If these photos don’t make you wanna quit your job and travel the world, we don’t know what will.

Asia’s diversity never fails to astound. Nowhere on Earth can you find a greater variety of cultures, languages, races, ethnicities, religions, climates, and geography. It’s mind-numbing.

These photos provide just a taste of what Asia has to offer. They’re also an important reminder of the need to protect what makes the world’s largest continent unique. Though the scenes depicted here may seem worlds away, our choices always have an impact wherever we may roam, reminding us to tread lightly.

(above) Penang, Malaysia

Bangkok, Thailand

Great Wall, China

Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh

Hong Kong

Polomok, Philippines

Bali, Indonesia

Maldive Islands

Nha Trang, Vietnam

Lhasa, Tibet

Huashan Mountain, China

Udaipur, India

Cassava farm near Luang Prabang, Laos

Bali, Indonesia

Singapore

Koh Samui, Thailand

Tokyo, Japan

Tainan County, Taiwan

Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Seoul, South Korea

Abseron, Azerbaijan

Busan, South Korea

Kampong Thum, Cambodia

Shanghai, China

Himalaya Mountains, Uttarakhand, India

Binh Thuan, Vietnam

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Meizhou, China

Koh Samet, Thailand

Dornogovi Province, Mongolia, from the Trans-Siberian Railway

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Ratchaburi, Thailand

Yangon, Myanmar

Eastern Vasayas, Philippines

Makalu Base Camp, Nepal

Kyoto, Japan

Taj Mahal, Agra, India

Elephant orphanage between Colombo and Kandy, Sri Lanka

Angkor Wat, Cambodia 

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Why racism lingers in the cosmetics aisle.

Many females of Asian, African, Latin American, and Arab descent learn early on that the more European you look, the better. Many cosmetic companies have worked hard to profit from this, providing women of color with toxic “solutions” for having the shade of skin they were born with.

Take skin lightening. Some might compare its harmful effects to tanning and say this is simply a case of people wanting what they don’t have. But the desire to have fair skin is deeper than that and has a much more damaging history stemming from internalized racism, a nasty place that rarely seems to be understood or even acknowledged.

On a recent trip to India, I was impressed by the way the country has sustained its culture despite Westernization and standards imposed upon it by British colonialists. Most local women I came across regularly wore traditional attire and as I rode through the countryside, I saw virtually every male wearing a khadi, homespun garb promoted by Gandhi as a way for people to boycott British products and return to using domestic-made goods. Ever since British rule ended in India in the late 1940s, the country has been renaming its cities to bring them back to their original Indian pronunciations and spellings.

But despite all of the preservation of culture in modern day India, the notion that fair skin is superior – which can largely be attributed to a history of lighter skinned people invading and ruling India – has been feverishly sustained and even expanded to encompass men. Ruthless advertising has further promoted the idea that lighter skin will get you the job you want, a significant other, and generally make all your dreams come true. While some of the most vomit-inducing commercials have been banned from Indian airwaves, there is still an abundance of advertising that needs no translation to show that companies that sell skin lightening products are capitalizing on a popular idea in India that a light complexion leads to a better life. These companies know: white sells.

While India’s issues with skin lightening are fresh examples, this is certainly not the only culture where people have held onto the idea that white is right. Amongst the youth of color I work with, it is not uncommon to hear the word “dark” being used as an insult or to hear a young black male include “light-skinned” on a list of the most desirable attributes of a female he’s interested in.

The acceptance and lack of questioning of this mentality regularly perplexes me. Beyond the obvious – that lingering racism gives an advantage to those in the United States who have white skin – it seems that many have forgotten, are unaware of, or choose to ignore the origins of color discrimination within black American communities: white slave owners forcing themselves upon black female slaves. The “light-skinned” offspring that resulted from this exploitation often had an advantage over their more African-looking counterparts, especially as slavery waned in the United States. Almost 150 years after the end of slavery, an archaic “lighter is better” mindset is still widely accepted, whether it is articulated or not.

