The International Market for Sustainable Apparel, the report that I authored for Packaged Facts on organic clothing and eco-fashion, has been published. Read the press release here; the abstract and table of contents are available here. Please contact me if you have questions about this report or about sustainable and organic clothing and textiles.
"Be joyful though you've considered all the facts."
(Wendell Berry)
For those who wander by, here's a special Valentine's Day post.
Environmentalists can and should embrace joy, beauty and abundance -- and what's more joyful, beautiful and infused with abundant possibility than falling in love? Yes, things are dire; yes, as countless apocalyptic movie scripts tell us, humans will still brake for love and romance.
The business of romance is lucrative, but it isn't very green. Just wait this week for those annual stories about how much we spend on chocolate, flowers, and jewelry in February -- the amounts are staggering. Yet chocolate as a commodity doesn't get a very high score on social, environmental or economic justice scales. And that's just the beginning - as it turns out, every heartfelt romantic gesture has its environmental issues.
Good news: There are options. Whether you're courting a newly-minted or old-growth environmentalist, do it sustainably and stylishly to melt their beautiful green hearts. If you're the wooee, suggest to your wooer that he or she keep the footprint light. Be righteous but gentle with tender and well-meaning suitors. Love makes the world go 'round - and it can help keep it spinning for generations to come with a few simple updates to tradition:
The rest is up to you; whatever you do, make it warm and graceful and passionate. May Cupid's aim be true.
I'm stepping in briefly to recommend Verlyn Klinkenborg's excellent essay on cloning animals for food, "Closing the Barn Door After the Cows Have Gotten Out," in the New York Times. Diversity matters.
This will be my last post on Organic Confidential for the time being, as I have other demands on my time. The archives will remain up for now. If you'd like to contact me about writing, editing, speaking, consulting, or for any other reason, you're most welcome to do so; my e-mail is in the sidebar. All content on this site is copyright-protected, so please check with me before re-distributing or publishing anything. Comments are open for now as well, and will be moderated. Thanks very much for visiting, and happy new year to all.
Elaine
2007 in Review
The direction of the organic industry and community feels uncertain as 2007 comes to a close. The mainstreaming of organic and its presence on supermarket shelves is no longer news, but the implications of that, and perceptions by consumers of what that means for organic integrity and smaller organic farmers, are ongoing issues. Thus we have J.M. Hirsch, Associated Press food editor, launching his 2008 food forecast by saying that organic has "jumped the shark" in marketing terms, and declaring organic co-opted. I disagree with that as a blanket statement, but I'm seeing more and more comments like that; where's the response from the organic community?
Here, my list of the top organic stories, events and trends of 2007.
A couple of other trends worth mentioning: First, I am noticing renewed interest in vegetarianism and veganism, and especially in a sophisticated, multicultural kind of vegetarianism. It seems connected to minimizing energy and resource footprints. Second, though the organic industry seems Internet-averse at times, there are really wonderful sites and blogs writing about food and environmental issues. In no particular order, some of my favorites:
Wishing you a holiday full of love, community, and peace. I'll be back later this week with my top organic stories of 2007. Merry Christmas!
It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious song of old
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold
Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
From heaven's all-gracious King
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long
Beneath the angel's strains have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
It's the shortest day of the year; the Solstice arrives late tonight or early tomorrow, depending on time zone. Find the still point of the turning world, to use T.S. Eliot's phrase, without which "there can be no dance," and honor the change of seasons. Nature's rhythms are what organic is ultimately all about. A couple of news items before I go make a cup of good organic coffee on this quiet, sunny winter morning:
It's the gift-giving time of year; the world seems evenly divided between those who've done all their making and shopping and ordering, and those who are just getting started. Either way, here are a few last-minute organic ideas for stockings that must be filled!
