My guest today is Shannon Smith, Communications and User Voice at Ecosia.org, a search engine that helps the environment by planting trees as you search the web. We’ll be talking about how trees create clean air and our our the air pollution we create harms trees. Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees when users search the web. The social business has already raised over $1.5 million for rainforest protection since its founding in December 2009. By donating 80% of its ad income to a tree planting program in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, Ecosia aims to have the highest positive impact on the environment per dollar. The Berlin-based start-up neutralises all CO2 emissions related to its search as well as publishing donation receipts online – its promise to the two million monthly Ecosia users, who are proving that small changes can have a big impact. Former journalist and writer Shannon Smith has liaised between users, partners and team members since 2010 to build Ecosia into a movement for sustainable change. She is a Texas native. www.ecosia.org

My guest today is Amy Ziff, Founder and Chief Capidealist™ (someone who believes that world change will come about through harnessing our collective purchasing power on the free market) of Veritey, a website that makes it exceedingly simple to find products and services that are healthy. Amy puts an amazing amount of work into evaluating the products she sells and rates each one for being nontoxic, sustainable, cruelty-free and socially responsible. We’ll be talking about where to start once you decided to eliminate toxics from your life as well as her own process of choosing toxic-free products. Amy is a trained journalist, proven entrepreneur, start-up veteran, and healthy living advocate. She never wanted to work at a women’s magazine writing about make-up. Amy always was looking for ways to make a difference, and to find better ways to live a healthy life. When she became a mom, everything came together. Amy was frustrated by how hard it was to make what should be simple decisions – healthy decisions – for herself and her family. For years as a hobby, Amy has been seeking out the truth about products and their real ingredients. (What companies put in their products can be shocking, including known carcinogens and other toxic chemicals that can cause an array of conditions from asthma to infertility, and which are often not disclosed.) Amy believes you shouldn’t need a PhD to decipher what products are safe to use and which to avoid. Yet the reality is that getting to the truth of what’s in a product can take hours of research and a lot of legwork. Most busy moms and parents just don’t have that kind of time. Veritey makes it simple for people who are time pressed to make healthier decisions. Veritey is about where truth meets healthy living. www.veritey.com

My guest today is Martin J. Blaser, MD, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. We’ll be talking about how the massive increases in the developed world of “modern plagues”—such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and autism—are related to loss of diversity of the complex—and crucially important—ecosystem of microorganisms within our bodies on which we all depend. As diversity diminishes, our immune systems are compromised, and we become much more susceptible to new infections. And this loss of micro-organism diversity is due to the use of wide use of antibiotics and products that contain antibacterials such as triclosan. Dr. Blaser has studied the role of bacteria in human disease for more than thirty years. He is the director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, the former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and has held major advisory roles at the National Institutes of Health. He cofounded the Bellevue Literary Review, and his work has been written about in many newspapers and journals, including The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City. www.martinblaser.com.