Finding hope in the marketplace

Hazel Henderson's, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy offers a hopeful look at how the marketplace can actually help solve some of our problems.

Hazel Henderson in an expert on sustainable development, the author a eight books, a syndicated columnist, and co-developer of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators—an economic tool that looks at measures beyond gross national product and other traditional economic indicators to evaluate economic and social success. I just finished reading her book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, and have to applaud her for documenting, through hundreds of examples, that the marketplace can be part of the solution to our myriad problems, and not just part of the problem.

In the book's introduction, Henderson says, "More ethical markets are now necessary in the twenty-first century information age... Markets can only operate where there is trust, transparency, honesty, and fidelity in contracts..."

I couldn't agree more. We, as consumers, and as investors (no matter how small our savings and investments), have previously unimaginable power. Companies that watch out for the triple bottom line (or the economic, environmental, and social bottom line) are being rewarded. Those that only look at the economic bottom line are skating on thin ice. "Global communications and 24/7 financial markets birthed the new global superpower: world public opinion," Henderson says. "Billion dollar brand names can be devalued in real time... Governments and corporations are responding."

People interested in the status quo often say we can't raise food sustainably and feed the world, we can't produce products that are truly safe and meet the needs of the world. They are wrong, and Henderson's book helps to show that. Green chemistry, green building, organic food production, and safe manufacturing are possible. They are the only hope for our future, and ultimately for the companies that produce the goods we consume. As Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet, the world's largest manufacturer of industrial carpet and fabrics, says in the book, "We might not be here today, but for the sustainability initiative we undertook." His company has been well-rewarded by pursuing the triple bottom line.

Henderson includes web addresses for organizations and businesses in the text as she refers to them. They provide a great way for readers to learn more, but my one complaint about this book is that 100 percent of these should have been cross-referenced in an appendix, to make it easier for readers to follow up on interesting topics. But this is a minor flaw; the book is well worth reading.

101 Solutions

A book review of Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic, by Liz Armstrong, Guy Dauncey, Anne Wordsworth.

This book is a good choice for the activist on your Christmas shopping list, and with our deteriorating health, our imploding health-care system, rocketing insurance costs, and economic hardship even among the insured (68% of personal bankruptcies are due to health care costs, and 75% of those people had insurance when diagnosed) more or us should become activists.

All three authors are Canadians who have been actively engaged in environmental health issues for years. They joined forces to create a book that says we can do something positive, we can join together to improve life for everyone. Cancer and other debilitating illnesses affect each and every one of us, directly and indirectly. At the beginning of the book, Dauncey says, “To work for a cure is clearly important—but it is equally important to prevent cancer before it starts.”

The book begins with a section that outlines the scope of the cancer epidemic and its impacts on individuals and society. It provides a fact-rich skeleton upon which the authors build the need for action, just in case anyone was still in doubt, including:

Body burden studies have shown that every one of us, including newborn babies, have hundreds of industrial chemicals in our bodies, many of which are known or suspected carcinogens.

Only about 5 to 10 percent of cancers result from damaged genes inherited from our parents. The other 90+ percent are from damage incurred during our lives.

There is also a cancer epidemic in wildlife (who don’t drink, smoke, or get obese). One in beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river is dying from cancer.

Cancer is also on the rise among companion animals. In a study that analyzed data from veterinary teaching hospitals around the country, there was a six-fold increase in bladder cancer in dogs between 1975 and 1995.

The second section of the book is dedicated to the 101 solutions, with ideas for individuals, parents, youth, action groups, the health-care system, cities, labor, business, governments, and global initiatives. The final solution, number 101, is “Don’t sit this one out.” Their message is to get involved. To make changes in your own life, and to say “enough.”

“Speak up,” they say. “Use your voice and vision of a healthy world to create the changes we need.”

Good advice!

Learn more about the book at Earth Future.

Exposed

Yesterday Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air, did an interview with Mark Schapiro. Schapiro is the author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products, and What's at Stake for American Power, which I reviewed when it first came out. The program was excellent, and Schapiro said a couple of things that stuck with me:

1.) Gross asked Schapiro how researching the book changed the consumer choices he makes. He said: What really gets me is, I like to have the information, and industry and the government have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent me, and you, and everybody else, from having the information about these kinds of substances, so that you can make a choice. I think at the very minimum, that is something people can demand. How has it changed how I do things? I smoke, I enjoy smoking, but I know what I am doing, I know the risks and I know what is involved with a cigarette. So the thing that gets me about this whole issue is, what you don't know. Get the information out there and people can make decisions about the risks they are willing to take, but right now the information isn't out there.

