The last few years, a whole bunch of eco-lifestyle magazines sprung up to bring green tips and news to all the An Inconvenient Truth viewers turned environmentalists. Now, the green magazines are already slowly dying off:

Plenty,** 2004 – 2009. This environmental magazine folded last month.** No longer will Plenty deliver green lifestyle news on 85-100% recycled, 20-30% post-consumer paper OR its carbon neutral website. Both are going to be discontinued, though it appears the employees got their pink slips before anyone updated Plenty’s website with the sad news.

Green Guide,** March 2008 – Dec. 2008. National Geographic’s venture into green lifestyle magazine publishing was very short lived indeed — at least in paper form. The quarterly magazine won’t be printed on FSC-certified paper any more, though according to Folio,** a digital edition of the magazine’s expected to be published through at least next fall. The website’s expected to stay up and alive.

GOOD magazine,** 2006 – . The magazine “for people that give a damn” will be gracing damn-givers’ mailboxes less in 2009, now that the bimonthly mag’s become a quarterly. As of now, GOOD’s policy of donating all subscriber fees to progressive nonprofit organization seems to have remained intact.

We still do have some green lifestyle magazines on newsstands. Body+Soul,** Martha Stewart’s green living zine, is still alive and kicking, as is the quarterly Positively Green.** Locally in Los Angeles, Whole Life Times,** a free monthly green lifestyle magazine I contribute to, publishes on — and the newer eco-foodie focused quarterly Edible Los Angeles** is still publishing after a year in business.

Still, the combination of an economic downturn and the evolving habits of people in an increasingly digitized world doesn’t bode well for magazines in general — eco-friendly ones included. This fact makes me oddly sad, though to be honest, I’d never subscribed to Plenty or Green Guide, and I let my subscription to GOOD lapse after its first year.

In fact, while I do still read a number of magazines, I realized today that I haven’t paid money for a single subscription I have now. The majority of my magazine subscriptions were free-ish; I got them by trading in airline miles that were about to expire. A few other magazines send me free subscriptions because I’m a green blogger. And Whole Life Times, as I mentioned, is always free for all.

While I have some nostalgia for the print mag form, I guess I don’t care about preserving it enough to pay for it. Many articles in the mags I get, I’ve already read on the web by the time I sit down to read the printed version, for one thing. For another, there’s just so much information out there calling for my attention that it seems odd to pay for even more to be sent my way.

And since print mags are made up, for the large part, of colorful ads I barely glanced at, I do feel a tad wasteful whenever I drop a print mag into the recycling bin to be hauled away by big, gas guzzling garbage trucks to big, gas guzzling ships to big, energy-intensive paper recycling mills in China (if the mag’s lucky that is; lots of paper’s just sitting in the ports these days because the recycling market’s drying up due to the economic downturn).

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, but I am wondering about your take on the dying magazine industry. Were you a subscriber to any of these mags that are shutting down or downsizing? Do you feel duty-bound to help ensure the existence of the green print mags that still exist? Or are you simply waiting for the print media to adjust and adapt — to find some way to make financially viable the articles and images they put out in the new, digitized world?

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