Garden Activists: Bringing green thumbs to urban blight
20 Apr 2012
From Washington Post
by Emily Wax
“Let’s throw some bombs,” a young woman calls out, waterproof floral purse swinging on her shoulder and Laura Ingalls braids flying behind her as a band of 25 followers cheer, “Cool!”
They rush toward a drab vacant lot in Shaw. Some climb up onto the back of a truck to get better aim at their target. But these bombers aren’t likely to appear on any terrorist list or even get arrested. They’re throwing “seed bombs,” golf-ball-size lumps of mud packed with wildflower seeds, clay and a little bit of compost and water, which they just learned to make at a free seed-bombing workshop for Washington’s guerrilla gardeners.
Junk food kills
2 Mar 2012
The U.S. industrial food and farming system, dominated by fast food restaurants and processed, chemical-laden food, has precipitated a public health crisis. Although nutritionists recommend that consumers avoid eating unhealthy junk foods, every day 75 million Americans “supersize” themselves and damage their health by eating at McDonald’s or other fast food restaurants. Forty percent of American meals are now purchased and consumed outside the home, typically consisting of high-calorie, low-nutrition items such as soft drinks, French fries, and low-grade meat, laced with fat, cheap sweeteners, pesticide residues, chemical additives, and salt. We have become a Fast Food Nation of bulging waistlines and high blood pressure.
Recent studies link pesticide residues and chemical additives like MSG in processed foods and restaurant fare to hormone disruption and obesity. No wonder 60% percent of Americans are either overweight or obese. One in every three children born since the year 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetime. Diet-related obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are now the nation’s number one public health problem, generating an estimated $150 billion in health care costs every year. Millions of youth and adults have literally become addicted to the chemically enhanced junk food served in fast food restaurants, school lunchrooms, and institutional cafeterias. In 1972, U.S. consumers spent three billion dollars a year on fast food – today we spend more than $110 billion.
The junk food industry, now under attack by public health advocates and parents, finds itself in a similar position to where the tobacco industry was in the 1990s. After decades of lies and industry propaganda, the truth is finally coming out: junk food kills.
Indeed, despite individual efforts by some states to tax soda pop, require healthier school lunches, or mandate calorie information in chain restaurants, obesity rates in the United States are growing. It is time for the federal government to stop subsiding, with billions of dollars of public tax money, the factory-farmed crops and animal products (corn, soybeans, cotton, dairy, and meat) that create the artificially low prices that prop up the nation’s junk food industry.
32,000 year-old flower has rebloomed
25 Feb 2012
Melting permafrost is not helping climate change, as it gives off gusts of globe-warming methane. But the world’s scientists are finding a treasure trove in areas where the snow melts.
A team at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia discovered – in a fossilized squirrel burrow in Siberia – remnants of the ice-age flowering plant Silene stenophylla. The plant had been buried at a depth of 38 meters in sediments with a temperature of ?7°.
Radiocarbon dating of the plants seemed to show that an ancient squirrel stashed them around 31,800 years ago, just before ice rolled into the area near the Kolya river.
Scientists used growth hormone to coax silene stenophylla back to life and eventually, back to bloom. They are now, according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report ” the most ancient, viable, multicellular, living organisms.”
The discoveries of this ‘ancient DNA’ as permafrost in colder regions melts is becoming a trend. Sometimes, seed finds turn out to have been deposited much later than scientists first believe, but the Soil Cryptology Lab in Moscow went to some lengths to ascertain that silene stenophylla‘s seeds were really as old as they seemed to be.
As permafrost melts, there will be more finds like silene stenophylla, and some scientists think ancient seeds might even begin to bloom spontaneously, giving hope that previous extinct varieties of plants will come back to life.
And if not, there’s always Norway’s seed vault to provide some genetic info.
