The Not for Sale twitter recently posted a link to an article from this past spring that named the world’s seven most irresponsible companies. They write –
Money isn’t everything – or is it? To most corporations, making a profit is goal number one – but some of those companies take it way too far, sacrificing the health of the planet and its inhabitants for a bigger bank balance. Far too many corporations turn a blind eye to the consequences of their destructive, exploitative practices. The worst of them are …

Are you looking for easy ways to find just businesses around you? Do you wonder if the product you are thinking of buying was fairly made? If you have an iphone, there are a couple of apps than can help you make those decisions.
Better World Shopper – an app that helps consumers vote with their dollars for the sorts of companies they want to support. From the app description – “Many companies claim to be “good corporate citizens,” but how many actually make the grade? With …

AlterNet recently posted Mike Sowden’s piece on the eight weirdest ways to go green. From eating free-range snails from your garden to solar-powered bikinis that charge your ipod, some people are getting really creative in the ways they can care for this earth. And of course, some of these eco-option fall into the “you gotta be kidding me” category. As Sowden writes, there’s “a dilemma for the eco-conscious military man: is there a sustainable way to bomb 10 shades of cr*p out of the enemy? Now …

Jonathan Blundell just posted an exchange he had with the PR people at Chipotle regarding the wages they pay to the farmers who pick their produce. Chipotle has been under much pressure recently to ensure that it’s workers are paid a fair wage. They say they are working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to attempts to bring better wages to the farmers. Agreements have been made to increase the wages of farm workers – most of who get paid nearly nothing and work in near slave-like …

From CNN.com
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) — In Pakistan’s combustible Swat Valley, some girls refuse to wear uniforms so they can make it to school without being harmed.
Other girls hide textbooks in their shawls to escape harassment.
School-age girls are among the victims in the fierce fighting between government soldiers and Taliban militants in the Swat Valley. The Pakistani government said it has flushed much of the Taliban out of the area, but some fighting persists.
Many girls remain banned from schools. Dozens of their schools have been bombed, and militants have burned …

I, along with the rest of the nation have watched in horror this past week as the details of the Jaycee Dugard captivity emerge. Very little angers me as much as hearing about the sexual assault of children. While I generally favor justice that restores criminals, cases like this almost make me want to support the death penalty or at least slow, painful castration for rapists. I can hardly imagine the damage done to Jaycee and the years of healing she and her family now face.
That said, …

from End Human Trafficking -
In 2007, a case of crucifixes purchased by St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was traced back to a factory in China where girls as young as 15 were forced to work up to 19-hour days, seven days a week. Today, Christian items from bible covers to t-shirts are being made in factorys which abuse and traffic workers. And some Christians are standing up and refusing to stand for slavery.
The Just Holy Hardware Campaign has launched this week as part of a movement to …

As the school year gets ready to kick-off, it’s time to consider how we can seek everyday justice through something as simple as how we pack our lunches.  Those plastic baggies and juice boxes add up and head straight for our landfills, but there are environmentally friendly options available.
ReusableBags.com has put together a fantastic guide to how to pack a waste-free lunch and what the benefits of doing so are -
From brown-paper lunch bags to plastic wraps and baggies to the unnecessary packaging of single-serving foods, our addiction to fast …

From the Austin-American Statesman
Austinites hope drink coasters can help battle human trafficking
Each coaster bears the story of a victim.
By Chelsea Duttweiler
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, August 08, 2009
They say they’re part of a new abolitionist movement, a wave of people dedicated to ending what they see as modern-day slavery. And they’re doing it, in part, using drink coasters at local pubs.
Austinites Shelton Green and Kester Smith, both 33, are working with seven friends to distribute coasters to bars and coffee shops with information about human trafficking.
“Trafficked people are all around us,” Green said. …

From National Geographic News -
August 5, 2009—Talk about a sea change.
From 2006 through 2009, Central Asia’s vast Aral Sea dramatically retreated, with its eastern section losing about 80 percent of its water in just four years (above, newly released NASA satellite images are animated to show the regression).
The immense body of water, which straddles Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (see map), was once the world’s fourth largest freshwater lake.
But in the past 30 years, 60 percent of the lake has disintegrated, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
In the 1960s farmers in this arid …