Green Talk

Photo by permission of Shira Gal

I am hoping that you are enjoying my “you’ve got green mail” feature.  It was a little quiet on the comment front on my first Green Mail article .  Did you like the copper faucets and door handles article about how cooper zaps those nasty virus bugs away?  I loved that one.

Today, I have a series of interesting articles for you:  ”Panties for Peace Campaign,” “eBooks-A Greener Choice or Not,” “Banned Toys for Sale: What to Watch Out For and What to Buy,” and “NASCAR Goes Green with Hybrid Pace Car.”

If you have a great post to share, please do in the comments.  Just give a little information about the posts so readers can decide if they would like to read it or not. You can submit one of your own posts if you like. Just keep the posts “green” in topic.

Enjoy!

Panties for Peace Campaign:  Send your panties to weaken the strength of the Burma.

“The Panties for Peace campaign was launched by a group of women peace activists from a Burmese peace activist group called - Lanna Action for Burma which is based in Thailand. Since we initiated the panties for peace campaign for Burma, women’s panties (as well as male underwear) have been mailed out by activists to Burma’s foreign missions in Australia, Singapore, and European countries.

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Photo by permission of Paul Goyette.

December’s topic for this month’s Green Moms Carnival is prevention. The question asked is, if we could create an agenda for our new President in order to prevent certain environmental, health, or social injustices from occurring, what would it be.  It is a thought provoking theme, which given the diversity of the Green Moms should be very interesting.   In December, this carnival will be hosted by Diane at the Big Green Purse.  (See the carnival post on Big Green Purse.) In addition, she has also set up a Prevention Agenda forum (a Ning group, which is a social networking group) where anyone can list their prevention agendas and interact with each other.  Diane has been a mover and shaker in the environmental field way before I knew what recycling was. She will be submitting these recommendations to the Obama transition team.  So, if you want to be heard, the Prevention Agenda forum is the place to be.

Here is my prevention agenda:

Dear Mr. President-elect:

I view myself as an advocate to help people live a more sustainable, healthier lifestyle. However, it is hard to be informative about a healthy lifestyle when every month there seems to be another chemical that has either leached into our food, appears in our toys, or shows up in our breast milk.

The Environmental Working Group (”EWG”) did a study of 10 cord blood samples in 2004.  They were testing for 413 toxic chemicals.  What they found was that on average each sample contained over 200 toxic chemicals ranging from consumer products, pesticides, to products that were banned thirty years ago.  The babies whose cord blood samples were taken were being exposed while in utero.

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Check out my Natural Pod giveaway gift certificate below!

Christmas season is almost here. But it seems like yesterday, that the Safe Toy Database was introduced.  Just last holiday season the creation of this Database brought to the fore-front the reality that are children have been playing with unsafe toys.   Wouldn’t it be nice to find a company who you could trust to sell environmentally safe, quality made toys?  No questioned asked?

Well, Natural Pod might be the answer to your prays.  This Canadian company “gets all of us” who desire environmentally safe, quality toys. How come?  The founders, Bridgitte and Allan Alomes, are the parents of two young children.

“We believe in a natural style of parenting. We found through our own parenting the limited choices that were available and wanted to create an easy source to find trusted products for all families, communities and educators,” Bridgitte explains.

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This week Boston, Massachusetts hosted the United States Green Building Council’s GreenBuild 365 ,drawing a crowd of over 29,000 people for lectures, green building exhibitions, and networking. During this week, Building Green LLC announced its pick of the top ten 2008 green building products drawn from its coverage on its website, BuildingGreen.com, and Greenspec Directory.

“Our selections of the Top-10 Green Building Products represent a wide range of product types in many different application areas,” noted BuildingGreen president Alex Wilson. There are a particularly large number of interior products in this year’s group of winners: the first FSC-certified and formaldehyde-free bamboo flooring; doors made with wheat-straw particleboard; a line of zero-VOC paint; a transparent finish produced from a byproduct of cheese making; and a line of organic fabrics.

Three of the products this year save energy, including a low-cost, solar water-heating system; a combination heating, water heating, and heat-recovery ventilation system; and a system for monitoring real-time energy (and water) use in buildings. Water saving products are represented by a line of rainwater storage tanks — the first rainwater storage equipment ever recognized in our Top-10 lists.

Fully half of the products this year are green in part because they are made from natural, rapidly renewable, or agricultural waste materials; natural materials often require significantly less energy to manufacture. A new compressed-earth masonry block is particularly noteworthy in this regard. “Most of the Top-10 products this year have multiple environmental attributes,”said Wilson as stated in BuildingGreen’s press release.

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Think how many bags of trash you send to the garbage a month. How many? One, Two, Six? Can you take the challenge being proposed by EnviroMom to reduce your daily waste to only one Trash can a month? Watch the above video on ABC’s Nightline to see their trash reduction methods in action. Reducing Trash never felt so good.

