Tag: environmentalism

Think Global, Act Local

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Stabilize The Economic Status Of The NEgro Through Directed Spending

“Think Global, Act Local” is more than an old saying or mantra; it’s a philosophy. Thinking globally while acting locally is a way to take huge problems, like racism (as the image shows), and break them down into manageable, individual, acts. It motivates anyone who believes “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

I was reminded of this when Nazneen Hamilton wrote about the importance of buying locally produced items. It’s not only a wise thing to help your local economy — and generally helps your own household finances (something you know I care about) — but it also has a huge impact on the environment.

Heck, buying locally grown food and/or locally made products is a far greener thing to do than getting a newer less-gasoline-guzzling car or even getting one of those hybrid or electric cars — because the cars and batteries are brought over the oceans on freighters, freighters which leave far larger carbon footprints (or wakes) than most of us can imagine.

So I have to ask you, when’s the last time you checked the labels to see if you could buy local?

And, if you do and find your favorite shop doesn’t offer a local alternative, have you pushed them to do so?

Reporting On The Mayan Predicted Demise Of Our Planet

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Early in 2010, Greta Sandler smelled the green, envisioning great commercial success in the “green” environmental movement. She cut and pasted digitally merged Shamanistic traditions and historical beauty tips, “recycling” non-attributed native sayings and public domain beauty advice into an ebook, Creating Inner Peace & Outer Beauty While Saving The Earth, published in April of that year.

One of Sandler’s most promoted save the earth beauty rituals was “100 Strokes For Healthy Hair & Animal Habitats.”

Before bed, give your hair 100 brush strokes while chanting: “Honor the sacred. Honor the Earth, our Mother. Honor the Elders. Honor all with whom we share the Earth: Four-leggeds, two-leggeds, winged ones, swimmers, crawlers, plant and rock people. Walk in balance and beauty.”

After completing the 100 strokes, remove the loose hairs from the bristles of your hairbrush and set them free outside as a gift to the earth and her creatures. As you give your offering, whisper your thanks and well-wishes for the creatures who may use your gifted hair to create homes and beds for themselves.

However, Sandler underestimated the viral nature of her YouTube video depicting the hair ritual. The video’s success led to Oprah Winfrey giving away Sandler’s ebook on her ridiculously popular “Oprah’s Favorite Things” holiday episode, which generated even more video sharing and adoption of the book’s philosophies. The cumulative effect was millions of vain and ‘proud to be green’ posers stroking their hair the requisite 100 times and setting the hairs free outdoors.

Such massive amounts of worldwide gifted hair would have disastrous consequences.

Giant hair storms appeared in America. The Bleach-Blonde Tumbleweeds of Los Angels, steady fodder for late night talk show jokes and Fark postings, quickly proved more than comical nuisances as they both fed and spread the flames of the September forest fires. The Grey Geezer Aqua-Nets killed thousands of dolphins and other marine life off the coasts of Florida and Mexico, leaving rotting corpses infecting waterways and spreading disease.

Sandler, now inspiring and empowering stay at home moms to sell her ebooks and line of green beauty products, such as wooden hairbrushes made by ‘indigenous peoples’, went on the media circuit, stating the free market had decided that neither she nor her movement were responsible for a few freak accidents.

Hipster environmentalist groups responded with t-shirts, bumperstickers, canvas tones and other activist merchandise with slogans like “Earth: Hair today; gone tomorrow. ” Their devotion to the cause consisted of public awareness campaigns — pithy practiced sound bites raging at the machine, designed to expose the public to their own swag more than expose the issue; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing except for sales. Sales of their t-shirts and totes — and more of Sandler’s books and philosophies.

Sandler’s business grew; Creating Inner Peace & Outer Beauty While Saving The Earth achieved international success.

In India, Sandler’s book was met with controversy. The progressive youth latched onto the work, twisting the casting out of ‘body waste’ hair into the process of ridding the country of the caste system. The movement was so successful, it resulted in the Black Blizzards of India, which looked much like their namesakes — the American dust storms of the 1930s.

By this time, ecosystems and weather conditions worldwide were affected; yet the Chinese, unable to view Snopes for The Truth of the results of those following Sandler’s philosophies, were eager to adopt this Western fad in the name of their Chinese Nationalist Shamanism Revival — which also served the government’s quest to present to the rest of the world the appropriate enthusiastic environmental consciousness. En masse the Chinese sent their hair offerings, blessing the world with additional clouds of hair the cumulative affect of which blocked out the sun.

Such agricultural damage left no natural anchors to keep the soil in place; combined with weather conditions and other ecological damage, the earth was rapidly becoming one giant Dust Bowl.

