Sweet Charity for a Mom with a Mission: Health Child Healthy World Arms Parents with Information about Environmental and Chemical Pollutants By Nancy Chuda Founder and Editor in Chief of LuxEcoLiving and co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World Last year First Lady Michelle Obama selected Healthy Child Healthy World as one of her favorite causes. [...]

By Alanna Brown, LuxEco Editorial Assistant You are terrified and frantic. You cram yourself, with six other women, into a three-foot by four-foot bathroom in a remote corner of your neighbor’s house. In order to survive, you will remain in this space for the next 91 days, with little to eat or drink, hardly room [...]

By Nancy Chuda founder and Editor-in-Chief of LuxEcoLiving and co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World. Reporting from San Simeon California. “San Simeon was the place God would have built–if he had the money.” In 1941, the lights  dimmed at La Questa Encantada when the movie  Citizen Kane,  Orson Welles homage to newspaper baron William Randolph [...]

By Nancy Chuda founder and Editor-in-Chief of LuxEcoLiving and co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World. This year Healthy Child Healthy World is celebrating its twentieth anniversary.  We have much to be proud of and grateful for beginning with the everlasting memory of a little girl whose short life, only five years, was for a greater [...]

By Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff, Executive Director/CEO, Healthy Child Healthy World and a LuxEcoLiving Advocate   Is there a link between the environment and illnesses such as pediatric cancer, asthma, allergies and behavioral problems? According to the scientists and doctors who advise Healthy Child Healthy World, the answer is yes. For example, we believe it makes [...]

Connected: Looking at love, death and technology in the 21st century Courtesy of Marketplace Listen to this Story Tiffany Shlain, technophile and filmmaker, discusses her new documentary and what it means to be connected — technologically and emotionally. Kai Ryssdal: It is, most of the time, great to be connected — to be able to [...]

Hands by Guido Daniele

Hands by Guido Daniele
By Florence “Flip” Ross, LuxEcoLiving Advocate and Contributor
If I could bring the planet Earth, back to its natural beauty
If I could sing its praise, and make the world assume its duty

If I could make the industries clean up their foul pollution
Our air, our water, would be clean, and would be the solution
If I could force our corporations to help clean up our planet

By Florence “Flip” Ross a LuxEcoLiving Advocate and Contributor We were very  attentive to the Presidential Election, we are paying attention to the war in Afghanistan, we are very absorbed in what is going to happen to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  We are very involved with who is going to win the Golden Globes [...]

By Janelle Sorensen, Chief Communications Officer, Healthy Child Healthy World Expert Opinion courtesy of Healthy Child Healthy World When my husband and I toured schools to find the one we wanted to enroll our daughter in, I’m sure I was silently voted one of the strangest parents ever. Why do I feel I was secretly [...]

By Nancy Chuda founder and Editor in Chief of LuxEcoLiving and co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to [...]

By Nancy Chuda founder and Editor in Chief of LuxEcoLiving and co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World What price would you pay to protect our countries most coveted resources? Last week, Republicans launched an unprecedented attack on our environmental protections. While under fire as the drama mounted concerning the debt-ceiling negotiations, GOP representatives added riders [...]

Steve Jobs might find a way to cut to the core of a major human rights issue impacting the health of children who get their daily dose of vitamins from eating apples. You can write to him sjobs@apple.com and let him know he’s got to get on this issue ASAP.

LOHAS Second Annual Los Angeles Networking Event & Reception – Provides Forum for Green Business Leaders. LOHAS, the producers of the annual LOHAS Forum is the leading edge of positive transformation for people, planet and profit, provides the opportunities for business sectors to connect, develop relationships and share ideas. The second annual Los Angeles networking [...]

LABC Sustainability Summit: Fulfilling Our New Market Potential Much is in store for the LA Business Council Sustainability Summit, including the “Salon of Masters” panel, featuring Michael Northrop, Sustainable Development Programs Director for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Scott Lyle, COO for GE/Arden Realty, John Mooney, CFO of Haworth, Inc. and Richard Maullin, President of FM3, [...]

By Mary Elizabeth Williams-Villano, LuxEco Editorial Assistant and author of the Resplendent Repurposing series
Even wonder what really goes on behind the scenes at your local thrift store? About how your donations are used — are they really helping people? How the charity decides what to charge? What happens to the stuff that doesn’t sell? And just how Green an operation is it, anyhow?
I got an inside peek into the operation of what is perhaps the best-stocked, best-run chain of thrift stores in the greater Los Angeles area when I spoke with executives of the National Council of Jewish Women, Los Angeles at the Fairfax Avenue headquarters.

