Slow Money: A New Movement for Social Enterprise

Social Enterprise | Marcia Stepanek | Friday 6th November 2009

Woody Tasch is a man with a mission. The former venture capitalist-turned-revolutionary, as he calls himself, is the guru of "slow money" - the name Tasch gives to his philosophy that combines a passion for social enterprise with the benefits of locally-grown food. Tasch is the catalyst behind a new national campaign to persuade at least 1 million Americans to donate between $25 and $1,000 each to
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Leading News and Opinion

	How good is your healthcare? Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 6th November 2009 Or doctor? Or hospital? Chances are, if you are satisfied with the outcome, you'd say the care was good. If you've had bad experiences then your review would be less positive. Regardless, you probably have little information to evaluate the quality of the healthcare you receive, the doctors providing it, or the hospitals housing them. How is the quality of healthcare evaluated? On the national level, you can look at key health indicators like life expectancy and under-5 infant mortality. Live in Switzerland or Costa Rica? Life expectancy is around 82 or 79 years, and the under-5 infant mortality rate is 5 and 11 per 1000, respectively. Live in Somalia or South Africa, however, and life expectancy drops to about 53 years, and infant mortality climbs to 154 and 49 per 1000, respectively. Lots of factors contribute to those figures, in themselves they don't tell us what is causing people to thrive or die, and besides moving from Somalia to Costa Rica, they don't help you make health decisions. National health insurance coverage figures tell us something about ability to pay bills: Only 1% of Taiwanese lack health insurance compared to 20% of Americans under the age of 65. But that doesn't tell us about health or care. Process measures are a good start, and at least in the US these are readily available for hospitals, less so for doctors. These report how often hospitals are doing important things: Giving aspirin to heart attack patients, for example. They are the types of things that have been shown to improve health outcomes, but they are not outcomes themselves. Read More

	Chickens In the City and Goats on the Roof: Keeping Livestock in Urban Environments Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 6th November 2009 I want chickens. However, given that my yard space is no more than six meters long, I think that this may be an unrealistic goal. Seriously, though, urban agriculture has branched out in recent years, and one of its more prominent branches is the idea of keeping farm animals in urban environments, mostly for eggs and milk, sometimes for meat. While backyard vegetable gardens and community garden plots are considered to be relatively innocuous in many urban areas, the idea of livestock in cities can be a little more difficult to sell. Different cultures have different ideas about the social acceptability of urban livestock. In Asia, animals have been a socially-acceptable part of cities for centuries because they are used to turn waste into food. In Africa, early colonial powers resisted the idea of urban livestock as backward, yet the practice prevailed. In Europe and the United States, the keeping of urban livestock has historically been a fringe activity that is rarely discussed. Many of the world's urban farmers are landless and rely on restaurant scraps and the leavings of urban horticulture to feed their animals. While urban livestock provide a valuable source of food and income, these animals are often feared as a source of noise and disease. In urban areas where rats roam the sewers and cars zoom busily around the streets, fears about the potential disease and noise from urban chickens seem a little extreme, but these fears are there. While all animals bring the potential for disease, access to veterinary services and good public health codes can moderate potential problems. Some argue that keeping small flocks of urban chickens may actually be a solution to controlling disease outbreaks like avian flu, since birds in urban, free-range flocks have smaller populations than those in factory farms, and therefore there is a smaller chance that the virus will spread and mutate. Read More

	American Policy: Three Reasons Politicians Wrong to Slowly Mitigate Climate Change Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Thursday 5th November 2009 A majority of American policy makers believe waiting 6 - 20 years and gradually mitigating climate change is the best way for America to act. Self proclaimed pragmatists, their argument goes something like this: to sign on with current climate change mitigation plans would require replacing functioning equipment prematurely at an ineffective cost. We should instead wait until equipment needs replacement- because emitting a ton of carbon in the atmosphere now is the same as emitting it 20 years later- we should wait to act. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong. Reason #1 To Act Sooner: A ton of carbon in the atmosphere now is not the same as a ton of carbon later on. Currently, the atmosphere has 380ppm of CO2e in the atmosphere; we will reach 550ppm by 2050 (IPCC, 2007). An increase of 380ppm to 381ppm isn't alarming. An increase from 550ppm to 551 and you start to play dice with the planet. Many American politicians don't address this "fat tail" problem: events that are low probability, highly catastrophic. Even if we become carbon neutral at 550ppm, there's a 4.2% probability of reaching an 8°C rise in temperature (Stern, 2008); to date, no politician has mentioned such probabilities in the States. Read More

