(Originally published at Green Options)

Google Earth recently launched their Outreach program to raise awareness about various issues. Outreach is intended to give non-profits "the resources, tools, and inspiration that they need to leverage the power of Google Earth for their cause."

There are many groups which are harnessing this visual power. Having already reached many through the visually powerful mountain-top removal through the Appalachian Voices and mapping the destruction that has raged across Sudan, Google realized the unique opportunity to connect people across the world. "At Google, we believe technology can be a catalyst for education and action," Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president, said in a statement.

The United Nations Environment Programme are using the satellite pictures as a "wake-up all to of us to look at the sometimes devastating changes we are wreaking on our planet." Using images focused on hot spots, their goal is to help people identify and understand the damage humans are causing upon the planet, and then to help them make an effort to change. Many issues ranging from water shortages, forest and biodiversity loss to climate change occur over a period of time which makes it difficult to appreciate the degree of damage that has occurred. Through approximately 30 years of images condensed to a time-sequence series, the viewer is able to visually connect the statics with powerful images.

Fair Trade Certified products was the newest layer announced, along with the Global Heritage Fund and Earthwatch Expeditions. This new layer allows consumers to view information on TransFair USA certified products. Over 70 co-ops are marked, including coffee, tea, chocolate, mangoes, and bananas. Each co-ops pop-up includes a picture as well as information about the Co-op, it’s location and community betterment programs which result from the sale of their Fair Trade goods. Creating this connection between consumers and producers is essential for honest and fair trade for when there is a person behind the product people are more likely to respect the humanity that went into production.

As Dr. Jane Goodall said, "Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. With Google Earth Outreach, more people have the chance to see, to care, and then to act."

To access these new layers simply download Google Earth and expand the Global Awareness layer to see those available and check out the many Fair Trade products and the people who grow them.

Brady and I have gotten our very first blogging nod (yippee)! It’s more than that great warm fuzzy feeling but it’s also so encouraging to have a community of people working towards change. I sometimes fall to bouts of hopelessness, which is not hard considering some of the dire predictions out there but nothing alleviates this pessimism like the positive power of others. Created by the guys over at Climate of our Future who believe in blogging with a purpose, they are out to recognize and spread the network of people seeking to change the world for the better. The Accidental Environmentalist was kind enough give us the nod, and now I get to brag about 5 other supercool blogs I love. If you have been nominated by me, you can read the rules at the end of this post and choose to participate.

No Impact Man I love this blog because it makes me evaluate my daily impact, something that had previously been smothered beneath years of consumer breeding. While I don’t have the gonads to go to his level yet, I’m making my own steps and am in awe of this green superhero and will be the first to purchase his organic, fair trade package-less locally made action-hero 2nd hand when it’s available!

“A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nut, Turns Off His Power, Composts His Poop and, While Living in New York City, Generally Turns Into a Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Draggin His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons Living Wife Along for the Ride”

Reproductive Health Reality Check Full disclosure, this is a site Brady works for. This blog perhaps isn’t as intuitive as other green sites, but contains important information that effects the environment in the largest way, through population. With World Population Day just this past week, attention was brought to the exceptional rate we are growing. With many environmental symptoms stemming from diminishing resources, it is time we took a hard look at controlling our growth and one of the first places to begin is with sexual education and access to contraceptives and an end to the Global Gag Rule.

The Alternative Consumer As a retailer I love the inspiration from this site, as a consumer I just love it.

The Alternative Consumer provides product reviews, eco news and green info to the next wave of smart consumers… fresh thinkers who consciously style their lives with their health and the health of the Earth in the forefront of their mind … chic, savvy shoppers who integrate “green” into their everyday buying decisions.

The Worsted Witch Anyone who loves green and gothic horror has to be cool. Her writing is wonderful and prolific, with some great posts over at Treehugger.

The Worsted Witch is the malformed love-child of my indecorous passions for knitting, sustainability, gothic horror, and illustration

Green LA Girl Green LA Girl was the very first blog I added to my reader, and has been my companion (though she probably doesn’t know it) through the sometimes murky waters of green fair trade-ishness Brady and I continue to traverse.

Ok… the rest is for the winners of this award. Congratulations!

It’s easy to participate in this meme. At minimum, you can proudly display the BPGC badge (it’s available in two varieties: Transparent GIF and JPEG with white background) on your blog and bask in the glow of our collective good will. If you are sharing the kudos, however, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.

