Category Archives: EverGreen

those who knew me in blogger-land knew i had a tab called ‘eco geek’ trying to document what i’ve done over the years…

well, it’s in 2.0 version now, with a bit of categorization but not perfect by any means.  lots of stuff i still have to do…

voila – here it is, ecogrrl documented.

got questions? lemmeno.

So…I came up with the name EcoGrrl in late 2008 when a colleague urged me to start blogging my words as I mentally prepared (well, as much as one can) for the death of my father who’d just suffered a hemhorragic stroke.

I was daddy’s girl as a child. He was a hydrologist, studying snowmelt and the effects of climate change on the region and how water’s behavior impacted the land. He loved quiet spaces – being out in the desert, collecting agates on the coastline, getting lost in the aisles of used bookstores, caring for his roses.

I see him in me now.

When I grew up, I was a force to be reckoned with yet with little guidance on how to direct or channel this energy. Some saw it as scattered, others as a free spirit. Deeply sensitive, I tried to create a protective shell…but still they told me this emotion, this personal approach I had, was not okay, not appropriate.

I grew up with my mother where food was whole, garden was natural, walking & biking & bussing were par for the course. Both she and my father loved the outdoors, and camping & hiking were natural activities.  I wore hand-me-downs as a child and laid out in the backyard on the grass or in an inner tube on the nearby river with friends, seeing shapes in clouds.

I belonged to an environmental group in school and my senior speech was in recycling. It wasn’t anything ‘hippie’ – it was par for the course.

Grrl means strength. It embraces the power of womanhood AND the openness of girlhood. As Eve Ensler said, “I am an emotional creature! “

This is me. EcoGrrl. Let us all be.

Did you know much of the conventional (not organic0 produce in our area grown comes from farms in Central Washington?  In the Tri-Cities area, there are farms all over, much near the areas surrounding the old nuclear site.

The nuclear waste tanks at Hanford, our country’s most contaminated nuclear waste sites, were discovered to have not met requirements and published in our newspaper today.

“The cornerstone of that cleanup is the vitrification plant to treat millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste. The waste is currently stored in 177 aging, underground tanks, many of which have leaked into the groundwater, threatening the neighboring Columbia River. “