Ecoholic

So, this week I started working at Starbucks! Which, can I mention, is just amazing because they are such an awesome company.

I had "coffee school" today, which was a workshop where we learned about the "Starbucks Experience" and we learned about everything that the company does with regards to Corporate Social Responsibility.

One of the most amazing things that I learned today about Starbucks was the relationship they have with the farmers who grow their coffee. Starbucks actually goes into countries frequently and works together with farmers to help them develop sustainable growing practices, helping the farmers learn how to grow the finest coffee beans, and then, because of the quality of the beans being produced, pays the farmers premium prices for their coffee beans.

What is most remarkable though, is the way which Starbucks will help out the farmers if there is a time of need. We watched a video today about a farm that was struck by a catastrophic natural disaster, and so, within 24 hours Starbucks has freed up one million dollars within the company in order to help the farmers rebuild. Just when they thought they had lost everything, Starbucks, came and went to the farms and helped the farmers get back on their feet.

I love starbucks mission statement, and I love starbucks. They want to be the largest purveyor of fine coffee, with unprecedented quality, and they are doing it without screwing anyone. They are doing it while ensuring that their partners are all valued, and that their farmers are not exploited.

Which brings me to the title of this post: Ecoholic.

Ecoholic is a book I bought recently, and so far I've really enjoyed it. Essentially, it's a consumer's manifesto, a good handbook for anyone who is looking to lessen their environmental impact, providing alternatives to modern products used daily which generally avoid the cancer-causing earth-destroying poisons and chemicals.

Now I say, so far I've enjoyed it, however, I feel that Adria Vasil has overlooked some key principles when discussing Starbucks.

On page 99: "NGOs have been pressuring major coffee companies to start selling fair-trade coffee for years now, saying the industry is making mountains off the backs of underpaid farm workers. Starbucks gave in (somewhat) and started selling fair trade coffee in 2002, and these beans now account for 1.6% of its sales (about 2.2 million kilograms). Starbucks also buys about 30% of its coffee direct from farmers, giving growers a bigger slice of the pie by cutting out the middleman. Fair- trade activists want to see that number cimb, and they also want to see the coffee shop start brewing pots of fair-trade java more than just once a month. FYI, three of the Starbucks I stopped in didn't even have fair trade beans on shelves."

I have problems with this statement for a number of reasons:

Starbucks did not give in to anything. The guiding principles of the mission statement, help Starbucks measure the appropriateness of their decisions, and selling fair trade and fairly traded coffee and refusing to be a part of exploitation is the core of the Starbucks culture. Many people seem to recognize Starbucks as another "greenwashed" corporation, however, the goal is to become the "premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles as we grow," and this includes treating each other with respect and dignity, as well as considering the environment and communities in decision-making

By extension this obviously includes the farmers, and as is illustrated in the Corporate Social Responsibility report, Starbucks takes their mission statement very seriously.

Vasil also fails to mention the ways in which Starbucks gives back to the communities, such as through the sale of Ethos water, in which 10cents from the sale of every bottle goes towards sustainable water programs around the world. Starbucks has set a goal of donating $10 million by 2010 toward helping children around the world get clean water and raise awareness of the world water crisis.

There's still more that Vasil conveniently ignored: Starbucks uses 20% renewable energy (although, why not bullfrog power??) and their cups are made from 10% (or something like that) of post-consumer material.

Of course, the best choice is to not consume coffee at all considering the fossil fuels etc, but Vasil definitely gives a biased and minimally researched account of the efforts that Starbucks makes. What Vasil should note, is that not only does Starbucks have such a wonderful mission statement, but, unlike many other companies, they are constantly revisiting the mission statement in order to ensure that in being a profitable company, they do not lose sight of the goals, ethics and responsibilities that they have set before them... The mission statement ensures that we don't lose sight of our resposibility as global citizens, while at the same time acknowledging that profitability is undeniably key to everyone's success.

Not to mention that Starbucks has an Environmental Mission Statement too which should have distinguished the company to Vasil as an obvious choice for the consumption of fine coffee which is fairly traded, if not all Fair Trade Certified... that would also be another middleman... woe is me

A quick look at a Starbucks Timeline will clearly show the company's swift expansion, along with their community contributions... i am quite dissapointed indeed.

fuck yeah stephane dion

I heard on the news this week that everyone in Alberta is flipping out because Stephan Dion is implementing a carbon tax and it is going to be a "massive blow" to the economy.

