by Julie Hall at ProgressiveKid

Thank god almighty we are free at last from white-president gridlock. In America now you can be black (technically biracial) and become president. This spanking new reality is genuine progress. It is progress for civil rights, for black Americans, for white Americans, for all Americans, and for world citizens everywhere. It is a gigantic symbol that race is losing currency as a reason for bigotry, and that is something to smile about.

But although bigotry took a hard kick to the gut on November 4, 2008, it caught its breath quickly and assuredly in America that day when voters banned gay marriage in California, Florida, and Arizona and banned adoptions and foster parenting by unmarried couples in Arkansas. So, while I’m glad Obama happens to be black, I’m grateful he is not gay because he would not be our President (-elect) if he were.

Chances are he would not have become a senator either, since he would have faced double jeopardy being black and queer. If he had become a politician at all he would have had to choose between success and personal honesty. Being extraordinarily ambitious, he might have opted for success at the expense of his integrity, keeping a fundamental dimension of his identity, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and experiences hidden from everyone around him. In this case, his relationships would have suffered because of his need to compartmentalize his private and professional life. To keep a low profile, he probably would not have had children or strong family ties of any kind.

If Obama were gay, he might have avoided politics altogether. Besides the practical challenges of being a gay politician, as a gay person a lifetime of experience probably would have eroded his self-confidence and ambition, making it unlikely that he would have aimed for the Senate or White House. He would have searched largely in vain for images of himself in the culture around him—whether politics, films, magazines, television, or even books. Within his own family he would have been uniquely alone as a gay son and brother, lacking the commonality of race or religion, making him an exile of sorts among the people closest to him. There is no way to know how his family and friends would have treated him growing up if he had been gay, but it is a safe bet that he would have endured at least some judgment, confusion, and detachment, if not worse responses such as disgust, contempt, coercion, abuse, and/or abandonment.

Even if Obama’s family and childhood social network had been exceptionally welcoming of his difference as a gay person, he would have nonetheless experienced a continuous barrage of messages from the world at large that he is unworthy of legal protection against discrimination from employers and landlords, that his relationships are unfit to be accorded basic civil rights, and that he is undeserving of full-scale parental rights. On a personal level, he almost certainly would have been subjected to an assortment of insults over the years, such as hectoring or even physical attack from strangers, rejection by friends’ parents, derisive and belittling gay jokes, people who purport gay friendliness while asserting that they themselves are “totally straight,” and a pervading struggle against being vanished by those around him who either wouldn’t see him or wouldn’t want to see him for who he is.

I am so glad Barack Obama is my smart, visionary, and black president (-elect). And unfortunately I have to be glad that he is straight, because he would not be our 44th president if he weren’t. But one of these days—I hope before I die—there will be a president who also happens to be gay in addition to being smart and visionary. Until then, I will wear my “lesbian for president” button, inspired by a straight black guy who rocked my world.

Julie Hall is the author of A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It and cofounder of the green online store ProgressiveKid.

Image by Justinfeed, Creative Commons license, 2008.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

by Sarah at ProgressiveKid

War, disease, economic devastation, and catastrophic geologic and climate events create refugees every day. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants’  World Refugee Survey 2008, worldwide there are currently over 14 million. An additional 25 million people are displaced internally and so are not considered in refugee totals. In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, the advances of Tutsi Rebels have displaced 200,000 people since August.

But those are just numbers. And they’re so big, it’s hard to understand what they even mean on a personal level, to the people who are refugees—and to the people who are not.

People Without a Place

To be a person without a place is to be

• a burden to someone else. As such, the refugee is unwanted.
• rootless. The refugee is bereft of the social support of community, job, home, friends, school, place of worship, connections. In short, all he or she has left might be a bundle of personal possessions, a few family members, and, if fortunate, daily access to food and water.
• on hold. Until the refugee again has a place in the world, he or she faces an immense challenge in raising a family, in making a meaningful contribution to society, in feeling worthwhile, and in establishing meaningful connections within a community.
• in a power imbalance. Other people wield control over the refugee’s life. The refugee cannot vote, cannot complain, cannot work to change his or her circumstances, cannot demand basic civil rights.
• in danger. Being a refugee means being subject to violence, to climate-caused hardship, to starvation, to illness, to rape, and to enslavement. In the three Somali refugee camps in northeast Kenya, the 100,000 refugees are subject to frequent attacks from bandits and militias. Their possessions are often stolen. The women are raped when they leave the camp to collect firewood or during bandit invasions. More than 300 rapes have been documented, 10 of them blamed on Kenyan police. In the Saharwi camps near Tindouf in the Algerian desert, where nearly 90,000 Saharwi have lived for 30 years, many refugees are enslaved, having become the property of other refugees in the camps. In August, Spanish police across the country freed 600 Russian sex slaves, economic refugees who had come to Spain for the promise of work picking strawberries. These are just a few examples of what a refugee faces.

Your New Neighbors

The United States has promised to admit 17,000 Iraqi refugees next year, up from 12,000 this year. (This figure pales in comparison to the burden shouldered by Syria, Jordan, and other neighboring countries of Iraq, which have taken in 1.5 million Iraqis.) The Center for Immigration Studies reports that 1.6 million legal and illegal immigrants, many of whom are economic refugees, settle in the United States each year. The Center predicts that if immigration continues at current levels, the nation’s population will increase by 167 million (56 percent)  by 2060, with immigrants and their descendants accounting for 63 percent of the increase. But immigration will not continue at current levels. Instead, as a result of climate change, it will most certainly increase as increasing refugee populations look for places to relocate.

What does it mean to be the host country of refugees? First there is an economic burden, as health care, education, and social service resources are increasingly tapped. Second there is the burden of social unrest caused when large numbers of desperate people suddenly pour into an area and begin to consume already scant resources.

Planet of Refugees?

Climate change will bring refugee status and the burden of refugee hosting to people in all parts of the world. The UN has warned that the numbers of refugees are again on the rise, and that climate change is creating a new type of refugee. Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees explains: “Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement, both directly through impact on environment—not allowing people to live any more in the areas where they were traditionally living—and as a trigger of extreme poverty and conflict.” The Christian Aid Agency predicts that there will be a total of one billion people displaced by climate change by 2050.

