Frustration Free Packaging!

(Photo stolen from Amazon's website)

3 years ago, I posted a rant about my frustration with toy packaging. I'm happy to report that Amazon is trying to help us and the environment with their new "frustration free packaging". They are working with certain toy manufacturers to have the toys packaged as simply as possible inside a plain cardboard box that is sturdy enough for the toy to be shipped in. If you want Amazon to gift wrap it, they will. The receiver will only have to tear a tape seal, open the plain box, and maybe open a couple of baggies of small parts inside and be ready to play with the toy. No more plastic that you can't cut through or endless twist ties. You get to the goods much faster and, best of all, the minimal and mostly cardboard packaging is much more environmentally friendly.

Now, the CO2 emissions from shipping the toy across the country, the resources used to manufacture the toy in the first place, and the materials some of the toys are made of that ultimately need to be disposed of when the toy's life cycle is over are still not environmentally friendly. But it's a small step in the right direction. And because Amazon is leading the way, with their gigantic volume they have some weight to throw around in terms of pressuring toy manufacturers to get on board with this. My overly ambitious hope is that we'll see these plain boxes show up next at our local toy retailers...

So, if you must buy new toys for the holidays this year, please consider looking on Amazon for the ones with frustration free packaging. And if you want to do better than that, buy, swap, or hand-me down used toys which have no packaging at all, don't need to be shipped across the country, probably have a lot of life left in them, and the kids will enjoy them just as much!

I Vote for Extinction

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The Sheer Ridiculousness of our Response to Environmental Disaster

This is really funny and really sad and really clever and really tragic and I just don't even know how to feel about it! I love the video and hate the reality. I'm having a hard time even facing what's going on with the bp spill.

I wish I didn't know what I do about the importance of wetlands, about marine ecosystems, about the persistence of crude oil, about how the effects of Valdez still aren't over and that this is potentially thousands of times worse, about all of the ramifications of our dependence on oil and the plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and other petrochemicals made from it, about how volunteers washing birds with dishsoap makes for nice news but is pointless because their habitat is gone or toxic enough to impact generations of their population, about how toxins biomagnify and move up the food chain, about how we don't even hear of the hundreds of marine mammals who've been killed, about how we cannot even begin to predict what all of the fallout will be from this spill in terms of lives cost, biodiversity losses, marine fishery collapse, impacts on food supply, the economy, the aesthetics of the region, the health impacts of rescue workers exposing themselves to toxic oil and its vapors for weeks on end...

It's CRUSHINGLY depressing. I have to not pay attention or my outrage and feelings of hopelessness will consume me. I have to just keep thinking about what I can do to play my part in creating the world I want to live in and I want my son to live in, moving forward from here...

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How to Save the World - Really

What's In Season?

(You can buy this vegetannual poster here.) 

The Vegetannual

I am currently relishing in reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Today I sat in the park at toddler hour (10 am) without my toddler, drinking my chai, and reading about the mythical, metaphorical plant Kingsolver invented, the vegetannual. She invented this plant to help the horticulturally challenged have a handy dandy way of understanding which produce is in season throughout the year and why.

Somehow I have gained the knowledge that cherries and peaches are summer fruits and cranberries are in season in winter, I think? Winter is definitely squash, or is that fall? and a mango in January isn't normal. But I'm kind of shaky on the whole thing because for as long as I have been in charge of grocery shopping, I have gone to supermarkets that feature all produce almost all year round. I haven't gardened much, but I've tried a couple of times and remember that seed packets have maps and charts on the back telling you where things will grow and when to plant them. I know my old neighbors cucumbers were out last July. But, uh...okay that's about it for me.

Kingsolver reminds us that most of the produce we enjoy are annual crops of flowering plants. All flowering plants share a life cycle abbreviated as: winter seeds lying in ground waiting, spring sprout, shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, pollinate, fruits, store extra energy as tuber, root, or bulb, seeds lie dormant until it starts over again next spring. All of the annual plants are growing roughly across the same growing season between frosts, but since we eat different parts of different plants, different produce items will be in season at different times. So, depending of course on latitude and climate and length of season for the particulars, the basic sequence of produce that is in season in any given place will follow that life cycle. Think about it this way: lettuces are leaves, peaches are fruit, beets are tubers. Meaning, lettuce will be in season first in the spring, peaches next in the summer, and beets toward the very end of the growing season in late fall. Isn't this brilliant?! Something I can understand and easily remember.

