Random Musings of an Eco Warrior

In a previous post, I addressed taking a fresh look at the disposable products and excess packaging we purchase and use, in an effort to keep those things out of our landfills and waterways. In this article I’ll delve into the ingredients contained in the products we use and their repercussions on the environment and our bodies.

The next time you shop for personal care or household cleaning products, take a look at the ingredients labels. You will likely encounter a long list of chemicals, most of which which you even won’t be able to pronounce. For example, on many shampoo bottles and cosmetics you will find the ingredient Quaternium-15, which is a Formaldehyde releasing preservative. For the uniformed, Formaldehyde is the major component in embalming fluid. It is also known as methyl aldehyde, methylene oxide, oxymethylene and oxomethane as well as by a host of other different names. Since the skin is the largest organ of the human body and readily absorbs substances placed on it, it is quite …

Several weeks ago while shopping in the new organic aisle in my local Thriftway supermarket, I overheard 2 women comment on the folly of organic food stating it “costs twice as much as regular food”, “doesn’t taste any different” and “isn’t any healthier for you”. I rushed to gather my thoughts to form a non-confrontational yet educational rebuttal but before I could get my lecture organized, the two has turned the corner of the aisle to the “regular” food.

My journey to organic living has been a long one which started in the early 1970’s when I began studying nutrition. As I read and learned about the benefits of the food I was eating, I also began running across articles and books about the adverse effects on our bodies and our ecosystem of the pesticides, herbicides and chemical petroleum based fertilizers being used on our food supply and on the plants from which we manufacture our clothes and household textiles. The very first book I read on the subject

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A few months ago I went to a neighborhood supermarket to do a little food shopping. On my list was to get a BAG of popcorn. While I usually buy organically grown popcorn at my local downtown natural foods store, I was out of it and had no plans to go downtown anytime soon, so decided, just this once, to get the supermarket variety. I located the snacks aisle where I found about a 6 ft wide by 6 ft tall display of popcorn, all being the boxed microwave variety. I searched and searched but there was not a BAG or JAR of popcorn to be found. So I went to the front of the store to find the manager to ask where the “regular” popcorn was, he quickly pointed me to the aisle I had just visited. So I trudged back to that aisle to check again but alas, in my absense, no BAGS or JARS of popcorn had magically appeared on the shelves. I commented to my daughter on the fact that this store apparently did

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America is the largest consumer of manufactured goods in the world and while we constitute only 5% of the world’s population we consume a whopping 24% of the world’s energy. In the United States, there are more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers. Cars and other forms of transportation account for nearly 30 percent of world energy use and 95 percent of global oil consumption.

Most of us have accumulated a mind boggling amount of STUFF. Rendered danger zones to enter at our own risk, our garages, basements, attics and closets are stuffed to the brim with camping equipment, grills, lawn mowers, old, broken and extra furniture, bikes, children’s and adult’s toys and games, gardening supplies, lumber, tools, broken items waiting to be repaired and boxes still unpacked from our last move (because we can’t find space to put the stuff). Items that at one point in time were considered luxuries such as televisions, cell phones, computers and air conditioning are now viewed as necessities or deserved rewards for all our hard work and all

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Perfluorooctanoate aka PFOA, aka C8, the chemical used to make Teflon non-stick pans, to “Scotchgard” furniture, in producing stain resistant carpeting and clothing and to coat the inside your microwave popcorn bags has been found in the bloodstream of almost every person and animal tested on the planet, including in the umbilical cord blood of unborn babies. Researchers have no explanation as to how this chemical has ended up in our bloodstreams. There are reports of thousands of pet birds who have died from the outgassing of hot Teflon pans, newly installed carpeting and “Scotchgarded” fabrics while the effects of this chemical on humans are still being studied. The half-life of C8 in our environment is thousands of years.

Being an avid gardener, I like to keep up with gardening news, tips and ideas from a variety of different sources. For the past few years, I been hearing on TV and radio gardening shows about gardeners in the northern states such as Minnesota and Michigan now being able to grow things they have never been able to grow before due to overall winter temperature increases.

For those of you who are not gardeners, the country is broken down into gardening “hardiness zones”. What that means is that you should choose and grow plants and trees that can survive in your “zone”. For example, I live in Philadelphia which has been traditionally categorized as zone 6. When I decide I want to plant a tree, shrub or perennial plant, I need to do a little research into which plants will survive in my “zone”, which basically means which plants can survive the typical

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I just read the article on this blog concerning France’s proposed taxation of households that have large quantities of CO2 output. While I can see both sides of the issue, I most definitely lean toward the taxation. Why? At the risk of sounding like the classic image of an older person saying “when I was your age I had to walk 10 miles to school”, I have been involved in the green movement since circa 1970, that’s going on 40 years now. I have heard 39 years of debates about what to do and how to do it and when to do it and that’s about all that’s happened, TALK. For all the new young green activists who see time from a different perspective than us older ones, try to imagine yourselves still having this discussion 40 years from now, not a very encouraging or inspiring vision, is it?  I am beginning to think it is all the hot air we

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When choosing and using commercial household cleaners, many of us forget that whatever we pour down our drains ends up in our water supply, reservoirs, oceans, rivers and groundwater where the chemicals released pose serious threats to marine and wildlife. In addition to our outdoor environment, the toxins in typical commercial cleaners also pollute our indoor air and in fact, our own bodies. It is an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality we have adopted in which we think whatever we discard is “gone”. The truth of the matter is, whatever is washed away or thrown away never really GOES anywhere, it is simply moved from one place (our homes) to another place on our planet (our waterways or landfills). So it is for those reasons that I created a green cleaning web page back in 1997. It was a labor of love during which I taught myself basic HTML code (having no web creation software to do it for me back then). After weeks of learning HTML, designing the page and researching and compiling

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