5 "REALLY" Last Minute Gift Ideas for Ethical Shoppers

You’re a socially conscious shopper, there are just a handful of days left till Christmas, and like many people, you’ve still got some names left on your shopping list. If your gift recipients live farther than a stone’s throw away, getting packages mailed out in time for the holidays is no longer an option, unless you want to pay exorbitant expedited shipping costs. So what’s a socially conscious procrastinator to do? I went on an online adventure to find out, and discovered some great last minute gift ideas that don’t require checking your values at the door.

Idea #1: Give the Gift of Choice. If you’re unsure what to give someone, instant Online Gift Certificates are a great last minute gift idea. To stay true to your values, target Online Stores offering Fair Trade products. Fair Trade is an economic model where producers work in healthy, safe conditions, are paid fairly, and employ environmentally sustainable practices. Make sure that the store you choose sends gift certificates automatically, so they arrive via email just moments after you order them. That way, when you order a gift certificate ON Christmas day, it will arrive ON Christmas day. For those who prefer to have something physical to give your gift recipients, many sites have a nice gift certificate graphic you can print out. In lieu of that, just paste the logo and gift certificate details onto an eco-friendly card. You’ll find plenty of Online Stores offering Fair Trade products listed on the Fair Trade Federation website. Choose “Online Shopping” in their “Find Products” drop down menu. http://www.fairtradefederation.org/

Idea #2: Invest IN Others FOR Others. For those who are not familiar, Kiva is all about loans that change lives. On their website, individuals can invest in a specific entrepreneur in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. Kiva has figured out how to get everyday folks to invest in the hopes and dreams of others with less opportunities and resources at their disposal. You don’t have to be rich to be a Kiva investor, and while one US dollar may not seem like much to you and I, it sure does go a long way in some other parts of the world. For last minute shoppers, Kiva offers gift certificates so you can invest in someone’s name. http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=gift&action=giftPromotion

Idea #3: Open up a Can of Worms. What do a crocodile, school supplies and a can of worms have in common? Well, they are just three of the many ‘symbolic’ gifts you can purchase from Oxfam America Unwrapped. Here’s how it works: You purchase an item from their website, the card goes to your gift recipient, and the gift goes to those who need it. In case you’re wondering, when you buy gifts here, an email is sent to your gift recipients automatically, making this a solid last minute gift solution. Their offerings include treated mosquito nets and school uniforms, bicycles and veterinarian field kits, and that’s a mere sampling of what they offer. Just remember, the items you select represent a contribution toward Oxfam America's many programs and not an actual physical item. http://www.oxfamamericaunwrapped.com/home.php
Idea #4: You Can Never Have Too Many Trees! There are an impressive amount of organizations offering to plant a tree in someone’s name for you, and that number seems to be growing (no pun intended!) I look at this as a great stand-by gift when you can’t think of anything else to give, you’re down to your last hours before gift giving time, and you’ve got internet nearby. To save you the 3 minutes it will take you to Google your way to tree planting organizations, here are some I found:

http://www.treegreetings.com/: This website offers “the e-card that plants a tree.” The card plays music (and the website talks to you) but I must warn you; the music is a little new-agey, but hey, to each their own. They make up for it with a catchy order page: “It’s easy as 1,2 Tree.”
http://www.treesftf.org/: This organization claims to have planted 50 million trees around the world and counting! They offer customized tree planting certificates, but since they have a 7-10 day lead time for online orders, last minute gift givers should print out info from their website to craft it into a presentable gift.
http://www.friendsoftrees.org/: Friends of Trees will plant a native tree or an entire grove in honor of your gift recipient and send them a card to mark the occasion. They promise to process online orders within three working days, so if you’ve missed the deadline for holiday delivery they have a nice graphic online you can print out and use until the real certificate shows up. For the truly motivated, they also invite the public to take part in the action by joining in the actual planting.

Idea #5: Charity Clarity. First, the gift idea: donate to a charity in someone’s name. Not the most novel idea, but hey, what do you expect? It’s late and we’re desperate holiday shoppers! If you go this route, there are some things you can do to boost the thoughtfulness. First, find a charity that really speaks to the values and interests of your gift recipient. Take my Mom, for instance. She loves her dog Zorro, a cute little mutt she got from a local shelter. So donating to the shelter where she adopted her dog from would definitely win me some points. Though I haven’t checked yet (I’m a procrastinator too) I’ll bet I could make a simple phone call to the shelter, give them my credit card #, and donate over the phone. Then I’ll reach for my trusty pile of recycled paper and sketch out a makeshift card to represent the gift. The bottom line is, if you’re going to donate to charity in someone’s name, put a little thought into it and you’ll come out smelling like roses!

