Like Wine for Trees

Next time someone asks if you prefer red or white, say, “How about green?” If you had to choose between wine and the environment… But what if you didn’t? Oenophiles and tree huggers, unite and raise a glass to sustainability! A carbon neutral wine is now available in Ontario and British Columbia. Santa Margherita’s Pinot Grigio is not only Carbonzero Certified, but also for every 750ml bottle sold from April 1^st to 26^th, 50 cents will be donated to Tree Canada in support of creating sustainable forests across Canada.

The sustainable taste of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, carbon neutral and top seller

Ideally, environmentally and ethically, everything we buy would be sustainably produced down the road at eco-friendly outfits by well-paid workers who loved their jobs. But most things we buy come with an ecological cost. I happen to like Italian wines (and Spanish, French, Chilean, Argentine…), so while I enjoy a number of wines produced in nearby Niagara and though I am conscious of the environmental expense of transporting wine and other products across the ocean and the continent, I sometimes want—okay, often want a wine from some excellent but distant wine producer.

In the past, I’ve had wines marketed as eco-friendly, with names like “Happy Frog” or whatever, some of which taste like what their names imply. But Santa Margherita’s Pinot Grigio (apparently the top selling Italian wine in Canada) I will drink again.

Okay, so I like the wine, but what is its environmental status? At Canada Blooms (on at the Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place, until March 23^rd), I spoke with the instigators of this initiative. Federico Trost, Santa Margherita’s sommelier and export manager, spoke of his company’s sustainable production practices “from grape to shelf.” They not only control the growth of the grapes, they even make their own bottles.  When I asked Carbonzero CEO Dan Fraleigh how Santa Margherita earned carbon neutral status for their Pinot, he praised Santa Margherita’s ongoing initiatives, which include emissions reductions and renewable energy production (for details, see http://www.carbonzero.ca/news) and then described three of the projects undertaken with the carbon offsets the winery purchased to make a difference beyond their own efforts and be certified carbon neutral: projects with Bison Transport in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, turning landfill emissions into fuel in Niagara, and repurposing methane emissions in Quebec. He said these aren’t the “excuse to pollute” variety of carbon offsets; they are “buying offsets that wouldn’t otherwise have existed.”

Michael Rosen, president of Tree Canada, which plants 600,000 trees a year, told me the cost, from germination to planting, is $4 per tree. Less than the cost of a glass of house wine, but still an expense. Fortunately, on top of the 50 cents for each bottle sold, Santa Margherita will donate another 50 cents every time you use the hashtag #sm_pinotgrigio. So, give a tweet, and if you want to enjoy a wine with no fossil fuel aftertaste, go to an LCBO or BC Liquor store (by foot, bicycle, public transit, or carpool) and stock up for Earth Day with Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, the one with the plantable basil-seed tag around the neck (750ml LCBO $17.95; BC Liquor $19.99 ). Sustainable wine? I’ll drink to that!

Theatre Review: The Sacrifice Zone

photo by Michael Cooper

Theatre Review: The Sacrifice Zone

If David Suzuki and Tim Flannery collaborated with Cirque de Soleil and the Fifth Estate, they might come up with something like Theatre Gargantua’s new drama The Sacrifice Zone. Toronto’s Theatre Gargantua is a hearty theatrical feast—contemporary, multi-disciplinary, multi-media. In collaboration with Aussie/Brit playwright and human rights lawyer Suzie Miller, they have developed a challenging show which examines how much people might sacrifice for justice, their families, their jobs, and other sometimes conflicting priorities.

The story—which seamlessly incorporates mystery, social commentary, and philosophical dialogue—is conveyed through a collage of dialogue, movement, acrobatic dance and image projection. It’s not one of those things you watch and whisper to your companion “We could totally do that”.

Read my full review at http://www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/November-2013/Theatre-Review-The-Sacrifice-Zone/

Where Your Purchases and Information Come From

“This Headline Is Irrelevant” will never make the front page. The evening news will not say, “Tonight’s top story, Nothing to Report.” You’ll get a lot of “news” about sports, and “Muslim Rage”, but never, “Government Forsakes Tax Payer Interests to Bail Out Acme Corporation” or “Tonight’s top story, our senior business correspondent, fired for investigating our major sponsor”. Likewise, products that admit “may contain nuts” will never admit “may contain cocoa harvested by captive runaway children”.

