Green is trendy these days. It's not the new pink or the new black, but the new way to live. From the food we eat to new cars with new fuels, renewed recycling efforts, composting, organic clothing, and new energy sources, countless aspects of our lives have switched to thinking Green. Living with the earth and future generations in mind is no longer the practice of dirty, tree-hugging hippies, as I have been accused on slightly more than one occasion. Green has become the hpilosophy for all ages, political views, occupations, and lifestyles. This is one trend that must continue to spread to all aspects of our lives and become the status quo for a world on the brink of catastrophe.

     There's my environmental doomsday belief pushing its way through. Let me slow down and focus on one small bit of positivity. I admit quite readily that living Green has its difficulties. I cannot offord a hybrid car, farmer's markets dwindle a bit here in Wisconsin winter, and old east-side apartments are not the best for water conservation (the incessantly dripping faucet drives me crazy, not because of the monotonous sound but the daily loss of water). If an opportunity to make a small difference crosses my path, I strive to take advantage.

    As I searched the myriad of travel websites looking for the cheapest flight to Denver, something on expedia.com caught my eye. A small ad banner, extremely easy to miss, said:

"TerraPass: Fly Green"

Hmm, that's a new one by me. The snow-ubiquitous "Green" with a new verb. Fly Green you say, and how dost one go about that?

"Fight GLobal Warming. Buy back the CO2 emissions of your next flight! Pick up a TerraPass and help to fund clean energy."

Okay, you have my attention.

     Air travel presents one of the best modes of transportation, quite obviously, and the world economy would virtually shut down overnight without it. However, that's a big vessel and it takes a lot of fuel to fly. All that burned-off fuel has to go somewhere. A cross country flight uses up 100 gallons of fuel per passenger. My flight to Denver on Frontier Airlines had 132 passengers. That's a lot of burned fuel.

      TerraPass provides a means to balance out the damage done by your travel; you can now erase the footprint that your flight leaves on the earth's atmosphere. The money that you spend on their passes helps to sponsor clean energy projects, such as adding a new turbine to a wind farm. It's your own personal REC or green tag. TerraPass partners with expedia.com to present the option of purchasing one of three mileage-based passes as you complete online the transaction for your flight. The three options are as follows:

1. Short Haul Flight - 2,200 round-trip miles, reduces 1,000 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Cross-Country - 6,500 round-trip miles, reduces 2,500 lbs

3. International - 13,000 round-trip miles, reduces 5,000 lbs

My flight fell in the Short Haul category, and only cost a mere $5 in addition to my plane tickets. A few weeks before the flight I received a TerraPass sticker, no doubt to cauze other passengers to inquire and thereby generate some buzz about the worthwhile opportunity to fly Green.

     When I returned to Milwaukee, I decided to rsearch the TerrPass company and I discovered some interesting facts. They offer these personal green tags for much more than flights. Green-minded customers can offset their own harmful effects from their homes, cars, and even student dorms. By entering information about your electric bill, car's make and model, daily use, etc. you can learn the size of your own carbon footprint and purchase a TerraPass to balance it our by sponsoring even more clean energy pojects.

     If you wish to continue to think Green, visit the TerraPass site and sponsor the clean energy effort. If balancing out your total footprint seems too big a step and you wish to start small and easy, keep TerraPass and expedia.com in mind next time you're planning to take to the skies. Imagine if half the passengers on every flight were flying Green...