You see them everywhere they are not supposed to be.  Plastic bags  have become an irritating part of the landscape, lining the highways, caught in tree branches, floating in the ocean.  The buggers jam recycling machinery, block drainage systems, languish in landfills, and are mistaken for food by wildlife.  Fashioned from petrochemicals, these bags are highly resistant to degradation.  While some can be collected and recycled, and all can be re-purposed as garbage and storage bags, these seemingly convenient plastic sacks generally wind up as fodder for the dump or become one of the main ingredients for marine pollution.

While the plastic bag has its friends in high places, such as the American Chemistry Council, ExxonMobil, and Dow Chemical, cities across the country are beginning to let the flimsy film know that it is not welcome.  A quarter of the world’s countries have either restricted, taxed, or outlawed single-use plastic bags, and the United States is slowly starting to follow suit.  San Francisco began the trend in 2007, and was copied on the local level by other cities including Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

San Luis Obispo is considering a bag ban with an additional tax for plastics, but has experienced opposition from well-funded lobbying groups and those that believe a bag restriction comes as an infringement to freedom of choice and as a burden to business owners.

One of the simplest and most effective methods of reducing your plastic footprint is to bring your own cloth or sturdy reusable bag with you to the local supermarket, restaurant, or retail store.  Here at Bambu Batu we carry cloth totes and Blue Lotus reusable produce bags for conscious shoppers.  All of your purchases from the store are bagged in recycled paper, and we are always enthusiastic to see customers bring their own backpacks, purses and satchels.

What do you think?  Should San Luis Obispo ban the bag?  Tax plastic?  Recycle reusables?  Are cities overstepping Constitutional boundaries when imposing levies on these products?  Are environmental risks enough to consider outlawing single use bags altogether?

With Fall firmly established and Winter on its way, it is time to start the search for the season’s perfect, warming beverage.  Luckily for San Luis Obispo residents, we have a fantastic resource for some of the highest caliber tea around.

Founded by two sisters with a passion for tea and culture, Swan Sisters Tea is a boutique company that maintains a year-round presence in the US and China in order to ensure the quality of some of the best and rarest leaves in the world.  Each harvest season, Swan Sisters travel to remote regions seeking the most unique and delicious vintages.  To them, tea is a magical beverage that encompasses culture as well as health, ceremony as well as science.  It is the mission of the company to spread the joy of tea and educate the public in an effort to share their passion and promote the drink as a way to live a healthier and more connected life.

Consistent with an environmentally conscious business ethic, Swan Sisters only sources teas that have been grown organically and without the use of chemicals, pesticides or fertilizers.  All packaging is either recycled or reused, leftover tea and cardboard are composted, and press materials are printed with eco-friendly inks.  The farms chosen to supply the company are selected based on the ethical treatment of its workers, meaning that Fair Trade practices are followed and encouraged.  It is the hope of Swan Sisters to coordinate and fund more Fair Trade certifications for their growers in the future.  To ensure freshness, each leaf is hand picked, and the dates of harvest and grade of each tea are carefully marked and recorded.

Bambu Batu is happy to announce Swan Sisters tasting and demonstrations this Saturday, November 26.  Come and sample expertly brewed and beautifully presented varieties, learn a little about the company, and take home a gift for the holidays.  For more information on Swan Sisters, contact Didi Yeh at <didi@swansisters.com> or <info@swansisters.com>.

“What on earth will it take?”

HopeDance FiLMs 2011 and Bob Banner present the movie Thrive, on Wednesday, November 30 at 7pm at the Palm Theater in San Luis Obispo.  This unique and thought provoking documentary reveals the consolidation of power fueled by money and globalization.  Weaving together developments in science, arts, politics, and the current waves of activism, the movie strives to offer solutions and suggestions for our ailing institutions, and strategies for taking control of our common future. Featuring commentary from visionaries and activists such as Amy Goodman, Deepak Chopra, Paul Hawken, and Vandana Shiva, the film hopes to enliven, inspire, and educate a world yearning for change.

In his journey to understand the devastation of poverty pervasive across cultural boundaries, Foster Gamble has discovered a code derived from UFO technology that has been embedded and represented in nature and human social systems throughout the centuries.  He believes that this information is a blueprint for finding a clean, limitless supply of energy that could completely revolutionize the way people live.  Gamble asserts that power could potentially be extracted from the space surrounding us, and therefore stands as a direct threat to our largest and most powerful economically influential industries.  By following greed and corruption through diverse sectors of our society, he makes the case that this information has been deliberately suppressed in efforts to control governments, banks,  businesses, housing, medicine, and educational institutions.

Through renewable energy, popular political will, and communication, can we come together as a people and not just survive, but thrive?