Author: Divas@72

According to an on-line article on marthastewart.com  there’s no denying that hosting a holiday party, is generally associated with some level of stress. As the host, you may feel all sorts of pressure—financial, social, and beyond. While there’s a lot that goes into hosting loved ones during this festive season, it is possible to host an easy holiday party—one that doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed and out of the control.  You need to give yourself enough time to plan and prepare so you don’t feel overworked on the day of your gathering.  So how will you be spending the holidays this year? What is one “essential” element makes you feel like it is holiday time? What is an unusual food you’ve eaten? Courtney gives us great info on holiday entertaining that is stress free and fun. Follow Courtney on Health on Facebook and on instagram @clgwellness, as well as courtneygravenese.com and malcolmpresents.com

So what can we do to protect the land? Since the new year is just around the bend, let’s create some New Years Resolutions for Nature. Here are some things that can be put into place to protect and restore the land.  They are easy to implement and will have a beneficial impact on our environment. This time of year the temperatures drop rapidly and the littlest creatures must struggle to keep warm.  The bigger ones must find enough food to get through the night. What we do on our landscape greatly affects the wildlife.  Leave leaves alone so that animals and insects can take cover and setup nests and habitats.  Think about using a rake or use an electric leaf blower to have less of a detrimental impact on animal habitats. Please leave downed trees in place, as animals use them for cover. Another thing you can do is reduce or stop applying pesticides. Toxic chemicals kill pollinators and other beneficial insects and creatures. Donate to a Land Trust to preserve open space. There are many things that can be done to have a safer and more eco-friendly landscape, and we can all make an effort in the new year to incorporate better practices to keep the land, air and water around us clean and healthy. Our resident nature expert, and friend of the show, Victoria Alzapiedi gives us some great tips and New Year’s Resolutions that will help nature. For more info follow New Castle Healthy Yards and Help Save Chappaqua Buttonhook Forest, both on Facebook. Please subscribe to our podcast, The Many Shades of Green on Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, Spreaker and more. Visit HudsonRiverRadio.com and Malcolmpresents.com for past shows. A shout out to our wonderful engineer Neil, and to Malcolm, Brian, Victoria, GD Meg, the team working to preserve the Buttonhook Forest, and everyone concerned about Mother Earth. She needs our help… #RaiseYourEcoConsciousness

Eating is a favorite pastime of many people, and home cooking tends to take up a lot of time, especially during this ongoing pandemic. So if spending long hours in a hot kitchen cooking, baking and cleaning is not “your thing” there are ways to make it easier and more fun. It is important to have a kitchen management plan in place to help keep vegetables from rotting and food from spoiling. By having good storage methods, using good kitchen tools, gadgets and recipes, many obstacles during your time in the kitchen, or grilling outside, can be over come.  There are tricks of the trade which are called “kitchen hacks”, that will make kitchen life a happier experience. 

Courtney, gives us some tips, a/k/a kitchen hacks, to help make your time in the kitchen a more pleasant experience. Just FYI, my kitchen hack is a bottle of red or a bottle of white, and some good music from Billy Joel’s ‘The Stranger’ album from my Spotify playlist.  For more information visit Courtney on Health on Facebook, on Instagram @clgwellness and visit courtneygravenese.com. For past shows go to malcolmpresents.com, tweet us @tmshadesofgreen

It’s time to activate our souls and become guardians and stewards of the land. We cannot keep sitting around watching the earth burn. There are many people who are working on solutions to the climate crisis, who devote themselves to getting out the message that Mother Earth needs us, and we must take charge. Sharon Abreu and Michael Hurwicz are two people taking their message and ideas, through music, education and activism to the citizens of Earth, both locally and globally. They are truly making a difference. We talk about climate education, as well as the connection between climate change and the military. We delve into how to reduce stress during these covid and climate crisis times. We also talk about whales, the importance of grass roots initiatives and more. As a special treat, Sharon and Mike played us a couple of wonderful songs. For more info go to https://climatemonologues.com/ or https://irthlingz.org/ and connectionpractice.org Tweet us your thoughts @tmshadesofgreen. #RaiseYourEcoConsciousness

Baby, you can drive my car
Yes, I’m gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my car
And maybe I’ll love you”…. if your car is electric!

