As environmentalism goes mainstream, corporations are marketing the word “green” as a panacea for the world’s climate crisis. Today the word describes a set of prescribed, mostly consumerist actions: buy local, organic and fresh; go vegan; eat in season; skip the elevator, take the stairs. “Green” has come to mean shopping at Whole Foods and possessing a Prius.
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Being an environmentalist doesn’t have to mean sacrificing dreams of having a family. In fact, as the five women on this list prove, being a mother can make us even more committed to keeping the planet clean and green. And while some environmentalists point to overpopulation as the leading cause of global warming, there’s more evidence showing that our mismanagement of resources is more to blame than the number of people on the planet.
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Burt Shavitz, a rural beekeeper whose homespun marketing for natural personal care products transformed him from an unknown recluse into the familiar scruffy face of a line of balms that healed a million lips, died on Sunday in Bangor, Me. He was 80. The cause was respiratory problems, said Christina Calbi, a spokeswoman for Burt’s Bees®, the company Mr. Shavitz co-founded in 1984 and which was sold to Clorox in 2007 for about $925 million. The brand still bears his bearded visage, wistful eyes and signature striped locomotive engineer’s cap. Even after the sale, Mr. Shavitz remained a paid spokesman for Burt’s Bees, though he had returned to his hermit’s existence in a 400-square-foot converted turkey coop in Parkman, ME, northwest of Bangor. The abode was equipped with a radio and refrigerator but not a television or running hot water. I realized I had it made because you don’t have to destroy anything to get honey. You can just use the same things over and over again, put it in a quart canning jar, and you’ve got $12. In 1984, Mr. Shavitz picked up a 33-year-old hitchhiker, Roxanne Quimby, who became his business and romantic partner. Ms. Quimby, a former […]
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Director James Cameron has designed Solar Sun Flowers as a gift to his wife, which have been installed on campus at her MUSE School in California. Cameron had five flowers installed on the 22-acre Malibu Canyon campus and they generate roughly 300 kilowatt hours per day. The flowers are expected to offset the non-profit school’s power usage between 75-90%. Amazing! The patent-pending design will soon be an available, free and open-source, to encourage wider use of solar power. Now that’s what we call charitable!
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Karen Warner founded Big Head Farm in 2009, located in southwest Michigan. After experiencing the challenges of starting a farm and creating a viable business, Warner began thinking through ways to support new farmers and to protect small to mid-sized farms from going out of production. Warner is currently working to advance a farm accelerator model that would give farmers the resources and support they need to succeed from start-up to retirement.
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Many food items that are produced in the United States are full of additives and chemicals. Unfortunately, Americans are eating lab-created and nutrient-stripped food that somehow got twisted around into being called healthy or normal. Because the food industry is a big business, many probably don’t know the facts about how their food is produced, and what ingredients in that food can do to our bodies.
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To make fashion more sustainable, the industry’s underlying structure and supply lines need a major makeover. Yet, despite these obstacles, a few designers–alongside fashion muses like zero waste hero Lauren Singer–are taking zero waste fashion from fiction into the real world.
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Consumers want safer chemicals and ingredients in their products, and they want companies to be transparent about what’s in their products. meet this demand and achieve a competitive advantage, retailers and manufacturers including Target, Walmart and SC Johnson have taken steps to phase out hazardous chemicals in their products and encourage product transparency.
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In order to run my zero-waste kitchen, I need to plan my shopping trips a bit. Before heading to the farmer’s market or grocery store, I take a look at the running shopping list on my phone and add a few things we might need. List in hand, I gather my zero-waste equipment. The list helps me figure out what I’ll need and while shopping, I stick closely to it. 1. Glass jars I use my glass jars at the bulk bins. Get the weight on these before you fill them up. At some stores, customer service will weigh them for you and mark the tare on them. Other stores set out scales and you weigh the jars yourself. The cashier will deduct the weight of the jar from your food when checking you out so you pay for weight of the food only. Lately I’ve been taking jars to the farmer’s market for berries. That way I bring home whole fruit rather than jam. A health food store in my daughter’s university town, Guelph, Ontario, Stone Store, doesn’t charge for all packaging but it does charge for nut butter containers, which I find brilliant. How many students will forget a jar […]
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Earth Day this year was officially Wednesday, April 22nd. Did you get your green on? Well, it’s not too late. I’ve seen in recent years Earth Day transform into Earth Week with green activities and events spread out over many days. Now if we can only get that kind of effort happening the remainder 51 weeks of the year, that would be progress!
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