Hasta La Gadget!

Hold up a small blue marble at arm’s length: that’s what we look like from one million miles away. We are all part of the same small, gorgeous and blue planet. We are unique in the universe (as far as we know), and teeming with water-based life.

All we know from centuries past and future has and will happen on this spinning orb we call home. Every decision, good or bad, has real, lasting consequences for our world. This blue marble is our one and only — as they say, “there is no Planet B.”

In the past century, however, our material lives have reflected a vastly different philosophy. Since our economy began using petroleum as fuel and as materials like plastic a mere hundred years ago, the way we move and live has unleashed a cascade of unintended chemical consequences on the earth. 

Climate change, ocean acidification and oil spills are all real threats to our environment, but the plague I wish to discuss is Plastic Pollution.

Kids growing up 30 years ago were part of a very different consumer landscape: drinking water came from water fountains, milk came in glass bottles, and ubiquitous plastic shopping bags didn’t exist. It was rare to encounter plastic trash in the wild, but when it was we removed it and restored the beach, trail or park to its relatively natural, clean state.

In a few quick decades that’s all changed. Plastic production has grown exponentially and it now pervades our lives. It’s nearly everywhere, and it’s unavoidable. 

If something’s not made of disposable plastic now, just wait for a moment and it will be. Bags, bottles, cameras, cars, clothes, combs, computers, flip flops, forks, glasses, lunch boxes, mugs, plates, pipes, straws, telephones, toothbrushes, toys, umbrellas… the list is endlessly expansive.

From fashion to electronics to vehicles, we have created an economy based on our ability to discard objects that may or may not still be useful. Even our word choices reflect our lack of consideration for how actions impact the planet. “Throw it away” is what we think we are doing when we discard an unneeded object.

“No one ever thought about, what does ‘away’ really mean?” my friend Dr. Marcus Eriksen said. “You are living in a world with 7+ billion people now. There is no room for ‘away.'”

Walking a beach on a remote, uninhabited island in Indonesia, I found colorful remnants of many of these items, discarded by former owners far, far away. The ubiquity of plastic has become the new normal, part of the ecosystem, with ramifications that boggle the mind. 

During the past century, plastic production soared from close to nothing in 1912 to more than 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 and nearly 300 million metric tons in 2012. Our planet’s system has failed to manage this material — since the 1970s at least 0.1% of this plastic has ended up in our waterways and oceans annually. Estimates suggest that hundreds of millions of tons of plastics circulate in the North Pacific marine system alone, and this problem is growing in all ocean basins.  

Once at sea, plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, but it still doesn’t really go “away.” Some sinks to the ocean floor, some washes up on beaches and some is eaten by fish and makes its way back to land in our seafood. A plastic bottle can take hundreds of years to degrade, whereas a long-lasting coconut fiber degrades in 20 years, an orange peel in six months and brown paper in just a few weeks.

As plastic persists in the environment it breaks into ever-smaller fragments called micro-plastic. Consumer products like facial scrubs and toothpaste can also contain tiny plastic beads that make their way to our waterways. About 10 percent of the plastic is visible, while the rest is buried under the sand.

On one seemingly clean beach, Marc Ward from the Sea Turtles Forever Blue Wave Team filtered more than half a pound of plastic from one square meter of water at Crescent Beach, Oregon in the summer of 2012, including 739 styrene flakes and 861 industrial pellets. Micro-plastic is found in the Great Lakes, many rivers and every ocean around the world. 

In Brazil we discovered more than 3,500 pieces of plastic of all sizes inside one young green sea turtle — a new (sad) record. By my estimates every sea turtle on the planet will eat some plastic during its life. At the one extreme an animal can choke, suffocate, and die. If it gets off easy and survives the plastic it will have decreased energy, slower growth, and lower reproductive rates. Ultimately, this means fewer baby turtles.

The ocean is not “full” of plastic — it’s far too vast. But plastic has now invaded ecosystems, animals and ourselves in ways its inventors and makers never imagined.

Cleaning up this mess is a challenge, but countries, municipalities, and communities around the world are taking action to stem the flow of plastics into our environment and find real, lasting solutions. We do have the answers and technologies to solve this, but we need more political and personal will to get there.

