Moms 1, Chemical Industry 0

By on October 21, 2011   /   Family, Health, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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By Senator Dianne Feinstein

Chalk up a win for moms around the country.

After years of battle, the chemical industry has reversed its longstanding position against restrictions on the controversial chemical bisphenol A, known as BPA, and asked the Food and Drug Administration to revise regulations on the use of the chemical in baby bottles and sippy cups.

It is ironic that the industry asking federal regulators to revise BPA standards is the very same industry that spent millions of dollars lobbying to block my legislation restricting the use of this dangerous chemical.

The American Chemistry Council must have realized that no matter how much money they spent, no parent, grandparent or concerned person would stand by while our children are used as guinea pigs with a chemical that could seriously harm their immediate and long-term health.

BPA is an endocrine disruptor, meaning that it can interfere with how hormones work in our bodies by changing their normal function. More than 200 studies link BPA exposure to breast and other cancers, reproductive disorders, cardiac disease, diabetes, early puberty and other problems.

Yet, the chemical industry stubbornly refused to listen to science and concerned consumers, and instead leaned on lawmakers.

Last year, the American Chemistry Council actually lobbied to prevent a vote in the Senate on the change it now seems to be advocating–a national ban on BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups.

Here’s why I think chemical industry lobbyists failed: Even though they successfully blocked a vote on BPA, consumers took matters into their own hands and voted against BPA with their wallets. Every time a BPA-free product was purchased, it marked a setback for the chemical industry.

For years the chemical lobby ignored the pleas of concerned parents, environmentalists and advocacy groups that called for a ban on BPA. Companies ignored the studies and continued to argue that there was no established link between BPA and many illnesses. There was simply no other alternative, the companies insisted—baby bottles and sippy cups could only be made with BPA.

Clearly they were wrong.

Read more at Senator Dianne Feinsten’s website

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19-year old girl takes solar tracking to new heights.

By on October 3, 2011   /   Family, Featured Post, Innovation   /   1 Comment
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Eden Full, a 19-year-old Princeton University mechanical engineering student has developed a non-toxic, cheap, recyclable device made out of metal and bamboo that allows solar panels to follow or track the Sun without the use of an electric motor. This does two things: 1) it boosts the output of the solar panels by about 40% (huge) and 2) it does so using a much cheaper and simpler method than traditional trackers commonly used in commercial projects (her technology costs $10, a lot less than the typical $600 solar tracker).

Eden and the SunSaluter (being developed by her company, Roseicollis Technologies, now) have won a number of big awards for this ‘simple’ device. She just won $275,000, in the 2011 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge and $10,000 in the the EcoLiving 2011 Awards a few months ago. And she’s also won a $100,000 fellowship from the Thiel Foundation this year. Way to go Eden!

Read more on Clean Technica.

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Harness Your Creative Genius with the Right Fuel

By on September 13, 2011   /   Family, Featured Post, Health   /   1 Comment
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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?

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It takes a village to help the environment

By on August 30, 2011   /   Family, Heart   /   1 Comment
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I imagine that most people are familiar with the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child”. While this rings true for children and families, I find that this can apply to many things. In fact, the community or village around that child or idea betters almost everything as it tries to grow and plant its roots.

At the moment, I believe this philosophy can be applied to making a change for our environment and helping our environment to continue to grow, as it should. While a lot of positive changes and growth begin in the home, much like with children, you cannot underestimate nor deny the positive influence provided by the village.

There are many ways that you can encourage your community to come together to help the environment. While we don’t exist in the same way as a community or village that we used to, it can still be a great way to educate and spread the word about some of the issues going on in the environment today.

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Backyard Agrarian’s 30-days without packaged food

By on August 16, 2011   /   Family, Health   /   1 Comment
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Liz Brown Morgan is a wilderness guide, turned environmentalist, turned water lawyer, turned tax lawyer turned Agrarian Revolutionary. Liz is the founder of Backyard Agrarian through which she writes about the requisite Agrarian Revolution and the Landscape Imperative needed to save ourselves – from ourselves. Liz is a yogi, a wild gardener, a telemark skier, a rafter, an eco-entrepreneur and a community activist. She lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just outside of Boulder, Colorado.

On the cusp of spring, here in the high mountains of Colorado, I found myself embroiled in the weekly battle that my husband typically oversees: Recycling. I was appalled. We are environmentalists. We eat organic food. We buy local. We do, what we thought, was our best to eat and live responsibly given the constraints of the culture that we live in. But here I was, up against that unspoken behemoth of wastefulness: food packaging.