Idea #5.5: Better Late Than Never. If you’re not buying what I’m selling and the ideas above don’t appeal to you, then go online, buy whatever socially conscious gift your heart desires, and print its picture out onto some pretty recycled paper with a note that says “coming soon.”

Written by: Tex Dworkin
http://www.globalexchangestore.org/



A special thanks to Tex Dworkin, Global Exchange Director of Marketing, http://www.globalexchangestore.org/ for sharing this article.

Take Control of your Energy Use

This article was taken dirctly from www.enn.com. Take a second to read this article, as it could end up saving you a lot of money per year!!!

How to Take Control of Your Energy Use, One Minute at a Time
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With the recent announcement of Obama's green team things are looking encouraging for massive change happening in terms of how our government interacts with and takes action on the pressing environmental issues

You might be wondering, how can I too make a difference? Or more immediately, how can I save money in these turbulent economic times?

The answer is all around you: Your computer you're reading this on, the light above you, and out in the kitchen, the refrigerator, your oven, and a host of other things. Each using electricity, many whether you have them switched on or not.

But how can you tell how much? How can you tell how much difference switching one thing out for another has? What keeping your lights off when you're not in the room does? Typically, it's been mostly a hindsight sort of thing, looking at your energy bill. And even then, you have no way of telling what's happening on an individual appliance basis.

Until now.

Greenbox is a system that allows you to know, per component, per minute, how much electricity is being used, at what cost, and in getting to know your usage patterns, it gives specific recommendations.

What sort of difference can this make? Greenbox puts it well when they say:
If 30% of us reduced our electricity usage by 20%, we would save over $8 billion per year on our energy bills, reduce emissions by 105 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year and avoid $10 billion in construction of new power plants. This is the equivalent of 35 coal fired power plants operating 24 hours per day.

No small impact. And from the sound of it, not terribly difficult to achieve. Really, most of it is just having greater awareness of what you use, and how you use it. They're not proposing people radically change the way they live. Though some would say this is the only way to make enough of an impact. And Greenbox could be used for that end as well.

How does GreenBox work? It's a web based interface that works on several different levels, from high level and broad to extremely fine grained. A wise move on their part, because not everybody assimilates and makes use of information the same way.

It ranges from pie charts showing what percentage of your use takes place during peak and non peak times, to what your carbon footprint is, complete with comparisons to, for example, the number of miles driven in a car to get those same emissions. And, giving useful context, it lets you compare your usage to a similar house, anonymously.

GreenBox is currently being tested both on the utility level and in home. If you're interested in knowing about when it becomes publicly available, gohere.

Readers: What other tools do you know of to help achieve greater personal energy efficiency? What practices beyond the usual do you do you do in your life that have proven effective? Any competitions you've had with friends/family/coworkers on being green?

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio School of Management in San Francisco. His overarching talent is "bottom lining" complex ideas, in a way that is understandable and accessible to a variety of audiences, internal and external to a company.

www.getgreenbox.com

In "Eat Local" Movement, Cuba is Years Ahead...

This article was taken directly from www.enn.com. A very informative, interesting 'green' website. Take a look!


In "eat local" movement, Cuba is years ahead....

HAVANA (Reuters) - After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba planted thousands of urban cooperative gardens to offset reduced rations of imported food.
Now, in the wake of three hurricanes that wiped out 30 percent of Cuba's farm crops, the communist country is again turning to its urban gardens to keep its people properly fed.

"Our capacity for response is immediate because this is a cooperative," said Miguel Salcines, walking among rows of lettuce in the garden he heads in the Alamar suburb on the outskirts of Havana.

Salcines says he is hardly sleeping as his 160-member cooperative rushes to plant and harvest a variety of beets that takes just 25 days to grow, among other crops.


As he talks, dirt-stained men and women kneel along the furrows, planting and watering on land next to a complex of Soviet-style buildings. Machete-wielding men chop weeds and clear brush along the periphery of the field.