Where are all the displaced people going to go? You can be sure that refugees are coming to your neighborhood, if you remain lucky enough to still have one. And the refugees will not just be human. We will be seeing refugees of every species in search of hospitable places on earth, looking for food, looking for water, looking for shelter.

If climate change remains unchecked, we are all in danger of becoming refugees from Planet Earth. Except there is no other place to go.

Image by Tracy Hunter, Creative Commons license, 2007.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

By Sarah at ProgressiveKid

Both President-Elect Obama and his former opponent John McCain endorsed “clean coal” as an important element of their energy plans. But “clean coal” is a fairy tale with a very bad ending, as in the Big Bad Wolf eats and digests Little Red Riding Hood and belches out a black cloud afterward.

The Fairy Tale

Once upon a time (February 2002) George W. Bush promised the people all over the land that he would invest $2 billion dollars over ten years to advance “clean coal” technology. The people said, “What is this wondrous thing, this clean coal of which you speak?” George W. Bush said, and I’m paraphrasing rather liberally, “Well, it doesn’t yet exist but in time, you’ll see, this magical technology will emerge.”

So companies from all over the land gathered their best people to see if they could meet the challenge. Of the first eight, two projects had to withdraw early on. Of the remaining six, two were discontinued during project development, two advanced to later stages, and one was completed. In the second round of competition, only four companies had their projects selected, and one had to withdraw eventually. One is in the operational phase and two are under development. Those two will purportedly demonstrate advanced “IGCC technology.”

IGCC. Whatever does that mean? IGCC technology (integrated gasification combined cycle) is technology that mixes crushed coal with oxygen and water to create a combustible liquid fuel known as “syngas.” The process makes coal a little cleaner, emitting a little less sulphur. One major problem with IGCC is that the cost to produce electricity with syngas is 15 to 20 percent higher than the process used by conventional coal plants (Marilyn Berlin Snell, “Can Coal Be Clean?” Sierra Club, Jan/Feb 2007). Another problem is that syngas emits more carbon dioxide than gasoline when it is burned in an engine.

Carbon Sequestration. The third round of projects will give up altogether on making coal cleaner and instead will figure out what to do with the pollutants once they’re emitted. The DOE calls this utilizing “carbon sequestration technologies and/or beneficial reuse of carbon dioxide.” The primary way of sequestering coal involves injecting the emissions into geologic formations for permanent storage. No one knows what happens when you inject carbon dioxide into geologic formations for long periods of time. But we do know that the sites will need to be monitored carefully because, if there were a leak, thousands of people could be killed instantly. In 1986, for example, in Cameroon, a volcanic crater-lake belched bubbles of CO2 into the air. The gas settled around the lake’s shore, killing 1,800 people and thousands of animals (Michael Graham Richard, “Important! Why Carbon Sequestration Won’t Save Us,” Treehugger, 7/31/06).

In addition, the storage process is very expensive and itself generates large amounts of carbon dioxide. Finally, the sequestration process only captures 85 to 95 percent of a plant’s emissions and does not capture toxic emissions such as mercury and other heavy metals (Co-op America).

In fairy tale language, carbon sequestration is like trying to put some of the evils back into Pandora’s jar once it’s been opened.

The Evils

So just what are the evils of coal? Hide under the covers while I tell you.

Evil 1: Pollution and Toxins. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, coal-fired power plants are responsible for generating more than 83 percent of carbon dioxide pollution since 1990. According to the EPA, they are the single largest source of mercury pollution in the country. In addition they have the highest ratio of CO2 output per unit of electricity of all the fossil fuels. Coal plant emissions include neurotoxins, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, arsenic, hydrogen chloride, and mercury and other heavy metals.

Mercury causes brain damage, mental retardation, and blindness. It can be transmitted through breastmilk. According to the U.S. Center for Clean Air Policy, 50 percent of the mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants can travel up to 600 miles (Center for Clean Air Policy, “Power Plant Emissions and Water Quality,” October 1997, Part 1, p. 13). And what happens if that traveling mercury reaches a lake, for example? According to the National Wildlife Fund, even as little as 0.002 pounds of mercury a year can contaminate a 25-acre lake, making the fish unsafe to eat (National Wildlife Federation, “Clean the Rain, Clean the Lakes: Mercury in Rain is Polluting the Great Lakes,” p. 4, September 1999).

Compared to other sources of energy, coal looks bad. It emits 29 percent more carbon per unit of energy than oil. It emits 80 percent more than natural gas (Worldwatch Institute, “Phasing out Coal: Environmental Concerns, Subsidy Cuts Fuel Decline,” Press Release).

Evil 2: The False Promise of Liquid Coal. “Clean coal” often refers to liquid coal. The idea is that coal converted into liquid form can be used to power vehicles, thereby eliminating our dependence on foreign oil. But the problem with liquid coal is that when you burn it in your engine it isn’t any more clean than if you burned coal rock in a coal plant. Burning liquid coal produces a little under two times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions of regular gasoline (27 pounds of CO2 per gallon of oil and gas versus 50 pounds of CO2 for liquid coal).

Evil 3: Mining. Whether you are producing liquid coal or regular coal, “clean coal” or regular old dirty coal, the coal has to be mined. With new attention and money given to “clean coal,” mining will certainly increase. Mining is a highly destructive activity that generates hazardous and acidic waste, contaminates groundwater, and requires the clearcutting of native hardwood forests so that mountaintops can be removed, opening access to coal.

The mining process generates liquid waste called slurry, a mix of carcinogenic compounds and heavy metals. The slurry is stored in open lagoons that, of course, sometimes break and flood. This is even more likely during periods of heavy rainfall and flooding (such as during global warming). Eighty percent of the coal waste surface impoundments do not have liners. Less than half the landfills and only 1 percent of  impoundments have groundwater monitors (“Fast Facts on Air,” A Sourcebook for the Clean Air Advocate, Clean Air Network, 2000), making accidents even more likely.