On this episode we discuss the past and future of electric vehicles (EVs) with John Voelcker, a leading expert in electric cars. We delve into the difference between combustion engines and the components of Electric Vehicles. What are the benefits of EVs, will there be more charging stations soon and where? What happens to batteries when cars are sold or turned in after perhaps a 10 year period? Find out what the US Auto industry is prepping for, as well as what China is doing on the EV front. Tune in to find out which electric car is the Motor Trend Car of the Year. Spoiler alert, it is the Lucid Air, which has a longer range than Tesla. John Voelcker is a Contributing Editor at Car and Driver magazine. He edited Green Car Reports for nine years, publishing more than 12,000 articles on hybrids, electric cars, and other low- and zero-emission vehicles and the energy that powers them. He now covers advanced auto technologies and energy policy as a reporter and analyst. His work has appeared in print, online, and radio outlets that include Forbes, Wired, Popular Science, The Drive, Tech Review, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” You can follow John on twitter @JohnVoelcker. A shout out to @GreenDivaMeg for this great connection. Check out more shows on HudsonRiverRadio.com and Malcolmpresents.com. Tweet us @tmshadesofgreen

Many major diseases that plague us—including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and Alzheimer’s—have been linked to chronic inflammation. According to an online article in health.harvard.edu, an anti-inflammatory diet can help you fight off inflammation. One of the most powerful tools to combat inflammation comes not from the pharmacy, but from the grocery store. “Many experimental studies have shown that components of foods or beverages may have anti-inflammatory effects,” says Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. So what triggers inflammation within the body, and why is it important to reduce inflammation by staying away from the medicine cabinet, and looking in the refrigerator? In this episode, Courtney answers those questions, and gives us some great information about anti-inflammatory foods and diets. Visit Courtney on her Facebook page Courtney on Health, on Instagram @clgwellness and on her website courtneygravenese.com. Also check out shows on malcolmpresents.com

On this episode we talk with our guest Nadya Hall, about how to to create environmental stewardship through community partnerships and programming.

Nadya is the community environmentalist at Teatown Lake Reservation where she supports their mission of inspiring lifelong environmental stewardship. She also manages the Environmental Leaders Learning Alliance (ELLA), a program that brings together members of conservation commissions from across New York’s Lower Hudson Valley to strengthen environmental protection at a regional level through education, cross-boundary communication, and inter-municipal collaboration. We must all be proactive in our communities to help reduce our carbon footprint. For more information go to Teatown.org. Subscribe to The Many Shades of Green podcast and check out hudsonriverradio.com and Malcolmpresents.com. #RaiseYourEcoConsciousness

What happens when the sounds of the waves are filled with cries of wildlife and sea creatures who have been covered in oil from a spill in their habitat? I refer, with emphasis to the BP Horizon Deep Water oil spill on April 20, 2010, which resulted in oil extending across 68,000 square miles within in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.  What happens when extreme storms bring fresh water into the Gulf from the Mississippi River and throws off the balance of the nature killing and disorienting fish and other wildlife, as well hurting the fishing and tourist industries? And wait, there’s more!  Add fracking in the Gulf and building new terminals to help export that gas, and we have another potential catastrophe in the making. Our guests on this episode are Dayna Reggero and Kelly Sheehan, who are on the forefront of the effort to stop fracking in the Gulf and fight fracked gas exports. Kelly Sheehan is the Senior Director of Energy Campaigns for the Sierra Club, where she leads a national effort to advance climate justice and a transition off of fossil fuels. She has been an environmental activist by passion and by trade for the past twenty years, directing campaigns to protect the environment, training and engaging people to participate in our democracy, and building a movement for social change. Dayna Reggero is an award-winning documentary film director and founder of a collaborative storytelling effort called the Climate Listening Project. Her work in the Gulf started at the age of 19, appearing with animals on television to talk about environmental concerns. We talk about fracking wells in the Gulf of Mexico and about the need to sustain our spirit in order to sustain the Earth. We need to shout and fight for the planet, but we need to maintain balance within ourselves so that we can help each other in order to protect Mother Earth. For more info go to  @EcoKelly | Instagram, Kelly Sheehan | LinkedIn, and Kelly Sheehan | Twitter and http://daynareggero.com and climatelisteningproject.org. For more episodes go to HudsonRiverRadio.com and MalcolmPresents.com Subscribe to TMSOG podcast, Twitter and Instagram @tmshadesofgreen

