From the Victory Gardens of World War II to the back-to-the-land-movement of the ‘60s to…
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It is never too early for children to learn about the environment and how to…
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Jesika Gonzalez will tell you that she wasn’t the biggest fan of Porterville, California, while she was growing up.
“When I was younger, I was very, like, angsty,” the 18-year-old said as she flicked her purple hair over her shoulder. “Whatever, this town’s small, nothing to do.”
Porterville is a predominantly Hispanic working-class town in the Central Valley of California, where environmental hazards include some of the worst air quality in the state; the past year’s torrential rains that inundated hundreds of acres of farmland; and a heat wave that pushed temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit this July.
But Porterville has this going for it: Its school district pioneered a partnership with Climate Action Pathways for Schools, or CAPS, a nonprofit that aims to help high school students become more environmentally aware while simultaneously lowering their school’s carbon footprint and earning wages.
CAPS is part of a growing trend. Like similar programs in Missouri, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, and New York City, CAPS is using the career-technical education, or CTE, model to prepare young people for the green jobs of the future before they get out of high school.
For Gonzalez, a self-described tree-hugger, the program has changed the way she looks at her hometown. These days, she downright appreciates it, “because I’ve had the opportunity to see that sustainability is everywhere.”
CAPS started in part because a local solar engineer, Bill Kelly, wanted to share his expertise with students in the school district’s career-technical education program. Kirk Anne Taylor, who has a deep background in education and nonprofit management, joined last year as executive director with a vision to expand the model across the state, and far beyond just solar power.
CAPS students are trained for school-year and summer internships that teach them about the environment and how to lower the carbon footprint in school buildings and the larger community. They earn California’s minimum wage, $15.50 an hour.
For instance, Gonzalez and her classmates held a bike rodeo for younger students. They’ve created detailed maps of traffic and sidewalk hazards around schools, to promote more students walking and biking to schools.
Other CAPS participants give presentations, educating fellow students about climate change and green jobs. They are helping manage routes and charging schedules for the school’s growing fleet of electric buses. They work with farmers to get local food in the cafeterias.
Their most specialized and skilled task is completing detailed energy audits of each building in the district and continuously monitoring performance. In the first year of the program, some of these young energy detectives discovered a freezer in a high school holding a single leftover popsicle. Powering this one freezer over the summer vacation meant about $300 in wasted energy costs, so they got permission to pull the plug.
The popsicles add up. Over the past few years, by reviewing original building blueprints, inputting data into endless Excel spreadsheets, and cajoling their classmates and teachers into schoolwide efficiency competitions, CAPS students have saved the district $850,000 on a $2.9 million energy budget — this in a district that was already getting about two-thirds of its energy from onsite solar. And 100 percent of the most recent participants are going on to college, far higher than the students who aren’t in the district’s career-technical education program.
CAPS is small, just 18 students this year. But its model sits right at the intersection of several big problems and opportunities facing the country. One is that in the wake of the pandemic, public school achievement, attendance, and college enrollment are all suffering, especially in working-class districts like Porterville. This is likely not entirely unconnected to the fact that young people are suffering a well-publicized mental health crisis, of which eco-anxiety is one part.
Career technical education programs like this one have been shown to lead to higher graduation rates and to put more students, especially working-class students, into good jobs.
And there’s massive demand for green workers in particular: Skilled tradespeople like electricians are already in short supply, making it difficult for homeowners and businesses to install clean energy technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act and associated investments are expected to create nine million new green jobs over the next decade.
Some CAPS students are also changing community attitudes toward climate change, starting with their own families.
Gonzalez says her dad is skeptical of climate change and the progressive politics it’s associated with, while her mom seems passive — “like, what can I do?” But they supported her involvement in CAPS because it’s a paying job, and recently her dad said, “I’m proud of you for doing what you like to do.”
She’s heading to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in the fall to study environmental science and management.