Spring Meadows Farm

If you want legitimate information, you have to get it from the horse’s mouth. So I visited some animals and their farmers two weeks ago on Open Farm Day in New Brunswick. On two farms, I saw turkeys and chickens move about freely in open pens that were not spacious but not overcrowded. I saw pigs that were happy as pigs in…sod (that’s what they’re happy to be in). They ran to me like any family dog would, then scurried off and played. A week later, returning from the farmers market, I ate bacon that came from one of their cousins, smoked by the articulate, charismatic, happy-but-overworked (his words) young farmer with whom I spoke both on the farm and at the market.

Kingston Farmers Market, New Brunswick

Another thing I saw on Open Farm Day was grass fed cattle. (Contrary to a popular myth, Canadian cattle can be raised exclusively on their natural diet of grass and hay year round; they just can’t graze in the pasture all year. The alleged “need” to feed beef cattle with corn—which they cannot easily digest, like making a lactose-intolerant person live on milk—is just a way to fatten them up in two years instead of three.) The four dozen cattle grazing in the field were as happy as cattle grazing in a field. The young ones, about 15 of them, were in a barn lined up almost shoulder to shoulder. The barn was clean and quiet, the air was fresh, the young cattle had fresh water and hay. What was distressing was that they were on very short tethers. For their first season, they can do nothing but stand up and lie down. The intelligent and personable farmer explained in plain and unapologetic terms that they are being shielded from pests (horseflies) and predators (coyotes) until they are grown. “We’d take them out for a walk every day if we could, but there are only two of us,” she said. “In the spring, they’ll be out in the pasture with the rest of them.” For a dog or a cat to be chained up like that for a year would be torture. But these are not pets. Compared to conditions for industrial cattle, such treatment is luxury. My first thought was, It’s so unfair. But I looked the cows and the farmers in the eye and, despite my sentimental misgivings, I felt that these were not conditions of cruelty and I did not feel the urge to return to vegetarianism.

If only we could all have such immediate access to the origins of all products we consume. To be able to drive an hour from home and see the very starting point of any item you pick up off the store shelf downtown, and form your own conclusions about how well the system is working. But for most people and most products, going to the source is not so easy. Where, then, do you get your information?

Around 1994, attending a presentation at UNBSJ discussing the emerging World Wide Web, I asked if it could be a reliable source of useful information. The presenter told me it would take time, but he believed it would gradually become a powerful resource.

My immediate reaction upon first reading about Twitter (back when I used to discover things on my own rather than through Facebook, to which I remember having a similar initial reaction) was, “What the hell is the point of that?” But as Oscar Wilde said, “The value of the telephone is the value of what two people have to say.” Although it is damningly faint praise, I can now say that a few minutes on Twitter supplies me with wide ranging information of significantly greater importance and interest than does “the news”.

People who have something valuable to say are finding each other. And, having been away from my own blog for some time, (the rewriting of my novel is going well, thank you), I was pleased to once again find something on my own—an increasingly rare occurrence—while looking for something to read in French.

http://alternatives.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/09/29/sourcemap-le-wiki-qui-simplifie-la-conception-des-produits/

This blog post introduced me to Sourcemap, “the crowdsourced directory of supply chains”. A project of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, Sourcemap “is a social network built around supply chains, enabling collective engagement with where things come from and what they are made of.” Something starts out as some project which then begins to attract a handful of geeks and enthusiasts, and then one day is suddenly indispensable, a tool which becomes to shopping (and selling) as a seat belt is to driving. People are becoming increasingly conscious of the harms their spending can be connected to.

A rant about fair-trade bananas or chocolate gets a pretty small audience. But responsible consumerism may become something in which everyone partakes as a matter of course once it becomes possible to confirm, as easily as checking the weather forecast, whether the thing you are planning to buy is produced under inhumane conditions, grown in night soil, derived from unsustainable sources, or shipped from thousands of kilometres away when a local, ethical, sustainable option might be available.

