Featured Non-Profit: Alliance For International Reforestation (AIR)

When you make a purchase at Organic Bug, know you are using your power as a consumer to affect positive change in the overall environment and social climate.  Organic Bug works with 1% for the Planet to give back to non-profits that share its belief that industry and ecology are inherently connected.

One such organization on the list of affiliated non-profits at 1% for the Planet is AIR: Alliance For International Reforestation. For the past 3 years Organic Bug has chosen AIR as one of its most treasured recipients, pledging a portion of 1% of gross sales to support the programs initiated and maintained by this outstanding non-profit.

From AIR’s Webpage: The Alliance for International Reforestation, Inc. or AIR, is a non-profit organization working to make a difference for the people of Guatemala and Nicaragua. AIR plants trees, establishes tree nurseries, provides environmental education for teachers and farmers, digs wells, builds fuel-efficient brick ovens, and helps to educate everyone about the environmental challenges facing Central America.

AIR was founded in 1992 and is maintained by its Founder & Chair of the Board of Directors, Dr. Anne M. Hallum. Professor Hallum has worked at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida since 1987 and teaches in the Department of Political Science.

Stetson is just 45 minutes from the Organic Bug office & warehouse and Organic Bug Co-Founder, Peggy English, has enjoyed meeting and corresponding with Dr. Hallum during the course of their ongoing partnership.

Peggy remains impressed with the fact that “at least 93% of all donations to AIR go directly to Guatemala supporting ongoing projects there~addressing the causes of rural hunger & deforestation.  I love that this organization addresses not only the symptoms, but works on solutions through education, planting of tree nurseries & teaching sustainable farming.”

AIR now has close to 300 community tree nurseries & over 1500 farmers have been trained in their own fields to use methods that will increase crop yields without using chemicals. The replanting of trees helps to prevent mudslides & erosion on the eerily deforested slopes that are sadly a part of the Guatemalan landscape.

Although AIR is a small non-profit, it has big goals and is at the top of our list to continue to support in the coming years.

Change You Can Bite Into

In 1971 Frances Moore Lappe released her now-classic book, “Diet For A Small Planet”. This groundbreaking book helped millions of readers understand the root causes for hunger and her core message was that food remains the central issue through which to understand world politics. As a continuation of her message of how the food system is broken and what needs to happen to fix it, her daughter Anna Lappe recently wrote a powerful book focusing on a different cause but the same solution.

Anna Lappe’s thought provoking book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It is clearly one of the most important books of the year. Her message is simple: “If we are serious about addressing climate change, we have to talk about food.”

Lappe confronts the major role industrial agriculture plays in the climate crisis. Her responsibly researched investigation into a broken food system proves that the global use of hazardous chemicals, biotech crops, concentrated animal feeding operations and processed foods is destroying the eco-system.

In this book, Lappe lays out 7 principles of a climate friendly diet in an attempt to make her pursuit for environmental reform OUR pursuit for environmental reform. Informative and inspiring, Lappe is convinced that eating a plant based diet will influence the marketplace in ways we cannot imagine in addition to helping in the quests to end world hunger and combat climate change.

Read about the causes of the food-climate connection and learn how you can be a part of the solution!

Blog Action Day, 2009

I’ve taken a little bit of a different approach to this year’s Blog Action Day than other bloggers I’ve read. They all have amazing points and I encourage you to read as many as you can! I wanted a very positive post and talk about something very simple, but often forgotten, love.

Loving our planet means many things to many people. It could be cleaning up trash in our oceans at a meet-up, clean-up group, it could be setting up recycling bins in your homes or offices, it could be educating students and consumers about alternative energy, or it could just be taking in a deep breath of fresh airwhile spending time with nature and appreciating every step, every tree, every smell, every feeling.

When you love something you want to give your all to it. If you’ve ever been in love with someone, you know the feeling I’m talking about. What if we started loving the planet as much as we love one another, and start proving our love? What if we walked a little more lightly, a little more consciously, a little more graciously, on our beautiful mother nature?

On Blog Action Day, I want to tell the world to open our hearts to the environment and look at ways we can show some love. There are many organizations to get involved with, petitions to sign, people to educate, laws to learn and know about, and probably many things that you could easily incorporate into your own life. Take that step, ask questions, research online, and try to do something nice for our environment.

Cheers to today and to our beautiful planet, the one I love and hope you will too!

Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future

There is nothing quite like New York City during the holiday season so, each December Justin and I make it a point to visit.  Our traditional agenda includes the following: 1. Watching people fall down on the ice rink in Rockefeller Center while scarfing down the outrageously yummy shrimp chop chop salad at the Rock Center Café  2. Drinking $18 martinis at The Peninsula Hotel’s Pen-Top Bar while shamelessly hoping to spot a celeb or two and  3. Visiting a new exhibit at one of our favorite NYC museums.  Typically agenda item number three involves some negotiating because my super geek fiancé votes American Museum of Natural History every damn year while I’m more of a MOMA gal myself.  Lucky for him, this year the Natural History Museum got my vote as well.

The second day of our trip, we hopped in a snazzy new hybrid taxi and headed uptown to check out the museum’s new Climate Change exhibit.  I’d read about this particular exhibit on the MSNBC website back in October and felt it was my Organic Bug blog writing duty to check it out. As a proud member of the green brigade generation, I was prepared to not learn much I didn’t already know, but three hours later I left the museum with a mind titillating with new environmental facts for my arsenal.

The exhibit takes visitors through a slew of climate related issues and is sometimes a bit preachy, but overall there is a nice balance between “here’s what we’ve done” and “here’s how we can change it.”  The interactive components of the exhibit help hit major points home on a very intimate level, and the recommended actions for change go well beyond the standard buy a Brita and convert to reusable shopping bags.

My favorite parts of the exhibit highlighted global adaptation efforts.  Throughout the exhibit, you can read about innovative ways in which communities around the world have learned to cope with climate impact.  For example, the people in Bangladesh have learned to make floating gardens to prevent loss of crops during massive floods brought on by monsoons.  And in The Netherlands, Dutch residents started building homes designed to float to avoid having to evacuate when floods waters rush through the low-lying region.

Shown in this picture is the carbon line. Right when you walk in to the exhibit hall there’s a mural on the wall with an illuminated red line over it.  As you walk from one end of the mural to the other, the line gets higher and higher demonstrating the atmospheric carbon level changes between before the Industrial Revolution and today. Pretty frightening reality.

If you’re in the city between now and summer ’09, I would say that this exhibit is certainly worth the $24!