(Photo: Model/green makeup artist May Lindstrom holding Philips’s new EnduraLED 60 bulb for McGraw-Hill’s Green Lighting book in their Green Guru Guide series. copyright: McGraw-Hill Professional photographer: Courtney Dailey)

Hiro Ballroom
88th 9th Av
NYC

Bastille Day
July 14, 8pm

Green Lighting Celebration

Meet Seth Leitman and Brian Howard, the  authors of  Green Lighting, McGraw-Hill’s new book in their Green Guru Guide series during the Rock The Reactors benefit  at the Hiro Ballroom in New York City on July 14, Bastille Day, 88th 9th Av. starting promptly at 8pm.

Recently, the state of Vermont voted not to renew Entergy’s license to operate the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. On April 2nd, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation followed suit by denying Entergy a new water permit for Indian Point.

Rock The Reactors, an anti-nuclear group dedicated to the shut down of the Indian Point nuclear power plant 30 miles North of Manhattan, which includes many ex-Indian Point workers working green jobs in the solar and LED industry, is inviting the anti-coal and anti-nuclear leadership to meet trend setters in the green fashion and design community, creating a strong coalition in support of the work done by dozens of IPSEC member organizations to prevent another catastrophic accident.

Anyone and everyone with something to say, something to sing, will have three minutes on stage. Commoners and celebrities alike. Poets, musicians, activists, dreamers, salesmen, dancers… three minutes to express your dismay, desire or involvement in shutting down Indian Point! (or BP)

Bastille Day at the Hiro Ballroom is sponsored by the Project Green Search modeling competition, in partnership with Greendrinks, GreenMUA and Global Green USA.

Join Rock The Reactors on Bastille Day, July 14 in New York, to finish what Musicians United For Safe Energy started back in 1979 with the No Nukes concert series.

Sonic soundscapes provided by Martin Ear. Performance by  C.B. Heinemann.

For all the information on the event, sponsors, participants, visit the Rock The Reactors website.

Read more about the Green Lighting book on The Green Living Guy blog.

(Bring LEDs. RSVP on facebook)

Women of the Green Generation held their first meeting in June of 2009. Kris Willey felt inspired to start a sustainable networking group for women because she had been attending green events for the past 2 years and suddenly realized that the majority of people she was connecting with were other women. When she mentioned this idea to some of her girl friends in green business, the response she received was an enthusiastic and resounding “YES!”

Women of the Green Generation creates a space where women can share their ideas and passions for solving environmental and social problems with economically viable eco-solutions.  The purpose is to provide a space for professional women to support each other. This can be done by means of sharing resources, business referrals, patronizing each other, sharing knowledge and experience, supporting sustainable community projects & non profits and the by the simple act of volunteering to help each other when help is needed.

Members consists mainly of women who either own or work for green businesses, but the group is not limited to green business women only, in fact they actively encourage other women to get more involved in sustainable business practices or think about creating products or services that reflect the sustainable paradigm of  “good for you good for the planet.”

WOTGG is dedicated to helping women find success in the green business space. Their mission is to inspire, educate, motivate, share resources, and connect with other individuals and organizations that are actively engaged in sustaining our planet and working towards positive transformation.

Their are hosting their Annual Summit at Evo-South in downtown Los Angeles on June 12th, 2010.

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There’s something in the air, can you feel it? Suddenly this country has awakened to an issue long buried as a forgotten environmental cause no longer worthy of much attention.

The anti-nuclear movement had gone out of fashion, imagine, when years ago it was all the rage. But you know, like all fashion, what was old is new again… what goes around comes around. Just like a style long worn out gathering dust in your closet, suddenly you want to shake off the cobwebs and wear it anew, looking as fresh as the day you bought it.

What happened was easy to predict for those with an ear to the ground and their eyes on the ball… The anti-nuclear movement started the environmental movement. There wouldn’t have been a need for grassroots renegades in the 60’s to start installing solar power and wind turbines, had it not been to “fight the power” embodied by the nuclear power industry. Climate change came much later, we all got side tracked.

In America there’s 104 civilian nuclear reactors in operation, usually two or three to a nuclear power plant. They’re all past their due date, built in the 60’s and 70’s, half of them leaking radioactivity. The task of decommissioning them, shutting them down, is so expensive, so daunting, it’s been put off, irresponsibly, by a governing authority totally bought and paid for by its own industry. It’s called the NRC, it stands for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The nuclear industry monitors itself, it has no other overseeing body, no independent safety assessors.

But now the nuclear power industry is broke, because it’s so costly to run, and it only does so because of the immense subsidies given to them, including the billions it costs each time there’s an accident, like when two Entergy plants were flooded during Katrina. So Obama, under pressure from Exelon, the Illinois-based utility which donated heavily to his campaign, wants to write the nuclear power industry a bail-out check for $58 billion dollars in loan guarantees to build new plants, when we should be using that money to train engineers to safely close down old plants before it’s too late.

