Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
April 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

The Economy Changes, So Change With It
BYLINE: By PHYLLIS KORKKI.

E-mail: [e-mail]

SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; CAREER COUCH; Pg. 15
LENGTH: 860 words
Q.You are looking for a job just as the economy appears to have entered a recession. Every day you hear about layoffs, hiring freezes and budget cuts. Do you need to look at your job search differently?

A. Yes, you probably do. During a downturn, you may need to work harder and longer to find a job, and be more flexible and creative in assessing your options. But hiring experts agree: plenty of jobs are out there, and certain types of workers remain in high demand.

The important thing to remember now is that as large numbers of jobs are disappearing, ''whole new categories of jobs are being created that nobody ever thought of before,'' said Richard Nelson Bolles, author of ''What Color Is Your Parachute?'' (Ten Speed Press), a career book he has revised continuously since 1970. For example, as demand for certain manufacturing jobs dries up, demand for some technology jobs is swelling.

In fact, some companies that are laying off workers are still recruiting, said Bernadette Kenny, chief career officer for Adecco, the staffing company. That is because ''most organizations know that there will be a talent shortage'' as baby boomers continue to retire, she said.

Q.What needs to be done differently as you look for a job in this environment?

A. Accept that you may be unable to move into a replica of the job you just held, Ms. Kenny said.

It is time to think harder about transferring the skills you have or acquiring new ones to move into a new type of job or industry, Mr. Bolles said. Be receptive to the idea that in the future you may be working ''in the service of new technologies,'' he said. That could involve taking relevant classes. Certainly, if you do not have computer skills, it is imperative to obtain them now, he said.

When the economy is in turmoil and businesses are shrinking or closing, entrepreneurs are always on the lookout to fill unmet needs, perhaps in a brand new way, Mr. Bolles said. Job seekers need to stay alert to what these needs are by following the business news, and adapt their skills to the companies that are trying to meet them, he said.

Of course, check the job boards, keep your resume sharp and send it out regularly. But during a downturn, understand that you may need to do much, much more than that.

At a time like this, it is more important than ever to use personal and professional networks, including alumni associations, so you can obtain referrals to help you stand out from the crowd, said Jon E. Zion, president of Eastern United States operations for Robert Half, the financial recruitment agency.

Professionals need to stay involved in continuing education, and certifications are especially important now, he said. ''You need every advantage as the economy slows and the competition for jobs increases,'' he said.

Q. What are some areas where demand for workers remains high?

A. Challenger Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm, recently identified the following areas as relatively ''recession proof'': education, energy, environmental services, health care, security and international business.

Demand is strong for people with expertise in information technology, including software business applications, Web development, database management and network administration, Mr. Zion said. And certain areas in accounting and finance are still thriving. People with credit collections and accounts-receivable skills, for example, should have less trouble landing a job, he said.

Q.What if you are unemployed, running out of money and have no leads in sight?

A. Consider taking an interim or contract position at a company, Mr. Zion said. Remember, he said, ''a substantial percentage of those positions convert to permanent status.'' The need for interim project financial professionals remains high, he said (take note, refugees from Wall Street and the mortgage industry).

But sometimes even interim jobs will be elusive or unremunerative. In that case, you may have to take ''a stopgap job,'' Mr. Bolles said. This could be ''work you hate'' that pays the bills, he said, but keeps you motivated to continue with a more ambitious search.

Q.All the rejections you are receiving, compounded by all the negative headlines you see, make it hard to stay optimistic. How do you keep from feeling discouraged?

A. Make a list of what you need to do each day, and ''try to keep your emotions separate from the tasks of the day,'' Ms. Kenny of Adecco said. ''This is not the time to say, 'Well, there aren't any jobs out there, so I won't look,''' she said.

During a downturn, it is all too easy for job seekers to ''live in a state of fear,'' said Janet White, author of ''Secrets of the Hidden Job Market.''

''It's that fear that's going to poison anything they try to do,'' she said. ''Whatever you believe to be true becomes your experience.''

