9 Easy Ways to Go Green
Posted by: J on: February 7, 2010
Inspired by the forgotten post I unearthed earlier this week about sustainability, I decided to continue on an environmental train of thought for a bit since, honestly, I don’t think one blog on this topic is enough! Thus, I bring you this short & sweet list of simple ways to be more sustainable. Let’s see how many of these we can incorporate in the next week!
Pee in the shower. I’m not even kidding. Toilet flushing makes up nearly 27 percent of indoor water use in a home, on average peeing in the shower once a day saves around 1157 gallons of water a year!- Purchase and use re-usable shopping bags (or just save the disposable ones and bring them back with you) whenever you go purchase something. If you buy something small, forgo the bag and toss it in your pocket or purse.
- If you get a period, consider using a menstrual cup in lieu of tampons and pads. Not only are they more environmentally friendly (think of all of the plastic/paper/etc. that you throw out each month), they’re also more friendly to your body. There’s no risk of toxic shock syndrome when you use a menstrual cup, because they don’t contain the chemicals that tampons do (they’re dyed white etc.) Also, think of the money you will save when you’re not buying pads/tampons every month!
- Start a scrap paper bin and throw all of those annoying class handouts, fliers, or whatever pieces of paper you’re given but never use into it – then, when you need to jot something down really quickly, you’ll know what to use! (And recycle when you’re done, of course.)
- Make it a point to start unplugging your electronics when you’re done with them, especially at night when you’re headed to bed! Needlessly wasting electricity is not cool. Not to mention – don’t forget to turn off lights, heaters, and so on when you leave a room. Personally, this is one I need to work on! Read the rest of this entry »
I’d Bet Mother Earth is a Feminist
Posted by: J on: February 3, 2010
Here’s an old post I finished on Amplify ages ago, but never put up on here!
If you had come up to me a week ago, yesterday even, and asked me if I was an environmentalist, I would have said no. (I wrote this sentence in September, but you get the idea.) I have friends who are Environmentalists-with-a-capital-E; they won’t drink out of water bottles because of the waste involved in producing them, they avoid makeup and chemical cleaners and a million other products that I never would have assumed did something to hurt the environment, they harness solar energy in their daily lives, they compost…. I don’t do these things, nor do I have the time and thus, I am not an environmentalist. Make that was, I was not an environmentalist.
I’ve always had my causes. In middle school it was anti-bullying – I wrote poems and stuck up for the kids in my class who were teased, I went “in the trenches,” so to speak, daily in order to fight for a more compassionate school environment. In high school I cared about education and literacy, I tutored a great deal in my school and my community. I also cared about poverty, and ending violence, and gay rights… every day, it sometimes seemed, brought a new cause.
Last year I came to college and I found feminism, a catch-all movement that seemed designed to expand and expand to hold all of the causes I cared so deeply about – gay rights, poverty, pacifism, racism, body acceptance… feminists seem to be tackling all of this, I’ve done my best to take on all of these causes, at least in passing, in my blogging over the last year and yet… environmentalism never seemed to make it onto that list.
Today I read eight pages that changed my life, and my feminism, forever. Pages five to thirteen of The Future of Nature highlight the problems with today’s “green” movement – namely, the separation of environmental issues from human rights issues – and the mindset necessary to promote positive change that just might save our planet (from pollution, deforestation, and the other injustices we inflict upon our earth) and the people that inhabit it – many of whom don’t even have clean water right now, thanks to the degradation we’ve put our planet through.
It’s the big farming conglomerates that drive the small scale farmers out of business, and into poverty. They pollute the air and treat their animals without any dignity or compassion, because there is no competition. They blast pesticides into the air and hormones into our meat, until not even the milk from our own human mothers is uncontaminated*.
It’s the privileged few countries – like the United States and Canada – that suck up much more than our fair share of the earth’s resources, leaving fellow human beings in developing countries without even the basic food and water they need to survive day-to-day.
That bottle of water I drank this morning is part of the reason why a girl just like me, living in Africa or Fiji or India does not have access to clean water of her own. That bottle is also a part of the reason that polar bears are drowning because they have to swim farther and farther to find solid ice to rest on – producing my bottle produced carbon emissions that thickened the ozone layer, trapping more heat in our earth and melting more of that bear’s ice…. It’s all connected.
Feminism and, more broadly, human rights activism can include environmentalism, it has to, because the way we treat our earth is so intimately entwined with the way we treat each-other. I’m a feminist because all oppressions are linked, and feminism is my way of fighting all of those oppressions at once – I’m an environmentalist because the oppression of humanity and the oppression of nature are linked, and I can no longer struggle to fight one, without advocating for the other as well.
If you were like me, content to leave the environment to someone else, I challenge you today: do some research – I reccomend reading the book I mentioned or watching the film an Inconvienient Truth – force yourself out of the blissful state of ignorance, into the scray reality of our quickly worsening environment so that you will no longer be able to do nothing.
