The Honour

International Women's Day is on Monday, and to celebrate, our town had its annual IWD event to add the names of exemplary local women to its Honour Roll. In this photo, midwife Sally McCrae is accepting her honour. Under extreme political pressure, Sally fights, and walks the talk for women who choose to birth at home.

Later in the night, the keynote speaker from the International Women's Development Agency spoke. In her speech she pointed out that although women have so much to celebrate, we still have a long way to go until equality for all is reached. I agree. She read out some statistics including: only 3% of the CEOs in the ASX companies are women.

This percentage represents an enormous gender inequality and reminds us that although women may vote and live independent lives, we should remember who really holds the power.

I say, you can shove your corporate power up your ass. This statistic is not a measure of women's deficiency, but of their virtue.

The planet is in serious trouble because of greedy CEOs, so why would we want to participate in the corporate model? When decisions are made because of shareholder profits instead of forests and air and flowers and fish, why would we want to play with you? We don't value you what you value. We value what you cut down, what you poison, what you maim.

Some might argue that the system needs more women in order to turn it around, but I don't think that's true. What we need is a brand new systems approach; not one that is measured by a disembodied GDP, but one that functions within in a steady state economy.

I hope you have a great International Women's Day on Monday!

May our hearts be strong, and our vaginas, happy.

Pollan Count

A few days ago our friend Jason sent us a link to a great interview with author Michael Pollan. If you have a spare 20 minutes and you're interested in the ethics of food, I recommend you watch the clip.

One of his main points is about how sneaky the food industry is. In his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan writes that if a food has more than five ingredients, you should avoid it. As a result there are many companies coming forward and saying their products are simpler. Such as Haagen-Dazs who has released Haagen-Dazs 5, a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. 

"You know, it’s still ice cream," Pollan says. "Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients."

Pollan is also an advocate for the local food movement, and says companies such as Frito-Lay are advertising that their potato chips are local.

"Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch," he laughs.

He also writes extensively on the evils of high-fructose corn syrup and says companies such as Snapple and Coca-Cola are now making a virtue of the fact that some of their products contain real sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup.

What that is, is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.

And so, Pollan has had to update his rules:

...if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.

I'm Sorry, Paul

I'm sorry Paul Hawken, but I cannot finish your book.

In 1993 when you published it, the world was a very different place, but your research and findings are nothing new these days. The things about which you wrote are known by all of us, which is great news; that what was once relegated to a niche market is now centre stage of the mainstream.

But what makes your book too frightening to read is that even now, 15 years after publication, nothing has changed.

Business has three basic issues to face: What is takes, what it makes, and what is wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins, and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species including humans.

Your premises and propositions are all valid and true and important, but because I know how the next decade and half pan out, they are rendered irrelevant.

Your 1999 book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, was referred to by Bill Clinton as being one of the five most important books in the world at that time. Time seems to be the key factor here, especially with texts that are specific to a particular period.

And so, I shall pedal up to the library now and return your book to the shelves where it will sit among the other important texts that testify how much has changed in our lifetime. Or how much has stayed the same.

Seed Hunter

Last night we watched Seed Hunter, the fantastic ABC doco about the Australian scientist, Ken Street. Street is charming and candid and oh so likable as we follow him and his team on their noble crusade.

The spiel:

As Australia and much of the world wrestles with hotter weather and a dwindling water supply, mass starvation at a global scale is on the cards if we can’t find ways to improve crop resilience. Scientists are exploring many solutions to adapt our food supply, including going back to mother nature herself to locate the genes that can withstand our changing climate; genes that, thanks to a high yielding monoculture, have almost disappeared. Australian scientist, Dr Ken Street, aka the ‘Seed Hunter’, spends his life searching for the tiny seed that could play a role in helping food producers around the world.

Two and half months ago I wrote about the harvesting of the first GM canola crops since the GM ban was lifted. Then yesterday I read that this harvested canola is now on its way to our grocery shelves.

We might think we can avoid GM ingredients if we want, but we can't. How can we when the canola oil that's being sold to us as cooking oil is not labelled as being GM? How can we when this oil is being mixed into our processed foods, and the leftover meal fed to our livestock?

While biotech giants such as Monsanto are racing towards their desired 100% seed ownership, Ken Street and his crew are scouring the globe in search of ancient seeds that will help ensure the survival of all Earthlings. There's no question as to whose team I'd rather be on.

Product Placement

I love the taste of this water. I have often thought that maybe because it is sourced from a nearby spring it has all the goodness in it that my body needs to flourish. Our bodies are best when we eat locally grown seasonal food, so surely it's the same for local water?

I love the simplicity of the label and the fact it is bottled locally, and in glass.

When I was thirsty and on the go I used to buy water in a plastic bottle, refill it a couple of times then recycle it. This was before I learned about the toxins these bottles leach.

This was before I realised that although I may have been recycling mine, 65% of plastic bottles end up as landfill. 

This was before I read that 314,465 barrels of oil are used every year, just so Australians can drink water bottled in plastic.

This was before I moved up here where there are natural springs aplenty, and where Coca-Cola Amatil source the water for their Mt Franklin brand. Every day we see petrol-guzzling water tankers chugging to the bottling plant in Melbourne from local springs. 

This was before I found out that Coca-Cola pays $2 per megalitre of water they take, which is about 5c a tanker. 5c!!

This was before I read this quote by the American environmentalist Derrick Jensen: "If people will pay for water bottled in plastic they will suffer any indignity.”

This was before PJ became a water activist and made this film as part of his campaign:

The Shock Doctrine

Reading a book like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, at a point like this in economic history is enough to make anyone want to run back to the safe pages of fictional books.