With the right attitude, on the other hand, job seekers ''can often turn this crisis into a real advantage for themselves'' by moving their life in a new and more fulfilling direction, Mr. Bolles said. When they look back, he said, they often realize that ''this is the best thing that ever happened to me.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: LAYOFFS (90%); RECESSION (90%); ECONOMIC NEWS (90%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (90%); RESUMES & CURRICULA VITAE (89%); EMPLOYMENT GROWTH (89%); EMPLOYMENT (89%); EMPLOYMENT SERVICES (89%); FACTORY WORKERS (78%); JOB CREATION (78%); EMPLOYMENT LISTINGS & SITES (78%); BUDGET (78%); ECONOMIC DECLINE (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (72%); CONTINUING EDUCATION (67%); BABY BOOMERS (66%); ALUMNI (50%); EMPLOYMENT SEARCH (91%)
COMPANY: ADECCO SA (55%)
TICKER: ADEN (SWX) (55%); ADE (PAR) (55%); AD11 (FRA) (55%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS561310 EMPLOYMENT PLACEMENT AGENCIES (55%); SIC7361 EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES (55%)
LOAD-DATE: April 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: DRAWING (DRAWING BY CHRIS REED)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Interview
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

848 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami
BYLINE: By RANDALL STROSS.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: [e-mail]

SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; DIGITAL DOMAIN; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1035 words
E-MAIL has become the bane of some people's professional lives. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook.

Mr. Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh -- the phrase ''e-mail bankruptcy'' has been with us since at least 2002. But he declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly replace those that are deleted unread.

For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it doesn't take all that many to seem overwhelming -- for me, the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire.

Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of correspondence without being crushed.

When Mr. Arrington wrote a post about the persistent problem of e-mail overload and the opportunity for an entrepreneur to devise a solution, almost 200 comments were posted within two days. Some start-up companies were mentioned favorably, like ClearContext (sorts Outlook inbox messages by imputed importance), Xobni (offers a full communications history within Outlook for every sender, as well as very fast searching), Boxbe (restricts incoming e-mail if the sender is not known), and RapidReader (displays e-mail messages, a single word at a time, for accelerated reading speeds that can reach up to 950 words a minute).

But none of these services really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies. And a recurring theme in many comments was that Mr. Arrington was blind to the simplest solution: a secretary.

This was the solution Thomas Edison used in pre-electronic times to handle a mismatch between 100,000-plus unsolicited letters and a single human addressee. Not all correspondents would receive a reply -- a number were filed in what Edison called his ''nut file.'' But most did get a written letter from Edison's office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries. They became skilled in creating the impression that Edison had taken a personal interest in whatever topic had prompted the correspondent to write.

To Mr. Arrington, however, having assistants process his e-mail is anathema. His blog, after all, is dedicated to covering some of the most technically innovative companies in existence. ''I can't believe how many commenters think the solution to the problem is human labor,'' he wrote.

Another recipient of large volumes of e-mail messages, Mark Cuban, similarly avoids reliance on human proxies. Mr. Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and various ventures, saw Mr. Arrington's post and wrote a short note on his own blog: ''2,433 Unread E-mails. I Feel your Pain.'' Mr. Cuban said that he receives more than a thousand messages a day, which he still processes himself, including the 10 percent that are of ''the 'I want' variety.'' (These were what Edison called ''begging letters.'')

That personal touch is sorely missed in the e-mail replies we receive from large companies. Customer service automation subjects a message to semantic analysis to extract its general meaning, then dispatches a canned answer at the least possible cost. It aims to provide a ''close enough'' reply; it does not provide reassuring words conveyed by one human to another.

Mr. Cuban and Mr. Arrington likewise could resort to a technological solution, preparing an auto-response for their public e-mail accounts that would warn strangers that the volume of e-mail precluded even a skimming, let alone dispatching responses. Yet both have resisted that course.

We all can learn from H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), the journalist and essayist, who was another member of the Hundred Thousand Letters Club, yet unlike Edison, corresponded without an amanuensis. His letters were exceptional not only in quantity, but in quality: witty gems that the recipients treasured.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, the author of ''Mencken: The American Iconoclast'' (Oxford, 2005), shared with me (via e-mail) details of her subject's letter-writing habits. In his correspondence, Mencken adhered to the most basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he believed writing back was, in his words, ''only decent politeness.'' He reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would expect the same courtesy. ''If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.''

Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them all the same day. He said, ''My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.''

YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work.

Today's advice from time-management specialists, to keep our e-mail software off, except for twice-a-day checks, replicates the cadence of twice-a-day postal deliveries in Mencken's time.

Ms. Rodgers said that Mencken was acutely disturbed by interruptions that broke his concentration. The sound of a ringing telephone was associated in his mind, he once wrote, with ''wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell had been run over by an ice wagon at the age of 4.''

