What an inspirational week! The Rainforest Agribusiness campaigners, interns, and legions of supporters across the world have taken major steps to bring about the end of palm oil expansion into endangered ecosystems and displacing Indigenous communities.

And they did it on the Internet!

So many non-profits use the Internet merely to raise funds or to raise awareness about issues, but the supporters of Rainforest Action Network seem to have figured out how to use online action to accomplish strategic goals and make progress toward our mutual mission. That seems like an idea worth spreading.

We have the opportunity to speak at a conference next spring doing just that, telling other non-profits how they can use the Internet to change the world, but we need your help:

Vote for our panel at the South-by-Southwest Interactive Panel Picker!

The conference organizers liked our panel idea but they’re putting the final decision in your hands. If we get enough votes, we’ll get a chance to tell other non-profits all about the amazing work that readers of this very blog achieved. We’d be leveraging people power to tell other organizations about how to leverage people power!

1. Genetic modification
2. Human experimentation
3. Polluting the environment
4. Causing social injustice
5. Causing poverty
6. Obscene wealth
7. Taking drugs

I’m not a Catholic, so I didn’t know that there’s a whole department of the Catholic Church put in charge of managing sins (the Apostolic Penitentiary) but Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti says that these are really more of an update than brand new sins. Pollution is a new form of gluttony, for instance.

If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has an impact and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization.

Rev. John Wauck from Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross explains it further:

We’re seeing now that the kinds of sin that have an impact not on particular individuals—I stole my neighbor’s property or I damaged his property—but I polluted in a way that damaged the entire environment, which doesn’t belong to me … it’s a sin in a certain sense against all of us.

The Vatican is walking the talk, as well, having committed to installing over 1000 solar panels, printing prayerbooks on recycled paper, and starting a reforestation program.

What struck me most about the list was that many companies, and not just the targets of RAN, now have mortal sins as their explicit mission statement. In fact, their charters are often the combination of two or more Seven Deadly Sins, like “Become Obscenely Wealthy by Polluting the Environment through Genetic Modification”.

We’re in the middle of Lent and Father James Martin, acting publisher of the Jesuit magazine America, notes this fact as well:

If you work for a company that pollutes the environment, you have something more important to consider for Lent than whether or not to give up chocolate.

It seems our targets have an authority greater than RAN they need to watch out for now.

I’ve embedded one of their ads below. We’ve found that “count the number of rainforest species that can’t be supported by a palm oil plantation” to be quite a fun (and challenging!) game to play while watching it.

Lest you think RAN is a lone voice in the wilderness on this issue, it should be noted that these ads triggered the wrath of the Advertising Standards Authority, who upheld all 4 counts of alleged truth-stretching.

Because MPOC had not provided substantiation to show that all palm oil plantations in Malaysia met criteria for sustainable production (not least because those criteria were not yet in existence), we concluded that the claim “sustainably produced” was likely to mislead.

On this point, the ad breached CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1 (Misleading advertising), 5.2.1 (Evidence) and 5.2.6 (Environmental claims).

…

The ads should not reappear in their current form.

The ASA operates over in jolly old England, where there’s actually a code for broadcast advertising and violations are noted by the national media. Here in the US, what passes for truth on television is a bit more lax.

The folks in Mountain View have changed my life for the better, several times. Google Search did it the first time, then Google Image Search, then Google News, Google Maps… Really, almost every project they come up with has improved the quality of my life, not just give me something fancy to play with.

I have a number of friends that work at Google. All great people, really smart and with their heart in the right place. They know the power that Google wields and endeavor to wield it in a way that’s good for the planet and her people. Yeah, China’s tricky but they’re working to figure it out. Not only do I love Google, I trust Google.

But even after all that, yesterday’s announcement that Google will make renewable energy cheaper than coal makes me really sad.

If I had to put it into words, it would be that Google’s new position of savior with regard to the unequivocal catastrophe of climate change feels a lot like the death of something very dear to me: government of, by, and for the people. For centuries, we’ve selected from those among us the people who we feel could serve the needs of the country at large and, for centuries, they’ve tried to do so. When they succeed, we give them another chance; when they fail, we replace them. This is the dream of the United States of America and almost every nation that’s written their constitution in the last 200 years.

There have been obstacles along the way, no doubt, but I believe that the general trend of humanity has tilted toward enlightenment. Two hundred years ago, slavery was legal. One hundred years ago, women couldn’t vote. Fifty years ago, drinking fountains were divided by race. We’re getting better, albeit slowly. But now the torch has been passed.

