10 global events we were all intrinsically part of.

What makes an event memorable? How does a “happening” sear into our collective mindset and take up permanent residence in our hearts and in our souls? Most often, of course, we are not personally there to witness or directly experience occurrences of global importance.

How many of us were in Cairo’s Tahrir square as protests raged earlier this year?

Who among us lost a loved one or ate radioactive food in Japan, or suffered pangs of hunger in East Africa?

In our media-saturated world, memorable events – indeed memories themselves – are delivered to us via an increasingly wide range of words and pictures, bits and bytes, accounts that stream to our attention, some touching us for a moment, some for a lifetime. Here’s a look at our Top 10 (in no particular order), with links to the stories and accounts that made them indelible to us.

1. March of Horrors: Japan’s Suffering

A tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeast Japan killed nearly 20,000, caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and triggered a nuclear power plant disaster that unleashed radiation into the environment. Within hours, videos of the unimaginable waves crushing the Japanese shoreline flooded world consciousness via YouTube and other Internet outlets.

2. The Harder They Fall: Arab Spring

Beginning with a small demonstration in Tunisia that grew to topple a regime, flames of unrest spread to Egypt, ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, and then to Bahrain and Yemen. Eventually Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi would be dead, and even today, Syrian protesters remain caught in a bloody battle with dictator Bashar al-Assad. Did social media enable and perhaps even spark these events?

3. European Disunion: Economic Crisis in the E.U.

The global economic downturn wreaked havoc in the European Union where austerity measures in Greece resulted in riots and protest, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was driven from office, and measures taken by Germany and France exacerbated an ongoing fissure between the E.U. and Britain. Meanwhile, disagreement about how to avoid a catastrophic meltdown flared across the Atlantic, as opinions about what to do remained as numerous as there are pundits and stakeholders.

4. Wanted Dead: American Operation Kills Osama Bin Laden

In May, American helicopters bearing a special operations team raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, whose followers carried out the 9/11 attacks. Within hours his body was buried at sea, and images of the corpse suppressed. Instead, a powerful and now-famous image of White House personnel – including president Barack Obama and Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – remotely watching the mission was made public.

5. The Fruit of Invention: The World Mourns Loss of Apple Founder Steve Jobs

The world lost some great minds to cancer and health issues as 2011 wore on, including writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. But, despite the sense that “it was coming,” the loss that seemed to most deeply move our high-tech world was that of innovator, inventor and Apple Founder Steve Jobs. As news of his death spread across the internet in October – in part via millions of his own inventions – biographer Walter Isaccson’s iBio hit the presses, eventually to set new sales records.

6. From Wall Street to Main Street: Occupiers Take a Stand

Beginning with a September protest in a New York City park near Wall Street, what became known as the “Occupy” movement quickly spread to many major American cities and beyond. The “leaderless” protests are said to represent “the 99 percent” against the richest 1 percent of Americans, who benefit from corporate and political corruption and greed at the majority’s expense. In November, images of a campus police officer at the University of California Davis pepper-spraying students went viral over the internet, instantly becoming a rallying point for the movement.

7. Us vs. Them: Obstructionism Paralyzes Washington

Despite being fractured between party traditionalists and Tea Partiers, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shackled the hands of Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate. On issues ranging from the economy to the environment, American leaders reached a seemingly endless stream of stalemates. Most notably, the President unveiled a massive jobs bill that was labeled dead-on-arrival by members of both parties. The New York Times commented on the political gamesmanship, and EcoSalon presented the many rifts dividing America.

8. Weather, Weather Everywhere:  Climate Change Marches On

With drought in Texas, killer cyclones in the Philippines, and monster floods in South America and Thailand, 2011 was another year in what seems like an annual escalation of climate change and severe weather. Perhaps the most wrenching weather-related disaster was the return of drought to the Horn of Africa. Data continues to show the impact humans have on the world’s climate, yet deniers continue their war on science. In October, EcoSalon named names.

