Many green parents (and doctors) have long thought that increased exposure to environmental toxins can lead to childhood diseases such as asthma, cancers, birth defects, and developmental disorders. CNN.com even ran a story last week about industrial chemical buildup in children’s bloodstreams. Now, the Shaklee Foundation and HealthyChild.org have teamed up to produce a new DVD that provides information for parents, teachers, school administrators, and child care professionals on five easy steps to create healthy environments for children.

Creating Healthy Environments for Children features Private Practice’s Amy Brenneman as host with Ben Harper providing music. Pediatricians Dr. Philip Landrigan and Dr. Alan Greene provide their expertise, as well. Their five major tips include:

• Avoid using pesticides
• Clean safely
• Help children breathe easier
• Provide healthy food
• Use plastic products wisely.

Pop the DVD in your computers, and you’ll find three tool kits, one each for home, child care centers, and schools, that provide resources for making each environment safer for children. The tool kits also give advice for community outreach and activism on safer environments for children.

The DVD will be released in November and retails for $12.95. More information can be found on HealthyChild.org’s website. HealthyChild.org is also releasing a similar book Healthy Child, Healthy World, in March of 2008

Sustainability is making its way into mainstream periodicals. It seems like almost every magazine in the past year has featured a "green" issue, some credible, some not. My friend just gave me the green issue of a magazine targeted at the marketing industry. So it’s no surprise that Edutopia, an education magazine for teachers and administrators published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, used sustainability as a theme for their October issue.

Kudos to Edutopia; this issue ain’t no puff piece. Every teacher looking to go green, or those already greening their classroom, can find something of use to them in this jam-packed issue. The editor’s note in the issue is penned by guest editor Bill McKibben of Step It Up fame, who skillfully explains why all teachers should and can incorporate sustainability into their curriculum.

Edutopia listens to McKibben’s advice by provided several ideas for sustainability lesson plans and projects for all ages. Not only are there many useful ideas in the magazine, but there are more on the magazine’s website. There are also tips for teachers, by teachers, about how to green up their own classroom practices: some helpful, some fairly obvious.

Sara Bernard highlights Clackamas High School in Clackamas, Oregon, one of the first LEED-certified schools in the country. Not only is their building green, but their curriculum highlights sustainability, and students all participate in experiential learning. In teacher Rod Shroufe’s sustainable systems class, students do nothing but focus on making their school more sustainable. They run their own recycling center, investigate energy use and waste disposal, and analyze food waste. Shroufe then offers his own tips for making schools more eco-friendly.

Richard Rapaport reports on school gardens and playgrounds. I’ve written about schoolyard gardens before, but the nature-based "alternative playgrounds" highlighted here were new to me — and quite fascinating. For example, at the San Francisco School in the Bernal Heights District of San Francisco, the alternative playground has a dirt plot with a water pump that creates mud with the perfect consistency for mud castles and pies.

There are also articles on student environmental research, experiential learning, and environmental defense efforts. It struck me how much students can accomplish when they become passionate about something. These articles paired nicely with two pieces on the nuances of talking to kids about something as urgent and pressing as global warming. Edutopia also has Ann Cooper’s opinion on local eating, something often avoided in green magazine issues in favor of more benign lifestyle changes (like the ubiquitous CFL). Cooper not only explains the benefits of local eating, but provides the laundry list of local eating books for those looking for more information. And, of course, what green magazine issue would be complete without the seemingly-requisite interview with Ed Begley, Jr?

Edutopia’s green issue is legitimate and will hopefully bring the message of sustainability to a greater crowd who may just have more influence on the future than our politicians: our teachers. Of course, I’m biased, but climate change and environmental destruction will impact future generations more than they will impact us. Our children deserve to hear the message and feel empowered to make positive changes.

National Geographic and kids social networking site Imbee have teamed up to facilitate communication between tweens aged 8-14 by creating a world-conscious online community. The website, National Geographic Kids Group, will feature blogs, videos, music, images, chatting, eco-tips and e-mail targeted at kids who are concerned with the environment.

