CNN Editor’s note: Fisher Stevens is an actor, director and producer. He is a producer of “The Cove,” an Oscar-nominated film that won the best documentary award from the National Board of Review in 2009. He co-founded Naked Angels theater company in 1986 and co-founded GreeneStreet films in 1996.

(CNN) — Before I started working on the documentary “The Cove,” I assumed like many others that dolphins and orcas enjoyed living at Sea World and other marine parks. They always seemed to be smiling, jumping merrily around their tanks, eager to put on a show for human spectators.

However, when I met Ric O’Barry, my perspective changed. O’Barry was the man responsible for capturing Kathy — the original “Flipper” — from the wild and helping to create the language used to train dolphins to do tricks and flips. When Cathy died in his arms some years later, O’Barry realized the whole process of capturing and training dolphins was wrong.
He eventually co-wrote the book “Behind the Dolphin’s Smile,” where he explains that the smiles you see on these animals are not true reflections of happiness. In actuality, they hate to be enclosed in their holding tanks and are often not fed until it is time to perform their daily routines. During his time as a trainer, O’Barry learned dolphins had true feelings — they would get depressed, stressed out, even suicidal. In some parks, the trainers have to give the animals Maalox and Tagamet to treat the ulcers that develop from their stress.

The horrific tragedy that occurred last week at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, has left me deeply shaken. My heart goes out to Dawn Brancheau and her family. Dawn lost her life doing the job that she loved, yet I — like O’Barry — believe that this job should no longer exist.

We know now that the whale involved in this accident has a well-documented history of violent behavior. SeaWorld knew of this history yet continued to exploit the animal and endanger the lives of its employees to put money in its pockets. If this isn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what is.

At this very moment, a dozen boats in the town of Taiji, Japan, are heading out and rounding up hundreds of dolphins in a secluded cove. The fisherman will close off the cove with nets, and with the help of employees from various dolphinariums, they will try to find the next “Flipper” among their catch. The fishermen will snatch these beautiful creatures from their natural habitats, hoist them into nets, load them onto airplanes and drop them into a cement tank in the middle of Turkey, Korea or other nearby Asian countries.

In some ways, these animals are the lucky ones. These dolphins escaped the fate of many of their pod mates, who are brutally slaughtered with primitive harpoons — turning the cove into a scene straight from Melville’s “Moby Dick.” The water turns bright red with the blood of the slain. The fishermen then transport the meat — despite health concerns of mercury content in the dolphins’ systems — back to shore, where they sell it to local vendors.

It’s time for us to step up and make a difference in these animals’ lives. Until we make marine parks obsolete, dolphins and other sea mammals will continue to be senselessly captured and slaughtered.

We can no longer fall for the argument that SeaWorld shows “make us love the dolphins and want to understand and protect them” — this couldn’t be further from the truth. As I see it, we will only truly love and understand these animals when we can watch them running wild and genuinely smiling in their natural habitat.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Fisher Stevens (and me).

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Daily Natural Health Tip #1

A huge mistake that a lot of people make is not eating enough green leafy vegetables in their diet.

I remember when I was young and my mom gave us salad every night with dinner, which was great for my health, but I got so sick of the same old salads night after night that I ended up not eating it for years.

Try to keep it interesting so that your whole family can enjoy this vital ingredient. There are dozens and dozens of types of salad dressings from the classic vinaigrette to creamy dressings and even yogurt based ones. There is no reason you cannot have several different kinds on hand so that each night the family can choose for themselves.

One of my favorite meals is healthy and delicious and most importantly easy and fast to make. It’s a simple and yummy chicken and tortellini salad.

Here is the basic full meal salad recipe, more an idea really because you can have as much of the ingredients as you prefer:

• Regular green leafy or romaine lettuce
• Rainbow Tortillini
• Chicken, you can cut it up in chunks and cook it on the stove or slice chicken breast as thick or thin as you like
• Toasted slivered almonds
• You can cut up some mozzarella cheese if you like but I usually don’t bother.
• Ranch dressing

I usually cook the pasta early in the day and refrigerate it until dinnertime. It’s delicious cold, it’s like a pasta salad with lettuce or visa versa.

By simply incorporating more leafy greens and whole fruits into your overall diet you are going to slash type 2 diabetes risk drastically.

