Green Goes with Everything: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet
3/5
()
About this ebook
Well, think of Today show contributor Sloan Barnett as that friend. A mother of three, a dedicated consumer advocate, Sloan gives us a fast, simple, down-toearth primer on the ways our homes are making us sick, and what we can all do to transform them into the safe sanctuaries we want and need them to be.
Sloan exposes the toxic truth behind the household products we use every day -- from laundry detergent to toothpaste to lipstick. She explains how these and other seemingly benign stuff can harm us and our children. She offers an array of alternatives, and inspires us to see that we're never helpless: Every day, we have the power to make better, smarter, safer choices.
Packed with common sense and sass, product picks and practical tips, Green Goes With Everything is for everyone who wants to live a healthier life.
Sloan Barnett
Sloan Barnet is a regular contributor to NBC's Today show and the Green Editor for KNTV, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. She has been a television and print journalist for more than ten years, and wrote a popular consumer advice column for New York's Daily News for nearly a decade. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and three children. For more information, please visit greengoeswitheverything.com.
Related to Green Goes with Everything
Related ebooks
Green Mama: The Guilt-Free Guide to Helping You and Your Kids Save the Planet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hooray for Grandparents: Ideas for Keeping Close, Building Traditions, and Creating Lasting Memories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSmart Housekeeping: a well managed home is a mirror of a good housewife's personality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMinimalist Home: How to Declutter, Simplify Your Life for Better Calm and Focus Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5My Life in Thirty-Seven Therapies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCleaning Essentials For Everyone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mumpreneur Diaries: Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Survive a Move: By Hundreds of Happy People Who Did Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGive It Up!: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Be Your Own Change Guru: The Ultimate Women's Guide for Thriving at Midlife Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFeed Your Soul with Flowers: A Therapy in Bloom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreating a Beautiful Home Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Validate Me! (How My Mom's Hoarding Kind of Messed Me Up.) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving in Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How To Have A Roaringly Successful Baby Shower Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSleep to be Sexy, Smart, & Slim: Get the Best Sleep of Your Life Tonight and Every Night Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClutter-Free Home: Declutter, Clean and Organize Your Home for a Stress-Free Life!: Organize & Declutter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreen Living - Simple Ways To Make Your Life Greener Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Space. More Time. More Joy!: Organizing Your Best Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHappiness for Two: 75 Secrets for Finding More Joy Together Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Jane Kenyon's "Having it out with Melancholy" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWinter Living Style Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLife Hacks for Parents: Practical Hints for Making Life with Kids Easier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFix It, Make It, Grow It, Bake It: The D.I.Y. Guide to the Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Detox Your Life for Radiant Health Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCrap at My Parents' House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Home Improvement For You
Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Organizing for the Rest of Us: 100 Realistic Strategies to Keep Any House Under Control Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5World's Best Life Hacks: 200 Ingenious Ways to Use Everyday Objects Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: Discover the Joy of Spending Less, Sharing More, and Living Generously Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Complete Book of Home Organization Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/510,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Declutter Like a Mother: A Guilt-Free, No-Stress Way to Transform Your Home and Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Small Apartment Hacks: 101 Ingenious DIY Solutions for Living, Organizing and Entertaining Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nobody Wants Your Sh*t: The Art of Decluttering Before You Die Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Book of Clean: Tips & Techniques for Your Home Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Elements of Style: Designing a Home & a Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Complete Do-it-Yourself Manual Newly Updated Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Homegrown & Handmade: A Practical Guide to More Self-Reliant Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Self-Sufficient Backyard Homestead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOrganization Hacks: Over 350 Simple Solutions to Organize Your Home in No Time! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Build a House: A Practical, Common-Sense Guide to Residential Construction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Green Goes with Everything