Mencken's 100,000 letters serve as inspiration: we can handle more e-mail than we think we can, but should do so by attending to it only infrequently, at times of our own choosing.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (90%); ELECTRONIC MAIL (90%); INTERNET & WWW (79%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); STARTUPS (71%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (73%)
COMPANY: GEOPHARMA INC (60%); FACEBOOK INC (58%)
TICKER: GORX (NASDAQ) (60%)
LOAD-DATE: April 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: H. L. Mencken answered all his mail on the day it arrived, whether 10 letters or 80, one approach to parrying today's waves of e-mail messages. (PHOTOGRAPH BY UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

849 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

The Librarians Call It an Anomaly (It Wasn't Rattling Chains)
BYLINE: By LISA W. FODERARO
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; NEW PALTZ JOURNAL; Pg. 33
LENGTH: 1077 words
DATELINE: NEW PALTZ, N.Y.
It appeared as a meandering shadow in the suspense section of the Elting Memorial Library here, pausing on the wide plank floors in front of a bookcase with titles like ''Night Call from a Distant Time Zone,'' ''A Gathering of Ghosts'' and ''Still Among the Living.''

Was it was a spirit looking for something to read in the middle of the night? Or was it, as some killjoys suggest, just a spider?

A surveillance tape picked up the image about a week before Halloween, and the mystery has deepened rather than dissipated with time. The video, called ''Ghost in the New Paltz Library,'' has been viewed on YouTube by some 4,385 people so far, while library employees and patrons continue to debate the possibilities and recount the coincidences.

Not only was it almost Halloween. Not only did the ''anomaly,'' as the library officially calls the shadow, appear in the oldest part of the building, where the shelves are filled with ghost stories. But the library had erected a temporary altar, or ofrenda, used in celebrating the Day of the Dead in Mexico. The altar was built in conjunction with a communitywide reading of Rudolfo A. Anaya's ''Bless Me, Ultima,'' a coming-of-age novel filled with magical realism.

''Some people say that since we had an ofrenda here, maybe that conjured up some spirits,'' said John A. Giralico, the library director, noting that some people had left notes on the altar to loved ones lost, along with photographs.

It all started on Oct. 25, when Jesse Chance, the circulation director, noticed that the library's alarm was turned off. He then saw that the door on Main Street that leads into the old stone and clapboard part of the library, dating to at least 1802, was ajar.

So Mr. Chance checked the surveillance tape from the room inside, with its wooden staircase, crooked door frames and mustard-colored bookshelves. He saw that a board member had left the door open after a meeting the night before: one mystery solved. But as he was rewinding, he also saw ''this weird squiggle on the screen,'' he recalled. The time stamp reads 3:30:09 a.m. as an amorphous gray smudge moves jerkily from the staircase over to the shelves and then disappears through the wall. ''The first time I saw it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up,'' Mr. Chance said. ''I don't know what it is, but it's really eerie looking.''

Mr. Chance, who said he did not believe in ghosts, told Raymundo Rodriguez-Jackson, a clerk who does believe, as he put it, that ''entities and spirits can exist.'' Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson, who grew up with a grandmother who had an ofrenda in her home, set out to duplicate the image on the tape. He placed a finger against the glass dome protecting the camera, as well as a rubber band and a paper clip.

''We're logical people -- we're library people,'' Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson noted. ''Whatever I put up there fuzzed up a little, but you could still tell what it was.''

For a while, the story of the enigmatic shadow stayed among the stacks. Some library workers came down on the side of a spider that somehow slipped under the dome and, at such close range, might appear blurry. Others argued for a ghost or at least some unexplained electrical energy.

''It's definitely not a spider because you can see right through it,'' said Avery Jenkins, a library volunteer, as he studied the tape on a computer at the library's front desk. ''If it was a solid object like a spider, there'd at least be a dot you couldn't see through. I just think some people don't want to believe.''

Carol Johnson, coordinator of the library's local history and genealogy section, the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection, unearthed information about two deaths that occurred in the Main Street house, where the library took up residence in 1920. There was one obituary for Oscar C. Hasbrouck, who owned the home and died in 1899 of what was then called consumption. A second obituary reported the death of Charles V. Auchmoody, a boarder in the house who died in 1908 after suffering ''a stroke of paralysis.''

But after The Times Herald-Record wrote about the puzzling videotape in March, interest spread in this village, 75 miles north of New York City, where hippie culture and New Age enlightenment meet easily. On Main Street, tie-dye is the fabric of choice and drum circles converge and disband at whim. One patron told Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson that she wanted to bring in dowsing rods, which supposedly can detect not only the presence of water, but ghosts as well.

''It makes sense if you believe we're all light beings,'' explained Karen Hedley, a mother of three and a massage therapist, who stopped by the library with her 7-year-old son, Ian. ''When you're in a physical form, you're just vibrating at a lower frequency. Some people who die get stuck between worlds.''

After seeing the video, Ms. Hedley said, ''Something about the movement is not buglike -- it's more purposeful.''

