In our first Whole Living Awards, we're saluting 10 eco-heroines -- and a few Earth-minded journalists -- who pour their passion into turning our blue marble green..

Rachel Gutter, 29: Greening America's Schools
Gutter is the director of the U.S. Green Building Council's Center for Green Schools, who aim to green all of America's schools within a generation. An alarming number of the nation's 140,000 schools are in poor condition; some have experienced dangerous code violations while others harbor unhealthy levels of dust, mold, and formaldehyde. Some 15,000 U.S. schools contain pollutants that make the air unfit to breathe. Green schools are not only safer for students, Gutter says, but, because they're energy efficient, also save school districts and taxpayers billions of dollars.

Nancy Gioia, 50, and Sue Cischke, 56: Launching the Ford Focus Electric

After more than five years in development, Ford Motor Company will roll out the first American All-Electric car, a version of the Ford Focus, later this year. This is in no small part due to the work of Nancy Gioia, director of Global Electrification, and Sue Cischke, group vice president of sustainability, environment, and safety engineering. "Sustainability is more than just CO2," Cischke says. "We also worry about water, human rights, materials. It's a triple bottom line: environmental, social, financial."

Meaghan O'Neill, Editor in Chief, Treehugger.com
Q: What's the coolest new green invention?
A: Rethinking how we use materials has resulted in some amazing designs: a student-built car that gets nearly 2,500 mpg, a Taiwanese building made from 1.5 million plastic bottles, a battery that smooshes to fit sizes D to AA.

Q: What's your eco dream for the future?
A:That we think about the monetary value of our natural resources. We should see forests as pollution-control centers and wetlands as water-purification factories, and think about what an investment in nature means to our collective P&L.

Lynn Henning, 53: Exposing the Polluting Practices of Livestock Factory Farms
Concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs) -- feedlots that confine thousands of cattle or pigs in hangar-size barns -- make up 5 percent of U.S. animal operations, but they contain half the nation's meat- and dairy-producing animals. A large CAFO produces as much waste daily as a city of 411,000. And while municipalities treat their waste, CAFOs store liquefied manure in open pits.

Lynn Henning, who monitors CAFO discharges for Michigan's Sierra Club, won the prestigious Goldman Prize in 2010. In her rural neighborhood, however, Henning is less celebrated. "I've had dead animals left on my porch, and my mailbox was blown up," she says. "I've been run off the road. Someone shot out my granddaughter's bedroom window." The girl was unharmed but terrified.

Judi Shils, 54: Founded Teens Turning Green, a Movement of Young Sustainability Activists

In 2005, Judi Shils led a small army of teens in lobbying for a safe cosmetics law in California. "That's when I saw the power of this generation," she says. Since then, the mom and former TV producer has launched the first line of eco body products for teens with Whole Foods Market. And her group, Teens Turning Green, is going national, with chapters in four states and counting. "This is the greatest gift of my life," Shils says.

Samantha Joye, 45: Sounding the Alarm on the Gulf Oil Spill's Impact on Marine Life
A world-renowned biogeochemist, Samantha Joye has made a career of studying the impact of oil on seawater. Joye was at her office when the rig exploded on April 2010. "All of us who knew anything about the oil industry knew that this was far worse than anyone was saying," she says. 

In the weeks following the explosion, Joye helped coordinate the waterborne efforts of researchers from several universities. What these scientists discovered would help shape the debate over the future of deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

Chip Giller: President and Founder, Grist.org

Q: What's the wackiest new green trend?
A: The immense climate backlash among many politicians in the last election. A few of us in the media branded them "climate zombies."

Q: What's your eco dream for the future?
A: That the federal government will enact meaningful climate legislation, finally tackling the issue of our time and unleashing a clean-energy boom.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, 34: Helping to Create Clean Energy Jobs That Reduce Poverty and Pollution

Q: What does Green for All do?
A: We want an economy that's clean and green. So we lobby to change laws while building a national grassroots movement. We also teach leadership skills to people across the country -- including a minister who's greening his church in Denver and members of an American-Indian tribe installing a water-treatment plant on their land in Montana. We want to create a movement that's big and diverse enough to make change.

