Good Gifting

This is newly updated for 2007. A couple caveats: I welcome suggestions, but this is not a site to advertise stores. I mention stores I've been to or shop at, but the goal here isn't to amass a long list of deserving stores. Mostly it's a list of 'generes' of giving with examples I particularly like. So feel free to leave info about your store in the comments, but don't be offended if I never ad it. There are millions of organic clothing stores, for example...I note this, and suggest people google them rather than this list being over-wrought.

I would like creative, unusual, green ideas...


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In my green gift guide, below, I’ve sort of categorized the sorts of gift genres I like. Sometimes I construct a green gift; sometimes I get an item that I would otherwise label hoary from a local shop or a used store and feel better about it; sometimes I get a fairly traded gift from the web. Generally This list will grow with time, with your suggestions, etc. And please do make suggestions.

SUPPORTING LOCAL ECONOMY
Basically, the local version of any of the following is better than the internet-purchased version in terms of supporting local businesses. Local meaning a store owned by an individual in your community--probably not a corporation-- or a non-profit organization in your community. If the choice is from Amazon or Target, I don’t see a huge difference, especially if you’re sending it to an Auntie in Argentina or something.
1) Crafts, Foods, Clothes from Locally Owned Fair Trade Shops.
Most major cities have a few. In Houston we have an ever growing number, though I most often frequent: Corazon, Taft Street Coffee, and Ten Thousand Villages (which is a chain, but a worthy one…). Hey, see what shops sell fair trade products in your part of the states (there’s not a world-wide listing, yet…but Google…)
2) Resale or antique shops. I am not a pro at Houston resale. Mostly, I go to a resale children’s shop called Young and Restless. In Montrose I go to Bluebird Circle, but I know this city abounds with good resale I don't know about. I will quote a little birdie's comment on adult resale rather than paraphrase: "Blue Bird on W Alabama is the granddaddy of resale - good selection of furniture and so forth and they sort the clothes by size. Catholic Charities on Lovett and the Junior League shop in the Heights also sort by size, but the Junior League store is best for the size fours of the world. Salvation Army on Washington and Goodwill on the North Freeway are the largest of their brethern."
3) Gifty Foods or Crafts from Farmers Markets Etc. We go to Central City Co-Op and they sell little edible items. Friends like Bayou City Farmer’s Market and Mid-Town Farmer’s Market. To find other Texas or US markets, go to Local Harvest.
4) Support A Local Charity instead of a Mega-One In Your Loved One’s Name. Too many to mention…
6) Gift certificates to local venues…restaurants, your favorite baby shop, a masseuse, an art class, a composting class, a cooking class, a writing class
7) Memberships to a local museum…children’s, mfa, natural science, zoo. 
8) Pass to a National Park in your area…go here
9) Shops of all Ilks. Childrens’, bookstores, bikes, hardware stores, antique shops. Might cost a little extra, but hey, no shipping and handling and the monetary and environmental costs it incurs.

GIVING DOUBLE, aka, SUPPORTING CHARITIES, SERVICE, JUSTICE:
All sorts of charities are making it very easy for you to give in another person’s honor. Most send the person something representative of your purchase, be it a certificate, a photo, a turtle tracking system, or the National Green Pages.
1) Giving That Benefits People: Give a cow to a family in a loved one’s name via Heifer International ... conservatives in the family?  They're pro-Heifer, from what I've gleaned in my own family.  You can all feel good about a gift from there.  Or help a rural community develop health or social services (or a number of other options) via Seva Foundation, Oxfam.  
2) Giving That Benefits Social Justice. Purchasing gift memberships for your loved ones to Oxfam, CoOp America, Pacifica, whatever organization it is you think they’d appreciate membership to.
3) Giving That Promotes the Environment. Trees for Life.
4) Giving That Promotes Conservation. Nature Conservancy gifts to save forests and reefs
5) Giving To Benefit Animals: Adopt and track a sea turtle throughout the year at Seaturtle.org, Farm Sanctuary
6) There are numerous websites that offer much longer lists of the many different ways you can give these sorts of gifts. The ones above caught my eye for various reasons. But here are three good sites to goto if none of the ones I’ve offered tip your kettles: JustGive.org, NoMoreSocks (defunct!), Oxfam, National Resources Defense Council
7) Echoage is a company that you ask guests to give $20 to for a gift (birthday is the idea on the site) and half that money goes to buying one gift for the child, the other goes to the cause of the child & parents' choice.

GIFT GIVING THAT PROMOTES EDUCATION , IMAGINATION &/OR IS SUPPORTIVE OF BUILDING FAMILY COMMUNITY:
There are millions of sites, so I won’t go into detail. But I like the ideas over at NoMoreSocks.
1) Scientific Toys
2) Board Games
3) Craft Items
4) Costumes, puppets…
5) Music
6) Photo related I have used Zazzle a couple of years to make mugs, aprons, t-shirts that make grandparents happy. Zazzle has a lot more options than similar sites for standard items. I am newly impressed with the sites Moo for unusual photo gifting options and the site QOOP because it makes nice photo books.

GIVING THAT GROWS:
I forgot this on my original lists, and it has been a longtime favorite gift of mine: sending seedlings or windowbox gardening kits to friends throughout the country. Last year I sent tomato plants to several relatives via Windowbox.com -- though they messed up two orders, they resent one and credited me money for the other, and I had a good experience. Windowbox promotes gardening for people w/o the space, which I think is a fabulous idea. Still, this year, my gifts will come via Seeds of Change because they sell organic plants and work hard at preserving biodiversity. You can buy a truffle tree for somebody to reap the benefits of, rent vines you get the bottles of wine from...

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE ITEMS FROM SOME FAIR TRADE SHOP OR ‘GREEN’ COMPANY (ORGANIC, FAIRLY TRADED, AND/OR vegan):
Basically, you can get the green version of about anything, but it costs…Also, check to make sure item is really green…ie, many yoga mats from green companies are made out of gassing plastics. Many green things aren’t “fair trade” and “vice-versa.” I’m happy when I can get both (and can buy them locally!)…but it doesn’t always happen. I’d shop around for most any of these items…you CAN find good deals if you look hard enough
1) Clothes: Buying new (or used!), organic, worker friendly, fairly traded, and/or vegan clothes or wallets, bags, or shoes.
2) Crafts: Buying fairly traded crafts from around the world for your loved ones try Global Exchange, Bright Hope, Ten Thousand Villages, World of Good
3) Food Items: AKA fairly traded coffee, teas, chocolates…Global Exchange, Café Campesino, Shaman Chocolates, Glee Gum
4) Personal Care Items: Soaps, salts,at stores like Our Green House.
5) Toys: Wood, cotton, pvc-free…Kid Bean, Toys from the Heart, Peapods
Portals to find the stores that sell these goods: Co-Op America, Eco Mall, Global Exchange
6) Jewelry: Buy recycled gold etc from GreenKarat.com
7) Movies: Buy movies that support women filmmakers at WomenMakeMovies.com
8) Health equipment. Healthy yoga mats at stores like Natural Fitness.

