Ashley Judd Rails Against Mountain Top Removal

During the I Love Mountains rally in Frankfort on Feb. 17, 2009, actor Ashley Judd took the podium to speak out against mountain top removal mining and in support of the Stream Saver Bill in this video.

(video courtesy of David Stephensen, Lexington Herald-Leader)

Household Cleaners Makers Face Lawsuit

From LATimes Greenspace

Environmentalists to sue for disclosure of chemicals in cleaning products

The makers of Tide, Ajax and other common household cleansers are being asked to come clean about their ingredients. Environmental and health activists announced plans for a lawsuit to make Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and two other major firms reveal the chemical ingredients of their cleaning products and their research on their effects.

Cabot Says No More Growth Hormones in its Milk

Cheese sales on the line, makers of Cabot brand of cheeses, cooperative owner Agri-Mark has informed its member farmers that if they want to continue using bovine somatotropin to boost production their milk they will have to go to sell their milk to the New York region. Trucking the milk that distance will increase the costs of production so much that the writing is on the wall, making the use of rbST unprofitable.

“I’d say most have seen it coming for quite a while, and feel if it impacts everybody the same way they can accept it,” said Bob Wellington, senior vice president of Agri-Mark, the largest producer cooperative in New England. “Some will wait right up to the very end, because they believe it makes them money.”

The author suggests that the New England dairy industry will be “rbST-free” by the end of summer 2009.

Monsanto Seeds Sustainable Agriculture Greenwash

This Greenwash moment is brought to us by Monsanto who intends to meet the challenges of tomorrow by redefining “sustainability”.

From the Monsanto website:

By 2030, Monsanto commits to help farmers produce more and conserve more by:

• Developing improved seeds that help farmers double yields from 2000 levels for corn, soybeans and cotton, with a $10 million grant pledged to improve wheat and rice yields.
• Conserving resources through developing seeds that use one-third fewer key resources per unit of output to grow crops while working to lessen habitat loss and improve water quality.
• Helping improve the lives of all farmers who use our products, including an additional five million people in resource-poor farm families by 2020.

That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto seeds are all about.

Monsanto was primarily a chemical company, prior to focusing on the seed market. It helped us keep our lawns green with toxic herbicides now known to be dangerous. In 1980, concurrent with the Reagan Administration, the United States Patent and Trademark Office began to grant patents on seeds. Since then, Monsanto has purchased seed companies worldwide and has become the leader in genetic modification of seeds, monopolizing control of food production through a combination of its seed and pesticide sales. It systematically uses legislative pressure and lawsuits to fight the blocking efforts of farmers and stores who reject their products.

This Vanity Fair article, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear” provides a fascinating and well-researched piece on Monsanto’s march to monopolize the seed market. It illustrates that Monsanto’s definition of “sustainable” is about sustaining itself.

GreenPeace of UK Greenwash of the Year Award Goes to…

United Kingdom’s Green Peace activists attempt to give the first annual Emerald Paintbrush Award to a company that has excelled in Greenwashing in this video. While the activists made it to the front desk of the award winner, British Petroleum (BP), they were hastily removed from the premises still holding the green award, the doors closed behind them.

The citation awarded BP for:

A multi-million dollar advertising campaign proclaiming its commitment to the earth, the sun and everything in between, and proudly announcing that the best way out of the energy “fix” is an energy “mix”.

In reality, the unnamed Tuxedo-clad activist said, BP had spent 93 per cent of its 2008 investment dollars in oil and gas exploration, drilling and distribution. Solar power received just $300 million dollar or just 1.3 per cent of BP’s total investment.

“So thanks must go to at this moment to BP senior staff, investment managers, strategists, and above all its advertising agency,” the jocular Green Peace representative concluded.

Banana, Blood and Fungus Describe Unregulated Corporatism’s Weakness for Greed

Huffington Post contributor Johann Hari offers a metaphor for unsustainable corporate practices in a telling of the history of the world’s most popular fruit: the banana.

Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.

Read more of Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times.

Congo and the FIght for Minerals

Often seen as a theater of ethnic cleansing, the Congo suffers from the brutal repercussions of being a mineral rich land. Here, mercenary profit drives genocide and systematic rape. As a Belgium colony, the Congo produced large amounts of gold which helped to fund WWII efforts. Now overseen by warlords and guarded by glassy-eyed gun-bearing youths, this once rich land produces the minerals required to make our electronic goods and gold jewelry. Writer and activist Ann Garrison offers this interview to Pacifica Radio’s KPFA.

West Virginia Gubernatorial Debate 2 0f 4 Held in Bedroom Community – Protesters Greet Candidates

This debate was the second of four gubernatorial debates held in West Virginia last week between incumbent Governor Joe Manchin, Senator Russ Weeks, and Mountain Party candidate for Governor Jesse Johnson.

Blocked out of the first and only statewide network televised gubernatorial debate, the balloted third party candidate Jesse Johnson shakes a few leaves off that two-party tree in this one hour debate held in Hedgesville, West Virginia. This debate was hosted by WEPM, a news/sports/talk radio station in West Virginia.

As the only candidate opposing Mountain Top Removal (MTR), Johnson provided relief to the protesting environmentalists in the crowd, many of whom had come to voice their objections to “The Path”, a high-voltage power line that would carve a 10,000 acre line through private properties in order to accelerate delivery of coal-powered energy to the East Coast states. While “the Path” is a federally mandated program, many see the current Governor as complicit in the sacrifice of West Virginia for the use of energy corporations.

There are a couple of interesting points to observe in the radio station’s reporting of the debate on its website, the most important of which is the exclusion of the discussion of MTR. A recent poll indicated that most West Virginians are against MTR, as well they should be given the level of contaminants dumped into the headwaters by profit-driven coal companies and the ensuing air pollution created by the burning of the coal. Instead, the station reported that the retention of teachers was the major topic discussed, which, while provocative, was not the heated point of opposition during the debate.

Hedgesburg is about a 5 hour drive from the state capitol Charleston and it sits in the upper east panhandle. It was once a sleepy rural area but has become a booming bedroom community for Washington D.C. commuters, who are transient in their commitment to West Virginia and unaware of the rest of the state’s history. The state’s history with coal mining has effected its politics for generations. It was a state made up of company towns in which a culture of obedience and isolation made it difficult for people to organize. This foundation of corporate control still permeates and aggravates the already dire conditions in which many live in the mid and Southern sections of the state.

One might wonder why the debate was not held in a more populated area so that the theater that held four hundred might at least be a quarter filled. Then again, it might be all too evident.