Switching to nontoxic skin care, body care, even makeup is easy enough.  With plenty of truly exceptional all natural product lines on the market today, you can swap out your moisturizer, body wash and mascara with no trouble at all.  But, when it comes to hair care, it can get a little more difficult.  In the past, few natural hair care lines lived up to the performance of their conventional, toxin-laden counterparts.  These au naturel shampoos and conditioners left hair waxy, stringy and feeling a little bit like straw.  Something their chemical cousins combat with harsh synthetic detertgents (like, sodium laurel sulfate), propylene glycol and silicones.  What is a girl (or boy) who wants silky hair without the chems to do?

Rare El’ements Salon Inspired Eco-Luxury Hair Care has totally taken care of this problem.  Not only does this indulgent hair care system leave hair strong, silky and smooth, but also helps to protect color.  Amazing!

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Photo credit: jurvetson

This past Friday the House of Representatives in USA voted yes to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a cap-and-trade energy bill, by a vote of 219 to 212. This historic climate change bill will require limits on pollution responsible for man-made climate change and it will help USA create a green economy, if it also gets thumbs up in the Senate.

“After a tense debate, in which the margin of success or failure never moved beyond a handful of votes, the House of Representatives passed the most sweeping climate change policy ever considered by Congress early Friday evening, the Huffington Post reports.

The outcome had remained up in the air up until the actual vote, with the White House and the president himself engaging in a heavy lobbying campaign aimed at restoring Democratic Party unity that seemed to be fracturing.”

President Barack Obama said in his weekly address that this new bill will help “create green jobs, ensure clean air for our children, move towards energy independence and combat climate change.”

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“As I became aware of the mounting global water crisis, I realized that it represented a clash of cultures – between a culture that values water as a shared sacred source of all life and a corporate culture that regards water as a commodity to be bought and sold.”

Quote from Shalini Kantayya, director of A Drop of Life – a futuristic sci-fi flick about the mounting water crisis winning Best Short Film at Palm Beach International as well as the Audience Choice Award at the IUOW Film competition. Will check it out some time (two years late anyway).

“Who controls water controls life”

Photo credit: Darwin Bell

“Would you like a bag with that?”, asks the girl at the grocery store check-out. You glance at the couple of items purchased, and think of the walk home. She sees you hesitating and adds “It’s okay; these plastic bags are biodegradable. In fact, they’re made of corn!”

“Perfect!”, you think. Or is it?

The Good

This specific type of plastic is called PLA, or Polylactic acid. Simply put, PLA is created by fermenting the starch of corn kernels. Plastic made from PLA look and feel exactly like regular plastic, and PLA plastic bags are just as durable and lightweight as their non-PLA counterparts.

A renewable resource, PLA or “corn plastic” is 100% compostable. Under the right conditions, PLA breaks down in about one to six months in a commercial composter.

The Bad

But wait… what about in a landfill? As we all know, unless recycled, plastic bags that are used for groceries end up in city landfills, not commercial composters. In order to biodegrade, the PLA must receive sufficient amounts of oxygen, water, light and soil, which are not usually present in a landfill. Thus, it can take corn plastic just as long as regular plastic to break down—up to one thousand years. Unfortunately, that means that using corn plastic bags to line trash cans is no better than using regular plastic.

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In December 2009 the governments of the world will discuss their responses to the climate emergency facing the planet. Civilized, educated , humanitarian people dread the outcome which is likely to be grossly deficient. However in March 2009 2,500 participants (mostly climate science researchers) gathered for the scientific Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (“Climate Change, Global risks, challenges & decisions”, Copenhagen 10-12 March, 2009, University of Copenhagen, Denmark).

The must-read Synthesis Report from the March 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (“Climate Change, Global risks, challenges & decisions”, Copenhagen 10-12 March, 2009, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) has just been released.

This is a vital synthesis of current climate science from the March 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that involved 2,500 professional participants, most of them climate science researchers. All were welcome and the program and abstracts of the papers presented are available here.

