Take a look at any issue of Natural Communities and the first thing that strikes you is the stunning photography that Jeff weaves through his publication.  He says he had to quickly learn how to use a camera to produce the magazine.  Since Natural Communities focuses on holistic lifestyle issues and information, Jeff has spent lots of time wandering the ridges, coulees, and lakes looking for inspiring scenes.

Whether it’s the intricate symmetry of a single dandelion head or the long view of a lake, Jeff captures the quietest parts of nature.  The centeredness of his photographs draw you inside each scene he’s captured.

Jeff has been working with us on advertising since he started his magazine.  We’re glad we convinced him to show his photography in our shop.

Born in Duluth, Minn., Jeff spent five years working as an engineer before changing careers.  His girlfriend turned him onto organic foods, creating a sustainable earth, and getting in touch with nature and spirit. In the summer of 2006, he got the idea to start a locally produced magazine dedicated to holistic living.

With nothing but his courage and money borrowed from a relative, Jeff quit his job and started his publishing business.  He admits that he had zero experience in anything to do with publishing a magazine, including photography.  But after two years of building a successful magazine, Jeff is still wandering the woods taking photographs so he can give nature back to people through the pages he publishes.

You can visit Jeff’s magazine at naturalcommunitiesmag.com.

The transition to Fair Trade production by growers, mainly in Colombia, Kenya, and Ecuador, is a huge improvement for workers at large flower plantations.

Production to satisfy the 19.5 billion dollar cut flower and plant market is labor and chemical intensive.  Workers at non-certified plantations often suffer from repeated exposure to toxic insecticides and herbicides.  When the crush for holiday shipments is at it’s peak, workers can be forced to work up to 18 hours without overtime pay to deliver flowers in time for big days like Valentine’s Day. 

Did you know that 90 percent of all gift flowers purchased in the US are given to women and that most of the floriculture workers on Fair Trade plantations are women?  It’s a parallel that demands mention.

Fair Trade in flower production directly benefits the women who make it successful.  In additon to a living wage for all it’s workers, certification requires employee benefits including 12 weeks paid maternity leave and childcare. 

Certification also alleviates a heinous practice common in modern agriculture — exposing workers to toxic chemicals.  Floriculture is the most chemical intensive agricultural practice in the world.  Studies have found over half of flower plantation workers showed signs of chemcial poisoning in countries like Ecuador. 

Plantations engaged in Fair Trade commit to reducing chemical use and provide saftey measures for workers like protective clothing.  Organic practices are becoming more widely used, but since flowers are simply admired instead of consumed, the transition has been slow in taking root.  While organic practice has not even been tried in production of the most common crops like carnations and lillies, organic practices continue to spread.

Fair Trade Flowers are readily available.  FTD, 1-800-FLOWERS, and even Sam’s Club offer them online.  Grocery chains including GIANT Food Stores, King’s Super Markets, and Whole Foods Market, offer them in their Floral sections. 

So the next time you want to say something nice, say it with Fair Trade flowers!

Keep shopping your good values!

If your tree needs sprucing up, we have a whole new section of ornaments this holiday season.  Check out our Brushkin animals from the Philippines.  These irresistible animals will become loyal holiday friends. You can have the moon and the stars keeping watch over your tree with our golden filigree ornaments from Nepal. 

Sometimes a great scarf is as good as a warm friend on cold winter outings.  Our Alpaca scarves come in rich and inviting colors.  I think it’s the perfect gift for anyone.  If you are like me, I rarely give clothing as gifts because size and personal tastes are always a dilemma, but I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t enjoy wrapping up in one of these!

You’ll find new jewelry on our site as well. If you’re into bold and chunky, we have two necklaces that make a statement.  Both are made from dyed tagua nut.  Tagua (also known as vegetable ivory) is solid, beautiful and makes our slice and chunky style necklaces a fascinating choice.  

And if cats are your fancy, we have a little friend for you.  Our new sterling silver cat pendant from Nepal is a perfect gift for cat lovers.

I hope you enjoy discovering our newest items, and remember…

Keep shopping your good values.

Businesess, as I have discovered, can be a huge consumer of all kinds of things from paper products to electricity and water.  In the shipping industry, for example, nearly every finished good you can think of is transported in a cardboard box.  Empty cardboard boxes can pile up at an astonishing rate.  

We keep a good number of the boxes we receive from wholesalers and use them to pack up customer’s purchases or ship orders we receive over the internet.  And they come in handy to store merchandize and supplies.  We do our best not to contribute to our local landfill. 

