Last Thursday, 15th of May, I went to my first L.A. Green Drinks event in West Hollywood. I had heard of this meeting at the Sustainable Works Workshops in Santa Monica last Fall. Barent Roth, our residential green living instructor was there and I ran into a few other people I had met there.
The meeting took place at Cisco Home, a green interior design store whose motto is “Built Locally to last Globally', located on 440 N.La Brea Blvd. The organic yet trendy decor for the meeting was a perfect environment to gather people who want to network, make new friends and keep informed about the green movement.
Our gracious host, Lorenna, Cisco Home's Sales Director invited me to sign in and introduced me to a couple of people. Refreshments and drinks were offered for a small donation of $5.00.
The meeting took place at Cisco Home, a green interior design store whose motto is “Built Locally to last Globally', located on 440 N.La Brea Blvd. The organic yet trendy decor for the meeting was a perfect environment to gather people who want to network, make new friends and keep informed about the green movement.
Our gracious host, Lorenna, Cisco Home's Sales Director invited me to sign in and introduced me to a couple of people. Refreshments and drinks were offered for a small donation of $5.00.
Around 9:00Pm, we listened to our special guest,Tom O'Leary, the Communications and Development Specialist at Forest Ethics. The organization's mission is to protect endangered forests and hold corporations publicly accountable for their damage to the environment with protests, email campaigns and national advertisements. Tom addressed two main pressing issues that Forest Ethics is actively campaigning against: The Tar sand in Canada which is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emission and the largest fossil fuel project in the world; the overwhelming junk mail we are regularly assaulted with in our home. He said that by the time we died we would have spent eight months of our life opening junk mail and that more than 100 million trees a year are logged to produce all that mail and almost half of it goes to landfills!
Tom and some of us in the audience talked about ways to make a stop to junk mail by subscribing to for profit or non profit companies that help consumers to be removed off commercial mail listings. Some of them are: Greendimes.com, 41 pounds, Directmail.com.
My personal experience has not been very successful with Green dimes. For $10.00, Visa cards mail advertisement has been a bit reduced but overall you need to work at it on a regular basis, keeping Green dimes notify about new companies addresses. It feels like the process never ends because as soon as Green Dimes manages to remove you off some commercial mail listings, other new companies start sending you their advertisement. I had more success with 41pound.org.
Finally, I left around 10:00PM, quite happy with my first L.A Green Drinks meeting both inspired about Tom O'Leary's speech and excited about making new friends, who just like me, are determined to improve their sustainable and eco-friendly lifestyle. It was a very fun and green educational night out that I will definitely repeat soon again!
For more information and schedule about LA Green Drinks, go to www.LAgreendrinks.org
To learn more about Forest Ethics campaign against junk mail, you can visit their website at http://www.forestethics.org/)
