Green Economy

Six eco-trends reshaping the fashion industry

Major brands and young, globally minded designers alike are asking the question: How do you come up with a garment that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and not rob from the future? Here are six trends that eco-designers are currently following.

Designer Natalie Chanin remembers the exact moment her fashion paradigm shifted. “I was standing on a street corner in the [New York City] Garment District holding this old T-shirt that I had ripped apart and sewn back together myself,” she says. A 20-year veteran of fashion and costume design, she’d spent the day meeting with manufacturers, asking them to do a hand-sewn line of her reconstituted T-shirts. People kept giving her “a cockeyed look, like I was from outer space,” she recalls. Standing at the corner of 37th and 8th after one meeting, Chanin realized she was finished with New York and with the industry status quo of fast and cheap production. “I looked at the stitching I was using and it looked like quilting stitches. That’s when I realized I should go back home.”

Chanin’s hometown is Florence, Alabama, once known as the T-shirt capital of the world for all the cotton milling, weaving and T-shirt production that went on there. When she returned in 2000 after her epiphany at 37th and 8th, the town was still adjusting to the sudden loss of 5,000 textile jobs as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Seeing the vacuum left behind in her community, Chanin questioned a business model that treats people like commodities, as disposable as the cheap garments it produces. Soon she started her own company, calledAlabama Chanin, which operates on a more sustainable model, employing local sewers, creating hand-finished garments built to last, and striving to run a zero-waste operation by “upcycling” (i.e., re-using) production leftovers.

Chanin isn’t alone in her ambition to radically rethink fashion. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of designers and apparel companies have embraced ethical alternatives to the industry’s resource-intensive and wasteful practices. And it’s not just diehard Al Gore fans making hemp yoga clothes. Fashion shows in major cities have started to include sustainable designs from major labels, and hundreds of new eco-fashion companies have come onto the scene. The last time eco was this chic, back in the early 1990s, the focus was on materials, like unbleached organic cotton. Today’s ethical trends reflect a deeper commitment to make the entire production process more sustainable.

In the early 1990s, the first eco-fashion line from a major label was Esprit’s Ecollection, designed by Lynda Grose, who today teaches sustainable design at the California College of the Arts. At the time, Grose says, it was hard to get management even to understand the value of organic cotton; today, many big-league retail brands not only offer organic cotton lines but have taken giant steps to address labor issues, pollution, recycling and sourcing of raw materials. “This is a long-term trend that will continue to grow,” says Grose, citing the collaboration of clothing companies Gap and H&M with the Cleaner Cotton Initiative; the improved labor standards of Levi Strauss & Co. and Nike; and the investment of upmarket U.K. department store Marks & Spencer in fair trade.

In 2005, Nike started assessing all design decisions through the lens of sustainability in a program called Considered Design. The goal: to reduce waste and increase the use of environmentally safe materials by 2020. The firm gives designers instant reporting on the environmental cost of their decisions so they can find cleaner ways of doing things right from the drawing board. “Nike is trying to move as quickly as we can to reduce our environmental impact, and the best way to do that is to include the designers in the process,” says Lorrie Vogel, general manager of Considered Design. “They’re our visionaries.”

Despite progress like this, industry leaders are well aware that there’s still more to do. “When you start accounting for the full cost of production,” says Jill Dumain, outdoor apparel company Patagonia’s director of environmental analysis, “the question becomes, How do you really come up with something that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and is not robbing from the future?”

Luckily, major established brands and young, globally minded designers alike are coming up with answers to exactly that question. Here’s a look at six trends that are bursting the seams of fashion’s old business model and creating a more sustainable future.

1) Know Your Supplier

Any idea you might have that ethical fashion is for dour do-gooders disappear when you see the French-Brazilian company Veja’s line of 1970s-inspired sneakers. “The main reason ethical fashion wasn’t selling was it didn’t have a sexy image,” explains Elizabeth Laskar of the Ethical Fashion Forum, a network of designers and fashion industry leaders in London. Veja shoes are sexy and chic enough to be an impulse buy, but they’re also the product of a meticulously cultivated supply chain from farmer to seamstress to salesperson to consumer. “We wanted to start from scratch,” says Sébastien Kopp, who co-founded the company with François-Ghislain Morillon in 2005.

