SeriesKeeping Fear at bay means riding into it without brakes.

This is the first of many stories we hope to gather from women who have overcome hurdles and challenges that have made them not only stronger women, but role models for others. Do you have a story you’d like to submit on how you have overcome something? Send us an email at contact@ecosalon.com

I am sitting at my kitchen table, my front door and windows wide open to let in the fresh mountain air, enjoying a cup of coffee and conversation with my best friend, Christiane, on the other side of the country, when the topic of fear came up.  “You should write about Fear, you have experienced it so deeply, and live daily with it nipping at your heels.”  I laughed wryly, “Yeah, Fear is definitely camped outside my door waiting for an invite to come on in.”

Pausing to think if Fear is rabbit hole I really wanted to dive into today, two dogs burst into my kitchen. Neither one of them belong to me and as I chase them out Christiane hears me shout, “Get out! Out! This is not your home, you don’t belong in here!”

“Hmmm”, she says, “It’s as if they arrived on cue to spark that response! Those words could easily apply to fear as much as to the those dogs.” A cosmic sign?  Or just two overly curious and cheeky canines looking for some free food? To me, Fear is the summation of all the undefineable things that throw up resistance to change, roadblocks to experience, and an inability to love unconditionally. Not a fan of roadblocks of any kind, fear is not a companion I am willing to share my time, or my coffee, with. I have experienced it keenly as rape victim – brutal violence and violation that left me in a broken heap in the dirt. I endure its nearby presence daily as the founder of an international non profit that hasn’t yet turned the corner financially, and as a single mother that risked everything to fight for women’s rights in conflict zones like Afghanistan and at times has to choose between groceries and phone bill. I know how closely Fear is shadowing me.

The trick is to recognize Fear, to say hello as you would to the paranoid Tea Party supporter you see at the coffee shop every day, but to not make friends with it. If you simply try to ignore it, it tries to engage you in conversation, sucking you into the abyss.  But acknowledging it sets boundaries. “Hi, I see ya, but I’m too busy to chat today.”  Move along.  I’ve got things to do.

It’s the same on a mountain bike.  I have donated my fair share of blood and skin to the Gods of Dirt and Rock along with a cracked rib and broken elbow. One particularly pricey donation came while bombing down the backside of Hall Ranch chasing a much faster, and experienced, friend. I washed out on a slab of rock covered in a veil of loose dirt and ripped the better part of my forearm and elbow off.  I spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out what was me and was rock, and I know that by continuing to ride, donations like this are part of the contract.  Fear whispers, “Slow down, use your brakes.  Dismount before the rock garden. Don’t try to lift your wheel over that ledge, you’ll get hurt again!” But what Fear doesn’t realize is getting hurt is part of the game.  No one is invincible, we’re not built that way.  Life is meant to PLAY.

The therapy I get from two wheels, one gear, and miles of singletrack, overwhelmingly outweighs the risks.  The combination of a clear head, burned out quads, and dirt in my teeth far exceeds the occasional bodily appeasement to the deities. The irony is that by conquering Fear on my bike, I keep the daily Fear of life at bay, much like the old song, by Little Richard, “I hear you knocking but you can’t come in,” I call out.

The little victories on the bike translate into confidence and courage and then equals bigger victories off the bike. Choosing to get back on the bike knowing it may draw blood is a choice, and one I make willingly, even happily knowing that 95% of the time I’ll come off my bike, sore and dirty, but also gloriously happy.

I embrace the risks I’ve taken, without them I wouldn’t have ridden my singlespeed across the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan. I probably wouldn’t have started mountain biking in the first place. I wouldn’t have lived abroad for ten years. I wouldn’t have started a business, or a non profit. I wouldn’t have entered the fight for women’s rights. I wouldn’t vacation in war zones. I wouldn’t have fallen in love. Twice. Hell, I wouldn’t have even become a mother, by far the scariest thing I’ve done to date, as anyone that has stared down a three-year-old’s tantrum can attest to.