SITES WITH MORE SPECIFIC GOOD IDEAS FOR GIFTS YOU CAN PURCHASE
1) The Green Guide via Grist
2) Co-Op America’s Green Pages
3) Environmental Defense
4) Tree hugger

BETTER WHEN THEY’RE USED…:
1) Books are good to give used, as they’re not particularly environmentally friendly. And it goes against the idea of local, but these days, it’s pretty easy to get a new-looking used book online. Or go the other way and get a funky old edition of a book, or an illustrated old edition…
2) Jewelry. Want to avoid supporting icky work practices in the mining industry & yet still get your sweetie some kind of bling? Antique jewelry is a good choice…
3) Baby/Kid Things. You can get good wooden baby toys and avoid those nasty plastic chemicals. Or a snowflake dress some baby only wore once. Or black patent leather shoes a baby wore twice. Or cool costumes for babies, kids, toddlers…
4) Furniture. Buy a crappy old table and refinish it. Or if you’ve got the dough, buy a refinished table.
5) Wrapping Paper. I’m ahead of myself here, but as long as you’re out, used stores (and your attic and about everywhere you look) is full of papers or cloth that make inexpensive, cool looking, distinctive wrappings.
6) Doo-dads. You know who you’re shopping for better than I do…go hunting!

HOME-MADE, CHEAP, OR FREE (AKA TIME)…GOOD FOR KIDS & STUDENTS OF ALL ILKS:
1) Bake. Deliver the goods to friends in lieu of purchased gifts
2) Books. Construct them yourself, write a poem or a story, or uses photos…or both…
3) Ornaments, picture frames, magnets. Go to a craft store (or a used store) find materials, and concoct them.
4) Calendars, cds, videos. Use the computer to make calendars or cds or a video
4) Compose. Songs, poems, stories, plays, portraits, dances…
5) Work. Clean out somebody’s garage, cupboards, paint their porch, weed their garden…
6) Sculpt. With clay or snow or granite.
7) Cross pollinate these and other ideas you have…
8) Puppets. Make puppets for the kids in your life…

HOARY GIFT GIVING:
A few trashy gifts that are not fair-trade, environmentally friendly, local, organic, or educational always slip into my giving. I don’t stress out too much, because I go out of my way to keep their numbers down. Last year I knew somebody who needed a talking Jackie Kennedy doll, so I will look locally and/or used…but I’m not holding my breath.
1) One way around this is to buy your gifts through sites like HEARTof.com, which is a portal you enter before shopping at regular places like Amazon or the Gap...but if you do enter these places through the HEARTof hurdel 75% of your purchase money goes to a charity of your choice. Similar organizations that give less money -- 35% -- are GreaterGood.com or IGive.com.

GIVING FRESH AIR:
1) Surprise the family with an outing to some outdoor place on your gift exchange day…an orchard, a sledding hill, a river, a park…bring snacks



***I have definitely not included all there is out there. This is a list that will grow at my pace, not the pace of the green gifting industry. If I forgot one of your favorites, or if you have a good idea about any of all this, please let me know in the comments!

The Big L.I.

I'm going to use my favorite BabyG names in the next few posts to see which ones feel the most like our little sweetie pie. Today's name of choice: Verdita (and variants).

GreenDaddy and I have been very busy the last two years doing all sorts of little things to make the world better for Verdita: we learned to compost, planted a garden, switched to 100% wind energy, joined a food co-op, searched out local and organic foods, turned more to buying used goods, got rid of one our cars and didn't buy a new one, we started avoiding petrochemicals, stopped using shampoo (usually), switched to nature store deoderant, joined freecycle to lessen our junk load in the dumps, & continued recycling, even our glass which means driving it to the recycling plant off Highway 59 and Westpark.

There's a lot more obviously green things out there we're not trying yet, but we're working toward: I want rain barrels and solar energy and a xeroscaped lawn and a meadow on our roof and less energy sucking cracks in the home and less time in the car and more efficient fuel and all sorts of things, these are just the first that come to mind. I think we'll get around to most of these things, as our life progresses.

But there are some difficult things you have to do to make the world better for your children, and you can't twiddle your thumbs and do it when you're ready.

First thing sounds silly, but it's on my mind a lot: we have only planted one tree in our yard, and we've cut three down. Choosing where to plant a new tree, what kind to get, thinking about how it will grow, whether or not it'll bump into the neighbors' trees...we keep getting caught in this indecisiveness that means there are three years of tree growing we have wasted in this house. I feel bad about that.

But I feel worse about the big L.I. Life Insurance. And how we still haven't bought any. Even though, like a tree, it's something you need to have planted last year. Once, GreenDaddy's work was going to send over a man to give him a checkup, and we totally forgot. That's the closest we ever go to it.

We're caught up on questions the way we are with the tree: how much should we buy? from whom? what kind is best? how will we know we have the best deal? Basically, we just want to have already had it. The rigomorolle is daunting. But daunting in this way we have no business of actually acceding to. Because there's this little former baby, Verdita, who needs us not only to do what we can to save the world, but also needs us to provide her some kind of security in case we don't survive the world long enough for her to grow up in it.

Our whole parenthood we've struggled in accomplishing legal and financial issues, the way I think a lot of people who don't want to be materialistic do. You don't want money to matter. You want the way you raise your baby to be enough. And I do think the way you raise your baby is a lot. But then, you, meaning I, I really want to make sure GreenDaddy and the baby, or just the baby, can recover as gracefully as possible if I kick the bucket. Money isn't all they'd need to do that, but having no money, and being short a parent, or two, isn't what I want for the baby either.

We did finally get around to writing a will, and we got it notarized, a few months ago. So our next hurdle as financially and legally responsible parents is the insurance thing. I wasn't sure this is something that belongs on Green Parenting...but it's a parenting issue we're grappling with and I wondered what other people are doing, how other people are faring on this front, and what other perspectives on the issue people have.

Living the Three Quarters Life

Yesterday, I switched to a three quarters full-time schedule for my job. I negotiated this arrangement eight months ago, but the switch depended on a new person joining the office staff and training that person to take over some of my responsibilities.

At first when I wrote out my new schedule to share with my co-workers, I felt disappointed. After all the patience and bureaucratic legwork it took to make the part-time switch, I realized that thirty hours is not dramatically different than forty hours. I will still go to work five days per week and during most of the daylight hours I will be sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen. Instead of starting work at eight, I am to start at ten the first three days of the week. Thursdays, I will leave at one so I can take a course towards my doctoral degree. Fridays, I will work a full day.