David Proctor, 17, grew up the oldest of seven. His mother didn’t believe in climate change, Proctor says, but grudgingly agreed to the CAPS program. It helps that Proctor is earning money for his work monitoring the district’s solar performance. He loves every minute.
He’s on track to graduate this coming December and be the first in his family to go on to college. He wants to combine his interest in climate change and public health.
Jocelyn Gee is the head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board, which has a reach of 96,000 people and focuses on creating equitable access to high-quality green jobs. They see a huge demand for programs like CAPS.
“We get a lot of requests from college students and high school students about what kind of roles are there for them,” Gee said. “This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.”
They said the strength of a program like CAPS is that it’s making life better for Porterville residents right now. “I really think that hyperlocal solutions are the way to go,” Gee said. “It’s great when green jobs involve the frontline communities in solutions.”
One factor that distinguishes CAPS from other green CTE programs is that it’s also designed to address the opportunity for public schools themselves to decarbonize. Schools collectively have 100,000 publicly owned buildings, and energy costs are typically the second largest line item in budgets after salaries. The Inflation Reduction Act, along with Biden’s infrastructure bill, contains billions of dollars intended specifically to address school decarbonization, but many districts lack the grant-writing and other expertise required to chip the money loose.
In partnership with CAPS, the Porterville Unified School District, or PUSD, recently learned they’ll be bringing in $5.8 million over three years from the federal Renew America’s Schools grant program. The money will fund lighting, HVAC, and building automation upgrades — all needs identified by the students’ energy audits — as well as an expansion of the internship program itself. Only 24 grants were awarded nationwide out of more than 1,000 applications, and the education component made Porterville’s stand out. PUSD and CAPS have also scored a $3.6 million grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) for a green schoolyards program.
The district is also applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant that would allow them to go from six electric school buses to 41, nearly the entire fleet. The vision is to train students to maintain and repair these as well. CAPS students have already started analyzing and planning more energy-efficient routes that allow for charging.
“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings,” said Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director. CAPS is expanding to three other districts in California, with more in the works, and the program in Porterville has drawn visitors from Oregon, New Mexico, and as far away as Missouri.
For Elijah Garcia, a graduating senior headed to the University of California, San Diego to study chemical engineering, the work has given him a newfound commitment to pursuing a sustainable career. It’s also given him hope for the future.
“We’re trying to change something — climate change — that when you look at it in a vacuum it’s, like, insurmountable. But this is boots on the ground. It’s a bit more tangible. I can’t do everything, but I can do this little bit.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This California high school includes sustainability and green jobs in its curriculum on Sep 7, 2023.
The Biden Administration took steps to set aside millions of acres of undeveloped land and vital habitat for migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, and caribou in the Arctic on Wednesday, announcing plans to prevent drilling in some areas and cancel all remaining oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a vast, federally protected area in northeastern Alaska that has long been at the center of fierce debate over fossil fuel development.
The Interior Department also said that it would limit drilling in more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized swath of tundra west of the Arctic refuge and an important subsistence area for local Alaska Native communities that depend on a healthy ecosystem and wildlife for food but also rely on oil royalties for revenue and essential services, like schools. The department would ban drilling on nearly 11 million acres in the area and restrict it on another 2 million.
“With climate change warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, we must do everything within our control to meet the highest standards of care to protect this fragile ecosystem,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The Biden administration also proposed a ban on drilling across almost 3 million acres offshore, in the Beaufort Sea. Conservation groups largely applauded the flurry of moves, some of which reversed Trump-era efforts to open up protected areas to drilling.
“We are pleased to see President Biden making good on his promise to implement durable protections for the irreplaceable landscapes and habitats of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Wildlife such as caribou, grizzly and polar bears, and migratory birds all rely on these intact and undisturbed habitats which would be impossible to replace if they were disturbed and fragmented by oil and gas development.”
Still, none of the proposals would restrict ConocoPhillips’ fraught Willow oil project, a huge expansion of drilling that the administration approved in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska earlier this year to the dismay of many climate advocates.