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I got this in my email box today and had to share, even though it’s sad, it’s important. It’s a message from Defenders of Wildlife:

Maximus the grizzly bear was “a big, beautiful, wild bear,” according to grizzly specialist Mike Madel. “He kept to himself, stayed out of trouble.”

But he was gunned down in the prime of his life. Left to rot in a Montana hayfield, his badly decomposed body was discovered a month after being ruthlessly shot.

His killer is still at large.

It is possible for you can help bring lawless wildlife killers to justice and respond quickly to other wildlife emergencies.

We’ve quickly moved to offer a reward to bring Maximus’s killer to justice. But sadly, this bear’s story is not unique.

Poachers have recently ended the lives of some of our most endangered animals including Florida panthers, southwest gray wolves and California condors. In Idaho, a female wolf pup was illegally gunned down from a roadway. And a thriving black market in bear gallbladders and other parts is fueling a slaughter of bears across the nation.

Help us post rewards for poachers and alert the public as we aid law enforcement in the capture of these heartless people. Please make a donation today.

For more than a decade, Defenders of Wildlife has worked with state and federal agencies, offering more than $245,000 in rewards to bring these ruthless wildlife poachers to justice.

We’re also pressing Congress to pass the Bear Protection Act to end the trade in bear parts that encourages a terrible poaching plague.

None of this work is possible without people like you.

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Are you aware that in the Pacific Ocean there is a massive, well, mass of floating plastic and other debris. It’s located in the northwest part of the Pacific Ocean, approximately a thousand miles off the coast of California.

It’s been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it makes up perhaps thousands of miles of open ocean. Gross right? Researchers are cracking down on it and trying to find out where all this garbage is coming from and why it is gathering there in such quantity.

Now researchers are trying to learn more about the sea-bound trash zone and perhaps find answers to basic questions. The crew on the job is a group of scientists from the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and they plan to spend 3 weeks studying the debris field.

“There may be a misapprehension … that if you got out there and stood on the middle of a deck you’d see nothing but plastic litter from horizon to horizon,” said Robert Knox, deputy director for research at the Scripps Institution.

“It’s relatively sparse, and you might or might not see something visible to the human eye at any particular location out there,” Knox says. “Certainly one does encounter pieces of plastic stuff that are big enough to see. But the other side of the puzzle is all the little bits and pieces of plastic that you can’t even see unless you scoop up a sample of seawater and see what’s in there.”

“I think it’s a little misleading to think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a great big island that you could practically get out and walk on, but the point is it’s a big area of ocean. So even a few pieces of plastic per square meter amounts to a lot of plastic when you add it up over this enormous ocean area.”

The information this new group of scientists are looking for are vital to combating the problem and making sure this kind of thing can be avoided in the future. Here are some of the answers they are seeking concerning the garbage patch:

1) How much garbage is there?
2) How big is the debris in the area?
3) What is the majority of the debris made of?
4) How deep does the garbage go, is it just on the surface?
5) How does all of this thrown away plastic and other material affect the food chain?

They are pretty sure that the vast majority of the garbage in the area is made up of different types of plastic and they want to know how that is affecting the marine life as well as birds etc. etc. who feed in the area.

While there are many facts they don’t yet know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch there are some things they do know:

The size of this zone is massive, perhaps as big as Texas. They are also pretty sure that the plastic began it’s journey in the ocean as bigger pieces but over time has been broken down into small bits like confetti that is most likely sitting just under the surface like so many bits of confetti. Just think, thousands of miles of shredded plastic bits that fish and birds are ingesting as we speak.

While other oceans, rivers and seas have debris fields of their own, at this time it seems as though the Pacific Patch is the largest by far. Rusty Brainard with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believes that this debris field contains not only plastic but also huge masses of fishing nets, which destroys ecosystems around the Hawaiian Islands.

What makes plastic so deadly is that as it breaks down and degrades it becomes smaller and smaller bits of poison that seabirds mistake it for food. They then dive down and eat it.

Brainard says they’ve found many, many skeletons of seabirds on the Islands and “their gut content is just filled with plastic.” How many other animals are eating plastic? Birds eat it, something else eats the bird which in turn is eaten by something else until these toxins finally find their way into our own diet.

Scary thought.

