Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Walk in OMBU Shoes and Reforest Our Planet

I’d wager that you never thought you could purchase a pair of shoes while helping with the world’s reforestation efforts. But it’s true. We now live in an age where more and more consumers recognize the merits of products made responsibly. OMBU is a fresh, young company intent on providing a product that you can feel proud of, with each and every stride.

OMBU shoes is committed to giving back to the planet and helping their customers do the same. The company provides a tree seed with every purchase of their shoes and also plants a tree on the customer’s behalf for one of the Trees for the Future Foundation Projects. To date, the eco-conscious shoe brand has planted thousands of trees around the globe!

But back to the shoes. The Miami-based company gave a traditional Argentinian shoe called “Alpargatas” a complete makeover. OMBU transformed the ugly duckling into a sexy, irresistible flat. They come in a variety of colors and patterns, and shopping their site is like walking through Dylan’s Candy Bar. The shoes look so delicious and enticing, you’ll want everything you see in your size.

And with prices between $35 and $45, you can indulge in a pair or two, guilt-free. Their sequins pattern are perfect for a night on the town while the polka dots and checkers are a bit more playful for day. If you’re feeling bold, go with their camoflouge pattern. And the classic solid will go with everything, I promise. Whichever OMBU shoes you decide on, rest assured they’ll be delivered right to your door in recycled fabric bags rather than wasteful boxes.
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High Fructose Corn Syrup IS Bad for Your Kidney, Liver and the Planet (but can be Funny Too)!

The original SHAMEFUL ad that was showing during the spring and early summer. Really.

Anyone with even a modicum of concern about what they eat (or what their family eats) has cut out high fructose corn syrup.

WHY is HFCS so bad for us? Mainly, because it’s processed, and processed foods are what are making us fat, by sneaking ingredients into our bodies that our bodies never evolved to digest. Michael Pollan has recommended eating foods with no more than a handful of ingredients and avoiding any ingredients our grandparents wouldn’t recognize; HFCS has never existed before human beings manufactured it for cheap sweetener. And it’s really cheap, meaning companies can easily add it to thousands of products that never even had sugar or sweetener in them to begin with (like potato chips)! In addition:

-High Fructose Corn Syrup is typically made from genetically-modified corn.

-HFCS has been linked to higher levels of kidney damage according to this study and to fatty liver disease in this study.

-Some HFCS has also been found to contain detectable levels of mercury (17 out of 55 products containing HFCS tested high on the charts for mercury). There are NO safe levels of mercury for women of childbearing age or children.

-It’s bad for our environment. “Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops. This maximizes yields, but at a price: It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil.”

-It is suggested that diabetics avoid it because they body doesn’t process it like sugar (glucose) which can wreak havoc on blood sugar levels.

-HFCS makes us fat. Long story short is that fructose, the sugar in HFCS, doesn’t stimulate leptin, a hormone which tells your body it’s full. So you’ve consumed a bunch of processed sugar-like calories, but your body doesn’t get the message, leading you to eat more calories. Fructose is also “an unregulated source of “acetyl CoA,” or the starting material for fatty acid synthesis. This, coupled with unstimulated leptin levels, is like opening the flood gates of fat deposition.”

But instead of responding appropriately to a cause of ill health and obesity, the corn industry has decided to try to justify it! You are on the WRONG side of history, folks. The people that are pushing HFCS as OK are in the same book as those folks who fought smoking bans for all those years. Shameful.

If you hear of scientific reports that say that HFCS is ok, check who’s behind that research (as the Mayo Clinic points out here). The food industry is rife with ‘reports’ put out by food manufacturers themselves, and as we saw with the tobacco industry reports saying smoking is ‘ok in moderation’ (the same claim HFCS folks are making here) I trust that data as far as I can throw it.

And while the evidence about HFCS and how unhealthy it is continues to mount, some comedians have taken the situation into their own hands. This is an hilarious parody of the Corn Refiner’s ad above.

And the HILARIOUS rebuttals. Gotta love a great satire. The second and third are priceless!

Why Greenfest? Here's the Answer

by Guest-blogger Katherine Cure

Katherine Cure sipping organic fair-trade coffee from one of the second-hand mugs that were available for use during Greenfest

“Greenfest? What’s that?” the tanned middle-aged East Bay native eating next to me asked, as I outlined to him my reasons for coming to San Francisco for the weekend. So I briefly cultured him on the green, before my mussels arrived. I explained what was about to happen: a three day festival that would display products, media representatives, fashion designers, energy producers and builders, all with green on their label. San Francisco, a known promoter of sustainable and environmentally safe practices (including bans to the use of plastic bags and Styrofoam takeout containers), was the chosen venue for what would be the last green fest of the year. “You should come,” I said, and indulged in my Italian dinner.

