31 Holiday Gift Ideas for the Socially Conscious

By Holly Beck, WireTap. Posted December 9, 2005.

1. Alternative Outfitters' vegan watches are strictly non-leather and cruelty-free.

2. Find a sapling at Jonsteen Trees and send it to a green-thumbed friend, complete with protective peat pot and instructions for the entire life of the tree.

3. The Syracuse Cultural Worker's thirteenth annual Women Artist Daybook features a day planner, women's resource lists, the holidays of numerous faiths, and a women's calendar. It's printed on post-consumer, chlorine and dioxin-free paper, and, of course, has lots of art by women.

4. One-of-a-kind album-cover sketchbooks are filled with paper made from 100% recycled blue jeans.

5. Find picture frames of all sizes, made from bicycle chains and car gears.

6. A truly wonderful book to give to anyone interested in sustainability is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, written by two people who make their living designing buildings and products that "nourish" people and our natural environments. The book itself is made from a clean, infinitely recyclable synthetic paper. Find an independent bookseller near you who carries it.

7. What do laughter and mints have in common? They're both refreshing! Indictmints come in a tin decorated with jailbirds Libby, Rove, Cheney and DeLay. Also available: National Embarrassmints.

8. Global Exchange sells a tea infuser mug and a coffee press mug, both made by craft producers earning fair wages.

9. Treat a friend in wintry climes to a Necknoosh, a button-up neck warmer made in Brooklyn with soft-dyed organic cotton.

10. These flags are for a different kind of flag-waving American.

11. Literati lip balm is all vegan and comes in four flavors: PoeMegranate, Alcott Apricot, Bronte Berry and ShakeSpearmint.

12. The 2006 "Cycle and Recycle" calendar, produced by and benefiting the International Bicycle Fund and a dozen other bicycle advocacy groups, celebrates the bicycle as an everyday transportation mode. According to the IBF web site, you can even use it again in 2017 and 2023 when the calendar year "recycles." A great gift if you can deal with their holiday shipping schedule.

13. Minneapolis-based feminist sex shop Smitten Kitten sells a whole host of safe, healthy, sex-positive goodies. Among their tamer items is InterCourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook.

14. It's true that candles and incense aren't the best things for health and air quality…. But if your friends insist, they can at least light them (during the day) with a solar-powered lighter.

15. This dried-flower picture frame is handmade (at fair wages) by artists in the Philippines, using all natural fibers, including a weed that interferes with local agriculture.

16. Inventive crafting company Motherboard says it uses 25,000 to 30,000 pounds of circuit boards each year, which would otherwise go into landfills, to make fun things like money clips sold by Eco Artware.

17. He's best known for writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Douglas Adams is said to have preferred his book on endangered species, Last Chance to See, co-authored with zoologist Mark Carwardine. It's a beautifully written, highly informative and witty account of their travels to the habitats of some of the last remaining members of several of the world's most endangered species. Find a local bookseller who carries it.

Holly Beck, 23, is a paralegal at a national child welfare advocacy organization. She lives in New York City.

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