Cultivating Food Security in Africa

This article is reprinted with permission from it’s authors: Abdou Tenkouano and Danielle Nierenberg.
As hunger and drought spread across Africa, a huge effort is underway to increase yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice. While these crops are important for food security, providing much-needed calories, they don’t provide much protein, vitamin [...]

A Global Crisis of Food Wastage

One year ago, a report was released by the United Nations Environment Program that over half of the food produced globally is lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain. This is a staggering fact that is substantiated by data from countries all around the world. It seems the [...]

Genetically Modified Food – A Growing Concern

Like most people, I’m concerned about the quality of the food that my family consumes. I’m well educated about the nutritional value of one food over another, but I was astonishingly ignorant of the fact that my family has been consuming foods that are genetically modified on a daily basis. As I began to research [...]

My 10 Favorite Green Blogs

There are so many great, green oriented blogs out there that it’s really impossible to chose just ten, but having said that, here’s my top ten list. Each of the following blogs presents something unique, either in the voice, the scope of their articles or the consistent relevant help they provide for those of us [...]

Sticky Issues with Cookware

American households have been using non stick cookware for nearly 50 years. These ‘teflon’ products were heralded in the early 1960’s as a great scientific advance to save housewives from hours of scrubbing to remove burnt on food from more conventional pots and pans. Americans happily replaced their cast iron and stainless steel cookware with [...]

Make Your Own Household Cleansers

When I first read about how you can clean your house without any of the harsh chemical products that line the supermarket shelves, I was really surprised. How could something so simple work? The more I researched, the more I realized that these recipes are ones that have been used for hundreds of years. Your [...]

Contaminated Drinking Water – in America?

On Dec 17th, the New York Times published an article that was seriously alarming. It seems that American tap water can not be trusted to be free from cancer and disease causing chemicals – even though it complies with current regulations. The problem is that the 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out [...]

Walmart’s “Green” Card

Now, the low carbon emission leader!
Walmart, the world’s largest corporation, is about to set a new standard for sustainable manufacturing, that could change the world. It’s hard to grasp just how big Walmart is. By some estimates the total value of all goods and services sold by Walmart accounts for one third of our [...]

Less in Your Landfill

The average American throws away about four and a half pounds of trash each day. Plastic packaging alone makes up 64 million tons by weight or 33% of all our garbage. Newspapers add another 14% and paper products in general, up to 40% of our landfill. Each person also discards about 2 to 3 pounds [...]

Health Risks of PVC Plastic

Four prominent groups – the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Toxicology Program, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer – agree that PVC is one of 52 chemicals that are confirmed to cause cancer in humans.
PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, is just one of the plastics that [...]

10 Ways to Go Green Today

For many of us, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was a wake up call that was loud and clear. Even more compelling (and scary) is Leonardo DiCaprio’s film “The Eleventh Hour”.  As the news keeps coming in, my guess is we’re actually in the last ten minutes if we’re going to stop the runaway devastation [...]

Six Tips to a Greener Christmas

Remember Bing Crosby crooning away about a White Christmas?  Well this year, I’m dreaming about a Green Christmas. I read that according to the EPA, Americans dispose of an additional million tons of household waste between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. That’s a 25% spike in waste, from 4 million to 5 million tons. A [...]