Posts Tagged ‘environment’
Love in a Bottle
After reading a recent NPR story about how even plastic without BPA is leaching estrogenic chemicals into whatever it comes in contact with, I was ready to give up plastic water bottles for good. I usually fill a bottle with tap water each night to keep beside my bed for late-night thirst quenching. Time to find a glass bottle – pronto! Well, ask and ye shall receive; yesterday I found a Love Bottle at my favorite local spa. It was exactly what I was looking for. And more, it turns out.
A Love Bottle is a reusable glass water bottle designed to replace the plastic bottles that we carry around and use every day. The idea for Love Bottle was born when a nutrition consultant in San Francisco wanted to find a way to improve the emotional and physical health of our country. As one of our most fundamental needs, water in a great looking, earth-friendly bottle supercharged with a little love seemed the perfect answer to helping many people in a simple and easy way. The next thing she knew she was starting a company. It’s mission is “to spread love, to improve health, to create a canvas for self expression, to help the environment, and to get clean water to people who need it.”
Why Love Bottle? The founder of the company, who calls herself “The Love Bottle Lady,” tells her story:
I’ve been drinking water out of a bottle with the word ”love” on it since 2005, after seeing a picture of a water crystal formed by the word love. Its beauty took my breath away. Intrigued by the photo, I investigated its origins and found that a wonderful man, Mr. Masaru Emoto, has been dedicating his life to the world of water and all it has to teach us. He has spent many years photographing how different words, pictures, songs, and prayers can affect water with its energy. To learn more about his work and to view beautiful water crystals, please visit www.hado.net
After realizing that water is affected by the energy surrounding it, I wanted to charge my water with the energy of love. I started drinking water from a homemade love bottle for a few months and though it was subtle, I could feel a difference when I drank from it. It made me feel good, and it made me want to drink more water. Now, I rarely drink out of anything but a love bottle and will actually search around the house so that I can drink out of my current favorite!
I also started noticing my friends asking for sips from my bottle and my husband “borrowing” my bottle when he came home from work. It made me think that perhaps more people wanted or needed a little love in their water.
I remember reading some time ago about Dr. Emoto and his work with water crystals. That someone would take his knowledge and find a practical way to use it to "put a little love in your water" was mightily engaging to me. The more I read about this company, the more I was, well, in love with it!
The creative in me was drawn to the idea of a water bottle that could be a medium not just for visual expression but for emotional expression as well. Love Bottles come in a variety of designs that are meant to be customized by writing and drawing on them, decorating them with stickers and bands, any way you can think of to make your bottle your own. "This is a place for you to express what you want more of in your life, or what makes you feel good." The idea is that if you feel good when you look at your bottle, you will feel good when you drink from it. Imagine the beautiful crystals that the water in your super-personal, super-charged Love Bottle would create!
And of course, Love Bottle solved my immediate problem of wanting to find a healthier way to drink water since I, like millions of others, do drink water on occasion from plastic bottles (my efforts to use a SIGG bottle at the gym notwithstanding). But I am just one person. Think of this for a moment:
29 billion plastic bottles are used each year in the US alone. 86% of these are not recycled, which means that all of that toxin-leaching plastic is ending up in our landfills and our oceans.
Plastic is petroleum, people. The 17 million barrels of oil used to make those bottles could fuel 100,000 cars for a full year.
And the 100 billion dollars spent globally on plastic water bottles each year could provide clean water for every human on the planet.
Statistically, each person in the US drinks one eight-ounce plastic water bottle a day. By replacing my statistical daily water bottle with a Love Bottle, I'm reducing my personal plastic water bottle consumption by 365 bottles per year (not to mention the money I'd be saving - have you bought a bottle of water at the movies lately?). If 1000 people use a love bottle, plastic bottle consumption would be reduced by 365,000 bottles a year. If 10,000 people use a love bottle we reduce our plastic bottle consumption by 3,650,000 bottles a year. I think you see where this is going. Not to mention all of the happy people we'd have walking around drinking love all day. It would be more than the environment we'd be saving. World peace anyone?
Love Bottle is dedicated not only to caring for the environment by reducing the impact of using plastic water bottles, but to supporting causes that preserve sources of clean water and ensure access to clean water for everyone. A portion of proceeds from each Love Bottle sale goes to Clean Water Action and to Global Water.
Love Bottles are available at all Exhale Spa locations and at many Whole Foods stores, in addition to numerous independent retailers across the country (a list of them is available on the Love Bottle website). You also can order Love Bottles directly from them on the site as well.
So, what will your Love Bottle say?
If I could save love in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do is to save every bit that I’ve ever felt and to give the whole bottle to you. (I think Jim Croce would be okay with that.)