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The green revolution is upon us, and this is another book filled with info about the toxic products in our lives and how we can make little changes to our lifestyles in order to make us more healthy, and the planet more healthy along with it.I have to admit, this book did have some good advice and good information in it. It was very America-centric, which is good for Americans, but bad for anybody who happens to live outside America when they read this book. I have plenty of research to do now to find out if Canada has pretty much the same view on chemicals and additives that America does. I know we don't allow bovine growth hormone to be used anymore, but beyond that, I have to admit that I have no idea what my country's green regulations are.Green Goes With Everything was broken up into easy-to-understand sections relating to the products and processes covered, from household cleaners to makeup to clothing, which prevented a whole lot of jumping around that I've seen in other books. It also had a handy listing at the back for companies that make green versions of a lot of the everyday products that we use, so as to give us a little more choice in the matter, which I'm quite thankful for.However (and isn't there always a 'however'?) this book felt like a huge advertisement for Shaklee products. Which I wouldn't necessarily mind so much if the author didn't have a personal stake in flogging Shaklee products. The company may make some good green alternatives to common products, but when the company is owned by the author's husband, I really have to ask myself how much she was recommending the products because she'd feel bad not recommending them, or because she gets to benefit from the potential increased sales. They may work just fine, but since her motives are suspect, now so are mine. I don't like branding being thrown in my face like that. It makes me take the advertising less seriously. Minus points on that one.This book also seems to be heavily geared towards women rather than men, or women and men together. Since it was written by a woman, I can't fault her too much, since most people tend to write what they know and for whom they know, and most people tend to generally have a majority of same-gendered friends. But this struck a chord with me and made me wonder if the proponents of green living are, as a majority, female rather than male.Either way, this made for some pretty odd advice. Like throw away your chemical cleaners right now, but even though your makeup might be dangerous too, yeah, just keep using that stuff and replace one item a week with a green alternative from now on. Is makeup actually that important to women? I understand that chemical cleaner are more dangerous all around than foundation cream or lipstick, but it still seems odd to say, "By the way, some lipstick has been shown to have dangerously high amounts of lead, so keep using it until it's gone, but if you can, try to find a green alternative, but if not, meh, that's not so bad." Minus points again on skewed priorities.But if you can get past the rampant advertising for her husband's company, you'll find a lot of useful information and advice in this book. Though it has its problems, I can't deny that this was a helpful book and an informative read.
Book preview
Green Goes with Everything - Sloan Barnett
GREEN GOES WITH EVERYTHING
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2008 by Sloan Barnett
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnett, Sloan.
Green goes with everything : simple steps to a healthier life and a cleaner planet / by Sloan Barnett.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Housing and health. 2. Environmental health. 3. Food—Toxicology. I. Title.
RA770.B37 2008
613'.5—dc22 2008021593
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7864-2
ISBN-10: 1-4165-7864-1
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
To Roger
and my three best reasons to save the planet
Spencer, Violet, and Lyle
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
THE REAL DIRT ON CLEAN
CHAPTER TWO
SCARY CLEAN
CHAPTER THREE
SAFE CLEAN
CHAPTER FOUR
CLEAN BODY
CHAPTER FIVE
CLEAN BABY
CHAPTER SIX
CLEAN FOOD
CHAPTER SEVEN
CLEAN WATER
CHAPTER EIGHT
CLEAN AIR
CHAPTER NINE
CLEAN ENERGY
EPILOGUE
RESOURCE GUIDE
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GREEN GOES WITH EVERYTHING
INTRODUCTION
Let’s begin by agreeing that we are all creatures of habit. We do what we do every day because that’s the way we’ve always done it. It takes a big reason for us to make big changes in our lives. And the reason is usually very personal.
Much to my surprise, I’ve become a green activist. I wasn’t always. Oh sure, I cared a lot about our planet and the changes we’ve made to it. But it wasn’t clear to me what I could do to make a difference. Then something very big and very personal happened and I saw the light, and the light was green.
Here’s my story.
My son Spencer had just turned three when, one day, I noticed he was coughing a lot. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Kids get sick. I told him to lie down, thinking he’d be fine—it was just a cough. A short time later I realized that his heart was pounding, as if it were trying to beat right out of his chest. Terrified, my husband Roger and I rushed him to the hospital. The emergency room doctors placed our son on oxygen and gave him strong steroids to help clear his airways. We spent the next two nights in the intensive care unit. The doctors told us he had something called reactive airways dysfunction syndrome—a form of asthma.