Kingsolver's explanation is much more award winning author than mine, so I invite you to read an article adapted from her book called "Stalking the Vegetannual".

Think Globally, Eat Locally

Now all this talk of in season, out of season is related, of course, to the travels of our food. You can't eat an out of season cherry unless it is in season somewhere else in the world at that moment, which means that someone is shipping it across great distances to you.

Some years ago, I became more aware of the distances that foods travel and the ecological impact that has and I began to read the signs and stickers at the grocery store that told me where my grapes and bananas were coming from. A handful of times I even decided not to buy something because it came from too far away and lately I've tried looking for locally produced labels when I have a choice. But most of the time, I just buy what we're in the mood for, the recipe calls for, or what strikes my fancy when I see it. And although I've been to the farmer's market on and off over the years, it has been more of a fun weekend outing than a serious way of providing food for my household. For sure we are snacking on out of season crude oil dependent tropical transports most of the time and giving it no regard.

Kingsolver's book asks the reader to give some regard to this. I will probably look further into the Slow Food Movement and groups like Locavores. I might revisit the idea of joining a local CSA. I've looked into it several times, but never taken the step. I might at the very least try to frequent the farmer's market more often. I might stop buying out of season foods and try to find recipes for the in season ones. But, herein lies the rub for me...

I believe in this issue and agree with it, but being non passionate about gardening, food shopping, meal planning, cooking, and all things related, I'm not finding an inner fire to get me actually making big changes on this one. And I fear that plus becoming used to being able to get all produce all the time is going to make it hard for a lot of us to do the right thing when it comes to sticking with local food.

Change takes time, though. So, at least understanding the vegetannual and thinking about it when I shop is a good first step!

Further Food For Thought

If our historical relationship to food and the ecological impact of agriculture interest you, I also recommend reading anything written by Michael Pollan or Vandana Shiva.

Leaving the Left Brain

Last night Backtire & I sat and watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk. Wow. If you don't know about the TED conference, check it out. All of the talks I've ever watched were fascinating and thought provoking, sustaining me for days or weeks. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who spent her life researching the brain and then experienced a brain hemorrhage that shut down her left brain. She had the unique opportunity to observe her own brain losing function and altering her perceptions and recover from this experience to share it with us. Watch her talk first. My reaction is below.  

It seems clear to me that this woman has something in common with people who have experienced near death experiences, out of body experiences, voodoo rituals, meditative trances, and ceremonial and recreational drugs. All of these things organically alter brain functioning, changing activity patterns in various parts of the brain, and therefore altering the person's sense of "normal" consciousness. It makes sense that people who have had the opportunity to see the world and themselves through a different consciousness would consider it a life changing experience and want to spread the word to others. And isn't that what both seeking enlightenment and taking ritual drugs are all about?

I find it fascinating to think that all of the visions, hallucinations, indescribable feelings, and awarenesses that people attribute to peyote or deep meditation or almost losing your life are really just things that are being unlocked from within your own brain chemistry. All humans must universally have the capacity to feel as if they are floating above their own body or see colors in the air that aren't there if only the right parts of our brains are stimulated or shut down. In fact there is much evidence of this, which I don't have time to find and cite right now, but I've read it here and there over the years.

I'm particularly fascinated by all of this, both as a scientific person who has devoted time to studying the brain and as a person who has never been lucky enough to experience any of it. It remains unreachable to me from my left-brain imprisonment. I haven't taken the drugs and I haven't had the head injuries. I haven't had the patience for meditation, as it just feels like sitting still and doing nothing to me, or worse, listening to the endless chatter of my left brain making lists and reminding me of things, which stresses me out instead of relaxing me.