Little did I know, even after attending the same event the past month at the nation’s capital, what I was to encounter the next day. Multitudes of San Franciscan and East Bay residents invaded the premises, packed the aisles, and even had to be forced out (myself included…) from the organic beer and wine stand, at 8 o’clock, when it was time for closure. San Francisco’s Green Festival was a success. Good news for organizers Global Exchange and Co-Op America, who with this one, finished a series of four green festivals around America. Good to see the green spreading.

Zach the Poet

Be them hippies or more conservative looking types networking for their companies and local eco-initiatives, I was lucky to encounter a number of very interesting personages. One of my favourites, although I could not really see the environmental in his initiative, was Zach, a poet who sat with his blue antique typewriter and wrote poems about everything with the most beautiful smile. A poem about falling in love, he made for me. Green or not, his presence is the epitome of the immense variety that gathered at the festival.

The anti-plastic bag brigade

Products on display represented pretty much every possible marketable category: food, beauty products, baby diapers, accessories for pets, eco-fashion, building materials and even medicinal mushrooms! Tasty samples of organic farmed produce, fair trade coffee, tofu, multigrain crackers, chocolate, cheese and the powerful drink maca (intense stuff), guaranteed a healthy bite and a full tummy. Eatwell Farm a California-based organic lavender farm selling fresh lavender in bundles and in little cloth packages (that reminded me of my grandma’s closet) as well as oils and hydrosols, was one of my favourites. The extremely creative aisles of eco-fashion representatives clustered in the upper right level, was another one of my faves. Features included colourful displays of clothes and accessories with guaranteed sustainable materials and fair trade products whose profit will reach the communities that made them, instead of some retail store.

The Hippy Gourmet Team

Vibes were loving and energetic; people smiley, switched on and empowered. Puppet shows, reggae bands, live percussion and a couple of wanderers performing skits, culminated the green experience. Once you passed the front door, where I was stopped more than once having of course forgotten my badge somewhere, you were inevitably immersed in the environmental wave.

Jennifer Horning and Kirsten Muenster

The greatest acquaintance at the festival, (other than Coicoi and Ninka, my girlfriends from Berkeley), ends this tale. Jennifer Horning and Kirsten Muenster, the first one a lawyer and the second a jewellery designer, approached the E Magazine booth where I was volunteering, to talk to me about Ethical Metalsmiths, their initiative for delivering sustainable jewellery. A lot of issues are behind the rings we wear and that beautiful necklace we covet. We might be unaware, especially in underdeveloped countries, of the poor work the gold, emerald and silver mines that provide designers with raw material for their creations, under inhumane conditions. Not to mention the environmental impacts of mining. But rather than refuse jewellery (thank god!), supporting empowered women like Jen and Kirsten who wish to find fair and eco-friendly solutions to these issues, might be the answer. By recycling existing pieces, getting certification for the materials used, or just helping in making mining practices fair, these loving, knowledgable and fashionable ladies, to whom I give my ten, are striving to make a difference.

For more on Ethical Jewelry, see this E Magazine article.

A Bottle of No Thanks, Please

Bottled water is so easy.  It’s water, in a bottle, genius!  I remember when it was chic and served in the finest restaurants.  Then one morning I woke up and my mother told me we were getting a water bottle for the house.  No longer was the tap good enough.  After another five years or so she didn’t want to wait for the Poland Spring man to deliver our weekly allotment of water, so there it was: bottles upon shimmering bottles in our refrigerator.  People come to our office for a meeting or you head off to a job interview and what to they offer?  A bottle of water.  It’s like an angel on your shoulder wishing you the safest and most comforting taste of pure H2O.

Never once did I ask myself, “What’s wrong with bottled water?”  Not until I realized how many bottles collected into my recycling bin.  Trash is a funny thing, one moment it’s in your kitchen and the next it vanishes.  Presumably we trust that our trash goes…Well, I don’t really know where I thought my trash went.

I recently read the book, The World Without Us, which contained an entire chapter dedicated to the evils of plastic.  It turns out that all the plastic we use and love, (hey I have to admit that it’s nice when you can drop a bottle without it shattering all over the floor), ends up in our oceans, and takes about a gajillion years to decompose (maybe I’m exaggerating, but I doubt it).  The impact it has on the fish, mollusks, birds and plant life of the sea is completely shocking and promises to change the ecosystem as we know it.  There really is no known half-life for plastic.  It breaks into little pellets sure, but how does it react with the natural world, and what does it become as it degenerates? 