	The Indelible Automobile Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 5th November 2009 Ever since Henry Ford rolled the first model T off of the assembly line, the automobile has shaped how countries have moved people and things. Items and people that were once moved by horse and buggy, and then later railway have increasingly been moved by cars and trucks. The highway systems of the US and Western Europe have become the model by which many developing nations shape their own transportation policies with cars and their necessary roads symbolizing progress. Even China is losing its status as the world's "bicycle kingdom" as the emerging middle class increasingly forgoes clean and energy efficient bicycle transport in favor of the car and Chinese government policy follows suit. But the automobile as the primary form of transport is a highly unsustainable pursuit. The contribution that cars make to climate change are well documented, but even if cars did not have a negative effect on the climate they are still not the ideal form of transport. There is sadly, a high human cost associated with driving. According to the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System roughly 35,000 Americans are killed annually in automobile accidents. Worldwide auto accidents take 1.2 million lives a year, a number that rises to 2 million per year when the effects of car related air pollution are taken into consideration. It is not only those riding in vehicles for whom cars pose a risk; pedestrians and bicyclists are often the unwitting victims of auto accidents. Read More

	Hedgerows: Secret Gardens That Support Sustainable Agriculture Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Thursday 5th November 2009 The lofty hedge - it's both a victim of topiary madness and the alternative to a fence for those who farm. It's also a secret garden that supports sustainable agriculture across Britain. There are nearly two million hedgerows in Britain. Many of them sit beside farm fields and delineate the boundaries of these fields. They also create a boundary that sheep and other livestock find difficult to cross. The hedgerow plays another, more subtle role in British agriculture. In an area with open fields, hedgerows are a refuge for wildlife and help support a sustainable farm ecosystem. Many hedges have been safeguarding farms for hundreds of years. Ancient hedges can date back to Saxon times, making them a thousand years old. Plants like hawthorn are common in hedgerows, and these planted areas also support more than two hundred species of non-hedge plants like ferns and flowers. These diverse and thriving rows of plants prevent soil erosion and create wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors, a last refuge of wildness in a human-dominated landscape. How can a shrub be so important in the ecological life of a farm? On a farm that strives to connect with its local ecosystems, refuges for wildlife are important. Bees are critical pollinators of farm crops, as are butterflies. Hedgerows are a place where wildflowers still grow, so they are important food sources for these pollinating insects. Most hedgerow plants are deciduous, which means that they lose their leaves in the fall. This layer of leaves is an important place for beneficial insects to survive the winter and replenish their populations in the spring. For larger animals, hedgerows are also sanctuaries. Birds eat the insects that can eat farm crops, and they hide their nests in nearby hedgerows. Larger predators like foxes use hedgerows as roadways to hunt mice and rats, animals that eat food crops. Read More

	American Policy: Climate Change Misinformation and Illiteracy Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 It is a growing concern that the world will have to move on without the US in trying to reach a climate change agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol. Many blame US inaction on a regrettable majority of Americans being climate change illiterate. Culpability lies within a range of reasons from big business lobbying against climate change legislation, the current economic fiasco, and a general lack of understanding of climate change for the average American. Even in California conversations regarding climate change are light and uninformed/misinformed when compared to Europe and the rest of the world. Not only is it a problem that there is little understanding and support; there is unfortunately opposition to protect our planet. September 28, 2009, a Bloomberg poll revealed climate change ranked dead last as a concern for US citizens. The Economy overwhelmingly gathered 46% of the vote, health care 23%, federal budget deficit 16%, Iraq and Afghanistan wars 10%, and finally Climate Change 2%. These results coincide with immediate individualistic concerns regarding job security and personal health. Unfortunately, there's more to the lack of American understanding regarding climate change than immediacy. Read More