Betsy Scolnik, president of National Geographic Digital Media, said "There’s something powerful about giving kids the tools to express themselves and to share common interests such as a love of animals and the environment that National Geographic represents. We hope that by using the social-networking tools that imbee.com provides, kids who visit our National Geographic Kids site can connect with other kids online who are inspired to care about the planet and the people, places and animals on it, in a safe, kid-friendly way."

The site also features content on animal, plant, and insect life, geography, science, and culture, and is highly controlled and secure so that the site remains safe for children. There’s also updates from the National Geographic Kids Hands-On Explorer Challenge, which led a group of 15 kids to South Africa in August 2007, and features their blogs and photos.

Overall, this site still has room to grow, but it’s a safe alternative to the MySpace/Facebook phenomenon. I appreciated the overlapping content with National Geographic Kids–the latter’s got phenomenal green stuff for the tween set. It’s worth checking out if you’ve got a kid who loves the environment and the computer.

When I talk to people about thinking sustainably, they inevitably ask for books to read, and although there are several books I love about sustainability, they’re all very specific to one area of sustainability. Want to read about food? Try Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, or the new Barbara Kingsolver book. Climate Change? How about The Weather Makers? Looking for the classics? Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold are a good starting place. But I haven’t yet found the primer, the comprehensive text that really gets into why humanity desperately needs to embrace a greener way of life.

The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine (Milkweed Editions, $18.00), just might be that book. A collection of thought-provoking essays selected and introduced by Barry Lopez, The Future of Nature includes writings by such heavy-hitters as Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and Derrick Jensen, all originally published in Orion, the seminal magazine covering the intersection of culture, nature, and the environment.

Released this past Thursday, the book is divided into six loosely-themed sections. Actions runs the gamut of activism, from small suburban grassroots efforts to stop construction on a SuperTarget store to bailing out direct-action activists in Appalachia. Refugees discusses those displaced by humanity’s interactions with the environment, giving a face to the faceless victims of climate change and the unending hunt for resources. Boundaries addresses the idea of the wilderness and our relationship with it. Reverence discusses how appreciation for nature, a love of and respect for it, is the essential guidepost for sustainable living. Monsters lays out just exactly what sorts of devastating things we’re doing to our only home, and Native leaves the reader with both hope and guidance for living in harmony with our ecosystem.

Highlighting both theory and practice of sustainable (and unsustainble) living, the causes of our ecological crises, and a vision for a lasting future, The Future of Nature provides a plethora of contexts for understanding just why we desperately need to change the way we live. Elegantly written and compiled, this book should be required reading for those interested in sustaining our future on Earth. The themes balance each other nicely; the reader understands the reality of the direness of humanity’s situation but is left with hope that good things are happening everywhere, those little pockets of positive change that will lead to a more balanced way of life. It immediately made me want to go read not only Orion, but every other piece of writing by this insightful group of writers.

Do you know a teen who wants to change the world? By Kids For Kids and their social networking site for teens, Idea Locker, launched a new contest for teens. The Going Green Challenge, a partnership with The Weather Channel, asks teens to create new products or services that could aid is solving global environmental problems, including climate change, drought, and famine.

The teen with the winning idea will not only win $10,000, but will win an "connection to reality" prize: an opportunity to blog on the "11th Hour Action" website, a tie-in to Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate-change film, The 11th Hour. The winner will also get to shadow one of the experts from 11th Hour Action in their work environment. The challenge officially runs from now until December 31st, and all youth under the age of 19 are eligible to participate. Teens who want to enter must do so via BKFK’s website.

"The connection-to-reality prize is especially exciting for us at BKFK, " said BKFK Founder and CEO Norman Goldstein. "As it empowers the winner to have their idea heard along with one of the most captivating movies of our time."

Idea Locker is a social networking site marketed towards teens that allows them to add friends, chat, and share ideas online. It is the brainchild of By Kids For Kids, a global marketing, branding and licensing company dedicated to make teens’ ideas a reality.