Mining destroys landscapes. In Appalachia nearly 1 million acres of hardwood forests, a thousand miles of waterways, and more than 470 mountains and their surrounding communities have been obliterated in the last twenty years in the process of mining. (Jeff Biggers, “‘Clean’ Coal? Don’t Try to Shovel That,” Washington Post, March 2 2008).  When a mountaintop is dynamited off and then its contents are cleared, the contents are piled up in the depressions between mountains. The result is a flattened landscape.

Mining is also dangerous to miners. More than 104,000 miners have died in coal mines in the United States since 1900. Twice as many have died from associated black lung disease. The Bush administration has called for reducing mine-safety funds by 6.5 percent (Biggers).

The Moral of the Story

The mercury contamination generated by the coal industry should be enough to persuade human civilization to shut it down once and for all. The talk about “clean coal” does not address toxins like mercury. It does not address the pollution and hazards of mining. It only addresses (a) a fraction of the carbon emissions generated by coal plants and (b) the development of liquid coal as an alternative fuel source. But carbon sequestration is a highly expensive and unproven, possibly risky venture that fails to capture all carbon dioxide emitted. And the burning of liquid coal emits more carbon dioxide than gasoline does. So what exactly is the clean part of “clean coal”?

The fact is that it is politically expedient to talk about “clean coal.” The states that are the big prizes in this election will stand to earn lots of cash in the decades ahead from their coal industries. But the cost in lives and quality of life cannot easily be measured. Once a politician has made a promise, there is the expectation of follow through. None of us can afford this particular promise. It includes no happily ever after.

Image by TheWritingZone, 2008, Creative Commons license.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

For me, wolves are easy to love, and hard not to cry about. For starters, they are beautiful animals—strong, smart, fast, muscular, lean, furry, and at times they smile. As a friend (and fellow pack member) of dogs, I feel a natural affinity with wolves too. Dogs are, after all, the likely descendants of wolves who became friendly with humans, to our mutual benefit (you toss me a bone, and I’ll guard the cave). But besides their aesthetic appeal and doggish familiarity, they reflect what I like best in me, and what I and the rest of my human clan exiled from our nature a long time ago—our free, clear, and purposeful animal selves.

In Praise of Wolves

Wolves are family animals, usually loyal to their mates and committed to their pack and pups, offering playful, affectionate, fierce, watchful, dedicated, and at times tough love. They are fastidiously clean, good den architects, and clever hunters who only take what they need and no more. They are highly intelligent and aware, with a sense of smell about 100 times more keen than our own, the ability to hear 6 miles away in the woods and 10 miles away in the open, and excellent eyesight trained to detect even minute movement. Their adaptive fur coats keep them warm in harsh winter and cool in hot summer, creating an almost impermeable insulating shield of warm (neither cold nor hot) air. They adapt to feast or famine, capable of eating 22 pounds of meat at a time or going for days with no food. Their lives are at once simple and complex. They live and die for their pack, following the herd with the seasons and avoiding people as much as they can.

Wolf: The Creator, Hunter, and Healer

Long before Europeans brought Small Pox, guns, and wolf-hating to North America, indigenous Indian tribes revered the wolf. They admired the wolf’s hunting ability and recognized the important role wolves play in ecosystems. The Cheyenne credited their tribal survival to the hunting skills they learned from wolves. Other tribes ascribed healing abilities and creationist stories to wolves, believing wolves made the land and the living things upon it. Such beliefs are not surprising given that wolves help keep herds healthy by feeding primarily on sick, old, and injured animals and that they sustain biodiversity by providing crucial food for animals such as opossums, ravens, raccoons, coyotes, vultures, and foxes who feed on the remains of their kills.

The Werewolves of London: A Brief History of Wolf Persecution

The fact that there is no recorded case of a wolf killing a human in North America has long been eclipsed by an irrational fear and hatred of wolves that stretches back to the time of the Inquisition. The fear-mongering Roman Church exploited sinister images of wolves and a widespread belief in werewolves in Europe at the time to exert secular control. Tragically for wolves worldwide the legacy of such superstition nearly led to their extinction by the early twentieth century. In The Ninemile Wolves, Rick Bass describes in painful detail how in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wolves were hunted for bounties, poisoned, trapped in metal vices, and fed meat laced with crushed glass. Understanding The Call of the Wild describes still worse wolf extermination methods, including setting traps that caught wolf pups on giant hooks outside their dens, injecting captured wolves with mange and releasing them to spread the disease to their pack, drowning them in their dens, using horses to pull off their limbs, and burning them alive. With the help of the U.S. and Canadian governments, the estimated 2 million wolves in North American had been reduced to the brink of extinction by the 1930s, with only a few hundred remaining.

Wolf Recovery: Success and Broken Promises

With protections under the Endangered Species Act beginning in 1973, gray wolves and red wolves began a slow recovery in parts of the lower 48 states. Dedicated wolf advocates continue to work hard to reintroduce wolves to wild areas and monitor their progress. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service statistics, in September of 2008 U.S. wolf populations were as follows:

• 4,002 in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin
• 1513 in Northwest Montana, central Idaho, and Yellowstone
• 52 in Arizona and New Mexico
• 6,000-8,000 in Alaska (not protected by the Endangered Species Act)

Although scientists have come to understand the vital role of wolves in the wild, and many of the prevalent misconceptions about wolves have been proven to be patently false, the species’ survival remains precarious. In Alaska, where wolves are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, aerial shooting of wolves is legal and encouraged by the government. Wolves and bears are chased by plane to the point of exhaustion and then shot at point blank range. According to Defenders of Wildlife, Governor Sarah Palin offered a $150 bounty for the severed forelegs of wolves and has consistently used state funds to fight initiatives to protect wolves and bears (including pregnant bear sows) from a systematic aerial hunting program of extermination.

In 2007, the Bush administration issued a License to Kill plan to delist wolves from Endangered Species Act protections and again encourage the extermination of wolves in the Northern Rockies, supposedly to protect elk herds and livestock. In fact, elk herds have been overhunted by humans, not wolves. Cattle, too, are seldom attacked by wolves. Coyotes, whose populations skyrocketed as a result of wolf extermination, kill far more livestock than wolves do, as do domestic dogs. A 2005 study by the National Agricultural Statistics Service cites the following findings for that year:

• Only 0.11 percent of cattle losses were due to wolf predation.