Progress, be it the steady march toward enlightenment or the fevered race to avert global disaster, is no longer in the hands of the people who we choose. It’s clearly in the hands of the employees of privately and publicly held corporations. George Lakoff likes to talk about the “Conservation of Government Law”, which essentially states that government, like energy or matter, can neither be lost nor gained. Every failure of government to lead provides an opening for other organizations. Corporate America has risen to the challenge and in many cases precipitated the emasculation of my most cherished human invention: government (though the Internet does run a close second).

The last seven years under the Bush administration have been disheartening, certainly, but I’ve managed to keep hope in the general idea of government. Now, I feel that too may have been lost. Google, if they can save us from ourselves, may prove a more powerful form of social authority than anything we’ve dreamt up before. Looking at the current candidates for President, their fake smiles and calculated statements, I’d rather pick any of my friends from Google to run the country in a heartbeat.

And that makes me sad.

It’s a fairly “enlightened” video game with lots of options (especially compared to recently featured ones). For instance, you can choose to feed the parts of the cows that don’t make it into the burgers back to the ones that are still waiting for slaughter. There are consequences for such actions, of course. Turning rainforest into grazing land (which RAN has campaigned against in the past) starts to cause climate change. But no worries, you can use your profits to bribe a climatologist to say it isn’t happening.

Even with the deck clearly stacked against me, I tried to give it a go and run as sustainable a business that I could. I avoided genetically-engineered crops, bovine growth hormone, advertising to children (yes, you even control the unruly marketing department complete with macs and mohawks) and didn’t bribe any state officials. I was managing to do alright for a while, even the Board of Directors was happy. That’s when the activists began. I started getting picketed by what the game called “corpulent gold-diggers” saying I caused obesity. I closed my eyes, clicked “corrupt a nutritionist” and never looked back.

Join me in the chatroom if you have any questions about what’s going on.

Update (1:06pm PST): Okay, it’s all over. Brant asked Bank of America some tough questions in front of a few hundred of their peers and they stammered through some half-baked answers before throwing him out. We’ll let you know when the archive is available if you missed the live feed. All in all, the technology worked great so I’m sure we’ll do this again.

“[W]e believe that a professional appearance will be more effective in projecting seriousness and determination to the administration, and more effective in swaying the opinions of those who are on the fence about the war.”

They say they’re reclaiming a sense of power and professionalism that has become identified with the Right exclusively. I can’t disagree with that, but part of me wonders how much of this is playing dress up. The Left can certainly spend far too much time worrying about what issues are the most palatable to the imaginary “Middle America” and not nearly enough time on what the issues should actually be. This is probably more prevalent among trying-to-get-elected DC types than the queer, pierced, bike-riding anarchists I call my friends out in SF.

However, I’m willing to admit that perhaps decorum—whether it be a shirt and tie or simply politeness—may transcend ideology and instead facilitate the expression of ideology. I do have sympathy for a lot of inaccessible government leaders and CEOs that are sometimes just as trapped by the system as any of us are. And RAN values our ability to transition from protesting outside a corporate headquarters to being invited inside to advise them how to suck less.

Whaddya think? Suits and skirts: shackles of corporate slavery or a prerequisite for being taken seriously? Or both?

I clicked on “What Can a Tree Be?”, wondering why being a key part of a diverse ecosystem, like providing shelter for animals, preventing erosion and producing oxygen was evidently not good enough. The next page treated me to an important looking person (you can tell because he’s wearing a suit) talking with an accent that a co-worker described as “just British enough to seem smart, but not so British as to seem foreign”. In essence, it’s the “Evil Accent” spoken by the Empire in Star Wars or the Romans in less-than-accurate Hollywood depictions.

Anyway, he admits that Weyerhaeuser looks at trees “a little differently” and urges me to click on some of the things that they’re busy turning trees into. Here are my favorites (sorry I can’t link directly, but it’s a Flash website).

• Food! Yes, they want to grind up habitats of endangered animals to create cellulose additives for ice cream. I feel that needs to be said again in italics: Weyerhaeuser wants to put trees in ice cream.
• Biofuels! Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. Do we really want to trade oil wars in the Middle East for Weyerhaeuser’s brand of clearcutting trees, jobs, and communities? Oh, and solar and wind power don’t cause homeless caribou.
• Trees! One of the things Weyerhaeuser is turning trees into is “even better trees”. That’s code for genetic engineering, my friends. Weyerhaeuser must have skipped the part in their history textbooks about monoculture farming and the potato famine, I guess. Monoculture plantations are like a baseball team with nine pitchers.

