Just using the power of media and this platform to shed light on issues that I think we all care about, and there’s something that we could all do to just think differently about issues like poverty and hunger and environmental decay. There are solutions and so we hope to showcase and to highlight the solutions and inspire people to go out and be the change, to be the solution. There’s plenty that each and every one of us could do; it’s just do something.

Hallo, warm-hearted viewers, and welcome to today’s Good People, Good Works featuring Bianca and Michael Alexander of the United States, co-founders of Conscious Planet Media, a socially aware media company which produces Conscious Living TV and Soul of Green TV.

These web-based television programs encourage viewers to pursue mindful, eco-friendly lifestyles. Now in its fifth season, Conscious Living TV features upbeat shows on green travel, eco-fashion, spirituality and other topics. Soul of Green TV highlights the urban sustainability movement including issues such as social justice, economic empowerment, and reducing one’s carbon footprint.

In addition to these shows, Conscious Planet Media provides media coverage of green lifestyle events and does marketing for eco-friendly companies. Let's now visit Bianca and Michael in Chicago, Illinois, USA to learn how these enterprises evolved.

We’re a media company so we produce original television programming, original documentaries, business documentaries and events for social change. So, specifically, we look at the areas of sustainability, we look at economic empowerment and social justice. We look at the area of health and then peace and non-violence. So that’s essentially what we’re here to do, is to raise the consciousness of the planet and do so through media.

Bianca Alexander hosts shows, conducts interviews and narrates documentaries. However, she was not always involved in television. In fact, she began her career as a lawyer.

Well one of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to help people, to really make the world a better place. My legal training really gave me the framework that I needed to be an advocate for things that I’m passionate about.

And I realized many years ago when I got on this green path that I’m a very educated person. I graduated from Princeton University (USA), the University of Virginia Law School (USA). I spent all this time and money becoming a learned person but I didn’t know much about the environment.

I didn’t know much about how to take care of my body. I didn’t know much about how my diet can impact people living on the other side of the world, and so I felt it was a great opportunity to use my legal background, to use my skills as a communicator, as an advocate and as a leader to hope to inspire people to live more conscious, more healthy lives.

I was basically an entertainment attorney at a big movie studio in Hollywood (USA). I met some amazing people who had opportunities to get me in front of the camera and so I was able to develop as an entertainment reporter interviewing celebrities like Halle Berry and Samuel Jackson and all the A-list names that you could think of, which was fun. It was exciting.

It gave me a sense of how to find my presence on camera, how to hold the microphone, how to interview people, and how to interact. And so from there I went on to host shows; everything from TV One to Lifetime, to USA, to FOX.

Although Bianca's career as a TV host was exciting, she gradually began to feel that the work was inconsistent with her personal values.

And I did a lot of makeover shows back in the early 2000’s when the makeover genre was a huge hit. They were very inspirational, the gigs I had but unfortunately many of the shows were underwritten by big companies that basically manufacture all these products that are polluting our planet, and I got to the point where I felt like my talents could be better used in helping to inspire people.

Michael plays many roles in the couple’s media enterprises, doing everything from marketing, to filming, to video editing. He now shares how his work has evolved.

My background is business development. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life for the last sixteen years, and so I was running a consulting company. And when we were in Sedona, Arizona, I was wondering what I was going to do with my life and one of the things that we talked about was I could use my skills as a salesperson, as a sales trainer, to really support Bianca in getting on-air as a conscious living-expert and as an advocate.

So that’s how I got into it. So I began getting her on various networks, various ABC, NBC affiliates across the country as a conscious living expert and next thing I knew we were filming stuff and next thing I knew I was learning editing.

When we return, we’ll learn more about the Alexanders and how they’re seeking to use their media company to uplift and transform the world. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works, as we continue our interview with Bianca and Michael Alexander, founders of the informative online shows Conscious Living TV and Soul of Green TV, which are inspiring viewers to pursue eco-friendly lifestyles. Bianca and Michael now describe how they came up with the idea for the programs.