Ok. News flash world: all environmentally responsible changes are not going to be profitable. This is a time where ethics has to come out on top of the almighty dollar, which I know will be difficult for Alberta to swallow because they thrive on oil sales.

So fucking right Stephane Dion. You implement that carbon tax and you stand your ground.
An excerpt from the article:

The Grit boss, in the city for Stampede festivities, argued neither the Harper government nor the government of Premier Ed Stelmach are doing enough to fight climate change, and that it's his job, as a federal leader, to forge ahead with aggressive policies that ensure a healthy environment for future generations.

and I agree 100% with Dion... Harper is definitely dropping the ball on the environment, and Alberta seems to have little to no interest in environmental responsibility given the circumstances.

While out in Southampton, I heard this on the news and rejoiced inside! I am so happy that Stephane is taking this initiate! Happy Planet!

A Culture of Life

So I just finished reading Jennifer Block’s book “Pushed,” and I have to say that I loved it! The only thing about the book that is a little annoying is that it is written specifically within the context of the American Healthcare System. Block did make reference to Canadian Studies, and I’ve finished this book with a lot of direction with regards to bibliography and my future research.

What is the most disturbing to me is the fact that so many women are being forced into the operating room for unwanted C-Sections. In fact, some women in the states actually receive court orders to undergo C-Sections. The C-Section rate in the US is incredibly high, sometimes as high as 40%... why are so many women undergoing C-Sections? Block tells us that it has to do with Liability. For example, Doctor’s Malpractice Insurance will not cover Vaginal Birth after a Cesarean (VBAC) which forces women who have one C-Section to have C-Sections for all subsequent births.

Block really provides an eye-opening and through discussion of childbirth practices in the western world, however, my favorite part of the book was the last chapter entitled “Rights” which actually discussed the way in which birthing women’s needs are continually circumvented by insurance policies. This was interesting because Block actually ended up focusing an entire chapter on what I consider to be the main issue with modern maternity care: the issue of reproductive rights. Women are daily forced into surgery and procedures (think: episiotomy) that they do not consent to, but that doctors consider to be “necessary.” Women are continuously finding themselves in abusive situations, often characterizing their birth experience in the hospital as rape, or feeling like a piece of meat. This should not be the way any woman feels after her birth experience. I’ve written about this in a paper I submitted for one of my women’s studies classes this year, but I framed the problem within ethics and did not consider the issue of rights. I think that Block does an excellent job of questioning the ways in which women’s rights are being violated time and time again within a hospital birthing setting. She discusses a problem which I have been noticing lately, particularly with the discussion of Bill C-484 which would essentially give fetuses rights. Bill C-484 is called The Unborn Victims of Crime Act and would protect fetuses if a woman is killed and is pregnant at the time. The problem is however, that by giving unborn fetuses rights, we will be getting into issues of re-criminalizing abortions, and now as we broaden our spectrum a bit, we’ll see that women’s rights will be circumvented in the delivery room, disregarding women’s autonomy and doing only what is best for the baby.

Doctors always say “We want a healthy baby,” essentially trying to justify the intervention through guilt and fear. The goal should be happy healthy mothers- if we don’t take care of the mother then how is the baby going to be cared for? How can we allow major abdominal surgery to happen over and over again, sending traumatized mothers home to care for new babies with huge wounds that can take months to heal? What is going on? Women have “…the right to bodily integrity, to self-determination, to liberty, and to privacy” (Block 253) and yet we find these rights repeatedly violated and women going home traumatized.

Why are we as women allowing this to happen to us? Why are women standing for this? I certainly am not. Luckly, I am privileged enough to live in Ontario, where I have a “choice” for my birth experience. Namely, OHIP covers midwives as an option for birth, whereas in the US midwives are illegal in many states. Why a midwife would be illegal is beyond me. A midwife provides everything a woman in labour could need: comfort, advise, strength, coaching, and most importantly, allows the labouring woman’s body to guide the labour, rather than stats and charts discussing risks. The midwife has patience and compassion in a way that the hospital does not, and in the end, allows a labouring woman to have the birth experience at the end which she is so entitled to after such hard work! Every woman should get to experience that orgasm after their baby is born, where they just hold him and the love hormones are released and bonding can occur.