By 2012 the world suffocated in hair and dust.

The cockroaches happily survived on the plentiful amounts of hair, biodegradable cotton tees and totes etc., and corpses for water.

Change Starts With Your Underwear

/ Deanna / 2 Comments

That’s what PACT, a new underwear company that launched yesterday says.

change-starts-with-your-underwear-pactAccording to their website marketing & press releases, at the core of PACT are “deep partnerships” with nonprofit organizations that work to create social and environmental change; each underwear collection is aligned with a nonprofit, with 10% of each sale given to support the matching organizations. “Internationally recognized artists and designers create graphic visualizations of each organization’s mission with underwear as their canvas” — with Yves Behar behind the first collections.

“In building PACT, we re-thought everything about the way underwear is made and marketed,” said Behar. “We’re not doing anything artificial or superficial, not with the body, not with the packaging and not with our partnerships. Our vision is to unite fashion and design with doing good in an authentic way, building a company that truly embodies 21st century needs, showing a new way for businesses to operate in the future.”

Unless, say, that business is in the United States…

Beginning with the farmers and ending with the final package arriving at your door, PACT strives to be as environmentally and socially responsible as possible. The farmers and cotton pickers involved in the growing and harvesting of the organic cotton were paid a fair price for their product. All fabric is dyed and printed using dyes and inks that are low-impact and free of heavy metals. Before it is shipped to PACT’s fulfillment center in Illinois, every element that goes into making your PACT underwear – growing the cotton, processing and spinning it, knitting or weaving, dyeing and printing, and cutting and sewing the final garment – occurs within a 100-mile radius in Turkey.

This is truly a regional manufacturing model that vastly reduces the carbon footprint of our supply chain. In fact, by manufacturing with a regional supply chain in Turkey and shipping the product in bulk to the US, our overall environmental impact is smaller than if we tried to manufacture the same product with a geographically fractured supply chain in the US.

I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but it seems to me that it would be most beneficial for “a company that truly embodies 21st century needs,” giving percentages of sales to US nonprofits, to have that company make their product in the US. Claims that this cannot be done in the US due to a “geographically fractured supply chain” are met by me with by assertions that there are many areas in the US (hello former textile towns!) which once did such things & would, especially in this economy, be only too happy to do so again.

Would it cost money to revamp old buildings? Yes. But it couldn’t be any worse than the cost of using the new colonialism of business abroad — until you factor in the long term wage differences. And that’s the key, isn’t it. That’s why you’re not peddling your fantastic “green” undies to people in the same 100-mile radius in Turkey — with the matching local nonprofit organizations, of course — because they probably couldn’t afford it on the low wages you pay them.

And are these really “green” undies? You want to make everything so green & wonderful over there — and then ship it here via freighter. (Didn’t we learn anything about the carbon footprint of shipping “green” cars & batteries?) Besides, once it gets to the docks, it’s gonna have to be trucked to Illinois, and then to individual homes.

See the problems here?

Change may indeed start with your underwear; but I think, especially in a case where you’re boasting of such a new way to do business — and green business too, that you’d be better to invest in the people & communities where you expect to sell your product. That’s sustainability. Of your target market, your company, & the planet.

The Fear Filled Prophecy For The Monday Move Meme

/ Deanna / 4 Comments

This week’s Monday Movie Meme topic is “fear.” I don’t particularly enjoy being scared; life is scary & fragile enough, thanks. Nor do I find any entertainment value in repeated bodily harm & numerous deaths — no many how many forms the gore takes. So I obviously do not watch many horror or slasher films. But I have managed to see some though — like I was there (with my mom) to see the original Halloween (1978) and I think I saw at least one more part in the classic horror series… Mom needn’t worry that I’d be up late with nightmares because, gross as the films were, they were rather forgettable to me.

But then I saw Prophecy (1979). Nothing, I mean nothing, had scared me as profoundly as that film.

prophecy-the-monster-movieProphecy is about a burned-out inner city doctor (Rob, played by Robert Foxworth) who is given the chance to escape to the country (Maine wilderness) for some meaningful (70’s hot issue) environmental science by investigating a dispute between a paper mill and the local Main Indians. He takes along his classically trained musician wife (Maggie, played by Talia Shire) — because there’s an important personal (and another political 70’s) sub-plot involving the couple: the embittered doc doesn’t want to bring another life into this horrible world, and she’s not only knocked-up, but isn’t so keen on (what I recall to be) another abortion.