• Coyotes killed 22 times more cattle than wolves did.

• Domestic dogs killed 5 times more cattle than wolves did.

• Vultures killed twice as many cattle as wolves did.

• Human thieves took 5 times as many cattle as wolves did.

Just this week on October 14, 2008, some much-needed good news arrived for wolves. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally withdrew the rules that would remove Northern Rockies wolves from Endangered Species Act protections, officially placing them back on the list. This is great news for Yellowstone wolves and the Yellowstone ecosystem. Unfortunately, wolves in Alaska are still under continual threat from aerial hunting, diminishing their numbers and endangered their survival in that region. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, approximately 800 wolves have been killed in Alaska in the last four years. And wolves everywhere face the constant threat of illegal hunting, habitat loss by human encroachment, and climate change.

Wolves: The Path to Ecological Integrity and Our Redemption

Recent studies in the Yellowstone area provide further evidence of the ecological importance of wolves. According to Defenders of Wildlife, through what is know as the cascade effect, wolves, as large predators, exert far-reaching influence over a wide range of species in their environment. By keeping the elk population in balance, the reintroduction of wolves has resulted in less grazing pressure on the plant base, allowing, for example, stream bed vegetation such as aspen and willow to regenerate. These restored trees in turn have reduced soil erosion and created better habitat for native birds, fish, beaver, and other species to return and flourish. The return of wolves to the area also has reduced the coyote population, which had exploded in response to their absence. By reducing the coyote numbers by as much as 50 percent in some places, the presence of wolves has led to an increase in species such as pronghorn and red fox.

But supporting wolf recovery is about more than reinstating ecological balance and biodiversity. Ending the persecution of wolves is a path to our own redemption, both environmental and moral. They have a rightful and necessary place in the environment that we share, and it is in our best interest to acknowledge and respect their vital role as fellow predators. Contrary to European wolf lore, the wolf is not a vicious monster. The evil we saw and still see in wolves is an image of ourselves we projected onto them. If we don’t like what we see in the mirror, saving the wolf is the best way to change the human face staring back at us.

How You Can Help Wolves

Here are five things you can do to help the plight of wolves right now:

1. Join Defenders of Wildlife to support their efforts on behalf of wolves.

2. Sign a petition asking Governor Sarah Palin to ban aerial hunting of Alaska’s wolves.

3. Adopt a wolf at Wolf Haven International so they can expand their wolf habitat areas.

4. Vote for Earth-aware politicians who will fight for wolves, climate change solutions, and environmentally sound policies.

5. Volunteer at a wolf-advocacy organization or wolf refuge. Here is a comprehensive list of wolf organizations so you can find one in your area.

Julie Hall is the author of A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It and cofounder of ProgressiveKid.

Image by Keven Law, 2008, Creative Commons license.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

For most of us chocolate is a happy part of Halloween. It’s hands-down the best treat in the bag—so popular, in fact, that kids have to keep an eye on their chocolate-pilfering parents at this time of year. So, it’s especially ironic that this beloved sweet treat is a living nightmare for the children who are caught in the chocolate slave trade.

Chocolate comes from the beans contained in the large pods of the cocoa plant, which is actually a small evergreen tree that grows in tropical regions. In the harvesting of cocoa beans, the tough yellow pods (4-16 inches long) are cut down from branches, opened with machetes, and scraped out. About 400 cocoa pods must be harvested to make one pound of chocolate  (one 16-ounce bag of M&Ms). Among the world’s biggest cocoa producers are the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon, with the Ivory Coast alone producing 43 percent.

Following an extensive study of cocoa farming in these countries, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in 2002 estimated that there were 284,000 child laborers working on cocoa farms. According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 109,000 children in Cote d’Ivoire work in the cocoa industry under “the worst forms of child labor”; as many as 10,000 are victims of human trafficking or enslavement. Many of these children are lured into slavery by promises of living wages, only to be beaten, forced to work for no pay, and confined to prevent escape. Others come from impoverished communities where they are removed from school because their help is needed on family farms. According to  Global Exchange, such child slaves and laborers experience the hazards of using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides with no protection. Enslaved children typically work over 12 hours a day harvesting cocoa beans and have no idea what chocolate tastes like.

Under the Wrapper

Why is this happening? The fundamental problem is that cocoa farmers are not paid living wages for their crops. Companies like M&M/Mars, Hershey’s, Nestle, and Cadbury buy the cocoa cheap, take enormous profits, and sell it for less than its real market value around the world. At one time chocolate was a rare pleasure. Now this $13 billion industry has made chocolate as commonplace as toilet paper (another undervalued commodity!), and cheaper. So far increasing political pressure on chocolate companies has only elicited hollow promises of reform with no real change, leaving the cocoa farmers as desperate as ever and children victimized by the system.

Silver Foil Lining

The good news is that fair-trade chocolate companies are providing an alternative to these exploitative and deeply immoral corporate practices. Farmers who sell fair-trade receive higher living wages and in exchange do not use slave labor. Fair-trade chocolate costs more because its price is a reflection of its actual market worth. People who buy fair-trade chocolate know that their sweet treat does not come at the expense of children abroad but actually helps reduce their victimization by supporting the viable economies of cocoa farming communities.  Organic chocolate is also a good choice because, according to Stop Chocolate Slavery (SCS), organic cocoa farmers are paid higher wages, ones in keeping with those paid to fair-trade chocolate farmers. SCS offers a detailed table of fair-trade, organic, or otherwise slave-free chocolate brands. They also offer further ideas for taking action against the chocolate slave trade, including an email list of corporate “cretins” to voice your outrage at. The International Labor Rights Forum invites people to join their Cocoa Campaign and to sign petitions demanding change in the industry.

So, don’t give up the chocolate this Halloween; just make sure you get the right kind (like from my favorite place) from now on. The monsters will hate you for it.

Julie Hall is the author of A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It and cofounder of the green online store ProgressiveKid.

