making activities more environmentally sound), says more bands are looking at the impact of their tours and wanting to green them up. Some “green tours” have even become company-wide policy and practice by venue owners and promoters like Live Nation and AEG.

“As someone who has been in a band on tour for the past 20 years, my experience has been that lots of bands have felt badly about their impact on the planet while on tour, but just weren’t sure what to do about it and their road staff didn’t have the capacity to take on any other work,” Gardner says.

But with Gardner’s Reverb and their collective, the Green Music Group (including industry greats like Bonnie Raitt, the Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Linkin Park and Janelle Monae), Reverb has really guided the music community when it comes to taking action on behalf of the environment.

From bio diesel tour buses to sizable donations earmarked for environmental causes, these 20 musicians are creating closer connections with the planet and their fans support them all the way.

(To see even more artists who have made changes to their tour’s carbon footprint go here.)

Jack Johnson

Hawaiian born and bred Jack Johnson is to be applaudeded for his two solar-powered studios, tour buses with sustainable biodiesel, eco-friendly tour merchandise, and for promoting ride share programs to and from concerts. No newbie to the green touring scene, Johnson has a history of doing the right thing.

His upcoming Kokua Festival benefit concert for the Kokua Hawaii Foundation will help to support environmental education in the schools and communities of Hawaii so they will be lifelong stewards of the earth. Expect to see onstage collaborations with legendary musicians like Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne, Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, Dave Mathews, Ziggy and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley and more.

Fun

A recent addition to the Reverb roster is the band Fun whose current greening efforts include recycling, green cleaning supplies, carbon offsets for all tour vehicles as well as recycling backstage as well as in the front of the house during shows.

Ben Harper

Ben Harper, famous for more recent hits like “Steal My Kisses” and “Diamonds on the Inside,” has been promoting green initiatives for years with tour merch including organic cotton t-shirts and recycled CD covers and was the headlining act for Reverb’s Campus Consciousness Tour last April and continues to make environmental leaps and bounds.

Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow has been a force to be reckoned with in the music community when it comes to taking action on behalf of the environment. Some of her recent eco-initiatives have been filling her trucks and buses with B20 biodiesel fuel, implementing extensive waste reduction and recycling backstage and on buses, offering local and organic food backstage and calculating and neutralizing the carbon footprint from tour buses, trucks, flights and venue energy use by supporting renewable energy.

Maroon 5

Known for their commitment to the environment, Maroon 5 was honored at the 2006 Environmental Media Awards and recently pledged their time and energy toward Global Cool, a newly launched initiative to fight global warming by motivating a billion people worldwide to reduce their personal energy use. Reverb first worked with Maroon 5 on their 2008 tour.

Jesse Carmichael, keyboardist for Maroon 5 says: “As we make little baby steps, we get more and more people interested in making tours sustainable and more and more aspects of all of our lives sustainable. And hopefully just get some information and spread it around to people, and we’ll all do what we can and things will move forward in a good way.”

Neil Young

Neil Young uses biodiesel trucks and buses and runs 17 other diesel vehicles on vegetable oil. Plus, he’s Neil Young. Just his singing and guitar playing make the world a better planet to live on.

J. Cole

J. Cole’s upcoming “The Sideline Story Tour” will run through 13 dates between April and May. The tour, which is being presented by Reverb, is part a larger event titled the Campus Consciousness Tour. The tour is being slated as “half tour, half environmental campaign,” with the aim to inspire and activate students in an charged atmosphere while leaving a positive impact on each city they play in.

Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson’s own brand of farmer-supported, earth-friendly biodiesel appropriately named BioWillie is used with Nelson’s own tour buses but also to B20 blend-to highway-roving truckers, the largest group of diesel consumers in the country. Grist says in addition to his work with Farm Aid, an organization he helped found more than 20 years ago to assist family farmers, “Nelson has also been active in supporting the use of hemp in clothing and fuel, and protecting horses from slaughter.”

The Roots

The Roots, a Grammy winning hip-hop group have supported PETA, Global Inheritance and of course been Jimmy Fallon‘s house band since the show debuted.

Drake

Drake has educated his fans on the benefits of going green and how they can become involved in building a green economy. Initiatives have included his tour bus running on biodiesel, recycling and composting stations at each stop, biodegradable catering supplies and eco-friendly cleaning supplies, catering cooked with local, organic food, as well as merchandise made of sustainable materials.

Drake tells EcoSalon: “I’m able to utilize a certain amount of momentum, a certain amount of shine and project it on to these individuals who are doing such great things… It’s a tour with a message, it adds something to the energy of the tour.”

Bonnie Raitt

Rolling Stone says of Bonnie Raitt: “The bluesy Bonnie Raitt‘s activism predates almost any musician on the green circuit today, beginning most notably with her co-founding of Musicians United for Safe Energy as a response the nuclear incident on Three Mile Island in 1979.”

In addition to using B99 biofuel for her tour buses, Raitt has long been a proponent for clean energy.