It is said that this release of hormones is crucial to mother-baby bonding. That it is crucial for breastfeeding, and that clamping of the umbilical cord should be delayed a few minutes once mother and baby have bonded and the rest of the blood in the umbilical cord (which is full of important nutrients) has entered the baby’s body. Not to mention that labour is so smart, that the pain is important to help women to know what angles and what positions to use to push, and when the baby is crowning, there is a special sequence of contractions which help the baby be ejected! Why would anyone want to be so meddlesome in such a perfectly designed event? This is what women’s bodies are designed for, and it is being taken away from us, snatched right out from under our noses.

We cannot stand for this, and need to make it an issue of reproductive rights. Block actually mentions her surprise that this issue has not garnered more of a response from bioethicists and reproductive rights organizations, however, as with the discussion of Bill C-484 in Toronto, the focus remains on abortion and birth control, not rights to actually reproduce the way we desire.

So, I would just like to end with some quotes from Block’s book which I thought were particularly compelling with regards to this question of rights:

“Adults seeking medical care have both the right to receive treatment ande right to refuse treatment, and they have the right to know the risks and benefits of each treatment option, including the option of no treatment at all. The legal term is informed consent.” (253)

“You can’t have a ‘culture of life’ if you don’t value the women who give that life.” (256)

“Autonomy is an unlimited, unimpeded negative right. A pregnant woman, any woman, has the right to refuse anything.” (258)

“You have the right to decide on abortion, you have a right to decide on contraception. Don’t you also have the right to decide where you have a baby, where you have your birth experience?” (263)

This last quote, to me, is the most profound. Why is it that feminists seem so hell-bent on making sure that abortion is legal and that contraception is easy to find and yet there is little to no feminist discourse with regards to the abusive treatment of women in labour? This book is definitely a call to action for me; right now I’m blogging in Southampton at the beach, with a very weak internet signal and no land line, however, when I return to Kitchener, I will be spending a significant amount of time doing some Canadian research on the topic- according to Block there is a Canadian Report on Maternal death due out this year, so I’ll have to see if it’s already been published, as well as call hospitals and ask them about their stats for particular interventions. Either way I will be blogging about Childbirth again… to me, it seems considerably more important than access to birth control or abortion… maybe it’s the stage I’m at in my life, but how can we really expect to have abortion access and birth control when women who actually want to give birth are unable to do so the way we want to? Millions of women give birth every day and leave hospitals traumatized and broken down, and still, our main focus of reproductive rights remains invested in abortion… this book is 100% a call to action, a call for revolution and time for women to make demands and demand access to alternatives, and their bodily integrity in childbirth to be respected, or rather, revered. It is a time to reevaluate what falls under the spectrum of reproductive rights, and quickly, maternity care needs to be saved!

Either way, if you’re interested in sources re: bibliography, or a more in depth conversation on this topic, let me know!

Jessica Valenti

Yesterday I took a trip into Toronto and met up with Christie to go and see Feministing's Jessica Valenti at a panel discussion hosted by the Miss G__ Project. The event took place at Camera Lounge on Queen St. in the "hipster" district of town. Very cool. I met Christie and her friend Sarah downtown and we had dinner (Dan happened to be downtown too, so he met up with us for a bit and that was awesome :)) and then headed over to Camera.

It was really cool to actually see Jessica and be in a room with her for a mature discussion of feminism. She started off by giving an introduction as to why she had started the feministing, and I really enjoyed learning the reason that the site was started. I was introduced to feministing by a friend, and have since loved it because I love to get me a taste of feminist discourse on current events. Essentially, Valenti started feministing because she wanted to reach a different demographic other than the privileged feminists who engage in high theory in universities. She has received much acclaim and criticism for her book "Full Frontal Feminism" because some feminists (including myself) think it's too colloquial. I also didn't have in mind that it would be so brash with the language, and I thought it was very basic. I honestly thought that Valenti's target audience was my demographic (ie: background in women's studies) but in reality, it was brilliantly for women who are still scared of the "f-word" or are feminists, yet in high school you're scared of ridicule, so this mainstream release is a god-send. However, Valenti explained last night that she intended that her books be modeled as guidebooks. They were written in order to introduce feminism to those who would not always identify as feminists, and serve as a handbook for them! It was purposely written in colloquial language so that it could be more conversational. Loved it.