It’s clear to me that things will get much worse before they get better. But it’s also true that in the past decade the number of citizens, scientists, businesses, students, organizations, and governments working towards a fix has grown tremendously. Bold experiments with materials, communications, and policy are underway with the results being shared fast and far.

Along with our understanding that “there is no away” we’ll need to wrestle with the question “how much is enough?”

It’s time we apply that same innovation, creativity, passion, and drive to do good embodied by businesses like those listed below to evolve the way we live and love on our one blue marble. 

“Away” is right here. And enough is enough.

pluckfastic (adj)

1. alternative to plastic conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; fun and creative alternatives to the single use plastics that pollute our ocean and beaches (e.g. a pluckfastic bag, bottle, fork).

2. extraordinarily good quality, made to get the job done then biodegrade, in reference to an alternative to disposable, toxic plastic.

3. an exclamation in response to someone using a reusable or biodegradable alternative to disposable, single-use plastic; as in: “wow, that’s a pluckfastic refillable glass water bottle (or coffee mug or shopping bag or take-out container) with the pluckfastic.org sticker on it!” or “r u pluckfastic?”

Taking it to the Beach: 5 orgs doing their part to change our relationship with plastic (and then some)

5 Gyres

Sea Turtles Forever

Plastic Pollution Coalition

Save Our Shores

Algalita Marine Research Foundation

Take Five: 5 companies making it easier to say no, thanks.

ChicoBag ~ a small reusable bags you’ll always have handy.

Klean Kanteen ~ stay hydrated in style.

To-Go Wear ~ reusable utensils galore.

Glass Dharma ~ for gorgeous reusable glass straws.

My Plastic Free Life ~ for everything else you need to know!

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Happy Birthday month to me and the National Park Service!

This first day of August we both enter a month of symbolic birthdays. On August 21 I turn 65 and become Medicare eligible, though I still feel the youthful enthusiasm and zest I felt as a child, largely because of the experiences I’ve had in our stupendous national parks. On August 25 our National Park Service celebrates its 100th birthday and enters its second century as caretaker of our national treasures in a country that is vastly different by race, ethnicity, gender and age than in 1916, and sorely in need of the lessons from our parks to help unify us.

From the perspective of age 65, I can see the long arm of destiny in my life. As a little girl growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s, slipping away to sit by myself on the banks of the stream that ran through our village, how could I have known that I was being prepared for the role I would play in my life? Sitting quietly under cool shade trees, watching schools of tiny fish darting and turning in the water and shrimp backpedaling on their tailfins, I dreamed of someday becoming a tour guide and introducing people to stunningly beautiful and historic places.

I had no concept of America, and no idea there was such a thing as a National Park System in the world. Yet for the past 20 years my husband Frank and I have been at the forefront of a movement that has made America’s national parks household words in homes where they’d never been uttered before, and growing numbers of ethnically diverse Americans have been drawn to visit and stand up for our parks.

From the perspective of 21 years ardent involvement with the National Park System, I can see the long arc the Park Service has traveled from its inception by passionate conservationists in 1916 to where it is today. The first director of the Service, Stephen Mather was also instrumental in its creation. His passion for nature and for protecting treasured spaces for Americans into perpetuity mirrors mine and can be deduced from how he left no stone unturned to achieve those goals.

According to PBS, Mather “counted as one of the highlights of his life meeting the legendary John Muir on a hike in Sequoia National Park in 1912. When he visited Sequoia and Yosemite in the summer of 1914, Mather was disgusted by the poor condition of the parks.

“He wrote a letter of complaint to his college friend, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, who invited Mather to come to Washington and do something about it himself. Mather accepted the challenge. As assistant to Lane in charge of the parks, he began a crusade to mold a haphazard collection of national parks into a cohesive system and to create a federal agency solely devoted to them: the National Park Service.

