To Wiki or not to Wiki? That seems to be the burning question of the day. Julian Assange has created international pandemonium with his viral Wikileaks website, and with Assange in protective custody in Britain, the resulting cyber warfare that 'hacktavists' have waged on the credit card companies and other organizations that have shut off payment to the site is downright scary.

The Wikileaks website proclaims that it provides "an anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists." According to some, crimes have been committed. Nonetheless, the release of confidential, high-security documents for public analysis and consumption certainly opens the door to an interesting ethical discussion.

When I ponder the utopically intriguing notion of complete transparency at all levels of international security, diplomacy, and business, I can't help but wonder: What's the price that we as individuals, as a nation, and as a global community are willing to pay for accountability? Is global ignominy a prerequisite to responsible behavior?

A wise man once told me, "We humans haven't cultivated our ability to communicate telepathically because we simply wouldn't be able to bear knowing what other people are thinking." Good point. I don't think our species is necessarily malevolent by nature, so is our general lack of accountability simply attributable to laziness?

I often hear from colleagues and readers about a decisive lack of accountability in the building industry. Builders and designers tell me that even if they construct the greenest house imaginable, it's impossible to get the financial and appraisal community to provide them with tangible reinforcement that would allow them to value the quality or efficiency of their projects. Code officials and city planners tell me that they can create and adopt the greenest code imaginable, but the enforcement of that code would likely be arbitrary and uneven at best in many jurisdictions. I could go on and on about each segment of the industry.

I see people endlessly searching for purpose and accountability, and constantly coming up short. Perhaps we shouldn't be looking so hard externally to political leaders and business executives. Perhaps all of the answers are staring at us in the mirror. In the immortal words of John Lennon, "It's easier to shout 'revolution' and 'power to the people' than it is to look at yourself and try and find out what's real inside you and what isn't.

With the holiday season upon us, I've been thinking a lot lately about gift giving. I just can't bring myself to buy volumes of stuff this year for my colleagues, friends, and family—stuff that might temporarily adorn a space, a boudoir, or a tree, but stuff that inevitably requires resources to produce and embodied energy to transport and will likely end up in a landfill, taking decades to photo-degrade into smaller and smaller particles that never really go away.

This year, Green Builder Media is putting our money where our collective mouth is—we're buying trees. To be exact, we're in the process of planting 200,000 trees—one for each of our readers.

There are many worthy tree-planting organizations. We especially like the kind people at The National Arbor Day Foundation, who dedicate themselves to replanting America's forests, and Tree People, who focus on planting trees in urban settings.

We chose to plant trees with Trees for the Future because we like their land-use approach that integrates agriculture, trees, people, and animals in the same space, as well as their policy of planting trees that are eventually used by the communities in which they are planted (we use trees for our magazine, so this is something that we're keenly aware of.) Some of the trees that they plant bear fruit or provide other essential agricultural functions. Others are used for biomass. Still others are eventually harvested for the construction of homes and community buildings.

"Most of our trees are planted for agroforestry purposes," says Gorav Seth, Head of International Programs at Trees for the Future. "Agroforestry allows farmers to diversify the products they grow and sell, protect their land from wind and water damage, increase groundwater supplies, build the quality of soil, and increase crop production significantly."

We ask you to join us in giving the gift of fresh air this holiday season—not because we get a kick-back or any specific business benefit, but because we believe that it's the right thing to do. If you'd like to take part in our tree planting initiative, please write to me at sara@greenbuildermag.com. We'll send you a tree-planting certificate that you can bestow upon your gift recipient, along with a complimentary digital subscription to Green Builder magazine.