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Sara Snow's – Fresh Living: The Essential Room-By-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home

I first became familiar with Sara Snow when I was pregnant and on bed-rest. Between reading baby books and eating I watched her Discovery show Get Fresh with Sara Snow and enjoyed her ease and playful approach to environmentalism. I love how Sara always mixes stories of her childhood into her day-to-day recipes for green living. This adds a personalized touch to her passion for all things green.

Growing up the daughter of Tim Redmond, co-founder of Eden Foods, informed Sara’s life as a green foodie and all around eco-advocate. In her new book, Fresh Living: The Essential Room-By-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home, Sara traverses the modern home, discussing every aspect of our lives and what we can do to connect more with nature and minimize wasteful practices. This unpretentious guide is an easy read that is full of useful information. Sara discusses everything from how to maintain a green lawn naturally (or better yet, how to plant wildflowers and indigenous greens that attract butterflies and deter mosquitoes,) to how to decorate a toxin-free baby nursery.

Sara gives detailed lists of what ingredients to avoid in beauty products, toys, household cleaners, and pretty much anything else one may have in their home or garden. Comprehensive definitions explain the origins of chemicals, how they are used and what is most harmful. These days many products, including purported “organic” or “natural” items, contain dubious ingredients. The explanations of scientific terms really help one to weed through the ambiguous marketing language of greenwashing. There are also recipes for how to make your own cleaners and home products that are totally natural and inexpensive.

A small part of the book I really enjoyed was the simple reminder that house plants are good. They bring the outside in, clean our air, and promote healthy chi. Sara shares a list of the top fifteen plants to have indoors to remove various pollutants from the air. These days people spend hundreds, even thousands on air fresheners and purifiers. Plants!

The description of composting is user friendly. Sometimes composting can seem detailed or labour-intensive, but Sara keeps it simple with a description of what we need and what ingredients can assist in maintaining a healthy compost, even for those living in urban areas.

An important theme reiterated throughout the guide is that there are real dangers in our environment, but we can be empowered by educating ourselves and creating an atmosphere that is fresh, vital and thriving. This book would make a sweet gift but is also an excellent resource to just have handy around the house.

350: Global Warming. Global Action. Global Future.

Last night I was reading my favorite magazine, Orion. Bill McKibben was discussing the campaign 350. From the website:

350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

But solutions exist. All around the world, a movement is building to take on the climate crisis, to get humanity out of the danger zone and below 350. This movement is massive, it is diverse, and it is visionary. We are activists, scholars, and scientists. We are leaders in our businesses, our churches, our governments, and our schools. We are clean energy advocates, forward-thinking politicians, and fearless revolutionaries. And we are united around the world, driven to make our planet livable for all who come after us.

We are everywhere, and together we are unstoppable.

We are currently living at 387ppm. Scientists claim numbers could reach 450-550ppm which would mean disaster for life as we know it. Every time we turn on a car, a light, the heat, the stove, the television, the computer; we partake. Unless we are receiving our power solely from renewables, then we are using coal and oil. The 350 campaign is hoping to influence lawmakers, political leaders, and individuals to take action. One view has perpetuated the notion that climate change, such as what we are experiencing now, is normal, just as ice ages come and go. However, the real science is in and it is time to listen, regardless of partisan politics.

Last week my extended family gathered. A discussion arose, among friends and family, about the fictionalized nature of global warming and how it is simply a marketing campaign so people can sell “green” products. Greenwashing exists. We know this. But this conversation, dominated by one in particular, was reiterating a denial about what is happening. My young cousin, who is twenty and overheard the discussion, told me she wasn’t sure. We had a decent conversation about some examples of climate change, what greenwashing means, and environmentalism in general. The information is out there. Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Terry Tempest Williams, Treehugger, Grist, Adbusters, Huffington Post, ENN – just to name a few sources.

Ocean Nitrogen on the Rise

A new study released by Nasa’s Earth Observatory focuses on the impact of anthropogenic nitrogen on our oceans. Up to one-third of the nitrogen entering the oceans is man-made, according to recent findings. The nitrogen increases biological activity in the sea, which, in turn, produces the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O.) These findings are some of the first, compiled by scientists, that actually quantify the environmental impact industrialized nations are having on the nitrogen cycle and how this is affecting open ocean. The increase in biological activity has a beneficial effect in drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere, but researchers found that two-thirds of this is offset by the increase in harmful N2O emissions.