But those two hours yesterday morning were precious and wonderful. I left the house when I normally would in the morning, but instead of going to my office I wrote in the library. The whole day I felt more cheerful and energetic. My work and family life felt more balanced. It is not that I spent more time with MaGreen and BabyG, but when I got home, instead of crashing on the couch and slogging through the evening, we all went to the university outdoor swimming pool. BabyG seemed to enjoy the pool. She climbed up the small slide and slid down it about twenty times in a row. Even though the absolute quantity of time I spent with my family did not change, I think the quality of the time was better.

In order to arrange this three-quarter schedule, I had to give up a quarter of my pay, which was used to cover part of the new staff person’s salary. We could not be able to pull this off oeconomically if MaGreen did not manage our finances as carefully as she does. She keeps track of our expenses using a computer program Quicken. She spent several days earlier this summer switching us to an internet bank, turning off our landline, setting up a good Skype account, and doing various other things to save us money. Also, even though my total income will decrease, our taxes will be lower so the cut in my take home pay is less than the total cut in my gross pay.

I hope I continue to feel good about the three quarters life and that it also helps MaGreen and BabyG feel a good balance in their lives too.

Why You Might Not Try To Save $2,000

The ATT&T Lesson: When you called AT&T two months ago to complain about the ever-increasing bill, a young man put you on a new plan to help you save $35 a month. The new plan, it turns out when you get your bill, costs exactly five dollars more than the old one. Because you like the quality of AT&T, you call and ask if you can get their cable internet without the phone. You can! If you also get their cable TV, which will eventually cost you $75 a month. Nobody believes you don't have a television (or that you have one in the attic, in case of emergencies). So you decide to switch to Earthlink cable. When you call to cancel AT&T, they tell you that it will cost you $100 because you were just put onto a new plan that requires a one year contract. You say you weren't informed of a yearlong service contract, that you wouldn't have signed up for one since you were considering the switch to cable for awhile now, and that even if they had told you, they lied about the price. They ask if you if you want to pay the one hundred dollar cancellation fee or keep your service. You ask for the manager. They say it's the weekend, the manager will call you by Wednesday. They have told you this before, about another issue, and you know what they mean is that you should call back on Monday. I haven't had the resolve to do this as of yet.

**Update** 43 minutes into a call in which you speak to 6 different AT&T reps, half of whom think your contract actually expired in August, half of whom think it began in March, you are informed that the manager has to call back because they're backloaded. Turns out it's not only on the weekend you can't talk to a manager, it's everyday.

The Internet Switch Lesson: No matter how proficient you have become in the last twenty years, it will always take at least eight solid hours, usually thirteen, of your time. When the installation guy leaves, for example, you will discover you don't actually have a working connection. The Earthlink call center will help you along and a few days later you will learn a 56k modem is faster than your new Earthlink cable. The Earthlink call center will tell you to unplug your modem and cable connection and restart your computer (the old goat takes more than 5 minutes to restart every time, and throughout this process, you will restart it at least 20 times) and swear your problem is solved. An hour later, you will call the same call center, tell them about the same slow problem. The new call center employee will try a completley different solution that sort of works. Eventually, they will refer you to Time Warner, who installed the service. Time Warner employee will perform all the same tests from your computer that Earthlink did, look at various settings, finally refer you back to Earthlink. At the last second the employee will get a bright idea, have you fix one more thing, and that will work.

The Energy Company Switch Lesson: You sign up for a new service April 16th or so, and get a note back from the Texas Power Commision telling you they've approved the switch for June 15. It takes two months, I guess, to. Um. What???? Whatever. I'm not making any phone calls.

The Bank Switch Lesson: Switch banks before you switch phone companies or you may not have enough life force left to fill out the online application and send it in via snail mail. We are switching from Chase, king of $12 service fees and low interest rates, to EverBank that charges nothing and gives 6% interest on both checking and savings. It's an internet bank...meaning I'll have to send in deposits, but it pays for ATM charges at whatever local bank you make withdrawls.

The Saving $2000 A Year Lesson Ask the internet readers to come up with one. You spend too long trying to think of a pithy aphorism or metaphor, but your brain is in a hateful mood and won't help out.

Skin Deep: It's in the Details

I.

Little Scotty Meek announced one day, out of the blue, that Vaseline is made of petroleum, just like gasoline. I was seven and he was nine. His information launched a heated conversation in which I reminded him that Vaseline neither smells nor looks like gas, and that if it was at all related to it my father surely wouldn’t put it on my lips when they were chapped.

Then came the quest for the bottle of Vaseline, which he pointed out, is also called: “petroleum jelly.” Since we lived in oil country, I knew petroleum was a fancy name for gas, but the new knowledge didn’t trip me up. Plenty of words, I told him, sound the same, but have different meanings. I couldn’t pull the word homonym from my pocket, but I did have examples: board/bored, write/right/right, and every child’s favorite: but and butt.

He wouldn’t concede, so we took the matter to my grandfather, a mechanic, and of course, I lost the argument. After that I refused to use gasoline jelly. No matter what people said, my child’s brain would not allow for the dual use of petrol in our car and on my lips. Lucky for my dad that Scotty didn’t know pajamas, toothpaste, or baby oil, vitamins, and bubble bath were also petroleum products or I’d have had the excuse I’d always needed to be in actuality the naked, dirty, deficient little varmint with rotting teeth that I’ve always been at heart.

II.

Lucky for BabyG, in the last couple of decades knowledge about not only the petroleum, but a host of other chemicals used in bath and body products has almost become mainstream. The likes of the world’s hippies, old-fashioned-recipe-traditionalists, new agers’, yuppies, and power-yoga-enthusiasts expressed so much distress at using these sorts of products that a number of new, more “natural,” often organic products had been called into being.

Of course, plenty of people working in the beauty industry did not relish being left out of the new order of environmentally-friendly upstarts. They realized many people weren’t even sure what they wanted when they bought 'natural'…that the word itself had become a fad. They hired ad executives who concluded something like: petroleum comes from old dinosaur bones: what’s more natural than that?, and then stuck the word natural on all sorts of dangerous, healthy, and not what I would consider "natural" products.

As a green consumer, I thought one simple way to ensure I get more “natural” products, is to shop at stores that are geared toward environmentalism. So for awhile, after our family decided to go green, we shopped at Whole Foods, and bought the exorbitantly priced lotions and toothpastes and shampoos there. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind that just because it’s at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean it’s natural. That’s like thinking buying a product at Safeway’s or Randall’s means its safe. You would like it to be so, but experience suggests you need to take the quest a few steps further.

I googled around until I found recommendations from environmental-friendly sources. But I was dismayed that while many of them told you what major-consumer-brands to avoid, why to avoid them, and what to use instead, they rarely if ever explained what products were used in the making of the ones they touted.

So I got online and researched the sorts or chemicals I definitely wanted to avoid. You’ll note the length of that list if you click on the link. It was a little much for me to carry every time I went to the grocery store, so I settled on just a few of them.

