Recycling Mermaids September 15, 2008

After watching our lounge-about Friday evening show, “How Clean is your House?”, my 5-year old son and I decided that our playroom looked nearly as bad as the one just featured. The white-coat clad hosts visit grimy-filthy-messy-scary houses with much health warnings and incredulous shaking of heads, before getting the residents involved in the onerous cleaning tasks. So 5-year-old and I decided to take action, and emptied boxes of toys all over the floor, and decided which toys were to be rubbished, which to be given away (clean and unbroken but unused), and which ones kept and TIDILY put away on DUSTED shelves.*

Two items in the “give away” box were our little plastic mermaids, C-Blu (she has synthetic blue hair) and Shell (fluffy pink plastic-y hair – appropriate namesake of the global oil company). Their hair needed some attention, and after shampooing and conditioning each so that I could attempt to de-tangle, Shell looked positively pleased, though C-Blu was non-plussed.

In the process of fussing over them, I began to wonder if I should keep them… After all, there is sentimental attachment: my now 13 and 12 year old girls used to play every night in the bath with their lovely mermaids, and later my sons used them as victims, targets, hammers, etc. Plus, by the time the next generation comes along, plastic dolls with synthetic hair MIGHT be a thing of the past. We’ll be back to wooden dolls with wool hair and cotton dresses.

Keeping the auld things, of course, jars with the “clear out your closet and change your life” attitude. Am I hanging on to the wrong things for the wrong reasons? Am I burdening my karma by not “letting go”? The angst!

C-Blu and Shell are, meanwhile, doing what mermaids do best: lounging around admiring the view, from my dressing table instead of at the bottom of the toy basket. The only certainty at this point is that they won’t (intentionally) end up in a landfill.

*dusting technique from the show that is great for 5-year-olds: put an old pair of socks over your hands, moisten, and wipe off dusty surfaces! Satisfying results with white gym socks guaranteed!

Monsanto and Me June 3, 2008

I got a letter in the post the other day from my Dad, with a newspaper article attached. The article is about
Monsanto, the monster company that, as my father put it, “ using GM seeds to establish a type of feudal system across the world…” According to the Montreal Gazette article, 12 million farmers worldwide who will plant GM seeds this year sign contracts agreeing not to save or replant seeds – so not only does the world lose biodiversity, but the farmers have to BUY new seeds each year. Further in the article, a Canadian farmer being sued by Monsanto says he never bought their seed, which costs C$80 per acre compared to C$20 per acre for conventional seed. How nice for Monsanto. Perhaps that has something to do with the “thousands of debt-ridden farmers [who] have committed suicide” in India.

Monsanto has lied before to maintain its profitability, according to a film called “The World According to Monsanto.” Apparently Monsanto execs refused to be interviewed for the film, and spokesperson Trish Jordan dismissed it as a “rehash” of old issues long put to rest. She says the “concept that Monsanto wants to take over the world is just folklore.” Tell that to the bankrupt farmers and the innocent farmers sued for “patent infringement” when really Monsanto should have been sued for corrupting seed supplies.

Back to our own little lives: When my husband read my Dad’s cover letter, he said, “So has your Dad changed his behaviour yet?” I laughed. I doubt it – but I’ll work on him over the summer when I visit with the kids. “He’ll find,” continued Tom, “that it’s not easy.” Hear hear.

The process is like this: you go to the supermarket with your new level of awareness. You start reading labels. You are in a state of disbelief at first: how can EVERYTHING contain all this rubbish that you’ve recently found out is BAD for me?? Eventually you begin to accept that if you’re going to change your behaviour, you’ll have to just plain old buy “organic” stuff to avoid the chemicals.

Then things happen to throw you off that track. Maybe you read that not all “organic” is really so; cheaters jump on the bandwagon along with the true organic folk, and they’re hard to tell apart. Or maybe your cash flow takes a dip and “organic” suddenly seems an expensive luxury – even a sucker-punch – compared to to what everybody around you is doing: grabbing the cheap veg, the standard milk, the 79 cent loaf, the paraben-stuffed shampoo.

