Lisa Foster, a former high school English teacher in Los Angeles, was living in Australia in 2005 (while her husband worked on a film), when she had a revelation at the check-out register.

Instead of asking the typical American grocery store phrase, “Paper or plastic?” the clerk asked, “Would you like a bag?”

Foster looked at the woman in line in front of her, carrying her own reusable grocery bag and the lady behind her, with an armful of them. She realized that she was supposed to say, “Oh, I have my own.”

She wondered to herself: what’s the deal with these bags?

She went home and did some research. Five years ago, no one brought their own bags to the grocery store, but the government did a public awareness campaign. Analogously, in 2002 in Ireland, the tourist trade was hurting because plastic bags were sarcastically known as the “new national flower.” The Irish government imposed a tax on every disposable bag. Politically, Australia could not impose a tax, but they did their own public awareness campaign which proved very effective. Foster recognized that the grocery stores had shifted their perspective: they’d still carry paper and plastic bags, but they would not offer them.

“Expectation is extraordinarily powerful,” she says. “Like looking at kids in the classroom to quiet down; expecting them to quiet with a stare is much more powerful than shouting at them.”

Before she returned to Los Angeles, Foster did further research. She always thought that paper bags were the way to go because they can be more easily recycled. But she found that it takes 50 percent more emissions of global warming gases to make paper bags than plastic bags, and 20 percent of all paper bags are recycled – the rest just end up in landfills.

Upon her return to Los Angeles in June of 2005, Foster told her friends, “We have to change this.” And a friend agreed that she had to do it.

She was even more motivated when she found out that eight to ten percent of the U.S. oil supply goes to making plastic bags.

“We will kill and die for petroleum, but once we make it into plastic, we just throw it away,” she says. So she contacted a Chinese factory where a reusable bag she had bought in Australia had been manufactured, and ordered 8,000 bags to be stored in her living room. She set up her own small business, 1bagatatime. She made calls to stores and potential buyers during her free period in the high school parking lot.

“I called stores and offered them the bags for 95 cents each, plus free shipping if they ordered before November 1.” She promised her husband she wouldn’t lose money – and she was hoping to get these mounds of bags out of her living room as soon as possible.

In March 2006, she left her teaching post (after eight years) to pursue her business venture.  Upon her leaving, the headmaster of the high school connected her with the chairman of the board at Ralph’s. By the end of 2006, she sold 200,000 bags to Ralph’s and Vitamin College.

Since she started, she has sold over 10 million bags. But as her business grows, she stays committed to her conscious intentions; by the third year of business – as the biggest buyer of the Chinese factory two hours outside of Shanghai – she demanded fair wages and made sure they did not higher children. When she recruited Verite to check on the factory, the wife of the factory owner who was also the bookkeeper, showed a book with scribbles and numbers. Since then, they have instated proper accounting techniques (pay slips), protective smocks, name tags, and a formal complaint system that has been mutually beneficial.

“The factory owners actually thanked me, because the migrant workforce has become more stable, and the workers don’t leave because they know they are getting a good deal.”

She says that bags purported to be made out of recycled material are not possible, since they would be poor quality and could not be dyed. However, she reasons that each bag she sells (still made out of plastic), require the resources of 11 plastic bags, but when consumers use and reuse them, they replace 1,000 bags. She says her bags appeal to U.S. consumers because of their trendy designs, colors, and thoughtful text.

Next month 1bagatatime will take part in the Portraits of Hope project in Santa Monica. For this project, blind and hospitalized children will paint art panels to mount on the Santa Monica beach lifeguard stations. 1bagatatime will use Portraits of Hope art on a messenger style bag and donate a percentage of proceeds.

Other than Foster’s success of launching a viable business catered to eco-friendly consciousness, what I find most compelling is that Foster’s personal career trajectory challenges the traditional linear thinking that the modern college-educated woman would do best to find her calling in her early 20’s and stick with it until retirement. Foster pursued her PhD in English literature for nine years, taught high school for eight years, and at a time when her daughters are out of the nest, she struck out on her own entrepreneurial venture. With 1bagatatime, Foster found a niche that became an outlet for her wisdom, independent thinking, and ethics.

The post One Bag at a Time: Lisa Foster Changes Grocery Store Expectations appeared first on EcoSalon.

Ben Lebrave, left, in Lomé, with a member of the group called Milenivo. “They mostly make ‘crunk’ style hip hop,” he tells me in an email.

Imagine getting off the airplane in Accra, Ghana and these are your directions:

“In west airport, ask for the north Dzorwulu (“djuwulu”) traffic light by the Fiesta Royale hotel. At that traffic light, there are women selling food, look for the place with the most people, where there are also taxis. There is a trotro station, tell the women you’re looking for sexy eyes, and tell her you’re looking for Kubolor, she’ll show you the way”¦”

These are the directions that Ben Lebrave has to guide him. Lebrave is a 30-year old French man currently living in Los Angeles who has just embarked on a month-long trip starting in Accra, Ghana, where he will meet with musicians like Kubolor and set-up partnerships to develop his budding record label, Akwaaba music.

