Kimberly Danek Pinkson, Founder of the EcoMom Alliance

Sustainable: That which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

I came to the world of sustainability through my father, who worked with indigenous shamans the world over, and my Hungarian-born mother, who introduced my sister and I to global awareness. I always joke that when other kids were eating Twinkies and going to summer camps, we were eating organic papaya out of ceramic dishes, and going to Native American Sweat Lodge ceremonies.

I was always trying to save the rainforests, save the whales, save something. But this is not to say that I didn’t enjoy a day of shopping with my mom and going to brunch at Neiman Marcus. I just always wondered why the two worlds had to be disparate. So, quite naturally I became a bridge builder, looking for ways to bring ideas and people together in ways that would not happen otherwise.

It took becoming a mom though, for me to realize that I had to start taking more steps for a sustainable future. First it was just buying organic food. Then came the organic shampoos, conditioners and toothpastes. Eventually, it was organic cotton clothes and bed linens. And now, I’m the Founder and President of the EcoMom Alliance, an organization committed to inspiring and empowering moms to take "First Steps for A Sustainable Future." Funny how life happens isn’t it?

But what does sustainable mean and why is it important?

It means you matter. For thousands of years, indigenous people have known what contemporary science has now “proven.” We are all connected and what we drop into one “corner” of the ocean, impacts all of the other “corners” too...

Charlotte Hudson
When I think about being a "green" mom, I first think that "green" applies to me because I am a new mom. Everything with my 9 month old is a new experience and I feel quite green behind the ears.

But I am striving to do everything possible to raise him to be as healthy and happy as I can, which often coincides with trying to live a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Every day, I try to make good choices on his behalf -- about what he eats, what he plays with, how much time he spends outside (in the shade!) -- but these choices are not without their dose of reality.

The truth is that I work full-time in Washington, DC. Balancing home and work is challenging -- to say the least -- and that doesn't even count trying to manage caregivers, grandparents, the grocery and the laundry. We are all busy. We all wish we had more time for both ourselves and our families, so when someone challenges us to make our lives and the lives of our children a little greener, my first thought is… of course, but who has the time?

Luckily, I feel like making greener choices is often just as easy and inexpensive as we would make anyway. I feel like this is especially the case with the foods we choose to give our children. When I tell my friends that I have been making my son's organic baby food, their facial expressions reveal both awe and concern. Am I crazy? Who has that much time to spend in the kitchen?

The little secret is that it is really EASY and in many cases, less expensive. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to feed my son organic food -- at least as long as I could -- until he learns the word for "Happy Meal."

Wendy Gordon, General Manager, National Geographic's TheGreenGuide.com

I'm a mom with two college-aged kids. Correction, I've got one son in college and another who just graduated. The older one and I just packed up his dorm room of 4 years of college life and brought most of it home. I'm a "less is best" type, and so set right to work sorting what's to be kept, what's to be replaced and what's to pass along.

Neither one of our kids are overly consumptive, but the new grad could outfit a small village with the commemorative t-shirts he collected from the many social and sporting events he'd attended over 4 years. That hopefully is what's in store for their second life, following our wardrobe purge this week. The local thrift shop is the perfect resting stop for a lot of our clothes, once we've grown out of or beyond them.

The equipment he'd accumulated formed another small mountain. After 4 years, the laptop sorely needed replacing and so for a joint graduation/birthday gift, his dad and I got him a nice new computer. But while one computer had served him well throughout college, he managed to lose several phones and iPods along the way, so one desk drawer was dedicated to the power cords, extra batteries, and parts that come with every new devise. Not sure why, but he used the same drawer to collect empty ink cartridges. This is all good however because we boxed it all up and will take it to the local recycling center. They recover what they can and recycle the rest.

Clothes were packed neatly, winter and summer things separately. We'll wash and put away some things for longer-term storage as his first real job will take him to LA, where he won't need so many heavy things. The son still in college returned most of his textbooks to the university store for resale. The graduate preferred to keep his. That was fine. He had collected some amazing books on art, literature through the ages, philosophy, religion, and history. These possessions seemed like keepers.

