Does your pencil manufacturer get an A or an F?
Maybe you don’t even use pencils anymore. But millions of schoolchildren have been heading back to school this month, stocked with packs of brand new pencils.
Most pencils are made from unsustainably harvested wood. Worse yet, many are made from some of the most endangered forests in the West, the Sierra Nevada. But there
are alternatives.
Download ForestEthics’
Back To School report card (PDF) and send it to anyone you know who uses pencils, or cares about our forests : )
Labels: environment, forests
Urge Sierra Pacific to be a better corporate citizen
Sierra Pacific Industries plans to cut down a million acres of California's forests in the next 50 years. SPI is one of the biggest landowners in California and owns most of the forest lands in the Sierra. Our forests are not all parks, like most American believe.
SPI has one of the worst environmental records of California's logging companies due to its years of clearcutting practices and steadfast resistance to adopting to a more sustainable forestry model.
ForestEthics is applying pressure to Sierra Pacific and
you can help.
Labels: activism, environment, forests
Where have all the citations gone?
A few lifetimes ago I was a marketing and communications specialist for nonprofits, most notably for
Bay Area Action and its later incarnation as
Acterra.
For a few years I wrote and/or edited weekly email newsletters and action alerts. I started doing this for the Headwaters Forest Project at BAA, then created a weekly EcoCalendar of events all around the Bay Area, and later founded Acterra's first general email newsletter.
During that span of about eight years, I also performed a lot of other communications functions, especially surrounding the Headwaters issue. For a few years my website and email list were the best sources for news on the controversies emanating from the North Coast, and I fielded inquiries from small and big sources alike, everyone from elementary school students to the big media outlets such as
Time and
CNN.
I spoke at events (the Green Party's state convention comes to mind) and universities (I presented to a Stanford law class once, which was a bit unnerving, but then I reminded myself they were just students), I did radio interviews, I fielded calls and emails and faxes from reporters all over the world, and my email list contained addresses from places as far-flung as Japan and Australia and people from the press, government, and even Hollywood.
Copy this, pleaseThis all happened in a time when the migration of such information to the Internet was much, much less frequent, and a lot harder to do. Nevertheless, lots of people copied my emails and forwarded them along to others. Which is what we wanted. Unlike commercial material, for which one might have copy-protection concerns, we wanted this information spread far and wide. Granted, we didn't want people to re-edit the information, so I simply attached a footer to my email template that stated that permission was thereby granted to forward the email in its entirety, for non-commercial purposes.
And people did it. In droves. They forwarded it on to their friends and family, co-workers, whomever. Some maintained their own large lists of concerned citizens interested in environmental issues, and they sent my emails along to them. Others posted my newsletters and action alerts on their AOL and
Geocities homepages, on university
listservs, and lots of other places.
Here are a few examples, still archived in various niches of the 'net:
Later, as search engines became more adept at crawling and indexing the content of the web (this had all occurred before Google existed), I'd be doing Headwaters research on
AltaVista or
Yahoo! or
Dmoz, and come I'd across some of my old emails and articles scattered across the web.
Fading wayIn more recent years I've noticed that
Google's algorithm seems to be devaluing these old (nearly ancient in Internet time) posts, probably for fairly legitimate reasons (the HTML of those old web pages would not withstand
semantic rigors of modern search technology), so they rarely show up in results, or if they do, they're buried many, many, many results pages deep. It's probably that a lot of those pages are simply gone now too, as people fold their old accounts or Geocities pages get closed down, or whatever.
When I first started noticing this, I must admit that it was a little sad, as it seemed almost as if my contributions were disappearing from the universe. I know this is not strictly true, but in a world where we seem to rely increasingly on Google to provide us with what we want to know (I'm certainly guilty of this reliance), it's disappointing that the content of those older articles is devalued in large part because the method used for archiving them did not use the modern HTML standards.
It's a little like devaluing the best encyclopedia in the (physical) library because its publishers have not yet made it available online. Perhaps the actual content contained in that encyclopedia is of better quality than anything published on the web, but most people would never know it because they'd never see it.
I'm conflicted about this on many levels. Partly because I believe passionately that people should have access to the best quality information (so I want people to go the library, or wherever they need to go for that single best source), but I also want that high-quality information to be much more widely accessible than that. Let's face it, the researcher in Prague seeking information on West Coast
salmonids can't easily get the 700-page document off the dusty shelf of the tiny library of the
Northcoast Environmental Center in California, can he? But what if it's the single best source, and it's not available online at all?
