Teens Turning Green: The Future of Inspiration and Change

I'll be honest with you: there are days when I want to give up. Although I was never under the impression it would be easy to convince women to use non-toxic beauty products, I'll admit I underestimated how lonely and hopeless the journey would feel at times. So after months of hearing comments like, "Everything is going to give me cancer anyway, so why not look good in the meantime," I was beginning to wonder if it even made sense to continue down this path.

It is for this reason that I packed my bags and headed to San Fafael, California, for the annual Teens Turning Green conference. I hoped that being around young people who haven't been around long enough to be beaten down and cynical about everything might be exactly the inspiration I needed to keep going.

The conference, and the teens who organized it, exceeded my expectations.

First, let me say that these young women are going to change the world. They have more poise, confidence, and self-assuredness than I may ever have, and a relentless determination to reach their goals. How lucky for us that their goal is to create a safer, more sustainable way of life from which we will all benefit.

To that end, they were able to recruit leaders in a variety of fields, all pertaining to the health of the planet and the people living on it. The keynote speaker, the enviably successful & ridiculously charming Adam Werbach, introduced his DOT (Do One Thing) initiative, in which a family, business, state, even an entire country, can make a lasting impact simply by choosing to change one thing. Imagine, for example, that women across America announced their next lipstick purchase would be from the natural and organic department? Or if all households in a given city agreed to turn their thermostat down one degree? While it seems like you, being only one person, can't effect change, the reality is that when a bunch of individuals come together with one goal, the rest of the world pays attention (hello Tea Party Movement).

The following day, it was the fashion and beauty panel that honed in on the impact we have on others when making buying decisions. One of my favorite comments came from Ecofabulous' Zem Joaquin: "It's not really about mindful (green) consumerism at all. It's about how you want to treat others, and whether you care about what happens to them." They pointed out both the positive developmenents in the beauty industry - like Alaffia's initiatives to empower women in Togo via sales of their products- as well as the scary stuff. Case in point: the encouraged overuse of pesticides on Indian cotton fields (to supposedly produce higher yields) gradually destroys the land itself so that farmers can no longer support themselves or their families. They incur so much debt that they succumb to hopelessness. Currently, every 30 minutes an Indian famer commits suicide, usually by drinking the pesticides that killed their farm. We have the choice of helping others or hurting them every time we buy something. And closing our eyes and ears to the situation doesn't actually change the outcome.

The scientists at the conference, not surprisingly, brought to the table the truly disturbing facts about chemicals and our health. Although we are led to believe that the jury is still out as to whether many chemicals in beauty products are toxic, the reality is that scientists know the chemicals are toxic. The question is simply at what stage(s) in human development are the chemicals most harmful, how much of them does it take for harm to occur, and which ones are doing the most damage. And while the Environmental Working Group is doing its best to persuade Congress to introduce legistlation requiring companies to be more transparent about their use of chemicals and to test new chemicals for safety, chemicals companies are flexing all of their muscles to make sure that doesn't happen. Back to the "making a statement with your dollars" thing I mentioned earlier.

This conference could have been a real downer. Clearly, much of what we're currently doing as a society is dangerous and unsustainable. Millions of people's lives are affected, even destroyed, on a daily basis because we need things that are cheap, fast, and worn by celebrities. The problems are so vast, it is easy to declare us "officially screwed," and carry on as before. But both the teenagers and the various experts focused on the hope for change in the future, and insisted that if we act now, we can change the future. I am certainly going to keep trying, and I hope you will join me.