Arts | Women of Green

This Bike-Powered Flower Vendor Delivers Sustainability With Her Bouquets

By wogwpa1358 on October 21, 2015 / Arts, Featured Post, Innovation / Leave a comment

Tags: ecological sustainability, green business, green business women, women entrepreneurs, women in green business

Visit San Francisco, and you might see a bicycle whizzing past with dozens of bouquets. While receiving flowers always makes people smile, Farmgirl Flowers gives people even more reasons to smile—sustainable practices and American-grown flowers. Here, Farmgirl Flower founder Christina Stemble talks with Urban Farm about how she keeps her blooming business—now nationwide—in line with her mission of sustainability. How did Farmgirl Flowers get its start? I started Farmgirl Flowers about five years ago, in Nov. 2010, with an idea of how to change the way flowers are purchased in the U.S. I’d like to say I started the business because I have a passion for flower, but in truth it wasn’t a burning desire to work with flowers: It was a dream to start a business that did something good. When working at Stanford University as the director of alumni relations and campaign outreach for the law school, I noticed that the flowers we would order for events cost more than I thought they should. That led me to start researching the flower industry, which is when I found that it was a huge industry, but with a tremendous number of problems and very little innovation. So I set […]

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“Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot” Circles The Globe

By wogwpa1358 on October 19, 2015 / Arts, Family, Featured Post / Leave a comment

Tags: books, ecological sustainability, environmental sustainability, overdevelopment, overpopulation

"Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot"

A provocative new environmental book, has become an international media sensation. Featuring over 200 heart-wrenching images, the powerful book brings stark attention to the growing crises posed by overdevelopment and human population size and growth. There are thousands of essays, articles and books dealing with population but “Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot” provides a convincing new way of understanding the impacts of population size on human welfare and nature. Through well-chosen quotes, and stunning photographs, this largely visual presentation documents the realities and role of burgeoning human numbers on a broad variety of important areas including the destruction of wildlife and natural systems, air and water pollution, food insecurity and climate change. This consequential book should be read by political leaders, development planners, and the public to bring about an end to the current neglect of voluntary family planning. As Nobel laureate Henry W. Kendall noted “If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.” –J. Joseph Speidel, Co-Director, UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health Advanced copies of the large format coffee-table photo-thriller were released in […]

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Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Win: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature

By wogwpa1358 on October 8, 2015 / Arts, Featured Post / Leave a comment

Tags: social justice, women authors, women in the arts, women writers, women's issues

Alexievich has consistently chronicled that which has been intentionally forgotten: the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Chernobyl, the post-Soviet nineteen-nineties. Svetlana Alexievich’s book “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster” begins with a woman’s account of watching her husband, a firefighter, physically disintegrating in a hospital bed in the days following the April, 1986, nuclear-plant explosion. “It’s as good as Shakespeare,” she said of the quality of the woman’s words when I asked her about that part of the book, years ago. “But do you know how long it took to get her to produce those two pages of text?” The first hours—and subsequent hours and hours—of an interview, Alexievich explained, are always taken up by the rehearsing of received memories: newspaper accounts, other people’s stories, and whatever else corresponds to a public narrative that has inevitably already taken hold. Only beneath all those layers is personal memory found. The Swedish Academy, which announced today that Alexievich will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, cited the writer for inventing “a new kind of literary genre.” The permanent secretary of the Academy, Sara Danius, described Alexievich’s work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.” […]

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Naja’s ‘Radically Different Underwear’ Offers Women Underwear For Hope

By wogwpa1358 on August 18, 2015 / Arts, Featured Post, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: eco-fashion, social justice, women entrepreneurs, women in sustainability, women's empowerment, women's leadership

Cataline Girald, Naja and Underwear For Hope Founder

“When you educate a woman, everything changes.” With her platinum credentials as a former New York lawyer, Stanford School of Business MBA (class of 2006) and successful entrepreneur Catalina Girald doesn’t seem like a 21st century revolutionary. But her latest and second e-commerce company Naja finds the Colombian-born, San Francisco-based Girald championing women in ways that are ground-breaking and impactful, not to mention inspiring. Launched in December 2013, Naja manufactures and sells beautiful, distinctive lingerie — in their own parlance, “radically different lingerie” — at comparatively reasonable rates. Its average bra price, for instance is $45 U.S., while lacy briefs are $14. A product pitch on the site under the heading “Meticulously Crafted. Fairly Priced” explains things thusly. “Naja products are characterized by unexpected attention to detail — the kind of detailing found only in luxury brands. From our memory foam cups, to our interior bra prints, to our ultrasonic sealed bra straps — we take pride in our artistry. But we don’t believe you should have to pay $80+ for a high quality bra.” The thrills don’t stop there. Naja (pronounced “nigh-ya”) lingerie is modeled on its site by women who look like women modeling lingerie for potential female […]

