Green Goes with Everything: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet - Hardcover

Barnett, Sloan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416578455 ISBN 13: 9781416578451

Publisher: Atria Books, 2008

Synopsis

Imagine if your best friend gave you vital information that could protect you and your family, and save you money, and help the planet. Imagine if you were given clear, simple choices, small changes that could have a big impact on your life. And you could still wear leather shoes and deodorant. You'd listen, right?

Well, think of Today show contributor Sloan Barnett as that friend. A mother of three, a dedicated consumer advocate, Sloan gives us a fast, simple, down-toearth primer on the ways our homes are making us sick, and what we can all do to transform them into the safe sanctuaries we want and need them to be.

Sloan exposes the toxic truth behind the household products we use every day -- from laundry detergent to toothpaste to lipstick. She explains how these and other seemingly benign stuff can harm us and our children. She offers an array of alternatives, and inspires us to see that we're never helpless: Every day, we have the power to make better, smarter, safer choices.

Packed with common sense and sass, product picks and practical tips, Green Goes With Everything is for everyone who wants to live a healthier life.

About this title

About the Author:

Sloan Barnet is a regular contributor to NBC's Today show and the Green Editor for KNTV, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. She has been a television and print journalist for more than ten years, and wrote a popular consumer advice column for New York's Daily News for nearly a decade. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and three children. For more information, please visit greengoeswitheverything.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

INTRODUCTION

Let's begin by agreeing that we are all creatures of habit. We do what we do every day because that's the way we've always done it. It takes a big reason for us to make big changes in our lives. And the reason is usually very personal.

Much to my surprise, I've become a green activist. I wasn't always. Oh sure, I cared a lot about our planet and the changes we've made to it. But it wasn't clear to me what I could do to make a difference. Then something very big and very personal happened and I saw the light, and the light was green.

Here's my story.

My son Spencer had just turned three when, one day, I noticed he was coughing a lot. At first, I didn't think anything of it. Kids get sick. I told him to lie down, thinking he'd be fine -- it was just a cough. A short time later I realized that his heart was pounding, as if it were trying to beat right out of his chest. Terrified, my husband Roger and I rushed him to the hospital. The emergency room doctors placed our son on oxygen and gave him strong steroids to help clear his airways. We spent the next two nights in the intensive care unit. The doctors told us he had something called reactive airways dysfunction syndrome -- a form of asthma.

Asthma? How did our little boy develop asthma? We'd never heard of asthma coming on so suddenly. We were confused and sick with worry.

We talked to our son's doctor. We talked to other doctors. We asked questions but never got satisfactory answers. Ultimately, we knew our son's condition had to be either genetic or environmental. Neither my husband nor I had any family history of asthma, going back for four generations. So we concluded the cause was environmental.

I've spent most of my career working as a consumer reporter, so I knew how to dive right in and begin researching. It didn't take long to discover that the United States is in the midst of an asthma epidemic. One of every thirteen school-age children in the United States has asthma. Asthma in children younger than five has increased 160 percent since 1980. Nine million U.S. children under the age of eighteen have been diagnosed with asthma. Asthma is the most common chronic childhood disease in the United States, and it's the third leading cause of hospitalization among children younger than fifteen. The suspected cause of these stunning changes? At least six well-designed epidemiological studies have found one answer: a strong link between the use of certain cleaning products and asthma.1 That stopped me cold. The cause of my son's asthma may have been me. I may have been poisoning my own son.

At the time, Roger had just become chairman of Shaklee Corporation, the leading natural nutrition company in the United States. Shaklee also produces a line of natural, nontoxic cleaning products, and has since the 1960s. Shaklee was green when green was just a color and "biodegradable" was a word only scientists used. We started using Shaklee products exclusively, and Spencer has never again visited the emergency room. Coincidence? I don't think so, and once you've read this book, I don't think you will either.

After that scare, I went to work learning about living clean and green. Much of the information you need to get clean and green is out there, but we're all so busy we don't have time to weed through all that material on the Internet and in books. Plus, it's all so scientific, it's easy to lose your way.

Since my husband and I began our crusade to help others get clean, my family and friends have bombarded me with questions about everything from cleaning products to baby clothes. I found myself becoming the go-to person for all sorts of well-educated but woefully misinformed people. And the more questions they asked, the more I realized the depth of the need out there for information in plain English. The media assault us daily with scary statistics and dire warnings about harmful products. Sometimes the information is reliable, sometimes it's not. Who can hope to separate what's important and relevant from what's just sensational and frightening? I thought that if I could compile the most crucial information, make it accessible and user friendly, and maybe even a little entertaining, people would be able to absorb the message.

Writing the book you have in your hands became my mission.