Around 15 percent of the world's food is grown in urban areas, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a figure experts expect to increase as food prices rise, urban populations grow and environmental concerns mount.

Since they sell directly to their communities, city farms don't depend on transportation and are relatively immune to the volatility of fuel prices, advantages that are only now gaining traction as "eat local" movements in rich countries.

ROOFTOPS AND PARKING LOTS

In Cuba, urban gardens have bloomed in vacant lots, alongside parking lots, in the suburbs and even on city rooftops.
They sprang from a military plan for Cuba to be self-sufficient in case of war. They were broadened to the general public in response to a food crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's biggest benefactor at the time.

They have proven extremely popular, occupying 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of land across the Caribbean island. Even before the hurricanes, they produced half of the leaf vegetables eaten in Cuba, which imports about 60 percent of its food.

"I don't say they have the capacity to produce enough food for the whole island, but for social and also agricultural reasons they are the most adequate response to a crisis," said Catherine Murphy, a U.S. sociologist who has studied Cuba's urban gardens.

GREEN PRODUCTIVITY

In Alamar, the members get a salary and share the garden's profits, so the more they grow, the more they earn. They make an average of about 950 pesos, or $42.75, per month, more than double the national average, Salcines said.
The co-op, which began in 1997, now produces more than 240 tons of vegetables annually on its 11 hectares (27 acres) of land, which is about the size of 13 soccer fields.
The gardens sell their produce directly to the community and, out of necessity, grow their crops organically.

"Urban agriculture is going to play a key role in guaranteeing the feeding of the people much more quickly than the traditional farms," said Richard Haep, Cuba coordinator for German aid group Welthungerhilfe, which has supported these kinds of projects since 1994.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, Cuba's supply of oil slowed to a trickle, hurting big state agricultural operations. Chemical fertilizers were replaced with mountains of manure, and beneficial insects were used instead of pesticides.

Unlike in developed countries, where organic products are more expensive, in Cuba they are affordable.

"We have taken organic agriculture to a social level," said Salcines.
Some experts fear that rising international food prices along with the destruction of the hurricanes will return Cuba to the path of agrochemicals. The government is planning to construct a fertilizer plant with its oil-rich ally Venezuela.

But Raul Castro, who replaced ailing brother Fidel Castro as president in February, has also borrowed ideas from the urban gardens as he implements reforms to cut the island's $2.5 billion in annual food imports, much of it from the United States.

Castro has decentralized farm decision-making and raised the prices that the state pays for agricultural products, which has increased milk production, for example, by almost 20 percent.
And, in September, the government began renting out unused state-owned lands to farmers and cooperatives, measures that met with approval of international aid groups.

"Decentralization and economic incentives. If those elements are expanded to the rest of the agricultural sector, the response will be the same," said Welthungerhilfe's Haep.

Buy Local vs. Fair Trade: An Ethical Shopper’s Dilemma

Another gift giving season is upon us and it’s time to decide on a shopping strategy. In one ear you’re encouraged to shop locally, in the other ear you hear about the benefits of choosing Fair Trade gifts. So which strategy is best, and is one better than the other? To answer a question with a question, who says you have to choose? The ‘Buy Local’ and Fair Trade movements both have their benefits.

One way to honor the bumper sticker mantra “Think Globally Act Locally” is to support your local businesses. Why buy cheese from Europe when there’s a dairy farm down the road producing double creamy Gouda that will knock your socks off? Buying local refers to choosing locally made products and soliciting locally owned businesses, which have environmental and social benefits. Products made locally have a smaller carbon footprint than products shipped from overseas, and thus are less of a strain on the environment. Shoppers who buy locally travel less distances to shop, which also reduces the carbon footprint. Local businesses produce more income and jobs for local communities than large retail chains do, and are more likely to utilize local services, such as advertising and banking. Supporting local businesses preserves the economic diversity of our communities and the unique character of our neighborhoods.

Sounds great, right? But what about choosing Fair Trade, another moral purchasing strategy?

Fair Trade is an economic model that ensures products are made by producers who receive a living wage, work in healthy, safe conditions and in many cases, employ environmentally sustainable processes. Fair Trade also tackles the issue of child slavery by guaranteeing that there is no abuse of child labor.

