3.21.2026 | 🌿 Clean Living Without Overwhelm with Lindsay Dahl

Happy Saturday!

Today we’re joined by special guest curator Lindsay Dahl, activist and author of Cleaning House. Our team, along with many of you in our subscriber community, recently read her book together as part of our book club and found her perspective both deeply grounding and refreshingly approachable.

Lindsay reminds us that caring for our homes and our health is not about perfection or fear, but about small, thoughtful shifts that ripple outward over time.

I know you’ll enjoy hearing from her today!!

xx
AmyAnn

💛 Welcome, Lindsay!

Happy Weekend!

I'm Lindsay Dahl, Chief Impact Officer at Ritual and author of Cleaning House: The Fight To Rid Our Homes of Toxic Chemicals. I’m so excited to be curating The Weekend Edit, as I've been a long-time reader of The Good Trade.

Each Friday evening, I feel relief, the opposite of the Sunday scaries. Eager to remove some of the hats I wear during the week—like my leadership role at women’s health supplement brand Ritual—I allow myself the space to embrace my role as mom and toy-picker-upper. Finding time and space for myself doesn’t really come easily for me, blocking off time to go to a yoga class on the weekends or brunch with friends isn’t available to me based on the needs of my children. Perhaps you too find it hard to relate to some of the advice that circulates social media for achieving the illusive “balance”.

Might I offer a few hacks that have made their way into my weekend routine that gives me a break. While my kids watch cartoons, I nestle myself in between them and enjoy their warm cheeks on my shoulder. And instead of scrolling on my phone, I open a book. My husband does most (ok…all) the cooking in our home, but Saturday’s I make pancakes for my kids and lemon honey tea and I relish the moment where I’m not the one responding to their requests. After bedtime I walk the streets of our neighborhood, without music or podcasts, just me and the sounds of the city.

A balanced and pragmatic approach is one I’m naturally inclined to embrace, and it is the filter by which I see my work as an author and activists working on addressing toxic chemical pollution in our products, air, and water. As today’s information overloaded world, fueled by social media, it becomes harder to know fact from fiction. My cell phone is accustomed to endless text messages from friends asking me questions about which product is safe, greenwashed, or non-toxic. As I unpack in my book CLEANING HOUSE (don’t worry, I don’t tell you how to clean your house), the burden we have placed on consumer’s shoulders to navigate which products are free from toxic chemicals and what is just misinformation, is simply unfair.

We shouldn’t have to add to our endless to-do lists “find a nontoxic mattress” or “safe baby products for my registry”. And as we know, having the time, resources, and education to take on this research is not available to many. Clearly, we need an upstream approach that takes this burden off our shoulders. That work, to shift the responsibility away from us to manufacturers is where I spend most of my time and energy and I encourage you to join me. At the end of my book, I share a robust Take Action section, and it’s a menu, not a to-do list. You can pick fast and free actions, like call scripts, for when you ring Congress. Or more time-intensive initiatives like finding PFAS-free carpet. The goal is to give you time back, peace of mind, and have the highest impact possible.