9. We are the World: All 7 Billion of Us

As the human population reached the 7 billion mark (with 3 billion more projected by the end of the century), debates about resources and birth control reheated. Can our planet sustain such exponential growth? In its inimitable way, National Geographic gave us the story in pictures.

10. Ask and Tell: End of Anti- Gay Military Policy in the American Armed Forces

After 18 years of controversy, the Pentagon repealed its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in September. After encouraging those who have been expelled under the policy to reenlist, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘out of many, we are one.'” An MSNBC story covered a historic kiss.

Images: TenSafeFrogs, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, S a l e e m – H o m s i, PIAZZA del POPOLO, bkusler, lwpkommunikacio, bogieharmond, Alex Barth, kevin dooley, woodleywonderworks, Beverly & Pack

The post The 10 News Stories of 2011 You Shouldn’t Have Missed appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThe Blue Angels and the Blue Asses who love them.

I’ll say it: I hate the Blue Angels.

I don’t hate the pilots, especially since one in 10 dies in these shows. Their skill is impressive, but so is ibuprofen’s power to eliminate the headache I had all weekend.

What I hate is the hypocrisy and denial from otherwise educated, progressive folk, or what those outside of San Francisco like to call elitists. How can a typically, or at least stereotypically, intelligent and engaged population possibly think the annual Fleet Week celebration culminating in a fuel-guzzling spectacle of mind-melting noise and nostalgic military might is cool?

Every year, the local media love to report on the inevitable controversy. There are those who adore the Blue Angels (the majority), the hippies who hate them (the minority) and the people who know they shouldn’t go in for such things but mumble about “civic pride” and “feat of engineering” before dashing down to the Embarcadero. Reliably, some outlet, usually a small weekly, will publish a complaint about this celebrated collective embarrassment – with politically-correct emphasis on the noise, never the navy! God no! – and the controversy flares up in the comment box.

This time around, when SF Weekly had the commie audacity to grumble about the deafening 150 decibel levels of the jets whizzing by their offices (“deafening” as the categorization for 150 happens to be an actual scientific fact), a keyboard-enabled denizen of San Francisco promptly attributed such grumbling to “carpetbagging transplants” who would dare deprive children of the fabulous experience of having class interrupted by the noise of the jets. No child of the Bay Area should grow up without that experience, he railed. I think it’s reasonable to venture someone still takes his PB&J without the crusts when no one’s looking.

This isn’t a video game. You can’t check into the Blue Angels on Foursquare. If you want to honor a great American marvel of technology, go bike across the Golden Gate Bridge. Fart all you like along the way, while you’re at it – you’ll put out far less toxic gas than the jets scorching overhead.

In short, I’m disappointed in my Berkeley-marching, Marin hot-tubbing, Haight-Ashbury pot-smoking brethren. (I’m also disappointed that sistren is not a word, but more on that another time.) Not because I out-smug them. Quite the contrary. I don’t attend rallies, I’ve never marched in protest, I wouldn’t wear Birkenstocks even if Birkenstock paid me in Manolos to do it, I eat meat and – wait for it – I don’t believe in sacrifice as a strategy. This hardly endears me to many a resident treehugger, but then I’m hardly enamored of an otherwise green population that mindlessly shows up once a year at the pier to cheer an outlandish and outdated display of sky-high dick swinging. Why must patriotism and pride always come wrapped around a weapon?

No one’s arguing that what the Blue Angels do isn’t enormously impressive. It is. The atom bomb was impressive. The many dams that have upended vital ecosystems are impressive. American feats of engineering, all. And you can argue for their necessity quite convincingly to many people and for many decades we have.

We are living in precarious times – thrilling times, to be sure. Our economy and our environment are in shabby shape, and that’s being generous. So for me, getting excited about a jet show is about as mature as getting excited about sandwich crusts. It’s just so entirely out of touch, and I have yet to hear a coherent defense.

I suppose this makes me a carpetbagging transplant and possibly a commie and definitely a curmudgeon, but in my opinion it’s time to put the Blue Angels on the shelf next to Formica, meatloaf TV dinners and Mommy’s Little Helper. We have much more fascinating “feats of engineering” going on, ones that might save us here and now, in the real world, in the true time and space we are all actually in and must face whether we want to or not. Escapism can be fun, but that doesn’t make it right.

