Do you remember where you were when MTV debuted on August 1, 1981? (If you’re too young to remember, then hurray for you). I was at a sleepover at my friend Allison’s apartment on West 95th Street in Manhattan. I lived in the suburbs at the time, so those city sleepovers were super cool. The first music video ever played on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. That song has been stuck in my head for the past two weeks because: “look at me now, Mom, I’m a radio star!” OK,maybe I’m not exactly a “radio star” – but I was interviewed for two radio shows this last week. The first interview, which was taped ahead of time, will air on John Shegarian’s Green is Good Radio show on Clear Channel network and on greenisgood.fm the week of August 27th. I also had the pleasure of appearing LIVE on “Valerie’s New York” last Friday, July 23rd on WOR 710 Talk Radio. Click on Valerie Smaldone’s picture to listen:

Why all the publicity? Well, of course I want to get the word out about my social venture EcoPlum. But if you listen carefully to both of my interviews, you’ll hear that I am desperately trying to reach people – trying to get them to be aware of their ecological impact. We are trashing the earth and we don’t even seem to care. While I am encouraged by all the hard work by environmental advocates like Annie Leonard, Sylvia Earle, Bill McKibben, Ken Cook, Kieran Suckling, and way too many others to name, I am also very frustrated. Excuse me if I’m starting to sound like a broken record (to continue with the “multimedia” theme) but based on what I see every day all around me here in NYC, people just don’t get it!! WHY CAN’T WE ALL STOP THE MADNESS? I mean seriously, what’s it going to take to get people to be more conscious of their impact? While I am tempted to start standing outside Duane Reade stores yelling “did you really need that plastic bag?” and “are you sure you want to use those chemicals on your baby?” and “are you kidding me? – you did not just drink half of that bottled water and throw it in the garbage!?!” – I know that’s not the answer. We just need to get through to people on a higher level.

A colleague of mine recently recommended that I watch this video series by economist Joshua Farley where he talks about Ecological Economics. I thought he made a lot of sense, so I’m passing it along in the hope that it will resonate with someone in an “AHA” sort of way.

Economics not your cup of tea? Well there’s always the good old “Story of Stuff” video that does a great job hitting home the message. Other good videos are: No Impact Man, Tapped, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc.,
Crude Impact, and Who Killed the Electric Car.

So here’s what I’m thinking: most of you reading this don’t need to be converted – you already are doing as much as you can to reduce your ecological impact. But I know you all have friends, colleagues, co-workers, family members who are still going about their business as usual and not thinking about their destructive behavior. So please pass this on to one of them and ask them to take a few minutes to listen to my radio show or watch one of these videos. If they do this and write to me (or better yet – send a video) with ONE thing they learned and ONE habit they will change, I’ll pick one lucky winner of $100 worth of EcoChipz that can be used for purchases in our EcoShop or donated to environmental causes. It’s that simple. Let’s all be video and radio stars and get our message out, one person at a time.

Please send all submissions to videostar@ecoplum.com or post them to our FACEBOOK page.

This past Saturday, I spent the day with actor Matthew Modine and 1,000 other parents, educators, students, vendors, facilities managers and community leaders at the Green Schools Alliance Resource Fair here in NYC. OK, I didn’t really “spend” time with Matthew Modine. Actually, I didn’t even talk to him and I arrived a little late for his presentation, but the point is that he and I and 1,000 other folks decided to spend a precious spring Saturday indoors, away from our families, because we all believe that school should be a place for our kids to learn about environmental stewardship in a safe, non-toxic facility.

The event was a mix of presentations, break-out workshops, and a resource fair with almost 100 exhibitors showcasing everything from “litter free lunch” materials to climate education to various schools’ green accomplishments.  What’s amazing is that many of these school greening efforts were spearheaded by parent volunteers who selflessly devoted hours and hours to working on committees, meeting with the school administration as well as the NYC Board of Education, decoding the maze of city bureaucracy, dealing with unions and associations, all so that our kids learn to be responsible citizens of planet earth while not getting exposed to toxic chemicals and wasteful practices at such an early age.

The speakers were all inspirational – I was so excited to hear Jamie Cloud of The Cloud Institute speak about the importance of teaching systems thinking, and to hear about Matthew Modine’s Bicycle for a Day program.  Steve Ritz’s stories of converting Bronx teens from craving “Crack to Cucumbers” through his urban farming program at school literally brought tears to my eyes.  After attending so many depressing presentations over the last few months in the wake of Copenhagen, it was heart warming to hear so much optimism and hope for our future.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that PS 166, where my daughter goes and my son went to elementary school, was presented with an award for winning the Green Cup Challenge for New York- a contest in which schools competed regionally to reduce their energy use over a month.  This was again due to the efforts of some unbelievably dedicated parents and a cooperative school administration.

