All college students know the feeling — that squeaky little hamster wheel of doubt about life post-diploma. What if I can’t find a job? What if I can’t find a job I like? What if I can’t find a job that aligns with my values?

Ditch that hamster wheel and climb on two wheels that can take you places, Maya Donelson would tell you. A 2006 graduate of New York’s Syracuse University, Donelson knew she wanted to do something green in her life. But it took a random adventure — a cross-country cycling-trip fundraiser for Greenpeace — to help show her the winding path to a fulfilling career.

Maya Donelson
Age: 24
School: Syracuse University ’06

The pedaling raised $1,654 (“not much, but still exciting,” she says) and ended in a visit to San Francisco, where Donelson realized she wanted to live. She moved there a number of months later and found an internship working on green, edible roofs. That led her to apply for and ultimately win a grant that helped her launch a dream program: growing organic food on the rooftop of one of San Francisco’s most progressive forces, Glide Church, in the needy Tenderloin District. With her $10,000 Project Slingshot award [PDF] — given by the youth-focused climate-action group Focus the Nation in partnership with Clif Bar — Donelson started Graze the Roof, a project that will produce hundreds of pounds of food in an oasis above the streets.

This summer, through Donelson’s program, some 200 homeless and low-income children and teens planted green things, held their first red wriggler, caught aphids, and learned how tasty it can be to eat your veggies.

What’s next? We caught up with Donelson recently to get her take on college, environmental work, and life’s surprising multiple choices.

You took all sorts of courses for your “environmental design-interiors” degree from Syracuse — environmental, fine arts, architectural. Was that helpful?

That actually helped a lot. Because by the time I graduated, even though my degree labeled me as an interior designer, I knew I didn’t want to pursue interior design. I wanted to look at the world from a more holistic perspective.

So school showed you what you didn’t want?

My professors in my major didn’t have the same passion for the environment that I did, so it taught me how to push myself — and that was a good thing. Being out in the real world, you know you’re going to have opposition: People aren’t always going to believe in what you believe in 100 percent. And you have to keep pushing forward despite them.

Why did you go on the bike trip?

My friend Rose Devlin and I decided to do it on our last night at Syracuse, even though neither one of us knew anything about touring. The longest distance I’d ever cycled was about 5.5 miles. We left from Virginia and rode into Oregon two months later.

How did you find your first job?

I found Tullio Inglese and T.I.A. Architects on the web, when I’d returned home to Massachusetts. I called him almost immediately and two hours later I was in his office in Amherst, a church he’d purchased and renovated. I knew instantly it was the place for me. I spent six months on a paid internship learning about his 12 principles of ecological architecture, drinking tea, browsing his library, and learning about all the models and prototypes he’s designed. I helped design a generic passive solar house and worked on a model eco-village and a project called Andromeda, a [proposed] sustainable city for China. I helped with the book he’s writing on ecological architecture. And I also redesigned his website — it was outdated and needed a makeover. Tullio leads a humble and modest life, and his work deserves more attention than it receives.

How did gardening and rooftops enter the picture?

My grandparents were farmers, and I grew up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts where we always had a huge garden to tend; I hold onto those memories very dearly. And then last summer [after moving to the Bay Area], I went to an opening at Green City Gallery in Berkeley — a place that showcases environmental projects. And I met Ingrid Severson, who did a small living roof installation there, and it was fantastic. I talked to her about the project and two days later I emailed her and asked if there were opportunities to intern at her nonprofit, Bay Localize.

I started working on their rooftop resources project, which analyzed the potential for rainwater catchment and solar power and living roofs. And I got this idea about starting a rooftop garden. Then last spring Ingrid told me about [the Project Slingshot] grant and said, “You should go for it!” So I got all the pieces together: I had, like, three and a half weeks to prepare the grant proposal. I didn’t even have a site for the garden yet. And that’s when Glide came forward.

Kids get their hands dirty on the Glide roof.

What does the project look like?

The rooftop is about 4,500 square feet, but in this phase we’re only developing 1,200 square feet. Glide serves the homeless and low-income population: It offers a huge array of services — free meals every day, job training, and lots of others. It also has a summer youth program. So over the summer, I led an eight-week rooftop garden club for kids, from kindergarten to teens, and they all got to spend time on the roof. Right now I’m looking at funding options to help Glide maintain the program for the rest of the year. It’s been the best job I ever could have imagined.

Any advice to the still-in-college?

Stay true to what you believe in, and you’ll find your path. Anything is possible, and you can make anything happen. There is power in young people who feel they can change the world. Harness that energy and amazing things happen.

A pop quiz for the college crowd:

Which of the following is no fun?
A) Beer
B) Doing it in the dark
C) Global warming activism
D) This is a trick question — they’re all related

If you picked C, you’re forgiven, says Maura Cowley, campaign director for the Sierra Student Coalition. But, dude, you’re so wrong.

The right answer, of course, is D. Today’s campus eco-actions involve all sorts of festive frolicking, from “Save the Ales” parties for the 21-and-older set to “Do It in the Dark” contests, green condoms, and risqué recycling campaigns.

“We want to make climate change a top issue among young people,” explains Cowley, “and to do that, we’ve had to come up with fun, accessible ideas that resonate with a wide audience — and not just with enviros.” Cowley, 25, knows the ropes: As a Penn State student, she led a campaign that brought renewable energy and energy efficiency to campus; since graduating in 2006, she’s worked for the SSC, the student wing of the Sierra Club.

