Earth Day - April 22, 2010 with the Peace Troop

This is the Peace Troop. I had the good fortune to meet them last September at the Santa Monica Pier during the Day of Peace organized by Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots organization.

They are pictured above in October when they came out to life guard tower 26 to do a beach cleanup with me.

A little background on them - Mothers, Kelly and Sherry decided that the traditional Girl Scouts weren't environmentally active enough - and so they split to form the Peace Troop. In a word, awesome.

We spent Earth Day together watching the film Tapped that, "examines the role of the bottled water industry and its' effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil."

One of the troopers asked, "Why doesn't Obama stop them."

Them being the big bottled water corporations of Nestle, Coke and Pepsi.

"That's a good question," I said. There wasn't enough time at the end to come back to that question.....

But they did decide 3 things:

1. to go home and tell their family about what they learned from watching TAPPED.

2. to tell their friends at school tomorrow.

3. to write a certain popular LA TV talk show host, that shall remain nameless here, to reconsider having the director of Tapped, Stephanie Soechtig, on her show instead of caving to the pressures of her sponsor....Pepsi - well they left that last part out.

I think it was unanymous though that everyone was going to switch to, "one of those stainless steel reusable bottles." I told them about Kleen Kanteen and that you could find them at Whole Foods among other places. Finally - when we watched Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, CA being interviewed walking the remote Hawaiian Beach littered with single use plastic water bottles, every one got very quiet. We live in a coastal city. This segment hit close to home.

So Happy Earth Day to the Peace Troop and to the people who made TAPPED. It was a great way to spend this day. I'll leave you with this -

Fact from Tapped - "The US uses 80 million single use water bottles a day. The recycling rate world wide for these containers is about 50%, but the US falls behind at 20%."

The rest end up in landfills, and in the ocean.......

A message for you from the Peace Troop