But another patron, who gave his name as Sneakers Daystar and his occupation as entrepreneur, declared it a shadow, possibly from a bat. ''I'll believe it's a ghost when I see this book on the floor,'' he said as he pulled on a binding with his finger to demonstrate.

New Paltz, founded in 1678 by 12 Huguenot families who had fled religious persecution in France, may be home to other spirits. Every Halloween, Historic Huguenot Street, a nonprofit group, gives a haunted-house tour of its National Historic Landmark District, with its seven original stone houses, the earliest built in 1705, and burial ground.

And students from the State University of New York at New Paltz invariably wander into the library looking for confirmation that the house they are renting is haunted. Ms. Johnson directs them to a long shelf of books with detailed records about older houses in the area.

''People come in and say they hear noises or books fall off the shelves or they just get a funny feeling,'' she said. ''They don't realize that if you live in an old house there's a good chance someone died there. The only time I felt sorry for a student was when we looked up the address and found out that it was a funeral home in the 1890s. He was pretty creeped out.''

Ghost or no ghost, Mr. Giralico, the director, sees a delightful subplot in the whole mystery. ''Look what else goes on at libraries besides our usual offering of books, films, periodicals and programs,'' he said with a gleam in his eye. ''It's great publicity.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: HALLOWEEN (90%); TALKS & MEETINGS (77%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (76%)
LOAD-DATE: April 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

850 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 20, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

LIVE
SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; Magazine Desk; THE GREEN ISSUE; Pg. 62
LENGTH: 4638 words
CHARGE THYSELF: When Freeplay's windup radio came out in 1996, it set the standard for eco-tech purity. Originally meant to deliver information to isolated populations lacking electricity, the Freeplay was a shortwave radio that ran only on human power. Thirty seconds of winding time produced 40 minutes of listening time. And now it's starting to gain allies in its heretofore lonely battle against the battery (which Americans currently consume at the rate of three billion a year). An Idaho start-up called M2E Power is in the forefront of kinetically charged consumer electronics. Having just secured $8 million in venture capital, M2E (''motion to energy'') expects to introduce a biomechanical-energy harvester within 12 to 14 months -- a device about the size of an iPhone that, when carried by a ''low-active person'' during the course of a couple of days, will generate a charge sufficient to power your cellphone for an hour or two.

The ultimate aim is a self-charging cellphone. Bad news for the battery industry, yes -- but M2E isn't all about moon-eyed idealism: half of its business model is devoted to military applications. Sony's Odo products, on the other hand, are a line of toys -- camera, music player, etc. -- that run when you crank, twirl or shake them. There are, alas, no plans to sell them. But when they started appearing at future-design shows this year, they resonated deeply with trend bloggers, an influential and conflicted group that is dedicated to ecological correctness but also likes really cute gadgets. No less fantastic is the equally conceptual Bamboo Phone imagined by the Dutch designer Gert-Jan van Breugel. Powered by a hand crank and made of bamboo, it also contains seeds, so a tree will shoot up in the landfill where it's buried. WM. FERGUSON

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GREENER PIT STOPS: Even the most grease-stained ''turnwrench'' acknowledges that auto racing may be difficult to justify in the climate-change era. Driving endless miles around a track for spectacle may soon be looked upon as a capital offense. Nascar and the other racing disciplines are aware of this and are taking steps to prevent a reaction. While ethanol-based fuels may not be the magic bullet that politicians describe when campaigning in Iowa, for motor sports they represent a great leap forward from the leaded gasoline that Nascar phased out just last year. The Indy Racing League (for open-wheel cars, not the stock cars of Nascar) switched to 100 percent ethanol last season. The American Le Mans Series is into the next biofuel generation, with the Corvette Racing team using a cellulose-based blend derived mainly from wood waste instead of corn. Nascar is the big dog, though, and a switch to ethanol would not only be a P.R. coup, but it could also inspire the sport's fanatically loyal and brand-specific fans to look into alternatives to gasoline. Brian France, the C.E.O. of Nascar, says he is looking into moving away from gasoline, despite the great cost of re-engineering the cars' fuel lines. Still, for a sport that is all about going in circles, it's nice to see some new turns. ROBERT WEINTRAUB

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SWEAT EQUITY: Many people go to the gym to become more powerful. But at California Fitness in Hong Kong, an Asian-based subsidiary of 24 Hour Fitness Worldwide, exercisers are actually powering the gym. The program, ''Powered by YOU,'' was conceived by Doug Woodring, a Wharton grad, and Lucien Gambarota, a French inventor, who run an alternative-energy company in Hong Kong. When a member begins to exercise, the machine she uses captures the energy she creates as electricity (which would otherwise be lost as heat) and uses it to run a light above the machine. Gambarota says that a person can produce 50 watts of electricity per hour working out at a moderate pace. ''If you spend just an hour per day on a machine annually, you could generate 18.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity,'' he says. That's the equivalent of powering a three-bedroom home in New Jersey for 14 hours. Since the program made its debut last year, 13 exercise machines have been hooked up; the chain plans to extend the project to its 24 other clubs throughout Asia. ABBY ELLIN