Moments after taking a chainsaw to an “idea”.

Image after image of tree technician complete with test tubes, latex gloves and safety goggles gets the point across pretty plainly. This company has nothing but contempt for nature as it is now and is completely dispassionate about twisting it into whatever will make them money. Plus, what’s so dangerous that they need safety goggles? The ice cream?

Considering how important forests (by which I mean complete ecosystems, not tree factories producing the straightest sticks modern science can muster) are to global ecology and how incredibly short-sighted it is to turn them into assembly lines to feed our overconsumption, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, quite literally, Weyerhaeuser can’t see the forest for the trees.

PHEVs offer the potential for reducing both emissions and fuel consumption, simultaneously addressing the issues of global warming and the nation’s dependence on imported oil.

Climate change and extractive industries (such as drilling for oil and mining for coal) are two of the largest threats to pristine ecosystems and their inhabitants all over the world, as well as being significant problems on their own. While we would never disagree with those saying that dusting off that old bike in the garage accomplishes the same stuff (and I ride zero-emission mass transit to work each morning myself), it’s undeniable that plug-ins are the route that automakers must take if they are serious about cutting vehicle emissions drastically and quickly enough to curb climate change. You can help us convince them over at FreedomFromOil.org.

One of the best reasons to plug in is that while oil can never be clean, the electric grid can only get cleaner over time. That’s why RAN’s Global Finance campaign is busy stopping new coal-fired powerplants and keeping banks from funding them altogether.

My personal transportation hero is Dave Raboy, a friend of RAN’s who fuels his all-electric truck (nothing hybrid about it!) with residential solar panels (his story is available on the NYTimes website, subscription required). He’s justifiably proud of the fact that since he bought his truck it “has cost me nothing to run. No maintenance, no oil changes, no gas.”

Update: Even the San Francisco Chronicle is raving about plug-ins today.

This past week, RAN Senior Campaigner Bill Barclay and I were in Tokyo, Japan, to help our Japanese staff host three forums focused upon the serious problems with old growth logging in Tasmania. Japanese paper companies purchase over 80 percent of the woodchips produced by Gunns Limited, the Australian timber company that is rapidly clearing Tasmania’s ancient forests; in fact, just three companies—Nippon Paper, Oji Paper and Chu-estu Pulp—comprise 70 percent of Gunns’ woodchip market. The goal of the forums was to provide Japanese companies, NGOs, citizens and the media with greater information on the tragedy that is occurring in Tasmania and to discuss potential solutions. In other words, why it might be a bad idea to source timber from a company that clear-cuts old growth forests, napalms the cleared land, kills hundreds of thousands of native wildlife, and attacks anyone who opposes it, as well as how to avoid such practices and still have adequate supplies of woodchips. RAN staff were lucky enough to be joined by several experts from Tasmania, including an ecological scientist, NGO leaders, and Peg Putt, Leader of the Tasmanian Green Party.

By most accounts, it was a very successful week: the Japanese activists were really enthusiastic; the response from the companies was fairly good; and I was encouraged by how much media interest in our campaign has grown. We had a full house for our public forum and were able to make important connections with NGOs interested in working to save Tasmania’s forests and endangered animals. Many of the Japanese companies that buy products from Nippon, Oji or Chu-estu finally seemed to understand just how egregious Gunns’ practices are and that a solution needs to be found.

That solution is simple: all Nippon, Oji and Chu-estu need to do is request that Gunns does not include any old growth or high conservation value forests in their supply, and these forests will take a huge step towards being saved. Gunns can’t sell them elsewhere because no one else will buy them – not even other bad logging companies like APP in Malaysia. There are detailed maps of critical forest areas readily available, and adequate supplies of woodchips from other sources, such as plantations, ready to go.

Unfortunately, Nippon, Oji and Chu-estu were noticeably absent from the company forum. RAN had arranged to meet with Nippon and Oji last week, but they pulled out at the last minute. Why? Because forestry officials from the Australian government wouldn’t attend. Why? Because they hadn’t printed their latest information booklet. Give me a break! These paper companies just want to continue making as much profit as possible by buying woodchips from old growth forests that no other company will.

The good news is that now that their customers and the Japanese public have learned the truth about what is going on in Tasmania, questions are starting to be asked and momentum towards change is building. Companies are improving their purchasing policies, asking not to have old growth woodchips from Gunns included in their supply, and pressuring their suppliers to improve their own practices. Japanese activists are talking about Tasmania, informing their networks, and asking companies to make progress. Having grown up around activists in Okinawa, Japan, it was awesome to see the strong interest and enthusiasm that our trip generated in Japan’s greatest city. My hope for the future protection of Tasmania’s ancient forests is improving every day (as is my recovery from jet-lag).

