Mary Isakson
Kitchen worms may sound like the latest urban plague; perhaps even the basis for a horror movie. Actually, it's just that the composting movement has come indoors.

These days it's easy to find inexpensive home composting kits with a plastic bin, a supply of worms, and simple instructions for providing a friendly home for those worms. In exchange for your effort, you are rewarded with composting service, provided by reliable workers (the worms!). The process is exciting for young children to participate in; it provides a tangible education in the natural world and a practical benefit in the form of compost for your houseplants, window boxes, or garden. (In New York City, the Lower East Side Ecology center offers workshops to get you started.)

Perhaps you are not quite open (yet?) to welcoming a pound of red wigglers into your home. There are other ways to benefit from composting:

Some community gardens and recycling centers accept contributions of household scraps; some organizations sell local compost -- find out if such organizations exist in your area. In New York City where I live, for example, there's a map of local composting services, available at GreenApplemap.org. To see if similar resources exist in your area, check out GreenMap.org, the website of Green Map System. Green Map is an international organization promoting development of local maps illustrating environmentally sustainable services; they provide an exciting opportunity for individuals or groups (families or schools included!) to promote a green theme of their choice in their local community.

Mary Isakson
Environmentally speaking: What should you do? What is most important, most efficient, and most effective?

Good questions, but in a way, insufficient. To develop a real commitment to environmental issues, you also need to ask: What do you enjoy?

I believe a mom’s attitude toward her own participation in environmental community service impacts her children. I encourage my daughters to participate in community service, and explain to them that it can be an opportunity to pursue something you enjoy. While we all have an obligation to contribute to society, it ought not be a burden and should not be a gift given grudgingly. Helping my daughters find what is right for them is a work in progress. In the meanwhile, I hope that setting an example may speak louder than lectures.

One of the opportunities for service that I have been lucky enough to find is at TheLotusGarden.org. For almost ten years I have had the privilege of tending a plot at the garden and helping to host community events, including field trips by my younger daughter’s preschool (this daughter will soon be entering sixth grade, but my trips with the preschool continue to be an annual event). This allows me to share my joy in gardening with an enthusiastic audience, and to impart increased knowledge of and appreciation for nature in the process.

The children love to see our lush "secret garden," delight in discovering the paths, the goldfish, the variety of plants and flowers. They enjoy participating in some gardening or a garden related craft project.

The entire visit takes under two hours, and the preparation for it is also fairly minimal. For me the morning is exhausting and satisfying; filled with the contagious enthusiasm of young children and a reminder of the focused attention they require. I love the time with them, and the peace when they depart, their piping voices quietly fading in the distance after the garden gate swings shut. It is always a pleasure for me to recognize one of these youngsters leading his or her family back for a visit on a subsequent Sunday.

Mary Isakson
A garden is one of life’s dirty miracles. I have fond memories of my father’s small-scale composting of coffee grounds and vegetable peelings in our back yard. I picture the climbing green bean vines, and recall with fondness the tiny carrots I grew in my own small plot. I pulled them up early and was disappointed with the scrawny little orange carrots covered with hair-like roots; carrots that would scrape down to the size of splinters when cleaned. But I wonder: Would I ever have recalled full-grown carrots so clearly or so fondly? The enthusiasm that led me to yank them up early infuses my memory of those tiny carrots with warmth that no full-grown vegetables have ever invoked in me.

It was with hope of giving my urban daughters a taste of that enthusiasm, a tangible connection to the earth, that I joined a community garden. To be honest, their level of participation in gardening has been less than I expected when I joined. But in the end, it has been a great experience for them and for me. They have picked cherries, strawberries, peaches, and currants that grow in the garden and are lucky enough to take for granted this access to truly fresh fruit. They have spent many summer evenings at the garden, sometimes offering help in my plot, more often mucking about with friends in the dirt, chopping compost, catching fireflies, and hiding mysterious objects in my plot.

My tiny carrots were disappointing; at the time it felt as if my experiment with gardening was a failure. With their memory, though, has grown recognition of a connection forged. This connection informed my decision to garden as an adult, and to share the joy of a garden with my daughters. If nothing else, I believe that this will foster their understanding that in fact the earth came first, and is underneath (and the foundation of) those concrete sidewalks they tread every day.

Mary Isakson
I love the pithy eloquence of Farmer Hoggett’s famous line from the 1995 movie, Babe. It's an amusing theme that runs in the back of my mind, reminding me of the importance of avoiding wastefulness.

Every day while cooking, eating, shopping, commuting, and even relaxing, moms make hundreds of choices that involve balancing our families’ resources with consideration of our environment. It would be paralyzing to spend hours consciously deliberating each decision, of course -- so it makes sense to pick out key issues and train yourself to focus on them.

Non-biodegradable plastic bags are an easy and obvious target. Their use has proliferated wildly over the past twenty years. See, for example, this September 2, 2003 National Geographic News article regarding their impact on the environment, and efforts to promote reusable bags in their stead. A more current piece in the Christian Science Monitor also addresses efforts to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags. Even though I reuse my bags as garbage can liners, my family, left unchecked, can accumulate a phenomenal number of bags. I have lately been training myself to reduce the number of bags I bring home.

Certain retailers are helpful in this effort, most notably vendors in the farmers’ market who routinely ask, "Do you want a bag?" rather than automatically providing one. "No, Thanks," is my default answer. I try to only accept a bag when I truly need it, pressing my purse, a tote, or even my gym bag into service instead.

I have carried this lesson over to other stores, where retailers otherwise automatically bag every little item. "I don’t need a bag, thanks." I blurt out while paying, trying to say it quickly, before the clerk has grabbed a fresh bag from the rack.

A word of caution: Unload all totes promptly, lest you forget an item. I can tell you from experience that it is unpleasant to discover a banana in one’s jacket pocket a few days after a shopping trip. Never mind the time the juice container fermented.

Free access to non-biodegradable bags has helped to make them ubiquitous, promoting mindless consumption. It is easy to envision retail shopping without them; many of us can still remember the days before their use was common. Reusable alternatives are readily available. Developing the habit of carrying a tote is not a major inconvenience. It is an easy thing to say, with regard to the overuse of plastic shopping bags, "That’ll do."

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!’).