One of the big offenders is the bottled water industry.  We’ve become as addicted to bottled water in recent years as stockbrokers in the 80s were to cocaine.  In fact every restaurant I enter now offers bottled water both flat and sparkling, and then almost disdainfully, they mention that tap is available too.  They make you feel like an idiot if you order the tap water.  They make you feel cheap, plebian.  I always answer, Los Angeles’ finest. 

Tap water was important when I was a kid, not just to stay hydrated, but because the water supply contained fluoride.  Many bottled waters don’t contain fluoride and this is leading to children with unhealthy teeth.  The reason being…You guessed it, bottled water.  Fluoridated water is free from our taps, and makes your kids’ teeth happy. Most bottled water does not contain fluoride. 

Lewis Black, the comedian, sums this entire bottled water thing up quite hysterically by saying we’ve sullied even our most ample and free resource.  About 70% of the planet is covered in ocean and 2% of the earth’s water is fresh water.  To put that in perspective, there are roughly 326 million trillion gallons of water on planet earth and 2% is fresh.  That’s a lot of fresh water.  And somehow we’ve agreed to pay our hard earned money for this gift of nature.

And, upon agreeing to buy this water we’ve also created a cost that nature must pay…We pitch in 38 billion bottles of water a year, roughly $1 billion worth of plastic.

But, enough with the depressing stuff.  On with the progress!

There are restaurants rebelling against these industries and while blindly voting with your dollar is not advised, supporting the fight is.  In San Francisco, there is a new trend: high end restaurants serving carafes of filtered tap water.  In some cases they even carbonate the water themselves.Glass carafes served into glasses of water equals much less waste. So we applaud these restaurants and suggest that you demand the same from your restaurant in your neighborhood.

So, find out what restaurants in your area do this.  If your favorite one doesn’t, then urge them to.  We can make a change, I think.  We just have to want to.  And if anyone tells you bottled water is better, tell them they’re wrong.  Free, clean, healthy water is a privilege.  In some countries it’s impossible to find.  Save the money you spend on water to buy something that can actually help you save those pure, crystalline springs they harvest all that clean crisp water from.

How to Light Up Africa?

In this image from the Smithsonian, you can see the lights of Europe at night, whereas most of Africa is dark.

As an inveterate night owl, reading this article in the Independent really made me think. The piece makes the point that most Africans don’t have access to electricity in the form of a grid, as we do here (where we seem to do our very best to waste it, but anyway), and therefore aren’t able to work much outside daylight hours. I can’t imagine being unable to work half the night away, whether I’m typing away on my laptop, watching a movie, reading, even vacuuming and doing yoga. I would certainly be less productive, and I wouldn’t be able to run this site, period since I do most of my writing for it between 11pm and 2am.

So how do we give the African people the ability to work all night if they want to, without sucking up fossil fuels to run these fun blinking machines? Setting up a grid like ours would not only be an environmental disaster, but it is a financial impossibility for impoverished nations.

Many of the continent’s poorest people are dependent on kerosene lamps or candles, and typically spend at least a 10th of their income on lighting
their shacks. The lamps often kick out more smoke than light, and there are frequent stories of huts going up in flames as they get knocked over. People
with a bit of extra cash may invest in a small diesel generator, but the extra illumination and the reduced danger does not quite compensate for the
noise and the polluting fumes.

The World Bank wants to sell LED’s, and suggests hooking them up to people-powered machines. LED’s use less than a watt of power to create light to read by, and while we may only be familiar in them for small lighting tasks, the technology for LED’s has come a long way, meaning they could provide an answer to part of Africa’s lighting puzzle.

Lighting Africa officially launches on 4 September, when organisers will unveil a competition for the design and delivery of low-cost, green lighting
products for low-income consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 350 companies have already expressed an interest – from Africa-based small
businesses to multinationals like Philips.

Unfortunately, there’s no mention of solar power in this article, though this would seem to be the obvious answer, as much of the poorest parts of Africa are known for their direct access to equatorial (meaning very regular) solar energy. Large hydropower projects ARE mentioned, without any commentary provided on the environmental destruction of this form of energy generation, which would seem to be a major oversight in the article. It sent a shudder down my spine to think of Africa’s largest river, the Congo, dammed along it’s long and winding path, which would disturb all the ecosystems along its route if regular flooding events were to be eliminated. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be money enough for this kind of huge hydropower project, so I’m hoping in the meantime solar panels become cheap enough so that Africans who want to stay up half the night reading don’t have to sacrifice their environment to do so.

Thanks to RemyC for the link!