From parabens to phthalates, according to this infographic the average woman puts on her body approximately 515 chemicals every day. What about you?
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NEWSFLASH! Rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn or exposed to its top-selling weedkiller Roundup suffered tumours and multiple organ damage, according to a French study published on Wednesday.
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We don’t want you to eat meat with antibiotics in it, you shouldn’t want to eat meat with antibiotics in it, and Robert Kenner, the director of the occasionally disturbing movie about the commercial food industry, Food, Inc., really does not want you to eat meat with antibiotics in it. Which is why he created this delightful crowd-sourced map that lets you enter your zip code to locate stores, farms, restaurants, and markets where you can get meat that won’t contribute to antibiotic-resistant superbugs that will kill us all.
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Think pink slime is gross? Wait ’til you see what other unappetizing secrets lurk within your grocery store.
1. “Pink slime”
The gross factor: The meat industry likes to call it “lean finely textured beef,” but after ABC News ran a story on it, the public just called it what it looks like — pink slime, a mixture of waste meat and fatty parts from higher-quality cuts of beef that have had the fat mechanically removed. Afterwards, it’s treated with ammonia gas to kill Salmonella and E. coli bacteria. Then it gets added to ground beef as a filler. Food microbiologists and meat producers insist that it’s safe, but given the public’s reaction to the ABC News report, there’s an “ick” factor we just can’t overcome. The primary producer of pink slime just announced that it’s closing three of the plants where pink slime is produced, and Kroger, Safeway, Food Lion, McDonald’s and the National School Lunch Program (among others) have all pulled it from their product offerings.
Eat this instead: Organic ground beef is prohibited from containing pink slime, per National Organic Program standards, so it’s your safest bet. If you can’t find organic, ask the butcher at your grocery store whether their products contain the gunk.
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Sharon Ede who is part of our Women of Green community and co-founder of the Post Growth Institute, is rallying forces for “Free Money Day”. On Saturday, September 15th people around the world will participate in this event by handing out their own money to complete strangers and asking recipients to pass half on to someone else.
Free Money Day is a signal interruption to business-as-usual, and a way to spark conversations about the benefits of economies based on sharing, as well as a liberating experience that gets people thinking more critically and creatively about our relationships with money.
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Four archetypes of entrepreneurship and how they contribute to a better world.
For four decades I have worked with small business entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses by keeping stakeholder success and consciousness of how they do business in the forefront of their minds. I have seen how, by developing the characteristics of what I call The Responsible Entrepreneur, anyone helping to bring new business into the world can fulfill the promise of entrepreneurship and contribute to the creation of a better world.
Every Responsible Entrepreneur represents one of four archetypes, each with a unique role to play in the entrepreneurial system. Cultural anthropologists have identified all four in every healthy culture, and all four are needed to ensure the health of our own evolving social system. Each takes on change differently in search of different outcomes. All four approaches can also be found inside established organizations, among intrapreneurs who lead change.
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Famed actress and octogenarian Bette Davis said getting older isn’t for sissies. Those of us over 50 know that, while the second half of our lives can be a time of emotional stability, mental acuity, wisdom and power, the physical fact of aging is undeniable. And the risk of age-related disease increases with each passing year.
There’s not much you can do to stop the inexorable march of time; but you can protect your health, and age more gracefully, with the following foods…
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One of the most powerful feminist works of the late 20th century was Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly. There is nothing fluffy about her perspective. It is a scathing condemnation of the world that men have built. The title itself is provocative and suggests many layers of meaning. Of all those layers, what means the most to me personally is the wonder of nature and the incomprehensibility of what we have done and continue to do to her.
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade and more recently, The Real Wealth of Nations made a crucial contribution to the feminist literature by showing us that the opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. In fact, matriarchy is a patriarchal concept. The true opposite is partnership, a harmonious balance between the masculine and feminine, men and women.m Both patriarchy and matriarchy are models in which one group dominates another. This is the antithesis of gyn/ecology.
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There are greater concentrations of precious metals in our e-waste than there are in the ground. And it’s a lot cheaper and cleaner to get things out of e-waste than starting a giant mining operation. Where would you rather get the materials for your next gadget?
The mountain of electronic waste rising around the world is a gold mine–literally. Urban deposits of e-waste (discarded computers, phones and other electronics) contain 40 to 50 times the concentration of precious metals compared to ore mined from the ground at great cost to the environment, human health, and buyers of latest gadgets. We should mine it our e-waste, then, rather than the stuff in the ground.
That’s the message from the “e-Waste Academy” co-organized by the United Nations University and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI). Despite the 21 billion dollars of gold and silver embedded in modern electronics each year, not to mention copper, tin, cobalt, and palladium and other metals, only a fraction of which is ever recovered. For example, 80 to 85% of gold in e-waste is lost due to crude (and dangerous) dismantling processes in developing countries and ineffective collection systems in developed countries (which are the source of most e-waste).
“Rather than looking at e-waste as a burden, we need to see it as an opportunity,” said Alexis Vandendaelen of Umicore Precious Metals Refining at the meeting.
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It’s funny how starting with a simple idea to make little things can grow to where it bumps up against big things.
When I see something like the recent controversy over the US Olympic team uniforms made overseas, I compare it to my experience with my company, Teres Kids. I started my company to make the world’s most comfortable children’s clothing.
The clearest path to super comfortable clothes led to organic cotton, then to made in America, then to superior quality, incredible durability, and – Presto! – outstanding consumer value.
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