December 2020

GAY BROWNE

Personal Environmental Health Advisor, Writer,
& Founder of Greenopia

The Eden Magazine December 2020

By maryam morrison

110 pages

By Dina Morrone

Author of Living With a Green Heart. Gay has made it her life’s mission to educate people on how to lead a greener, healthier life, and how to leave a lighter footprint on this earth, and the book is a guide to educate and implement.

When her son was diagnosed with ailments attributable to astounding levels of toxins in his body, Gay set out on a journey that led her to become an environmental pioneer. In 1994, even before the US Green Building Council established the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines for environmental building verification, Gay created what she calls “an optimal personal environmental health space.” She began designing and constructing the first completely environmentally responsible home of its kind. She’s also the founder of Greenopia, a company dedicated to achieving personal and community environmental health through small and large habit and behavioral adjustments. Greenopia is a comprehensive best-selling series of city-by-city guidebooks listing local eco-friendly resources.

“Environmental issues have long been a concern for millions of people, but it is easy to feel disempowered and overwhelmed. In With a Green Heart,” Browne shares a roadmap for making incremental changes that will ultimately affect cumulative environmental change. She shifts the conversation from large-scale environmental issues to individual ones that promote personal environmental health.

Gay, thank you for your time. You are a Personal Environmental Health Advisor. Please tell us what motivated you to choose this path?
Three events in my life influenced my decision to focus on a career in environmental health.

First, I was born an asthmatic, so there hasn’t been one moment in my life when I haven’t thought about the quality of the air around me.

Whether it’s walking into a forest or a hotel room, I hold my breath as I cross the threshold, hoping it will be a ‘safe’ place to breathe. *According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 13 people have asthma. More than 25 million Americans have asthma. This is 7.7 percent of adults and 8.4 percent of children. I hope my work will help raise awareness and create cleaner air policies for all of us and fund new research to treat this condition better.

Second, I spent six summers, in my mid-teens and early twenties, canoeing in the areas of the Boundary Waters, with my high school history teacher, Tom Grunwald. He was a real mentor to me and taught me the importance of having nature in my life.

During those years, the water quality in the lakes went from drinkable and pristine to undrinkable and poisoned by acid rain. The degradation of something I deeply loved hurt my young soul and made an impression on me. That is still one of the primary reasons that drive me today to protect nature. I probably would have become a park ranger if my parents would have allowed it. I worked in Yellowstone one summer and have spent 25 years hiking and fishing in Montana and Wyoming. My favorite place is to be out in nature, somewhere.

Third, when my oldest son was having some trouble learning to read in 2nd Grade, I was advised to look into his heavy metal levels. Dr. Murray Clarke, a homeopathic doctor, one of the significant mentors in my life, ordered some testing, and I subsequently learned that Alex had very high mercury levels. I was devastated that much of this mercury was transferred from me to him while he was in utero. After chelation, his learning issues subsided, and now he has an MBA and flies his own light aircraft, but it was a big wake up call for me as a new Mom and scared me into action. Learning first hand about the effects of invisible toxins in young children, I became a Mom on a Mission. That mission was and has become my life’s work. To educate individuals on the invisible toxins in our environment so they can make safer choices for themselves and their families, creating a healthier world for everyone.

Post-Covid, I will be addressing this issue with corporations in a more significant way. Their transparency and safety is a key factor in the fight against toxins.

Also, you are a founder of Greenopia. Please tell us more about it.
After learning about the number of toxins in our daily lives, I had the opportunity to rebuild the house where my then-husband and I lived. With the help of Mary Cordaro, a bau biologist, I turned it into one of the original green homes in Los Angeles, 1994 (pre-LEED). Working hand in hand with Mary and our great contractor, Chett Hoover, I developed a sizable Rolodex of green building resources. People started calling to ask me who and what I used to build a green home, and one day, a friend suggested that I consider creating a business around greening people’s homes. Since my earlier career had been in print publishing, creating a guide book seemed like a pretty reasonable idea. After my youngest child went off to nurseryschool, I rented a little office in the building next to her school and started developing the business plan for Greenopia. Ferris Kawar, my first research director, and I built the research model with college interns walking door to door, asking businesses what they were doing to be green. A few years later, we had this research professionally scrubbed and rebuilt by The Bren School and later hired our second research director, Doug Mazeffa, from that project. Doug took the database and built it into the excellent criteria based research model it is today. It’s being refined to add to the social consciousness of our decade.

Greenopia has just signed a deal with Dean Berg of Path To Green Home and Belissa Rojas to merge companies and launch an environmentally responsible and socially conscious App in the 4th quarter of 2021. This App will help individuals find safer, greener, and more socially responsible choices in their daily lives. It will also give a daily score and feed of data that will go back to their city. This data will help cities better quantify how green their residents are and what they can do to lower their carbon footprint and create healthier cities. The most
important thing we can do is to help individuals understand how their choices affect themselves and the planet.

If it’s not toxic for you, it’s not toxic for the planet. Individual actions do count when it comes to climate change.

After a 15-year successful career in advertising and public relations, how did you decide to pivot and become an environmentalist?
Beyond the experiences I had as a child, building a healthy home and helping my son heal, the pivotal moment when I decided to go from ad sales to environmental advocate happened after lunch with John Adams in 2005.

John was CEO of NRDC at the time, and he invited my then-husband and me out to lunch, where he proceeded to tell us about climate change and a movie that a friend of his, named Al Gore, was producing called The Inconvenient Truth. After hearing this story and the work of NRDC, I was hooked and have been on that path ever since. That one lunch changed my life forever.

