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

Observer Ethical Awards Announced: No More Weaseling!

The shortlist for the fourth annual Observer Ethical Awards, in association with Ecover, is announced. Last year’s awards saw Divine Chocolate scoop Ethical Business of the Year, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Celebrity Campaigner of the Year and Ken Livingstone Politician of the Year. Thousands of entries have now been whittled down to 33 shortlist nominees. Why the Ethical Awards?

Ethical issues have been variously pitched as cool, transformed, rebranded and even normal (praise indeed given their former tie-dye/wind-chime hugging roots). This is all absolutely valid, but for our fourth awards, I’d like to pitch the ethical outlook as being simply vital.

Inevitably, given the current fiscal climate (politely described as “challenging”), some leaders and big businesses will try to weasel out of environmental and social justice commitment or scale back previously “ambitious” plans to become low carbon. If you like, this is the opposite of greenwashing but just as pernicious.

The best defence against such weaseling, when commitment to a better planet is more important than ever, is mass engagement and enthusiasm for new and better ideas, campaigners and their projects. And the Observer Ethical Awards are all about enthusiasm. Each year this is reflected in the fact that you vote in your thousands for the people and ideas you think make a real difference.

The entrants were judged by a combination of reader votes and by a celebrity panel that included; Jo Wood, Ben Okri, Rick Edwards and Deborah Meaden. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on Wednesday 3 June.

The Observer Ethical Awards are instrumental in bringing green issues to the forefront of consumer minds and making businesses reassess their attitudes towards sustainability. The awards recognise those who pioneer a sustainable future and identify products, ideas and companies that make ethical living possible.

For the full shortlist or more information on the Observer Ethical Awards, check this page out.

What Are Your Consumer Consequences?

Play this fun (or is it scary?) game, Consumer Consequences, to see how many Earths would be needed if EVERYONE lived like you did. I’ve used calculators like this before, but this one really covers all the bases and you even get to make a funny avatar for yourself. Good times courtesy of American Public Media. How many Earth’s did you get? Report back in the comments. Come on, you’re just wasting time at work anyway, right? Hee. hee.

This is actually part of some great programming that you may have been hearing this week if you listen to public radio (you should!):

American Public Media recently announced that “Consumed,” American Public Media’s cross-program series on the sustainability of the consumer economy, will broadcast on public radio stations nationwide November 9-18. “Consumed” will provide listeners with a unique perspective of the impact our consumption has on our economy, our ethics, our environment and more.

“Consumed” comprises reports from Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report, Marketplace Money, Weekend America, Speaking of Faith, The Story and American RadioWorks. Each program will examine the consumer economy in its own way, providing a thorough, multi-disciplinary approach to a topic that affects all of us.

How Good is Good Enough?

Cartoon by John Darkow

A few years back, in the middle of a cultural studies seminar that sidetracked into a tag-team Wal-Mart bash, the woman sitting next to me rolled her eyes. “This argument is so last year. Can we get over Wal-Mart already?” she said. I’m one of the few Americans left who’s never been inside the warehouse-sized stores, so I couldn’t say anything. I’ve never been able to contribute to the rhetoric as anything more than a theorist and the arguments against the chain do seem insurmountable.

With the chain’s new campaign to showcase themselves as environmentally friendly, they’ve opened an experimental store in Texas run by renewables, taken to carrying organic food products, and, at the same time, added more fodder for the anti-Wal-Mart activists. Frankly, I’m not sure how to feel about the whole thing. On the one hand, Wal-Mart exists already, so I should perhaps applaud their eco-friendly tactics (since the US doesn’t require them to do this stuff and people buy from them like crazy). On the other hand, they’re exploiting something I believe strongly in for a market gain and while they do so, they may water down the meaning of organics and environmentalism while still contributing to the unquenchable demand for consumables – itself un-environmentally-friendly. (Check out this previous Eco-Chick post for more on this argument.)

