It started as an innocent-seeming question on my "sustainable living on a budget" listserv. A mama wanted ideas for sustainable party favors for her four-year-old's birthday party.

I was a little surprised that the first several answers were rather unoriginal but sweet ideas: have guests bring used toys or books to exchange; involve children in making something to take home (soap was the rather ambitious suggestion); or painted terra-cotta pots with little plants. Finally someone offered timidly, "you could go without the favors!"

Exactly. How is setting a cultural standard of buying rather useless items for other children to take home from a party you are throwing sustainable? Even if these items are good for the earth, or creative or lovingly-made, they still involve expense and work. Shouldn't a party simply be about celebration, not about things?

In my opinion, sustainability should be, not just about the environmental impact of something, but also the financial and societal impact. If everyone in a society stops offering favors and purchasing forgettable doodads for birthdays and holidays, it would stop being an expectation. Instead of buying a gift for friends' birthdays, my children make cards or help me sew stuffed things. For parties we host, I offer homemade cupcakes and delicious food and my hospitality and never offer favors. While I can't say I save a lot of money -- it's not that favors and goody bags are expensive -- I imagine that the impact of my decision is to quietly spread my Better Way.

Sometimes doing nothing at all is the most sustainable choice of all.

"It's the economy," John Kallas was telling a friend.

I was browsing a street fair here in Portland when I saw the booth of Kallas, a local wildcrafting expert. It was hard not for a sustainable food geek like me to get excited, what with the jars of wild edibles ranging from black walnuts to Indian potatoes to assorted parts of the cattail plant. He was talking to a friend in between my questions ("how do you dry walnuts?" "Is lamb's quarters a native plant?") about the state of his business. Evidently, it was good. In a typical year, with Kallas' income from Wild Food Adventures' nature walks, workshops and expeditions, he barely broke even (and it was a good thing much of his food was gathered wild). This year? He'd already exceeded last year's income. The bad economy is very good for him.

It's a great time to be in business if you're helping people eat more economically, to get "off the grid" a bit. Another local food "hacker," Monique Dupre, has her Sustainable Living on a Budget workshop series sold out weeks in advance and has raised her prices due to demand.

On the other side of the food and fuel equation, local family bike supplier Clever Cycles is closed for weeks. The reason? The year-old bicycle shop had sold so many of its Bakfiets cargo bikes, Xtracycle cargo kits, BoBike children's bike seats and other solutions for family biking that it didn't have anything to offer the customers clamoring to park their minivans and SUVs and switch to bike transportation.

Now I'm making a mental list of businesses booming in this economy (and I don't mean Exxon!). What companies in your local area are doing fabulous thanks to the downturn?

My friends and neighbors and I are catching on to the latest sustainability movement: farming your front yard. It's variously called "Food Not Lawns" or "Edible Estates" or "Urban Homesteading" or simply "gardening." But it's not just about growing a little food, eating local, saving money, or helping the planet; it can also be about making money.

And it's not new, or American. In fact, Cubans have been farming urban plots for decades. An AP story yesterday tells of a woman whose government job was cut back to $3 a month. She took advantage of a government program (championed by Raul Castro) that supported urban farming and took over a 1/2 acre plot. Now she makes $100 to $250 a month growing spinach, sweet potatoes and spinach, and selling them to her neighbors. Every penny she makes goes straight to her own pocket, and she's feeding her family in the bargain.

As Americans increasingly grow disillusioned with an economy that's built to work them long, hard hours, far from home, rarely spending time outdoors or with their family, never cooking their food; as consumers demand more and more locally- and sustainably-grown produce; urban farming is becoming exceedingly attractive. A friend recently contacted me with a proposal: a woman she knew was growing food in her backyard to sell to local restaurants. Might I help her?

With a huge, sunny, fertile backyard and a developing interest in gardening, I was all for it.

I've launched into a personal project to eat more sustainably, and I'm taking my whole family of five along with me. Though I have always believed in the good things that can come from simple, healthy food and have oft-repeated the mantra "eat close to the earth," it's only been in the past few months that I've put my family's eating habits into context with our lives, and the world. Reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle convinced me I should stop eating feedlot-raised meats, choosing instead animal products from range-grown cows, pigs, and chickens; reading Plenty, the tale of the 100-mile diet, convinced me of the importance and essential economy of eating in my own "foodshed."

But it was Michael Pollan who reminded me that spending more on food could actually save me money.

The first and loudest response to the prospect of eating sustainably is, "I can't afford it!" And it's true, by and large, purchasing meats, vegetables, fruits and dairy products that are produced by smaller, more sustainable farms will set you back anywhere from a little bit to a LOT more than buying from industrial monocultures and foreign factory farms. Got rice? It's $6 for a packet of wild rice from Oregon in my favorite gourmet market, compared to less than a dollar a pound for white rice from China. Ground beef: $2.99 a pound at Safeway. Ground buffalo grown on the open range in central Oregon: $8.99 a pound at my farmer's market, AND I have to wait in line 20 minutes.

But, let's think about this Pollan-style.

The headline could read, "Move over Supermom: The tale of the übermom." Or maybe, "Super (simple) Mom is new maternal 'It' Girl." In today's New York Times, the profile of Shannon Hayes is full of generosity, nuance, and flaw; she's a representative of the mother who chooses to trade a power suit for cast-off jeans, to home school her children, to eschew plastics, to recycle and compost everything, to live more simply. She's also a representative of the women who can't do it all (her fridge isn't sparkling, she doesn't fold her clean laundry).

All that aside, her lifestyle is appealing to those who would Live More Simply. She raises her own food and her family barters its chickens for handmade pottery. She and her husband don't work conventional jobs, choosing instead to spend plenty of time with their two young daughters and evangelizing the sustainable lifestyle; to butcher and sell their fancy organic lamb.

When I see an article like this, the question that always springs to my mind is, could I do this? And, hand-in-hand, how much does it cost?