What comes more easily in this economy than an assortment of empty wine bottles after you’ve just thrown a smashing get-together? With the preference being on sourcing cheap entertaining ideas, most people now see staying at home with a good meal and great wine as a viable alternative to spending money on restaurants and clubs.

Wine Bottle Ideas:

There are a number of ways to reuse wine bottles. Among the more common ideas are reusing them as water pitchers, votive vases, torches, and flower bed liners. However, there are dozens of other smart options that are rarely explored.

Rewined Recycled Glassware – Get uniquely hued wine bottle glassware made from orphaned bottles left behind at local restaurants and bars.

Water Feeders – On a very hot day or when you’re away, fill the bottles of water and stick them into the pot or soil near your plant. The water will slowly percolate from the bottle and into the soil.

Wine Bottle Chandeliers – In addition to the popular row lighting and pendant lighting, Pottery Barn put together an interesting chandelier with wine bottles strung around it. Even though four dozen other people will likely have the same statement piece, at least you know it’s a unique sustainable element in your home. Plus it catches the light beautifully during the day and especially at sunset.

Wine Bottle Cheese Boards – What could be quainter than using a cheese board made out of wine at you next cocktail. Apparently that’s exactly what Vineyard Designs thought when they started offering their custom recycled wine glass boards.

Wine Bottle Building Blocks

Rather than just one element, your entire home or venue can serve as a creatively designed showcase – a testimony of your creativity and commitment to sustainability.

Wine bottles can be used to create an interesting mosaic-styled wall piece. The most gorgeous of these displays is just outside of Montreal at a place called Bottle Houses, Prince Edward Island.

PEI is known for its lush landscapes and pastoral living, which makes the wine bottle homes stand out that much more, offering a mixture of ingenious modern design paired with an idyllic setting; and the combination works brilliantly.

This theme of bottle wall art has been running strong from coast to coast. Javier’s, an upscale restaurant in Crystal Cove, features bottle-inspired wall art as a key feature in their eclectic setting.

Using wine bottles as building blocks shows creativity and ingenuity that can be carried to stylishly eccentric levels when used in restaurants. Morimoto’s Japanese Restaurant in New York has an entire wall created out of bottles. The result is a dazzling spectacle that has the potential to launch a restaurant. An alternative design is found at the Boa Steakhouse in Hollywood, where rows of bottles are lined along a clear wall.

Wine bottles go beyond just building blocks and have also become integral parts of a building’s thermal dynamics, providing a unit that’s not only appealing to the eye, but also meets our duty to our environment. But if you’re not a wine drinker, you can ask local pubs and restaurants for their bottles, who I’m sure will be more than happy to give you their rubbish to turn into your own treasures. The same ideas can also be achieved with beer, liquor, Pellegrino or other glass water bottles.

Wine Ideas brought to you by Air & Water, Inc. and written by Shireen Qudosi

Crude is the story of a community of 30,000 tribal members in the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador who hold a corporation to bear for its crimes against their land, their livelihood, and most importantly, their lives. The film follows the intricacies of what has been called the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

The indigenous population claims that Chevron, the parent company to the former Texaco, spent thirty years contaminating the air, land, and water of an area the size of Rhode Island which is now called the “death zone.” Cancer, leukemia, and birth defects are among some of the effects of Big Oil. The film was shot and edited over a period of three years, with Berlinger and the crew sacrificing their own safety by facing both environmental (toxic fumes, disease, searing equatorial heat) and man-made dangers (shooting near the Colombian border where drug runners and FARC rebels are very active) to capture a story they felt must be shared with the rest of the world.

Berlinger’s cinematic sensibility paints a picture that captures the lush vitality of the Amazon, the horrendous atrocities endured by the tribespeople, and the complicated path that social justice must traverse, all the while avoiding cliche and stereotypes. Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Foundation have both been instrumental in bringing the Ecuadorian devastation to the public eye.

Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, and noted activist, appears in the film to lend celebrity to the cause. Repeatedly referring to the Amazon as “the lungs of the earth,” Styler and others point to the far more serious nature of the toxicity than mere dollars can assuage. If Ecuador is in trouble, we are ALL in trouble. If tribe members cannot fish or swim, that affects us directly. Transnationals can no longer act in a vacuum of backyard antics.