Anyhow, the evening was quite wonderful, as first Jessica talked about her website and then her books and feminism, and then we moved on to a panel discussion which included members of the Miss G__ project Laurel Mitchell, Sarah Wolf, who has a background in Family and Sexuality studies from UW and has been education coordinator and acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Waterloo. There was also Jessica Yee, who is a 22-year old proud indigenous Chinese-Mohawk woman focusing her work on the sexual health of aboriginal youth. Jessica actually writes for Shameless Magazine which is the Canadian version of Feministing. How fabulous! I'm really happy to have a blog I can read which takes a decidedly Canadian perspective and discusses Canadian current events. However, I digress.

The panel discussion touched on interesting topics such as Bill 4-c84 which is an incredibly hard to understand two page long Bill. (I tried to find the text of the bill but I couldn't, so here is a fact sheet for the time being.) The Bill is the Unborn Victims of Crime act which would give fetuses human rights if a pregnant woman is murdered. This was quite interesting as homicide is the number one cause of death for pregnant women, second only to complications with birth. Anyhow, the problem with this bill is that it will cause many grey areas in the law, especially with regards to abortion- will this recriminalize abortion? Also, the bill seems pointless because in Canada we serve our sentences concurrently. So, if you get two convictions of life in prison, then you only spend 25 years in jail, not 50.

The panel also discussed issues of "mainstream" type feminism. For example: many feminists would get flack for addressing Jamie Lynne Spears' pregnancy or Amy Winehouse's crack addiction, but one guest at the event who presumably wrote for Shameless brought up the issue: when can you address these things? Shameless addressed the Jamie Lynne Spear's thing because they felt that it dealt with so many feminist issues and if we are going to try to recruit women for the feminist team, we need to address the pop culture. A "holier than thou, I am so above celebrity gossip" attitude definitely is not going to be the way to encourage our youth not to be scared of the f word.

All in all, it was a great night with lots of interesting and discussion about how to engage our youth. What I took from the night is that feminism becoming mainstream shouldn't cause us to devalue it. It's not only the academics who are feminists, and women who don't engage in high theory can also be feminists and participate in the mainstream culture (to a degree).

Good times had by all.

Wall of Silence Conference Continued- Jane Doe and more

Toronto Star May 20, 2007 (Section A7)

Police Seek Help after York U assault

Police are asking the public for help investigating an assault on a woman at York University Thursday evening. The assault occurred on the south side of Harry Arthurs Common. Anyone with information is asked to call 416-808-2222.

------------------------------

In my last post on the Wall of Silence of Conference I specifically discussed the increased number of "assaults" occuring on their campus, and that's why this little tid-bit was particularly disturbing and chilling. First of all, this little citation is literally all the publicity the incident was given, and on top of that, the euphemism assault had to be used, making the incident seem less serious than it really is. How about describing it as what it really is: sexual violation. Would that stir up too much controversy? I don't understand why we have to refer to the rape and violation of women as "assault". It does no one justice, and only serves to devalue and depoliticize what is happening to women every day. And on a university campus at that; where we are all supposed to be mature, and dignified human beings. This is a systematic problem occurring on the York Campus, (and other university campuses too) and fairly soon female enrollment is going to go down because so far nothing is happening to ensure the safety of the women.

York University and local media needs to wake up and smell the fucking coffee on this one:
This is a huge problem, and really, it should be getting more than 5 lines buried in the middle of the paper. How many rapes and assaults have their been on the York campus since September? At least three, and that is so unacceptable, and this hiding of it is despicable. What The Star needs to do is write a huge series on this type of behaviour among our men, and, just as was discussed in the conference, challenge the framework in which these rapes are occurring, which is apparently the 'permissive' environment of the university campus.

I am too pissed right now to write about Jane Doe. I could never do her justice...

First post in a series on the Environment

After reading that Newspaper article in the National Post I talked about a couple days ago, I just finished reading the 100-Mile Diet written by Alisa Smith, and J.B. Mackinnon in order to begin to put into perspective considerations for the future when it comes to our environment and food. Considering the riots around rice, there's no time like the present to begin a foray into local eating. The book was an extremely well written, thought-provoking chronicle of the experiment of eating locally and I throughly enjoyed it.