He's back in his room at home, a pretty small apartment, but everything we're not giving away manages to fit (more or less). In a month, he'll be heading to California for a job and his first post-college apartment. He's bound to accumulate possessions with time, but I'm hopeful he's picked up just a little bit of his mom's sense of the value of things and the virtue of "enough."

Kimberly Danek Pinkson, Founder of the EcoMom Alliance

Yesterday my son came home from his first fishing trip with, yes, you guessed it, a fish. I was very excited and proud of him until I realized that I would have to help him clean it.

Native Americans talk about the web of life. How everything on this precious planet of ours is woven together just so. How it falls apart when we don’t walk in balance. I don’t eat meat very often, I am not a vegetarian anymore – gave it up during my pregnancy when my body seemed to scream out, "beef, beef, I want beef" – and I always talk about how important it is that kids grow up knowing where their food is coming from, but cutting off the fish’s head and cleaning out the guts? Ugghh, the things we go through in the name of raising children and walking our talk.

But I bucked up, asked Corbin to say a little prayer for the spirit of the fish that gave its life to him and then, we did the deed. And Corbin had him for dinner with garlic and lemon.

Thinking about this web of life is critical to shifting toward a greener lifestyle. As is realizing that this whole thing about trying to stop global warming, while noble and real, is not just about the planet. It is about you. Because sustaining your self, sustaining your home and sustaining your planet, it’s all connected. When push comes to shove, and the organic almonds at Trader Joes have gone up to $6.99 and the conventional almonds are only $3.99, what are you going to do? How much does climate change really mean then? How about your health?

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time

As a mother and writer, my motivation and inspiration have often been how to give up the least and have the most. Shocking I know. I am always trying to see how shifting a habit can make a difference. And what happens if we all do it?

I know that if any group make things happen, it's women, and especially mothers. I've listed below some of my favorite small shifts that I've made recently while grocery shopping and around my home.

1. Buy sliced bread that is only packaged in a single wrapper rather than a double wrapper. Double-wrapped loaves contain more plastic. The waste generated by this additional wrapper across all households in the U.S. and Canda would weigh nearly 60,000 pounds -- or the total weight of all the food you will ever eat in your lifetime.

2. Buy block cheese instead of the pre-sliced individually wrapped servings. The energy used to make the plastic wrappers for slices of American cheese amounts to the equivalent of more than 13.8 million gallons of gasoline per year.

3. Run full loads in your dishwasher to save energy, and don't pre-rinse before putting dishes in. Do both and you'll save up to 20 gallons of water per dish load, or 7,300 gallons over a year. That's as much water as the average person drinks in a lifetime

4. Try to flush just one less time per day, and you'll save about 4.5 gallons of water -- as much water as the average person in Africa uses for a whole day of drinking, cooking, bathing and cleaning. (This is my son's favorite rule!)

5. Try to limit canned fruit, and eat fresh fruit over the summer months whenever possible. The process involved in canning is at least 10 times more energy intensive than picking fresh fruit. If every U.S. household replaced just one pound of canned or jarred fruit with one pound of fresh fruit during each of the summer months, the total energy saved could operate the kitchen appliances of over 21,000 households for an entire year.

6. Use fewer paper napkins everywhere. Each of us consumes on average 2,200 2 ply napkins per year, or the equivalent of 6 a day. If everyone in the U.S. used an average of one less napkin per day, more than 1 billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year.

7. Buy loose, unwrapped candy from the bin. Many candy wrappers contain chemicals that make them stain and water resistant, but which also make them difficult to recycle.

If you want to see more of where those came from -- and what's been taking up the better part of my life -- check out ReadTheGreenBook.com.

Dr. Trevor Holly Cates, co-founder of GreenThisLife.com
Families spend a great deal of time in the kitchen; cooking, cleaning, eating and sometimes socializing. During that time, we may be exposed to a number of toxins. Do you know what is in your kitchen that could be negatively impacting your health?

