Action is the Antidote to Despair

By Zoe Weil

You’re making all the right choices. You’re an organic locavore. Whenever possible, you bike, take public transportation, or walk instead of drive, and when you drive it’s a hybrid. You choose cruelty-free, toxin-free personal care products. You’re a member of a dozen different organizations all with missions you wholeheartedly support. Compact fluorescents? Of course. Bottled water? Never. Yoga and exercise? Regularly. A positive attitude? Absolutely.

But perhaps you, like me, have those dark nights of the despairing soul when you worry whether we really can turn things around on our beleaguered planet. You present a sunny disposition, but deep inside, you sometimes struggle with your own hopelessness. And then you head to your Zumba or Pilates class to sweat away your anxieties and have a shot of wheatgrass to give yourself a boost. You focus on your good choices to stave off any bad feelings lurking below the surface.

But there’s a way to truly lighten your soul, and that is to take all that passion that drives your healthy, humane and sustainable choices and put it not only toward your daily decision-making but also toward your active participation in affecting change.

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a reporter, “What is your message?” Gandhi had a big message, of course. He was trying to free his country from British rule using only nonviolent methods, and he was rarely averse to sharing his beliefs with others. But on this particular day, he responded to the reporter by jotting down on a piece of paper, “My life is my message.”

When I first read this, I was stunned by the universal truth of Gandhi’s statement. If Gandhi’s life is his message, I surmised, then my life is my message. Each one of our lives is our message, whether we like it or not. The real question then becomes, “Am I modeling the message I most want to model?” “My life is my message” became a mantra for me, and I sought to make sure that the choices I was making modeled the message I wanted to spread. Readers of this blog know all about this because you do it every day. And that’s fantastic.

But, and this is the hard (gelatin-free) pill to swallow: in today’s world with the huge problems we face, from global warming to escalating worldwide slavery to the horrifying rates of species extinction to unimaginable institutionalized animal cruelty, etc., modeling one’s message isn’t enough. We must also work for change.

There are myriad systems that need transformation: food production, electronics production, energy, schooling, conflict resolution (can’t we come up with an alternative to war?!), architecture, suburban sprawl, transportation, and so on. Even if our individual daily choices do have a positive impact, that isn’t enough to fully transform unsustainable, destructive, and inhumane systems into ones that are restorative, healthy, and just.

But here’s the great news: when we not only harness our energies toward making healthy daily choices, but also uncover our most creative and viable solutions to solve systemic problems, we discover that we have never felt more alive, joyful, and purposeful.

So, what issues do you care about most? What skills and talents do you have? What great ideas do you carry around inside of you that, if enacted, could actually help change an unhealthy system and create a wonderful new avenue for peace?

Here are some ideas others have enacted:

Dara O’Rourke got to thinking as he rubbed sunscreen on his 5-year-old daughter that he should look into what’s in it. When he found out that he was smearing toxins on his daughter, he decided that more people needed to know what he knew. With a team of scientists and researchers he launched http://www.goodguide.com/, creating a business that now allows each of us to learn all sorts of important information about our products. His work enables us to make more conscious choices aligned with our beliefs.

When Katie Redford was in law school, she visited Burma and discovered the horrifying human rights violations perpetrated on the Burmese by a military dictatorship in cahoots with a U.S. oil company. She then wrote a paper invoking an obscure law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, arguing that U.S. citizens have the right to sue American companies for their human rights violations abroad. It took nine years and a group of fellow lawyers to win her case, which set a precedent and thereby changed a system.

Mohammad Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh during his country’s terrible famine in the 1970s. He wondered what all his education was for if he couldn’t help his own people, so he went into the village and asked 42 people what they needed. Their answer? A combined $27 to bring rice to market. This launched the microcredit movement, which has since lifted millions of people out of poverty. Yunus created a new banking system so that people with no collateral at all could borrow small amounts of money. He has since won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Notice he didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics, but rather for Peace, because lifting people out of poverty creates peace.)

Joan Baez once said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” If ever those dark nights of the soul threaten your peace of mind, remember that your efforts to harness your imagination and creativity on behalf of meaningful, systemic change will not only make a powerful, positive difference in the world but will also bring you incredible satisfaction and sense of accomplishment.