Now the question is, how does one go about writing about everything in a book within the scope of this medium??It certainly is agood question and I'm not really sure of what the answer is, so I'll do my best to cover the main points in some coherent fashion.

What I thought was of significant note was the author's acknowledgement and understanding that the efforts of two people to eat locally are not meant to save the world, nor would they ever be successful in doing so, but rather, reveal some very important facts about today's consumption habits and, more importantly, the missing factor of traceability of where our foods come from. What I truly hope will happen, is that by many people reading The 100-Mile Diet, not only will the earth become healthier, but this book will inspire thoughts of sustainability and the manner in which it is becoming less and less apparent, particularly from a Canadian perspective.

What I found myself thinking about constantly was the fact that Canada was once a self-sustained country, and now, so much product is imported and exported daily, that we are slowly losing our independance as a country. We are very quickly becoming more and more dependant on other countries to provide us with even simple things such as our produce, when Canada is so abundant with food!!

I once knew someone (who ironically was working towards an enivronmental studies degree) who bought three individual slices of watermelon in February and said "I like me a slice of Watermelon any time of the year!"

Each and every time I think about local eating, I think about this particular example. This person had no idea or consideration for how far those three slices of watermelon had travelled to end up on her plate, which is the scary part. The implications of the likely underpaid labour, and the emissions alone should be enough to force someone to stick to seasonal, local vegetables. Moreso, I would think that the lower quality of product would also play a part. Since the move towards globalization has become so rapid, it is the traceability of our food that has become so distant, as well as the quality. Mackinnon talks about traceability, and said some things that I think are worth quoting:

It's no secret, that we, as a society, have been losing the traceability not only of our food, but of every aspect of our lives. On any given day, chances are high I will have no idea what phase the moon is in. I cannot reliably list my brothers' birthdates, and I regularly use products that work according to principles that I cannot explain... Fifty years aglo, there was still widespread connection to food and the places that it comes from. In the United States, 40 million people lived in the countryside. Many people kept kitchen gardens, raised chickens, or knew a beekeeper... now...legions of modern children have never seen a cow. (55)

How can kids never have seen a cow? How has the cow become the absent referent to the production of milk? The meat on our plates? How have we lost so much connection and understanding of our food?? How have all the things we eat become so disembodied or disconnected? The answer of course is our desire to have everything when we want it, not when it is in season or available. But rather, on demand. It is this "on demand" attitude that is causing us to deplete the earth's resourses at astounding rates...

The average Canadian's food has about 2, 500 kms of travel total. This is truly atrocious. Tomatoes are picked off the vine while they are still green even though the peak time to pick tomatoes in order to ensure the freshest nutrient rich product, is, like other produce, when the fruit or veggie is at its peak ripeness. So, in the effort to have whichever fruit/vegetable whenever we want it, we compromise our earth, which is highly unethical, and we compromise the nutritional value of the food we are consuming, which is just plain stuid.

In fact, a line from Ani difranco's Song Half-Assed says it all:

"Spring is super in the supermarkets/and the strawberries prance and glow/nevermind that they're all kinda tart and tasteless/as strawberries go/meanwhile wild things are not for sale/anymore than they are for show"

Now, at any time of the year, one can find any type of produce in the supermarket, and it is so normalized, that consumers would never even consider how much these purchases damage the earth, and themselves. There is truly a difference between fresh picked strawberries and strawberries shipped from California, but the sad part is that we are beginning to forget that tangible and important difference: Ontario strawberries are infinitely juicier and sweeter than California strawberries. They are a brighter red, they are strawberries the way strawberries were when we were kids and we went with our moms to pick them. The lesson of The 100-mile diet is this tangible difference that we cannot forget, or we will lose our local farmers, and produce, we will lose our self-sustainability.

However, part of the problem is that not everyone even recognizes the problem with eating imported foods and, specifically "non-foods" which have become the dominant discourse of our eating habits. The fact is that these eating habits, (ie: being able to access watermelon in the winter with little to no effort) are becoming normalized, and it doesn't even occur to the average consumer to consider how a product made its way into the store. The 100-mile diet provokes me to consider how every item I eat ended up on my plate, which causes me to make better choices for my health and for the earth. Essentially, because the supermarkets and corporations are taking over everything, we are losing a sense of the possible, and this is very sad indeed.