III.

Enter the Environmental Working Group, “a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. focused on safeguarding public health and the environment.” This group spent two years compiling information on almost 15,000 products, and they offer up their findings in an online database called Skin Deep. If you want information on a beauty product not already in the database, you can send the brand in and get it added.

Skin Deep has an incredible database that not only includes information on brands like Crest or Suave, but it covers alternatives like Tom's of Maine, Jason, and Avalon Organics.  It analyzes the numbers of toxins, the number of ingredients that haven't been studied, and the known risks of the toxins that have been studied and comes up with a level of safety: 0 for products that pose no risks, 5 for extraordinarily toxic products.  You can search the database by typing in a brand name you're interested in, or by searching via a general area, like baby shampoos.

Below, I entered "Jason toothpaste," which I switched to when we first went green.



If you click on the product name, you get a long page detailing the particular products analysis, as well as a side bar glance that sums it up.  To the right, is the sidebar that came with the Jason Sea Fresh Spearmint Toothpaste my family has been using awhile.  It took awhile to get used to Jason -- it's a clear gel with a tingly taste totally unlike any toothpaste I'd tried before -- and I wasn't looking forward to switching brands.  I was relieved that although the Sea Fresh Spearmint we were using rated as moderately unsafe, the Sea Fresh Plus Coq-10 rated a whole point lower (go Coq-10!).  The lowest rated toothpaste, Fresh, is made of Umbrian Clay and costs $20 for 4 oz. -- I can get a 4 pack of my Jason Sea Fresh Coq-10 for that.  Its safty rating ties with Burt's Bees, but and lags only behind Fresh, Dr. Bronners, PeelU, Accelerade and Garden of Life. One day I might get sick of shelling out money for toothpaste and revert to using Baking Soda like my dad (but what about fresh breath!?)...but until then, I'll enjoy the days dappling in the oddities of health food toothpastes.

For those of you dying to see a general topic search, the first one I looked up was baby shampoo.  Because while GreenDaddy and I have gone no-poo, Lila is an Aubrey Organics girl.  Here's what I found:



Clearly, I was pleased to see BabyG's was the least toxic on the list...of 18 shampoos, it was only one of two with a low concern rating.  But one thing I like about this list is the surprises: Johnson and Johnson was in the lower 2/3...but still ranked about the same as the "green" brand, Desert Essence.  However, Desert Essence signed a cruelty-free compact, and Johnson & Johnson didn't.  The worst rated shampoos are Gerber, Mustela, and Modern...they got actual red, high risk dots.  

IV.

Admittedly, obsessing over these sorts of things can be loony-bin-making material.  I'm still not sure how bad moderate is, really, or how good low is.  When I look up one of my favorite products and get a long list of the toxins it contains, the ingredients nobody knows anything about since they haven’t been studied, and the final analysis of its safety, I am slightly flummoxed. I am no scientist. I don’t really understand the analysis, but the spirit of the site: which is free, which sometimes recommends big-named-brands over the health-food store brands, I trust. And in this era in which the numberless amount of labels claiming to be natural finally suggests the word "natural" itself has crossed into homonymuous terrain, this might be the closest I’m going to get to understanding what I put in or on my family’s bodies.

Is Al Gore a Hypocrite? Am I? Are you?

The Fox News people seemed to enjoy reporting on Al Gore’s utility bills. The source of their reports was the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a conservative non-profit that obtained the past two years of Al’s electricity bills. They are high. His twenty-room home and pool house consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours. Apparently his pool is heated. An Al Gore spokesperson offered a number of defenses on his behalf. He and Tipper work out of the home. They have to maintain electric security systems. They bought an old house and it takes time to increase its efficiency. They have plans to install solar panels. In the meantime, they buy their energy from green sources and purchase carbon offsets. So he’s not really a hypocrite.

I wasn’t surprised that the Fox News report on Al’s utility bills was unfair and unbalanced. I am surprised about the heated pool. Surely Al can exercise or enjoy himself some other way in the winter? I’m glad he was called on it. The lifestyles of public figures should be scrutinized if they claim special authority. Another example would be a gay-bashing gay preacher. He should be outed. Likewise, Al Gore’s heated pool is news.

What about us? How do DaddyG, MaGreen, and BabyG compare against the 10,656 kilowatt-hours average? I pulled out MaGreen’s electricity file and added up the figures. The bill lists our “KWh Electricity Used” very plainly. Our total electricity usage for 2006 was 7,802 kilowatt-hours – three-fourths of the national average. In your face Al! We win, you lose. You, Al, are a hypocrite and we are the high priests of green. So what if your documentary helped establish a public consensus on global warming? We walk the walk. I haven't even mentioned yet that we buy our electricity from Green Mountain Energy, a wind energy company.

I guess it helps that our home has four rooms not twenty. We have a gas stove and water heater. We keep our windows open and the air-conditioning off when possible. And most importantly, we have a special kind of motivation that’s missing in Al’s life – a tight budget. (I just heard that the reduction of my hours to 75% full-time that I requested will happen. That’s great news for our overall well-being, I think, but our budget’s about to get even tighter.) We can’t rest on our laurels, we need to reduce our electricity usage and our bill. Our total electricity cost for the past year was $1,500. It would be great if we could cut that by 20%.

I logged into the Green Mountain website, guessing that they might provide some statistics. The website not only gives basic statistics, it automatically generates nifty charts showing our usage by month. Below is a graph for 2006:



I learned a lot from that graph. Clearly air-conditioning is the number one source of our electricity consumption. Our August usage, when the air-conditioner runs at full blast, is almost quadruple our usage in January when our gas heater runs.

The sad thing about this piece of knowledge is that I don’t know what to do about it. We live in Houston. It’s very difficult to live without air-conditioning here. Maybe getting insulating curtains would help cut our energy consumption, but those curtains can be expensive. I’m not sure that we would recuperate the cost of buying and installing them. And from what I’ve read, they keep the heat in during the winter. They don’t keep the heat out in the summer. I also read about these electricity meters in England that help people monitor their usage. Even if I could find one for our home in the US, I don’t think micromanaging our appliances will help that much.

I’m hoping that by paying more attention to the monthly bills, keeping our ceiling fans running more often, and being more mindful of when we turn the airconditioning on, we can cut our usage without suffering in the coming heat.

Must Green Parents Be Rich Parents?

Before BabyG was born, MaGreen and I saved a little each month like a good bourgeois couple. Even though we didn’t make huge incomes from our teaching and editing jobs, we were paid decently. We lived in moderation but did not have to count every penny. Right after BabyG was born, the balance of our income and expenses did not change much. I took all of my vacation days and my supervisor allowed me some flexibility. Though it was stressful, MaGreen and I managed to care for BabyG without any substantial extra expense or loss of income. After two months, I had to return to the regular schedule for my full-time, five days per week desk job. And MaGreen had to kick her own studies into highgear. So we started to pay for childcare and we went from saving money to barely breaking even.