For more than 40 years, Congress has debated whether to allow oil drilling on the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge, which encompasses the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, about 200,000 animals that are an important cultural resource and food source for Alaska Native people, particularly Gwich’in families on the southern edge of the refuge, where the caribou migrate.
Beneath those plains lies an estimated 4 billion to 12 billion barrels of oil. In 1980, Congress established the 19-million-acre protected area but left open the possibility of oil development on 1.5 million of those acres, on Alaska’s northern coast. Since then, fossil fuel interests, Alaska’s state government, and Alaska Native corporations that own the rights to the area’s resources have been keen to unearth the oil.
For years, environmental groups, Gwich’in leaders, and Democratic politicians pushed to keep the area off-limits to drilling. But in 2017, a Republican-controlled Congress mandated the sale of oil leases as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, the Interior Department had already canceled and refunded two leases, at the request of companies that owned them. That left seven existing leases, encompassing 365,000 acres, and all were held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state agency that invests in industrial projects.
The Biden Administration suspended the state agency’s leases two years ago, citing “multiple legal deficiencies in the underlying record supporting the leases.” On Wednesday, Secretary Haaland officially canceled those leases.
Alaska’s oil and gas industry and state government, however, criticized the Biden administration’s moves. Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said the Arctic refuge leases were issued legally and added that the state “will be turning to the courts to correct the Biden Administration’s wrong.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden bars oil drilling across wide swath of Alaska’s Arctic on Sep 6, 2023.
The summer of shattered heat records – hottest month, week, and day — has just shattered another record, perhaps the most fitting of them all: hottest summer.
June, July, and August were the warmest three consecutive months ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, the World Meteorological Organization reported on Wednesday.
August wound up being the hottest one ever and the second warmest month on record, just behind July, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The average temperature in August was 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.2 degrees Fahrenheit) — about 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial average. Scientists warn that if the planet stays above that threshold for years humans will have to contend with the worst consequences of climate change. The news comes as extreme heat rounds the corner into September: 80 million Americans, from Texas to Vermont, are under heat alerts, while triple-digit temperatures break records in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
“Climate breakdown has begun,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, said in a statement accompanying the WMO report.
The risks of an overheated planet are hard to ignore: a hellish streak of 31 days with temperatures above 110 degrees F in Phoenix, Arizona; more than 200,000 people in Canada forced to evacuate during the country’s worst wildfire season on record; and marine heat waves struck the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the waters off the coast of Florida, where spiking sea surface temperatures, above 100 degrees F, caused mass coral bleaching.
While this summer has been historic, it can also be considered prophetic. Scientists have long warned that scorching summers — marked by deadly heat waves, freak storms, and record-hot oceans — could become the norm as humans burn fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases into the air, trapping heat and warming the planet. Meteorologists say the El Niño weather pattern that started earlier this year has helped make summer hotter than usual, but they also note that warming from El Niño typically ratchets up in its second year. Up to this point in the year, 2023 ranks as the second hottest on record, behind 2016, the last time there was a strong El Niño.
Across the United States, nearly 5,000 weather stations set daily heat records in August, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Average global sea surface temperatures hit their highest-ever monthly mark in August — about 21 degrees C (69.8 degrees F). And in the same month, the extent of Antarctic sea ice shrunk to a record low for that time of year, at 12 percent below average, according to the WMO.
That this summer has broken so many heat records is “a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system,” according to Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Another consequence is extreme weather — drought, floods, and wildfires. Dangerously dry conditions helped spark the deadly wildfires on Maui in August, where the historic town of Lahaina burned down and 115 people died. On the other side of the planet, in Greece, hundreds of firefighters have been battling blazes, but a freak storm just dumped two feet of rain in a few hours on Tuesday, causing historic flooding. In July, torrential rains led to a biblical deluge in Vermont, which previously had a reputation as a climate refuge.
