Green Elephant

That's me, behind one of my favorite animals: a Caribbean Reef Shark.

Hi!  Thanks for visiting the Green Elephant blog!  All the posts here are written by a marine biology  professor– Sherri– with the goal of giving you the inside scoop on big environmental problems and how we can solve them.  I know this stuff inside and out because I have spent a LOT of time studying it (BS in Biology with a Chemistry minor, Master of Oceanography… and even an MS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences) and teaching  it over the past 15 years.

So, why call this “Green Elephant”?

It’s the “elephant in the room”: an enormous, growing, scary-ass, depressing problem that we’d rather just ignore: we are damaging the biosphere that keeps us alive (that’s why it’s “green”).

We cannot ignore the green elephant for even one second more.  Yes, admitting we are destroying the only home we know can support us is scary, but the alternative is worse.  So, how do we start fixing this?

Well, I teach at a small college… but every semester, when I tell my students what we are doing to our biosphere and some of the consequences we know are coming, they are SHOCKED.  No one has ever told them this awful news before.

I have realized I need to reach a wider audience.  We should all know this stuff.  And, if we all knew it, we would be able to do something to fix it!  So, here I am, a newbie blogger, trying to teach the world what we are doing to our home… and, ideally, trying to start a whole new kind of global ecomovement… a girl has to hope, right?!

Actually, for more than a decade now, I have been pretty hopeless.  All that bad environmental news is just so overwhelming and so impossible to do anything about… but then, out of the blue, I had what I shall call an “ecopiphany”:

You and I are not the root cause of most of our environmental problems!

I mean, how many of you spent the day hacking down ancient forests in Canada?  Or dumping chicken feces into the Chesapeake Bay?  Using child labor to harvest cacao, that you slashed and burned rainforest to grow?  Anyone…?  Obviously, these problems are not caused by our direct actions: they are caused by large-scale operations of environmentally irresponsible companies… oh right, but where do they get all the money to be so destructive?  From us.

Every dollar you spend is a vote that says “Keep doing what you’re doing.

Here’s some money to help.”

Got the sniffles? If you buy Kleenex(tm), you just helped Kimberly-Clark chop down ancient boreal (northern) forests in Canada (which means you’ve also enhanced our rate of global warming)…

Eating chicken on your South Beach diet? If it’s from Tyson or Perdue, you just helped pollute the Chesapeake Bay or some other unsuspecting aquatic ecosystem…

Gotta have a little chocolate after dinner?  [Me too.]  But if it’s from Nestle’s, you just helped put a little kid to work on a cacao plantation…

See what I mean about depressing?  We in the US are incredibly consumptive, which means we provide MAJOR funding to all these destructive, unethical, awful activities around our planet.

But, if we can use our consumer power for good, instead of evil, we can solve these problems very easily and quickly.  Just don’t buy from the destructive companies, and do buy from the ecologically and ethically sound ones… because, for these companies, no revenue = no way to damage the environment.  So, you don’t have to forego tissues and chickens and chocolate… you just have to buy them from the RIGHT companies.  This blog will tell you who the good guys and the bad guys are… so you can help solve environmental problems every time you shop!

I am hopeful that, together [now, you stop that: no singing "Kumbaya"... gosh, you people are really getting mushy on me already!], we can turn one Green Elephant (the big “green problem”) into another: a big, unstoppable eco-positive consumer force.  Now, who wants to do some shopping? 

Get out there and get your tissues: here’s a great list of good and bad paper products, with a link to send Kimberly-Clark a piece of your mind too!

As for chickens, you can purchase organic, free-range birds (and other meats) from a zipcode-searchable list of sources … or if you want to get really crazy, you can raise your own (these people are an awesome source of info!).

And let’s not forget the chocolate: the best seems to be Dagoba (check out this review of their environmentally- and ethically-sound, and fair-trade certified cacao sourcing).  Believe me, the chocolate tastes so much better when you know no person was enslaved, and no rainforest destroyed, to make it.  Bon Appetit!