Organisation promoting and certifying responsible management of forest
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Behind every "planet-positive" product wrapped in plastic lies the fascinating paradox of greenwashing—where marketing promises grow faster than bamboo but stand on foundations about as sturdy as a soggy paper straw. Welcome to the messy jungle of environmental branding, where not everything labeled clean actually is.Greenwashing represents the dangerous intersection where trademark law meets environmental claims. Companies build entire brand identities around sustainability without the substance to back them up. However, regulators worldwide are fighting back. The FTC's Green Guides in the US, the EU's Green Claims Directive, and similar regulations globally are creating serious consequences for hollow eco-promises.The casualties of this crackdown are numerous and notable. Volkswagen's "Clean Diesel" campaign resulted in $30 billion in fines when emissions-cheating devices were discovered. H&M's "Conscious Collection" faced lawsuits for being mostly fast fashion with minimal sustainable materials. Coca-Cola promotes recycling while consistently ranking as the world's top plastic polluter. Even financial giants like Goldman Sachs have paid millions for overstating the sustainability of their ESG funds.The distinction between legitimate certification marks (like Forest Stewardship Council or Energy Star) and self-created eco-labels has become a crucial battleground. When SC Johnson invented its own "GreenList" logo, consumers assumed third-party verification that didn't exist. The resulting lawsuit demonstrates how sustainability can't be fabricated through clever branding alone.For those navigating these green waters, specificity and transparency offer the safest passage. Vague terms like "eco-friendly" invite scrutiny, while precise statements backed by evidence build lasting trust. As trademark lawyers, marketers and entrepreneurs, our challenge is clear: align intellectual property with genuine sustainability, not just environmental aesthetics.Ready to sharpen your eco-radar and spot corporate green shenanigans? Subscribe now and join us in exploring how intellectual property shapes our world—from the products we buy to the promises we believe. Because in both IP and sustainability, authenticity always outlasts imitation.Send us a text
Nos preocupa el estado de nuestros bosques. Esta es una de las principales conclusiones que se extraen del informe Sostenibilidad: del consumidor al bosque, realizado por FSC España. En concreto, el deterioro de los bosques y la deforestación en el mundo preocupan a ocho de cada diez personas (82,5%). Porcentaje que baja ligeramente, pero que sigue siendo muy mayoritario, si hablamos de la situación específica de los bosques en España (74,5%). A juicio de las 1.700 personas entrevistadas para este estudio, la manera más accesible y sencilla de contribuir a la sostenibilidad y al cuidado de los bosques es comprar productos de empresas o marcas que respetan los bosques a precios similares a los que pagan (45,5%). Precisamene, el objetivo del Forest Stewardship Council es velar por todas aquellas cuestiones que requieren atención si de verdad hablamos de gestión forestal de los bosques: conservación de sus entornos naturales, protección y desarrollo económico de los gestores de dichos ecosistemas, aprovechamiento sostenible de los recursos naturales derivados de los mismos, etc. Sobre todas estas cuestiones hemos charlado en la siguiente entrevista con Gonzalo Anguita, director ejecutivo de FSC España, que nos ha explicado cómo funciona este sistema de gestión ambiental, social y económica de los bosques. Con Anguita también hemos analizado el reto que supone la futura entrada en vigor, prevista para finales de año, del nuevo reglamento europeo EUDR, cuya finalidad es minimizar la deforestación y la degradación forestal asociadas a las materias primas agrícolas importadas en la Unión Europea. Y tras la entrevista al director ejecutivo de FSC España, nos ha dado tiempo a realizar una revista de prensa positiva, en la que repasamos algunos noticias propias y de otros medios de comunicación. Aquí te dejamos con este nuevo programa de Noticias Positivas.
In episode 274 we learn about environmentally friendly charcoal with Ben Jablonski from The Good Charcoal and we go back in time to 1959 with author, Phil Coffin as we discuss his books, When Baseball Was Still Topps and A Baseball Book of Days. Plus Chef Ray Sheehan assumes guest co-hosting duties. Ben Jablonski is the co-founder of The Good Charcoal. The company's mission is good charcoal, good for the environment, good for the community. Ben grew up in Australia where grilling was central to celebrations or gatherings. In 2020, Ben wanted to give consumers a healthy charcoal alternative. The Good Charcoal won a 2023 leadership award through the Forest Stewardship Council due to their sustainability efforts in Namibia. As a leader in building ethical organizations, Ben has been featured in The Washington Post, Yahoo! Finance, and The Weather Channel to talk about how The Good Charcoal is making a positive impact on the environment and people's health. Go to https://www.thegoodcharcoal.com/ for more information. Phil Coffin is a longtime editor at The New York Times and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He joined us to discuss his two books, When Baseball Was Still Topps: Portraits of the Game in 1959, Card by Card and A Baseball Book of Days: Thirty-One Moments That Transformed the Game. When Baseball Was Still Topps tells the importance of baseball in 1959 while looking at every card in the 1959 Topps set and provides fascinating details. A Baseball Book of Days provides a detailed narrative of the game's most important moments, told in 31 singular, remarkable days. We recommend you go to Baseball BBQ, https://baseballbbq.com for special grilling tools and accessories, Magnechef https://magnechef.com/ for excellent and unique barbecue gloves, Cutting Edge Firewood High Quality Kiln Dried Firewood - Cutting Edge Firewood in Atlanta for high quality firewood and cooking wood, Mantis BBQ, https://mantisbbq.com/ to purchase their outstanding sauces with a portion of the proceeds being donated to the Kidney Project, and for exceptional sauces, Elda's Kitchen https://eldaskitchen.com/ We conclude the show with the song, Baseball Always Brings You Home from the musician, Dave Dresser and the poet, Shel Krakofsky. We truly appreciate our listeners and hope that all of you are staying safe. If you would like to contact the show, we would love to hear from you. Call the show: (516) 855-8214 Email: baseballandbbq@gmail.com Twitter: @baseballandbbq Instagram: baseballandbarbecue YouTube: baseball and bbq Website: https//baseballandbbq.weebly.com Facebook: baseball and bbq
One football field's-worth of forest is lost every single second of every single day. Loss of forests means loss of species and loss of stored carbon; it also means an increased risk of pandemics.On today's show: Explaining the ways in which deforestation is linked to the pandemic prevalence, with tangible action steps for conscious consumers.Here's a preview:[5:00] It's not *just* about timber; it's about livestock, soy, and palm oil too[12:30] Exactly what happens when we raze forests and the generalists (ahem ... the rats, the mosquitos) march in[26:00] Breaking down the differences between the 3 Forest Stewardship Council certifications[29:00] Revisiting the palm oil problem [32:00] The industrialized food system is broken, and it pays to shorten your personal food chain Resources mentioned: Episode #447: No Topsoils, No Food Episode #187: Why Is Palm Oil Bad? This show is listener-supported. Thank you for supporting! Join our (free!) Facebook community here. Find your tribe. Sustainable Minimalists are on Facebook, Instagram + Youtube @sustainableminimalists Say hello! MamaMinimalistBoston@gmail.com.
One football field's-worth of forest is lost every single second of every single day. Loss of forests means loss of species and loss of stored carbon; it also means an increased risk of pandemics. On today's show: Explaining the ways in which deforestation is linked to the pandemic prevalence, with tangible action steps for conscious consumers. Here's a preview: [5:00] It's not *just* about timber; it's about livestock, soy, and palm oil too [12:30] Exactly what happens when we raze forests and the generalists (ahem ... the rats, the mosquitos) march in [26:00] Breaking down the differences between the 3 Forest Stewardship Council certifications [29:00] Revisiting the palm oil problem [32:00] The industrialized food system is broken, and it pays to shorten your personal food chain Resources mentioned: Episode #447: No Topsoils, No Food Episode #187: Why Is Palm Oil Bad? This show is listener-supported. Thank you for supporting! Join our (free!) Facebook community here. Find your tribe. Sustainable Minimalists are on Facebook, Instagram + Youtube @sustainableminimalists Say hello! MamaMinimalistBoston@gmail.com.
Считается, что рубка леса вредит природе. Но в Африке на участках с активной лесозаготовкой разнообразие животных и растений почему-то выше. Ученые стали разбираться почему и выяснили, что если компании-лесорубы следуют правилам экологических сертификатов, которые выдает Лесной попечительский совет (Forest Stewardship Council), это поддерживает биоразнообразие и помогает защитить лесных обитателей от браконьеров. Оказалось, что на сертифицированных территориях больше крупных млекопитающих, особенно из числа уязвимых видов.В последнем выпуске первого сезона подкаста редактор N + 1 Марина Попова обсуждает с членом экологической палаты FSC International Юлией Бурнышевой, как рубка леса спасает зверей, по каким принципам работает Лесной попечительский совет и почему экологические сертификаты оказываются такими эффективными. Встретимся в следующем сезоне.
This episode is all about the power of advocacy and moving business towards a low carbon economy.Influential public figure, philanthropist Jon Dee is the founder of a number of initiatives including Planet Ark, DoSomething, and National Recycling Week. He is also the chair of the Forest Stewardship Council of Australia and New Zealand.Host Rose Mary Petrass, Senior Journalist at FS Sustainability, sits down with Jon to find out how to motivate business to take action on climate.
On this show we take a journey through the challenges facing our world's forests. What does it take to protect tropical rainforests in places like the Amazon from illegal logging? What about the corporations profiting off the illegal logging trade? Host Jack Eidt speaks with Forest Policy Specialist Scott Paul on his transition from activism with Greenpeace to corporate sustainability with Taylor Guitars. Many of the woods traditionally chosen to make acoustic guitars are under pressure due to a range of factors, including rising global consumption patterns and land conversion, and too often in many parts of the world, a lack of dedicated governance. Stressing the importance of ethical wood sourcing for musical instruments, Scott Paul shares how Taylor Guitars' innovative projects in Cameroon and Hawaii are setting new standards for environmental responsibility in the music industry. We hope to uncover the intricate relationship between forests, guitars, and global sustainability. For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio Resources/Articles: https://woodandsteel.taylorguitars.com/authors/scott-paul/ Scott Paul is Taylor Guitar's Director of Sustainability [https://www.taylorguitars.com/about/sustainability]. Prior to this, the majority of his career was spent as a forest policy specialist and activist, including 14 years at Greenpeace. Scott has worked for The White House Office on Environmental Policy, participated in the UN forest policy dialogue since 1995, and has served on multiple boards of directors, including the Forest Stewardship Council. His work has taken him to the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Southeast Asia, the Canadian boreal, Alaska, and the Russian Far East. He is also the first person in over 100 years to have been arrested for Sailormongering. Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs. Podcast Website: http://ecojusticeradio.org/ Podcast Blog: https://www.wilderutopia.com/category/ecojustice-radio/ Support the Podcast: Patreon https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LBGXTRM292TFC&source=url Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats Episode 222 Photo credit: Scott Paul
Monika Patel is Director of Communications and Marketing at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) of Canada. FSC is all about promoting sustainable forestry, ensuring responsible sourcing, as well as adherence to environmental and social standards. Learn more here, in the show notes.
El Comisario europeo de Medio Ambiente, el lituano Virginijus Sinkevicius, se encuentra de gira en Paraguay, Bolivia y Ecuador para intentar calmar los temores por la entrada en vigor a finales de 2024 de la prohibición de la importación de productos que procedan de zonas deforestadas. Entre los productos considerados de riesgo están el cacao, el café, la madera, la carne, la goma y la soja. Para finales del 2024, las empresas que importen productos a Europa tendrán que probar la trazabilidad de que sus productos no provienen de zonas deforestadas, a través de datos de geolocalización, que tendrán que suministrar los propios productores. Esta norma ha generado mucha preocupación y los países afectados piden que haya más precisiones.Es lo que esperan en todo caso obtener con esta visita del comisario europeo, el lituano Virginijus Sinkevicius. En Bolivia,Aída Palau habló con Jorge Ávila, gerente de la Cámara Forestal de Bolivia en Santa Cruz. La exportacion de madera a Europa representa en torno al 15 %, esto representa entre 15 y 18 millones de dólares. Ávila reconoce que hay preocupación en el sector agropecuario pero se muestra bastante confiado porque su sector, dice, está muy avanzado en temas de trazabilidad: "Nosotros somos un país en vías de desarrollo. Y no podemos prescindir de la producción agropecuaria. Y nosotros como industria madera, que somos los principales enemigos de la deforestación, no podemos tampoco negar de que para producir hay que deforestar. ¿Cuál es la diferencia en nuestra posición con relación al resto? Que nosotros creemos que la deforestación debe ocurrir en suelos que son aptos para el desarrollo agropecuario.Aída Palau: ¿Cómo es el sistema que tienen de trazabilidad?Jorge Ávila: Básicamente es una imitación casi perfecta del sistema de certificación FSC, el Forest Stewardship Council que es un sistema muy, muy muy rígido, muy estricto, muy complejo. Creo que podemos superar cualquier tipo de investigación en nuestra trazabilidad. Yo creo que Bolivia está en perfectas condiciones, por lo menos en la industria de la madera para poder cumplir con aquello. El tema es que aún no conocemos los detalles o los alcances de esa trazabilidad que pretende la Unión Europea."Bolivia, tercer país con mayor deforestación en el mundoBolivia se ha convertido en el tercer país con más deforestación en el mundo, tras Brasil y la República Democrática del Congo. La causa, según el director de la ONG Tierra, Juan Pablo Chamucero, el modelo de cultivo expansionista de la soja: "La deforestación actual se ha duplicado con respecto al promedio que se tenía hace hace una década, del 2022 al 2023 hemos estado deforestando alrededor de casi 400 mil hectáreas por año. Bolivia tiene actualmente 55 millones de hectáreas de bosque, pero en los últimos 40 años hemos perdido casi 8 millones. Básicamente la ampliación de la frontera agropecuaria en las tierras bajas del país es muy grande y esto, pues ha ido afectando lo del nivel de bosques...con los impactos correspondientes en términos de clima, de temperatura, inclusive de productividad."El asunto es que no tenemos realmente tierras con vocación productiva agrícola o por lo menos en la cantidad de lo que se produce actualmente, entonces la manera de llegar a producir las cantidades que se pretenden producir es justamente, pues deforestando, removiendo, desmontando, para habilitar tierras para la agroindustria y en segundo lugar para la producción ganadera, que está favorecida o impulsada no sólo por el sector privado sino por las mismas políticas estatales, porque esto supone una serie de beneficios de orden económico también." concluye Juan Pablo Chamucero. Escuche aquí el programa de Noticias de América consagrado a este tema:¿Podrá la Unión Europea con sus nuevas normas encontrar el resultado para esa difícil ecuación, crecimiento económico y lucha contra la deforestación? De momento, entre los exportadores persisten muchas dudas.Otros temas relacionados:La UE prohíbe la importación de bienes procedentes de la deforestaciónRegeneración Natural Asistida: una técnica accesible para regenerar los bosques
El Comisario europeo de Medio Ambiente, el lituano Virginijus Sinkevicius, se encuentra de gira en Paraguay, Bolivia y Ecuador para intentar calmar los temores por la entrada en vigor a finales de 2024 de la prohibición de la importación de productos que procedan de zonas deforestadas. Entre los productos considerados de riesgo están el cacao, el café, la madera, la carne, la goma y la soja. Para finales del 2024, las empresas que importen productos a Europa tendrán que probar la trazabilidad de que sus productos no provienen de zonas deforestadas, a través de datos de geolocalización, que tendrán que suministrar los propios productores. Esta norma ha generado mucha preocupación y los países afectados piden que haya más precisiones.Es lo que esperan en todo caso obtener con esta visita del comisario europeo, el lituano Virginijus Sinkevicius. En Bolivia,Aída Palau habló con Jorge Ávila, gerente de la Cámara Forestal de Bolivia en Santa Cruz. La exportacion de madera a Europa representa en torno al 15 %, esto representa entre 15 y 18 millones de dólares. Ávila reconoce que hay preocupación en el sector agropecuario pero se muestra bastante confiado porque su sector, dice, está muy avanzado en temas de trazabilidad: "Nosotros somos un país en vías de desarrollo. Y no podemos prescindir de la producción agropecuaria. Y nosotros como industria madera, que somos los principales enemigos de la deforestación, no podemos tampoco negar de que para producir hay que deforestar. ¿Cuál es la diferencia en nuestra posición con relación al resto? Que nosotros creemos que la deforestación debe ocurrir en suelos que son aptos para el desarrollo agropecuario.Aída Palau: ¿Cómo es el sistema que tienen de trazabilidad?Jorge Ávila: Básicamente es una imitación casi perfecta del sistema de certificación FSC, el Forest Stewardship Council que es un sistema muy, muy muy rígido, muy estricto, muy complejo. Creo que podemos superar cualquier tipo de investigación en nuestra trazabilidad. Yo creo que Bolivia está en perfectas condiciones, por lo menos en la industria de la madera para poder cumplir con aquello. El tema es que aún no conocemos los detalles o los alcances de esa trazabilidad que pretende la Unión Europea."Bolivia, tercer país con mayor deforestación en el mundoBolivia se ha convertido en el tercer país con más deforestación en el mundo, tras Brasil y la República Democrática del Congo. La causa, según el director de la ONG Tierra, Juan Pablo Chamucero, el modelo de cultivo expansionista de la soja: "La deforestación actual se ha duplicado con respecto al promedio que se tenía hace hace una década, del 2022 al 2023 hemos estado deforestando alrededor de casi 400 mil hectáreas por año. Bolivia tiene actualmente 55 millones de hectáreas de bosque, pero en los últimos 40 años hemos perdido casi 8 millones. Básicamente la ampliación de la frontera agropecuaria en las tierras bajas del país es muy grande y esto, pues ha ido afectando lo del nivel de bosques...con los impactos correspondientes en términos de clima, de temperatura, inclusive de productividad."El asunto es que no tenemos realmente tierras con vocación productiva agrícola o por lo menos en la cantidad de lo que se produce actualmente, entonces la manera de llegar a producir las cantidades que se pretenden producir es justamente, pues deforestando, removiendo, desmontando, para habilitar tierras para la agroindustria y en segundo lugar para la producción ganadera, que está favorecida o impulsada no sólo por el sector privado sino por las mismas políticas estatales, porque esto supone una serie de beneficios de orden económico también." concluye Juan Pablo Chamucero. Escuche aquí el programa de Noticias de América consagrado a este tema:¿Podrá la Unión Europea con sus nuevas normas encontrar el resultado para esa difícil ecuación, crecimiento económico y lucha contra la deforestación? De momento, entre los exportadores persisten muchas dudas.Otros temas relacionados:La UE prohíbe la importación de bienes procedentes de la deforestaciónRegeneración Natural Asistida: una técnica accesible para regenerar los bosques
INTRODUCTIONDo you know where the paper and wood you use come from? What concrete guarantees do you have that a certified entity is not harming endangered species? What are the standards and the governance driving this certification body? In this episode, Peter Wood lays out big pieces of answers on the table with a focus, this time, on the #PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification).It is the logical sequel to episode 48 devoted to FSC certification. They are both part of a series of “Certifications Spotlight: Truths and Traps” audio clips. They will all unravel the mysteries behind the logos, certifications, and declarations you find on packaging. Let's equip you with knowledge and critical thinking to decipher:its meaning,its application,its grey areas,and its pros and cons.HERE ARE THE RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Episode 48: [Certifications Spotlight Audio Clip 2] FSC, Forest Stewardship Council with Peter Wood of UBC as well: https://www.look4loops.com/packaging-podcast/ep48-certifications-review-fsc-forests-logging-wood-paper An article that explains the problematic situation about logging in endangered species habitat: “B.C. allows logging in critical habitat of one of the province's sole recovering caribou herds” https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-caribou-habitat-wood-river-basin/ Peter Wood mentioned wording from the (Canadian Standard Association) CSA's SFM standards that get to the core of the problem, that the “standards” are ultimately up to the company. The actual wording of this is as follows (under “Assessing values, objectives, indicators, and targets”, page 72): “Management experience might show that previous targets were either easily met (resulting in more rigorous objectives) or impossible to meet (necessitating more realistic goals)”.Let's note that we have learned that since Ecojustice launched the legal challenge, the CSA has decided to close this certification system. Teal Jones, the logging company that is facing the biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, with more than 1,000 people arrested, is certified to CSA, and just posted this news on their website, indicating what is happening: https://tealjones.com/certifications Here is the website of the Competition Bureau Canada, a consumer fraud body that can help prevent false claims: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/competition-bureau-canada/en An article about the Ecojustice legal challenge against the SFI: “Canada's largest sustainable forestry program [SFI] accused of greenwashing”: https://biv.com/article/2022/12/canadas-largest-sustainable-forestry-program-accused-greenwashing For the real keeners, the full legal complaint can be viewed here: https://ecojustice.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/SFI-CB-Complaint-Final.pdf The PEFC website: https://pefc.org/ WHERE TO FIND PETER WOOD?His LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-wood-66811128/ ABOUT PETER WOOD FROM UBCPeter has been working on issues related to forests and sustainability for over twenty years now, both within Canada and his home province of British Columbia, as well as overseas, in places like the Congo Basin and Borneo. He is currently a lecturer and coordinator with the Master of International Forestry Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.PODCAST MUSICSpecial thanks to Joachim Regout who made the jingle. Have a look at his work here. I am happy to bring a sample of our strong bonds on these sound waves. Since I was a child, he made me discover a wide range of music of all kinds. I am also delighted he is a nature lover and shares the Look4Loops 'out of the box philosophy'. He is an inspiring source of creativity for me.
Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Eleanor Goldfield comes on to talk about her film, "To the Trees," a documentary that highlights forest defense tactics in Northern California. The film is meant to call into question our current relationships to nature, how we might reframe them, and why that reframing is vital to our survival and having a livable future. Guest Info Eleanor Goldfield (she/her) is a filmmaker and journalist who works to highlight different movement and struggles. You can find her work and her film "To the Trees" at tothetreesfilm.com and artkillingapathy.com. Eleanor can also be found on Twitter @RadicalEleanor and Instagram @RadicalEleanor Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Eleanor on "To the Trees" & Forest Defense **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and I use they/them pronouns. Today we are talking to a filmmaker about a really beautiful film called To the Trees. And I'm really excited for you all to hear this conversation. We're going to talk a lot about logging and forest defense and just kind of like the extraction industry in general, and then just about some, you know, cultural or psychological paradigms that we have around resource extraction. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here is a jingle from another show on that network. **Inmn ** 01:40 And we're back. Hi, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about your background, and what you're here to talk about today? **Eleanor ** 01:55 Sure, thanks so much for having me. My name is Eleanor Goldfield. She/her. I'm a queer creative, radical filmmaker, and journalist. And I've been doing frontline--I hesitate to say activism--I've been doing frontline actions and journalism since 2010 together. And before that I'd been doing organizing and community organizing since about 2003, before the second Iraq War. And I'm here today to talk about my latest offering in the film domain, which is called, "To the Trees," and it's about forest defense tactics in so-called Northern California and also about our relationship to nature and the necessary shift that that must take for us to have a livable future. **Inmn ** 02:50 Cool, um--I mean, not cool that a film like this needs to get made but cool that a film like this now exists and can teach people a lot of really awesome things. I highly encourage everyone to go out and watch the movie. It's really wonderful. It's really beautiful. But could you kind of give us just like a recap of the movie. **Eleanor ** 03:17 Sure. Yeah, and the films available at ToTheTreesfilm.com. And all of my work is also available at ArtKillingApathy.com. So kind of a general overview of the film is that I went out there to do.... This is kind of how I work. I ask folks if they need any support--and I'm ground support, by the way, because I don't do heights. Although, I did climb a redwood when I was out there, which was a terrifying experience. And I'm never doing it again. **Inmn ** 03:49 They're so big, **Eleanor ** 03:51 They're ginormous. And that was my first...that was the first tree I decided to climb because...yeah, whatever. And it took me 45 minutes. And it's 200 feet up in the air, and I was terrified. And it took me like 15 minutes to get up the courage just to step off the platform. And the tree sitter, they were like, "You just step up," and I'm like, "What do you just step up? I'm gonna die," and they're like, "No, you're not. You're gonna be fine. I swear" and I'm like, "Oh God, this is so terrifying." And they're like, "Yeah, maybe you are ground support." **Inmn ** 04:20 Ground support is crucial. **Eleanor ** 04:23 It is crucial. Yes. And it's very much.... That's very much me. I was built to like just be grounded, I think. So I went out there basically saying, "I would love to help you all and do support and also, if it's cool with you, I'll bring a camera and I'd love to just hear some of your stories." And so folks were cool with that. And so there I go, traipsing into the woods. And it's a beautiful tree village. And the redwood forests, if folks have never seen them, I mean it's like Narnia. You know the forest floor is Like this plush, you know, soft and welcoming space. And then you look up and it's like the trees are so tall that you can barely see the crowns. It's just kind of like this green haze above you. And so I just started talking to folks and talked to a couple of tree sitters. I also spoke with somebody who does more of the judicial side of things, like trying to get forest...or like logging companies in court and how that kind of works with tree sitters. And then I also spoke to an indigenous woman, Marnie Atkins, who is a member of the Wiyot tribe, spoke to her a lot about perspectives on what's going on in these forests and the paradigms that are different between her people and the colonizers who came. And so it's kind of a.... [trails off] I call it at the end, I have this, I have this slide that says, "To the trees: It's a dedication, a call to action, a promise, and a militant apology." And I wanted folks to feel that, that it's an offering and it's also an invitation, not just to act in whatever ways we can but also to question the way that we think about these beautiful places, whether they be the redwood forests or whether they be the the ecosystems that are outside your front door. **Inmn ** 06:42 Yeah, yeah. And it's.... I feel funny that this is one of my first questions, but it was one of the pieces of the film that kind of really got me--it's like always knowing that Capitalism uses things for really silly things--but learning that the main use of redwood trees is to just turn them into kind of crappy decks. Is that right? **Eleanor ** 07:12 Yeah, yeah, it's based on market forces. The best use of a redwood tree is decking. And not only that, but redwoods can be 2000 years old. And of course, if you were to chop down a 2000 year old tree--which by the way, there's no law against it in California or anywhere else in the in the United States--if you were to do that, yes, that deck would last a while--it wouldn't last 2000 years--it would last a while. But the way that they cut down trees at the rate--because of course, no one's gonna wait 2000 years--they cut down these trees in their infancy. So the strong heartwood of the tree has not had a chance to develop. And so you're cutting down these trees, you know, destroying any future that they might have to rebuild an ecosystem, and you're turning them into a deck that is not even going to last like a decade because it's just not made of wood that has had a chance to mature. And so you're literally destroying burgeoning ecosystems for the sake of a deck that is going to last less than, you know, the length of a Britney Spears' single. It's just...it's ridiculous. **Inmn ** 08:35 Yeah, yeah, I feel like that's one of the harder things that I struggle with when really thinking about industrial Capitalism is just the...it's like the cost of what it...like what it costs to do to the planet versus what is gotten from that. And it's not even like, oh, you're gonna get something that's like, "We cut down this tree and it's gonna last this family multi-generations," you know, it's like a piece of shit that's gonna rot and fall apart in a decade. **Eleanor ** 09:12 And that's the whole, you know, that's one of the primary issues with Capitalism is that it treats things that are finite, like trees and clean air and clean water, as if they're infinite. And it treats things that are infinite, like ones and zeros on a computer, as if they're finite. Like, "Oh, we don't have the money." And, I mean, it's like--I can't remember who it was-- maybe it was Alan Watts, who said, "That's kind of like saying, 'You don't have enough inches to build a house.'" Like that doesn't make any sense. Like of course you have more money because you just make it up. It's all a fairy tale. Whereas the things that we can't just make up like a 2000 year old tree or a clean river, you treat as entirely disposable, and that is one of the primary issues with the paradigm of Capitalism and thereby colonialism, which was the battering ram of Capitalism. **Inmn ** 10:08 Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what are the life cycles or growth cycles or logging cycles like in places that are being [testing words] harvested? Destroyed? Whichever word. **Eleanor ** 10:34 Yeah, that's that euphemism, right? "Oh, we're just harvesting." No! So, basically, there are several different cycles that can be used. I think one of the shortest ones for redwoods is 45 or 50 years. So if you clear-cut and then you--and redwoods are actually one of the few trees that can sprout, like from a stump. Like it's self...I can't remember what it's called. Self-sprouting or something? And so you have to wait 45 or 50 years. Now, whether they always do that or not, is up for debate, especially depending on what they're hoping to get from the products. But it's 45 or 50 years. Some will say, "Oh, we're gonna leave this plot for 100 years," or whatever. And again, whether that's done or not, is up for debate. And it's also difficult because industrial logging has only been around since like, you know, 120 years or so. So when we talk about the amount of time you really need to grow these forests, it's like we're going back to a time before this was even a conversation because you couldn't possibly tear down the forests that quickly. And so we're in this kind of odd liminal space where people are talking about, "Oh, we're gonna have to let this grow again for 100 years," but 100 years ago this wasn't even a contemplation. And so the cycles are based on, again, like the market forces. LIke, okay, well, at 45 or 50 years these trees will be ready to be harvested and then can be used to do whatever we want with them, you know? Truck them off to the sawmill. And that, again, is it.... Well, I could go off into so many different tangents, but I'll pause. **Inmn ** 12:36 I do.... We love tangents. We love rants. So this wasn't surprising to me, but I've spent like a little bit of time in the coal fields of West Virginia, and it seems like there's this kind of similar thing in logging where there's a strong guidance to preserve the cardboard frame of what things look like from a road or something, you know, so it's like the devastation appears a lot less impactful. I am curious what kind of lengths or strategies logging companies go to--or the State goes to--to make it seem like nothing all that bad is happening? **Eleanor ** 13:25 Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you brought up West Virginia because my first documentary was actually about West Virginia. And I talked a lot about the coal fields. And I actually did a flight above them because you can't--I mean, to your point--you can't see it from the roads. And you can really only see the vast devastation if you're up in a plane. Or if you have a drone or something like that. So in California, they call it the 'visual impact' or commonly called 'the beauty screen.' And it's this idea that, particularly Inmnorthern California--because Northern California, unlike West Virginia, which is very proud of its coal, Northern California doesn't want you to think it's proud of logging--it wants you to think that it's super proud of the trees, which is really twisted. **Inmn ** 14:21 Yeah. Yeah. **Eleanor ** 14:22 It's like being a serial killer and then being like, "I have a human rights organization." So they will.... Right before you get to a lot of these THPs, that's timber harvest plans, you're driving through, for instance, the Avenue of the Giants, which is part of a redwood forest, Redwood National Forest, and it's gorgeous, right? And you would never think that just a few miles up in the hills there are these vast bald spots. And so they want to ensure that that stays the case, right? So you just keep driving and you keep driving up the one on one and you just see trees and then the Pacific Ocean is over here and you're like, "Oh my god, California is amazing!" **Inmn ** 15:06 "We love trees!" **Eleanor ** 15:07 Right. But it's being destroyed. And you can't see that. And it's very important that you can't see that because the companies that own this land--because most of it is privately owned logging land--and the companies have this like...one of the guys in the film says, "This eco groovy PR campaign and this facade." And they want you to think that everything is done respectfully and sustainably when, of course, you can't clear-cut sustainably. So they want to make sure that you can't see it because that would fly in the face of their 'eco groovy facade.' And part of that is also that they have a certification, which is called FSC, Forest Stewardship Council certification. Which if you've ever been to a Home Depot or Lowe's, oftentimes FSC wood will be more expensive because the idea is that it's sustainable. And so you get to feel good about yourself, you know, like, "Oh, sweet, this isn't from a clear-cut," but it is. And the Forest Stewardship Council, even if it started with honorable aims, is a complete...it's just a rubber stamp for the logging industry. And there's been a long list of horribleness, including stealing indigenous land, clear-cutting old growth forests, and you know, and yet they have that little FSC stamp. So people think, consumers think, that this is done sustainably. But of course, it's not. And so this is all part of that greenwashing campaign, whether it be the 'beauty screen' or the FSC stamp, it's all part of that push to ensure that the consumer remains in the dark and thinks that, particularly, Northern California is sustainably harvesting their, in quotes, 'harvesting' these trees and ensuring that they will be around forever. **Inmn ** 17:09 Golly, yeah. And I imagine people also...like the consumer on the end of like...they, you know, they go into Home Depot, or they're hiring a contractor to build their crappy deck, I'm sure they're really ecstatic that they have this...are getting this redwood deck. Like, I feel like it's just the name, you know, "Redwood," it sounds so majestic. It sounds so like, "Wow, this is gonna last me a really long time." Is that kind of like part of it too, do you think? **Eleanor ** 17:44 Yeah, I think it sounds.... You know, I was in bands for years, and people used to talk about the wood that went into their instruments like, "Oh, it's mahogany neck." and someone's like, "Oh! It's a mahogany neck." **Inmn ** 17:57 It's an electric guitar...like it doesn't matter. **Eleanor ** 18:01 And sure, I mean,as a former audio tech, I can be like, okay, I've heard the difference in acoustic guitars where you're like, "Okay. That. Yes." But it is also pretty.... I mean, mahogany is not endangered in that sense. But still, it's pretty twisted to be like, "Yeah, the best way to use this tree is to turn it into an instrument or a deck or whatever. It's that like, again, in Capitalism, nothing has inherent value in and of itself. Nobody's like, "Oh, wow, an oak tree! That's super cool!" Everyone's like, "Hmm, what can I do with that?" It's like, maybe you could just leave it the fuck alone. I don't know, Maybe that could be a thing? But nothing in Capitalism has inherent value in and of itself. So it always has to be twisted and contorted into something. And that carries with it a certain status, right? Like, oh, if you have this deck made out of redwood or if you have that guitar made out of mahogany, it becomes a status symbol. And so that is also part of like the poisoning that is Capitalism, psychologically, I feel. **Inmn ** 19:06 Golly, I wish--I know, this is a recurring theme on the show--but if only our lives were more like those of hobbits. I mean, they just have a Party Tree, and that's a community resource. And they're like, "We need a party tree. It needs to be like 3000 years old and that's a party tree." If it's not 3000 years old. It's not a Party Tree. Or, yeah, the forest on the edge of town that everyone's like too afraid to go into. **Eleanor ** 19:40 Yeah, well, and this is actually something that I think is funny, too, that we have so many stories, whether that be through, you know, Lord of the Rings, or like when I was growing up, I partially grew up in Sweden, and there's so many stories still today about the Forest and its power. And I feel like that's also an interesting relationship that we have with the forest is that we are a little bit afraid of it. And that also...that also pushes us into this relationship where, okay, well, I'm gonna conquer my fears, right? As opposed to the stories--and there are these stories even in European cultures--that talk about the beauty of the forest and what the forest gives us. But that's also an interesting dynamic between a lot of Indigenous stories that I've heard where, yes, there might be like some being that lives in the forest that you don't want to interact with. But a lot of it is also about how, "Oh my gosh, look at all of the beauty and the life that we get from the forest," as opposed to, "Woods are terrifying. Don't mess with them at all. Just don't go there." It's like, but that's also going to dictate how you feel about cutting down a bunch of trees. **Inmn ** 21:04 Yeah, it's wild that fear of the forest means we have to destroy the forest. It's a bad mentality. As much as I love a story about the Dark Forest, you know, and wish that that was like a more sustainable option, growing a more deep connection to the forest is probably a more sustainable way to go about things. Did you ever see Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind? **Eleanor ** 21:33 Yes, I did. **Inmn ** 21:34 Yeah. Incredible movie about a toxic forest that will fucking kill everyone who comes into it. Because it eventually was like, "No humans. You can't. No, I can't take anymore. Here's poison." **Eleanor ** 21:50 Don't blame it really. **Inmn ** 21:52 Yeah, and it's like, "No, I need several thousand years to recuperate from the harm that you've done and eventually I'll be a forest you can come in again." **Eleanor ** 22:04 Right. Right. Well, and I think... We talk about that in mutual aid spaces, or in organizing spaces, like, okay, if harm has been caused and there needs to be time to recover then possibly we can get to the point where we can be in community together with that person who did the harm.... It's like, we do that as humans. And it's necessary, right? And that is exactly what ecosystems need too. Like, the idea of--this is also how we fuck it up in terms of the Capitalist mentality--the idea of like, "Oh, we're going to leave that to grow for another 45 years before we