Yet the extent of damage exacted by the summer of scorching heat and severe weather still hasn’t come into full view, in part because the U.S. gravely underestimates death and illness associated with extreme heat and climate change.
The end of summer also happens to coincide with what’s often the most active part of hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean. NOAA has forecasted a more active fall than normal, with up to five major storms. One, Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm that intensified as it crossed unusually warm seas, already struck Florida at the end of August, destroying homes and cutting off power as it thrashed the state’s Gulf Coast. Another, Tropical Storm Lee, is on track to become an “extremely dangerous hurricane” by Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The planet just sizzled through the hottest summer on record on Sep 6, 2023.
In Georgia, 61 environmental activists and other opponents of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known as “Cop City,” are facing felony charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a law originally designed to take down the mafia. Several defendants are also charged with money laundering or domestic terrorism.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr emphasized that the sweeping charges were meant to stop violent acts, such as the sabotage of the construction site and the assault of officers attempting to secure the property. However, the text of the indictment indicates that the majority of those charged are not actually accused of committing violence or property damage at all. In fact, more than half are accused of little more than trespassing, camping, and sitting in trees in the forest where the project would be built; distributing flyers; or being part of a loosely-defined “mob” that allegedly existed to cause property damage — an action that, according to the prosecutors, amounted to aiding and abetting acts of terrorism.
The 110-page document devotes several pages to an exposition of anarchist philosophy, and it appears to allege that the “criminal enterprise” in question began the day that George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. In addition to the dozens of individuals it implicates, it specifically targets an Atlanta-area nonprofit that allegedly purchased supplies for protesters.
“This is an intimidation lawsuit designed to stop and silence opposition to the project,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace, in an email. The nonprofit environmental organization has spent years fighting a separate civil RICO case filed by the pipeline company Energy Transfer, claiming that Greenpeace conspired with others to concoct the 2016 Standing Rock movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. “It is clear that the intended message is: watch out, or you could be next.”
Though high-profile attempts to cast environmental protest movements as criminal enterprises have proliferated in recent years, there’s little precedent in the U.S. for a state entity to criminally indict environmental activists on RICO charges.
Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, a legal aid organization that has supported Cop City opponents, said she’s aware of only one other criminal racketeering indictment of U.S. activists. The Indiana case targeted two protesters who participated in nonviolent actions opposing the expansion of Interstate 69. The racketeering charges were eventually dropped.
“If these kinds of charges and this kind of state repression is permitted in a democratic country, that is really telling for other parts of the country and other parts of the world,” Regan said.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Carr denied that the RICO case was an anti-democratic attempt to intimidate activists. Over the course of three years, he said, members of the movement known as Defend the Atlanta Forest had thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, glass bottles, and fireworks at police, firefighters, EMTs, and contractors. They damaged safety vehicles, torched excavators and bulldozers, vandalized a church, punched a police officer, and harassed and intimidated law enforcement and contractors. They went on to trespass and destroy property in Florida, New York, Oregon, and Michigan, he claimed. “The individuals who have been charged are charged with violent acts,” Carr said emphatically.
The indictment itself tells a more complicated story. Sixteen people’s RICO charges are tied to throwing objects, damaging property, or, in two individual cases, punching an officer and approaching police with guns and knives. The indictment also charges five people with domestic terrorism for attempting to commit arson.
However, most of the allegations involve nonviolent activities. Three defendants were swept into the RICO case for distributing flyers in the neighborhood of a state trooper, calling him a “murderer” in reference to the police killing of Manuel Paez Terán, a protester who went by the chosen name Tortuguita. At least seven are accused of little more than “attempting to occupy the forest,” apparently by camping or climbing into a treehouse. The campers separately face domestic terrorism charges in a different county — again, solely for camping.
More than 20 RICO charges stem from the events of March 5, when a crowd of protesters damaged equipment at a construction site before joining a music festival organized by Cop City opponents. At the festival, police conducted a mass arrest that included a staff attorney at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. The racketeering indictment says the activists participated in “an organized mob” designed to overwhelm police and cause property damage. It accuses none of them of actually damaging property, but says that joining the “mob” amounted to “aiding and abetting terrorism.” Most of those defendants were also previously charged with domestic terrorism in another county.