Image by unknown photographer.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

by Sarah Lane at ProgressiveKid

As the struggle in the economic markets rages on, you can feel confident that your family’s particular financial concerns are pretty much irrelevant in any specific plans to slow down the slide of our economy into a likely recession. We regular people (a.k.a. nongazillionaires) are simply going to have to take care of ourselves and each other. And when it comes down to it, making like Buddha and saying to yourself (I’m paraphrasing here), “I don’t have any control over it anyway,” might be the healthiest strategy in terms of your own emotional and mental health.

Besides, there may be a green lining to all of this economic turmoil. I can’t think of any more effective way to get most Americans to change their lives than lack of cash. So let’s try—amid foreclosures, job loss, the costly (on so many levels) war in Iraq, salary freezes, skyrocketing health care costs and grocery, gas, and heating bills—to look on and for the bright side of things.

Instead of freaking out, join me in taking some sensible, healthy, positive steps toward change at home that are good for you and your piggy bank as well as the planet. It’s a win-win!

1. Drink filtered tap water instead of bottled water. See The Trouble with Bottled Water for all the reasons to break the bottled water habit. Also visit the New American Dream site for information on their Break the Bottled Water Habit campaign.
2. Eat at home. It’s better for you anyway. Check out our post Stand Up for Your Rites for information about the benefits of eating family dinners. Besides, eating at home means you can better control whether your food is organic, locally grown, hormone free, and so on.
3. Pack your family’s lunches. This way you can make them healthier and you can reduce the waste that comes with takeout.
4. Get rid of cable. You don’t need it. Really. Rent movies from Netflix or your local video store. That way you get rid of the ads, the paranoid news coverage, and negative media voices. And you’ll buy less stuff overall because you won’t be hearing the television ads that make you think you need more than you do.
5. Go to the library. Most of the time you don’t need to own a book in order to use it. And your decision will have an effect on the publishing and paper production industries.
6. Hang up your clothes to dry. Find yourself a space-saving drying rack like the $20 one at Ikea. We put ours by the wood stove in the winter and in the sun in the summer. Save money, save energy.
7. Use the air dry setting on your dishwasher.
8. Grow your own food, organically, using your own compost. You don’t have to have a 20-acre farm. Even growing a few tomatoes on a balcony will save you a little money, green up your outdoors, and give you some nutritious food.
9. Make your own cleaning products. Vinegar and an eco soap will do just about everything you need in the cleaning department. They’re eco friendly and affordable.
10. Use fluorescent bulbs. They’re better for the planet and more cost effective. Bonus!
11. Invest in a nonelectric carpet sweeper for the carpets and use a broom or a dust mop for the floors. Use the electric vacuum just once a week or every other week. That way you give your vacuum a break, extending its life, you cut down on electricity use, and you spend less on vacuum bags and filters.
12. Use cloth napkins and rags instead of paper napkins and paper towels. Paper products are expensive and deplete our natural resources.
13. Put your appliances on power strips that you can easily turn off when not in use. The ideal places for power strips are the stereo cabinet and the TV/VCR cabinet. Click off the whole system when you’re not using it and save money and energy.
14. Get your news from the Internet or the radio. You don’t need a newspaper. Or read the free paper in the waiting room, at the library, on the ferry, in the train station. Get a copy at work and share it. Or, if you must have a paper (confession: I kind of have a Bad Greenie weakness for the newspaper), then use the paper post-read in myriad ways before you recycle it. Line the rabbit’s house, use it to soak up spills, use it for protecting items in packages that you send.
15. Brew your own coffee. A French press combined with a grinder makes good shade-grown, fair trade coffee fast. It’s easy! It’s more affordable! C’est magnifique!
16. Buy clothes at resale shops. Learn to make your own. You can get a good sewing machine for under $200. Threadbanger is a great site for diy sewing advice and ideas. If you have to buy new, limit your purchases to a few, good quality, styling eco items that will spiff up your wardrobe.
17. Carpool. Share the cost of gas. Share your kids and the job of driving them around.
18. Look for affordable fun things to do. The local pumpkin patch/hay maze is affordable and fun. Start a movie night with friends and take turns hosting. Go for late afternoon walks. Do art projects together. Visit national parks and forests. Play games at home. Card games and board games are not that expensive. Our latest favorites are Mille Bornes and Parcheesi and Stratego. Don’t forget cooperative games.
19. Save your money for the really important stuff, such as making sure you’re not getting poisoned by lead in your lunch or BPA in your drinking water. Spend some money on a good water bottle and a good lunch bag, for example. I know a place, ahem, where you can get these.
20. Combine car trips. With some simple planning you can avoid taking a trip into town or to the strip mall every day. Do it once or twice a week. Try to incorporate the bus or a bicycle into your errands or your commute.
21. Color your own hair if you’re just not ready to go gray. By coloring it yourself, you can stay away from the chemicals. Use one of the para-phenylenediamine-, ammonia-, peroxide-, resorcinol-, and paraben-free brands on the market like Act by Nature.
22. Make your own cards and giftwrap from recycled paper. Use fabric scraps and leftover paper, newspaper, and magazines to decorate or to wrap. Go digital for invitations.
23. Trade with others. Swap graphic design work for piano lessons with your local piano instructor, for example. Share tools with a neighbor instead of buying your own expensive tools for just your own use.
24. Visit your farmer’s market. Eat locally which is in some ways even better than organic and more affordable.
25. Take your own garbage and recycling to the dump and recycling center if you have the option. That way you’ll be motivated by the savings on garbage service to cut down on your waste and to increase your recycling. In our house we’ve got the dump runs down to about two cans only every two or three weeks.

One final word of advice: Chocolate. Do not under any circumstances deprive yourself of chocolate in these difficult times. But even though non-fair trade chocolate is cheaper, don’t go there. You don’t want a guilty conscience, and knowing how most chocolate is made and by whom will leave a bad taste in your mouth. Pay a little extra for the fair trade stuff. You can make it go farther by using fair trade chocolate chips in cookies.

It would appear at least so far that we can’t really control economic troubles of this scale. But we each can control how we respond. And we can choose to see our economic troubles as an opportunity to take one giant leap forward toward greening our lives. When we find ways to save money in intelligent ways we often also are taking steps to save the planet.