Technology will catch upI believe (nearly) all of these documents will be available online someday. It may be a decade or more away, but it will happen.
And I will do my part. I have archived all my data from the Headwaters Forest years, and all my BAA articles and photos, and while they're not really in any usable order right now, I am confident that technology will continue to advance in ways that make the data easier to sort and publish. It's already been happening, with sites like
Flickr making it easier to share photos, and tools like
blogs and
wikis making it easier to publish and collaborate.
Not all my contributions have faded away
Interestingly, search technology has more recently broadened to include the content of printed books too.
Google Book Search began scanning the collections of several leading universities in 2004. While Google's tool is still in beta and it comprises mostly academic works, I was mildly surprised to see my name turn up with a few results. I was cited in
Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash, by Brian Tokar, and
Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service , by Carolyn Ross, Joseph M. Williams, and Ardel Thomas. I'd forgotten that I was also thanked in
Inciting Democracy: A Practical Proposal for Creating a Good Society, by my friend Randy Schutt.
Labels: BAA, blogging, books, copyright, email marketing, email newsletters, environment, forests, Google, Headwaters Forest, marketing, misc. personal, nonprofits, projects, search, writing
Junk mailers pay less for postage than you do – a lot less
While individuals now pay 42¢ to mail a regular letter, direct mail marketers have once again been granted a much lower rate by the government bureaucrats who make up the rules. It costs just as little as 14¢ to mail one of those credit card offers you got twelve of yesterday.
ForestEthics.org believes junk mailers shouldn't be rewarded for invading our privacy and destroying the environment. Less than 10% of
Canada’s Boreal Forest is protected. It is being logged at a rate of 2 acres a minute, 24 hours a day, to make things like catalogs and junk mail.
The
Do Not Mail campaign has collected over 40,000 signatures since March. If you haven't made your voice heard yet,
do it now.
Labels: activism, environment, forests, politics, recycling
Tell politicians we need a Do Not Mail Registry
Unless you're a big fan of junk mail (I suppose there's
someone out there like that) you may want to sign ForestEthics' petition to
create a Do No Mail Registry that would work like the existing Do Not Call Registry.
An astonishing 100 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered in the U.S. each year, accounting for
one-third of all the mail delivered in the world (!).
And guess whose forests are being cut down to make all that crap you just throw away?
Learn more...Labels: activism, advertising, environment, forests, politics, recycling
Arbokem's Downtown Paper
Two weekends ago I was at
Compostmodern, a one-day conference put on by the
AIGA about sustainability and the design industry. I chatted for a while with the reps for the great paper company
New Leaf Paper, and I asked them if they'd ever heard of Arbokem paper, which I'd used back in 1997 and '98 for some clients and for
Bay Area Action's letterhead.
Arbokem's little-known Downtown Paper line was one of the best alternatives on the market back in the late '90s, and that's saying a lot. That time was pretty much the beginning of recycled papers' popularity, but almost no companies processed chlorine free and very few paper lines were 100% post-consumer.
But Arbokem's Downtown line was even better. It was 45% wheat straw (agricultural waste that would ordinarily be burned and cause air pollution), 42% post-consumer recycled paper, and 12% calcium phosphate, which whitened the paper without the normal chlorine bleaching process that causes cancer-causing chemicals to be poured into our streams.
Tonight I was thinking about the paper again and I Googled
Arbokem to see if it's still around. Sure enough, the company is, and apparently they do all sorts of
other obscure R&D, but it looks like the paper is not produced anymore. Shame, it was a great alternative.
Incidentally, while Googling Arbokem I came across
this 1997 article from the Palo Alto Weekly that I'd never seen, which mentions my use of Arbokem (look for "Western Front Graphics," my old company name, about two-thirds down).
Labels: environment, forests, Mark Bult Design, paper, recycling, Western Front Graphics
boycott Kleenex
Greenpeace has started
a campaign against Kimberly-Clark, the company behind such brands as Kleenex, Scott, Viva, Cottonelle, and more.
Kimberly-Clark uses 100% virgin fiber for its Kleenex products and even boasts about it on their website. Because it's better for "softness." But their oh-so soft products come from unsustainably managed forests, predominantly logged by clearcutting.
Labels: activism, environment, forests
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