Five years ago, there were only about 25 volunteer student organizers for the SSC at a thin smattering of colleges, says Cowley. Today, the SSC has thousands of student organizers at 150-plus colleges nationwide, all searching for creative ways to mobilize green forces.

Likewise, the Energy Action Coalition, an umbrella group for the SSC and 47 other green organizations that focus on students and youth, offers fun-laced forums to spread its message. Power Shift is a prime example — a youth summit in Washington, D.C., that combines climate activism with crowd-rocking music and spoken-word performances.

Beer bashes are another playful way to, well, draft new recruits. Organizers of “Save the Ales” gatherings [PDF] raise awareness about climate change by telling party-cipants that global warming threatens supplies of hops, a key ingredient in beer. Hops need cold winters; when global warming makes temperatures unusually hot, production suffers and beer prices climb. Beer also requires a steady supply of fresh, pure H2O, so the parties provide opportunities to talk about clean water — or launch any number of worthy efforts, from petition-signing to fund-raising. (Post-college progressive groups like Drinking Liberally can also attest to the power of politically charged beverage consumption.)

“Do It in the Dark,” meanwhile, doesn’t mean what you think it does — unless you think it means energy-saving contests between dorms, frats, or sororities. Colleges across the country have been holding these smackdowns in which student residences compete to see which can use the least amount of electricity. In the process, students get turned on to the power of turning things off. They power down computers, flip off lights, unplug cell-phone chargers and other electronics when they’re not in use, and install compact fluorescent lightbulbs. In turn they get treated to non-electric parties, with acoustic music and schwag like CFLs and green condoms. The victors get glory, more parties, and prizes like bikes and iPods. Williams College offered up tips for slashing energy use and ended up saving $10,000 in electricity costs during a month-long “Do It in the Dark” competition in spring 2006, earning props from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Not frisky enough for you? Consider the “I (heart) slutty paper” campaign in which student Hannah Riches, winner of a National Wildlife Federation fellowship, convinced the New School in New York to use non-virgin, 100 percent recycled paper and reduce paper use campus-wide.

Other green campus events can include concerts by eco-friendly bands, glow-in-the-dark soccer games (no nighttime lighting needed!), and giveaways of goodies like reusable water bottles and condoms. Even students stuck in the dorm cramming for tests can listen to green-leaning musicians and draw the blinds to let in natural light.

If they peer out the window, they might even see someone in the center quad dressed as a wind turbine and engaged in faux hand-to-hand combat with a rival dressed as a coal plant. “One of our other fun ideas is to have pretend boxing matches between the two,” Cowley explains. She’ll let you guess who wins.

A fuddy-duddy disclaimer: All of the alcohol-related events mentioned in this story are intended for responsible drinkers of legal age, in compliance with laws and campus rules. Alcohol abuse is associated with everything from DUI arrests to rape, suicide, and death. ‘Nuff said.

For some people, life starts after college. For Karoline Evin McMullen, it began in middle school.

Karoline Evin McMullen
Age: 18
School: Yale University

By the time she was 14, McMullen of rural Geauga County, Ohio, had already: written a textbook for elementary school kids; started a project with two friends to protect endangered brook trout; won a Christopher Columbus Award and a trip to Walt Disney World; and won a President’s Environmental Youth Award and a trip to another fantastical kingdom, the White House, to meet President Bush and the head of the U.S. EPA.

Those awards — and others — poured in after McMullen teamed up with a couple of eighth-grade friends to form Save Our Stream, an effort to help protect one of Ohio’s last reproducing populations of “brookies” from pollution in the watershed. After surveying community members and discovering that most didn’t know much about the issue, the trio designed and distributed educational pamphlets. They reminded residents that poisons dumped in yards and down storm drains ended up in waterways; they put warning stickers on stormwater grates; they pointed out that, since most people in the area relied on wells, groundwater purity would help human health, too.

Since then, McMullen’s textbook (Where Did They Go? A Community’s Struggle to Preserve the Native Ohio Brook Trout) has been published by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. And she helped lead another campaign that brought students and volunteers together to plant 1,000 trees in stream-restoration areas.

We asked McMullen about her future plans as she spent a last day at home, packing up before the drive to Yale to start her freshman year.

You’ve got more on your résumé already than a lot of 30-year-olds. Are you going to slow down in college?

Oh, my goodness, I would say the opposite. I think my background in environmental activism and my dedication in high school have given me a base on which I can build bigger experiences. And the environmental movement on college campuses and the green culture there is really flourishing — the energy and the passion and the copious amounts of free time there can all really help.

How are you going to decide whether environmental engineering — your current interest — is the right career?

I’ve just recently realized, “Hey, I can do everything I want to do.” So I’m trying to stumble my way along! The requirements of environmental sciences and environmental engineering at Yale involve the geopolitical things and the hard sciences — the beakers and pipettes, and also the social, the political, the economic. And that’s what I like: I’m really interested in the interdisciplinary nature of all the different environmental fields. So technically I’m heading in a science direction, but I’m far from just wanting to look at the lab stuff.

What about fun?

That’s what one of my relatives said — she said, “You’ve got to have fun!” And I said, “Are you kidding? I get to take the classes I want and wake up every morning and say to myself, ‘What do I want to do today?’” What could be more fun that that?

Why brook trout?

I grew up in a very rural environment; it’s a combo of several townships that are too small to have their own post offices. I wanted to start an initiative to try to get the community to appreciate the local environment, because I started to see some development happening, and I wondered, “What happens if you put a McDonald’s there?”