• The problem: Toxic cleaning products stored under the kitchen sink can contribute to poor indoor air quality. The chemicals in cleaning supplies vary in toxicity levels. The warning labels refer to acute exposures only and often provide inadequate information. Exposure to some of the ingredients can cause eye and respiratory tract irritation, headaches, dizziness, visual disorders, and memory impairment. The long-term effects are not known for many of the compounds, but some are known to cause cancer in animals; others are known to cause cancer in humans.

  The solution: Instead of harmful cleaning products, try making your own. Baking soda, salt and vinegar can clean just about everything in your home.




• The problem: Plastic containers and bottles used to store food in your kitchen can leach dioxins and phthalates into the food. Dioxins are carcinogenic and phthalates interfere with hormone function in the body. Heating and freezing plastics increases the release of these toxins into food.

  The solution: Store your food in safer alternatives such as glass, ceramic and stainless steel.

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time

I must be doing something right. Despite living in such a disposable society I am raising a child -- a seven-year-old boy -- who is obsessed with recycling. He's got the basics down: aluminum, glass, newspaper and plastic. But he's on a mission to see how far he can push the recycling envelope.

Now that he understands that we all create 4.5 pounds of trash a day, he has actually started to weigh his trash and his recycling to see if he can make more of the good than the bad. But sometimes I worry and wonder what must go through his little mind as he wanders into my bedroom at night to ask me things like, "Can you recycle this mom?" holding up a stuffed toy Viking I got him last year in Iceland. "No honey, go back to bed."

It doesn't stop there with the little mind. We did a "day of waste" in his classroom, and I explained to the kids that over the course of our lifetime each of us will create 600 times our adult weight in garbage. It was hard for us to imagine that, so we made a garbage monster and it went something like this: Broken down, your torso would be paper, one leg would be yard trimmings, the other food scraps, one arm would be plastic with a rubber hand, the other would be metal with a wood hand, your head would be glass and your neck would be all the other stuff.

"In the end," I told my son's first grade class, "We all leave behind a 90,000-pound legacy of trash for our grandchildren."

They were a little scared of me at that point.

Still my son persevered on his quest to push the trash to the limit...

Mary Isakson
I polled several friends recently to find out what each of them does to promote a green approach to life for her family. The almost universal initial response was an admission of guilt for failure to do more, which I heard even from moms who are quite environmentally aware.

It is easy for each of us to value and respect our environment, and sometimes hard to put this into practice. Fortunately, the second-clearest message I heard from my friends was quite practical: Limit your consumption. The most common way to implement this is to reuse!

Whether it's take-out containers or outgrown clothes, toys or books, consider a way to reuse items before trashing them. Try a twenty-four-hour challenge period: Try to think of alternative uses for every item that you lean over to toss in the garbage during that one day (Whew!).

Besides complying with your local recycling programs, you could also try the following:

• Many public libraries accept donations of used books. In New York City, Project Cicero partners with schools and other community groups to collect and distribute new and gently used books for distribution to local under-funded schools and libraries. The National Book Foundation has also posted on their website a list of organizations throughout the country that accept donations of books.


• Perhaps you do not have a favorite young niece of nephew to accept your children’s hand-me-downs. In my apartment we keep a shopping bag in the front closet especially for outgrown clothes and toys. When the bag is has been filled by my daughters (surprisingly often), I drop it at the local thrift store. Luckily for me, it's only one block from my home.


• A fun alternative may be to organize a clothing drive in your apartment building, school, church, temple, block association, or office. Children can easily participate, helping to write or decorate the signs or fliers promoting the event, and helping to bag the items for pick up. Tips for organizing a drive can be found at CharityGuide.org.
• Consider secondhand shopping yourself. It this brings to mind an image of an unappealing old shop, shed the musty image and remember that there are plenty of quality reusables on the market (think ‘antiques’, think ‘vintage’, or simply think ‘cheap!’).