The participation rules are simple:

1. When you get tagged, write a post with links to up to 5 blogs that you think are trying to change the world in a positive way.
2. In your post, make sure you link back to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they know they’re now part of the meme.
4. Optional: Proudly display the “Bloggers For Positive Global Change” award badge with a link to the post that you write up.

Originally posted at Green Options.

Cheers! Have a refreshing sip of an organic beer. Except it’s not organic, but it says it’s organic. But it’s not. What?

The USDA, which certifies organic products, announced a controversial proposal in May which would allow “38 new non-organic ingredients in products bearing the ‘USDA Organic’ seal. Most of the ingredients are food colorings derived from plants that are supposedly not ‘commercially available’ in organic form.” However, included among these is hops, a critical ingredient in beer. The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) has raised issue with this “Budweiser exception” and with only a 7 day public comment period, it seemed our organic beer would become not. However, within that short period and with no formal announcement consumers united and filed 1,264 comments.

From the Beer Activist, the rationale of the exception being made is that these 38 ingredients are 1) “minor” ingredients in their products, and 2) not commercially available in organic form.

1. Hops are not essential to the character of beer? Before I even knew what a hop was I knew it was what made beer beer. Not to mention beer cannot be legally labeled as such without hops.

2. Organic hops have been available commercially through such companies as Seven Bridges Cooperative for quite some time. And in a beautifully quick response to demand just a couple weeks ago, Anheuser-Busch began “brewing our nationally available organic beers with 100-percent organic hops.” Why? Because the USDA was stalled, and 100% organic was required before this proposal. Rather than be forced to pull their line of beer A-B suddenly sourced the hops they had previously claimed did not exist. A great push forward for organic hops farmers which is now threatened by this new proposal.

The OCA announced last week that the USDA has extended the comment period by two months, which means there is time to act! In order to preserve the integrity of organic certification, follow these steps and make the USDA remove hops from the list of ingredients:

ACTION STEPS:

1. Click here to file your opposition via the Organic Consumers Association website.

2. To read all 1,264 comments submitted during the original seven day comment period, go to www.regulations.gov, scroll down and click on “Advanced Search.” In the “Agency” pulldown menu, select “Agricultural Marketing Services.” Skip all the rest of the fields until the bottom, where you need to type “ams-tm-07-0062″ in the “Keyword” box and select “any word”. Then hit “submit.” It’ll only give you 14 results, but if you click on the hyperlinked “document ID” “ams-tm-07-0062″ you’ll get all 1,264 comments.

3. Grab a glass of your favorite organic brew and raise a toast to its continued organic status!

We understand that the Free Trade system is broken. We know that sweatshops are bad. We do not want to support child labor. And yet we do so often. Why? Perhaps because they are removed from our immediate awareness. Terms like slave & child labor carry with them horrible images, understandings of atrocities. But frequently these are generalized, the faces of the individuals subjected to them blurred through distance.

World of Good, the developers of the Fair Wage calculator and Fair Trade retailer, has sent Emily to visit various Fair Trade co-ops to demonstrate the calculator and evaluate the co-ops. She even visited one of our own suppliers, Tara Projects, and is blogging her experience.

To gain perspective she also visited some child labor sweatshops. Her account of what she saw made me cry. The descriptions are neither sentimental nor sensationalized. They are simple, as the horrors are simple.

From Emily’s World of Good blog:

6/24/07

I hardly know how to write. Today I visited a hidden slum in New Delhi that is home to a dozen handicraft sweatshops that use child labor. Joshi, the Director of Social Programs for Tara Projects (the fair trade organization I am working with here) took me to see the sweatshops so I could better understand the difference between a fair trade and a non-fairtrade workshop in Delhi. Dressed in traditional Indian clothing and posing as a student, I accompanied Joshi and Shankar, Tara’s intern from France, to the slum. Naseer, our driver, dropped us off on a seedy street teeming with people. At first I thought this was the slum, but Joshi shook his head and motioned us across the street, where we met up with the man who oversees the sweatshops. He is about 20. Joshi has somehow convinced this man that we are not a threat to him, and he had agreed to show us the workshops under the impression that we were interested in the crafts they produce. Joshi and our guide led us through some back streets to a slit in a wall. We passed through this slit and entered into a shaded maze of squalid passages and hovels: the slum.

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