In addition to matters of skin tone, black females with tightly curled tresses are likely to be inculcated with the notion that their hair in its natural state is unmanageable – and bad. Many black girls are taught this at a young age, and before they can get to know their hair, many of them have had it straightened with a toxic chemical relaxer. These chemicals sink into the scalp; these harmful ideas sink into impressionable minds. It can take years to undo the physical, psychological, and let’s not forget environmental damage, that is, if it is reversed at all.

If a black woman decides to present herself as she is, she will still have to learn how to explain herself when she inevitably comes across an ethnophobe; she may be informed that her appearance is an outdated relic of the failed “black is beautiful” movement in the sixties.

This mentality is deeply harmful in communities with a history of racism and oppression, but the idea that there’s a singular beauty standard for all women to achieve is rife in our world, regardless of a culture’s history. The solutions to such invented problems are, quite literally, toxic – not just emotionally but environmentally, as well. For women, there is always something to “fix.”

Images: Greg Westfall, Dainis Matisons, Spiralsheep

John Robshaw is a master of many things – textiles, tradition, color, pattern – and (apparently) it was all by accident. Mr. Robshaw was experimenting with traditional Indian block printing techniques and building pieces of glorious artwork when a friend suggested using his creations for upholstery. The aesthetic of John Robshaw’s textiles and products was born.

As any textile lover knows, Robshaw’s ability to flawlessly combine pattern, texture, and color through fresh evolutions of ancient techniques is the epitome of perfection. Robshaw has embellished his home with the same creative mixture of elements. This visual feast of ethnic pieces sprinkled with Robshaw products is the country home of the wildly talented designer. Though the property lies in bucolic Connecticut, the history of India lines the walls and floors.

Mr. Robshaw, I am available to grovel at your feet (and house-sit) at your earliest convenience.

This sumptuous home was featured in Lonny. Be sure to devour the original article – the block printing tips are irresistible.

For more Lonny inspiration, delve into this interview with Michelle Adams and then tour her charming apartment.

(Images via Lonny.)

Each week here at EcoSalon, I beg my favorite bloggers and designers to hand select a beloved green product, whether it’s a finish, furnishing, or accessory. The end result? An endless anthology of aesthetically perfect products for your perusal.

This week we will meander to India with Gagan from Of Peacocks and Paisleys. Gagan was born and raised in India, where she grew up with an innate sense of appreciation and value, and an early distaste for waste upon moving to the United States (in India, nothing that can be repaired or salvaged is ever thrown away).

Gagan has selected a handful of Indian handicrafts that she wants to bundle up and carry home with her during her next trip to India, “because they pack so much color in light, fold-able, and carry-able sizes.” These gorgeous items are handmade with materials on hand by Indian artisans. The gorgeous Wildflower Wonderland wall hanging (detail shown above) is woven of sari and kurta borders (click here for a glimpse of the full patchwork tapestry).

The lovely Gagan couldn’t leave India without a couple of Indian folk art paintings. Vidushini’s United Forever II depicts the union of the creative forces in the universe in the unique Madhubani style (on the left). Brajeswar Pattnaik’s Sailing II (on the right) is painted in the traditional Patachitra style (crushed stone colors on tussar silk).

If you want to peruse a little more Indian folk art, this website will satiate your craving. You can catch up with Gagan at her blog (don’t miss her graciously hosted, beautiful home tours).

Necessity, it’s said, is the mother of invention. Small wonder, then, that a new small wonder designed to put computing into the hands of masses has been born in a country with, well, plenty of masses. The government of India has released a prototype tablet computer that it says will sell out of the gate for a mere $35.

The touchscreen tablet can draw solar power and runs on a variation of Linux and has no internal storage, though it’s memory-card ready. On the what-it-does-have-front, those oh-so-few beans will get you a built-in word processor, video conferencing capabilities and, most important, a connection to the internet. Cloud-based computing is a key factor in the device’s low ticket price and compact architecture, as users can access web-based tools and applications through a browser as opposed to programs installed locally on the computer itself.

According to Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal, the device is designed for students and low-income families, and will be made available to 110 million Indian schoolchildren as early as next year. Quoted in the guardian.co.uk, Sibal says, “The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India. We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything.”

At $35, PCWorld, calls the device “virtually disposable,” in comparing it with the $100 XO computer developed by MIT and used in the One Laptop Per Child program. Who knows, the technology might even one-day give Apple’s $500 iPad a run for its money; India says it’s looking for manufacturing partner to mass-produce the device and eventually push the price down to $10. Yeah, that’s right. $10.

Image: seeveeaar

In addition to packing a hefty antioxidant punch, the mango – a superfruit if there ever was one – is now proven to fend off poverty, global warming, and sexism.

According to an article in the BBC News, residents of the Dharhara village in the Bhagalpur district of northwestern India have engaged in a social experiment using mangoes to up the value of their daughters. In many parts of India, girls are seen as less desirable than boys. Families want a male heir, and a son is seen as an extra source of income for the family.  Female feticide – in which doctors illegally abort unborn baby girls on the basis of their sex alone – is rampant throughout India, with 50 million girls missing, according to UNICEF. Female feticide has created a shortage of eligible brides in India, with males in some urban regions traveling to rural areas to secure a wife. But girls who aren’t aborted are often subject to extreme domestic violence later in life. Bride burning, in which men set fire to their wives for lack of a sufficient dowry, occurs in parts of India.

It is against this grisly backdrop that the residents of Dharhara have decided to make their daughters more valuable in Indian society. For every girl born, the family plants at least 10 mango trees in the village. The mangoes provide a source of income for the parents, allowing them to save enough money for a dowry upon their daughter’s marriage – thus avoiding the violence that accompanies a scanty marriage settlement. One mango orchard yields about $4,245 worth of mangoes each season, enough to supplement the familial income, with leftover money going in a bank account for the child’s dowry.

“We heard about it from our fathers and they from their fathers. It has been in the family and the village from ages,” Subhendu Kumar Singh, a school teacher, told the BBC. “This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in our village.”

While the Dharhara tradition shelters the village’s girls from the misogyny in greater India, the fact that mango trees alone can make a girl more valuable speaks volumes of the undervaluing of women in the first place. Preferable, of course, is a major cultural shift, one in which women – mango trees or not – are treasured from birth like men. But barring that, the Dharhara mango project is a model worth emulating.

Image: Mickey_boy[L]

You don’t have to be an economist to want to understand the economics of “the fabric of our lives.” Case in point: The recent ban on cotton exports by the Indian government has piqued my curiosity. I wanted to understand whether this ban would have an impact not only on the cotton farmers, particularly those growing organic and fair-trade cotton, but also what impact it might have on us as consumers.

What I learned is that there are no clear answers.

Fact: the price of cotton is at a 15-year high.

Why? According to Eco Textile News, this is the result of Indian authorities lowering cotton export tax rebates. With higher rebates there is more incentive to export raw cotton. Once you lower those tax rebates, you are effectively lowering its export appeal. Supply goes down, but demand is up (marginally), and the price of cotton rises.

So why ban raw cotton export altogether? What does this mean to the farmers? And what will be the impact to consumers?

The reason for the ban is simple, if you are the Indian government and your best interest is to protect the textile industry. A robust export market means a shortfall in the amount of cotton available for India’s own textile manufacturing sector. When you factor in China as a fierce competitor, this makes sense. China is, after all, the world’s largest cotton importer.

When it comes to the impact of the ban on cotton farmers, there are conflicting views.

On the one hand, some experts contend this decision was made in haste, out of panic over the fact that cotton prices have risen by 80%. And, that by restricting exports, cotton farmers (particularly organic and fair-trade growers) are not seeing any of the benefits enjoyed by the cotton traders. The organic and fair-trade cotton growers in India rely heavily on its export, and some believe that when times are good, these communities should be supported rather than punished.