What a wonderful combination: model your message and work for change, two sides of the same coin, one that will fund a peaceful, healthy world for all.

Zoe Weil is the president of the Institute for Humane Education where the world becomes what you teach. She is the author of “Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life,” “Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times,” and “The Power and Promise of Humane Education.” Visit her blog.

My Top Ten Eco-Lifestyle Changes

By Colin Beavan

1. Stop eating beef. Worldwide, beef production contributes more substantially to climate change than the entire transportation sector. Plus, a diet with no or less beef is better for you anyway.

2. Give up bottled water. The production of plastic water bottles together with the privatization of our drinking water is an environmental and social catastrophe. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gasoline. Plus, the health consequences of drinking water from plastic are not clear.

3. Observe an eco-sabbath. For one day or afternoon or even hour a week, don’t buy anything, don’t use any machines, don’t switch on anything electric, don’t cook, don’t answer your phone, and, in general, don’t use any resources. In other words, for this regular period, give yourself and the planet a break. Keep your regular eco-sabbath for a month. You’ll find that the enforced downtime represents an improvement to your life.

4. Tithe a fixed percentage of your income. Currently, many of our societal health and welfare services, at home and abroad, are tied to consumer spending which, in turn, depends upon planetary resource use. But the idea of buying stuff to help people is crazy, especially when you consider that our consumption is harming the habitat that we depend upon for our health, happiness and security. If you want to help, don’t go shopping. Just help. Commit to tithing part of your income to the non-profits of your choice.

5. Get there under your own steam. Commit to getting around by bike or by foot a certain number of days a month. Not only does this mean using fewer fossil fuels and creating less greenhouse gasses, it means you’ll get good, healthy exercise and we’ll all breathe fewer fumes. A city with pedestrian and bike traffic is a lot more pleasant to live in than a city filled with vehicles.

6. Commit to not wasting. Wasting resources costs the planet and your wallet. Don’t overheat or overcool your home–a few degrees make a huge difference. Let your clothes hang dry instead of using the dryer. Take half the trips but stay twice as long. If your old cell phone works, consider not getting another. Repair instead of rebuy. The list goes on and on.

7. Build a community. Play charades. Have dinners with friends. Sing together. Enjoying each other costs the planet much less than enjoying its resources. Let’s relearn to joke around and play in ways that cost nothing to our pocketbooks or our planet.

8. Take your principles to work. The old adage “the cost of doing business” can no longer hold true. We must act as though we care about the world at work as much as we do at home. A company CEO or a product designer has the power to make a gigantic difference through their business, and so do the rest of us.

9. Dedicate a day’s worth of TV viewing to eco-service each week. The average American watches four and a half hours of TV a day. Take one day off from the tube each week and join with others to improve our planet. Voluntary eco-service is a great way to find community who support your values, and is also a great way to learn about environmental issues and quality of life issues that go along with them.

10. Believe with all your heart that how you live your life makes a difference to all of us. We are all interconnected. We make a difference to each other on many different levels. Every step towards living a conscious life where we consider the consequences of our actions provides support to everyone else—whether you know it or not—who is trying to do the same thing. We are the masters of our destinies. Let’s act as though it is so.

Knocked Up and Vegan

On this Meatless Monday, Chloe Jo Davis has stopped by to share her pregnancy tips and the ups, downs and total bliss of being a eco-glam, vegan mama-to-be!

By Chloe Jo

I always knew I wanted to be a Mommazon. So when I became a vegan activist some moons ago, I knew that being a vegan and choosing to live an entirely cruelty-free and green lifestyle (well, as green as you can get in NYC) would be a huge part of my pregnancy. I’ve got a few weeks to go before I pop out my little vetus (vegan fetus) and I couldn’t be a happier expectant Mommy.

I wish more people had given me the straight, sister-to-sister facts before getting pregnant, so I’ll be that person for you, pretty childbearing possum. Remember the tips, stories, and experiences below are my own. This does not mean you will necessarily experience everything as I did; still, I hope these tips make your journey into Mommyhood easier, if possible.

Get Through the First Trimester

If you knew how bad it could be, you might not get pregnant. Prepare to be nauseous all the time, tired most of the time, and agitated frequently for the first three months. Drink bubbly water, chew on ginger, or drink ginger tea for nausea and upset tummy. I also found drinking a tiny bit of kombucha helped ease my nausea. Please research this on your own as some books advise against fermented foods, of which kombucha is one.