	Social Values: How Vulnerable to Profit? Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 There's a boom in the creation of social enterprises but there's also a debate raging among the leaders of this new field over whether the most successful new enterprises will be able to sustain all of their original core values of social good -- especially if or when these new organizations link up with or get bought by for-profit firms. Gabriel Brodbar, director of New York University's Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship, cites this concern as one of the more important topics facing the new field of social entrepreneurship. During a break in the recent PopTech conference for social innovation in Camden, Maine, I caught up with Brodbar; here's an edited transcript of that conversation: What do you see as the key trends facing those in the field of social enterprise this fall? Within the socially entrepreneurially-focused organizations out there -- like Ashoka, StartingBloc, NYU Reynolds, Ashoka, Justmeans and others -- I think there's a philosophical debate afoot. The motivation of these organizations has a lot to do with ethical integrity, consistency, and commitment, and it's all good. In all sectors, if you can play around large-scale social change, it's great and if companies don't want to, that's okay too. But a lot of the companies that play in the social enterprise space today were formed because of their desire to realize a specific social change or to realize social impact in a very specific way. Companies like Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, Tom's Shoes, Stony Field Farms, Honest Tea -- all of these companies have very strong corporate social responsibility [CSR] principles baked into their DNA. There was no b.s. there [when these firms were created]. These principles were all very for-real; there was a tremendous amount of due diligence in the supply chain in terms of their environmental impact and so forth. Honest Tea, for example, did one of the most thorough and honest assessments of its carbon footprint, and they did that because of a genuine commitment to the environment and also a genuine concern for their bottom line. Coca-Cola just took a 40 percent stake in Honest Tea, and I think that within the next six months, Coke could buy a controlling stake in it. This has raised a lot of debate and speculation over whether these new developments will change Honest Tea. And it's not just Honest Tea. There is nothing in place -- no legal entities and no contract that insures that when a social enterprise changes hands that the corporate socially responsible behaviors that are associated with the brand -- the ones that made the company what it is -- are going to continue. There are, I think, some great efforts in play to encourage acquired companies to behave in more socially responsible ways but there is nothing that guarantees these behaviors will continue in the case of partnerships or takeovers by for-profit companies. Should public sentiment shift and suddenly [social enterprises] become less in vogue, what's to insure that these socially responsible behaviors continue beyond the initial relationships? Read More

	Playing God: Are We Trying to Make Developing Countries into Our Own Image? Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 Development is difficult. Solving world hunger, for example, is not simply a question of feeding the hungry. Food aid argues the charitable organization CARE, may actually spur on hunger by destabilizing local food economies and driving local farmers out of business. Teaching the hungry how to more efficiently farm, can actually create new unexpected inefficiencies. The Green Revolution in India, in which farmers in the Indian state of Punjab switched from traditional methods to American-style farming - with chemicals, high-yield seeds and irrigation- was once thought to be a rousing success. However, under scrutiny the shiny label of success has lost some of its sheen: India's Green Revolution has depleted ground water, destroyed soil through salinization, locked farmers into cycles of debt and turned what was once a localized hunger problem into a structural one. It also hasn't actually solved India's hunger problem: 1/4th of the world's hungry call India home. A whopping 230 million people or 18% of India's 1.25 billion population is hungry. It is this model (with the addition of GMO technology) that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a driving force in development, is tenuously throwing its support behind to end hunger in Africa. Read More