It’s now cheaper to produce electricity from solar and wind when you take into account the long term environmental costs of nuclear power, and you don’t have to pawn off a ten thousand years legacy of radioactive waste on future generations. That’s the problem we’re faced with today, a problem much more pressing than climate change, down played by everyone involved in a cover up worse than anything experienced with banking scandals.

This week, the Vermont legislature voted 26 to 4 to shut down their nuclear power plant. They were the only state in the Union with authority superceding the NRC. A major victory for the anti-nuclear movement, which has witnessed the NRC rubber stamping new licenses for old reactors all over the country, despite public outcry around hosting communities. The Vermont vote has turned the tide, because it showed the media, that given the choice, a majority in this country would rather not go down the path of nuclear power anymore, because it’s a dirty, unnecessary risk.

In addition to solar and wind, the introduction of super efficient lighting, especially light emitting diodes (LEDs), is reducing electrical consumption in areas where energy saving programs have been put in place like New York and California. Fashion is rising to the occasion. During fashion week, Eco-Chick reports that designers like Gary Harvey have started to incorporate anti-nuclear themes and slogans into their clothing. We need more… we need cool t-shirts and jackets to put the message out there on the streets!

It’s no secret that when I’m not blogging about fashion or electric cars, I also run an anti-nuclear direct action group called Rock The Reactors which has focused primarily on the Indian Point nuclear power plant just 30 miles North of Manhattan on the shores of the Hudson River. Green fashion model May Lindstrom, also known as Betcee, lent her striking image early in her career to the first stories published about our work. In the last 4 years Rock The Reactors has been organizing events, it researched, wrote and filed with Green Nuclear Butterfly and other IPSEC members, over 158 petitions against the relicensing of the plant.

On July 14, Rock The Reactors will host a “Celebration of Green Lighting” at one of New York’s most popular clubs, the Hiro Ballroom. We’re asking designers to come up with amazing things models can wear and photographers can shoot on that evening. You have six months to prepare, make extraordinary things. Anti-nuclear is back in vogue… imagine… high tech and green gadgets have taken the place of boiling water with the most toxic man-made substance on Earth. Isn’t that a no brainer, a win-win situation? Except as usual, the folks in power don’t know any better yet, so fashion needs to show them.

(Photo Credit: Brian Clark Howard)

Why is the green movement downsizing? Green stores are closing, green magazines are folding. What’s happening? At a time when we need more sustainable businesses than ever, they might be sustainable in the sense that their owners and customers are concerned about the fate of the planet, but they are not sustainable in the financial sense… now why is that?

I started asking myself that question a few weeks ago. First thing that came to mind was what Abbie Hoffman said: “America is in a perpetual state of revolution, because the mainstream keeps absorbing its counterculture.” That’s been the criticism of Earth Day, everybody is green now, even ExxonMobil.  Avatar sends out a beautiful environmental message, sponsored by McDonald’s. Doesn’t anyone feel the hypocrisy here, or is it just me?

I’ve noticed that once a green brand gets bought up by a large corporation, their sales might go up, but their message gets toned down. The companies themselves stop their militancy, stop supporting causes, stop bringing up the rear. And while there’s more green products on the shelves than ever, still only a bleep on the GNP radar screen, why does it feel like we’re right back where we started?

That’s because even though most people will tell you they’re environmentalists, and some very well may be, conscious, recycling, tree hugging souls… they really haven’t done their homework on the politics, studied how deeply rooted the problem really is. So if you don’t understand the past, you’re doomed to repeat it. All we’ve done is hand over our best play to the opposite team.

It’s very naive to think that we’re all in this together, and that rich or poor we breathe the same air. I used to think so. It helped bring about the green economy, eco-luxury, pricey electric cars and far away land organic spas. But look around you, has anything really changed? I don’t mean to depress you, but when are we going to stop handing over the shop?

Green stores come and go because the moment Wal-Mart, Kohl’s or Target start selling organic clothes… or their version of what organic means, hundreds of pioneering green start-ups go belly up. It’s the law of averages. When did volume equate survival? So people on limited income can afford the green lifestyle.

Environmentalists have revolutionized all industries. From the lab to the factory floor; to the distribution chain to the stores; and into people’s homes. From the organic booze at the bar to the safe cosmetics in your kit, green chemistry is changing everything we dream about, make, sell and use. But are we stuck with corporate culture? Is that what we want in our lives. To wear GE proudly on our sleeve, refer to ourselves as “we” when we talk about our work? Knowing that while we might be installing solar panels, the company we work for also makes nuclear reactors for submarines?