The first trimester is also a spiritually intensive time. Get prenatal massages, meditate, and know your body is freaking out getting used to all these new hormones and changes. Roll with the changes and be as loving to yourself as you can. Let yourself cry when and if you need to. And be sure to have a husband (or partner or BFF) who is available for midnight applesauce runs, massages, dog walks, or tax help. You’ll probably need it.

Enjoy the Second Trimester

By the fourth month you will be tiptoeing through the tulips. You will feel like a powerful Mother Earth Goddess and won’t understand how anyone could possibly not feel amazing all the time. Relish this time. You will be done with the nausea and exhaustion, and hopefully any anxiety.

Don’t be surprised if you, formerly a salad queen, can consume nothing but empty carbs for the first trimester. Don’t freak if all you want are bagels for two months; you’ll be fine and so will PeeWee. It happens to most of us. Enjoy it, and know your baby is getting what they need; your body will tell you what to eat. I couldn’t stand the sight of raw greens for the first trimester, so I made sure to get my vitamins in other ways. By the second trimester I was back to my healthy livin’ ways. The amazing thing is, as a vegan, I’ve had no cravings other than “Hmm, I’d love a grapefruit right now,” or “I really want some brown rice tonight.” When you are eating a totally balanced, healthy diet, you won’t have cravings because your body is getting everything it needs!

So what if you eat raw and do yoga every day? You may still opt for pain relief during your birth, and I’m certainly not going to judge you for it. You may choose to go totally natural in the bathtub with a doula or midwife, or choose to have the option of drugs in a classic hospital birth. Either way, trust that you know yourself and what is best for your body.

If you are having a boy, decide in advance if you want to circumcise. Stick to your guns, no matter what anyone else has to say. This is your baby, not the world’s. Whatever you decide, I highly recommend a documentary called, “The Business of Being Born” to empower yourself with knowledge. Here’s more on the journey I’m personally taking with the circumcision decision.

Your partner or husband will be going through the pregnancy too. Be considerate of that. Just because they don’t have the midnight hunger pangs, barfing days, or shocking growth spurts of hair in odd places doesn’t mean they aren’t also feeling fear, anxiety, and worry. That’s par for the course. Of course, some people feel totally ready from the start. My husband, who was always an angel, has sprouted wings of silken diamonds during the last 8 months. He is totally confident and overjoyed. All we talk about is our Son and we are more in love than ever. When you both first feel that baby kick (or in my case, mosh pit dance), the tears will flow and it will be magical. Nothing is more beautiful than creating a family with the person you love most in the world. It is sheer poetry and to be relished like a perfect strain of kombucha.

Third Trimester—School Is Almost Out!

Invest in a hot water bottle for backaches, buy your nursing bras now (regular bras will not be comfy), and be sure you are all signed up for a highly recommended birthing class. Try your best to enjoy the last few weeks of life with just yourself and your partner. Enjoy the wonderful solidarity of other moms on the street who come right up and start chatting, giving tips and advice; but take all tips with a grain of salt. This really is the greatest time of your life, even if you feel like crap some days. Pregnant women are as close to goddesses as possible—you hold the source of life and magical power inside, and you’ll feel it! Allow yourself to be treated as such. This is going to be one perfectly unique adventure!

Our Dirty Secret

The contest winner is #5-Molly B! Please email us at info@crazysexylife.com so that we can send you a 50 load and 25 load bottle of Method’s new plant-based, 8X concentrated, vegan formula laundry detergent!

When I travel around the country and meet people, it’s funny how there are common complaints people share. When gas prices climbed past $2 for the first time, everybody wanted my inside tips on saving gas. As I’ve been trekking around the country to help my friends at Method promote a new laundry detergent, what I’m hearing more and more from people is this: why in this age, where everything can happen at the speed of light, are we devoting countless hours a week to the drudgery of laundry?

I couldn’t agree more. And I’ve tried to find a pleasant way to wash my sheets and clothes. I did the line-drying thing outdoors, thinking it would be like living on a farm with sunny fields and red barns; instead a bird pooped on my sheets. I tossed dried lavender in the dryer thinking it would infuse it with aromatherapy; it clogged the lint trap with what looked like rat droppings. What I really needed to figure out was a way to speed it up, so that I could use my newfound free time for myself.

