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For many years, environmentalists have fought the stereotype that they are always saying "No":

"No" to power plants and power lines, to new freeways, to urban sprawl, to bulldozing the desert, to toxic waste dumping, to gas-guzzling cars, to air pollution and to open-pit copper mines, to name a few.

But since mid-June, 13 environmental advocates in their 20s have had a chance to travel around the country and inspect a host of eco-friendly and American Indian-run projects whose leaders are saying "yes":

"Yes" to biodiesel gasoline, to locally grown foods, to composting, to rebuilding one hurricane-ravaged Indian reservation and to building campgrounds on another one.

Their trip, via a biodiesel-fueled bus, came courtesy of a foundation named after a longtime Tucson congressman and environmentalist.

Saturday, the group of former fellows with the Morris K. Udall Foundation wound up their tour in Tucson with a celebratory dinner and a chance to reflect. Seated in the lobby of a West Side hotel where they were staying, they talked that morning of the hopes and inspirations they'd gained from watching solutions at work.

Among them:

● A Fry-o-Diesel plant in Philadelphia makes biodiesel from grease trapped at and shipped from restaurants as a pilot project. The biodiesel, a renewable fuel, is ultimately going to be sold as fuel to the operators of trucks who haul in the grease.

● In Eugene, Ore., a gasoline dealer and convenience store called Sequential was selling biodiesel fuel and ethanol for gasoline and locally grown organic foods.

● A Local Burger restaurant in Lawrence, Kan, makes all of its meals from locally produced goods, including elk, buffalo, pork, beef and lamb for their meat burgers along with vegetables for their veggie burgers. None of the burgers or hot dogs sells for more than $5.50, and the locally grown products are supposed to save fuel used for transporting foods from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

● An Oklahoma City health-care conference stressed American Indian health issues, including the problem of diabetes that speakers said affects one in three Indians. The talks leaned heavily on ways to prevent the problem, by having those in the audience understand that their fatty diets — a world apart from what their ancestors ate — is one reason for their disease.

● In San Francisco, the city government is using price incentives to encourage residents to bring food scraps and other compostable materials for composting instead of letting them go into landfills. So far, about 20 to 40 percent of residents are participating in the composting, compared to 80 to 90 percent who participated in recycling. Nearly 70 percent of the city's garbage is being diverted from the landfill, the Udall scholars said.

● In Chicago, city officials are speeding up permitting processes to encourage green, energy-efficient building, and working on plans to expand their existing 150 miles of bike paths to 500 miles. The tour also stopped at a nonprofit company called Working Bikes that was salvaging old bicycles for rebuilding, and training people to rebuild them.

● At the American Indian Salish-Kootenai College in Pablo, Mont., the fellows met with biochemistry students who are researching possible vaccines for animal diseases and others conducting research on extremophiles, bacteria that thrive on extreme conditions such as the temperature in geysers in Yellowstone National Park in neighboring Wyoming.

The fellows, coming from all over the country, took pains to note that none of these projects by themselves or together will solve the massive environmental problems facing this country, such as dependence on non-renewable energy or global warming.

"It's not one size fits all — we're seeing individual solutions," said Bret Muter, a 22-year-old graduate of Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich. who majored in environmental biology.

But these individual projects can work in steps toward a more sustainable existence, said Kayana Warren, a 24-year-old 2006 graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle who hopes to build a career in international conservation policy.

"Personally, I'd love it if it all happened and changed everything overnight," Warren said. "But all the things we saw are making a big impact, one step at a time. It's really inspiring to see how many different ways people are taking these steps to help the environment."

It's easy to be pessimistic about how big global warming is, but ultimately you can do a lot on your own to reverse the trend, said Julie Curti, 23, a graduate in environmental studies and geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"You make a million choices every day that have different effects," Curti said.

One of the most promising developments they saw was the prospect that some of these projects could help re-localize a city's economy, said Eli Zigas, who is 23 and graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa, where he majored in public policy.

Besides the Local Burger and Fry-o-Diesel businesses, they visited Philadelphia's White Dog Cafe, which buys much of its food from local farmers and donates 10 to 20 percent of profits to its foundation that works to build a more sustainable and socially just local economy.

At a catered meal they had in Oklahoma City, they ate locally grown tomatoes, salad greens, raspberries and bread. Because of the University of Montana's Farm to College program, the students ate in their dormitory dining halls locally produced cherries, beef and wheat.

The tour made Curti more hopeful not just about the environment, but about the entire country, she said.

"I had lived in Germany for a year, and they're incredibly progressive about environmental issues. I used to look at the U.S. and say, 'Why aren't we doing that stuff here? What's our problem?' But I learned we are doing it here, in our own way, in our own culture of American individualism. I think it still works. It's just different.

"And they're not just hippie-dippy types out there," she added. "They're all kinds of people."

The Udall Foundation is named for the late U.S. Rep. Morris K. "Mo" Udall, chairman of the House Interior Committee.

Udall, a Tucson Democrat who served in Congress from 1961 to 1991 and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976, was a forceful voice on environmental issues. He helped protect millions of acres of wilderness, in Alaska and elsewhere, from development. He died in 1998.