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CommentOut, Out Damn Spot
This morning I was doing laundry. I discovered a stain on a t-shirt and reached for my Ecover stain remover. You see, I have been doing my part to be kinder to the environment by switching to eco-friendly cleaning products. But as I was applying said product and sending a little prayer to the goddess of suds that my t-shirt would get clean, I wondered why I buy this stuff if it doesn’t actually, well, remove stains.
Lo, if there wasn’t an article about this very question on the front page of today’s New York Times. They address their question to dishwasher soap that seems to do anything but actually clean dishes. You see, the phosphorous that makes it possible for your dishwasher to create bright and sparkly dishes is very, very bad for the environment. So, in response to a law that went into effect in July, 17 states that produce dishwashing soap have reduced the amount of phosphorous to .5 percent from previous highs of nearly 8.7 percent. The result? Soap that is cleaner for the environment, but not for the dishes.
“Low-phosphate dish detergents are a waste of my money,” said Thena Reynolds, a 55-year-old homemaker from Van Zandt County, Tex., who said she ran her dishwasher twice a day for a family of five. Now she has to do a quick wash of the dishes before she puts them in the dishwasher to make sure they come out clean, she said. “If I’m using more water and detergent, is that saving anything?” Ms. Reynolds said. “There has to be a happy medium somewhere.”
Um, I have a radical idea. Why don’t you just wash your dishes by hand? According to most of the consumers quoted in this article, they either have to wash them before they put them in the dishwasher or after they bring them out anyway. How can using all that water be good for the environment? So, if you’re putting all that time and elbow grease into the project, why not just skip the dishwasher altogether? It would save electricity too.
Then the article turns it sites on household cleaners. Most people do want to make choices that are good for the environment, but there is evidence to suggest that many green products generally do not work as well as their mainstream counterparts (I personally can attest to this). Changing to green products does have one immediate benefit: the people who use them don’t get sick from exposure to the harmful chemicals in mainstream cleansers.
Reports of burns, rashes, dizziness and scratchy throats among housekeeping employees have plummeted at North Central Bronx Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center since the staff switched to new cleaning products in 2004, said Peter Lucey, an associate executive director for support services at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. The number of lost days linked to injuries from the products declined from 54 in 2004 to zero last year, he said. “It’s the switch and the training,” Mr. Lucey said.
There is a non-profit group in Oakland, California that is dedicated to helping women form environmentally minded cooperatives and trains housekeepers to use more environmentally friendly products and methods. One of their trainers says that “products like vinegar, baking soda or the newer cleansers work just as well as traditional items if applied in the proper mix and quantities.”
Hm. I wonder what they used to clean houses and hospitals before all those chemicals started showing up in cleaning products. Vinegar and baking soda perhaps?
Before you go getting all verklempt about the progress we’ve made since then with our whoop-ass, heavy-duty, anti-bacterial cleaners that are so much better for us, let me remind you that it is widely held today that overuse of these sorts of cleaners are actually making us less healthy, not more, by creating super bacterias that are getting harder and harder to fight. I read somewhere that if you wash your hands with regular soap and hot water, that is perfectly adequate to wash away whatever icky stuff you need to get rid of. (I’m not a scientist – if you want to find this reference might I suggest Google.)
So, it may be a bit less convenient to wash dishes by hand, but if your dish soap is so awful that you have to do it anyway, what difference does it make? Just think, once you get rid of your dishwasher you’ll have room for a wine fridge! Let’s face it, if you live in the city and eat out all the time like I do, how many dishes do you really use at home anyway? Another benefit to apartment dwellers with postage-stamp size closets like mine: you only have to buy a few products to clean your whole house instead of a different bottle for each cleaning job you have. A few rags, a brush, a mop. Voila! Fewer products, more money to fill said wine fridge.
The New York Times did not tell me how to solve my stain removing problem. I wish my grandmother were here to show me.
Save A Park; Save Your Brain
A posting today from The New York Times‘ City Room blog tells the story of how a devastating storm that brought down hundreds of trees in Central Park last year has actually become a blessing in disguise. Parkgoers and park employees alike were horror struck at the initial devastation. But now, with cleanup efforts complete and plans to replant in the works, New York’s park commission and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit agency that runs the park, are seeing the opportunity they now have to restore an overgrown park to the original vision of its creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
The de facto thinning out of densely wooded areas is closer to what the park’s original designers intended, said Douglas Blonsky, the Conservancy’s president and the administrator of Central Park. “The concept was of drawing you into the park and having these visual experiences,” he said. “You would see something in the distance that would cause you to say, ‘Hey, I want to go see what that is.’ ”
Mr. [Adrian] Benepe [parks commissioner] said: “They were painting a portrait in the land. And this is like when you find a painting and it’s been overpainted somehow over the years, and you have the opportunity to take all that overpainting off and see the landscape as Olmsted and Vaux intended it.”
I like this metaphor of park as painting.
