by Tao Oliveto

Green – safe and biodegradable – cleaning products have been around for awhile and continue to flood the market. This is good news for our health and the health of our environment but it also feeds the perception that to live the good, “clean” life, we need to buy lots of stuff in bottles and boxes. In actuality, nature provides most of what we need for clean living – inside and out and top on the list is Apple Cider Vinegar.

Apple Cider Vinegar, made from organic apples and ages in wooden barrels, demonstrates the miracles of fermentation. Inside your body, only a few teaspoons daily (mix with juice or water), it cleanses, detoxifies, balances ph, fights arterial plaque, provides vital minerals like potassium as well as living enzymes. It also aides digestion, regularity and assimilation. Pets and other animals benefit in many of the same ways from small amounts of apple cider vinegar added to food or water. It has also been proven to improve their resistance to fleas and biting flies.

On the outside, it conditions hair, helps heal skin irritations and cold sores, controls dandruff and athletes foot, soothes sore muscles and is a great deodorant. You can also use it as a mouth wash.

For household use, Apple Cider vinegar disinfects all surfaces, kills mold, bacteria and germs while being completely safe to use without gloves or ventilation. Mix a small amount with water and use it to clean windows without streaking. It can be combined safely with any other ingredient – adding salt enhances it’s disinfectant power. Use it regularly in drains with baking soda in to prevent build-up and clogs.

Shelves and cupboards full of cleaning products is so 1950′s. Go back to basics and back to nature with clean and green Apple Cider Vinegar. Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar is organic, unpasteurized, unfiltered and raw – tells all here.

by Tao Oliveto

More bad water news appeared recently – fear of pharmaceuticals. Trace levels of prescription drugs have been found in some water supplies. Strangely, we won’t hesitate in swallowing the latest quick-fix for pain-relief, depression, appetite control or menopause, but we panic when considering the possibility of ingesting our neighbor’s prescriptions by drinking water from the tap. So, it’s back on the bottle for many – sad news for the environment and for our overall health.

It’s still unknown exactly how much contamination our treatment plants can remove from our drinking water, but going back to the waste of bottled water obviously doesn’t solve the problem, especially since 40% of bottled water, including Aquafina and Dasani, is simply filtered tap water. Never mind that numerous studies have shown that bottled water is generally no safer or healthier than tap water. When fear leads, people follow and the bigger fear usually wins.

Moreover, the problems of drinking bottled water have not disappeared. Dioxins and other plastic-derived toxins can and do leach into water in plastic bottles. (I’ve previously posted details here and here.) Remember, we are also paying up to 10,000 times more to drink this bottled water than what is coming from the tap.

Environmental costs? Still with us. It takes more than 10 million barrels of oil – emissions included – to produce bottled water. Americans still throw away over 60 million plastics water bottles each day, each taking up to 1,000 years to break down – more pollution, more toxins getting back into our soil and water supply…the vicious cycle continues.

I stopped wanting to drink from the tap when I was overpowered by the smell of chlorine but it made more sense – economically and otherwise – to purchase a counter top filter to improve the quality of what I was drinking. I started with a basic, inexpensive version, but even since I’ve upgraded to a 3-filter system, it has paid for itself 10 times over by now if I compared it to buying even the cheapest bottled stuff. There are many models available. You can start here.

(There is no perfect solution to our water contamination at present, although a return to the sanity of composting human waste, rather than sending it directly into our water system would eliminate much of it.)

Filtered tap water is still the best option for our health and the environment.

by Tao Oliveto, Carrboro, NC

Have you seen the recent Starbucks/Got Milk advertisement? Not only a old and tired play, but as misleading as the original version.

It shows an aproned and smiling employee, holding up a latte with the “Got Milk?” tag underneath, including the misleading health claims about the getting “half the dairy you need” from the milk in your Latte Grande. Not a regular, reasonable latte, but a super-sized high-$ version.

Because of hormones, pesticides and antibiotics, non-organic milk is not healthy in the first place. And although I enjoy lattes occasionally (the soy version), I’m not going to be convinced that it’s part of a healthy diet. We don’t need the daily “goodness” of super-sized caffeinated drinks, nor does the planet need the paper cups and plastic lids that comes with them. From Lime.com:

According to Metaefficient.com, we used and disposed approximately 14.4 billion paper cups in 2005 — or a mind-boggling 410,000 paper cups every 15 minutes. That number is expected to grow to 23 billion by 2010 unless we change our current coffee-drinking ways.

I had heard whisperings about Starbucks moving to organic milk last year, and maybe a few stores carried it briefly, but it’s been confirmed that the initiative has been dropped. Looks and feels a lot like their same half-hearted efforts to support Fair Trade. And just what about all those paper cups?

Like many mega-businesses, Starbucks had an opportunity to make a positive impact on consumer habits as well as the organic coffee and milk industries. They missed the mark and then some.

by Tao Oliveto, Carrboro, NC

Stay with me here. I know what you’re thinking. After all, I became a vegetarian and then vegan at the age of 16 and I did it for the animals and for the planet. Following a lot of personal research, I returned to eating dairy and eggs after moving to Carrboro, where I was introduced first-hand to the natural and humane practices at local farms. I saw chickens completely free to roam (and in fact, hanging out on the farm-house porch), as well as contented cows and goats grazing in spacious pastures.