A Sourcemap showing sources of laptop components

With the “era of traceability” now upon us, participating in unsustainable and unethical consumerism is becoming increasingly inexcusable. Even here in backwards old New Brunswick, I am finding with no effort such things as fair-trade chocolate chips and local, grass-fed beef, at multiple locations and reasonable prices (no more expensive than the same products in fancy-ass Toronto where everything other than rent is generally cheaper than on the east coast).

Sourcemap shows shared shortcoming of shipping

Take a look, get involved. We can bring meaning to the phrase “guilt-free shopping”. Where did the parts of this computer come from? Where will they go when it is recycled? Who made your T-shirt and where was the cotton grown? Sourcemap is still a work in progress, and it may not dazzle you yet, but watch out. You may soon forget what life was like without it.

Drop That Banana! Doleful Story of Corporate Malice and Control of Media

Bananas!* (2009) is a documentary about Dole food company being found liable, in an LA courtroom in 2007, for malice and misconduct. No surprise, they got that reversed. (Yeah, like a group of poisoned banana farmers from Nicaragua could win against a billion dollar multinational. Disney puts all the happy endings in their movies, not in their news programs.)

Bananas!* At Any Cost?

Just as Bananas!* was set to open at the LA Film Festival, Dole threatened to sue everyone involved in the production and presentation of the film. Plucky Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten decided that, if they were going to sue him and try to silence his film, he would capture it all on film. The result is the nail-biting and inspiring new film Big Boys Go Bananas!* (2011).

Big Boys Go Bananas!*

As I sat down to watch my reviewer’s copy of the film, a friend offered me a banana. “Is it Dole?” She thought it might be Chiquita. I lamented (whined, blew hot air), “That’s no better.” I prefer my banana growers unpoisoned and fairly paid. As described in the film Big Boys Go Bananas!*, (and reminiscent of stories of corporate news-hijacking discussed in another fine new doc, Shadows of Liberty) Chiquita got an apology from the Cincinnati Enquirer for its 18-page 1998 exposé of how “Chiquita exposed entire communities to dangerous U.S.-banned pesticides, forced the eviction of an entire Honduran village at gunpoint, suppressed unions and paid a fortune to U.S. politicians to influence trade policy.”

Dan Koeppel, journalist and author of Banana: The Fate of The Fruit That Changed The World, says in Big Boys Go Bananas!* “We have an astounding lack of curiosity, the journalism community in the US; a lack of skepticism.”

During the Hot Docs film festival earlier this month, I interviewed the unassuming Gertten. I asked him what he made of this lack of curiosity. Gertten told me his Canadian producer of Bananas!*, Bart Simpson (also of The Corporation), “couldn’t get people interested in this story. [People thought it was]…too heavy… too much …Maybe it’s too dangerous.”

What has changed since Bananas!* [the first film] came out?

In my own country they say that Fair Trade bananas has more than doubled. In that sense, the Fair Trade farmers have better conditions than before. The conventional bananas are produced as they have always been produced, under a cloud of chemicals—one third of the production costs of conventional bananas is for chemicals. So my film, in that sense, hasn’t changed anything for the banana workers. What I did for the banana workers in Nicaragua is, they have fought for a long time to tell their stories to the world. I told their story.

Are things like the Occupy movement and Fair Trade making an impact?

The people who created the financial crisis are still in power…My new film is partly about the PR industry…When a big corporation has a PR crisis, they do everything they can to turn the story around. Can you imagine how much the banks are spending on PR over the last five years! And you can’t follow that money. Because, you read an op-ed in a big newspaper here in Toronto signed by some professor; that op-ed could be written by some PR company and paid for by a bank. And everybody’s hunting away with their microphones to interview the professor, but he’s actually just sending out a paid message from the most powerful people in the nation. And if we could follow that money, if the PR business was transparent, we could see, “OK yeah, but you’re talking—these guys are paying you.” Then we would listen to him in a different way. And that doesn’t happen. So, in these times when journalists are losing self-confidence and losing jobs, and the PR industry is growing and making more money than ever, I think we need to legislate about transparency. If they don’t want to be transparent by free will, then we have to ask for it.

Both films are playing in Toronto this week at Bloor Cinema.

