Spoiler Alert

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, everybody’s favorite secret agent, James Bond, fought villains like Dr. No, an evil scientist out to sabotage U.S. missile tests, and Mr. Big, a Soviet agent using pirate treasure to finance espionage in America. But as Bond’s friend Mathis tells him in Quantum of Solace, “When one is young, it’s easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. As one gets older, the villains and heroes get all mixed up.”

The reference is to a shady new Bond villain, agent of the Quantum organization – Dominic Greene. In public, Greene is a leading environmentalist whose organization, Greene Planet, buys up large tracts of land for ecological preserves. But behind the scenes, Greene has another agenda. As he says to his co-conspirators, “This is the most valuable resource in the world and we need to control as much of it as we can.”

The film makes a number of plays on the assumption that the resource in question is oil – but oil is so…twentieth century.

By the time Bond has pursued Greene from Italy to Haiti, from Haiti to Austria, and crash-landed his plane in a sink-hole in the high, barren desert of Bolivia, we make the discovery that this vital resource is – surprise! – water.

Colluding with Greene is a cast of evil characters taken straight from the history books. We have General Medrano, the ex-dictator of Bolivia, to whom Greene says, “You want your country back? My organization can give it to you.” We have the U.S. Ambassador, myopically sticking to the familiar program: “Okay, we do nothing to stop a coup, and you give us a lease to any oil you find.” And we have the British foreign office, continually wrangling with M15, Bond’s spy agency. When Bond’s boss, M, tells him that Greene is not an environmentalist but a villain, the foreign Minister says, “If we refused to do business with villains, we’d have almost no one to trade with.”  Ain’t it the truth.

The fact that Quantum of Solace makes water the villain’s object of greed, replacing oil, gold, diamonds, and mutually assured destruction, is telling of the point we’ve reached. More telling still is the fact that our villain’s cover has him acting as an environmentalist, the ultimate corporate greenwasher. The fact that the action winds up in Bolivia – the country where, in real life, both Bechtel and Suez have tried and failed to take control of community water resources during and shortly after the reign of former-dictator-turned-neoliberal President Hugo Banzer – brings the plot frighteningly close to reality.

If only the water movement had a few organizers with the physique, the gadgets, and the, er, style of Bond. While we have many great documentaries telling the story of the global water wars, including this year’s Flow and Blue Gold, one is forced to wonder if 007 does a greater service to the water movement than even our most highly talented documentarians. After all, who better than Hollywood to characterize the greenwashing corporate water profiteers as straight up evil, sans the need to justify the hyperbole?

Matieu Amalric, the actor who played Dominic Greene, wanted to wear make-up for the role, but director Marc Forster “wanted Greene not to look grotesque, but to symbolize the hidden evils in society.” Similarly, the original screenplay had Greene having some “hidden power.” But in the final cut, the director seems to have decided that corporate power was power enough.

One wonders if Dominic Greene – had he not died drinking motor oil to quench his thirst in the Bolivian desert – might give the keynote speech at the upcoming World Water Forum in Istanbul. After all, the World Water Council that puts on the forum is presided over by Loïc Fauchon, a former executive at one of the French subsidiaries of Suez, the world’s largest private water corporation.

As we learn from the WWF website, “One of the benefits of joining the WWC is the Council's ability to influence decisions related to world water management that affect organizations, business, and communities.” Perhaps their secret meetings will also be attended by executives of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose recent partnership with Coca-Cola aims to help the global soft-drink giant become “the most efficient company in the world in terms of water use,” with “every drop of water it uses…returned to the earth or compensated for through conservation and recycling programs.” And, with this blending of fact and fiction, it would hardly be surprising to find Greene’s signature on the CEO Water Mandate, which has companies with such devastating environmental track records as Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, Unilever, and Nestle pledging to “help address the water challenge faced by the world today.”

When M, Bond’s overweening boss at M15, finds out about Quantum, she demands, “What the hell is this organization, Bond? How can they be everywhere and we know nothing about them?”

Well, my darling M, the answer is simple: like transnational corporations, and like the large NGO’s that work with the private sector to reform its practices and green its reputation, and like the International Finance Institutions whose interests are increasingly endangering the United Nations’ mandate to defend and protect human rights, they can be everywhere because their particular form of villainy works best when hidden in plain sight.

Thankfully, the world’s water is safe, because, behind the scenes, secret agent 007 is on the job.

