On the day that the Kyoto Protocol is going into affect, it seems fitting to mention a few web design and hosting companies dedicated to promoting environmental responsibility in cyberspace.

With a tag lines “Connecting people and planet” and “websites powered by the wind,” Earthsite’s mission is to offer “green marketing and design services with renewable energy hosting.” This the first hosting service I’ve run across that uses renewable energy to run its business, a choice that grounds cyberspace in therealities of energy use and material design.

From this site Iinked to two San Francisco design firms, Conscious Creative and Digital Hive that both aim to integrate sustainable practices with the communication design. Conscious Creative’s site has won the “Environmentally Friendly Website Award” which recognizes “websites that have gone the extra mile towards making a real change to our environment.”

What I find interesting about these companies is their efforts to define ecological design not just in terms of the clients they tend to serve–environmentally and socially conscious organizations–but also in terms of more material issues, such as how they power their servers and what kinds of paper they print brochures on.