On the other hand, some organizations support the banning of raw cotton export from India.

“I believe the true value of this commodity is long overdue, and has been taken advantage of for so many years,” says UK Pants to Poverty representative Ben Ramsden. “Without any move to keep cotton within India, the booming Indian textile and garmenting industry could be considerably challenged, putting further strain on this very fragile industry.”

Will we feel this impact on our wallets?

In some cases, fabric suppliers could pass their costs up the supply chain. This would result in retailers paying more for basic cotton items such as socks and t-shirts. However, some industry experts claim the ban will have little impact on domestic cotton prices, as most of the exports for the current cotton season have already been committed. So if we do feel any price sting, it will likely be marginal.

To this end, Ramsden says, “If this goes some way to enabling us all to understand more about where our clothes come from, and why our choices can change the world, then the whole exercise will be fantastic.”

Image: Ken Lund

“Come do it again,” Tekla Kostek would beckon to the teenage girls at our ballet academy in Los Angeles as they stood with one hand on the hips of their leotards, their other hand self-consciously brushing back the wisps of hair escaping their buns.

“You have to understand,” I remember she once told us, “You do the moves that look ugly. I don’t want to see the steps that you’ve already mastered.”

I had finally made it to the highest level offered at that academy – the coveted Level 7. Then, I stopped improving. The headmistress guided us through the same exercises every day. She gave some corrections, especially to the girls who showed the most promise, but we had ample time to stare in the mirror and pinch the skin around our waists. Then a new teacher came to town.

Tekla Kostek, who trained at the National Ballet School in Canada. At age 25, she had just come from working five years in the corps at Boston Ballet.

I would watch Tekla Kostek before class, drinking a coffee and taking her cigarette break – her lean, elegant body – the ideal classical body I did not have. But when Tekla, whom I came to know affectionately as “TK,” saw my keenness to train, she took me under her wing for prima ballerina bootcamp, giving me the attention and coaching I craved. In TK’s classes I did not have time to scrutinize myself in the mirror – instead, I came out of TK’s classes having changed the hue of my leotard with the soak of sweat, contemplating new theories about a leg extension, or how to hold my arms in a way, as she would explain, from a trapezius muscle extension.

Now, 10 years later. I am the age that TK was when she was my teacher. I recently moved back to Los Angeles, and I hoped to re-connect with my former teacher. Little did I know she had become a yogi.

Not a “yogi” in the pretentious sense; a sharing, open and practicing yogi who would make me oatmeal and tea in her home and tell me about her recent three-month journey in India.

On a sunny Friday afternoon at her home in Echo Park, TK brews me a cup of chai. The house she lives in was built in 1907, and has a contemplative artist’s vibe, as we sit at a round wooden table and she reflects on the time she knew me.

“You teach what you know, which for me was the old-school style. My approach was, “˜I’m going to give you something totally impossible.’” She says that in many ballet classes teaching people steps as if it is an impossible challenge of beauty that they will never get right is “inscribing negativity.”

And then I start to learn more about her perspective as a ballet teacher. After she taught me ballet, TK went on to teach ballet at Loyola Marymount University and became a principal dancer of Los Angeles Ballet. In her time teaching, she has realized that in ballet classes, we “compartmentalize the body” by focusing on technical aspects of that wrapped posé or extension of the leg and these are thoughts that feed the mind. Rather, a ballet teacher should do drills to simply creating patterns in the body through repetition – so the dancer doesn’t even have time to think.

She moved back to Boston for 2006, where she taught ballet at the University of Massachusetts. There, she had her students shout “I am Great” affirmations in class.

“You come to really interesting results,” she says, “when you get rid of “˜you’re not good enough.’  This is because your way of thinking about yourself becomes your reality. In dance, by thinking we are not good enough, we are ingraining into our muscle memory this idea of lack.”