Before he left in mid-April, I met up with Lebrave at a cafe in Venice Beach to talk about his previous three trips to Africa and his plans with this trip: to collect more music and set up recording partnerships with recording studios in Ghana.  Lebrave launched Akwaaba Music in 2008, with one ultimate goal: “to make African music as easily available anywhere as any music.”

Lebrave, who has worked for Moonshine Music and Digital Media Group was inspired to set out on his own to create an African record label when he took a one-week trip to Ghana. He had realized that his job at Digital Media Group was about to be cut and was in search of exotic music, rather than the indie genre he’d been working with.

“The cabby from the airport starts talking to me,” Lebrave recalls. “The cabby tells me, “˜The hotel where you’re going is not so great. Why are you here? You want to hear music?’ Then, he takes me to a place with a crazy base sound system.”

“Being in a place with blasted loud music was so refreshing,” Lebrave remarks, as a contrast to his experience as a DJ in Los Angeles where he had to obey a restrictive rules with regards to curfew and noise.

“It’s poor – a couple plastic tables, fridges, a couple subwoofers (a little soundsystem) – but much more interesting than what I had heard in hip hop or reggaeton, with distinctly Ghanaian chords.”

In 2006, Lebrave appeared in a Big Mac commercial and he used the $35,000 he earned from that commercial to strike out on his own and fund future trips to Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, and Angola.

He says that his relationship with Akwaaba and love of travel gives him a more in-touch approach to bringing African music across the Atlantic.

“There’s a growing interest in Africa but no one goes. Even people in South Africa don’t go and fly to Africa to meet with musicians on their turf,” he says.

Author John Collins reported in 2000 that so-called “world” music amounted to 14 percent of global record sales and that African music is the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. market, increasing about 40 percent per year since 1995 (“The Generational Factor in Ghanaian Music” p.72.).

But Lebrave isn’t sure how the importation of music from Africa to America officially translates into the official fair trade label. He says this concept is called “equitable trade” in French. However, “Fair Trade” is applied to paying people a decent wage, but in his case he is sharing ownership of right to an artist’s music.

When he launched Akwaaba and told people it was a fair trade label, people thought he was using the label as an excuse to compensate for mediocre music.

“They’d come back to me and say, “˜Dude I thought your music was fair trade. It’s actually pretty good.'”

“No standards have been developed for music,” David Funkhouser of TransFair USA wrote in an email to me. “TransFair USA has ownership rights to the phrase “Fair Trade Certified” and they certify products (coffee, tea, chocolate, flowers, olive oil, etc.) for which standards have been established.”

Lebrave says that in standard music industry contracts, the royalty rates are 10 percent, but with Akwaaba, he pays the artists 50 percent of the profits using Western Union, since most artists don’t have a bank account.

In November 2008, Lebrave put out Akwaaba’s first compilation. The second compilation came out in February 2009, and since then he’s released one compilation per month.

According to an Internet statistics site, the Akwaaba website currently has about 3,000 views per day. Since January of 2010, Lebrave has sold 1,000-3,000 songs per month, mostly on iTunes, and is increasingly selling directly off BandCamp for a dollar per song. “Just A Band” a Kenyan group, accounted for nearly half of those sales. “Another slightly more glorious amount,” he points to, is a recent deal where a TV show will pay $3,500 for a song by Iba Diabate.

Lebrave writes from Ghana today of one of his first meetings, with Panji of Pigen Music, “he considers that taking an African artist and modifying his sound to appeal to a specifically western audience is doomed for failure. We couldn’t agree more!”

To keep up with Lebrave’s blog and his latest beats, you can check out: www.akwaabamusic.com. One of my personal favorites is “Sunrise” by Just A Band, with a hushing, sexy and mellow melody set over a clucking of background percussion that carries the song’s current.

The post Traveling to Ghana in Search of Akwaaba Music appeared first on EcoSalon.

“Come do it again,” Tekla Kostek would beckon to the teenage girls at our ballet academy in Los Angeles as they stood with one hand on the hips of their leotards, their other hand self-consciously brushing back the wisps of hair escaping their buns.

“You have to understand,” I remember she once told us, “You do the moves that look ugly. I don’t want to see the steps that you’ve already mastered.”

I had finally made it to the highest level offered at that academy – the coveted Level 7. Then, I stopped improving. The headmistress guided us through the same exercises every day. She gave some corrections, especially to the girls who showed the most promise, but we had ample time to stare in the mirror and pinch the skin around our waists. Then a new teacher came to town.

Tekla Kostek, who trained at the National Ballet School in Canada. At age 25, she had just come from working five years in the corps at Boston Ballet.