Mackinnon again:
The garden is a constant reminder that our depleted global environment is linked to the gap we have constructed between our food and ourselves, but a deeper truth is rooted in paleoecology. The science bears witness to changes enormous in scale, the fact that even the continents are work in progress. It can make a person's brief existence seem meaningless; more than that, though, it staggers the mind with the duty of care in our everyday lives. The universe seethed a billion years to give us a row of cabbages, or a quail's egg, or a broken heart. (pp146-146, emphasis mine)

So, I will conclude this post because it is getting excessively long, but not before I say just a couple more things:

• Alisa and J.B. wrote often in their book how 100-mile eating was like adding another part-time job to their life- it's actually sad that it has become so difficult to purchase locally, and so they don't maintain that everyone should strive completely to eat locally because it is a lot of extra work, but to make a conscious effort to make wise consumer choices
• In all of our consumer choices we need to make a concerted effort to choose foods that are good for ourselves and the earth- which I have begun to do in everything I purchase, particularly with all these "non-foods" disguised very sneakily as food
• For anyone in the K-W area, I have found a "Year-round guide to local food" which provides a link in order to help everyone purchase locally: Foodlink Waterloo Region
• Read the book. It's an "easy" read, but makes very important points about the state of the earth and self-sustaining countries. Eating locally with preserve the self-sustainability of Canada as well as help save our local farming, and in the end save farm country world-wide- a real eye opener that I reccommend 100%

Coming up:

• In Defense of Food- I'll take a look at "food" today (think: Oreo Cakesters, which only have 4 real food ingredients out of about 20 on the list, McDonalds, MSG in just about everything)
• The Sexual Politics of Meat- Animals and Women as an absent referent, the connection between the abuse and slaughter of animals and the abuse and butchering of women... an argument as to why every feminist should be a vegetarian. (I've read a couple chapters already, it's pretty convincing)

Research on Pregnancy

In my continued research on the Ethics of Western Childbirth practices, I have on the way:

The Business of Being Born

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth

along with some literature from the Government of Canada Website...

So Excited!

Who Killed the Electric Car: General Motors Crime Against Humanity and Mother Earth

Between watching Who Killed the Electric Car and The Corporation, I have gotten really riled up about branding and consumerism all over again. (and of course, ethics)

I am particularly pissed off at GM, and will never purchase a car made by them. Basically a brief synopsis of the documentary is that The California Air Resource Board (CARB) passed a law stating that a certain percentage of vehicles sold in California had to be zero emissions. This of course gave car companies two options: to comply, or to fight it.

In the beginning they complied, and GM came up with an electric car which as it turned out, everybody wanted. The car was sytlish, "sexy" and fast, with a excellent milage, something like 120 miles per charge. This car could meet the needs of 90% of the population and have zero emissions. This is exactly the type of car that the world needs, but of course, the almighty dollar and the oil companies got in the way. The cars were all leased out, but the contracts were not those with an option to buy out at the end of the lease.

So, what happens is a ton of complicated and corrupt stuff which I'll try to summarize as best as I can, though it may be incoherent:

- the car companies, not just general motors decided to sue CARB. They argued that there was not a market for the electric cars. (even though there were huge waiting lists for a product that wasn't even available) GM took the waiting list of 4000 people and managed to whittle it down to 50 people who were willing to actually sign on the dotted line. They said (paraphrased): "Once we explained all the limitations of the product, no one wanted to sign." Well of course no one wanted to sign, the company began with the limitations of the product. No company ever does that with a product they genuinely want to sell. As Naomi Klein illustrates in "No Logo," it's not hard to plant desire or want for a product in the mind of a consumer, particularly with advertising technologies available today.

- right around the same time that the car companies were suing CARB, the federal government in the US starts to push fuel cell technology. There are video clips of George Bush talking about how fuel cells are the way to the future etc. Well, this is so stupid, and has so many problems. First of all, hydrogen fuel cells are still a finite resource, second is that the infrastructure would be impossible to create to a level at which it wasn't inconvenient for commuters to fill up. There are gas stations everywhere, the infrastructure is there. Hydrogen cars will never become popular enough because the infrastructure isn't there and is prohibitively expensive to set up. So, the cars will never sell, so the industry will never have the resources to create the needed infrastructure. Further, a fuel cell car does not have very good mileage, and requires frequent re-fuelling, which, is prohibitive because of a lack of infrastructure. Hydrogen fuel cells are destined to fail. Even if the electricity comes from a carbon plant, it is still the best option with the lowest emissions. (If one had Bullfrog Power, then everything would be completely emissions free.)