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PETS: Americans spend more than $40 billion a year on their pets, more than the gross domestic product of all but 70 countries. An increasing share of this business is being devoted to helping companion animals tread more lightly on the planet. Jasmin Malik Chua, a correspondent for Treehugger.com, has written about how people can green their pets. ''For many people,'' she says, ''it starts off being concerned about their pets' health, especially after the scares about tainted pet food imported from China. After looking for safer food alternatives, the next step is finding sustainable and renewable products.'' Chua, who lives with her two cats in Jersey City, champions alternative sources like recycled newspapers or wood-waste products in favor of clay cat litter (a byproduct of strip mining). Chua also urges pet owners to substitute odds and ends found around the house for expensive plastic, petroleum-based playthings. ''Dogs and cats don't care how much you spend on their toys,'' she says. And sometimes merely being a responsible pet owner can have hidden environmental benefits. ''Microchipping your pet could be a green act,'' Chua says, noting all the gas guzzled and fliers printed when searching for a lost pet. Carol Perkins typifies the new breed of green-pet entrepreneurs. Her company, Harry Barker, sells dog beds and toys made from hemp and biodegradable poop bags made from soy and corn. Harry Barker's dog beds are stuffed with fibers made from 100 percent postconsumer-recycled polyethylene terephthalate, which itself is made from water bottles and other discarded plastic items. ''The stuffing is eco-friendly and just as fabulous as virgin polyester,'' she exults. JEFF STRYKER

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JUNK MAIL: ''We tend not to use the phrase 'junk mail' because 'junk' is in the eye of the beholder,'' says April Smith, a project manager at Catalogchoice.org, a free online service for consumers wishing to avoid unwanted catalogs. Junk or not, there sure is a lot of it to behold, with Americans receiving an estimated 19 billion catalogs in the mail each year, at a cost of 53 million trees and 5.2 million tons of carbon emissions. (This doesn't include credit-card solicitations or entreaties from charities.) Consumers can also reduce mail by signing up free at the Direct Marketing Association's mail-preference service (DMAChoice.org). The D.M.A.'s efforts are part of the paper and direct-mail industries' attempts to fend off do-not-mail legislation, under consideration in a dozen states, modeled on the federal do-not-call registry. A spokeswoman for International Paper, Amy J. Sawyer, has a different defense: ''The direct-mail industry generates $600 billion in economic activity annually and employs 3.5 million Americans nationwide. Mail helps consumers target their shopping and saves millions of automobile miles per year as people use the mail for everything from catalog shopping to DVD rentals.'' JEFF STRYKER

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NATURAL DEATH: Last summer a crematorium in Bath, England, announced that it would try to reduce harmful emissions by stockpiling the deceased until company burners could be filled enough to justify the 2.5 hour operation -- ''to minimize gas usage as an environmental issue,'' an official wrote. (According to recent estimates, the cremation of a human body releases about 100 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.) But with the new measures, the officials cautioned, some bodies would need to remain uncremated for a day or so. The reaction? Horror and dismay, despite the good intentions. In the United States, activists have been taking on mainstream burial rites for environmental reasons, too. According to the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization in Santa Fe, N.M., the ''death care'' industry uses, in a single year, ''more steel (in coffins alone) than was used to build the Golden Gate Bridge'' and enough reinforced concrete to ''construct a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.'' Steel and concrete have immense carbon footprints. Irrigating acres of parklike cemeteries or air-conditioning memorial buildings increases the environmental impact. ''People think you're lying there like Vladimir Lenin,'' says Billy Campbell, an E. O. Wilson-quoting physician who is considered a pioneer of the United States' green-burial movement. He began organizing environmentally supportive burials in rural South Carolina in the late 1990s, informed by a strict conservationist's orthodoxy: no harming of plants; shallow graves (to keep the body in the soil's ''living layer''); simple shrouds or even unadorned burial directly into the ground; and a maximum of 100 bodies per acre (as opposed to 800 to 2,000 in most cemeteries). He says his company, Memorial Ecosystems, which he runs with his wife, has performed 100 burials, and he developed the ecological standards of the Green Burial Council's approved providers. His newest site, Honey Creek Woodlands, sits amid 2,100 acres owned by Trappist monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, 20 miles outside of Atlanta. Graves are minimally marked and ecologically restored with sparse adornments like a wild ginger root or indigenous maple sapling. Think of it as a natural necropolis. CHRISTIAN DeBENEDETTI