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Shop Peapod 24/7 and get $10 in FREE groceries

Some of the staples of our diets are the ones with the highest pesticide contamination levels in the world and we need to be talking about this more. If no one knows it’s a problem they won’t complain to the suppliers and nothing will ever change. We will continue to get sick and have no idea why. I am writing this to spread the word that we should all be switching to organic produce to keep our families healthy and strong.

I mean, healthy food should be good for us right? Is that too much to ask?

By choosing organic foods you will cut out a drastic amount of not just pesticides and related chemicals, but also hormones that are found in meat. The main reason most people haven’t already totally turned to organic fruits, vegetables and meats is because they are often more expensive.

I am not sure what it’s like where you live but in my city, buying organic at the big chain stores costs a lot but when I actually go out to the farms and buy the fruits and meats there it’s a lot more affordable. This way you also get to see just where the food comes from. If you have anything like that around your town or city, check it out.

In the meantime you can at least avoid the 12 dirtiest fruits and vegetables. By doing this alone you can easily lower your pesticide exposure by almost 90%. Shocking! And good to know.

Here are the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables:

* Peaches- 96.7% of samples tested positive for pesticides, 87% for multiple pesticides
* Apples- 94.1% tested positive, 82.3% for multiple pesticides
* Sweet Bell Peppers- 81.5% tested positive, 62.2% for multiple pesticides
* Celery- 94.1% tested positive, 79.8% for multiple pesticides
* Nectarines- 97.3% tested positive, 85.3% for multiple pesticides
* Strawberries
* Cherries
* Kale- 53.1% for multiple pesticides
* Lettuce
* Imported Grapes
* Carrots- 82.3% tested positive
* Pears

That was disheartening, but there is some good news too. While those are contaminated (and are pretty much all my favorite foods!) there are some that are clean.

Clean uncontaminated foods:

* Onions- no detectable residues on 90% or more of samples, zero samples positive for multiple pesticides
* Avocado- less than 10% tested positive, less than 1% for multiple pesticides
* Frozen Sweet Corn- no detectable residues on 90% or more of samples, zero samples positive for multiple pesticides
* Pineapples- less than 10% tested positive, less than 1% for multiple pesticides
* Mango- less than 10% tested positive, less than 1% for multiple pesticides
* Asparagus- no detectable residues on 90% or more of samples
* Frozen Sweet Peas- 77.1% had no detectable pesticides
* Kiwi
* Cabbage- 82.1% had no detectable pesticides
* Eggplant- 75.4% had no detectable pesticides
* Papaya
* Watermelon- 28.1% tested positive, 9.5% for multiple pesticides
* Broccoli- 65.2% had no detectable pesticides
* Tomatoes- 53.1% had no detectable pesticides, 13.5% positive for multiple pesticides
* Sweet Potatoes

How sad is that?! I like some on the clean list but the dirty list has all my favorite fruits :O Oh well, what can we do? Write letters to try and get the laws changed, that’s what, and buy local organic produce whenever possible.

Technorati Tags: highest pesticide contamination levels, contaminated fruits and vegetables, local organic produce

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The gases we have in our atmosphere called greenhouse gases are ever-present and help to keep our planet at a constant and livable temperature. Over the course of history, we have pumped a lot of these gases into the atmosphere in the form of carbon and fossil fuels. This has caused the temperature to rise. Global warming is about a serious a threat as there is.

It’s already started to affect many regions and ecosystems on our planet, and will affect a lot more in our own lifetime. The ice caps have already begun to melt, causing water levels to heat and rise through thermal expansion. The amount of carbon in our atmosphere is killing the coral reefs, wiping out entire ecosystems and biodiversity. And this is just the start; what we’re already seeing today.

Global warming brings on a complete climate change. No matter if it’s in the long-term or short-term, this is also affecting the earth’s desert regions. Deserts rose in temperature between 1978 and 2000, at an average rate of 0.2-0.8 degrees Celsius. This rate is much higher than what could have ever occurred naturally. This meteoric rise has been attributed to the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. The ensuing global warming is expected to cause an overall increase in rainfall. High latitudes are projected to warm more than mid to low-latitudes, resulting in more rainfall in higher, less rainfall in the subtropics.

While the anthropogenic warming of the global atmosphere is already sufficiently warming and drying deserts; deserts cool the neighboring global atmosphere. This is a state that is also projected to further intensify due to the global warming phenomenon.

