Elisa's Green Scene

Better late than never: Zero-waste holiday advice from Whole Foods

Yes, I realize that it's already the day after Christmas (how did that happen, exactly?) But Whole Foods has been featuring a whole series of good advice about reducing waste on their blog Whole Story.

And surely some of that is evergreen advice, right? (No pun intended.)

So check out how to reduce waste when it comes to:

Holiday Cards (My solution: Um, neglect to send them for four years in a row...the horror!)

Holiday wrapping (My solution: OK, I do have one actually useful solution. Toys R Us sells these recycled and recyclable gift bags...they're only $1.49, which is less than normal fancy gift bags, and they can become your recipient's grocery bags moving forward.)

Holiday Lights (My solution: Holiday lights? Those are for looking at at other people's houses.)

Christmas Trees (My solution: You guessed it...stopped getting one somewhere around the turn of the century.)

Holiday Parties (My solution: Go to other people's, and bring vegan food!)

And finally: The Day After. I really like some of the suggestions, particularly: If you get something you don't particularly want, need or like: Donate it or pass it along to someone who does. Why get in the car and drive to the mall and return it to a store that's probably struggling as it is, all to trade it in for something, let's face it, that you probably don't really need, but just like a little more. 

They also have practical advice about batteries and electronics and cell phones. And they even have a gift card recycling program...how odd is that? (Don't stores usually take the gift card when it's used up?)

Anyway, it was a really useful series, one I should have shared ages ago, but as per the title of this post: Better late than never.

Happy holidays to all!

Big Business: Bane or Boon to the Environmental Movement?

About 10 days ago Jared Diamond stirred up a bit of a debate with his NY Times Op-Ed: Will Big Business Save the Earth?

If you read this blog for any period of time, you'll eventually see me talk about how green commerce (products, services, etc.) will never go mainstream until it delivers the same value for the dollar as non-green commerce. You'll see me talk about how I may be a vegan, among other things, but I'm all in favor of baby steps. That taking a few steps towards a more ethical and sustainable lifestyle is better than taking no steps at all. You'll see me argue that absolutism or perfectionism is the enemy of progress.

So, at first glance, Diamond's Op-Ed speaks to me. It makes sense to me that it is only when multi-national conglomerates start not only to care about their environmental impact, but to seek to publicize any positive impact, that we can make mass change and improvements. Part of me does believe that small improvements from a company like Walmart may net out better results for the planet than the small personal improvements from thousands of individuals.

We need both. That's for sure.

Food Politics, however, doles out a cold splash of reality (and incredulity) about Diamond's Op-Ed in: Saving the earth: Coca-Cola?

And the pendulum swings the other way. Crediting companies like Coke for what they plan to do does seem premature. Questioning the motives of for-profit companies in this country, where corporate social responsibility programs still need to somehow contribute to the bottom line in order to be fiduciarily responsible, seems rational, not cynical. 

For me, it's a tough call. How can big companies become more responsible citizens overnight and in one fell swoop? Don't they have to take incremental steps? Not just because they have  fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but also because they have massive numbers of employees and processes in place...let's be realistic about what it takes to re-direct Titanic companies (and I don't use the metaphor lightly).

So, I'm just a bundle of non-answers and gray areas on this. How about you?

Send BlogHer Diane MacEachern to Copehagen!

The Huffington Post is going to send one citizen journalist to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, to represent regular people (and, of course, report back).

I think that person should be Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse.

You can hear more directly from Diane both on her Big Green Purse blog and on her voting page at the HuffPo.

The voting deadline is tomorrow, so visit here, suffer through the clunky HuffPo registration and/or FacebookConnect process and VOTE FOR DIANE! 

She's currently running in about 4th place, so get your vote on.

Gracias!

The Quick Compose test

Cross posted at Healthy Concerns, since I did the same test to both blogs!

Right below this post is my first attempt to use Quick Compose. This seems to be Typepad's way of incorporating Status Updating (i.e. the kind of posting done in Twitter or Facebook) into one's blog.