When Kopp started looking for growers in Brazil who could consistently produce the materials he needed—organic cotton, wild-harvested rubber and vegetable-tanned leather—he found many farmers cultivating less than an acre of cotton and rubber harvesters who had no business know-how. Working with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), he helped organize and train the farmers in the Ceará region, developing the market for cotton. “It’s a global fight to work with very small producers,” he says. “They’re far away from communication links and roads. You have to know them, know their challenges and know the paradoxes in the field. But it has a long-term benefit for everybody.” Kopp is convinced that relationship-based supply chains are scalable; his company is growing fast, without advertising, and demand is strong on five continents. “If two crazy French guys did it, it’s possible,” he quips.

2) Just Say No to Waste

When he founded Rickshaw Bagworks, Mark Dwight was frustrated with the wasteful cycle of seasonal forecasting and overproduction common in the accessories industry. “I started looking just at the engineering part of this problem,” he says. “How do I get rid of waste in manufacturing?” His answer: a modular design concept featuring a classic bag interior and trend-driven fabrics on the exterior flaps. Since the interior remains the same, and can be updated with seasonal fabric styles, Dwight doesn’t stockpile unsold finished goods that need to be dumped at season’s end. He has also created the Zero Bag, made from a single piece of nylon, with not a scrap wasted. “Mother Nature has a certain healing capacity and we’ve exceeded that capacity, so now we’re starting to live in our own waste,” Dwight says. “As a species, we’re smart enough to solve just about any problem. Now is the time.”

3) Close the Loop

When you wear out a Patagonia garment, you don’t have to feel guilty about disposing of it. Just take it to a Patagonia location and it’ll be recycled into something new. “When you look at this raw material, which is in essence the same raw material as the end product, reusing it makes sense,” says Patagonia’s Dumain. The company’s directors are working to make all products recyclable by 2010. The firm has already seen energy and carbon emissions reductions as a result. “The more we learn about how much energy it takes to grow, extract or mine raw material, the more we’re convinced that closed-loop cycles make sense,” says Dumain. Adds the California College of the Arts’ Grose: “The old model was linear; you make it, sell it and dispose of it. The new model is cyclical.”

4) Start Upcycling

With millions of tons of perfectly usable clothes thrown away every year, designers have started tapping into this waste stream for raw material and inspiration. Britain’s Junky Styling and Canada’s Preloved brands have both made fresh “upcycled” designs constructed from clothes that would otherwise end up in the landfill. U.K.-based designer Mia Nisbet has gone a step further. In her fashion studies at the Glasgow School of Art, Nisbet discovered one of the disturbing side effects of fashion’s fast-consumption model is that old clothes get dumped on markets in Africa. “When these clothes are exported to African countries, it can be devastating to the fashion economy,” she says.

To turn this situation around, she started a business based in Malawi. She purchases castoff clothes from street markets and hires local tailors to construct her creative designs, which mix Western styles and locally produced traditional Malawian textiles. Her clothes, sold in boutiques in London and Los Angeles, bring lost fashion wages back to Malawi’s economy. Nisbet hopes her initiative will inspire consumers to look at their own closets differently. “The way the disposable fast fashion market is going these days, it’s important to take stock of what we’ve already got. People don’t realize what they’ve already got in their wardrobe may have the potential to be something different.”

5) Go GLobal

It used to be that designers in Paris, New York and Milan would send out their concepts to be produced by cheap labor in the rest of the world. But fashion shows and shops increasingly showcase designers from developing economies like South Africa, Brazil and India. Tamsin Lejeune, director of London’s Ethical Fashion Forum, says this will support the evolution of an increasingly equitable marketplace. “For emerging economies, fashion is an inspirational way they can access more trade,” she says. “It’s a more sustainable model, which isn’t exclusively about businesses in the West sourcing [in the developing world.]“

Many of these designers are also attuned to environmental and social issues. Samant Chauhan, from Bihar, India, has created a widely acclaimed line of couture silk garments made entirely from silk harvested without killing the silkworm. Chauhan aims to preserve the age-old spinning and weaving techniques in his native village, Bhagalpur. “This was my hometown but I was not aware of this silk,” he says. “When I was in fashion school, I came to know this is something very unique.” Now he works with a local NGO to organize craftspeople to negotiate with buyers from the apparel and home décor industries.