Asthma? How did our little boy develop asthma? We’d never heard of asthma coming on so suddenly. We were confused and sick with worry.
We talked to our son’s doctor. We talked to other doctors. We asked questions but never got satisfactory answers. Ultimately, we knew our son’s condition had to be either genetic or environmental. Neither my husband nor I had any family history of asthma, going back for four generations. So we concluded the cause was environmental.
I’ve spent most of my career working as a consumer reporter, so I knew how to dive right in and begin researching. It didn’t take long to discover that the United States is in the midst of an asthma epidemic. One of every thirteen school-age children in the United States has asthma. Asthma in children younger than five has increased 160 percent since 1980. Nine million U.S. children under the age of eighteen have been diagnosed with asthma. Asthma is the most common chronic childhood disease in the United States, and it’s the third leading cause of hospitalization among children younger than fifteen. The suspected cause of these stunning changes? At least six well-designed epidemiological studies have found one answer: a strong link between the use of certain cleaning products and asthma.
¹
That stopped me cold. The cause of my son’s asthma may have been me. I may have been poisoning my own son.
At the time, Roger had just become chairman of Shaklee Corporation, the leading natural nutrition company in the United States. Shaklee also produces a line of natural, nontoxic cleaning products, and has since the 1960s. Shaklee was green when green was just a color and biodegradable
was a word only scientists used. We started using Shaklee products exclusively, and Spencer has never again visited the emergency room. Coincidence? I don’t think so, and once you’ve read this book, I don’t think you will either.
After that scare, I went to work learning about living clean and green. Much of the information you need to get clean and green is out there, but we’re all so busy we don’t have time to weed through all that material on the Internet and in books. Plus, it’s all so scientific, it’s easy to lose your way.
Since my husband and I began our crusade to help others get clean, my family and friends have bombarded me with questions about everything from cleaning products to baby clothes. I found myself becoming the go-to person for all sorts of well-educated but woefully misinformed people. And the more questions they asked, the more I realized the depth of the need out there for information in plain English. The media assault us daily with scary statistics and dire warnings about harmful products. Sometimes the information is reliable, sometimes it’s not. Who can hope to separate what’s important and relevant from what’s just sensational and frightening? I thought that if I could compile the most crucial information, make it accessible and user friendly, and maybe even a little entertaining, people would be able to absorb the message.
At least six well-designed epidemiological studies have found one answer: a strong link between the use of certain cleaning products and asthma. That stopped me cold. The cause of my son’s asthma may have been me. I may have been poisoning my own son.
Writing the book you have in your hands became my mission.
As a girl, I loved nature. I was a green teen, you might say. As far back as I can recall, I wanted to help our ailing planet. But I was naive; I thought saving the environment meant, for example, saving the penguins in Antarctica. I spent countless hours worrying about those penguins and their cold, fragile habitat, which I hoped to someday visit. I knew nothing about carbon footprints in those days, or emissions, or the ozone layer. And green? I thought that was something that looked cool with pink.
The epiphany came when I was twenty-one. My mother organized an ambitious family expedition to the South Pole. My parents, one of my brothers, and my eighty-three-year-old grandmother all embarked on the journey of a lifetime. At last I was going to meet my beloved penguins face to face.
There was nothing first class about our trip. This was no Princess cruise, with fancy food and nightly entertainment. There was no bingo, no disco, no spa. We sailed on a workhorse of a boat that also functioned as an icebreaker. When we boarded, we were each issued a huge puffy red coat, filled with down. (There were sixty of us altogether, wearing the same red coats. A comical sight.) We burrowed into those coats as the weather grew colder, and by the end of our ten days at sea they had become a second skin. It was late December—summer in Antarctica—and while it was light almost twenty-four hours a day, the temperature was brisk.
I remember spotting my first iceberg. It shimmered before me like a mirage floating on a mirror-smooth sea. I’ll never forget that sight. The sunlight, the blue-green water against the stark white iceberg—I’ve yet to see any photo that conveys its breathtaking beauty.
