I am thrilled to announce literary representation by Don Fehr, currently the top-selling nonfiction literary agent in New York, at the leading literary agency, Trident Media Group.
Authors he represents have won numerous awards including The Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Don embraced my upcoming book with a passion and conveyed the insight and understanding necessary to elevate its proposal to attract publisher interest — for which I am very grateful.
THE ASPCA’S GROCERY LIST TOOL HELPS YOU AVOID FACTORY-FARMED FOOD
The ASPCA’s (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals®) Shop With Your Heart Grocery List is a searchable directory of welfare-certified animal products and plant-based alternatives.
"Shopping with your heart is not about being perfect or about any single right way to eat, it's about recognizing our individual power to improve farm animals' lives," said Daisy Freund, vice president, ASPCA Farm Animal Welfare. "To achieve a world without factory farms, this movement needs to include everyone. The ASPCA's Grocery List is designed to help consumers, no matter what they eat, make choices that show animal agriculture that there is no place for animal cruelty in our food system."
With more than one million views in 2021, the Shop With Your Heart resources have proven essential for those seeking alternatives to factory-farmed products, whether plant-based or animal-based, with meaningful ASPCA-recognized animal welfare certification.
Shop With Your Heart has helped millions of farm animals:
The number of animals raised under meaningful welfare-certified standards has doubled to more than 600 million annually.
Over 140 food companies offering welfare-certified products have been added to the list - a 350% increase in the number of meaningfully higher-welfare products on the market.
The ASPCA has secured 200+ public commitments from food companies to improve and audit animal welfare in their supply chains, which will impact hundreds of millions more animals over the next few years.
The vast majority of Shop With Your Heart users (92%) say that the program made them more motivated to avoid factory-farmed products with most having changed what they buy or how they shop for food.
More than three out of four (79%) Shop With Your Heart users report trying to reduce consumption of at least one type of animal product, with 84% finding it easier to identify alternatives to factory-farmed products using ASPCA resources.
Check out the Shop With Your Heart list here.
Photo credit: Jaromir Chalabala / Shutterstock
10 BIG WINS FOR FARM ANIMALS IN 2021
The Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter reports 10 momentous victories for farm animals in 2021 including the biggest animal welfare reform in history: The European Commission’s ban on almost all cages and crates for the 340+ million farm animals in the European Union.
Other victories include the U.S. breaking cage-free records, a huge investment increase in the researching of plant-based alternatives to animal-sourced foods, four more countries banned fur-farming and 12 other European nations are now calling on the European Commission to ban fur farming across the EU.
Read the entire list here.
Photo credit: Bruscha Pixabay CC
9 BIG ENVIRONMENTAL VICTORIES FROM A MOMENTOUS 2021
What a turnaround 2021 was from 2020 in terms of protecting our environment and the Earth we all share!
The Wilderness Society reminds us that 2021 featured significant environmental victories including restored protections for the Bears Ears, Grand Escalante Staircase, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts national monuments, denying oil rigs access to the Arctic Refuge, establishing permanent logging protection for Alaska’s vast Tongass National Forest, the U.S. rejoining the Paris Agreement and taking an active role once again in international climate efforts, and more.
Check out the entire list and watch an inspiring video here.
Photo credit: Timothy G. Lumley CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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THE IMPORTANCE OF NAPPING & SEEING AMAZING THINGS
When you’re run down, even exhausted physically and/or mentally, we know how refreshing and rejuvenating it can be to simply take an afternoon nap, a siesta... Or to be able to sleep in on a given morning.
It’s also rejuvenating to behold amazing things.
This photo and post below touch both bases.
Whales, being mammals, need to breathe air so they must keep moving. This is how sperm whales take a break.
HUGE GLASGOW COP26 CLIMATE MARCH AS GRETA THUNBERG ATTACKS ‘GREENWASH’
Take a look at the size of the recent COP26 climate march in Glasgow posted by Stuart Gibson on his twitter feed after Greta Thunberg criticized the focus on climate offsets as nothing more than corporate and state "greenwashing."
As Jess Shankleman and John Ainger point out in their Bloomberg article, “Offsets are a way for buyers to continue polluting while essentially paying someone else to adopt climate-friendly behaviors. But no global oversight or common standards exist, and an abundance of low-quality offsets appears to have little impact on global warming.”
Greta Thunberg tweeted, “The fossil fuel industry & banks are among the biggest climate villains. Now Shell, British Petroleum and Standard Chartered (bank) are here in Glasgow trying to scale up offsetting and give polluters a free pass to keep polluting. Their plan could trash the 1.5°C goal.”