Here in Boston, we’ve been engaging in some “painting” restoration of our own. For the past couple of years I’ve done some volunteer work for the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which is devoted to restoring and preserving Boston’s own Frederick Law Olmsted masterpiece. After the completion of the Big Dig – that infamous multi-year infrastructure project that put the freeways cutting through Boston underground – it was possible to restore portions of the Emerald Necklace that had been destroyed by overpasses and other roads. For the first time in many decades, the Emerald Necklace is once again the connected chain of parks that Olmsted envisioned, and the work of the Conservancy is returning the parks that comprise the Necklace to their original designs, removing non-native plantings and other elements to return woodlands to their rightful states and restoring the Muddy River to once again be the point of access and landscape amenity that Olmsted intended for many potential users of his park.
It’s heartening to see that people revere both history and our public green spaces and, even in today’s fast-paced, high-tech world, recognize the value in preserving both. Because now more than ever before we need spaces like these, of which Frederick Law Olmsted said:
We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done, where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.
In this article from The Boston Globe last year, we learn how the city hurts our brain.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
Apparently, living in the city, despite all its good qualities that made us want to live here in the first place, can make us stupid, tired, aggressive and depressed. What we can do about it? Get thee to a park.
One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
It seems that Olmsted already knew what scientists over a hundred years later are “discovering” – that occasional immersion into the tranquility of a green space is good for us urban dwellers.
Give Me an “S”
This is brilliant. Shamanic Cheerleaders. Yes, really.
The Shamanic Cheerleaders are a performance group dedicated to bringing spirit while delivering multi-dimensional entertainment wherever they go. Their intention is to deliver a “message of all-inclusive consciousness through playful levity.” Through high-energy performances that are one-of-a-kind and individually tailored to suit an event or theme, they raise awareness about environmental/social issues and current events through a variety of cheerleader including dance, acrobatics, spoken word, song, cheer and music.
The Shamanic Cheerleader started as a character that founder Rana Satori created for Burning Man as a form of expressive art therapy. Everyone loved her and she decided to start a group because, as Rena says, who ever heard of one cheerleader? Indeed.
Based in the Bay Area, the squad is made up of acrobats, aerialists, yoga teachers, a naturopathic doctor, musicians, therapists and a full-time mom from Oakland. They bring their divine pep everywhere from yoga conferences and Green festivals to Las Vegas and San Francisco’s Global Summit for social and environmental changemakers. “There’s so much dogma in the Bay Area, it’s a relief to be around the shamanic energy, which is all about levity and accepting everyone,” said funk singer Blane Lyon, who provides music for Shamanic shows.
From a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Their tongue-in-cheek performances poke fun at the best of Bay Area New Ageism, from the raw foodies to the sacred geometry groups to the ayurveda followers. But underneath the jokes is a serious intention to raise eco-consciousness and find enlightenment by making everyone feel like a winner.
“We take big concepts within Buddhism, shamanism, Hinduism and the environmental movement, and we teach them down in a cheer that’s peppy and catchy,” said founder Rana Satori, 35. “When we cheer it’s like a compassionate smack on the astral plane.”
About themselves, the Shamanic Cheerleaders say:
We, the Shamanic Cheerleaders, use the term “Shaman” with great respect for the profound and diverse legacies of healers and mystics throughout the world. We do not claim to be Shamans. We recognize the value and universal nature of Shamanic healing techniques, including their use of intentional song, dance and energy work to promote personal and community healing. We have developed our own unique performance style that has not originated from any one direct lineage but is more a fusion of a wide range of healing and performance modalities.
Who couldn’t use a rousing cheer to raise a little mojo, especially on one of those days when work and the grind seem to have sapped all of your energy, spiritual and otherwise.
“Ready? Om-kay!
Don’t be a worrier!
Just be a warrior!
Don’t be a worrier!
Just be a warrior!
Have faith!
You rock!”
I wonder when they’re coming to Boston.
Everyday Wildlife Champions: Saving Animals in the Gulf
I have to admit that beyond a general awareness that there was a large oil spill in the Gulf I had no idea what was really going on down there until recently. As the severity and extent of this disaster finally dawned on me (no pun intended, which is unusual for me) I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had been so unaware and unconcerned. Shame on me.
Mark Morford’s column Behold our dark, magnificent horror sums up just how horrible this all is.
Really, it’s not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion. It’s not just the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled, or the stunned scientists who can only hypothesize how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean’s ecosystems at the very root level.
It’s not even the endless, heartrending tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged or wildlife killed. The fact is, any one of these aspects alone is enough to poison your soul for as long as you wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom. It is nothing but bleak.
Underneath all this oily gunk is a little bird known as a laughing gull. It was rescued Thursday [June 3] from a beach on East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast. The story telescopes to the plight of this one little bird in NPR’s June 4th story A Little Bird Mired In Oil Illuminates A Big Problem:
Sometimes a single picture has a way of capturing an important news story in a way that remains fixed in the public’s imagination and defines that story.
