Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Help Fight Chocolate Extinction!

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by Starre Vartan · 07/09/08

First the honeybees (and duh, the honey) and now chocolate is on the decline? Say it ain’t so!!

According to this CNN article on the subject of chocolate extinction, “Yields are declining all across the cocoa plantations of West Africa, where two thirds of the world’s supply is grown, as soils are degraded and the area able to support the crop retreats>”

But wait, there’s a solution!

I only eat fair-trade chocolate made from organic cocoa beans- and you should too! Not only does it taste soooooo much better, it prevents the very situation that’s degrading the land where cocoa beans are grown. The deal is that to make money (and cheap chocolate), farmers in Ghana and other chocolate-growing countries have to take down the rainforest and plant cocoa bean plants in unnatural ways. And what happens when you mess with Mother Nature?

The problem is that cocoa is naturally a rainforest plant that grows in shady conditions surrounded by a high biodiversity, but recently hybrid varieties have been grown on cleared land as mono-cultures and in full sun.

While this will give higher short term yields, the soil quickly becomes degraded and the lifespan of plants can be cut from 75 or 100 years, to 30 or less. When the trees die and the land is exhausted the farmers must move on and clear more rainforest to plant cocoa.

No chocolate (horrors!) AND no rainforest (probably worse-no, I admit, definitely worse).

Three of my favorites are pictured above (and don’t forget, dark chocolate is healthier than milk and because it’s vegan, it has a lower carbon footprint), so stick to organic, fair trade dark chocolates, which support healthy growing conditions for cocoa plants- and for the people that farm them.

TRY: Divine Chocolate (from an awesome worker-owned cooperative, this stuff is AMAZING!)
Green and Black’s (crazy yummy flavors like Ginger)
Trader Joe’s house brand (my fave is with pecans and raisins)

Yes, they are more expensive- chocolate is a treat and should be labor-intensive to grow if done properly. So eat less of it, and enjoy it more! Commercial chocolate tastes like wax flavored with old cocoa beans swept off the floor of a Dickensian factory (probably I’m not far off). Hey, if we don’t save the chocolate, think about what’s left!! CAROB. ‘Nuf said.

Africa, biodiversity, car, carbon, carbon footprint, Events, Fair Trade, Fair-Trade Chocolate, farm, health, labor, Milk, oil, oils, Organic, Plants, rainforest, spa, trees, vegan

UN Eco Conferences

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by Courtney Tenz · 06/15/08

Pardon my absence the last few weeks, but this month has been an unbelievably busy one in the green arena here. Bonn, Germany’s former capital city and the current seat of many NGOs and UN divisions has seen back-to-back conferences and I’ve been inundated trying to keep up with the conference happenings.

First, we had the UN Conference on Biodiversity – something that seemed really exciting at the time, with delegates from nearly 200 countries gathering to decide on ways to conserve habitats, develop across-the-board rules on GMO food, and find ways to prevent the extinction of endangered species.
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biodiversity, conservation, Germany, kyoto protocol, preservation

E.O. Wilson Wins TED Prize

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by Starre Vartan · 04/11/07

Us Eco Chicks love E.O. Wilson; his books include Biophelia, The Future of Life, and his latest, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, are masterworks of nonfiction writing about the environment and our place in it.

Each year, the TED Prize is granted to three individuals with the
talent to change the world. Winners receive $100,000 and something
much more valuable … a wish. These wishes are announced during
acceptance speeches at TED, and the community marshals resources to
help them come true. This year’s winners — former U.S. President
Bill Clinton, biologist E.O. Wilson and photojournalist James
Nachtwey — announced their wishes last month at TED2007.

TEDPrize winner E.O. Wilson wants to create the Encyclopedia of
Life. (Imagine a dedicated wikipedia to index all things living)

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf
of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more
about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that
we’re still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; and yet
we’re steadily, methodically, vigorously destroying nature. Wilson
identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), and
makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of
Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on
every aspect of the biosphere.

(Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA.)
Duration: 24:21)

Amazon, biodiversity, book, books, community, insects, media, movies, resources, spa, Tea, video

IPCC Report

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by Katie Kish · 04/07/07

Well, IPCC’s (intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2nd report of four came out Friday (thats a pdf link…) It is by far the most comprehensive and heavily reviewed word on climate change. They don’t conduct experiments or get funded by companies… It is a collaborative effort put together in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N Environmental Program to combine and summarize the absolute best information that we have on climate change and what will happen in the coming years. There are three working groups that put together different aspects of the information; Group 1 – the relevant science Group 2 – the potential negative and positive effects climate change will have on nature and the economy and how to adapt Group 3 – options for change. In other words, this is the report to trump all other reports on climate change. And this year they’re releasing another assessment… If you missed it, the report on relevant science was released in February.