What kind of activism do you imagine doing at Yale?

Earlier this year I was at a youth summit with Jane Goodall to gather ideas from youth around the world and put them into action in terms of environmental justice. And she encouraged me to look into a group called Engineers Without Borders, [which builds sustainable engineering projects in impoverished areas worldwide]. And then I was speaking at a conference by the Construction Industry Institute …

The what?

I was invited to speak through a Destination ImagiNation team — we’d been involved in a creative problem-solving competition. And our team placed third, but we sort of created a buzz — a group of high-school girls in a math-science competition dealing with the construction industry. So we were invited to speak at this conference and when I was there I met Bernard Amadei, [the founding president of Engineers Without Borders]. They have a very active chapter at Yale, so I’m excited about that.

Do you think you’re more optimistic than most people?

Optimism is one of the hallmarks of my generation — the seemingly boundless ability to access information and creatively solve problems. But it’s present in all generations. Dr. Jane [Goodall] — she obviously has that frustration with politics, but she has such faith in the ability of people to solve the problems of today. And I see it everywhere: in my friends, my teachers. One wants to see the promise and opportunity and exciting possibility of the future. If you’re sunk into complacency, you’ll continue to stay there.

How should people avoid the complacency pit?

There are students who have fallen into a very comfortable apathy. It can be easy to zone out with the Game Boy and forget what’s going on around you. World hunger or such things: They’re not things Americans have to deal with. It’s important to keep in touch with what’s going on in your community and in the world.

What eco-action hasn’t worked for you?

My brother and other students at middle school lobbied to make the spotted salamander the official state amphibian. A state senator introduced a bill on their behalf and it passed in the Senate, but now it’s stagnating in the House. It’s facing opposition from supporters of the bullfrog, which is invasive and cannibalistic.

Sometimes people do things because they don’t realize they can’t. If this makes no sense to you, you haven’t met Chris Samila, a (permanent, as he jokingly puts it) senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he had some epiphanies, founded a business (Green Summit Inc.), and somehow managed to pull off a wildly successful green business expo on campus. With no experience. And no real cash. And about five volunteers.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” Samila says. “There were so many nights where I was like, ‘Oh my god, what do we do now?’”

What they did, it turns out, was bring together several thousand students, locals, and business owners for a one-day showcase of green products and services spilling out from under a rented tent on campus. The April 2007 event was so successful, Samila signed on to coordinate another GreenSummit in 2008 — this time a two-day affair at the Phoenix Convention Center — to again bring consumers, educators, and eco-friendly businesses under one roof. The summit, which took place on Sept. 5 and 6 with support from ASU and its Global Institute of Sustainability, drew 5,000-plus people, including a U.S. Commerce Department-sponsored delegation from Eastern Europe. Next year the GreenSummit will expand to Atlanta.

We caught up with Samila shortly before this year’s expo began, on a day when he’d been racing around campus putting staticky film (an eco-friendly, no-residue variety) on windows to advertise the event.

Why window stickers?

We’re trying to do as much as possible without using paper. So we’ve mostly been trying to get the word out through social networks to avoid things like flyers and mass mailings. With the summit itself, we really pushed the exhibitors hard to create digital profiles. We didn’t want them putting out a billion promotional packets.

How did all this environmental commitment start in your life?

The first six months at ASU, I lived in the most insane party complex you can imagine. It was like Animal House. So after about six months I said, “Okay, enough,” and started going to the library. And one day I picked up a book called Ocean’s End, about the Black Sea and the environmental destruction of the oceans — how there was no return. And all of the sudden it occurred to me: We’re messing something up and we can’t fix it. It’s too late. And I decided I wanted to be able to fix things now, before it’s too late. When the ASU School of Global Studies opened in the spring of 2006, I was one of the first to enroll.

Where did the business angle come in?

In the fall of 2006, I read about Greenbuild [a green-building conference and expo] and I thought, “I gotta go to this.” The school actually funded my trip to the conference in Denver, and I was just awestruck by the amount of innovations there. The message was, building green isn’t too expensive or difficult. There are no insurmountable issues. The biggest issue is that we need to get everyone to realize these are issues in the first place.

But the real epiphany involved compact fluorescent light bulbs, right?

It happened in winter break, after Greenbuild. My friend Lance and I took a trip to Costa Rica and we were going though the jungle, and there were all these CFLs in these jungle huts. And we were like, “Whoa.” This was a really remote area and I thought, “If Costa Ricans can use CFLs in huts in the jungle, we can get people to use them in America.” I decided I wanted to do an event on campus that showcases CFLs and shows who’s using green products that can make a difference.

How did you know what to do next?

I pretty much googled “event management” and got some students together to contact and invite companies. We’d be working till 11:00 and 12:00 at night, in between classes making phone calls and trying to get this thing going. And later I called my stepdad, who has a marketing company in Atlanta, and we borrowed someone from his staff to make a website that looked legitimate. Luckily the Global Institute of Sustainability started helping us. God almighty, it was stressful.

Any advice for fellow college students?

All of these industries realize they have to think outside the box to solve problems, and a lot of them want students to help — they want to connect with them. Sometimes you can talk to a company and they’ll say, “Get lost.” But you’ve got to just keep pushing, keep trying, and don’t get pissed off. Join the AIA [American Institute of Architects]; join trade groups. There is this initial disconnect between the business world and students, but businesses really admire how we can multi-task — emails, text messaging, phone calls, Facebook, AOL, all going at the same time. If you can take that and take your caring about the environment and put that in the business world, it’ll make a tremendous difference.