For more information on the films, see http://www.bananasthemovie.com/ and http://www.bigboysgonebananas.com/about

Please read the published portion of my interview for more about why Gertten thinks a documentary about a banana company might be considered “dangerous”. Post City www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/May-2012/Now-playing-Indie-filmmaker-Fredrik-Gertten-takes-on-food-giant-Dole-He-tells-us-why/

Now go enjoy a Fair Trade banana.

Happy World Fair Trade Day!

World Fair Trade Day, Take a Step

 

I discovered today is World Fair Trade Day as I was having my “breakfast” of the Fair Squares (brownies) I made yesterday.

World Fair Trade Day (WFTD) is the largest Fair Trade event in North America, with events happening from May 6 to 20. But the most important event is when spend money on chocolate, coffee, sugar, bananas, and other products that are farmed in far away places, too often in conditions you wouldn’t want to perpetuate, even if it would save you 20 cents a kilo.

 

As my Fair Trade Day gift to you, here is my recipe:

Fair Squares

Mix

• 1 cup flour (unbleached)
• 2 tablespoons Fair Trade cocoa Fair Trade

Beat

• 2 eggs from humanely raised chickens
• ½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1½ brown sugar Fair Trade
• ¾ cup melted butter from humanely raised cows

Combine, pour in prepared square pan.

Bake at 325°F for 35 minutes. Don’t overcook.

Icing, prepared just before the brownies come out of the oven and poured on while icing and brownies are hot (if you time it right, the icing will spread itself out in a smooth glaze).

In a small sauce pan melt and heat till bubbling

• 2 tablespoons butter from humanely raised cows
• 1 tablespoon  Fair Trade cocoa

Without delay, mix until smooth

• 1 cup icing sugar Fair Trade is available, so if you don’t find it, request it
• ¼ teaspoon vanilla
• 1 to 1½ tablespoons milk from humanely raised cows

And to be completely fair, share them. And don’t be shy about letting people know that the treat they are enjoying is not the product of abuse, exploitation and child labour.*

*Unless you had your kids make them.

Shadows of Liberty: The Real News is on the Comedy Network

What’s the news?

If you had wanted to know what dirty deals Conrad Black was up to a decade ago, would you have wanted to rely on information from a newspaper he owned  (National Post – Canada, The Daily Telegraph – UK, Chicago Sun Times – US, Jerusalem Post – Israel, and hundreds of community newspapers in North America)? That’s what you do when you believe the daily headlines and the evening news. The vast majority of the “news” we are marinating in is owned by five corporations, one of which is Disney. Does it make sense to get your news from Disneyland? Not that every word is a lie; even the devil sometimes speaks the truth. But one is advised to seek better sources.

On the weekend I had the privilege of speaking with Jeff Cohen, journalist, media critic, and founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). (He will be familiar to those who have seen Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.) Cohen was in town for Hot Docs, the documentary film festival, for the world premiere of a documentary in which he appears, Shadows of Liberty. This stylish and important film, written, directed and produced by UK-based expat Quebecer Jean-Philippe Tremblay, takes its title from Thomas Paine

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

Evan: When “the news” is filled with celebrity scandals and sports, what does the word “news” even mean any more?

Cohen: News is changing in so many ways. It’s shrunk in terms of how much of it is about information we need [in order] to be informed citizens in a democracy. In [the US], one of the few bright spots that really has people thinking more critically is Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and Colbert Report. It does the kind of feisty reporting that news is supposed to do. In my country, you can’t say that stuff unless you’re a comedian. Since they don’t pretend to be journalists, they can get away with journalism. 

What effect will Shadows of Liberty have on audiences, and what can they do?

I think they will walk out saying “I can’t trust corporate news.” I think that’s the first thing. A lot of people in the movie have organizations and websites. Amy Goodman hosts Democracy Now!. John Nichols writes for The Nation. Hopefully people will leave the movie critical, not trusting, and they’ll search the internet. And as long as we maintain a free internet, they’ll be able to find alternatives, and those alternatives will keep growing if we can protect the internet.