The warming takes place due to the direct reflection of solar radiation by the earth’s surface from the desert. In contrast to the direct cause of enhanced warming, the actual effect of deserts is that they’re cooling the atmosphere. Though this is quite the paradox, it is actually simple to comprehend. Desert regions and their surrounding geographical locations all have ecosystems which thrive in their own environment. Any degree change, plus or minus, grossly upsets the balance of nature.

Deserts make up one quarter of the earth’s land surface, so it is a situation that much be assessed. To do this, scientists look at the carbon storage which is sequestered in organic and inorganic compounds within the desert soil. It is the organic carbon that is most sequestered when the rainfall permits. Studies are being done that are returning the same results in every desert region. Deserts and hot and bare places, no one seems surprised that they’re slightly rising in temperature. But just as a few degrees melts the ice caps and changes the world, so will a few degrees in the desert region.

There is a lot more at stake than just some dried up land which is, for the most part, uninhabited. Millions of peoples’ lives are ultimately controlled by the temperature of the desert. If they change at all, the surrounding areas will indeed suffer. Deserts are the home to vast ecosystems. Underneath the dry sand and clay, life is thriving there and needs the climate that it evolved in to survive in.

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Sarah Palin has gone too far, way to far! Not only is she still a staunch supporter of aerial hunting of wolves she now wants to be able to poison and gas the wolves and their pups. WTF?? She is nuts, how can anyone think hunting wolves to extinction is a good thing?

This week alone there have been 66 wolves killed in Alaska.

There’s more too. They want to go full boar with the traps now as well. These are inhumane and cruel, I find it stunning that in this day in age we still are so barbaric. Sarah Palin must be stopped, I dunno how political circles go but they better put a lid on her and her anti wolves status.

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Watch more videos at PETA.org

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They have a whole store filled with green products, how cool is drugstore.com! Pass the word along!

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Going green seems to be the preferred way for most people these days. Though we do still have plenty of people who wish to capitalize on the everyman and make massive profits, we also have plenty who wish to change all of that. The benefits of green marketing can be overwhelmingly good for everyone who lives on this planet.

Saving our planet is the most important thing, the thing that we need to be thinking about every time we make a decision in business and in life in general.

Green products in particular are important because they help average people in the by relieving some of their financial burden (in many cases) long term. To run your home on any sort of fuel or electricity can cost in the hundreds or even thousands per month. Going green and buying only from green markets is something that every man and woman should try to do. Choosing better and more efficient light bulbs for example can save a ton in electricity bills.

The main thing that green markets offer customers is trust. People want to shop with the thought that their best interests are at heart. Though supply and demand can often be a very cruel business model, green entrepreneurship offers a little piece of mind to all customers.

Doing something good for the planet, while saving some money in the long-term for yourself, is a very sound way to do business. Green product markets are offering to give back to their customers and to the world. This may be the reason that the green way of life and business idea is shunned in most corporate corners of the world. Big Oil wants nothing to do with a market whose purpose is to make a costly and safe alternative.

Green power marketing offers other utilities and power marketers a way to set apart their many numerous products. But it’s not an easy market for all of those who try. To date, utility experience with green-pricing has been rather mixed.

Some programs have met and even exceeded their goals rather easily, while some less fortunate have been unable to produce little if any positive customer response. Some even experience resistance from environmental and consumer groups on the grounds that they’re not any different from the other power marketers.

But the public should not be deterred by this. In today’s world, of course some ideas are met with resistance. How many potential investors laughed at the idea of the super information highway that would connect the world?

You have to wonder if all the negativity is just from people who cannot capitalize at the expense of the green market. One thing is for sure, our planet needs it. Our planet needs us. The overall benefits of green marketing can have an enormous effect on our economy and planet. The benefits would be quite vast, especially to customers.

Green marketing can get the customers needed to explode and become the primary market in the world as long as they use their imaginations and try hard enough. The customers will come, and they will stay. If treated fairly, people would be more than happy to stop shopping at that big blue store with the smiley face, and start shopping in the big green store with the solar powered lights.

It’s just a matter of time before green markets change our way of life for the better.

Technorati Tags: green marketing, Green products, green markets, green markets, Green product

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