What struck me the most about this event, in addition to the shear number of participants, was the interesting break down in the background of the participants.  While a large number of them were true greenies who have been fighting for the environment for decades, an equally large number were reformed MIGGs like me, only relatively recently clued in to the dangers that wasteful practices, processed food and toxic products have on the health of our children, ourselves and our planet.  This is an excellent thing to see, all of us working together towards the same goal, all of us getting our butts out of bed, missing brunch, baseball and soccer games in the park, and forgoing other Saturday happenings to secure a better future for our children and their children as well.

Last Friday I had started to wake up my kids for school, when I looked out the window and thought better of it. I checked my text messages and there was a notification from the NYC Board of Education that all NYC schools were closed – SNOW DAY! Since my son Noah has a particularly violent reaction to being woken up, I was happy to let him go back to sleep and save myself from some berating and screaming (my husband usually is the butt of this behavior, but he was stuck in California since his flight was canceled due to the snow storm). So I happily crawled back into bed for a little more sleep and reminisced about the snow days of my youth. This is the second Snow Day NYC has had in a month – woo hoo! I started thinking about how people have actually been using the snow to support their “where has global warming gone?” jokes.

Have you seen the Jon Stewart clip making fun of the global warming deniers? I posted it on our Facebook page a few weeks ago, but in case you missed it, here it is, let’s call it Exhibit 1:

Pretty hilarious, in a sad sort of way. But you may say – he’s just a comedian – what does he know? I then turn to the respected Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, for Exhibit 2: at a speech to the Columbia Business School Alumni Club last week, Sachs talked about climate change in an alarming way. He said things like: “we can’t go back” and “we are acting ignorantly, indignantly” and “we are diverging from a sustainable trajectory” and my favorite: “if we all had our own CO2 clouds over our heads, we’d be OK.”

That’s not enough for you? Well, for Exhibit 3 I give you NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman when he writes about “Global Weirding” in this recent Op-Ed: “Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill.”

So what can we do? Well this week, Repower America has launched the largest call-in campaign for climate ever to urge the Senate to support a strong clean energy and climate bill. Please join me in calling the senate! And don’t put away those snow shovels yet, I hear more snow is to come!

I love discovering cool internet tools. The geek in me speaks again. So when I took a moment to check out URTAK.com I was happy I did. One of the many Columbia Business School email lists I subscribe to is made up of CBS entrepreneurs. I had seen some postings by a company called URTAK but never paid much attention. I guess what grabbed my attention this time was the following: “you might like this free collaborative poll – to embed on your site or blog.” Something that is free, collaborative, provides some feedback and insight into consumer attitudes, and has an embeddable widget? It sounded too tempting to blow off.

At EcoPlum, we are always interested in gaining insight into human behavior and attitudes about “going green.” We’ve developed complex surveys and have collected some compelling data. But I must admit it takes quite a bit of effort to obtain the survey responses. The nice thing about URTAK is that it is easy, quick, and gives instantaneous results. I don’t love that the questions are limited to “Yes or No” type questions, but I understand why they started with this format.

So here is my first attempt at using URTAK – which is clearly in beta and needs a lot of usability upgrades, but nonetheless is pretty cool.

Please – answer these questions, add your own, share with your friends, and let’s get some interesting data about eco-attitudes! Thanks!

What is Your Eco Attitude?

HAPPY FRIDAY! I love Fridays. I remember the euphoric feeling I would get on Fridays when I was in high school. Maybe I was going away for the weekend on one of my youth group’s “conventions” and I was giddy with anticipation of the fun and flirting and camaraderie ahead. Or maybe I was just elated to know that I didn’t have to get up at the crack of butt for school the next day. Whatever the reason, Fridays made me happy. Now that I’m a middle aged mom and life can be a drag at times, I’m thrilled that Fridays still have that hint of excitement. Today I’m feeling generally excited about the direction of Sustainable Business. (OK, a little geeky, but true).

Over the past months, I’ve been very involved with a series sponsored by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York’s Sustainable Business Committee called “Making Green from Green.” The presenters have been phenomenal and I sense a true commitment to sustainable practices from these industry leaders. Yes, I know, lately I have been skeptical, frustrated and generally down on big business and its ability to lead in this area. Why just a couple of blogs ago I was saying that the consumers need to be the ones to demand and drive change. And I do believe that. But I am also seeing a genuine effort by businesses to do the right thing.

