“Celebrate Green!” Says Mom-Daughter Team
Two Washington State women — Corey Colwell-Lipson and her mom, Lynn Colwell — have come out with a great new green guide that’s just in time for (dare I say it?) the holiday season.
Titled Celebrate Green!: Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations & Traditions for the Whole Family (2008, The Green Year), their book offers a wealth of tips, resources and background on how (and why) to make your celebrations eco-friendly, whether it’s a house-full-of-guests Thanksgiving feast, a gathering of friends at a baby shower, an office party or a Halloween gathering for the neighborhood kids.
The seed for the book was actually planted two years ago, when Colwell-Lipson was trick-or-treating with her two young daughters and dreading the volumes of sugar they were collecting. When homeowners at two stops handed out jars of bubble-blowing soap and stickers, though, the girls were thrilled … and Colwell-Lipson envisioned ways to encourage a greener and healthier Halloween.
“On a daily basis, we’re inundated with stories about lead-laden toys, the childhood obesity epidemic, and shortened lifespans of future generations, not to mention environmental concerns about global warming, toxic waterways, and vanishing species of plant and animal life,” Colwell-Lipson writes in the introduction to Celebrate Green! “With so much work to do, I wondered, could celebrating holidays differently really alter our course?”
Colwell and Colwell-Lipson make a good case in Celebrate Green! that the answer is, “Yes.” And they back it up with lots of creative, green — and inexpensive — ideas that will make their book a handy reference tool for the eco-minded year-round.
Does making your celebrations green really matter all that much? Colwell has a ready answer:
“Frankly, I no longer, in good conscience, can act as though excess, unhealthy and un-earth-friendly activities don’t matter if I engage in them only a dozen times a year,” she writes. “They do matter for one reason. I’m not the only person living on Earth. Multiply what I do in the name of ease, thrift, fun, or simple ignorance by billions. Both the problem and the solution become apparent.”
I couldn’t say it any better.
You can learn more about Celebrate Green! here, and find more ideas for the fast-approaching holiday of Halloween at the authors’ other site, Green Halloween.