That’s the compromise people were not willing to make in the 60’s which people are willing to make now. Both worlds, the green world we’re trying to build, and the old post-industrial world we’re trying to escape from, co-existing side by side, creating an eerie sense of stagnation and helplessness, eroding our spirit, defusing our anger, ultimately slowing down the pace of change to a Bilderberg crawl.

Electric cars at the expense of clean electricity, as deals are made to power the charging infrastructure with new nuclear power. Actors and actresses who one day lend their face to environmental causes, while the next are seen on billboards in Asia hording the worse anti-green crap there is. And they live with themselves, within the lie… actors, acting… telling us what we want to hear, thinking we wouldn’t notice.

I’ve been accused of being too pure. And yet I’m not perfect. I live in an old farm house, so old in fact, we don’t have the resources to fix it up so it can be energy efficient. Our solution is to keep the heat so low, we wear three sweaters, and long for Spring. That’s because green work, real green work, doesn’t pay unless you sell out to the machine, then you become one of them, with that white glow, that fake smile, that superficial graciousness… smothered in kindness and lies.

In the 60’s we wanted to change the system… and we did, to a point. The new generation has embraced a global understanding of our responsibilities… thousands of books and websites educating us about how to go green. An alternative economy has grown out of this, where solar, wind, ethanol, LEDs, sustainable clothing, organic coffee and green cosmetics, have transformed corporate culture to be more in tune with nature.

But we still have a billion vehicles spewing toxic brew, old nuclear plants leaking into ground water, coal mining blowing up mountains, burger chains clear cutting rainforest… why? Why as a collective mind can’t we change our destructive behavior? Why is war, exile, desolation, starvation more important to our species than restoration and stewardship? Why is playing video games 3 hours a day, more important than joining a conservation corps to revive neighborhoods? We live in a culture of avoidism, where it’s easier to walk away, than confront your demons. How can that help you grow as a human being?

All the pressures end up falling on the shoulders of a few… all too often badly paid, hard working drones, fueled by a sense of desperation. We need a big win. We need something larger than life to give us hope again. A sign the planet isn’t going to let us down. A place to hang our hearts.

As I was walking down the road this evening trying to wrap my head around all the things I have set in motion in my life, and how in the heck I am going to string them all together into something that makes sense a few months from now, I started looking around at all the houses, all the Christmas lights going up everywhere… including this little choochoo train on a neighbor’s roof. A few years ago I would get sad about all the electricity these lights was wasting, some families paying hundreds of dollars in utility bills simply for the pleasure of ornating their homes with multicolored bulbs celebrating a holiday which for some, is nothing more than a marketing ploy to empty our pockets in exchange of gifts soon discarted and forgotten.

But then it dawned on me, if it hadn’t been for these Christmas lights, the LED industry wouldn’t have found such an easy niche to slip into, to sneak their wares into a marketplace resisting change, without setting off too many alarm bells. Today, the majority of Christmas lights are LEDs, short for light emitting diodes, it only took a few short years. They don’t get hot, they don’t set dry pine trees on fire, they don’t cost an arm and a leg to keep lit all night long. They consume a fraction, as much a 95% less electricity, than the Christmas lights we were using as recently as a decade ago. So that’s a Godsend, because it means that LEDs are slowly creeping into our lives, dramatically reducing our electrical footprint, to the point where it might very well be possible to shut down some of the older, dirtier coal and nuclear power plants which are contributing such grief to so many.

So this Christmas I’m thankful for these otherwise excessive lights strung in trees and windows, even if they burn for an ideal, like Santa Claus, I left behind long ago… they are only there for a few days, yet they have opened a whole can of worms which is game changing for the utilities, allowing a very disruptive technology to quietly enter the marketplace and provide technological innovation that, long term, is having a positive impact on the planet by reducing our footprint.

If you’re reading this blog, it’s because you have green bones in your body… you care about the decisions you make buying clothing… you know that the Greenloop pays close attention to the labels and the materials it sells, the philosophy of the designers. Every aspect of fashion is changing, from the jobs models are accepting, to the ingredients found in make-up. Our industry is led by the buying decisions women and men make when they spend their money in stores, online… this is the beauty of natural, philanthropic capitalism.

The same way the lights on the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza indirectly moves inventors, engineers, scientists to constantly improve on the technology that makes things shine so we can read at night, or drive dark roads… the same is true with cosmetics. Every time you buy a beauty product from a company which has made the effort to either remove or never include toxic ingredients in the first place, there is a green chemistry lab at a research center or a university which is getting additional funding to develop cradle to cradle molecules. That is what motivates me every day to continue the work I do, linking the evolution of green consumer products to the planet saving science behind them.

