Chevron and Sierra Club to work together?

Sierra Club’s Carl Pope’s debated with Chevron CEO David O’Reilly and got him to agree to come to Washington with him to lobby against the coal lobby. Is that really going to happen?

Listen to the whole debate here.

Restore the Clean Water Act

From Food & Water Watch:

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it intended to establish broad protections to achieve the law’s goal of restoring and maintaining the physical, chemical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters. However, since 2001, Supreme Court decisions have called into doubt these broad protections. The Bush administration exploited these doubts to weaken oversight of our nation’s water.

Now, you can help to restore the Clean Water Act to its full strength!

This Thursday, June 18, the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee will meet to consider the Clean Water Restoration Act (S. 787).  Congress must act now to resolve the confusion and uncertainty around the Clean Water Act because we are losing many vital waters to pollution and complete destruction.

Some members of the committee have floated weakening amendments.  They want to ensure that the damage done to the Clean Water Act isn’t repaired.

You can stop these efforts by emailing your Senator and asking them to oppose any amendments designed to weaken the Clean Water Restoration Act.

The Clean Water Restoration Act needs to move forward now to resolve the confusion and uncertainty around the Clean Water Act that is leaving many vital waters open to pollution and complete destruction.

Use their form to send a note to your congresspeople.

New New York enviro laws coming our way?

Here are some issues Albany is considering (via NY League of Conservation Voters website):

ELECTRONICS WASTE RECYCLING (Click here to contact your legislators)

• Improper disposal of computers, televisions, printers and other devices releases toxic chemicals including lead, mercury, chromium, and cadmium, threatening public health and the environment.

  Albany needs to enact a law that would require that manufacturers of electronics be responsible for the collection, handling and recycling or reuse of discarded electronic equipment. This would require them to submit an e-waste management plan to the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) by 2011, collect a minimum of 25 percent of annual equipment sales each year by 2016, and increase the collection rate to 45 percent by 2018.

  In addition, any e-waste bill should require that the manufacturers be responsible for costs associated with the development and implementation the plans, prohibiting the imposition of collection fees on consumers.
  

CLEAR THE WAY FOR FASTER BUSES (Click here to contact your legislators)

• Over the past 30 years, New York City bus ridership has increased by 53 percent. This has caused an increase in traffic congestion, due in part to vehicles other than buses utilizing bus-only lanes. In addition to slowing traffic, congested bus lanes cause vehicles to idle, releasing pollution into the air.

  A bill in the state Legislature (S. 2709/A. 862) would create a program to improve New York City bus mobility by installing cameras to photograph vehicles using bus lanes. This will improve enforcement of bus-lane use and create more efficient bus service for residents and visitors.

GIVE LOCAL GOVERNMENTS THE POWER TO PURCHASE GREEN POWER (Click here to contact your legislators)
Under state law, local governments are required to purchase power (as well as other products) from the cheapest possible source. In many instances this law prohibits local governments from purchasing renewable power. By doing so the state is inadvertently hampering the market for renewable energy and impeding the growth of the state’s burgeoning clean tech economy.

S. 4599 would allow local governments to purchase clean energy at a limited additional cost. It is an important step towards improving New York’s commitment toward building a clean and sustainable energy future.

Updates of hydro fracking near NYC water supply

Via New York League of Conservation Voters:

U.S. Rep Eric Massa announced possible support this week for H.R. 7231, a bill meant to force natural gas producers to reveal the concentrations and contents of the chemicals used in the drilling process.

Congressman Eric MassaBack in 2005, the Bush administration exempted the industry from the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, thereby allowing them to practice a process known as hydro-fracturing without having to disclose all chemicals used.

Recently, the issue has come to the fore due, in large part, to a drilling boon of the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation extending (much of it deep underground) from Ohio and West Virginia up into Pennsylvania, the Catskills and the Southern Tier. The entire formation is estimated to contain somewhere between 168 to 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

While accessing a natural gas may be a necessity, Massa said during media a teleconference, “I don’t want to be here 25 years from now when you cannot swim in the Finger Lakes or irrigate the fields of your winery with fresh water from a well.”

First Section of High Line Park Opens to the Public

From NYC Parks’ Daily Plant:

Volume XXIV, Number 4969

Thursday, Jun 11, 2009

First Section Of High Line Park Opens To The Public

The view from atop the newly-opened first section of the High Line.
Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro

On Monday, June 8, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Friends of the High Line Co-Founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond, and government and community officials opened the first section of the High Line, the highly-anticipated, new public park built on top of a 1930s-era elevated rail line. The High Line is the first public park of its kind in the United States, built 30 feet above Manhattan’s West Side. The opening of the first half-mile section of the High Line is the culmination of more than three years of construction and ten years of planning.

