BRING IT HOME GREEN

- Zippora Karz, Contributing Health Writer

“Bring it home Green,” an environmental awareness event hosted by the Boys and Girls Club of Malibu, showcased the Club's new Green Program, focusing on how Malibu Club teens can make a difference in their community. Since I'm heading the non-profit arm of an organic, green and sustainable construction/landscaping company (eco-partners.net), I knew this was important for me to attend.  This event was so profound for me. From the topics to the people delivering them, I know it sounds corny, but I feel changed. I don’t remember all of the specifics of who said what, but key points were stated in such a way that I cannot stop thinking about what more I can do.

Let me start by introducing the list of brilliant speakers and a bit of what they touched on.

Daniel and Laure Stern started by welcoming everyone and introducing the speakers.  Then, Club Ambassador Kelly Chapman Meyer, a local Malibu mom, PTA President and a leading national and local environmental activist got up. Currently, she heads the NRDC Leadership Council in Los Angeles and is a member of the NRDC Global Leadership Council. She serves on the Board of Heal the Bay and helped secure passage of the California State Environmental Education Initiative, which integrates environmental education components into all aspects of California’s k-12 curriculum. But it is Kelly’s heart that shares her message most strongly.

Early into her talk, Kelly showed a slide of a pelican that she had seen many years before in the Smithsonian museum. The bird’s insides were exposed, full of all sorts of plastic debris from the human waste that did not decompose inside the bird. She shared how this was the picture that first grabbed her heart.

Much of the day's focus was on plastic, and how it must be banned. Kelly shared some staggering statistics -- like how Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour! According to Kelly, another mind-blowing statistic concerning our paper use is that every year nearly 900,000,000 trees are cut down to provide raw materials for American paper and pulp mills.

A lot more nauseating information and statistics can be found here.

Next, Kelly interviewed Laurie David, of whom I've been a huge fan ever since she produced Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Recently I have heard about her travels across the US with Sheryl Crow, on an awareness campaign. Laurie David is a nationally renowned champion of the environment, and she founded the Global Warming Virtual March.

Laurie and Kelly dialogued about the seriousness of the issues at hand. Kelly told us that Al Gore said that Laurie has done more to raise awareness on the environment than any other person. As impressive as that was to hear, I didn’t need to know it to be impressed by her. As intense as the problems are (she stated this is not a question anymore, Global Warming is a proven Scientific fact a moral issue) she delivers information with strength and conviction, but also humor and tenderness.

They spoke carbon footprints -- that each of us has one -- and all of the ways we can lessen ours. Some things we can do to help include: taking shorter showers, turning the car engine off instead of idling while waiting, unplugging chargers when not in use (cell phones, hair dryers, electric toothbrushes) and saying NO to the plastic bag. They talked about bringing your own recycled grocery bag (which they handed out to each person there) to the store, using non-plastic reusable water bottles (also handed out), saying "no" to styrofoam or any product packaged in plastic and even asking the grocer to switch packaging materials.

Dr. Marcus Eriksen, the director of Research and Education for the Algalita Foundation, www.algalita.org was up next. He had just returned from a sailing expedition deep into the Pacific Ocean towards Japan, studying waste -- specifically plastic -- and its detrimental effects. He had with him a long chain that was beaded with everything from pen caps to plastic cups with Japanese writing that were found inside the ocean life. He drove the point home that plastic cannot be broken down, and not truly "recycled," as well as how much we consume of it and how much waste is floating around our oceans, landfills and inside the animals.

Even though I was completely sold by this point and ready to take charge, I noticed some of the youth in the room seeming a bit bored -- maybe another lecture at the end of a long school day. That’s until Jasper Robards took the stage.

Jasper, grandson of actor Jason Robards, is the son of Suzi Amis Cameron (wife of James Cameron).  He is a student at New Roads in LA and he held up 2 large garbage bags full of plastic cups and bottles that he said he picked up on his walk to the high school that day. That trash was theirs.

The room fell silent and the kids saw how they were contributing to the problem. He told them he would organize groups at his school that would team with Malibu High School to clean up the schools and beaches. The room was now a buzz with passionate activists knowing they could do something.  

Well, for a first event to kick off the Club’s new Green program I think they accomplished their goal of engaging the teens in environmental action locally and beyond. For me, it inspired a new sense of purpose and motivation. I decided to look for ways to make a difference on the local level, and while I was at Pacific Coast Greens market, I was brave and asked the assistant manager why certain vegetables (namely the brussels sprouts) were packaged in plastic? Why couldn’t they be loose instead? She agreed.

I feel so proud that there are people out there who are so committed to bettering this world we live in and leading the way for us to join.