2.) At the end, Gross said, "Thanks for all the bad news." Schapiro came back with this: I don't see this book as a bad-news book. I have been following environmental topics for years and I have found these arguments over and over and over again. Environmentalists say, 'Take this stuff out, it's really dangerous' and industry comes back and says 'Get real. We have got to make trade offs in modern society, and we are going to end up throwing people out of work, and it is going to be too expensive, and it will be an economic catastrophe for our country, plus the stuff isn't dangerous anyway.' To be honest I got tired of that dynamic, it gets like Kabuki theater, the same arguments back and forth. Then I started following what was happening in Europe and I said, 'Hey, wait a minute. The world's major economy is requiring that things be done differently, and so what is the reaction?' I started looking at what is the effect in Europe, and the economic catastrophe that was predicted never happened. So it has been a bluff, over and over and over here in the United States as to what is-and-isn't possible. So I see it as the opposite of a bummer. I see it as kind of a new way of looking at things and a new way of looking at what is possible.

Yesterday morning, I had breakfast with a friend. He said something similar to me, about my blog being bad news. But like Schapiro, I don't see knowledge as bad news. I see it as empowerment. When we do know about all this scary stuff, we can weigh risks, we can make educated decisions, and we can demand change. As consumers, I truly believe that we have remarkable power! Vote for safer products every time you go to the store. Let corporations and government know you won't settle for less than full disclosure so you can make educated choices. They will listen.

(Listen to the Fresh Air interview here.)

Food for thought

I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver is well known for her award-winning novels (such as The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, and Pigs in Heaven) and they are marvelous, though I appreciated this book even more. The narrative follows Kingsolver and her family (husband, Steven Hopp and daughters Camille and Lily) through a year of eating almost exclusively the food they grow themselves, or purchase from local farmers near their Virginia farm. In it, she says, "I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food, or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question..."

She goes on to say, "I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration... Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

"It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry... but a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life. I consider it the hoodwink of my generation."

Industrial food is a big part of our health problems. Because of the industrialization of our dinner, we are eating worse than ever before, in spite of the sheer abundance in the big box stores where we shop. So, Kingsolver writes with passion of the celebratory nature of good, wholesome, real food, cooked from scratch. As she pointed out in an interview I did with her for an upcoming article, "We have to eat. It is the one consumer choice we make three times a day, and there are so many different problems that have the same answer: we are worried about food contamination, with one scare after another making headlines, we are worried about our use of fossil fuels and climate change, we are worried about our vanishing farm cultures, and we are also worried about our health and the obesity crisis. All these problems are associated with eating processed foods, and all of these problems have one solution: get food from closer to home, and get back into cooking from scratch."

So, with this in mind, let me talk about cookbooks. I have dozens, but really there are just four cookbooks that I reach for with regularity. They cover the world of cooking and food choices (literally):

The Joy of Cooking, which I wrote about recently, is an absolute, must have cookbook. If you only own one cookbook, it is the one you should have!

Last night I made Potato Corn Chowder with some of our Yukon Gold potatoes (soup is a great use for the tiny potatoes I get from my garden). I used the recipe from Fresh Choices, an unusual cookbook in that it really drills down into information about the food choices we make, and how they affect our health. In nine chapters, it serves up great recipes plus a wealth of excellent facts, figures, and news on food (organic, local, grassfed, and beyond) and how our choices affect our health and the earth.

Colorado Cacheis another cookbook I reach for frequently. With over 400 pages, it always has a recipe that works for me. If you like Mexican food, there is a chapter dedicated to it, and the "potpourri" chapter covers things like homemade mustards, jellies and jams, and liquers and cocktails.

And for the last of my regular cookbooks: Author Sheila Lukins is an inveterate traveler who spent two years on a food journey around the world. Part travelogue, part cookbook, and rounded out with menu suggestions, her All Around The World Cookbook is the book to pickup when you feel like experimenting with different spices, or combinations of ingredients. For example, for chicken soup, Lukins gives a table that shows combinations of ingredients that make chicken soup what it is in 22 different countries, ranging from Argentina to Turkey.

      

For your Christmas list

Plenty of what I write about is bad news and downbeat types of stuff, but here's something upbeat. I absolutely love, Organic Body Care Recipies, a new book by licensed holistic esthetician and certified aromatherapist, Stephanie Tourles. Everybody should put this book on their wish list for Christmas, a birthday, or just an I-want-to-treat-myself-to-something-nice day!