Sorry, Fear, but you have to stay outside with the dogs.

The post Overcome: Fear Has No Home Here appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans are tricked into believing products equal happiness.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Studies On The Development Of Consumerism

“All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.” -Alfred L. Kroeber, The Superorganic

If you took a time machine back to 200 years ago, you would see families living modest lives: busy working at home tending their vegetable patches or livestock, cooking and eating family dinners, making their own soaps, sewing and mending their own clothes, using what they had down to the last scrap, and buying as few products as they possibly could to maintain the comforts of their lives on their modest incomes.

Fast forward to today, where most American households buy everything they own from a store and consume far more than they actually need; nowadays, community refers to our Facebook friends, we home-make almost nothing for own consumption, we have no idea where our food or other products come from and we dispose of barely used products regularly, in order to replace them with something new for the sake of newness. We’ve become a consumer society which currently consumes approximately 1 1/2 times the amount of resources that the planet can produce annually.

What’s driving our culture toward consuming is a recipe based on keeping up with the Joneses, a rise in societal shopaholism and our basic survival skills at work within society. It’s also safe to say that in the name of industrial prosperity, the economies of Western civilization have pushed us to this point.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that in the eyes of capitalism, we’ve become trapped. Industry marketers and advertising experts have been able to turn our own survival skills against us in the name of turning a profit.

Consumer Grooming
Ever catch your mind wandering while looking at a fashion magazine or a sexy billboard, thinking, “I wish I could have that…” These thoughts may not in fact be yours, rather a direct product of the marketing industry’s labors to grab your attention. Consumer grooming is the method of applying psychologically embedded imagery, strategically placed where they will be seen by the masses, to influence the purchasing choices of the global population. Our human desires to be loved, respected and admired are played upon through airbrushed images modeling sex, status, wealth, and beauty aspirations. This is not a new thing, it’s been in the works since before the Victorian Period.

A portrait of the Astor family stiffly posing, shows the idyllic life of the extremely rich during the Industrial Revolution. While age perhaps has made this image more elegant to our modern eyes, this would be the Victorian equivalent to today’s Kardashian family Christmas card.

Madeline Levine, modern day psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, describes in her book the negative effects affluence has on children growing up in wealthy families due to dramatic changes in American culture as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

The Psychological Underpinnings Of Advertisements

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate“. -Victor Lebrow, Economist, 1955

Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings. In the 1890s, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave sweeping attacks on production for profit, propelling the rise in conspicuous consumerism in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted a spreading consumer trend that appeared during the Industrial Revolution with the emergence of nouveau riche moguls who were displaying their wealth and social standing prominently through conspicuous consumption of material goods, ultimately evoking envy among their neighbors.

Apparently their neighbors were taking the bait, right along with the growing middle class. Back in 1899, Veblen, scathingly noted a general trend in society that people were willing to give up their quality of living, their health/family/spiritual life balance, in order to appear wealthy through their dress.

For all his studies and reports, whom did his theories aid the most? It was the industrial businessmen who had much to gain from reading his findings even if he carped at the wealth throughout his work. Many of the conclusions he came to showed that given the opportunity, society could easily be encouraged to consume aggressively through different forms of peer pressure. His theories outlined how wasteful habits of over-consumption was spreading, giving industries, like the fashion and beauty product industries, the key to pushing huge amounts of unnecessary products to unconscious consumers.

By the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom theorized that lifestyle changes brought on by the industrial age were inducing a “philosophy of futility” in the masses, which would only increase fashionable consumption. By the 1930s, advertising executives in a budding industry realized that they could capitalize on the social phenomenon of consumerism by encouraging consumers to compete with their neighbors for social status. In 1932, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a leading ad executive noted to colleagues that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”

Study after study has been written about our social tendency to conform to a collective wasteful behavior. While these studies do not seem to be reaching most of the population to educate, economists and businessmen have been eager to read them, continually thrilled to learn more about the harnessing potential behind the phenomenon of consumerism.