“Mather took on staff, paying their salaries out of his own pocket, and began a public relations and political lobbying campaign to build awareness of the parks and increase their size and number. He raised funds from his wealthy friends to purchase new park lands and he often purchased land himself and donated it to the National Park Service for protection. He joined forces with the budding automotive industry to ‘democratize’ the parks by making them more accessible to a broader cross-section of Americans. He and his assistant, Horace Albright, professionalized the corps of superintendents and rangers in the parks. . .”

Today, the current office holder in Mather’s position is fronting a proposal that, for the first time in 100 years, would allow greater commercial/corporate presence in our national parks and require park staff to raise funds, completely foreign to their job description. As I discuss in this blog, the order has been criticized by the National Parks Conservation Association, the Coalition of Retirees and is the subject of multiple online petitions, but still today is shrouded in secrecy. It is scheduled to go into office in 2017 when the current director will have left office.

As the Service enters its much-heralded Centennial month, we remain far short of Mather’s goals of “democratizing” the system and making it accessible to a broader cross section of the public. Many millions of people still have not been reached with the message that there are such things as national parks, that they represent our collective legacy and history, that they belong to us and that we have the duty and privilege of protecting them for the future.

To help accomplish these goals Frank and I, along with legions of other people including members of the Diverse Environmental Leaders Speakers Bureau that we formed in 2014, are among the catalysts for a growing nature movement of racially diverse Americans. As members of the Next100 Coalition, we are striving to help shape a new vision for the Park Service’s Next 100 years by asking President Obama to issue a Presidential Memorandum with policies to ensure a more diverse system, workforce and stream of visitors.

Like Mather, this week we’re heading to Washington, DC to do what we can for the parks and their future, including helping inspire young leaders in the Historically Black Colleges & Universities Initiative (HBCUI) for public lands, accompanying them to meet with Members of Congress and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.

For mine and the Park Service’s birthdays, the greatest gift I could get is to see Mather’s vision for the Park Service being realized. I know it can happen because my nascent vision as a child desiring to be a tour guide introducing people to beautiful places has been filled beyond my wildest dreams, almost outside my own volition. The great mystic and philosopher Joseph Campbell said it best in The Power of Myth, “I don’t have to have faith. I have experience.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

We are all the same, yet so different. It’s incredible that there are so many people on the Earth, and you can hardly find human beings who are alike, even twins look different if one takes a closer look at them. And no doubt that we are not only different in term of our physical looks, but also regarding our views on life, moral values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Every child in the process of development reaches a stage when it becomes a personality. It’s a long process through which a child can make a lot of mistakes, learn new things all the time, formulate his or her interests, hobbies, attitudes, perception of life, etc. Society as a whole and parents are guiding the child and influence his or her further personality development.

Through the process of child’s development to the stage when one reaches maturity, the attitudes and life views can undergo different changes. Often, to convey one’s individuality, teenagers and adults show their opinions and express their personality via different things.

Choosing a particular outfit is going to tell a lot about each person. We cannot read other people’s mind, – that’s why we formulate our first impressions by looking at them and what they are wearing. There are different clothes styles, like official one (if we want to emphasize our professionalism), casual (when we just want to feel comfortable without attracting too much attention), etc. One could also combine different clothes styles to emphasize his or her innovativeness and boldness. The choice of the clothes color is going to say something about a person as well. There is a danger, of course, to fall into a stereotypical thinking and make wrong conclusions, like perceiving an individual who is wearing black as someone strict, sad, serious, but we can try and pass those stereotypes. Besides, first impressions are not the last ones.

Choosing certain accessories can talk quite a bit about every person. Wearing earrings, necklaces, bracelets of an individual form serves as a great way of self-expression, especially for women. Men can choose some embroidered hats with their creative logo and image, customized purses, bags and watches to express their personality.

Getting a tattoo is one of the ways of revealing one’s identity as well. Depending on what picture, sign, words and in what part of the body one chooses to have a tattoo, it will show a person’s interests and views. For example, seeing a tattoo of a camera on a person’s hand will speak about his/her interest in photography and, probably, art in general.

Wearing a particular makeup (or not wearing it at all), choosing to have short or long hair, experimenting with the hair color can give us some clues about the person’s individuality. It’s about presenting yourself to other people and giving them hints of how you want to be viewed and perceived by others.