That happened Friday, when people around the world picked up newspapers or clicked on computers to see a heartbreaking image of a single bird covered in a layer of gunk that looked like melted chocolate.
That gunk, of course, was oil, and that bird was found along the coast of East Grand Terre Island, La.
And despite the horrific image, that little bird — a laughing gull — is lucky, according to Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, where the creature is being treated.
Holcomb tells NPR’s Michele Norris that the bird was rescued early — “so even though it’s covered in oil and it’s tired, it’s in relatively decent shape.”
But the little gull is the symbol of a scary turning point for wildlife on the Gulf Coast, Holcomb says. Yesterday, a big swath of surface oil broke free of the main slick and headed toward shore.
So when I saw a television ad for Dawn’s efforts to help rescue and clean the birds and animals affected by this spill, although I ordinarily would not respond to something with even a whiff of blatant commercialism, I was inspired to go to the Facebook page they have set up for the Everyday Wildlife Champions who are working tirelessly to save wildlife in the Gulf.
The otter paw grasping the edge of the tub kills me!
I’m sure that there are many, many ways that we can contribute to rescue and cleanup efforts that will be needed more than we can even guess right now. But Dawn is getting close to their goal of raising $500,000 and if buying some dish soap helps to save a tiny little bird or a frightened little otter then doesn’t that seem like the very least that one could do?
Eco-Easy
This rainy Tuesday brings us the sixth weekly installment of my commentary on trendwatching.com’s “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010.”
We started with Business Unusual, followed by Urbany, Real-Time Reviews, (F)luxury and Mass Mingling. Today’s trend? ECO-EASY.
While the current good intentions of corporations and consumers are helpful, serious eco-results will depend on making products and processes more sustainable without consumers even noticing it, and, if necessary, not leaving much room for consumers and companies to opt for less sustainable alternatives to begin with. Which will often mean forceful, if not painful, government intervention, or some serious corporate guts, or brilliantly smart design and thinking, if not all of those combined.
Think anything from thoroughly green buildings, to a complete ban on plastic bags and bottles, to super-strict bluefin tuna quota — anything that by default leaves no choice, no room for complacency, and thus makes it ‘easy’ for consumers (and corporations) to do the right and necessary thing.
This is the trend that bums me out, that I can’t explain away with a clever marketing strategy. Unfortunately, the reality is that here in the US we don’t make being ECO very EASY most of the time. Corporate interests are usually put above human and ecological ones and its a rare company that has the chutzpah to go against the grain and actually cleave to eco-friendly philosophies, policies and product production.
Case in point:
Some recent, random and hands-on ECO-EASY examples, from governments to B2C brands, to get you going (or better, to copy or build on):
• The small town of Bundanoon in Australia’s New South Wales has banned the sale of bottled water for environmental reasons. The community voted to replace branded water bottles with empty bottles labeled “Bundy on tap” that can be filled and refilled with water from taps and fountains on the main street.
• In September 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to introduce a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in France. Polluters will have to pay EUR 17 per ton of carbon emitted, which includes not only businesses but individual households as well. The tax will cover 70% of the country’s carbon emissions and bring in about EUR 4.3 billion of revenue annually.
• The government of Mexico City recently passed a law restricting businesses from giving out plastic bags that are not biodegradable. Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco enacted an ordinance in March 2007 that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags
• UK sandwich chain Pret a Manger decided to stop selling tuna sandwiches after the Earth Day 2009 release of End of the Line, a documentary exposing over-fishing of the world’s oceans.
Do you notice anything about this list? Only one single example is from the US – those hippies in San Francisco banning the use of plastic bags. Similar efforts here in true blue Massachusetts didn’t get very far.
There are occasionally heartening signs, like the US-backed proposals to ban international trade in bluefin tuna and to protect polar bears, measures that were voted down by the UN. But in general I think it’s going to take a lot of pressure from small groups of people who feel very passionately about these issues to get government to enact the laws that will make it profitable for corporations to make it easy for consumers to be eco-friendly on any kind of a meaningful scale. Especially here in the US where such issues are usually met with overwhelming indifference and complacence.
To paraphrase a popular contemporary fictional character: there will be a time to choose between what is easy and what is right.
Next week: Tracking & Alerting
Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.
My name is Angela Eloise and I am a freelance writer. That sounds as if I am copping to an addiction. I am. In addition to writing this blog, I also write a column about social media and I am at work on a series of essays that I hope to see in print some day. Cloud of Chaos was born from my desire to dance with the absurdity of life, to create a space where I could write and share all of the gorgeous, fun, snarky deliciousness I find spinning around me every day. What does a spinning cloud of chaos have to do with writing? Everything, as it turns out.
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