As a girl, I loved nature. I was a green teen, you might say. As far back as I can recall, I wanted to help our ailing planet. But I was naive; I thought saving the environment meant, for example, saving the penguins in Antarctica. I spent countless hours worrying about those penguins and their cold, fragile habitat, which I hoped to someday visit. I knew nothing about carbon footprints in those days, or emissions, or the ozone layer. And green? I thought that was something that looked cool with pink.

The epiphany came when I was twenty-one. My mother organized an ambitious family expedition to the South Pole. My parents, one of my brothers, and my eighty-three-year-old grandmother all embarked on the journey of a lifetime. At last I was going to meet my beloved penguins face to face.

There was nothing first class about our trip. This was no Princess cruise, with fancy food and nightly entertainment. There was no bingo, no disco, no spa. We sailed on a workhorse of a boat that also functioned as an icebreaker. When we boarded, we were each issued a huge puffy red coat, filled with down. (There were sixty of us altogether, wearing the same red coats. A comical sight.) We burrowed into those coats as the weather grew colder, and by the end of our ten days at sea they had become a second skin. It was late December -- summer in Antarctica -- and while it was light almost twenty-four hours a day, the temperature was brisk.

I remember spotting my first iceberg. It shimmered before me like a mirage floating on a mirror-smooth sea. I'll never forget that sight. The sunlight, the blue-green water against the stark white iceberg -- I've yet to see any photo that conveys its breathtaking beauty.

When we finally reached the Antarctic, there was nothing but ice, snow, and one lonely scientific station. I could have stared into that blank white horizon forever. So pristine, so clean, so pure. And then I saw them: thousands of penguins marching toward us. (They do march, by the way.) Picture it: sixty tourists in puffy red coats meeting something like half a million little beings in tuxedos. They barked, pooped everywhere -- the penguins, not the tourists -- and smelled really bad. But I loved it; for the first time, I felt fully alive, immersed in the experience, a part of nature, not an observer. Magic.

It was that trip that made me decide I wanted to work on environmental issues, to do what I could to safeguard the earth. But I was the daughter of a practical woman. She wanted me to keep my options open. I wanted to attend Yale's School of Forestry -- she convinced me to apply to law schools as well. (I was single-minded, however: My essay on my law school applications was all about Antarctica.)

While waiting to hear from grad schools I applied for a job with Greenpeace. They had an office in New York City, my hometown. I remember worrying that my outfit wasn't Greenpeace-y enough, so I went shopping for something crunchier. Less Barneys. My concept of environmentalist wear at the time was sort of Twiggy meets Tonto. When I arrived at the tiny Greenpeace office, I knocked timidly at the door, but there was no answer. Odd. For a moment I thought I must be at the wrong place. Nope. It said "Greenpeace" right on the door. These were the days before cell phones, so I couldn't call. There was a dry cleaner right below the office. They let me use their phone to make sure I had the right day and time. I reached the Greenpeace answering machine and left a message. When they called back to reschedule, I learned that everyone in the office had been out that day on an "action" -- which was code for the fact they'd all been arrested while protesting a tanker coming into New York Harbor. Even though I thought they were doing great work, I couldn't see myself having a criminal record. I decided Greenpeace wasn't for me.

So I went to work for a wonderful organization, the Rainforest Alliance. I was happy saving the parrots and the rubber trees, and then one day I got a frantic call from my mother: I'd gotten into law school. But not just any law school. A good one. New York University. It felt like destiny, so I started classes that fall, with an eye toward an eventual career in environmental law.

The following summer I landed a job with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading organization specializing in legal action to protect the environment. But just before I started work, they decided that a first-year law student wasn't the ideal intern. I was devastated; I believed that the NRDC was the best place for me. I ended up in the Manhattan district attorney's office. It wasn't saving the penguins, but it was a sexy second best.

Life takes you where it will. I continued my career at the DA's office for several more years but also found that I had a knack for writing and a growing interest in working in television. I knew that the fastest way to land a TV job was to leave New York for a smaller market, but New York was my home and I didn't want to leave. A friend suggested I try writing a newspaper column offering free legal advice. That seemed like a fine idea: I knew that most people who came into the DA's office had never met a lawyer before. For the most part, they had no money, no access to good legal counsel, no idea how to survive the system. I thought a "Dear Abby"-style column about the law could provide a needed and valuable service. I wrote up a sample column and handed it to a friend who knew people at the New York Daily News. I didn't think I had a shot. They were the largest newspaper in New York. But they loved my sample and gave me a chance. Within weeks I was also writing a legal column for the national magazine Mirabella.

I guess the stars were lining up for me. Around that same time, one of m...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416578455
• ISBN 13: 9781416578451
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320