TIP ONE: IF YOU NEED A NEW WASHER, NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY.

Brand new washers are designed to clean clothes faster, use less water and save money on energy use. The Department of Energy recently allocated $300 million to all fifty states as part of their “Cash for Appliances” rebate program. Each state has compiled different rules and regulations on when their program will start, what will qualify and how you can apply the rebate savings. The overall rule is that only Energy Star qualified appliances will be eligible, so for states that are offering rebates on washing machines, the same rebate will not apply to the matching dryer since no dryers currently qualify for the Energy Star mark. So, if your dryer is working fine, just buy the washing machine to take advantage of the rebate. All programs are starting at different times, from February to April, and will continue until all the funding is used up. Keep track of your state at energysavers.gov/rebates.

TIP TWO: STOP OVERDOSING

One dirty secret of the laundry business is that we’re all guilty of over-dosing. If you’ve ever filled a washing machine with clothes you felt could use an extra boost of cleaning power, you likely add more than the recommended amount of detergent. Believe it or not, this can actually make your clothes…dirtier.

Since washing machines are becoming more energy and water efficient, too much detergent can leave a film on your clothes. Since detergent is designed to attract dirt, wearing overdosed clothing can actually make them dirtier faster…causing you to wash your clothes more often. And residual detergent inside the machine can build up, causing it to work less efficiently and leave a mildew smell.

To “clean” your washing machine, pour two cups of white vinegar and run the machine as usual. This will remove all the residual soap and give you a clean palette.

TIP THREE: CHUCK THE DETERGENT JUG.

One of the drudgeries of laundry is hauling the heavy jug of detergent home from the grocery store. It was only in 2007 that Wal-Mart mandated detergent sold in their stores to be a minimum of 2X concentrated, which led to smaller bottles, a savings of 95 million pounds of plastic resin, and less watered-down formulas, saving 400 million gallons of water. Three years later, a new detergent bottle small enough to fit in your front pocket is debuting, which is 8X concentrated and features a patented precise pump that delivers the exact amount of detergent needed with no messy caps or drips on the side of the bottle. This is from my friends at Method (which is cradle-to-cradle certified) and features SmartClean technology, a 95% plant-based formula that inverts the cleaning molecules to clean clothes faster and better. But here’s the best part: For city-dwellers, busy moms, and anyone who dreads dragging a heavy bottle to the Laundromat or home from the store, this is a revolution in laundry. It’s itty bitty, and a little goes a very long way.

TIP FOUR: LET YOUR HAMPER SORT FOR YOU

Nothing can ruin a load of laundry like a red sock mixed with a load of whites. To speed up sorting through dirty clothes all over the floor or on the table at the Laundromat, invest in a 3-compartment hamper that sorts whites, colors and delicates for you. Each compartment is marked clearly with a sign so every member of your family knows what goes in each bin. For apartment dwellers, 3-compartment tote bags are also available for smaller washes.

TIP FIVE: SPEED UP THE DRYING PROCESS

While a clothesline may be the greenest option, it’s not the fastest or most practical one for most. To save time, try to dry one batch of clothes after another; the residual heat from the first batch will dry the next one faster. Add a DRY towel to a batch of wet clothes in the dryer; the towel will absorb moisture while the clothing dries and speed up the drying process. When drying towels and bedding, throw in two tennis balls saturated with fabric softener; the balls will help fluff towels and bedding to speed up drying and keep them softer and less wrinkly. It also saves money since you do not need to invest in fabric softener sheets.

To help a Crazy Sexy Life reader speed up their routine, I’m giving away a 50 load and 25 load bottle of the new Method Laundry detergent. All you have to do is a leave a comment and we’ll use a random number generator to pick the winner! Good luck!

Planet Ponzi

I don’t know about you, but I sure enjoyed Bernie Madoff’s ponz-o-matic perp-walk for the cameras yesterday. Who doesn’t love a billionaire on the red carpet in cuffs? Fascinating! How does a greedy geezer get away with such a colossal swindle for so long? But I’m not talking about government’s lack of oversight here (that’s a whole other mess), I mean the quiet checks and balances within a man’s own soul. This is why we stare at pictures of criminals, isn’t it? We hope to find answers written somewhere in the face. We need to sigh with relief that they’re not us… But not so fast. It turns out we do in fact share something in common with Madoff, and his scam offers us a valuable opportunity to understand ourselves in fresh terms. That is: the human race has been running a vast con job on mother earth herself… and the gig is nearly up. Welcome to Planet Ponzi.