	When green choices aren't healthy Health \| Ano Lobb \| Tuesday 3rd November 2009 One of the great things about Justmeans is how it fuses so many interrelated ideas. Whether its climate change, sustainable food, ethical consumption, or social enterprise, it all plays a major role in the health of individuals and populations. But good work can be corrupted, for example eco-labeling occasionally attempts to "green wash" products into seaming more earth and people friendly than they are. And sometimes seemingly responsible choices turn out to be unhealthy ones. A few examples: Solar panels are one ethical solution to growing global demand for electricity. However, an essential silicon compound created during manufacturing leaves a toxic byproduct, silicon tetrachloride. Extremely damaging to human tissue, it can cause burns, kidney failure, and lesions in the liver and heart. Ethical manufacturing practices call for energy-intensive remediation of this toxin, but unfortunately several documented cases in China, currently the world leader in solar panel production, have found where this toxin was dumped in fields, contaminating nearby communities. CFL (compact fluorescent) bulbs are popular for their long life and meager electricity consumption. What is rarely mentioned is that they contain mercury. Each CFL contains about a tenth of the amount of mercury found in an old thermometer. That wouldn't be much if you only had one light bulb. But the average house has 20 to 30, meaning a significant amount of mercury. Not only is it likely to up in a landfill, but whenever a bulb breaks, you are exposing yourself and family to a potent neurotoxin. Read More

	Digging out of the Junk Mail Mountain Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Tuesday 3rd November 2009 After going to my mailbox to collect my mail after a few days away, I am always surprised at just how much junk gets crammed into that little box. If it isn't those annoying reminders from magazine companies alerting to me that if I act NOW I can save up to 50% off the newsstand price, its credit cards that I'm instantly approved for, or catalogs I have no idea where they got my address. (No, I am not a 60 year old male with prostate problems, thank you very much.) Buried among that mess are the bank statements, bills, and a few super market circulars. Yes, it seems that the majority of what gets sent through the post now-a-days is junk. Thinking just how much paper and waste is generated from all that mail does not do well to support a greener product consumption. So how can we rid ourselves of the mountains of junk mail? There is a way to unburden yourself from all those unwanted deliveries, but it will take some effort on your part and a bit of persistence, as those advertisers desperately want your business. (Economic times are tough for everyone!) But don't let that dissuade you from doing the right thing. First, before recycling all that paper, (I know you would never just toss it in the trash! :) ) take a moment to Read More

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	How good is your healthcare? Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 6th November 2009 Or doctor? Or hospital? Chances are, if you are satisfied with the outcome, you'd say the care was good. If you've had bad experiences then your review would be less positive. Regardless, you probably have little information to evaluate the quality of the healthcare you receive, the doctors providing it, or the hospitals housing them. How is the quality of healthcare evaluated? On the national level, you can look at key health indicators like life expectancy and under-5 infant mortality. Live in Switzerland or Costa Rica? Life expectancy is around 82 or 79 years, and the under-5 infant mortality rate is 5 and 11 per 1000, respectively. Live in Somalia or South Africa, however, and life expectancy drops to about 53 years, and infant mortality climbs to 154 and 49 per 1000, respectively. Lots of factors contribute to those figures, in themselves they don't tell us what is causing people to thrive or die, and besides moving from Somalia to Costa Rica, they don't help you make health decisions. National health insurance coverage figures tell us something about ability to pay bills: Only 1% of Taiwanese lack health insurance compared to 20% of Americans under the age of 65. But that doesn't tell us about health or care. Process measures are a good start, and at least in the US these are readily available for hospitals, less so for doctors. These report how often hospitals are doing important things: Giving aspirin to heart attack patients, for example. They are the types of things that have been shown to improve health outcomes, but they are not outcomes themselves. Read More