- CARB ruled in favour of the car companies, and struck down it's clean air act, essentially "giving it away" by not forcing car companies to comply. The car and oil companies would end up losing profit through the electric car.

What happened with the electric car was that as soon as CARB ruled, GM started going around and collecting the cars (EV1). No one's lease had the possibility of the buy-out, and though the car owners begged and pleaded to keep the cars, GM reclaimed all of them, and took them to a junk yard to have the crushed and shredded.

The irony of all this is that now, there are a plethora of hybrid cars available. Japanese brands began to make hybrids because they feared a loss of profit if they didn't offer something comparable to the EV1, and GM and American car companies destroyed all their electric cars. After all of this, the Japanese and other imports began to outsell the American companies. So what do we have today? Nissan, Toyota, and (most annoyingly) GM, all with hybrid or electric models available. Car companies are touting the technology of the future when we had the exact car to solve our problems of global warming, and they took it away and destroyed it. That is so morally, and ethically corrupt, it just makes me want to scream. I don't want a hybrid car. I want the zero emission car that we had and then saw snatched away from us and literally destroyed.

It really does come down to the almighty dollar for the car companies. GM committed a crime against humanity and the environment by destroying a car with zero emissions, and now American car companies play the hero with their new technologies of "hybrid" vehicles. It really goes to show how corrupt the oil industry has made everyone. We digging ourselves a huge carbon grave, and yet, GM and all the others are still getting away with their facade of actually caring about the future of the earth. How can a company which claims to care about the future of the earth and climate change try to pass off the hybrid as the technology of "today" when, as was illustrated in the documentary, it is really the technology of "yesterday"?

Now, what really gets me and my hatred for GM, is the most recent issue of Green Living grabbed the last time I was at the Big Carrot on the Danforth. Here is a screen shot of one of the ads in the magazine, and please observe the irony. This is an ad for GM. Of course it is. Touting
their innovative technology for making environmentally friendly vehicles. In fact, I'm surprised that they actually advertise an electric car in this ad (also infuriated as well because they have literally come full circle, at the expense of tax payers money and purely motivated by greed). The amount of advertising that GM does in this issue of Green Living is vomit inducing. The facade that they actually care about the environment is overshadowed by their complete disregard for it about 4 years ago. I cannot view GM as a credible company at all, and do not trust that they *actually* care in any way shape or form about climate change or ethics.
I am reminded right now of Emmanuel Kant, who maintains in his essay "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals" that no action has moral worth at all if not driven by the intention to bring about a morally positive outcome. GM's marketing of electric/hybrid/fuel cell technology is nothing but an attempt to ensure that they do not lose any profit to the imports and nothing to do with an environmental conscience.

It was also infuriating for me to continue to flip through the magazine and find an article called "Giving cars the Green Light: Auto Makers are listening to consumers" which, ironically enough, featured GM; they were talked about first, and also had the largest picture of their car. (The page can be found here on page 19) This makes me question the politics behind putting together the magazine itself. How much of a role did GM pay in order to have this feature presented as independant of corporate influence? I wonder actually, how much of Green Living was funded by GM through these endorsements, and the amount of advertising they have in the magazine. Is Green Living a credible source for living a green lifestyle? Of course, all solutions in the magazine are figured through purchases and consumption. Is this magazine really just one gigantic product endorsement? Because that's the impression I get now that I analyze further. The prominence of GM advertising in Green Living is what set off the alarm bells, and now, as I "read" the magazine, I find it's a ton of ads intersparced with articles about the products advertised. It's advertising disguised as literature. This ad really helps to illustrate the illusion of "caring" that GM wishes to convey to the general product, about their values as a company. The representation of "car heaven" as something that actually does resemble the dominant understanding of what heaven is like devalues the notion of heaven along with deceiving the consumer into believing that GM is a company to be trusted. A company who truly does want to "improve air quality" and "protect the climate" would not create and market an electric car, and then take the car off the market and send it to "car heaven" when the oil companies put the pressure on to keep the money in the industry. A company that truly cared about the environment and a moral duty to do what they could to protect our environment would have done everything they could to sell as many of those cars as they could. Unfortunately, as I learned in the The Corporation today, corporations are literally by definition, forced to only consider the bottom line. The money. Apparently ethics has been sacrificed at the hands of the the corporation, and then, when the trends show that an electric car will indeed be profitable, then the marketing and branding frenzy begins again. It seems that this sudden availability of hybrid/electric cars has been driven by expedience. However, this is not to say that I don't think that Hybrid cars are exciting! However, it is just really annoying that corporations deceive the public like this. They have betrayed all of humanity and all of life by selfishly halting production of the electric car, and now that profits are there, the cars are available, marketed as "fresh" ideas, a conscious effort to save the environment. The CARB let down the world when they revoked the clean air act by essentially allowing GM and other American Auto industries to abandon work on electric cars, and redirect focus to carbon and oil.


