Guest blog post by writer and environmentalist Tom Andersen

The schooner SoundWaters on in Mamaronack, August 1, 2011

Has Long Island Sound fallen out of the public consciousness? To some extent, yes. At least that was the impression of the folks at Save the Sound (a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment) and the Long Island Sound Study’s Citizens Advisory Committee.

They spent part of the last couple of years asking questions about the Sound and listening to the answers, and what they decided was that the Sound — not just its problems but its qualities, its beauties — has become less of a concern for the people who live near it.

That’s bad news because along with the qualities and beauties, there are serious problems. Hypoxia still turns dozens if not scores of square miles of Westchester, Nassau and Fairfield counties into a near-dead zone in July and August. Contaminated stormwater forces the closure of beaches with every heavy rain. Storm drains, streams and rivers carry tons of trash from the watershed into the Sound, sullying marshes and tide flats and beaches.

To change consciousness and to push for solutions, Save the Sound and the Citizens Advisory Committee came up with SoundVision, a two-year action plan to restore and protect Long Island Sound. They unveiled it for the first time on Monday, August 1, at Mamaroneck’s Harbor Island Park.

The action plan has four major components:

1. Protecting Clean Water to Achieve a Healthy Sound
2. Creating Safe and Thriving Places for All Sound Creatures
3. Building Long Island Sound Communities that Work
4. Investing in an Economically Vibrant Long Island Sound

Each has three to seven action steps. For example, two of the steps under Protecting Clean Water to Achieve a Healthy Sound are:

1. Promote green infrastructure projects in neighborhoods and in large city sites
2. Ensure that new construction in the Long Island Sound region uses low impact development to avoid stormwater pollution

You can read the others in the full report, at www.lisoundvision.org//full-report.cfm

At Monday’s event, the CAC co-chairs — Curt Johnson of Save the Sound and Nancy Seligson, a member of the Mamaroneck Town Board — summarized the details. Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, County Legislator Judy Meyers, and Mamaroneck Village Trustee Toni Pergola Ryan each expressed support for the plan, as did Jennifer Herring of the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium and Dianne Selditch, the center director of SoundWaters.

The plan for the day was to follow the press announcement with a two-hour sail on the Schooner SoundWaters, which was docked in Mamaroneck Harbor’s East Basin. But the presence of thunderstorms throughout the region — and in particular a pall of heavy blue-gray clouds hanging over the Sound outside the harbor entrance — forced the cancellation of the boat ride.

Although the weather was a disappointment it did not discourage anyone or distract from the longer-range action plan.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Curt Johnson said, “but we have a long way to go.”

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Tom Andersen- Happy Clammer

Tom Andersen is the author is This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (Yale University Press). A Pound Ridge resident, he writes about the Sound and other environmental issues on his blog, ThisSphere.blogspot.com

High temps in NY July 23, 2011 from Weather.com

by Mike Gordon and Heather Flournoy

Our neighbors are in trouble, and we can help. Imagine a heat index of 112 in NYC, humid, and no air conditioning, no fans, no electricity.

Last night’s headlines from The Daily Westchester:

• 20,000 people in NYC without power
• 1,700 in Westchester as of 10:30 pm

Con Edison  is urging customers to keep their energy usage to minimum as the record-setting temperatures placed an extra burden on the power grid.

Together we can stop the drain on the grid!

On a hot day, go to the movies, swim in a pool, starting at 11AM isolate your air-conditioning to one room and read a book, unplug everything.

Dishwashers and laundry? Do it after mid-night, or don’t do it at all!

Air conditioning? Counter-intuitively, turn it way up tonight! It’ll allow you to coast a bit more in the morning.

Therefore we’re asking you this: Let’s turn of EVERYTHING and ask our neighbors and friends to do the same…

• Unplug electronics.
• Turn off AC when not in house. It is NOT true that running it continuously saves electricity! Again, run it on high over-night; your house will coast for a bit longer when you turn it off at 11 AM.
• Turn off pool pumps
• Turn off lights
• Turn off the hot water heater during the day.

Large consumers are being paid to turn off what they can; we will volunteer it.