-Jeff Conant
e-mail • bio

Want a new way to teach your kids and students about farmed fish? Food & Water Watch  has just come out with a new animation, “Fishy Business,” available online
as a fun and easy-to-use resource for parents and educators to teach their children about the potential dangers of fish farming.

 The animation describes in detail the process of fish farming. Specifically, it shows the effects of pollution, overfishing, and the cramped and unhealthy conditions in fish farms, as well as how fish feed is altered with antibiotics and growth hormones. Parasites and disease that are present as a result of the farming can also be spread to wild fish. The animation describes a variety of other problems also caused by this practice, in a way that is comprehensive, without being overwhelming – making it an ideal educational tool.

Recently the National Organic Standards Board – a panel of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – passed a rule allowing farmed fish to be labeled as “organic” – despite the fish farming process being incompatible with organic standards. This goes to show that it is all the more pressing for parents and children alike to understand that some fish being sold in grocery stores, which may bear the seemingly safe label of “organic,” may actually be unsafe and unsustainable. 

Check out our website to learn more about the dangers of fish farming, or to sign a petition asking Congress to protect our health, oceans, and coastal economies.  You can also check out our seafood buying guide that recommends safe and healthy seafood choices.

– Sofía Baliño

Campuses across the country compete for placement on the cutting edge
of climate action. Washington University of St. Louis' recent switch away from bottled water consumption demonstrates an easy green initiative propelling the institution toward a more sustainable learning environment.

Kicking the bottle, the Washington Bears united with the city of St. Louis in
celebrating award-winning tap water.  Just this August, Food & Water Watch joined St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay in providing 5,000 reusable drinking water bottles to city employees, banning the purchase of bottled water by city departments, and issuing a call for a federal trust fund for water infrastructure.

While most campus campaigns kicking the bottled water habit start with
students, Washington University channeled the “Tap It” campaign through its Office of Sustainability. “Tap It” has conducted outreach this fall to win the hearts, minds, and drinking glasses of the campus community, emphasizing the importance of environmentally-conscious consumer choices that reduce carbon emissions.

At the start of next semester, Student Union Academic Affairs Chair Kady McFadden plans to apply for a $10,000 grant from Brita Water Filtration Systems to increase campus accessibility to drinking water. The campaign currently plans to install new sources for drinking water around campus.

"Tap It" efforts counter the bottled water industry's deceptive marketing, which has eroded consumer confidence in public water systems.  With the deluge of advertising over the last decade "bottle-washing" America's youth, up to fifty percent of consumers drink bottled water, believing that it is safer even though the US has some of the finest public water in the world and tap is more highly regulated than bottled water.

Sip by sip, turning on the tap and filling up at the fountain, thirsty Bears fans support a functioning and publicly-accountable water system, working towards ensuring everyone clean, affordable water at one-one thousandth the cost of a plastic bottle.

– Amy Dowley

The holiday season is approaching, which means that it’s time to look for new ways to spice up old traditions. And just in time for the holidays, Food & Water Watch is releasing its very own sustainable seafood recipe cookbook entitled “Fish & Tips.” The recipes featured are provided by fishermen, chefs, and some of our best submissions from our recent “Get Cookin’ Recipe Contest,” and are all meant to be cooked using sustainable seafood recommended from our Smart Seafood Guide.

While it may be hard to imagine the holidays with seafood, consider this: at the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and the Native Americans actually ate seafood along with their turkey. Whole Foods is putting that concept into practice by having their very own “Shrimpsgiving” – a period of special prices on their seafood, specifically shrimp, so that consumers can have a variety of options for the holiday season. Keep in mind, however, that not all of the offerings at Whole Foods are fair game in terms of sustainability.

If you do choose to buy your seafood there, be sure to only buy those items listed as “safe” in our Smart Seafood Guide and the foods listed on it. For more information about Whole Foods and our concerns with some of their offerings, click here.

When in doubt – try to buy locally instead, and be sure to ask questions about how the fish were caught, treated, and raised. Be sure to choose wild-caught over farmed, and local over imported; choose those that have been exposed to little or no contaminants, and ideally fresh over frozen. If farmed, choose those that require fewer inputs. For more, click here.

Stay tuned for more information on the cookbook’s release and how to obtain your very own copy for the holiday season!(Coming soon.)

