The Virtuous Consumer
The Twelve (Green) Days of Christmas
By Leslie Garrett

Not only do I find the song – The Twelve Days of Christmas – incredibly annoying, it’s also highly impractical. Woe to the gift-giver who offers me a partridge in a pear tree or anyone drumming, piping, leaping or dancing. I’d prefer a pair of warm gloves, please.
To deter those who take their cue from the excess of the season, I offer up my annual guide to the 12 Green Days of Christmas – gifts that are a pleasure to give…and to receive. And gifts that won’t make Mother Nature blanche.

1st day: A programmable thermostat. You can save two percent on your heating bill for every 1°C (2°F) you lower the thermostat. Look for a thermostat with the Energy Star logo.

2nd day: A low-flow showerhead for you that will restrict water output to no more than 2.5 gallons per minute. You’ll use 25 to 60 percent less water and 50 percent less energy than with a conventional unit. And at only $10 to $20 per showerhead, it’s the perfect gift for someone you’d like to shower with.

3rd day: LEGO – Kids aged three and up love these tried-and-truly non-toxic (no PVC, no lead!). The past few years have seen more recalls in kids’ toys than ever before. LEGO remains a toybox staple.

4th day: Give the gift of no junk mail by registering the person on your Christmas list with 41 Pounds. It’s estimated that the average adult receives 41 pounds (19 kg) of junk mail every year. 41 Pounds will rid you of 80 – 95 percent of this, saving millions of trees in the process. www.41pounds.org

5th day: A membership in Community Supported Agriculture. Your membership fee – which will provide you farm-fresh produce for about five months – allows local family farmers to stay in business, while offering up their generally organic goodies. Find one by asking at your local farmer’s market or visiting www.localharvest.org

6th day: Buy your six-year-old some sweatshop-free play clothes from American Apparel. All clothes are made in LA in a factory that pays workers a fair wage. You can even buy organic cotton t-shirts, leggings and more. Prices are reasonable and the clothes are made to last. Visit www.americanapparel.net

7th day: A week’s worth of earth-saving undies! Green Knickers is a UK-based company that offers panties in organic and fair-trade cotton, hemp, silk and bamboo. They’re beautiful and ethical and come in a gorgeous, hand-made gift box made of recycled materials from a worker’s cooperative in Nepal. Visit www.greenknickers.org

8th day: Buy a “green” book. There are, increasingly, books printed on recycled paper, FSC-certified paper…including my own! www.amazon.com

9th day: Offer up gifts for everyone on your Christmas list in a great-looking reusable bag. While there are plenty available right in your own neighborhood, you can also find them online (my favorite is LyziWraps, created by a child for a school project): www.lyziwraps.com

10th day: Buy your ten-year-old some beauty products that ensure her health – inside and out. As the body’s largest organ, our skin is at least as susceptible to toxins as any other. tweenBEAUTY was created to offer tweens products that are free of parabens, phthalates and other chemicals we don’t want in our tweens. Find out more at www.tweenbeauty.com

11th day: A case (minus one for taste-testing by the gift-buyer) of organic or locally brewed beer. There are more micro-breweries popping up every day – offering up local and frequently organic beer. Ask at your local Beer Store.

12th day: A year’s worth of green power. While an extravagant gift, offering up the gift of green power is one with incredible dividends to the planet. Green power essentially means purchasing the equivalent amount of power a household uses from “green” sources, such as wind, solar or low-impact hydroelectric. In Ontario, the only “green” power source is through Bullfrog Power at www.bullfrogpower.com

It’s a day that tends to celebrate “too much”. Gifts. In-laws. Food. While I can’t control the onslaught of relatives, I can help you take back your plan for a greener holiday. Let’s start with:

The Food
It’s easy to green your holiday meal and, in fact, changing what’s on our plates can be a highly impactful (not to mention tasty) way to make that connection to Mother Earth.
Whether your family salivates at the prospect of turkey, roast beef or ham for the holiday meal, consider a few key factors before digging in.
For starters, what was the animal fed? Cows that are grass-fed are not only better for you (lower in fat, higher in Omega 3s, for starters), they’re also healthier, happier and better for the planet. How? Because they’re eating what their digestive systems are designed to eat, they release far less methane from burps and…ummm…flatulence. And before you roll your eyes, all that cow gas creates more greenhouse gas emissions globally than all forms of transport combined. So eating grass-fed goes a long way toward shrinking your carbon footprint. Look also for grass-fed lambs.
If you plan to put pork on your fork, look for pasture-raised pigs. It means they’ve eaten what nature intended and are healthier and happier piggies as a result.
If you’re a turkey lover, you’ll want to avoid those supermarket birds in favor of a heritage and/or organic bird. The difference isn’t only that the latter tastes far better, but that the cruelty inflicted on these caged and speed-fattened turkeys is unimaginable. And aren’t the holidays about goodwill toward hens (and turkeys and…you get the idea).
Don’t forget to surround your meat with lots of organic, locally grown goodies, such as all those root vegetables that you can still find close by, whatever your climate. Organic produce means you’re not giving pesticides and fertilizers a free ride on your plate

