So Fair Trade or Fair Trader?

I've been working on a project investigating organic fair trade coffee, tracing the bean from the growers through the various intermediary steps terminating with the consumer. Its been a long and complex route with new facts learned at every step. With each bean of knowledge I gain the complexity grows.

The question that kept arising was "What is Fair Trade and what does it really signify?"

Today I spent the afternoon talking with Mark of Conscious Coffee who helped answer these questions. A local roaster with over 12 years in the industry, Mark is on his way to Aceh, Sumatra to visit some of the same coffee growers we met this past summer. We thought it might be good to share our experience and get his take on the confusion behind the fair trade label.

So why are there so many fair trade labels and products out there and what is the difference?

Fair Trade is a certification that provides rules regarding pesticide use, workers treatment..etc that growers must meet in order to get the Fair Trade label. Much of the coffee Mark at Conscious Coffee buys comes from cooperatives who have invested their time and energy into creating a high quality coffee bean for the specialty coffee market that includes conforming to the regulations for fair trade and organic certifications.

They are the Fair Traders.














Conscious coffee and other roasters like it make a conscious decision to invest in these communities not because they have the best tasting bean or because they offer the best priced fair trade organic coffee. They invest in these communities because these cooperatives are making a long term commitment to produce high quality coffee that will help to support their community and improve their lifestyle. This intention is important to both sides of the conscious coffee market. Fair traders want to help facilitate this process. Its not "Profit Over People" coined by Noam Chomsky, but profit working for people.

On the consumer side of this relationship the connection from the cup of coffee they buy to the grower becomes transparent. They can trace that cup of coffee directly from the region of the world where the coffee was grown, to the cooperative, and often down to the farmer and village who grew the beans.

The gist of this is that by consciously choosing to buy traceable beans you invest not just in yourself and your immediate pleasure, but in the future of these people and communities laboring to provide these products for your consumption. (Yes, this is a simplistic way to look at it because the issues surrounding coffee growers is so complex and transcends political as well as socioeconomic concerns, but this is also an important way to understand these relationships between our consumption and their production).











A Fair Trader is a person or business who's idea of success is wrapped up in the success and sustainability of those communities that produce the products they sell.
Other retailers offer Fair Trade coffee but they are simply outlets for marketing this product without a connection to the source. The money they make never makes it back to the origin or growers because there is no partnership involved. These large retailers don't know their growers, the regions or the concerns of the coffee growers. The growers have no voice.

Fair Traders like Conscious Coffee considers the producers and communities as integral parts of their business and are invested in improving not only their lives but the lives of the farmers as well.

The Fish is Gone: Technology Paradox Killed it.

My fish died today.
He was just a goldfish I won at a fair, oh about 10 years ago. So I suppose he was old and it was time but I blame his death on the technology paradox.

Technology simplifies life by providing choices and functions not otherwise offered, yet that very simplicity requires a increase of operations and capabilities that often are too complex to control, requiring innovative and equally complex design to translate it's functionality.

In short, somewhere I must have misread instructions, misinterpreted directions or become confused about the affordance, constraints, and mapping of the care required for my goldfish and it's habitat.
I gave it food, although maybe too much food at times. Then I wasn't sure just exactly how much chemical I was supposed to add to the water to de-chlorinate it. As for the algae, how much was too much?

Come to think of it, there are dozens of things, technological things that produce background static and stress in my life for the basic reason they are not simple enough to understand and operate.
My digital watch/timer, my DVD player clock display, my alarm clock, my new touch screen cell phone, the menu table of my digital camera, my computer...to name a few.

I tend to use these objects only in a few prescribed ways that I, through trail and error and through reading the manual, have been able to mentally map. It's like learning a new language each time. I look for ways to naturally map these objects' functions based on how I intuitively work. Most often this mapping is not natural but based on my previous experience with the earlier generations of these products.

Occasionally a product comes along that requires no heavy sighing (the price I pay for being technologically up to date). For example, the i Pod is a quick study, easily mapped mentally because the functions mimic natural behavior. Not only that, it creates an enjoyable interface that encourages use because it is fun. I'm referring to the navigation wheel. I love the way it turns in a circle, the sound it makes and the simple tree structure of the database.