Imagine a farm in the ocean that produces fish containing PCBs and other toxins, and dumps chemical-laden waste directly into surrounding waters. Does that sound organic to you? According to the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) – a commission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – fish from these “factory farms of the sea” should be able to carry the USDA Organic label. In fact, this week the board is meeting in Washington, DC to recommend allowing fish from open water aquaculture operations to be certified as organic.

But organizations within the organic, ocean conservation, consumer and food safety communities oppose this proposed decision because the principles and practices behind open water aquaculture –growing tens of thousands of fish in cages anchored to the seafloor - are simply incompatible with basic organic standards.

What exactly are these organic standards? Ecological balance and conserving biodiversity. So now let’s take a look at aquaculture and see if it meets these guidelines. While some day certain carefully controlled aquaculture practices may fit this description, currently, open water aquaculture does not. The farming of carnivorous finfish – like salmon, cobia, Atlantic cod and halibut - in open net pens using wild fish in feed threatens wild fish populations and the marine environment.

In addition to dumping pollution and producing contaminated fish, these ocean fish farms release genetically inferior fish that might mate with wild fish and use massive amounts of fishmeal made from depleted wild fish stocks. In this system, inputs, outputs, health and animal welfare cannot be monitored and controlled, completely contradicting organic principles such as promoting biodiversity and minimizing environmental impact.

Food & Water Watch is making sure these problems are taken seriously. Today we hosted an event where Consumers Union, Center for Food Safety and Alaska Trollers Association spoke out against NOSB’s plan. You can even listen to the speeches from the groups’ representatives here.  

And just to make sure we drove the point home, we served fresh, wild-caught Alaskan salmon  - which will NOT be considered organic according to NOSB’s plan - and “swam” up the street in a “salmon run” in protest to the board’s meeting to deliver over 15,000 public comments. Just take a look at these great papier-mache salmon heads!

NOSB will be making its decision about organic fish as early as Wednesday, November 19th, so make sure to check back within the next few days about this important decision!

- Erin Greenfield
email • bio

Meet us at the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle between November 20-22! We will be there handing out free seafood guides and magnets and getting the word out about important fish issues.

Pacific Marine Expo is the largest commercial marine tradeshow on the West Coast.  Serving all aspects of the market, including commercial vessels owners, commercial fishermen, boatbuilders and seafood processors, this annual event covers it all.  If you make your living on the water, or provide services to those who do, this is your show.

-Food & Water Watch

"a last-minute assault on the public happening on multiple fronts," is how Matthew Madia, a regulatory expert at OMB Watch, referred to the administration's final deregulation efforts.

During their last days in power, President Bush and his administration are  evidently uninterested in improving their image or even maintaining it. It seemed fathomable, after multiple indications of failure, that the administration would acknowledge the incompetence of its deregulatory doctrine and, like the public, accept the need for regulation.

Unfortunately, that's nowhere near the case. Instead, they've decided to blatantly ignore consumer interest and have one last push at passing rules to further weaken our health, safety, and environmental protections.

Like frat boys ending a party at full drunken force, it looks like they are rushing to do as much as damage in as little time as they can. Perhaps they have learned something in the course of their eight years of experience – they’re attempting to set these policies up in a way that will make it difficult for the incoming administration to reverse them. If they pass a rule by December 22nd and it takes effect before Inauguration Day, the new administration will not be able to revoke it without creating a new rule, which often takes months.

In the coming weeks, Food & Water Watch will be working hard to minimize the damage the administration is expected to inflict on the public and the environment. Stay tuned for opportunities to help and take action on one important issue now: urge the USDA to protect our food labels.

–Elissar Khalek
e-mail

Just when it seemed that the melamine scare couldn’t get any worse  – we find out that the problem may be far deeper than we imagined. Eggs sold in Hong Kong, imported from mainland China, have been found to have twice the FDA’s supposed “safe limit” of melamine.

How did it get there? Apparently through contaminated feed – which means that beef, chicken, pork, and fish may also be at risk. However, U.S. and European agencies have yet to do something about it.

While Hong Kong authorities are responding by expanding their testing of products to include pork, fish, and offal products, the same sort of initiative has yet to be seen in the U.S.. And in Europe, while authorities admit to being aware of the situation, they still have not issued any sort of alert to consumers. In this they are showing an astonishing degree of willful irresponsibility, shockingly similar to FDA’s backdated (and long overdue) recall of the contaminated Koala’s March cookies. 