When Amy wrote about green magazines, she mentioned GOOD as being one of her favorites. I, too, a self-described magazine junkie, am a big fan of GOOD since it’s inception last year. With all the depressing news out there on any given day, GOOD always reaffirms my faith in humanity. Its focus is, like its name implies, good stuff: those things that are making our world a little bit better, and when I’m feeling down about what’s going on around me, GOOD usually perks me up. It’s a rare magazine that doesn’t need an annual "green" issue: sustainability has been a priority since the magazine was founded.

The latest issue (Sept/Oct 07) is no exception. The issue, which commemorates their one-year anniversary, focuses on design solutions. A topic I covered a while back, green schools, gets a feature nod from Eva Steele-Saccio. Steele-Saccio highlights different schools’ efforts to reduce their footprint and become more energy efficient, and acknowledges that there are benefits beyond energy savings: "Green schools create a healthy atmosphere for learning that has measurable results. The combination of natural light, fresh air, open plans, and multi-use facilities that encourage community involvement has helped student test scores rise by 20% and reduced asthma rates by 39%."

There’s also a feature about a village in England that launched a community effort to reduce their carbon footprint, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral village in the U.K. GOOD’s product reviews almost always include items produced with sustainability in mind, and in this issue, they create a proposal for better CFL packaging: create a package that can be used to ship burned-out bulbs back to the producer for proper disposal. There’s also a profile of Rogan Gregory, founder of clothing company Loomstate, who was virtually responsible for bringing organic cotton to the fashion industry though his work with Loomstate, and his other two companies, Rogan and Edun

Even subscribing to GOOD can make you feel good: 100% of your $20 subscription costs goes to your choice of twelve charities, including the World Wildlife Fund and Oceana. Good is printed on 30% recycled post-consumer paper that is EcoLogic certified, and 100% offset by projects Good is actually involved in.

The September/October issue of GOOD is on newsstands now.

When giving your kids, "the talk", it always helps to have a book as back-up. It justifies your broaching a sensitive, potentially uncomfortable topic like…global warming. And although conservation and environmentalism is a topic for all ages, those children in pre-adolescence are just about ready to hear about the big guns of climate change. Three recent children’s books broach the topic of climate change to your middle-grades children (ages 9-12); two were penned by celebrities of the green world.

Following on the heels of the successful An Inconvenient Truth of almost the same name, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming (Penguin Young Readers, $23.00), aims to present the same ideas from the documentary to a younger audience. The text of this book is excellent: it simplifies the ideas of the original film without talking down to young readers.

An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming (Scholastic $15.99) aims to educate kids about why global warming is happening, how it is affecting our planet, and what kids can do to protect our earth. The book is packed with gorgeous photos, graphs and charts, making it accessible to visual learners, and little jokes scattered throughout the pages might be amusing to adults, as well. The Guide is even printed with soy ink on 100% FSC-certified, post-consumer recycled paper.

Finally, Gas Trees and Car Turds (Fulcrum, $16.95), written by Kirk R. Johnson, curator or the Denver Natural History museum, and illustrated by Colorado naturalist Mary Ann Bonnell, is a quick read that breaks down the science behind global warming and carbon dioxide so that children can understand it. While not as high-profile as the other two books, it does focus on explaining carbon dioxide as an invisible something that connects almost everything.

School started yesterday, and with it came a whole new crop of students in my environmental sustainability class. Although I wish the summer was longer, and getting back into the routine is hard (falling…asleep…now), I love the first few days of the semester, when I first start to see kids reaction to the idea of sustainability.

Teens, by nature, don’t have a ton of impulse control. Parents of teens are thinking to themselves, "Well, duh." But seriously, many lack the frontal lobe development to fully consider how their actions impact others. It’s why many make stupid choices.

However, this doesn’t prevent them from grasping the notion that how most Americans live might not be the best way to live. I started our first full day by having the class go through the Earth Day Foundation’s online eco-footprint calculator. This simple test asks participants questions involving such subjects as the size of their home, their eating habits, and their transportation habits. Though far from comprehensive, it’s quick enough that I can get a whole class through, working in small groups, in enough time to tabulate the class average, and the results, though probably not 100% precise, give students a rough idea of the magnitude of how they live.