“Rather than destroying this valuable piece of our history, we have recycled it into an innovative and exciting park that will provide more outdoor space for our citizens and create jobs and economic benefits for our City,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “Ten years ago, detractors thought the High Line was an eyesore. Thankfully, there were a handful of people who looked at the High Line and saw also an extraordinary gift to our city’s future. Today, we will unwrap that gift.”

Access points to the High Line from street level are located at Gansevoort Street, 14th Street, 16th Street, 18th Street and 20th Street and will be open during the park’s operating hours, from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM. The High Line’s landscape is fully ADA-accessible, with an elevator at the 16th Street access point, and another at 14th Street to open in July. Visitor access may be limited during the High Line’s first summer season due to the anticipated high volume of visitors and the High Line’s limited capacity, as well as ongoing construction and horticulture work. During this opening season, visitors will be directed to enter the park at the Gansevoort Street access point, unless an elevator is needed.

The High Line’s design is inspired by the wild, self-seeded landscape that grew up naturally on the High Line when the trains stopped running in 1980. It retains the original railroad tracks from the industrial structure and restored steel elements including the High Line’s signature Art-Deco railings. An integrated system of concrete pathways, seating areas and special features blend with naturalistic planting areas to create a singular landscape.

“Today’s opening of the first section of the High Line demonstrates our commitment to finding innovative ways to continue adding open space to New York City,” said Commissioner Benepe. “Thanks to a fundamental partnership between City government, elected officials, and an extraordinary, grass-roots citizen organization, Friends of the High Line, this park project is the most exciting in generations. This new public park, elevated 30 feet above the ground, will serve a neighborhood in need of parkland and attract visitors from around the world.”

The total cost for Section One and Two of the High Line is $152.3 million. The design and construction cost of the section of the park that opened today is $86.2 million. Funding for the project includes $112.2 million from the City, $20.3 million from the federal government, and $400,000 from the State. Remaining funds will be raised privately by Friends of the High Line as part of their operating agreement with the City. To date, Friends of the High Line has raised $44 million in their capital campaign for the High Line.

“Ten years in the making, the High Line is a testament to what New Yorkers can accomplish if they dream big and work together,” said Friends of the High Line Co-Founder Robert Hammond, “In these challenging times, gifts like those from the Diller – von Furstenberg Family Foundation and Philip and Lisa Maria Falcone will allow us to finish construction on Section 2 and help build an endowment for the future maintenance of the High Line.”

With the opening of the first section of the High Line, Friends of the High Line, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, begins its role as the conservancy charged with maintaining and operating the High Line. Under a license agreement with the Parks Department, Friends of the High Line is responsible for raising the private funds for and staffing the High Line’s day to day maintenance and operations on behalf of the Parks Department, as well as public programming and outreach related to the park.

Friends of the High Line began advocating for the High Line’s reuse as public open space in 1999. In 2002, the Bloomberg Administration endorsed the project when it filed with the United States Surface Transportation Board requesting authorization to create a railbanked trail on the High Line. The Surface Transportation Board granted a Certificate of Interim Trail Use in June 2005. The High Line structure south of 30th Street was donated to the City of New York by CSX Transportation, Inc., in November 2005. Construction began on the High Line’s transformation into a public park in 2006.

Summer Art in Parks

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
No. 77
www.nyc.gov/parks

Summer Art In Parks: A Round-up

Fishing in NYC

Shorten the gap between You and Nature with this event:

Location

Cost

Free

Contact Number

(212) 408-0219

Contact Email

robin.schatell@parks.nyc.gov

Trying to Support Earth-Friendly Brands

It’s trickier to support The Little Guy than you thought…

From Organic Consumers Association:

Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, Naked Juice: Your Favorite Brands? Take Another Look

Confident that you are buying good, socially conscious brands? Find out the real story behind all that marketing money and store visibility.
By Andrea Whitfill

Straight to the Source

My first introduction to natural, organic and eco-friendly products stems back to the early ’90s, when I stumbled upon Burt’s Bees lip balm at an independently owned health food store in the heart of Westport, Kansas City, Mo.

Before the eyesore invasion of ‘98, when Starbucks frothed its way into the neighborhood, leading to its ultimate demise, Westport was the kind of  ‘hood I still yearn for. It was saturated with historically preserved, hip and funky, mom-and-pop-type establishments, delivering their goods people to people.

I was surprised more recently when I saw Burt’s Bees products everywhere — in grocery stores, drug stores, corner bodegas and big-box stores like Target and Wal-Mart. I thought to myself, fantastic; the marketplace is working, and good for Burt. He has made his mark, and the demand for his products is on the rise.