The Tree:
The endless fir debate… Frankly, this is one of those “on the one hand…but on the other…” issues. Let’s break it down:
If you already have a fake fir, stick with it. Unless you can still smell it off-gassing (which is possible), lavish it with lovely decorations and use it until it’s a Charlie Brown-esque twig. If you simply can’t bring yourself to have a fake tree any longer, donate it. The environmental damage has been down. Better to keep it out of landfill and let it live on in someone else’s living room.
However, if you want to go live, short of cutting down an old-growth pine, you can’t really go wrong. Most Christmas trees are grown for the express purpose of being chopped. If you want to go REALLY green, try a “live” Christmas tree. This is a tree that you keep in a pot (which, of course, limits its size – no soaring Christmas trees for you this year!), then, when you’re done with it, you simply store it somewhere warmish…and plant it in your garden next spring. In the meantime, it’s busy doing what trees do best – absorbing our CO2 and, in true Christmas spirit, giving off life-sustaining oxygen.

The Decorations:
I’ve yet to see a made-in-China decoration that rivals anything Mother Nature can offer up. Pinecones, dogwood branches, acorns, chestnuts, pine boughs… Add some LED lights and you’ve got a home filled with warmth, beauty…and no toxic chemicals leaching into the bodies of your loved ones.

I recently visited Morning Glory Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, an infamous farm that has kept the island in organic produce for the better part of 35 years.
The produce was lovely, the wind turbine beautiful and the crowds unwieldy.
As I jockeyed my way out, I was struck by something that I rarely see – but that is frequently lobbed at me as criticism of the so-called “green” movement. What struck me, almost literally given how people were driving, was the number of high-end gaz guzzling SUVs, stocked to the brim with the makings of their evening’s organic meal.
The farmer’s market I shop at in my home town doesn’t seem to have yet been discovered by the Lexus-driving crowd. Or if it has been, they must park elsewhere.
So I’ve tended to be somewhat defensive when, during my speaking engagements or media interviews, someone derides the notion of living green as “too expensive” and the domain of wealthy people who can afford, as one person put it, “to spend $5 on a grape.”
I’ve always insisted that if you think eco-living is about spending a lot of money, you’ve missed the point.
But after witnessing the legion of wealthy (or at least leveraged) people flocking to the farm market, perhaps I’ve been the one missing the point.
Perhaps green living has been expropriated by the segment of the population who can afford to spend $5 on a grape. Perhaps that’s why so many people I know, people with good intentions, have dismissed it as something they can’t afford to do right now.
But I maintain that so much environmentalism is about making choices that will save you money. If you can’t afford to install solar panels, or switch to a green energy provider, but I’ll bet you can install CFLs (if you haven’t already) and use power bars to plug in TVs, DVD players, etc. so that you can turn them off. Phantom energy, which those electronics suck up even when they’re turned off, continue to suck roughly 75 of the total energy they use. Hence the power bar to cut power off at the source.
Those who can’t afford a hybrid can surely keep their tires inflated to the proper amount, turn off their car if they’re stopped for more than 10 seconds and change their oil to improve fuel economy.
You can shop vintage for clothes, create a swap with neighbors for lawn mowers or make their own non-toxic cleaning supplies.
You can curb Christmas consumption and rely on Mother Nature (think pinecones, acorns, evergreen boughs…) to decorate for you.
You can park the car and ride your bike…or get a bus pass.
You can turn off the AC and open some windows.
You can compost. Refuse to buy disposable napkins, plates, cups.
Living green isn’t about spending it…it’s about saving it.

