7gen Bloc

Update on the fate of the bees…

Meet Kimberly Paulk, today's guest blogger for a Wednesday. Kimberly says she spends her time writing, enjoying her family, and engaging in the noble pursuit of trying to figure out how to stop screwing up the planet for our kids.

While I never have, I know many who make it a weekly ritual to visit a nail salon to get painted. While I have insisted that the three women in my family only do their nails outside or in the garage to avoid polluting the air in our home, I was deeply saddened by a recent article in the NYTimes about the women who work in nail salons.

Here's the first guest post of the week, this one from Inspired Protagonist Christina Frutiger of Gig Harbor, Washington... Everyone loves a bouquet but the flower industry is a very toxic one, to say the least. They are mostly grown in third world countries like Ecuador with little or no regulations in regards to the tons and tons of chemicals used, creating many health problems for their workers and then shipped thousands of miles... you get the picture.

This weekend my family and I returned to New York City for a four-month stay after 15 years in Vermont. Our move was prompted by having two of our three children attend New York University this Fall. Our youngest daughter will spend the semester at the local Rudolf Steiner School. As we move from a large five-bedroom house on the shore of Lake Champlain to an 800 square foot apartment in mid-town Manhattan (luckily our daughter Chiara will live in the same building with her grandmother) it feels more like living in an hotel room than a house.

For our next trick, we will take a single small company and make it appear very nearly almost everywhere at once… Here we are taking 2nd place in Cook’s Country magazine’s dishwashing liquid tests. Last week, Jeffrey appeared on WOR radio’s Joan Hamburg Show in New York City. You can hear his segment here (scroll down to August 29, Hour 1). Jeffrey is also featured on the Fast Company blog in this interview outtake from the magazine’s September cover story on Greenpeace’s Adam Werbach.

Marc , not sure why your defending offsets. I sit with the question of "offsets" here at 7th Gen and wonder why it is we are all agreeing to a framework that is not strong enough to meet the challenge of what we need to do to build the needed architecture and infrastructure for a new world design - a design that looks at the deeper question raised by an economy, a present economy, built on waste (an economy built on building more waste (GDP)).

Almost three weeks ago, my family moved to a new home. As much as I love it here, I’m finding that I’m missing our old home’s energy systems, which were fairly sustainable from a climate crisis perspective. Over the course of our decade-long occupancy, we had gradually replaced all the existing appliances with new EnergyStar models, and all the lighting with CF sources. We phased out our furnace and learned how to heat entirely with wood, a renewable local resource we burned in a catalytic stove.