The Christian Science Monitor recently published an interesting two-sided argument on Wal-Mart’s newfound environmental ethics that included these new-to-me facts about the company’s future plans:

They’re talking about doubling the fuel economy of their fleet by 2015. They hired a consultant to go through their dumpsters and figure out what could be recycled and what couldn’t. They found out that 80 percent of the stuff in the dumpsters could be recycled and the CEO said, “Great, we’ll recycle that. We’ll tell our suppliers that we’re not going to accept the other 20 percent anymore. And we’ll get rid of our dumpsters.” They’ve adopted something called “the precautionary principle” for chemicals. If there’s a chemical that is suspected of being toxic and if there are safer alternatives that can be used, they will stop selling products that contain the potentially toxic chemical. That’s a 180-degree turnaround from the standard way of doing business in America.

Unfortunately, though, the rhetorical question concluding the discussion is the same one that repeatedly floats through my brain: “How good is good enough?” When I first moved to Germany and saw a McDonald’s refrigerated delivery truck that advertised itself as running on vegetable oil, I was both excited and appalled. Excited by a company using low-oil transportation. Appalled that McDonald’s had co-opted something green for their benefit (I mean really, isn’t it immensely cheaper for them to recycle the vast quantities of veggie oil than to use diesel?). Then I wondered: is altruism a necessity in the environmental movement or am I being too demanding?

I live in a country that successfully voted against Wal-Mart by spending their Euros elsewhere (though one study suggests it may have also been an inability to work with labor unions that provided difficulty for the Arkansans), so I still don’t have to personally worry about the Wal-Mart argument. Still, I wonder about the power of companies buying into the eco-movement in whatever ways they see fit. Does buying organic from a discount shop instead of a co-op dilute my choice? Is solar power really better if the panels are purchased from an oil company?

Patriarchy of Pork

While reading through my environmental ethics text book today (that will be used for a class called Philosophy and the Environment…woot!) I came across a section called “Patriarchy of Pork or Feminist Fuss” in a chapter called “Ethics and Animals”.

The section is only about a page long (a bit less, actually) but it goes on to outline a theory. The author of the book first pointed out that when asking his university classes who were vegitarians it was a majority of women that raised their hands. This isn’t an outlandish claim, and I believe that. What is wildly outlandish is his reasoning behind this.

Back-in-the-day, he says, women would cook for their family. The daughters and the mother would prepare the meal and set the table. The men would them come, and they would get the plates of food first. As they are passed around the table, all the men would take the meat, so that when it got to the women, there would be none left for them… So he argues that it is this patriarchial ritual that has made the women of today become vegitarians more so than men…

I fail to see the logic. Like, I understand how some women in these circumstances would just accept that fact they were probably not going to get any meat (oh why not just make more? or take some first? …whatever.) but as for this making people vegitarians now?…With the vegitarians I lived with last year it was a decision based on animal rights, health or the environment – not some internal pressure to release their oppressed past.

On that note of crazy feminist things, Feministing has the craziest anti-feminist quotes up, my favorite is:

I am not defending radical feminism, which I consider to be a minor mental illness…

Mountain Clubs or Country Clubs?

Unlike bigger mountains out west, the craggy granite outcroppings of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Vermont’s Green Mountains are within a day’s drive of about 75 million people. Each summer, mountain clubs and other non-profits get to work educating hikers about Leave No Trace and the responsibility of land stewardship.

But not all mountain clubs are created equal. The old and now-behemoth Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is coming under frequent fire these days from hikers who claim that the AMC has abandoned its commitment to the mountains and the ordinary folks who trek through them. Instead, the AMC is building quasi-resorts such as Crawford Notch’s new Highland Center to attract wealthy visitors and corporate groups. Other smaller and less controversial groups inlcude Vermont’s Green Mountain Club (GMC), the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), and the Guy Waterman Alpine Stewardship Fund.

The Guy Waterman Fund, which offers grants for land stewardship and education, was established in memory of a long-time dedicated White Mountain advocate who, along with his wife, Laura, was instrumental in raising environmental awareness in the northeast mountains. Their fabulously well-written and suprisingly funny books include Backwoods Ethics, Wilderness Ethics, and Forest and Crag.

Laura Waterman, by the way, also recently wrote a memoir, Losing the Garden, about her life with Guy at their Vermont homestead, where for twenty-seven years they lived without heat, running water, or electricity while penning over ten books and countless articles from the kitchen table of their two-room cabin.