Vanity Fair featured an article in the 2007 Green Issue on the case in Ecuador, and attorney Pablo Fajardo, who passionately represents the plaintiffs. In one scene in the film, Fajardo notes that he is not intimidated by the high powered legal team because he has truth on his side, which makes his work that much easier. He doesn’t have to work diligently to create lies about what is happening.

Without sensationalizing the health effects of the toxic swamp left in the Ecuadorian jungle, Berlinger simply allows the water to tell the tale. The water, the rivers, the streams, and pools appear fresh from a distance as children play, women wash, and people drink. Once approached, the rainbow sheen of petrol catches the light and the scent of gasoline sends heads reeling. The ground is soft sludge as the pollutants work their way through the soil and into the Earth. One of the Texaco/Chevron representatives claims: “this is not contamination, this is industrial exploitation that your government permitted.” Amazing. This film must be seen.

In order for this film to have a chance of being seen by the rest of the country, it must nearly sell-out in NY, LA and SF, so tell your friends, blog about it, spread the word…go see this film. Because the film doesn’t have huge marketing dollars, it’s up to people like you and me to spread the word online.

Here are some important screening dates: for locations click here
-NYC: September 9-22
-L.A.: September 18-24
-S.F.: September 25-October 1
-D.C.: October 23-29

Even more good news – LUSH has recently eliminated sodium lauryl sulfates (SLS) from many of their solid shampoo formulations. The new and improved formula uses a gentle, natural alternative derived from pure coconut oil.

From the LUSH website:

Sodium coco-sulfate is less irritating than SLS because it removes less moisture from the top layers of skin. For people with sensitive skin (prone to dermatitis, acne, eczema, psoriasis, and chemical sensitivity), the drying property of SLS may cause flare-ups of skin conditions or may worsen existing conditions. Sodium coco-sulfate also leaves hair and skin wonderfully soft and conditioned.

The solid shampoos that are now SLS free are Karma Komba, New!, Seanik, Soak & Float, Squeaky Green and Ultimate Shine. (Now if only they would nix the synthetic perfumes!)

Another thing I love about these solid shampoos is that a little goes a long way and one little bar will last you months on end. Mine usually lasts for up to 3 months of almost daily use. It’s easy to use, too – you can either apply it directly to your wet hair, or wet it and rub it between your hands and then apply the lather to your hair.

Lush henna

I used to have the kind of hair that women have nightmares about. Thin, frizzy, oily at the roots and damaged at the ends. I fought it for years, trying to tame it with one product after another while simultaneously making it worse with chemical hair dye. That’s right, I’ll admit that I’m not a natural redhead. My natural shade is a dank dishwater blond – the sort of nondescript mousy ‘color’ that doesn’t complement any skin tone.

Three years ago, I decided to take a chance on henna, even though I’d heard from various friends and hairdressers that it was a big no-no. They claimed that it was all too easy to fry your hair or get a frightening frog-green with it, but I’d heard on the LUSH forum that it just depended on the kind of henna you used (you need body art quality henna, not the stuff you see at health food stores). So, I went for the LUSH Caca Rouge Mama, the reddest shade they have.

My hair after henna: huge improvement!

Holy goddesses of shining beautiful hair, this stuff has been a miracle for me. Not only did it impart upon my woebegone tresses a sparkling, natural looking shade of auburn, it also totally transformed it after about six months of use. Maybe it’s just that I don’t torture my hair anymore with chemicals, but it’s now growing longer and stronger than ever and I can just let it air-dry with soft, voluminous, sleek results. That’s not to say that my hair is perfect – just a huge improvement over what I used to deal with.

The best part? It’s totally eco-chic. Henna is about as natural as you can get for hair color, short of sorta tinting it with some berries (good luck getting that to stick around longer than a few days!). Once I started using henna I breathed a sigh of relief that dozens of unpronounceable chemicals weren’t leaching into my scalp every month. Plus, you’re not supporting the animal testing that goes on at some big corporations’ hair dye labs.

