Darryl Hannah Is Off The Grid

She also has a cool vlog (video blog) that comes out weekly. From the SF Chronicle:

The vlog, which features a new segment every week, chronicles Hannah's personal explorations of the latest in green living. Topics have included green building, vegan diet, gorillas in Rwanda and biodiesel -- one of Hannah's favorite topics.

"I haven't been to a gas station in years," she said. "It feels so good not to be a slave to gas, playing the whole game of war for oil."

Her vlog entries have a fun-but-serious tone that conveys the importance of making sustainable choices -- while underscoring the fact that such choices don't have to be sacrifices. On the contrary: Green choices enrich Hannah's life.

The past year has seen a mini-boom in green celebrity: Cameron Diaz, Leonardo di Caprio, Ed Norton, Matt Damon and others have lately joined the eco-celeb pantheon that has long included a handful of activist-actors like Woody Harrelson and Ed Begley.

But Hannah's commitment is longstanding. She's been a vegetarian since she was a kid. Her two houses -- one in the Rockies and one in Southern California -- have been off the grid for a dozen years, relying on solar panels and graywater systems. She buys carbon offsets for all her travel.

"I've carbon neutralized myself so many times," she said, "that I've got a carbon surplus. But I still continue to do it."

That kind of personal, lived environmentalism has always made intuitive sense to Hannah. "One wouldn't think that you would have to become an environmentalist or a humanitarian," she said. "It's just natural to treat people and other creatures on the planet with respect."

But in spite of her strong conviction, for most of her life Hannah did not advocate publicly for environmental causes.

"I never had come up with a really profound and strong gesture -- nothing like Julia Butterfly's," she told me. "So I figured the best thing I could do was live by my beliefs. That's probably the most profound thing that anybody can do."

But in the wake of Sept. 11, Hannah realized that simply tending her own garden wasn't enough. As the nation tumbled headlong into an ill-conceived petroleum war, Hannah was driven to speak out. On the first anniversary of Sept. 11 she went on Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" "to talk about our biofuel options -- that we don't have to go to war for oil."