I recently discovered this really cool company, CSRHUB, that ranks about 5,000 publicly traded companies on their environmental, employee, community and governance actions and performance. They have gathered data from 50 different sources of company Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) data and aggregated it for us all to use. In fact, one of their sources is the non-profit Climate Counts, one of EcoPlum’s environmental causes. So I decided to go through and pick some companies that scored well, and see what you all thought.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have you had experiences with these companies that you would like to share?

Have a great weekend.  I know I will be tickled pink when the alarm clock doesn’t go off at 6:30 am tomorrow.

Well the Copenhagen conference did not exactly have the outcome many had hoped for, but let’s look at the positive in all this:  two years ago, we had a president who did not even acknowledge that man made Global Warming existed.  Now we have one fighting for a global climate agreement.  And while many feel that Obama let the world down, one reporter who was in the room at the talks said “I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again.”  I’m guessing it was some combination of China’s manipulation and Obama’s need to accommodate all his domestic interests that brought us to where we are.  There is not much we can do about China, but we can help change the priorities right here in the U.S.

How?  Are we all powerless pawns of big business’s schemes?  The answer is NO!  Of course first you need to buy in to the unpleasant fact that business has power and that business decisions are made based on profit.   Sure there are socially minded business pioneers out there like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms and Ray Anderson of Interface, but they are few and far between.  They were able to find a way to make money and do good and the same time.  But for the most part, when it comes down to profit vs. doing good, business will come down on the side of profit. That’s the basis of our capitalist society and, well, it  isn’t going to change in my lifetime.

So where does this leave us?  We must not forget that WE are the consumers and without us many businesses could not exist.  How is it that we have allowed ourselves to be duped for so long?  Fine, before the internet, social media, and the “age of transparency,”  companies could get away with keeping damaging information locked up in their secret vaults, but not anymore….Things are coming out, choices are becoming available, and we need to show that we will not stand for being poisoned, losing our oceans and lakes, and of course, being made extinct by Climate Change.

I was visiting with a friend this past weekend and was reminded about how much I am in the minority.  Here is a well educated, intelligent, caring, socially minded, gay mental health professional, for Pete’s sake!, and she is still buying junk food full of chemicals, still buying water bottles, still using plastic bags – what will it take for her to WANT to make more healthy, positive, sustainable choices?   Not to pick on anyone, but aren’t we all responsible for this planet?  Don’t we all have the obligation to speak up against businesses and demand quality products that will not harm us, our children, or the environment?   If people stop buying products such as plastic water bottles, the companies will have to stop making them!  If people demand food and personal care products free of toxic chemicals and materials, the companies will have to change their ingredients. I refuse to believe that the only way companies can be cost effective and competitive is to use materials that are poisonous!   I’m sure that is not true.

It’s all about being informed consumers and not letting the big corporations pull the wool over our eyes any longer.  I refuse to sit back and be manipulated and I urge all of you to do the same.  Make your voices heard,  vote with your wallets, stop buying all this CRAP and demand the quality products that you and your family have always deserved!!

Please make a pledge this holiday season to make ONE change, just one, that will send a message to corporations that you can and do hold the power to make a difference.   And please reward the companies that are already making a difference.  Share your pledges and actions in the comments section below!  We’d love to hear from you!

Here are some resources:

Climate Counts ranks companies on their efforts to be good climate citizens.

Green America approves companies that have met strict Environmental,  Fair Trade and Labor standards.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board has a directory of companies that sell recycled products.

And of course at EcoPlum, all of our products meet one of the third party certification and approval standards commonly relied upon by industry, and we give back with every purchase – either to you or to one of the great non-profits out there working tirelessly on saving our environment.

Peace, Love, Happiness and Empowerment to you this holiday!  Happy Holidays to all…and to all a good night….