Heather and Renee of EnviroMom are part of the Green Mom Carnival, in which I am a part of.  The women of the Green Mom Carnival are so inspirational and I am honored to be part of them.  When one of the women is in the spotlight I  feel like a rock star too by association.   (Heather and  Renee, don’t forget about us little people who knew you when…)

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Photo by permission of CavinB

My husband is one of the most prolific readers. He receives dozens of newsletters on all health related subjects and forwards me interesting topics to write about.  I have to admit some of my best finds come through him.  My usual routine is to research what he sends me, call the company, write a post and then publish it to the site. This takes a lot of time, and I still have so many great links that are waiting in my email inbox.

Today, I will be starting the “You got Mail” series whether it is from him or another terrific source with one caveat.   I will not be researching  the veracity of the information in the links but I will assure you,  it is worth checking out. Drum roll, please…

• What Door Handles Actually Kill Bacteria? via Mercola.com.  According to the article, a recent study has found that cooper fittings kill germs.  Read on to learn why cooper faucets and door handles might be beneficial in your home.
  

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Video reproduced by permission of TED.com

This is an excellent video by Sir Ken Robinson, an engaging speaker, about how schools kill our creativity featured at a TED conference. This video is not just for parents or grandparents of school age children. It is for all us who felt our own creativity is or was hindered by our education. I promise you Robinson is very entertaining and peppers his lecture with funny stories especially about Shakespeare as a child.  (Yes, believe it or not, he was a child.)

The most poignant part of the video for me was the discussion of ADD. I was diagnosed as a child and took Dexedrine until I was in sixth grade.  I don’t fault my parents because without it I would not have been able to learn in the conventional educational framework. I could not read. My ADD may have been compounded by a learning disability (dyslexia) which my children swear that I have.  (Don’t ever ask me my right from my left.) I passed my learning issues down to my children, and they subsequently had problems learning how to read and two of them have ADD. 

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Use your power tools to create one delicious, creative dinner.  Huh?  No, I am not sipping a little of the sauce. Ask Duke DesRochers, the creative chef/handy man behind his Renaissance Man video (see above) as his entry to become the Next Food Network Star. Think Emeril Lagasse of Green Planet/Bob Villa with a little of bit of Jerry Seinfeld thrown in serving you a fixed table with a carrot spindle as part of the presentation.

Duke is Lorelle VanFossen’s cousin of Lorelle on Wordpress fame (one of the blogs I follow).   Taking something you have to create something new is right up there in my book as being environmentally friendly.   Even if you can’t connect the dots on cooking and power tools, this is pretty darn creative.

Before you go run for your dusty old power tools, Duke warns wear protective eye ware and CLEAN your power tools well.  If you think Duke’s turning a potato into a cup topped with a sauce is pure genius, put a comment under his video at the Food Network site or view his video there.   Just think what he can do to an apple. Duke, perhaps a table?

Just think what a hit you will be at your next family gathering if you create some power drill master pieces?  Your family will never complain about your food again.  Priceless…

So, Readers, have you used something at your home that was a little unusual like Duke’s use of tools to help him cook?

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Photo by permission of Robert Whitlock

Thaddeus Truitt, a senior at University of Oregon, recently contacted me about a survey that he is doing for his business administration class, “ Business Strategies and Planning”  taught by Professor Elizabeth Hjelm.  (This is a real college survey. I am confirmed  the legitimacy of it with his Professor.)  He explains, “my class is researching the fair trade market for food products and analyzing how fair trade adds value for consumers.”

The survey request has been posted throughout the blogshere including Facebook, class mates, etc. so that he can get a wide range of results.   So, please take the time to answer his survey. It only takes a few minutes and does not ask for any personal information such as name, address, or email.  In addition, if you have any feedback for him to make the survey better, I am sure he would like to hear them.   Please list them in your comments.

As soon as the class has collected the data, I hope that Thaddeus tells us the outcome.  I am very curious about what he discovers. Thaddeus, don’t forget about us!

After I took the survey, I found I had questions for all of you.  Being the question Queen, I will just roll out the questions. Ready?

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This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

The other day, I received an message on my personal Facebook page from Michelle, aka the Green Bean of Green Phone Booth, with  a copy of a video by Roger Doiron urging our new President (Eater in Chief) to consider turning the White House landscape into a working garden.  It is not that far fetched since many Presidents had White House Gardens until we made it easier to truck food from all over the world.  Please watch the short video above of Roger’s proposal.

Just to give you some background on Doiron, according to an interview by Mother Earth News, he has been involved in growing food in one way or another for thirty years. He is currently the Founding Director of Kitchen Gardeners International ,  which is “a nonprofit network of over 5,000 gardeners from 90 countries who are taking a hands-on approach to local foods systems development.”  In addition, he is a freelance food and garden writer as well as a photographer.

Why the First Lawn?

“The White House has had food gardens at many different points and was even home to a herd of sheep in 1917 when President Wilson brought them in to replace the power mowers. In February, I decided to put the idea back on the public agenda by posting it on the Web site OnDayOne.org where people are making different proposals for what the next president should do upon taking office,” he indicated during the interview.

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