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Atomic Moms, Radium Girls, and Hiroshima Maidens: Part 3

By wogwpa1358 on August 6, 2015 / Arts, Family, Featured Post, Health, Heart / Leave a comment

Tags: social entrepreneurs, social justice, women and war, women for peace, women's issues

Here is a little-known piece of history about Hiroshima: the story of how twenty-five young Japanese women, crippled and disfigured by the effects of the atomic blast, banded together to fight against their despair. They were brought to the United States in 1955 for plastic surgery – lodged in American homes and operated on at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital – in a remarkable humanitarian effort that is itself an epic.

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Atomic Moms, Radium Girls, and Hiroshima Maidens: Part 2

By wogwpa1358 on August 5, 2015 / Arts, Family, Featured Post, Health / Leave a comment

Tags: social justice, toxins in environment, women and war, women workers, women's empowerment, women's issues, womens rights, worker's rights

The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new army gadget used by American soldiers. The women were told that the glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint was harmless, and so they painted 250 dials a day, licking their brushes every few strokes with their lips and tongue to give them a fine point.

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Atomic Moms, Radium Girls, and Hiroshima Maidens: Part 1

By wogwpa1358 on August 4, 2015 / Arts, Family, Featured Post, Heart / Leave a comment

Tags: family, social justice, women and war, women in media, women's empowerment, women's issues, women's leadership

August 6, 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on a human population, specifically the people of Hiroshima, Japan. As a commemorative series, Women Of Green is taking a look back at the impact of nuclear war on the lives of women. This is the first post in the series. Mothers and Daughters Reflect on the Bomb In looking at the effects of nuclear weapons on mothers and daughters, the documentary film, Atomic Mom makes clear not only the past and effects, but also a way forward. In addition, filmmaker M.T. Silva has created Momisodes, a web series of Atomic Mom where mothers and daughters share thoughts on peace, and you can contribute your own ‘momisode’ to the series. The Film: Two decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. President claimed it was a particular mission for his administration to reduce the numbers of weapons on the planet, and to secure those weapons and materials that remain. The importance of this mission is too often forgotten in the current century—except when politicians raise the specter of scary nations who might have or attain weapons, like North Korea or Iran, or scary, […]

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Women Sommeliers: Changing the Wine Industry One Bottle at a Time

By wogwpa1358 on July 31, 2015 / Arts, Featured Post, Innovation, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: glass ceiling, women entrepreneurs, women in business, women's leadership

Women and wine go together like men and beer during the Super Bowl. Except with a lot less shouting and high-fiving. Perhaps it’s the relaxing sensuousness of opening and pouring a bottle, or maybe it’s the swirling and slow sipping that we love. Or maybe it’s just the fact that wine in all its varieties and styles is quite a fascinating, delicious, and beautiful part of the human experience. It’s not that women don’t love a good beer—we most certainly do. But wine is special. It can be sophisticated without pretention. It satisfies. It tells a story. And for women sommeliers, their story is only beginning to be told. A sommelier knows more about wine than most people will ever even think to ask. In our food and wine-pairing world, the wine expert is a necessity, of course. But master sommeliers are rare, women among the ranks, even more rare. That is now changing. In this enlightened era, only 32 of the world’s 229 master sommeliers—that’s just under 14 percent—are women,” reports Bloomberg. “Canada has two. Three-quarters of them ply their trade in the U.S.” Men have long dominated the sommelier industry, bringing an air of arrogant, snooty wine knowledge […]

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The 3% Conference: A passion project that became a movement

By wogwpa1358 on July 28, 2015 / Arts, Featured Post, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: social entrepreneurs, social justice, women entrepreneurs, women in business, women's empowerment, women's leadership

Kat Gordon worked for 20 years as a Copywriter/Creative Director and saw firsthand how women were often left out of pitches and important meetings. She describes the “Ultimate Emperor’s New Clothes Moment” of her life as the day her agency pitched the Saab car account with 16 men and one woman and then was mystified why they didn’t get the business.

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