Ahhh, the bedroom: an oasis of pleasure, a place where terms like “emissions reduction” and “off-gassing” should never intrude. Not that environmentalism and sex don’t mix. It’s just that lying back and thinking about things like CO2 and carcinogens isn’t exactly … hot. So what’s a passionate greenie to do?

The answer is easy as one, two, wheee. We’ve assembled a slew of ideas (and a whole lotta handy resources) that will allow you to relax and enjoy yourself — and they’re handily categorized in order of difficulty. Not that you’ll find much of the latter, since greening the bedroom is easier, more erotic, and involves a heck of a lot more nakedness than any other eco-action we can think of. It doesn’t even require self-denial or making out on scratchy sheets.

Here’s how to start.

Level One: A Quickie

Shower with your sweetie. To start — or finish, as the case may be — get lathered with your partner. You’ll save water, especially if you don’t linger too long (showers aren’t good for tantric sex anyway). And make sure you’ve got low-flow showerheads, which are affordable, come in dozens of pleasing varieties, and save mega-gallons of water.

Photo: bigteazetoys.com

Level Two: Afternoon Delight

Trade in your toys. Slide ‘n’ glide with organic lubricants and massage oils, or get rolling in vegan condoms (they’re devoid of dairy proteins). You can also play with dozens of eco-friendly sex gizmos, from medical-grade silicone vibrators and dildos to phthalate-free (there’s no family-friendly way to say this) butt plugs.

Soften your sheets. Luxuriate on silky-soft organic cotton, bamboo, or hemp linens, grown and manufactured without pesticides and other nasty toxics.

Find a new turn-on. Replace the incandescent bulbs in your love nest with energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which come in all kinds of configurations, from dimmers to, er, three-ways. Opt for the “soft” or “warm” versions to get the best glow. Fire up the soy or beeswax candles, which flicker without the lead and petroleum found in conventional models. Or, hey, go ahead and play in the dark.

Level Three: Tantric Bliss

Say yes, yes, omigod-right-there-yes! to family planning. This might sound like a no-brainer, but thanks to a swelling world population — fed by 80 million unwanted pregnancies each year — there are now 6.6 billion people on the planet, a number that could hit 11.9 billion by 2050. A potent counter-move? Support the battle for reproductive rights around the globe so that humans everywhere have access to contraception and family planning. Whatever your population-related plans, also make sure to practice safe, protected sex, so that your passion has happy endings. The earth will be moved.

Get Green(er) with Grist Links

Organic candles and more:
Aveda
Bluecorn Naturals
Adirondack Craft

Green sex toys:
Good Vibrations
Tantus
Smitten Kitten
Babeland

Organic sheets and more:
Earth Erotics
Northern Naturals
Pristine Planet
Bed, Bath, & Beyond
EcoMall

Organic massage oils, lubricants, vegan condoms, and more:
VeganEssentials
Good Clean Love
Glyde
Earthly Body

Lighting up:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program
Electric Power Research Institute

For information and action alerts on family planning/reproductive rights:
Planned Parenthood
Ipas
EngenderHealth
Family Health International
Pathfinder International
Population Action International

Illustration: Keri Rosebraugh

If only parenthood were like that.

That’s the kind of wistfulness I’ve been indulging in over the past few weeks as I’ve worked with Grist on its special series about green parenting. The project is jam-packed with tips and information about everything from safe bibs to school lunches. Reading it, I’ve been inspired by the expert advice, grateful for the guidance and humor, comforted by the fact that so many millions of parents are committed to greenness — and freaked out enough to want to grab the nearest pacifier (Jack Daniels, anyone?).

I’m imagining I’m not alone here. It’s hard not to have a high-blood-pressure moment when we’re faced with data about the poisons in our world, the exposures we’ve had to the poisons, the exposures our children may have had to the poisons, and the fact that setting things right will take a daunting effort involving governments, corporations, courts, and citizens around the globe.

So when Grist asked me to write a conclusion to the series, my first thought was: I can’t. The loose ends are everywhere and they’re growing like kudzu. The more I learn about perfluorooctanoic acid, pesticide residues, VOCs, PCBs, off-gassing, and lead-filled toys, the more confused and paralyzed I feel. It’s overwhelming! And my second thought was this: maybe that’s the whole point.

Parenthood, by its nature, is a messy thing, filled with anxiety, unknowns, bad plans that turn out OK, and good plans that go comically wrong. Green parenting gives us the burden and then some: it puts our kids and the whole planet on our shoulders. If we were Atlas, we’d definitely shrug.

But what if we lightened the load — what if parents vowed to stay underwhelmed? We’d have to take basic safety measures, of course, like staying away from mercury-filled fish and tossing out Poison Me Elmo and his toxic-lead toymates, among other things. If we had extra time (don’t laugh), we could also work on one green issue that grabs us, whether it’s water pollution, renewable energy, or simply keeping the “dirty dozen” most-pesticide-laden foods out of the family diet. Beyond that, we could just follow the advice we give our kids. We could do our best.

Perfection, for one thing, isn’t an option. And personally, I’m glad, since I’ve failed to achieve it for so long. In my 11 years as a parent, I’ve spent countless dollars on organic foods but let my daughter eat piñatas-full of candy. I’ve shredded and ripped out my basement floor tiles, only to find out they all contained asbestos. I’ve given one of my best friends — a fantastic enviro-ista — a cute foam chair for her son that was probably a PBDE waste dump (she chucked it).