According to the 2005 US Census statistics, our income is thoroughly average. We make about 125% of the median family income for a 3-person family in the state of Texas. (In the US, the disparity of wealth is huge. A relatively small number of people make way more money than we do. For this reason, the average income is a lot higher than the median income.) In terms of income, our family is the representative American family. We’re the 21st century Cleavers. So if we are barely breaking even that means families below the median income – half of the families in the US – are probably not barely breaking even. They’re just breaking. Despite the high GDP per capita here, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked the US second to last for child well-being among economically developed nations. The US was at the bottom or near it for nearly every category including income poverty, reading levels, aspirations, and child mortality. Check out the full Unicef report (1.5MB pdf).

Unlike a very large percentage of our fellow Americans, I think we have the minimum “capabilities and functionings” to call our lives dignified. Our incomes, education levels, assets, and status allow us to raise BabyG with enough attention that she won’t have a childhood of deprivation. We don’t deprive ourselves either. But I want more than the minimum. I don’t just want to attain the lowest threshold of dignity. I want to spend less time at my desk and more time with BabyG. I want to have an exercise routine. I’d like to write my novel. I’d like to do more community organizing. So I asked my supervisor to get my workload reduced to 75%. Instead of working 40 hours per week on average, I would work 30. And it looks like my request might go through by August. I am very excited. Even though I haven’t even started the new schedule yet, I feel a tremendous sense of relief. The problem is that if I work a 75% schedule, I will make 75% of my previous salary. We will go from slightly above median family income to below the median and from barely breaking even to going into debt.

So I decided its time to count the pennies. We need to cut our monthly expenses by several hundred dollars! I logged into all of our accounts and compiled all the expenses from checks, cash cards, and credit cards. Then I assigned the individual expenses to one of the following categories: childcare, education (tuition and books for MaGreen and me), professional development, rent, miscellaneous (gifts, clothes, toys, etc.), groceries, eating out, telecommunications, transportation, energy, health, cash, bank fees, and entertainment. Finally, I made a table showing monthly totals under each category so I could get a sense of what stays the same and what varies.

Out of our expenses, childcare, education, and rent account for 65% of the total. Those are fixed costs. We can’t change those arrangements without hurting our quality of life and our future. Groceries are a whopping 8% of our expenses. Buying organic vegetables adds up. We thought eating out would be the obvious “culprit,” but even though we go to restaurants two to three times a week that’s only 4% of our expenses. We spend more on our telecommunications (phone line, cell phones, internet connection, and webhosting) than we do on eating out. Since I bicycle to work and MaGreen drives our old Mazda about ten miles per week, our transportation costs are low. And even though we buy our electricity through a windmill company, our utility bills aren’t that high. So it’s not clear to me what we can cut without sacrificing our emerging green lifestyle.

MaGreen went over the numbers and we talked about them over dinner. We decided to eat out less and cook more with cheaper ingredients without giving up on organics. We’re going to look for cheaper telecommunications deals. And we’re hoping that by tracking our expenses more carefully, we can generally rein them in. I’ll post how we’re doing the next time we do the calculations. Wish us well!

Green, Socially Responsible Gift Giving

Dec 2007 update

Ouch, says my pocketbook. But, alas, I have never figured out how to extricate myself from participating in the winter holidays’ madness. Plus, BabyG and GreenDaddy have birthdays December 22nd. And BabyG’s Dadi, GreenDaddy’s dad, has a birthday the 26th. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

The main reason I can’t excuse myself from gift-giving frenzies is that I like giving, and I like receiving. My dad liked holidays, especially this one. My family didn’t do a lot of things well…but holidays and gift giving were good. We never had tons of gifts, we just always exchanged thoughtful ones. And this is still important to me. I liked sitting in a room with the whole family, opening things one at a time, mulling over each, remembering them. It’s the surprise I love most. I like adorning my family and friends with things they’ll love but not expect. And these days, I enjoy figuring out how to give people surprising, delightful, AND worthwhile gifts…which means socially responsible, green, charitable, homemade, or local.

In my green gift guide, below, I’ve sort of categorized the sorts of gift genres I like. Sometimes I construct a green gift; sometimes I get an item that I would otherwise label hoary from a local shop or a used store and feel better about it; sometimes I get a fairly traded gift from the web. Generally This list will grow with time, with your suggestions, etc. And please do make suggestions.

This is newly updated for 2008. A couple caveats: I welcome suggestions, but this is not a site to advertise stores. I mention stores I've been to or shop at, but the goal here isn't to amass a long list of deserving stores. Mostly it's a list of 'generes' of giving with examples I particularly like. So feel free to leave info about your store in the comments, but don't be offended if I never ad it. There are millions of organic clothing stores, for example...I note this, and suggest people google them rather than this list being over-wrought.

SUPPORTING LOCAL ECONOMY
Basically, the local version of any of the following is better than the internet-purchased version in terms of supporting local businesses. Local meaning a store owned by an individual in your community--probably not a corporation-- or a non-profit organization in your community. If the choice is from Amazon or Target, I don’t see a huge difference, especially if you’re sending it to an Auntie in Argentina or something.
1) Crafts, Foods, Clothes from Locally Owned Fair Trade Shops.
Most major cities have a few. In Houston we have an ever growing number, though I most often frequent: Corazon, Taft Street Coffee, and Ten Thousand Villages (which is a chain, but a worthy one…). Hey, see what shops sell fair trade products in your part of the states (there’s not a world-wide listing, yet…but Google…)
2) Resale or antique shops. I am not a pro at Houston resale. Mostly, I go to a resale children’s shop called Young and Restless. In Montrose I go to Bluebird Circle, but I know this city abounds with good resale I don't know about. I will quote a little birdie's comment on adult resale rather than paraphrase: "Blue Bird on W Alabama is the granddaddy of resale - good selection of furniture and so forth and they sort the clothes by size. Catholic Charities on Lovett and the Junior League shop in the Heights also sort by size, but the Junior League store is best for the size fours of the world. Salvation Army on Washington and Goodwill on the North Freeway are the largest of their brethern."
3) Gifty Foods or Crafts from Farmers Markets Etc. We go to Central City Co-Op and they sell little edible items. Friends like Bayou City Farmer’s Market and Mid-Town Farmer’s Market. To find other Texas or US markets, go to Local Harvest.
4) Support A Local Charity instead of a Mega-One In Your Loved One’s Name. Too many to mention…
6) Gift certificates to local venues…restaurants, your favorite baby shop, a masseuse, an art class, a composting class, a cooking class, a writing class
7) Memberships to a local museum…children’s, mfa, natural science, zoo. 
8) Pass to a National Park in your area…go here
9) Shops of all Ilks. Childrens’, bookstores, bikes, hardware stores, antique shops. Might cost a little extra, but hey, no shipping and handling and the monetary and environmental costs it incurs.