I went to my first “community” garage sale this morning. It’s an annual event and involves an entire neighborhood, putting their goodies curbside by 6 a.m., then waiting for the circus to come to town. Which it does very shortly after.
By the time I arrived at 7:30 to sell the two items I was desperate to get out my garage (and that my friend who lives in this neighborhood said I could sell along with her stuff), the bargaining was already in full swing.
I sold my jog/bike stroller fairly quickly, which put $40 in my wallet. And so I strolled, driveway to driveway, looking for treasure.
What I found was salad spinners. And hard-boiled egg slicers. And tea cups.
Rescue Heroes, teddy bears and My Little Ponies.
Cookbooks. Danielle Steel books. And VHS tapes.
It made me wonder exactly how many salad spinners exist in the world right now, languishing in people’s kitchens, basements, garages. Waiting to be sold or landfilled.
I actually use my salad spinner, but I’m in the minority, it seems. Most people buy their lettuce washed and bagged. Spinning has become redundant. A quaint chore from the old days.
I also picked up a few tips from garage sale veterans. One driveway in particular resembled a mob scene. It held some great finds. I picked up a couple of gorgeous, older wicker chairs that need nothing more than a new coat of pant. What’s more, all funds supported the London Grands, a local group of grandmothers that fundraise to support the untold grannies in South Africa raising their grandchildren, as a result of the AIDS pandemic. The combination of true treasure and genuine charity proved impossible to resist…not just for me.
And so…I share their advice:
•Don’t offer junk. If something is broken, useless or redundant, fix it, donate it or trash it (depending on chances of repair) rather than make the rest of your goodies look equally lousy.
•Don’t make people dig. Display your wares with the eye of a window dresser.
•Price things reasonably. Most novices price things based on what they paid for them rather than what they’re worth now.
•Fund-raise: If there’s a charity you want to fund, let buyers know that some proceeds will support it (pick a figure and stick to it). Might convince the undecided to open their wallets.
•Offer food or refreshments. One packed driveway was selling back bacon sandwiches ($3) and drinks for a dollar. People are more generous on a full stomach.
•Here’s a tip from me: Think long and hard before you buy that must-have kitchen utensil. After leaving the garage sale, I stopped for milk on my way home. There at the checkout? You betcha – salad spinners for as cheap as they were being sold second-hand and hard-boiled egg slicers.

Time to suck it up, folks, and take a look at the myriad ways we have a hand in our world’s addiction to oil…

I can barely look. For weeks, I’ve avoided news of BP except for snippets here and there, which was all I could stomach. I basically wanted to know one thing only: Have they stopped it. The news, repeatedly, was…no.
But I couldn’t ignore the photo on the front page of Saturday’s Toronto Star. Or today’s.
From all accounts, it’s a mess. It’s hard to get an accurate measure of just how big the Gulf oil spill really is. Though the leak has been somewhat stemmed, it nonetheless bled oil at 200,000 gallons daily, or roughly 5,000 barrels/day from April 20 til mid last week. Most reports simply call it “big”, “unprecedented”, “massive.”
There’s plenty of predictable outrage. Finger pointing. Blame-shifting.
But while Washington dickers over whose fault the initial blow-up is and just how, exactly, to stop it up then mop it up, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at the role we play in this ecological disaster. Even if you ride your bike and eschew plastic, you’re likely as addicted to oil as the rest of us.
It’s hard to believe but petroleum isn’t just the fuel of choice of our automobiles and airplanes. I confess the multi-tasker in me is incredibly impressed. Less than half of a 42-gallon barrel of oil is used to fuel transportation. Which means that more than half – roughly 22.6 gallons – is used to create an astounding assortment of day-to-day products. Such as? Well, just look at the bizarre places you’ll find oil in your own home…

Your kids’ room: Those crayons that smell like childhood? That’s right. Petroleum.

Your office: The ink you use to sign your name? Uh-huh. (Which finally explains why eco-biz supply companies tout their use of soy-based ink.)

The medicine cabinet: Got a headache? Pop aspirin (with its unique blend of benzene and petroleum) for your pain. If allergies are your issue, petroleum to the rescue again – in the form of antihistamines.

The dresser drawer: Those panty-hose? “Satin” undies? Let’s just call them petro-panties…

The kitchen: Those vitamin capsules pack a lot of synthetic nutrients…er…petroleum.

The bathroom: Keep cavities at bay with a dab of petroleum-slash-toothpaste.

The dining room: Make dinner romantic by lighting a little scented petroleum – in the form of a candle – for ambience.

Your purse: Freshen your mouth with a quick chew of – you guessed it – petroleum-based polymers in your gum.

The stereo: Your CD? You guessed it.

Your makeup bag: You’ll find plenty of petroleum here…starting with your lipstick.