LUSH isn’t the only source of top quality henna; you can also find it (plus TONS of great info about using henna) at Henna for Hair. Henna isn’t just for redheads either; you can get a wide range of shades using various formulations – check out the Personal Mixes page on Henna for Hair to learn more.

I hate that living modestly is starting to be equated with disregarding the comforts that we’ve been given… instead of a noble and earth saving way of life.

I have a group of friends who all live together. In a maximum 6 person house (4 “real” bedrooms) there are 13 people. They have no television, only a couple of them have a computer, when I go over there are rarely lights on and they in no way went out of their way to buy new furniture or anything for the house. On top of these smaller things they also bike around – no one owns a car – cook together with vegan, organic, dumpster dived food and they run the house on grey water.

Just a quick summary for those who don’t know – dumpster diving is when you take food out of a dumpster to eat it. A lot of people get a little grossed out by this thought however having worked in a grocery store I assure you there is more than plenty of completely fresh and fine food being thrown out. Before knowing people who dumpstered I often thought “why would those dumpsters be locked???” but now I know that for whatever reason some grocery stores don’t want people stealing their garbage.

Grey water is essentially just reusing water. Most houses that are being built in Guelph are already implementing grey water systems directly into the house by connecting washing machine water to toilets. Said friends put the plug in during a shower and use shower water to flush toilets. And to be honest – the toilets don’t get flushed that often anyway.

For me, this would be an almost impossible way of living. I hate being cold, they never have the heater one. I live on my computer, they don’t have internet. I drink a liter of milk a day, they never drink milk. I will never will with a roommate ever again in my entire life unless I’m getting married, they live with 12 other people. It takes a lot of dedication and passion for the environmental movement to live this kind of lifestyle.

When I told my brother and a friend of mine about this they had the same reaction “that’s disgusting”. … I said that you would just have to get used it, but then they corrected me. Neither meant that it was physically disgusting, but that it was disgusting to see people choosing to live like “the poor”. They felt as though this was a mockery to people who couldn’t afford food, who couldn’t afford to live with just one family in a house and who couldn’t afford to keep their hydro on. Instead you have a household of by no means rich, but by no mean poor… group of kids who are choosing to not work and live like that. They choose to eat “garbage”, to be cold and to stay in the dark.

I brushed it off at the time, but it is now one thing that has been running through my head day in and day out. The only reason grocery stores throw out “almost” expired food is because if they lower the price people won’t buy the higher priced food – so they just keep it until it doesn’t make sense to sell it at the same price point and then toss out the perfectly good food.

Granted, dumpstering started out as a way to beat economic struggling but soon became a haven for “freeganism” (those who want to escape the consumerist life and culture) so it is backpacking off something poor people WERE doing. But with grey water… 50 – 80% of all residential water waste is from grey water.

Is what they are doing inherently wrong because they’re not taking advantage of all that is available to them? Or is it noble because they are not adhering to an overly comfortable lifestyle knowing what damage it does to the world.

I personally take the latter – I think that if you’re going to live in guilt or if you know that what you’re doing is wrong for the world and wrong socially then you just flat out shouldn’t do it. Sure, my friends aren’t taking advantage of a lot of “comforts” that are available to them, but they can also say that they are contributing less to huge problems. Continuing to simply “enjoy” and frivolously go about life without considering the impact that this “comfortable” life is doing is far more of a disgusting way to live than to try and do something about it.

If everyone here in Canada (or anywhere, really…) lived like that we’d have way less water waste, more food to distribute to the actual poor, we would create less of a carbon footprint in general and we’d be more in touch with the “real world” as opposed to being consumed in television and internet.

I can understand that people who have grown up in Canada or “western” life styles wouldn’t be comfortable living like my friends. However, unless you’re able to say that you are helping or lowering your over all impact on the world as much as they are – you should just shut your mouth. Living like that is a choice, it is not a mockery of people who can’t afford more “comfort” it is a choice to do the right thing for the world.

Anyone who knows me knows I LOVE a good facemask, which besides detox teas and lots of leafy greens seem to be my only saving grace. There’s something transforming about them, the way they tingle and harden on the face, their delicious aromatherapy while you wait, and the fact that (does this defeat the purpose? I say no….) you can get some work done while you’re also helping your skin look a little less like…you work so much! NO JOKE- I have one on as I type this! Here are my top three picks for the best all-natural masks out there.