Let’s keep in mind that this is not a sustainable approach and socially we can better prepare for this in the future. If we had a micro-grid now, our homes would be remotely controlled: left unplugged all day until twenty minutes before we came home, and then cooled for our entry. We’d be paid for that control, just as large consumers are.

More about the Smart Grid

More about Mike Gordon and Joule Assets

It got me thinking about what I do naturally to reduce consumption, and the challenges of following through when at a big conference.

Here are some quick ideas you can do today at the show involving re-use, recycling, little habit changes, and more.

8 tips for greening your day at Blog World and Book Expo America

1- Don’t Take That Napkin: Take 1 napkin, not 10. And only if you need that one.

2- Say no to plastic water bottles. I noticed at least two concessions yesterday that had glass water bottles. One was Agape, serving up Greek food downstairs.

3- Find the recycling bins. I’ll update this later when I find where they are at Javits.

4- Skip the taxi. NYC has good public transit. But if you are making the run from Grand Central to Javits Center like I am, you’ll need to plan on half an hour. Directions from Grand Central to Jacob Javits by subway and bus: Take the S to Times Square, then take the 1 train from Times Square to 34th street and 7th ave. Your metro card allows for a transfer, so grab the 34th street bus over to 10th to the Javits Center stop. By the way, I shared a cab with people last time I was at Javits, and it took just as long due to traffic.

5- Coffee Cup Nightmare- imagine how many hundreds of thousands of coffee cups are tossed each day in NYC. Stop the bad dreams. Bring your reuseable mug. If you forget it, grab your coffee, then keep your disposable mug for reuse later in the day. At least you’ve cut your coffee cup waste in half for the day. (And of course coffee cups are lined with parafin, which is petrochemical waste, into which one is pouring hot liquids)

6- Take a good look. Use the expo to educate yourself on waste. Even if you can’t seem to change habits in an instant, start looking around and estimating the waste numbers, multiplied by the number of people attending and working at Javits over these days, multiplied by the number of times they use something in a day: cups, containers, napkins, trash bags, wrappings, food, cleaning supplies, paper for paperwork, tickets, printouts. And we haven’t even considered the travel of all the people getting there and home, plus the transport of food and products in, then the waste out of there. And where does it go?

7- Put in a good word. In feedback forms, Twitter, Facebook or in person, ask Javits Center and Reed Expo organizers to increase their waste reduction, recycling and toxin reduction measures. I’m going to go so far as suggest they get in vendors using mainly organic food, and with serious waste reduction measures in place.

8- Partying after the expo? Skip the straw. Right. Who needs those stupid plastic stirrers in their bourbon? It’s bad enough the parties are using plastic glasses. Greener option? Beer in a glass bottle. Cheers!

Have fun!

Reed Expo on Twitter: @ReedExhibitions Javits Center on Twitter: @javitscenter KatonahGreen on Twitter? @katonahgreen and @reallysocial

Also find me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/katonahgreen and http://www.facebook.com/reallysocial

Credit Where Credit is Due

More on Javits Center green initiatives

Case Study: Statue of Liberty Green Initiatives for Concessions and Operations

4th and 5th graders at KES in the Greenhouse

KES students show off their new water bottle refill faucet

A variety of water containers that happened to be on hand in our classroom

Katonah Elementary school has a theme for the year: “Make a Difference.”

This means making the school a better place, improving yourself, and among other things, helping the environment by doing things at the school like recycling and reducing the use of materials like paper, says student council member Isabella.

First, who are these “Hot Bloggers”? They are eight 4th and 5th graders from Katonah Elementary School who are participating in a “Do the Write Thing” workshop on blogging, led by yours truly. The subject? Sustainability in the KES school. The newbie bloggers?  Mikey, Marc, Isabella, Aiet, Hiya, Julia, Beatrix, Reed are in the house!

First we looked at some local blogs: KatonahGreen.com, A CommonPlaceLife.com and KnotSewCrafty.com. Then we looked at an example of a popular blog by a young person, 14 year old Orren Fox who has been blogging for a couple of years: Happy Chickens Lay Healthy Eggs.

