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Annabelle Gurwitch
 
 
   
 
 
Actress, author and activist Annabelle Gurwitch is host of the Planet Green (Discovery Channel) television show, "WA$TED," and the writer/director of the documentary film and book "FIRED: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed," which remind us that all great success is born of failure.

DETAILS ON HER "WASTED" AND "FIRED" PROGRAMS FOLLOW:

WA$TED

What Leading Climatologists and Frat Houses Taught Me About the Saving the Planet.

A Lecture-Video Program
WITH ANNABELLE GURWITCH

Host of the Planet Green (Discovery Channel) television show, "WA$TED", NPR commentator and author, Annabelle Gurwitch, brings her irreverent wit and personality to the very serious discussion about the state of our environment.

Her interactive "WA$TED" lecture program uses elements of the TV show's premise to help provide campuses, corporations and organizations with strategies for saving the planet – and saving money -- through green living.

On "WA$TED," her research team collects and completely analyzes one month's worth of a participant's (a family, fraternity house, etc) garbage, tracks the amount of fuel and energy use, water consumption, electrical waste and other energy inefficiencies, and then creates a sustainable eco-plan for each participant. The team then tracks the participant's progress, and provides them with a detailed account of their own carbon footprint. Finally, Annabelle presents some simple solutions to help minimize it, as well as provide a breakdown of the economic savings realized.

In her multimedia lecture, Annabelle screens an episode of "WA$TED", gives both comedic and statistical examples of the wasteful consumption of Americans, recounts her in-the-field carbon foot printing experience and its value in terms of creating social change and promoting sound environmental strategies. By giving communities a way to compare their consumption with others, Annabelle provides a useful tool to affect meaningful change.

"WA$TED" tips for going green on a budget:

•If every household in the U.S. switched out even one roll of paper towels to one roll of recycled paper towels, we would save approximately 544,000 trees! Solution: cloth dishtowels.

•People typically use between 10 to 15 gallons of water washing a sinks- worth of dishes. One of the simplest things you can do to cut down on water is to fill a pot of water in your sink, let dishes soak to loosen the dirt instead using water pressure, you will save hundreds, if not thousands of gallons a year.

•19 Billion catalogues clog up our mailboxes every year! The production of catalogues in the US, from the cutting of trees, printing of paper, and shipping, produces the same amount of emissions as 2 million cars annually.

•If every household changed five regular light bulbs and started using the compact fluorescents, it would be the equivalent of taking 8 million cars off the road for a year.

•All of us have more household appliances than ever and we leave them plugged in, drawing power, 24/7. Even when turned off, 'standby power' can account for over 5% of a home's annual electricity use, that adds up to a lot of money. Solution: plug cell phone chargers and computers into power strips for easy one stop switch off once they are charged up.

•Each year approximately 3.5 billion wire hangers escape from closets in the U.S., and they end up sitting in landfills taking up precious space and being totally wasted. Only 10% are returned to the dry cleaners. Simply bring them back to your dry cleaner to be used again.

•The average American eats 200 pounds of meat a year, if we each cut back by just 20% it would be like the entire population switched to driving hybrids. The average American family throws away 122 pounds of usable food a month. If we recovered just 5% of the food Americans throw away each year we could feed over four million people a day.

FIRED: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, & Dismissed
(Also available with the film)

When Annabelle Gurwitch was fired from a play by Woody Allen, she wondered how she would cope with being fired by a cultural icon. Turning to friends in show business, she was assured she was not alone. Once the subject had been broached, everyone she knew from her rabbi to her gynecologist to her colleagues had advice, and their own accounts of getting the boot. This set her off on a journey to answer the question: was being fired going to be the best thing or worst thing that would happen to her in her working life?

Annabelle turned the wit and trauma of the "Fired" experience into a book and a documentary film. The book received rave reviews and has been featured on "The Today Show", CNN, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and in People Magazine, InStyle. The Washington Post called it, "a caustic but merry compendium of failure." The New York Times said, "Fired proves that sometimes losing well is the best revenge." The book was number #1 on the New York Post Hot List and was featured in Oprah's Anticipation list.

As she was writing the book she became interested in the downsizings occurring all over the country. She began researching and traveling coast to coast, interviewing people as diverse as Bill Maher, Tim Allen, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Garlin, Anne Meara, David Cross and GM workers in Lansing, Michigan, whose perspectives ranged from the tragically comedic to the just plain tragic. Annabelle has heard it all -- from new euphemisms, "you're being unexpectedly leisured" to "we're promoting you to customer!" She attended job fairs, received "outplacement services", interviewed human resource directors, downsizers, and the downsized who were seeking new jobs.

She visited Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, and economist Ben Stein, who spoke about the growing insecurity the American worker faces today and the incredible inequities being created through corporate and government policies.

"Fired!" reminds us that all great success come out of failure and being fired can be a part of the growth process, that humor helps, and that if you’re employed in America today your firing may be both the best and the worst thing that can happen in your working life.

More about Annabelle:
Annabelle is currently a contributing writer and commentator at NPR and on VH1, The Fox Network and CNN, and a regular contributor to "Not Just Another Cable News Show" on Headline News. As a columnist for The Nation, she targets everything from politics to pop culture to "Going Green." Her essays have appeared in publications including Parade, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Child and Glamour, and her environmental pieces have aired on NPR and in webisodes for The Daily Green web site. Annabelle serves as a spokesperson for the "Do Not Mail Registry" for Forest Ethics, the non-profit that has saved over 12 million acres of endangered forests. For six years, she hosted TBS's "Dinner and a Movie".