Green Right Now

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

The Eco Gift Festival in Santa Monica set for next week claims to be the biggest green gift convention in the world. With a projected attendance of 15,000 and 150 vendors, it may well be, we’re not sure, but it certainly promises a big presence with sellers offering gifts made from garbage, recycled silver and gold, bamboo, plant-based medicinal oils (hey, it’s LA), and even poop.

Make that elephant poop, which a company quaintly named “Mr. Ellie Pooh” turns into paper products.

Now that’s thinking large. And it’s not the only eye-popper expected at the festival. Cool Planet Jewelry founder Jerry Cope gives 100 percent of his profits from the company’s recycled silver and gold Stop Global Warming collection to stopglobalwarming.org. Tom’s Shoes, inspired to put shoes on the feet of impoverished Argentinian children, gives a pair of shoes for each pair sold. They’ve donated in Argentina and South Africa. [Read more →]

By Tim Sanders
Saving the World at Work

Mr. Stanley Marcus once told me, “Everybody is generous during good times, but only generous people give during hard times.”

True words, indeed.

Today I gave a talk at an Easter Seals event in Palm Beach Florida. The fundraiser was aimed at local business leaders, and my task was to connect giving with good business. The message I delivered was: Don’t give up on giving. Don’t give up on giving your employees purpose. Don’t give up on the responsibility revolution. If you gave in 2005, you should find a way to do it in late 2008.

Why is this possible, given the current business climate?

Because companies that give back have happier employees, engaged customers and good karma. Especially during hard times when all the good-times-Corporate-Charlies are bugging out and acting like a dog trying to protect his last bone.

If you want your company to honor its commitments to local charities or foundations, ask your employees to help ‘raise the money’ through cost cutting, giving up on certain items or matching funds. You’d be surprised how innovative they can be!

Here’s another benefit: Giving is the cure for scarcity thinking. When you give, especially during tough times, you teach yourself that there is enough to go around. After contributing, you realize that you won’t starve and life goes on. That’s the value of charity, it teaches us the abundance mentality.

The other plus is that you help your people get our of misery and start learning to care about the less fortunate. Trust me, there are millions of people in this country that are much worse off than you, and need your help now more than ever. The exercise of giving will validate this and help you find more motivation, inspiration and drive when you get back to the office.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

By Barbara KesslerGreen Right Now

Guess what city just mandated that businesses disclose their toxic chemicals, put a five cent price tag on plastic bags and set up a future ban on the sale of bottled water at city-owned centers as well as plastic take-out food containers?

Portland? San Francisco? They’ve taken some similar measures. But no, the latest municipality to get aggressive with consumer waste is Toronto, Canada’s largest and apparently greenest city.

This week the Toronto City Council set in motion a sweeping effort aimed at reducing the number of plastic disposables - grocery bags, water bottles and take-out cartons - that wind up in the local landfill. [Read more →]

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

I remember spending one long, gray Christmas season seven years ago in the hospital with my daughter. I wouldn’t say it was a terrible time. While we weren’t happy to be hospital-bound, but we were enormously, elatedly grateful that our little girl, just 3 ½, had survived a critical surgery and was getting the medical care she needed.

Still, spending Christmas morning in the hospital in slushy, deserted downtown Baltimore is a memory in sepia. There’s nothing quite so bittersweet as waking up with a child on a special day, only to recognize that those austere medical surroundings are still with you: the whirring breathing equipment, the IV, the white blankets, the 5^th floor view to the parking lot.

I always awakened first, and I would watch her until she did. That morning, I noticed someone had slipped a stuffed animal onto her bed, a white reindeer with shiny gold antlers. When she awoke, her eyes caught sight of it immediately. And she smiled.

Her smiles were worth a million bucks at the time, because she hadn’t yet recovered her speech.

