Natural Living Urban Style

The third annual Natural Living Expo was held in Des Moines on March 1, 2008. Booths offered information on nutritional eating, child rearing, body realignments, safe cleaning products, land management, environmental advocacy, lawn-waste compost, an electric hybrid car, and resources for shopping locally. Attendees did not quite constitute a crowd but there were plenty of people strolling through the Animal Learning Center at the fairgrounds.

The presenting sponsor for this year’s event was enrgPATH. Gold star sponsors were Campbell’s Nutrition, Silent Rivers Design+Build, Toyota of Des Moines, PolySteel Insulating Concrete Forms, and Capital 106.3. Angela Clark is the owner of enrgPATH, an online resource directory of green businesses. She said that the expo is “just the beginning” and she can “see lots more…natural living events in Iowa’s future.”

Given the pleasure dogs have found in my winter coat of late, with all the dirt and the smell of friends’ dogs and cats buried into it by this time of the season, I took delight in finding the locations of GreenEarth Cleaning companies. Beaver Ave. Cleaners (3704 Beaver Avenue) and Franklin Park Cleaners (5804 Franklin) do not use petroleum products in their dry-cleaning process. A brochure picked up at the expo claims that without the use of perc, the dry cleaning smell is gone, as are fading colors and shrinkage. I found out in a conversation that they have a contact for cleaning feather pillows.

Janet Coester had the best quote of the expo. When I asked her why she sold Shaklee products, she replied, “I had used the protein when I was 19 because I was too lazy to cook.” She also said she sells the products because she tried to decide what to do with her life other than fundraising for different projects that let her be passionate and help the planet. Janet is one of those ordinary Iowans that has an interesting story. In the early 1990’s, she walked alone the 6,200 miles across the Russian Federation. Now she donates up to 33% of her product sales to SEED, or Sustainable Ecological Economic Development. SEED is a Cedar Rapids group that organizes low income families to plant their own gardens.

Ruth Knelle sells Shaklee in the Des Moines area. She selected the Center on Sustainable Communities to receive donations from her product sales. When I asked her why she sold the products, she said that 40 years ago she decided she didn’t want to hurt the world.

Whether is was the natural living or just the joy of a warm day, people at the expo were enthusiastic. Sharon Hicks, owner of Green Goods, a business that sells products through host parties, was particularly energetic. She was kept busy with inquiries so I talked with Tonya Jansen of Taoton Homes out of Ankeny instead. Jansen said one of the architectural considerations with new housing is that the roof eaves need to have a greater overhang to allow enough solar panels to capture the winter sunlight.

M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa.