Greetings and Salutations!

First I'd like to let editors know that my email is a bit backlogged right now. Trying to rotate my day-night schedule around to daytime for today's graduation ceremony of a family member played havoc with my brain and awakeness. I will work diligently on getting caught up. If you're waiting for an answer for me, I apologize and I will get to that soon!

Thank you so much to all the editors who sent in their carbon footprint and hours-worked information. We have finalized our site-wide green statement! The average editor carbon footprint is 16.9 tons of CO2 a year. The average editor does BellaOnline related activities 6 hours a week. I also made a rough estimate that the average editor uses 9% of their home (which is what I do) for BellaOnline activities. I didn't want you all to have to pull out your tape measures and measure the area you use as your office :)

So multiplying those all by each other, and then multiplying by our 300 editors, that comes out to 17 tons of CO2 a year for all editors for BellaOnline related activities. When you add that in to the servers and to my values, that's just under 27 tons of CO2 a year.

We've now offset this by taking part in a massive replanting effort headed by the Nature Conservancy. They are creating a large ecosystem that both benefits the earth and creates a large habitat both for stationary and migratory creatures. You can read about this here -

http://www.plantabillion.org/

By adding our voice in to their efforts, we've ensured that the resulting woodland is large enough to be meaningful for the animals. Also when large efforts like this succeed, they help to spur other regions to take on equally large challenges because they see it can work!

We've donated trees in our BellaOnline community name to account for the full nine years that we've been in operation. We had fewer servers in the beginning, and fewer editors, but I figure it'd better to round up :) So that was 243 tons. It's a tree per ton, so we are now proud planters of 250 trees. We added in a few extra :)

Thank you again for all your help! Every time you fire up your laptop or computer, know that there will be happy trees who are soaking in that carbon dioxide and turning it into oxygen! There are joyful birds and other critters too who are hanging out in our trees!

If you didn't get your carbon footprint in, feel free to still send it in - I'll use updated information for coming year tree purchases!

http://bellaonline.com/misc/green/


TIME MANAGEMENT COURSE

Thank you so much to the editors who helped tweak and test out the brand new free Time Management course we just created. This is a public course available to all BellaOnline members and of course to editors as well! You can find the course here -

http://bellaonline.com/course/course30

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments on it to help it become even more useful!

Have a great weekend!


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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