Danny Seo's eco-consciousness started early-but maybe that's what you get when you're born on Earth Day. The environmental-lifestyle guru and author of the Simply Green book series has focused for more than 18 years on finding stylish ways to live in harmony with the environment. Seo, now 30, talked with Blue Egg about celebrity, the organic Bloody Mary, and how the word recycle has finally lost its crunch.

You've always got some new project in the works. What's the latest?
A calendar called Do Just One Thing. It's 366 tips based on seasonality. Each day is a different tip, and it's all printed on recycled paper. The last tip at the end of '08 is that you can return it to the publisher for recycling.

You've been involved with environmental causes since you were 12 years old, but it seems everyone else is just getting on board now.
It's a great thing that people think green is so hot, that green is so "trendy." But I get really, really nervous when people call this a trend.

Why is that?
A trend is something that's a flash in the pan. It comes in; it goes out. It's like an Ugg boot. And I don't want this to be viewed as an Ugg boot. This is a little bit more than just a fashion statement. It's really about a cultural shift, so I'm not too worried that it actually is a trend.

But the more people talk about it being trendy, the more I'm worried about the backlash. Especially with-and I hate to say it-all the celebrities, which can often bring that on. There are even websites dedicated to tracking celebrities and their green doings. But this is a really big category-the environment. It's the entire world! It's a very global issue, and there's going to be different points of view and different people and different types of media doing their thing to make it interesting.

How much did being born on Earth Day inspire you?
It's huge. My 12th birthday was in 1989. That was the heyday of Greenpeace going after the whaling boats, chaining themselves to trees-it was very graphic. I was naive enough to believe everything, but idealistic enough to think, Well, maybe I should just change it. I realized that we were always asking people to change the way they lived their lives, and we would make people feel really guilty about everything from the car they drove to the food they ate to the way they raised their children. But then we would never really give any solutions. [A different way of doing things didn't become clear] until I was 19, after I ran a national nonprofit where I was sort of on my own. On one side, I was the ardent environmentalist, but on the flip side, I cared about style. So having a comfortable home, eating great food-

-looking good while you're doing it...
Right. I thought, There's got to be a way to marry the two of them together. When I started working with the idea of green lifestyle in 1995, people thought it was an oxymoron.

Everything was still crunchy and on the fringe.
The idea of green style was just ridiculous to people. It's funny how it's all about green style now.

remember being 21. I went to all these major book publishers in New York, and I said, "I want to write a lifestyle book about green living, but it's going to be beautiful. So it won't be about solar panels and straw houses, but gorgeously illustrated with full-color photography on recycled paper, and I'll talk about comfort and texture and taste." They all laughed at it.

Wow.
One of the publishers said, "We will never publish such a book, because that's such a fringe book and we only do big, mainstream books." Well, move forward a few years later, and I'm reading the New York Daily News, and they announce a $1.2 million [deal] for two green-living books.

Times have definitely changed
I was five years ahead!

While that must be somewhat gratifying to know, are you a little bitter?
No, because my motives are very mission driven; they're not profit driven at all. So the more that I can actually see people altering the way they live their lives, and the more mainstream a lot of these concepts and ideas become-it's actually very fulfilling.

How can I make my next party green?
What makes a good party? The food and the wine. This is a great opportunity to think what's in season, what's local, and what's going to be the freshest, most delicious thing you can have. So ingredients should either be in season, local, or organic as much as possible. There is a huge variety of fabulous organic wines, but also organic spirits out there, too. A good easy-to-find vodka is called Reyka. It's Icelandic, from a geothermal factory-very clean-tasting. You can make a great organic Bloody Mary with fresh horseradish, fresh organic tomato juice, and different spices.

Do I hear a new book about green cocktails in the works here?
[Laughs] I don't know if there's a market big enough for that!

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