We then talked about what a weblog is, what motivates people to write blogs, and what would motivate members of the group to blog about. The answers varied from Xbox to Technology and Gadgets to Ancient Roman Mythology.

As an aside, I just wanted to thank everyone for their enthusiastic assistance in helping me with my first use of a SmartBoard. These things are pretty awesome tools and a lot of fun to use!

For much of the class we addressed some pretty serious topics. The class invited assistant principal Terry Costin in for an interview.

Mr. Costin has been a quite leader in moving KES to reduce its waste and consumption and to engage parents, students, other schools, the town and outside professionals in continuing dialogue about what the school can do to achieve the goals that has made it a leader in the Green Schools Coalition. Mr. Costin told the story of water bottles and his search to find out how many water bottles were consumed in the school district. The conclusion may surprise you: 9,000 per month! Mikey quickly tallied that meant 90,000 per year based on a 10 month school year. Mr. Costin shared that this means that there are over $135,000 in water bottle sales per year. Beatrix was right on top of the issue when she asked how much money the school makes on those sales, and she was aware there was a vendor involved in the sales as well.

Everyone agreed that this represents a lot of unnecessary waste and they support solutions like bringing refillable water bottles to school. The school has a pilot Water Refill Station outside the cafeteria, the purpose of which is to see if an faucet whose shape is designed to make it easier to fill a water bottle will increase student use of refillable water bottles.  So far it seems well-used, but there are a few problems. Reed and Marc reported that they have heard students complain that they didn’t like the taste of the tap water. Beatrix did a quick survey of some students and found that so far most of the 5th graders she asked said they didn’t like using the fountains. Mr. Costin added that there was a slightly higher than suggested sodium issue at one point, but that has been resolved so perhaps the water tastes better now. He also said they are lucky at this school because the water quality is high and consistently monitored.

Every member of the group reported having their own reusable water bottles at home.

Julia, Beatrix and Isabella asked Mr. Costin how students could get reusable water bottles with the KES logo on it. He replied that they would be available during April at the PTO store, and added that April is “Earth Day every day” month, and the school would be highlighting various green initiatives throughout the month. Beatrix suggested that there be an announcement made the day prior to the bottles being available so that students could bring money with them the next day.

Next up: The Greenhouse Program

The group moved to the school’s greenhouse and greenhouse facilitator and master gardener Cathy Clare led a discussion on Cow Pots, er… grow pots that look like peat pots but are made from cow manure. The pots fertilize the growing plant and then get planted right into the ground with the plant. Aiet and Miss Clare led a discussion the economics of the pots: where they come from, how they get processed, transported, distributed and brought to market before coming to the classroom. The greenhouse plays an important part in the KES curriculum and keeps students alert and interested in what they are learning, as well as giving students insight into where their food comes from and the biology of plants. Miss Clare is involved in the greenhouse and also the school’s edible garden.

Recycling and Composting

Julia noted that this past fall’s Halloween Fair was green and they reduced their garbage by 67% by recycling and composting. Mr. Costin related that paper consumption at the school has been drastically reduced in the past three years.

A Few Notes

The group agreed that they wanted this post written as you see it, rather than using first person quotes from each of them. This is a WordPress.com blog, and hosting is free.  To participants: If you have comments, please post them below. You will need an email address in order to do so, so if you don’t have one of your own, perhaps your parent can log in, and let you write a comment. Please identify yourself by first name if you do. And please let me know if you decide to blog, and feel free to ask me any further questions you may have!

photo by Anna Flournoy

These last few weeks various people in my family have suffered from a highly contagious flu with symptoms ranging from high fever, intense sore throat, joint aches, neck pain, swollen glands, cough and severe headache, to nausea, exhaustion and progression to bronchitis.

Each of us–my brother, his wife, their baby, my mother, my daughter and myself–took different approaches, including the all-natural way, and resorting to antibiotics for the progressive infections and cold medicines.

Here is my problem with the cold medicines: We are sick: infectious, and low immunity. We take a cold medicine that makes us able to go out and continue working in a public place, doing double damage: spreading the virus plus exposing ourselves to further immune onslaught. Have the flu? Take it seriously and don’t spread it and don’t complicate it.