	Chickens In the City and Goats on the Roof: Keeping Livestock in Urban Environments Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 6th November 2009 I want chickens. However, given that my yard space is no more than six meters long, I think that this may be an unrealistic goal. Seriously, though, urban agriculture has branched out in recent years, and one of its more prominent branches is the idea of keeping farm animals in urban environments, mostly for eggs and milk, sometimes for meat. While backyard vegetable gardens and community garden plots are considered to be relatively innocuous in many urban areas, the idea of livestock in cities can be a little more difficult to sell. Different cultures have different ideas about the social acceptability of urban livestock. In Asia, animals have been a socially-acceptable part of cities for centuries because they are used to turn waste into food. In Africa, early colonial powers resisted the idea of urban livestock as backward, yet the practice prevailed. In Europe and the United States, the keeping of urban livestock has historically been a fringe activity that is rarely discussed. Many of the world's urban farmers are landless and rely on restaurant scraps and the leavings of urban horticulture to feed their animals. While urban livestock provide a valuable source of food and income, these animals are often feared as a source of noise and disease. In urban areas where rats roam the sewers and cars zoom busily around the streets, fears about the potential disease and noise from urban chickens seem a little extreme, but these fears are there. While all animals bring the potential for disease, access to veterinary services and good public health codes can moderate potential problems. Some argue that keeping small flocks of urban chickens may actually be a solution to controlling disease outbreaks like avian flu, since birds in urban, free-range flocks have smaller populations than those in factory farms, and therefore there is a smaller chance that the virus will spread and mutate. Read More

	American Policy: Three Reasons Politicians Wrong to Slowly Mitigate Climate Change Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Thursday 5th November 2009 A majority of American policy makers believe waiting 6 - 20 years and gradually mitigating climate change is the best way for America to act. Self proclaimed pragmatists, their argument goes something like this: to sign on with current climate change mitigation plans would require replacing functioning equipment prematurely at an ineffective cost. We should instead wait until equipment needs replacement- because emitting a ton of carbon in the atmosphere now is the same as emitting it 20 years later- we should wait to act. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong. Reason #1 To Act Sooner: A ton of carbon in the atmosphere now is not the same as a ton of carbon later on. Currently, the atmosphere has 380ppm of CO2e in the atmosphere; we will reach 550ppm by 2050 (IPCC, 2007). An increase of 380ppm to 381ppm isn't alarming. An increase from 550ppm to 551 and you start to play dice with the planet. Many American politicians don't address this "fat tail" problem: events that are low probability, highly catastrophic. Even if we become carbon neutral at 550ppm, there's a 4.2% probability of reaching an 8°C rise in temperature (Stern, 2008); to date, no politician has mentioned such probabilities in the States. Read More

	The Indelible Automobile Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 5th November 2009 Ever since Henry Ford rolled the first model T off of the assembly line, the automobile has shaped how countries have moved people and things. Items and people that were once moved by horse and buggy, and then later railway have increasingly been moved by cars and trucks. The highway systems of the US and Western Europe have become the model by which many developing nations shape their own transportation policies with cars and their necessary roads symbolizing progress. Even China is losing its status as the world's "bicycle kingdom" as the emerging middle class increasingly forgoes clean and energy efficient bicycle transport in favor of the car and Chinese government policy follows suit. But the automobile as the primary form of transport is a highly unsustainable pursuit. The contribution that cars make to climate change are well documented, but even if cars did not have a negative effect on the climate they are still not the ideal form of transport. There is sadly, a high human cost associated with driving. According to the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System roughly 35,000 Americans are killed annually in automobile accidents. Worldwide auto accidents take 1.2 million lives a year, a number that rises to 2 million per year when the effects of car related air pollution are taken into consideration. It is not only those riding in vehicles for whom cars pose a risk; pedestrians and bicyclists are often the unwitting victims of auto accidents. Read More