Watch Danny Kaye – Wonderful Copenhagen in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

You may have noticed that I’ve been conspicuously silent since the Copenhagen talks started on Monday. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had such strong emotions over this – mostly not positive – that I’ve kept to myself until I had something nice to say. Or if I just don’t want to accept the frightening reality of it all. I have such fond associations with Copenhagen – not that I’ve ever been there – I haven’t – but “Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen” was definitely a happy song around my house when I was growing up. We loved the movie Hans Christian Anderson and were fortunate enough to have had Danny Kaye as a guest in our house. We watched every Danny Kaye movie together, my mom and dad would dance around the house singing “Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen” and all was good in the world. The polar ice caps were pretty much the same as they had been for millions of years, it snowed and was cold in the winter, small island nations weren’t worried about rising tides, and the term “environmental refugee” did not exist. OK – maybe things were not as rosy as I remember them – there was a little war going on in Southeast Asia, presidents, presidential candidates, and civil rights leaders were being shot, and there were separate public bathrooms for blacks and whites – so I’m not saying I would want to turn the clock back at any cost. But can you believe where we are?

You may have heard me rant about greed and big business and the haves and have nots. Just the other night my husband and I watched “Farenheit 911″ by Michael Moore. I’m sure there are two sides to every story, and I did not take everything in the movie at face value, but it certainly did make a point: greed is the cultivator of evil. Well Copenhagen on the surface seems to be the epitome of the haves and have nots – the developed industrial nations that are the biggest contributors to global warming are the ones least likely to be affected by it while the small underdeveloped nations are bearing the brunt of our dumping. So the talks seem to be breaking down along those lines. How selfish can we be? Are we only going to start to care when our favorite vacation spots are no longer accessible due to the affects of climate change? The good news is that the world is waking up and realizing that there is a huge problem. The bad news is that global warming is happening much faster than we ever predicted. The even worse news is that greed is once more getting in the way. But what makes it so much more frightening is that with time we will all become the victims of this short sightedness. We are likely to see catastrophic changes on earth (that’s our planet, people!) within our lifetimes, or at least in our children’s lifetimes – WTF???? It’s nothing new that big business and greed don’t really care about the casualties left in their wake. But c’mon, this time the casualty is LIFE ON EARTH AS WE KNOW IT! Um, can we please stop thinking about our bank accounts and address the biggest challenge we have faced in the history of the human race?

Wow – I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to go there….please excuse my rant. Hopefully something really good will come out of these talks. We must all make our voices heard that we DO care about our earth, about our future, and about the nations that are at immediate risk. Let’s make sure everybody representing us in Copenhagen knows that we want to see the world come together to solve this problem, that we CAN take a moment out of our busy lives, out of the hustle and bustle of the holidays, and implore that we stop this craziness, and turn the environmental clock back – back to a time when it snowed in the winter and my parents danced around the house.

JOIN THE WEEKEND OF ACTION THIS WEEKEND, DEC 11-13!! Find a vigil or rally to join in your community.

So I got into a heated discussion today with a representative (let’s call her Ms. C) of a sustainable education institute. One of my interns had arranged this meeting – he is a graduate student at a New York business school and he has been learning a lot about the organizational and systems approach to teaching sustainability. This is related to a project we are working on here at EcoPlum that involves educating for sustainability.

On the way downtown I grabbed my afternoon Decaf Americano in a personal cup at that coffee place I keep mentioning. Just as the train was pulling into the station I tried to chug the last drops down so I wouldn’t have an accident on the subway. Well I missed my mouth and poured coffee all over my cream colored blouse, my white jacket, and my pretty scarf (my old business partner used to give me things like Shout wipes and baby bibs for the Holidays – ha ha). Anyway, I was a little self conscious when I arrived all coffee stained for this meeting.

So we sat down to discuss our different approaches to educating people to become better stewards of the planet. In my intro, I talked about how at EcoPlum we are all about empowering the consumer with the information and incentives they need to make responsible choices…how we encourage people to make small changes that collectively make a big difference. She went on to talk about how their program is focused on training the leaders to affect change through changing mindsets and taking a big picture systems approach to teaching sustainability. I have to say I really like what they are doing, especially since their trainees are mostly educators and administrators in the K-12 school systems. Awesome – let’s “teach our children well” as CSNY sang so many years ago.

How did this conversation possibly get heated and downright uncomfortable, you may ask? I think it was when Ms C started using terms like “treating the symptoms not the problem” and “dictatorial approach” and “short term solution” when talking about, well, my exact approach! She was only trying to make a point – that you can’t address the symptom without addressing the problem. But I got a little defensive. Then my intern, in an effort to illustrate the importance of addressing the root causes to get to the best solutions, took a minute to share this story:

The Lincoln Memorial had a big problem with bird poo, so the initial reaction was to kill the birds. After some investigation they found that these little gnats were attracting the birds, so the next reaction was to kill the gnats AND the birds. But finally, one person discovered that the gnats were attracted to the type of lighting used on the monument. So the lighting was replaced with a less gnat-friendly kind, the gnats and birds went away, and lives were spared.