I grew up in San Francisco so I’ve been an environmentalist since maybe I was eight years old. When I was sixteen years old I saw “Medicine Man,” which is a movie with Sean Connery and ended up buying some rainforest. And when I graduated from college my first business was distributing eco-friendly products and so I’ve always had a passion for it. And when we first connected she did not.

I didn’t have a clue (about environmentalism).

She’s brilliant and once she really got it and understood it, we really felt that there was a major piece of the world and a major piece certainly in the US of mainstream people that weren’t really connected to it.

It was really missing a good piece of the population so we really felt like Bianca’s story and her experience in going from not really understanding it to being an advocate for it was a great way to go out and talk to mainstream people and really make a difference in the mainstream environment.

For Bianca, her journey to a greener lifestyle began with doing the laundry. She was very surprised when Michael informed her that the detergent she was using was destroying the aquatic environment.

I hadn’t made the connection to the role that I can play to make the world a better place and so that was really for me the bridge articulating the importance of just the tiniest little thing that you can do, that each one of us can do.

Some of Bianca and Michael’s shows inform viewers about how to select eco-friendly products when shopping.

The first segment that I did, was “Healthy Alternatives to Your Favorite Personal Care Products.” So just meeting people where they’re at. Guess what? We’re all human beings. We’re all going to eat, get up, brush our teeth, take a shower, comb our hair, use shampoo, basic things.

You’re going to put clothes on and rather than speaking to people in these big, theoretical concepts we meet them where they’re at and so I think because of, my own journey in just really being someone that knew nothing about this and didn’t care about it to a person who can say, “Okay, this is something that can actually make me a healthier person. This is something that can actually make me feel like I’m doing something positive just by making a more conscious choice with the product that I put on my body, by making a more conscious choice about the product I put in my washing machine.”

And so I think people really resonated with those and that’s really where it started. The episodes that we produce on our shows came from there and really just meeting people where they’re at and the choices that they make in their everyday lives.

One of the recent events produced by Conscious Planet Media was Verte Couture, Chicago's first ever all eco-fashion show and green lifestyle event. The gala evening, which included an organic vegan buffet, featured delightful and colorful fashion designs made from eco-friendly or recycled materials, all of which were free from animal products. One of the featured designers was Leanne Hilgart, who has created a vegan line of clothing called “Vaute Couture.”

Well, I have two sections of pieces that will be shown tonight. The main line is the outer wear line, some beautiful dress coats for Chicago winter that are also vegan and eco-conscious. To know that you can live conscientiously without sacrifice, being vegan in particular is not about what you can’t have but it’s about empowering yourself in all the everyday choices you make, and making a difference in those little choices and how they add up, that’s what I want people to think about.

What’s the key to the amazing success of the Conscious Living and Soul of Green shows?

The whole format of our shows and our approach and how we present is really about inspiring, making it fun, making it accessible and entertaining and easy. Because nobody wants to think of one other depressing piece of news including the danger our planet’s in.

It’s kind of a scary thing. I know myself personally, I tend to feel a little paralyzed like, “Oh God, what can I do?” But I need to find a way to make it fun and make it interesting and entertaining and that’s really what I think people resonate the most with.

What’s the single most eco-friendly change Bianca and Michael Alexander have made in their own lives? Find out next Sunday on Good People, Good Works featuring the concluding episode of our interview with the enthusiastic co-founders of Conscious Planet Media.

For more details on Conscious Planet Media and its television programs, please visit:
www.ConsciousPlanetMedia.com
www.ConsciousLivingTV.com
www.SoulOfGreen.com

Blessed viewers, thank you for watching today’s program. The World Around Us is next after Noteworthy News. May Providence bless your life with health, wisdom and abundance.

In his thoughtful book, “In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier,” Dr. Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University, USA calls for regarding dolphins as “non-human persons.”

