Book Review: The Eco Chick Guide to Life

If you’ve been looking for ways to be more environmentally responsible, but still want to maintain a stylish, convenient, modern lifestyle, we know just the book you should be reading. The Eco Chick Guide to Life: How to be Fabulously Green, by Eco-Chick.com’s Starre Vartan, is the definitive guide to going green without sacrificing the good things in life. In fact, the book is jam-packed with practical, fun advice on topics like fashion, travel, cleaning, beauty, saving energy and decorating your home.

Starre, a noted journalist and environmental scientist with a fantastic eye for chic eco-friendly fashion, doesn’t just give tips for living a greener life. She gives the rationale behind them, explaining, for example, that diamond, gold, silver and platinum mining create gaping holes in the earth and pollute the water and topsoil. Her solution? Buy vintage jewelry, or seek out suppliers that meet Fair Trade and ethical and environmental mining standards. Even better, Starre illustrates how you can be ‘fabulously green’ without having to drop loads of cash – you can be eco-chic on a budget.

A ‘green shopping basket’ is also provided for each chapter, giving you the inside scoop on where to score goods like ethically produced jewelry, toxin-free personal care products, drain cleaners that won’t harm the earth and even organic beer and wine. In fact, The Eco Chick Guide to Life even provides recipes for delicious fresh, seasonal cocktails like the Fizzy Harvest Mojito – which would be perfect for autumn!

My personal favorite chapter is ‘Fab, Eco-Friendly Fiestas’ which contains a quiz to help you determine your party style, tips for encouraging your guests to go with the green flow at all of your soirees and all of the various ways you can make every aspect of entertaining more earth-friendly. It’ll be a great guide to have on hand for the upcoming holiday season.

The best thing about this little book is you can use it as a compact little resource for practically any questions that pop up in your mind about to green up your clothes, home, transportation, vacations, groceries and more. Pick it up at Amazon.com or your local bookstore, and be sure to check out the Eco Chick blog for even more tips!

Link [Eco Chick] + [Amazon.com]

Eco-Chick.com Kicks Ass!

Eco-chick.com is the go-to source for all things eco-friendly and feminine. It’s a virtual treasure trove of green eye candy, fun features and valuable ‘green’ info. Eco Chick fills the niche left between all of the environmental blogs that cater to men and moms. Sometimes, you just wanna know about the best natural mascara, the latest in green fashion and, as the site’s founder and editor in chief Starre Vartan says, where to get a fair trade spanking paddle.

From the site:

Starre founded Eco Chick in October of 2005 with the idea that women who cared about the planet needed a place of their own on the web. At the time, most environmental blogs were guy-oriented, and very serious, and Starre thought that while discussion of scientific issues was important, consumer action would be second only to policy shifts in protecting the environment and creating a more sustainable culture. Enabling individuals to clean up their lives also gives each and every person an opportunity to realize their impact natural environment, a principle imperative to real change.

It’s a simple principle; every object has a life cycle, whether it be a bar of soap, a take-out container, an energy bar, a pair of shoes or a loveseat. It was somewhere before you got it, and it will go somewhere else when you’re done or gone. Just because you can’t see it before or after you buy it/use it/eat it/love it doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for it. We’ll show you how to find the things you love, and keep you updated on what’s going on in that great green world.

Recent stories on Eco Chick include natural cleaning recipes, ruminations on the effects of the natural sweetener ‘stevia’ going corporate, an organic bedding giveaway, reviews of organic booze and observations of green practices in Paris, France.  Starre and Olivia Zaleski, the Managing Editor, also write for the Huffington Post and several other green blogs including The Daily Green and Treehugger.

Fun Eco Chick fact: the site is run and hosted by anarchist webmaster, Dan Sieradski. He’s the guy who created the website for Matisyahu, and if you don’t know who that is, go check it out, because he’s beyond awesome. An orthodox Jew from Pennsylvania playing reggae – amazing.

Finally, a little shameless self-promotion if I may. If you just can’t get enough of yours truly here on EarthFirst.com, check out my posts over on Eco Chick, where I write about beauty and herbal medicine.

Link [Eco Chick]

Accidental Planet Killing: So, These New Orleans Wetlands Actually ARE Good for Something…

Eco-Chick.com happened upon a very interesting old news article on the New York Times website. The self-congratulatory article, published in 1910 and titled “NEW ORLEANS’S PLANS FOR GREAT SUBURBS; Over a Million Acres of Marsh-Land Within Its Limits to be So Converted”, tells of plans to ‘reclaim’ this ‘unproductive’ land for use as gardens, homes, hamlets and towns.

The article proclaims the benefits of draining this land, including fewer alligators lurking around and less room for mosquitoes to breed. They even went so far as to promise better views from your car window driving into the city – because, you know, concrete is so much more beautiful than marsh lands.

Eco-Chick notes that the destruction of these wetlands may well have had something to do with the damage New Orleans suffered at the hands of Hurricane Katrina, considering that wetlands help protect the mainland against storm surges. They dug up this quote from the NOAA:

Low lying coastal areas in and around the Gulf Coast have always been susceptible to storm surge from hurricanes, but the situation has worsened over time as protective coastal wetlands have disappeared due to land subsidence and human intervention.

It’s just another example of how ‘progress’ has damaged the earth. We are sold so many bottles of snake oil for ‘the good of mankind’.

Link [Eco-Chick] + [New York Times]

Photo credit: Flickr user Prince Roy