GIVING DOUBLE, aka, SUPPORTING CHARITIES, SERVICE, JUSTICE:
All sorts of charities are making it very easy for you to give in another person’s honor. Most send the person something representative of your purchase, be it a certificate, a photo, a turtle tracking system, or the National Green Pages.
1) Giving That Benefits People: Give a cow to a family in a loved one’s name via Heifer International ... conservatives in the family?  They're pro-Heifer, from what I've gleaned in my own family.  You can all feel good about a gift from there.  Or help a rural community develop health or social services (or a number of other options) via Seva Foundation, Oxfam.  
2) Giving That Benefits Social Justice. Purchasing gift memberships for your loved ones to Oxfam, CoOp America, Pacifica, whatever organization it is you think they’d appreciate membership to.
3) Giving That Promotes the Environment. Trees for Life.
4) Giving That Promotes Conservation. Nature Conservancy gifts to save forests and reefs
5) Giving To Benefit Animals: Adopt and track a sea turtle throughout the year at Seaturtle.org, Farm Sanctuary
6) There are numerous websites that offer much longer lists of the many different ways you can give these sorts of gifts. The ones above caught my eye for various reasons. But here are three good sites to goto if none of the ones I’ve offered tip your kettles: JustGive.org, NoMoreSocks (defunct!), Oxfam, National Resources Defense Council
7) Echoage is a company that you ask guests to give $20 to for a gift (birthday is the idea on the site) and half that money goes to buying one gift for the child, the other goes to the cause of the child & parents' choice.

GIFT GIVING THAT PROMOTES EDUCATION , IMAGINATION &/OR IS SUPPORTIVE OF BUILDING FAMILY COMMUNITY:
There are millions of sites, so I won’t go into detail. But I like the ideas over at NoMoreSocks.
1) Scientific Toys
2) Board Games
3) Craft Items
4) Costumes, puppets…
5) Music
6) Photo related I have used Zazzle a couple of years to make mugs, aprons, t-shirts that make grandparents happy. Zazzle has a lot more options than similar sites for standard items. I am newly impressed with the sites Moo for unusual photo gifting options and the site QOOP because it makes nice photo books.

GIVING THAT GROWS:
I forgot this on my original lists, and it has been a longtime favorite gift of mine: sending seedlings or windowbox gardening kits to friends throughout the country. Last year I sent tomato plants to several relatives via Windowbox.com -- though they messed up two orders, they resent one and credited me money for the other, and I had a good experience. Windowbox promotes gardening for people w/o the space, which I think is a fabulous idea. Still, this year, my gifts will come via Seeds of Change because they sell organic plants and work hard at preserving biodiversity. You can buy a truffle tree for somebody to reap the benefits of, rent vines you get the bottles of wine from...

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE ITEMS FROM SOME FAIR TRADE SHOP OR ‘GREEN’ COMPANY (ORGANIC, FAIRLY TRADED, AND/OR vegan):
Basically, you can get the green version of about anything, but it costs…Also, check to make sure item is really green…ie, many yoga mats from green companies are made out of gassing plastics. Many green things aren’t “fair trade” and “vice-versa.” I’m happy when I can get both (and can buy them locally!)…but it doesn’t always happen. I’d shop around for most any of these items…you CAN find good deals if you look hard enough
1) Clothes: Buying new (or used!), organic, worker friendly, fairly traded, and/or vegan clothes or wallets, bags, or shoes.
2) Crafts: Buying fairly traded crafts from around the world for your loved ones try Global Exchange, Bright Hope, Ten Thousand Villages, World of Good
3) Food Items: AKA fairly traded coffee, teas, chocolates…Global Exchange, Café Campesino, Shaman Chocolates, Glee Gum
4) Personal Care Items: Soaps, salts,at stores like Our Green House.
5) Toys: Wood, cotton, pvc-free…Kid Bean, Toys from the Heart, Peapods
Portals to find the stores that sell these goods: Co-Op America, Eco Mall, Global Exchange
6) Jewelry: Buy recycled gold etc from GreenKarat.com
7) Movies: Buy movies that support women filmmakers at WomenMakeMovies.com
8) Health equipment. Healthy yoga mats at stores like Natural Fitness.

SITES WITH MORE SPECIFIC GOOD IDEAS FOR GIFTS YOU CAN PURCHASE
1) The Green Guide via Grist
2) Co-Op America’s Green Pages
3) Environmental Defense
4) Tree hugger

BETTER WHEN THEY’RE USED…:
1) Books are good to give used, as they’re not particularly environmentally friendly. And it goes against the idea of local, but these days, it’s pretty easy to get a new-looking used book online. Or go the other way and get a funky old edition of a book, or an illustrated old edition…
2) Jewelry. Want to avoid supporting icky work practices in the mining industry & yet still get your sweetie some kind of bling? Antique jewelry is a good choice…
3) Baby/Kid Things. You can get good wooden baby toys and avoid those nasty plastic chemicals. Or a snowflake dress some baby only wore once. Or black patent leather shoes a baby wore twice. Or cool costumes for babies, kids, toddlers…
4) Furniture. Buy a crappy old table and refinish it. Or if you’ve got the dough, buy a refinished table.
5) Wrapping Paper. I’m ahead of myself here, but as long as you’re out, used stores (and your attic and about everywhere you look) is full of papers or cloth that make inexpensive, cool looking, distinctive wrappings.
6) Doo-dads. You know who you’re shopping for better than I do…go hunting!

HOME-MADE, CHEAP, OR FREE (AKA TIME)…GOOD FOR KIDS & STUDENTS OF ALL ILKS:
1) Bake. Deliver the goods to friends in lieu of purchased gifts
2) Books. Construct them yourself, write a poem or a story, or uses photos…or both…
3) Ornaments, picture frames, magnets. Go to a craft store (or a used store) find materials, and concoct them.
4) Calendars, cds, videos. Use the computer to make calendars or cds or a video
4) Compose. Songs, poems, stories, plays, portraits, dances…
5) Work. Clean out somebody’s garage, cupboards, paint their porch, weed their garden…
6) Sculpt. With clay or snow or granite.
7) Cross pollinate these and other ideas you have…
8) Puppets. Make puppets for the kids in your life…

HOARY GIFT GIVING:
A few trashy gifts that are not fair-trade, environmentally friendly, local, organic, or educational always slip into my giving. I don’t stress out too much, because I go out of my way to keep their numbers down. Last year I knew somebody who needed a talking Jackie Kennedy doll, so I will look locally and/or used…but I’m not holding my breath.
1) One way around this is to buy your gifts through sites like HEARTof.com, which is a portal you enter before shopping at regular places like Amazon or the Gap...but if you do enter these places through the HEARTof hurdel 75% of your purchase money goes to a charity of your choice. Similar organizations that give less money -- 35% -- are GreaterGood.com or IGive.com.