After Greta and activists from Greenpeace and the Indigenous Environmental Network interrupted a panel on carbon offsets to protest greenwashing, Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International told those gathered, “Carbon offsets mean climate sabotage. They aren’t just a tool to greenwash climate inaction and delay the transformation we need, they’re also going to drive devastating land grabs in the Global South.”
They are absolutely correct.
At COP26 our national leaders, polluting corporations, and the banks financing their projects demonstrated their continued failure to present any course corrections which can meaningfully impact our worsening climate emergency. The failure of COP26 is on them.
For more details read the Bloomberg article.
Photo credit: QUENTIN BRUNO/Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
INDIA REPEALS CONTROVERSIAL FARM LAWS FOLLOWING A YEAR OF PROTESTS
Every day for more than a year, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have protested three new laws claiming to “modernize” Indian agriculture — laws that were a thinly veiled push to forcibly expand industrial agriculture throughout India.
Over 700 people died in the protests yet the resolve and determination of those involved never wavered.
On November 29th, the Indian parliament, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lead, repealed each one of these new laws.
When industrial agriculture was pushed on Indian farmers just two decades ago, hundreds of thousands of farmers embraced it. Prices for their crops plummeted causing a large number of them to lose their farms. Over the 15-year span beginning when industrial agriculture was introduced in India, author Vandana Shiva notes that, “284,000 farmers have committed suicide because of the non-sustainability of capital- and chemical-intensive farming based on nonrenewable seeds.”
These recent laws are testament to the abject disregard for the loss of 284,000 farmer’s lives as a direct consequence of embracing the false promise of industrial agriculture, as well as the ruthless insidiousness of the ‘profit at all cost’ mindset of industrial agriculture corporations and their proponents including Bill Gates.
This is a huge victory for 2 million Indian farmers, for regenerative agriculture, and a seminal step in addressing our accelerating climate crisis.
On November 19th, bowing to political pressure with key elections approaching, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that these new agriculture laws would be repealed in parliament. Wary farmers vowed to continue their protests until the day the Indian Parliament passed the repeal. That day has now come.
Rear the Independent article here.
And a New York Times article here.
Photo credit: Randeep Maddoke Wikipedia Commons
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HOW TO GET MAXIMUM NUTRITION FROM YOUR FOOD: PUTTING FOOD COMBINING, SOURCING, & PREPARATION METHODS TO WORK FOR YOU
In this outstanding report, Ocean Robbins, CEO of the Food Revolution Network examines “simple strategies that can accelerate the nutrient value you derive from your food.”
He explores food sourcing and storage, food preparation, fermented foods, the benefits of preparing alliums, raw vs. cooked, nutrient and food combining, and vitamins.
Five delicious recipes are also provided that showcase the power of food combining.
Enjoy and explore this article here.
Photo credit: MaxPixel CC0
PRESIDENT BIDEN RESTORES BEARS EARS AND GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE MONUMENT PROTECTIONS!
Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society, states, “The President's actions will fulfill a promise to restore protections illegally ripped away from national monuments while at the same time ensuring these same lands address the need to tackle the climate and extinction crisis.”
He suggests this is the first step toward an even grander goal: “Restoring protections to the monuments is a significant step toward the goal of protecting 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by the year 2030 — a first-of-its-kind national conservation target that has been adopted by President Biden. Experts say conserving an interconnected network of lands and waters will give us the best chance at curbing the worst effects of climate change; adapting to the shifts already happening; preserving wild nature amid an ongoing extinction crisis; and ensuring communities have access to clean air, water and outdoor spaces.”
President Biden also protected the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England.
The photo above is from the Valley of the Gods in Bear’s Ears. You will discover other beautiful photos of these monuments in the article here.
Photo credit: © Matthew Dillon, RuggyBear LA Photography Wikimedia Commons
ANNOUNCING MY LITERARY REPRESENTATION BY DON FEHR
I am thrilled to announce literary representation by Don Fehr and the Trident Media Group Literary Agency.
Don is currently the top-selling nonfiction literary agent in the country. Trident Media Group is the leading literary agency in New York.
Authors he represents have won numerous awards including The Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Don embraced my new book with a passion and conveyed the insight and understanding necessary to elevate its proposal to attract publisher interest — for which I am very grateful.
More to come regarding my upcoming book!
THE DIVESTMENT MOVEMENT’S BIG MONTH
On October 18th the Ford Foundation, with an endowment worth over $16 billion, announced it would divest from fossil-fuel companies. Other foundations, private investors, universities, and governments also pulled their assets in records numbers last month.
John R. Platt writes in The Revelator that Bill McKibben and 350.org “first advocated for fossil-fuel divestment in 2012 as a way to ‘revoke the social license of the fossil fuel industry.’”