Needless to say, I was shocked when I recently found out that Burt’s Bees is now owned by Clorox, a massive corporate company that has historically cared very little about the environment, but whose main industry is directly associated with harmful chemicals, some of which require warning labels for legal sale.

Clorox; yes, that’s right — the bleach company with an estimated revenue of $ 4.8 billion that employs nearly 7,600 workers (now bees) and sells products like Liquid-Plumr, Pine-Sol and Armor All, a far cry from the origins of Burt.

I now understood. The reason Burt’s Bees products were everywhere was precisely because they now had a powerful corporation in the driver’s seat, with big marketing budgets and existing distribution systems.

The story of Burt is a charming one gone bad. Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in Dexter, Maine, lived an extremely humble life selling honey in pickle jars from the back of his pickup truck and resided in the wilderness inside a turkey coop without running water or electricity.

In the summer of 1984, Shavitz was driving down the road and spotted a hitchhiker who needed a lift to the post office. He pulled over and picked up Roxanne Quimby, a 34-year-old woman who eventually became Shavitz’s lover and business partner. Quimby started helping him tend to the beehives, and that eventually led to the all natural-inspired health care products made with Shavitz’s honey and the birth of Burt’s Bees products.

Burt’s story and very powerful narrative gave Burt’s Bees products their legitimacy in my book. Creative entrepreneurs and knowledgeable consumers together working their magic; not the results of a corporate behemoth out to dominate the marketplace.

However, Quimby and Shavitz’s relationship became ’sticky’ in the late ’90s for reasons unclear, yet probably having little to do with honey. Their romantic break up carried over to the split of their business partnership as well. In 1999, Quimby bought out Shavitz’s shares of the company for a small six-figure sum. Quimby then continued, becoming phenomenally successfully and growing sales to $43.5 million by 2002.

In 2003, a private equity firm, AEA investors, purchased 80 percent of Burt’s Bees from Quimby, with her retaining a 20 percent share and a seat on the board. In 2006, John Replogle, the former general manager of Unilever’s skin-care division became CEO and president of Burt’s Bees. The company was sold to Clorox in late October 2007 for $925 million.

Quimby was paid more than $300 million for her stake in Burt’s Bees. At the time of that deal, Shavitz reportedly demanded more money, and Quimby agreed to pay him $4 million. Quimby now refurbishes fancy, swank homes in Florida, travels the world and buys massive chunks of land in her free time. Our bearded man Shavitz, on the other hand, now 73 and unchanged, continues to reside amidst nature in his now-expanded turkey coop, which still remains absent of electricity or running water.

The Burt’s Bees story is disconcerting. I vaguely remembered long ago that one of my favorite ice cream products, Ben & Jerry’s, sold out. Unilever (which also owns Breyers), the giant conglomerate with an estimated market cap of $50 billion and close to 174,000 employees, bought Ben & Jerry’s in 2000 for $326 million.

I began to wonder about the other products I liked, trusted and respected for their independence and their social responsibility. How many were really owned by big corporations, who were going out of their way to hide the link between the big corporate company with the small, socially responsible brand? It didn’t take long for my list of disappointments to grow and grow.

Upon first meeting someone, I can usually tell a quite a lot about them by the contents of their bathroom. The brand I see most often behind medicine cabinets of people I consider to be environmentally conscious is Tom’s of Maine. What Tom’s says to me about the person is that they are willing to spend a little bit of extra cash in order to take proactive steps to help green the Earth.

Well, no more. My bathroom assessments will never be the same. Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate-Palmolive, a massive, tanklike company with an estimated 36,000 employees and revenue of approximately $11.4 billion. Its big products include: Ajax, Anbesol and Speedstick.

I am only left to wonder, is Trader Joe’s, popularly known to showcase Tom’s of Maine in its hygiene department, just as much in the dark about all of this as I have been? Or is Joe’s simply another conduit for big corporate products?

As my curiosity grew, I took a little field trip to the grocery store with one of my friends to be a “brand anthropologist.” “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” I said, aiming to check out all of the brands that I and countless other good consumers were buying in our efforts to support grassroots business and not corporate behemoths. Little did I know how deep the hole was going to be, and in some cases, how hard to find out who owns what.

Thinking Dairy

In the dairy section sit many flavors of Stoneyfield Farm Yogurt. I knew its socially conscious CEO, Gary Hirshberg, had created major organic brand recognition to become the No. 1 seller of organic yogurt in the United States, but since then Danone, the French conglomerate (which also owns Brown Cow), acquired a majority holding in Stoneyfield. This is the same Danone that had to recall large quantities of its yogurt in 2007 after it was found to contain unsafe levels of dioxins. (In an interesting twist, the still-active Hirshberg sits on the board of Dannon U.S.A. Unlike most of the early entrepreneurs, who took the dough and left the scene, Hirshberg is still involved. )

Read the Rest Here

What’s in the Curious Hand Soap?