When it comes to using airspace, it’s like using our water and simply because there’s no precedent doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing to do.

While RAN continues to actively support the Grassy Narrows community against being logged into cultural genocide, I couldn’t not comment on this very innovative initiative from another Canadian First Nation.

I don’t know what telecommunications companies are like up in Canada, but down here they are kinda evil so I strongly support this community in standing up for their fair shake.

But, while she brought many a microphone, she didn’t stop by to interview us but to give us the basics on podcasting. What equipment we needed, how much it would cost, how often we should produce one, etc. She also suggested—a suggestion I’m taking right now—that we ask our supporters what they’d like to hear. We’ve come up with all kinds of ideas, from short and funny behind-the-scenes looks at the often chaotic office here at RAN to in-depth and lavishly told stories about people impacted by the issues we work on to everything in between.

What would you like? What issues should we cover? How long should it be? Do you even listen to podcasts? You all support us with your time and money, so we want it to be something valuable to you.

It seems that the future has quite a history and there’s always been a buck to be made by telling it. While the science-fiction of the 50s and 60s gave us some great things to look forward to, like robot companions and jetpacks, 50 years later and we’re still looking forward to them. If we go all the way back to a Ladies Home Journal article from 1900, featuring predictions for the year 2000, certainly we’ll see things that have already come true, right?

As much as I would really enjoy commenting on each and every one of their predictions (as each one is a window into what was and wasn’t “imaginable” in 1900), I’m going to stick with a few of the most relevant.

Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers.

Yep, this one’s pretty much true. No specific mention of what they will run on, but back in 1900 electric vehicles were outselling gas engines pretty handily.

Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

This one seems to suggest the internet, or at least the transmission of data over phone lines, though certainly not as robustly as we’ve come to know it. It’s strange to think that in 1900, no readers of Ladies Home Journal had ever seen a color picture of an elephant, much less something like Planet Earth (which is amazing, and my roommate just got the series on DVD for her birthday).

Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles.

Oh wait… That one’s the internet.

Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper.

Those numbers are remarkably accurate for one hundred years ago and, though we’d prefer wind and solar over hydroelectric plants, it’s nice to see that the move to renewable energy away from coal has been going for over a century now. This is one prediction that we can, and should, make come true today. Yet, banks continue to fund new coal plants. Sad.

Lest you think I’m being unfair by resurrecting an old article just to cheer on electric vehicles and beat the coal industry over the head with it, let me be clear. Some of these predictions, thank god, did not come true. What kind of prognosticator even suggests something like this…

There will be no wild animals except in menageries.

Eek!

In my days before being the web designer for RAN, I did a fair bit of print work and developed an interest in ways to minimize the ecological impact of what—at the end of the day—is still turning trees into disposable content. It’s when I first learned of the FSC and kenaf. I truly believe that we need a take-your-values-to-work day as our 9-to-5 efforts often have just as big an impact on our environment as the lightbulbs we use or car we drive. I’ve been paying attention recently to the role designers play in creating both desire (and thus consumption!) and solutions.

For this reason, I was delighted to pick up the “Green Issue” of Creative Review magazine. According to the cover, it’s technically called the “It’s About Time We Did Something About Sustainability and the Environment” issue. That same cover also has the table of contents, just to save some pages. Getting magazine designers to think about sustainability leads to some very interesting innovations. A special section breaks down how much ink, paper, metal plates, and chemicals went into the issue’s making and how they’ve sized the magazine to waste less paper (it’s square), are switching to a new paper, recycle their plates and unsold copies, and are examining their entire supply chain for ways to improve.

Other articles include: Creative Activism, talking to your clients about sustainability, how to design for low impact, the greening of Apple, inside the greenwashing industry, and taking your studio carbon-neutral. All the bases are covered. Finally, they fully acknowledge the “Green Issue” trend and the dangers of mere lip service instead pledging that the changes they made for this issue will be permanent from now on and advertising their downloadable version E-CR which, obviously, saves a lot of ink and paper.

In stark contrast, I picked up the latest copy of Common Ground at my local coffee shop, taking note of interviews with both Bill McKibben and Van Jones (who makes me proud to be a Jones). The articles were great as expected but I was horrified to find three more copies sitting on my front steps when I got back to my apartment. One for me, one for my roommate, one for my upstairs neighbors. I looked around and noted that yes, everyone on my block had received a free copy of the “Earth Day” issue. I’m already a member of GreenDimes to avoid just this situation and the added preposterousness of it being the “Green Issue” was honestly insulting.