When faced with the ever expanding number of new technologies, I feel an affinity with De Cervantes' Don Quixote and Thoreau's Walden. I want to hide in the wilderness or attack these modern windmills but technology is not the over bearing all consuming monster that is taking over our lives. It provides me great advantages and comfort. The design and implementation of that technology is what pushes me to consider a more simple life, where my time is not consumed by bad design. Choices and varieties have become a burden in ways I never dreamed of.

I often wonder as technology progressed throughout the ages, was there such an abundance of things and choices that advancement was hamstrung like in this more modern era? Did the blacksmiths in the Middle Ages continue to use tools that were difficult to operate or inadequate for the job? Or were these badly designed objects quickly tossed aside in favor of more efficient better designed tools? I think the consequences of bad design was more immediate back then, seen in outcomes of wars or survival over harsh winters.

Nowadays our technology acts as a buffer preventing us from leaping over design disasters immediately into more workable designs. We must continually muddle through because the consequences are not clear. If my current MP3 player interface is difficult to navigate, I will still manage to survive the winter. I can build my Taj Mahal and no one will wonder why. This is the second level of the technology paradox. Like a tornado it spins within itself creating more things that take more time that create more need for things.

Give me sleek, well designed, naturally mapped objects and I will consider dismounting my horse and abandoning my spear to embrace the modern world once more. As we move away from the obsession with technology like a child in a candy store wanting everything all at once, I think we can transition into a world where the important choices are around time and not things.

Good, thoughtful design plays an important role.

To read more on this subject:

Donald Norman writes about "The Design of Everyday Things"

Sumatra or Bust

For the next month we will be in Sumatra Indonesia touring coffee plantations, exporter warehouses and various other locals to trace the developed world consumption of coffee back to the producers. Here we will explore the similarities of our challenges and hopes, the diversity of values and expectations. This project is an extension of the concept of Reproduction over Production. How does this idea fare in the face of some tight economic and social realities?

For the full story as it unfolds check out our blog:
Sumatra or Bust

Coffee, Cinnamon, Paper and Orangutans, what do they all have in common?

Reproduction over Production...is it only a dream?
What does this mean?















This is where a society produces only as much product, uses only as many resources as can be reproduced or renewed readily.
Our current capitalist economic system has been borrowing from the future for centuries. We've cut down our old growth forests, sterilized our soil, polluted our oceans and air, all in the name of profit. Money.
Nothing wrong with that as long as these resources last. They are our natural capital and need to be accessible on some level for profit. This has always worked because our world population was relatively small and the level of our resource usage has never been greater than the ability of the Earth to renew itself.
Not anymore.
The current economic model will lead to our destruction unless the paradigm shifts.

This is an interesting time to be alive. It is on par with the shift during the 15 century that occurred in the scientific world with the help of Francis Bacon. He created a methodology, the scientific method, that pioneered a inductive way of thinking. It changed the way people thought, the fundamental way they looked at things. it ushered in the scientific era.

Our wealth in the developed world insulates most of us from the hard edges of this type of change.
We don't see first hand the dwindling limits of the world's resources.
We don't experience first hand the consequences.
We can't really relate to the reality of this process because our societal systems support and protect most of us.

I'm on my way to Sumatra, Indonesia to visit coffee cooperative, Orangutan infested rain forest, illegal Palm Oil plantations, and cinnamon orchards popping up inside preserve boundaries.
I want to look at the edges of this change and see first hand the issues, complexity and the people. How are the people coping? What are their needs and how might I, as a great consumer, help them? Can we in the developed world shift our habits enough to include these people in our greater vision of a sustainable, reproductively rich world?




http://www.gopetition.com.au/petitions/orangutan.html

Admissions of Foolishness

After many decades on this earth you would think I would know my own desires. With thoughts of meaning and worth bubbling through my electrified nerve highways I missed the point. I created "nice" or "splendid". A simple miscalculation yet when applied to fragile new growth, devastating.












I have yet to bring in the couch of sympathy off the porch of my ego. More foolishness embedded in previous foolishness. What matters is the clock is ticking and I am spending time the way I prefer.
Buried deep beneath everyone's exotic plumage are hidden desires that wield a particularly deliberate force. "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts..." Schumann.












This is a divine manifestation.
Like a mandatory lunch under the bodhi tree.

