Elisa's Green Scene

Growing Green Awards 2010

Hat tip to Fedele Bauccio for pointing me to the 2010 Growing Green Awards organized by theNational Resources Defense Council. Bauccio was a 2009 winner in the Business Leader category.

The four categories are:
Food Producer
Business Leader
Thought Leader
Water Steward

Here is the eligibility information:

Eligibility

Recipients may represent a variety of fields including food production, food service, retail or restaurants, academia, journalists, policy advocacy, and government. The panel will consider candidates from across the country (candidates operating outside of the United States will not be considered) Individuals in the following four categories are eligible: 

Food Producer: Farmers or other food producers, including aquaculture, who employ innovative techniques to sustain agriculture, the natural environment, workers and community;

Business Leader: Entrepreneurs who effectively use the marketplace to promote sustainable food systems, develop infrastructure that enables producers to be more sustainable, or advance sustainable innovations anywhere along the supply chain from farm to fork;

Thought Leader: Visionaries who advance sustainability as it relates to food through creative research, public education, and outreach.

Water Steward: Farmers or other food producers who have made extraordinary contributions in demonstrating water efficiency, sustainable water use and the protection of water quality.

And here is the criteria:

Innovation in promoting ecologically-integrated food systems. This may include minimizing inputs of energy, water, and chemicals; reducing pollution and global warming gas emissions; use of on-farm polyculture; increasing natural resilience; and stewardship of biodiversity, pollinators, open space and land resources.

Potential to achieve wide scale adoption, implementation or behavioral change.

Advancement of health, safety, and economic viability for farmers, farmworkers and rural communities.

As you can probably guess, I would love for every submission and winner to be about food production and distribution that was not animal-based. Although most of last year's winners were indeed involved in plant-based agriculture, certainly a couple of them were not.

However, I do acknowledge the value of rewarding people meeting the criteria above, and in particular I'm so glad to see the last criteria about improving the lives of farmers ***and farmworkers*** on this list. 

In all the recent hype and hoopla about conscious eating, I have seen a lot of ink devoted to talking about the health and well-being of humans, animals and the planet. All of which is true. But very little ink has been devoted to the health of a particular subset of humans...not the ones eating the food we're all so conscious about, but the ones producing it. 

Happy to see it here.

This is, admittedly, not my field, and I'm not sure I know who to nominate. Perhaps Jonathan Safran Foer as a Thought Leader? He qualifies because I think his work this year will be the catalyst for a lot of behavioral change.

Or perhaps blogger and BlogHer Food '09 speaker Greg Massa, who migrated his family's brown rice farm into an organic one. [Although I confess to being bummed he has incorporated raising ducks for meat into his farm.]

Who would you nominate?

Going green in bed

I've posted at least once before about eco-friendly and ethical accessories for the bedroom. But really, is once enough?

So, here's a resource for vegan, eco-friendly sex toys: Karmasm.

Why, because it's good karma.

Their tagline is "Positive energy in our intimate moments", and they cite the environment, worker's rights and avoiding animal cruelty as their guiding principles for sourcing their products.

I hope they do a healthy business, with healthy, sexual vegans and greenies!

Watch the Bioneers Conference live via streaming video

The Bioneers Conference is an annual event that brings together smart people talking about important things...like sustainability and social justice...the things you probably care about if you read this blog.

Thanks to the conference and Ustream, you can follow along live starting today and throughout the weekend.

I'm speaking on a panel tomorrow at 4:30PM about social media and sustainability. 

I hope you'll tune in, and you can check out more about the entire schedule here.

Live TV : Ustream

Blog Action Day for Climate Change

Today is Blog Action Day.

You know what I'm going to say, right?

The single most important thing you can do each and every day, as an individual, to help the environment, our planet, your own health and, of course, the animals is: Go Vegan!

Why? Well, you can find a lot of links explaining on Vegan Soapbox's Blog Action Day Post.

The bottom line is that going vegan will reduce your own person carbon footprint and contribution to climate change more than driving a hybrid or a myriad of other perfectly nice, but let's be clear, less effective, personal actions.

Now, I also happen to drive a hybrid. And I recycle. And I actually am very good at not over-consuming. I don't shop for clothes hardly ever. I buy my music and books electronically now. I try to shop for local and organic foods (easy for me, living in California.) I work via BlogHer to make our conferences greener. 

So, being vegan isn't all I do to be green. But it is the most important thing I do.

And it is the thing I do over which I have the ultimate total and final control.

And if you consider yourself an environmentalist and you aren't doing it, you need to be thinking about why. because the answer is, I bet, going to be about personal pleasure and what you think your preferences are (having often never tried.)

And that, my friends, is the same rationale for driving a Hummer.

Happy Blog Action Day. did you participate? If so, leave a link in the comments, so i can read your thoughts!