Among philosophers, to be a person, no matter what the species, is to have traits that we’ve always said are unique to humans alone: self awareness, a sense of time, a sense of personality, emotions, individuality, uniqueness, higher order intellectual abilities and the like.

Find out more about Dr. White’s philosophical perspective, Thursday, April 15 on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.

Hallo, splendid viewers, and welcome to today’s Good People, Good Works once again featuring Bianca and Michael Alexander of the United States, co-founders of Conscious Planet Media, a socially aware media company which produces Conscious Living TV and Soul of Green TV.

These web-based television programs encourage viewers to pursue mindful, eco-friendly lifestyles. Now in its fifth season, Conscious Living TV features upbeat shows on green travel, eco-fashion, spirituality and other topics. Soul of Green TV highlights the urban sustainability movement including issues such as social justice, economic empowerment, and reducing one’s carbon footprint.

In addition to these shows, Conscious Planet Media provides media coverage of green lifestyle events and does marketing for eco-friendly companies. Michael Alexander now gives insight into one of the highly informative programs they recently produced.

One that we just finished was a piece that we did on food deserts. Food deserts are basically urban environments where the inhabitants have greater access to liquor stores and to junk food than they do to fresh fruits and vegetables. So basically it’s a food desert because they can’t get fresh fruits and vegetables. And here in Chicago (USA), over 600,000 people live in food deserts.

And so we’ve received a tremendous response from that because in many circumstances people would say that’s an inalienable right to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. So we are bringing that story to people and highlighting this problem. And on the other side any time we highlight a problem, we try to find solutions. And so we highlighted several organizations here locally in Chicago that we said are the solution to food deserts and that’s by creating urban gardens here in the city.

Organic gardens.

There’s a lot of unused land in these food deserts that can be converted and in many instances is being converted to grow food for the local inhabitants.

Here is an excerpt from the program “The Growing Solution to Urban Food Deserts” that was featured on Soul of Green TV.

According to a recent study by the Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group, on average, residents in food deserts have to travel twice as far to reach a grocery store than a fast food restaurant or liquor store. The vast majority of foods found in these local convenience stores are dangerously high in sodium, high fruitose corn syrup, saturated fats, and preservatives and low in nutrition value.

I think if we have vegetables and fruit in our neighborhoods, then our people would be more into eating right.

Well I was just diagnosed with high blood pressure. If I had a place where I could, usually just go in there and just get bananas or fruit or things of that nature, it would be helpful to me.

Fortunately, there’s a growing movement of grass roots activists looking to solve the food crisis by growing fresh organic produce right in the heart of the city. Chicago native Ryan Beck manages the urban farm for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in downtown Chicago.

It’s just a small urban plot about a quarter of an acre but you can get a lot of food out of that. Even in the starved urban settings, with the urban skyline, people expect a parking lot to be here, not a garden. Basically, we're creating an urban oasis in the food desert and bringing organic, healthy food to places where “food deserts” exist; where people can’t typically get fresh, organic, quality food.

Most traditionally grown food is full of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, genetically modified engineering, all these things that have been linked to disease, that have been linked to different afflictions and irritations (Cancer.) and cancer and there’s not a small correlation.

There’s actually a large correlation between the rise of the use of petrochemicals and mass agriculture and the rates of disease that have been going up along with that. So one of the things that we advocate for is grow your own produce. Grow anything. Everybody should be growing something on this planet, in this economy.

And I think the other element is that people say, “Well it’s just a trace amount. It’s just a little bit of chemicals or a little bit of herbicides.” But the reality is that if you have a trace amount of something, but you have it every single day for an entire lifetime, that’s quite a bit of something.

One of the things we try is to really reach people about their health. It’s about living a better life from a health perspective and recognizing that there is an inherent connection between health and sustainability, and health and the environment. If we take care of ourselves then we can take care of the Earth.

What keeps you both motivated?

God. Meditation and yoga.