I tried to find an explanation inside of how Common Ground, with a print run of 50,000, was monitoring and improving its practices. All I could find was a recycled logo, with no indication of the degree (100% post-consumer, I’m hoping). For a San Francisco magazine full of ads for organic milk and yoga retreats, it gets its ass handed to it by a bunch of UK designers in terms of walking the walk. Here’s hoping they step it up and outdo them next round, as I do genuinely appreciate the content.

Okay, I admit that I haven’t read every single Green Issue that’s out there, but these are my picks. Feel free to nominate your own best and worst Green Issues in the comments.

Crossposted on Stanifesto.

Having grown up in northwest Indiana, the very epicenter of the SuperBowl, I would be sorely remiss if I did not mention it at least in passing. But now that I have, let’s talk a moment about a much larger game being played, with much higher stakes.

Over the last six years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have written the most authoritative study on Climate Change to date. It has been penned by over 800 scientists and reviewed by an additional 2500 from over 130 countries and represents the very best science we have on the subject. The Summary for Policymakers (pdf) is available online. In brief, the findings were:

1. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” (p.4)
2. There’s a 90% chance that humans have caused it. (p.3)
3. Emissions are so out-of-control that warming will “continue for centuries” even if they’re stabilized. (p.12)

I’ll let you take a moment to go through the fives stages of grief before we move on.

By move on, I mean, introduce the other team. Yes, coming out on the other side—against the report—is a well-oiled machine of energy companies, PR hatchet men, and legislative puppets.

ExxonMobil (via one of their “unbiased third party” think tanks, American Enterprise Institute) has already gotten caught offering bribes to any scientist willing to dispute the report. No research required, just disagree. All they want is a climate of confusion (pun intended).

Next, PR hacks like self-appointed “Junkman” Steven Milloy (to whom I will not befoul myself by linking, but do read his profile on SourceWatch), have tried to deliberately misrepresent the report by accusing the media of deliberately misrepresenting it. Having long since given up trying to prove the contrary to any scientific findings, the best they can do is shed doubt on what knowledge real science has rendered. Nice try, but it turns out I can read.

Similarly, Senator James “At-least-I’m-not-Senator-Stevens” Inhofe (R-OK), has gone on record calling the report “a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain”. The statement is so ironic it attracts magnets.

I am not given to hyperbole. Phrases like “worst” and “best” I reserve for the actual “worst” and “best” subjects of a category. Similarly, if I say something like, “I love this movie,” I have often already considered marriage before someone taunts me with the suggestion. I note this because it will ground my following opinion as beyond a stereotypical enviro-exaggeration, but the truth as far as I am concerned. These people who would place their profits, their salary, or their kickbacks ahead of the health and safety of not only our natural world but the lives of every man, woman, and child on this planet cannot be called anything nicer than traitor to the human race. They’ve been deceiving, deluding, or dragging their heels for far too long. I search my heart for some scrap of compassion for them to forgive the terrible crime they’ve committed against all of us and find none.

Let’s leave them to their petty machinations and meddling and pay them no more mind. In the meantime, the rest of us will Step It Up and try to get Earth back on the right track before things get even worse. Hesitation is over and done. Do all you can, as soon as you can. We meet this challenge and our great-great-great-grandkids will sing the victory in their songs. We fail and no songs will be sung.

Environmentalism is just as much about "Saving the Earth" as it is about "Saving the Grandkids".

I admit that I have a strange fascination in watching corporate PR at work—most of them are so wonderfully sneaky. I get a little giddy whenever one of them, especially one from a company whose stock ticker looks like a ski jump, says that RAN doesn’t “get” business.

Anyway, I’m interested in what everyone thinks of his suggestion (when asked how RAN could be more effective at getting them to change) to buy a Ford hybrid. Personally, it sounded like telling someone concerned about second-hand smoke to buy a pack of Lites.

So here’s some homework for everyone:

1. Read Ford’s 2004/05 Sustainability Report.
2. Check out the Bergen Record’s ToxicLegacy.com.
3. Decide for yourself.

See if you’re frustrated, too.

Especially of note is table #1 on page 4, a rundown of car companies and their future prospects. Way down at the bottom is our good friends at Ford Motor Company. I’m very impressed with JPMorgan, it took us a couple years to figure out that Ford was key in the effort to help turn around global warming. They pointed the finger less than six months after adopting an environmental policy.

Quick studies over there.