The closest I ever get to altered consciousness is in the shower, while driving sometimes, or in the hypnogogic/hypnopompic state each morning and night. I feel kind of zone-y and stream of consciousness at those times. Random thoughts occur to me and I automatically synthesize bits and pieces of my experience and memories together and often come up with interesting ideas. It's a nice break from the chatter and it leads me to the creative spark and the satisfaction of self-reflection, but it's still pretty left-brained, I think. I cannot even imagine floating above my body or feeling enormous and expansive and one small part of the energy of the universe. I can intellectualize that concept, but I don't truly "get it".

Think about this- each person on the planet due to their individual make-up and various groups, due to their cultural influences, and in fact each brain possessing animal may indeed be experiencing the world and themselves in slightly or entirely different ways. If I live mostly in my left brain and you live mostly in your right, do we see eye to eye? Can we understand each other? Does a gorilla or squirrel experience the world in more of a right brain enormous and expansive way than I do? When I try to see things from others' point of view, is it an exercise in futility because I am making a gigantic and flawed assumption each time, which is that the other being essentially views themselves and the world and the relationship between them the same way that I do, when in reality I cannot even fathom what their personal universe is like?

I agree with Jill Bolte Taylor's essential message- that we would all benefit if we could all tap into our right brain more and understand our interconnectedness and be at peace with ourselves and each other. We don't want to induce brain injury in everyone. I'm not sure how I feel about passing out the drugs to all. So, how do we get there?

Sanjay

This is 6th in the Earth Week 2008 series.  

Sanjay- I don't know what to say!  You've been outgoogled.  Finding you online is the proverbial needle in they haystack because a certain famous someone has got your name.  

Here you are in the car on our trip to SF a few years back.  A group of us went up to participate in the UN's World Environment Day International Student/Youth Forum.  It was so cool to be a participant in a workshop facilitated by you.  I love role reversals!  

You were a star at PR, shameless with a video camera or onstage with a bullhorn.  Our Healthy Foods and Recycling Campaigns were so successful because of your creative and tireless promotion.   Oh how I wish I had one of those VHS to laptop converters so I could share your recycling videos with the world.  But you are safely protected from embarrassment by old school tech.  Actually, I know a place that could convert it for me...hmmm... 

What has the infamous San-man been up to since then?  I wish I knew.  

Shan

This post is number five in the Earth Week 2008 series.  

Shan, here you are at your  Earth Day Festival.  It was your harebrained idea and I brought up every good reason why it couldn't be done by a handful of high school kids in a few short months.  I'm glad you didn't take no for an answer.  It's a toss up which of us was more proud that day when it all came together and really happened.  

After graduation, you became a banana slug, grew your hair long, and went to live in the trees, or so the rumor goes.  A year later, you returned to bless our 2nd Earth Day with your presence.  Look how earthy you'd become!

And what of your harebrained ideas?  Luckily for the rest of us, you've nurtured and expanded them.  You are committed to working for social change and teaching as many others as possible effective strategies for doing so.   

Majoring in community studies, working with the SEC, the CSSC, the LRDP-SSIC, the XYZPDQ...I mean, the Student Environmental Center, the California Student Sustainability Coalition, contributing to the Long Range Development Plan Strategic Student Involvement Committee, and creating a compost and garden plan for the UC Santa Cruz Blueprint for Sustainability. Whew!  How do you keep all of those acronyms straight?  

Most interestingly to me is your work with the Transformative Action Center, an outfit inspired by the methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King whose goal it is to promote creative, non-violent, effective strategies for social change.  You've helped bring a Transformative Action course to several UC campuses so that hundreds of students can learn how to empower themselves and others to change the world.

And when you really want to inspire others, you sing!  (Here's the video.)

Shan, it's a good thing that you are still going strong, because I'm getting tired.  I've spent more time changing diapers than changing the world in the past two years.  But, reading about all you are doing re-inspires me to re-awaken some harebrained ideas of my own...

Gayaneh

aka Diana, aka Gayo

Hey! Why didn’t we ever think of it before- it should be Gaia!

You jumped in with both feet at Cal State Northridge, quickly becoming the Associated Students Director of Environmental Affairs and having the ear of the board in making campus sustainability decisions.

I had so much fun attending the first Earth Day Festival you threw for the campus and hearing about your efforts to promote the recycling program, both natural extensions of what we had done at the high school level.

