or What’s the deal with organic foods?

by Karen A. Teeters

Years ago my immune system was in poor shape. I suffered from so called seasonal allergies all year round so my body was fighting those natural foreign substances all the time even though things like mold, dander and pollen really could not hurt me.

I discovered that supplements could build up my immune system and make me feel better. I was feeling run down all the time so you can imagine that when I discovered supplements, I thought it was a miracle.

But many years later I made a better discovery. Naturally or organic grown whole foods like fruits and vegetables had all these great vitamins and nutrients in them. The healthy, organic soil is the source of the nutrients. And my body could absorb these nutrients in a natural healthy way that built up my immune system even better than supplements. Agribusiness no longer farms in this older, organic fashion and thus the conventional whole foods do not contain the nutrients our bodies need to thrive.

Here are two great videos I discovered on YouTube. They are offered by an educational health video company called PsycheTruth. So what’s the deal with organic foods? Watch on…

Youtube LinkOne

Youtube LinkTwo

What is your opinion? Do you buy organic to get the nutrients your body needs naturally? What difference has it made in your health?

Guest Video/Blog from The Hour Interview with Ed

The actor and environmental activist talks about 40 years of living green.

The Moment it All Changed:

“I started in 1970 with the first Earth Day… I was 20 years old — I’d lived two decades in that horrible choking smog… I’d had enough, I said, ‘Earth Day, sign me up! I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.’ I started recycling, composting, I rode my bike around, I took public transportation.”

On Riding His Bike to an Oscars Party:

“I was thought of as more odd than I am today, if that’s possible.”

On how his Eco-Friendly House fit into the Hollywood Lifestyle:

“There was a time when people thought it was really weird, and people said, ‘Ed, have you fallen on hard economic times?’ They literally thought there was something wrong, that I’d had a bankruptcy filing or something.”

Thank you to The Hour for this story.

Ed Begley walks his talk and even has his own natural cleaning product, Begley’s Best.

Earth Day

By Senator Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day

Courtesy of:

http://earthday.wilderness.org/

Get a List of the Local Earth Day Events in Your Area Here:

http://earthday.envirolink.org/

What was the purpose of Earth Day? How did it start? These are the questions I am most frequently asked.

Actually, the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

I continued to speak on environmental issues to a variety of audiences in some twenty-five states. All across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment. The environmental issue simply was not to be found on the nation’s political agenda. The people were concerned, but the politicians were not.

In Our Hands

After President Kennedy’s tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me – why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air – and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.

Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’…coordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned….”

It was obvious that we were headed for a spectacular success on Earth Day. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of my U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, inquiries, etc. In mid-January, three months before Earth Day, John Gardner, Founder of Common Cause, provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters. I staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes as coordinator of activities.

Green Living

Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

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Particpate in your community’s local Earth Day events this year and bring the kids. You’ll enjoy the great outdoors  and your kids will have fun too!

Get a List of the Local Earth Day Events in Your Area Here:

http://earthday.envirolink.org/

Want more like this? Follow GreenLivingZone on Twitter!

By: Twitter Buttons

a green essay by Karen Ann Teeters

The change we need for environmental turnaround starts with you.

We have the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December 2009. There is already talk of diminished expectations and they have not even met! Trying to research the roles of corporations, governments, society, and individuals in the role of sustaining a healthy environment is like any major issue today – extremely challenging to come up with anything that is not polarizing.

There is a lot of empirical evidence to support capitalism’s favorite expression, “the bottom line and return on investments,” as more important than investing in environmental concerns. And of course there is an argument to support the eleventh hour concept from environmentalists, that it is almost too late for any human action to make a difference.

Here is an “imaginary scenario” to drive home the point. The tsunami of environmental destruction (the eleventh hour- the environmental “end” of life as we know it – no more breathing!) is arriving tomorrow at 2:00 PM eastern time and the business reaction is as usual, “No time for that, I have my list of responsibilities today to make sure my shareholders make a profit and I have to get back to work before my manager walks in.”

Then go ask any individual that is working for a large corporation or even a small company, in their “off business” hours, what his or her opinion is about what to do about the wracked up situation with the environment. You’ll probably get a very empathetic answer concerning issues like the importance of recycling, organic foods and electric cars. Maybe the task of environmental actions is too complicated for any one ordinary individual to understand. Building green, eating green, driving green, working green. We are buying books about every day green choices and watching movies about the seriousness of the oncoming urgency of the outcome if we do nothing. For many people, its a green blur!