6) Take It Slow

Natalie Chanin may run Alabama Chanin from an abandoned T-shirt mill in her hometown of Florence, Alabama, but her business model is radically different from those mass production days. Chanin takes a “slow” approach to fashion. Slow design focuses on quality and on “an awareness of the materials and the people making them,” says Kate Fletcher, a U.K.-based fashion consultant, credited with applying the concept to fashion.

Chanin draws inspiration from the days of Alabama’s quilting bees, when women would gather to hand-stitch quilts, and from her grandparents, who lived simply and grew their own food. “It seemed to me my grandparents actually had it right,” Chanin says. “They lived with respect for everything around them.” Chanin’s garments are created with that same respect for quality and craftsmanship. They are handpainted and embroidered by local craftswomen. “How much better would it be,” she muses “if we only bought things that we love so much we never want them to leave our life?” Chanin also sells patterns and raw materials for those who want to try making their own.

Chanin’s company may be small but it’s leading a new trend, in which style is defined not only by the cut of the cloth, but by the integrity of the business model.

source: ode, Carmel Wroth

MillerCoors Recycles 98 Percent of Brewery Waste, Saves Resources

MillerCoors released its 2009 Sustainable Development Report, “From Grain to Glass,” last week, representing the first such report since the 2008 joint venture between the two beer giants.

Recycling efforts outlined in the report contributed to a 98 percent recycling rate of all MillerCoors brewery waste in 2008. Photo: MillerCoors.com

The report highlights the companies sustainable development efforts in five main areas:

• Alcohol Responsibility
• Environmental Sustainability
• Sustainable Supply Chain
• People and Community Investments
• Ethics and Transparency

According to the report, MillerCoors was able to reuse or recycle an impressive 98 percent of all brewery waste, including glass, plastics, paperboard, metals and organic waste.

The company partners to manage recycling and reuse of all brewing byproducts, including materials such as spent yeast. From ethanol production from waste beer to animal feed from left over barley melt, there is a place to reuse most all the organic waste produced.

The joint venture between Miller and Coors enabled the companies to travel 45 million fewer miles annually when transporting beer to the market, representing a reduction of 75,000 tons of carbon emissions.

Other sustainability highlights include:

• Reduction of 10.4 million pounds of aluminum used per year due to a small reduction in the diameter of aluminum can ends.
• Increased production of beer, but decreased usage of water. The company exceeded the 5.0:1.0 water-to-beer ratio standard set by the United Nations Environment Program at 4.1:1.0.
• Reduction of corrugate packaging in point-of-sale marketing displays.
• A reduction in the amount of aluminum needed in cans by seven percent over the last five years in two main breweries- the equivalent aluminum used to build 168 Boeing 737 airplanes.

“In our first year as a new company, we have established a strategy around sustainable development,” said Cornell Boggs, Chief Responsibility and Ethics Officer for MillerCoors. “This report brings our hard work to light and puts the focus on MillerCoors people, business partners and communities.”

source: earth911, Lori Brown

Why Best Buy Is Rooting for the Smart Grid

The retail giant that helped bring car stereos, camcorders, and CD players to the masses wants to be homeowners’ best friend in the emerging world of smarter, greener technology.

Best Buy hasn’t been front and center as a green business leader. Thecorporate responsibility section of its website focuses primarily on Energy Star appliances and e-waste recycling, which the company rolled out to all of its 1,000 or so U.S. stores earlier this year. Beyond that, the company seems to be engaged in the usual efforts to reduce its environmental footprint.

Behind the scenes, however, Best Buy has aspirations to become consumers’ go-to resource for a range of green products and services, from e-vehicles to solar panels to a myriad of gizmos designed to help households plug into the smart energy grid as it rolls out in the coming years. The company’s thinking, along with its initial efforts, suggests that the mainstreaming of next-gen green products is within view.