Kimberly Danek Pinkson, Founder of the EcoMom Alliance

So here I am, out in the world talking about going green, but there’s my son, completely, irrevocably and 100% prime time in love with his sippy cup. His plastic sippy cup. The one that satisfies his midnight soymilk addiction.

As all moms know, plastics are unbreakable, lightweight, generally inexpensive and very convenient. And let’s face it, after the very first time you took your first baby out to run errands, convenience became a driving factor in many a decision (i.e. the midnight sippy cup).

However, the long-term price of convenience, when it means risking your child’s health, or his chance to swim in a clean lake, is not worth it. Plastics are extremely toxic for both your planet and your health. They are made from petroleum, a non-renewable, and mostly imported, resource. And all that great packaging? Imagine it in your local landfill.

The use of plastics in food storage and cooking has been linked to cancers, birth defects, poor brain/nervous system development and endocrine disruption, which, among other things, causes premature onset of secondary sex characteristics (early puberty). As if all that weren’t enough, plastic manufacturing and incineration creates air and water pollution that sends those chemicals right back into our rivers, soil, food chain, and then into your body. Not a pretty picture.

So what to do? Thanks to some forward thinking engineers, entrepreneurial moms and a few good old-fashioned options, there are alternatives to plastic that are both convenient and healthy...

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time
The other day I realized that my obsession with waste, plastic and getting to the end of the school year without buying anything new might have gotten the best of me.

My son came home from school with a broken lunch box. The zipper was shot. Two more weeks left. I had had high hopes that one lunchbox would have seen us to the end. I was not going to CVS to buy a plastic lunch box for the next day. I had to put a rubber band around it for him for the next day of school. Then I rushed online to ReusableBags.com and ordered him the lunch bag made from recycled plastic soda bottles (cool totes -- a large insulated lunch bag for $18.95). But I was so frenzied that it get here right away, I spent an extra $19.95 to ship it overnight. So now I'm spending more to ship it than the bloody blue-bag-with-green-frogs lunchtote actually cost!

My son comes home the next day, broken bag in hand, to check out his new recycled lunch tote.

"Mom," he says, completely mortified.

He tells me that he is not a baby, and he won't carry anything with green frogs any more. I had gotten so caught up in my "greenness" and the fact that it was the "right" lunch box for him that I forgot to see it for what it was, which was a lunch box for a three year old, not a seven year old. So now I'm out $38.90, we still have no lunch box, and I have to give the green frogs to the cleaning lady who by the way thinks I've gone mad...

Laurie Benenson

Making sure the food I prepare for my family is healthy and safe is a bigger job than it used to be. It seems that every week there is a new area of concern regarding the food supply.

A few years ago, I felt I was doing a good job if I declared fast food joints off limits (with the possible exception of road-trip refueling) and tried to make sure we had fruits and vegetables every day. Then I added "organic" to my list of prerequisites, especially for those fruits and veggies that seem to retain the most chemical pesticide residues after harvest (for instance, berries). Then other concerns kept popping up: avoiding trans fats, which up until recently were present in most breakfast cereals, crackers, and snack foods; only using hormone and antibiotic-free meat and chicken; and limiting consumption of the types of fish that contain the most mercury (tuna and swordfish).

But with the recent e-coli outbreaks in such healthy foods as spinach, lettuce, and scallions, even buying produce marked "organic" no longer insures that the food is safe. Not when it's grown on gargantuan factory farms and sent out to all parts of the country, with minimal oversight (the use of tainted water was blamed for last year's e-coli episodes, but the spinach itself was supposedly grown using organic guidelines).

So now my new resolution is to try and buy as much of our fruits and vegetables as possible at the weekly farmer's market, which features locally grown produce raised on relatively small farms. (We are lucky enough to live in Santa Monica, California, which has one of the world's greatest open-air markets.)

The people selling their produce at the farmer's market are personally responsible for the safety of their food, and that makes me feel much more confident. Besides, buying local reduces the amount of fuel needed to transport the food -- so it benefits not only our health, but goes easier on the environment as well. It's a win/win situation -- and besides, shopping at the farmers market is community-minded, convivial and fun.