	Hedgerows: Secret Gardens That Support Sustainable Agriculture Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Thursday 5th November 2009 The lofty hedge - it's both a victim of topiary madness and the alternative to a fence for those who farm. It's also a secret garden that supports sustainable agriculture across Britain. There are nearly two million hedgerows in Britain. Many of them sit beside farm fields and delineate the boundaries of these fields. They also create a boundary that sheep and other livestock find difficult to cross. The hedgerow plays another, more subtle role in British agriculture. In an area with open fields, hedgerows are a refuge for wildlife and help support a sustainable farm ecosystem. Many hedges have been safeguarding farms for hundreds of years. Ancient hedges can date back to Saxon times, making them a thousand years old. Plants like hawthorn are common in hedgerows, and these planted areas also support more than two hundred species of non-hedge plants like ferns and flowers. These diverse and thriving rows of plants prevent soil erosion and create wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors, a last refuge of wildness in a human-dominated landscape. How can a shrub be so important in the ecological life of a farm? On a farm that strives to connect with its local ecosystems, refuges for wildlife are important. Bees are critical pollinators of farm crops, as are butterflies. Hedgerows are a place where wildflowers still grow, so they are important food sources for these pollinating insects. Most hedgerow plants are deciduous, which means that they lose their leaves in the fall. This layer of leaves is an important place for beneficial insects to survive the winter and replenish their populations in the spring. For larger animals, hedgerows are also sanctuaries. Birds eat the insects that can eat farm crops, and they hide their nests in nearby hedgerows. Larger predators like foxes use hedgerows as roadways to hunt mice and rats, animals that eat food crops. Read More

	American Policy: Climate Change Misinformation and Illiteracy Climate Change \| Juan Carlo Pascua \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 It is a growing concern that the world will have to move on without the US in trying to reach a climate change agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol. Many blame US inaction on a regrettable majority of Americans being climate change illiterate. Culpability lies within a range of reasons from big business lobbying against climate change legislation, the current economic fiasco, and a general lack of understanding of climate change for the average American. Even in California conversations regarding climate change are light and uninformed/misinformed when compared to Europe and the rest of the world. Not only is it a problem that there is little understanding and support; there is unfortunately opposition to protect our planet. September 28, 2009, a Bloomberg poll revealed climate change ranked dead last as a concern for US citizens. The Economy overwhelmingly gathered 46% of the vote, health care 23%, federal budget deficit 16%, Iraq and Afghanistan wars 10%, and finally Climate Change 2%. These results coincide with immediate individualistic concerns regarding job security and personal health. Unfortunately, there's more to the lack of American understanding regarding climate change than immediacy. Read More

	Social Values: How Vulnerable to Profit? Social Enterprise \| Marcia Stepanek \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 There's a boom in the creation of social enterprises but there's also a debate raging among the leaders of this new field over whether the most successful new enterprises will be able to sustain all of their original core values of social good -- especially if or when these new organizations link up with or get bought by for-profit firms. Gabriel Brodbar, director of New York University's Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship, cites this concern as one of the more important topics facing the new field of social entrepreneurship. During a break in the recent PopTech conference for social innovation in Camden, Maine, I caught up with Brodbar; here's an edited transcript of that conversation: What do you see as the key trends facing those in the field of social enterprise this fall? Within the socially entrepreneurially-focused organizations out there -- like Ashoka, StartingBloc, NYU Reynolds, Ashoka, Justmeans and others -- I think there's a philosophical debate afoot. The motivation of these organizations has a lot to do with ethical integrity, consistency, and commitment, and it's all good. In all sectors, if you can play around large-scale social change, it's great and if companies don't want to, that's okay too. But a lot of the companies that play in the social enterprise space today were formed because of their desire to realize a specific social change or to realize social impact in a very specific way. Companies like Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, Tom's Shoes, Stony Field Farms, Honest Tea -- all of these companies have very strong corporate social responsibility [CSR] principles baked into their DNA. There was no b.s. there [when these firms were created]. These principles were all very for-real; there was a tremendous amount of due diligence in the supply chain in terms of their environmental impact and so forth. Honest Tea, for example, did one of the most thorough and honest assessments of its carbon footprint, and they did that because of a genuine commitment to the environment and also a genuine concern for their bottom line. Coca-Cola just took a 40 percent stake in Honest Tea, and I think that within the next six months, Coke could buy a controlling stake in it. This has raised a lot of debate and speculation over whether these new developments will change Honest Tea. And it's not just Honest Tea. There is nothing in place -- no legal entities and no contract that insures that when a social enterprise changes hands that the corporate socially responsible behaviors that are associated with the brand -- the ones that made the company what it is -- are going to continue. There are, I think, some great efforts in play to encourage acquired companies to behave in more socially responsible ways but there is nothing that guarantees these behaviors will continue in the case of partnerships or takeovers by for-profit companies. Should public sentiment shift and suddenly [social enterprises] become less in vogue, what's to insure that these socially responsible behaviors continue beyond the initial relationships? Read More