There might be different ways of expressing one’s personality, and the selection of this or that mode of expression depends on various factors like different life periods, cultural aspects and, minor, but not the last factor, is the mood and a desire to experiment in life and try something different. Life is not rectilinear; the personality is not rectilinear as well, we are in constant movement, are changing all the time and use different self-expression methods depending on those changes.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The 2016 Democratic convention concluded with Hillary Clinton’s paean to American exceptionalism. She contrasted “morning in America” with Donald Trump’s “the barbarians are at the gates.” In addition to the stark contrast in the vision of the two candidates, we learned five things at the conventions.

1. Hillary Clinton was able to unite Democrats. Republicans came to Cleveland promising to unite around Trump. That didn’t happen. Cruz, Kasich and the Bush family didn’t endorse Trump and he denounced them all.

The Democratic convention started on low note with the DNC email scandal followed by the resignation of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. For a few hours on Monday it looked as if Democrats would battle on the convention floor. Then the Monday program started and comedian Sarah Silverman — previously a Bernie Sanders supporter — ad-libbed: “Can I just say, to the Bernie or bust people, you are being ridiculous.” Her mocking words punctured the Bernie or bust balloon. While a few Bernie supporters continued to be disruptive, the vast majority got behind Hillary Clinton. (A Washington Post poll indicated that 90 percent of Bernie backers would support Clinton.) By Thursday night, the Democratic Party was unified.

2. Clinton did a much better job organizing the Democratic convention than Trump did organizing the Republican convention. Each day of the Republican convention saw some epic screw up such as Melania Trump’s plagiarism or Ted Cruz failing to endorse Trump.

In contrast each day of the Democratic convention worked well. Speakers kept to the script and stayed within the allotted time. As a result, the TV ratings for each night of the Democratic convention exceeded those of the Republican convention.

The success of the Democratic convention is another indication that Hillary Clinton is a better manager than Donald Trump.

3. If Trump doesn’t get the attention he wants, he will do something crazy. After the Republican convention, I wrote, “The GOP convention may give Trump a modest ratings bounce but it won’t last because he can’t stop acting crazy.”

On Wednesday — evidently starved for attention — Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton’s emails. On Thursday, Trump said he felt like hitting convention speakers who disparaged him. (He followed this with a fundraising email begging recipients to not watch Hillary’s acceptance speech.)

Clinton denigrated Trump’s character in her acceptance speech: “Imagine [Donald Trump] in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

4. Hillary has the credentials for the job, Trump doesn’t. During the Republican convention, The New York Times reported that Trump’s son, Donald Junior had approached Ohio Governor John Kasich about being Trump’s running mate. Trump Junior reported that, if he accepted, Kasich would be “the most powerful vice president in history;” Trump Junior explained that Kasich would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. When queried what job “President” Trump would do, Trump Junior explained, “Making America great again.”

Wednesday night at the Democratic convention, billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg observed: “Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s running his business? God help us.” Bloomberg went on to recommend voting for Hillary Clinton, “a sane, competent person.”

5. Democrats have become the Party of Reagan. The conventions witnessed an unexpected role reversal: Republicans became the Party of godless pessimism. Democrats became the Party of hope and optimism; the Party that believes, like Ronald Reagan, that “it’s morning in America.”

Unique to a modern Republican presidential speech, Trump never mentioned God. Instead he mentioned himself, over and over; notably “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

At the Democratic convention, participants chanted, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, touted their religious background and their lifelong commitment to public service. Michelle Obama reminded us all America “is the greatest country on earth.” Barack Obama reintroduced the “audacity of hope.” And Hillary said Americans face a choice, “We have to decide whether we all will work together so we all can rise together.”

It was a stark contrast: Republican gloom and authoritarianism versus Democratic optimism and community spirit — “Let’s be stronger together.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

What if it took you four hours a day to cook all your meals because, in addition to cooking, you also had to search for firewood? What if you could only work and study during the day because you had no light at night? What if when you went to the emergency room after injuring yourself, you were turned away because there was no electricity?

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.