Synthetics are not Organic!

Perhaps if you are like me, you peruse the isles of your supermarket scanning the thousands and thousands of items for product labels that read organic. Consumers buy organics for a myriad of health, environmental and ethical reasons. Some consumers are concerned about the routine use of toxic municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer on conventional farms; others worry about filthy slaughterhouses, diseased feedlot animals, E. coli, salmonella, and fecal contamination; while other consumers buy organic as a way to promote the livelihoods of small family farmers.

Whatever their reasons, 13 million of the 106 million US households actively seek and support the organic industry. Wouldn’t they be horrified to find out that their organic labeled products were in fact made with synthetic substances? ...

While this is not the case yet, it is worth noting that several industry groups including the Organic Trade Association and Kraft Foods have recently lobbied Congress to amend the Organic Foods Production Act established in 1990. If amended synthetic substances would have been able to be used in food products labeled as "organic." Thankfully, the courts ruled in favor of the consumer’s right to know mandating that only natural ingredients can be labeled as organic.

What you need to know about US organic labeling law:

• 100 Percent Organic – is truly organic!
• Organic - at least 95% is of the product content by weight is truly organic
• Made With Organic - at least 70% of content is organic
• Less than 70 % of content is organic – the product label can only list ingredients that are organic

Drilling in the Arctic Refuge will not improve our security

We all know that there’s been constant talk of security from both government and industry ever since September 11, 2001. Recently the security conversation has focused on Hurricane Katrina, the failure to deal with this natural disaster, and our oil dependency. Some say that this natural disaster has shown us that we need to decrease our dependency on foreign oil, and therefore drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How this connection can be seriously established is beyond many of us, but it’s being touted as the only answer for our safety. One of the power-houses laying this message on pretty heavy is the single-issue lobby group Arctic Power. This is taken from their homepage:

This “message�? has more holes than a piece of pumice. But the point I’d most like to highlight here is the supposed security drilling in the Arctic would bring.

You might remember the oil spill that occurred in Alaska on October 4, 2001, four years ago today. A local hunter, quite intoxicated, shot the pipeline (supposedly impervious to bullets), causing what even the operators of the pipeline referred to as a “significant spill�?. Estimates on the number of gallons spilled range from 3,500 barrels to 6,800 barrels in just one day's time. The largest reported pipeline spill prior to this 2001 spill was a whopping 16,000-barrel (672,000-gallon) spill when the line was bombed with plastic explosives at Steel Creek near Fairbanks in February 1978. The people responsible were never discovered.

Here we are, years later, discussing terrorists, natural disasters, oil dependency, and security. A drunk hunter hits the pipeline with one rifle bullet, causing oil to spray over 75 square yards in a matter of hours, and we’re told that drilling in the Arctic is safe?

The point is this: oil drilling is messy – for the land and the sea, for communities nearby, for the consumers… for everyone but those who have no concern for the environment, and who have so much money that they could buy their way out of any mess. Our dependency is what makes us insecure, period. It doesn’t matter where the oil comes from- we’re not safe from natural disasters, terrorists, or drunk people with guns while we’re in this cycle of addiction and exploitation.