	Playing God: Are We Trying to Make Developing Countries into Our Own Image? Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Wednesday 4th November 2009 Development is difficult. Solving world hunger, for example, is not simply a question of feeding the hungry. Food aid argues the charitable organization CARE, may actually spur on hunger by destabilizing local food economies and driving local farmers out of business. Teaching the hungry how to more efficiently farm, can actually create new unexpected inefficiencies. The Green Revolution in India, in which farmers in the Indian state of Punjab switched from traditional methods to American-style farming - with chemicals, high-yield seeds and irrigation- was once thought to be a rousing success. However, under scrutiny the shiny label of success has lost some of its sheen: India's Green Revolution has depleted ground water, destroyed soil through salinization, locked farmers into cycles of debt and turned what was once a localized hunger problem into a structural one. It also hasn't actually solved India's hunger problem: 1/4th of the world's hungry call India home. A whopping 230 million people or 18% of India's 1.25 billion population is hungry. It is this model (with the addition of GMO technology) that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a driving force in development, is tenuously throwing its support behind to end hunger in Africa. Read More

	When green choices aren't healthy Health \| Ano Lobb \| Tuesday 3rd November 2009 One of the great things about Justmeans is how it fuses so many interrelated ideas. Whether its climate change, sustainable food, ethical consumption, or social enterprise, it all plays a major role in the health of individuals and populations. But good work can be corrupted, for example eco-labeling occasionally attempts to "green wash" products into seaming more earth and people friendly than they are. And sometimes seemingly responsible choices turn out to be unhealthy ones. A few examples: Solar panels are one ethical solution to growing global demand for electricity. However, an essential silicon compound created during manufacturing leaves a toxic byproduct, silicon tetrachloride. Extremely damaging to human tissue, it can cause burns, kidney failure, and lesions in the liver and heart. Ethical manufacturing practices call for energy-intensive remediation of this toxin, but unfortunately several documented cases in China, currently the world leader in solar panel production, have found where this toxin was dumped in fields, contaminating nearby communities. CFL (compact fluorescent) bulbs are popular for their long life and meager electricity consumption. What is rarely mentioned is that they contain mercury. Each CFL contains about a tenth of the amount of mercury found in an old thermometer. That wouldn't be much if you only had one light bulb. But the average house has 20 to 30, meaning a significant amount of mercury. Not only is it likely to up in a landfill, but whenever a bulb breaks, you are exposing yourself and family to a potent neurotoxin. Read More

	Digging out of the Junk Mail Mountain Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Tuesday 3rd November 2009 After going to my mailbox to collect my mail after a few days away, I am always surprised at just how much junk gets crammed into that little box. If it isn't those annoying reminders from magazine companies alerting to me that if I act NOW I can save up to 50% off the newsstand price, its credit cards that I'm instantly approved for, or catalogs I have no idea where they got my address. (No, I am not a 60 year old male with prostate problems, thank you very much.) Buried among that mess are the bank statements, bills, and a few super market circulars. Yes, it seems that the majority of what gets sent through the post now-a-days is junk. Thinking just how much paper and waste is generated from all that mail does not do well to support a greener product consumption. So how can we rid ourselves of the mountains of junk mail? There is a way to unburden yourself from all those unwanted deliveries, but it will take some effort on your part and a bit of persistence, as those advertisers desperately want your business. (Economic times are tough for everyone!) But don't let that dissuade you from doing the right thing. First, before recycling all that paper, (I know you would never just toss it in the trash! :) ) take a moment to Read More