At first blush, a company better known for stereos than solar panels may seem an odd match to be ground zero for green tech. But there’s a logical link. As the wired and wireless connections grow among home energy systems, electric vehicles, and information technology, consumers will need a reliable resource for finding products and expertise, as well as the ability to make everything work together as advertised. That’s where Best Buy hopes to come in.

If you scan the landscape of what’s coming over the next few years, you begin to see the opportunities: plug-in electric cars that not only can recharge from a household outlet, but which can serve as an energy storage device to power your home as needed; plug-and-play home solar or wind energy devices that can be installed by homeowners; smart home appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers that can negotiate with the local utility to take advantage of the lowest-possible energy rates, or power down to reduce grid stress; home energy meters and related gadgets that allow you to program lighting, heating, cooling, and appliances so as to maximize comfort and minimize energy bills; the ability to control all this remotely via any computer or smart phone; and more.

“When you turn to the smart grid, the ability to take complex technologies that are going to plug into the home, utilize home area networks, communicate back over broadband to utilities — it’s going to be a fairly complex system,” Rick Rommel, Best Buy’s Senior Vice President, Emerging Business, explained to me recently. “We think that’s a place where Best Buy can take our experience in in-home systems sales, support, and installation and apply it to the smart grid.”

The fruits of these aspirations are just now finding their way into Best Buy stores. In the past few weeks, the company introduced electric bicycles at 20 stores in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area (as well as online). It also plans to offer a cool electric motorcycle, the Enertia, made by Oregon-based Brammo, in which the retailer’s venture capital arm, Best Buy Capital, made an investment last fall. “An electric scooter is really just a battery and a computer on wheels,” Rommel points out.

If they get traction from customers, e-bikes and motorcycles could become an entry point for Best Buy as a purveyor of other electric vehicles — both sales and rentals. “The change that’s in front of us right now is the transition from gasoline to electric,” says Rommel. “And if you look at the disruption that this transition in technology does to sales channels, it opens up opportunities for companies like Best Buy to begin to participate.” The company hasn’t made any announcements — and Rommel wouldn’t say — but what follows could be small neighborhood electric vehicles like the Peapod or the Zenn. And maybe even e-vehicle rentals: “We’ve heard that the Zipcar community is increasingly asking for secondary cars like trucks and vans that you need just once in a while,” says Rommel. “So why invest in a really expensive second vehicle when you can get it only when you need it?”

And then there’s the service piece — the critical need to help consumers install and maintain all these gizmos. That’s where the Geek Squadcomes in. Rommel sees the Best Buy unit — the company bought the Minneapolis startup that specialized in repairing and installing PCs in 2002 — as a natural component of its greentech strategy. “We’ve been the smart friend that helps the consumer do it themselves, or when they need help in the home we’ll do it for them. And that has allowed them to make more sense and get more value from the complex products you put in the home. From a consumer’s point of view, if one device that connects to my home area network that does home energy management doesn’t work, who do you think they’re going to call? Geeks make high-tech house calls, and that is a tremendously valuable asset in a home environment that’s becoming increasingly complex.”

The story can potentially spin out from there. If Best Buy can garner a following of greentech-minded consumers, the company could play a pivotal role in working with utilities, product manufacturers, and others to design consumer-friendly products — just, as I imagine, it already does for everything from cell phones to flat-screen TVs — along with the technologies that integrate them, leveraging the smart-home communications standards that are beginning to emerge. There’s potential for the company to help accelerate markets.

It’s a compelling story line, to be sure, but equally important is that it illustrates the potential for incumbent companies to be key players in advancing green technology. While cutting-edge innovation will likely come from countless start-ups, it will be up to the mass merchandisers to accelerate market uptake beyond the green devotees and early adopters.

In the case of Best Buy, it appears to be an early adopter itself, potentially gaining a competitive edge as the green economy truly fulfills its promise.

source: greenbiz

EcoLogo to Develop Environmental Standard for Toys

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — The EcoLogo Program has started developing a standard that will allow toys to receive EcoLogo certification for meeting certain environmental criteria.