There are two things that will probably keep me from using this all that regularly:

1. No titles or categories for your Quick post. It's really just the message. No headline. No ability to categorize (that I saw). So it interrupts the visual and formatting flow of your blog, providing less information that is, I think, required.

2. I may try it again, to see if you can post a hyperlink under text, but it didn't seem like it on first glance. It automatically converts any URl you enter as a hyperlink, but as per the test I did, that was a pretty long, gnarly URL. I would have preferred to put that link under text.

Now, it may encourage me to keep this blog a little more active by posting quick thoughts and links so easily.

But the bigger question, then, is this: Would that improve the quality of the blog. The beauty part of sharing ephemeral thoughts on Twitter is that they're just that: Ephemeral. Not too weighty. Fun, sure. Conversational, often. But without the conversational element, do those same thoughts hold up for a blog "post"?

Any of you using this feature? How? Why? Will you continue? What do your readers say?

There's giving, and then there's giving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I wanted to share some great posts over at BlogHer that are about giving. And giving.

Karen Walrond has posted a great guide to 5 Great Ways to Use Your Photographs as Holiday Gifts. I can attest that making photo books from your digital photos is now mega-easy, and always goes over well...especially with grandparent-ly types. You may not have kids yourself, but you've probably taken pictures of your nieces and nephews, and nothing says you can't be the one providing great family shots. Used to be this was Apple's brilliant idea as part of iPhoto (and still is), but everyone is doing it now. I was in Walgreens the other day and noticed they had a machine to make a photo book.

Karen goes beyond the photo book, though and suggests four other creative photo ideas. I did not know there were digital photo frames that could be remotely updated via email...sounds totally intriguing.

Check those and other ideas out here.

But if you're looking for a way to give back, more than give, check out Siel's post: Make Your Town's Thanksgiving Celebrations Eco-Ethical. What I love about Siel's post is that it does encourage us all to look past the wonderful opportunities there are to give and give back online...and I do think it's wonderful...and to see what might be going on in our own local communities. What local merchants can you frequent? What local charities can you support? What local people in need can your good intentions serve?

This holiday season is likely to be like last holiday season...more thoughtful, more frugal, more mindful.

I think both of these posts got my mind heading down that path with their helpful, practical, inspiring advice.

How are you giving this Thanksgiving?

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?

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!

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day for Climate Change

Blog Action Day 2009 is tomorrow, and I'm going to do my best to take part, how about you? If you want a lot of detail, i suggest you check out Virginia's post on BlogHer.

But the basics are:

1. You can sign up on the above site to say you're participating.
2. Post a badge to your blog
3. Tomorrow, write your actual Blog Action Day post
4. Go back to both the BAD site and BlogHer to add your link to their link-aggregation tools
5. Read what everybody else says about climate change tomorrow!!!

I registered this blog. Will you register yours?

Here's a video to get you inspired:

And here's the badge I'm going to add to all the others on this blog!

And tomorrow I intend to write. About climate change. And diet. And how they are intertwined. Don't miss the fun!

Superfoods? How about Superlocalfoods?

I'm not much of a superfood consumer, but I've always looked a bit longingly at them, be it acai or goji berries or the similarly high-priced options at my local Whole Foods. 

Treehugger brings up an issue with many superfoods that perfectly illustrates the quandaries in which you can find yourself when you're attempting to live green. And healthy. Any ethically. And responsible. And so on.

Namely: Plenty of superfoods aren't exactly also local foods. Or seasonal foods. But superfood production often gives a livelihood to impoverished communities in developing nations.

What are we to do?

Well, Planet Green has a post to remind us that some of the more exotic superfoods may be trendy, but the health properties in superfoods can be found in more common foods, grown in many parts of the United States, if that is indeed where you dwell, as I do.

While I am swayed by the opportunity to lend support to making a living for the people in those other countries, it's hard to argue against not only the environmental benefits of local, season foods, but also the fact that our own economy isn't doing so great, and plenty of farm workers in this country need our support too.

I already cook with many of the local superfoods Planet Green mention, but next time I hit the store or the Farmer's Market, I think it's time to buy a beet or a pomegranate or two!