Every day, we see the negative effects of climate change on our planet. Is it too late to turn things around?
I am a stubborn optimist” about everything but particularly climate change. I think we have the chance to slow it down, but it will take everyone working together to get the results we need. Corporations, big businesses, and countries have created massive campaigns, but most people still think their actions aren’t important. I hope that Greenopia’s new App will help people measure their daily impact and direct them to ways in which they can lessen their impact and not make them feel like they are giving up their freedom or quality of life.

Please tell us more about your latest book, Living with a Green Heart.
Living With A Green Heart is the story of my journey into the world of environmental health. It is a prescriptive handbook for keeping your body, home, and the planet healthy in a toxic world and how to do it with a social conscience. When I began to change my life, I was overwhelmed and confused so, what I created is a step-by-step green heart action plan for myself and my readers. If health is our most important asset, I feel people should have the opportunity to become aware of the challenges in their environment and then be offered solutions in the same place. I sometimes wonder why people spend inordinate amounts of time studying investment options for their 401Ks but not the options surrounding their health and well-being. I am not a scientist or a doctor, but I have become a very savvy researcher in environmental health because it interests me intensely. After meeting John Adamas, I got very depressed when I learned about climate change, its impact on our lives, and the role corporations have had in this issue. I decided to write this book to create hope for myself and others, to get a little control over our future. I am uncomfortable in the role of being preachy and don’t like preachy people, so I tried to present the material in my book in a way in which readers could choose what and when it was important to them.

Freedom of personal choice is really important to me, especially when making a lifestyle change but, I wholeheartedly feel that the choices I make shouldn’t hurt anyone else. “Loving your neighbor as yourself” was a value that my parents taught us, and I still believe in it today, perhaps more than ever before. As an environmentalist, how do you feel Bees are important for our planet?

I have not studied bees, but what I do know is that 40% of the honey bee colonies in the US died in 2018, according to significant sources.

This statistic freaks me out. Bees have a major impact on our food production and supply because they are pollinators. A third of global farm output depends on pollination, mainly by honey bees. Albert Einstein said variants along the lines of “…If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.

There would be no more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, and no more man. Bees are one of many insects that are in decline due to urbanization and mass farming practices that have upset the balance of soil and nature. Don Smith, from Kiss The Ground, and founder Ryland Englehardt, have amassed a wonderful group of young people across the US that are advocating for healthy soil. They and Paul Stamets, the world-famous American mycologist, are great people to contact if you’re interested in knowing more. Both of them had movies released last year, Fantastic Fungi and Kiss The Ground.

I highly recommend watching both movies.

We are racing towards being always more dependent on a cell phone, WIFI, and technology. What are your thoughts on this?
I didn’t grow up with cell phones and therefore look at them as a tool to communicate, especially during working hours and when trying to reach my children, who are far-flung these days, but I don’t live with my phone.

I don’t like to use my phone at night or on weekends. I have a big issue around privacy and the usage of personal data. I try to do most of my shopping in local stores and not respond to ads online. I am not a fan of social media. I let my children know that when I was growing up, your personal life was special and personal, not something you broadcasted to the public. Not using social media has probably hurt my public profile and book sales; however, I just haven’t been able to find a way into that space with the appropriate messaging. It feels like what you put out one day is already forgotten by the next, and it’s always a contest to see who’s more beautiful or has more followers. It feels like people’s lives and their thoughts are being devalued in search of something better. It feels a little disposable to me. Like ‘fast fashion’ that is here today and gone tomorrow, it just adds to the clutter in our lives.

Also, people don’t think about this, but every time you send an email, it uses a tiny bit of electricity that has to be fueled by something. That something is a natural resource. This affects climate change. Electricity isn’t free just because you can turn it on with a flip of a switch. I am also very concerned about EMFs and the physical effects of prolonged exposure to them. I have always kept my bedroom EMF free, so, at night, my phone lives in the bathroom, just far enough away to hear the alarm but not close enough to disturb my sleep. I devoted a whole chapter to EMFs.

Who is your favorite author?
I like to read, and I like to write, so I like words, and I like stories and different authors for different reasons. I like some authors because of their content and others for the way their words sound when they’re strung together. When I learned to write, my creative writing teacher
always told me to read my writing out loud. If it sounded good out loud, it was well written. There is a rhythmic cadence to the spoken word, and that should be reflected in writing. I used to read out loud to my kids every night when they were young, so some of my favorite authors are of those children’s books that I liked to read with them: Rudyard Kipling and The Jungle Book, Shel Silverstein and The Giving Tree as well as The Dr. Suess Series. The most recent book I read and couldn’t put down was The Overstory by Richard Powers. It had both good writing and good content. As a nature lover, this book hit home hard for me.

Are you a vegan?
After almost ten years of being a vegan and falling off the wagon, I have found the best diet for me is a plant-based diet. As such, I eat mostly plants but occasionally fish and meat once in a blue moon. I am very careful about what fish I eat as a lot of the fish in the Pacific has some levels of radiation from Fukushima. I originally became a vegan when I had a brush with cancer around 50, and my doctor said that switching my diet to include more plants and cutting out sugar would help prevent cancer. Once I started eating that way, I found it agreed with me. I also think less meat can help the planet. I am a big proponent of Meatless Mondays.

What is your favorite dish?
That’s a hard one. I’m not sure I have a favorite dish, but I do have favorite foods, green smoothies, bran muffins, yogurt, and granola with blueberries, bananas, and flaxseed. I love warm oatmeal cookies and banana cream pie.

Is there something none of your friends or family know about you that you’d like to share with them and our readers now?
One day I want to have a treehouse where I can go and sit and write and read. I always wanted one as a child. I love cozy spaces.

Special Thanks to my children Alex, Colin and Katie, I couldn’t do this work without their support and unconditional love.
Arna Behar for the Photography.