By Blue Planet Run •
September 10, 2008
Run, Walk or Cycle 30 miles within 30 days starting October 1 to provide safe drinking water to 1,200 kids for life! Register now, it’s easy. You can form a team, find a team or go solo. Cover all of your 30 miles in one shot or spread it out over the entire month! Go to: http://www.blueplanetrun.org/30-mile
This is a great reason to start getting into shape. If you are already an athlete, just do what you are doing and apply it to this very worthy cause! We need 1,000 athletes to join Team Blue with a pledge of $1/mile. Help us by spreading the word. You can download a flyer from our website under “what more you can do.”
Currently, these kids miss school and walk long distances to find and collect water. They often resort to a hand-dug open pit used by animals and people. The water is filthy! They get sick and miss even more school. With a well, these kids are given a proper education; they are healthy; they can grow their own vegetables!
By Simran Sethi •
August 18, 2008
Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Here’s a sneak peek on sneakers.
With ye olde cobbler long dead (re-soling Jesus’s Birkenstocks in forgotten profession heaven) and cheap production methods shortening the lives of shoes, Americans have gotten into the habit of pitching worn out (or simply undesired) kicks and buying new ones. Shoe-shopping has become something of a fetish, a joke, an emblem of the spoiled housewife who fills her emotional void with Italian suede.
We could go into Manolos, but we’ll focus here on sporty treads, not just to stay on-topic but because they account for a third of the U.S. shoes market.
The production of athletic shoes is infamously shady, from a human rights perspective. Historically, manufacturing giants such as Nike have followed cheap labor, exploiting workers in developing countries so that they might enjoy enormous profit margins. (Nike has really turned itself around in recent years, however, and is now one of the greener players on the field.)