It gets worse. The Taiwanese government found recently that ammonium bicarbonate – used in the manufacture of cookies, bread, and some Chinese snacks – had melamine levels between 70 and 300 parts per million – when Taiwan’s legal limit is only 2.5 parts per million. While Taiwanese authorities were quick to issue a ban on the sale of this item, the fact that it took this long for it to get discovered is cause for alarm.

Clearly the current food production standards in China are not designed to ensure public health. Even worse, the Chinese authorities have been anything but forthcoming about the issue. There are media sources that report that the health department of Liaoning found melamine in local eggs at the beginning of October. These same tainted eggs had been labeled by the food safety authorities as an “organic product.” While they did order an investigation into the feed company involved, they deliberately suppressed the news from the media.

In addition, a manager from a feed company based in the central Henan province recently told the Associated Press that the practice of using melamine in feed has been going on longer than previously reported – at least seven or eight years. The fact that this sort of deception went unnoticed for so long, or worse might have been deliberately hidden from the public eye, is unacceptable. And to think that only now the world has begun to figure it out.

The assumption that leaving China to its own devices will lead them to fix the problem on their own is purely wishful thinking. More recalls are in order – but even more importantly, the inspection standards in our own country need to be vastly improved, as do those abroad. China is not the only one to blame if our own country’s federal agencies will not take the time to verify that the food it is importing is safe.

“Smithfield: Good food. Responsibly.” This is the heading at the top of the Smithfield website, trying to convince consumers that all of its environmental awards actually reflect environmental quality.  And they now have another award to add to their list of accolades – the McDonald’s first ever Sustainability Award, a prize that they actually nominated themselves for. They presumably won it for having described how they try to conserve natural resources, treat animals humanely, and ensure the health and welfare of their employees. Now if only all this were true, then this award would be a great achievement.

This is hardly the first time that Smithfield has been given a pat on the back for supposedly being environmentally friendly. On their website, they talk about being the first to receive ISO 14001 certification for its U.S. hog production and pork and beef processing facilities – presumably the “international gold standard for environmental management.” Not to mention being ranked as a “socially responsible company,” or other awards from places like the American Meat Institute or the Virginia government.  Sounds quite impressive, right?

So what’s our problem? We want to know how an organization can be considered to be environmentally friendly when it raises hogs on factory farms, creating enough waste to rival an entire city – such as the 500,000 hogs at one site that produce more waste than all of Salt Lake City. That waste is untreated, and often, it is not contained- in one case in North Carolina, millions of gallons of waste have contaminated rivers and creeks. Is that really worthy of an award? Or in this case, several?

As you can see in our report – “The Trouble with Smithfield: A Corporate Profile”  - the company has a variety of environmental and labor practices that are just unacceptable. And their impact extends even further than workers and the environment– people living near their facilities have been known to experience extensive health problems as a result, including depressed immune function, asthma, and mood disorders. That’s hardly worthy of an award.

Food & Water Watch's fish team is currently in the Gulf of Mexico region, working to bring out a variety of local voices to the Gulf Council's public hearings on aquaculture. Marianne and Sascha, two of our fishy fighters, send dispatches from their work in the north Gulf region.

We hit the ground running on Wednesday, having meetings with various local allies in Mississippi to plan our week. In the evening, we were invited as guest speakers for the local Mississippi Sierra Club chapter. We had a great discussion about ocean fish farming, and in particular concerns with use of wild fish in feed for farmed fish. About 1 billion pounds of Gulf Menhaden are already taken annually from the Gulf of Mexico – and these fish are important in the wild as food for larger wild fish, birds and other marine wildlife. The chapter is very interested in Gulf of Mexico issues, and a group of people from the meeting agreed to attend the Gulf Council public hearing Monday night! They plan to carpool down to Mobile. We also had an interview with a reporter from the Associated Press by phone. That night, we headed up to New Orleans to stay with friends.

Thursday, we spent the day hanging flyers announcing the meeting at New Orleans colleges, including Loyola and Tulane, two schools with well-known environmental programs. We contacted some professors to get the students up on the Gulf fish farming issue. A number of students have already committed to attend the Council’s comment session Monday night, so we have arranged free transportation to and from the meeting for them, and are hoping more will join us. We also spoke to a Times-Picayune reporter who expects to come to the Council meeting in Mobile from New Orleans.

