Filmmaker Mario Van Peebles, along with his family, takes a lighthearted approach to going “green” in a new reality television show on cable network TV One. “Mario’s Green House” follows the Van Peebles as they try to build a home that’s environmentally friendly. Mario Van Peebles describes the project and spreading the green message within communities of color.

Leading sports leagues in North America are striving to meet their environmental challenges as growing attention is focused on climate change issues. Each major sports league is pursing a multitude of green initiatives.

As a follow-up to the market insight article “Take Me Out to the Ball Game — North American Green Stadiums,” published in May 2008, Frost & Sullivan looks at some of the initiatives the major sports leagues in North America.

This fall, a raft of environmentally-themed films, from all perspectives, are premiering, and several are tying their launch to Climate Week N.Y.C., which is holding events around New York City this week.

Why hasn’t the gaming industry been looked at by the sustainability media and ranking organizations, and through mainstream media’s sustainability lens? Are there leaders and learners, and what are they doing? Why aren’t there Energy Star slot machines?

True to their name, the Goodes are an infuriatingly smug and self-righteous bunch: a nuclear family that’s hell-bent on maintaining the world’s smallest footprint. Gerald and Helen Goode drive a hybrid and live by the tenet WWAGD (“What would Al Gore do?”). They’ve named their adopted African son Ubuntu (in a mix-up, he turned out to be white South African). They feed their pet vegan dog food (he sneaks out at night to eat woodland creatures). The series (premiering 5/27 at 9 on ABC) plays like the funhouse-mirror version of Judge’s blue-collar spoofs King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead, and it, too, is liberal with its laugh lines.

I’ll be programming this into the DVR when I get home this evening.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival has a schedule that’s greener than Fifth Avenue on St. Patrick’s Day, but what’s the environmental impact of the festival itself?

Nevermind the Hollywood glitterati. Many of the films debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival feature a more understated star known as Mother Earth, and she plays roles ranging from dramatic to mysterious to horrific.

With one film all about dirt, another about global overfishing, and another still about a family’s attempt to live with no net impact on the earth, the environment is getting top billing this year at Robert Redford’s indie film festival, which kicks off Thursday night in Park City, Utah, and runs through January 25.

America’s dream factory is out to put its reputation for waste in the can.

With a huge carbon footprint, and possibly more influence than any other industry, big TV networks and movie studios are partnering with major environmental organizations to go green. A growing list of behaviors once cutting-edge such as recycling, composting, and using wind, solar, and alternative fuels have become commonplace in Hollywood.

Turn off Dora and Sponge Bob. GreenGorilla.com’s “Gorilla in the Greenhouse” is infectiously funny, cleverly written and (listen up, parents!) shares a meaningful moral in each episode. Episode 2 of the “Gorilla in the Greenhouse” animated Web series hits GreenGorilla.com on December 9.

A passionate, witty young filmmaker-ecologist named Josh Tickell is hoping that his film “Fuel” catches on in the green environs of Seattle, Portland and Austin, Texas, and has a cross-country run comparable to the biodiesel powered “Veggie Van” in which he took to the road a decade ago.

While major labels struggle with implementing eco initiatives, smaller labels pick up the slack

Since before Wyatt Earp gambled with Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Arizona, and the rich and famous flocked to Monte Carlo casinos on the Riviera, poker chips have been weighted down with lead, a toxic metal. In the latest showdown under the voter-adopted state anti-toxics law, an Oakland nonprofit with a a long string of notches in its environmental-safety belt two weeks ago forged a clean poker chip agreement with a major manufacturer and 21 casino owners to get the lead out.

At this year’s Media that Matters Film Festival, the winning video in the environment category was an animated film illustrating the impact of electronic waste on both humans and the environment.

The video, entitled E-Waste, was one of 12 films honored in the Eighth Annual Media that Matters Festival. Screenings of this year’s festival will be held in various locations throughout the summer, including Washington D.C. on July 23.

They say that if you want to prepare for parenthood, or just grow up a little, you should get yourself a houseplant. If that goes well, maybe you graduate to a Labrador retriever or parakeet, and then — hooray! — on to full fledged adulthood. It’s at our best that we humans set ourselves apart in the world by tending the lives around us.

Which brings me to Wall-E, the latest Disney Pixar project to grace the big screen, and whose plot revolves around the last living plant on a destroyed Earth. The flora in question is a single, generic, mangy sprout. And yet for the remainder of the human race, now living in space on the Axiom luxury “starliner”, the little plant is more than the genetic key to restoring Earth. It’s the first wobbly step toward regaining humanity and adulthood after 700 years of infantile space living.

In April of 1991, National Public Radio (NPR) began running a regular environmentally focused news segment called “Living on Earth.” NPR was the first major news outlet to take environmental news seriously. According to Bruce Gellerman, a longtime environmental reporter and alternative host for “Living on Earth,” “We’ve been reporting on the cutting edge of this topic for a long time… topics like endocrine disruptors, climate change, social justice and lead.” For many years, it seemed that NPR was the only major media outlet with any consistent focus on environmental stories. “The world finally caught up to our environmental reporting… It’s extraordinary how long it has taken,” says Gellerman.

EcoMedia, an environmental media company, and CBS Corp. plan to work with U.S. mayors and local municipalities to “green” cities across the country. The project will use CBS’s local resources and leverage corporate advertising and sponsorship revenue to improve the quality of the environment in key markets across the nation.

Four-time NBA All-Star LeBron James teams up with Nickelodeon’s The Big Green Help pro-social campaign this month in a brand-new online mini-game, LeBron James: Worldwide Big Green Bike-a-thon! that features James himself. Available now on http://www.biggreenhelp.com, players are asked to help a bike-riding LeBron avatar deliver green tips across the globe to rack up points and progress to the next level of play. In addition to the game, James will appear in a The Big Green Help public service announcement (PSA) airing throughout the summer. Designed to empower kids to take action on the environment, Nickelodeon’s The Big Green Help multiplatform campaign provides information and tools to help explain climate change to kids, and connect them to energy saving and earth-friendly activities in their everyday lives.

“Independent labels are about more than just records,” says Stephen Glicken, musician, producer and co-founder of New York-based Green Owl Records. His company is committed to releasing records with as little impact on the Earth as possible. Green Owl’s CDs are packaged in 100 percent post-consumer paper, and last year Green Owl won accolades for its Sundance Festival film entry, Everything’s Cool: A Toxic Comedy about Global Warming.