The indictment’s biggest target is three leaders of the nonprofit Network for Strong Communities, which operates a bail fund that has supported Cop City arrestees. Police arrested the three earlier this summer for money laundering — a charge repeated in the new indictment. Prosecutors allege they misled donors by using contributions meant for other projects to pay for occupation of the forest. Fifteen counts of money laundering amount to less than $1,200 of mostly camping supplies, including $363 in food and “forest kitchen materials.”
The trio also faces RICO charges for thousands of dollars spent on camping-related purchases, including tarps, tools, tents, and kitchen and bathroom supplies. They allegedly bought “radio communication supplies” as well as a generator, and paid to host climbing training sessions. Carr said in his press conference that the organization also paid for a drone and surveillance equipment. The only alleged transaction apparently associated with violence was one defendant’s purchase of $180 in ammunition — but what kind is not specified. Regan argued that the indictment provides no evidence that the various purchases were used for illegal activity.
Additionally, Georgia prosecutors allege that the trio published dozens of blog posts on the website Scenes from the Atlanta Forest, including comuniques that take responsibility for sabotage or call on people to join events opposing Cop City. The web site is set up to allow activists to submit messages that an administrator publishes. The indictment does not cite evidence tying the board members to the posts.
Though the charges were filed in a Fulton County court — the same court that indicted former president Donald Trump in recent weeks — most of the Cop City activities took place in neighboring Dekalb County. Dekalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston announced in June that her office would withdraw from criminal cases related to Cop City, citing discomfort with the attorney general’s charging decisions. The future is unclear for more than 30 domestic terrorism charges previously filed in Dekalb County.
When asked about the Fulton County case’s timeline, Carr said he couldn’t share details about legal strategy. But he added, “Today was an important day to send a message that we’re not going to allow violence to occur in this state.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Georgia’s organized crime law swept up dozens of nonviolent ‘Cop City’ activists on Sep 6, 2023.
Some books take you on epic emotional journeys, while others provide you with knowledge and insights on a new subject. To Dye For, an account of the toxic evolution of fast fashion by Alden Wicker — from its mauvine- and arsenic-tinted beginnings to the takeover of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — does both. It is essential reading for those who have ever experienced skin sensitivity, a rash or worse due to clothing laden with harmful chemicals. And for anyone interested in the true cost of the modern fast fashion that is polluting the world with toxins and discarded bargain clothing.
I had the pleasure of talking with Wicker recently about the book, which delves into the toxicity of contemporary fast fashion, as well as its Victorian era origins.
I asked how she first became interested in learning more about the dangerous truth behind fast fashion.
“It took me a surprisingly long time to hear about fashion toxicity, especially since when I first heard about it in 2019, I had been writing about sustainable fashion for almost a decade and I hadn’t heard anything about chemicals in clothing that could harm consumers,” Wicker told EcoWatch over the phone. “A radio program contacted me and wanted to know if I could comment on this lawsuit brought by Delta Airlines attendants against Lands’ End, who made their uniforms, and some of the reactions they had were just horrific, way beyond anything I’d heard of before.”
“They had bleeding rashes and breathing problems, brain fog, extreme fatigue that was so bad that they were somewhat disabled when they got on the plane with their colleagues, hair falling out… it really ran the gamut from all sorts of different reactions, and they were so bad that you couldn’t wave them away the way the airlines and the uniform makers wanted to do.”
I asked Wicker if the people who originally invented these chemicals were aware of their potential harm.
“That’s an interesting question because the chemical industry is coming up with new chemicals all the time, but the very first commercially invented chemical was mauve dye in the mid-1800s. And this guy knew that at least the production was dangerous. There were explosions, he would have to leave his lab to catch his breath, and almost immediately people started having reactions to these new fossil fuel-based dyes. People had striped rashes on their ankles from socks and reactions to shirts that are dyed synthetically. And then with nitrobenzene black, which is used for shoe blacking, some people actually died.”