But could I eat meat again? I wasn’t completely sure. What about the land and the resources used to raise grazing animals? I’ve read about the carbon footprint created in this industry and the release of methane – a potent green-house gas. I needed to know more.

It turns out I didn’t have to look farther than my local Independent news source. Reporter, Suzanne Nelson does her homework and then goes directly to the source – the farmers – to give us the whole story. In fact, there is so much enlightening information, I encourage you to read the entire article here.

The bottom line turns out to be that animals grazing on small farms in fact keeps soils rich in nutrients and allows for the aerobic decomposition of manure, preventing the release of much methane into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the vast majority of cattle are raised in feedlots or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), which, besides being inhumane, is proven to be an environmental disaster in every way.

Here’s a couple of excerpts and only a few of the fascinating facts of raising our animals in humane and environmentally sane ways. Read more!

Rich, fertile soil contains large quantities of carbon. Poor soils contain very little. So grazing cows on depleted soils not only makes the land more fertile, in the porcess it traps carbon. Happily for climate stability, the process of making soils rich in organic matter, and thus carbon, can be accomplished relatively quickly. And the catalyst is the presence of ruminants.

Yet by far the most abundant contributor to nitrous oxide emissions [300 times as potent as methane in terms of greenhouse gas] is “agricultural soil management,” according to the EPA. And here again, feedlot animal operations – and the chemical fertilizers used to grow crops when cows are taken off small farms – are directly connected.

by Tao Oliveto, Carrboro, NC

Food leftovers are the single largest component of the waste stream by weight in the United States. Households throw away more 25% of our food – about 96 billion pounds of food a year. Meanwhile, the average restaurant generates 50,000 pounds of waste a year – 50% of it is food. Overall, about half of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted.

The rest of the developing world is catching up. Food waste in Hong Kong has doubled over the past 5 years – restaurants are now fining patrons for uneaten food, by the ounce or by the sushi. Although restaurants are ultimately responsible for controlling their end-of-day waste, it’s up to the consumer to change habits. Order only what you can eat and take home what you can’t (come prepared with your own to-go container or ask for your food to be wrapped in foil rather than put into a box). If leftovers are not your doggie bag, at least you can feed your home compost.

When did we start throwing food away – before or after we started installing disposals in kitchen sinks? Food and water make the world go ’round, yet we take both for granted. Shifting this perspective is especially important for children – some of the biggest wasters at home and in school lunchrooms. It’s up to parents to make an early impression. I remember my mom often saying, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” It was really unusual to throw any food away. (Parents, give your kids what they need, not only what they want, establishing better eating habits – and less wastefulness in the future.)

Landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States, a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than CO2. Most of the methane produced is from anerobic kitchen waste, which, when oxygen depleted, ferments rather than composts. As it turns out, food in landfills causes more problems that non-biodegradables. Food for thought.

Rob Brezsny saved a part of my heart and soul through his brilliant prose, facts, figures, reminders and promises that spill forth in his book published in 2005,

PRONOIA Is The Antidote For Paranoia, How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Bessings.

Birthed in part during Burning Man that year, Brezsny believes in the power of truth and beauty – things that were slowing waning from my view of the world. I devoured this book – a journey of insights, realizations, exercises and experiments. I was so busy absorbing lightness and wisdom that I forgot to give up. In fact, I carry with me one of his most enlightening truths: “DESPAIR IS LAZY.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain’t easy to carry out our mission. We’ve got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.

That’s especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame.”

Did you ever do something simple and immediately realized that you should have done it years ago? It could have been something like started exercising, took the bus to work, quit junk mail or stopped drinking too much coffee. It’s usually, in some way, good for you, good for others, or just feels right.

In my recent case, I bought an electric tea pot. I drink a lot of herbal and green tea, for both health reasons and the pleasure of holding a warm mug while I work or read. When it comes to tea, I like the good stuff and I long ago switched from tea bags to buying in bulk so that I didn’t have to make trash to get my fix. I also compost the used leaves, in case you are wondering.

It all felt pretty good, but I was turning on the stove burner at least 5 times/day to heat the water. This did not feel good. I’d heard about those electric teapots, but most that I came across were made mostly from plastic – ugh – and I felt funny about spending the money on something so gadgety.

Then the Upton Tea Imports Electric Kettle came along. I saw it while at my favorite local coffee/tea house yesterday. Stainless steel, variable temps, auto shut-off. Estimates of energy savings are around 50% of what is used to heat water on the stove. That did it. I won’t bother doing the numbers, I’m certain that for me, this pot will pay for itself ($50) in no time – both in dollars and carbon emission savings.

I can also use this pot to heat the water I use for washing dishes by hand, making my occasional french press coffee, and the pot keeps the water warm for an extended time after turned off. Like I said, I should have done this years ago!

Norma Grasse belongs to a quilting club. She says she quilts about 4 hours/night. When asked why she does this, she said, “quilting DRIVES ME CRAZY AND KEEPS ME SANE.”

It makes sense to me. Perhaps all the people who are screwed up in the world are the ones who don’t have anything to drive them crazy…

Are you crazily sane?