Kurt Kohlstedt: Editor in Chief, WebEcoist.com

Q: What's the coolest new green invention?
A: Nanotechnology-based and spray-on solar aren't new, but solar strategies like these are finally becoming available for everyday households like never before.

Q: What's your eco dream for the future?
A: That people will stop needing to use the word "green" as a preface -- we'll see people adopt cheap, local, easy solutions to energy needs without a second thought.

Willow Rosenthal, 39: Building Community and Farming Skills in Low-Income Areas

Living in West Oakland, California, Willow Rosenthal would bike 30 minutes just to buy fresh produce. Along the way, she'd pass abandoned lots and imagine the fruits and vegetables that could be cultivated on the neglected land.

In 2000, Rosenthal purchased a 3,700-square-foot plot and City Slicker Farms was born, providing low-income families with healthy, affordable food and serving as a safe haven for local youth. Now she's consulting with aspiring urban farmers who want to follow her lead.

Summer Rayne Oakes, 26, and Betina Singh, 27: Created an Easy-to-Use Online Marketplace to Connect Designers with Sustainable materials

Q: What is Source4Style.com?
A: Our website allows any designer or brand to search for and source sustainable materials from suppliers all over the globe. We offer nearly 1,000 textiles that can be searched by material, country of origin, and attributes, such as recycled or organic. Later this year, we'll have a directory of providers around the world that meet our criteria.

Q: How do you verify suppliers' claims?
A: We take them through a rigorous questionnaire based on the Eco Index, the standard for assessing environmental footprints within the apparel industry. Then we share information with our designers.

Tina Quinn, 49: Founded Nonprofits to Clean Up California

Nominated by a colleague, Tina Quinn was chosen from all of the Whole Living readers' choice nominees for her work with the nonprofit behind a new California law phasing out copper (a watershed pollutant) from auto brake pads. She also founded a nonprofit to support eco-activities such as composting and gardening for 12,000 local school kids.

These companies are worth of recognition for their eco-minded initiatives.

SC Johnson: 100 percent of its cleaning products' ingredients will be disclosed at WhatsInsideSCJohnson.com by 2012.

Starbucks: 100,000 paper coffee cups were made into new ones in a 2010 test program. The company aims to recycle all 4 billion cups sold annually by 2015.

Intel: 68 million gallons of freshwater will be saved per year thanks to design changes at an Intel chip factory.

The Empire State Building, New York: 100 million pounds of CO2 emissions per year will be nixed with its 2011 switch to wind power.

We tip our hats to the noble efforts of these Gang Green legislators.

Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman (CA) and Ed Markey (MA) and Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) sponsored sweeping climate-change legislation, which failed to garner bipartisan support.

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) penned a bill requiring safety testing of all industrial chemicals -- it never left committee.

But not all was lost: Senator Dick Durban's (D-IL) landmark bill requiring food makers to create and implement food safety plans (imagine that!) became law in 2011.

We'd love to see more of these cropping up in 2011.

Curbside composting: Seattle and San Francisco now pick up scraps along with trash.

Vegivores: Foodies are going meatless, and not just on Mondays.

Guerrilla gardening: Eco rebels are "seed bombing" urban spaces.

Alternapower: $243 billion was invested in green energy such as wind farms and solar power in 2010 -- up nearly a third since 2009.

Last but not least: Though their reach may not be as widespread, the most impressive and creative eco-initiatives these days are local.

Chicago plans to slash greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050 and has made all traffic lights LED.

In North Carolina's Outer Banks, single-use plastic bags have been banned from stores.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, has the nation's only solar-powered farmers' market.

Cleveland is the first city to provide advantages for sustainable companies bidding on contracts.

Dallas is converting wastewater into methane gas to cover 5 percent of the city's energy needs.

And the eco-makeover award goes to Houston: The oil capital is now an electric-car hub, wind power investor, and the country's largest municipal buyer of green power.