Last year you took a hiatus to travel to Armenia and get married, taking time out from changing the world to have a personal life. 

How dare you?!     ; )

So, you’ve been stealth for awhile and I can’t find much else online. But I owe you a phone call, so I’ll get more information the old fashioned way, by actually talking to my source. As soon as I can find some time to make a phone call… (mothers of 2 year olds, you understand, right?)

Meanwhile, happy wedded bliss! Hope the “newlywed phase” lasts as long as possible.

(This post is fourth in the Earth Week 2008 series.)

Ding

Third in the Earth Week 2008 series.

Ding, I can't remember the particular circumstances that led to you donning these leaves, but this picture symbolizes your nature loving ways.  

When we last spoke, you had spent the summer traversing the country, working for the park service.  There were bear encounters, thunderstorms, long train rides.  Back at Cornell, you emailed enthusiastically about participating in your first non-violent protests and long backpacking trips.  We lost touch as you got further involved in campus life.  

Your current resume is long, and I'm sure I only dug up part of it.  It's exciting to see how seriously involved you've become in the sustainability movement-majoring in natural resources and joining (and usually leading) the Environmental Justice Working Group, Sustainability Hub, Living Sculpture Project, Society for Natural Resources Conservation's Outreach Committee, Wilderness Reflections, Redbud Woods Working Group, Kyoto Now! ...

Not to mention the Maribel Garcia Community Spirit Fund honored you with their inagural award for your work at the Ithaca Youth Bureau tutoring low-income kids and counseling them about good nutrition.

(Oh yeah, and, in your spare time, you've been performing concert piano with the University's Piano Society.)

And, yay, you haven't forgotten your roots!  I see that you've helped organize Cornell's Earth Day celebrations, too.  

Well, all of this led to being selected one of only 80 young adults in the nation to be awarded a Udall Scholarship "in recognition of (your) work and career plans regarding the environment." Good thing you won it, too, or I wouldn't have been able to plagiarize the press release for this post.

The one award you didn't win?  Sorry to hear it, but you did not get the 2008 Name Of The Year Award.  

According to the articles I read about you, your planning a career in environmental education and educational policy.  I can't wait to see what changes in the world you can affect in the future.  You've got a great track record so far.  

The leaves really suit you!

Heather

This post is second in the Earth Week 2008 series.

Heather, we haven’t talked in a while, but I think of you every time I hear about San Francisco’s landmark decision to ban plastic shopping bags in the city. I remember you trying in earnest to get our local Trader Joe’s to at least pull the canvas bags they sold out of their bottom shelf hiding place and prominently display and promote their use. 

That was only 4 years ago, back when a few of us were radically preaching reusable shopping bags to those we knew.  How much things have changed in a few short years!

These days even Wal Mart has jumped on the bandwagon. Readers, if the $1 price doesn’t outweigh the megastore’s global resource plundering ways, then maybe a $54 couture grocery bag will at least make you feel as if you’ve paid through the nose to destroy the planet so that you can, uh, save the planet. Wait…

But, I digress. The point is that, yay, Heather, people really are starting to change their ways on a large scale. Massive cultural change starts with grassroots efforts like yours, so way to go for having the cajones to try to Change the World.

Since then, it looks like you were selected for UC Berkeley’s Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Sustainability (CACS) and have worked as an energy conservation intern developing an Energy Education program that will

“implement energy efficiency projects in four buildings on campus. The plan will focus on engaging the staff, faculty and students that use these buildings in order to understand how much energy they consume and how they might change their habits. They hope to be able to share proof of significant energy conservation at the end of the semester and to foster Cal's culture of sustainability.”

High Five on that!  and onward...

Happy Earth Day to You!

In honor of Earth Day, I want to honor my dear friends, the fellow founders of Change The World.

In it's heyday, Change the World was a youth organization whose mission was to promote the personal development of youth through social and environmental activism.  Sadly, Change The World is no longer an active organization, but I know it's spirit lives on in the people who found themselves involved with us over the past 6 years.  

