A nonprofit in Washington takes old computers, fixes them up, and sells them at a reduced price.

With winter just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to keep yourself warm, indoors or out. Synthetics and wool are the most common options for a base layer.

Oil and natural gas are the raw materials for most synthetic fibers, and fossil fuels are among the least sustainable resources out there. Producing polyester, the most common synthetic in long underwear, uses about twice the energy as wool production, and generates about four times the amount of CO2.

In addition, wool comes from a renewable resource. But raising sheep does require a lot of water, and sheep produce large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Wool becomes the clear winner when you add performance to the equation. It can absorb a lot more moisture than synthetics without feeling wet or cold. Wool also doesn’t smell as bad after you’ve worn it, it’s fire resistant, and it usually lasts longer than synthetic fabric.

Wool isn’t cost-free, but it is the better environmental choice—and remember that you can cancel out some of its impacts by turning down the heater at home.

Noah Grant wrote this article for YES! Magazine's "YES! But How?" column. To read more YES! But How?, click here.

Hemp advocates tend to get a rapturous look when they talk about their favorite plant. And they have some very good reasons for that.

You can make hemp into clothing, paper, wood composites, personal care products, paint, and food, among other things. Hemp yields several times the amount of fiber per acre that trees do, and as an annual crop, is easier to manage. It doesn’t require the huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides that cotton does, and doesn’t come from fossil fuels like synthetic fabrics. Hemp fiber is also particularly strong, meaning that paper can be recycled more times and textiles last longer. And hempseed oil is a great source of healthy essential fatty acids.

But advocates often go a bit overboard when they describe the benefits of hemp. The plant actually has some of the same problems as others grown on a large scale. It requires about as much nitrogen fertilizer as wheat and is comparable to other crops in terms of water use. Also, as an annual crop, hemp doesn’t do much to preserve the soil or provide animal habitat. It requires a lot of energy for harvesting and processing, and like any monoculture crop, it doesn’t help biodiversity.

Using hemp will give you some good eco-karma, just not as much as, say, eating all organic or vegetarian. So get some hemp products, but also check out clothes made from organically produced cotton, and paper and wood from sustainably harvested trees or recycled pulp. And as always, look for ways to consume less, rather than just shifting to new sources.

This article was written by Noah Grant as part of "YES! But how?" To read more, click here.

The staff at YES! shares their favorite sustainable gift ideas.

We'd love to hear your comments too. Please email us.

Fix It
• My family had an old Nintendo sitting broken for over a decade. I found an article on how to fix it. I sneakily stole it from them, fixed it up, and gave it back to them. I’m not sure if they still use it, but I know they enjoyed it for a while. I imagine you could do this for any broken item sitting in someone’s garage. An old bike, a television, a radio, etc. They get a “new” thing without wasting all of the resources that go along with making a new item. —Jon

Go Local, Way Over There
• What to get for my not-particularly-green in-laws across the continent? From an online list of farmers market participants for their small Connecticut town, I found a family farm producing free-range cattle, Four Mile River Farm. I called them up, and asked if they would put together a collection of frozen cuts of their beef as a present to be picked up. They were so happy to do it, and I think my inlaws made new friends. —Tracy

• Small concerts. The public radio station that serves the gift receiver’s town will have a calendar of the more interesting small concerts passsing through, and information for how to order tickets. You can inflict your own taste onto your friends.

• Membership to a local public radio station. Art museum memberships often come with free tickets and advance screenings for big events.

Just for Me
• My favorite gift still is a CD that a friend made for me. I like music, but don’t really know a lot about it, and he is a DJ. So I felt like a V.I.P. getting this personal music selection. And somehow he just hit it right and I have been listening to it for years now. —Lilja

• I have a friend who makes her own gifts, and my favorite is a flannel pillowcase with different colorful fabrics for the body and the border pieces. Not only are they beautiful and comfy, but I think of her every night when I go to bed! The perfect gift for someone you care about. —Sharon

Read more YES! Sustainable Gift ideas at our Web site, here.

Why not give the gift of YES! this holiday? You can give a one-year subscription, a copy of the book "Making Peace" and a YES! tote bag by clicking here

The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen Process, 2008, 330 pages, $16.95 Go to your local bookstore or buy online.