I believe that I will end it here. But seriously, the documentary is amazing and I recommend that you watch it. It will truly open your eyes to the deceit that exists all around us, particularly with the perception that the technology for the electric car does not exist yet and is far off in the future.

A final note: The documentary shows us "car heaven." the reality is a lot less fluffy and feel good than the ad. It is a god-forsaken landfill essentially, where cars are crushed and then shredded into a million tiny pieces. It is dingy and it is sad to know that all those electric cars were just crushed and destroyed like that, when we had the answer to our problems at our finger tips.

Coming up next: A closer look at "The Corporation," revisit Naomi Klein's "No Logo," with a particular focus on the concept of sponsored individuals on university campuses.

As if I didn't just blog enough...

I just finalized a long post about branding and advertising, however, I feel the need to post this immediately. It is 100% related to the previous post yet is local and tangible and I want to blog this while everything is accurate in my mind.

Ok. So, Tim Hortons has come to be a household name in many Canadian homes. They continue to be a household name despite the fact that their coffee is not Fairly Traded, despite the fact that they still have not made any move to introduce a biodegradable sleeve to their repertoire (rather then the double- cupping method), considering that their cups are not biodegradable and Tim Hortons comprises over 60% of the coffee market. Ok. So, that aside Tim Hortons for the most part, even after turning out to be any other corporate giant out to make a name for themselves, is of course, selling a brand, not a product. Consumers don't buy the product, they buy the brand and all its associations of being a Canadian Tradition.

Anyhow, all this aside, they have at least done environmentally conscious consumers one favour by offering a discount if you bring in a travel mug or reuse your previous cup. A ten cent discount- that's how much we are willing to spend to help save the earth. Now we've put a price on it. Anyhow, I digress.

This in fact is just a consequence of Tim Horton's being a stupid crappy corporation.

So, we go through the drive through tonight, and I place the order, ordering mine in a travel mug that is "about the size of a large." We pull up to the window, we hand over the mug, and they pour the contents of one of their large disposable cups into my travel mug.

I honestly could not believe that I witnessed that. Now, this has happened to me three times at three different locations. This is NOT a coincidence. Tim Hortons is creating the illusion that they care about the environment at least a little to give you a ten cent discount off of your coffee to bring in travel mugs, but they really just pour your coffee into a paper cup for efficiency's sake at the drive -thru, and throw it out. They literally trick you into thinking that you are decreasing your environmental footprint! That is so unethical on so many levels! Individuals are working hard to try be responsible, and places like Tim Hortons, "institutions" are deceiving us by having us believe that they would not be so damn stupid and disrepectful- BUT, they are. These corporations also don't give us and our values much credit do they? If we are going to seriously change the world are we going to resist "brands" entirely? Will we be able to find some way to reconcile with them? I am seriously going to be contacting head office about this. You should too. I am so outraged that this is happening- I will definitely be boycotting Tim Hortons.

**Just a side note** Even if for some reason Tim Hortons tries to say that they reuse the cups or some crap then they've got some bigger problems re: Food Safety

**Update** As i re-think this experience i have considered that the drive-thru itself is an issue. In an effort to be eco-friendly the drive-thru's gotta go. You know, emissions.