But I’ve also tried to make my peace. Living an über-green lifestyle, I know, requires total control — and that’s something no one has over their offspring.

I love hiking and being outside; my daughter hates most outdoor activities that don’t involve trampolines. I like farmers’ markets; she dislikes crowds. I love fresh raspberries and organic yogurt in the morning; she craves Krusteaz frozen pancakes with bacon, bacon, and a side of bacon.

I could let this stuff drive me crazy — and sometimes it does. But when I’m at my parental best I focus my energy on doable things, and do them. After getting this Grist assignment, I threw out the old plastic bowls in my cupboards and gave the non-organic apples in the fridge to the pet rabbits. I started buying bottled organic milk from a local dairy, eighty-sixed the noxious toilet-bowl cleaner, and bought my daughter a puppy (now she has to go outside to walk the dog!). I also purchased those recycled facial tissues recommended by Alan Greene as a small step with a big impact and, thanks to Montana’s cold weather and the fact that I’m allergic to the puppy, I’m getting really good use out of them.

In the end, I’m not sure I’ll ever be that bird in the sun. Total serenity and parenthood don’t seem to mix (unless, that is, the kid is sleeping). Tidy conclusions don’t seem possible, either. But underwhelm-ment is a goal I can live with. And maybe that’s the best beginning.

Open mouth, insert junk food.

Photo: iStockphoto

How have I sunk so low? That age-old problem, complacency, set in, combined with the fact that my daughter in recent years has become increasingly picky and health-food hostile. I let the junk into her life just so she’d eat something — anything — with enthusiasm.

The good news? I’ve turned a corner, thanks to this denial-busting assignment from Grist, with additional thanks to nationally known nutritionist Cynthia Sass, a New York City-based registered dietitian, health expert, and author of the book Your Diet is Driving Me Crazy. Give kids the information they need, Sass convinced me, and they’re going to want to eat right.

“What older children need is a basic understanding about this stuff — about the chemicals and additives and fats and sugars and how it affects their bodies,” she says. “Kids are great critical thinkers.”

The pickiest fifth-grader and the most eye-rolling teen are equally devoted to taking control of their lives, in the food department and all others, she says. Engage their smarts and their natural sense of outrage — about the disodium inosinate in those Doritos and the pesticide residue on that peach — and they’ll become allies in the food fight.

“The key is to avoid trying to trick them, or sway them, or force them to clean their plate or eat in a certain way,” Sass says. Playing the food cop when they’re downing the junky stuff “really pushes them toward those foods.”

By sleuthing with your kids instead of for them — reading labels and finding out together what foods have nasty additives and which fruit juices have no fruit in them and how that strange purple vegetable from the farmers’ market actually tastes — you engage them and bond with them, too.

Simple enough. I asked my daughter this week to read me the label on her maple syrup, which had not a single ingredient that was vaguely related to a maple tree. She was outraged.

Among Sass’s other recommendations:

For a quick fix, you can also download and print out the list below [PDF] of the eight foods every kid should eschew. Post it somewhere in view and let the chips fall where they may. Which just might be in the trash.

FOODS TO ESCHEW
The foods listed below are more noxious than nutritious — for you and for the earth.

1. Sodas
Teeth go rotten with Coke. A 12-ounce serving of most sodas contains 7 to 10 or more teaspoons of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that’s linked to rising rates of obesity and diabetes. (To see what this amount of sugar looks like, check this out.) Diet sodas aren’t much better: they’re filled with aspartame, a questionable artificial sweetener, and studies show that people who drink them weigh more than those who don’t.

2. Hot dogs, bacon, and processed lunch meats
It’s no baloney: high-fat meats like hot dogs, salami, and just about everything in your supermarket’s pre-packaged lunches and “deli aisle” are filled with hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and artery-clogging cholesterol and saturated fats. The latter can build up and cause strokes, heart disease, and cancers in adulthood. The nitrites in these meats are linked to increased risks of childhood cancer, too.

3. French fries
Most fries — America’s most popular vegetable dish — wallow in cholesterol-boosting hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, aka transfats. The fats in French fries also seem to cause more deep belly fat accumulation, putting people at risk for diabetes and heart disease. And a single serving of fast-food French fries offers dangerously high levels of acrylamide, a toxic chemical than can cause reproductive damage and cancer.

4. Doh-nuts
Just look at Homer. Doughnuts are the poster-child for food gone wrong: sugar-encased, high-fat packages of refined grains and empty calories, with food-dyed candy sprinkles on top. Plus, it’s hard to eat just one.

5. Juice-flavored drinks
Some fruit juices are actually made with, uh, fruit juice. But most are only about 10 percent juice, plus water, sugar, and juice concentrate (which has almost zero nutritious value). Apple juice promotes tooth decay; over-juicing in general promotes obesity. Eat an actual raw organic fruit instead. If you’re thirsty, drink some (non-bottled) water.

6. Artificial butter-flavored microwave popcorn
Artificially flavored anything is bad for you, but buttery-flavored nuked popcorn has the added problem of releasing toxic fumes, which in large amounts can cause a potentially fatal lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans — or what’s become known as “popcorn lung.” Hundreds of workers in popcorn factories already suffer from the ailment, and a prominent researcher has warned federal regulators that consumers are also at risk.