There are ways we can minimize the nitrogen levels:
-Drive less
-Drive a hybrid
-Golf on environmentally friendly golf courses or encourage your local courses to practice sound and sustainable ways to maintain their lovely “greens”
-Next time you see that brown spot on the lawn, think twice before using fertilizer
-Buy local!

“Anyone concerned about climate change will be alarmed at the scale of man’s impact on the world’s oceans, as revealed by our new study,” said Prof Peter Liss, an environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia.

“The natural nitrogen cycle has been very heavily influenced by human activity over the last century – perhaps even more so than the carbon cycle – and we expect the damaging effects to continue to grow. It is vital that policy makers take action now to arrest this.

“The solution lies in controlling the use of nitrogen fertilizer and tackling pollution from the rapidly increasing numbers of cars, particularly in the developing world.”

Adding Sulfur To The Atmosphere's Diet

It seems as though anyone with any sort of science background is scurrying around trying to solve the problem of global warming. Recently some geoengineers proposed a “solution” that would just make matters worse. It’s an idea that really makes me think that real and professional scientists shouldn’t be left to solving global warming. Their idea? Clouding the atmosphere up with man made aerosol particles. This would deplete the ozone in “some” regions, mostly the North and South poles, making those regions colder, yes, but also creating irradiated dead zones. But to them it seems like a pretty fair trade off.

These aerosol particles that would be added to our atmosphere would in theory reflect sunlight away from the earth thus cooling the planet. But consider that for a second. Instead of investing money into long term life changing solutions to global warming, we’re going to add more chemicals to our atmosphere so we can shift weather patters, and deplete our ozone to the point where areas of our Earth would be considered “dead zones”. Save one part of the earth by destroying another? It seems like such a scheme would cost a gigantic amount of money and would be a huge logistical challenge.

Playing with the Earth like this is just crazy. We’ve seen time and time again (with trying to move waterways and using chemicals to grow food) that playing around with nature is rarely, if ever, a good thing. When it comes to our atmosphere, there is so much that we don’t understand and so much that we’re still discovering. Where would geoengineers even get an idea like this? In 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo erupted and it released sulfur into the atmosphere. There was a direct correlation with the temperature decreasing.

All of these newfangled attempts at cooling the planet are getting out of control.

There’s the man-made volcano that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space “sun shade” made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet’s temperature. The forest of ugly artificial “trees” that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the “Geritol solution,” named after a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement with extra iron — in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

All of this time, energy and money is being poured into these ridiculous attempts at using science to cool the planet, when really humanity would be better of pursuing changes within their industrial, economic and home lifestyles. All of these crazy ideas could lead to disastrous weather patterns, cloudy skies through which we’d never see the sun again, droughts and famine. We have no idea. Changes on Earth take millions of years for a reason, we can’t just start dumping tonnes of sulfur on the planet and expect everything to be okay. The Earth’s systems are just not that simple.

The Kids Are Not Going to Be Alright: They're Going to Be Pissed

Several of my friends have had babies in the last few years, and some are on their second round already. Though it seems to me that there are far too many people on the planet already, it’s difficult to begrudge anyone the basic human drive to reproduce, and my friends’ kids ARE ridiculously cute. I’m pretty sure they are all genius artists who will invent the next version of rock ‘n roll and create world peace, too. But every time I play with them, surrounded as they typically are by plastic toys, educational videos and the other detritus of modern children’s lives, I look into their eyes and I know: in 20 years, they are going to hate us.

Of course all teenagers and college students hate their parents a little bit (or a lot, depending on the hormones), as it’s part of forging one’s own identity. Isn’t it the American way to hold your parents in contempt until you’re at least 25, and then become them?

But these kids are going to have good reason for their anger, and I predict a revolution when these tiny tots grow to understand the legacy their parents have left them. They will inherit a planet-wide environmental mess, and it might not be impossible to fix, but it’s going to take the best minds of their age (plus their offspring), lots of money, and a singular desperation to fix what’s wrong before it’s too late. What these kids face in the coming years will make the mistakes my generation has been left with: Rockefeller drug laws, repeated pointless wars in the Middle East, and lack of marriage rights for homosexuals, seem like quaint oopsies in comparison. They’ll be figuring out how to handle the planet-altering effects of massive droughts (hey, it’s already happening) and global warming has barely gotten underway), disintegration of ecological webs as species disappear during the current mass extinction, and human migration due to the effects of global warming, not to mention changes we can’t even foresee yet.

Well, you say, each generation has to pick up after the one prior to it in one way or another; what gives those kids in diapers more permission than anyone else to let us have it? The answer is that we know what we’re doing to the environment and we still continue to do it.

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