But journalists – not just the ones with “Organic” or “Natural” glossies, but The Economist, National Geographic, Time Magazine, or the long-standing Ecologist, keep telling you: farmers are being financially destroyed. Crop biodiversity is being suffocated. Land is being poisoned. Crops are being genetically manipulated beyond what we can control (for example the unexpected (?!) contamination of Round-up Ready seeds into adjacent farmers’ fields). Climate is changing because of our consumption patterns. We are fucking up nature!! “We” keep forgetting we ARE nature: a mammal, with basic survival needs that include FOOD and CLEAN WATER.

So you sigh and go to the grocery store and… buy less. Because it all seems so unnecessary now. You don’t need some extra-smelly shampoo. You don’t need the latest shade of mascara. You don’t even need to colour your hair (finally, even hairdressers are admitting they know how poisonous hair dye is, so now they don’t let it touch your scalp. How helpful. But it still goes down the drain to become your future drinking and bathing water, or at least irrigation for the food you’ll eat. Hello! Stop pretending the chemicals disappear like magic! You have to not use them in the first place.) You realize you’d rather save your pennies for a hybrid car. Your children look gorgeous in 2^nd hand clothes, and when you do buy them a new pair of jeans, you wonder – and maybe even research – the brand to know where it’s manufactured and under what conditions.

Yes, you have become a conscientious consumer. Imperfect, not always convinced or energetic enough to keep your standards super-high, but another drop in the tide of people realising you need less, and what you need shouldn’t harm others – neither your beloved children, nor the stranger halfway across the globe.

Ah, it’ll be a busy summer, changing our consumption behaviour. Get ready, Dad!

Read the full article here: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/saturdayextra/story.html?id=d450ef65-c3ad-4678-8978-c5ca305ca630

The Tao of Too Much Driving May 19, 2008

How to make lots of driving harmonious with my existence? Listen to the children.

It’s guilt-tripping to drive so much, knowing about the carbon footprint we’re creating for ourselves… However, our children are in schools 1/2 hour away, and the buses are so badly coordinated that we’d end up on the road more rather than less trying to catch different buses at different times. So this year my husband and I decided to share share the school runs and drive all the way to school each day.

Last week I had collected my five-year-old and he had many interesting observations. Here are two (accompanied by emphatic chubby-5-year-old hand gestures):

Doing nothing makes me tired, but doing something makes me un-tired. … Eating is something that I do that doesn’t make me tired. [followed without pause by:]

I know what cow poos look like. (Oh?) They’re greenish brownish. (How do you know that?) I went into the cow field once [pause, to see if I'll reprimand for going without permission into the cow field]… and I saw the big brownish but with greenish … stuff… sort of greenish brownish poos. (I see.)

There was more… I’ll have to take notes. This is our 4th child and I don’t seem to tire of their unique observations. My dad’s favourite is “empty puddles”. That’s what potholes were to my daughter some years ago. My niece, aged 4, hand out to feel the rain drops beginning to fall, said “I can smell the rain.” In French, “sens” (“Je sens la pluie”) can be smell or feel, and my niece was learning both, from each parent. The translation to English was priceless. (Of course, you can smell rain too, but I’m quite sure she meant “feel” the rain drops on her hand).

Listening to the older children brings me up to speed on the latest crude & rude school yard sayings as well as all the lyrics to Avril and Killers songs. Aren’t I lucky.

what causes breast cancer in a teenager? May 1, 2008

My friend A and I had a great time yesterday, sniffing aromatherapy oils. No, it wasn’t a way to get high, we were just comparing quality. A has just finished a full-time course in natural therapies in Carlow. She has started to make her own organic skin creams & other products, in addition to offering Indian head massage, reflexology, and yoga courses at her home. I tried a sandalwood hand cream… yummy. And she made me a shea-butter-based lip balm (I was running out of my conventional one) with rose and sandalwood. Fabulous. And she’s mixed another hand cream for me (she is an angel).

We were chatting about the benefits of organic and additive-free body products and she told me about a 14-year-old who found a lump in her breast. Can you imagine? What a horrible fright. And what causes such a disease in someone so young? Does our mind do it to us, or is it really the chemicals in our deodorant (and on our food, and in the air…)? In any case, that teenager’s mother sure made a quick switch to natural products.

