A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

It may be that you can hide things from your partner and even from yourself, but you can’t hide from the relentless and elite team of sex researchers here at EcoSalon. We found them. All of them. And they’re downright embarrassing.

1 in 10: number of single British men who admit they hide their teddy bears from their girlfriends

1 in 3: number of Americans who admit they have lied to their partners about money even after combining finances

359: number of men arrested for soliciting sex workers in a “National Day of Johns” sting on February 5th

1: “Very discreet” pilot per private flight on Flamingo Air, Cincinnati’s “most outrageous airline”

32: Age of a Georgia man charged with posting Craigslist ads under other men’s names soliciting anonymous sex

161: Number of the Senate bill that would require sex offenders to register on social media sites like Twitter

The post Sex by Numbers: Secrets and Lies appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Hill…

I just couldn’t let this one go by. And it pains me to bring it up. But let’s talk about a few inconvenient truths.

Who’d have thought that President Bill Clinton was the eco-friendly “bad boy” of the Clinton-Gore administration? He made intimate phone calls to his special friend from inside the White House during his scandal; Vice President Al Gore took a private jet during his. How could our anointed Captain Planet turn his back on (in addition to one other key figure) Mother Earth?

Masseuse Molly Hagerty has been dishing about the Nobel Peace prize-winning climate change guru’s ‘crazed sex poodle’ behavior. I won’t go into the gossipy details of the alleged massage because it has no relevance here.

But, some facts have arisen about the other, more globally pressing issues about the Harvard-educated family man becoming entangled in this controversy. He was staying in Portland, Oregon, and asked staff at the luxury Hotel Lucia to find him a masseuse. Two things. One, the Hotel Lucia is lovely, lively, hip and chic. But just because it’s located in the Emerald City, doesn’t make it a green hotel. Maybe Gore forgot to do a simple search for one of these environmentally friendly lodgings. Also worth noting: Staying at the Doubletree is not any greener simply because the word tree is part of its name.

Plain and simple, Gore hasn’t been practicing what he’s been preaching all these years. Witness the purchase of his bachelor pad in San Francisco in 2006.

Gore paid $3.9 million for the apartment atop the grand St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco in 2006. There is a swimming pool, a health spa, a roof deck and even a butler available to bring refreshments along with his order of double standards. He enjoys an opulent personal lifestyle while lecturing the public on green morality.

It’s a complicated situation being a public personality. The spotlight can illuminate, yes, but it can also seduce and reveal the bad in someone as well as the good.

Tabloid fodder aside, it’s the double talk with regard to core message that’s difficult to stomach, let alone abide. San Francisco is one of the greenest cities in the country. So what kept Gore from finding, or erecting, a sustainable living space? Building a green house doesn’t take much more than money. Heck, even Glenn Beck built and lives in one.

University of Manchester Professor Geoff Beattie published a study about environmentalism and attitudes versus actions. In it he differentiated between how people felt about being “green” and what they actually believed and did about it. Sean Coughlan at the BBC reports:

Researchers, at the university’s Sustainable Consumption Institute, made video recordings of people talking about issues such as global warming – looking at how their words matched their body language, such as hand gestures and expressions.

The study found that while people could control their speech to express green opinions, their unconscious gestures suggested their “true thoughts and feelings” lay elsewhere.

Explicitly, people may want to save the planet and appear green, but implicitly they may care a good deal less.

Given it is these implicit attitudes that direct and control much of our behaviour in supermarkets and elsewhere, these are the attitudes that we have to pursue and understand and change.

It’s common knowledge that people (politicians, especially) will say one thing and do another, often the opposite. It’s just difficult to observe, in hindsight, when some of those people take a very public stance, muscle their way to icon status – and make less good on their word. The lesson here: If you’re going to fall from grace, make sure you have a cushy seat on a private jet to make your descent a comfortable one.

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: socketsite

The post An Inconvenient Roof: Al Gore’s Controversial Lodgings appeared first on EcoSalon.

In late December an important story broke here in California that calls into question the integrity of foods labeled “certified organic”. It’s tragic that the greed of a few operators can jeopardize the integrity of the entire system. Unfortunately, as we have seen with the melamine scandals, when there are piles of money to be made, greed can trump ethics. For some, the temptation to cheat is just too strong.

Back in 2004, a former employee of California Liquid Fertilizer revealed that instead of making a certified organic liquid fertilizer from chicken feathers and fish, the company was spiking their fertilizer with much cheaper ammonium sulfate, a chemical not allowed in organic production. Before you get scared, this is not a food safety problem. It’s simply cheating. Organic farming principals disallow the use of chemicals.

The Sacramento Bee broke the story in late December after the paper obtained documents from the California Department of Food and Agriculture through a Public Records Act request. It’s troubling that the California Department of Food and Agriculture officials were notified of the problem in June 2004 by the whistle blower, but didn’t take any action to remove the product from the market until January 2007.

The farms that unknowingly used the fertilizer have not been charged. They are some of the largest organic producers in California, supplying large, mainstream, grocery retailers nationwide. One of these farms, Earthbound, is doing the responsible thing by testing its produce for chemical residue.

The lax enforcement of the California Department of Food and Agriculture notwithstanding, this issue points to another problem in the organics industry: price pressure. As organics started to go mainstream and become big business, big players wanted to win the game. Large food retailers like Walmart and Target and large grocery chains like Albertson’s compete mainly on price and work with razor thin margins. Larger farms with economies of scale are better able than smaller, more diverse farms to supply the large grocers. Prices go down, making organics affordable for more people, which is a good thing. The farms are under pressure to produce more, which requires more inputs to make the plants grow faster. Yet the farm managers need to keep costs under control if they want to sell to the big guys. I think it’s an all-too-human reaction on the part of the pressured farm managers not to ask too many questions about the really cheap fertilizer they are buying.

California Liquid Fertilizer held as much as a third of the state market in 2006 before state regulators quietly pulled the company’s leading product. And the problem isn’t over. It’s widening. In November 2007, another company’s liquid fertilizer was pulled. And last week, Federal agents raided Port Organic Products Ltd. of Bakersfield. Though no charges have been filed in that case, county records from 2005 show Port Organic has stocked thousands of gallons of aqua ammonia, a common source of synthetic nitrogen.

Organic food has long been criticized as being elitist. The increased availability of affordable organic foods in mainstream grocery stores has gone a long way toward dispelling this myth. Now I worry that instead of a two-tiered food system where some people can afford organic food and some can’t, we’ll have a two-tiered organic system. People who cannot afford to shop at their local farmers’ market and take the time to research the farms and ask questions about the farmer’s practices will end up with fake organic food – that they are paying more money for than they would conventional.

And that’s really sad for everyone – consumers, and the farmers and organic producers who have worked hard all their lives build an industry based on trust and transparency and who now find their integrity called into question. Shame on companies like California Liquid Fertilizers and Port Organics, whose short-sighted profit motives may well damage the long term livelihood of all.

Sources: 1, 2

Image: Kevin Dooley

The post Tainting Trust: Fake Organic Fertilizer Scandal Widens appeared first on EcoSalon.