Several weeks ago, when PJ and I had finished watching the final episodes of Underbelly, it was exciting to read in the paper about all the unsavoury underworld characters we had come to know and even like.

Not so with Klein's chronicle of greed. To read her descriptions of so many militant capitalists, such as the Chicago School's Milton Friedman, and what they were prepared to do to get their economic policies into place in other countries as well as in the US, is frightening to say the least. But to open up the paper and read the extent to which the world economy has been affected because of such greed is simply horrifying.

From forbes.com:

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs took home $74 million in salary, bonuses and other awards last year. Richard Fuld, chief executive of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers received $71.9 million.

Over the past five years, Fuld made $354 million leading his company on a wild ride that ultimately ended in bankruptcy. He was Lehman's biggest individual shareholder.

Let's hope Rudd's crackdown on "extreme capitalism" and bank executive salaries is received as the blow we wish we could deliver ourselves, personally. 

In the US, it looks like someone beat us to it:

Public Concern

This is the first image that came up when I googled Private Public.

This morning I left later than usual for my walk and ran into two different parties of bush walkers in full Gore-Tex attire. At my usual hour it is just the native animals who spy me in my op shopped conglomeration of mismatched colours and layers.

I had my iPod and was in my own world as I listened to the latest This American Life podcast, so to see other human forms amongst the trees really punctured my sense of solitude.

The private made public.

Later in the morning over coffee I read the chapter of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine entitled, 'A Corporatist State,' in which she writes:

In some ways, however, the stories about corruption and revolving doors leave a false impression. They imply that there is still a clear line between the state and the [disaster capitalist] complex, when in fact the line disappeared long ago. The innovation of the Bush years lies not in how quickly politicians move from one world to another but in how many feel entitled to occupy both worlds simultaneously.

The public made private.

And then just now I read on (Text)ure and (me)aning about artist Sophie Calle's fascination with the interface between our public lives and our private selves.

Calle's followings, recordings and wanderings are her work.

She brings the public/private space to the gallery.

To the published page.

To the archive of the extraordinary ordinary.

The private made private made public.

Crisis Opportunism

I am half way through reading Naomi Klein's 533 page tome, The Shock Doctrine, which seems an especially pertinent choice of books right now, given the current situation on Wall St.

The Shock Doctrine: The use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters – to push through unpopular economic measures often called 'shock therapy.'

I will save my opinions until after I have finished reading it, but just wanted to recommend you watch this clip:

Fighting For It

This morning on my walk I listened to a podcast interview with Emmanuel Jal, who at aged 8 was a child soldier carrying an AK-47 rifle in the Sudan People's Liberation Army. (He was later adopted by a British aid worker and is now a rising international music star.) 

The interviewer said that by 18, the usual age for conscription, people can determine right from wrong, but at aged 8, you haven't yet developed a conscience.

I heard this and thought nothing of it. Until Z saw this poster and asked what it was.

PJ and I explained to him that Fair Trade empowers farmers in developing countries, (though we left out that John Pilger has an argument against some Fair Trade agreements, saying they are constructed by the privileged).

In response Z said he wishes he were a policeman. If the greedy people are mean to the farmers, he would put them in jail for one day. If they do it again, he would jail them for two days. And if they do it again, in they go for three days...

I look at a lot of the injustices in the world and the generation of the perpetrators and I think: up until what age can our behavior escape scrutiny?

The Blog Baton

I am a huge proponent of small business not corporatised business in the same way I am all for local and regional autonomy, because the dissemination of power means more diversity and more choice for more people.

Which is one of the reasons I love living in the country: the decentralisation of sovereignty, and why I love being a part of the blogosphere: the decentralisation of information.

Last night I taught the final class for this term's course on blogging. Just as I felt when I taught English in Thailand, I felt so proud when my students got the hang of what they were doing.

Here is a snapshot of what some of them are doing:

www.claudiasgreenacres.blogspot.com

www.hotartglass.blogspot.com

www.bookcamel.blogspot.com

www.nottheadvocate-jab.blogspot.com

All About the Kids

I once had a fight with someone I had known for a long time that caused the demise of our friendship. She was considering applying for a job in the marketing department of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. I encouraged her, saying that when she gets in, the first thing she should do is get rid of the McDonald's that's attached to the building. She vehemently disagreed, saying the multinational donated a lot of money to medical research.

I have always been crap at maths. But I know what it means when I read that obesity rates in Australia have more than doubled over the past 20 years and that we have overtaken the US as the world's fattest nation.

In 2011, the Royal Children’s Hospital will be relocating, a date that also signals the end of the lease for the McDonald’s outlet there. Let's hope the hospital sees the figures – 26% of the Australian adult population are now obese (compared to an estimated 25% of Americans) – and doesn't renew the leasehold.

But but wait, there's definitely more! And I am not just talking about the centimeters around our waistlines. I am talking about the wondrous specimen of evolved humanity that is Premier John Brumby, who, we are told in today's paper, "...has not ruled out fast-food companies getting involved in school canteens or classroom programs in a revamp of the public education system."

Not only is Brumby deluded about the alleged benefits of GM crops, but he is also happy to turn a blind eye to the corporations who want to feed these so called foods to our children, denying companies would take advantage of their position to promote their commercial interests. 

"If you're asking if this is an opportunity for commercial promotion, it is not," he says. "This is where businesses and where industries want to do more for the children. It's not an opportunity for business to use this as an opportunity to lever their products."

Of course not, My Brumby. It's all about the kids.