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PLANT MORE TREES: Every schoolchild knows there is no poem so lovely as a tree. But does everyone know just how green they can be? According to Deborah Gangloff, the executive director of American Forests, a nonprofit conservation group, ''Three trees will sequester one ton of CO2 over a lifetime of 55 years.'' She notes that a carbon calculator on her group's Web site tells you how many trees you can have American Forests plant (for a $1 donation each) to make up for the miles you drive or the fuel you use to heat your home. ''This is a feel-good thing,'' Gangloff admits, ''but we are really planting those trees.'' American Forests programs have planted 25 million trees since 1990. Some trees do more good than others. When it comes to helping the environment, urban trees ''can be 15 times more effective than a tree merely standing in the forest,'' Gangloff says. Dan Burden, who founded Walkable Communities in 1996 in part to promote planting and maintaining trees in urban settings, claims in his booklet, ''Urban Street Trees,'' that ''a single street tree returns over $90,000 of direct benefits (not including aesthetic, social and natural) in the lifetime of the tree.'' Shade trees near residential and commercial buildings can reduce demand for air-conditioning; deciduous trees lose their leaves in winter, allowing the sun's heat through. Researchers have developed models to guide property owners on how to preserve and plant trees strategically to realize the greatest energy savings. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, for example, determined the impact of planting shade trees and found that costs of cooling dropped 8 to 18 percent and the costs of heating declined 2 to 8 percent when a residential building was provided with a tree canopy roughly equal to two strategically placed trees. JEFF STRYKER

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DISPOSABLE VS. COTTON: The heated debate over the environmental costs of diapers, a roughly $5 billion business, goes something like this: on one hand, the 25 billion or so disposable diapers used per year in this country are bad because they are made with petroleum-based plastics, account for more than 250,000 trees being cut down and make up some 3.5 million tons of landfill waste that won't decompose for decades. Cotton diapers, on the other hand, now enjoying a resurgence in popularity, cost less over the long run but require vast amounts of energy from the production of cotton, the washing and the distribution. Environmental and industry groups brandishing rival stats and studies have effectively declared a draw. Even an outspoken group like the Natural Resources Defense Council declines to take a trenchant position (''six of one and a half dozen of the other,'' a spokeswoman says). Apparently the only way between the two sides is to do without (which means teaching babies to use a toilet) or adopt some middle-way product like gDiapers, which combine cloth and flushable elements. The late Donella H. Meadows, the founder of Vermont's Sustainability Institute, recognized the conflict long before the carbon footprints of everyday objects were a mainstream concern. ''It's great to try to move our lives in the direction of ecological righteousness, but it's also true that every human activity has environmental impact,'' she wrote in an op-ed article that appeared in newspapers in 1990. In addressing the debate over diapers, she had what may have been the final word. ''From the earth's point of view,'' she said, ''it's not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.'' CHRISTIAN DeBENEDETTI

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COLIN BEAVAN: Last year was a time of intense lifestyle changes for the nonfiction writer Colin Beavan. He carried his own coffee jar to avoid disposable cups, shunned plastics, moisturized with almond oil mixed with beeswax and deodorized with baking soda. He pedaled his toddler daughter Isabella around on the back of a custom-made bicycle rickshaw, while his wife, Michelle Conlin, scootered to and from her job as a financial writer at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The family did without the TV, stereo and air-conditioner. (For the last three months, they unplugged the refrigerator and turned off the lights entirely.) Beavan and his wife made their own yogurt and vinegar, grew window-box herbs and composted food scraps. He lost 20 pounds. But what he calls his ''no-impact'' year, structured to minimize his carbon (and ecological) footprint, was also a fun year. People still came over to play guitar and charades with the family. Now Beavan is eating at restaurants again, but only orders vegetarian and turns down paper napkins. The lights are on in the house, but sparingly. His new sneakers are made from hemp and natural rubber. Even Conlin, who remembers loving to shop, has bought only a few work shirts. Beavan is writing both a book about last year, which is due out in 2009 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a daily blog (noimpactman.com) on a used computer. Coming off the no-impact rules was strange: ''We went to see a Nicole Kidman movie,'' he says. ''I was really excited at first, but then I felt overwhelmed by the noise. We left thinking, Hey, it might be O.K. not to do this again.'' Beavan and Conlin are still carrying their coffee jars: ''The other day, Michelle went to go get a coffee in a disposable cup, but then she stopped them before they put it in the cup,'' he says. ''She came out and said it just felt wrong.'' When I visited their apartment and left the lights on in the bathroom, Beavan got up to shut them off. ''Wasting electricity makes you as bad as Donald Rumsfeld,'' he said, gently. Later, he mused: ''A lot of people think that environmental living is hard or deprives you, but we need to change the system so that it supports environmental choices. The fact is, I liked living in a more durable way.'' TESS TAYLOR

