MNN makes its move.

Bringing eco-responsibility beyond the choir and to the Masses.

Horserace? Treehugger (orange), MNN (Green), Inhabitat (Blue). Other big sites: Grist, TheDailyGreen.

(elephant doesn’t even yet make the list—we’re at 80K/month according to Compete, 205K according to Google Analytics)

Mother Nature Network, the big green site many folks still don’t know about, is exploding fast, gaining on leading, established green giant Treehugger.com and surpassing other great green sites like Grist, Inhabitat and The Daily Green…according to Compete.com.

Note: Compete’s numbers are weird: Treehugger, the orange site above, has something like 2.5 million unique viewers a month according to a convo I had a few months back with Graham Hill, TH’s founder, on a live web chat hosted by Inc. And, of course, I believe him; besides, Compete also underreports elephant journal’s uniques by about 50% when compared with our Google Analytics numbers. Still, I’ll assume that whatever yardstick it uses to measure is (equally in)consistent across all sites.

Why does any of this traffic stuff matter? It doesn’t really—what matters most is editorial quality, integrity.

And, besides, all of the above sites are in this together, generally: we’re all trying to do the same thing.

But, too, it matters a whole heckuva lot: “green” has to be something big, something mainstream…if only liberal America gets behind being eco-responsible (which in itself would be a dreamed-of eventuality) we’d only be halfway there. Taking care of God’s green earth is something we can, and should, and must all get behind. This is not only about elephants and tigers and climate change…it’s about us. Cancer rates, unhealthy food, diabetes.

Check it: