Big Oil Causes Big Mess in Ecuador
The Ecuadorian rain forests are suffering, and so are its inhabitants. Texaco (currently owned by Chevron Corporation) began prospecting for oil in Ecuador in 1964. They found what they were looking for, and built the invasive petroleum extraction infrastructure that still oppresses the local indigenous people and the Amazon.
Chevron insists that their involvement ends there. They refuse to take any responsibility for ominous environmental disaster that plagues the region that Texaco once profited from, and instead point their finger at PetroEcuador, a state-owned Ecuadorian oil company.
Ecuadorian citizens seem to disagree with the American company. A class action law suit was filed against Chevron in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 Amazon residents for polluting their environment. Read more
Sustainability: Thinking Beyond Borders Part Four
The immigration debate in the US has no relevance to the environmental issues that we are facing today. However, hate groups like Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) would like U.S. citizens to believe otherwise.
The anti-immigrant movement’s argument that immigrants are to blame for U.S. ecological degradation is deeply flawed. It has so many holes that it is transparent to anyone who thinks critically about the accusations they present. This is a strategic attack on immigrants, and cannot result in any productive environmental solutions. It only breeds more anti-immigrant hatred and leads Americans astray from real environmental progress. Read more
Bush Destruction Continues to the Very End
The Bush Administration has revealed devastating changes to an agricultural guestworker program. This program is known as H-2A, and has existed since 1986. It allows for farm owners and agricultural employers to bring in foreign born citizens to work on temporary visas.
This program has never been popular with unionizers and farm worker rights groups due to it’s negligent and oppressive nature. In fact it’s predecessor, the H-2, program ended over the controversial abuse workers in the program endured. Read more
Sustainability: Thinking Beyond Borders Part Three
Plastic makes up about 90% of the trash found in the ocean, and thanks to Charles Moore, a sailor and environmentalist, we now know that there is quite a lot of trash in our oceans. It is found particularly in and near the North Pacific gyre, which comprises most of the northern Pacific Ocean and is roughly the size of Texas. Read more
Sustainability: Thinking Beyond Borders Part Two
When Americans import goods from foreign regions they are often exporting environmental degradation. In the U.S. we import all of our coffee, mostly from Colombia, Brazil and Guatemala. And we import a lot of it. After oil, coffee is the second largest import in the United States.
Luckily, about two thirds of the world’s coffee beans are still classified as arabica. Arabica beans are grown at higher altitudes, require less watering, and need cooler climates. Which means that almost all arabica beans are shade grown, greatly reducing the number of trees being cut down. Shade-grown coffee also grows slower than other varieties, producing a more flavorful, higher quality product. Read more
Sustainability: Thinking Beyond Borders Part 1
I saw an article last week titled “Why Environmentalists Support Immigration Reform” on the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) website. Considering myself an environmentalist, I read the passage to better my understanding of exactly why “I” support immigration reform.
Now of course, as some of you may have already guessed, I was a bit skeptical of the entire notion, but I tried to keep an open mind. When doing a “preliminary skim” of the article, I noticed a rather interesting statement: “But however one may try to abdicate responsibility for it, the connection between immigration, population, and the environment remains.’ I was rather confused, thinking, ‘Well, I can see a connection between immigration and national population, and I can see a link between global population and environmental issues…” But I somehow couldn’t link those two thoughts. How are they connected? Read more
The Miracle of Thunder: Turning Water into Oil
Thunder Boone Pickens Jr. may have been the greenmailing poster boy for the oil industry in the 1980’s, but so what? It’s 2008 America! The man did a little research…and bam pow! an alternative energy activist is born. If you’re like most Americans and spend more time than you should starring at a screen (computer or TV), you’ve most likely seen his commercials. They feature the self-proclaimed “man with a plan” preaching the urgency of our environmental and economic crises, and offering a solution: The Pickens Plan.
Mr. Pickens’ layout calls for building new wind generation facilities and switching (firstly commercial) vehicles to run on natural gas instead of refined oil. Then, he will harness the power of the wind turbines, creating energy to replace the electricity that was previously supplied by natural gas. While reading his scheme, I couldn’t help but notice that he never mentions anything about Americans slowing down the pace of our energy usage. Perhaps we’d like to believe that we don’t need to change our lifestyles, but there simply aren’t enough resources for us to be consuming at the rate that we do. Although Mr. Pickens would disagree with me. Read more
Security, Sovereignty, & Justice
Earlier this year, prices of food staples shot up 40 percent, marking the fastest rate of increase since 1990. The current recession is beginning to bear its weight on the spending choices of middle-class Americans, from big ticket items to weekly grocery lists. Twenty eight million citizens are now relying on food stamps to survive - a record high and a sure sign of increased poverty levels. Food riots have been increasingly occurring around the world due to the rising price of grain and fear of starvation. Our nation’s food security is already at risk, and while some people may be reluctant to come to terms with this reality, I think it’s time to take a more in-depth look into social food movements already battling these pressing sustenance issues. Read more
Fueled by Rice (part one)
Last weekend, Chicago hosted an international group of athletes in the Chicago Marathon. Runners from Kenya, Russia, Japan, Ethiopia and other countries all competed in the 30 km race. Meanwhile, half way across the world, a group of “amateur bicyclists” (read: recent college grads) from the United States are starting to end their international journey of over 10,000 miles. The meager group of five, calling themselves Fueled By Rice (FBR), have spent the last year cycling through a significant chunk of the Northern Hemisphere.
Promoting cultural understanding, peace, and sustainability, FBRs seem to spend most of their time familiarizing themselves with native peoples of each of the countries they visit. Thirsting for more than geography lessons and UN statistics, they have managed to paint a global narrative filled with faces and personal interactions, all documented through their blog. Read more
Buying Local Food: Pros and Cons
These days it seems, the hippest things a person can do is grab their made-from-recycled-materials-travel-mug, fill it up with the “fair trade” blend at the coffee shop, go pick up the new bamboo flooring, throw it in the back of the Prius and bring it to their new ecologically-sound condo. Which is a good thing, considering that some consumers still opt for the paper to-go cup while buying cherry wood panels, and zooming around in a hummer. Luckily, more often than not it’s pretty clear which products will cause a lesser amount of harm to the planet. However, with all of the conflicting agendas and information available, it can be hard to make a decision. Read more
The Scary Side of Genetically Modified
In Cudahy, Wisconsin, Sister Luigi Frigo conducts the same experiment with her second grade class every year. The children keep a group of mice in the classroom, and for four days feed them highly processed junk food (containing genetically modified ingredients and preservatives). On the first day the students notice a dramatic difference in the mice’s behavior. They become lazy, antisocial, and nervous. In a similar experiment at a high school in Appleton Wisconsin, the mice “destroyed their cardboard tube, were no longer nocturnal, stopped playing with each other, fought often, and two mice eventually killed the third and ate it.” according to author Jeffrey Smith. When they returned the mice to a healthy diet for a couple of weeks, they began to act normal again. One year, the class tried to repeat the experiment with the same group of mice a couple of months later, but they refused the food. Read more
What Consumers Need to Know About Organic Food
In Eastern Oregon resides the headquarters of a major beef conglomerate, Beef Northwest. They produce meat that is sold under the “Country Natural Beef” (CNB) label. The cows raised to produce this beef are brought up by small family farmers who allow the cattle access to pasture for the first 16-18 months of their lives. After that, they are sold to CNB. They are shipped to a feedlot, and fattened on a mix of corn, potato, and alfalfa feed (which cannot be guaranteed to be GMO free) for the remaining three months of their lives.
These feedlots have been under scrutiny in the past by organic food advocates, for administering illegal quantities of drugs to their animals. Now things are heating up again, this time the focus is on the workers. Read more
Keep Growing Power to the People
“Organic” can mean a lot of different things these days. Chemists define the word as a class of chemical compounds that have a carbon basis. Some people merely associate “organic” with something they bought at Trader Joe’s last week. “Organic” is most commonly thought of by American consumers as food that has been grown or raised without the use of conventional pesticides, antibiotics, or growth hormones. I know I always assumed that if something was labeled “organic” it meant it was probably produced in a more conscious, personal manner. But that is not always the case. Read more
The Freegans Among Us
The other day I listened to a customer in the coffee shop where I work complain about the cap Costco put on the amount of rice each customer can buy per visit. It occurred to me that this guy must not have heard about the world’s food crisis. I thought about suggesting to him that he try visiting Haiti, where a farmer can grow rice, but not actually afford to buy it.
The world’s poorest nations have been falling short of what many of us consider a basic right: to produce and reserve enough food to feed their own people. Now that this problem is hitting closer to home, I wonder how Americans will respond. Two recent articles in In These Times caught my attention on this subject. In David Moberg’s piece on the global food crisis he says, Read more
Pedal Powered Humanitarianism
While issues, like global warming and the threat of decreasing natural resources paint the media headlines green, there seems to be less room for other pressing social issues. What happened to Guantanamo Bay? School of Americas? The war in Darfur??
Maybe there is only so much room in the hearts and minds of compassionate Americans? What if we could combine forces and create organizational ventures that are socially responsible and ecologically friendly?
Read more
Ads in California Ask Environmentalists to Consider Racism
Yesterday an organization, called Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), began running radio ads in areas of California targeting environmentally-concerned citizens. They want people to know that immigrants are destroying “natural treasures” through over-population. In their press release they state:
“If we want to start healing our environment, we’ve got to slow population growth. More people mean more cars, more sprawl, higher energy demands, more air pollution, more demand for water and more paved-over farmland.”
Ecoploitation?
During the first three decades of the 1900s there was an intense ecological movement in Germany. It was a movement of youth that promoted a return to the land and opposed industrialization’s damage to the earth. They were called Wandervögel or in English “wandering free spirits”. They practiced and idealized a lot of the same things as modern day environmentalists. But what ultimately became of this movement would horrify most of today’s environmental activists.
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