In a times of great tumult, we are reminded of the calls for peace echoed by 1960′s activists: War Is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things
AMP founders with two Congressional Representatives, from left: Gloria Vanderbilt, Lenore Breslauer, Felica Bernstein, Joanne Woodward and Barbara Avedon
By Nancy Chuda, Co-founder of Healthy Child Healthy World and Co-Fouder and Editor in Chief LuxEco Living
On March 19, 2011, my mother, Lenore Breslauer would have been 88 years of age. She passed on the eve President Bush declared war on Iraq, March 20, 2003. US military invasion of Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was a coalition forces cooperative. Approximately forty other governments, participated by providing troops, equipment, services, security, and special forces, with 248,000 soldiers from the United States, 45,000 British soldiers, 2,000 Australian soldiers and 194 Polish soldiers. Additionally, 70,000 Kurdish military troops joined forces.

By Nancy Chuda, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief LuxEco Living and Co-Founder of Healthy Child Healthy World
Last night, CNN reported that engineers are at higher risk of extreme levels of radiation due to a potential meltdown. In Japan’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) power plant, nuclear authorities have reported that spikes of radiation have escaped from the facility at levels that can be dangerous to human health.
But what does this mean for Americans, especially those who live on the western coastline where the fallout may occur.

Empathy and Compassion in the Wake of Japan’s Tsunami Crisis By: Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Compassionate Life and Founder/Director, Green World Campaign The aerial shots are heartbreaking enough: the before-and-after satellite photos of Arehama and Otsuchi that reveal the cruel devastation of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The aftershocks are rippling throughout the world. Some [...]

By Merry Elkins, LuxEco Editorial Assistant
Ken Kragen knows what it’s like to accomplish the impossible. He’s done it time and time, again. This time every California Community College Campus and Student is his beneficiary with his Hands Across California campaign on April 17th, 2011.

By Merry Elkins, LuxEco Editorial Assistant
Best known for being a star-maker, Ken Kragen, who is also an author, teacher, and film and television producer, has charted the career course of some our most celebrated entertainers including Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie, Tricia Yearwood, Olivia Newton John, The Bee Gees, The Smothers Brothers, Harry Chapin and more; but nothing he has accomplished in his illustrious career has ever achieved the significance or the scope of his philanthropic work.
For breathing life into Hands Across America in the 1980s where young and old alike joined hands across the country to call attention to hunger and homelessness here in the US; for setting in motion and organizing the recording We Are the World, that brought together 45 prominent recording artists including Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen to raise $64 million to feed people in Africa and for founding USA for Africa to distribute the money, he received the United Nations Peace Medal, something few civilians receive and an honor for which he is most proud.

By Nancy Chuda Founder and Editor-in-Chief of LuxEco Living and Healthy Child Healthy World
Enter Wael Ghonim, a charismatic young Google executive who helped launch the protests in Tahrir Square. His heroism validates what a real social network can do. Sorkin and Facebook aside, certainly not as newsworthy, will win the Oscar for best Original Screenplay not because of a few Harvard grads, but Google. The Umpire of all networks which will always win… it just makes adsense!

Life imitates with purpose as the world watches Wael’s Facebook page, as he herds the hordes of young brave Egyptians as they face off in the streets urging President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The cacophony of people, police, military, women, men and press from around the globe could not visually hold the power or the purpose that the Internet is providing.

by Mary Elizabeth Williams-Villano, LuxEco Editorial Assistant and author of the Resplendent Repurposing series
As if those of us who are concerned about toxic chemicals in our environment didn’t have enough things to worry about, we must now add methamphetamine lab sites, either currently operating or long closed down, to the list. The inconvenient truth is that you could be living in one right now. Or parked next to one. — Mary Elizabeth Williams-Villano, LuxEcoLiving Editorial Assistant

By Florence “Flip” Ross, LuxEco Advocate

We are all familiar with the saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” but when I travel through Israel I can’t help but think “When in Israel, do as the Israelis do.” How remarkable they are at accomplishing the impossible.

When they tried to build a harbor in Ashdod, they called in all the experts they could think of to help them do it. The experts from Holland (whom for sure they thought could accomplish this, since their country too was below sea level) told them it was impossible. Imagine their disappointment, but not to be deterred they said: “Okay, we’ll do it ourselves,” and do it themselves they did.

By Alanna Brown, LuxEco Editorial Assistant

Our very own LuxEco advocate, Olivia Newton-John was a guest on the taping of Oprah’s show Tuesday. Oprah, filming two shows at the Sydney Opera House this week, had a star studded line-up for her travels Down Under.