Soap Box

Growing up in a small agricultural community, I learned to respect the will of Mother Nature.  If the weather was bad, crops were bad or livestock died.

Now that I'm an adult, I see Mother Nature in a whole new light.  The land can be misused and species can be hunted to extinction--Mother Nature can only do so much to fix that.

So I have my soap box.  I don't eat or use products that contain certain ingredients:

• Parabens--not necessarily because of the environment, but because they've been linked to cancer.  They're found in almost everything in bodycare, generally near the bottom of the list of ingredients, and there's multiple types, so anything that ends in -paraben is a no-no for me.
• Oil palm tree derivatives--found in every.damn.thing anymore.  Sodium laureth (or lauryl) sulfate, palm oil, partially hydrogenated palm oil, etc. are found in food products and in bodycare--shampoo, hand wash, toothpaste, etc.  Palm oil plantations are taking over Southeast Asia and leading to deforestation of rainforest land, specifically and most written-about, orangoutang habitat.
• "Made in Japan" or "Made in China"--this is the most recent thing, and mostly because of the discovery that China and Japan are slowly killing off endangered species that will likely be unable to rebound.  On the land and in the sea, animals are being killed for "delicacies" in these countries.  Asses.
• Beef.  I'm trying to cut back on this, which is a bit hard to do where I live.  It's a cattle culture around here.  I'm not cutting out red meat all together, I'm trying to switch to wild game or bison.  Beef is very bad for the environment because of the amount of water needed to keep them alive and the fact that they let off methane, an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

I get fired up about stuff like this.  I'm turning into quite the treehugger.