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ECO ANXIETY: Ecological degradation is not only affecting our external landscape; it's also influencing our psychic one. Neologisms paint the picture: solastalgia is the depression caused when your local surroundings are damaged significantly; eco anxiety is a generalized worry about the environment. The therapist Linda Buzzell and the social worker Sarah Anne Edwards have defined another ailment, the Waking-Up Syndrome, and they recently wrote a paper with that title. ''There is an epidemic of anxiety,'' says Buzzell, who is also the founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy. ''People are starting to realize that they can't just blame the government and corporations, that it comes down to their own behavior.'' We've reached a point where a quotidian activity like bagging groceries raises existential questions about our ecological footprint. The six stages of the Waking-Up Syndrome sound a lot like the stages of grief. First comes denial, then a slow acknowledgment. This is followed by despair and anger at the realization that, in the words of Al Gore, ''We didn't ask for it, but here it is.'' LISE VAN SUSTEREN (sister to Greta, the Fox News correspondent) is a prominent psychiatrist whose own eco anxiety began a few years ago as she learned more about global warming. ''One of the things that is true of any type of trauma is that the more you are exposed to it, just like tennis elbow, the worse it gets,'' she says. Van Susteren remedied her anxiety in the same way she might counsel a patient: she managed it. She went to Nashville to train with Gore and now tours the country giving a slide show based on his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth.'' ''Anxiety is a tricky thing,'' she says. ''You want to be anxious enough to take action but not so anxious that you become paralyzed.'' Jerilyn Ross, a practicing psychotherapist and the C.E.O. of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, points out that eco anxiety and its related syndromes have not earned official designation in the annals of psychiatry. She does, however, acknowledge that something is going on culturally. ''Somebody came over to my house recently and didn't happen to see our recycling,'' Ross says. ''She said, 'Oh, don't you recycle?' It's as if everybody is judging everybody now. The social pressure is really intense.'' ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON

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SPORTING EFFICIENCY: You might be surprised to know that the National Football League has had an environmental director for 15 years: Jack Groh. He has been with the league since Brett Favre's second season in Green Bay, so he has credibility when he says the league's efforts are ''not done as a P.R. stunt.'' Rather, the attitude is that, as Groh says, ''the league would be better off in its bottom line'' using green principles. Groh oversees Super Bowl projects -- like a reforestation program in Arizona -- but he hasn't persuaded the N.F.L. to establish green practices for its teams. Major League Baseball, however, has just done so, a fact that irks Groh: ''After 15 years, that should have been us.'' M.L.B. collaborated with the Natural Resources Defense Council to draw up a comprehensive program for its franchises. Reducing the environmental impact of its travel and reducing the use of unrecycled paper are primary elements; how they will be enforced is unclear. In the National Hockey League, the Players' Association has teamed up with the David Suzuki Foundation, which created a carbon-offsets program for skaters. In the land of the Kyoto Protocol, Japanese professional baseball has enacted rules to speed up the games, shortening the time between innings, half innings and each pitch. The goal is to lop 12 minutes from each game, saving harmful emissions produced as a result of powering the stadiums. If only Groh could persuade the N.F.L. to eliminate a TV timeout or two. . . . ROBERT WEINTRAUB

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URBAN FARMING: Jules Dervaes and three of his adult children live on one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena, Calif., a block away from a multilane highway. On this tiny sliver of land, they manage to be mostly self-sufficient. ''This is our form of protest,'' says Dervaes, who is 60, ''and this is our form of survival.'' The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden. Dervaes's father worked for Standard Oil, but his son took a markedly different path. Dervaes moved into his current Pasadena home in 1985 -- temporarily, he thought. As the years passed and his hopes of relocating to the country were delayed, he ''decided that he wanted to see how much we could grow here,'' says his 33-year-old daughter, Anais. The family generates cash for their limited expenses by selling produce to local restaurants. Though Dervaes and his children are accustomed to the neighbors' strange looks at their crowded lot, the local chefs don't seem to share the skepticism. ''They'll call me in the morning and pick the amount that I need for that night,'' says Jim McCardy, who owns Marstons, a restaurant in Pasadena. ''The flavor is just incredible.'' CHARLES WILSON