GIVING FRESH AIR:
1) Surprise the family with an outing to some outdoor place on your gift exchange day…an orchard, a sledding hill, a river, a park…bring snacks


***This is newly updated for 2007. A couple caveats: I welcome suggestions, but this is not a site to advertise stores. I mention stores I've been to or shop at, but the goal here isn't to amass a long list of deserving stores. Mostly it's a list of 'generes' of giving with examples I particularly like. So feel free to leave info about your store in the comments, but don't be offended if I never ad it. There are millions of organic clothing stores, for example...I note this, and suggest people google them rather than this list being over-wrought.

A Blackspot Birth

My wife gave me new shoes on the day our baby girl was born. It was also my twenty-eighth birthday.

"Open your presents," she said between contractions. She's a show off, my wife.

In short, my daughter was born the same day I was, the same day I opened my Blackspot shoes.



Adbusters, the organization that makes the shoes, claims that they are "one of the world's most environmentally friendly shoes." The organic hemp fabric fits the contour of my foot snugly. The recycled tire soles are firm. They don't bounce and cushion like the gel-filled shoes I wear to run or walk long distances. I wear the Blackspots to work. I pedal in them down Dunlavy. Last week, another bicyclist called to me.

"Are those Blackspots?" he said. He had some on too. "You're the only other person I've seen wear them," he said. Now we greet each other whenever we pass. Maybe we'll have lunch. Become friends.

It's fitting that my wife gave me the shoes on the day our girl was born. Like our baby, the Blackspots were made by a union. That is, a unionized factory in Portugal that operates with decent labor conditions. Neither the shoes, nor our baby, were made by a corporation that maximizes profit at the expense of human well-being. Also like our baby, the Blackspots are vegetarian. No leather. My Blackspots seem to be growing too. The loose ends of the thread running down the center seam are fraying, getting longer by the day, like our baby's astonishing hair.

As a final comparison, note that in my family's culture we put a black spot on a baby's face to keep away bad luck. The black spot, or najar as we call it, is meant as a mark of imperfection so that evil spirits do not linger around those we love.

You’re Too Poor and Ugly to Live Green

She’s on the cover, he’s on page twenty-six with his hands in the garden. They have two pure-bred Afghans named Ahab and Ishmael. They feed "the boys" one pound of raw, organically-raised beef every Sunday. Their home and backyard are perpetually in renovation – a little bit greener each time – most recently on a Budhist theme. Two SUVs are parked in the garage and for this they are embarrassed; they have a Prius on backorder. Their compost bins were custom built by an artist who needed the money. God’s compost bins, fit for clippings from the Elysian Fields. They had their lawn replaced with drought-resistant native plants. They have nine garden plots. The fennel leaves and carrots are almost ready. If they don’t grow their ingredients, they buy them from the farmer’s market. Keep the change, she says to the local farmer, dropping a twenty for a basket of squash. They eat chocolate made from cacao grown on a cooperative farm in Guatemala. Their dining table was fashioned from salvaged wood. They replaced their year-old bed with an Amish mattress made from tree-tapped rubber. They wear hemp shoes sewn by Portuguese unionists. They buy soaps made without petroleum-based perfumes, toothpaste without lauryl sulfates, and deodorant without aluminum chlorhydrate. They are white. He’s forty-nine and she’s been in her late twenties for fifteen years. They do not have children. The earth is their child. They live within two miles of a Whole Foods. They have tickets to the Oxfam famine banquet next Saturday. They donate to the Wilderness Preservation fund and cook portabello mushrooms while camping outside of Joshua Tree. When they visit the Galapogos islands, they do not step off the path. It’s a delicate ecosystem, he says. He’s a lawyer who specializes in corporate bankruptcy and she’s a green interior designer. Her signature move is to place an abstract, organic cotton couch in the middle of antiques – ottomans, chests of drawers, and floral rugs. They put their savings in Socially Responsible Investing mutual funds.

And you! Let’s just say you’re not quite poor enough to get food stamps. Whenever someone mentions Whole Foods, you smirk and say, “Whole Paycheck.” You would wear Blackspot Shoes, but they’re twice as expensive as your regular sneakers and your feet are extra wide. You’d like to garden and compost, but you live in an apartment that doesn’t have a backyard. If you put a plastic compost bin in the parking lot, your neighbors would complain about the smell even if it doesn’t smell. They would claim that there are more cockroaches since you moved in. You sleep on your grandmother’s old bed. The only thing that’s green about your mattress is that it caves in like a river valley when you lay down. You have about as much chance of living a green lifestyle as you do of becoming a Baywatch star. Come to think of it, the woman on the cover of that issue of Organic Style sort of looks like a Baywatch star. If you tried to live green, you’d look like some kind of worthless hippie. Not to mention you have a colicky baby and you’re a single mom. No, you have two babies and both you and your partner work full time at desk jobs. That’s not it, you have three boys – ages two, three, and five – who just might shake the house off its foundation before bedtime. It takes about all you’ve got to heat up some Hamburger Helper and open a can of fruit cocktail for dinner. Anyhow, you were raised on preservatives and you turned out fine…mostly. Face it. You’re too damn poor, ugly, and busy to live green.

Must Green Parents Be Poor Parents?

When I was twenty-one, much to the dismay of my family and friends, I quit medical school. I had just come back from working on a public health project in the poorest region of Peru. After two months among Quechua-speaking people in little Andean towns like Huascahura and Huayopuqyo, I made the break from medicine, a decision I had long considered but never built up the courage to do. Rather than spend my life focused on a particular disease or set of diseases, I wanted to devote myself to considering, encountering, and changing the way we think about justice, wealth, and living meaningful lives. Instead of studying a protein in a tapeworm, I wanted to ask why the native peoples of Peru didn’t have the kind sewage systems that would eradicate tapeworms? Why are they poor? What is poverty? Why did my life seem less meaningful than the life of a guy who makes less than $2 a day? I thought the writing life would be the best way for me to explore those questions.

The most common response to my decision from family and friends was, “How are you going to pay for your children’s college education?”

Maybe I wouldn’t be able to pay for my child to attend a private school, I thought. Maybe my future child would not want me to sublimate my ideals and desires in order to save up a three hundred thousand dollar college fund. Maybe my child would want a dad who was actualized, took risks, and lived fully. If I made my career choices based on the college-fund concept of parenting, I was worried that I would become too busy and well-paid to be physically and emotionally present. I asked myself, is a childhood good only if it culminates in attending a US top twenty college like Northwestern or Duke?