Transformation by Fire

A couple of months ago there was a fire in the foothills near my home. It scorched one of my favorite walking trails. Two weeks ago I finally managed to get out there and explore. What I saw wasn't my familiar trail, but a changed landscape. The area was so rocky. The fire had burned the tall softly flowing grasses that hid the rocks. Those unusual stumps and decaying logs were left as piles of ashes. I could now see how the trail wound up and around the mountain slopes. With the grass and some of the trees burnt to cinders I had a clear view into the distance.

I thought to lament the loss of my favorite trail and the feelings I associated with traveling it. But then I realized I was fortunate to be given a perspective that was unique. A view into the underbelly of this area. This rawness, realness, not dressed up and served on silver was this piece of earth I thought I new but had only bothered to glimpse it at the surface. Things were different one level deeper but I hadn't seen it.













I experienced the process of the transformation of an artist to be like this fire. Things are painful. They are stripped away. You're left raw and vulnerable but there is something real, new and elemental about what's left. It the essence of who you are.
This wasn't something to grieve or bemoan, but a place to begin anew, refreshed. Once I learned to re contextualize my experience, I could see the path in front of me more clearly. I could begin to grow again.

Eco Conscious Design

Eco friendly design.

Is the role of an eco conscious designer solely limited to the products they use and provide for clients?

Eco design begins with the cultural understanding of a product and its context?

Bringing awareness into our business practice of ways of living in respect to others, other environments, businesses, cultures..etc is a key component in operating a sustainable business. Although profit is major, creating a platform of sustainable practice is no longer an option in today's business environment. Wal-Mart once reviled for its business practices involving employee treatment and resource usage, is now leading the industry in implementing energy reduction methods. Scale has a lot to do with Wal-Mart's new position. Simply changing all their lighting to compact fluorescence bulbs has saved them millions and garnered them new respect for leading the way. What brought about this transformation? Public pressure and economic pressures related to rising energy costs.

Eco conscious design is more a question of either choosing a reactionary business strategy or being a leader in the business world by creating a viable business model demonstrating the effectiveness of sustainability and eco consciousness that does not value profit over people.

Inauguration 2009 : A Suspension of Cynicism

This year has been one of extremes where belief, collective and individual has figured prominently.
As an artist belief is a word I am intimately familiar with on both sides of the spectrum. I am often given to letting the neutrinos, dust, universe, energy...etc do their work in the absence of immediate inspiration.
Question: when has immediate anything especially inspiration ever become a reasonable expectation?
Segue to politics of today Tuesday January 20th 2009.
Something has happened today through collective belief, thought, intention, that puts life in perspective, on the knife edge of meaning.
Barak Obama as President of the United States is the result of intention and belief in ( insert your ideas here) through out the population, individual and mass.
I feel proud, once again, as if I was somehow responsible just because of my belief.
For today at least may we suspend cynicism.

Goodbye 2008

I was listening to Geoff Nunberg at NPR talking about
the word of the year.
He chose "Joe".
He went through the history of the use of Joe, the common man, GI Joe, good ole Joe, Say it ain't so Joe, Joe six pack, Joe blow... Fascinating.
So I asked myself what would be my word of the year?


epistemology?
integration?
heterodoxy?
infrastructure?
all these words surfaced because of investigations into my thesis topic. But one particular word came to mind in the latter part of this year that speaks more powerfully to me than any other:

re.lief –noun

1.	alleviation, ease, or deliverance through the removal of pain, distress, oppression, etc.

2.	a means or thing that relieves pain, distress, anxiety, etc.

3.	money, food, or other help given to those in poverty or need.

4.	something affording a pleasing change, as from monotony.

5.	release from a post of duty, as by the arrival of a substitute or replacement.

6.	the person or persons acting as replacement.

7.	the rescue of a besieged town, fort, etc., from an attacking force.

8.	the freeing of a closed space, as a tank or boiler, from more than a desirable amount of pressure or vacuum.

9.	Feudal Law. a fine or composition which the heir of a feudal tenant paid to the lord for the privilege of succeeding to the estate.

10.	Literature. a. a distinct or abrupt change in mood, scene, action, etc., resulting in a reduction of intensity, as in a play or novel.

11. on relief, receiving financial assistance from a municipal, state, or federal government because of poverty or need.