cut it down again," that's not allowing a relationship to recuperate, right? That is, once again, treating something in that violent way, like the violence of ownership versus stewardship, right? Like, ownership is a violent relationship--I mean, just look at slavery--but stewardship suggests a respect. And I think there's also space for fear there, too, right? I think that, you know, when I was a kid walking through woods, I would feel a little...maybe a little scared, but I would also feel safe, like, "Oh, I'm safe within the woods." So I think we can carry both of those at once. And I think that sometimes when you have a deep respect for something, there might be a moment where you're like, "Oh, that's, that's creepy." But there's also this feeling of like, "I'm safe here." And I think that, you know, I think that carrying multiple truths at the same time and multiple thoughts is just beneficial. But yeah, I think that the idea of allowing places to recover is super important, while also recognizing that we have a role in that. And that's something that Marnie talks about in--and actually one of the tree sitters as well--talks about in the film is this idea that the relationship we need to have with nature is not removing ourselves from nature. And I always think of...I spoke with somebody who does work in Africa with the Maasai, and she was saying that the Maasai were removed from their ancestral lands in order to create a conservation park. But what happened with the ecosystem when they were removed is the ecosystem started to fall apart, because the Maasai were an integral--and had been for 1000s of years--an integral part of that ecosystem. And so it belies that notion that we are somehow outside of ecosystems. No, we are super reliant on them. And I think that kind of that kind of thinking is also super important to remember that like, you know, Indigenous peoples have used, for instance, wildfires, as a way to steward the land, because they're not the wildfires that we see today. They were wildfires that were able to replenish the soil and the land, get rid of invasives, and things like that. So the idea that humans are a part of these ecosystems, and that we have to learn those ways of being and rid ourselves of the notion that we can somehow be outside of, and other than, the ecosystems. **Inmn ** 25:29 I mean, it's like, it's.... I feel like, it's the same thing with most struggles out in the world is we have the tendency to want to remove ourselves from those things. And it is usually detrimental to those causes for us to think of ourselves as outside of everything--which, you know, obviously, there's struggles that we should send our specific voices around and that we should...like certain people should like not make about themselves--but like, for the most part, we are entrenched in all of in all of the thing. And we have to be an active part of them to fix them. **Eleanor ** 26:13 Totally. And I think that, you know, the idea of like, we should always be a part of these struggles, and not make them about ourselves, right, like the struggle to defend redwoods is not about us. It's just that in our own space, we can have these conversations about what it means for us humans to be in the struggle, just like I think, you know, right now, I've been in conversation with several fellow Jews about what's going on right now and what what we're dealing with as Jews. That is not something that I want to put out into the world like up on, you know, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it because it takes the focus away from Palestine. But within our Jewish community, I think it's an important conversation to have. So it's like...It's that...It's that way of being in the struggle. And then if you--just like I think white people need to have conversations with each other about what it means to...like what does Black Lives Matter really mean? And what does dismantling racism really mean? Don't do that at a Black Lives Matter protest, okay. That is not the time, but in our own space and time. So I think, again, you can hold both of those, and I think it's important to. **Inmn ** 27:29 Yeah, golly, to go tangent for a second on that, like, I don't know, I read this article yesterday, I think, about this.... It was an interview with this Palestinian man who was talking about being asked about antisemitism and like his response to it was like, Israel is.... Israel as a State. Israel displaced Jews living as Arabs in Palestine. Like, Israel is bad for Jewishness and Jewish people. **Eleanor ** 28:15 Yes, thank you. **Inmn ** 28:16 And this is like all part of this, like colonizing myth, and any colonizing myth, is to create these others to create a "side," or whatever. I don't know. **Eleanor ** 28:29 Yeah, that's so true. Israel is the greatest threat to Jews in the world right now, I think. **Inmn ** 28:37 Um, too.... Not that I don't want to talk about this stuff more but to veer back towards the movie, I am curious about the collaboration between different...like attacking the problem from different angles. And in the movie, there's kind of this triple-pronged approach that is presented as there's people on the ground doing stuff in the trees, there's people doing legal work, there's indigenous people doing stewardship, and then there's people coming in to make movies about it. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how, like, all of these things interact and like help each other. **Eleanor ** 29:32 Sure. So, it was actually Tom Wheeler, who works at Epic in California, who said that we exist in an ecosystem with each other, which I liked. And he was talking about how--and he works on the legal side--and he was talking about why the tree sitters are important. And I really appreciated that because I think a lot of times we get, you know, the classic saying that like, "When anarchists meet, we meet in a circle. And that's also how I do firing ranges." And unfortunately, like it's true--not just with anarchists, it's just that my anarchist friend happened to say that. I think it's everybody on the left, regardless of what...if you have a title for your preferred angle. But I think it so often is the case that it's like, "No, my tactic is the most important. If you don't want to do my tactic then you're wrong and you're an asshole and you're standing in the way," and it's like, but not everybody can do the thing that you're doing. Like, I can't climb--I mean, I can climb a tree, but I won't, there's like, you know, the floor is lava or some shit--and not a lot of people have the ability to get up into the woods, to take that space and time. And a lot of people don't have the expertise to do legal battles. You know, we need a lot of good lawyers out there. I think the Lakota Law Project taught us that. Look what's happening in Atlanta. Like. you need good lawyers. So I think instead of getting on people's cases, about tactics, I think it's really important that we recognize that whatever your passion is, whatever your expertise or your drive is, there is a place and a need for that in our movements and in whatever struggle. And so I really appreciated that about the folks that I spoke with, is that they all were complementary and understanding of the other people in the struggle and understood that the goal was the same, was to protect these spaces and protect them out of this feeling of love for these spaces. And I think that's the other thing that's really important is that nobody was doing this for the, you know, the Instagram likes or because they thought it...because it paid the most money or because anything like...they were literally like, "Because I love these spaces," either because I have a strong ancestral connection to them or because I've just fallen in love with them from being around them. And so I think that that's the other thing and that this diversity of tactics is necessary when confronting something so vast and so disgusting as colonialism and Capitalism. We have to do whatever we can. And these folks are doing whatever they can. And Pat, one of the tree sitters, actually talks about this too in the film, like, sit wherever you can, do whatever you can in the ecosystem that you know, in the ecosystem that you love. Like, it doesn't have to be in a redwood. Cool if it is, but we don't have to choose the most superlative ecosystem or the most superlative place to do this. All ecosystems are worthy and Inmneed of our collaboration and protection. And again, in whatever ways we can. **Inmn ** 32:57 Yeah, yeah. It's really disheartening to watch spaces kind of rip themselves apart in being upset that everyone is not doing the tactic that they want. And that is something that I've always really appreciated about, especially, forest defense campaigns or like other kinds of extraction industry defenses--I can't think of words right now--is just the recognition that we need a lot of different kinds of people to do this work. And, you know, I feel like maybe part of that is people maybe having gone and done things and then gotten in a lot of legal trouble and being like, "Oh, fuck, we need lawyers," and then like, realizing like, "Oh, lawyers are really cool!" But, yeah, that's something I just really appreciate about those campaigns. Um, yeah, I don't know, maybe this is a funny question. Say I'm some random person--or not random--just I'm a person listening to this podcast who's been like curious about forest defense and doesn't really know where to start or how to get into that. Like, I want to.... I've never done forest defense and I want to go get involved in a forest defense campaign, either one that's near me or one that's, maybe, far away. Do you have any advice for someone like that? **Eleanor ** 34:48 Sure. I mean, I think just start digging into folks who have the knowledge that you're interested in. So like Inmnorthern California, there's the tree sitters union, I think they're on Instagram @thetreesittersunion. There's also, like down around where I am, close to Appalachia, there's Appalachians Against Pipelines. Greenpeace does a lot of like trainings, like climbing trainings and things like that. And those are also spaces where you might be able to meet folks that are like minded. But honestly, like in terms of getting started on a campaign, like.... You know, in the film, again, they just say, just, you know, I" walked up...we walked up and we saw that there was a chainsaw at the bottom of this tree And were like, 'Oh, I guess we'll sit in this tree.'" I think people feel like there has to be this, you know, there has to be the war room where you got all the plans and you got the poster board and you got paper clips and all that. But you don't! Like yes, plan is good so you have water and shit, but it doesn't have to be this really elaborate. campaign to start with. And earlier this year, I was in Germany because I was doing a tour of my film about West Virginia coal in the coal regions of Germany. And I went to this tree village that is absolutely gorgeous. And folks were still living there, even though the campaign had kind of moved on, and I was asking them, like, "Okay, so what's the story here?" And it was the same thing. It was like, "Well, we just didn't want them to cut down this forest." I mean, it really is that simple. Like, I think, again, there is this...there's kind of this mystique to the idea of frontline defense. And, yes, it can build to something where you've got several tree villages or you have, you know, a resistance camp blocking a pipeline that's also like a food forest. Like, sure it can become that. But you don't need to start with that. You just need to start with yourself and some comrades, and this, again, this feeling of love for this place that is threatened. And again, like looking for organizations or like minded folks--and the ones that I mentioned are good places to start--but there are definitely others that I don't know of personally. **Inmn ** 37:14 Yeah. I'm having...I guess having witnessed campaigns in a lot of different places, I'm curious about this. Are there any kind of differences that you noticed between forest defense campaigns here in the United States, or like Turtle Island, versus in Europe, or any kind of like other places that you've been? Either in terms of repression, tactics, or just like how people organize? **Eleanor ** 37:52 So, I'd say in terms of the repression tactics, I mean, people in Europe--I can only speak to, currently, Germany and Sweden--but people were very shocked and disgusted at what happened to Tortuguita and what happened down in Atlanta in terms of facing terrorism charges and Rico charges. But there is also, I mean, in Germany, earlier this year, the cops brutally beat people who were trying to save a small town, Lützerath, from being destroyed for an open coal pit mine. So in terms of the direct pushback, the violence, they're not getting shot, but they are getting the shit beat out of them. And so there's absolutely that understanding that, you know, fascism is on the rise across the globe. And neither Europe nor the United States have to look very far in their history, or their present really,to find ways of emulating the fascist state that they are moving towards. And so, in terms of repression, I think it's mostly like the legal battles that are the main difference between the US and Europe. And I think in terms of organizing, I do see a lot of similarities, basically, because it's the same story. It's people who were like, "Actually, you know what, no, you can't fucking do that. I'm not gonna let you ruin this." And I do find a little bit of the same problems in terms of organizing. Like, for instance, Inmnorthern Sweden--which a lot of people don't know that Sweden, Finland, and Norway have indigenous peoples that were then colonized--so the Sami are the indigenous people of the far-north and their ancestral lands blanket across what is now Norway, Finland, Sweden, and parts of Russia. And that's also where a lot of forests are. And it's up in the Arctic Circle. And there's a lot of still culturally important practices, like reindeer herding, that happen there that are being disrupted by deforestation and mining. You know, like Sweden announced recently that, "Oh, we found lithium in the north." Oh, great! **Inmn ** 40:24 Oh no. Leave it there! **Eleanor ** 40:26 Yeah, exactly. Don't tell Elon Musk. So, yeah, there's a push to protect these spaces but also this difficulty of like, okay, how do we, as non-indigenous people in Sweden make these inroads. And the Sami are historically very reticent of working with Swedes--I don't blame them--or Norwegians or what have you, because of what's happened in the past. And I noticed that here, too, right. It's difficult sometimes for people who are not indigenous to make those connections in indigenous communities. And so I see a lot of that struggle as well. But at the same time, again, when you are coming at it from this place of, "Well, I too want to protect this out of love. And not because I'm looking for some kind of accolade or whatever," that I think that you can make those connections and you can make that struggle collaborative, as long as you're coming at it from that space. And, so I do see that happening in places outside of the US and I think it's rad. **Inmn ** 41:43 Hell yeah. That's really great. Golly, this is a really weird question, but, you know, my brain's always on a tangent. Are there any forest defense influencers? Is this a thing in the internet and the internet world? I'm imagining the person who's just there for, you know, Instagram likes, or something, and I'm like, is that real? **Eleanor ** 42:10 So like, not like the straight up forest defenders, but there's definitely like the Sierra Club type that are like.... You know, so, again, it's like this kind of gray area--I'm a big fan of recognizing nuance--it's like this nuanced space where the person cares and doesn't want to see it destroyed but also wants to virtue signal to people that they care. And that gets all gummed up in the whole Capitalist shit show. So yeah, it's a gummy area. **Inmn ** 42:48 Yeah, and this is--golly, whatever, I love funny questions--so I'm curious about this from, you know, I've had my own experiences with different with different organizations, but is there any kind of tension or like problems that you do see between on the ground direct action campaigns versus these larger NGO or like nonprofit structures like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not asking for a shit post about these groups or anything, just some of the nuances or complications that can come up? **Eleanor ** 43:38 Yeah, I mean, again, Capitalism fucks everything up. There were a couple of organizations that I reached out to when I was in California, and they were first happy to talk to me, but then when they realized that I was there supporting and speaking to tree sitters, who are, by definition, breaking the law, because it's private timber land, did not want to speak to me anymore. And I think that's very clearly--like whether they personally wanted to or not is not the point--but as an organization, I think they realized, "Oh, well, our donors are, I don't know, some rich asshole over here. And if we do that, if we engage with people who are very overtly breaking the law, then that's not good for our bottom line. And we need our bottom line in order to keep protecting the forest.: So in their mind, they were doing that so that they could continue to protect the forest. But of course, this creates that splintering that is so useful for the system. In reality, they should be working with the tree sitters. Like, you have the ability to work together to protect these spaces but because you have to make sure that you get the foundation money or these rich donors or whatever, you can't. And so I absolutely see that and I think that's also a global problem because a lot of this does cost money, you know? Like, rope is not cheap. Just making sure that people have supplies and food and things. Like shit costs money. And it's not like tree sitters get paid. So it is difficult, but I tend to--I shouldn't say...I don't want to be prejudiced ahead of time, but I've I find that I often am--be prejudiced against a big organization that says, "We are protecting the forest." It's like, are you? Or are you doing like forest walks and shit--which is cool--and like picking up trash. But that is not the same thing as standing between a chainsaw and a tree. And that's not to say that like, "I'm more radical than you." It's just a necessary context, I think, for understanding, again, this ecosystem that we're a part of. Like, we