On April 1st, we embarked on our mission to bring positive environmental stories and essays to your browser or newsreader every week day. So far, the response has been great and all of us are heartened by the diverse, thoughtful, solutions-oriented community that is starting to form here. I’ve already learned so much from the articles and comments, not to mention from editing the site itself. It’s truly a beautiful thing to watch our fellowship grow.

Today I’d like to highlight some of my favorite articles from the last seven weeks. From participating in democracy and deciding to reach beyond “sustainability,” from cooking with kids to hitting the brick wall of realizing the enormity of the task ahead of us, we have covered a lot of ground, and we will continue to do so. But one thing will always remain constant: our commitment to falling in love with the future enough to take responsibility for making it clean, just, and beautiful.

Conducting nature, or why sustainability is not enough lays out The Sunny Way’s entire reason for being. Responsibility, happiness, and love shows us how to discern what’s real and the importance of commitment.

In Getting kids excited about cooking and What we can do about kids and commercialism, Stella points to new (and old!) ways of being with our children that encourage them to take an active role in the world around them, in everyday actions and in learning to think critically.

In Mass Power Shift: Ain’t democracy grand? Uli shares her experiences in lobbying the Massachusetts State Legislature to adopt stronger climate change measures. She also tells us about the amazing Avory Lovins and his talk on Winning the Oil Endgame.

City girl Rena learns about lots of different kinds of eggs in An imperfect dozen. In On purists, she also points out the ugly side of sharing one’s knowledge and discusses how to avoid the purist trap.

We address why we must stop fighting America’s Culture War in Sitting out the Culture War, and our mixed results in our first attempts in The 11th Hour and Megan’s Earth Day debacle.

And in our first podcast, Anatole shares the story of Global Generation and the amazing work they are doing with urban kids in London to connect them to the environment in which they live.

Matt, Jen, and Stella tell us all about the pleasures of old stuff; Fawn describes for us how her busy family of 4 produces less than one bag of trash a week; and Victoria does the math on how much trash she has diverted from the landfill over 13 years of composting—over a ton! Astounding.

Finally, Rich shares some great videos from Al Gore and James Brown to get us on our feet and moving.

Thanks for joining us so far, and I hope you’ll jump in and join the conversation. I can’t wait to see how it unfolds, can you?