Tonya Kay is a professional dancer, television personality, film actress and danger artist. A vegetarian of 25 years, vegan for 15 of those and raw vegan for the last 7, Tonya Kay pioneers the green health movement with appearances, publications and green media (available at 
Eco Blogs Clean and Green Everyday Enjoy Life and Still Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
| Enjoy Life and Still Reduce Your Carbon Footprint |
| Wednesday, 10 June 2009 | Tonya Kay | Blog Entry |
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If you can figure out how to leave light footprints in your personal home, then you can do it in your community. And if you can live a low-impact lifestyle there, you can do it all over the world. I've been a raw vegan since 2002, and one of the many cool side effects of this lifestyle is how gentle it is on the world. No longer must my foods come wrapped in plastic. No longer do I throw out gallons of water used to boil food or wash dishes. No longer must I use electric or gas appliances to prepare a meal. My diet makes my home basically waste-free; my garbage output is only five gallons/month—between two people! So it always surprises me, with this actual light-tread possibility, why new raw-fooders would trade in their microwaves for electricity-gobbling juicers, blenders and dehydrators. Especially when there are equal, cheap, non-electric options out there. If you read my blog regularly, you know I use a hand-crank blender and a human-powered juicer. I also use a solar-powered dehydrator—one that I designed and built myself. You can build one, too. It’s easy and fun; just follow the directions in my article, Building a Solar-Powered Food Dehydrator. Like I said, we still wanna party in the city, we still wanna travel the world, we still wanna eat our flax crackers and dried fruit. I'm not advocating hermit utopianism here. I'm providing a clean, affordable option to have everything you want out of life and let all traces of your footprint's path be blown away in the next desert breeze. [See a complete list of writing by Tonya Kay on EcoHearth.com or visit her Clean and Green Everyday blog. - Ed.] Comments
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Written by SunLoving Bunny! (Kathy) , June 11, 2009
**My diet makes my home basically waste-free; my garbage output is only five gallons/month—between two people!
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That is great when your husband (or anyone you are living with, roomate, children, mother-whatever)-it is great when people living in the same house appreciates the benefits of a healthy diet, healthy diet is individual. But it will always mean eating as much organic foods as possible. If people stopped buying foods with preservatives, antibiotics and harmones, they would have no choice but to stop making them. Organic foods are so expensive, not everybody can afford to buy everything organic. But the last thing the government needs to do is lower the standards of what they call organic. I am curious though, how do you carry your stuff home? Even the Farmers Markets uses plastic grocery bags. Everyone looks at me like I landed from outer space when I put green vegetables in the carrot juice in my blender. The other day at the beach, some angry woman came up and asked me if I was into that Save the Earth ****? I had no idea WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT. I had just finished rollerblading, which got everybody staring, believe it or not, and now I was drinking some water from some cocunut shells I kept after eating the coconut. They are easy portable drinking glasses, do not break or crack that easy, and it makes me think of being on vacation in Jamaica!
Written by Tonya Kay , June 18, 2009
I carry my farmer's market groceries like I carry everything: with my two strong arms and reused bags! Then I pack those reused bags full of organic, in-season farmer's market goodies into the saddle bags on my bicycle and ride my fit city self home.
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Even in my 5 gallon/month of garbage household, the two of us living there still have different approaches to our environmentalism. Let's just say I'm pretty hardcore. If it was just me, I think my waste output would be 5 gallons per 6 months! Seriously! Always in life you will interact with people whom are not as into the green movement as you are, even when they are really into it. I'm a raw vegan and my family is not, for example, so holidays at home are different than potlucks I host in LA. But what I've found is that when dealing with people whom eat differently or consume products differently, that enjoyment of life is the most important thing. If your love for the planet and health is keeping you from enjoying life and having positive relationships, then it's time to rexamine YOUR approach to your ideals. In other words, you are more effective at inspiring change when you are open minded, compassionate and patient. Heck, when I met my Lover, he drank a pot of coffee daily and a pack of cigarettes, too! Talk about the power of open mindedness: now he is raw vegan and green like me (yes, not as hardcore as I am) but I never said a word. It's not my job to monitor other people. Just to love what I do and share what I love with them - maybe they love similar things! I'm pretty sure that people who don't get your desire to Refuse, Reuse and Recycle are in transition, too. Somewhere, this consciousness is creeping into their televisions, magazines and marketing propoganda, so by simple popular vote, they too are changing, if even somewhere deep and presently unrecognizable. You matter - continue! |
I met a woman from Spain while staying at an organic farm/hostel at the base of Japan's Mt. Fuji. She said that humans (specifically speaking of Spaniards) are leaving very deep footprints on the world. She, like me, obviously wishes to leave lots of footprints all over the world, but perhaps more like snow shoes over freshly fallen winter powder. Or, better yet, like sandy beach prints washed away entirely by the next tide. 
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