Ideal Bite

If you've been reading us for a while, you might know that I grew up in a small little town called Libby, tucked away in the Rocky Mountains of northwestern Montana.

Libby's in beautiful country - all peaks and streams and evergreens - and when I was growing up, one of the town's main industries was mining. What did we mine? A pretty little substance called vermiculite - a golden-streaked shale stone that got puffy when it was heated. A stone that was soft and smooshy?  Sounds like awesome insulation to me.

It sounded like awesome insulation to big business, too, and by the time I was born and living in Libby, W.R. Grace had bought the operations and was using the branded Zonolite vermiculite in housing insulation. And as a company town, we used it for other things, too - we rototilled the tailings into our gardens to help with aeration. We built a high school track out of it (nice and soft to run on). My little league fields were surrounded by the stuff.

Little did we know that the vermiculite was loaded with tremolite asbestos or that it was laying the groundwork in our lungs for something called asbestosis - a disease that is killing an amazing number of people in my hometown, a fact means I need to get free asthma tests and chest x-rays every few years.

Whenever people hear this story, they always make a leap - always wonder if the reason I am now spending my days working to make the planet a little healthier stems in part from the fact that I grew up in a town touched by that tragedy.

Truth is, I don't know. I'll never know how much it played into my desire to do what I do today.  I actually don't think about it all that much, to be honest. I figure that there are a lot of people all over the world, who are a whole lot worse off than I am (or than the people in Libby are), with shorter life spans and even more terrible diseases. And given the way that people drive here in the Bay Area, I could get hit stepping off a curb long before my lungs potentially give out.

Still, when a tip like today's comes up, I gotta praise the giant strides we are making in the green world.

Eco-insulation?  Yeah, sign me up. 

-Heather...off to remind myself to replace my insulation with some denim stuff...