The Insider’s Guide to Life is your editor’s weekly column exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, living, and anything else, including high decibel ranting. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: (matt)

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Female soldiers serving overseas are denied their legal right to choice.

There isn’t a much more intrusive and demanding employer than the United States Military. If you enlist, you give up a great deal of personal freedom and accept the strong likelihood of being placed in harm’s way. In return, you receive many benefits: the honor of serving your country, superb on-the-job training, job security and reportedly the best health care benefits in the country. But it may shock you to learn that service women don’t have the same access to legal reproductive healthcare that their civilian counterparts enjoy.

The trouble began with the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, which ensures that federal money is not used to fund abortions – on military bases, in Planned Parenthood facilities or anyplace else.

Anti-choice politicians and activists have spent a lot of time over the last few months making sure that there’s confusion about how government dollars are used to fund abortions. Here’s the quick answer: they’re not. See Hyde.

Think about what this means for an American service woman overseas.

Female soldiers stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries where abortion is illegal have to get special, unpaid leaves of absence and – using their own money – fly to a country where it is legal to get an abortion. Because of Hyde, they can’t get one on base.

Other than cases in which the life or health of the woman is in immediate danger, female soldiers cannot get an abortion – a legal medical procedure in the country they are serving and risking their lives for – on a military base, where they are supposed to receive health care because said health care is government-sponsored. Talk about a Catch-22.

For many years, servicewomen and military wives were able to use their own funds to access abortion care on military facilities overseas. In 1988, an internal Department of Defense memo took away that right. In 1993, President Clinton signed an Executive Order lifting the ban, but then in 1995, an anti-choice Congress passed a law reimposing it. And here we are.

“Abortion is essentially illegal on base and it puts servicewomen into a pre-Roe situation: If you have money, if you know who to ask and if your commander lets you leave the base, you have a choice. If not, you don’t,” says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

On a foreign military base, there’s usually a treaty or agreement with the host country and stipulating rules and regulations apply. Saudi Arabia is the best example. Servicewomen there are allowed to drive on base, but can’t drive in the rest of the country. The same is true with veils, which they must wear if they leave the base.

Given these examples, it would seem that even if abortion is illegal in the host country, U.S. laws would apply on base. But common sense doesn’t apply and the consequences are dire.

“I heard a story about a soldier was stationed in the Philippines. His wife was pregnant and the baby had fatal problems. The closest place to go to terminate the pregnancy was Japan, but they couldn’t afford the trip. She was forced to carry the pregnancy to term,” says Kolbi-Molinas.

People in the military, she explains, do have fewer privacy rights than the rest of us, and you’d need your commander’s permission to leave the base for any reason, including medical procedures. What goes too far is that the facilities ban requires disclosure to the officer, sometimes to the whole unit. There are serious repercussions. Unsurprisingly, a woman leaving active duty to get an abortion isn’t good for a unit’s cohesion, and has shown to be damaging to women’s military careers.

According to the ACLU, more than 365,000 women presently serve in the military. If, while they are deployed, they happen to get pregnant – either because they had consensual sex and the birth control failed or they are raped – they are unable to do anything about it. And rape isn’t a small issue. According to a 2003 study of female veterans, 30 percent were raped or suffered a rape attempt during their military service. Uncle Sam, I’ll do the math: thirty percent of 365,000 is more than 109,000 women.

And abortion isn’t the only reproductive health service that is compromised for active servicewomen. “During the first Gulf War, I heard about a soldier in Kuwait who was having issues with her IUD. None of the doctors she had access to there had a speculum, so they had to use spoons,” says Kolbi-Molinas.

Their lives are on the line for ours, and we can’t do better than spoons?

The first way to protect servicewomen on our bases is to ensure that full reproductive health services are legal, just as they are at home – for now. If the right to choose is compromised or lost in the States, active duty women don’t stand a chance.