need more people to be the ones standing in between the trains on the tree. And I think we need fewer people being the ones, you know, typing up newsletters about this forest walk where you can plant a sapling or some shit, just in terms of what we need. That's what I would say. **Inmn ** 46:25 Yeah. Yeah, It's weird how similar the idea of an NGO or something being getting donors to lead a forest walk.... It's the trap of building an organization that gets too big and has too many dependencies on Capital to sustain itself. It's, yeah, it's.... I don't know. I think about this a lot with different projects that I've been a part of. Like I'm part of this community theater group and I'm like, we can't get too big or it's gonna cause huge problems. We can't be too successful or else it all falls apart. Yeah, I think that would be my biggest thing with some larger NGOs is it's cool if y'all's thing is like bringing in money, that's cool. But it seems like the real problem is an organization like that's inability to accept a diversity of tactics or donors to really look past--and maybe this is a shitpost--but the idea wealthy donors who want the experience of like donating to an environmental nonprofit and want that experience of like bringing their kids on the forest walk, this is the same thing as getting a like, quote, "heirloom redwood forest timber deck that is sustainably 'harvested'" Like it's the same thing. **Eleanor ** 48:15 Yeah, it is very twisted. And of course I think that's the problem is that there's no such thing as money without strings. And so when you have these big donors--and I know this from just other spaces that I've organized, even outside of the environment--okay, well, so-and-so is gonna give this much money, but then they also want us to build the website this way or they want us to make sure that the action looks like this. And it's like, but also these people don't know anything about organizing. So then their ideas are shit and you're like, "Look, the whole entire campaign is falling apart because you want this sign to say something completely stupid," and it happens all the time. And that's why, unfortunately, we as organizers have to have this balance of like, "Okay, we need this much money, but if we just get it from one or two donors, what do they want in return for all of this cash?" And there's always going to be something. They're not just going to be like, "Hey, really happy that we can support you in whatever you're doing," like, that's never the case. So yeah, it sucks. But yeah, until we can just, you know, pay rent in good deeds or something, that's gonna be the problem. **Inmn ** 49:35 Or like shift our cultural mindset beyond like...you know, if I'm a wealthy donor or something, then the important thing is that the people have the money and resources to do the work, not that I get anything in return from it. I don't know, I feel like--and maybe this is my bias, having not traveled much outside of the States--is that we have this very individualistic mentality around everything, and that that extends to forest and extraction resource defense and like.... I don't know. **Eleanor ** 50:15 It is a.... And one of the people in the film Marni, a member of the Wiyot tribe, talks about this individualistic paradigm that has perpetuated, that we as children of Empire have, because it's been passed down to us. And even those of us who have been radicalized, I like to say that there's no way that you can ever be like 100% AntiCapitalist. Like it's a daily struggle, just like you have to be antiracist everyday and antifacist. Like, there is no like, "Got it! No, I'm done." So she talks about this like this--and you know, to go back to Lord of the Rings-- **Inmn ** 50:18 The real goal podcast, right? It's not. But... **Eleanor ** 50:27 It all has to do with Lord of the Rings. She likens it to Gollum. And if anybody listening has not read Lord of the Rings, first of all, please do so. But secondly, Gollum is not a character that you want to emulate. Like, that is not how you're supposed to read that. Like, oh, Gollum is cool? Like, he is literally driven to mental anguish and dismay and physical like breakdown because he's so obsessed with this one ring. And that is not a good thing, right? It's not something where you're like, "Yeah, Gollum!" and he loses like all his community. Like, he's just by himself. And yet, we have built an entire system on the paradigm of Gollum. Like be by yourself. Fuck community. Care only about the thing that you can own and that can thereby, of course, own you in return. It's so fucked up. And yet, that is like the foundation of Capitalism. And so of course, when we step into a forest...and is one of the lines that I have in my first film about West Virginia is "How can you look at a mountain and think 'mine.'" Which is, of course, a double entendre. Which, I'm a sucker for those. But it's like, that's what we do. We've been programmed into stepping into these beautiful spaces and thinking, "Oh, I wonder how much this would be worth if I destroyed it?" Like, what kind of fucked way is that to look.... And it happens, you know, I have a toddler and people will kind of laugh when I'm like, "We go outside and we hug trees together," and they'll laugh. And I'm like, "So that's kind of weird that you think it's funny in like a derogatory way, because wouldn't it be more fucked up if I had like a toddler axe, or some shit, and I was teaching him how to destroy these things? Like, why do we have this paradigm where it's weird to teach your kids to love nature but totally cool to give a five year old a hunting rifle or something. Like what in the hell? And I'm not saying that you shouldn't hunt. But we hunt for fun. Like we don't hunt because we need food. We hunt because it's fun. **Inmn ** 53:17 Or for the trophy. **Eleanor ** 53:20 Right, for the trophy, which you can say is the same with the redwood deck. It's a trophy. It's something to show off to people. You don't need it. Like you could, you could stack stones and have a deck. Like, you don't need the fucking redwoods. And she also made...Marni makes this point in the film too, like, of course, people have used wood for generations, to use for firewood, to widdle sculptures, to build things. And she's like, "I totally get that, but you can't do it at this scale. You have to have this relationship with nature so that you only take what you need and make sure that there's enough for the next time," and you see this throughout indigenous cultures. You know, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it in "Braiding Sweetgrass," the idea that--and I don't remember if it was her tribe or another one that she's talking about--would go out and get fish, but then they wouldn't get all of the fish. They'd just get the ones that they needed, right? And they would know that there's all these fish 'getting away'--in the white perspective--but they're not 'getting away,' they are surviving so that you can go fishing next time. And so again, it's like this...it's a very short sighted paradigm that is totally individualistic and totally destructive, that doesn't.... And again, like Gollum is totally destroyed but he doesn't see it himself. It's only people on the outside that are like, "Oh, God, that guy's not doing well." And yet again, we don't, we don't see it from the inside. And so I think that's why it's so important to step outside of that programming and just see the logic or the illogic of these situations and allow ourselves to fall in love with nature and question why that sounds corny when we say it out loud. Like, why is it corny to fall in love with a tree or a river or what have you. I mean, like, that is actually really beautiful. And it is necessary if we are to get to the space where we can say, "Defend what you love." Because if you don't love something, you're less likely to defend it, right? Like, you know, of course, that's why parents always defend their children because you have this natural need, like you love your child so much, or your partner, or your friend, or what have you. You're less likely to defend a total stranger. It's just like a human thing, or an animal thing. And so if we don't love these places, these spaces, then we're less likely to be moved to defend them. **Inmn ** 56:01 Yeah. Golly, so don't be like Gollum. Don't hoard ultimate power and destruction. Be like a hobbit and enjoy the 3000 year old party tree because it's a beautiful tree. **Eleanor ** 56:19 Amen. **Inmn ** 56:23 Well, this seems like a great place to kind of tie it off, and because we're also almost at time, but do you have any final thoughts or questions that I didn't ask you that you wish I'd asked you? And then after that, anything that you want to plug? **Eleanor ** 56:43 Just, I mean, it was something that I included at the end of the film, my good friend Carla Bergman co-wrote a book "Joyful Militancy," which I also recommend to everyone. **Inmn ** 56:53 Oh, yeah. We had Carla on not too long ago. **Eleanor ** 56:57 I love Carla so much. So one of the things that they talk about in that book, Carla and Nick, is this idea of rigid radicalism and the need to be fluid but not flimsy. And I think that that's something that...that's another practice that I'm trying to get more into, because I think a lot of times when we have a stance or when we have a perspective, we can get stuck in it. And then, we can let it weigh us down. And I think it's really important, no matter what fight we're fighting, to be able to be fluid because it will allow us to confront the next struggle, the next shitstorm, the next fire, or whatever. But if we are too rigid, we will get caught up in the flood or the flames and be carried away. And so I think it's important to stay fluid but not flimsy. And yeah. **Inmn ** 57:59 Sick. Are there any places that you can be found on the internet where you would like to be found or where your work can be found? I know you plugged stuff at the beginning but we'll throw stuff in the show notes. **Eleanor ** 58:14 All of my work is at artkillingapathy.com That's where my films are, my music, my poetry, and journalism. This specific film To the Trees is at tothetreesfilm.com and I am on Instagram and Twitter @RadicalEleanor. **Inmn ** 58:32 Wonderful. And are you working on anything? Got anything coming up soon that you're working on? **Eleanor ** 58:38 I think I'm going to work on some of the footage that I got in Germany as kind of like an addendum, or a compliment, to my first film about coal regions in West Virginia. I have footage from coal regions in Germany that I think I'm gonna put into something. **Inmn ** 58:58 Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show today. **Eleanor ** 59:01 Thanks so much for having me. **Inmn ** 59:08 If you enjoyed this episode, Defend the Party Tree. You can also tell people about the show. You can support the show financially by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. You can also go to tangledwilderness.org and check out some cool books that we have for sale, because we are a publisher. We put out books, we put out zines, we put out podcasts, obviously. And we're working on all kinds of really fun stuff. So, go check it out and get a cool book. We also do this zine of the month club where for like 10 bucks a month, you can get a zine version of our monthly feature mailed to you anywhere in the world. You can also listen to the feature for free on our other podcast Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, where we do interviews with the author And that's really it. We would like to have a special shout out to a few of our Patreon supporters. Thank you, Patoli, Eric, Perceval, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixster, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & Odell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, Theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Macaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much. And we will see everyone next time. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co
INTRODUCTIONIf I say: “logging, wood, and paper”? Would Ancient Forests and Indigenous People's rights come to your mind? Do you know if and how far the Forest Stewardship Council is acting in protecting that? I am talking about the FSC certification that you can find on several packaging and more. Off we go! It is time to go over it with a fine-tooth comb with our enthralling guest, Peter Wood. FSC is the first of a series of “Certifications Spotlight: Truths and Traps” audio clips. They will all unravel the mysteries behind the logos, certifications, and declarations you find on packaging. Let's equip you with knowledge and critical thinking to decipher:its meaning,its application,its grey areas,and its pros and cons. HERE ARE THE RECOMMENDED RESOURCES The PhD of Peter Wood that evaluates the changes that companies have to make in order to meet FSC certification: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/17844/1/Wood_Peter_J_200906_PhD_thesis.pdfThe criteria for FSC in BC merged with the Canada-wide standard: https://connect.fsc.org/document-centre/documents/resource/181The very interesting expose: Alecci, Scilla. 2023. How auditing giant KPMG became a global sustainability leader while serving companies accused of forest destruction. https://www.icij.org/investigations/deforestation-inc/audit-firms-kpmg-environmental-sustainability-logging/Motion 65, the resolution adopted by the General Assembly of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in September 2014: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/644/protecting-intact-forests-fscs-motion-65-getting-the-facts-straight/The book chapter of Peter Wood about the possible restriction of stopping logging and intact forest landscape: Nikolakis, W., & Wood, P. (2022). INTACT FOREST LANDSCAPES AND THE FOREST STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL. The Role of Business in Global Sustainability Transformations, 148. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364148308_Intact_Forest_Landscapes_and_the_Forest_Stewardship_CouncilThe 2 episodes in our Unboxing Your Packaging podcast with Canopy: Episode #32 with Valerie Langer, “Packaging: the best starting point for more circular solutions and products?” (https://www.look4loops.com/packaging-podcast/ep32-europe-canada-regulations-circular-solutions-collaborations) & Episode #22 with Lee-Ann Unger, “How to envision a sustainable future for the paper packaging supply chain?” (https://www.look4loops.com/packaging-podcast/ep22-sustainable-paper-supply-chain-protecting-forests)A highlighting YouTube video on the channel of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance with Ken Wu, “Old-Growth Forests vs. Second-Growth Plantations - The Differences”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp3iL72wy4A&t=4sAnother video with the same subject published on the Ancient Forest Alliance Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ancientforestalliance/videos/1852036138224298/?extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-AN_GK0T-GK1C&mibextid=NnVzG8 WHERE TO FIND PETER WOOD?His LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-wood-66811128/ ABOUT PETER WOOD FROM UBCPeter has been working on issues related to forests and sustainability for over twenty years now, both within Canada and his home province of British Columbia, as well as overseas, in places like the Congo Basin and Borneo. He is currently a lecturer and coordinator with the Master of International Forestry Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. PODCAST MUSICSpecial thanks to Joachim Regout who made the jingle. Have a look at his work here. I am happy to bring a sample of our strong bonds on these sound waves. Since I was a child, he made me discover a wide range of music of all kinds. I am also delighted he is a nature lover and shares the Look4Loops 'out of the box philosophy'. He is an inspiring source of creativity for me.
Weź do ręki książkę, notes, opakowanie chusteczek lub papierową torbę na zakupy i przyjrzyj się im dokładnie. Bardzo możliwe, że na odwrocie znajdziesz symbol drzewka - to certyfikat FSC, Forest Stewardship Council - jeden z najbardziej współcześnie rozpoznawanych certyfikatów. Co zmienia w przemyśle drzewnym? Jakie warunki należy spełnić, aby go uzyskać? W jaki sposób przekłada się na ograniczenie wylesiania? I w końcu - w czym produkt z certyfikatem FSC jest lepszy od tego bez certyfikatu? Na te pytania odpowiada Karolina Tymorek, dyrektorka FSC w Polsce, z wykształcenia mgr inż. ochrony środowiska, prywatnie miłośniczka lasów. Rozmawiamy też o tym, jak można się zaangażować w inicjatywę Tydzień Lasów, który trwa do 29. września. Podcast powstał we współpracy płatnej z organizacją FSC.Dodatkowe informacje:Więcej o Tygodniu Lasów FSC przeczytacie tu: https://bit.ly/460DMDR Więcej treści znajdziesz tu:Instagram: http://bit.ly/3Vene60 YouTube: http://bit.ly/3iddUR7 TikTok: http://bit.ly/3gDdaob Realizacja: Justyna Czyszczoń - redakcjaMysław - audioP & C Paulina Górska | Varsovia Lab.
In occasione della manifestazione Cheese, organizzata da Slow Food, sono stati consegnati i premi per Resistenza Caesaria 2023. Parliamo di allevamenti, formaggi, accoglienza, tradizione e tutela del territorio insieme a Eros Scarafoni, allevatore e produttore nel sud delle Marche con l’azienda agricola Fontegranne, e con Giampaolo Gaiarin, docente all'Istituto di San Michele all’Adige, tecnologo alimentare per la Fondazione Edmund Mach.Da un derivato animale a fini alimentari come il latte, alla lana. Insieme a Patrizia Maggia, presidente di Agenzia Lane d’Italia, parliamo dei problemi relativi a questo “scarto”, che può diventare una risorsa preziosa, se opportunamente valorizzata.Un esempio di utilizzo virtuoso della lana sucida (ovvero non trattata) è quello che arriva da Agrivello, una startup fondata da Chiara Spigarelli, che produce pellet fertilizzanti naturali realizzati al 100% con la lana di pecora.Dal 23 al 29 settembre si tiene la campagna globale di Forest Stewardship Council per promuovere la consapevolezza sull'importanza della gestione forestale responsabile: con il presidente Giuseppe Bonanno parliamo del significato del certificato FSC e cosa viene garantito con questo riconoscimento.Settembre è il mese dell’Alzheimer e sono tante le iniziative in corso. Nel consueto appuntamento settimanale con Si Può Fare nel Sociale, Cristina Carpinelli è andata a sentire un concerto degli Iperfal Track, un gruppo di musicisti con e senza Alzheimer. Le canzoni possono risvegliare nella mente ricordi vividi anche nei malati di Alzheimer in fase acuta.
