As part of your Thanksgiving celebration this year, why not offer thanks to the planet by having an eco-friendly Thanksgiving holiday that will be as good for the environment as it is for your friends and family?

There are a lot of things you can do--from choosing locally grown food for your table to reducing your energy consumption--that can make your Thanksgiving a little greener this year.

I've put together 10 tips to help you have an eco-friendly Thanksgiving that will impact the environment much less than it does your waistline.

The Greenland ice sheet is melting and losing mass at an accelerating rate, and has been doing so since the late 1990s, according to a new study reported in the journal Science and funded by the National Environment Research Council. Scientists who conducted used two different methods--satellite observations and a state-of-the-art regional atmospheric model--to independently confirm the results.

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause sea levels around the world to rise 7 meters (approximately 23 feet) if all the ice melts. Since 2000, the Greenland ice sheet has lost enough mass to cause an average global sea level increase of about half a millimeter per year--about 5 millimeters total over the past decade.

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Ever since Hurricane Katrina swamped the city of New Orleans in 2005, a lot of people have pointed the long finger of blame at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--and this week a federal court agreed.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. issued a 156-page opinion that the Los Angeles Times describes as a "stinging rebuke to the corps" for its failure to prevent the devastating floods by properly managing the levees and other infrastructure that should have protected the city.

"The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions," Duval wrote in his ruling.

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During the federal government's bailout of the auto industry earlier this year, Chrysler Corporation received $15.3 billion in taxpayer money to keep its factories humming--partly in exchange for the company's aggressive plan to produce a fleet of electric vehicles. Now that the money is safely in the Chrysler coffers, however, the automaker has announced a new plan to disband its electric vehicle team and to produce only a token number of electric cars.