The toy was an anonymous donation. Some group, I don’t even know which, had taken the time to gather the toys, assign them to appropriate kids and make sure they were in place very early Christmas Day. They had peeled away from their own family affairs to help a bunch of strangers: a hundred or so kids with disabilities and special needs stuck in a rehab unit inside Johns Hopkins Medical Center.

Later that day, I remember some of my daughter’s hospital pals coming by to show off their presents. One girl we’d come to know, wheelchair-bound after her treatment for cancer, came by quietly with her dad, a pathologist. She handed my daughter a Barbie video, something she’d outgrown but that she knew would delight a three-year-old. She too had lost her ability to speak, and so the girls communicated through nods and eye contact.

It sounds cliché, but you can do a lot of good at the holidays. Your old coat, a gently used book, a retired computer, a toy or video that didn’t get used — all these can find a good home. Read our story by reporter Diane Porter, an expert recycler, to find out the many, many places you can donate, both close to home and as far away as your gift is needed. Move that extra stuff out of your closets and drawers (hit the garage too), and spread the spirit of the season.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By Diane Porter
Green Right Now

We’re too familiar with the downsides of the holiday season. Bags of new things come into the house and get hidden in already-full closets and drawers. Boxes of decorations come out of their hiding places, muscling their way into your living space. Wrapping paper and ribbons multiply like guppies, scissors and tape go missing, cookies come out of the oven and the doorbell rings. When it’s all over, we work to find places for the new stuff, stash the decorations again and vow to make next year different.

Guess what. It’s next year.

What if - indulge us here, for a moment - what if you could simplify first this year, getting rid of things you don’t use, recycling them where they’ll be appreciated? What if you could make space now, and begin the New Year with closets that don’t look like they’ve been through a natural disaster?

You can. And you’ll feel so good, because one computer, one stuffed animal or one pair of old athletic shoes can change a life.

“You’ve heard the story about the young person tossing starfish back into the ocean when they washed up on shore and were in danger of dying in the hot sun, right?” asked Barry Cranmer, president of the Share the Technology computer recycling project. “Someone asks why she was bothering because there were so many and she wouldn’t be able to rescue them all, so it wouldn’t really make any difference.

“As she tosses another back into the water, she says, ‘it will make a difference to this one.’ “

Take a quick tour of your closets, the basement, the garage. Are there books, tools, sports equipment you no longer need or use? Old towels, a wedding dress, a wheelbarrow?

Let’s save some starfish.

The kids’ room

Kendra Robins knows her territory. The founder of Project Night Night, a program that gives books, stuffed animals and blankets to homeless children, learned when she had her son that not all toys find their forever home the first time around.

Children “find their favorites, and those get super-loved,” she said. “The other ones sit on a shelf, looking cute. Things are either tattered beyond recognition or nearly pristine.”

This year, in its fourth year of operation, Project Night Night will distribute more than 25,000 tote bags to kids who don’t have homes. Each bag will include a brand new blanket, at least one children’s book, and at least one gently used stuffed animal, most of which have been donated from kids’ rooms just like yours.

“Shelters use them for welcome gifts. All of this is new and very scary to the child, and some of the shelters are not that nice. A lot of kids are frightened, and having a stuffed animal helps,” Robins said. Books are important because homeless kids often have lower academic achievements than others. And the blankets give them something new, all their own, to cuddle for security.

Project Night Night has drop-off locations in Phoenix, Arizona, the Bay Area in California and in Solon, Ohio, and five mailing addresses around the country. You can also work with the organization to keep your donations in your own community. Project Night Night sells its Tote Bags online for $3.50; you commit to packing them and donating them to a shelter of your own choosing or one of the 300 shelters with which they already have affiliations.

The planned California High Speed Rail system, which voters endorsed with a yes vote on initial funding in November, would offer travel times competitive with air travel and less than half what comparable trips would take by car.

The concept drawings here, provided by the CHSR Authority and graphic animators Newlands & Company, Inc., illustrate how the system would work and be meshed with existing infrastructure.