Guster

Guster band member Adam Gardner is co-founder of tour-greening company Reverb.

Gardner tells EcoSalon: “Equally important to greening the tour itself is engaging the thousands of fans the tour reaches to take action and make changes in their own lives. We’ve found the key to this is making it fun and inspiring. The fact that the musicians are ‘walking their talk’ is also critical. We encourage musicians to be enthusiasts and not feel like they need to stand on a soapbox.  Reverb sets up Eco-Villages at concerts with local non profits, games, calls-to-action and green products and technologies for fans to check out. These eco-villages are extensions of the bands’ interests and support for environmental issues.”

Janelle Monáe

Grammy nominated singer Janelle Monáe has also had her time with Reverb on their annual Campus Consciousness Tour. Monáe told Ecorazzi last year that she loved the idea of bringing more of an overall experience onto college campuses. In addition to recycling and carbon offsets, Monáe’s concerts offered green cleaning supplies for buses and reusable water bottles for the crew.

“CCT has the right formula by combining music and activism and delivering it in a fun way to students,” says Monáe.

Dave Mathews Band

An on-going partnership between the Dave Matthews Band, Reverb and IZSTYLE, the Bama Green Project encompasses all of the environmental efforts undertaken by the band while on the road, in the studio or at home. In addition to working with the band, the Bama Green Project is also dedicated to educating DMB fans around the world about how to take simple and positive environmental actions.

Stefan Lessard bass player for the Dave Matthews Band tells EcoSalon: “One of the biggest things is getting the fans involved. Being out there and educating fans not only about what we’re doing as a band, but also what they can do themselves at home.”

Linkin Park

The fact that 1.3 billion people around the world do not have reliable and safe access to electricity recently inspired rock band Linkin Park to kick off a solar lighting initiative. The focus of Power The World is to supply solar powered lights to 1 million families by the end of 2012. The group has also pledged their support of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All initiative last month as well as educating fans about reducing their carbon footprint.

John Mayer

John Mayer’s brand, AKOG (Another Kind of Green) was created from the belief that small steps toward environmental sustainability can effect widespread change when multiplied by a great number of participants. AKOG has been present on Mayer’s tours since 2007.

REM

R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1988, and began to espouse political and environmental concerns while playing large arenas worldwide. Known for their long-standing commitment to a number of environmental, feminist and human rights causes, R.E.M. has also volunteered to join campaigns encouraging voter registration, handgun control, and rainforest protection.

Brett Dennen

There’s more to a rock star’s life than sex, drugs and rock and roll and up and comer Brett Dennen is just the fresh face to prove it. Subscribing to living healthy, cooking from his backyard garden, and eating mostly raw, Denne can be found selling Klean Kanteen reusable water bottles at his shows, and sending partial proceeds to The Mosaic Project, which “empowers children to create peace now, build communities across differences, and break down stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.” TLC reports that “low-income students will use the proceeds to attend a unique human relations outdoor school.”

The Fray

Formed in 2002, The Fray is an alternative rock band from Denver, Colorado. The Fray has worked with an eco-friendly philosophy since early in their career. Beginning with their collaboration with Reverb in 2005, the band has made efforts to lighten their environmental footprint. According to Rock the Green, In the recent past, The Fray has employed sustainable touring techniques like carbon offsets, recycling, and online carpooling resources for fans.

Barenaked Ladies

Barenaked Ladies is a Juno-winning and Grammy-nominated Canadian alternative rock band, best known for their light-hearted, comedic performance style. Reverb and BNL created Barenaked Planet and have worked together on tours and cruises since Reverb’s inception in 2004.

Image: AVclub, FanPop, slipped disc, Style Crunch

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was around 12 I helped my father gut a deer.

That night, before anything happened, my mother and I were talking softly by a crackling fire. It was November, with darkness falling early and the wood’s silence deafening, even perched on a cliff overlooking the choppy waves of Maine’s Kennebec River.

When my father burst in with the cold he just huffed one word: “Help.”

My mother, little brother and I sprang into action, throwing on our down jackets and obligatory Hunter’s Orange and grabbing flashlights to go where we knew a dead deer would be waiting; an animal that we probably saw many times gracefully moving through the woods, eating from the green meadows and sleeping at night in the nearby pasture with grass tall enough to hide most of me.

My older brother had been left behind in a farmer’s cornfield to watch over the deer in case any other animals were curious, and as we neared, we could hear him singing “America the Beautiful” as loudly as he could. It still breaks my heart to think about him like that.

My father’s kill wasn’t a clean one, so he’d had to track the beast with my brother all day, following spatters of blood on dry leaves and tramped branches until just after sunset when they found it in a nearby cornfield. The farmer had let my father finish him off with his .22, and we were there now to help get the deer back to the cabin.

“Help!” My father yelled after slitting the belly.

I reached in and felt the warm innards, seeing blood on me as my brother held the flashlight. Like some horror movie, it flashed on the broken corn stalks surrounding us, then the deer, then my other brother’s scared face.

