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Saving the Forest from your Bathroom

Fake NY Post Tells Real Story on Climate Change

Photo Essay of Conservation Corridor threatened by the Border Wall

Green Jobs- Golden Opportunities

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Saving the Forest from your Bathroom

Did you know? Americans could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper- just once.

Click here to download the tissue guide to your iPhone or to get a paper version.  The Guide makes it quick and easy to find out which brands of facial tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, and napkins are truly green and which should be avoided.

Greenpeace and countless activists have asked Kimberly-Clark (K-C) to help save the Boreal forest since 2004, when the Kleercut campaign was launched. In a tremendous victory for ancient forests, including the Boreal, the company that makes popular brands like Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle has announced a new policy that places it among the industry leaders in sustainability, bringing the Kleercut campaign to a successful completion.

Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the wood fiber used in its products – including the flagship brand Kleenex – from environmentally responsible sources. By 2011, Kimberly-Clark will ensure that 40 percent of its North American fiber is either recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – a 71 percent increase from 2007 levels, representing over 600,000 tonnes of fiber. Also by 2011, Kimberly-Clark will eliminate any fiber from the North American Boreal Forest that is not FSC-certified.

“The revised standards are proof that when responsible companies and environmental advocates come together, the results can be good for business and good for the planet,” said Scott Paul, Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director. “Kimberly-Clark’s efforts are a challenge to its competitors. I hope they pay close attention.”

K-C’s sustainability policy: Not just about protecting the Boreal

The Canadian Boreal Forest is North America’s largest ancient forest, providing habitat for threatened wildlife such as woodland caribou and over 1 billion migratory birds.

But clearcutting doesn’t just wipe out the biodiversity of a forest – it wipes out an essential carbon storehouse. Canada’s Boreal Forest stores an estimate 186 billion tones of carbon, 27 times the world’s annual fossil fuel emissions — meaning that a victory for the Boreal is also a victory for the climate.
While protecting the North American Boreal Forest has been a focus of the Kleercut campaign, K-C’s policy is about protecting Endangered Forests the world over. Greenpeace would not have agreed to anything less.

Because of K-C’s place in the paper products market, the company’s new policy will send a strong signal to its competitors, Procter & Gamble and Georgia Pacific, that creating a policy that protects ancient forests is a key element of sustainable business.

Fake NY Post Tells Real Story on Climate Change

Amidst the usual daily bustle of hurried pedestrians and newspaper vendors at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue subway station this morning, it was easy to spot the Yes Men’s latest prank.

At first blush, the newspaper, which was distributed by volunteers across NYC today, did look a lot like the New York Post. Yet any closer examination revealed that it was clearly not your run-of-the-mill Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid.

With a giant headline proclaiming “We’re Screwed” alongside an image of lighting striking Manhattan’s skyscrapers featured on the cover, the 32-page tabloid was devoted entirely to environmental issues. Check it out online here.

Even the sports section had an environmental bent, with an entire story devoted to enumerating carbon emission cutting opportunities in pro sports (such as NOGASCAR — a hybrid car version of NASCAR).

While a full-page color ad featuring a couple making out on a beach (the kind of image one frequently sees in ads for vacation packages) advertising “sex” reminded readers that that this activity has “no emissions (of the carbon variety)” (The faux travel ad’s slogan: “Why Travel? — You Just Wanted to Get Laid, Right?”)

Outside the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop in downtown Brooklyn, Erica (she declined to give her last name), a young woman who’d picked up a copy of the paper with a friend earlier that morning at Union Square, stopped to talk to my friend and I about her response.

“First of all we were really scared,” she told us. She had been particularly struck by an image of a large tornado featured in the paper.

She said she soon realized “it was fake.” But she added, “It’s very possible … We need to be more environmentally conscious.”

Indeed, as Rory O’Connor points out, the fake paper’s coverage of a city report predicting “massive climate catastrophes” will hit New York City as a result of global warming is all true.

It just takes a fake NY Post to get the real story about climate change out to the city’s tabloid readers.

Source: Alternet.org

Photo Essay of Conservation Corridor threatened by the Border Wall

Launch the photo essay featuring the Chihuahuan Desert!