Even one of our wholesalers helped me out last week.  Minga Fair Trade Imports is in constant need of boxes for shipping.  So, after a visit, they were kind enough to take some of our largest boxes and bubble wrap off my hands.  Our back room is a little tidier and I feel better about not throwing away more boxes and packing.  

Almost exactly two years ago, when we were getting ready to open the store, we needed fixtures on a shoestring budget.   Mostly out of necessity, but also out of a desire to tackle waste, we went dumpster diving across the street behind a clothing store that was closing.

Dumpster diving is hard, dirty work, but we snagged some real finds.  Though you probably could not tell just by wandering around our store, many of the fixtures we use were saved from the landfill.   A little cleaning, imagination, and some paint worked wonders. 

An old vanity topped with discarded shutters became a jewelry display, while an abandoned tie rack is now a beautiful scarf display.  With a little care and creativity, a stack of dusty relics became valued display pieces. 

It takes constant effort.  This year I found great printed shopping bags made from recycled paper, but it required some thought and research.   But I’m happy to know that our customers will walk out of our store just as green as they came in. 

Keep shopping your good values! 

It’s easy to forget that there are lots of places in the world where people have none of the things I just mentioned.   They get up wondering about their safety and how to meet their daily needs. 

In times like these, a little perspective is good for the soul. 

Our government is regularly using the “T” word — as in trillion dollars – to describe the amount of money it will take to bail us out of our current financial mess.   It’s a number that bears little resemblence to any reality in our daily lives.  So how much is that really?  If you stacked up a trillion pennies, the stack would reach past the moon to a height of 986,426 miles. 

Back here on earth, let’s compare a trillion dollars to the amount of money it takes to sustain a worker in say, Kenya.   The living wage in that country is somewhere between $5-10 per day — so a worker there might be able to sustain themselves for a month on the cash you have in your wallet or purse right now.  

The national hangover from the housing bubble and our financial crisis will pass, and while there is probably more pain ahead, it teaches us once again that just because we can live beyond our means for a time, doesn’t mean we should.  

Shopping is not on many people’s minds in these tense days of serious financial reconsideration,  but we’re here when you want to join hands with artisans around the world to change the world – one purchase at a time. 

It was almost like December here again recently with the arrivel of more Tropical Salvage furniture and other distinctive items.

We have been offering beautiful Tropical Salvage hardwood furniture here in the shop for nearly a year now. It never fails to start conversation with our new customers. Each piece is made from salvaged wood in Indonesia — either from demolished buildings, or logs that are literally mined from where they fell and were buried by mud flows or ash falls. Some of the recovered wood is ancient and reveals the beginnings of mineralization.

Our pieces range from a practical wine cabinet to carved wooden boxes perfect for tabletop storage. We have tables, sideboards, chairs, occasional tables, and coffee tables on display in our store. For the first time, we will soon begin offering some of these items online.

From the moment we opened our shop nearly two years ago, Haitian metalwork has been a popular item in our store. Tough steel from discarded oil drums is cut and hammered into distinctive designs. Our stunning Sun Wall Hangers are made from this metal and then painted in striking colors to bring out the highlights of the shaped and embossed surface.

We’ve also added wonderful greeting cards with a story that fits our mission perfectly. The women of Original Tea Bag Designs collect used tea bags, dry them, then paint them for their fascinating cards. The cooperative gives work to previously unemployed women living near Cape Town, South Africa. I couldn’t agree more with their motto. “When life gives you tea bags… make art.”

Look for exciting new items here at Driftless Fair Traders through the Fall and Holiday season. Fair Trade has never been a better choice.

Keep shopping your good values!

It takes a hardened first-hand account to bring home the miserable chaos that rules in much of Afghanistan.   I just got an inside look at Afghanistan from Sarah Chayes, a founder of the Arghand Cooperative in Kandahar.   She sometimes sends missives to Arghand’s retail partners.    

There is a brittle frustration in her “Notes from the Field,” dated August 22.  In a report that pressed on my heart, she wrote in part:

I’m feeling a little funny again, that slight pounding of the heart upon the instant of awaking in the morning, sleep broken when the dogs bark at night, that sense that something is brewing…

Little of what she narrates of life in Kandahar sheds hope for the situation there.  She feels that the recent jailbreak and tandem attack on Arghandab by the Taliban had little to do with territory and everything to do with sending a loud warning.  