In a world economy where globalization is king and profits are queen, small-scale producers are left without resources or hope for their future. Children are forced to work instead of receiving an education and local environments suffer from the ‘profits now’ mentality that damage environments for future generations. Fair Trade helps exploited producers escape from this vicious cycle of poverty. The Fair Trade system benefits over 800,000 Farmers organized into cooperatives and unions in 48 countries. Revenue from Fair Trade cooperatives is used on a variety of community projects, including training of producers in organic and sustainable farming techniques, building houses, schools and clinics and guaranteeing health care for the whole community.
So now it’s time to decide…buy local or Fair Trade? It’s important to note that choosing Fair Trade products can actually help your local merchants survive in this sluggish economy. Prices for cheap imports made in sweatshop factories outside of the US are usually so low that local merchants have difficulty competing on price. So during a time when consumers are looking to cut costs wherever possible, cheap knock offs made in sweatshops often outsell locally made products, even though the quality is drastically lower.

Whichever you decide, the good news is that the ‘Buy Local’ and Fair Trade movements both have tremendous benefits. They support environmentally sustainable solutions, and layers of middlemen are left out of each economic model, helping to ensure that a fair percentage of profits actually reach the producers. Fair Trade and locally made products are often handcrafted with care, resulting in a higher quality product than the mass-produced sweatshop products available in big box stores, and in both cases, the preservation of cultural heritage is a by-product of doing business.

If you’re married to the idea of buying locally, remember that some items are not grown locally, like cocoa. Cocoa trees are only grown in tropical regions of Africa, Asia, South and Central America. So if you’re looking for socially conscious chocolate in the US, consider chocolate made locally with Fair Trade Certified cocoa. That way, you can support your local chocolate maker AND Fair Trade cocoa producers around the world.


Beyond chocolate, there are lots of other instances where products from the Fair Trade and Buy Local movements are harmoniously combined to create special products all their own. One example is from Handmade Expressions, a sourcing partner for socially and environmentally responsible products based in Austin, Texas. They sell their handmade copper alloy bells to local artists who incorporate the ethically produced crafts into their artwork that is then sold locally.
Some proponents of the buy local movement consider choosing Fair Trade products an ethical challenge because products imported to the US have a bigger carbon footprint than locally produced products. In an op-ed piece for Western M, Steve Brooks, the acting head of Oxfam Cymru points out that “if everyone in the United Kingdom switched one 100W light bulb to a low energy equivalent, CO² emissions would be reduced in one year by 4.7 times the amount saved by boycotting fresh fruit and vegetables from sub-Saharan Africa.” If this is true, then perhaps the carbon footprint issue is not such a big deal after all. If you’re not buying that, and you’re shopping for a coffee lover, consider Grounds for Change, the first coffee roaster in the nation to complete the rigorous third-party certification process necessary to obtain the CarbonFree® Certified Product label. To get a product certified CarbonFree®, a company must submit the item to a third-party process that formally scrutinizes the carbon emissions associated with every step in production from the country of origin to your cup.

Whether you choose local or Fair Trade products or a combination of the two this holiday, what’s most important is to shift your spending from mass produced products made in sweatshops to ethically produced products. According to the US Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce, US retail e-commerce sales reached $29.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006, and e-commerce sales accounted for just 2.8% of total retail sales, so you do the math. That’s a lot of dough! Wal-Mart alone reported $340 billion of sales revenue back in their 2006 financial report. Yet the Fair Trade Federation, the US’s network of Fair Trade businesses, reported $160+ million in total member sales in 2006, a tiny crumb compared to the overall US retail pie. If just 5% of US Wal-Mart customers shift their spending to Fair Trade products this holiday season, imagine the positive impact it could have on our environment and producers’ lives?

In November 2008 a McNeil/Lehrer report estimated US retail spending at 55 billion dollars. How much of that spending is on ethically produced products is up to you, so this holiday, remember that it’s not about buying more, but rather buying differently, and every dollar you spend is a statement about how you want this world to be.

A special thanks to Tex Dworkin, Global Exchange Director of Marketing, http://www.globalexchangestore.org/ for sharing this article.

Resources
Buy Local:
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/buylocal/
http://www.buylocalday.org/index.php

Fair Trade:
http://www.fairtradefederation.org/
http://www.fairtraderesourcenetwork.org/
http://www.transfairusa.org/
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/retailers.html