After Harold and I put our two kids to bed, we usually have, oh, about 20 minutes to chill on the couch together before I pass out from exhaustion. Lately we’ve been watching some great movies in “installments” – the latest of which is the documentary The Cove. If you care about the environment, animals, the ocean, or simply want to see something really good, go out and rent this film now! On the movie level, it’s a fabulous film – suspenseful, beautiful filming, funny at times, inspiring, touching. A group of activists sneak into a restricted cove in Japan to film (using really cool high tech equipment) the annual slaughtering of dolphins. There are some great quotes (“There are 2 kinds of people – activists and inactivists.”) There are these hard core environmentalists of an older generation wondering who is going to take their place when they’re gone? There are convincing arguments about why you should never support or buy into swimming with dolphins in captivity. There is some tricky unspoken cultural stuff, too – look at how we Americans treat our cows and pigs and chickens…are we any better?

Along with Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this seems like one more reason to go vegetarian, or at least to know who is raising your food and how they are raising your food. Some of the best scenes in The Cove are simply the underwater scenes with dolphins in the wild – and seeing them interact with humans in the open ocean. They’re beautiful, smart, playful creatures and one scientist argues maybe they’re even more intelligent than we are. At least they don’t go around slaughtering us using inhumane methods and then trying to feed our mercury poisoned meat to school children, right? I was hoping for some happy real life Hollywood ending (i.e. the dolphins are saved!), but sounds like the slaughter is still continuing. Read what you can do here.

{Photo from The Cove via A.V. Club}

If I wasn’t running a letterpress invitation company, I would love to be Nicholas Kristof. He’s an editorial writer for the NY Times who is a wonderful example of using one’s life – and job – to bring about concrete change in the world. One of his focuses has been bringing attention to women’s plights around the world – childhood prostitution, for instance, or the crazy high mortality rates for women in childbirth, or the lack of education of girls. He writes, “In the 19th Century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. ‘Women hold up half the sky,’ in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.” What a guy. How can we, as women, not care about this?

His latest column in last Sunday’s paper deals with those suffering from obstetric fistulas – 3 to 4 million women in Asia and Africa, often injured in childbirth while teenagers because they gave birth before their pelvises were fully grown. After giving birth, a young woman with obstetric fistulas is “incontinent,” Kristof writes, “steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.” These young women are then usually abandoned by their husbands – “scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.” And to repair their bodies and their lives? A $300 surgery that takes 20 minutes. Wow.

I’m coming at this three months after an amazing birth of my second child, a birth complete with a doula and a midwife at a local birthing center. It makes me think if I wasn’t running an invitation company, I would love to go back to medical school, learn stuff, and then help women in this way. But – I don’t have a medical degree, can’t do medical school right now, so what I can do is this. We’re running a free invitation envelope printing promotion through Smock. Buy a letterpress invitation set, get free envelope printing on your outer envelopes through December 31, 2009. This saves you about $300 for a quantity of 100 invitations. Sure, you can pocket the money, or use it to buy some nice organic sheets, or shoes, or books, or – you can donate the savings to the Worldwide Fistula Fund (or pick another cause that you care about) and really make a difference in someone’s life. Even if you’re not shopping for invitations – make a difference, forgo that Starbucks coffee for a while, and then make a donation. Read more about what you can do to help those suffering from fistula on Nicholas Kristof’s blog.