The Arsenal Of Advertisement Aimed At Consumers

The advertising, media, and marketing industries work to create and place ads in front of the people who are most likely to imitate and be influenced by it. Namely this would be people interested in anything related to societal activities: those who follow culture through magazines, TV, movies, or by surfing the net, live in an urban environment, or who at very least, listen to the radio.

In order to do accomplish their goal, the ad industry has come up with continually innovative methods that encourage the social drive to “keep up with the Joneses.” Celebrities since time immemorial have been brought in, images of excessive materialism carefully placed for target audiences to see and in turn, a consumer response to go shopping. This method of advertising has been highly effective at driving sales and has become one of the most effective forms of marketing excessively used today.

Vintage Elizabeth Taylor selling hair cream with a brand slogan attached, appealed to women that wanted to have hair like the  iconic Taylor. They didn’t mention that the cream is made with toxic chemicals or that you might need a team of hair stylists along with the cream to achieve her coif.

And Michael Jordan probably sold more shoes for Nike than anyone in history, while making millions doing it. Like Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag, Nike turned Jordan’s namesake shoes into a “limited edition” to drive consumers into fearing that they might not get a pair. This effectively allowed the company to raise the prices of the products incredibly to meet their high demand, adding consumer status and “value” to the shoes. Quite often the Air Jordan shoes would be back-ordered for months or until the next edition was released.

The fashion media even invented their own celebrities. In the 1980s and 90s supermodels were born when the industries realized that they could draw attention to images featuring favorite “iconic” models, unusual in their looks, who had loads of attitude and glamour. Glamazons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Cambell, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista became household names and were easy to recognize in fashion spreads.

Women fell in love with the images of their beautiful “lifestyles” portrayed in fashion magazines and they achieved celebrity status for their pretty faces and extraordinary physiques. Women poured over their favorite fashion magazines: playing name that model, studying their make-up, hair and styling in an effort to emulate their style, beauty, and allure. Completely distracted by the pretty faces adorned with cosmetics and designer products, the under laying message that was embedded in the images easily sunk in. Of course, one would have to buy the products these beauties were modeling in order to emulate them.

Reality TV shows, featuring made-up, pseudo-celebs, have been devised specifically for product placement.

Superficiality, rage, greed, jealousy, envy, and competitiveness are now gratuitously displayed, on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, and Jersey Girls. All three shows invite viewers to embrace petty drama into their own lives and suggest that celebrity status might follow, even for people who completely lack talent.

The underlying message in all this media-based imagery is, “If you buy our products, you too will be beautiful and admired,” but the obvious question begging to be asked should be, “What are we hiding?”

Image: Tinou bao

The post Fashion Marketing 101: The Psychology Behind Retail Happiness appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesPart 3: The fashion industry is emerging from its cocoon post-recession, a changed sector where consumers are more cautious, manufacturers are on their toes and designers are struggling to stay afloat doing business as usual. In this five-part series, we take a hard look at the fashion world, speaking with industry leaders, luminaries and experts. This week we ask: Now more than ever, is eco-fashion inextricably linked to conscious connections with land and place?

We might attribute eco-fashion to ’60s youths, with their natural approach to style, but the official terminology came much later. The term “eco-fashion” came into the mainstream in the late ’90s, and 2005 was perhaps the most significant year. EcoSalon’s Louise Lagosi writes, “In 2005, it became a marketing tool which is why we suddenly knew about it. Capitalists needed to bank on a trend and this was something they couldn’t ignore. It became the tipping point for eco-fashion.”

While eco-fashion most certainly did become a focal point for all industry sectors circa 2005, if we take a look at why it has stuck, we might be surprised.

Textile Arts Center knitting group

A Consciousness We May Not Be Conscious Of

Owyn Ruck, General Manager of the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, says our green awareness has gone beyond being just “eco-friendly” to a deeper understanding of how things are made.