I would watch Tekla Kostek before class, drinking a coffee and taking her cigarette break – her lean, elegant body – the ideal classical body I did not have. But when Tekla, whom I came to know affectionately as “TK,” saw my keenness to train, she took me under her wing for prima ballerina bootcamp, giving me the attention and coaching I craved. In TK’s classes I did not have time to scrutinize myself in the mirror – instead, I came out of TK’s classes having changed the hue of my leotard with the soak of sweat, contemplating new theories about a leg extension, or how to hold my arms in a way, as she would explain, from a trapezius muscle extension.

Now, 10 years later. I am the age that TK was when she was my teacher. I recently moved back to Los Angeles, and I hoped to re-connect with my former teacher. Little did I know she had become a yogi.

Not a “yogi” in the pretentious sense; a sharing, open and practicing yogi who would make me oatmeal and tea in her home and tell me about her recent three-month journey in India.

On a sunny Friday afternoon at her home in Echo Park, TK brews me a cup of chai. The house she lives in was built in 1907, and has a contemplative artist’s vibe, as we sit at a round wooden table and she reflects on the time she knew me.

“You teach what you know, which for me was the old-school style. My approach was, “˜I’m going to give you something totally impossible.'” She says that in many ballet classes teaching people steps as if it is an impossible challenge of beauty that they will never get right is “inscribing negativity.”

And then I start to learn more about her perspective as a ballet teacher. After she taught me ballet, TK went on to teach ballet at Loyola Marymount University and became a principal dancer of Los Angeles Ballet. In her time teaching, she has realized that in ballet classes, we “compartmentalize the body” by focusing on technical aspects of that wrapped posé or extension of the leg and these are thoughts that feed the mind. Rather, a ballet teacher should do drills to simply creating patterns in the body through repetition – so the dancer doesn’t even have time to think.

She moved back to Boston for 2006, where she taught ballet at the University of Massachusetts. There, she had her students shout “I am Great” affirmations in class.

“You come to really interesting results,” she says, “when you get rid of “˜you’re not good enough.’  This is because your way of thinking about yourself becomes your reality. In dance, by thinking we are not good enough, we are ingraining into our muscle memory this idea of lack.”

Upon returning to Los Angeles, TK began teaching ballet again at Loyola. In 2008, she went to France on a music tour with her husband, Antoine Salem, who is a musician. “We smoked and drank our way through France, but when I came back and returned to yoga class, I realized I couldn’t be a hypocrite; it’s all about the breath. I quit smoking.”

TK went through a yoga teacher-training course at Exhale in Los Angeles and in November 29, 2009, left for India to seek her teacher’s guru, Paramahamsa Nithyanada.

She observes, looking back, she was “always really interested in meditation. How do you recreate that bliss experience that artists operate out of?”

What she experienced in India she had always understood at an intellectual level, but finally had the opportunity to live it at Nithyanada’s Life Bliss Engineering program at Bengaluru, India. Just the name of this program would have made me roll my eyes and giggle a bit, if it had not been TK telling me about it with a serious glow.

She recounts a sample day for me:

• 5am wake up
• 5:45am breakfast (South Indian satvik food)
• 5:45 – 8:30 asana practice (vinyasa kria)
• Afternoon of Puja (lecture/workshop)

She says that sometimes they would meditate through the whole night, because the meditation was so invigorating.

After a month in India, she appealed to her friends for help to stay on and complete the three-month program. She was surprised by an outpouring of generosity and raised a total of $2,000 from her friends along with encouragements; they told her that she was doing what they had always wanted to do. At the end of the program, her husband, Antoine, came to travel with her for two weeks in India.

Sitting across from TK as we chat about her journeys, we look out over a front garden that will soon sprout rows of corn and other vegetables. Since her return from India, she has “taken the pace down,” for moments like these with friends, “moments of sharing.”

“I want to be more aware of how I contribute,” she says. She does this by having quieter, more homebody days.

Her main livelihood continues to be ballet; in two weeks she will start rehearsal for Los Angeles Ballet. This past month she has been staying in, eating rice, beans and oatmeal. Her current project, Oatmeal28, will be a raid around town to use the vegetables from her urban garden to provide a healthy vegetarian fast food option to the late night music and art scene in Los Angeles. She also plans to write a book with her husband about artists teaching methods, inspired by Kenny Werner.

Her main disciplines now are writing and meditation, which she combines for her blog, Marriage Morals and the Urban Guru.

An afternoon conversation has taken us late into the evening. I’m no longer so concerned about being a beautiful ballerina, but rather, interested in being able to live my life according to deeper ideals. Many young adults have become jaded or cynical, at odds with what post-college life has yielded them. I look to my former teacher, my friend, TK, and now I marvel at her own growth.

As she sits back in the flowy kulats she brought back from India, and we share our experiences, I find that once more, TK has inspired and pushed me to keep dancing – from the inside out.

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