An Associated Press story came out today on the lawsuits against retailers who sold private-label organic milk produced by Aurora Organic Dairy while the dairy company had probationary status with regard to their organic certification. USDA (and the certifying agent) never revoked Aurora's organic certification, but according to the story, the lawyers suggest that retailers had a responsibility to know that the dairy had a probationary status and should not have sold the milk as organic. Woven throughout this long battle are consumer expectations about organic practices that may exceed or diverge from what the national organic standard actually requires.
Firmani & Associates, one of the law firms involved in these suits, sent me an unsolicited e-mail last week informing me that, "According to investigations
the milk labeled organic, and being sold at higher prices, is in fact not
organic according to FDA regulations." Organic 101, anyone? FDA doesn't regulate the organic label. It's hard to give credibility to a law firm that doesn't yet have a basic understanding of the regulatory framework. But that's just the tip of this messy iceberg.
There are no winners here. I think the tenor of the organic dairy war has done a lot of damage to consumer views of the integrity of all organic foods. As a friend said last week, the perception of misbehavior and even corruption has not been limited to one or two companies or to the organic dairy category, but to the entire organic market. The people who work in the companies and organizations on every side of this situation are part of my community; as individuals, I believe -- I know -- they all care deeply about organics. So where does it go from here?
Transparency is a basic principle of organic agriculture and the organic certification system, and it's getting short shrift. Aurora was not transparent to the organic community or to the public about the ways in which their farms may have exceeded the boundaries of the organic rule, or how they would address problems. The National Organic Program at USDA and its accredited certifier, Colorado State Department of Agriculture, were similarly not transparent about actions they were or were not taking against any noncompliance (And where is the long-awaited proposal for more rigorous pasture standards for organic dairy that might begin to move this debate forward? The NOP is severely under-resourced, but this proposal needs to be made public for open discussion, finalization, and implementation.)
Cornucopia Institute, a tax-exempt nonprofit that positions itself as a watchdog organization and has driven much of the media maelstrom, has also avoided being transparent about its funding sources and operational structure. Cornucopia risks its own credibility by engaging in scorched-earth tactics and venomous attacks on the companies they oppose, as well as individuals who work for those companies (posted on organic dairy list-serves) and indeed on anyone who dares to question them. Their attitude has been "do as we demand, not as we do." I believe in watchdog organizations, and the organic industry needs them, and they too have got to adhere to the highest standards of conduct.
Lawsuits targeting the retailers brings up the question of how far the gatekeeper role should go for mainstream retailers selling organic products, or any third-party-certified products. That's a discussion worth having, as they're in an interesting position. Consumers want organic to mean things that are not written into the law at this time and yet they also want organic food to be cheap and easily available. And too many seem ready to abandon organic either way -- either because it's not everything they want it to be under one label, or because, if it is everything they want it to be, it's too expensive. If situations like this continue to do damage and result in lawsuits like these, companies like Costco and Target may decide it's just not worth it to continue to commit to the organic market. And then everybody pays again, in a different way.
Retailers have shown their share of insensitivity, as well, in looking for cheap organic products and appearing sometimes to revel in the high markup they've been able to charge. Here, too, let's see some transparency about the cost of food, its source, and how much is returned to organic farmers.
Meanwhile, organic remains a small percentage of a very large global food industry that is highly dependent on pesticides, subtherapeutic antibiotic use, genetic modification, factory livestock farming, monocropping, the steady destruction of biodiversity and small farms, and little regard for long-term precautionary policy. Maybe there ought to be some class-action lawsuits targeting that system.
There is a baby-and-bathwater lesson here; let's strive to play by the highest rules, fix what must be fixed, and redirect some focus and energy to creating a stronger and better organic world.
I've just signed on for a big research and writing project on sustainable apparel; this is an exciting, emerging market full of imagination and entrepreneurial vision. The growth of the organic cotton market, a significant piece of the sustainable apparel framework, has been incredible in the last couple of years, as consumer interest and design applications have begun to support it.
For those of you who are interested, I've started Red Thread Studio, a blog about sustainable and organic textiles and clothing, global textile traditions and techniques, and textile arts.