The key moral imperative of the Synthesis Report is “Inaction is inexcusable”.

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The Australian Green senator Christine Milne, the first female leader of a political party in Tasmania’s history, delivered this speech to the Australian National Press Club this past week.

Key quote from the speech:

“The truth is the climate nightmare is real and happening now. We are destroying the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the snow caps. We are eroding our beaches, and our coastal cities will face managed retreat due to sea level rise. We are drying our food bowl, the Murray Darling, beyond repair, jeopardising rural communities and our food security.

Many of our Asia Pacific neighbours are struggling with rising seas and extreme weather which threatens a refugee crisis beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

The Himalayan glaciers, which feed all the major rivers of Asia  — the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yellow and Yangtze  — are melting away. Once they are gone, a third of the world’s people face a parched, hungry and, most likely, violent future.”

For what we have to do urgently – install renewables, return air CO2 to 300 ppm, return carbon as biochar to the soil, re-afforestation and cessation of carbon pollution and deforestation – see Climate Emergency Facts and Required Actions and 300.org – return atmosphere CO2 to 300 ppm.

Photo credit: schoschie

You know there are certain ingredients that you don’t want in your cosmetic products.  But you may not know all of the name variations or even exactly why certain ingredients are harmful.

Well, leave it to Stephanie Greenwood at Bubble & Bee Organic to come up with an easy, convenient and (even) fun way to keep you in the know on toxic ingredient education.  With “Today’s Chemical” (Stephanie’s new chemical ingredient education service) you can ask a question about toxic ingredients in cosmetics, learn about chemicals and get recipes for homemade beauty products. Read the rest of this entry »

An overwhelming global scientific consensus says that man-made global warming is happening NOW. Indeed for the latest see the report from President Obama’s science advisers that states that massive climatic disruption is already affecting the United States and that projects that the average U.S. temperature could rise by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century (see “White House: climate change damage happening now. Obama’s first global warming report most dire yet: Ill effects already here, will get worse”). Thus White House report report co-author Anthony Janetos of the University of Maryland:

“There are in some cases already serious consequences. This is not a theoretical thing that will happen 50 years from now. Things are happening now.”

Nevertheless the climate sceptics are unfazed and essentially all governments around the world are committed to continuing to increase atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration above the present level of circa 390 parts per million (ppm) to even more dangerous levels.

In contrast, in climate criminal Australia (one of the world’s worst annual per capita greenhouse gas polluters) climate activists and leading climate scientists are calling for urgent reduction of atmospheric CO2 to 300 ppm. The Australia-based Climate Emergency Network, the Canberra Climate Action Summit (over 140 Australia-wide climate action groups), the influential Yarra Valley Climate Action Group and 300.org all say – informed by the latest science from America’s Dr James Hansen (NASA GISS), Australia’s Professor Barry Brook (climate science, University of Adelaide) and others – that for a safe and sustainable existence for all people and all species the atmospheric CO2 of our warming-threatened planet must be urgently reduced from the current circa 390 ppm to 300 ppm (click here for details and documentation).

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Sometimes researchers are blamed of being alarmists stirring up fears of a fictional dystopia by the business-as-usual crowd. But it seems a forewarning of conflict over oil in Peru is proceeding according to exactly such a warning. The news first…

40+ dead at protest

In extension of free trade agreements the Peruvian government has plans for ‘developing’ the Amazon homelands of many indigenous communities – opening it for oil, mineral, logging, and agricultural exploitation. Locals have been protesting some of these initiatives claiming they are unconstitutional and in violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. When police intervened fighting erupted. Body counts wary; one is as high as 81.

President Alan Garcia Perez is claimed to have been behind a massacre on suspects of being Maoist guerrillas in 1986. A former army colonel turned politician is siding with the protesters. An arrest warrant has been issued on protest leader Alberto Pizango who has gone into hiding.

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Obama will abandon complex policies on emissions, clean coal and refocus on achievable goals like applying deodorant daily, learning what to say when you burp.

Don’t worry! It’s just some good’ol satire. Or is it?