Future Forests has gifts packed in tubes to make an attractive gift. You can select the forest you want your trees planted in through their program. You can also designate a celebrity like Leonardo DiCaprio and receive a certificate and a map showing where your trees are growing.

Then, once you've calculated how much carbon dioxide your activities make, you can click on the link to pay to have the corresponding number of trees planted for you to offset your emissions. Typically, you'll receive a certificate with a map showing where your trees were planted.

In addition to offsetting your own emissions, you can have trees planted in another person's name. This makes a great gift, and people are doing it to commemorate weddings, the birth of a baby, and to celebrate birthdays and holidays.

There are critics of this idea within the environmental community. The trees take time to grow to the point that they begin to sequester significant amounts of carbon. Another concern is that some of the groups organize these efforts are run as for profit businesses. However, as time passes, individuals should have a variety of groups to choose from that plant run these tree planting programs: some will be run on a non-profit basis, and be able to do more with each dollar donated. And some criticize that people and companies may be doing this for attention. But, an important point to consider is: do we continue to cut more and more trees and not replace what we cut? Or do we begin to turn the tide and start a (hopefully) huge movement to plant trees? Only 1/5 of the Earth's historic forest cover is intact.

Future Forests may be doing the greatest service in terms of raising awareness of this concept. However, they may not be the most efficient group in terms of the number of trees planted per dollar donated. American Forests is a group that's been around since 1875 and has had tree planting programs well established before the idea of being carbon neutral ever was developed. You can use their calculator to estimate your impact. Then their site will let you make a corresponding donation to plant the number of trees to offset your impact. They don't use the term "carbon neutral" and you won't get any special certificates or maps, but the net effect is similar to programs that might be the "hip" thing to do.

Also important to remember:

Since trees are so important at sequestering carbon, it's more important than ever to recycle and buy recycled paper products. Recycle the paper that comes into your home or work place. While your neighborhood may only have curbside recycling for newspapers, nearby recycling centers let you recycle magazines, cardboard, even paperback books. You can also donate books to some libraries or used book stores. Have your name taken off mailing lists. You probably get a lot of catalogs that you don't really want. Rather than just throw them out, have the companies stop sending them to you. Also, you can now buy paper products like toilet paper, paper towels and bathroom tissue that's made from recycled paper. Even mainstream grocery stores like Giant and Safeway carry them. They're easy to find because they usually have green colored packaging.

Likewise, each watt of electricity and each gallon of gasoline that we consume only contributes to global warming, so reducing energy use is still critical.

Other ideas:

Ask business, both small local ones and large corporations to begin offsetting emissions. It's an ideas that's taking hold and companies that want your business often will respond to this.

If you offset emissions, get a bumper sticker made that says something like "Carbon Neutral Vehicle". This raises awareness of a concept that a lot of people don't know about. You can compose custom bumper stickers on some websites and have one or two printed and mailed to you for about $5 each.

See if your workplace will participate in offsetting emissions.