What were we all about?  In a nutshell: high school kids identified things in their community they wanted changed, brought them to the group, and members facilitated each other in making those changes happen.   I supported them with cheerleading, logistics, funding, and a corner with a couch, coffee table, and some workstations.  

Meetings around that coffee table were intense and inspiring.  Initiative and creativity were rewarded.  Ideas for projects were all over the place... shot out, bounced around, torn down, and rebuilt anew with focus and clarity.  

The atmosphere was composed of equal parts excitement, tension, bonding, idealism, and the stress that comes from self-imposed high expectations, deadlines, and spending far too many hours together. Whether or not we would ever change the world was up in the air, but it was clear early on that we were changing ourselves and each other.  

What were some of our accomplishments?  We booted the soda companies off campus in the first 6 months, with help from our friend Jackie.   A handful of kids against Coca Cola, inertia, and all the groups that benefitted from the money earned on soda and WE WON!  We were on fire!  Next up, we started an award winning campus recycling program for paper and cans & bottles.

We hosted an annual Hunger Banquet assembly that hundreds of kids attended in order to educate others about the inequality of resource distribution around the world.  We hosted basketball tournaments and game show style evening shows as fundraisers for the tsunami Victims, Hurricane Katrina victims, and Smile Train, which provides free surgery for children born with cleft palates.  Each time we did a fundraiser, we raised $4,000-$7,000.  

Our crowning achievement and the event most fun to work on was the annual Earth Day Festival.  Hundreds of hours went into planning the smooth operation of a community festival with live music, refreshments, games/crafts/activities for all ages, and informational booths hosted by non-profit environmental organizations.  Remember, teenagers concocted and ran this thing!  It grew bigger each year and was really something to be proud of! 

Mentoring the kids through accomplishing all of this and more over the years led to another creation, an academic elective course designed to empower students to effect change through developing their leadership skills.   The class was an outgrowth of what started as a tiny club of 5 people years before.  The vision was that each year, 30 kids would enroll in the class, but would recruit volunteers for the projects they undertook, so that hundreds of kids would be touched by the program as the years went by.  A beautiful ripple effect. 

We were off to such an amazing start, but after 5 years CTW dissolved.  I had a baby and then we moved away, sealing the deal.  We would have all loved to leave a continuing legacy and had fantasized together a lot about expanding on a grander scale, but CTW was, in the end, too dependent on myself and the other founding members for survival. 

Those other founding members?  They graduated and went off to college, returning with decreasing frequency to help the "next generation" out as the years went by and they became more involved in their own new projects.  

And, rightly so!  So, let's check in with what they are doing now.  I have been sporadically in touch with them to varying degrees in the last few years.  My plan this week is to google them and listen to the grapevine and dedicate one day's post to each.  At the end of the week, I'll do a wrap up reflecting on where we all are today.  

How are you and the people you know changing the world?  

Incontinent Truth

Apparently, a former colleague of mine sent out a mass email to her co-workers asking if anyone had seen her copy of Incontinent Truth.  

You know, that political propaganda piece with the slick graphics that came out last year.  The one that shocked a nation into the realization that we are on an undeniable road toward losing control of our bladders.  The one that tried to convince us that each and every American can make a difference by doing Kegels daily.  Everyone knows that movie was funded by the adult diaper industry.

Someone in Hollywood needs to get ahold of this idea.  It will be the next great parody, in the tradition of Store Wars, Spinal Tap, Spaceballs, and Top Secret!.  (Yes, I know how to punctuate.  It has a ! in the title.)  

In all seriousness, I loved Inconvenient Truth and am glad it did so well. Despite any of its flaws and the resulting criticism, Al Gore, et al. achieved something that none of the rest of us have been able to do.  He created a green tipping point.  It's now cool to be concerned about climate change. Oprah is on board.  So, is Wal-Mart (although I'll still never shop there). More Joe & Jane Publics than ever before are curious about the environment and thinking about the future.  

Sure, there's a lot of focus on CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs) and organic shampoo and not enough on the manufacturing and transportation chains that lines the shelves of every megastore with them.  But, it's a start. Good things will come of this.

Meanwhile, what parodies have you enjoyed?  How did Inconvenient Truth impact you?