Is America ready for Fair-Trade?

Starbucks is going Fair Trade in the UK, so is Cadbury. Their U.S. counterparts aren’t. What’s up with that?

This piece in CS Monitor by Eric Marx pretty much sums it up:

…more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys.

And as I pointed out here, environmentalism and organics tend to trump fair-trade. The article confirms that:

TransFair USA, the nonprofit that licenses products to carry the fair-trade certified label on agricultural products, says it is looking into establishing standards for apparel. But fair-trade fashion faces significant hurdles in the US.

“It’s quite easy for the fiber industry to develop their own weak ecolabels in order to pull the wool…

We don't follow the trends, we set them

Rocker Dave Grohl names his daughter Harper Willow.

Soon rockstars will be dressing like us!…

We care about the footprint, let’s not forget the foot

Today my feet are nice and cozy in a pair of Merrell slippers. Like 90% of shoes, they were Made in China.

This is going to be a brief Where Am I Wearing Wednesday because today I want to talk about feet more than shoes.

The Shoe:

Merrell’s corporate code of conduct – I couldn’t find one on their site. Contact them and join me in asking them what’s up with that:

The environment and labor practices both factor into my shopping decisions. I scanned your website for your corporate code of conduct and couldn’t find one. Could you please direct me to it?

Thanks,

Kelsey Timmerman

Labor conditions in the shoe industry in China – Well, it is China. When I visited there in 2007, I met workers who…

My Bro's Bite airing on the World Vision Report

My essay about my brother coming down with Malaria after our excursion into the Honduran jungle is airing on the World Vision Report this week. He’s fine now. I’m just glad that I could get a story out of his suffering.

One of the folks at WVR contacted me looking for a funny piece – I believe they said quirky – about malaria and wanted to know if I had anything. “Boy, do I,” I told her.

It’s not easy to do Malaria quirky, but it is easy to have fun at my brother’s expense.

The story is part of their Malaria special…

Malaria 2009: Countdown to Eradication

Malaria remains one of the world’s great killers. Every thirty seconds, a child under five dies from malaria. That contributes to…

The good folks at the Wandering Educators who reviewed WAIW? and named me as their photographer of the month in February are giving away boatloads of cool prizes today, including an autographed copy of Where Am I Wearing? Here’s all you have to do to enter:

1. Register at www.WanderingEducators.com – it’s free and easy and keeps our site spam-free.
2. On April 20, leave a comment on ANY article on our site – you’ll be automatically entered.
3. Check in every hour on April 20 for prize updates.
4. Use Twitter to retweet details (@WanderingEds) about our giveaway and you’ll be entered for special prizes.

For more details, go here.

I hope I win something, although…

A book that has changed the way I buy mushrooms

I’m not quite done with “Poorly Made in China” by Paul Midler, but it has already changed my life, specifically what type of mushrooms I buy. Paul is kind of the “cultural grease” that smooths business relations between factories in China and international importers.

One of the projects he works on is a bottled soap that depending on its packaging is hand soap, body wash, or bubble bath (the contents are all the same). Anyhow, after Paul sees the lack of standards and corner cutting that goes on at the factory that makes the soap, he stops using soap when he showers.

Today while shopping for groceries, Annie sent me off to get canned mushrooms. Unfortunately, all the canned mushrooms were Made in China, begging me…

Pentagon using Tactical Garbage in pursuit of alternative fuels

The way I see it there are 3 ways that technology rapidly advances:

1) Greed – Somebody is going to make oodles of money if…

2) Space – “How the heck are we gonna win this here space race?”

3) War – “How do we kill more of them and save more of us?”

Let’s think about this in terms of our quest for alternative fuels.

Since we’re not launching poop-powered rockets into space…yet. And the green revolution has yet to fully evolve. War might be our best hope. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever write.)

Consider this piece in the Washington Post:

“Every time you bring a gallon of fuel forward, you have to send a convoy,” said Alan R. Shaffer, director of defense research and engineering at the Pentagon. “That…

Sedaris on recapturing travel experiences

David Sedaris is at it again in the New Yorker. And here I figured that it would probably be awhile before he wrote for them again due to the intrusive nature of their fact-checkers.

When you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you travelled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing next year and the year after that. Of course, you don’t, though, and the next thing you know you’re an aging, unemployed elf, so desperate for love that you spend your evening mooning over…

WAIW Reviewed in the Key West Citizen

I just stumbled upon a review of WAIW in the Key West Citizen.

Do you know where your clothes were made, by whom and under what conditions? Do you care? Should you care?

There’s at least one journalist and travel writer out there who thinks you should.

In his non-fiction debut “Where Am I Wearing,” former Keys resident and Ohio native Kelsey Timmerman contemplates the tag in the back of his favorite T-shirt (it reads “Made in Honduras”) and decides to visit the places where his clothes were made in the hope that he might meet just a few of the people who had produced them.

Key West is where I got my start as a writer. It’s less romantic than it sounds. I didn’t write with a mojito at…

Russell Athletics and Union Busting

The latest ire of the anti-sweatshop movement is Russell Athletics. Activists have convinced major universities to cancel apparel contracts with the company.

From Forbes.com:

According to the Workers Rights Consortium, a group that monitors labor conditions abroad for colleges, Russell spent two years trying to intimidate workers who attempted to unionize before closing the factory when they did.

“They’re well on their way to being the first company in history to be kicked out of collegiate sports because of their labor practices,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the WRC. “I can’t imagine their affiliates will be too happy about that, which includes the NBA and the NFL and others.”

Russell says it announced the closure of the factory last October due to falling demand for the fleece sewn there….