Tourles has several older books on the subject, which I have used in the past, but I really love this brand-new book, because it's so comprehensive: it features 175 recipes for totally natural lotions and potions that help you care for skin, body, and hair, as well as improve your mood, provide comfort when you are sick, or repel pesky bugs. The first third of the book provides important background on A Natural Approach To Beautiful Skin, Hair and Nails; The Natural Apothecary; and Tools of the Trade for the Kitchen Cosmetologist. The next two thirds is recipe central, and the back of the book includes helpful appendices that point the reader to resources and additional reading.

When you make your own skin-care products you are assured that there aren't hidden, nasty chemicals, such as parabens and phthalates. And the cost is significantly lower than for store bought concoctions (investing in some of the essential oils is pricey at first, but they will last a long time, and they are typically used by the drop).

So far, I've tried Salt of the Earth Body Scrub, Tangerine Toner, and the Balancing Scrub and Skin Lightner. They're quite wonderful, and I can't wait to try more recipes. The book has cool ideas sprinkled throughout for creating gifts from your homemade goodies, something I plan to do this year at the holidays!

[Note: To make it easier for you to check back on this and previous reviews, I've added a Reviews page to the Toxic Burden website. I've also updated the Tips page. And, I welcome comments, questions, and discussions. Just click the "comments" link at the bottom of the post to get involved!]

Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips by Kris Carr

I attended the Mountains and Plains Booksellers' Association fall meeting last weekend in Denver (ostensibly to sign copies of my Pocketful of Poultry book and to meet with my editor from Storey Publishing), but while there, I had to take advantage of the situation! I spent a few hours cruising the trade show floor, looking at this season's new releases from dozens of publishers. For a book junkie, what could be more fun? I found a number of books there that looked appropriate for book reviews here, and will cover them over the coming weeks...

The first one: Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips. This part-memoir/part-prescriptive book, is by Kris Carr, an actress and photographer diagnosed at 31 with epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, a cancer of the blood vessels in the liver and lungs. It has a foreword by Sheryl Crow. Carr also did a movie by the same name, which aired in August on the TLC channel.

I haven't seen the movie, but I will say, this book is absolutely exceptional. Funny, scary, heart-breaking, and inspiring, all rolled into one, the book offers not only Carr's tips, but also those of dozens of other young women who have heard the words, you have cancer. There are downright practical tips (learn what your insurance coverage includes before beginning treatment, or drink plenty of clean water and eat organic) and whimsical ones, too (have a shaving party and don a pink wig when it's time to let your hair go). Though the focus is on young adults with cancer (including a chapter on dating, sex, marriage, and babies), this book can easily cross generations, empowering women who hear the big-C diagnosis to live fully and purposefully. For this, Carr deserves a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and an Oscar.

Exposed by Mark Schapiro

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I changed servers for my website, and had technological challenges getting the blog migrated.

I just finished reading Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power by Mark Schapiro (Chelsea Green, September, 2007) and would recommend it to others. Schapiro not only looks at how chemicals are affecting our health, but also how the United States’ failure to maintain our world leadership in the environmental arena is now costing us economically as well. In particular, he looks at how the Eurpean Union’s environmental initiatives are changing the world stage and impacting the decision making at key US industries, including electronics, chemical production, and consumer products manufacturers.

Schapiro also looks at how our head-in-the-sand approach to environmental protection is now leaving us vulnerable to becoming the world’s dumping ground for seriously nasty chemicals that are outlawed in other countries. For example, he points to data that shows China "exports five hundred million dollars a year of processed wood to the United States that has been treated with formaldehyde, a binder in plywood and other home- and office-construction materials. Formaldehyde is a 'known carcinogen,' according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and a contributor to asthma in young children and respiratory problems in adults, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. In the spring of 2006 a timber company in Oregon, Columbia Forest Products, conducted tests on imported Chinese birch planks that it purchased at a Home Depot (such tests are not done by the U.S. government, thus our primary information on such matters comes from the private sector or NGOs [nongovernmental organizations, or nonprofits]). The company discovered levels of formaldehyde far in excess of the permissible levels in Europe or Japan."

He makes a pervasive argument that "US economic influence is quietly fading as its political and corporate leaders fall out of step with the forces of global integration that they once avidly pressed upon the world."

In spite of tougher regulations, the twelve-member Eurozone (the historic core of the EU) is outpacing us economically. The Eurozone 2.7% growth in 2006 compared to our own 2.2% growth. We need leaders who will help keep us safe, and by doing so, help protect our economic status and world leadership.