Friday was a very busy day! We headed out early to drive down to the bayou – through Galliano, La Rose, Cut Off and more to meet up with some of our local fishermen friends.  We had an hour at radio station KLRZ with Ken Friedlander, the “Rajun’ Cajun,” on Talk on the Bayou, to let people know about the upcoming Council meeting and the final decision on fish farms for the Gulf. Margaret Curole from Commercial Fishermen of America joined us to talk about how ocean fish farming in the Gulf can hurt Louisiana’s coastal communities. She also detailed the horrible conditions she’s seen in fish farms while traveling internationally. We had a number of callers tell us they are very worried about fish farms in the Gulf and that they are planning to come to the Council meeting to voice their concerns. It’s sounding like the Council meeting is going to be very interesting with the various types of people planning to attend.

Early on Saturday, we met up for breakfast with some of our local allies in Gretna, a historic community on the outskirts of New Orleans. We then went downtown to catch up with our fish team colleagues Christina and Justine, who had been working in the southern Gulf. They came north for VooDoo Fest, a local music event. Our fish mascot is going to VooDoo to tell people about the Gulf Council’s plan to permit offshore aquaculture in the Gulf and collect signatures on a petition. We had a quick collective chat, then split up again – our team headed back to Biloxi, and Justine and Christina to VooDoo Fest. Our plan for Biloxi was to stop at the various docks and bait shops to tell people about the Council meeting. We hung a number of flyers and handed out many packets of information. Some people told us they hadn’t heard anything about the fish farming plan, and were very concerned.

The Gulf coast seems to be slowly rebuilding from the storms in recent years. There were a number of new houses and docks, and there were noticeably more boats in the marinas than last year at this time. One area we stopped still had no parking lot – just some gravel and sand. We learned that in such cases, we should park the car elsewhere and walk to the docks – we got the car stuck in the sand for a while, until some of the fishermen noticed and came to help push us out (it was a great ice-breaker!).  We stopped at the local TV and radio stations, then at the Sun-Herald newspaper office. We had a late dinner at a local seafood restaurant, then drove back to New Orleans. We are going to VooDoo tomorrow!

– Marianne Cufone and Sascha Bollag

Food & Water Watch held the Get Cookin'! sustainable seafood recipe contest to gather the best recipes for the variety of seafood choices we recommend in our Smart Seafood Guide. Over the past several weeks, we received a multitude of recipes from seafood lovers all over the place. We were so excited to see how many people out there care about what they eat and have so many creative ideas for serving it.

We judged the recipes on the basis of several criteria: first, they had to include a type of seafood that we recommend in our Smart Seafood Guide. Other criteria included healthfulness, ease of preparation, originality and of course—most importantly—deliciousness. This last factor might seem subjective, but we had a panel of dedicated judges from the Food & Water Watch staff, including our partner chef, Rocky Barnette, who gathered to cook and taste all the recipes. It took a few rounds of voting before we were able to come to final decisions on all our winners, but we finally did. Throughout the tastings, everyone’s response seemed to be the same: “yum!” According to Chef Rocky, all the recipes were well-written and very professional. All the staff judges had a lot of good things to say about every recipe.

So we’d like to congratulate all of our winners on their wonderful recipes, and thank everyone who entered for their participation and enthusiasm. Stay tuned for the winning recipes, to be featured in a forthcoming recipe booklet out in time for the holidays.

Here are our fabulous seafood chefs:

Elaine Sweet with Crazy Cajun Shrimp Etouffee Cream over Garlic Noodles
Joan Churchill with Curried Clams and Melon Salad
Clayton Jay Davis with “Idaho Meets the Sea”
Roxanne Chan with Lebanese Scallop Salad
Rosemary Johnson with Black Cod with Butter Pecan Sauce
Bev Jones with "Grillted" Pomegranate Shrimp Salad
Candy Barnhart with Puffed Golden Halibut over Zucchini "Pasta"
Francis Garland with Crab Pizzawich with Wine-Soaked Grapes
Ken Hulme with Hogfish Hoagie
Wolfgang Hanau with Alaskan Salmon and Indian Cornbread Pie
Peter Halferty with Squid Risotto

All of these winners will be receiving a copy of the recipe booklet and a snazzy Food & Water Watch chef’s apron (pictured here on several Food & Water Watch staff).

And our grand prize of $250 goes to Jane Ingraham for her San Francisco Fish Stew. Congratulations, Jane!  