Image by Squeaky Marmot, 2007, Creative Commons license.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

by Sarah Lane at ProgressiveKid

Ritual is good for all families. Researchers tell us that family rituals make people happier (S. Harrar 2003, p. 28) for one thing. And they find in family routines experienced by kids of four years of age predictors of academic achievement at age nine (Barbara Fiese 2000). But some of the rituals a lot of us grew up with don’t mesh with the values and goals of the green movement, or they seem alien or even devoid of meaning to people with an awakening sense of concern for the planet. For example, the unsustainable practice of giving or receiving oodles of Christmas gifts can make us feel heavy and unhappy. The Fourth of July emphasis on explosions feels uncomfortable in an age of climate change, forest fires, and dwindling wildlife.

So what’s a green family to do? Here are some rituals that greenies can agree on and use as the foundation for more personalized adaptations based on individual belief and culture:

1. Eat dinner together. National polls in the United States indicate that between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, compared to earlier periods, families were eating fewer meals together and spending less time hanging out, just talking (Robert Putnam 2000). But family dinner time is a highly important ritual for family health. The Importance of Family Dinners IV, a report issued in 2007 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, concluded that “Frequent family dining is associated with lower rates of teen smoking, drinking, illegal drug use and prescription drug abuse.” Joseph Califano Jr., CASA’s Chairman and President, writes, “one factor that does more to reduce teens’ substance abuse risk than almost any other is parental engagement, and one of the simplest and most effective ways for parents to be engaged in teens’ lives is by having frequent family dinners.”

And over the course of five years, researcher Dianne Neumark-Sztainer and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota studied more than 2500 adolescents at 31 Minnesota schools. They found that adolescent girls who frequently ate meals with their families were less likely to be using extreme measures to control their weight five years later [Project Eating Among Teens (Project EAT)].

Dinner time is the best time to gather and reflect on the day, catch up, reconnect, and plan for tomorrow. Use it to focus on the most important people in your life.

2. Honor the big moments. (And recognize the differences among family members in terms of the perception of what is big.) Acknowledge birthdays and anniversaries, graduations, accomplishments, firsts and lasts. The acknowledgment doesn’t have to involve a crystal cascading champagne fountain and 200 guests. It can be something as simple as a note, the time to take a photograph, or completing a page in a scrapbook. What it must include is awareness on the part of one individual of the significance of the event for the other.

3. Create a thankfulness ritual. The work of researchers Robert A. Emmons (University of California at Davis) and Michael E. McCullough (University of Miami) on the health benefits of gratitude underscores the importance of gratitude rituals. They found that even simple gratitude rituals were associated with increased levels of optimism, happiness, goal attainment, alertness, energy, connectedness, quality of sleep, and health.

There are many options for gratitude rituals ranging from making lists to a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner. One simple gratitude ritual is to keep a bowl and three stones by your bed. Every night before sleeping, put each stone in the bowl, thinking of one thing you’re thankful for to correspond with each stone. This is simple enough for young children to do and so makes a great family ritual.

4. Create a negativity-releasing ritual. It can’t be news to you that lowering stress levels has important health benefits. Just to confirm what we already know, a recent study of more than 2800 adults published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found lower levels of cortisol, the “stress” hormone, in people with positive affect. As you probably know, long-term high cortisol levels can increase blood pressure, lower immunity, increase abdominal fat, and impair thinking. The study found especially significant results for women in whom positive affect was associated with lower levels of interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, which are inflammatory substances associated with risk for heart attack, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

All family members can benefit from the conscious practice of ridding one’s self of negativity and stress. But this is not to say that certain stressors shouldn’t be brought home. On the contrary, home is where many such things can be dealt with best. But there is a difference between actively working through a negative event and bathing in it. You can help your children learn to be proactive about stress, finding effective ways to talk through and work through problems and then let them go. Yoga, meditation, and exercise are great ways to do this, but these are not always ideal strategies for young children.

You might consider installing a touch stone or touch branch outside your front door. Whenever anyone comes home, they touch the stone or branch and remind themselves that they are entering a sacred space. The idea is to leave negativity outside and to bring inside the intention to work through real problems, turning to other family members for guidance and support and not to use them as receptors of negative emotions.

5. Celebrate and honor the cycles of life. There are six key annual calendar events that green families can mark with ritual.

a. Sping Equinox (March). Celebrate rebirth after winter. The perfect ritual is to plant a tree or flowers.

b. Earth Day (April 22). Honor your planet, the animals, the trees, the water, the air. Do something for your planet and spend time outside. Liberate trees from ivy. Help restore a salmon stream. Work on trail restoration. Set up rain barrels in your yard. Put up a bird feeder. Volunteer at an animal shelter.

c. Summer Solstice (June). Celebrate the sunlight. Celebrate vitality, energy, joy. A family picnic, a special late evening walk, a camping weekend, a visit to a planetarium, or a meal of seasonal food are great ways to ritualize this event.

d. Autumnal Equinox (September). This is the celebration of the harvest, a time to be thankful for what the earth has given you. A ritual visit to a farm, carving pumpkins, canning, or making apple cider help remind us of the impending winter and of the goodness of summer. We remember that all good things end and we share our hope for the future.

e. Day of the Dead (November 2). Honor the ones you have lost. In our home, we make an altar every November 2. On the altar we place images of the people and animals we miss. We include talismans, things that represent our emotions and the loved ones. We light candles and keep them burning all evening long in memory.

d. Winter Solstice (December). During the winter when life is dormant remind yourself of the key reasons to be joyful: friends and family. This should be a celebration of light, of hope in future awakening from cold and sleep. Lighting candles, gathering for a meal, singing, or doing something for others who are hungry and cold are perfect rituals for this event.

We green, free thinkers who dream of a radically transformed society sometimes feel a little like we’re blazing trails in the dark. Ongoing rituals that are full of meaning for people who care about life and the planet can sustain us during difficult times and during times of doubt and fear. Teach your children that ritual is a life tool, a way to mark the passing of time, a means to increase awareness, gratitude, and hope, and a strategy for coping effectively with hardship and loss. It may be one of the most important strategies we have for dealing with the complications of an ailing planet.

by Sarah Lane at ProgressiveKid

During the Republican National Convention we’ve been hearing a lot about two key themes: personal freedom and personal responsibility. I am a big fan of both. I value and cherish my freedom and feel great empathy for people who live in places where they are severely restricted in their ability to speak their minds, to move about freely, or even to wear what they want to wear. As a corollary I also feel great responsibility: to value and protect those freedoms, to care for the place where I live and the people who live here, to pull my weight and make a worthwhile contribution to my community.