We are trying to make a difference with our everyday actions but when we congregate into groups of businesses or corporations to make a living and feed our loved ones, we seem to  lose touch with the dark outcome of the actions of these large, unresponsive companies. They all have these wonderful voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility statements or CSR’s that present themselves as caring, green members of the community – but many read like well written press releases rather than longterm real world commitments to create change and contribute to the community. You’ve all seen these laughable commercials from oil and chemical companies (BP – Beyond Petroleum) of their green activities that don’t come across as genuine.

I once had a discussion with a business coach who had an amazing insight about how the ethics of businesses work. His theory was that when a company gets to be 200 employees or more, somehow people at management level tend to feel that their actions are anonymous or hidden. The idea of personal responsibility to the greater good seems to get lost, questionable activity easily becomes the norm, and concern with profits override every decision. We have seen this very thing happen with major corporate breakdowns such as Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson and others.

Should we try to pass a law that states no company will ever be larger than 200 people to overcome this tendency for businesses to become dishonest and sociopathic in behavior? Nah, the lobbyists would never let that happen and besides that would be more like fascism than capitalism.

I must say I enjoyed Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, A Love Story. One of the alternative explorations presented in the film was small sized worker cooperatives that are run democratically by the workers who actually own the companies and share equitably in the profits. One was a robotics company called Isthmus Engineering and the other was Alvarado Street Bakery. Here are the details from Moore’s website:

—The Isthmus Engineering website  describes the company’s “Seven Cooperative Principles”:

• Open membership – no gender, social, racial, political or religious discrimination
• Democratic control – one member, one vote
• Equitable economic participation among members and distribution of profits based on patronage
• Autonomy and independence – controlled by members
• Education and training
• Cooperation among cooperatives
• Concern for community

The Alvarado Street Bakery website  describes cooperatives as “a business voluntarily owned and controlled by its member patrons and operated for them and by them on a nonprofit or cost basis. It is owned by the people who use it … based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.” —

I like the last principle listed for Isthmus Engineering – Concern for community. I don’t think a company composed of all owners, managed by democratic control who live in a local community would do anything to harm its community or citizens. This is democracy in its purest form – one member – one vote. We don’t have that in any of the industrialized democratic nations on earth because most governments, such as the US, are setup as a “republic” – a representative democracy.

The old complaint is that our representatives seem to lose touch with what their constituents need. The concept and acceptance of “lobbyist” has hijacked our government. As the large corporations act as corporate gift givers to influence our elected officials, we wonder what has happened to the “republic” part of our government. Do corporations have more sway than individuals over what the representatives’ support? Any green bill or any bill for that matter, often gets locked in committee and has amendments added that seem to greatly alter original intent.
Corporations can not be trusted to self regulate when it comes to issues such as our air, our water, our trees, our climate, our health. The growing perception is that we are just “human resources” to them – like EverReady batteries. We are in our current financial mess precisely because of deregulation. Our government needs to pass bills to regulate the actions of corporations and all we get are bills with loopholes. In September and early October 2008 at the height of the initial financial meltdown, 98% of the calls to elected officials opposed the bank bailout! But Congress went ahead and passed the bank bailout bill anyway. Senator Feinstein said, “Main Street just doesn’t get it.” And now, word is out that the recent climate bill will probably be watered down by the time any votes are put to it.

You ask yourself, what can we do as individuals? I know what I have laid out here seems so doom and gloomy, yet we need to know the lay of the land, and what the odds are before we can take any action. Many of us are becoming active in green groups, buying green products, and educating ourselves the best we can so that we have an inhabitable planet to offer our future generations. Looking at the causes of unresponsive governments and large corporations often feels overwhelming.

Committing to expansive changes, such as responsible and responsive elected officials, more regulations in place, less lobbyist influence, more small worker cooperatives, countries working with other countries, taking personal responsibility by how we spend our green dollars and use energy on a daily basis, may seem like way too much. But, let me make this small suggestion. Just pick one thing. Just get started with “one thing,” then add another… and another. Go green in your home. Get involved in greening your community. That’s how eco-activist and actor, Ed Begley Jr. got started. Yes… small steps.

Only you as an individual can make that decision. Start your own group. Start blogging yourself. Check out all the green microbloggers on Twitter. And don’t stop, because there is hope.

Karen Ann Teeters is a green blogger and you may read more of her posts at www.greenlivingzone.com

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What are you thoughts about who we need to become to make a green difference before its too late? What green steps have you taken?