This is me with LUSH’s Sacred Truth mask on. So cute, no?

LUSH

OK, not everything from the UK-based-but-available-worldwide LUSH store is totally natural; they use some artificial colors in some of their products. I’m over it. BUT their face masks are totally natural, so much so that they need to be kept in the fridge, and even then only last so long (a bit longer than they advise in the store, FYI). And you can’t buy them online- you need to go to one of their stores to get the fresh stuff. I like the Sacred Truth mask for regular weeks, and the Brazened Honey, which smells so divine I want to dive into a vat of it, is for hardcore skin repair, but ask in the store what’s best for your skin type.

I’m a total whore for their soaps too, which are cut off huge blocks and are wrapped in paper- in fact all their stuff is very minimally packaged and they ALWAYS ask if you really need a bag, since you probably don’t. This seems to be company-wide policy, as I regularly visit the LUSH stores on the Upper West Side in NYC and Greenwich CT. When I was recently in London, they asked there too. If you’re a nice, polite human being (and maybe make the salespeople laugh a bit), they’ll give you all sorts of free samples, so you can figure out what you like.

Origins

I’ve used Origins makeup for years; they make the least pore-cloggins stuff I’ve found anywhere, and it all smells fan-freaking-tastic. When I need a pick-me-up I use their anti-blemish Out of Trouble mask, which has camphor for a wake-me-up-right-now! scent, oil-abosorbing zinc oxide and sulphur (don’t worry, you can’t smell it) and salicylic acid.
Oh, and they have a new organic skin care line that looks yummy- I haven’t tried it yet though.

Neal’s Yard

Another UK import, Neal’s Yard is the ne plus ultra of organic beauty products, with great partner organisations and a commitment to organic products wherever they can make it work in their products. I like the Organic rose antioxidant mask for a mellow, feel-good, smell-better mask that reminds me to take it easy.

And if you’re looking for natural wrinkle-erasers, check out this piece on The Daily Green about my favorite eye creams/serums.

Want to make your own HAIR-revitalizing mask out of fresh, organic ingredients? Try this one!

A Right to Know for Clean Waters is a campaign to tell Congress that the public should be notified when sewage pours into our waterways.

If you want to know the next time there’s a massive sewage dump (no pun intended) in your local lake or river send an email to your Member of Congress and ask them to support Right-to-Know legislation.

Your voice will help flush out (no pun intended again) the issue of secret sewage spills. Hopefully change will come about and we can go back to enjoying those summer dips, canoeing, paddling, fishing, and floating aimlessly without worrying about e. coli.

The particular question that I’m proposing to all of you seems to be so simple, but is loaded with consequences, philosophies and ideas. People have examined the data around global warming and have concluded that we’re in a tight spot for the very near future. How do these people continue to rationalize getting into a car? Flying? Keeping lights on? Using cell phones? Living in a consumer driven society?

At first the answer is simple – because every little bit helps. But then after some consideration it occurs to the thinker that they may just really be a low lying nobody. No one is going to follow their example and they’re just living their life more simply and less comfortably for no reason what-so-ever. The problem is not that I, Katie Kish, fly. It’s that millions of other people in the world fly. So why should I discontinue my travelling wants when the rest of Canada, America, Europe… etc. is still hopping on and off planes at will?

On top of that – the Earth has been through some pretty horrific events in the past. There have been mass extinctions, floods, droughts, ancient cities taken right out… and the Earth has “replenished” (or at least done alright) and moved on. What is so different about the impact that humans are making? Give the Earth it’s time and it will turn back into a lush place again. That sort of thought doesn’t work if you’re concerned about humans continuing to thrive.

These questions and comments are products of the idea brought up recently in a post at The Intersection with one comment that attempts to answer the question:

Given that the vast majority of the population is unwilling to make dramatic lifestyle changes right now (ie. abandoning air travel, scrapping their car, etc…. ), imagine the social response to two courses of action. Were you to abandon all carbon-emitting activities, those who disagree are much more likely to dismiss you as radical and extreme (think: dirty hippie). However, by taking bold strong steps toward a limited impact lifestyle in a rational way, you stand a much stronger chance of persuading others to follow suit.