In the heart of North America’s largest desert lies a biological oasis—a little-known expanse of basin and range straddling both sides of the boundary between the United States and Mexico. The Chihuahuan Desert Borderlands, as it is called, is a sparsely populated 30- million-acre wilderness where barren lunarscapes, arid scrublands and cactus forests coexist with majestic canyons, lush grasslands and pine-oak woodlands.

To the abundant populations of year-round and migrating wildlife, the borderlands is a land without borders, a single ecosystem that rivals Greater Yellowstone in its biodiversity. Hundreds of species use the borderlands as a migratory megacorridor, including monarch butterflies, black bear and more than 10 species of hummingbirds. Populations of elk, pronghorn and desert bighorn sheep flourish as well.

Hovering several thousand feet above are sky islands—desert mountains whose peaks snag clouds and drain their moisture. These mountains nourish the region’s relict forests of oak and pine trees and isolated stands of Douglas fir and quaking aspen. This rich habitat is one reason why more than 400 bird species have been seen in the 800,000-acre Big Bend National Park—more than in any other national park in the United States.

The borderlands are the linchpin of one of North America’s most vital wildlife corridors. And yet the region is also the focus of plans that would fashion a barrier along the border, although it is difficult to imagine a more effective deterrent than the canyon walls that rise as high as 2,000 feet above the river.

While most of the discussion about fences has centered on urban areas, concern is being voiced about the potential impact barriers in more remote areas would have on wildlife. “The specter of any kind of barrier that would preclude the movements of native and migratory wildlife back and forth between the United States and Mexico causes us a great deal of consternation,” says Carter Smith, director of the Conservancy’s Texas chapter. Other, more conservation-friendly tactics should be considered in the Chihuahuan Borderlands, he says, such as vehicle barriers, surveillance technologies, and stepped-up border and aerial patrols.

Whatever the outcome, the Conservancy and partners plan to press ahead. “The borderlands is one landscape, irrespective of political boundaries,” says Smith. “We are participating in an extensive binational conservation effort.” Private land owners, agricultural cooperatives, corporations, governments and conservation groups have banded together to place more than 2 million acres on both sides of the border under some kind of protection. And more land is being added every year. Through their efforts, the borderlands remains one of the continent’s wildest places.

to read whole article click here.

Aurhor:  Joe Nick Patoski

Source: nature.org

Green Jobs- Golden Opportunities

You can already see the Green Wave lifting some communities, where hybrid and bio-diesel cars, stores with organic produce, homes with solar panels on the roofs, and green, vibrant parks are increasingly common. But go just a few miles away to urban centers, and the Green Wave often feels like a distant and irrelevant concept. Many people are just trying to survive, and the concern is not eating organic, but eating. Period. So who is participating in the new green economy? And who will reap the benefits?

It’s not surprising that the green economy has been developing more quickly in privileged, well-resourced communities. But if current trends continue unchecked, it’s possible that white and affluent communities will reap all of the tremendous benefits of green economic development, while poor communities and communities of color fall further behind. The result would be what we call eco-apartheid: a situation where the benefits of the Green Wave bypass the communities who need them most.

Van Jones, in his book The Green Collar Economy points out that environmental movements of the past always have had short comings because of their inability to embrace people in all sectors of society. Take, for example, Teddy Roosevelt’s creation of national parks, which by some is considered his greatest achievement in office; written into the protection of the park preserves is the doctrine that there can be no permanent human shelters in the preserves. This policy further desecrated the Native Americans way of life which is principally founded on environmental stewardship.

In order to face such large challenges of economic crisis, rising unemployment, global warming, we will need to band together and make sure that all sectors of our society have eco-equity, and are locked into the new, clean, green economy. Urban residents will need to be active participants in their city’s green economy, generating wealth, health, and real community safety.

This call to action is particularly necessary within the Latino community. If we as Latinos can raise awareness of the importance of the environment to our health and our economy, we can contribute to a green economy that benefits us all.

Learn more about Van Jones and the Green Collar Job Campaign at: www.ellabakercenter.org