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Well, it's Columbus Day, North Korea seems to have acquired nukes, Iraq is falling apart, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, a sex scandal threatens to topple the Republican leadership in the House, polls are indicating a Democratic landslide in the mid-term elections, and slowly, incrementally, invisibly, never on the front page, the climate continues to warm and the end of cheap energy moves ever closer.

Jonathan Rosenthal, fair-trade fruit purveyor, answers questions

Jonathan Rosenthal. What work do you do? I am the top banana at Oké USA, a new fair-trade fruit company owned by farmers, fair-trade organizations, and nonprofits. What does your organization do? Oké USA is a new model of fair trade that links farmers, fair-trade organizations, and eaters. Farmers get a fair price, a fair […]

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A great story in the now-threatened L.A. Times focuses on a heroic small business in Rancho Dominguez in Southern California called Advanced Cleanup Technologies.

This 14-year-old firm can get 30 calls a day, to clean up every kind of toxic spill you can imagine.

They've long pioneered new clean-up and pollution-control methods, and now they're trying to scrub the fuel-oil smokestack emissions from ship engines that have been fouling air at ports for years.

A Port of Long Beach official is calling their new barge-based system a potential "major breakthrough."

All that's great, and what Ruben Garcia and his team have done is admirable, and maybe even incredible.

But that's not what this post is about.

This post is about a word -- the word used to describe our movement and people like us.

At the very end of the story, an engineer for the company declares that because their technology can reduce 90% or more of emissions of three major pollutants, "if you're an environmentalist, you're going to want this."

True. I do want this. And, more fundamentally, I expect that anyone who breathes and lives or works near or at a port will surely want this pollution control, and as soon as possible.

But what did you just call me?

Even conservationists can’t escape animal welfare issues

A fascinating article in the NYT on elephants in Africa makes clear that the treatment of elephants has serious consequences for how they behave toward humans and greatly complicates conservation measures. Advanced mammals such as these share too many social and emotional traits with us for us to believe that their survival is merely a matter of biology, habitat, and the physical sciences. An environmentalism that ignores issues of animal welfare is not only profoundly myopic, but is bound to fail at even its core mission of conservation.

UPDATE: I'm not sure what the occasion is, but there's another article in the NYT today about animal intelligence that is definitely worth a read.

We are entering an age in which we are going to be confronted with the fact that many of the traits we thought were unique to us are not, and this will force us to reevaluate our attitude towards animals in very profound ways.

Democrats must move to attract conservation-minded evangelicals before the Republicans do

The vast majority of green voters are Christian. Apparently, there just are not enough of them. One must also keep in mind that environmental issues have not historically split along party lines. Before their assimilation by the religious right, the Republican Party used to be the environmental party.

Here is an article from the Associated Press that pretty much sums up the looming "creation care" dilemma:

Dewitt said evangelicals will not call themselves environmentalists. They are going to call themselves pro-life ... But pro-life means life in the Arctic, the life of the atmosphere, the life of all the people under the influence of climate change ... Robinson said he voted for Bush in 2004 because of his opposition to abortion, but it was a tough decision, making him feel he was voting against the environment. If the conservatives want the Christian vote, they are going to have to address this ... The pastor feels like Noah cutting his first tree to build the Ark.

How ironic, cutting trees to build an ark. And there is this:

Documentary on massive sweatshops in Tijuana airs Tuesday on PBS

Get out your day planners, people. On Tuesday, Oct. 10, (that's next week) at 10 p.m. (but don't trust me, check your local listings) PBS partners with Grist to present Maquilapolis, a documentary about the hidden costs of cheap electronics and the realities of life for Mexican maquiladora workers. (And you thought I was only interested in brain-numbing reality television ...)

The term "Maquilapolis" refers to the "city of factories" in Tijuana, Mexico, where huge warehouses turn out televisions, electrical cables, toys, clothes, batteries, and medical equipment. And the film is focused on the workers in those factories: women like Carmen Durán (pictured at left, photo: David Maung). From the film's website, here's a brief glimpse at what life is like for Carmen and other maquiladora workers:

Maybe we shouldn’t be courting the religious demographic

While I'm loath to disagree with Al Gore on anything -- much less political strategy -- I have a number of reservations about the environmental movement actively courting the religious demographic. Most of them are irrelevant to the larger discussion, but an article in The New York Times makes me wonder if we aren't being overly tactical in our thinking, at the expense of a long-term strategy.

New food column opens with a look at a superlative coffeehouse

Note: This post marks the launch of Mad Flavor, in which the author describes his occasional forays from the farm in search of exceptional culinary experiences from small artisanal producers.

Three Cups in Chapel Hill, N.C., offers what might be the nation's finest non-espresso coffee experience.

I can't say so definitively. Nearly every U.S. city now has at least one café lorded over by a coffee-obsessed madperson; I've by no means sampled them all, though I'd love to try. Every time I go to a new town, though, I seek out the best coffee, and I've found nothing that matches Three Cups.

Me

Sorry again for my blog absence. I'm afraid it will be ongoing, as I'm leaving mid-day today to head down to Westwind in Oregon to speak at a meeting of the Northwest Environmental Defense Center. I'm speaking from notes, but I may try to write it up as a post later.

Also, I hope we can get some discussion going on the God & the Environment series, which is going to expand in coming weeks. I've got several interesting people lined to talk to. This thing started almost by accident -- I had an interview with E.O. Wilson lined up, then the Sleeth book crossed my desk, and then the Moyers PBS special popped up, and then ... it just spiraled out from there. This topic is on a lot of people's minds these days.

As y'all probably know, I'm ambivalent about religion in general, and about the intersection of religion and environmentalism. But I must say the passion and commitment of the people I've talked to recently has been affecting. Putting the factual content of religion aside, it certainly seems to be a source of inspiration that nothing in the secular world has yet matched.

Anyway, lots to talk about. More next week.

Underwater concert sets world record

Katie Melua has two impressive credits in her CV. One: she's the biggest-selling female artist in Britain. Two: she performed the world's deepest underwater concert.

On Monday, Melua and her five-piece band played two gigs for workers on a gas rig nearly 1,000 feet below sea level, an event Melua called "surreal." The concert was held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Statoil -- a Norwegian petroleum company -- and was filmed for broadcast on Norwegian TV. In addition to British pop singers, other recent deep-water discoveries include 10 new species of corals and a "treasure trove" of other new marine species.

The concert took place just hours before the re-release of Disney's The Little Mermaid -- a popular film featuring marine life jamming on the ocean floor. Coincidence? I think so.