I wondered what examples candidate McCain and his running mate Palin would give in their exploration of these two themes. I wondered if there would be discussion of our important Bill of Rights and how we must defend it. I wondered if there would be talk about our responsibility to protect the land where we live, the air we breathe, and the water we drink and to care for one another.

This is what I heard:

• We must take responsibility for our own financial problems and know how to balance our own checkbooks. (McCain)
• We must take responsibility for keeping healthy. (Palin)
• We must protect the freedom of large corporations to make more money. (McCain and Palin)
• We must protect our freedom from those who want to take it away. (McCain and Palin)

What I heard didn’t make me wave cardboard signs or toss confetti. It made me feel sad. And angry. I started talking back to the radio. This is why I got cranky:

1. If I had felt McCain were speaking to me, his message about checkbook management would have seemed like an insult. I know how to balance a checkbook; most people who are lucky enough to have one do I would imagine. Anyone who can do simple math, such as the administrators of the federal government presumably, can see that there is a problem when more is going out than is coming in. The trick, and this is where we need great leadership, is in figuring out how to make sure there is a little more coming in than is going out. And I don’t think that knowing there is a deficit is going to make a worker facing job loss, a truck driver facing huge gas bills, a sick person facing doctor bills, or a homeowner facing a balloon payment suddenly get more to come in. Urging every hardworking American to take responsibility for his or her own financial issues will not protect us from the mismanagement of gigantic financial institutions such as Enron and Morgan Stanley and Freddie Mac, financial crises caused by nearsighted health care policies, shortcomings in our public education system, or financial devastation resulting from climate-related problems such as floods and drought and storms. Balancing a checkbook is not a policy or a vision. It’s a skill that the current administration lacks.
2. Palin’s message that taking care of yourself will take care of the health crisis may resonate with some people: smokers and overeaters, for example. But does it sit well with people who suffer from Lyme disease or arthritis or salmonella poisoning? What about people who have cancer caused by toxic runoff from large industry? Upon hearing that message, do they think, Oh, yes, if I start walking twenty minutes a day that should take care of things and my mounting hospital bills? Taking care of your health is an important responsibility. But people who want to become the top administrators of an entire nation need to talk about their own responsibilities: specifically, what they are going to do to help the people of that nation deal with a looming crisis.
3. Large corporations do not need our help if helping them means hurting the rest of us, which it almost always does. We do not need to give large corporations permission to avoid the responsibilities the rest of us have for safeguarding our environment and our health. We do not need to protect their ability to make large sums of money now at the expense of our futures.
4. The people who have thus far taken away our freedoms are within our own borders, not in Iraq. To protect those freedoms we don’t need to go anywhere but D.C. The erosion of the right to free speech, to petition the government for a redress of grievances, against unreasonable and unwarranted searches and seizures, to due process, to a speedy and public trial, and against cruel and unusual punishment has occurred at our own hands. And we have shown ourselves to be indifferent to the rights not only of those within our borders but also of those outside our own borders who fall under our control, diminishing our stated values and principles by restricting them geographically, temporally, and even by nationality, race, creed, and sexual orientation. Sarah Palin tried to have a large quantity of books banned from the Wasilla public library including Flowers for Algernon, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Leaves of Grass. I don’t want my liberties eroded in the name of someone else’s religion or squeamishness. Our Constitution was designed to prevent such tyrrany.

The theme of the last night of the convention was Country First. The idea is that we Americans should set aside our differences and put our country first. The problem with that reasoning is that our differences are far too important; they are about essential values, about whether, for example, we value property rights more than human rights, big business over human health, the teachings of one religion over freedom of thought.

I don’t belong at that party. When I snapped off the radio, I thought, “I don’t want country first. I want life first.” And not just the lives of unborn fetuses but the lives of ailing senior citizens, the lives of the lower classes, the lives of all children whether they show a great deal of promise or not, the lives of animals and trees, the life within our watersheds and rivers and oceans, in the canopy, in the soil. Not just the lives of Americans but also the lives of folks across the planet whether in Iraq or Pakistan or Darfur or Gaza or South Ossetia. And not just the lives of people but the life of ecosystems all over this planet.

McCain and Palin talk about freedom and responsibility. These are good themes, but I would talk about them much differently. I would talk about earning our freedom to eat as we want, to be who we are, to move about freely, and to live free of the fear of being macheted or nuked or missiled or starved or tortured or raped or enslaved. How do we earn that freedom? By (1) caring for the place we live and the life that surrounds us and honoring our differences and (2) simply by being alive. This is the responsibility we all share: to care for one another and, therefore, by extension, ourselves. The message is not flashy, sarcastic, tough, or spunky. But it’s true.

Image by David All, 2008, Creative Commons license.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

by Julie Hall at ProgressiveKid

As with all meaningful change, there is no simple fix for our climate change crisis. There is no pill, band aid, 12-step formula, or “expert’s” advice to heal Earth or its life forms. There is no “clean” nuclear power that will preserve our current luxuries without risking even more environmental disaster, no green product that will redeem generations of overconsumption, no fluorescent light bulb that will reverse the excess of our industrialized systems, no recycling process that can restore forests, no zoo or seed bank that can preserve our world’s biodiversity, no replacement planet we can relocate to. For worse and for better we are stuck here with our mess and our weakness, our solutions and our strength.

Not that you shouldn’t install those fluorescents if you haven’t already. Yes of course cut out the plastic, switch to reusable bottles and bags, recycle and reuse, buy less, eat less meat, trade your grass for trees and plants, conserve water, ride your bike, buy locally and organically. Each step toward sustainability counts. But these are merely first steps, and we can’t stop here. As we take the next steps to restructure our local communities toward more sustainable self-sufficiency (as they once were), commute less, conserve more, transition to renewable energy sources, and regreen our environment, there are deeper changes we face.