The EcoLogo Program has so far developed more than 120 different standards covering a wide swath of products. More than 7,000 products from 300 brands and companies have been certified to the various standards. Each standard has specific environmental criteria based on the product or service it covers.

“Growing numbers of toys and children’s products have been making environmental claims like ‘all natural’ and ‘earth friendly’ without consistent meanings to the terms and without providing any proof of the accuracy or relevance of the claims,” Scot Case, executive director of the EcoLogo Program, said in a statement. “The new EcoLogo standard will define clear criteria that products must meet before they can claim environmental leadership.”

Vague terms and a lack of widely-accepted definitions of some phrases has also led the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to work on revamping itsGreen Guides, which offer guidance on the use of marketing and advertising claims.

The EcoLogo Program’s toy standard development process will last 12-18 months and is accepting input from any interested parties, whether they’re consumers, companies, non-government organizations or others. The process will first determine what environmental issues and questions the standard should address.

source: greenbiz, GreenDesignStaff

Recycling

Maine Passes CFL Recycling Law for Manufacturers

Maine is the first state to pass a law requiring companies that manufacture compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) to fund recycling programs. Known as Legislative Directive 973, the law also establishes standards for the amount of mercury present in each bulb.

Similar recycling legislation is currently being reviewed in California, Massachusetts and Vermont, while California already passed a law enforcing mercury content.

While Maine is the first state to pass the CFL Recycling law, companies around the country, such as Home Depot, accept CFLs for recycling. Photo: Charlesandhudson.com

CFLs have been endorsed by groups including the EPA and ENERGY STAR for their energy-efficiency and longer life span than incandescent bulbs.

However, the presence of several milligrams of mercury has caused several states to ban them from landfills, which is not an issue with incandescent bulbs.

LD973 will go into effect on Sept. 12, and manufacturers will be required to submit a recycling plan in 2010. Mandatory collection of bulbs will begin in 2011.

Michael Bender, policy project director for the Mercury Policy Project, said in a statement, “Passage of this law sends a clear message out nationally (and globally) that a new day is dawning for total life cycle management and shared responsibility—from ‘the cradle to the grave’ for products containing mercury and other hazardous substances.”

For consumers, it’s unlikely that Maine’s laws will provide any differences on the surface. Nationally, retailers including Home Depot and IKEA already accepted CFL bulbs for recycling, and Maine just completed a pilot-program where consumers could drop off burnt-out bulbs at other locations for free.

Capitalizing on the new legislation, Air Cycle has upgraded the services of its LampRecycling.com site. The company offers recycling reports, certificates and tracking of shipped bulbs so its customers can be in compliance with CFL recycling laws.

source:earth911, Trey Granger

Green Building

Rice Concrete Cuts Greenhouse Emissions

A new way of processing rice husks for use in concrete could lead to a boom in green construction.

Rice husks form small cases around edible kernels of rice and are rich in silicon dioxide (SiO2), an essential ingredient in concrete. Scientists have recognized the potential value of rice husks as a building material for decades, but past attempts to burn it produced an ash too contaminated with carbon to be useful as a cement substitute.

The world’s penchant for consuming concrete is a huge problem for climate change. Every ton of cement manufactured for use in concrete emits a ton of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Worldwide, cement production accounts for about 5 percent of all CO2 emissions related to human activity.

source: ENN

Energy

U.S. power plant emissions fall

U.S. power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide dropped sharply in the first half of the year as the electricity industry prepared for tighter regulation in 2010, Genscape said Monday.

Sulfur dioxide emissions were down 24 percent compared to the first half of 2008, much more than would be expected due to the recession and lower electricity demand, the power industry data provider said in its quarterly review of energy trends.

“The industry is clearly going through a dress rehearsal for the implementation of the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) in 2010, and judging by allowance prices as well as the fundamental data, it is a stellar performance,” Genscape said.

Other emissions also were down, though exact comparisons with SO2 were complicated by different rules governing the three pollutants, Genscape Senior Vice President Abudi Zein said.