When we finally reached the Antarctic, there was nothing but ice, snow, and one lonely scientific station. I could have stared into that blank white horizon forever. So pristine, so clean, so pure. And then I saw them: thousands of penguins marching toward us. (They do march, by the way.) Picture it: sixty tourists in puffy red coats meeting something like half a million little beings in tuxedos. They barked, pooped everywhere—the penguins, not the tourists—and smelled really bad. But I loved it; for the first time, I felt fully alive, immersed in the experience, a part of nature, not an observer. Magic.
It was that trip that made me decide I wanted to work on environmental issues, to do what I could to safeguard the earth. But I was the daughter of a practical woman. She wanted me to keep my options open. I wanted to attend Yale’s School of Forestry—she convinced me to apply to law schools as well. (I was single-minded, however: My essay on my law school applications was all about Antarctica.)
While waiting to hear from grad schools I applied for a job with Greenpeace. They had an office in New York City, my hometown. I remember worrying that my outfit wasn’t Greenpeace-y enough, so I went shopping for something crunchier. Less Barneys. My concept of environmentalist wear at the time was sort of Twiggy meets Tonto. When I arrived at the tiny Greenpeace office, I knocked timidly at the door, but there was no answer. Odd. For a moment I thought I must be at the wrong place. Nope. It said Greenpeace
right on the door. These were the days before cell phones, so I couldn’t call. There was a dry cleaner right below the office. They let me use their phone to make sure I had the right day and time. I reached the Greenpeace answering machine and left a message. When they called back to reschedule, I learned that everyone in the office had been out that day on an action
—which was code for the fact they’d all been arrested while protesting a tanker coming into New York Harbor. Even though I thought they were doing great work, I couldn’t see myself having a criminal record. I decided Greenpeace wasn’t for me.
So I went to work for a wonderful organization, the Rainforest Alliance. I was happy saving the parrots and the rubber trees, and then one day I got a frantic call from my mother: I’d gotten into law school. But not just any law school. A good one. New York University. It felt like destiny, so I started classes that fall, with an eye toward an eventual career in environmental law.
The following summer I landed a job with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading organization specializing in legal action to protect the environment. But just before I started work, they decided that a first-year law student wasn’t the ideal intern. I was devastated; I believed that the NRDC was the best place for me. I ended up in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. It wasn’t saving the penguins, but it was a sexy second best.
Life takes you where it will. I continued my career at the DA’s office for several more years but also found that I had a knack for writing and a growing interest in working in television. I knew that the fastest way to land a TV job was to leave New York for a smaller market, but New York was my home and I didn’t want to leave. A friend suggested I try writing a newspaper column offering free legal advice. That seemed like a fine idea: I knew that most people who came into the DA’s office had never met a lawyer before. For the most part, they had no money, no access to good legal counsel, no idea how to survive the system. I thought a Dear Abby
–style column about the law could provide a needed and valuable service. I wrote up a sample column and handed it to a friend who knew people at the New York Daily News. I didn’t think I had a shot. They were the largest newspaper in New York. But they loved my sample and gave me a chance. Within weeks I was also writing a legal column for the national magazine Mirabella.
I guess the stars were lining up for me. Around that same time, one of my girlfriends, who worked at ABC News, was riding an elevator, holding a copy of Mirabella under her arm. The head of hiring, who was standing next to her, spotted my photo and asked who I was. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at Peter Jennings’ desk at 2:00 a.m., with no on-air experience, analyzing the O.J. Simpson trial on live TV.
It’s funny; we often don’t so much determine our lives as get carried along by them. I got married. I had kids. I moved. I still cared about the environment, and I wrote a few checks to various environmental groups, but looking back I now see that I’d lost my way. In a sense my children brought me back to who I was meant to be. They made me think about the world they would one day inherit. Then, when Spencer got sick, I came full circle. The iceberg, the penguins, Mother Nature, the environment—all these things had suddenly become personal.
And I turned green. In a sense my own evolution into someone who cares passionately about what today are called green issues
tracked the evolution of our society’s appreciation and concern about the environment. Back in the late 1960s, when the environmental movement started to take off, it was mostly about pollution—smokestacks belching smoke, rivers so filled with chemical waste they caught fire, drinking water that caused diseases and death. I still remember the television ad that showed a proud native American with a single tear edging down his cheek as he watched people tossing litter on the ground.
