WAIW at IUPUI

Tomorrow I’m doing a signing on the campus of IUPUI in Indianapolis at the University Barnes & Noble. It’s from 11-1.

Be there.

Where clothes.

Know where they were made.

Here’s a campus map if you need one….

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How much will you give me for my son?

Just the other day I wrote about how travel makes the news more relevant: “If I have gained anything from my travels it’s not a well-traveled savviness, envied by others, but an increased caring.”

That being the case, when I read this story in the NY Times by on Chinese boys being bought, stolen, and sold, I couldn’t help but think of Dewan and Zhu Chun’s son Li Xin.

The crazy thing about this story is a man who bought a son didn’t think there was anything wrong with paying money for another human being until he learned that the child had been kidnapped. I try to look at the world with an open mind. My first reaction to this was repulsion, but then I try to…

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Is America ready for Fair-Trade?

Starbucks is going Fair Trade in the UK, so is Cadbury. Their U.S. counterparts aren’t. What’s up with that?

This piece in CS Monitor by Eric Marx pretty much sums it up:

…more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys.

And as I pointed out here, environmentalism and organics tend to trump fair-trade. The article confirms that:

TransFair USA, the nonprofit that licenses products to carry the fair-trade certified label on agricultural products, says it is looking into establishing standards for apparel. But fair-trade fashion faces significant hurdles in the US.

“It’s quite easy for the fiber industry to develop their own weak ecolabels in order to pull the wool…

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We care about the footprint, let’s not forget the foot

Today my feet are nice and cozy in a pair of Merrell slippers. Like 90% of shoes, they were Made in China.

This is going to be a brief Where Am I Wearing Wednesday because today I want to talk about feet more than shoes.

The Shoe:

Merrell’s corporate code of conduct – I couldn’t find one on their site. Contact them and join me in asking them what’s up with that:

The environment and labor practices both factor into my shopping decisions. I scanned your website for your corporate code of conduct and couldn’t find one. Could you please direct me to it?

Thanks,

Kelsey Timmerman


Labor conditions in the shoe industry in China
– Well, it is China. When I visited there in 2007, I met workers who…

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My Bro's Bite airing on the World Vision Report

My essay about my brother coming down with Malaria after our excursion into the Honduran jungle is airing on the World Vision Report this week. He’s fine now. I’m just glad that I could get a story out of his suffering.

One of the folks at WVR contacted me looking for a funny piece – I believe they said quirky – about malaria and wanted to know if I had anything. “Boy, do I,” I told her.

It’s not easy to do Malaria quirky, but it is easy to have fun at my brother’s expense.

The story is part of their Malaria special…

Malaria 2009: Countdown to Eradication

Malaria remains one of the world’s great killers. Every thirty seconds, a child under five dies from malaria. That contributes to…

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The good folks at the Wandering Educators who reviewed WAIW? and named me as their photographer of the month in February are giving away boatloads of cool prizes today, including an autographed copy of Where Am I Wearing? Here’s all you have to do to enter:

1. Register at www.WanderingEducators.com – it’s free and easy and keeps our site spam-free.
2. On April 20, leave a comment on ANY article on our site – you’ll be automatically entered.
3. Check in every hour on April 20 for prize updates.
4. Use Twitter to retweet details (@WanderingEds) about our giveaway and you’ll be entered for special prizes.

For more details, go here.

I hope I win something, although…

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A book that has changed the way I buy mushrooms

I’m not quite done with “Poorly Made in China” by Paul Midler, but it has already changed my life, specifically what type of mushrooms I buy. Paul is kind of the “cultural grease” that smooths business relations between factories in China and international importers.

One of the projects he works on is a bottled soap that depending on its packaging is hand soap, body wash, or bubble bath (the contents are all the same). Anyhow, after Paul sees the lack of standards and corner cutting that goes on at the factory that makes the soap, he stops using soap when he showers.

Today while shopping for groceries, Annie sent me off to get canned mushrooms. Unfortunately, all the canned mushrooms were Made in China, begging me…

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Pentagon using Tactical Garbage in pursuit of alternative fuels

The way I see it there are 3 ways that technology rapidly advances:

1) Greed – Somebody is going to make oodles of money if…

2) Space – “How the heck are we gonna win this here space race?”

3) War – “How do we kill more of them and save more of us?”

Let’s think about this in terms of our quest for alternative fuels.

Since we’re not launching poop-powered rockets into space…yet. And the green revolution has yet to fully evolve. War might be our best hope. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever write.)

Consider this piece in the Washington Post:

“Every time you bring a gallon of fuel forward, you have to send a convoy,” said Alan R. Shaffer, director of defense research and engineering at the Pentagon. “That…

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