On February 18th, the House passed H.R. 3 and voted to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood. If it passes the Senate we’re all in a lot of trouble. Far more than an abortion provider, Planned Parenthood offers STI testing, HIV testing, cancer screenings and access to birth control to women who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

As Candace Straight, co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice, wrote: “Beyond the title’s hypocritical and not-so-subtle taxation, H.R. 3 would disadvantage an entire spectrum of women and families. From the brave women serving in our military overseas to federal employees and the poorest of our citizens, this bill directly aims to restrict access for those in need.”

See where your Senators stand and then contact them voicing your support or disgust, depending. And, if you can, float a little money at Planned Parenthood – the organization really is on the frontline protecting reproductive freedom and it needs all the help it can get right now.

In honor of International Women’s Day, let’s extend the laws of this land to our courageous women in uniform, whether they’re standing on its soil or not.

Image: Familymwr

The post Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…and Don’t You Dare Get Pregnant appeared first on EcoSalon.

The quest for sustainable textile sourcing is surely front and center on every conscious fashion designer’s agenda for 2011. Thanks to new resources like Source4Style, identifying and acquiring sustainable fabrics is becoming less time consuming and arduous in terms of research and supply checks. In addition to recycling and upcycling textiles that are all ready in the waste stream, several resourceful fashion designers have targeted the massive global stockpile of military surplus garments and fabrics. Heather Heron and Christopher Raeburn are standouts in this latest phenomenon, as their chic and functional designs transform high quality fabrics into timeless signature pieces that just might out maneuver sustainable strategies of the past.

Heather Heron  For Environment Furniture

We are not talking about “military chic” here, or the glorification of war-mongering attitudes, but given the fact that our troops have been deployed somewhere at some time for as long as hemlines have been shifting, it is inevitable that there is a hefty surplus of military fabrics on standby for reuse.

As British fashion wunderkind Christopher Raeburn described in an interview with Fiona Sibley of The Guardian, it makes sense that a designer looking for durable (often waterproof) fabrics would choose to tap into a cache of military ponchos, parachute fabrics, and field tested canvas/woolen gear.

“…The military always has to overproduce its garments, so there are warehouses with thousands of square feet of military surplus sitting around. For me, giving that a new lease of life is very interesting. What is available depends on political issues: I use fabric from the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic, but also from the former East Germany, which has a post-cold war feeling. After the first Gulf War there was a fall-out of desert camouflage. I spend a lot of time researching the supply, and now my challenge is to find quantities to make my production scalable, to be able to make 100-200 garments, not a handful.”

Raeburn, who studied at The Royal College of Art and was a February 2009 recipient of the Ethical Fashion Forum’s Innovation Award, works first and foremost as a precision-driven craftsman who artfully transforms military garb into beautifully tailored garments that Vogue, Barneys, and numerous fashion glossies have latched onto. All of his designs are made in Britain, something that allows him to monitor scalable production as well as maintain ethical standards. In the end, Raeburn’s designs are first and foremost about fashion with a production process that just happens to be ethical and conscious in its smart use of materials and built-in functionality.

Comme des Garcons

As the folks at BurdaStyle recently pointed out, designers like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons have been working with reclaimed garments and dry goods for years. Khaki fatigues patched together with military tent fabric and jackets serve as iconic collage elements for street style dressing. Designer Heather Heron might fall into this camp with her eco-luxe accessories that highlight the raw beauty of vintage military fabrics transformed into sleek clutches, computer sleeves, and totes that are ideal for modern living.

Heather’s most recent collection on view at Environment Furniture’s New York showroom demonstrates the beauty of transforming one basic style of vintage army sack into five functional and smart looking pieces. A pleated clutch crafted out of Swiss army textiles definitely sends a message that sustainable style is more than an attitude; it’s a gorgeous testimony to accessories that just get better with age and personal adventure. Add to this the fact that Heron produces all of her designs locally in California with skilled artisans, and the reports from the field just seem more and more promising. The military “trend” is here to stay and it is up to us to find the most sustainable way of addressing and demobbing the issue.

Lead Image Christopher Raeburn

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