Fifteen prominent women who broke the gender barriers and stepped into historic leadership roles.
See them in all their glory in this Washington Post slide show.
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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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As my knowledge and passion grows, I see that we, as Americans and world citizens, have a lot of work to do. To combat frustration and despair that grip many of us after we see movies like Food Inc., I have developed a platform for change. Human creativity remains to be one of the last resources that has not been commodified for profit. There are vast untapped stories, images, fears, dreams and damaged lives out there that are waiting to be expressed.
Our Facebook Page, World Food Day KC 2011 Flash Mob has many functions, but at the top of the list is: A place where we can express in different ways our concern, hope and fears around the topic of the future of food. These expressions, in turn, are then made into posters and fliers that are free for world citizens to download in order to make their own parties, potlucks, protests, flash mobs or advertisements. We encourage people who feel that they don’t have a voice to contribute, as their healing becomes our healing. The system in the U.S. and around the world is truly in a crisis of proportions that we are barely conscious of.
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From the filmmakers of the Sundance Award-winning film FUEL, comes the new documentary FREEDOM. In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill; filmmakers Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell (check out our interview with Rebecca on Women Of Green) took an international journey to investigate alternatives to fossil fuels. FREEDOM offers an array of green solutions. From about advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol, to plug in hybrids, we learn about the sustainable technologies that could fulfill our transportation needs.
With insightful and inspirational interviews form former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, Singer/Songwriter Jason Mraz, international author Deepak Chopra and actors Michelle Rodriguez, Amy Smart and Ed Begley Jr., FREEDOM invites people to not just get mad, but get motivated.
Above all, FREEDOM calls for a revolution in how we live. Inevitably we must shift the types of houses and cities we live in, we must rethink the way we work and change the way we treat each other and the planet. Most importantly we must transform ourselves.
More information on theater location and time coming! If you are anywhere near Santa Fe, NM on August 23, I’ll see you at the screening. If not, check out the FREEDOM Film site for a screening near you.
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One of the best parts of my work with Women Of Green is I get to hang out with some of the coolest, smartest, electrifying people on the planet. Rha Goddess is at the top of that list. She is a captivating performance artist, activist and social entrepreneur who uses her artistic and motivational talents to heal, transform, and inspire. If you are an entrepreneur (or want to be) whose mission has social change at the heart of your enterprise, listen to this interview. Rha’s shares her hard-earned business savvy with her deep passion to make a difference, and shows us how to “Stay True, Get Paid and Do Good”. That’s music to my ears.
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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.
Pharmacy chain Walgreens plans to offer electric vehicle charging stations at about 800 locations across the country by the end of the year, making it the nation’s largest charging station retail host. Thumbs up? Thumbs down?
Read more at Environmental Leader.
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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.
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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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