My favorite bit of Discovery's Planet  Green programming is the Keep It Green Girls on G Word.  They are bawdy and hilarious as they trip their way in four inch heals through explorations into the world of "green." 

No, the program is not overly scientific, but it speaks to the masses and more importantly is highly original and entertaining. 

So imagine what a dork I was when I randomly ran into Shelley Pack of the Keep It Green Girls in LA during an audition and then begged her for an interview.  Luckily for me she's a nerd at heart and agreed to the sit down.

Raegan: Tell me how the Keep it Green Girls were created?

Shelley: In 2006 my friend Sarah [Norton] and I decided to do something to give back. We settled on the environment because it wasn't the buzzed about topic it is now and it needed a little love.  So, by ourselves, we just started shooting these short videos about riding the metro and going to the farmers market.

Raegan: Those early videos were hilarious. I loved the one were you rode the bus.

Shelley:  That one was crazy. Everything was improv. We were just average Joes you know, recycling and all the normal stuff in real life, but not super eco friendly so when we tried products or tried to change our lifestyles to be greener we were learning. In a way that's why the show worked.  We weren't coming from a place of judgment.  We were learning together with our audience.

Raegan: So how did you end up on Planet Green?

Shelley: We did the videos for a year, just posting them on YouTube.  Then I woke up one morning and I had an email from Planet Green.  They said, "We like your videos. Do you have any more?" Ummm...yes we do. So I sent them the rest of the videos we had and then they called us in for a series of interviews, which were like "dates."  On the third date we were asked to be correspondents for G Word.  We shot 14 episodes with them. Our "Fallen Fruit" episode was the first thing Planet Green ever shot.

Raegan:  How was the response from the public? Do you think you influence people to be more environmentally friendly?

Shelley: People would write to us and tell us that they were trying the waterless carwash, or were going to local farmers markets or looking into buying hybrids because they saw us talking about them so that was cool. I was just really hoping to raise awareness. I think we did and we even had people watching in other countries so that was amazing.

Raegan: So tell me about your documentary.

Shelley: It's a documentary about hemp.   It's funny what a stigma hemp has.  It's like when I say hemp I automatically drop into a whisper like I'm talking about marijuana [she drops into a whisper as she says marijuana].  But they're not the same plant and hemp is so useful it can be made into fuel, food, oil, paper, cloth and plastic.  It has the potential to help us get rid of our oil addiction and it is illegal to grow it in the US.  You can buy it and sell it, but not grow it.  It's an easy plant to grow too because it doesn't need pesticides and it can grow where other plants like cotton cannot. These socks are made out of hemp.  [She throws me a pair of clean folded socks that were lying on the table.]

Raegan: These are really soft.  I always think of hemp as a rope fiber.

Shelley: Here let me show you some hemp products.

[Shelley runs to the back of her house and brings out bottles of products including shampoos, shaving creams, washing machine detergent, a DVD case, and a t-shirt.]

Shelley: That's all made with hemp, but I had to ship it all to me or find it at Whole Foods.  It's hard to find in the US and then it can be expensive cause it's imported. Canada is making a lot of money growing our hemp. You can order great hemp stuff through Vital Hemptations and Hemp Traders.

Raegan: Why do you think hemp is illegal in the US?

Shelley:  Because there is a lot of money to be lost by industries like the oil industry.  Hemp could replace most of the products we make now out of oil. Oil is in everything from shampoos, to pesticides, to plastics.

People say it's because the plant is related to marijuana and looks like it, but hemp is 14 ft tall and marijuana is 4 ft. tall.  Anyone can tell the difference.  In the documentary I even took pictures of each plant to my "Bubby's" nursing home to see if her and her friends could tell the difference and of course they could. 

Hemp is not weed.  There is such a slight amount of THC in it that even if you smoked huge quantities of it you still couldn't get high.  Some people argue that people would plant marijuana among Hemp crops to hide it, but if they did the cross pollination would actually lower the THC in the marijuana so it would be worthless. No one would plant marijuana anywhere near hemp.

Raegan:  So when is your doc going to be out?  What's the title? 

Shelley:  I am hoping to have post-production work done in a month and have it out by September.  Tentatively it's titled, "It's Okay to Say Hemp."  The title addresses all these preconceived notions people have about hemp or even about the kind of person that supports growing hemp.

Raegan: Any plans for after the documentary is released?

Shelley:  Save the world, stop the war in Iraq, fix global warming. I got a lot to do. Very full schedule.

You can see more of Shelley Pack's work at Infinite Light Productions.  To learn more about Hemp got to the North American Industrial Hemp Council Website.

And check out Keep it Green Rides the Metro:

Related Reading:
The Future of Eco Fashion
America Tries for Hemp Agriculture


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