Great story! But was he implying that I am just killing birds by preaching to people to stop buying water bottles?? Is my whole approach just a band aid solution? Hmmm…

Tonight I talked to my ever so wise husband about this meeting, and he reminded me that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. For example, if our health care system only focused on wellness and preventative health programs and never healed the injured and sick, that wouldn’t work!

This whole experience did get me thinking if the direction I was taking for educating on sustainability was, in a sense, myopic. I was focusing on concrete measurable results – but would these results be sustainable over time?? The strange thing is that I have always favored a systems approach to other problems (health care for one) and I have been very critical of and disheartened by the business community’s short term profit driven strategies. It is something I have struggled with since I graduated from business school almost 20 years ago.

The important thing is that both Ms. C and I came out of this meeting a lot richer. She later sent me an email to say I had left her with a lot to ponder and think about. She and my intern certainly did the same for me. I am excited to learn more about the organizational/systems approach to educating for sustainability and look forward to hopefully reaching people I wouldn’t have reached before. And I also hope that Ms. C and her institute integrate some of the incremental, concrete, and tangible steps that result in measurable changes.

It’s Blog Action Day today and the topic is CLIMATE CHANGE.

How cool is that (no pun intended)? About 10,000 bloggers around the world are talking about the mess we’ve made of our planet and trying to encourage individuals and world leaders to do something about it. Awesome.

Climate Change. That’s what the EcoPlum Blog is about – every day – so you’ve already heard a lot about what I have to say about this topic. Like how it’s not easy being green, how consumerism is so ingrained in us as individuals, how we are so wasteful without thinking about the consequences, how we can make small changes that collectively make a big difference, and how we are ALL responsible for conserving our limited resources. One of the ways to do that it to just STOP SHOPPING. That may seem strange coming from the founder of a green SHOPPING site. So I’m thinking of changing our slogan from “Where it Pays to Buy Green” to “If you have already exhausted all other options to re-use what you already have and you absolutely have to buy something, then buy it here and buy it green.” Too long?

I just read a blog by Chris Baskind on More Minimal that just stated this so perfectly that I wanted to share it with the world, or at least my subscribers…oh just read it…

Stop Shopping the Planet to Death

Well said, Chris. I just want to add the following. Next time you are out shopping or preparing for a party or even doing a corporate event, ask yourself these questions:

1) Do I REALLY need this?
2) Is there something I can reuse that will perform the same function?
3) If I do buy it, how long will it last, is it reusable, recyclable?
4) What else can I do with this money???

It’s been quite an adjustment for me – I like things all shiny and new and neatly packaged. I still am tempted to buy things like nice neat memo pads at Staples when I have plenty of free memo pads I’ve accumulated from hotels and giveaways. But I resist. Those hotel memo pads don’t look as neat on my desk as the color coordinated pack from Post It, but it’s a small sacrifice to make to save our future.

In my first post, “Welcome,” I introduced the MIGG. This is a person who doesn’t make the environment a top priority because:

M – My actions are just a drop in the bucket!
I – I’ve got bigger issues to deal with right now!
G – Global Warming? – Not in my Lifetime!
G – Greenwashing is everywhere – who can I trust?

As a reformed MIGG, or rather a transformed MIGG, I find the hardest one of these to get over is the feeling that this environmental crisis is so much bigger than any one person, and that my actions are just a drop in the bucket. I mean, are we just going to hell in a handbasket anyway? Last week in an op-ed in the New York Times – “Are we too late?” – H. D. S. Greenway came just short of declaring our impending doom. With the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference around the corner, he’s not the only one saying we need to focus on drastic geoengineering measures to reverse global warming rather than trying to prevent it.

That’s all well and good, and I’m glad the earth scientists out there are working on figuring out how to blast fake volcanoes and cool down the atmosphere, but I can’t get my little head around that. What I do know is that I like trees, I like the ocean, and I understand that when it comes to the ridiculous amount of waste we produce as individuals, it is a zero sum game – there are only so many places for that plastic that takes 700 years to begin to decompose to go. I know there is an island of plastic garbage double the size of Texas floating around in the Pacific Ocean. That I can understand. So while the scientists do their work, I will do mine. I will do everything I can to reduce the amount of waste I produce, be conscious about the ultimate disposal of the materials I consume, and continue to blab about it to anyone who will listen. Thanks for listening.