I was recently flipping through a magazine when I came across an ad for the Toyota Earth Day Scholarship Program. I guess the image was compelling enough for me to visit the website when I got home. Toyota Canada Inc. and Earth Day Canada have come together to encourage today's youth to take an active interest in the environment by rewarding Canadian high school students who take part in environmental community service and display academic excellence.

The Toyota Earth Day Scholarship program is offered to those who are entering their first year of full-time, post-secondary education and will award $5000 to 15 students. One national winner will be selected from the 15 winners and will also be given a laptop.

What a great way to encourage youth to raise awareness about environmental issues!

Hurry! Applications are due on January 31, 2009.

Read about how you can help the environment.

Today’s Green Living post is by Tara Nolan. She is the web editor of our sister site, CanadianGardening.com. Check out Canadian Gardening’s new site after you read her post about going green in the garden.

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I was recently flipping through David Suzuki's Green Guide when I came across a section titled "An Apple's Ecological Footprint." Still feasting on what's left from the height of Canada's apple season, I always have these little round bits of crisp deliciousness on my mind. So naturally, I had to stop and read it.

In his Green Guide, Suzuki explains in layman's terms the ecological footprint of an imported apple. It obviously doesn't take much to imagine how many resources growing, transporting and assuring freshness of an apple takes. But what really made me stop and think was the idea that anyone here in Canada could purchase an imported apple. Take one of my favourite apples, the perfectly tart Empire apple - a cross between the yummy McIntosh and sometimes-too-sweet Red Delicious. When I bite into one of these apples that came right from my backyard (better known as Ontario), my taste buds sing with satisfaction.

Snacking on apples aren't the only joy I get from these Canadian gems, I also enjoy baking with them. Some favourite apple treats of mine are apple pie, apple muffins and apple crumble.

Currently, I'm lamenting over the fact that Canadian apples will soon be hard to come by until fall. Sigh.

Apple trivia: Did you know that the apple tree originated in Central Asia? Also, there are over 7,500 recorded varieties of apples.

Just a short FYI today.

I just learned from an older Canadian Living issue that front-loading washers use 40 per cent less laundry detergent and water and 50 per cent less energy than a top loader.

Another interesting note about your dirty laundry, which I read about it Kim McKay and Jenny Bonnin's True Green, is that the average washing machine produces close to 200 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions a year, and if you wash your clothes in hot water, you're producing 5 times more greenhouse gasses than you'd use when choosing the cold setting. Choose cold and save in emissions and on your bills.

And, I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but only do a load of laundry when it's a full load!

More on going green:
• 6 ways to go green and save money
• How to make your vacations greener
• How saving water will save you money

Last Thursday at about 10 p.m. we lost power at our house. Thinking nothing of it, we snuggled up in our blankets and promptly fell asleep. At about 3a.m., I woke up to my poor dog being sick. Our house was freezing!! I had to put on a head lamp to find my doggy's sick pile and clean it up. Pour Scout was shivering so we all climbed back into bed together and were all nice and toasty from each other's body heat.

I couldn't belive it when we awoke at 6 a.m. and the power still wasn't back. FREEZING! FREEZING! FREEZING! Good thing we have a battery operated radio and was able to flip it on a hear that there was a huge blackout in the west end of Toronto. Luckily power had been restored at my dad's house, so we went over to get warm (and raid his fridge - there's always much better food over there!).

This little bump in everyone's daily routine got most people in the west end of Toronto thinking about emergency preparedness. Though at our house we were equipped with headlamps, candles and a battery operated radio, that was about it. We had no water in the house and no wood for our fireplace. Though we had spare food, we had no extra fuel for our camping stove to cook it. Had this blackout lasted longer or was city wide, we would have been in some serious trouble.

Since then we've bought a few jugs of water, a wind up flashlight, spare food for the dog, a slow-burning candle and some reserve fuel for the camping stove.

Oh, and on a green note, think how much electricity and water the west end of Toronto conserved over that clost to 24 hour period.

Have you been affected by a long blackout? How did you fare?

Are you prepared in case of an emergency? What's in your emergency kit? What should I add to mine?

In a quest to save money and ... er ... the environment, many of us will be taking a staycation this year.

What's a staycation, you ask? It's when (more...)

Recently, a reader e-mailed me and asked: When buying pop, is it more environmentally friendly to buy it in plastic bottles or aluminum cans?

In doing some research on the Internet, I found some (more...)

My partner came down with a serious bout of the flu the other night, and in order to help cure him I pumped him full of Gravol to help with the nausea, Tylenol to bring down his fever and chicken noodle soup to comfort him (they all do work like a charm). It was only yesterday when I thought (more...)

Good day Green Living Blog readers, and a happy New Year to you all! As I was leisurely flipping through Saturday's Globe and Mail today (a day late, as per usual) I saw that the Style section mentioned some green changes to the design world that we should all be on the lookout for this year. Here are a few of them (more...)