When the money started rolling in, safety took a back seat to profits.
“The thing is, people profited so enormously off dye manufacture for textiles that, the guy who actually invented mauve, he ended up getting out of business because he felt so uncomfortable with it,” Wicker said. “And we’ve seen throughout history, not just in the history of dye manufacture and fashion manufacturing, but in other types of manufacturing… people will do anything, corporations will do anything to stuff down any evidence that this is causing harm, even when it’s right in their face.”
“The dye manufacturers in Germany and Switzerland, and then in the United States, would do the same thing over and over again, they would discover that there was bladder cancer in their employees, they would ask somebody reputable to study it, then they would take those findings and hide them, and keep doing what they’re doing for another decade.”
Why weren’t regulations put in place to stop chemicals like arsenic from being used in clothing?
“[In] the early 1800s, arsenic was used to create one of the first synthetic dyes, which was arsenic green. And even after arsenic green fell out of favor because there was this Victorian Era panic over it, it was still used to brighten the color of other synthetic azo dyes,” Wicker told EcoWatch.
“As long as people are profiting off of something, they are not going to willingly shut down their production, and I think the reason why none of these things have actually been banned is because the industry does this thing where it’s like, ‘You don’t need to regulate us, we’ll just voluntarily phase it out.’ [But] even if they have voluntarily phased it out, that leaves the door open for it to come back in, especially when you’re talking about countries where there’s no regulation, where it’s about making things as cheap as possible.”
What is the extent of toxic fashion? Is most clothing toxic on some level unless it’s made of natural, organic material?
“I cannot tell you what percentage of clothing contains hazardous substances because, first of all, we don’t have ingredient lists. Most fashion brands don’t know what’s in their own clothing, and to test clothing costs tens of thousands of dollars. What I can tell you is that this is not a problem limited to ultra-fast fashion brands,” Wicker said. “There have been hazardous substances found in high amounts in mass market fashion brands, in children’s clothing. They are used by brands that call themselves environmentally friendly. There are luxury brands that haven’t done anything towards safe chemistry. So I would say, while I can’t tell you what percentage of clothing is hazardous, I can tell you that it’s a widespread problem.”
Are the clothing brands asking for chemicals to be put in their products, or is it the manufacturers that do it?
“It depends. A fashion brand would never say, ‘Can you please add PFAS to my products.’ What the fashion brand would say is, ‘We need stain repellency, we need water repellency.’ And the manufacturer will say, ‘Okay.’ And the manufacturer will buy their chemicals maybe from a certified supplier, maybe from the guy down the street, and they will give the fashion brand what they want at the cheapest price possible,” Wicker told EcoWatch. “So this downward price pressure coupled with the fact that fashion brands don’t know what’s in branded chemical mixtures and products, and that they rarely have a relationship with chemical suppliers, or even with the dye house sometimes, means that there’s a lot going on in their supply chain that they don’t know about.”
What are the most hazardous chemicals found on clothing these days?
“There’s so many… PFAS, which provides stain and water repellency — known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they never break down — they’re linked to thyroid disease, several types of cancer, birth defects, obesity, immune system suppression. They’re on a lot of stuff that doesn’t even need it — they’re just thrown on there — so they’re on a lot more things than you would think,” Wicker explained. “Other things that show up a lot [are] phthalates, which are hormone disrupting chemicals; they’re in a lot of plastics and synthetics. [Bisphenol A (BPA)] was found in sports bras and T-shirts and socks, polyester-spandex, all of them, from some of the largest companies, dozens of companies, even ones that have robust chemical management programs… and that was way more ubiquitous, I think, than anybody thought.”
So if you buy something that’s polyester are you pretty much guaranteeing that you’re going to have some kind of nasty chemical on there?