We have some wonderful surprises in store for you, some of which are premature to talk about now, but I can tell you this much. In February I am assisting the Green Energy & Building Expo in Connecticut at the Mohegan Sun organized by an ex-marine, Peter Romano, who understands the contributions our immense defense budget can make by developing green alternatives, as predicted by the First Earth Battalion in the 70’s, most recently depicted in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats with George Clooney.

Then in May, rock promoter legend Steve Zuckerman has invited me to speak about our Big Igloo project at his Next Gen Expo in Hollywood, Florida. A who’s who of some of the cutting edge social engineers in the country, a mix of TED and Bioneers coming together to redefine futurism with some of the stars of the medium.

Come June, Summer Solstice, the Greenloop and GreenMUA is developing a two day event in Los Angeles which will bring together all these elements around a celebration of beauty and fashion, to kick off our 2010 Project Green Search. It’s going to be a long walk from here to there… but it’s also starting to look more and more like a real train, with lots of wagons filled with wondeful people and planet saving tools… and I’m thankful.

Merry Christmas!

Actually, only seven… three of them already live in Los Angeles;  Vanessa Meier, Rachel Avalon and Jessica Williamson. Both Zion Francis and Juliana Tran are from Austin, TX. Ariel Clay is coming from San Francisco. Leilani Munter from Cornelius, NC. Rachael Joy from Mount Rainier, MD. Erika Schmid from Portland, OR and Karen Pannochia from Miami.

It wasn’t easy for Project Green Search to narrow it down from 130+ entries to just ten. The online voting was a bit of a confusing mess, because the design platform we chose to build the web site only offered that voting option as a preset. Many people ended up voting by mistake while they were simply trying to access a contestant page… there was no instruction manual or practice run, but it was the only option we had. Wordpress or nothing. We were dead set on launching this competition, so we made it work. We will do better next year.

We  asked the judges not to look at the number of stars, the rating, only consider how many votes each entry received. All things considered, online vote popularity didn’t feature all that much into their decision. They looked closely at modeling potential, education, screen presence, media background and experience. It boiled down to running averages on each judge’s top ten submission in order of preference, inviting to the finals those who featured most frequently, the highest on each judge’s list.

We’re confident that the ten women picked to participate in the finals represent the best expression of majority verdict by the judges. It wasn’t easy. Competitions create more losers than winners, that’s what I want to address here. We don’t cast Project Green Search in the same light as your run of the mill cut throat reality TV show. PGS is much more of a collaboration, developing talent to bring attention to issues all dear to our heart. In a sense, the winner, should and will, represent all the other contestants, become a spokesperson for all the women who entered this contest, which isn’t a contest really, it’s more like a direct action!

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Andira Rain Tees was founded by Beth Doane in 2005. The word “Andira” describes a tall tree that grows in the Brazilian Amazon and has been been used medicinally for centuries by indigenous people. Due to logging and deforestation, the species is rapidly disappearing.

Andira Rain Tees are 100% organic cotton and designed by youth living in endangered rainforests across Central and South America. The illustrations are what they see around them and each Rain Tee features their name and thoughts about what’s happening.

For every Rain tee sold, the non-profit Kids Saving the Rain Forest will receive a tree they can plant to replace one that has been destroyed. Though a sapling is by no means an equal to a tree hundreds of years old, it is a small start.

World Rainforest Week is October 12th-18th. Take a moment this week to learn more about what’s happening in the rainforests around the world and what you can do to make a positive difference.

If you haven’t heard of Colin Beaven yet, let me tell you- the man is inspiring. He convinced his Prada-loving, quadruple-vente-latte-addicted wife to join him in an experiment to reduce their negative impact on the planet. To zero. ZERO. No waste, no petroleum use, no plastics, no purchases of new items, no electricity. Did I mention these two live in Manhattan…with a three-year-old daughter? Yes. Bold..and mildly insane.

Somehow, the three Beavans made it out of the year long experiment alive with many lessons learned, a blog, a book, and a movie featured at Sundance. Here’s Colin and family in the documentary that pushed them to the edge of their marriage…

Inspired yet? Are you ready to ride your bike to work, buy bulk food, reuse everything, and turn off your lights after dark? Starting October 18th, No Impact Week is your chance to give it a shot. Check out the guide presented by the Huffington Post…



You can download the guide and share it, electronically of course,with anybody who you think might be up to the challenge. It’s a big thing to take on, but so fun. Who wouldn’t get at least a few laughs from attempting to wash their clothes in the bathtub…with their feet?  You can sign up here and keep the conversation going on Twitter by using the hashtag #nipweek and following @noimpactgroup. Except, it does require electricity to tweet, soooo you might have to scratch that last part.