“Understanding not only reminds you of the impact of an object on the environment, but also allows for the true appreciation of the object. Things from our past are easily represented through physical objects, and by understanding more about the making, we pay more respect to our past – and thus ourselves and current environment,” says Ruck.

Permacouture Institute batch dyeing

Pioneering women have entered the sustainable scene, with many dropping the “eco” terminology altogether, introducing heritage craft with natural textiles and dyeing to further promote this awareness. These designers and entrepreneurs have taken our appreciation of what is eco to a new level, where natural materials are not only being used, but are being designed to biodegrade to leave virtually no footprint at all. But there’s something deeper yet at work – something bordering on the primitive.

Ruck says the growing desire to go past the surface of the eco label is a weighty subject.

“What does this even mean to the average person, who may know nothing about the production of the product? The more prevalent these words become, the more people want to understand them. People are not stupid,” says Ruck. “They want to understand what this movement is about, what do these words mean, why the large price tag on designers using natural and sustainable methods? Maybe it’s not to the point yet where the H&M’s of the world using such terms are ignored, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

She adds that education is key, as well as knowing the person or the story behind the brand.

A New Seasonality

Adie + George

Sasha Duerr, Founder and Co-Director of the Permacouture Institute in San Francisco, author of The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes and co-designer for Adie+George, is one of those pioneering women willing to educate and create in concert. Duerr says creating her line has been an experiment and a labor of love fusing natural textiles with a desire to test out a new seasonality.

Having just completed a full collection of Northern California artisan spun (fair trade), local and seasonal naturally-dyed knits, Adie + George hopes to broaden the topic of biodiversity for color, while also looking at connections to the physical source of materials. Duerr says she hopes her collection will ultimately finish in the compost pile after a very long and well-loved life to create more food, color and fiber for future fashion.

Adie + George co-designer, Permacouture Institute co-founder and author Sasha Duerr

She also asks us to consider something we’re not used to when it comes to fashion: seasonal colors based on what’s in season, as we do with food. Though she says it takes more care, thought, and common sense to understand the benefit of why we should use natural dyes, following what makes the most sense for nature is not always perfect, and it is not always commercial.

“Fashion seasonality in the industry is so far out of sync with actual seasons, that it is difficult to sync your samples to your production process with batch dyeing. So we choose some plant dyes that are always readily available in the urban environment (example: avocado pits). This created the mauves, grays, and pinks in our collection. For the other color [yellow], we derived a system to use two weed dye plants that bookend each other in wet and dry season so that we know if one is not available the other will be,” says Duerr.

Permacouture Institute

Can there be four seasons in fashion when designers are creating this way?

“I think there can absolutely be four local seasons of fashion in sync with what makes the most sense for nature and culture,” she says. “Refining the process is ongoing and creating a healthy and thriving life for ourselves as designers and human beings, also means saying ‘no’ to the insanity of how the industry currently functions on the expectations of  ‘fast fashion’ seasonality. Time after time, appreciating more with less is usually the most satisfying.”

Primitive Permaculture

Another design duo working closely with nature is designer John Patrick of John Patrick Organic, in collaboration with knitwear designer Amanda Henderson, for the A/W 2011 season. To document the story of the collection, Patrick collected video footage and provided visuals of his supply chain onto a Sourcemap to document the garments from fiber collection through manufacturing and production local to the Eastern United States. See the inspiring video here about the people behind his collection.

John Patrick Organic and Amanda Henderson’s A/W ’11 collection

The supply chain began with wool fibers sourced in upstate New York at Hudson Valley Sheep and Wool Company. After the wool was sorted and washed, it traveled to either a mill in Canton, Massachusetts, or directly to Queens, New York to be knit into hand crafted sweaters by Henderson. The fabric used in the collection was created at Draper Knitting in Massachusetts, then cut and sewn in NYC’s historic garment district and finally previewed and exhibited at New York Fashion Week in February 2011.