Read more of what I heard from the director and Cohen at http://www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/May-2012/Hot-docs-interview-why-you-shouldnt-believe-anything-you-read/

And for another spectacular example of corporate control of media, see what happens to Fredrik Gertten when dares to make a documentary about food conglomerate Dole. http://www.bigboysgonebananas.com/

My interview with that filmmaker will appear next week. [Now available http://www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/May-2012/Now-playing-Indie-filmmaker-Fredrik-Gertten-takes-on-food-giant-Dole-He-tells-us-why/ Also see GoodEvaning post “Drop That Banana!”]

Dreaming on Your Feet

I had a dream that my girlfriend and I went to the chocolatier and bought some Fair Trade chocolates for Easter. We got in the car and, as I was steering us onto the highway, she had both her feet pressed on top of mine. I couldn’t step on the breaks or the gas and could hardly see around her, cars rushing all around us.

My girlfriend had a dream that she was driving a getaway car, but my feet were in her way as she was trying to stomp on the gas.

We woke up, holding each other. Her feet were pressing down on mine. My feet were pushing up against hers.

Have we been stepping on each other’s dreams?

If we wake up, can I get safely home with my Fair Trade chocolate? And what is she going to get away with?

Please tell me your weird “when I woke up from my dream” moments.

Water WAnTER: Waste Not Want Not

Water: Think Globally, Drink Locally

Whenever I think about what’s important, water comes to mind. Nothing does a body more good than water. I fill myself with water, I immerse myself in water. The closer I live to water, the happier is my life.

UN Water World Water Day

Water is it.

I would not claim that I use less water than others, but I think about how I use water, and I appreciate water. We use water the way we use the word “it“, without thinking about it, without considering what it means or where it came from or how we would get by without it. It’s crazy how it is always there for us.

Will water always be there for everyone?

If you don’t know what happened in 2000 when an American corporation bought all the water in [Cochabamba,] Bolivia, including the rainwater, then you have not yet seen the most important film so far this century The Corporation (2003).

Another film that should interest all fresh-water drinkers is Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008), just one of the films being shown at the Ecologos free Thursday evening film series Water Docs in Toronto from March 22 World Water Day until April 22 Earth Day.

If documentaries aren’t your thing, consider the political weight of Canada’s water as examined in the dramatic Paul Gross mini-series H2O(2004).

What can one person do?

Appreciate your water. http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/freshwater/

Let others have their water. http://www.blueplanetproject.net/Involvement/index.html

Don’t stop bathing, but think about how much goes down the drain. Here are a couple of habits I’ve acquired:

1. When running the water till is gets cold/hot, I collect that “waste water” in a pitcher and save it for my plants.
2. BYOTW. I almost always bring a bottle of tap water whenever I leave the house. I’ve rarely had a day when I didn’t wish I had some water, so I try to always have some with me. (The only time to buy bottled water is when travelling in regions where the local water system carries little beasties my gut is not accustomed to and the other options are dehydration or dysentery. I’ve learned to go for sparkling water to make sure it is not bottled tap water).

How Much Water Is Needed For That?

But water is wasted everywhere you look, and it’s not just about tap water and bottled water. Water is inextricable from agriculture, food security, the oil sands, etc., etc., etc. Water is everywhere wasted.

Happy World Water Day!

Just My Luck

Yesterday, after facilitating the Science and Philosophy Book Club discussion on Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, at the Centre For Inquiry, I went into the subway to buy tokens for the first time since the new-year fare hike.

As I stood before the dispensing machine, stunned by how little change I could expect back from a $10 bill, a fairly normal-looking human approached me with three subway tokens in his hand – which is all you get for $10 now. He asked, as people rushed around on all sides like a scene out of the cinematic masterpiece 2012, “Are you about to buy three tokens?” I started to say that I’m not going to be suckered out of – how much? He took advantage of my bewilderment and said something about having too many tokens and not enough cash for a burger.

The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker

My civil language must have provided him such a window that he had a clear view of my nature, which is so far from doing harm that I suspect none. I dipped into my pockets and pulled a fiver out of one and what may have been $6 in coins out of the other. He took the money from my hands and put the three tokens in my palm as if he was helping me lighten my burden. As I was about to let loose with a ferocious, “Hey…”, he deftly clutched a hefty bunch of low-denomination coins (mine) from his hand and plunked them into my other palm. Now my “hey” was ready. I said he owed me more change than that. He added a quarter saying, “Oh right, sorry. There you are; exact change.” And he politely vanished into the crowd.