“It’s really hard to know, but it was polyester-spandex mixes that had the BPA in it, so I think that is risky to buy that if you’re trying to avoid endocrine disrupting chemicals, which everybody should,” Wicker said. “Polyester is also dyed with disperse dyes, which are known skin sensitizers and can cause skin reaction and potentially other types of allergies as well.”
I asked Wicker whether washing something a few times could make it safer.
“Washing your new clothing when you buy it can help with some types of contaminating chemicals that weren’t meant to go on there. You don’t know where your fashion has been, it’s just good hygiene to wash it. It could have been contaminated with pesticides, with fungicides. There could be some left over from the manufacture process that was supposed to be taken off. So definitely a good idea to wash it, but it’s not going to get rid of those purposefully applied performance finishes, like PFAS, like nanosilver, like dyes, for example. So it helps, but it’s not the perfect solution.”
What is the best way for people to protect themselves from toxic clothing and textiles? Is it safer to buy older clothes that are worn and have been washed many times, like from thrift stores?
“The first thing I would tell people is to try the sniff test first. If you pick it up and it smells bad, that’s a really good indication that you should not buy it, or if you open the package and it smells bad. I’ve had people tell me that packages smell like gasoline — terrible idea,” Wicker advised. “That also can help if you’re buying second-hand fashion because the scented laundry products can cause reactions in a lot of people, and they have known hazardous substances. So definitely buy second-hand fashions, they’re a really good way to get more sustainable, natural fiber fashion for a more affordable price, but just give it the sniff test before you take it home, for sure. And look for natural fibers whenever possible — they’re not gonna be perfect, they’re not guaranteed, but they tend to be less risky than synthetics. Avoid ultra-fast fashion brands or any… fashion brands you’ve never heard of before, that advertised to you over social media or you find on marketplaces like Alibaba and Amazon. Look for… labels… like Oeko-Tex, Bluesign and GOTS Organic.”
In To Dye For, Wicker talks about a flight attendant who got so sick from his airline-issued uniform that it became a choice between protecting himself and keeping his job.
“It’s such a sad story. He got sick immediately, the first time he put on the new uniform from Alaska Airlines in 2011, and he got sick every single time after that. He was taken off the plane, he was taken to the hospital. They eventually did switch out their uniforms, but by that time he was sort of permanently disabled. He had terrible skin problems all the time, he had terrible breathing problems, and if he was even around the uniforms he would go into anaphylactic shock. And he kept working because that was his job, he loved his job and it was the only thing he knew. He was too old at that point to switch careers completely. He passed away at age 65 from asthma and his surviving partner believes that it was due to the health problems that were kicked off by the uniforms.”
Many others had reactions to those same uniforms, Wicker said.
“I think that it was up to 24 percent of the Alaska Airlines attendants reported reactions, and those are just the ones that felt safe enough and had strong enough reactions to report it to the union.”
What was the primary cause of the reactions to the Alaska Airlines uniforms?
“We don’t know exactly because there were so many different things applied to and found on those uniforms. There [were] restricted types of azo dyes, there was tributyl phosphate, there was teflon, which is PFAS. There were so many different things, and that was why it was so hard to hold these fashion brands and uniform makers accountable because they were saying, ‘Tell us the one chemical that’s doing all of this,’ and it could’ve been a bunch of different ones working on the same organs, or working in synergy with each other to cause these reactions.”
I asked Wicker what she thinks the future of fast fashion will look like.
“We definitely need regulation, but this whole consumer education thing, it’s not working. We can’t shop our way out of this problem, we can’t conscious-capitalism our way out of this problem,” Wicker said. “We don’t know if we pay five dollars more for a shirt if that money’s going to get to a garment worker or get to a farmer or pull a certain amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But this is a very tangible problem, it’s happening in the places that make our fashion, and then we’re just reimporting all that toxic pollution… I was hoping that by making that connection we could galvanize a movement to fix this problem and show that there is no ‘over there’; there is no ‘away.’”