I asked Henderson if she thinks designers need to have a better connection to where they’re getting their materials. She believes it’s “a fundamental connection that greatly inspires the end result,” and adds that elements of story-telling and honor in fashion has been lost to the past and that perhaps we need to have more of it when considering clothing.

A John Patrick Organic knitting mill for the A/W ’11 knitwear collection

“Native Americans would worship the animals that brought to them necessities for survival. They adorned simple garments beautifully and meticulously in order to honor that animal and what was provided to that individual person and what it meant to them,” says Henderson. “That is the element of fashion I wish to resurrect, which is why this project with Organic meant so much to me. Why I felt that establishing a connection with my materials, and the story of those wools, was so important to both John and me.”

But with a hungry society enamored with fast fashion’s quick catering to trends and bargain basement pricing strategy, can this story really matter to the consumer? Do we as a society have the patience to hear it?

“Now is a perfect time for the consumer to cease spending on numerous new garments with short-lived spans, especially from designers who consider price over both human and clothing quality of life. Rather, to invest in few, very selective pieces, with great meaning to that person, at a higher material quality and technique level. Timeless clothing with hand-made history, and primal human meaning. After all, clothing has been around since the early beginnings of human existence, and can inspire a modern person to consider their roots. That ancestral element, to be passed through the generations,” says Henderson.

Fashioning Self In Relation To Environment

Abigail Doan, fashion writer for EcoSalon, textile artist and founder of Ecco Eco, says that while she is an “eternal optimist” regarding consumer’s connections to clothing, she isn’t so sure that we are closer to being significantly connected to what we wear as a result of a raised fashion consciousness.

Doan says cost and overall availability are things that still influence which items consumers select and incorporate into their wardrobes. Someone living a few hours from a major city is likely to either shop at a local mall, a local main street retailer, or hunt for bargains online when trying to locate new fashion acquisitions.

“This is why I feel that ‘conscious fashion’ also needs to incorporate ideas about fashioning self in relation to the environment as a complete approach to how clothes shopping relates to one’s ethical and environmental views,” says Doan. “Being connected to nature via our clothes must first come from an awareness that is generated by the individual in response to how to create or style an identity that reflects one’s awareness about conservation, materials, and craft.”

Doan, who grew up in a household where hand spinning and sheep shearing were regular activities, goes on to say, “From this platform one can build a wardrobe that reflects a connectedness that is meaningful and perhaps even sustainable.”

Abigail Doan photos

Designers will always have to make money and consumers will always want something new, but the psychology of fashion is changing.

Duerr-Fossel says it will all come down to our individual lifestyles – that this consciousness extends beyond fashion to many areas including food, transportation and even the way we love one another.

“It is an overall choice to do things that help the environment, in many aspects of your life, and when you start with one, it’s easier to keep going. Which we can see with this idea of homesteading very clearly. I think all these changes and movements feed off one another in a nice way that keeps our society changing to something more positive,” Duerr says.

Our hearts are set on it.

Image: sydigill, b3d, Dan Zen

The post The Post-Recession Fashion Industry: A Return to Nature appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesEnvironmental cleanup in the wake of Japan’s twin disasters. Part 4 in a special series.

A surreal and compelling mix of headlines (read: Royal weddings, Osama bin Laden) may be dominating this week’s news, but the unfolding events in Japan after the March earthquake and tsunami – compounded further by nuclear plant instability – continue. Among the many significant issues: all that garbage.

Nothing illustrates the growing glut of plastic in the ocean from land-based sources like a natural disaster. All of those bleach bottles, all of those candy wrappers, all ending up somewhere. Whether littered or properly disposed of, it doesn’t actually matter when natural forces manifesting in the ocean overcome the borders of sea and land. And rather than death by a thousands cuts (plastic litter and watershed trash from land), Japan’s tsunami unleashed a vast amount of debris virtually overnight into the Pacific. (To see how the theoretical path of the debris works over time, click on this link to view an animation.)