I wanted to share some of my own recipes for food and drink I found soothing to my throat, palatable and energizing over the last few days. My hope is that it might help a couple of others heal quicker, or provide some relief of symptoms naturally. There are plenty of books and natural doc’s who can help you with your protocol for recovery. I’ll link to one below.

Part of most Doc’s advice is to rest and hydrate. But that blasted sore throat made it painful to swallow any water or liquids. I finally came up with a tea I made regularly that soothed my throat, was warm and comforting: Rooibos-Coconut Tea. I figured it gave me some nutrition. I alternated this with Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat with Echinacea about every 2 hours.

WARM ROOIBOS-COCONUT TEA
ingredients
Filtered water*

• 1 rooibos tea bag
• 1 dash cinnamon
• 1 dash allspice
• 1 teaspoon raw local honey
• 1 Tablespoon coconut milk (canned organic)

Boil filtered tea water, fill mug 3/4 full with water and drop in tea bag. Let stand for 3 minutes. Remove bag. Add spices. Mix in honey until melted. Stir in coconut milk solids until melted.

This drink tastes great, plus is creamy with no dairy. Dairy causes congestion and is not suggested during an flu or cold.
*make sure water is non-chlorinated

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With the sore throat, it was difficult to swallow foods, but I was craving creamy soup. I was also low on energy so needed something very simple to make. Necessity is a great motivator! (required equipment: pot, handheld immersion blender, knife and cutting board.

CREAMY CAULIFLOWER SOUP    | dairy, gluten, and meat free
organic ingredients

• 1 head cauliflower
• 1 small onion
• 1 shallot
• 1 half bunch parsley
• 3 stalks celery
• 5 small potatoes
• Sea salt
• dash of cayenne or chili

Heat 6 cups filtered water. Begin rough chopping onions, shallots, celery and drop in hot water. Cover, cooking on low. Rough chop the cauliflower, parsley, and quarter the potatoes. Drop in the water. Cover. Cook on low until the potatoes are soft. (about 45 minutes)

Remove from heat for 10 minutes. Blend with immersion blender until creamy (about 1 minute). Add a few drops of cold-pressed virgin olive oil to top of each bowl. Serve.

Don’t have an immersion blender? I recommend this stainless steel KitchenAid handheld blender. I use it at least 4x per week to make quick soups, salad dressings and fresh mayonnaise.

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It is a serious concern of mine that we all learn how to bolster our immune systems, as well as modify our habits, to be able to deal with the increasing numbers of flus and viruses we will be exposed to over the coming years. You can read more about it in Dr. JE Williams book Viral Immunity.
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Keeping it local: I found all ingredients for the soup at 2 places: potatoes, onions, shallot, parsley: Gossett’s Farmer’s Market in South Salem. Everything else I found at Mrs. Green’s in Katonah, but if you are closer to Ridgefield you get everything at Nature’s Temptations.

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Coming up: Two Meetups:

Sunday: “The Making of a Conservationist: Alex Shoumatoff.“  and

Tuesday: Greens of Early Spring Wild Foods Walk

JOIN THE MAILING LIST TO GET NEWS OF UPCOMING GREEN EVENTS, MEETUPS, ACTIONS and WORKSHOPS

Every Saturday in South Salem, a year-round Farmer’s Market. Weekly events and environmental education, plus a great community experience. Gossett’s Farmer’s Market.

Check out Really Social Strategies, our grass-roots marketing and new media consulting firm.

Connect on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter: @katonahgreen
Join the Katonah Green and Beyond Meetup Group

I love the when we get to witness the power of art join forces with the power of the people’s message. Right now our water supply is in danger in New York!

The danger is the result of Hydro-fracking. Read more about it here, and check out the video interview with Marc, a clip of his song “No Frackin’ Way!” and join us this weekend in Woodstock, NY to participate in a filmed citizen action event to oppose the devastation of our water supply.
(the following was written by singer-songwriter Marc Black)

Hydro-fracking (or Fracking) is the process of harvesting natural gas from deep underground by drilling, high pressure water and undisclosed chemicals that contaminate groundwater.