After quitting medical school, I worked for a year in publishing. Then I went to graduate school for writing and literature. I made about a thousand dollars a month teaching freshman at the University of Houston. My classes were about analyzing the language of advertising, war, colonialism, and trade agreements. I met my wife at that time and she did the same kind of work. I took a semester off to work for a feminist NGO in India. When I got back, MaGreen and I organized anti-war protests. I felt that I was doing my part in the struggle for global justice. I had to teach myself to live on an extremely tight budget. I bought clothes secondhand, scavenged for used furniture, and cook my own lentils, rice, and vegetables.

As soon as MaGreen and I started to think about having a baby, my mindset started to change. It’s all fine and good to subject yourself to poverty, but doing so to your children is another matter. Accumulating wealth is essential to weathering the big shocks that life inevitably throws at a family like illness, natural disasters, losing your livelihood, or whatever other unspeakable things. We don’t live in a country with a decent safety net. I absolutely don’t want anyone in my family to go through the humiliation and forced poverty of Medicaid, disability, or what’s left of welfare. Forget an Ivy League education without debt, what if we can’t even afford to help our child obtain a decent education at all? Also, I don’t want our child to be burdened with fiscally caring for us when we are elderly.

MaGreen and I, as parents, feel an obligation to build wealth, but at the same time we do not want to abandon our ideals. We will not buy mutual funds that include weapons manufacturers like GE, companies that attempt to patent seeds like Monsanto, or multinationals that rely on sweat-shop labor like Nike and Walmart. Investing in those types of companies will not help create the kind of world I hope our child inherits. We don’t want to hinge our family’s fiscal security on global inequality. Ever since I learned that the East India Tea Company was the first multinational company traded on a stock market, I have refrained from buying any stocks or mutual funds. The East India Tea Company impoverished India, reducing it from one of the wealthiest places on earth to one of the poorest. How can I willingly take part in that system?

We do have one strategy in place. My parents helped us buy a duplex with two apartments in the back. We live in one of the units and rent out the other three. We are providing decent housing to people who make steady, but limited salaries – an electrician, a caterer, a newspaper reporter, and a webmaster at a pipe company. The rental income goes towards our mortgage payments and helps us live in the center of the city. I can bicycle to work and build equity. But our entire financial security cannot depend on one piece of real estate.

My job at Rice University working for the journal Feminist Economics has allowed me to build some savings, but I’m not sure what to do with it. They’re sitting in a savings account that earns less interest than the inflation rate! MaGreen and I are reading Co-Op America’s Guide to Green Investing, which came with our membership to Co-Op America. It lists mutual funds like Domini and Calvert that have social justice and environmental criteria.

Green parents do not have to be poor parents. Some of the people I lived among in Peru were demoralized and resigned to their pitiful lot. Most of them, however, were striving for dignified lives. They tilled rocky desert soil, spun wool, wove rugs, and built their homes from mud. They organized as communities along political and religious lines. MaGreen and I are striving for the same dignity for our family and communities, but we refuse to get a leg up by stepping on those below.

Atoning for a Sin

We have fallen from the grace of the Goddesses of Green. Please hear me witness now. My parents flew in to see their granddaughter for the first time. They rented a little beach house on Galveston island for the week so that we could all stay together by the Gulf shore. MaGreen and I did our best to prepare, packing all of our gear into the car. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fit the wooden co-sleeper in the car. Even though we sleep with the baby in the bed, in our judgment we needed somewhere safe to keep BabyG. So we bought a huge portable, plastic, combo crib/changing table/play pen called the Graco Pack N Play…and we bought it at Walmart.

I knew it was a sin when we committed the act. We must atone for purchasing goods from Walmart, because it is an anti-union monster. By making the purchase from Walmart, we contributed to the erosion of workers’ rights here in the US and globally. It’s just that the local, non-corporate baby shops don’t sell Pack N Plays and the consignment baby store didn’t have one. The Pack N Plays at the other big box stores like Babies R Us and Target were an additional twenty dollars and on top of that price difference, their models did not have the features we wanted. In seeking atonement, MaGreen and I have decided that we will donate $40 to Walmartwatch.com which is helping coordinate efforts to defeat Walmart’s abusive practices. And we will redouble our efforts as consumers to support fair, ecologically sustainable trade.

Eco Green Natural Gift Ideas for Baby Showers and Holidays

MaGreen and I both try to avoid obsessive and arguably immoral consumerism. We know we will not become ideal parents by buying expensive, new things. We frequent a local second-hand baby shop and are grateful for hand-me-downs. However, expecting parents and newborns do receive many gifts. Gifts are an expression of the givers’ love (or at least their sense of duty and obligation). And new parents do need lots of equipment and clothing. I hope this list is useful to new parents, friends, and family. In making our choices, we sought out organic and fair trade items when possible and reasonable. In some instances, however, we believe plastic makes sense or is unavoidable. Unfortunately it can be difficult to create a baby registry for these types of gifts. We’ve had some success with felicity.com. Please feel free to make suggested additions or critiques through the comments option. Note the prices are approximations in US dollars and we don’t receive any advertising money.


Baby Clothing, Receiving Blankets, and Sheets
mamasbaby.com
www.ecobaby.com
www.sckoon.com
store.naturalchildren.com

Baggie/Gown Organic -- $21.99
Bummis Sleeveless Bib -- $9.25
Organic Kimono, snap wrap style -- $14.99
Zutano Complete Outfit (cotton and colorful, but not organic) -- $29.95
Sckoon Organic Cotton Baby Underwear -- $13
Sckoon Organic Cotton Wrap-me Body -- $24
Organic Cotton Cap (many options available) -- $9
Organic Sheets -- $150

Cloth Diapering, Diaper Services, and “Diaper Free” Supplies
www.theecstore.com
www.babynaturale.com
www.diaperpin.com/home.asp
Google Diaper Services Directory

Infant Potty Training by Laurie Boucke -- $19.50
Daytime Diaper Cover: Bummis Prints -- $10
Nighttime Diaper Cover: Stacinator Deluxe Fleece Prints -- $17.50
Snap Pants -- $14.03
Fuzzi Bunz Micro Terry Inserts -- $5.50
Fuzzi Bunz Stay-Dry Changing Pad -- $14.95
FUZZI BUNZ system (see fuzzibunz.com/care.htm) -- $14.95
Happy Pants, Small 8 – 14 lbs. -- $12.00
Hemp/Cotton Fleece Doublers -- $2.33
Imse Vimse Swim Diaper -- $11.95
Infant 4x6x4 Chinese Prefold - $1.50


Technology
www.tvbgone.com

TV-B-Gone (keychain remote that can turn off televisions) -- $19.99

Other
store.gxonlinestore.org
www.aubrey-organics.com
store.naturalchildren.com

Organic, Fair Trade Teddy Bear -- $29
Aubrey Organics Baby Shampoo -- $7.95
Case of 10 Fair Trade Green & Black's Chocolate Bars -- $35
Receiving Blanket Organic -- $22