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KATEY WALTER: Over the past few years, Katey Walter, a professor at the University of Alaska, has quickly made a name for herself -- she's only 32 -- by publishing papers in the journals Science and Nature on methane emissions in Alaska and Siberia, where she spends several months each year doing field research. The atmospheric concentration of methane (CH4) is far below that of carbon dioxide (CO2), yet it is 25 times more potent over a hundred years as a greenhouse gas -- and last year concentrations started rising after about a decade of holding steady. ''Our projections suggest that as the Siberian permafrost thaws, and lakes form and expand there,'' Walter says, ''the amount of methane coming out of that process is equal to 10 times the amount of methane now in our atmosphere.'' Walter says that most of the methane in the atmosphere, about 60 percent, comes from us -- from our landfills, livestock herds, rice farms and energy development (methane is in natural gas, which occasionally leaks from pipelines and wells). The other 40 percent comes from nature. When dead plants and animals decompose on the forest floor, they produce carbon dioxide. When they decompose under water, methane is the byproduct. If you've ever watched bubbles coming up from the La Brea tar pits on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, you've seen methane burps. Siberia's permafrost holds vast stores of ancient (and frozen) plant and animal matter; should that matter decompose under melting ice, there would be extensive burping. Another worry: warmer climates might allow ''seeps'' of additional methane stored deep in the earth's crust. ''The question is whether the permafrost acts as a lid'' and keeps these huge natural reserves from escaping, Walter says. So the fundamental goal is keeping the planet cool and the permafrost frozen. But she adds that there can be benefits in the gas that comes from animal waste and farming and from natural seeps. ''If we could capture the methane and utilize it,'' Walter says, ''we're doing two good things: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and reducing the need for shipping diesel to rural places, which is expensive and energy intensive.'' JON GERTNER

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FREE TO DRY: Alexander Lee has what he calls an immediate, IMBY (''in my backyard'') way to attack global climate change. As the founder of Project Laundry List, he is crisscrossing the country urging people to forgo electric and gas dryers -- second only to refrigerators in energy consumption among common household appliances -- in favor of hanging clothes out (after washing them in cold or warm water). That places him in the middle of a heated debate about aesthetics and class. Approximately 60 million Americans live in homeowner and condominium associations, and those sometimes have covenants banning clotheslines on the assumption that they look tacky and bespeak poverty, threatening both views and property values. Lee acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him. ''According to the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of the population thinks the dryer is an essential appliance,'' he says. Clothesline proponents are taking their case to state legislators with proposed ''Right to Dry'' bills. So far, 10 states have statutes limiting the ability of homeowners' associations to restrict solar-energy systems. But except in Florida and Utah, where laws specifically mention clotheslines, the question remains whether clotheslines count as ''solar-energy systems'' under the statutes. JEFF STRYKER

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JULIAN SINCLAIR: For years, Rabbi Julian Sinclair led a double life. He kept his two identities -- as a yeshiva-trained Jewish scholar and a self-described economist and policy wonk schooled at Oxford and Harvard -- apart. But the increasing portents of climate change convinced Sinclair that a religious response to what he calls ''the biggest big-picture policy challenge we face today'' is precisely what the world needs now. ''The environmental movement has been overwhelmingly secular for 40 years and has achieved amazing things,'' he says, ''but it hasn't yet figured out how to move people on a massive scale because it isn't telling the right story.' Sinclair says he believes that the ''doom-laden apocalyptic narrative'' favored by the mainstream environmental movement can paralyze rather than motivate necessary lifestyle adjustments. Conversely, he says religion -- which has been ''in the behavioral-change business for 3,000 years'' -- offers a distinct message of hope and boasts an impressive track record of moral persuasion: ''There have been watershed moments when religion has barged into public life, blown away the windbaggery of politics-as-usual and declared with irresistible force, 'This must change now!' '' Following the lead of the popular ''What Would Jesus Drive?'' campaign from the Evangelical Environmental Network and Jewish sustainability organizations like Hazon (''Vision''), Sinclair helped found the Jewish Climate Initiative. He is also the author of the forthcoming book ''The Green God,'' in which he consults the world's spiritual traditions for teachings about how humans can confront climate change. Regarding his own religion, Sinclair says Judaism regularly expresses spirituality through ''mundane deeds that awaken deeper consciousness.'' ''If going to the bathroom can be a religiously meaningful act (there's a blessing said after doing so), then switching to C.F.L. light bulbs can be, too,'' he says. Still, the economist in him urges first things first: ''Shifts in consciousness can take decades that we don't have. Trade in the S.U.V. -- then let's talk about the sacredness of the earth.'' LEAH KOENIG