Do you think it’s a good idea to recycle and repair clothing rather than to keep making more?
“I definitely think it is… One of the things that might stand in the way of clothing recycling is that if you are taking toxic fashion and recycling it into new fashion, that new fashion will be toxic… so this is something we need to solve at the beginning of the pipeline,” Wicker emphasized.
“I think everybody should have the right to say what gets put on their bodies. And right now we don’t live in that world. But we could, if we have enough political will.”
The post ‘To Die For’: The Toxic Evolution of Fast Fashion by Alden Wicker appeared first on EcoWatch.
Conservation NGO African Parks has announced that it will work to rewild more than 2,000 southern white rhinos over the next decade.
The organization has purchased Platinum Rhino, the planet’s biggest private captive breeding operation for rhinos, a press release from African Parks said. The property covers more than 19,000 acres in South Africa’s North West province.
The 2,000 rhinos at Platinum Rhino represent as much as 15 percent of the remaining population of wild rhinos in the world.
“African Parks had no intention of being the owner of a captive rhino breeding operation with 2,000 rhino[s]. However, we fully recognise the moral imperative of finding a solution for these animals so that they can once again play their integral role in fully functioning ecosystems,” said CEO of African Parks Peter Fearnhead in the press release.
African Parks, along with a dozen African governments, manages 22 protected areas.
Platinum Rhino was auctioned in April of this year due to financial strain, but received no bids. Without the protection of the private operation, the rhinos would be at risk of habitat fragmentation and poaching.
“Breeding rhinos is an expensive hobby,” said John Hume, the breeder who opened Platinum Rhino in 2009, in an interview with AFP, as reported by Africanews.
Hume said he had spent $150 million trying to save the majestic mammal, but had “run out of money.”
African Parks decided to purchase the Platinum Rhino property and all the rhinos under its protection after partnering with the South African government to conduct an assessment of the property. African Parks has previously translocated rhinos back to Malawi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as managed protected areas.
The single objective of African Parks is to rewild rhinos over the course of the next 10 years. Its goal is to place them in secure and well-managed areas in order to supplement or establish strategic populations so that the species will no longer be in as great of risk.
“The scale of this undertaking is simply enormous, and therefore daunting. However, it is equally one of the most exciting and globally strategic conservation opportunities,” Fearnhead said in the press release. “We will be working with multiple governments, funding partners and conservation organisations, who are committed to making this rewilding vision a reality.”
African Parks will phase out the Platinum Rhino breeding program and release all the white rhinos into the wild in one of the biggest continent-wide undertakings to rewild any species.
African Parks has been working alongside local communities and governments for more than two decades to make sure protected areas and their ecosystems are safeguarded.
“On behalf of the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, I would like to congratulate African Parks and Mr. Hume for reaching this important agreement which facilitates a conservation solution for the rhino[s] currently in a captive facility,” said Barbara Creecy, who is the South African Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, in the press release.
“Our Government is guided in our approach to conservation by the UN Convention on Biodiversity and our own white paper. In this regard we are ready to support African Parks and other partners with technical and scientific advice in developing a conservation solution that includes translocating the animals over a period of time to suitable parks and community conservancies in South Africa and on the African continent,” Creecy added.
Rhinos were originally made up of two distinct subspecies: the northern and southern white rhino. Just two female northern white rhinos exist in captivity in Kenya and are not being bred, making the subspecies functionally extinct.
The southern white rhino population consists of less than 13,000 individuals after rebounding to around 20,000 following a historic low of 30 to 40 individuals in the 1930s. They are poached for their horns, which are sold in the illegal wildlife trade.
“The conservation sector is delighted that African Parks can provide a credible solution for this important population, and a significant lifeline for this Near Threatened species,” said Dr. Mike Knight, chairman of the IUCN African Rhino Specialist Group, in the press release. “This acquisition provides the unique opportunity to re-wild these 2,000 white rhino[s] for the benefit of people and rhino conservation in Africa.”
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