7. Chips
Whether they’re potato chips, Doritos, or some other entry in this snack realm, chips are high-fat and high-sodium with almost zippo nutritious value. Like French fries, many are also filled with alarming levels of acrylamide, a chemical that forms spontaneously when starchy foods are baked or fried.

8. Chicken nuggets
Cute as they are, these golden morsels aren’t much more than a greasy, breaded salt-delivery system. They’re filled with cholesterol-raising fats and super-sized loads of sodium. If you’ve seen Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, you’ll also have heard the allegations that Chicken McNuggets were once made with sick chickens. And they’re prepared with chemicals like TBHQ, a form of lighter fluid. Just say McNo.

That’s right, Congress.

The oyster is your classroom.

Amid growing evidence that learning about nature and actually experiencing it can help children become healthier, happier, more engaged citizens, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) introduced the No Child Left Inside Act in the Senate and House this summer. The goal of the legislation, treading the path forged by author Richard Louv and his acclaimed 2006 book Last Child in the Woods, is to restore environmental education in American classrooms. Such lessons, the evidence shows, can help boost grades across the board, while also preparing students for the myriad challenges ahead: accelerated climate change, pollution, depleted resources, and vanishing flora and fauna, to name a few.

Supporters of the legislation include more than 70 organizations, from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Sierra Club to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the National Education Association. Among the bill’s driving forces is the North American Association for Environmental Education. Grist checked in with Brian Day, executive director of NAAEE, to find out what inspired the bill — and why on earth it matters.

Might as well start off with the rude question: Why do teachers need Washington’s help to get kids outside? Can’t they just shoo them out for recess — mission accomplished?

Brian Day.

Getting children outside is very important, but the bill is about much more than that. In essence, what it would do is provide federal dollars to help train teachers in environmental education and help states create and carry out environmental education plans.

What we aim to do is go back to educating the whole child. We believe children need the whole piece: social studies, history, art, music. And they need to know about the natural world so that they can make good decisions as adults and citizens. We want to make sure that high-school graduates are environmentally literate.

No Child Left Inside is a wink-wink reference, of course, to the No Child Left Behind Act, which hasn’t exactly encouraged the whole child approach. Critics say NCLB has forced teachers to hyper-focus on reading and math. What’s happened to environmental ed in the meantime?

Environmental education is one of many things that got Bushed-out in the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers have been under so much pressure to prepare children for the mandatory tests in reading and math that they haven’t totally stopped teaching everything else, but they’ve come close. In many schools, looking at environmental issues has virtually disappeared. The budget for environmental education has been almost zero for six years now.

What’s the price tag on No Child Left Inside?

The current version asks for $100 million a year in teacher training — which looks like a fountain of youth for us. It might sound like a lot of money, but you’ve got to look at it in perspective: the state of Maryland alone spends $7 billion a year on education.

Are you aiming to turn millions of schoolkids into enviros?

We really want people to understand this: Environmental education is not about advocacy in the classroom. No Child Left Inside is about helping train teachers and helping children understand the issues. The aim is to help students understand how water systems work, how air pollution systems work, how solid waste and sewage treatment systems work, and how business and other concerns factor in. If we can teach children about physical, human, economic, and living systems, we’ll be enabling them to ask questions and come up with their own solutions. We want them to be able to work within their community on things like where to put a parking lot — or where not to put it, for example, because it might impact a water system. It’s about providing children with good, honest arguments from all angles.

Still, isn’t most environmental education going to be pro-environment?

Some people do come up to me and say, “Oh, I thought you were wanting to train everybody to be a treehugger!” But I say, “No, some of the kids we teach are going to grow up and hug trees, and some of them are going to chop them down.”

Literally? As in, they’ll become loggers?

Some of them might. But a lot of them will grow up and buy houses and other things that require chopping down trees. As environmental educators, we’re just asking that people get the information they need to make responsible choices.

The bill draws on research done by the State Education and Environment Roundtable, a group that’s been studying what happens when schools offer environmental education. According to the results, enviro ed boosts student enthusiasm for learning and improves test scores in reading, writing, math, social studies, and science. Plus, it encourages kids to move around, which fights obesity. Who would want to defeat a measure like that?

So far, knock on wood, we haven’t had any opposition. And we’ve got a lot of people on board. No puns intended.

Dr. Alan Greene.

Consider: In 1995, Greene and his wife Cheryl sat down at their kitchen table in San Mateo, Calif., and launched the world’s first pediatric website, DrGreene.com. It grew into a behemoth, providing advice, virtual house calls, and information that attracted 50 million hits per month. Since then, Greene has written three books on children’s health and parenting. He’s been a trailblazer in the internet-for-health movement; he helped draft standards and ethics for medical websites (in 2000 he wrote the Millennium Oath, a pledge for physicians to use open communication with patients instead of the secrecy urged in the Hippocratic Oath). He’s also a pediatrician at Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a pediatric expert for WebMD and other outlets. He even wears green socks.

We reached Greene this month to ask him about his latest success — the just-released book Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care — and to hear his surprising views about parent power.

You’ve spent years as pediatrician and answered nearly every question known to parenthood on your website. Why did you want to write this book?

A few years ago I did a study with the Environmental Working Group where we measured umbilical cord blood in babies. We found an average of 200 different industrial chemicals in their cord blood at birth. Of the total 287 chemicals we detected, 180 are known to cause cancer in humans and 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system. So I realized that what’s “out there” is in us — even in the most inner sanctum of the womb. Being green and getting pregnant and raising a baby are so intimately connected, I just had to explore the impact of the environment on babies, and vice versa.