Episode Summary: In this episode, our guest is Dr. Jeremy Williams. Jeremy earned a B.Sc.F. from the Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Forest Economics from the same institute in 1986. In between the two degrees, he worked with the Sabah (Malaysia) Forest Department as a CUSO volunteer and then later as a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Jeremy has consulted since 1987, and the majority of his experience is grounded in the forest sector. Early areas of specialization included wood supply analysis and forest modeling, developing and assessing criteria and indicators of sustainable development, and sectoral analysis work. Starting in 1999, Jeremy began to undertake forest sustainability and compliance audits in forests across Ontario (these generally range from 500,000 – 1.5 million ha). He has undertaken approximately 50 of these audits, more than half as the lead auditor. Jeremy has also been active with the Forest Stewardship Council, serving as a technical writer for the Canadian National Boreal Standard, leading part of the centralized national risk assessment for controlled wood in Canada, and most recently studying the impact of Intact Forest Landscape protection. I have also become an FSC auditor, and have participated in approximately 12 assessments and numerous annual audits. Jeremy has been in the carbon space since 1999, when he undertook a series of projects for the federal government looking at afforestation and reforestation prospects in Canada. He has been involved in the development of three forest carbon protocols, developed project description documents for afforestation projects, been a verifier, and undertaken reviews and analyses of different forest carbon protocols and risks of reversal. Jeremy also conducted an expert review of the British Dept of Energy and Climate Change's biomass research. In addition to his work in the forest carbon space, Jeremy has undertaken studies of the carbon associated with grasslands, completed a carbon footprint analysis for a company that manufactures picture frames, analyzed GHG data for a quarrying operation, and completed a carbon accounting for a major cannabis producer. Jeremy has also worked with and advised many First Nations and the Métis Nation of Ontario, for whom he is an advisor and assists with various projects, including mentoring new staff. For ten years, Jeremy served on the Board of Directors of the Silver Taiga Foundation, which managed the model forest program for the Komi Model Forest, in Russia. Between 2009 and 2014, he was chair of the Board.Finally, for the last several years, Jeremy has been a core team member for the Sustainable Biomass Program's Regional Risk Assessments from British Columbia, New Brunswick, and most recently, Nova Scotia. Jeremy also led the preparation of a Catchment Area Analysis for two pellet mills in Burns Lake and Houston, B.C. In this episode, our host, Anne Koven speaks with Dr. Jeremy Williams. Jeremy is a Registered Professional Forester with the province of Ontario in Canada. He is also the president of Arborvitae Environmental Services providing clients with services related to carbon offsets, verification, forest management planning, forest economics, auditing and consulting. Here, Anne and Jeremy delve into the sourcing aspect of mass timber to help builders and architects understand where their wood is coming from and how to ensure it is coming from a sustainable source. They also touch on biogenic carbon and its implications in sustainable construction with the climate crisis always in mind. Connect with Jeremy: LinkedIn
Keith Eshelman is the co-founder & CEO of Parks Project. Parks Project, founded in 2014, came from the idea that we can all do more to support America's parklands. In the early days, Keith volunteered at trail days in local national parks—through this, he realized that there was a huge lack of participation from the next generation. To change that, he created collections of apparel and accessories that would further connect consumers with parks to raise awareness of the projects taking place daily around the country and give folks a story to wear that supports outdoor conservation.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:00] Intro[01:01] What are Parks Project's products?[01:33] Where the idea of Parks Project came from[03:00] The progression of Parks Project products [04:59] Finding customers through organic influence[07:00] Knowing that “We're onto something”[08:17] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io/connect[09:13] Sponsor: Sendlane sendlane.com/honest[10:39] Insider perspectives for launching a brand[12:33] Ecom vs wholesale buyers[14:01] The evolution of the brand[15:30] Advice for founders finding product-market fit[17:30] Manage your relationships with your customers[18:39] Getting featured by Fast Company[19:18] There's still much to do and learn[19:54] The wellness aspect of Parks Project[20:44] Where to find Parks Project[21:08] Keith's tips when going to parksResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeCelebrating America's National Parks with a line of apparel, accessories and home decor parksproject.usConnect with Keith linkedin.com/in/keith-eshelman-a972473Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connectSchedule your free consultation with a Sendlane expert sendlane.com/honestIf you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!
A familiar mark for many, the FSC tick represents the well known and highly trusted Forest Stewardship Council. Created in 1993, the FSC is an international forest certification scheme established to nurture responsible forestry so both forests, and the communities they support can thrive. In this episode of the Specification Joe and Laurence are joined by Melanie Robertson (CEO, FSC Aus/NZ) and Stefan Jensen (Policy and Standards Manager, FSC Aus/NZ) to learn more about FSC certification, and what it means when you see their logo on a wood product. To learn more or get in touch with FSC Aus/NZ you can visit https://anz.fsc.org/. For any questions or suggestions please contact Joe and Laurence at hello@nwmedia.au.
For decades, the Forest Stewardship Council also known as the FSC has had a core policy of prohibiting the commercial use of genetically engineered or genetically modified trees in its certification program. But that ban is currently under threat as commercial interests push for a plan that would have the FSC overseeing test plots of GE trees in what has euphemistically been called a learning project.Currently the US government is also considering allowing the release of genetically engineered American chestnut trees into US forests. Along with opponents in North America, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (also known as CBAN) has noted that this dangerous experiment threatens a spread of GE trees into Canadian forests as well.CBAN has recently released a report The Global Status of Genetically Engineered Tree Development: A Growing Threat, which sheds light on the current status of efforts to genetically engineer trees for release into the wild and use on plantations.In this episode of Breaking Green we will talk with Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.Lucy Sharratt works in Halifax as the Coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, also known as CBAN. CBAN brings together 16 groups to research, monitor and raise awareness about issues relating to genetic engineering in food and farming. CBAN members include farmer associations, environmental and social justice organizations, and regional coalitions of grassroots groups. Lucy previously worked as a campaigner and researcher on this issue at the Sierra Club of Canada and the Polaris Institute in Ottawa. Lucy also coordinated the International Ban Terminator Campaign which secured a strengthened global moratorium on genetically engineered sterile seed technology.Lucy has a Master's degree from the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University and has authored numerous articles in various books on the subject of genetic engineering.Don't miss this episode and subscribe to Breaking Green wherever you get your podcasts.This podcast is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project. Report The Global Status of Genetically Engineered Tree Development: A Growing ThreatCBAN information on FSCStop GE Tree Petition to FSCStop GE Tree American Chestnut petitionBreaking Green is made possible by tax deductible donations from people like you. Please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose false solutions. Simply text GIVE to 716-257-4187.
October 18, 2022--Hosts Chad Swimmer and Paul Schulman speak with Gary Hughes, America's Program Coordinator for Biofuel Watch International for a dive into the betrayed promises and conflicts of interest of the Forest Stewardship Council with its internationally recognized stamp of sustainable forestry.
Có một sự thật là các bạn mới làm Marketing sẽ không quan tâm đến Marketing Strategy. Bản thân mình hồi mới đi làm đã nghĩ Marketing Strategy nghe thì hay thật đấy, nhưng toàn …chém gió. Mấy người làm Strategy toàn nói thứ đao to búa lớn mà không thực tế, không liên quan gì đến công việc hằng ngày của mình như post bài SoMe, chạy quảng cáo, làm landing page cho website,… Nhưng càng về sau khi hiểu hơn về Marketing, mình càng thấm giá trị của Strategy. Tất cả những thứ mình làm, tất cả mọi hoạt động Marketing của business đều bị chi phối bởi Strategy. Nếu như Business là 1 cái cây thì Marketing sẽ là các nhánh cây, còn các hoạt động Marketing diễn ra hằng ngày là các tán cây và lá cây - những cái cụ thể hiển hiện bạn có thể nhìn thấy. Nhưng một cái cây có thể khoẻ mạnh, phát triển bền vững, thân có cứng cáp, lá có xanh tốt hay không thì nó hoàn toàn phụ thuộc vào gốc rễ của cái cây - cái mà bạn không thể nhìn thấy. Strategy chính là rễ cây đấy. Trong podcast mới của Marketing Insider, mình có cơ hội được trò chuyện về chủ đề Marketing Strategy với chị Võ Minh Ngọc, admin của group. Với nhiều năm kinh nghiệm làm việc với nhiều mảng khác nhau của Marketing & Communication, ở nhiều lĩnh vực khác nhau, trong nhiều môi trường làm việc khác nhau, chị Ngọc chia sẻ góc nhìn của chị, kèm với ví dụ thực tế về Marketing Strategy: - Marketing là gì? Lịch sử và bản chất của Marketing - Marketing Strategy là gì? Tạo sao lại cần marketing strategy? - 1 framework cơ bản của Marketing Strategy. 5 bước xây dựng chiến lược Marketing. Vì đây là chủ đề hơi khó nắm bắt và khá nhiều lý thuyết nên chị Ngọc cũng chia sẻ thêm 2 ví dụ liên quan đến Marketing Strategy: - Một là áp dụng tư duy Marketing Strategy cho bạn đang kiếm việc làm. - Hai là xây dựng Marketing Strategy & những bài học xương máu từ chính business của chị. Giới thiệu khách mời: Võ Minh Ngọc - Global Marketing Manager của Forest Stewardship Council™. - Founder của Impactus Global Communication & Career Mentoring Hub. - Từng làm việc với các tổ chức quốc tế lớn như World Bank, Asian Development Bank, WWF. - Kinh nghiệm làm việc đa quốc gia: Đức, Anh, Việt Nam. - Admin group "Chuyện MarCom ở Châu Âu" Kết nối với chị Ngọc trên LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ngocminhvo/ Với những bạn mới làm Marketing, đây sẽ là chủ đề bạn nên quan tâm đào sâu càng sớm càng tốt, đồng thời. Với những bạn senior hơn thì podcast này sẽ là 1 dịp để bạn ôn lại kiến thức về Marketing Strategy và có thể có thêm góc nhìn mới từ chia sẻ của chị Ngọc. Vì một chút sự cố kỹ thuật nên phần hình ảnh của video chưa được đẹp lắm, nhưng không ảnh hưởng gì đến chất lượng bài chia sẻ trong bài podcast. Mọi người thấy hữu ích thì nhớ like và subscribe kênh nhé. Sắp tới sẽ có rất nhiều chủ đề thú vị như Growth Marketing, Growth Hacking, Marketing Automation, Integrated Marketing Plan. #MarketingStrategy #StrategyMindset #Marketing #Marketinghistory #marketingstrategyframework TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Intro 0:00:59 Giới thiệu khác mời Võ Minh Ngọc 0:02:28 Career journey của chị Ngọc 0:11:00 Marketing là gì? 0:13:00 Lịch sử & bản chất của Marketing 0:21:02 Marketing Strategy là gì? Tạo sao lại cần marketing strategy? 0:22:30 Marketing Strategy framework: 5 bước xây dựng chiến lược Marketing. 0:38:54 Áp dụng tư duy Marketing Strategy vào Job Hunting. 0:46:45 Business case: xây dựng Marketing Strategy & những bài học xương máu. 1:09:03 Lời khuyên cho Junior Marketer 1:11:23 Closing words
Kristen talks to Kyla about deforestation and the state of the worlds forests today. Topics: what is deforestation; how does deforestation occur; what are the effects of deforestation; why are forests so great; the history of Forest Stewardship Council and other forest eco-labels; what can we do to help. Leave us a voicemail! https://podinbox.com/pullback Website: https://www.pullback.org/episode-notes/episode96 Harbinger Media Network: https://harbingermedianetwork.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/PullbackPodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pullbackpodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PullbackPodcast/ Pullback is produced and hosted by Kristen Pue and Kyla Hewson. Logo by Rachel Beyer and Evan Vrinten.
“We asked the Forest Stewardship Council to go on the ground and do the whole certification process, just like they do for paper…Then they're following that rubber throughout the chain of custody all the way through to the factory here in Georgia….We have just produced the first FSC certified tire.” Maureen Kline on Electric Ladies Podcast With President Biden's recent signature on the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. is making the largest investment in mitigating climate change in history, $369 billion. Part of those funds go toward boosting the transition to electric vehicles, from charging to creating a sustainable supply chain – augmenting the Infrastructure Bill investments earlier this year. One of those parts is tires. As the rubber literally hits the road with these huge government investments in transforming our auto sector, Listen to Maureen Kline, head of sustainability for Pirelli Tires, explain how Pirelli is making sustainable – and smart! – tires to host Joan Michelson on Electric Ladies Podcast. It might change how you buy your next car. You'll hear: How Pirelli is using outside sources like the Forest Stewardship Council to help them make sustainable tires in a credible and responsible way. What “smart tires” are, how they work, and how they keep passengers safer than “normal” tires do. How Maureen got Pirelli to include an option in the company's 401K plan options to invest according to ESG criteria. Plus, insightful career advice …. “I think what's really important is to gain knowledge of sustainability and weave it into every career… Use all possible, learning opportunities, whether it's online courses, listening to your podcast, reading, and just get your overall sustainability education in order. And then you can really start diving into how to make what you do, more sustainability focused.” Maureen Kline on Electric Ladies podcast You'll also want to listen to: Telva McGruder, Chief Diversity Officer of General Motors – on pivoting that 100+ year old company from gas-powered cars to electric cars Neha Palmer, Founder/CEO of TeraWatt Infrastructure on charging for EV trucks Sandrine Dixson, Co-President of the Club of Rome (country leaders, CEOs) on transitioning to a net zero economy Jackie Birdsall, Toyota, Senior Engineer, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles Margaret Lewis, New Flyer electric buses Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our podcasts, blog, events and special coaching offers.. Thanks for subscribing on Apple Podcasts or iHeartRadio and leaving us a review! Reach us on Twitter @joanmichelson
Welcome to a special episode edition of this ongoing series focusing on tree planting and agroforestry. Often when we think about agroforestry we think first about food. Orchards of fruit and nut crops are certainly an important aspect of agroforestry, but so is the responsible harvesting and care for woodlands for building materials and fuel. For a long time now I've admired the work of Ben Law who's a woodsman, permaculture practitioner, and author of many books on developing, tending, and using the products that come from the woods. Ben is a wealth of practical knowledge and is a founding member of the Forest Stewardship Council. He also has worked for Oxfam as a permaculture consultant. He's also the author of The Woodland Way: A Permaculture Approach to Sustainable Woodland Management. Ben's woodland house has been featured on The World's Greenest Homes, a series of the Discovery Channel's Planet Green and his latest book, Roundwood Timber Framing, is a full color guide to his beautiful and traditional building techniques. This is a special episode today, because it comes from the archives of one of my favorite podcasts, one that helped to inspire me to begin my own back in the early days. Since I can hardly hope to improve on my friend Scott Mann's exceptional interviewing style in the Permaculture Podcast, I reached out to him to ask if he would allow me to rebroadcast his interview with Ben and he generously said yes. Scott and I, along with our friend and colleague Jill Cloutier from Sustainable World Radio have teamed up to form the Regenerative Media Alliance, a union of independent media producers working to broadcast regenerative solutions across the world. Be sure to stick around until the end where I'll share more information about this alliance and give you the early signup information for the RMA's professional development conference. In this interview, Ben and Scott discuss a wide range of woodland management ideas and options like coppicing and pollarding. Ben describes some of the valuable skills and products that can be central to profitable forest management or forest based businesses. Overall I really love this conversation for the mindset that comes through from Ben as he describes his deep relationship with the woodland that he stewards and I hope that it helps you to look at the forest in a deeper way as well. Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://ben-law.co.uk/ https://ben-law.co.uk/product-category/books-dvds/ https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/web/ https://regenerativemediaalliance.com/
Where did the materials in your couch come from? What happens to them after they've been thrown away? These questions and more are at the heart of today's interview with Laurence Carr, host of the TV show Chez Laurence on EarthxTV! We sit down with Laurence to learn all about sustainability in the design and furnishing of the built environment. Listen in to learn about how YOU can make sustainability a priority in your life! Check out Chez Laurence on EarthxTV: https://video.earthxtv.com/shows/chez-laurence Check out the following links to learn more about sustainable furnishings: Cradle to Cradle Institute, Sustainable Furnishings, The Forest Stewardship Council, GOTS, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, The Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative Learn more about our nonprofit here: LastChanceEndeavors.com
Scot McQueen, Senior Technology Officer at the Forest Stewardship Council, joins us from Olympia, Washington to share with us how he is leveraging technology to drive positive and impactful change in forestry around the world. What does Esri, Planet, Tableau, DocuSign, Amazon Web Services, and Google all have in common? They are part of the FSC Technology Consortium and working together to solve some of the toughest problems in forestry. As an example, come listen to Scot describe how FSC is tackling the chain of custody problem through blockchain technology. You're in for some goosebumps with this one!
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.
Building on Episode 9, we continue our focus on wood as a climate solution. But not all wood is created equal. In fact, most lumber extraction leads to a degraded environment. So in order to deliver on wood's carbon storage promises, we need to push for sustainable forestry practices.Brad Kahn is the Communications Director for the Forest Stewardship Council in the US. And Terry Campbell is Vice President of Sustainable Impact at Sustainable Northwest Wood in Portland, Oregon. They are both doing great work to promote sustainable forestry and get more good wood into building projects. We talk about FSC certification and examine the many values that it covers such as water and air quality and biodiversity. We also touch on wildfires, small farms, tribal lands, and corporate climate commitments.
Today's guest is not only a professional athlete, he is an impact athlete - someone who is using their voice in the professional athletic world for good. Jeremy Casebeer is a Professional Beach Volleyball Player and Host of 'Our Impact' Podcast, working to accelerate climate solutions and protect our oceans. While he's not dominating in the sand as a champion and 3x best server of the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) he's working as an ambassador for Parley for the Oceans and Forest Stewardship Council as well as using his platform to scale his impact and partnering with responsible brands that he loves! In this episode, we chat about Jeremy's journey to becoming an Impact Athlete, how others could use their platforms for good, and his podcast Our Impact. Our Impact With Jeremy Casebeer - https://bleav.com/shows/our-impact-with-jeremy-casebeer/ Episode Shownotes - https://lenasamford.com/hometown-earth/scaling-our-impact-with-jeremy-casebeer/
Aubrey McCormick is the regional manager of the West at the Forest Stewardship Council, she is the CEO and Co-Founder at Black Sheep Design (building and designing sustainable homes), and she is also a former professional golfer who wrote the first CSR report in golf helping to drive social and environmental impact in the sport. I'm excited to speak with Aubrey for a number of reasons. She did for golf what I am working to in beach volleyball and she has worked on many of the same ideas and questions that I am currently working on. How can athletes learn about the issues they care about and use their platforms in sport to scale social and environmental impact? How can athletes gain experience, useful skill sets, and build their network to eventually transition into a purpose-driven career that aligns with their values? In our conversation we talk about how she worked with stakeholders across the golf community on the first CSR report, some of the obstacles she faced and lessons she learned, and how she used her experience as an athlete in her work at FSC to work with major brands like Patagonia, Amazon, and Microsoft to scale sustainable forestry. We also talk about onesimpleaction.org, a new online marketplace for FSC certified products, and the impact that consumers can have by shopping for sustainable forestry products that are certified by FSC. If you have any feedback please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I'm always looking to improve. If you enjoy this conversation, please consider sharing it with a friend.
