Sandhill Cranberry Farms via Equal ExchangeFair Trade often conjures images of distant lands and foreign cultures. However, Fair Trade is not limited to the Third World and its benefits are realized by all people. There are several organizations within the states that follow the ideal set by the Fair Trade movement.

Equal Exchange has started a "Bringing Fair Trade Home" program which seeks to extend the "model of partnership to family farmers, farm workers, and farmer co-operatives." There are small co-op farms which produce their organic almonds, organic cranberries and pecans. "All are family farmers, and people with a commitment to their communities, to growing delicious, nutritious crops, and to stewardship of the land they work." With U.S. farmers falling from 6.5 million in 1935 to 1.9 million by 2003, and "over 50% of the revenue generated globally by food retailing is accounted for by just 10 corporations", there is a similar need of support to small family farms regardless of their location.

In 2005 Equal Exchange partnered with Organic Valley, the Farmer Direct Co-operative and RAFI-USA, to create the Domestic Fair Trade Working Group with the goal to gather people of similar beliefs from the US and Canada and develop a set of Principles for Domestic Fair Trade "which translates the goals and priorities of the international Fair Trade movement into the regional, domestic and local spheres."
The principles created are similar to the international Fair Trade criteria but tailored to fit small domestic farms: family scale farming, capacity building, democratic co-ops which have participatory ownership and control, rights of labor, equality and opportunity, direct trade, fair and stable pricing, shared risk and affordable credit, long term trade relationships, sustainable agriculture, appropriate technology, indigenous peoples' rights, transparency and accountability, education and advocacy.

Farmer, farmer, put away your DDT. I don't care about spots on my apples, just leave me the birds and the bees, please. Sometimes we listen to the songs, and we can even sing along with them, but we don't actually hear the words. "Big Yellow Taxi" just might be one of those songs. It's worth your time to learn the words (and if you have children, teach them).

Though many of us in the younger generations may think that this is a Counting Crows song, it was actually originally written and performed by Joni Mitchell in 1970. The song covers such topics as development & urban sprawl:

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.

Editor's note: Green Options is pleased to welcome Robin Schidlowski to the writing team. Robin is a feature writer and co-editor for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability's newsletter, and lives in the Bay Area. She'll be covering happenings in that part of the world, as well as writing about urban and general sustainability, and "zero waste."

Paul Hawken spoke in San Francisco last Friday on the final stop of his book tour, as a part of the Long Now Foundation seminar series. In his new book, Blessed Unrest, Hawken describes the global movement, which he declines to give a name, toward environmental and social justice. In a 60 minute speech and Q&A session, Hawken proffered an explanation for what is transpiring.

Hawken told a story of how Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired by Antoine and Bernard Jussieu in Paris and subsequently wrote Nature. He then told how a college-aged Henry David Thoreau was inspired by Emerson and wrote Civil Disobedience, and how Rosa Parks then read Thoreau's essay the summer before she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in 1955. He was describing the networking and the roots of the collective conscious that he calls the “curriculum of the 21st Century”.

Hawken observed that the common thread between the literally millions of organizations in the movement is that, although they all have different ways of expressing their goals, none have contradictory values. They are all, in unique ways, exhibiting moral opposition to an unjust state. He quoted Thoreau: "If the government is unjust, the just man is in jail." Hawken described an atomized, bottom-up collection of organizations working to put down the injustice that permeates every institution, everywhere. He told of how the movement, like the immune system, categorically identifies and destroys disease (or the disease destroys it).

Photo Credit: Whitehouse.gov

Jimmy: Well… since President Bush is SOARING in the polls with his approval rating hovering in the 30% range I thought it might be interesting to take a look at his environmental record and his perceived Turn-Around on the environment, particularly on climate change.

As I have noted before Bush doesn’t always earn the enmity the environmental community harbors against him. One personal anecdote that would be funny if it wasn’t sad is this walk-the-walk vs. a talk-the-talk comparison of residence between George Bush and uber-conservationist Al Gore. Now Big Al has since made amends and is LEEDing the way by giving his place an environmental make-over… but it sometimes makes me wonder where his heart really is.

