All the "green" hotel stuff -- not washing the sheets and towels every day, planning to start an organic-produce-buying program -- just doesn't seem like a good enough gift to the world this year. Not when barefoot vendors in ragged clothes are still hawking jewelry outside big, luxurious resorts, and schoolkids in nearby villages can't get their hands on a book.

All the buzzwords are confusing: ecotourism, geotourism, ethnotourism, sustainable tourism. They've become so ubiquitous they're nearly meaningless.

A traveler has to do some serious research to figure out who's really giving the world something back these days. We couldn't fly around to see for ourselves, but we talked to a lot of people and did a lot of reading in circles like the World Heritage Alliance, Sustainable Travel International, ResponsibleTravel.com and the International Ecotourism Society. The result was this unscientific list of places mentioned more than once.

These are places that are actively trying to give people homes and restore their livelihoods, or educate their children, or save a dry river. They or the foundations they