This week we're meeting with Liisa Kelo, Value Chain Development Manager at FSC. The Forest Stewardship Council mission is to promote environmentally sound, socially beneficial and economically prosperous management of the world's forests. Its vision is that we can meet our current needs for forest products without compromising the health of the world's forests for future generations.In this episode Liisa takes us into the world of wood and fashion. Listening to this episode will allow you to better understand the action of FSC, the textiles of cellulose origin and the stakes around wood in the world. CONTENT TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE EPISODE1:05 : Liisa presents herself2:34 : Why she decided to dedicate her life to sustainability 3:14 : Her definition of sustainable fashion05:21 : What is her job ? 07:09 : What is FSC? Who is it for? What is it for? How do you get it? 11:24 : How much does it cost ? How long does it last? 12:16 : What does it bring? What is at stake around wood ?15:23 : What is the link between fashion and FSC ? 17:00 : What is Viscose, Lyocell, Modal, Acetate19:50 : To what extend those fibers are really sustainables ? 21:40 : The Fashion Forever Green Pack25:27 : How can the fashion industry accelerate its sustainable revolution ? 28:35 : What makes her feel optimistic ? And what are the biggest challenges in the coming years? 31:33 : Quick rapid fire questions section KEY LEARNINGS « Sustainable fashion is fashion that is sourced and produced responsibly, both environmentally and socially, but it's also renewable and circular. And essentially, it's fashion that has a positive social, environmental and economic impact. » « What we want to do at FSC is to strive for the best results for the forest. »« We're encountering a major problem, it's that at least half of cellulosic fiber is still not certified. So we don't really know where they're coming from. That could be coming from areas from deforestation or human rights violations. And so leaving these forests unprotected and vulnerable is a major issue. »TO SUPPORT SMART CREATION THE PODCASTDon't forget to share and talk about the podcast to your friends and colleagues, it's easy and it helps the podcast a lot, and please rate it 5 stars and leave us a comment on Apple Podcast.To know more about Smart Creation and Première Vision https://www.premierevision.com/fr/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.
“We asked the Forest Stewardship Council to go on the ground and do the whole certification process, just like they do for paper…Then they're following that rubber throughout the chain of custody all the way through to the factory here in Georgia….and we have just produced the first FSC certified tire.” Maureen Kline on Electric Ladies Podcast The transportation sector is transforming, from GM's announcement that they are eliminating gas engines by 2030, to Ford's announcement this week about going all EV, to the massive legislation moving through Congress now to rebuild our transportation infrastructure. All those vehicles still need tires, though, and rubber is still an environmental challenge. How to balance safety with environmental protection? Pirelli Tires thinks they have found a solution – and these new tires are “smart” as well as sustainable. How? Listen to Maureen Kline, head of sustainability for Pirelli Tires explain it to host Joan Michelson on Electric Ladies podcast. You'll hear: How Pirelli is using outside sources like the Forest Stewardship Council to help them make sustainable tires in a credible and responsible way. What “smart tires” are, how they work, and how they keep passengers safer than “normal” tires do. How Maureen got Pirelli to include an option in the company's 401K plan options to invest according to ESG criteria. Plus, insightful career advice …. “I think what's really important is to gain knowledge of sustainability and weave it into every career… Use all possible, learning opportunities, whether it's online courses, listening to your podcast, reading, and just get your overall sustainability education in order. And then you can really start diving into how to make what you do, more sustainability focused.” Maureen Kline on Electric Ladies podcast You'll also want to listen to: Jennifer Gerbi, Deputy Director and Acting Director, ARPA-E, Dept. of Energy Anne Kelly, Ceres, on the role of the business community in the clean energy transition Lisa Jacobson, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, on the impact of covid on energy and transitioning to a clean energy economy Margaret Lewis, New Flyer electric buses Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our podcasts, blog, events and special coaching offers.. Thanks for subscribing on Apple Podcasts or iHeartRadio and leaving us a review! Follow us on Twitter @joanmichelson
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
With catastrophic floods back home in Germany, Chancellor Merkel is in Washington - with a big agenda to get through with her host, Joe Biden - including climate change. We speak to Matthias Matthijs who teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Also in the programme, the Korean palm oil giant Korindo has been ejected from the world's leading green certification body, the Forest Stewardship Council, in the wake of a BBC investigation. We find out more from the BBC's Rebecca Henschke. On UN Young Skills Day, we speak to Dimitris Lampros and Rania Vlachou of Swim Me, who have created a smart swimming cap and goggles that enable blind people to be more aware of where they are in a pool. Plus, the BBC's Russell Padmore reports on the challenges faced by pubs in Ireland, which have had to remain closed throughout most of the coronavirus pandemic. James Mayger from Bloomberg in Beijing joins us for commentary throughout the programme, alongside political journalist Erin Delmore in New York
After days of unrest, South Africans have been urged to stop panic buying fuel. Layton Beard of the Automobile Association of South Africa offers us his reaction, and we get a sense of the wider picture. Also in the programme, the Korean palm oil giant Korindo has been ejected from the world's leading green certification body, the Forest Stewardship Council, in the wake of a BBC investigation. We find out more from the BBC's Rebecca Henschke. On UN Young Skills Day, we speak to Dimitris Lampros and Rania Vlachou of Swim Me, who have created a smart swimming cap and goggles that enable blind people to be more aware of where they are in a pool. Plus, the BBC's Russell Padmore reports on the challenges faced by pubs in Ireland, which have had to remain closed throughout most of the coronavirus pandemic.
It's NAIDOC week! A time to celebrate and amplify indigenous voices, and I have a great one for you on today's episode This conversation was recorded live at Renew Fest back in May. It was SUCH an amazing festival with just the most incredible people, thinkers, talks, workshops, performances, and ceremonies. I highly recommend if you can to get out to Renew Fest next year Today's conversation was with one of the headline speakers, and over the next few weeks I will be sharing more of these live headline conversations from the festival, interspersed between my regular episodes My guest today, Rachel Cavanagh, is a Minjungbal and Yugambeh woman from Bundjalung Nation; she is also a firefighter and cultural fire and land management expert who has studied natural & cultural resource management, and has worked for the Forestry Corporation of NSW, the Forest Stewardship Council of Australia & NZ, and Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation. (So she knows a thing or two about cultural fire and land management practices) We talk about a lot of things in this yarn, starting with the impacts of 2019/20 bushfires – not just the devastating environmental destruction, but also the deep cultural loss that aboriginal people felt and continue to feel from those events We talk about society's mis-management of country, and how externalising the cause of these fires to something like climate change is over-simplifying things, and is really reflective of our disconnection to land and country as a whole We talk about the need to have people on-country and looking after it, and some of the problems that sections of the environmental movement are causing by saying we just need to let things re-wild And best of all she beautifully shares her perspective of what connection to country is, and how that looks, sounds, feels, and smells, and what we can do to re-build that connection in our own lives Happy NAIDOC week everybody, and please enjoy this conversation, live from Renew Fest, with Rachel Cavanagh
Pina Gervassi is the Climate Director of the Forest Stewardship Council, which is an independent not for profit organisation that brings in experts from the economic, environmental, and social domains to promote the management of and protect forests on a global scale. Pina Gervassi started working at the FSC 18 years ago and has worked in many branches and locations of the organisation around the world.· www.fsc.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info
“Since I was a child, most of my family were dedicated to nature, fishing and agricultural engineers, so I started to love nature since I was very little, and then when I realised how important the Amazon is for the world and that I was living in a country [Peru] that's really important, not only because of forests but also for biodiversity, indigenous people…I decided that I wanted to do that and I knew that was the place I wanted to be.”Pina Gervassi is the Climate Director of the Forest Stewardship Council, which is an independent not for profit organisation that brings in experts from the economic, environmental, and social domains to promote the management of and protect forests on a global scale. Pina Gervassi started working at the FSC 18 years ago and has worked in many branches and locations of the organisation around the world.· www.fsc.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.
The Creative Process · Seasons 1 2 3 · Arts, Culture & Society
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others. "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
"I'm a deep believer in the values of democracy, human rights, and the system where civil society and people play a key role in the discussions about society and also assuming responsibility, whether it's through labor unions, youth organizations…I think one key solution at the level of society is more equality. More equal societies bring a lot of advantages. I think that is a critical component to building a sustainable society. We cannot pretend that the current distribution of wealth on this planet between countries and within countries is a fertile ground for longterm sustainability. It isn't."Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. He is a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in global environmental governance, climate change, and sustainable development. Previous to his work at EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute and of the Political Science department at KU Leuven, senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development.· https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/executive-director · https://www.eea.europa.eu/ · www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others. "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
The Creative Process · Seasons 1 2 3 · Arts, Culture & Society
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She's a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.· www.oneplanetpodcast.org This interview is the first in our new One Planet Podcast series, which is available both on The Creative Process and on its own channel from the end of March. The podcast features environmental groups and notable changemakers from around the world, including European Environment Agency, Citizens' Climate Lobby, EarthLife Africa, One Tree Planted, Global Witness, Earth System Governance Project, Marine Stewardship Council, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Association des Amis de la Nature, Forest Stewardship Council, Polar Bears International, and many others.Episodes feature a host of ways you can take action and get involved in local or international environmental movements so that we can work together for a better tomorrow.· "Rebirth" by Juan Sánchez is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Listen in as Susan Inglis and I talk about her organization’s mission to merge Health, Environment, and Profitability in the interior furnishings space. SFC advocates for eco-friendly products and educates consumers, retailers, and manufacturers about better practices in the industry. Other fun topics of conversation include: sustainable forestry, regenerative business practices, market-driven solutions to environmental toxins, and the circular economy. Why should we care about a circular economy? Hint: It can often save money! Episode Sponsor - www.sustainablehomesofthefuture.comContact Host - info@shfbuild.com About Susan: Susan Inglis is Executive Director of the Sustainable Furnishings Council, and resident expert with the organization she helped found in 2006. She has led SFC to work with industry leaders to establish criteria to gauge the sustainability of furniture products and practices; develop programs for educating all sectors of the industry; and attract hundreds of companies to membership. Inglis is also founder and owner of From The Mountain, a company that imports hand spun cashmere yarn from Afghanistan, providing safe income for over 100 women there. Inglis serves on the Board of the American Sustainable Business Council and was awarded a 2017 Visionary Leadership award by the NC Business Council. She lives in North Carolina. Show Notes: Sustainable Furnishings Council - https://sustainablefurnishings.org/High Point Furniture Market - https://www.highpointmarket.org/Forest Stewardship Council - https://fsc.org/enSustainable Forestry Initiative - https://www.forests.org/Architecture 2030 - https://architecture2030.org/
On today's episode, we sit down with Co-Founder of Original Grain, Andrew Beltran! Original Grain is the premiere maker of all natural wood and stainless steel watches that started in 2012, and are based out of San Diego, California. Using unique materials like old Kentucky Bourbon barrels, retired seats from Yankee Stadium, or decommissioned military ammo crates, OG only uses wood that is either repurposed or certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council. For every watch sold, Original Grain, and its partner commit to planting a tree. These trees afford people more food and a chance at a better tomorrow. In 2019, the company celebrated planting its 500,000th tree! "No two watches are the same. It's not just a time piece, it's a piece of time!"
Listen to Prepared Neighborhoods Author, Activist and Entrepreneur Scott James and hear his take on America's Purpose and how each of us can prepare ourselves, our families and our neighborhoods for predictable crises like storms, floods, earthquakes and pandemics. From helping to build sustainable soccer balls to helping neighbors become more resilient to avoid the worst AND increase human connectivity no matter the political affiliation, Scott's attitude and actions show us how bottom-up efforts make a difference in the real world! More info: https://www.whatsamericaspurpose.com/ Research: Read Scott's book here https://preparedneighborhoods.com/scottjames Read about Scott's Neighborhood in Washington State: https://bainbridgeprepares.org/ Read about the Green Sports Alliance here https://greensportsalliance.org/ Read about Forest Stewardship Council here https://us.fsc.org/en-us/certification Read about Permaculture here https://www.permaculturenews.org/what-is-permaculture/ Read about Marshall Ganz' Leading Change Network here: https://leadingchangenetwork.org/
Dr Jeanette Gurung is a forester and gender equality and climate expert with many years of experience in the international development sector. She is the founder and Executive Director of WOCAN – Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, a global network with over 1,300 members in 113 countries to support capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment. She is the innovator of the W+ Standard ™ to measure, quantify and monetize impacts of projects on women, through the use of a results-based financing approach, providing ways for companies, governments, organizations and individuals to confidently drive and measure social and economic empowerment for women. She has managed projects for the Asian Development Bank (Harnessing Climate Change Mitigation to Benefit Women) and other UN and bilateral development agencies and led and served on numerous committees such as The Forest Dialogue Steering Committee, Gender Expert of the CGIAR Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Program, Advisor to the Forest Stewardship Council, FAO’s Policy Committee on Incentives for Ecosystem Services, and UNFCCC’s Expert Group on Gender and Climate and more. She speaks to us about being a female forester, pursuing gender mainstreaming in male dominated organizations, her Phd thesis on the same topic, the devaluation of women's labour in natural resource management, being motivated by frustration, innovating new standards, the struggle for financing gender and climate projects, working across sectors and silos, inclusive feminine leadership, climate reliance, nature based solutions, the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and much more. She joins us from Hawaii, USA.