Bush does live somewhat conservatively to the extent any president can but what about Bush’s policy? I find it hard to cut through the rhetoric with the environmental community attacking every policy as not enough and Bush seemingly unwilling to aggressively defend his policy for fear it might hurt his street cred as an evil capitalist.

Bug Based Bio Fuel
Oxygen Trick Could See Organic Costs Tumble
Solar Decathalon Preview
Air Quality By SMS
EU Sees Green Future For Business

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(Posted by David Zaks in News and Views at 8:31 PM)

This is part 2 of my series of posts about visiting GM Headquarters in Detroit for the ChallengeX program and to meet with some GM executives. I attended this event representing both GreenOptions.com and EcoGeek.org, and these articles are cross-posted to both sites. Previous story here.

Several of the vehicles were available to be driven at the ChallengeX event. Of the vehicles that were there, I was most interested in driving the University of Waterloo's entry. Most of the teams (12 of the 17 competitors) were using a B20 biodiesel blend as their fuel and all but one of the others used some form of internal combustion with E85 ethanol or reformulated gasoline. But the University of Waterloo team took a different approach.

The Waterloo vehicle was powered by a hydrogen fuel cell (with onboard batteries for backup) and propelled by front and rear electric motors. When I sat down behind the wheel, my guide from the Waterloo team explained that some of the things in the vehicle that are different from the way we're used to driving a car. There were a number of different sounds, coming from the front and the rear, as various systems came online to start the fuel cell system in operation. Matt Stevens from the Waterloo team explained the whole sequence of operation to me this way:

If green office buildings provide important benefits, like decreased absenteeism and improved productivity of the workers inside, it only makes sense that schools and students reap these same rewards. Surely every parent would love for their kids to have fewer sick days.

To further this concept, Global Green, USA is hosting the 2007 Green Schools Symposium on Thursday, June 14th. You might remember Global Green from it’s pre-Oscar bash in February, which featured the likes of Orlando Bloom and Leonardo DiCaprio. This event, however, has a slightly different (and less famous) audience.

The Symposium will provide a forum for discussing case studies, new research on the benefits of green schools, and new design tools to help create resource-efficient, healthy, and productive schools. This year, the conference features a special focus on charter schools. The one-day event will be held at the California Science Center.

Is migration the key to breaking the stranglehold of global poverty? I raised that possibility here in April in a piece Can Migration Change the World?. But Lant Pritchett — the former World Bank official who has just been tapped to help Google.org plan its philanthropic approach to alleviating poverty — goes a lot farther. As a NYT profile this Sunday put it: He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. … The basics are simple: The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot. This strikes Pritchett as bad economics and worse social justice. He likens the limits on labor mobility to “apartheid on a global scale.” Pritchett, in his book Let Their People Come (most of which is available for free download), argues that the only way to effectively deal with global poverty is to add to the standard approach (of trade, aid and debt relief) work mobility for at least a portion of the world’s unskilled laborers. The rich… (more)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:52 PM)

What do you do when you’ve got a problem like communicating the need for renewable, efficient energy to hundreds of millions of people? Harness the web, of course.

SmartPower, a nonprofit marketing organization that promotes clean energy, used YouTube to form the Clean Energy Challenge. The aim was to create an ad for SmartPower around the belief that “clean energy is real. It’s here. And it’s working.”

After reviewing 150 submissions (not a ton, but not bad for such a wonky topic whose actors have virtually no chance of finding a mate on national TV), the $10,000 winner has been chosen. But in the true style of any reality show, the final results are drawn out over several days. The top 10 ads were posted on June 10th and for every day until the 18th one ad will be removed, finally leaving the “last ad standing” on Monday.

The winner will be announced via webcast at 5:00PM on June 18th and all finalists voted off are highlighted on the SmartPower Blog.