Upon returning to Los Angeles, TK began teaching ballet again at Loyola. In 2008, she went to France on a music tour with her husband, Antoine Salem, who is a musician. “We smoked and drank our way through France, but when I came back and returned to yoga class, I realized I couldn’t be a hypocrite; it’s all about the breath. I quit smoking.”

TK went through a yoga teacher-training course at Exhale in Los Angeles and in November 29, 2009, left for India to seek her teacher’s guru, Paramahamsa Nithyanada.

She observes, looking back, she was “always really interested in meditation. How do you recreate that bliss experience that artists operate out of?”

What she experienced in India she had always understood at an intellectual level, but finally had the opportunity to live it at Nithyanada’s Life Bliss Engineering program at Bengaluru, India. Just the name of this program would have made me roll my eyes and giggle a bit, if it had not been TK telling me about it with a serious glow.

She recounts a sample day for me:

• 5am wake up
• 5:45am breakfast (South Indian satvik food)
• 5:45 – 8:30 asana practice (vinyasa kria)
• Afternoon of Puja (lecture/workshop)

She says that sometimes they would meditate through the whole night, because the meditation was so invigorating.

After a month in India, she appealed to her friends for help to stay on and complete the three-month program. She was surprised by an outpouring of generosity and raised a total of $2,000 from her friends along with encouragements; they told her that she was doing what they had always wanted to do. At the end of the program, her husband, Antoine, came to travel with her for two weeks in India.

Sitting across from TK as we chat about her journeys, we look out over a front garden that will soon sprout rows of corn and other vegetables. Since her return from India, she has “taken the pace down,” for moments like these with friends, “moments of sharing.”

“I want to be more aware of how I contribute,” she says. She does this by having quieter, more homebody days.

Her main livelihood continues to be ballet; in two weeks she will start rehearsal for Los Angeles Ballet. This past month she has been staying in, eating rice, beans and oatmeal. Her current project, Oatmeal28, will be a raid around town to use the vegetables from her urban garden to provide a healthy vegetarian fast food option to the late night music and art scene in Los Angeles. She also plans to write a book with her husband about artists teaching methods, inspired by Kenny Werner.

Her main disciplines now are writing and meditation, which she combines for her blog, Marriage Morals and the Urban Guru.

An afternoon conversation has taken us late into the evening. I’m no longer so concerned about being a beautiful ballerina, but rather, interested in being able to live my life according to deeper ideals. Many young adults have become jaded or cynical, at odds with what post-college life has yielded them. I look to my former teacher, my friend, TK, and now I marvel at her own growth.

As she sits back in the flowy kulats she brought back from India, and we share our experiences, I find that once more, TK has inspired and pushed me to keep dancing – from the inside out.

With not only H&M and organic certifier EcoCert caught in an unprecedented organic cotton scandal, courtesy of “organic cotton” suppliers from India, retailers worldwide can’t help but brace for their own industry-altering aftermath.

According to Ecotextile News, Lothar Kruse, a director of the independent testing laboratory Impetus in Bremerhaven, Germany examined the cotton fabrics that came from Indian farms and claimed roughly “30% of the tested samples” contained genetically modified (GM) cotton.

The head of the Indian agricultural authority Apeda, Sanjay Dave, told the newspaper they were dealing with fraud on “a gigantic scale.”

Organic Exchange, an organization committed to expanding organic agriculture, is releasing figures any day regarding how much so-called organic cotton India has produced on an international level for retail.

Current figures provided by them include 61% of the total amount of organic cotton produced worldwide in 2008-2009 were from them, with some 107,000 tons of fiber out of the total 175,113 tons grown worldwide.

Ecotextile News also reports that “Indian authorities discovered the alleged fraud back in April 2009 and fines were imposed at that time on third party certification agencies EcoCert and Control Union.”

Rumors have been flying for some time in the sustainable textile industry halls that the Indian organic cotton sector has been suspect.

Wondering what’s wrong with genetically modifying organic cotton?

