Green Options

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Blue Planet Run Foundation taps into the deeper running issues African women face when they lack access to water. The first ever African Women and Water Conference was recently held at the Greenbelt Center (home of Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai’s, Greenbelt Movement to plant trees). Annette Faye, a representative of BPRF’s Peer Water Exchange reports her findings:

Why would women need to gather to discuss the topic of water?

• Pastoral women wake up at pre-dawn hours to walk great distances in order to collect water and relieve themselves. By midday they must walk out into the desert at a greater distance to avoid being seen, often returning ashamed and sometimes soiled.
• Water privatization makes water inaccessible to most because it raises prices. Male water vendors dominate the communal water points, so women have to wait in long lines. Women get beaten if it takes too long to return home, accused by the husbands that they are cheating on them.
• Desperate women exchange sex for water to avoid the line.

Every single women agreed, and took for granted, that water is their responsibility and that it’s a problem.

The AWWC, held in Kenya, was comprised of 30 women from all over Africa. These women were eager to learn and share with their communities. The five-day schedule was packed, going well into the evening. Between activities women broke into song and dance. They learned how to implement new technologies, write business plans, test water’s safety, and use the Peer Water Exchange collaborative model. The women were excited to join a global network and liked that the PWX application is standardized.

When I began Eco Child’s Play over a year and a half ago, I pledged to make Kiva loans on behalf of our blog. After making several Kiva loans, I’ve decided it is time to donate to and highlight different organizations helping families and/or the environment around the world. This month, I have made a donation to Women for Women International on behalf of Eco Child’s Play.

Call it a chick thing. Call it too many episodes of “Little House on the Prairie” growing up. Call it a quest for crafting a livelihood around our inner female pioneer, wanting to create businesses around our passions for food, the land and leaving this world a better place. While the number of farms in the U.S. continues to decline overall, the number of farms purchased and run by women under 55 is on an upswing. With most of these new female farm ventures embracing sustainable agriculture principles — and many moving into farming after careers in other industries entirely — these chicks add a significant positive ripple into our food system, one organic, heirloom tomato at a time.

“Women farmers today are reinventing the face of organic agriculture,” explains Denise O’Brien, executive director of the Women in Food and Agriculture Network. “They’re focused on raising healthy food for their community and often sell their products through farmers’ markets or community supported agriculture initiatives.” Young women, such as Zoë Bradbury in Oregon, are ditching traditional career paths early on to go for their dreams of being a farmer and contributing to creating a local, healthy food system. Or these women may run diversified farm-based businesses, such as Marguerite Ramlow who runs Artha Sustainable Living Center from her farm in Wisconsin, conducting organic gardening, yoga, renewable energy and sustainable living workshops on-site.

Why this trend of women launching farm and food based businesses?

Editor’s note: The Santa Fe Women’s Group in Costa Rica is empowering themselves by making biogas from manure. Written by guest author Thomas Carmona.

As if cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing were not enough, the women of Santa Fe also lead a powerful organization, the Santa Fe Women’s Group, which fulfills many vital roles for the community. One of the group’s biggest projects has been producing biogas.

The Project

The Santa Fe Biogas project, in its initial stages, was simply a concern communicated in Women’s Group meetings: “How can we avoid buying expensive tanks of gas and inhaling smoke in the kitchen?”

Editor’s note: This week, Eco-Libris blogger Raz Goldenik talks with author Diane MacEachern about her new book Big Green Purse. This post was originally published on February 22, 2008.

Can women make the world a greener and a better place with their purses? Diane MacEachern believes they do and she wrote a great book Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power To Create a Cleaner, Greener World, which is a call-to-action for women to use their power as buyers (women spend 85 percent of every dollar in the marketplace) to make a difference.

MacEachern’s message is simple but revolutionary: if women harness the “power of their purse” and intentionally shift their spending money to commodities that have the greatest environmental benefit, they can create a cleaner, greener world.

We covered the book few weeks ago, and since I was fascinated with the simple but yet powerful message of the book, I wanted to learn a little bit more about it from the author itself and interviewed Diane MacEachern. I know that not all of you see green consumerism as the best way to fight global warming and achieve sustainability, but Diane makes a very good case here in explaining how realistic and powerful option it is. you are welcome to read and judge for yourself. The book was published last Thursday, February 28.

Exercise is a green approach to health care. Yes, a green pregnancy means making the most of what you take into your body, through what you eat, drink, and breathe, and also absorb through your skin, hair, and nails. But how you move your body is another powerful green way to make a difference.

There are many benefits of exercise during pregnancy, including improved physical conditioning, strength, flexibility, and stamina. It builds endurance for labor and delivery and a quicker postnatal recovery. By exercising regularly, you may be able to reduce some of the common discomforts of pregnancy such as backache, swelling, and constipation. Most of all, you feel great about yourself when you exercise.

How Exercise Can Help More Than Medication

Let’s take a look at the effects of exercise versus medications for two of the most important complications of pregnancy.

Gestational Diabetes

As many as one in eight women will develop gestational diabetes sometime during their pregnancies, increasing health risks for themselves and their babies. Researchers at the University of Southern California School of Medicine studied a group of women who had already developed gestational diabetes and who had fasting blood glucose levels high enough to require insulin. Half of the women in the study received the recommended insulin. The other half got personal trainers instead. The trainers supervised the women while they did simple twenty-minute stints on exercise bikes. The results were startling: moderate aerobic exercise was equally effective to insulin! Blood glucose levels were statistically the same in both groups.

Oh yeah, you read the subject of this post correctly … shopping, eek. The holiday gift season usually begins the day after Thanksgiving, a day which I intentionally avoid doing any buying. This year, shops and merchants are breaking out the good stuff (and the good deals) right after Halloween to try and help jump-start the economy again.

If having a gift-free holiday is not something your family would go for, why

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The Raging Grannies, pursuers of activist causes since 1986 are still going strong. From humble beginnings as a peace group in Canada, to The Today Show, magazine articles, newspaper and tv coverage, the grannies have a rich history. They’ve been arrested, investigated, cheered and jeered, but still they go out and rage for change.

Join me in a look at the history and accomplishments of this group of seniors [...]

Sunshine isn’t the only great thing about summer - don’t forget the sales! With a continued concern about the cost of green living, you now have the chance to be green and save green at the same time (ironic, no?). Greenloop, the Portland-based online store, is having its annual summer sale with all clothing, accessories, and bodycare for men, women and children being marked down from 20-60% off.

Greenloop is one woman’s

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Surf, sun, and fun - the most common things Long Beach, California is known for. Thanks to Wisdom Tees,
we can add another phrase to that list: sustainable style. Many of the
eco-clothing brands like to use shocking images on their apparel to try
and inspire others to act, but Wisdom is different. "We believe that
wearing our Wisdom tees with purely positive and inspiring
affirmations, one will have a clear impact on his or

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Two weeks ago, I lost one of my favorite socks while moving to a new apartment. I'd feel pretty silly about having just a pair of sock being shipped across the country so I kept putting it off. While browsing around my local Whole Foods yesterday, I spotted Maggie's Functional Organics socks in the clothing section (which was next to the vegetables… go figure). Having checked out Maggie's site once or

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