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Blog Archives - October, 2011
Heavy Metals in Halloween Face Paint – October
26, 2011 The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics produced a report in 2009 entitled Pretty Scary: Heavy Metals in Face Paints, which revealed that ten out of ten children’s face paints contained low levels of lead, and six of the ten products were contaminated with the potent allergens nickel, chromium and/or cobalt, some of which far exceeded safety recommendations of industry studies. So, this Halloween dress your kids in costumes that do not use face paint or make-up. Malkan advises to especially avoid face paints around the eyes, mouth, and on hands because they can end up in the mouth. Here are some more tips for a healthy, green Halloween:
Greening the Ghosts and Ghoulies from Natural Child Magazine.
Opting For Life – October 19, 2011 Any real learning that takes place under such circumstances
is, at the very least, incidental. Putting highly curious and motivated children
into a numbing, dehumanizing, and
demotivating atmosphere, then trying to artificially motivate
them to learn about the world in a restrictive, compartmentalized fashion to an
arbitrary bureaucratic timetable seems like a very inefficient process. For this
reason, formalized schooling can get in the way of learning, rather than
facilitate it. As one mother once said to me, “Our homeschooling career started
when play school interfered with watching a shopping center being built. We
opted to watch. We opted for life.”
Living As If Greed Didn't Exist –
October 17, 2011 As important as the Occupy protests are, I wonder just how effective they ultimately will be. What will make these issues priorities for corporations and governments? Already, we’re hearing bankers and financial newspapers cautiously supporting the occupiers. Really, who wants to be seen on the side of greed?! But you know, there are already lots of solutions to the problem, many models for sharing wealth, for putting people in control: worker and buyer co-ops, the slow money and slow/local food movements, land trusts, ethical investing, community credit unions, urban homesteading, life learning, alternative economic indicators, fair trade, co-housing, restorative economics, rooftop power, local currencies, barter, “living enterprises” as David Korten calls them…. These and many more models already exist; people are already living as if greed didn’t exist. We’ve been writing about them in Natural Life Magazine since 1976, and there is no lack of info in other non-mainstream periodicals and books, and on the web. They are all participatory. They are designed and
implemented by us, working together with our neighbors, not by governments and
corporations. They require that we understand how things work and that we make
the rules for ourselves. They require that we stop thinking of economics as
something other people – big business, bankers, brokers, and bosses – do while
we watch from the sidelines. I hope that the occupations that are now underway
will provide some leadership – inspiration and information – for participants to
get involved in the alternatives that are already in place and to create even
more, while they’re waiting for change at the top. We can create a new and
better world!
Angry? – October 13, 2011 I have a theory that what many of us are feeling is a general grumpiness born of anxiety that turns into unfocused anger at anything and everything in our path. These are anxious times and fear about the future can be overwhelming. So we get a little too judgmental, a bit more impatient, more easily frustrated. On top of that, many of us are living life too fast, trying to cram too many things into a frantic day, too tightly scheduled to allow time for anything to go wrong or to get in our way, let alone to breathe. “Anger is a signal and one worth listening to,” writes Harriet Lerner in The Dance of Anger. In everything from our personal relationships and business transactions to the state of the world, anger can be a useful sign that something is wrong. And that something is often injustice. Unfortunately, many of us are too busy and too angry to search for our anger’s real cause and then do something about it. More often than not, we either bottle the rage up inside or take it out on whoever gets in the way (and one sometimes leads to the other). “Those of us who are
locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who
dare not get angry at all,” Lerner reminds us. So the trick is to figure out
the real cause of our anger, and what is an effective expression
of it. It is easier to rage behind
a windshield or a web avatar than to slow down and confront the real issues.
As we’ve seen in so many countries this year – and are watching now on
Wall Street – anger can be used as a potent and powerful tool for change. But while
we’re doing that (in either the public or private realm),
please let’s remember to take a deep breath, smile, and stay peaceful and
focused.
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