Our climate problem isn’t merely an overdose of CO2. Global warming is fundamentally connected to overpopulation, pollution, industrial manufacturing, industrial farming, capitalist media manipulation, exploitation of natural resources, poverty, corporate abuse, and governmental abuse. We’ve had evidence for a long time now that these are unsustainable situations around the globe. Climate change is merely one more, albeit the most radical, reality check in a long series of warnings that have gone largely unheeded.

So as the weather around us turns strange, as drought, fire, floods, and storms reach unprecedented proportions, let’s hope we ask ourselves the right questions: What matters? How should I live? What should I teach my kids? What do I actually need? How can I take less and give more? What can I contribute to heal the damage around me? How can I help other living species?

There are more specific questions that may follow. How does the food I eat make me feel? How does television affect my thoughts and emotions? How do my specific choices and actions affect the world around me? How am I using my time? Am I connected with my family and friends? Are my kids receiving positive messages about themselves and their world? Are my kids confident, humble, connected, empathetic, resilient, capable of joy, and awake to the world around them? Am I?

These are not easy questions to ask or answer, which is why they must be addressed. As Rilke reminds us, “Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it. . . . That something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” The power of difficult challenges in our lives is why millions of us around the world are watching the Olympics right now. We admire the athletes for achieving something profoundly difficult. Although the media would have us ignore the athletes who do not win medals, we are impressed nonetheless with their accomplishment of making it there and trying. And this is why we are disappointed when athletes take the easy route with drugs.

Most of us know intuitively that when it comes to taking care of our extraordinary home planet there is much more we need to do. We know that there is no easy fix to solve climate change and no easy fix to solve the related environmental problems we have wrought. Although we may have lost sight of it, we know in our wisest hearts that life is to be honored, not exploited, squandered, or taken for granted; that one by one we must each take responsibility and not look to others for answers; and that in the process of saving ourselves we might just recover our own dignity and sense of purpose along the way.

Julie Hall is the author of A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It, a poet, and cofounder of the green online store ProgressiveKid.

Image by David Goehring, 2006, Creative Commons license.

©2008 ProgressiveKid

Parents are a jumpy bunch these days. Even before I had my daughter I was troubled by the prevailing attitude among parents that the world has become a place too dangerous to let kids be kids anymore. Popular opinion seems to be that it is now too risky to let children do time-tested things like play outside unsupervised, climb a tree, explore on a bike, or walk to school alone, all things my friends and I enjoyed as kids. Once I became a mother I began to witness first-hand the stifling paranoia among other parents about their kids’ safety and to see the effect it was having on kids. Not surprisingly a new major study by Play England, part of the National Children’s Bureau of Great Britain, found that half of all kids no longer climb trees and 17 percent have been instructed by their parents not to play tag or chase. Although 70 percent of adults reported having had their biggest childhood adventures outside in natural settings, only 29 percent of children have such opportunities today. Depressingly, most children reported having their biggest adventures in playgrounds.

With his 2006 book The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv alerted our generation to the alienation of children from nature and the damaging effects of childhoods spent mostly inside, citing obesity, depression, and loss of self-esteem. Likewise, the recent British study points to the importance of risk-taking to “increase the resilience of children,” and “help them make judgments.” Although most parents today had such opportunities for outside play and risk-taking as children themselves, many of them are failing to make the connection between their own vital developmental experiences and their children’s need for the same things.

Why? Media fear-mongering in recent decades has given the public a distorted sense of the dangers of contemporary society. If we believe what we are told by ratings-hungry “news” outlets, human nature has suddenly turned inexplicably bad, predatory perverts are everywhere, and child molestations and abductions are rampant. The fact is that most sexual and physical abusers are family members—not creepy strangers. This is confirmed on the American Psychological Association website. Abduction rates are declining, with most being by family members or other acquaintances of the child. Moreover, according to the U.S. Department of Justice violent crime against children actually has dropped by nearly half since 1973. Human nature has always been a mix of astonishing cruelty and equally astonishing kindness, dolled out in varying ratios across our species’ population but averaging out to generally benign behavior.

Whether stirred by media hype and/or disconnection from nature and the nature in ourselves, contemporary parental fear is unhealthy for our kids and debilitating for parents. It reflects a fundamental loss of confidence in the general decency of others and, even more sadly, in the capability of our kids. To make matters worse, parental fear over children’s safety often obscures or even supplants our commitment to our children’s broader well-being. Tending to our children’s safety helps keep them out of harm’s way (though there are never guarantees). But simply keeping them out of harm’s way is not enough for kids and, as studies remind us, not even always healthy for them. Rather than focusing obsessively on kids’ safety, tending to their well-being helps give them skills and awareness that they require to be confident, capable people that develop into high-functioning adults.

How we foster the well-being of our children must be answered by each of us, depending on our values and the personalities of our kids. A great place to start is to have more faith in the resiliency of our kids—and ourselves—to bounce back from hurts, mistakes, failures, and false starts. Without such difficulties, there can be little healing, learning, triumph, and success. This kind of faith is really a faith in nature itself. It is a faith in our own animal selves and in the natural cycles of living—struggling and growing, protecting and challenging, exerting and resting, acting and reflecting, falling down and standing up again.

The topic of raising kids free-range, a term used by Lenore Skenazy on her thought-provoking website Free Range Kids, came up recently in an online mother’s forum I belong to. One mother expressed in extreme terms what many were feeling when she said she would “lock and chain” her kids to her because of “perverts on the loose” in a “rabidly changing world.” She called free-range parenting “science fiction.” Unfortunately mothers with such an approach to parenting become a far greater threat to their kids than the world at large. Thanks in part to the often grotesque influence of television and other negative media messages, parents unwittingly make their children helpless, soft, dull, and cynical to boot.

There is no fiercer mama bear than me, but I also know that my daughter requires a reasonable level of freedom to grow and gain the confidence she will need to thrive as an adult. And setting that aside, life is simply so much richer when it is lived fully, with dirty feet and skinned knees. There is nothing sweeter than knowing she is in the raspberry patch out back grazing at will in her bare feet, without anyone to answer to but the universe before her.

Julie Hall is the author of A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It, a poet, and cofounder of the green online store ProgressiveKid.

©2008 ProgressiveKid