The Riverhouse in New York City’s Battery Park district is a LEED-certified, 320-unit building with geothermal heating and cooling, twice-filtered air, non-toxic paint and landscaped roof gardens.© Phillip Ritz, courtesy Flickr

So-called “ocean deserts” or “dead zones” are oxygen-starved (or “hypoxic”) areas of the ocean. They can occur naturally, or be caused by an excess of nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers, sewage effluent and/or emissions from factories, trucks and automobiles. The nitrogen acts as a nutrient that, in turn, triggers an explosion of algae or plankton, which in turn deplete the water’s oxygen.

The Internet is teeming with online stores, catalogs and environmental groups that sell green-friendly gifts for the holidays. Pictured here: a child’s snail pull-toy from Earthentree, made by artisans in India from sustainable wood that is dyed with natural vegetable dyes and finished with lead free non-toxic organic resin

Motor oil leaked from individual vehicles -— or outright dumped by homeowners and commercial garages -— constitutes a significant chunk of storm water runoff, the fallen precipitation that runs off of roads and parking lots and inevitably finds its way into local water bodies.