A Ponzi scheme is basically when you pay off early investors with money from newer investors. It’s also called a pyramid scheme because it grows in the shape of a triangle – each new tier of victims must be bigger to cover payments to all previous tiers. This is sustainable only so long as you can keep more and more fresh money flowing in. But once that dries up, even a little, the whole thing collapses. They always do, and usually quite quickly. What’s astonishing about Madoff is that it went on for so long and got so big.

But Bernie’s mischief is a sideshow to the main stage. Are you sitting down? The global economy actually works in a similar way, and we’re watching the whole house of cards teeter as voodoo economics collides hard with planet earth.

Capitalism is all about growth. It thrives on the creation of more and more wealth. Follow the money back to its roots and you’ll always find natural resources. Our desire to exploit natural resources is certainly nothing new. But for thousands of years we, like all living things, were part of a food chain that was limited by each year’s sunlight. We understood the circle of life because we lived in it. But through the millennia our pesky penchant for science, mixed with some God-given dominion, slowly pulled us away from the garden. Our dislocation took an abrupt turn off track with the discovery of oil. Suddenly, a million years worth of stored sunlight was available in a moment. The industrial revolution kicked into high gear. Enormous amounts of energy were applied exploiting other resources, which in turn were used to exploit yet more resources, on and on in a vicious cycle of production, consumption and waste that grows like… you guessed it, a Ponzi scheme. Today we have a complex industrial food system that’s 30 times more energy-dependent than just a century ago. Not to mention all that stupid shit they sell on infomercials late night.

Capitalism is a cool party train so long as the oil wells are pumping and there’s somewhere to dump the waste. But over the past decade or so, we’ve been shaken with the realization that Mama Earth has her limits. She’s slamming on the brakes and the boxcars of the Economy Express are piling up in a spectacular derailment. As the dust settles, we’re beginning to think hard about a new way of doing business where the earth gets to vote again.

I’ll never forget my first lesson in ecology: a Native Alaskan ceremonial mask I saw in a museum when I was a kid. A crazy-assed spirit face, and on the sides it had hands with big holes in the palms. I learned the holes represented a guiding rule: for every salmon you catch, you have to let one slip through. When’s the last time you saw them do that on Deadliest Catch? The next big lesson came from the compost pile: in nature, there is no waste. The thing is, there’s nothing romantic or remarkable about this view of life. It IS life. Nature is self-sustaining, ponzi schemes are not. Native people acted on behalf of their unborn’s unborn, corporations act on behalf of the next quarterly report. The earth is round, yet we’ve been jamming it into a pyramid-shaped box.

In court yesterday, Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty. The fallen billionaire will probably die in prison. He hung his head and expressed deep regret for the pain he caused. He explained that when it started, he thought it would end quickly. It just grew out of control. He said, “As the years went by I realized this day, and my arrest, would inevitably come.” Call him the greedy sociopath he certainly is – don’t forget the swine specifically targeted charities! (he also screwed amazing activists like John Robbins of Diet for a New America fame). But let’s also stop and think about the Madoff in all of us. The part of us that knows we must stop, knows our day in court will come, but we lack the courage to do the right thing. Old Bernie’s cooked. But for us there’s still time – although not much. Big Mama’s negotiating for a limited time only.

Our ticket back home is renewable energy. Sun, wind, and waves are forever so they can’t be boxed into a ponzi scheme. Amidst this crisis there’s enormous opportunity and great hope. The days of denial are over. We have a new leader of the free world who embraces science and progressive, holistic, long-view solutions. These first 50 days of Obama’s term have been dizzying in the scope of change. So much legislation and money is being directed to these issues that I can’t keep track. Huge sums for renewable energy. Please share links and details that you may have!

We all have to do our part to fan these winds of change. As my wife Kris says, it’s time to “turn shit into champagne.” Of course, that’s a sustainable, local, organic shit vineyard. 2009 will be a great vintage.

Peace,
Brian