No, Oprah, no!

I caught Oprah's Earth Day special today. I left the room several times during the show because I wasn't able to handle certain portions. I know the journalistic integrity of Oprah is (seemingly, I'm no journalism major) relatively good for daytime talk shows, and that it's fairly dumbed down so that the entire public can relate, but still.

This is what today's episode consisted of:

• Environmental vagueness that I wouldn't expect outside of Sesame Street. Recycle! Compost! Don't use plastic OR paper bags!!!
• Sandra Bullock hawking her soy candle line.
• Julia Roberts declaring that she always keeps reusable shopping bags in her car so that she never has to take plastic bags. Oprah didn't have the heart to tell Julia that plastic-bag refusal doesn't cancel Humvee useage.
  
• Oprah scared of worms and vermicomposting. Way to install fear in the housewives you are trying to encourage.
  
• Oprah exclaiming that she didn't know that your skin absorbs the contents from applied beauty products. How else would moisturizers work, or self-tanners for that manner?
• Fear-mongering about SDS and parabens. I'm not saying we shouldn't be cautious, but I would certainly be pleasantly surprised if there was mass movement towards products without these ingredients by the Oprah-watching public, because they're in EVERYTHING and alternative products are usually more expensive.
  
• Extremely general environmental information, including the same frequent misuse of scientific language that is prevalent across the general news machine and public.
  
• Some mumbling by Al Gore at the end for good measure. (The audience seemed to clap more when they learned they would receive a free box of soy candles than for poor Al.)
  

"Chemical" or "chemical substance" refers to a substance for which we know the chemical formula. Water is a chemical. Salt is a chemical. It is not being used correctly if you purport that "chemicals" are causing problems in our water and air and beauty products.

"Pollutant" and "contaminant" aren't interchangable, but that's a story for another day.

I once argued with a seller hawking "natural" beauty products because she was boasting that other products are full of "toxins". The word specifically refers to a toxic substance produced by a living thing, and there isn't a lot of snake venom in regular beauty products.