Makes you wonder - leaving out the potential toxic chemicals in the cleaning products used at Curious, what’s in our hand soap?

From the Organic Consumers Association:

What’s in YOUR Body Care Products?

Follow-Up Tests of Leading Personal Care and Household Cleaning Brands Reveal Improvements in Levels of Carcinogenic 1,4-dioxane

But New Study Indicates Some Products Mislabeled as “Natural” Should Have Cancer Warning

ANAHEIM, CA - Today, a new follow-up study was released that assesses levels of the petrochemical carcinogen 1,4-dioxane in leading conventional as well as “natural” and “organic” brands of personal care and household cleaning products. The results indicate significant improvement for 23 products from sixteen major brands that had formerly been found to contain potentially dangerous levels of the contaminant 1,4-dioxane in a similar study held in March of 2008.

• Read the Full Press Release…

• Download the Press Release (Word doc)

• Read the results of the follow-up testing (PDF)

• 1,4-dioxane Fact Sheet

Campaigning for Organic Integrity in Bodycare Products

The Organic Consumers Association’s “Coming Clean Campaign” has been working to clean up the ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ personal care industry for the past five years. Unlike organic foods, many personal care products are falsely labeled as “organic”.

OCA’s Coming Clean Campaign is focused on cleaning up the organic personal care industry by ridding of fraudulent labeling that is misleading consumers. The OCA believes that organic bodycare standards should mirror organic food standard.

This means that:

• Certified organic agricultural feedstocks are utilized in the manufacture of the key basic cleansing and conditioning ingredients, versus petroleum or conventional feedstocks.
• Manufacture of such ingredients is ecological.
• The toxicity of each ingredient is minimal
• Non-agricultural water is not counted in any shape or form as contributing to organic content.

Over 600 organic businesses have signed on to support this campaign (see a list of supporting businesses here or sign your business on to be a supporter here).

If you are a personal care producer or retailer and would like to support OCA’s Coming Clean Campaign, click here.

The word “organic” is not properly regulated on personal care products (example: toothpaste, shampoo, lotion, etc.) as it is on food products, unless the product is certified by the USDA National Organic Program.

Due to this lax regulation, many personal care products have the word “organic” in their brand name or otherwise on their product label, but unless they are USDA certified, the main cleansing ingredients and preservatives are usually made with synthetic and petrochemical compounds.

This is why the Organic Consumers Association recommends consumers look for the USDA organic seal on personal care products that claim to be organic. Although there are multiple “organic” standards all around the world, each with its own varying criteria, the USDA Organic Standards are the “gold standard” for personal care products.

If you are looking to purchase a product that is totally organic, look for the USDA organic seal. If it doesn’t have the seal, read the ingredient label to find out how many ingredients are truly organic and how many are synthetic.

Identifying Toxic Contamination in Personal Care Products

Stop Bogus “Organic” Misbranding or Certification

To help remove some of this misleading organic labeling from the market, in late March 2008, the OCA and Dr. Bronner’s filed Cease and Desist Letters to many of the bogus “organic” brands who utilize conventional and/or petrochemical material instead of organic material in making their main cleansing ingredients, some of whom even tested positive for the carcinogen 1,4-Dioxane in this study. Read the press release here and the Cease and Desist letter here.

Many companies misbrand “Organics” on their labels but consumers should look for products certified under the USDA (see recommended list here), because there are other weak so-called “organic” standards that a product can become “certified” under, which do not allow ethoxylation and 1,4-Dioxane, but allow hydrogenation and sulfation of conventional, not organic material, to make cleansing ingredients preserved with synthetic preservatives.

Two of these weak standards consumers should look out for are the Ecocert and OASIS standards; Ecocert actually allows certain petrochemicals in cleansing ingredients.

Learn more here.

Surveys clearly indicate that when a product labels itself as “Organic” or is sold by a company with the word “Organic” in its brand name, consumers are willing to pay extra, because they believe that product does not contain cleansing ingredients made with conventional and/or petrochemical material, that may be contaminated with carcinogenic compounds like 1,4-Dioxane.

See survey results here.

The Power of Media

This simple documentary brings to light some pretty eco-unfriendly practices our tax dollars have been paying for (aerially spraying herbicides all over the 2nd most biodiverse country on earth to kill coca plants).  Curious has contributed to raising awareness on all kinds of important issues (Chicago Ten, anyone?), and seeing films like this one serves as a little nudge to remind us we could do even more.

Shoveling Water from Witness For Peace on Vimeo.