According to the Human Genome Project, the act of genetically modifying something like organic cotton has its own ripple effect from the potential environmental impacts of unintended transfer of trans genes through cross-pollination and unknown effects on other organisms (e.g., soil microbes), to the loss of flora and fauna biodiversity.

Cut to the chase: when we screw with nature, we screw ourselves.

So what kind of ripple effect will this new information have on the entire sustainable textile industry?

Aside from the fact that eco-haters will have a field day bashing sustainable industries striving to make progress, this presents a great (if painful) opportunity to thoroughly consider our supply chains.

When companies large and small can’t trust certifiers and government officials to ensure organic products are in fact organic, we in the eco-world have reached a breach of the worst sort.

From designers to retailers, from teachers to industry writers, we all will come to realize that trust in large corporations and organizations can still be a shaky commodity and one that will require even more stringent watch-dogging.

One can only hope this clamp down won’t add a larger price tag to an already inflated organic ticket.

Image: Le Xav

Here’s an article to stop you in your tracks.

Ecotextile News reports on the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India -an area troubled by its farmer suicide problem – and the tribal area of Adilabad, Andhra Pradesh. For those of you not aware that watchdogs are necessary, you need only read on.

According to Coral Rose, founder of Eco-Innovations, companies like Designs LLC, (doing business as Jonäno), CSE, Inc. (d/b/a Mad Mod) and Pure Bamboo, LLC are guilty of deceptively labeling and advertising their products as made of bamboo fiber when in fact they’re made of rayon. Welcome to the Wild West of sustainable consumer goods.

The companies have been charged with making false and unsubstantiated “green” claims, stating that their finished products retain the natural antimicrobial properties of the original bamboo plant. Litigation continues against the fourth company The M Group, Inc., d/b/a Bamboosa, and its principals.

Susan Donaldson, senior buyer for eco retailer VivaTerra (full disclosure: VivaTerra is an EcoSalon sponsor), says the takeaway from this controversy is that our current system for labeling a product leaves a lot to be desired.

“Whether a material is called ‘bamboo’ or ‘rayon from bamboo’, neither one tells us much about the lifecycle of the product,” says Donaldson. “What kind of energy is used making this item and how much? What kind of dyes? What are the workers treated like? What happens when you dispose of it?”

Still, Donaldson is optimistic about the bamboo controversy.

“I believe there still is a great opportunity with bamboo, and just as we are seeing such progress in the organic cotton industry, I hope that manufacturers of rayon made from bamboo can also transition to more sustainable processing.”

VivaTerra sources their bamboo textiles from a fair trade company that maintains a closed-loop, carbon-neutral manufacturing process and factory – one of many bamboo companies making real efforts to improve both transparency and eco-credibility.

In researching the issue further, I read this story about Zameen Organic, a farmer-owned, organic cotton trading and marketing company. Zameen grows and promotes Fairtrade, organic and pesticide-free cotton and works with farming communities in rural India through GOTS certification. The funds amassed from the venture will be used to strengthen sales teams across the US, Europe and India with the aim of building up a presence at retail level and in particular in high-street stores.

Ecotextile New says, “Now numbering more than 4,000, the farmers, who invest their own capital into Zameen, hold the most shares in the company and play a big part in shaping the policies as well as benefiting from shareholder dividends.”

For every ton of raw cotton Zameen buys from farmers, they set aside an organization development expense of 1,100 rupees (approximately US$24) to invest in Zameen. Last season, Zameen harvested around 374 tons of organic cotton.

Though not a total solution for the region, Zameen Organic has helped substantially with a decrease in suicide farmers whose crops have yielded nothing and land sharks still bilk them for 60% interest. Many men, seeing no hope in sight, go out into the fields that are supposed to support them, drink the farming pesticide and die.

Though the bamboo textile industry in many cases needs improvement, I believe that the more sustainable options these farmers have at their disposal, the better.

Image from the collection of the International Rice Research Institute