Treehugger Brings Green to the Masses

Google's oft-publicized mantra is "Do no evil." If Graham Hill, the 38-year-old founder of Treehugger were to create a maxim for his business, it would probably be "Do good."

Treehugger is a media outlet focused on pushing sustainability into the mainstream. It primarily does this through a blog, which publishes more than 30 posts a day as well as newsletters and videos.

The seeds for Treehugger were planted long ago, even if Hill didn't recognize it at the time. Hill grew up in Canada with a family that was all about conservation. His hippie parents followed a humble lifestyle and lived in harmony with the land. Hill's father built the family's house from the recycled logs of another home and created a gravity-feed system for water. The Hills used kerosene lanterns, tended to a garden, owned chickens, heated with a wood stove and were impervious when a regular rolling blackout struck the area.

"We tend to focus on building stuff, but I like to think about megawatts," says Hill. "How many coal plants can we not build because we're just focused on conservation?"

Hill found success building Web sites for others. Beginning in 1995, he and his cousin launched a Web-development company, SiteWerks, and grew it into a dot-com winner. They sold it three years later. Having already tasted success, Hill wanted to turn his attention to the ailing Mother Earth.

But Hill knew the hippies were already on board and only made up a small percentage of the population. To really have an impact, he'd have to reach the masses.