And yes, I do plan to find time and someone with the skill to help me to go beyond these basic templates and make both blogs a little more interesting to look at.
Apropos of nothing directly on-topic, I've been reading This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich, about her travels in Greenland among Inuit Eskimo tribes who still hunt with harpoons. I sought out this book because, first, Ehrlich is an intoxicatingly beautiful writer, and I hadn't read anything by her in a long time. Second, this is always a hard time of year for me; it's cold, it's icy, it gets dark early, and I think I have some primal melancholy around it from being born late in the year in the most northerly major city in North America. It's made me existentially hungry for warm breezes, palm trees, turquoise water, and the widest possible spectrum of color.
So what better way to get a little perspective on winter than to read about Greenland? Suddenly my long nights with eight hours of daylight (versus four months of darkness) and temperatures in the teens don't seem so bad. I have a heated car instead of a dogsled. And let's get right down to it -- I don't have to hunt my food or eat a steady diet of seal, narwhal, and Arctic hare (I imagined this to be some kind of giant nether-bunny, but it's pretty much your normal wascally wabbit).
In This Cold Heaven, Ehrlich -- who hungers herself for cold and treeless horizons -- takes us back through the expeditions of Knud Rasmussen in the early 20th century. Local food, if you will, was the only food there was, but no one was farming; everything had to be hunted, not just for food but for skins for clothing and blankets, twine, and fat to burn for heat and light. A failure of will or a turn of weather meant starvation. Shamans ruled the day, shapeshifting into spirits, or animals, or lightning, or wind, and their magic could make or break the hunt.
Though planes fly in and out now, this way of life is alive and meaningful. In order to hunt, Inuit need ice to travel by sled. Melting ice means impassable paths to the food supply and a crumbling and impoverished cultural infrastructure. Suddenly global warming, and its erosion of the glacial ecosystem, becomes a vivid and immediate danger.
In 2007, Ehrlich returned to Greenland for a year-long expedition to document the effects of climate change on the culture and environment of the far north. Though it appears to be updated only through March, the Point Hope Web site lets you follow the journey. From the site:
Farthest North: The End of Ice is a circumpolar journey to be undertaken in the International Polar Year 2007-2008 to explore the changing climate of the high Arctic and its effects on the indigenous people who have survived and thrived at the top of the world for 5,000 to 20,000 years.
It will explore the ways in which the changing climate has already affected their icescapes and landscapes, their lives and traditions. Arctic ecosystems are in a state of collapse and the remaining subsistence traditions of these boreal cultures are vanishing with them. Gretel Ehrlich, who has been traveling by dogsled with subsistence Inuit hunters in northern Greenland for 13 years, will travel with reindeer herders and coastal hunters, and stay in the villages of Arctic Alaska, Sapmi (Lapland), the entire northern coast of Nunavut, North-Western Greenland, Western Siberia, and Chukotka.
We will see how and why Arctic people now function as the “early warning system” for a climate crisis that is global and will affect humans and animals at every latitude. We will travel by dogsled, snowmobile, reindeer, and fixed wing airplane.
The Arctic ecosystem is the most fragile in the world. The plants and animals are already pushed to the northernmost extreme, so when climate warms, there’s nowhere to go. When an entire ecosystem collapses, everyone in the world loses. Humans and animals, birds and fish, ice-age survival skills and ways of knowing and talking about internal and external realities vanish.
To return to topic, here in the temperate regions, supporting organic agriculture and buying local organic foods are a part of whatever solution our world may be able to implement. Though every choice is complex, we know that, in general, reducing dependence on petroleum (by eliminating chemical fertilizers and inefficient or unnecessary transport) is an important step. So if you're looking for escape to an alternate but relevant reality, look to the North, via book or Internet -- for a new appreciation for our relatively mild climate, an adventure with a brilliant writer and intrepid journeywoman, and a reminder of the big picture when it comes to conscious eating.