This figure exhibits the projected pathway of flotsam that entered the ocean after waves hit Japan on March 11, 2011.  The model is based on historical data from drift buoys pinging GPS locations in The North Pacific over several years. Image Credit: Nikolai Maximenko, International Pacific Research Center.

The garbage is coming.

Within about a year, garbage will start hitting Hawaii’s shores and the coast of California within three, before circulating back out again to Hawaii and adding to The North Pacific Garbage Patch where it will circulate in the gyre.

Initially, it is difficult to determine how much we’re talking about, but think of it this way: Imagine taking all the plastic for a couple of miles or more from several cities situated on a coastline, and sucking it into the ocean. Think about taking thousands of grocery stores full of plastic products, all those single-use yogurt cups and half and half containers, lifting them all at once, and throwing them into the ocean. Think about all the dumpsters. The reycling bins. The storage facilities. The freight containers. Interesting, if disheartening, California beach-combing is on the way.

University of Hawaii at Manoa‘s Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner created the model. (Full disclosure: Maximenko advises the non-profit I work for on our gyre expeditions to search for plastic pollution.) Modeling, as a science, is still a very difficult enterprise as so many vectors affect how flotsam will actually travel when at sea. But judging by the vast amounts of debris pulled out to sea by Japan’s tsunami, the ultimate impact will be significant.

Finding remnants of the waste three to five years from now, after it has traveled thousands and thousands of miles at sea, will remind us as a society that although the 24/7 news cycle might forget past tragedies, plastic is forever. And it will remind us of the legacy of our culture. 24/7.

Editor’s note: This is part 4 in a special series on plastic. Read part 3, part 2 and part 1.

Images: Official U.S. Navy photographs

The post Plastic Surgery: Where Will Japan’s Tsunami Garbage Go? appeared first on EcoSalon.

“How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?”

– Charles Lindbergh

Editor’s note: Look for “visual poetry” in the mix at EcoSalon every weekend.

Image: visualpanic

The post Visual Poetry: Lindbergh appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveThe clash over plastic, and a surprising industry admission.

The Fifth International Marine held a week ago on Oahu was like the prom for plastic garbage nerds. All sides of the issue converged on Oahu. There were the cool kids (Jack Johnson strumming some tunes), the industry guys sporting pleated pants held up by braided belts (evaporating bad cologne), science dorks walking quickly from point A to point B without so much as noticing the sun, and vociferous activists pumped up on coffee. It was many fish in a small pond, a full net of stakeholders concerned with how the chemical bottom line translates to plastic pollution in our shared ocean. The general tenor of the NGOs was simple: call a spade a spade. Calling plastic pollution ‘marine debris’ is ducking the problem. Calling it what it is, makes people act. And after this conference, I’d expect we’re going to see this issue amplified.

Starting with the Science

What we know, is that we don’t know a lot. Expeditions to sample the ocean surface for plastic are expensive, and precious few have ever made it out of port. I spoke with Kara Lavendar Law, from SEA Education, who has the most data on plastic distribution in the ocean. SEA has been monitoring plankton for over twenty years in the North Atlantic and Caribbean, and as a result, has pulled up a lot of plastic in their samples. While we’ve only really heard about the North Pacific Garbage Patch in the media, there exists much more data on the North Atlantic, thanks to Law and her team. The situation is startling: 6.5 pounds to 184 pounds per square kilometer of water. (There are 315 million square kilometers of ocean on planet earth – and we’ve only been packaging everything we consume in plastic for 40 years.) It’s important to note, however, that outside of the gyres, plastic is still present, but ostensibly in smaller quantities – though this isn’t for certain. From personal experience, having sailed three times across both the North and South Atlantic conducting sampling, I’ve never seen a plastic-free sample.