One Note Project
Posted by: J on: February 2, 2010
Check out our new page & help me turn this into something cool!
(PS. I know this has been done before in varying forms before, I just figured starting off a chain of happy events might be a fun way to pass our time!)
Something Old…
Posted by: J on: January 30, 2010
I’m posting something from the drafts today because I’m having serious writer’s block. I found this completely written & unposted… the last time I looked at this was almost a year ago on March 7th, 2009!
***************************************
I used to comfort myself with the idea that, one day, someone would fall in love with me in spite of my imperfections and see the beauty in me… and then they could help me see the beauty in me.
I’m not going to lie, that happened, but looking back I wonder why I felt that I needed someone else to love me before I could really love myself. The truth is, I didn’t and neither do you!
Just for today, why don’t YOU try to be the “someone else out there” who finds you beautiful…
Its time for us all to stop worrying about our imperfections. I want to share this image that I was introduced to via Sociological Images…
As cheesy as it sounds, its time for us to stop worrying about being imperfect, no one is perfect. The truth is, its our imperfections are what make us interesting, unique, and loveable… your imperfections are ab important part of you, so stop beating yourself up over them! Its time to stop reaching for this constantly changing, always fleeting idea of perfection and accept the thing that you are perfect at… being you!
I’mPerfectly Me…
Now its your turn, I want to try again something I suggested awhile ago. Sit down (or stand up, whatever you prefer) and think up five things you love about yourself. You don’t have to write them, you can just think them, but keep going until you get to five no matter how hard. Now, once that’s done, think of five things you feel make you imperfect… think about what you would be like without those things, think really hard and find reasons, real concrete reasons, to love the parts about yourself that you find imperfect.
For instance, I talk a lot (some may say too much) but I love that part of me because it has helped me to make many friends, I’m very uneven (my left side is bigger than the right) but I wouldn’t change that if I could, it makes me unique and gives me a way to relate to people since everyone is a little uneven*. Also, I am incredibly emotional but if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t be so understanding of other people and I definitely wouldn’t have the ability for empathy that I do. I worry a lot but that’s okay too, it means I am always prepared and it often shows people how much I care about them. Finally, my body is not super-model shaped… I’m not even small enough to be considered thin but that’s okay because my weight is a part of me and it allows me to wear the clothes that I do
Learn to love yourself the way you love others; freely, unconditionally, flaws and all… its amazing how much better life can be when you’re not wasting time feeling bad about yourself!
* Did you know that people’s left sides are usually larger than the right, due to the fact that the heart is on the left side, and thus it gets more blood-flow?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Eating Disorders
Posted by: J on: January 27, 2010
As a psychology student, I understand why psychologists feel that labels and standards are important; however, as a woman who knows many people who struggle with disordered eating (including myself) I hate the way the psychology community treats eating disorders.
For instance, one woman in the comments of an article I read* has gone through several diagnoses, from anorexic to exercise bulimic to EDNOS**, depending on which doctor was treating her at the time; because she felt as if the psychiatric community could not help her figure out conclusively what was wrong with her this woman ended up alienated from therapy and, thus, forced to heal largely on her own. This is not good.
Eating Disorder diagnosis and standards are useful tools; they help psychologists to have a universal understanding of what a patient is going through, for one, and they also help people to figure out what they are suffering from and how to begin treatment. However, the strict category model currently used by the DSMIV is also incredibly problematic.
I have friends and relatives who have struggled with disordered eating. For that matter, I’ve struggled with a disordered relationship to food off and on for my whole life. If there’s one thing I know, its this: no two people with an eating disorder look or act the same. Eating disorders, at least in my opinion, are a lot less about behaviors and a lot more about mental processes. What do I mean by that? It’s simple.
Lets take Weight Watchers as an example. A person who has a healthy relationship with their body and food can go on Weight Watchers and lose weight without losing themselves; that’s not necessarily true of someone with an eating disorder. The last time I went on Weight Watchers I did it for a week and three days exactly before I quit and never looked back. I did this because I knew the way I was behaving was not healthy: I was obsessing over food, making graphs and calculating points for hours each of those days, I was pushing myself to eat less and less points each day, and I felt horrible if I ate up to my points limit for the day. Essentially, my thought processes behind the healthy diet became incredibly unhealthy. I wasn’t eating a dangerously high or dangerously low amount of food, nor was I exercising excessively… what I was doing was obsessing, and hurting myself with my own thoughts. I may not have had an eating disorder in the traditional sense, but I certainly needed guidance to help me rectify my disordered thinking about food.
Most people I know have a story like mine; many of them have stories much more intense then mine. I was lucky, my experience ended fairly positively as I found a therapist who could help me feel comfortable with my body and my food choices, and my parents found a way to finance that therapy. Unfortunately, due to strict insurance policies and even stricter diagnosis guidelines many people’s stories do not end like mine.