This year versus last, nitrogen oxide emissions fell 5 percent in May and 11 percent in June, mostly due to the recession, the report said.

Second-quarter carbon dioxide emissions were down 10 percent in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative service area, where they can be monitored, mostly due to cool weather in the Northeast and the recession, Genscape said.

But the decline in SO2 is largely because of the new rules coming in 2010 and an allowance scheme that favors early implementation, the power data provider said.

Article continues:  http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5655EL20090706?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

source:ENN

International

The Ripple Effect: Seeding Innovation in Securing and Transporting Clean Water

In so many parts of the world, attaining and transporting clean water for drinking and cooking takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and effort. In fact, an estimated 1.2 billion people worldwide lack easy access to clean water. And even those who can get to a source of clean water, oftentimes end up with contaminated water by the time they transport it home in various types of vessels. It obviously just shouldn’t be that way… so global design consultancy IDEO decided to join forces with the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that invests in entrepreneurs to solve the problems of global poverty, in order to find suitable solutions for clean water portability in the developing world. The effort is called The Ripple Effect. (The project will be one many innovative projects discussed on the second day of the Social Capital MarketsSOCAP09 conference in September.)

So far, the collaborative has completed the first half of the project in India. The second half, focusing on East Africa, is now underway. Funding for the project came through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The approach is to work with local organizations that are already providing community water–some of these groups are businesses, some are NGOs. Our goal is to innovate in the sector as a whole by improving access [to clean water and transport] through collaborative design,” explains Sally Madsen, an IDEO designer working on the project.

The first phase of the India project was to partner with experts in India to assess the needs and the unique requirements for collecting and transporting clean water in India. The team learned a number of important aspects of water collection in India from this experience which would later impact how they developed solutions. They learned, for example, that one’s caste has a direct relationship to what type of access to clean water one has, and that this could mean that even if a person in low caste is provided an improved means of attaining water, they might not be permitted to use it. They learned that in some slums, such as in Mumbai, families have very little space inside their homes to store water, a factor that would need to be worked into water storage design. They also learned that different people around the country have differing levels of standards when it comes to defining what clean water means.

In late winter of this year, the collaborative team conducted a workshop in Hyderabad, to which it invited members of local organizations involved in water procurement to join. During the workshop they talked about ways the group could create systems tailored to the particular needs of Indians and begin brainstorming and creating prototypes. The next step was to identify local companies and NGOs to which it would award grants and coaching as they move forward with their designs. These grants went to Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, Naandi, Piramal Water, WaterHealth India, and Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP).

These groups proceeded by creating prototypes and testing them in the field for various water-toting applications, based on the distance that individuals would need to travel with the water and how they would store it once they arrived at home.

Finally, each of the awardees presented its solution for clean water procurement and/or transport at the India Water Summit on June 12, an annual event designed to advance clean water access and infrastructure in the country. You can read more about their presentations and solutions here.

“We are looking at this as seeding innovation,” says Madsen. “We are not just doing design, but we are teaching the design process and we think that these organizations can internalize this. These groups will then learn from each other. It’s a new model for encouraging collaboration.”

photo: IDEO

source: triplepundit

Food

How Organic Farms are Shortchanged

The consumer demand for organic food has increased, according to a report released last month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Sales of organic food more than quintupled, increasing from $3.6 billion in 1997 to $18.9 billion in 2007. In 2006 alone the U.S. organic industry grew 21 percent in sales. Over two-thirds of consumers buy organic products at least occasionally, and 28 percent of consumers buy organic weekly.

The USDA report states that the “fast-paced growth” of the demand for organic food “has led to input and product shortages in organic supply chains.” The report cited a 2004 survey that found 44 percent of organic handlers had a shortage of needed ingredients or products, and 13 percent were not able to meet the market demand for at least one organic product in 2004.

The report concludes that public investment in organic farming “facilitates wider access to organic food for consumers and helps farmers capture high-value markets and boost farm income.”

“Two of the major findings of the USDA report—conventional food corporations taking over successful independent organic companies, and increasing dependence on imports—are not unrelated,” said Charlotte Vallaeys, Farm and Food Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute.