Have you seen positive research findings, too?

Definitely. Take pesticides: there was a great study done in 2006: researchers took typical kids in a suburb outside of Seattle, and they did urine testing and found high levels of organophosphorus pesticides, which are very widely used. They’re actually more dangerous than DDT: they’re linked to ADHD and developmental delays and lowered testosterone levels in adult men. But they’re not long-acting the way DDT was. And what the researchers did was switch the children to a mostly organic diet, with organic foods that parents could buy at the local store. And in 24 hours they had lower pesticide levels.

That’s pretty encouraging — that one of the biggest threats to children’s health can be reversed in a single shopping trip.

What can you do if you can’t afford an all-organic lifestyle?

Another reason I wrote the book was to put these things in perspective and make things as simple as possible. What you can do, for example, is try to eat organic foods at least during pregnancy, when babies are the most vulnerable. Pregnancy is also a time when you have the most control. The baby is only going to be exposed to what goes on your skin, what goes in your mouth, and the fumes you inhale.

And, again, it’s possible to turn things around. Researchers have been looking at bisphenol A, one of the nasty plasticizers that are all over the place, and they gave it to pregnant animals. Then they gave the animals extra levels of folate and genistein [an active ingredient in soy], and it erased the damage. Getting great phytochemicals and antioxidants in your diet during pregnancy can go a long way.

What are you seeing that’s not so heartening?

A lot of the environmental diseases are getting worse. Asthma has tripled or quadrupled in recent decades, peanut allergies have doubled in a five-year period — and they can be very serious. Cancers are also on the rise across the board. There’s been a 250 percent increase in ADHD. Autism is on the rise: the incidence used to be 1 in 10,000; now it’s 1 in 166. It used to be that doctors saw high cholesterol, and glucose tolerance out of whack, and out-of-control waist sizes in middle-aged people. Today, about two-thirds of high-school students already have one of those problems. Type-2 diabetes, which used to be called adult-onset diabetes, is really on the rise — we’re seeing it starting in fourth grade. We have a ticking diabetic time bomb.

We’re giving kids too many calories, too many ingredients that kids’ bodies don’t know how to deal with, and diets so unbalanced that kids are missing out on many of the protective nutrients they need. Obesity is very, very common.

What are parents worrying about more than they should?

The first question I usually get is, “What diaper should I use?” The whole diaper thing is blown way out of perspective! Look at the Sunday edition of The New York Times: that one edition kills more trees, clogs up more landfills, and is a much bigger environmental problem than diapers. Research shows that the total impact of a child wearing diapers for a year — whether you’re using cloth or disposables — is about equal to burning up 54 gallons of gasoline. So it’s a small thing, comparatively speaking.

The key is to choose whatever diaper seems right, and then try to reduce the impacts. For disposable diapers, the big impacts come during manufacturing, so you should choose brands that aren’t made with chemicals like chlorine. For cloth diapers, the issues are the fuel used to transport them and the water and electricity used to wash them. If you use a delivery service, find one that has biodiesel or hybrid vehicles. If you wash them at home, use a nontoxic detergent. Another option is hybrid diapers like gDiapers. They’re an environmentally sound outer diaper that’s reusable, with an insert that’s flushable.

Is there one piece of green furniture that’s a must-have?

The mattress. Children sleep on that more than 12 hours a day, so an organic mattress is important. The whole incidence of SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome] decreased dramatically when we started putting kids to sleep on their backs, but I think part of the problem also came from children having their faces down in all the chemicals in conventional mattresses: polyvinyl chloride, phthalates, polyurethane foam, fire retardants.

What can we do if our older children slept on non-organic mattresses when they were babies, and we didn’t know any better?

Even if kids come into contact with something harmful, a lot can be done with them at any age to repair the damage. It can be done with great foods: organic, raw foods that are rich in antioxidants. A daily vitamin and mineral pill is also a great safety net. Even better than that is finding foods that you can teach them to like. Berries are a wonderful source of nutrition. So are cherries, and kids love them frozen without the pits.

You’ve written on dozens of enviro issues. Which one tops your list?

I’m working most on the food front, and my reasoning is that every bite of food we take is an investment we make in our bodies — or a debt we take out. It’s a vital and immediate impact. And it also impacts our air, land, streams, and global warming. If just 10 percent of our food supply were organic, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the roads. On farms, about 40 percent of the oil use comes from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that are all oil-based.

Any last words of advice for frazzled parents?

Pick your battles. And relax. Kids are extremely resilient — there’s a lot of time for them to overcome things. And even little changes can make a big, positive difference.

OK, so David slew Goliath. He never had half the battle facing Mary Brune and her fellow mothers in their crusade against the $500 billion-plus chemical industry.

In 2005, Brune and a trio of her friends in the San Francisco Bay area founded Making Our Milk Safe to raise awareness about the pesticides, lead, mercury, phthalates, perchlorate, PCBs, PBDEs, and other poisons invading human breast milk. Brune signed on as director and MOMS soon gained 600 members around the country — and political clout, too. This year, the group joined Friends of the Earth in the co-sponsorship of AB 706, a California measure banning the use of chlorinated and brominated fire retardants in furniture.

Toxic fire retardants, Brune knew, are the Frankensteins of the furniture world: rising up from countless foam-stuffed couches, chairs, and other products, they drift invisibly into household air and dust, making human exposure inevitable. Chlorinated fire retardants are so dangerous they were banned in children’s sleepwear nearly 30 years ago, only to show up again in furniture. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, are equally odious — and have been measured in North American women at levels higher than anywhere else in the world.

