E walks the talk.

E/The Environmental Magazine isn't just writing about wind power, we're actually buying it. Through a partnership with Renewable Choice Energy, we're offsetting 100 percent of our electricity use for the next three years through the purchase of wind energy certificates.

The plan is based on the fact that the grid combines both "clean" and "dirty" energy together into one big power supply. Here's how it works: we calculated our energy use (in a small office building in Connecticut and at our printer in Vermont) at 160,956 kilowatt-hours over the next three years, and then purchased wind certificates to make sure that much wind energy goes back in the grid.

Our wind "offset" amounts to 224,051 pounds of avoided carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually, the equivalent of 244,597 miles not driven in an average car, or 20 cars effectively taken off the mad. If you were to do this at home, you'd buy 600 kilowatt-hours of wind-generated power for $15 a month, and get the same benefit as planting 140 trees, David Alexander of Boulder, Colorado says he decided to buy this form of green energy because "life is the sum of all our choices."

"Renewable Choice Energy has signed agreements with affiliates of such major companies as Coldwell Banker, Sprint, Johnson & Johnson and Silk soymilk," explains CEO Quayle Hodek. One major buy came from Whole Foods, whose New Mexico and Colorado stores are purchasing 20 million kilowatt-hours of wind power annually, thus dodging 28,891,246 pounds of CO2 pollution a year. They did it, we did it, you can do it, too! CONTACT: Renewable Choice Energy, [phone], www.renewablechoice.com.

JIM MOTAVALLI is editor of E.