Gas companies are enticing New York State farmers with offers of $4000 per acre to lease their land. This temptation is a cruelty that’s often too difficult to resist. And besides endangering our clean …water, it’s ripping apart families and communities.

There is a temporary moratorium on this process in New York, but it’s critical for us to keep the pressure on the government.

‘Gas Land’, a stunning documentary film, has been getting lots of attention. It presents a very clear case including a demonstration of a man turning on his faucet, lighting a match and thereby creating an explosion! As a songwriter who cares about this issue, I want to do my part. I hope you’ll join me.

Marc has written a song, ‘No Fracking Way’ and recorded it with John Sebastian and Eric (dueling banjos) Weissberg, among others.

Have a listen to a clip from the beginning of “No Frackin Way” 

ADD YOUR VOICE TO THE SONG:

• FREE event at the Bearsville Theater, Woodstock , NY
• Sunday, Jan 16 at 2 pm.
• Come prepared to sing or bring an anti-fracking sign for the video!
  

Read more on the Katonah Green Meetup site.

Heather Flournoy interviewed on PCTV with Sol Skolnick

INFORMING OURSELVES

The information is out there. How do we green our lifestyle? Look online, go to a bookstore, or most imporantly, think it through.

As far as I can tell, the biggest changes come when someone starts questioning what’s in front of them, and decides to educate themselves.

Question what’s in a package or accepted ways of getting things done. So if you watch television, you were probably inadvertantly taught how to clean your house, for instance.

MILES and THE PAPER TOWEL ANALOGY

You follow what you’ve been taught. For some reason it became the norm to use Brawny paper towels for cleaning up spills and even general cleaning. So people have adopted the habit of going to the store, purchasing multi-packs of Brawny towels, using them to clean and tossing them away. But as soon as they stop and consider that those towels came from 4,000 miles away, are made from trees, then oil is consumed in transporting them to a warehouse, then they are trucked to stores, then a person drives to pick them up, then they are tossed. Not to mention the plastic packaging. And repeat. Over and over. This is a consumable. Multiply that by all your neighbors doing the same, and their neighbors and people all over the country. Do some math and figuring. How many paper towels are being used right now? Wow. It’s a pretty needless waste in my book.

And that’s a product with limited ingredients: paper and packaging. Imagine if we educated ourselves on something like shampoo. There are often around 25 ingredients. We’d look into where and how each of these ingredients is produced, how it is shipped, how it is processed, and then how the final mixed product is packaged, how the packaging was created, produced and transported, and how it all gets to us. So how far away it comes from. And what those ingredients really are.

DISPOSAL

Then we add one more thing to this scenario: how it is disposed of. Gone. A lot of people are now conscious of recycling packaging, so perhaps your shampoo bottle is a plastic that can be recyled in your town and you recycle it. But we need to think about the ingredients of those bottles being flushed into our water and soil.

AWARENESS

It’s all a matter of awareness. Education. Behavior change.

I think once we educate ourselves in this way we naturally begin to question everything.

BASIC CHANGES

Now to the basics of what we can do:

I like to break it down into rooms of a house. This makes it feel more manageable we have do-able goals for change. For instance, we can tell ourselves, “This year I’m going to green my kitchen.”

We could focus on the kitchen or the bathroom or the laundry room or even the outside of the house, like switching over to push mowers or converting our lawns to perennials and vegetable gardens.

Let’s start with the kitchen. It will feel more manageable if we break it down. Set ourselves a goal: ‘this year I’m going to green my kitchen’. Give it some time for educating yourself and your family. Deciding what changes to make, getting used to new patterns of behavior, purchasing.

Top 5 things we can do to green our kitchens

1- Food: begin by buying educating yourself about one food category and switching over to buying those foods locally and sustainably grown. Let’s start with Meat. There are lots of regional producers of chicken, beef, pork and lamb. You can find these meats at area farmer’s markets.