Against this backdrop, San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno (D) introduced AB 706 in February. The bill was dubbed the Crystal Golden-Jefferson Furniture Safety and Fire Prevention Act, in honor of a Los Angeles-area firefighter who died of work-related non-Hodgkins lymphoma (it’s a common cause of cancer in firefighters, owing to the poisonous smoke produced by fire-retardant-treated materials when they burn).

Firefighters across the state supported the legislation. But all forward motion ceased this summer when a group called Californians for Fire Safety kicked off a multimillion-dollar anti-AB 706 campaign, bankrolled by world leaders in the flame retardant business: Virginia-based Albemarle Corp. (annual sales of $2.4 billion); Connecticut-based Chemtura Corp. (annual sales of $3.5 billion), and Israel-based ICL Industrial Products, considered the globe’s top producer of bromine.

On Sept. 12, the California Senate bowed to the wishes of the chemical-industry lobbyists hovering in the wings and put Leno’s bill into deep freeze for 2007; it can be reintroduced in 2008. We caught up with Brune to find out why she got involved in this fight — and how it feels to be potentially facing round two.

Q. At first, AB 706 almost looked like a slam dunk. What happened?

A. The chemical industry kicked off a huge campaign: glossy mailers to registered voters, robo-calls, television ads, full-page ads in the major newspapers. We estimate they’ve spent $5 million to $10 million to defeat the bill. By comparison, we spent $5,000 on our video [watch it below]. It’s been a small, grassroots effort by our members and our allies at Friends of the Earth and MomsRising.

Q. Your opponents said fire retardants are needed to save lives. How do you answer that?

A. The main culprit in fire deaths is smoldering cigarettes; that’s why California mandated flame retardants in furniture 30 years ago. But today, smoking is down in general, we have a law in California requiring that cigarettes be self-extinguishing, and we have smoke detectors and other improvements. And there are other products available — wool and polyester fillings, for example — that are affordable and just as effective as the brominated and chlorinated flame retardants, and they’re also nontoxic. There’s no need to be choosing toxic chemicals when there are safe alternatives.

Q. Cosponsoring a bill is heavy lifting. What made you sign on?

A. Naiveté? [Laughs.] No, actually it was perfect for us. There have been increasing studies over the years linking toxics in breast milk to health problems. And PBDEs had been found in babies’ cord blood. But this May a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives [PDF] specifically looked at the level of flame retardants in breast milk and a particular type of birth defect, undescended testicles in baby boys. And one of the causes was the endocrine-disrupting effect of PBDEs.

In Sweden, they have fantastic bio-monitoring data that goes back about 30 years. In the ’90s the studies showed that levels of PBDEs in breast milk were doubling every five years. Because of that, companies in Sweden were asked to stop using these chemicals and, as a result, there was a decline of PBDE levels in Swedish mothers. Getting rid of the chemicals in commerce was proved to be an effective way to decrease levels in breast milk.

We also wanted to bring a human face to the campaign. We were nursing moms who were really doing this for our children, because kids are at risk. So far there isn’t any study that shows that any of these chemicals are safe.

Q. Doesn’t the chemical industry say they’re safe?

A. Yes, they do, and I’m not sure how they say it with a straight face. But as far as I’m concerned, as a parent we take precautionary measures to protect our children every single day. We use car seats, we put safety locks on our cabinets. So when we know that something children come into contact with every day — beds, couches, mattresses — is dangerous and could seriously hurt them, we have to do something about it.

Q.You can’t see PBDEs coming out of your couch cushions. You can’t feel them mutating your cells. Does that make it hard to convince people that the chemicals are dangerous?

A. When I was a kid, I lived in a community where there was this bug truck that would ride around at night spraying insecticide, and my sisters and I would run through the spray and play. No one knew what the spray was. My one sister had a hysterectomy at 33, my other sister has never been able to conceive, and I had a hard time getting pregnant and might never have another child. Very few people would trade their futures if they knew the risk they were taking — if they knew what these exposures could do.

Mary Brune protests at Target in fall 2006. (Photo by Gregory Dicum.)

Q. Who are your chief opponents?

A. Three companies — Albemarle, Chemtura, and ICL Industrial — are the main manufacturers of these chemicals right now. But they’re not saying, “Given the fact that kids are at risk, let’s use our dollars to produce the least toxic fire retardants we possibly can.” They’re not saying, “Let’s take $10 million to try and keep children safe.” Instead, they’re using $10 million to try and stop a safety bill from becoming law. I hope that the public will start to see these tactics and see that it’s our health that’s at stake.

It’s staggering when you consider that our aggregate exposure to all the synthetic substances in our environment could be the underlying cause of so many diseases and developmental problems — just look at the increases in cancers, infertility, autism. What it boils down to is that companies should not be able to put things on the market without regard to what the end result will be. We need to make sure things are safe before we put them out there.

Q. What should nursing mothers do?

A. Breast milk is still the best choice for kids. That, we feel very strongly about. But we need to speak up in the marketplace and in legislation, and we need to tell corporations and politicians that it’s not OK that toxic chemicals in the environment are ending up in breast milk. It’s a violation of our rights.

The idea that toxic chemicals have gotten into our breast milk — that what should be the purest food on the planet has become poisoned — that’s something almost unthinkable.