What’s most surprising about SEA’s data is that it suggests plastic density has flatlined over 20 years. A scientist isn’t going to to go on the record making claims without proof, but she will pose the questions: Where is it going? Is it sinking? Consumption and population are both going up, which means more plastic is going into the ocean, so why is the data flatlining? The plastic has to be going somewhere. Various theories float around at the conference. Nearly every scientist believes that input is getting greater but to date, there has been no comprehensive study of the ocean floor for plastic pollution.

Industry

I spoke with the American Chemistry Council representatives at the conference. Their massive public relations problem is oceanic plastic pollution. These are the guys who have to deal with fourth graders asking them why they kill turtles. The American Chemistry council represents all the companies that produce the resins that the manufacturers make everything plastic out of. They like the “Marine Debris” label because it encompasses all the jetsam in the ocean. But what’s out there is plastic. As if sea turtles weren’t bad enough, there’s the even bigger publicity nightmare: dangerous chemicals in mothers’ breast milk. That’s the kind of issue that drives public outcry and policy that limits their activities on the books.

Mostly, they’ve tried to promote recycling as the solution, even though the capture rates post consumer are so low they almost cease to matter (3-12%) worldwide. The real problem, though, is that recycling doesn’t work. You can’t make a bag out of a bag, and this is hardly an extreme claim from an environmentalist contingent. The industry is well aware of this, which I confirmed when I spoke with Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, the largest recycler of polyethylene in the country.

Here’s why recycling doesn’t work: to make another bag, 70% virgin content is introduced in the new bag, along with 30% post consumer. The result of recycling one bag roughly introduces 3.3 new bags into the waste stream. Daniels didn’t like that I was using math, but finally, after asking him this question: “So, is this a fair statement: no matter how much you recycle, no matter how much recycling infrastructure you build, the net result of recycling is more plastic in the world, bags or otherwise?” His answer, simply enough, was “Yes.” (I almost fell out of my chair.) By his own admission, the net result of recycling compounds the plastic problem rather than ameliorating it. Daniels used the phrase “Cradle to Cradle” several times and I kept asking him to define what that means. He couldn’t. He’s making three cradles out of one cradle and they’re made of plastic. The interest in recycling is economic, not stewardship. What they fear is that people will quit consuming their products. Recycling is a system neatly built to ensure perpetual consumption by duping people into believing they’re doing something good for the environment.

Now, you can make a PETE bottle out of a PETE bottle, but the regulations to make it food safe again makes it cost prohibitive. For the most part, the only thing that can be made from recycling plastic is another plastic product. Whether they’re durable goods or single-use isn’t really the point. Plastic is plastic.

The NGOs and Activists

These are the people flaming pissed about belly-up sea turtles, bird carcasses with lighters in them, seals strangled by plastic box ties, fish caught in six pack rings. They’re also mad about everyone – you, me, your children – being full of chemicals from plastic. The American Chemistry Council sponsored this conference (as did Coca-Cola), so it appears at least that they’re trying to engage the activist and science community more transparently. As an activist, getting an ACC official on the phone has been an incredibly difficult task and here, at the conference, they were subject to all the major activists working on this issue. They don’t like that we’re going after bans of their products, again, feebly arguing that all we need to do is recycle. Activists in the rabble groaned when an industry representative championed a new plastic bottle made out of plant-based material as progress. Leave it up to the plastic industry to turn organic material into something that doesn’t biodegrade.

Activism starts at home. Refusing single-use plastics, opting instead for the coffee cup or stainless steel bottle, is a big step. Then it’s time to start engaging the businesses you frequent and ask them a simple question, “What are you doing to reduce your plastic footprint?”

Next up in the series, we’ll talk about how much plastic we all use, where it hides, and how to avoid it.

Image: Micro-fragments of plastic the beach of St. Helena, a very remote island in The South Atlantic. Credit: Stiv Wilson

The post Plastic Surgery: Hawaii, Science, NGOs and The American Chemistry Council appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesThe first in a special series on plastic.