When I say “vanished”, I mean he was more determined to split than I was to shout him down and get back what may have been about a buck fifty he’d scammed me out of. I just watched him go. This is “Toronto the good”. I was not offended but simply bamboozled, both that he would go to such lengths for pocket change and that I found myself letting him do it. I was fascinated by both of our behaviours.

How is this “lucky” for me? In the following two ways.

1. I had a student from one of those beautiful beachy places in South America which I am privileged to have visited and hope to see again. He described a day he was walking on the beach in his swimming shorts and flip-flops – nothing to steal. Someone pulled a gun on him, in a public place in broad daylight, and said he wanted those stylish shorts. My student said he knew what happens to he who hesitates. He ran home naked and alive.
2. For a mere buck fifty or so I got a priceless lesson. Don’t trust anyone ever; every person on this Earth is evil scum and you can never drop your guard for a second! The next person who says, “Excuse me,” to me is going to get a ferocious kick in the balls (oh, he’ll have balls, because it takes balls to be that low.)

That’s me, lucky and still learning.

All I Want for Buy-Nothing Christmas

Only 21 shopping days left till hypochrismas. Here’s how I rolled over the past week.

Last Friday on GoodEvaning, I wrote Occupy the 99%: How to Shop on Buy Nothing Day. In preparing that post, I encountered Buy Nothing Christmas, which reminded me of the documentary What Would Jesus Buy? and I said to myself, Yeah, right on, Brother! Those ideas are easy for me to buy into since, being a recently diagnosed freelance writer, I can afford to buy nothing.

That same evening I went to Swap Sity’s screening of the film Living Without Money and listened to guest speaker, “Barter Babe” Shannon Simmons, talk about how to make bartering a part of your personal financial plan. That’s something I could afford – Christmaswapping!

Buy Nothing Christmas

But when my dear family began to pester me for my “Christmas list”, which should be an oxymoron rather than a cliché, I felt myself toning down the buy-nothing rhetoric. I’m doing it for them, I told myself, because it would just break their little hearts if I didn’t have something under the tree to unwrap, from each of them, with their names on the tags. Altruism can be a vicious game.

So yeah, yesterday I sent out my list. If I were to get everything on my list, the retail value would be more than I’ve earned in the last six months – I’m talking hundreds of dollars – stuff that I have admitted I do not need.

Then today I flip-flopped again. After saying a firm “No” three times to joining an expedition to a non-specific warehouse sale, I caved rather than “ruin the Christmas spirit”. The aim of the mission was to buy “stocking stuffers” – the season’s most repugnant word pair. What horror. Mountains of infomercial rejects. Who could possibly want any of this crap? Damn, I am such a hypocrite! Okay, I confess – I let someone buy me a $4 baking pan, which I will use for baking Fair Squares*, the brownies I will be giving everyone for Christmas. [Too late for a SPOILER ALERT?]

Now here is my selfish Christmas wish, which I am sending out to you and the world. What I want for Christmas is to increase my readership of a dozen subscribers to over 100. So, please, indulge me. Try getting in the spirit of giving without spending, and make this the best Christmas ever – for me – by subscribing to https://goodevaning.wordpress.com/.

And it’s a gift you can give to everyone you know at absolutely no cost to anyone. And it’s a gift you can enjoy for years to come, or ignore without guilt, or get rid of without harming the environment, or – the best option – re-gift without letting go of it.

Please take a few seconds and subscribe, and then take a minute to suggest to a few of your friends and family that they subscribe, too. I don’t aspire to be “bigger than Jesus”, but I’d like to spread my words. That’s what I want; what do you want? Donate a comment.

Have a happy solstice!

 

*To help the producers of the ingredients – many of them actual Christians in Latin America – earn a wage that might enable their families to celebrate Christmas, I use Fair Trade cocoa and Fair Trade sugar (and eggs from local, free-run chickens). FREE RECIPE FOR SUBSCRIBERS.