But what’s “natural?” Read the label! If you’re not good at reading labels, subscribe to The Ecologist magazine! They do an article every issue on what’s in commonly used products. You’ll learn. (Your life may depend on it!) My friend had been learning about parabens and sodium lauryl sulfates and sodium laureth sulfate – cheap cleaners used in shampoos, soaps, etc, and said to be carcinogenic and irritants. She has no interest in cutting corners, is keeping her products absolutely natural and organic, and makes up bespoke products for clients based their needs.

Our sniffing exercise showed us the difference between really good quality organic essential oils, and cheaper ones. For the really good organic ones, have a look at obus.ie. Don’t faint at the prices – we compared price lists too and obus’s can be double the cheaper kind. It balances out when you realise you only need a drop of the good stuff to 2-3 drops of the cheaper stuff.

Anyhow, A uses the good stuff in her creams. What a difference it makes. Even 11 year olds can tell – mine nabbed my new lip balm to take it to school this morning. We agreed to share…

If you’d like to know more about A & her products drop me a comment – I’m not sure how willing she is yet to have her details posted to the world!

Madonna April 29, 2008

Thank goodness for the Ray D’Arcy show on Today FM and Beat to keep me awake on the school run. Today it was Dis Madonna Day, lots of texts came in about her. Mostly related to Madonna aging un-gracefully, though a couple defended her chameleon-like career. (After a while, though, pointed out Ray, it all becomes so new-all-the-time that it’s a bit bland).

My favorite: “Stop dissing Madonna. Leave the poor chap alone.”

Here’s a question: if Madonna is so unpopular, how come she sells so many albums? Even at the fit old age of 50 she’s still gyrating… I mean generating… more revenue than I ever will in a year.

Anyhow, I wouldn’t mind having Madonna’s butt, but only if I didn’t have to do the work. I’m now working up to the Flora Mini-Marathon in Dublin on 2nd June and despite my (admittedly meagre, so far) efforts to run – in addition to doing yoga, a bit of gardening and other minor physical activities – there’s not a lot of change happening to the ol’ glutes. It’s a BIG muscle group and not an easy one to keep UP. So I suppose, since Madonna’s been keeping her butt up for about 30 years (since she gave up chips and beer), you could say she’s a symbol of “global sustainability.” In the most unintended way. That’s nearly funny…

Tata or “Tah-tah”? April 23, 2008

It’s disturbing. 1 million cars a year Tata hopes to sell, in India, to the vast populace whose reputations within their communities will be enhanced by having 4 wheels instead of 2, opening up opportunities to, for example, attract a good wife. Price (of car): $1,000.

I peered at the image and mused aloud, “is it powered by batteries? Solar?” My husband laughed. “It’s a tuk-tuk with an extra wheel. It’s cheap. You don’t get solar power for $1,000.”

I can understand it. We all have communities that we look to for approval – your yoga community, or school friends, or fellow church-goers, or hip clubbers. We make ourselves look good for them, by buying the eco-mat and eating whole grain / txtng r frnds / praying ardently / putting lots of hair product & trendy jeans on. So the average Indian fellow looking to improve his lot in life is going to leap at the chance to make himself (and by extension Mr. Tata) better off. Or seemingly.

A million new cars a year in India – what’ll it smell like? How will a million new horns a year sound? What’ll it look like? 3.29 million square km of urban jungle? Will the cars last? Where’ll they go when they break down and are discarded because this year’s model is just as cheap and comes with, say, a built-in tissue-box space?

So is it good for Tata and “tah-tah” for the planet?
The article I read was in the ecologist: www.theecologist.org

For a lot more of this kind of environmental stuff check out www.astraea.net/blog.

things could be worse… April 22, 2008

There’s nothing like a reminder of what other people’s lives are like to bring you up short on your own little complaints. After blogging this morning on my poor auld vacuum cleaner situation, my long-time friend H sent me a link to Sarah MacLachlan’s “World on Fire” video. Sarah’s got her perspective sorted out. Have a look. Thanks, H!

The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SkdyRcK9KM