As for the newly released report – The future does not look so bright. The report given by hundreds of scientists says that there will be big problems in Asia, Sub-Africa and Small Islands, but that North America and Europe are not off the hook either. Increases in heat waves, loss of food production and water resources, more severe storms and erosion are all already happening. It is the poorest of the poor countries that will be getting hit the hardest, but also the poorest of the poor in affluent countries will also feel the extremely detrimental effects. Those who can’t afford health care, or water to be shipped to them. Those whose houses can’t stand up against extreme storms and can’t afford to pay a lot of money for groceries.

Some scientists have criticized the report saying that it was too watered down and not “striking” enough – so really, if what you’re about to read is the “watered down” version… imagine how catastrophic the …properly watered (?) version would be.

“We’re no longer arm waving with models,” said Dr. Parry, who identified areas most affected as the Arctic, Sub-Saharan Africa, small islands and Asia’s sprawling, crowded, flood-prone river deltas. “This is empirical information on the ground.”

The report said that climate patterns were shifting in ways that would bring benefits in some places — including more rainfall and longer growing seasons in high latitudes, opening Arctic seaways, and reduced deaths from cold — but significant human hardship and ecological losses in others. (NYT)

…

“These impacts have been known for many years, and are now seen with greater clarity in this report,” he said. “That clarity is perhaps the last warning we’re going to get before we actually have to report in the next IPCC review that we’re seeing the disaster unfolding.”

What sort of impacts? I’ll do a recap…

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Africa, agriculture, Animals, arctic, Australia, biodiversity, car, cities, climate change, death, Easter, eating, Europe, fall, fish, flooding, Food, health, health care, labor, model, models, NYTimes, oil, reduce, resources, rum, soy, summer, Target, urban, water

Ocean Acidification: Another Symptom of Global Warming

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by Jennifer Veilleux · 03/29/07

I attended the 8^th Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture at the Smithsonian on March 5^th entitled “What Corals Are Dying To Tell Us About CO₂ and Ocean Acidification.” Ken Caldeira, the presenter, spoke to about 500 people in a packed auditorium about the current trends worldwide in coral reef health. He expressed concern that although popular media talks about the effect CO₂ has on the air, there isn’t much spoken about the effect CO₂ has on the oceans. And the oceans are not an indefinite sink for CO₂.

Carbon Dioxide deposits in the oceans and the molecules bind with the water molecules to create Carbonic Acid. If there is too much Carbonic Acid, it can change the pH of water and is corrosive to the shells and skeletons of marine organisms coated or composed of calcium carbonate, such as corals. The acid literally eats away at the organism.

Why is this important? As pollution increases in our global ecosystems, biodiversity is reduced and food chains can be disrupted. In the case of corals, they are the food source, breeding ground, and home for a whole system of organisms, the diversity of which is sometimes compared with rainforests. If the current deposition trend continues, oceans will loose not only corals, but the ecosystem that corals sustain as well.

Visible loss of coral has been recorded worldwide. Though CO₂ exacerbates the destruction of corals, it is not the only factor. Eutrophication, temperature changes, and human development have also taken their toll. It will take tens of thousands of years for the oceans to recover chemically to normal levels. The current situation of CO₂ deposition in the oceans can be compared with the meteorite theorized to have hit in the Yucatan 65 million years ago that caused a great amount of chemical change in the ocean (along with temperature change) and resulted in a biological impact from which the corals did not recover for 10 million years.

The solution offered by Dr. Caldeira was two-fold. More research must be done on the oceans, we currently know so little about the effects of long lasting events. And we must change our current energy production and consumption. The average American is responsible for producing 120 pounds of CO₂ per day, 40 pounds of which deposit in the oceans. This is five times the global average. Natural release of CO₂ is 50-70 times less than this. This is yet another reason we as a global community need to take energy production alternatives seriously and move away from our dependency on fossil fuels.

For more information on corals:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2006/03/coral_reefs_faq.html

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Duffy.html

http://oceanacidification.wordpress.com/

biodiversity, car, carbon, community, consumption, Energy, Events, Food, fur, garden, Global Warming, health, Home, media, News, oceans, pictures, Pollution, rainforest, reduce, water