Not only does the quiz give students a score of approximately how many acres of resources they use, but it roughly calculates "how many planets" it would take to sustain humanity if everyone lived like them. After each student finished the quiz, they came up to the SmartBoard, where I had an Excel file with everyone’s name, and entered their scores, then calculated a class average. On average, if everyone lived like my class, we would need 3.5 planets to sustain us. When I explained what this number meant, the class guiltily looked at each other, particularly those who had high numbers.

"Why is that number a big deal?" I asked.

"There aren’t 3.5 planets," a student volunteered. "Well, there are, but we can only use one. So…" he sheepishly trailed off. The class laughed.

I asked the kids what questions from the quiz surprised them. Remember, most of them are coming in with little prior knowledge of sustainability other than "recycling=good; global warming=bad." The number one concept they didn’t expect was questions about their diet. Why does it matter how much meat I eat? Why does it matter where my food comes from? I explained the them that a lot of resources go into food production, like water and fossil fuels.

"Wait, so it basically takes gas to make our food?" one student asked cautiously. I smiled slyly because I love watching the synapses fire!

"If it’s Twinkies, there might be actual petroleum in your food itself," I countered.

"So what are we gonna do?" another student asked panickedly.

"Well, that’s what this class is about. Getting the number down to one," I said Like a television show, the bell rang.

Imagine my shock when I opened my mailbox to find the latest issue of Newsweek sporting a fire-glowing orb and the headline "Global Warming is a Hoax.*" It’s hard to believe (particularly for the GO family) that there are still people who deny that climate change is happening and caused by humans. With the influx of pro-green exposure in the media, many greens saw this past year as the tipping point in awareness and activism on global warming. Yet, "deniers" still exist, and Newsweek’s cover story (complete with tongue-in-cheek headline) aims to track the foundations of the denial movement, the major players behind it, and the motivations behind the well-coordinated effort to keep the American public doubting that global warming is real. (That asterisk? It noted "Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change.")

"They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Worth, quoted early in the article. The key tactic? Creating doubt in the minds of both policymakers and the public by disputing the science behind global warming. As soon as then-senator Al Gore brought global warming to Washington’s attention in 1988, groups with benign names such as the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment, which were actually lobbyist groups from the petroleum, steel, auto, and utilities companies, began an all-out war to contradict the overwhelming body of science that supported global warming.

The rhetoric changed as the science supporting global warming grew more and more conclusive. It started with "the science behind global warming is wrong", moved to "global warming is happening, but it is not the fault of humans", and ended with the current denier mantra, "global warming is happening, and we may be causing it, but it’s effects are hardly anything to worry about."

Also impossible to ignore in the article is the amount of money and power changing hands between lobbying groups, policymakers, and scientists. One Exxon-Mobil-backed group has offered $10,000 to scientists willing to speak out against global warming. And that might be what’s so depressing about the "deniers": it seems that from day one, their motives were entirely based on the acquisition or preservation of money and power. As Gore demonstrated in a graphic in An Inconvenient Truth, what’s more important: bars of gold, or the entire planet?

The article is fascinating and puts a face (and clear strategy) on the campaign against the planet. This issue of Newsweek is on newsstands now, and the entire article can be found on Newsweek’s website.

Ontario's Liberal Party unveiled its plan for statewide environmental sustainability education, Education Minister Kathleen Wynne announced yesterday. "We must help students build on the knowledge and leadership they have already shown on climate change issues," said Wynne. "Our government is committed to reaching every student with an environmental education that inspires them to take positive action."

The Canadian province's plan infuses environmental education in all grade levels across disciplines, as well as creates an optional Grade 11 course focuses exclusively on environmental education. Ontario previously had mandatory environmental education, but that initiative was eliminated in 1998. The new initiative will cost $4 million.

The plan was partially in response to a report issued by the Ontario Ministry of Educations's Curriculum Council and their Working Group on Environmental Education that recommended the standardization of environmental lessons and inclusion of parents in that education. The report, titled Shaping Our Schools, Shaping Our Future, is available online.

The plan is just part of a string of environmentally-friend initiatives the Ontario government has supported, including the EcoSchools program, two green-themed websites targeting high school and elementary students, and a Clean-Air and Climate Change artwork and essay contest.