For a more thorough education, go meet the farmers. See the property, how they produce, what they feed their animals, how they treat the soil and the water. That’s your water supply. Water connects us.

So that helps about 7 months a year. There are a few year round markets here in Westchester: one in S. Salem, one in White Plains. There is a local foods market in Bedford Hills. Meats can often be ordered from a farmer directly and frozen. Added benefit to greening your meat supply is that the meat will have more flavor, have more CLA (Conjugated linoleic acid) which is a healthful free fatty acid.

And yes, I’m an environmentalist who isn’t saying to become vegetarian.

2- Cleaning chemicals- think before you put any more chemicals down the drain, find out what they are and what they do to our water supply. Start looking into greener alternatives. We have two local manufacturers of green cleaning supplies. The Citrasolv company is right up in Danbury and their products are in all the area health food stores. Sound Earth is in Fishkill, NY. Or get radical and start making your own cleaning agents.

3- Paper: replace your paper towels and napkins with cotton. I find great ones at estate sales! Use cotton rags for cleaning too. Cut up worn or stained towels or cotton sheets.

4- Water reduction. Find ways to clean dishes with less water. This one is a matter of changing habits: don’t leave the water running. Make it a game. How little water can I use to get these dishes clean? Can I capture water to use it for watering plants. I have one friend who captures shower water into a bucket and uses it to flush the toilets. There are levels of how green we get.

5- Lights- replace your lights with LED lights. There are cool LED light strips you can easily install under upper cabinets to illuminate your counter work space. LED’s are much more efficient than compact fluourescents, last longer, and are instant on/off, meaning that you don’t have to wait for them to heat up and you can turn them on and off without concern for wearing out the bulb.

This is just a beginning. Just some ideas for a place to start becoming aware and make small changes that will eventually have a huge collective impact. Keep checking back to this blog for more ideas, and send me your ideas. I love them, and love sharing them.

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JOIN THE MAILING LIST TO GET NEWS OF UPCOMING GREEN EVENTS, MEETUPS, ACTIONS and WORKSHOPS

COMING UP

An important workshop for people working in nonprofits and community activist groups to have 3 hours with top new media expert, David Mathison. Saturday, October 9th at the Katonah Library. Click for details.

Every Saturday in South Salem, a year-round Farmer’s Market. Weekly events and environmental education, plus a great community experience. Gossett’s Farmer’s Market.

Check out Really Social Strategies, our grass-roots marketing and new media consulting firm.

Connect on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter: @katonahgreen
Join the Katonah Green and Beyond Meetup Group

And there is more to beans than chili! I consider myself a master at economical and healthy shopping. And one of my secrets is shopping in the bulk aisle. Luckily for me there is a health food store not too far away that has an extensive organic bulk section. I make an afternoon of heading over to Nature’s Temptations in Ridgefield, CT to stock up on bulk items, have a nice lunch in their deli and meet CT friends for coffee (or a fresh organic juice!). Whole Foods stores also usually have a good bulk item sections, but you have to check every item to make sure it’s actually something healthy. Often their bulk items are not organic, or are processed. But they do carry a good selection of organic beans, grains, nuts, dried fruits and granolas.

Shopping bulk organic makes sense. 

Some items are less than half the price per pound than buying the same brand item pre-packaged!

Having base dried ingredients like these means I can always make a meal with a few fresh ingredients and these staples, and I always know exactly what’s in my food. I soak beans the night before, rinse and cook on low during the day. I make White Beans and Oregano, classic Vegetarian Chili with sweet potatoes, and in the winters love split pea or black bean soups. Quinoa is quick cooking and delicious, especially with a few chopped veggies, some sauteed onions and some chili powder and a little olive oil tossed in.

Here is my bulk shopping list for month of dry goods, all organic.

• 2# short-grain brown rice
• 4# brown basmati
• 1# red quinoa
• 1# white quinoa
• 2# small white beans
• 1# black turtle beans or 1# split peas
• 2# small red beans
• 3# maple or agave sweetened granola
• 1# thompson raisins
• 2# raw sunflower seeds
• 3# rolled oats
• 1# whichever nuts are best priced at the moment: almonds, raw cashews or walnuts
• bulk grind-your-own-fresh peanut butter
• bulk coffee, and if they have it, bulk tamari and oil.