It’s a plastic world and it’s here to stay – the plastic, that is. It clogs our sewers, it litters our beaches, it kills our turtles, it leaches chemicals into our baby bottles (and we’ve recently learned that it’s not just BPA that causes estrogenic activity). But the people who produce and sell this non-biodegradable omnisubstance of our lives sure don’t want you to stop buying, buying, buying. And they’re spending a lot of money to protect their market interest.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be investigating where plastic hides, the powers that protect it, the environmental consequences of widespread adoption, as well as taking a look at alternatives and ways to reduce the plastic footprint. Click through to the slideshow to start the series.

This fall I had the chance to sail across The South Atlantic ocean with pro surfer Mary Osborne, studying plastic pollution in the South Atlantic. I enlisted Mary to the cause and she’s picked up the ball and is running with it, serving now as an ambassador for 5 Gyres. I caught up with Mary recently to chat about what she’s up to in her outreach efforts. To raise plastic use awareness, she has worked with Ventura, California photographer, Angela Izzo to produce this series of portraits with Mary clad in waste packaging.

Says Angela of her inspiration for the series: “By using pop culture imagery and media as an inspiration to create ‘Fantasy’ like scenes and sets, the images entice the viewer to look deeper into the photograph. At once, the viewer is confronted with the actual material being made of plastic trash, and Mary’s iconic image works to target a wider audience who may not be aware of this issue. My goal for this project is to raise awareness of the current plastic devastation confronting our oceans and to encourage change through individual action like bringing your own bag to the store, growing your own food and being mindful of our everyday habits. Together we can make this world a better place.”

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Stay tuned for more synthetic sojourning in the days to come.

The post Plastic Surgery: A Series On Waste, Fashion, Policy And Consumer Culture appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesLuxurious silk and sharp acacia thorns as a human fingerprint.

Another EcoSalon favorite at Art Basel Miami Beach in December was Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. From afar (image above), his untitled piece on display at the show looks like a blown up image of a human fingerprint. Upon closer inspection (image below), we find thorns like weapons ready to wound, jutting out from the large canvas covered in beautiful silk fabric.

The juxtaposition of the dangerous acacia thorns with the luxurious, silky material is beautifully executed, tempting us like children eager to come closer and touch.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Kim Derby’s new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art. We heart art, and there’s nothing nicer than a midday dose to offer a moment of contemplation.

The post The Heart of Art: Fateful Fingerprint appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesThe sea as “boundless liquid energy” caught frame by frame.

The ocean will support, calm and cleanse; it can also crush, destroy and drown. Keegan Gibbs attempts to capture this complexity in his grainy, moving photographs of the sea. A surfer and photographer, Gibbs has a deep reverence for the ocean and its “boundless liquid energy.”

His images convey a range of emotions from pensive to energetic, but his intimate relationship with the sea stems from the balance it brings to his life:

“I go to the sea to surf, to bond with friends or to be alone, to let out aggression or to find inner peace. The moving ocean is my solid ground. The moment one stands up on a board, propelled by a wave racing across the sea, one is only aware of the present – nothing else. I have never found any other way to achieve that absolutely pure and meditative mindstate.”

Gibbs’ collection of images for Open Space, and some of his other pieces reflecting oceanic visions, can be seen on his blog here.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Kim Derby’s new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art. We heart art, and there’s nothing nicer than a midday dose to offer a moment of contemplation.

The post The Heart of Art: Open Space appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesIt’s what happens when lush plants become wall decor.

EcoSalon was at the most recent Art Basel Miami Beach, and caught a glimpse of Doug Aitken’s Sex. A terrarium bursting with exotic flora representing a veritable Garden of Eden, this piece leaves plenty to the imagination. Just don’t tell that to Adam and Eve.

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Kim Derby’s new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art, offering a glimpse of artistic inspiration from artists around the globe. We heart art, and there’s nothing nicer than a midday dose to offer a moment of contemplation.

The post The Heart of Art: Garden of Eden appeared first on EcoSalon.