When they arrive in Maine, it’s pulped into your head that a crisis is at hand at the paper mill. It’s the environment vs. progress, land vs. capitalism, with the lumberjacks on one side and the Indians on the other. In fabulous retro kitsch film style, Armand Assante plays the young Native American activist, angrily defending the old world traditions with modern gangsta style; gotta love the irony of a film trying to make points about the wisdom of native cultures using an Irish-Italian actor to play a Native American.

The idealogical & political war has been going on for quite some time now, but things are coming to a head. People are missing and the lumberjacks are certain it’s the Indians who, upset that the paper mill is damaging the land, have taken or harmed the people in the name of politics. But something else is going on… Something just below the surface… And we are shown that literally when a duck, floating atop the water, is gulped as dinner by a fish below…

Long creepy story short, the menace is a native alright; but it’s not exactly human.

The Indian legend has it that the creature is Kataden, there to save them, their land, their way of life — but really, it’s a bear that, due to the paper mill’s dirty pool (poisoning the water pools) has mutated into some sort of hideous & huge bear-pig.

prophecy-movie-horror-monster-kataden

As I too vividly recall, the Native American lore says that the legendary Kataden is a being which embodies “every other living creature” — something scientifically paralleled in a Darwinian theory of fetal development when Kataden’s drowned cubs are found by the doctor who supposes these babies are the results of the paper mill’s mercury poisoning. This made everything all the more “plausible” & frightening to my then 15 year old mind.

Like most horror films, the cast of characters is slow to catch on to the real problem, giving way to lots of violence — violence which serves to bloodily & bodily illustrate all the issues at hand.

Along with the paper mill vs. Indian clash, you have the clash of ways and beliefs between the younger Indians & the older Indians, the corrupt and ignorant/innocent paper mill persons, and the “exploration” of modern life via the personal issues of a modern couple. She’s emotional & artsy (feminine) and he’s all hard(ened) science (masculine), which echoes the other film’s value laden battle themes (nature vs.money, faith vs. pragmatics, traditions vs. modernization, the gift of life vs. quality of life).

The dangers of each are literally & graphically presented in such scenes as one of Kataden’s babies trying to suckle from Maggie’s nipple, the attack on innocence represented as a child in a sleeping bag, and the elderly Indian leader meeting his maker as he smilingly goes to meet his savior, Kataden.

And then there’s the matter of her pregnancy… Will the doc bring a child into this world? Does he have a choice? How much does he resent her — enough to not save her as his masculine protective duties dictate? Has she eaten too much of the mercury poisoned fish? Will the monster bites she’s suffered be a problem? Dogs & cats Bear-pigs & men living together; mass hysteria.

At the end of the film, life is affirmed: nature & femininity wins, overcoming corporate masculine greed with a show of traditional human survival instincts rooted in love. But at the end another creepy creature is seen, suggesting a sequel…

Did we learn the right things? Will the thing grow up, then rise up to teach us something new? Only it’s 1979; the 80’s are on the horizon, our backs are turned on the lessons learned, and no sequel has yet to come.

But I’m unable to forget it all — or the images in my head.

Yes, Prophecy is blunt heavy film — heavy on the cliches, ham-handed in using horror to punching them like a fist to your face to make the point — but it was also effective in scaring the crap out of me & placing issues heavily in my heart.

I’m not sure if “adult me” would be so moved. I did catch parts of it on late night television one night, but I wasn’t prepared to sit & give it it’s proper attention (it was on while I worked to meet a deadline) and it was so edited for content that I felt ripped-off. But I’d really like to see it again and see if it holds any of that old (black & terrifying) magic. It must hold something if I retain it so vividly 30 years later.

Click the pic & watch a clip!

For info, images, quotes, opinions, etc. on this film see BadMovies.org & Kindertrauma.

Smoking Hot Fashion: Recycled From Cigarette Butts

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Chilean designer Alexandra Guerrero’s Mantis line of fashions were inspired by the burning question of what to do with the vast amounts of cigarette butts strewn about in the City of Santiago Chile.

These are not toxic textiles; according to an interview with the designer at GreenMuse, the garments are made of 90% sheep wool and 10% purified cigarette butts:

The purification process begins with the cigarette butts going through autoclaves (a pressurized sanitation process). They are then washed in a solvent; they go through the autoclave again, are rinsed and dried, and, finally, are shredded to create a wool-like material. The resulting liquid byproduct is also being donated to be tested as a biological insecticide for plant pest control.

The percentage of recycled cig butts is hoped to be increased once it become more financially feasible.

cigarette-butt-haute-couture-by-alexandra-guerrero

Guerrero has cleaned and recycled about 5000 cigarette butts and designed a dress, a vest, a poncho, and a hat even some soap. Currently, the only way to purchase the items, viewable at her blog, is to contact her via email at mantis.yea @ gmail.com.