To all other sustainable seafood enthusiasts—both chefs and eaters—keep your eyes peeled for recipes to come. You can also click here for more ways to get involved with sustainable seafood--help to protect our oceans from unsustainable fish farming and check out our Smart Seafood Guide for recommended buying and dining choices!

- Erica Schuetz
email • bio

In preparation for the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s upcoming public hearing on open ocean aquaculture, Food & Water Watch’s fish team has been traveling around the Gulf Region speaking with fishermen, students and others about the plan.

For the past couple days Christina and I have been driving around Mobile Bay – from Mobile through Bon Secour, Foley Beach and Gulf Shores. We started out the day stopping by a couple bait and tackle shops, where most people were surprised to hear about the plan and couldn’t believe that it was already coming up for vote. It’s shocking to imagine that a plan with so many negative ramifications for commercial fisherman, shrimpers, recreational fisherman, coastal communities and consumers in general hasn’t even been publicized.

Next, we made our way down to Pelican point where we found some people net fishing off the end of the road. One – the “mayor” and “dock master” told us he didn’t understand why anyone would talk about putting resources into building farms in the Gulf – which will add more pollution – when we need to spend our resources cleaning it up.

Traveling down the coast from there we made our way to four fish houses. The first specialized in Royal Red Shrimp  – a deep red, deep-water shrimp considered a local delicacy in Alabama. At the others we saw red snapper and brown shrimp. People there were concerned about having fishing grounds restricted by industrial fish farms and frustrated about being pushed out the decision making process for a plan that could make or break their livelihood. Sadly, fishery decisions being made behind closed doors isn’t anything new to them.  Various fishing regulations – combined with fuel prices and competition from imported products – have already pushed many men and women out of the fishing industry. Open ocean aquaculture could be the last straw for those who remain.

To keep the gulf waters open to fishermen – and to keep wild, clean, green, safe seafood on our plates – we need people to tell the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council not to move forward with the plan. For those of you in the Mobile, Alabama area, your chance is on Monday October 27th at the Renaissance Riverfront Hotel.

- Justine Williams

A special congratulations goes out to one of our board members, Maude Barlow, whose impressive activism career recently led to her appointment as senior water advisor to the U.N. president!  In addition to the award-winning film, Blue Gold, which is based on her book,  Maude Barlow has written 15 other books and received six honorary doctorates. To add to her remarkable resume, she was just awarded the Citation for Lifetime Achievement from the Canadian Environment Awards, Canada's highest environmental award.

Congrats on both of these well-deserved honors, Maude!

-Food & Water Watch

Over the past several weeks, melamine has become a household name. It seems that not a day goes by without another product being recalled or suspected of contamination. All this begs the question, how did this not get discovered sooner? How did the range of products involved become so vast? Clearly China is going to have to do some fancy footwork to redeem their products in the eyes of the world. And the world must learn to respond quicker.

Recently 1,500 dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur died from eating melamine-tainted feed, leading to the development of kidney stones. All in one village. Yet this was not a first – last year, melamine-contaminated wheat gluten, a pet food ingredient made in China, caused dozens of dogs and cats in North America. Why was nothing done then?

Weeks after the food recalls in the U.S. began, Koala’s March cookies containing melamine were found on shelves in Connecticut. In Canada, Sherwood Brands Pirate’s Gold Milk Chocolate Coins were also found to have more than the supposedly “acceptable” level of melamine. Again, questions arise about our food inspection standards, and the production standards of China.

Every time we think we’ve heard the end of it, it seems that another products is discovered that has slipped through the cracks. And this isn’t just a U.S. problem or FDA failing – it’s an international issue. Australia had to order a recall of a milk drink and cake brand after tests showed melamine. Britain’s sex shop chain Ann Summers had to suspend sale of their “I Love You” sets of chocolate body spread for the same reasons. It almost makes you wonder what isn’t contaminated by melamine. It seems to be everywhere. And the potential consequences are anything but trivial, as shown by the thousands of babies that were sickened, and the unfortunate few that died, as a result of drinking tainted baby formula.

The fact that this has been allowed to continue for so long is unacceptable. While a short-term solution requires a ban of all melamine-contaminated products (not just those that meet the FDA’s arbitrary – not to mention meaningless – “safe” level of melamine), a long-term solution requires a complete overhaul of our food inspection system. In addition, we need to start holding other countries whose food we import accountable for their products, to ensure their safety and quality.