Is there any use in choosing to live more sustainably if you’re surrounded by an unsustainable system? There are those who argue there is little value in making efforts to trim your own ecological footprint. They lament, “It’s difficult to skinny up your life when you live within a system that needs structural change,” built to drive itself off a cliff. The GrowthBusters disagree. But who can you turn to for good advice on this? An astrophysicist, of course! We’re joined in this episode by NYU professor Joshua Spodek. Yes, he has a degree in astrophysics, but these days he’s busy teaching and coaching leadership and entrepreneurship, doing TEDx talks, authoring best-selling books, blogging daily, and hosting his own podcast. It takes Joshua a year to accumulate a load of trash, and he hasn’t hopped on a plane in four years. So when it comes to both the joy, and the value, of individual planet-saving action, Josh is our guy. Here is the complete email from Rob Boman in Oregon (we shared a portion of it on the podcast) Links promised are below this. Hello, I just listened to podcast #35 (uncoupling nonsense). I could send a lot of stuff and I’m in the process of developing a website, but for now, you might find this interesting: I call it The Fifteen Criteria Points of Genuine, Meaningful Sustainability Thanks for your work, Robert Bolman 1) What people commonly refer to as “sustainability” is not truly sustainable. For example, people will refer to “sustainably harvested lumber”. Lumber may be harvested in a manner that is not destructive of forest ecosystems, but in order for lumber to be sustainably harvested, not only would the chainsaws and logging trucks need to be running on something other than fossil fuels, but the chainsaws and logging trucks would need to be MANUFACTURED using something other than fossil fuels. When you consider the amount of energy required to make a large metal object like a logging truck, it is clear that even Forest Stewardship Council certified lumber is far from sustainable 2) Genuine, meaningful sustainability is defined by a rigorous set of criteria including, but not limited to the use of nonrenewable resources and the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. 3) It therefore follows that achieving genuine, meaningful sustainability is a dauntingly complex, remote, far-flung ideal. It will be VERY difficult to achieve. 4) As difficult as it may be, genuine, meaningful sustainability WILL be achieved because to do anything less is unsustainable. Whatever the human family fails to do voluntarily, we WILL do involuntarily. It is possible that we will become a sustainable, advanced, complex civilization. On the other hand, dust blowing on the wind is sustainable. 5) The longer we wait, the longer we procrastinate, delay and make excuses, the more wrenching and traumatic the transition to sustainability will be. We are squandering precious time and resources presently. We have used up approximately half of our one-time geological allotment of fossil fuels. The remaining half will be increasingly more expensive and energy intensive to extract. We should be feverishly using the remaining half to construct the post-fossil fuel infrastructure that we will need. This is especially the case when considering Climate Change. Fully preparing for life without fossil fuels could take decades. Also, it is not at all clear just HOW everything we do with fossil fuels can be accomplished with wind, solar and biofuels. The time to begin that transition is NOT when the fossil fuels are dwindling and the economy is collapsing. 6) Growth is unsustainable. Period. Within a closed, finite system like a petri dish, an island or a planet, growth of the physical environment cannot be continued. Thus, mainstream economics with its emphasis on perpetual growth is quite misguided and unsustainable. (The joke goes that an economist is someone who believes that given sufficient water and fertilizer, a tree can grow to be 100 miles tall.) 7) The best efforts at sustainability will be in vain if population isn’t addressed. It has been consistently shown that the best way to encourage poorer populations to have fewer children is to provide them with education, health care and a more humane quality of life, generally. Therefore, arguably, the extremely poor distribution of the world’s wealth is unsustainable. 8) When the consequences of a given action are not fully understood, it is best to err on the side of caution. This is called The Precautionary Principle and if so called “conservatives” were genuinely conservative, it would be the bedrock of their philosophy. It is safe, prudent and truly conservative. When looked at in the context of genuine, meaningful sustainability, so called “conservatives” are not conservative at all. They are radical, cavalier and dangerous. 9). Carrying on with business-as-usual, assuming that technology will emerge to save us is optimistic to the point of irresponsibility. This is a good place to invoke The Precautionary Principle. No doubt new technologies will emerge to help us through the coming transition to sustainability, but we are facing some serious challenges and there is no guarantee that technology will make this an easy transition. Technological optimism IS NOT a sound basis for public policy. 10) Human labor is environmentally neutral. So, wherever any toxic, energy intensive industrial or agricultural practice can be replaced with a different process using human labor, that’s what we should do. Seen in the context of the approaching depletion of fossil fuels, we perhaps don’t need to worry about unemployment. There will be plenty of work for people to do. 11) In order for market forces to govern a sustainable world, environmental and social costs must be accounted for. The way mainstream economists view the world, countless true environmental and social costs are nonchalantly brushed aside – dismissed as “externalities”. Then, with a straight face, these same economists insist that the “wise and invisible hand of the free market” should be allowed to decide things for us. We might as well have a chimpanzee with a Ouija board making some of society’s more important decisions. It’s absurd. For example, if the true environmental and social costs of fossil fuels were accounted for, they would be far more expensive and we would be living in a very different world with dramatically different transportation, land use, manufacturing and agriculture. 12) So many powerful economic interests make so much money from such unsustainable business practices and so many people enjoy such great levels of comfort, convenience and entertainment through such unsustainable means that achieving genuine, meaningful sustainability will be very upsetting to a lot of people. In other words, the necessary and inevitable changes are gonna PISS PEOPLE OFF. 13) Therefore, in order to achieve genuine, meaningful sustainability, those in positions of power must carry out dramatic, sweeping changes for which there may not yet be widespread, popular support. The practice of politicians tiptoeing around, reluctant to upset people must end. True leaders must be ready to say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Here’s why. And this pallet of document boxes is the scientific research supporting our decision, so please stop shouting and start reading.” 14) It follows that in order to achieve widespread, popular support for sustainability, the public must be educated – a task too important to be left to the mainstream media & “education” as it commonly exists. Corporate lawyers should not earn ten times the income of a public school teacher. Rather than cutting funding for National Public Radio and Television, funding should be dramatically increased with the condition that all corporate underwriting be eliminated. We should consider a national public print media to provide an alternative to the New York Times and Washington Post. 15) In order to function better as a species, human beings must develop an enhanced faculty of discernment whereby we will tend to believe what is true as distinct from believing what happens to be convenient. It has been articulated by people ranging from Albert Einstein to Shirley MacLane that HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS MUST CHANGE for the world’s problems to be resolved, but this idea is viewed as being vague or abstract – better discussed by philosophers and psychologists than by policy makers. But there is nothing vague or abstract about the DENIAL, DELUSION and sometimes SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR being exhibited by those in positions of power in the world. The hierarchies of power don’t groom and condition the finest people among us to rise to the positions of leadership. In order to achieve and thrive in positions of power, people often find it necessary to embrace a deeply flawed view of reality. Or in many cases, sociopathic behavior can serve those in power very nicely as they dig, claw, kick and gouge their way to the top. This is how politicians and corporate executives wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, genuinely believe that their behavior is acceptable and then spend their days doing a gross disservice to future generations. It is high time we bring the full weight of modern psychology to bear on those running the world. LINKS: (We didn’t get around to discussing all these, but we want to share them with you, anyway.) Joshua Spodek website Leadership and the Environment (Joshua Spodek’s podcast) Dave Gardner episodes of Leadership and the Environment What everyone Gets Wrong About the Environment – TEDx Talk by Joshua Spodek Find Your Delicious: Leadership and the Environment – TEDx Talk by Joshua Spodek Joshua Spodek on flying: What a Year Without Flying Taught Me About Responsibility, Empathy, and Community – in Inc. Magazine Covid-19: Addiction to Flying and Other Polluting Behavior Was a Lack of Motivation and Imagination Year 4, Day 1 of Not Flying The Longer I Go Without Flying, the More People Talking About Flying Sounds Like They’re Talking About Heroin The Longer I Go Without Flying, the More People Talking About Flying Sounds Like They’re Talking About Heroin, Part 2 Joshua’s 20-Minute Vegetable Stew A Christmas Thought on Climate and Population - by Joshua Spodek Towards the 'Walden Wage” Waiting for the World to End - by The Mavericks Join the conversation on Facebook Make a donation to support this non-profit project. Archive of all episodes of the GrowthBusters podcast Subscribe to GrowthBusters email updates See the film – GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth Explore the issues at www.growthbusters.org View the GrowthBusters channel on YouTube Subscribe (free) so you don't miss an episode:
Parliamo del ruolo degli alberi nel cambiamento climatico con Giorgio Vacchiano, ricercatore Università Statale di Milano, e come possiamo proteggere queste risorse, con Diego Florian di Forest Stewardship Council.
Parliamo del ruolo degli alberi nel cambiamento climatico con Giorgio Vacchiano, ricercatore Università Statale di Milano, e come possiamo proteggere queste risorse, con Diego Florian di Forest Stewardship Council.
Episode 3 is here and we are feeling FESTIVE. Becky is a recovering gift lover who enjoys cheesy christmas films and ALL the trimmings the festive period has to offer. Mac is trying to find the true meaning of Christmas through her year-round appreciation of A Muppets Christmas Carol and has been saying BAH-HUMBUG to gift giving for a long time. The Most Wasteful Time of the Year explores how the holiday season can put a lot of pressure on us and the environment as the amount of buying unwanted gifts and throwing away un-eaten food dramatically increases. Join us as we learn about gift giving cultures across the World, ask parents to stop hating on each other in the war to buy the most presents for their children and we provide some handy practical tips to move from wasteful to wonderful. Resources: https://www.fsc.org/en - Forest Stewardship Council https://www.soilassociation.org/ - Soil Association https://www.1millionwomen.com.au/blog/how-furoshiki-japanese-fabric-wrapping/ - Japanese fabric wrapping https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/ - Amazon price tracker https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/news/news-archive/2018/fake-vs-real-christmas-tree-what-s-better-for-the-environment - Real vs Fake Christmas trees *note we stated 9 years of use in the episode and the article states 10 years* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEiRkPpOBMk - arm knitting tutorial https://www.elfster.com/ - Secret Santa exchange website
Celebrating 45 years of Friends of the Earth. Walking tall amongst giants - FoE's work in forests. Friends of the Earth came to forests later in the game and was strong from the 1990s via old growth forests campaigns. We worked to critique plantations, break down the greenies vs loggers dynamic by working with unions (Earthworker experiment), and bringing in Indigenous voices. FoE helped to set up the Forest Stewardship Council, and further sharpened our holistic approach. Presenter: Megan Williams. Guests: Fiona York, Martin Daly, Anthony Amis.
Urwälder speichern besonders viel Kohlendioxid und sind wichtig für den Schutz des Weltklimas. Um dem Abholzen entgegenzuwirken, zertifiziert der internationale Forest Stewardship Council seit Jahrzehnten nachhaltige Forstwirtschaft. Er bescheinigt, dass Produkte mit dem FSC-Siegel aus „umweltgerecht“ gefälltem Holz hergestellt wurden. Doch kann der FSC die Vernichtung der Urwälder aufhalten? Der Dokumentarfilm deckt die Zusammenhänge zwischen dem FSC und der weltweiten Waldwirtschaft auf. (Online-Signatur Medienzentren: 49800327)
Slow furniture Inexpensive store bought is often badly made with cheap materials like particle board, and the very cheap ones may give off formaldehyde.These materials take masses of energy to make, and they don’t last long, especially if there is any water damage.Solutions * Buy furniture made from whole materials, including solid wood, which while it may cost more up front, the resale value is substantially higher down the line. With wooden products, check whether it is sustainable, Forest Stewardship Council is a reliable certification.* Buy less and wait until the perfect piece arrives. A minimalist aesthetic is actually pretty cool. Don’t need to clutter up your place* Buy used. This can be so much fun hunting down these treasures. Manage to afford much higher quality this way. Used furniture holds its value much better than new as well, or even gains in value if you catch the trends. Often the older styles are much tougher and can handle rough treatment from kids or flatmates* Buy used. This can be so much fun hunting down these treasures. Manage to afford much higher quality this way. Used furniture holds its value much better than new as well, or even gains in value if you catch the trends. Often the older styles are much tougher and can handle rough treatment from kids or flatmates * Be careful of old upholstery or foam. Check out carefully
Wild Country produce a delicious range of condiments worthy of the finest condiment connoisseur, including Al Brown's mild mustard.McKinlays Shoes iconic fifth generation business is featured on the Making It New Zealand Series.The Buy New Zealand Made team head to the Zoo for day, feed giraffes (with video!) and discover the importance of the Forest Stewardship Council to them and the difference we can make when buying products.Munch Cupboard show their alternative to plastic wrap and why reusable honey based wrap products are the future for a sustainable life....and lastly we share our Net Promoter Score results after 12 months of Executive Director Ryan Jennings at the helm. LINKS TO BUSINESSES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEWild Country http://www.wildcountry.co.nzMcKinlays Shoes: https://mckinlays.co.nzMunch Cupboard: https://www.munchcupboard.comWellington Zoo: https://wellingtonzoo.com
Ilson López is the President of Belgium. Not the European country, but the indigenous village in the district of Tahuamanu, in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, at the western edge of the Amazon forest. He’s part of the Yine people, who are scattered from here all the way to Cusco, the capital of the old Incan empire, about 500 kilometers to the southwest. The village gets its name from the alleged homeland of a rubber trader named Justo Bezada, who began working with the people of Belgium – or “Bélgica” in Spanish – in the early 1900s. Rubber tapping suited them, says López, because it provided a way to earn cash income for schools, food, and health care without destroying the forest. “Back in the day, we'd roll it into a big ball, which traders would take on a plane to Lima,” he says. “But that business started slowing down in the 1970s, and we've been struggling ever since.” As the rubber trade dried up, the people of Bélgica grudgingly turned to logging – sparingly at first, but more and more as roads came, bringing logging trucks and loggers seeking lucrative cedar and mahogany. Balancing Economy and Ecology In 2002, the people of Bélgica won demarcation of their territory, and with it the legal right to earn income from its products. They divided the territory into zones for commercial activities like rubber tapping and ecotourism, as well as pure conservation areas for traditional hunting and fishing. But logging was something they struggled with – morally and logistically. “We didn't have any capacity to do the extraction right,” says Lopez. “So at first we operated in the black market – basically just letting loggers into the territory and getting paid for it – but the local authorities came to us and said, ‘You're not doing this right.’ And that's when we learned about certification.” Specifically, certification under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC. You know those little labels you see on cabinets and tables and on boxes of paper? The Forest Stewardship Council Environmental NGOs like WWF created the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, together with some forward-thinking timber companies, after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro failed to deliver a real global compact. The idea was to create some sort of standard for sustainably-harvested timber to at least give the good guys a boost. It’s based on ten principles that stakeholders agreed would make it possible to extract valuable trees without destroying the forest, as well as auditing procedures to make sure the practices were being followed, and then labeling, so consumers would know the difference – and, hopefully pay extra for the good stuff. Indigenous Constitutions At this was happening, indigenous people all across the Amazon were creating so-called Life Plans, or Planes de Vida, which are something like indigenous constitutions. “The Life Plan is a document, or an exercise, that sets out our vision of where we want to go and helps us understand how to get there,” says Lopez. “FSC certification became one of the pillars of our Life Plan, because it was a way that we could improve productivity while saving the forest. We also included rubber tapping and conservation.” The Sustainable District It helps that Bélgica is located in the district of Tahuamanu, which is something of a sustainability success story, thanks in part to the Cardozo family. Three brothers and a sister, their parents settled here in the 1950s and become major landowners and political leaders, as well as proponents of sustainable development. Alfonso Cardozo is the mayor of Iñapari, the district capital, and he lobbied to prioritize granting of concessions for groups that embrace FSC certification. It was he and his brother, Abraham, who persuaded the people of Bélgica to join FSC, and it was one of their companies that helped the Bélgicans create and execute the sustainable logging plan needed to earn FSC certification. That meant meeting the FSC’s ten principles – ranging from hiring comuneros, or members of the community, to meeting ever-evolving standards for good land management and equitable community relations. Lopez, however, says the Cardozos charged too much for their services, so the Bélgica ruling council switched to a second company, and then a third. Today, says Lopez, the people of Bélgica get 80 percent of the income on timber sold from the territory, and the current partner, a company called MADERYJA, has never missed a payment or been late. FSC Impacts Seventy percent of Peru’s certified concessions are located in Tahuamanu, and the neighboring concession of Maderacre, in which the Cardozos also held an interest, is also FSC-certified – and more accessible by jeep than Bélgica’s. It spreads out over 220,000 hectares, divided into 20 plots of 11,000 hectares each, and the company works just one plot per year, so there are 20 years between harvests. The concession was cobbled together by a businessman named Erasmo Wong, who made a fortune building up Peru's largest chain of supermarkets before selling the company and devoting his life to philanthropy and sustainable agriculture. Environmental NGO WWF has been working with Maderacre to monitor the impact of its operations on wildlife, and Josefina Braña, who runs WWF’s Forest and Climate Program, says the early indications are promising. “The jaguar population is thriving, and we’ve seen monkeys, tapirs, birds, agouti, ant-eaters, and sloths,” she says. “Biodiversity is thriving because of the reduced-impact logging they use.” Reduced Impact Logging The company uses drones to first identify valuable trees, then it sends out teams to survey the area from the ground. “We use drones to identify the trees that are tall and thick enough to chop,” says Fermin Zapana Pilco, who oversees all extractive activities in the concession. “Then we map out routes to them, and finally we send out teams to see if the tree we want to chop will hurt other trees when it falls.” The trees and patches of forest are separated into different categories: some are classified as high-conservation value (HCV), which is an official designation developed by the Forest Stewardship Council in 1999, meaning they're not to be destroyed. “Some will also just be immature,” says Pilco. “That means they’re too small to harvest, so we leave these for when we return to this plot in 20 years.” If there are seedlings or high-conservation trees near a tree they’re targeting, they map out a way to cut the tree so it falls where no seedlings or high-conservation trees are, but if that's not possible, they make a note of that and move on to the next tree. “It costs us about 35 percent more to do FSC certification, as opposed to just doing what the law requires,” says Kroll. “But the market doesn't really pay a premium – or, if it does, it's 5 percent at most. Reduced Waste We come to a massive mahogany that's passed all the criteria: it's about 70 years old, two meters in diameter – six and a half meters around, but wider at the base, and 30 meters, or about 10 stories, high. It branches out about 18 meters up, so only the first six stories can be used for wood. Put another way, it's 40 tons of biomass, which means 20 tons of carbon, which will become 73 tons of carbon dioxide if the tree burns or decays and mixes with oxygen in the air. That's 14-times as much greenhouse gas as the average passenger car emits in a whole year of driving. About 40 percent of the tree will end up in flooring and furniture, which locks up 30 tons of that carbon dioxide, but what about the other 44 tons? That's almost nine cars' worth. “Some of it will be used as biofuel for our ovens,” says Nelson Kroll, Madeacre's forestry manager. “We use those to dry out the trees, but we're also working on a deal with a local farm, which wants to use it for mulch and compost.” A Natural Climate Solution That's good for the climate, because healthy soils absorb carbon, as well as nitrogen and hydrogen, and they reduce levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, three powerful greenhouse gasses. A landmark study published in 2016 showed that we can get 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement's 2-degree target just by improving the way we manage forests, farms, and fields. That study, called "Natural Climate Solutions" identified 20 specific pathways do doing that – one of which is sustainable forest management, which is what FSC is all about, and another of which is improving soils. These natural climate solutions deliver more than one-third of the mitigation needed to meet the climate challenge, but they get just 3 percent of dedicated climate finance and 1 percent of climate-related media coverage. The tree spreads out at the base, like a duck's foot, and the worker injects his saw into the base vertically, straight up and down, building kind of a wall of wood on three sides of the foot, so these 40 tons will fall where he wants them to. After it lands, workers begin chopping in and marking it with alphanumeric codes to identify the tree according to the forest inventory, the section of the tree, the date it was chopped, and of course the concession. Traceability and Legality The concession began marking the trees to meet FSC traceability requirements, but traceability has become a legal requirement, too, because the European Union and the United States have both banned the import of illegally-harvested timber. As a result, exporters are supposed to trace their timber to legally-sanctioned concessions. That doesn’t, however, always happen. A 2014 analysis by Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends, for example, dissected tropical deforestation from 2001 through 2012 and found that roughly 49 percent of all agriculture-related tropical deforestation in that period took place illegally, and roughly half of that illegally-harvested timber was exported. That same year, a global coalition of governments, corporations, NGOs, and Indigenous Peoples’ organizations endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which is a pledge to end forest loss by 2030. The NYDF is broken into ten goals, with #10 being improved forest governance. Today, a coalition of environmental think tanks called NYDF Assessment Partners, of which Forest Trends is a member, published updated findings on progress towards Goal #10 and found that not much has changed. Specifically, the report, called “Improving Governance to Protect Forests”, finds that law enforcement has improved slightly since 2014, especially on the demand side, and that traceability has also improved, but that average deforestation rates increased 42 percent since the NYDF was signed. Countries like Peru, which has a sketchy history on this front, are trying to protect exports by improving enforcement – although the effectiveness of that is limited, too, because countries like China don't put much effort into verifying legality of imports. “There can be no effective global approach without the support and participation of China, the world’s largest importer of timber and exporter of forest products,” says Kerstin Canby, Director of the Forest Trends Forest Policy, Trade, and Finance Initiative. “We are, however, seeing some improvement in enforcement of the European Union Timber Regulation,” she added. “By mid-2018, for example, EU Member States have implemented 17,735 checks on domestic timber, and they implemented 2,704 checks on imported timber in 2017, while more than 992 penalties have been assessed, and 21 cases went to court.” If every forestry concession on the planet worked the way these two do, we'd have a fighting chance of meeting the climate challenge, but the district of Tahuamanu is an outlier, with a government willing to promote sustainable forestry and a citizenry willing to embrace it.