Then, gradually, we began to see that everything we do affects everything else, that we live in a closed ecological system. By the 1990s, Americans started demanding safer, saner choices—food raised without pesticides and herbicides, products that are organic. Green
came along just in the past few years as a sort of shorthand for things that don’t hurt you or the world you live in. It went from someone else’s problem—those polluters
—to our own.
It’s suddenly become fashionable for Hollywood stars to ditch their limos and sports cars for fuel-stingy hybrids. But you don’t have to be rich to be green; in fact, one of the great things about green living is that it’s often more economical in the long run. You save money. That’s part of the attraction of energy-efficient fluorescent lightbulbs: Yes, they use less energy, but they also last ages longer than old lightbulbs, so while they cost more initially, you end up saving money. These days, you don’t have to march in the streets to show you’re green; all you need to do is screw in a new lightbulb.
That’s how little it takes and how easy it is to begin to take personal responsibility. I wasn’t one of those suddenly radicalized moms who throws out everything in the refrigerator but the baking soda and a lemon. I started slowly. I began by interviewing doctors, especially pediatricians, and I soon noticed that they were all about cures; they didn’t talk much about causes. These were the very same doctors who saved my son, who helped him breathe, but they weren’t conversant with what might be lurking behind his sickness. That stunned me and galvanized me.
In the years since those scary days, doctors have begun to acknowledge that our homes can make us sick, that they can often be filled with invisible poisons and toxic air. The seemingly benign products with which we wash our clothes and dishes and teeth and floors can shorten our lives. Even the things we buy to eat can put those we love at risk of disease.
Look, I don’t live in a log cabin. I don’t bake my own bread. I wear leather shoes like everyone else. I’m normal. I’m you. And I’m far from perfect when it comes to being green. I’m different shades of green, let’s say—some days kelly, some days hunter, some days a selfish lime. But I’m trying, and I think there’s a lot of value—practical value for you and your family—in trying, too.
When you think about how difficult life was for your grandmother, it’s hard not to be thankful for how much easier and convenient life is now. But hold the thanks. By failing to understand the hidden costs—economic, social, environmental, and, yes, physical—of the way we live our lives, we’ve put ourselves, our families, and our planet in grave danger.
I hear you. You’re saying, Look, I’m just one person; how can I possibly make a difference? No way can I save the planet.
True enough. But you can protect and save your family. And by doing so you can reduce the impact of everything you do on that small part of the planet over which you have some control, about which you have some real choices.
That’s what this book is about: having choices. And with each small, quiet, incremental better choice you make, you make your own corner of the globe a safer, healthier, more sustainable place.
Recently, I was reporting an Earth Day story for the local news. I told viewers that one quick way to save energy was to unplug their cell phone chargers. (Chargers keep drawing power even after the phone is fully charged.) Simple, right? Easy and hassle free. Then I got home that night and confronted my own hypocrisy. I hadn’t unplugged my own cell phone charger. Hey, I’ve got three kids. In the morning it’s all I can do to pour milk over the Cheerios, let alone remember the planet. But I try. I’ve gotten better. Even the most committed and dedicated environmentalists are always evolving.
When it comes to the environment—and many other things, for that matter—I think most people make choices based on three criteria: health, convenience, budget. Then, if their choice happens to be good for the planet too—great. Bonus. Hard to think about melting glaciers when you’re tired, hungry, and operating on a tight budget.
But you can protect and save your family. And by doing so you can reduce the impact of everything you do on that small part of the planet over which you have some control, about which you have some real choices.
That’s where this book comes in. It helps you make greener choices without sacrificing convenience and budget. More important, they’ll be choices that will also be improving your family’s health. And be warned: Once you get started, you won’t be able to stop. There’s a natural momentum that comes with doing the right thing for yourself and your family and your planet. You buy one nontoxic cleaning product, you start using one baby bottle made from materials that are safe for your infant, and the next thing you know you’re recycling and riding a bike to work and buying organic