Corporate Responsibility

Here's a photo from Saturday's anti-Tire Burn Rally on the Green in Middlebury, Vermont:

What's wrong with this picture? Well, there's no rally in it for one thing. And why might this be, the inquiring protagonist asks? Because the local media report on the rally from which yours truly drew last weeks post got the date wrong and I never verified this important bit of inadvertant misinformation, that's why. My mistake and my humble apologies to anyone who actually turned out for the invisible event this past Saturday. To quote Getrude Stein, there was no there there. On the plus side, however, it was a nice day to suddenly find oneself with nothing to do and the coffee in Carol's Hungry Mind Cafe was quite good.

The actual real correct now-properly-verified date for the tire burn rally is this Saturday the 28th from noon to 3:00 on the Middlebury town green. Really. I swear. If there's no rally on the green this Saturday, International Paper can burn my collection of Neko Case CDs for power...

The International Paper Company’s plan to conduct a test tire burn in the boiler of its Ticonderoga, NY plant continues to lumber toward its scheduled November 6th start date. We Vermonters have just a few weeks left to preserve our inalienable commonwealth rights to clean air.

The good news is that People for Less Pollution is holding a massive rally on the town green in Middlebury, Vermont this Saturday the 21st from Noon to 3:00pm.

If you’re anywhere within breathing distance, please come out and show your support for a healthy atmosphere. A big crowd will send a big message to the would-be polluters at International Paper. There will be food, live music, theater from Bread and Puppet, appearances by Bill McKibben, Senator Jim Jeffords, and others, and a lot more. (Who says you can have fun saving the world?).

Wandering around the blogosphere, one thing becomes clear fairly quickly: There aren’t a whole lot of active blogs out there in the digital ether working to create a movement of change or sustainability or whatever you want to call the one thing that we really need to get moving on. There are a lot of good blogs covering eco-issues and plenty of progressive political blogs, but these are mostly focused on specific subject areas and most often they’re more like a combination newsreel and soapbox than they are about trying to get town meeting going to make a broad range of things happen.

Few and far between are those blogs harnessing all this whiz-bang technology to bring people together, start a conversation about where we go from here, and then use this beginning to build a movement that addresses change in all its forms and on all possible fronts. But the Thought Kitchen is definitely one everyone should check out.

For those following the twisted saga of our local International Paper Company plant’s intention to burn tires and sewage sludge in its boiler to save a few bucks on their monthly fuel bill, here’s an update from downwind of the Big Ugly:

Plant officials have announced their intention to conduct their initial test burn sometime in early November. They have to give New York State authorities 30 days notice, and that notice is expected any day now.

To reiterate, as the people living directly in the prevailing atmospheric path of the anticipated pollutant plume (I dare you to say that 10 times fast), we really don’t need to need to breath the airborne garbage the tire burn will produce. And produce it will because International Paper is refusing to install modern pollution control technologies on their smokestack. Even without the tire burn, the facility already produces more than twice as much toxic pollution as all the other polluting facilities in Vermont combined. Cough. Hack. Wheeze.

Everyday as I read through the news, I'm committed to not let it get me down. And as you know… that ain’t easy. Well, it just got a lot harder.

The only computer I’ve ever owned in my life is an Apple. When our IT department told the company that everyone would be using PC’s, I said, "Great, but not me." When Apple came out with their first lap top, a suitcase sized device, I was one of the first to buy it. My 12 inch PowerBook G4 is an extension of me. It’s always by my side or in my backpack. Wherever I go, whatever I do, it’s right there. This blog post has been written on it as have four books, millions of emails, and who knows how many memos.

But right now my fingers hesitate to touch the keys. I’m ashamed and embarrassed. Steve Jobs, please save me. Do something. Green my Apple!
Greenpeace, an organization I proudly serve as a board member just launched a campaign to let the world know that my Apple (and everyone else’s) contains hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned. Needless to say, for a variety of reasons, this is extremely distressing news to me. The toxic materials inside my Mac are cutting lives short by exposing children to dangerous chemicals in China and India, the two countries most of our so-called "e-wastes" usually end up.

Greenpeace is demanding that Apple “Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines” and “offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.”

Come on, Steve. Please do something!

Over the weekend, someone at the office pointed out to me that Philip Slater, a columnist at the political blog the Huffington Post, had written an article in which, as part of a larger argument, he said our decision not to sell our products to Wal-Mart was evidence that I was practicing “prissy puritanism.”

Our Wal-Mart decision didn’t come easy. There was a lot of soul-searching and a lot of debate, and as I feel quite strongly about the position those deliberations led to, I felt equally strongly that a reply to Mr. Slater was in order. It took me a few days to get to it, but here’s the comment I left on the Huffington Post this morning …

The battle to prevent International Paper from unnecessarily dirtying Vermont's air and irresponsibly poisoning her citizens continues. This afternoon, Vermont Public Radio aired a story on the latest tire burn developments featuring our very own Scienceman, Martin Wolf (a man who knows his way around paper mill contaminants), explaining just what we've been doing about it. Give it a listen...

Last week’s deadline for the EPA to object to the proposed International Paper Company test burn of tires and sewage sludge in the boiler at their Ticonderoga, NY plant passed without any comment from the EPA. This lack of objection means that International Paper is now free to conduct the test burn, which will send all kinds of big time nasty pollutants (fine particulates, dioxin, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and benzene to name a few) into Vermont’s air simply because the company refuses to spend a few bucks to install up-to-date pollution prevention equipment on its smokestack.

Now that the last hurdle has been jumped, the company is proceeding with the test burn. Though it needs a couple of weeks to prepare for the burn, the fuse has been lit.

As Jeffrey has noted, here in Vermont these days the roof of our world is dyed deep blue and the sunlight falls through air that’s almost primevally fresh and clear. You could say they’re perfect skies, but they might be a whole lot less so soon. Turns out we’ve got a bit of a potentially unhappy atmospheric situation looming over our home turf. And we need everyone out here in Blogland to lend a quick helping hand. Please read on and come to our aid…

According to news reports coming out of Brazil, the Amazon rainforest has been granted a stay of execution at the hands of soy bean growers. Responding to public protests and activist pressure, Cargill, Inc. and other major soy traders have declared that for the next two years they will stop buying soy from growers occupying newly deforested lands.

The decision should go a long way toward halting the clearing of rainforest for massive soy plantations. At least in the short term. If growers and potential growers know they won’t be able to sell their crops, they’ll have zero incentive to undertake the hard work of clearing tropical forest for new plantings.

As Jeffrey and Gregor discovered when they visited the region in June, soy farming has become perhaps the most destructive force in the Amazon basin. (Greenpeace has an excellent overview of the issue here. Be patient… it takes a minute or so to load.) The word that big international soy buyers will now refuse to tacitly fund this destruction is very welcome. It’s a temporary solution, of course, but it will buy some much needed time to (hopefully) put some meaningful permanent protections in place.