The jewels of Jes: Spreading compassion through jewelry
9 Feb 2012
I truly believe the reason my work has been so successful is because it’s infused with my passion for life – passion born from a place of deep compassion, for all creatures and our beautiful Mother Earth. My collectors can feel this and have expressed how deeply inspired they are by the love built into every design and how good it feels to wear jewelry and support a company that celebrates life, by honoring ethical practice and raising awareness.
My interest in the environment developed from a childhood spent mostly outdoors. Countless hours riding my horse bareback deep into the wooded hills near my home – never failed to return me to my souls essence. Nature was my altar as much then, as it is today. It’s the place where I can hear and feel my heart’s wisdom; not only does it inspire my creativity, but anchors it. My relationship with animals is no different. They are so pure, present and without judgment – I always feel relaxed in their company, like I can really be myself and love without constraint.
When you love something unconditionally, it is natural to want to do anything in your power to protect it. My real work as an artist is to spread compassion and bring awareness to the suffering innocent, and the abusive practices that are detrimentally impacting our Earth. As a business owner and entrepreneur, I feel a responsibility to affect positive change in my immediate environment – and on a global level. Implementing ethical practice in business requires a lot of research, attention to detail, and in many cases extra expense – but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I get to stand behind (and in front of) a company that brings more beauty into the world, while helping eliminate what is not so beautiful. My dedication to this level of integrity has also created amazing opportunities to collaborate with bigger companies making a powerful impact socially and environmentally.
6 Keys to Happiness to Live By
16 Jan 2012
Make time for those closest to you. Be kind. Forgive. Give thanks. Let’s add one more…smile often. There you have it. The secret to the fountain of youth. Do you have one you’d like to share?
Harness Your Creative Genius with the Right Fuel
13 Sep 2011
Ellen Livingston is founder of Living Yoga Now, a yoga studio and raw food learning center in Ann Arbor, MI. Ellen has studied nutrition for over 20 years, and lives a vibrant, healthy raw lifestyle. She provides raw food coaching, classes, and nutrition tips.
When passion, mental clarity, and focused energy all come together, our creative expression is at its peak. We’re not likely to make major creative breakthroughs when we’re tired, uninspired, feeling foggy or scatterbrained, or in pain or discomfort of some kind. If you want to live an inspired life and spend a lot of time in your creative genius zone, you need to keep yourself feeling good.
There are many spokes in the “wheel of health” that require our dedicated attention, such as healthy food, good sleep, sunshine, fresh air and exercise, loving relationships, beauty, humor, and meaningful creative work that we enjoy. Our health is hampered by any spoke that is out of alignment. It is a lifetime project to keep all these important requisites of health in balance, a project that requires our constant recommitment if we truly want to thrive and experience our peak creativity.
One spoke is not more critical than another, but the food we choose to put into our body several times every day has a particularly major impact on how we will feel, how well we can function and whether we can tap our genius zone.
Surely you have experienced the dullness of being that follows a very rich or heavy meal, or the mental fog that accompanies a day of eating mostly junk foods. How about a scattered or antsy feeling from refined sugars or stimulants, followed later by a deep tiredness? In these scenarios it is often all we can do just to keep up with the general tasks laid before us – originality and sustained creative flow is just not happening. Can you imagine the possibilities if instead you were running on the perfect fuel and operating at full capacity, all the time?
Making green meaningful to women – Show 49
27 Jul 2011
OK, we know that American women buy 85% of the products on the planet, and we know we’re the keepers of the home and hearth, so why in the world are we buying so many products laden with toxic chemicals? Why are we voluntarily bringing them into our homes? This is a big disconnect for me. So I asked my guest, Margaret McAllister, an advertising creative director with a specialty in marketing green to women, this question.
“The most important thing we, as marketers, can do is to educate women about what they’re buying, why they’re buying it, and to relate those products to her specific life,” she said in this podcast. “If you really want to bring the message home to women, show them something that she specifically cares about. And there’s probably nothing more precious to her than her children.” I would agree. This self-professed cultural anthropologist shares with me more down-to-earth insights like this in this interview. If this topic intrigues you as much as it does me, listen in and, most importantly, join in the conversation. Love to get your take on this.
