Photo Credit: Tareed Mohammed
I often find myself wondering what it would take to convince my smart-phone obsessed friends to leave their cell phones behind for an entire day. Gasp! Unfortunately, I will admit, that just the thought of not being connected to the world via email, constant texts, ‘Words with Friends’ scrabble game, or even my camera apps (yep, I have a slight ‘Instagram’ obsession), makes me cringe just a tad. Recent news, however, reporting changes in brain activity caused by cell phone use, has me a bit concerned and more likely to take a cell phone vacation every so often. Read more…
Conscious consumers take note! The global campaign, Free2Work, is helping shoppers avoid unethical products with the new iPhone app reference guide that rates products and companies based on their policies regarding products made with forced, trafficked or child labor. The app, named one of the “11 Great Apps for 2011,” is the only smart phone tool that provides customers such insight, via the A through F rating scale, as they shop. Read more…
Photo Credit: Ashton Teske
San Franciscans have done it again.
The city has done well to maintain its place in the vanguard of the environmental movement and is home to some of the world’s most innovative environmental legislation and initiatives. This time, the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors President, David Chiu, is proposing that by 2010, 20% percent of trips taken in San Francisco should be done by bike, which is more than double the current rate. Read more…
Photo Credit: Fields To Families
Katie’s dreams of feeding the hungry began at age 11, when the third grader turned a donated cabbage seed into a 40-pound vegetable that helped to feed 275 homeless people in her hometown of Summerville, South Carolina. “I knew I wanted to do more to help all of those people who were struggling to eat so I started vegetable gardens,” she said. “I now have 5 gardens and the harvest is donated to people in need in my community. This fall I should be able to donate over a thousand pounds of healthy food to people in need.” Read more…
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Did you know that indoor air pollution is the 4th largest health risk in the developing world? Or that exposure to cookstove smoke kills nearly 2 million people every year? That is a life lost every 16 seconds.
Every year, according to the United Nations, 1.9 million people are killed from the toxic smoke produced from makeshift indoor stoves used in developing countries. Those most affected are women and children, who are likely to spend the majority of their time indoors with a close proximity to the smoke, and suffer from lung and heart diseases as well as low birth weight. People living in poverty in the Third World commonly fuel their stoves with crop waste, wood, coal and dung, which are simply the only materials available to them. Wood is difficult to come by due to deforestation from development, population pressure, as well as expansion of agriculture and land degradation. The toxicity from these primitive stoves is a leading cause of death and disease, but is also the second biggest contributor to global warming, after the industrial use of fossil fuels. Read more…
Photo Credit: Gabriel Herrera
We all know smoking kills, right?
If this is news to you, then you may be interested in the fact that cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals (200 of which are known to be poisonous) and over 60 have been identified as carcinogens. The harmful consequences associated with smoking are staggering! Lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, blocked blood vessels and a large variety of other ailments and diseases are commonly associated with tobacco smokers. Read more…
Photo Credit: Dick Rochester
Are you getting ALL of your essential vitamins? If you spend most of your time indoors, chances are, you are missing out on your necessary vitamin D intake, which a new Oxford University study says can be linked to a variety of diseases. The main reason for Vitamin D deficiency is not enough time out in the sun, and for some, it’s poor diet choices. Read more…
Photo Credit: Sam Howzit
For all you wine enthusiasts, selecting a fine bottle of wine has raised some new questions. Next time you’re in the supermarket making your purchase: do you think cork, plastic or screw top? As more wineries begin to move from cork stoppers towards plastic and aluminum caps, we enter a debate of which products are more sustainable. Read more…
Photo Credit: China Daily
China has a population of just over 1.3 billion people and is the world’s largest and most populous country. With its rapid economic growth, increase in motorization, industrialization, urbanization, and energy consumption, China has created major air and water pollution problems that are harming its people. In fact, about a quarter of the country’s surface water is so contaminated that it is unfit even for industrial use. Read more…
Photo Credit: Boston.com
While we are watchfully embracing the capping of the BP Gulf oil spill after 85 long days and 184 million gallons, it’s important to remember the damaging effects the oil has had on countless species of wildlife. The devastating oil spill is not only threatening fish (and fisherman), birds and marine mammals, but sea turtles as well. Already claiming the lives of over 467 endangered sea turtles, the survival of many others is unknown. Read more…
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