On this episode of the Re:co Podcast, Kim Elena Ionescu speaks to Andre de Freitas, Executive Director of the Sustainable Agriculture Network. Andre has over 20 years of experience working with sustainability initiatives, with a focus on responsible sourcing and certification in agriculture and forestry. He led the development of the first sustainability policy and implementation systems for Rabobank in Brazil, served as the executive director of the Brazilian NGO IMAFLORA, and as the Director General of the Forest Stewardship Council. Andre also served as a member of the ISEAL Board for many years and in 2015 joined the Advisory Board of Social Accountability International. At Re:co Symposium in April, Andre took part in our session on sustainability. He talked about trends in sustainable sourcing and encouraged companies to consider whether they are having the impact they think they're having. This talk from Re:co Seattle is supported by Toddy. For over 50 years, Toddy brand cold brew systems have delighted baristas, food critics, and regular folks alike. By extracting all the natural and delicious flavors of coffee and tea, Toddy Cold Brew Systems turn your favorite coffee beans and tea leaves into fresh cold brew concentrates, that are ready to serve and enjoy. Learn more about Toddy at http://www.toddycafe.com. Links: - YouTube video: http://www.scanews.coffee/video/talks/reco-symposium/reco-seattle-2018/andre-de-freitas-trends-in-sustainable-sourcing/ - All Re:co videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/RecoSymposium - Speaker bios: http://www.recosymposium.org/speakers/ Subscribe to this podcast on your favorite app: - iTunes: http://www.apple.co/2sXdmSj - Stitcher: http://www.bit.ly/2JBJOk8 - Pocket Casts: http://www.bit.ly/2JBowTT - RadioPublic: http://www.bit.ly/2JCfeGY --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/specialty-coffee-association-podcast/message
This is the fifth and final part of episode 2 at the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn, Germany with John D. Liu. In this part we hear two conversations about the important but historically ignored voices from indigenous nations, including their long history of oppression by globalizing civilization, the distinct worldviews inherent in the global economy and indigenous cultures, and the importance of bridging these differences and working together to protect and restore the Earth. John D. Liu is Ecosystem Ambassador for Commonland Foundation and Visiting Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also catalyzed the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement. You can find his films and research papers at We will first hear John Liu speak with Leo van der Vlist, who works for the Netherlands Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Embassy for the Earth, and is a member of the international Forest Stewardship Council. For over 25 years, Leo has been working with indigenous peoples to protect and restore their sovereignty, and for the last couple years has been working with large scale ecosystem restoration projects involving local communities. After Leo, we'll hear another profound conversation, with Marcos Terena, an indigenous elder from Brazil, along with his translator, Mercio Cerbaro, PhD researcher at the University of Surrey in the UK. Marcos has been working for decades to involve sovereign indigenous voices in the global conversation. In 1988, he was integral to the inclusion of indigenous rights in the Brazilian Constitution. In 1992, more than 700 indigenous leaders worldwide elected him to speak to world leaders on their behalf at the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the first time an indigenous person had addressed the United Nations. He also founded the Union of Indigenous Nations, the first indigenous rights group in Brazil, and is the coordinator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. In this interview, he shares valuable observations, concerns, and wisdom about mankind's relation to Mother Earth. Michael DiGiorgio recorded the banjo-bird jams I'm using in the intro and ending. You can find his amazing nature art at . Mike says that if you'd like to buy the album of his nature-banjo jams, you can find his email on his website and he can mail you a CD.
In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have acquired an unusually large amount of authority. These are the leading INGOs that have become household names across the world, such as Amnesty International or Oxfam. Yet, Stroup and Wong make the case for the tenuous nature of this position as leaders: in order to hold on to the position, INGOs avoid radical opinions in favor of more incremental approaches to global social change. Leading INGOs are in many ways trapped. Using detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews, Stroup and Wong show that INGOs must temper their behavior to maintain a delicate equilibrium and preserve their status. (Note: during the interview, the organization Wendy Wong mentions is called Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC.) Stroup is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College and Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have acquired an unusually large amount of authority. These are the leading INGOs that have become household names across the world, such as Amnesty International or Oxfam. Yet, Stroup and Wong make the case for the tenuous nature of this position as leaders: in order to hold on to the position, INGOs avoid radical opinions in favor of more incremental approaches to global social change. Leading INGOs are in many ways trapped. Using detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews, Stroup and Wong show that INGOs must temper their behavior to maintain a delicate equilibrium and preserve their status. (Note: during the interview, the organization Wendy Wong mentions is called Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC.) Stroup is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College and Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have acquired an unusually large amount of authority. These are the leading INGOs that have become household names across the world, such as Amnesty International or Oxfam. Yet, Stroup and Wong make the case for the tenuous nature of this position as leaders: in order to hold on to the position, INGOs avoid radical opinions in favor of more incremental approaches to global social change. Leading INGOs are in many ways trapped. Using detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews, Stroup and Wong show that INGOs must temper their behavior to maintain a delicate equilibrium and preserve their status. (Note: during the interview, the organization Wendy Wong mentions is called Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC.) Stroup is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College and Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international not for-profit, multi-stakeholder organisation, established to promote responsible management of the world’s forests. It's considered by many to be the gold standard of forest management in the world. FSC Malaysia began operations back in 2014, with the aim to be the main driver for bringing the world's leading standards to our country. Anthony Sebastian, a Wildlife Ecologist and Conservation Planner, who also sits on the Forest Stewardship Council's International Board of Directors, joins us to discuss the challenges and successes they've encountered, so far.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In episode 12 of SustainableJoes’ 2084, Stephen sits down with Monika Patel, Director of Programs & Communications at the Forest Stewardship Council. FSC is one of the worlds largest NGOs, out to protect our global forests. This podcast is candid, it is live, and full of value added content. Some of big take aways from […]
François Dusrèsne, le président du Forest Stewardship Council, présente les enjeux de rencontre de Vancouver sur la gestion responsable des forêts dans le monde.
If you know anything about IKEA Group, the giant Scandinavian furniture company, you know that most of their products are made of wood, and you may even know that they're one of the "good" companies that tries to buy only products that are sustainably harvested. They've pledged that, by 2020, 100 percent of their wood, pulp, and paper will either be recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably produced. So far, they're on track to achieve that, according to the Forest Trends Supply Change initiative -- which tracks the progress companies report towards achieving environmental commitments. The Supply Change entry for IKEA shows the company was 61 percent of the way towards achieving its 2020 goal as of March of this year. Two months earlier, my colleague Kelley Hamrick at Ecosystem Marketplace published a report called "State of Private Investment in Conservation 2016", which I was flipping through this morning while researching today's show. In so doing, learned that IKEA has also started investing in forests all across Europe -- explicitly to make sure those forests are managed in ways that serve a larger public good, and in so doing help the company meet its sustainability commitments. As of January, when the report came out, IKEA had purchased about 100,000 hectares of forest in Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltics, and it had earmarked more than 1 billion more dollars for investing in sustainable forestry. Make no mistake: they're doing this to make money, but do do so in a sustainable way, and that means this qualifies as "impact investing", which is any investment that's designed to generate both a profit and a larger public good. The Global Impact Investing Network has identified more than $30 billion of impact investments in the last three years, and Kelley's report, which I alluded to above, identified about $8 billion earmarked for impact investments specifically involving forests, farms, and fields -- all of which need to be better managed if our civilization is to survive the climate challenge. Now, $8 billion is nothing to sneeze at, but it really is just a sneeze in a hurricane compared to the $55 trillion global economy. What's more, on top of that $8 billion, another $5 billion was allocated, but went uninvested. Today we speak with Noelle-Claire LeCann and Richard Fronapfel, who run impact investment group AlphaSource Advisors and see big opportunities for people who want to make money by helping the world better manage its forests, farms, and fields in the Anthropocene
If you enjoy this podcast, consider buying me a coffee: https://adamstoner.com/support We're accustomed to seeing a variety of logos on our products. Pick up any item and along with the brand name and variety you'll also be bombarded with other information: What is it made of? Where was it made? How much does it weigh? What size is it? What's the nutritional content like? Any potential allergies? How do I dispose of it? How do I store it? How do I wash it? Can I tumble dry it? and so on, and so forth. There are already logos out there to help consumers distinguish so-called ‘good products' from bad ones. The Fairtrade Mark is perhaps the most globally recognisable of them all but there's also the Soil Association's ‘organic' certification, the Rainforest Alliance seal to look out for on tea and coffee, and the Forest Stewardship Council's certification. If you're in the UK, you might also be familiar with the Red Tractor logo which you can look for on animal, dairy, and fresh produce. The Leaping Bunny logo is the only internationally recognised symbol proudly showing that no new animal tests were used in the development of any product displaying it, and that funny kite-looking symbol on your helmet or smoke alarm is a quality assurance mark given out by the British Standards Institute. There are hundreds of these things and all of these logos mean something. They're simple, graphical signifiers that help consumers make better, safer, and more ethical choices, from ensuring fair-pay for workers to supporting better environmental standards, consumers pay attention to these symbols when looking to buy. Despite all of these symbols – spanning food to window-fittings – I can't seem to find anything that marks clothes as ‘sweatshop-free'. By that, I mean no money anywhere along the supply chain, from cotton-picking to sewing to screen-printing to shelf-stacking, should go in to the hands of sweatshop owners. I can't find any symbol that tells me the product I am about to buy has never touched a sweatshop in its creation. While individual companies proudly tout some of their range as ‘Sweatshop Free', these companies have differing definitions of what a ‘sweatshop' is and their criteria for checking and certifying themselves (which is never a good sign anyway) varies wildly. This isn't even a new idea. In 1999 Naomi Klein wrote a book called No Logo, in which she expressed the same concerns. Already, a common imperative is emerging from the disparate movements taking on multinational corporations: the people's right to know. If multinationals have become larger and more powerful than governments, the argument goes, then why shouldn't they be subject to the same accountability controls and transparency that we demand of our public institutions? So anti-sweatshop activists have been demanding that Wal-Mart hand over lists of all the factories around the world that supply the chain with finished products. Klein, however, fears a ‘No Sweat' logo will become ‘just another logo for the conscientious consumer'. I agree, but consumers, conscientious or not, are people. People who need to eat and buy clothes and as people who need to buy products, buying better and publicising the ways in which to do so is one of our most powerful forms of protest. Yes, that pretty dress is only be £4. Yes, technically speaking, it has already been made so you wouldn't be forcing a child to make it for you… but that isn't how this works. Don't fuel the need for bad companies to make bad products by buying it. Don't line their pockets with your hard-earned cash, while your pockets were stitched by people working for as little as 60p per day. Even with the absence of a centralised and independently certified ‘No Sweat' logo, we know the companies to avoid. Primark links to an entire page about their ethics, front-and-centre on their website and yet has been littered with plenty of allegations in the past. If you think sweatshops were just a thing of the nineties, think again. In 2013, disaster struck in Bangladesh. Rana Plaza, a garment factory creating clothes for the likes of Matalan, Primark, Walmart, and Bonmarché, collapsed. 1,135 people died, around 2,500 were injured. The Bangladesh Fire Service said the upper four floors had been built without a permit. The architect, Massood Reza, said the building was planned for shops and offices but not factories. Primark claim they don't own the factories, but that doesn't mean they can wash their hands of the affair. While Primark did compensate families (to the measly sum of $200 USD[*], and only if they could provide DNA evidence that they had lost a relative), prevention is always better than cure. Lush – the UK-based cosmetics company – has the right stance. They don't buy products from suppliers who test on animals. Even if they're buying a totally different product; if the company tests on animals, the company is a no-go. They don't want to see customer money pouring in to the hands of practices they do not believe in. I think that's a respectable decision taken by a heavily respected company. All of the certifications I've listed have strict criteria, controls, and checks in place to ensure the company or product is worthy of bearing their mark. I am no expert on sweatshops but allow me to hypothesise the criteria for what a ‘No Sweat' logo might look like: Nowhere along the supply chain, from cotton-picking to screen-printing, designing to distribution, is anyone paid less than living wage in the country they are working in. By rule of thumb, people making the garments should be able to afford the garments. The minimum working age should not be lower than the age for completing compulsory education in the country they are working in. The supply-chain should be audited and tested regularly, independently of the company and its shareholders. It would be good practice to demonstrate traceability to consumers. The factories should be built to the standards of the stores, with sensible and adequate health and safety regulations, and facilities for employees. Employees should be entitled to the same staff benefits as others: holidays, paid sick-leave, maternity and paternity leave, regular breaks, and paid-overtime. Employees should feel safe in their environment, free to raise concerns, protest and unionise. There could, of course, be many, many more criteria to measure. For employers, higher pay means heightened efficiency, a better and more consistent quality of work, stronger employee morale, and, ultimately, retention rates of skilled workers. For employees, higher pay is often a path to the ‘American Dream' for their families: education, stable employment, and home ownership. So, the next time you walk in to a high-street store, gander at the price-tag and catch yourself in surprise, ask yourself this: How can cotton picked in Brazil be packed, shipped and processed in China, stitched in Vietnam, get shipped to Europe for screen-printing, before being shelved in the UK ready for you to buy? [*] $200USD is about three months wages for a garment worker in Bangladesh. My point is: to multimillion dollar companies like the ones listed, $200 USD is just a nice staff lunch.
Head over to http://www.pathwayspodcast.com for all the information on Tamsiens episode. Tamsien as the Corporate Sustainability & Membership Lead at The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a non for profit that ensures we are producing products and services that are coming from sustainable forest practices. In addition to this Tamsien has a fast growing bookstagram profile – Babbling Books, combining her love of books with her knowledge of social media and marketing. To find out more about Tamsien check out: · Babbling Books · The Awesome Foundation · The Forest Stewardship Council
In the news: Owner of former mill sentenced to prison time; Update in Georgia-Pacific, Buckeye deal; Company completes sale of specialty paper business; Indonesian company withdraws Forest Stewardship Council certificates; Fire at mill under investigation; Dormant mill to stir back to life; Amusement park to replace mill; and much more! Nips is a weekly show of contemporary information related to the pulp and paper industry worldwide. Hosted by Jim Thompson, the voice of the worldwide pulp and paper industry.
Miljöcertifierade skogsbolag hugger ner unika skogar de lovat att lämna och säljer virket som miljövänligt. Kaliber har granskat miljömärkningen i skogen, som lovar brett men håller tunt. Alla större svenska skogsbolag lovar att de bedriver ett miljövänligt skogsbruk. De är miljöcertifierade enligt den internationella organisationen FSC, Forest Stewardship Council, och hävdar att de följer regler som är mycket hårdare än vår egen lagstiftning. Men i verkligheten är bilden en annan.I en tredjedel av sina avverkningar når bolagen inte ens upp till lagens krav om miljöhänsyn. Lokalbefolkningen ser sina svampskogar försvinna, tvärtemot regler om social hänsyn. Och det heligaste av allt, skyddsvärda så kallade nyckelbiotoper anmäls för avverkning, och försvinner, trots att det är tabu och strider mot det de har lovat.