Keep off the lawn, really!
11 Jul 2011
When I was little, I lived on a hill. One of the great joys of summer was rolling down our fresh-cut lawn until I was dizzy. And each summer like clockwork I would break out in a rash all over my body. Little red bumps would emerge on my arms and legs. Back then, no one knew about chemical reactions from lawn care products. But that was exactly what was happening. Thankfully, we’re way more aware of the pesticide load on our kids, but still we spread that white powdery blanket over our lawns to keep them “nice and green and dandelion-free”. I wish there were more films like A Chemical Reaction to wake us up to the toxins seeping into children. Watch this trailer and see how a whole town dared to stand up to the big chemical companies, and changed the world for the better.
Are you a green parent? Green Mama shows you how – show 47
6 Jul 2011
For me, hands down, the biggest “going green” motivator was having a baby. From the moment I found out that I was pregnant, I watched what I put in my mouth like a hawk. Not to say that I didn’t cheat now and then – sneaking a really greasy French fry when no one was looking, but basically I knew whatever I put in my body, I put in my baby.
At that time, “going green” wasn’t the rage it is today, so I didn’t have all the resources parents have at their fingertips now. That’s good news for parents. I think the challenge today is how NOT to get overwhelmed by it all. Here to help parents with that is Manda Aufochs Gillespie otherwise known as The Green Mama. She is the creator of TheGreenMama.com in Vancouver, Canada. A resource to inspire greener living for mamas and papas. She has put together the ten most effective green parenting habits for 2011. Listen up and see where you stand.
The Green Mama’s ten effective habits of parenting
5 Jul 2011
It’s like magic: having a baby. I don’t just mean the obvious: bump one day and baby the next. I mean what happens to the parents, the mom especially. One day she is a woman and the next day she is a mother. That act of becoming a mother represents the largest life change, and the most sudden, that most people will ever experience. One day you are free to stay up late drinking wine, forget your sunhat, and pass judgment at the woman with screaming toddlers, impertinent teenagers, or breast milk stains on their silk blouses. Then, seemingly overnight, you are part of a secret tribe of women giving each other the thumbs up when passing with sleeping babies in strollers or sharing tips on favorite slings and you oh-so-sympathetically-and-without-ANY-judgment smile at the frazzled mother trying to pry her child’s booger-filled hands out of the bulkfood bins in the aisle of the grocery store.
From asthma to aesthetics: How Zem Joaquin created an eco fabulous life – show 44
17 May 2011
When Zem Joaquin’s two children suffered from chronic asthma, she took it in her own hands and undertook a major renovation in her home — and her life. “I was frustrated by the fact that both of my children were constantly being hospitalized. I was up so many nights with a nebulizer in hand with crying children,” she painfully remembers. “The pediatricians just kept saying that it was part of childhood, that many children have asthma.” But after they recommended putting her children on long-term steroids, she said, “Enough is enough!”
Accelerated Aging Strikes Again: Maria Rodale on aging gracefully.
12 May 2011
Maria Rodale writes about studies that are finding that genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are now found in almost all our processed foods including non-organic corn and soy, cause accelerated aging.
Mainstreaming green behaviors demands massive new approach
11 May 2011
Do you have ideas about how to use purchasing power for sustainability and the way to take green spending habits mainstream? Please share them!
Happy Mothers Days to the Mother in all of us
8 May 2011
Happy Mothers Day to the Mother in all of us. We picked roses for you today. A celebration of your beauty and strength. Photo credit: Regina Foster, artist extraordinaire.
Love Food Hate Waste
7 May 2011
Here at Women Of Green, as we scour the landscape for ways to support ourselves, our home communities and the world community to embrace sustainable and regenerative practices (and products!) we keep coming across one after another after another incredible projects.