The Northwest Green Home Primer by Kathleen O'Brien and Kathleen Smith Timber Press, 2008, 304 pages, $24.95 Go to your local bookstore or buy online.

by Pamela O'Malley Chang

I once thought that being an architect would give me the knowledge and experience to make good design decisions. As my career progressed, I found that involved clients—who studied their options and looked for something better—inspired me to find more creative solutions. Clients who barely took the time to understand the basics never motivated me to produce anything beyond “bland.”

Over time, I came to believe that as a society, we had become bad clients. How many of us had time to earn a living and educate ourselves to make informed decisions about our homes and neighborhoods? We had abdicated our responsibility for the built environment and ended up with sprawl, indistinguishable tract houses, sick building syndrome, and oversized homes that wasted land, energy, and materials.

Green construction is the opposite of not-my-responsibility architecture—it recognizes the importance of individual choices. When a green designer selects, say, a particular slope and orientation for a roof, she knows that choice affects how well the building withstands wind, rain, sun, or snow. She considers what type of roofing materials will be appropriate and where windows may be placed to brighten dark interiors or avoid late afternoon glare. She knows that cumulatively, thousands of similar decisions can raise or lower a city’s temperature, replenish or deplete its water supply, and speed or slow the rate at which construction waste is sent to landfill. Green design is the expression of a mature society’s desire to live as if each of these decisions matters.

The Northwest Green Home Primer is a comprehensive text for anyone who chooses green design for home construction or renovation. While the Primer focuses on the Northwest (emphasizing that effective green solutions are always specific to their local environment), the book’s overall approach is adaptable to any region.

The authors, building consultant Kathleen O’Brien and architect Kathleen Smith, are specialists in sustainable design. Both live in green homes that they helped plan. Their credentials are impeccable, and their research thorough.

Readers who like dense technical details may enjoy this text cover-to-cover. Others can learn a lot just by grazing. The book has well-organized checklists and is full of helpful illustrations and case studies. You can glance at a diagram to understand how a heat pump provides summer cooling and winter heating by circulating fluid from your house to deep in the ground where temperatures are stable. Or you can look at photographs showing examples of temporary ponds, which you could construct in your yard to help replenish your local aquifer.

O’Brien also draws on insight from her own home design process and tells how it saved her money and energy in the long-term: “We set our sights on exceeding [the] rigorous … [state] energy code. … As a result, we insulated ourselves somewhat from rising energy prices. … We built our home in 1998, at … roughly one to two percent more than what it would have cost to build … conventionally.”

I wish this book had been available when I did my own green renovation. More importantly, I hope that homeowners, buyers, and builders will use this book to acquire the knowledge to challenge architects to build green.

In a lighter but arguably deeper-green vein, The Urban Homestead is a good-natured (in all senses) guide for urbanites who want to live off the land without leaving the city limits, by such means as greening their homes and growing, preserving, and composting their own vegetables. The authors offer Homestead as “an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life.”

“We bake our own bread because it is better than what we can buy,” they write. “We raise our own hens because we like chickens and we think their eggs are worth the trouble … There’s mead brewing in our guest bedroom because you can’t buy mead … and because fermentation is the closest thing to magic that we know.”

If such activities appeal to you, you’ll find yourself reading this book the way gardeners read seed catalogs in mid-January. Along the way, you’ll encounter instructions for cooking acorn meal (see above), building a self-watering plant container, and making clay-and-seed balls for lobbing wildflowers into fenced vacant lots. You’ll learn how to be an urban forager—from fruit-picking to dumpster-diving—and how to harvest gray water from your laundry or shower.

The authors, a husband and wife team, do their urban farming in Los Angeles. They dispense opinionated tips and useful resources. Despite numerous typos, Homestead is a book I’ll want to give to my frugal-foodie relatives.

Ten years ago when I completed my own home renovation, I concluded that green design would hardly make a drop of difference unless it became ordinary and accessible. The Northwest Green Home Primer and The Urban Homestead bring complex choices about homes and food within almost anyone’s grasp. Together, these books give me hope that ordinary people can reclaim decision making from the “experts” and inspire us all to live more creatively and responsibly.

Pamela O'Malley Chang wrote this article as part of YES! Magazine's In Review column. Read more Book Reviews from YES! Magazine.