I think of that experience often, especially lately here on Cape Cod, with the sounds of gun shots ringing in the conservation areas on early mornings when I walk the dog.

I think of how silly it is that full-grown men and women are in the woods with cold guns walking lightly, hunting their meat. Do we still need to hunt? Isn’t it a bit excessive when most Americans no longer need to kill animals for survival?

The hunters could say the same about us non-hunters growing our own lettuce. Why do we need gardens when we can go to the supermarket?

We’re all a bunch of grinning hypocrites.

Am I better than they are, buying my organic chicken at the local grocer from a farm I can’t confirm is really a utopian chicken society? How about that grass fed beef? Have the cows been getting their hugs?

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t eat meat at all, and even the little I do eat bothers me mostly because I don’t want to think about it as an animal. I do not want the consciousness of knowing where this part of my diet comes from. I want the disconnect to hide the fact I am eating something that was once living and breathing, to pretend I’m not pulling bags of gizzards out of the poor bird’s butt before I plop it into a crock pot.

This distance I have from my own food weighs heavily on me, but meat nights are easy and convenient for a family of four. Especially when you have a picky eater in the bunch.

Hypocrites.

Maybe we all should be hunting, gardening, foraging. Forced to reconcile ourselves to the facts that food comes from something, somewhere, someone and doesn’t magically appear on our favorite supermarket shelves.

The hunters are out again as I type these words. The pop, pop, pop makes me wonder where all these phantom deer are hiding. How many beautiful animals are being hog tied down to truck roofs and carted off to the butcher as I sit here? My memory travels back to the hunting camp on the Kennebec, where my mother and I took morning walks to see where the deer slept overnight – steam rising from the matted grasses where they had just lain, leaves laced with bits of fur to let us know, that once they lived.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: me’nthedogs

The post Between the Lines: The Disconnect appeared first on EcoSalon.

Surrounded by natural beauty, the Inn by the Sea on Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, Maine offers luxurious accommodations.

Fall in New England marks leaf-peeping season and beautiful sunsets, making it a perfect time to visit and enjoy the cool weather. Located just outside Portland, Maine is Inn by the Sea, a coastal destination where “luxury comes naturally.” Renovated extensively just a few years ago, it’s now nationally recognized for its eco-friendly practices.

Because Inn by the Sea is adjacent to a wildlife sanctuary, it is a designated wildlife habitat, making it one of the first hotels certified as “Green Lodging” by Maine’s DEP. It seems that the Inn is leading the hospitality industry in Maine through other aspects as well. It was the first to heat with biofuel, the first to be carbon neutral, and the first to have dual flush toilets as well. Other cool eco-features include solar heating for the pool, recycled rubber floors in the fitness room, recycled cork floors in the spa, and the inn even assists eco-conscience couples in planning green weddings.

Perhaps one of the aspects of Inn by the Sea that we love so much is that it goes beyond the corporate level by engaging guests with educational classes that are offered to pass on the environmental messages. Weekly seminars and garden tours are offered on the Inn’s five acres of seaside gardens, teaching guests how to plant for wildlife, while children learn about bug ecosystems during the summer’s “Bug’s Life” series.

If you go: Check out Sea Glass, the Inn by the Sea’s restaurant featuring local ingredients from produce to cheese to sea salt. Rates start at $189USD per night.

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Inn by the Sea, Cape Elizabeth, Maine appeared first on EcoSalon.

It’s not necessarily somewhere you want to hang out in winter. But you couldn’t pick a more pleasant seaside town in summer than Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with its gorgeous Colonial and Federal style houses and colorful brick buildings lining the harbor. Half the fun of visiting is eating fresh seafood at a restaurant along the Piscataqua River (if you can splurge, try the Wellington Room). Then there’s the added bonus of being able to look across the water and see Maine. Sure, it’s just the town of Kittery you’re staring at and not Winslow Homer’s cliffs, but still. Maine! Wandering the shoreline of two states in this particular cove, you feel like you’re getting two snapshots of historic coastal New England for the price of one.

If you do make the few minutes’ drive across the Memorial Bridge to Kittery, you’ll realize that, unfortunately, most people are making a beeline for the town’s gigantic outlet malls. We say skip those and head straight for the historic sites, like the small museum at Fort McClary, the Lady Pepperell House and other historic buildings in Kittery Point.

For museums on the Portsmouth side, check out cool paintings and photos of New England seaside life at the Strawbery Banke Museum or period furniture at the Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden. If you’re still hungry at the end of the day, you must stop by Bob’s Clam Hut, the quintessential New England seafood shack where you can get whole clams, clam fritters, clam burgers and clam cakes. Perhaps not the healthiest pick, but Bob’s, which showed up recently on The Food Network, is a member of the Green Alliance, a Portsmouth-based environmental group. Bring your own silverware to Bob’s and they’ll donate $2 to green causes.

Image: InAweofGod’sCreation

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