Divestment has now “turned into what’s probably the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history,” according to Bill McKibben. “It’s not only badly tarnished the social license of these companies but dented their access to capital so badly that Peabody Coal called it one cause of their bankruptcy and Shell Oil said it was having a ‘material adverse effect’ on their business. Since their business is having a material adverse effect on the prospects for life on earth, turnabout is fair play.”
John R. Platt confirms this pressure has started to influence business leaders’ decisions. In October, “five major investment groups with a collective $60 trillion in assets called for the utilities in which they have holdings to decarbonize by the year 2035.”
The essential shift to a clean energy economy is underway — and accelerating.
Rear the full article here.
Photo credit: WClarke Wikimedia Commons Exxon Mobil Refinery - Baton Rouge, Louisiana
LAO TZU WISDOM
A healthy diet, necessary supplementation, exercise, meditation… beyond these aspects of a healthy lifestyle I've touched on in previous posts, protecting your health and optimizing your lifespan includes nurturing a positive attitude.
Pausing for self-reflection is part of this.
Contemplate Lao Tzu's truth.
Consider it in reverse order as well: Your destiny in this lifetime is predicated on your character, which is a manifestation of your habits, which in turn develop from your actions, which emanate from your words, which are extensions of your thoughts.
What are you thinking?
A 32,000-YEAR-OLD PLANT IS GERMINATED!
I think this is just amazing.
One day around 32,000 years ago, an arctic ground squirrel ate parts of a plant, silene stenophylla, including its seed. The squirrel was digesting it when its life ended.
Its body was recovered from permafrost and examined. Scientists germinated this plant seed. This silene stenophylla just bloomed.
It is 32,000 years old.
The strength, the vitality and stamina of living things — of life itself — is incredible.
100+ COUNTRIES COMMIT PROTECTING 30% OF THE GLOBAL OCEAN BY 2030
At the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York earlier this month over 100 countries committed to support a goal to protect at least 30% of the global ocean by 2030.
The 30 by 30 ocean target wants to eliminate fishing and undersea mining in 30% of the global ocean. This will enable fish to safely regenerate their numbers which in turn will prevent overfishing. It will also “halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and enhance climate change resilience, which in turn should deliver positive outcomes for all people” as Masha Kalinina writes for the PEW Trusts.
Her article lists the countries that have now signed this initiative and committed to this goal. Over 100 countries — but not the United States or China, which egregiously overfish the oceans and are driving many species toward extinction.
We may not be able to do much to make China change its ways, but we can raise our voices and take action to help the United States reclaim a mantle of moral and ethical integrity in a world of nations by signing this initiative and taking strong action to support this admirable, essential, 30 by 30 goal.
Read the article here.
Photo credit: Daniel Roberts/Pixabay
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MY ESSAY WAS JUST PUBLISHED IN THE RENOWNED CUTTHROAT JOURNAL
The Moral Imperative to Regenerate American Communities: Marlon Foster, an essay adapted from my upcoming book, was just published in the 15th anniversary edition of the renowned literary journal, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts.
The essay was also awarded the prestigious Barry Lopez Nonfiction Prize – Honorable Mention.
Check out some great poetry and writing and read my essay, which appears on journal page 144, here.
STAYING POSITIVE IN A CHAOTIC WORLD
Melody Meyer has an influential blog in the food industry space. In this post, she posits the question, "How can we all stay positive in a world full of chaos?"
She has four suggestions that are well worth reading.
Visit her blogpost here.
Photo credit: Dr. Matthias Ripp/Flickr
LAWSUITS OVER MISLEADING FOOD LABELS SURGE
Andrew Jacobs reports in the New York Times that “Class-action litigation against food and beverage companies hit a record high last year, with 220 lawsuits filed in 2020, up from 45 a decade ago.”
This a welcome state of affairs.
It’s time to stop the large food corporation greenwashing of their factory farmed meat and dairy products. These lawsuits will help prevent future misleading packaging information on some of the country’s best known brands.
Andrew Jacobs cites examples including: “Cargill turkeys are sourced from ‘independent family farmers,’ Sargento cheeses contain ‘no antibiotics’ and Tyson uses ‘humane and environmentally responsible production’ to raise its chickens while providing workers ‘a safe work environment.’"
Beyond the concentration-camp horror of American factory farms and the suffering that billions of animals endure for the duration of their lives, factory farmed products are toxin laden and nutritionally deficient compared to humanely and ethically raised, pastured animals that are not genetically manipulated.
Consumers need truthful packaging to make informed decisions on the food they purchase as it directly effects their health and quality of life.
Perhaps this can evolve into a class action lawsuit on behalf of all Americans to force this industry to be honest in its packaging and even better, to eliminate the blight on humanity of factory farming.
Read this article here.
Photo Credit: Karen Neoh/Flickr CC