The message they intended to deliver to the local population came out in stereo: we can come in here when we want to.  If you’ve been collaborating with the government or the foreigners, we’ll know about it.  We’ll string you up by the heels long before ISAF gets around to mounting a counter-attack.  Ordinary people make up the audience that matters in this fight.  For them, the menace of the Taliban message, as expressed in the June assault, couldn’t have been more convincing.

Sarah has been arguing for years that the Karzai government is threatening the future of the country as much as the Taliban.  Corruption, self-interest, and double dealing with the Taliban, have put the average Afghan in the middle of a no-win situation.  Afghans are now forced to chose between competing evils.

In the midst of all the turmoil, the cooperative continues making the essential oils for their wonderful soap.  Often they are running their presses at odd hours when electricity is available.  Sarah reports the cooperative is just about finished planning and paying for a solar electrical system that will gain them independence from the unreliable local grid.  

Still, the future of any enterprise in Afghanistan, including Arghand, is tenuous.  But we keep hope in play by supporting Arghand while we pray for change.  

Keep shopping your good values.

CorpWatch calls greenwashing “the phenomena of socially and environmentally destructive corporations, attempting to preserve and expand their markets or power by posing as friends of the environment.”

There is a raging debate in the environmental and business communities about what really constitutes greenwashing. Even more prickly is the debate about whether calling out corporate powers is useful in driving American business to become more sustainable.

While it may seem obvious that putting SUVs in natural settings and implying they are somehow good for the environment is just outright deception, most claims of greenwashing are not clear cut.

General Motors is often accused of greenwashing by promoting its electric car, the Volt, that is not yet available for sale. Yet it would hardly make sense for GM to wait until 2010 to market a car they know will be in production by then.

Most critics of corporate green initiatives seem to be playing a zero sum game. They are not unhappy with corporate moves toward sustainability, but they complain that progress is not far or fast enough. Given the explosion of public awareness in the past decade, but the slow pace of change in public habits, how realistic is it to expect change to proceed any faster?

And how green does a company have to be before it avoids the risk of being labeled as hypocritical. That’s what a lot of them are wondering.

Much of the debate is encapsulated in Jeffrey Hollander’s blog, The Inspired Protaganist. Hollander, President of Seventh Generation has had an ongoing debate with Joel Makower at GreenBiz.com. Pragmatism and principle battle it out in this particular post and the comments that follow.

Hollander and Makower both have valid points, and the passion of their arguments speaks to what’s at stake as American business struggles to embrace necessary change.

Keep shopping your good values!

We invite you to have these adventures and more.

Of course, we don’t really have elephant poo, but we do have wonderful cards and boxes from Thailand made of elephant poo for you to hold.  Yes, you heard me right.   The dung is first dried completely and then thoroughly rinsed.   The remaining fibrous material, from the plants elephants eat, is mixed with natural bonding agents and then formed into sheets to dry. 

And if you’ve never been to Nepal, you can still take home fragrant incense made from native ingredients growing in Nepalese valleys.  Glimpse the colors of Ecuador in our fine cotton blend fabrics, or take a Llama to bed with you.  We have Teddy Bears made with natural re-claimed Alpaca fur.  

So, you see, the adventures are endless and the connections with indigenous craftspeople are infinite.   Spend your summer having a little adventure.  Come to our store and travel the world!

Keep shopping your good values!

The items we carry come from all over the world and it would be impossible for me to track them all.  That’s why certification organizations like the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International are so important.

FLO International certifies mostly agricultural producers and workers through 20 certification organizations that joined forces in 2004 to synchronize standards and represent under a single recognizable brand. 

You probably recognize this logo from quite a few Fair Trade products. If you want to view some other Fair Trade logos to look for, check out this Wikipedia entry.

We obtain products primarily through members of the Fair Trade Federation.  That group requires their members to go through an application process that focuses on their Fair Trade practices.  When we offer FTF member products like our colorful blouses from Minga Fair Trade Imports, we can channel that trust to you our customers. 

Unfortunately, there are occasional abuses. Workers may not be paid the standard wages, or products may be labeled as Fair Trade when they are not.  Some unscrupulous behavior is inevitable, but it is light years ahead of a system that generally embraces the bottom line over any other concern.  

Sometimes we decide that we can’t wait for, or don’t need, certification to partner with a cooperative.  We contacted Arghand Cooperative on the suggestion of a customer.  Though they are not certified by any organization, we felt we had to connect you to their wonderful soaps and oils so that this foothold of stability and economic progress in Afghanistan can endure. 

Trust, yet verify, someone once said.   Well, we’re doing both.   

Keep shopping your good values!