As the saying goes, we can have our cake and eat it too. Odds are that what is most tasty in that cake is the fat and the sugar. It is not surprising that some of our favorite snack and “junk food” choices are high in fat. Is it ok to splurge now and then? What detrimental effects do fats have on our diet and is there such a thing as a good fat? Low fat, no fat, trans fats are all part of the vernacular when we speak about diets or dieting. The truth is we all need some fat in our diet, as it is an essential part of a healthy and balanced diet. 

While there’s nothing wrong with having a delicious and low-nutrient treat every now and then, it’s best for your health if you keep foods high in trans and saturated fats to a minimum. Courtney gives us some great info on cooking with fats, and info on Omega 3s and more. So don’t be afraid to enjoy a piece of that gooey chocolate cake now and then, as it is definitely one of the joys of life! For more info follow Courtney on Instagram @clgwellness, on her FaceBook and at courtneygravenese.com. For more shows go to Malcolmpresents.com and on YouTube via Malcolm Presents. Tweet us your thoughts @tmshadesofgreen

On this episode we focus on actions being taken by community residents to preserve and protect a beautiful pristine property, in Northern Westchester, which appears to contain Indigenous Native American cultural stone landscape and other remnants of their life on that parcel.   Victoria Alzapiedi and Tracey Bilski of New Castle Land Trust give us some history about the land in question and the surrounding properties. We must respect and take care of what the  Indigenous Native Americans left us, and honor their footprints, as they were the keepers of the land centuries ago. We are the keepers now, and we need the collective will of the community to help preserve and protect this land. Email questions to [email protected]m or go to their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/groups/newcastlelandtrust For past TMSOG episodes go to hudsonriverradio.com, malcolmpresents.com and subscribe to our podcast on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, iHeartRadio, Spreaker and more. #RaiseYourEcoConsciousness

’Tis the season for ghosts, goblins, Jack O’Lanterns and all things spooky. Bags of assorted Milky Ways, Candy Corn, Hershey’s Chocolate, Sour Patch Kids and my favorite, Reese’s Peanut butter cups (yes, there is peanut butter in Reeses, isn’t that healthy?) are flying off the shelves. 

Consumers are expected to spend 3 billion dollars on candy this year, and over half of all parents stash Halloween candy to enjoy after the holiday, (again, love Reeses). Yup, candy is on everyone’s minds for better or worse. How much of what we are eating this fall will add to our body weight. During the holiday season we need to be conscious of maintaining healthy balanced diet. Courtney will give us information about how we can do that and watch our weight during this time of year. Don’t get spooked!  Watch out for the tricks and enjoy the treats! For more info follow Courtney on Health on FaceBook and Instagram @clgwellness. Check out the websites courtneygravenese.com and malcolmpresents.com. Tweet us @tmshadesofgreen

We must do everything in our power to protect and preserve Mother Nature. Time is no longer on our side, and though I hate to be a downer, the effects of our thirst to be constantly plugged in is leading us to a scorched earth. The world is full of wonderful, beautiful things, but our actions are threatening our very existence. We need to work together to bring solutions to what we have brought upon ourselves. Our guest, Dr. Danielle Begley-Miller, is an ecologist and works to preserve the land. Danielle has an extensive background in forest research. She is the Director of Science and Stewardship at Teatown Lake Reservation. She comes to Teatown from Penn State University where she received her doctoral degree in wildlife in 2018. Danielle is responsible for the implementation of Teatown’s land stewardship and environmental research programs, as well as the supervision of select volunteers and interns as they participate in these programs. She is a true steward of the Earth! For more info go to teatown.org #RaiseYourEcoConsciousness