And the list goes on. And on. Just like the oil spewing into the Gulf…

I’m crazy about hemp. I wear it. Wash myself with it. Moisturize with it. Eat it. Treat insect bites and scrapes with it.
I’m astounded by its applications in building. I’m amazed by its multi-tasking abilities – a backyard plot of hemp and a little ingenuity and one could arguably produce everything necessary to live: clothing, shelter, food, medicine.
I’m appalled, however, by hemp’s inability to shed its connection to its counter-culture cousin, marijuana. I can barely mention hemp without someone giving me a wink and a nudge and offering up some lame joke about the munchies.
As the Ontario Hemp Alliance phrases it (rather drily) on its site: “Although both hemp and marijuana are categorized as Cannabis Sativa, marijuana has an average potency of 5-15% THC (the chemical substance which gives marijuana its psychoactive properties) whereas hemp has less than 0.3%THC. At this concentration, hemp has no psychoactive properties.”
In other words, hemp won’t get you high.
However, even I, who knows better, hesitated last week before offering my father a slice of homemade bread containing hemp seed.
He had an appointment later that morning at the Ministry of Transportation. At 80, he was required to reapply for his license, to be tested to ensure that he was still capable of driving. I worried that part of the process might be drug-testing. I erred on the side of caution, an old tale about a government employee being fired after eating a poppyseed bagel and testing positive for heroine, weighing on my mind. Instead, I offered Dad a cup of herbal tea.
In hindsight, of course, it would seem I was on drugs. Which, for the record, I wasn’t.
Still, my love affair with hemp continues unabated. I will continue to enjoy it in myriad forms. I will also continue to give it to my young children (who, incidentally, are too young to drive). Indeed, there are days when I wish hemp did offer some “pharmacological” benefits, such as rendering my three high-energy progeny incapable of little more than sitting on the sofa feeling mellow, something I’m not sure any of the three has ever experienced. “Mellow” doesn’t seem to be in their psychological makeup so much as high-strung and determined. I could simply whip them up a pizza or two, sit back and contemplate the eco-perfection that is…hemp.

(This blog entry was originally published here.)

March 20 is Meatout, which despite the fact that it sounds kinda like a campout with steak, is in fact about encouraging us to eat less meat. It’s hard to argue with the facts, laid out in 2006 by the UN which determined that our love of meat is more harmful to the planet than our love of cars. Or by Jonathan Safran Foer, whose recent “Eating Animals” is stomach-churningly effective at making factory farmed meat less than appetizing.

I walked the vegetarian path for a few years and, except for the occasional whiff of bacon that make me question my choice, felt quite happy…and healthy. But surrounded as I was by committed carnivores, I eventually sourced grassfed, pasture-raised, organic meat for all of us…though we (especially I) eat far less than most. Which not only helps keep us trim, but our food bills as well.

Give Meatout a try. Then give it another try. My guess is you’ll hardly miss meat once a week. Or twice a week. And your body will rejoice at the increased plant-based foods making their way through.

Not like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz…but as in lowering your face’s carbon footprint. Confused? Don’t be.
It’s as simple as giving up your facial wash for a bar of soap. The old-fashioned bar of soap is oft overlooked or unfairly branded as drying to skin or, perhaps, just not “scientific” enough to tend to our face’s foes – aging, sun damage, blemishes.
Truth is, it’s just as easy to offer up science’s latest marvels in a bar than in a bottle.
What’s more, soap comes a lot less packaging and is lighter…so less GHGs released in shipping.
My fave? Kama soap, which comes in lots of good smells, including Ylang Ylang with Vitamin E. It’s cheap, lasts a long time and my skin feels awesome.

My uniform is jeans and t-shirts. Dressed thusly (how often does one get to string those two words together. I think I’m channeling Jane Austen), I feel most like…me. I particularly love t-shirts that say something, whether funny, provocative, clever, pithy. Ideally something that gives people pause to stop and think.
Which is why I love my WWF “Hotter Than I Should Be” collector T. And Revenge Is tees. And greenisblack tees.

Other fave?

When I Grow Up I Will…

Keeping up with the “Greens” is infinitely more exhausting than keeping up with the Jones. Every time I embrace a new eco-principle – buy local! buy fresh! don’t buy at all! – some study comes along to reveal the flaws.
Not too long ago, it was the bamboo bamboozle, in which eco-friendly bamboo was revealed to not be bamboo at all…really it was rayon. My own bamboo clothes weren’t among those cited for violations, but nonetheless they seemed a little less green.

Now it’s local food.

The local food movement seemed beyond reproach. It focussed on the eco-benefits of buying food that was grown closer to home. Surely that‘s green.

Not so fast, says The Globe & Mail. However, despite the provocative headline, the article fails to convince me that eating locally isn’t a better (read “greener”) thing to do.

It focuses almost exclusively on fish, a muddy issue in any case. We have debate around farmed versus wild, high on the food chain versus low, mercury contamination, overfishing, methods of fishing… In short, fish can be problematic whether you’re catching Lake Huron trout or ordering halibut at your favorite restaurant.

In other words, the benefits of eating locally don’t necessarily carry over into seafood, which, forgive the pun, is a whole other kettle of fish.

So keep eating locally. Eating anything is going to impact the planet…but eating food grown close to home certainly reduces that impact. And creates a positive economic impact in your community.

Bon appetit.