I decided then and there to embark on a 30-day adventure without packaged food. I convinced my husband to join me, cleaned out the cupboards, grabbed some tote bags and Tupperware, and headed to the farmers markets, the grocery stores and whatever farm stands I could find.

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Izilwane takes on women, reproduction and consumption.

By on August 2, 2011   /   Family, Health, Leadership   /   1 Comment
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Tara Waters Lumpkin, environmental and medical anthropologist, is the president of the nonprofit Perception International and founder, editor-in-chief, and project director of the online multimedia platform Izilwane. Perception International is a nonprofit that promotes environmental, cultural, and perceptual diversity worldwide. Izilwane is one of its projects and focuses on creating awareness about the importance of changing how human beings perceive themselves in relationship with other species and the natural world.

Just as Copernicus forever altered our perception of the role of humans in the cosmos, Dr. Lumpkin’s organization believes that humankind can redefine our human place in local and global ecosystems as being a part of nature, rather as seeing ourselves as being above nature. The website asks, “How can we change our perceptions and, thus, alter our negative impact on biodiversity? Are we evolutionarily hard-wired to destroy other species? Or can we become more aware of our own ‘animal nature’ and consciously and deliberately change our behaviors?”

What is truly new about Izilwane is that we work with volunteer eco-reporters from around the globe. Reporters use writing, photos, video, and more to reflect on what is happening globally to biodiversity and how we can change human perceptions to stop the massive species die-off we are perpetuating. By being participatory in our journalistic approach, we are creating activists around the world who support our mission to stop biodiversity loss, as well as educating the general public. This is why we call ourselves a platform not an ezine.

Dr. Lumpkin is also a nonprofit consultant and journalist. Although she is a resident of Taos, New Mexico, her fieldwork has propelled her around the globe. From 1993-1994, Dr. Lumpkin worked in Namibia to conduct research for her PhD, where she studied the community use of traditional medicine. A few years later, in 1997, she traveled to Panama as a “Women in Development” fellow for USAID and the Panamanian National Commission on the Environment where she researched ecotourism possibilities in the Panama Canal Watershed. Since then she has worked for a variety of nonprofits across the world, including Tibet, where she conducted a Maternal and Child Heath Needs Assessment. Her project resulted in the building of a health clinic in Gargon village, and the training of nurse midwives and doctors.

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Tomatoland exposes the dirt on Florida tomatoes.

By on July 26, 2011   /   Family, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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We all know that Florida is famous for its oranges. But if it’s up to Barry Estabrook, the Florida tomato will soon upstage its sister. His new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, exposes some juicy facts about how these red rivals are grown and who’s doing the pickin’. According to the book, children as young as 12 do farm work and workers are paid by the number of containers of fruit they pick, a system that often leaves them with less than the minimum wage.

Estabrook writes, “This might explain why the life expectancy of a migrant worker in the United States is only 49 years … migrant workers typically make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, a figure that is distorted because it includes the higher wages paid to field supervisors.”

To make matters worse, pesticides abound in the sandy soil their grown in, and farm workers are exposed and often unprotected. Give me one of those tomatoes and let me throw it at the culprits here. Shame on you.

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Mother and daughter birth a big vision

By on July 18, 2011   /   Family, Featured Post, Leadership   /   7 Comments
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With the birth of my son fast approaching, I wanted to take a stand. I wanted to create a community where real people could come and learn about environmental hazards and the simple changes they could make for their families, the environment and their pocketbook. I enlisted the help of one of the most passionate people I know, my mom, and we set out to create change.

For us, it mattered that change was easy and simple. It mattered that change could come from a small action that anyone could do, regardless of time and money. We also were determined to take a stand against plastic bags. It’s easy to see why – toxic and foul litter in the four corners of the planet, killing marine life and choking our natural resources. It seemed the perfect fit. What if we could get every person in North America to stop using plastic bags?

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Keep off the lawn, really!

By on July 11, 2011   /   Arts, Family, Health   /   Leave a comment
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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.

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July is clean-up-your-act month

By on July 7, 2011   /   Family, Leadership, Nature   /   Leave a comment
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Ever visit a landfill? It ain’t pretty. Most of the debris of humanity ends up there. Bottles. Tires. Plastic. Old newspapers that you were suppose to recycle. Well, this month you have a chance to redeem yourself. July is “Waste Less” month and Women Of Green is participating in the GOOD Challenge. A month-long effort to lighten your load (and Mother Earth’s) in any way you can. Here are some ideas to get you started.

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