Everyone knows that Californians love their cars. Even more than loving our cars, we are married to them. The state is built for cars, and the cities are laid out to make it almost impossible to live without cars and without driving a LOT. Right up to a few months ago, new developments were popping up all over the place, but $4.00 a gallon gasoline, and the subprime crisis have combined to turn many of these new communities into ghost towns or slums.
But many areas have been less affected by the housing slum. Houses in urban areas, or those close to good commute options are holding their values. It seems that someone has noticed this.
A bill now making its way through the legislature would dole out state transportation funds—about $15 billion—only to those communities that pursued “smart-growth” development plans, such as filling in commercial strips and building new homes around existing roads and rail lines. “We know people are going to drive. We want them in their cars for less time,” said the bill’s author, state Senator Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). It’s a pragmatic approcah to a persistent problem: Instead of preventing new development—a move that business interests say stunts economic growth—the measure would encourage cities to build responsibly.
Bravo – we say. Let’s start thinking ahead. We are all for people living a good life, smartly
In South America, yerba mate has been revered for centuries as the “drink of the gods” and is drunk daily for optimum health, sustained energy and mental clarity. Of the six commonly used stimulants in the world: yerba mate, coffee, tea, kola nut, cocoa, and guarana, yerba mate triumphs as natures most balanced stimulant, delivering both energy and nutrition. The leaves of the rainforest mate tree naturally contain 24 vitamins and minerals, 15 amino acids, abundant antioxidants. In fact, The Pasteur Institute and the Paris Scientific society in 1964 concluded “it is difficult to find a plant in any area of the world equal to mate in nutritional value” and that yerba mate contains “practically all of the vitamins necessary to sustain life.”
Guayakí has pioneered an innovative business model called Market Driven Restoration in which Guayakí serves as a bridge linking consumer purchases of healthy yerba mate products in North America with indigenous communities engaged in sustainable agriculture and reforestation projects in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Each person that drinks two servings per day of Guayakí Yerba Mate helps protect approximately one acre of rainforest every year.
With a passion for mate, Guayakí partners with small farmers and indigenous communities to source mate from the sub-tropical forests of South America. From the simple love of a beverage, Guayakí drinkers have become a driving force for conservation and community development by paying a fair trade price for rainforest-grown mate. In honor of the Aché Guayakí people native to the mate forest, we bring you Guayakí Yerba Mate
Irradiation is not the solution to food-borne illness,” said Bill Freese, Science Policy Analyst at the Center for Food Safety. “In fact, it serves to distract attention from the unsanitary conditions of industrial agriculture that create the problem in the first place.
As Firedoglake points out
The majority of food borne illness linked to greens come from viruses, not bacteria. Irradiation won’t kill the viruses — but it does increase the greens’ shelf-life. Gee – wonder what the real agenda is?
The FDA has approved genetically modified food and now irradiated food with no scientific evidence that the food is safe and that nutrition is not lost. In fact
The FDA’s proposal concedes that irradiation will make spinach less nutritious.
Fresh spinach is extremely nutritious, as every mother knows. Irradiation will rob it of some of those essential nutrients, all to avoid tackling the problem at its source,” said Freese.
What to do instead? As FDL suggests
(1) Eat locally — try and buy locally raised and grown produce, meat, and poultry.
(2) Prepare your own food from scratch. The fewer processing steps, the fewer the chances to contaminate them in industrial food preparation.
Hey, I just heard from the Daily Grist that Finland’s capital city has garbage cans that thank users in celebrity voices for not littering when garbage is put in them!
Kudos to the Fins for improving politeness and cleanliness in their capital in such a clever way.
We first heard about TerraCycle when Inc. Magazine called them “the Coolest Little Start Up in America“. The creation of 19 year old Tom Szaky, TerraCycle uses worms to make organic fertilizer from garbage. It packages the fertilizer in recycled soda bottles, making it a totally green product. Very cool, we thought, but what’s next?
As regular readers know, we don’t like plastic shopping bags. In fact, we think getting rid of plastic bags altogether and only using cloth bags would be the single best thing we could do for the environment. Even so, we recognize that even with the best of intentions we sometimes wind up with plastic shopping bags. So then what do we do? The best option is to reuse them as much as possible, and that leads us to the Ridley. The Ridley is a small pouch, made from 100% natural canvas, that you can use to store plastic shopping bags. There is a strap that you can use to tie the ridley on to a handbag, back pack, or even a canvas shopping bag.
The Ridley is the creation of Bibi Rogers – here is how she describes the inspiration
It all started with a kayaking trip. Bibi Rogers and her son, Daniel, were on one of their weekly trips at Delray Beach when they came upon a clutter of plastic bags littering the water. Bibi was disgusted and appalled, and the sight stayed with her for the weeks and months that followed.
Despite being aware of the consequences of dumping plastic bags on the planet, however, Bibi found that more often than not, she would arrive at the grocery checkout without any plastic bags from home or her fashionable reusable canvas shopping bag, necessitating the use of another five or ten bags from the supermarket. That’s when it started to stick. She needed to do something.
Bibi came up with the idea of an eco-friendly plastic bag carrier that can easily be attached to a handbag, backpack, shopping bag or belt loop, and named it The Ridley after one of the world’s smallest, most endangered species of sea turtles. She then developed other applications for this basic idea and founded 4U2ReUSE in September 2007 with the goal of manufacturing her bags to help others to remember to reuse their plastic bags and reduce their environmental impact.
We tried the Ridley, and were able to put 12 plastic shopping bags inside it. We have been carrying it around for a few days, and we have already found it useful. Because of the Ridley, we reused a bag rather than get a new one (and then put it right back into the Ridley) – And, if we do have plastic bags, at least we know that the bags won’t be blowing around and ultimately heading into the ocean. We still say the best answer is to bring your cloth bag, but the Ridley is a great second choice.
The Ridley is available from 4U2Reuse. Retail price is $25 -
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We are always on the lookout for new items that are new, organic, fair trade, and delicious. That’s why we were so excited to find