The real solution to carbon emissions (not to be confused with solving the problem of global warming) lies in substituting non-sustainable technological systems for sustainable ones.

Is the point of living the movement to try and inspire others? To continue to convince yourself? To have a certain peace of mind? Is the point of living moderately to save human generations of the future? Are we just a part of nature that should be left to our mess ups as nature has been left in the past?

I’m curious.

What’s your point?

Durex 2003 Sex Survey Highlights

• People have sex an average of 127 times a year.

• Three quarters of those polled are happy with their sex lives.

• Eastern Europeans (Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Russians) are the most sexually active 45% of those taking the survey reported having a one night stand.

• Those in Thailand, China, and Vietnam were the most contented with their sex life.

• Fins and Russians were the least happy.

• Americans were low on the frequency list in 2003 at 118 times per year.

• The three countries with the lowest sexual frequency were Sweden (102), Maylasia (100),and Singapore (96).

• 48% of women admitted to faking an orgasm.

This week I’ve been pillaging sex readings and topics for one of my cultural geography classes. One of the most interesting topics I’ve come across in my eco-sexual readings is the topic of condoms. Having had not so friendly experiences with the pill I switched to condom exclusive relations but I’ve found that going down the condom road gets a little bit ethically bumpy, even though they are deemed by many to be the best eco-choice.

The question is still floating around about latex condoms – are they biodegradable and are the additives biodegradable? I will admit that I haven’t found an consensus on it, so I’m not convinced that there is a agreed upon answer. (If someone knows differently, please feel free to school me. I have found places that say they are biodegradable, and others that say they are not.) A lot of people are allergic to latex, so there is always the option of polyurethane condoms, but these are a type of plastic and thus not biodegradable, so so far latex is the better choice between the two. There are of course condoms that are biodegradable, but they are not effective against STDs.

But in general we can come to the conclusion that the condom has in one sense or another been a great contributor in preventing an even more dire ecological catastrophe. There are a few things that are adding greatly to environmental degradation right now – pollution being a pretty big one and over consumption. Individually none of us are doing too much harm. I’ve gotten into an argument or two with various people about the effectiveness of “living the movement”. Their argument being a very good one – you as an individual living the movement has no impact what so ever. (But leading by example has a pretty big one.) The problem is… there are 6 billion of us. And billions of us drive cars and over consume. Billions of us contribute to the process of deforestation. Not just us individually.

Malthus told us all that eventually our resources are going to vanish, and we’re going to kill each other off due to competition. We’ve found different ways of getting around this happening. We create machines to keep people alive, manufacture foods and chemicals, keep finding ways to make energy and basically use the Earth to death. Why do we need to do this? Because we keep popping out children. The simple and effective form of birth control – the condom has given our species a way of controlling population, and thus needing fewer resources. The condom is a staple of a social achievement, it’s a conscious attempt to slow down and take control of our population.

But please… remember not to flush your condoms.

Flushing condoms is a huge no-go, more so than flushing tampons. It will clog pipes and treatment plants – not to mention that flushed water often runs out eventually into the environment.

Wikipedia tells us that (latex is biodegradable and…) an estimated 61 million to 100 million condoms are disposed of improperly in Britain alone, and as we can see from the durex survey at the beginning Brits aren’t even the ones having the most sex. The condoms end up covering coral reefs and sea grasses.

Part of what I’ve found in my readings about latex is that if they are biodegradable, they’re not going to biodegradable at all underwater. Regrettably it looks like the best option is to simply send the to the landfill. Female condoms are made of polyurethane, so I recommend sticking to the male condoms if you’re in a hetero-relationship and are considering female condoms as an alternative. By biggest recommendation is that if you’re into monogamy get yourself and your partner tested and then you’ll be in the clear for sheep skin condoms. But although the sheep skin condom is biodegradable, don’t go throwing it into the composter – animals love that scent you know.

Although latex condoms may or may not be recyclable, sheepskin may not protect against STDs and they’re all around not perfect they are an incredibly important part of healthy societies. Not only do I recommend you check out vegan options for condoms or take a look at condoms at environmentally friendly stores – but just use them in general and support the spread of their use in underdeveloped and developing countries.