A few weeks ago the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interviewwith Marion Nestle, a nutrition and public policy expert and activist. Nestle pointed out that until the last farm bill, “organic farmers received not one break from the federal government,” but corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton farmers receive about $20 billion a year in farm subsidies.

Nestle also noted that fruits and vegetables, essential for human nutrition, are considered to be specialty crops by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). “Industrial agriculture also benefits from federally administered marketing programs and from cozy relationships with congressional committees and the USDA,” Nestle added.

Going organic is a process and farmers need help during that process. The latest farm bill provides $22 million in mandatory funding to offset the costs of getting and keeping organic certification. It also includes $78 million over five years for research on production and marketing practices.

The goal of federal farm bills since the first one was passed in 1949 is to help family farmers. However, over 60 percent of small family farmers are not eligible for subsidies, according to U.S. Agricultural Census data. Seventy-one percent of farm subsidies go to the top ten percent of subsidy receivers, according to the Organic Farmers and Gardeners Union, most of which are large farms.

Small farms (27 acres or less) have “more than ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms,” according to Christos Vasilikiotis from U.C. Berkeley. Converting small farms from traditional methods to organic “would lead to sizeable increases of food production worldwide.” Vasilikiotis believes that “only organic methods” will help small farms survive and increase their productivity.

source: triplepundit

Climate Change

Study: Tropical rain band is shifting north

Warming suspected; freshwater shortages for some Pacific isles likely

Earth’s most prominent rain band, near the equator, has been moving north at an average rate of almost a mile a year for three centuries, likely because of a warming world, scientists say.

The band supplies fresh water to almost a billion people and affects climate elsewhere.

If the migration continues, some Pacific islands near the equator that today enjoy abundantrainfall may be starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner, researchers report in the July issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“We’re talking about the most prominent rainfall feature on the planet, one that many people depend on as the source of their freshwater because there is no groundwater to speak of where they live,” said Julian Sachs, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper. “In addition many other people who live in the tropics but farther afield from the Pacific could be affected because this band of rain shapes atmospheric circulation patterns throughout the world.”

While water is increasingly becoming a hot commodity around the globe, there is no global water shortage. Human demand for water has tripled in the past 50 years, by some estimates. Yet Earth has essentially as much water now as ever — about 360 quintillion gallons.

Rather, human populations put ever more pressure on local and regional water resources, which in some cases — such as the American Southwest — are dwindling with climate change. The water still exists, it just gets dumped elsewhere.

The band of tropical rainfall is created at what scientists call the intertropical convergence zone. There, just north of the equator, trade winds from the northern and southern hemispheres collide where heat pours into the atmosphere from the tropical sun. Rain clouds up to 30,000 feet thick dump as much as 13 feet of rain a year in some places.

The amount of rain in the zone actually increased between 1979 and 2005, this video shows.

The band is thought to have hugged the equator 350 years ago, during the planet’s Little Ice Age (roughly 1400 to 1850).

From dry to downpours
The authors analyzed natural records of rainfall (including microbes and chemical ratios) left in annual layers of lake and lagoon sediments from four Pacific islands at or near the equator.

Washington Island, about 5 degrees north of the equator, is now at the southern edge of the intertropical convergence zone and receives nearly 10 feet of rain a year. But during the Little Ice Age it was arid. A similar arid past was found for Palau, which lies about 7 degrees north of the equator and in the heart of the modern convergence zone.

In contrast, the researchers present evidence that the Galapagos Islands, today an arid place on the equator in the Eastern Pacific, had a wet climate during the Little Ice Age.

“If the intertropical convergence zone was 550 kilometers, or 5 degrees, south of its present position as recently as 1630, it must have migrated north at an average rate of 1.4 kilometers — just less than a mile — a year,” Sachs said in a statement. “Were that rate to continue, the intertropical convergence zone will be 126 kilometers — or more than 75 miles — north of its current position by the latter part of this century.”

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Gary Comer Science and Education Foundation.

© 2009 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

source: msnbc

Opinion

Betraying the Planet

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

source: New York Times, Paul Krugman