Building the rail lines would cost less than adding highways, according to the CHSR Authority — as suggested by this picture where the train could carry as many passengers as are riding in four lanes of highway traffic.

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

In case you missed it, just before Thanksgiving, the World Meteorologic Society let us know that the atmospheric greenhouse gases reached their highest levels ever in 2007.

The same year the Arctic ice shelf pulled back more than ever. Hmmm. Coincidence?

According to the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the causes were clear: “Population growth and urban development worldwide continue to increase the use of fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. At the same time, the clearing of land for agriculture, including deforestation, is releasing carbon dioxide into the air and reducing carbon uptake by the biosphere.”

I checked a summary of the WMO report for any good news but found little.

Experts don’t expect a decline in greenhouse gas concentrations until decades after we curtail emissions here on the ground. With strong policies curbing GHGs, the concentrations could level off at around mid-century.

Which means what? Well, we won’t know how well we’re “fixing things” for a long time. To give you an example, remember CFC’s (Chlorofluorocarbons) ? These man-made gases used in refrigerants and aerosol products were mainly responsible for poking holes in the ozone layer. Their levels are declining now because of restrictions put in place in 1989, according to the WMO report.

As for greenhouse gases, scientists mainly hope to hold the line on when they peak in the atmosphere. If the peak comes too late, say by 2020 or 2025, they fear we’ll have lost the opportunity to make amends. (Scientifically it’s a little more complicated than that.)

So back to the good news, where is it? Well, the world did manage to collaborate on solutions pertaining to CFCs. Perhaps, once again, cooperative action will carry the day.

And too, we know what we’re confronting. We have seen the enemy and it is us. That might not be comforting. But we know now that we must get off fossil fuels. We must conserve, find clean energy solutions to power our houses and cars; discover ways to live that don’t take an undue toll on the water, air and soil.

The U.S., with 4 percent of the world population and one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, has not, for all its talk and expertise, been a good steward of the earth. Still the world looks to the U.S., with its abundance of human resources, for strong leadership. As United Nations climate talks opened in Poznan, Poland, today European leaders said they hoped for stronger U.S. engagement on the issue, given that president-elect Barak Obama has placed a high priority on fighting climate change.

Under President Bush, the U.S. has declined to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the main guidepost for emissions reductions, saying it would be too costly to businesses and that developing nations like China needed to do more. That stance is expected to change. U.S. youths attending the Poznan conference told the Environmental News Service that they hoped their country would confront climate change more aggressively.

“As youth representatives of the United States, we’re working with other young people from around the world here in Poland,” said Jeremy Osborn, 24, from Connecticut. “It’s time for our government to do the same. If we can all get along and work together, so can they.”

About 11,000 people, representing nearly 200 countries and hundreds of environmental groups, are attending the two-week conference in Poland, the 14th Conference of the 192 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Their goal is to further find and refine ways that nations and global groups can develop technology and finance solutions to climate change.

With the U.S. economy now officially in recession, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, called on participants to focus on climate change actions that work hand in hand with economic recovery.

So where’s the good news? Today, 11,000 people gathered to discuss a common purpose.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By Catherine Girardeau
Green Right Now

Despite the derailing economy, California voters got on board for reviving train service in their state November 4th by passing state proposition 1A — a $10 million bond to begin construction of a fully electric rail system running 220-mph trains between San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal and Union Station in Los Angeles.

The bond is a vote of confidence from the public and a down payment on the $40 billion-plus project that plans to run high-speed trains from Sacramento to San Diego. The plan’s boosters say it will create jobs, relieve air and highway congestion, and help the state meet its legislative mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Slideshow: California’s High-Speed Railway Plan

While detractors like the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board said California’s budget woes make spending billions of dollars on a massive transportation project not only ill-advised, but “potentially the biggest boondoggle in California history”, proponents called the victory a landmark for high-speed rail nationwide. [Read more →]