(As a short end note, I would like to point out that I am aware of the religious controversies around condoms. But I’m not going to touch it with a 10 foot pole. I don’t agree with the religious side of the controversy, but I really want to focus on the positive outcomes that safe sex and sex eduction have given us.)

A little satire, because sometimes it’s the best way to make a point. (Think Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and then read…..

Text by guest-blogger Johnathan Wilbur

In the last few years, I’ve heard (and overheard) a lot offhanded despairing with regards to the whole “Global Warming” phenomenon. A beautiful seventy degree December day in New York is now inevitably tempered with prognostications of environmental doomsday.

I’ve made my fair share of these comments. Take this conversation:
“What a gorgeous and unprecedented day! Can you believe it’s the middle of January, and I’m walking around in a t-shirt?”

“It’s rather terrifying,” I rebut, mouth poised for my best Debbie Downer face. “When I was a teenager, at this time of year, I had to shovel my car out of thigh-high drifts. One winter, walking home from work in Chicago, I feared I wouldn’t make it those three blocks home, alive.”

What’s more: I nearly hemorrhaged on Houston Street after screening Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. (In fact, it may have been Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up” that set the whole episode off in the first place.) The powers that be were fear-mongering with aerosol cans when I was in grade school, the vegans, mad cow disease and GMO-judgment-sticks in hand, thoroughly depressed me for at least seven years, and now the Greens are running around in their Priuses, with their rank dreadlocks and eco-mometers, descrying ultimate thermageddon. As if post-millennial Americans didn’t have enough to worry about: paying taxes, raising children, dealing with insurance companies, getting lost in bureaucracy, paying off overwhelming credit card debt, getting five servings of vegetables a day, when (and how) to program their TiVos, who will be the next American Idol, or whether Brad will leave Angie.

So after much deliberation, I’ve created my own inconvenient truth: if I don’t do something to maintain a certain joie de vivre, I may die before global warming can kill me. This is how it works. If Al Gore is right, we’re all going to be incrementally boiled alive over the next twenty years anyway. The kind of change needed to put the serious brakes on global warming, is the kind of change that would require at least a gazillion people to wake up tomorrow and rethink the way they live, dramatically.

So I can be a mega worrywart—be boiled alive, almost imperceptibly over the next (and best) twenty years of my life, fidget over the environmental impact of leaving the kitchen light on, flushing my toilet that extra time, or taking a taxi home those ten blocks from work—or I can say, “Hey, I’ve got a huge fucking ecological footprint! Fuck you!” and enjoy the warm weather, at least while it’s reasonably temperate.

That means:

1. I’m going to eat as much factory farm beef as I want, whenever I want.
2. I’m going to buy, not just a Hummer, but a Hummer limo and drive it everywhere, even if I’m going just a few blocks.
3. I’m going to run my dishwasher as much as I like, with as few dishes as I like.
4. I will avoid Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and Wild Oats at all costs, and if I’m in a pinch and must shop there, I will ask for each item to be double-bagged, separately, and when I get home, I’ll wad up those bags and throw them in my upgraded trash can, right on top of my recyclables.
5. If I’m feeling low, I will treat myself by going to the department store the furthest from my home (in my Hummer limo) and smash as many compact fluorescent light bulbs as I can before the store kicks me out.
6. I will eat at McDonald’s at least four times a week.

Hey, I know there are way more ways than this to really step up my quality of life, and
I know you’re thinking of them right now.

The best part of living this way: you don’t have to share those ways with anybody! If you’ve found a particularly hedonistic way to live in discord with the environment, don’t feel like you have to write your Senator about it, petition Congress, or rally your neighborhood. It’s all about you! If you’re spending too much time inspiring others, you’re not spending enough time making the most of the little time we’ve got left! The only reason I’m writing this essay, in fact, is because I happen to like writing.

If you’re going down, go out with a little élan. It took mad concerted effort on your parents’ part to get winter weather like this. They did it for you, so do them a favor, and enjoy it.
I say, “Save the guilt trip, Melissa. I’ll see you in ten years, downtown; I’ll be the one with the funny ears on an inflatable glacier, circling around the tip of the Freedom Towers.”