I am going to reveal here a simple truth that most of us probably know deep down but ignore because if it’s true, if it’s really, really true, then pretty much every consumer product we’ve enjoyed, trusted, or just not given a second thought about our whole lives is rendered unenjoyable, untrustworthy, and worth thinking about really, REALLY carefully before we buy it the next time:
Toxic chemicals are not good for us.
I said it. I’ll say something else while I’m at it:
The FDA and EPA are doing at best the bare minimum and at worst nothing whatsoever to protect us from them.
The second statement is less of a cold, hard fact than the first, and is heavily tinged with my disappointment in our government’s ability to withstand the lobbying of big businesses, but you’d be hard-pressed to make a credible argument that either agency is doing enough to make sure that we aren’t all on a path to some kind of cancer, sooner or later, from the complex cocktail of chemical toxins assaulting us in our foods, in our personal care products, in our water, and in our air on a daily basis.
Luckily our bodies are strange and wondrous things that can resist a heck of a lot of these attacks. For a percentage of us, though, a percentage that is growing all the time, it’s too much, and we end up with cancer, or asthma, or chronic and debilitating conditions, simply because our bodies just couldn’t absorb any more poison. Additionally, while most of us in the Western world live “upstream” from our waste and have water treatment plants and Brita filters, most of the world’s population does not–and NO non-human living things do. So every time we pick up the latest beauty fad and use it unthinkingly, there is a chance we are killing someone or something, somewhere, if not ourselves just yet.
Thus, one of our ongoing projects here is to find the chemical-free alternative(s) for you for the everyday products in your lives, and also convince you that switching to such products can be simple, inexpensive, and, quite frankly, liberating.
It takes a bit of a shift in mindset–who am I kidding?–a HUGE shift in mindset. You must go from the idea that “if it’s on a shelf at the grocery store and I see gentle, reassuring commercials for it on TV, it must be TOTALLY SAFE and GOOD FOR MY FAMILY”, to the idea that “if it only contains natural ingredients and was made by a non-major manufacturer it MIGHT be approaching some semblance of safety”, which is tough to do, especially if you, like me, have been watching TV your whole life and learning that Puffs Plus is THERE FOR YOU when your nose is stuffy and Sunny Delight helps you START YOUR DAY RIGHT, and, let’s not forget, that people who worry about this stuff are a bunch of hippie-freaks.
But what if it was completely normal, unremarkable, and mainstream to want to buy products from and support companies who care whether or not they’ve endangered an entire population or whether or not the earth is even here in a usable state for our great-grandkids?
We think it can be done, just a step at a time, and far more easily than you’d imagine. Here are the small steps we’ve started to take–we hope you’ll try taking a few of them along with us and spread the word!