- Sofia Baliño

Last week the feature documentary Blue Gold won the Audience Choice Best Environmental Film award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Based on Maude Barlow's and Tony Clarke's book "Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water," this film brings to the forefront the unethical dealings of corporate giants, private investors, and corrupt governments that are trying to control what little is left of the world's fresh water supply. 

However, people are fighting back, trying to protect what is rightfully theirs and of their descendants. Their efforts range from lawsuits to revolutions, from local protests at schools to fighting it out at U.N. conventions, in the hopes that water is not reduced to being a commodity or a tool for manipulation. The film brings all this and more to light, not allowing anyone at fault to escape from blame.

The audience in Vancouver took notice, and we hope that the word keeps on spreading. Future showings of Blue Gold include the Planet in Focus Film Festival (October 22, 2008 in Toronto) and the Environmental Film Festival (March 22, 2009 in Washington, DC) – with hopefully more to come.

For more information, check out the Blue Gold website at http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com

- Sofia Baliño

On October 11th , our fish team ate their way through Taste of Georgetown in Washington, DC, while promoting the new Smart Seafood Guide. We had a great time working with Sea Catch Restaurant & Raw Bar and Executive Chef Chris Sgro who prepared two gourmet dishes using Food & Water Watch’s seafood recommendations from the guide. 

Chef Sgro served jumbo Gulf Shrimp wrapped in pastry & bacon with boursin cheese, along with wild Alaskan salmon tartar – both huge hits with the crowd, making it easy to talk to people waiting in the long lines about clean, green and safe seafood. Just take a look at how these delicious dishes are a feast for the eyes!

Also on-site was our soon-to-be-named fish mascot (link) who was posing for pictures and getting people to sign the “Holy Mackerel! This Plan Stinks!” petition. What exactly “stinks”? The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is voting on a plan in less than two weeks to allow industrial fish farming in Gulf waters. But their plan doesn't protect fishermen, consumers, coastal communities or the environment from the potential negative impacts of a new big industry. Our fish team is making its way down to the Gulf region to keep this bad plan from going through, and is arranging carpools to take people to the council meeting for a question and answer session for the public with the entire council.

So if you live in the Gulf, make sure to sign up and make sure your voice is heard! And for those of you who live in other parts of the country, you can still make a difference by signing the petition.

- Erin Greenfield
email • bio

 

In kicking the bottle, the Kindle conference joins a growing movement of restaurants, cities and college campuses rejecting bottled water and removing plastic bottles from public functions. Earlier this year, Food & Water Watch helped to facilitate access to tap water for 50,000 fair-goers at the inaugural Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. Food & Water Watch has developed a how-to guide, “Free Your Event from Bottled Water,” in response to a growing trend in bottled water-free event planning, including trade shows, conferences, and university events, as well as festivals and specialty events. 

 

The conference's host city of Portland, ME, joined the Take Back the Tap campaign this summer, encouraging people to drink the city’s tap water and to support local public water systems. Across the state of Maine, rural communities have received recent media attention sparked by “water wars” pitting Nestle-Poland Springs private bottling interests against the concerns of citizen groups and water activists who defend local control of community groundwater. 

 

Join the Take Back the Tap and make your next event bottle-free too! 

 

About Bioneers 

 

Bioneers is a nonprofit organization providing education on practical environmental solutions and innovative social strategies for restoring Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and healing our human communities. 2008 marks the nineteenth year for the Bioneers Conference in California and the seventh year of partnering with local, independent community groups and organizations to produce these satellite conferences. The other venues include Anchorage, AK; Baltimore, MD; Boulder, CO; Bozeman, MT; Carbondale, IL; Cleveland, OH; Detroit, MI; Grinnell, IA; Houston, TX; Logan, UT; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; New Bedford, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Spokane, WA; Traverse City, MI; and Turlock, CA.  

 

Some Bioneers featured at Kindle - The Northern New England Bioneers:

Alexandra Cousteau

Saving Our Water Planet

 

Peter Neill

 

The World Oceans Observatory

 

Russell Libby

Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association

(MOFGA) 

 

J. Carl Ganter

 

Circle of Blue

 

The conference also features a "Water Rights" workshop led by Tom Linzey, co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and CELDC organizer and water rights warrior Gail Darrell. Gail, founder of Citizens of Barnstead for a Living Democracy, pioneered the passage of the first New Hampshire