A Bulk Buying Green Tip and A Word of Caution

If you want to make your shopping trip greener, try bringing your own re-useable containers to fill. Clean, clear plastic bag, plastic or glass containers. Just check with your store before you do this to make sure they can figure out how to accommodate you. The rule is they are not allowed to re-use containers, but a customer may bring their own. But I recently faced a problem with the local chain Mrs. Green’s. Someone in the community told me that they wouldn’t allow us to bring our own containers. So I called them and they said of course we may. I then went in armed with 5 matching Ball jars which I intended to fill with bulk rice, quinoa and nuts. I got the bulk section manager and got her permission and weighed my jars before filling them. But alas! When I got to the register, they charged me for the jar weight! I asked that the cashier take into account the weight of the jar and she said she couldn’t do it. I asked her nicely to please call the bulk manager. No help, they couldn’t actually figure it out. They called the store manager who also couldn’t do it and offered to dump all of my food into plastic bags for me, then put it back into the jars. But then they would have to throw out the plastic bags they said! Geez. This means that for nuts which were $7.99/lb, they wanted to charge me an extra $4 for using my own jar! I tried calling Mrs. Green’s for a response but got none. So double check with each particular store as to how this would work for them, before bringing your own containers and trying to save them money, and save a few gallons of petroleum product from the wastestream.

Have local shopping tips? Send them to editor [at] katonahgreen.com

________________________
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Follow me on Twitter: @katonahgreen
Join the Katonah Green and Beyond Meetup Group

Cynthia Brennan, general manager of the new Chappaqua Farm Market and co-owner of TABLE Local Market in Bedford Hills, explains the mission behind the market: “Our main goal is to support sustainable agriculture and land use in Westchester County while promoting food health values in our community by providing fresh, local food.”

We agree with her wholeheartedly and think that holds true for all of the area farmer’s markets.

For more local food information check out the Local Green Guide.

SATURDAY

events organized by Katonah Green’s Heather Flournoy

9-1pm Local Foods, a Master Herbalist and a Raw Food Chef, Saturday, Sept 11

3-6pm Sign up to attend the potluck and book discussion: Climate War! Meetup with author Eric Pooley and Harvest Potluck, Saturday, Sept 11

A few more reasons to eat locally from Treehugger.com here.

Mother Earth, painting by Anna Flournoy, 2008

My daughter is 16 and thinking about choosing a career. She is artistic and loves language and philosophy and music, art and writing. But she wants to make a difference, and has been agonizing over how to best accomplish her goals unless she becomes a scientist or doctor (both could help in her goal of teaching people how their environment impacts their health).   In 2008, I heard Andrew Revkin, former New York Times Dot Earth columnist, give a presentation to high-school teachers and staff about the future of the environmental movement.  The talk was interesting, but for me the the last few minutes were the most inspiring.  Mr. Revkin walked away from his PowerPoint presentation and said simply and passionately, “We need everyone.  The environmental movement has lots of scientists. We don’t need more proof that the planet is damaged.  What we need now are politicians to make legislative change; writers and filmmakers to spread the message;  sociologists  to understand what keeps people from changing; marketers to show us how to influence mass change.”

We need people to spread the message.

If you have students passionate about the environment, encourage it. If they aren’t good in math or science, it doesn’t matter. All talents are necessary. We  need everyone.

We need farmers.  We need engineers.  We need speakers. We need sociologists.  We need teachers.  We need builders.  We need fundraisers.  We need scientists. We need volunteers.  We need parents to teach their children a new paradigm.  We need people in technology.  We need people who give us hope. We need healers and counselors.  We need artists, filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians, and storytellers to spread the word about the rampant damage our society is inflicting on the planet, and encourage a mass behaviour change.

We all know that children are the future. Teachers and parents play a critical role in encouraging every child to be the part of the movement, to think broadly, to take part in creating a sustainable future in their own way. Encourage them in whatever direction their hearts and minds lead them. It’s their planet!