I think what keeps me motivated is just turning on the TV. Seeing what movie studios are turning out for the most part and also on the other side, seeing how many brilliant creative people there are out there right now, how many talented young filmmakers and writers and journalists and the dichotomy between those two.

That’s what keeps me motivated because we really hope to provide a vehicle for many of those talented people to bring these messages out there and to bring more balance to media and to messages that are being populated all over the world.

When we return, we’ll have more from our interview with the energetic Alexanders. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

It’s about a state of being, a state of consciousness that transcends what we’ve all been told up until now how we need to live our lives. And so it really comes, I think, back to making an awareness; it’s really a spiritual path. We wouldn’t be doing this but for our spiritual foundation. So our hope is really to use media as a force for a positive change.

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works, as we continue our interview with Bianca and Michael Alexander, creators of Conscious Living TV and Soul of Green TV. The Alexanders wholeheartedly believe that media can play a large part in bettering our world.

The reason that we were blessed and have continued to be blessed with the our work and with the amazing people that we work with and support us is because we have an important role to play hopefully in bringing this planet into more alignment and bringing more justice and love and peace into the world. That’s a life-long mission. It may take our whole life to accomplish it but it’s one of those things that eight hours is never enough to accomplish a goal like that, so there’s always more to do.

I think our goal is to, at the end of the day, to raise the consciousness of the planet. It’s a unique time in the world and you can have a tiny organization in Chicago that can have an interesting story and we can get that story out all over the world, on YouTube as an example, and hundreds of different websites all over the world. And so I think for us that’s really what we’re hoping to do is to just continue to perpetuate that message.

The most effective step an individual can take to constructively transform the world is for them to adopt the organic vegan diet. The Alexanders share their thoughts on diet and the future of our planet.

Obviously, going vegetarian if you’re a meat eater will instantly reduce your overall carbon footprint, just given all the waste and the water. It takes 3,000 gallons of water a day to support a meat eating lifestyle. The average vegetarian lifestyle takes only 300 gallons of water. That’s just an example. Let’s not even talk about all the off-gassing from all the cattle.

So just from an environmental perspective it has a huge impact and then just from a health perspective again you bring it back to what’s in it for the individual viewer, the individual person. And then for me spiritually, I think from a humanitarian perspective, I think it’s important to value life, all life, all living things, all living creatures.

And as we are no longer ingesting and vibing the energy of death and destruction, which is basically what happens every time you sink your teeth into meat, people’s awareness and consciousness and overall sense of being is going to be happier too, which will inspire them to go and do better things in the world and it goes on and on.

It’s like a reverse food chain. It’s like take care of the little one and we’ll all get to ride the wave of higher and greater and higher consciousness and I think there’s no limit to what we all can accomplish once our state of consciousness and our vibration rise. The vibration of the average meat eater is definitely lower than a person who doesn’t have that stuff in their system.

And I know that each and every time that I ingest meat I’m ingesting the death of that animal, I’m ingesting the pain that they went through in that moment and if that’s what I’m taking in three meals a day or one meal a day, it’s no wonder that our society is at war. It’s no wonder that we continue to perpetuate war all over the world.

So I think a key element of us creating a planet that works for everybody and a planet that is peaceful is a vegetarian lifestyle and is an organic lifestyle because ultimately there is a greater consideration for the world beyond just a profit through the organic farming movement. Factory farming is killing our planet, frankly, and it’s done for a profit. So we believe a vegetarian lifestyle and organic farming, that’s peace. So I think it’s key.

Many thanks to Bianca and Michael Alexander, and all the others who share their joy, enthusiasm and uplifting ideas for improving and transforming our planet. Their using of TV and other forms of media to make a difference in the world is truly an inspiration to us all. May Heaven bless their noble efforts.

For more details on Conscious Planet Media and its television programs, please visit:
www.ConsciousPlanetMedia.com
www.ConsciousLivingTV.com
www.SoulOfGreen.com

Respected viewers, thank you for watching today’s Good People, Good Works. Next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News. May we all grow each day in love and wisdom.