Focusing Rescue Efforts on Women: Sexism or Equality?
Posted by: J on: January 17, 2010
Part II of the previous post is coming ASAP, I just felt this deserved priority. Also, as you can tell, I have given up on my draft-posts-only until my drafts were empty attempt because it was making me hate blogging… I will be sifting through the drafts over the next few months to bring you the posts that always deserved to be finished, but I need to be able to focus on current events too!
******
So I’m sure most of you know by now that many of the Men’s Rights blogs out there are FREAKING OUT right now because several organizations, like MADRE, have made a commitment to focusing their aid efforts in Haiti on women and children. If you’re not familiar I’ll let the blogger at The Spearhead explain his take on this situation:
However, some relief groups have decided that women deserve more aid, and have come up with a number of reasons why men should be left to die from injuries and disease while women get preferential treatment.[...]
It is not clear whether such discrimination in the wake of disaster is legal in Haiti. In any event, if men are needlessly dying because these women’s groups are hoarding supplies for women only, the Haitian government should send troops in to seize the supplies and distribute them equally to needy men and women alike. That would be a true act of mercy.
This may seem like a valid, if blown out of proportion, argument at first glance. However, there are a few reasons why I am incredibly reluctant to give creedence to the people complaining about MADRE and like organizations.
The first reason, the “humane” and “compassionate” comments that the readers of this blog leave. For example:
“I hope their plane crashes on the way to Haiti.”Better still, I hope it gets blown off course and makes a crash landing on a castaway island somewhere, the women-only crew/passengers all survive, they have to get by as best they can for a year with no men around, and at least one of them records what happens (because I wouldn’t be counting on any of them to still be alive to tell the tale).
Misandry is a bubble. Bubbles always pop.I am waiting for a time when women are paid a cash bonus for aborting a male fetus. This, of course, will distort the gender ratio and make such a civilization ripe for replacement.
There is no law in Haiti beyond the flickering lights of a few UN/InternationalAid Camps. Machete wielding gangs are the real arbitrator of who gets what everywhere else.Stupid feminists. When they go there and announce that their aid is for women only, they will be unceremoniously chopped up and dismembered. Unless, of course, they can induce some American guys to help them deliberately starve Haitian guys. But that can only work in the very few places where any kind of Law prevails.
I don’t care how much of a jerk someone is, I would never wish for their plane to crash, or even worse for their dismemberment and yet these were the common sentiments on this blog. This is how I made my first assesment: these people are clearly not coming from a good place, a place that values all human life.
The second assesment took a little more digging but, still, I very quickly managed to confirm that, on top of being jerks, these bloggers were also very ignorant. The blog post attempts to act as a call for equality, however, traditional aid that ignores gender completley is rarely equal. Why? Well, lets look at the facts:
- Women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men during natural disasters.
- “Women have less access to resources – social networks and influence, transportation, information, skills (including literacy), control over land and other economic resources, personal mobility, secure housing and employment, freedom from violence and control over decision-making – that are essential in disaster preparedness, mitigation and rehabilitation.”
- “Women are [...] overrepresented in the agriculture industry, self-employment and the informal economy, in under-paid jobs with little security and no benefits such as healthcare or union representation. The informal and agricultural sectors are usually the most impacted by natural disasters, thus women become over-represented among the unemployed following a disaster.“
- “Because housing is often destroyed in the disaster, many families are forced to relocate to shelters. Inadequate facilities for simple daily tasks such as cooking means that women’s domestic burden increases at the same time as her economic burden, leaving her less freedom and mobility to look for alternative sources of income.“
- “Disasters themselves can serve to increase women’s vulnerability. Aside from the increase in female-headed households and the fact that the majority of shelter residents are women, numerous studies have shown an increase in levels of domestic and sexual violence following disasters. “
- “As one of the primary aspects of women’s health in particular, reproductive and sexual health are beginning to be recognized as key components of disaster relief efforts, however attention to them remains inadequate and women’s health suffers disproportionately as a result.“
(All but the first fact via GenSalud)
The point? When the MRAs making this complaint see EXTRA aid being given to women, they are neglecting the bigger picture – a picture that shows the huge disadvantage women start out with when dealing with a natural disaster. When that disadvantage is taken into account “extra” aid looks a lot less like a “bonus prize” that callously ignores men and much more like an effort to even the playing field and give women just as much a chance to survive as men. Equality, not callously exterminating men… thats what feminism is all about!
If you plan to donate, please consider contributing to MADRE or the Gender and Disaster Network in their efforts to help foster equality, even in a time of crisis. Or just donate to any Haiti-focused charity but, please, do something. If you know of any other awesome organizations please let us know in the comments!
