In an earlier post, I ranted about the dreaded Traveler´s Diarrhea, or TD.

In that post, I specifically mention that if the TD lasts more than three days, then you should seek medical help, because it´s NOT going to go away on it´s own. I had to use my own advice this past week.

And a quick word of warning should you become extremely gastronomically distressed while out there in the big, wide world – remember that it is KEY that you seek medical treatment in the country in which you were sickened. Never go home feeling ill in the belly and expect the Western Medical Establishment to be able to help you.

The  country in which you acquired the disease is accustomed to dealing with it on a daily basis. Most of the time, you can march down to the corner drugstore, tell the clerk your symptoms and they will prescribe the effective treatment for you on-the-spot.

Once, I made the mistake of drinking some bad water right before I got onto a plane bound from the jungle to LAX. When I got sick, I thought, ¨Great. I´m headed to my home city, where there are the best doctors in the world!¨

Wrong. The Western Medical Establishment is great for some things -  like if you´ve been in a car wreck or need to have your internal organs put back together. But hear me . . . most know nothing about effective treatment of parasites. Actually, with global travel becoming more commonplace, the instances of traveler´s coming home with nasty parasites is ever-increasing.

My well-heeled US doctors put me through a continual battery of tests that came out negative, but I knew something was wrong. They told me I was crazy.  If you feel you have an intestinal parasite, it´s imperative that you become your own strongest advocate (even though you may not have alot of energy to do so). After six months of problematic doctor visits, I finally had a friend bring some meds back from abroad and that finally fixed it. My doctors, all the way from my general practitioner to gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai, were all well-meaning, but clueless.

This time, the problem got fixed with some meds from the drugstore. All for less than $10.00 US. My US medical file is about 2¨ thick from the time when I was sick before. I wonder how much all of that cost the insurance company. I certainly know it cost me a great deal in time, anxiety and sickness – let alone dollars. And they still weren´t able to fix it, diagnose it or listen to me, the patient. It was as though they were offended that I might be trying to diagnose myself.

Trust me, fix it in the country where you got sick.

I’ve been purposely reticent about ceremony the four months I’ve been in Peru, for a lot of reasons. I feel like now is the time to shed some light on those choices and to also open up a bit about plant medicine.

When I came back to Peru, I had a lot of inner work to do and I knew it. I was in a sad funk, fighting the same old battles with myself regarding work, money and life. It seemed like I had almost everything I wanted: living life on the road, in love, traveling with a great boyfriend, seeing and doing so many exciting things every single day – but it was like I couldn’t appreciate any of it. I was all plugged up mentally and spiritually and didn’t even know why.

I was still carrying the same old stories. I was still in shock from the whirlwind that had been 2008 – temporarily leaving Venice Beach, quitting my job, living in hotels with my cat, bouncing around for eight months. I was so stressed out that the hair on the back of my head began falling out at an alarming rate. By November of last year, I had a smooth bald spot beginning on the nape of my neck that extended halfway up the back of my head. And the hair wasn’t growing back. I was concerned. Stress releases lots of toxins into the body and mine had become a wasteland.

When I began taking part in ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies in Peru again I did not want to write about the details of my inner healing. I did not want to diminish the power of the process – and I felt like my very life and health depended on it. I didn’t want my innermost healing on display for the entire world wide web to read about. I didn’t want the pressure of having to blog about any of it or analyze it in a public forum. I didn’t want to worry about what my or Matt’s family might think about it.

Ceremony for me isn’t about sitting in the dark, puking while hearing some pretty songs and seeing some cool visuals . . . man. It’s hard work, sometimes frightening, often cathartic. I wanted my healing to unfold naturally, without being rushed, judged or critiqued. I needed an indefinite amount of time to focus on nothing except my own health and healing – and so that’s what I have been doing. Now here I am, four months later, and my life is completely changed as a result. I’ve rid my body of the toxic stress – that habitual underlying current keeping my insides agitated. I’m no longer in a funk, my writing arm doesn’t go numb anymore, I’m excited about life, my hair is growing back and I’m well on the way to writing as my full-time career.

I’ve thought about all of this long and hard and the bottom line is that plant medicine has saved my life – literally. There are lots of first-person accounts written by people from around the world – click here for my own 2006 article published at Perception Engine. Do I want to become a shaman and facilitate other people as they work directly with plant medicine? No, but I do have a very real pull to write about it in a new way.

Plant medicine is such a big subject – the politics involved (both locally and globally), the huge spectrum in modalities of use, unspoken controversies, and a new emerging feminism within the movement. My goal is to facilitate an in-depth and well-rounded understanding for those with an interest in the subject, particularly those focused on their own inner-healing.

I´m b-a-a-ck!

When I got to Peru and went deep inside myself, I realized that I was carrying some major amounts of sadness, negativity, anger and a whole lotta self-loathing and judgements. So, I decided it was time to take a break from the blog-world and to be OK with that – to not be angry at myself for taking a hiatus. So, for the last two months since I´ve been here in Peru, I´ve been relaxing and working through some of this yuckiness and learning to take the responsibility for all that I´ve brought into my life – whether it be the sweetness or the sadness. And in the process, I´ve realized quite alot about myself and subsequently, the world at large.

I felt that a daily log of my healing would be not only too personal to broadcast on the worldwide web, but that it might also diminish the power of the process. It´s been an incredible journey of self-realization and discovery. I will say that I feel as though the path I was headed down was a potential path to disaster of my health and well-being. The new path I´ve carved out for myself is one of positivity and health. I´m happy to be back in the blog-world. I´m happy to be back in the real world too – and focusing upon the things that truly do matter: health, help and happiness.

Within the next few days, I plan to unveil a new direction for this blog, but to be honest, I´m still not sure which direction that I will focus upon. I do plan on back-posting entries from the past couple of months (January and early February) in order to share parts of my simple journey in the wonderful country of Peru.

Disposing of garbage here in Pisac is a unique experience in observation and an opportunity to learn that refuse doesn’t just magically disappear. There is no faraway, out of sight and out of mind dump. We’re all on our own in this matter as there is no garbage man. To have to deal on my own with every bit of waste that’s generated in our household is a humbling and ultimately, a very mindful, experience.

Surprisingly, it’s really not that difficult, nor time consuming to deal with the trash – it just means cultivating some new habits. First, realize that every single little item that we bring into the house eventually must leave by our own hands in the most efficient and sustainable method possible – that includes dish sponges, plastic bags, containers of all types, kitchen scraps and used toilet paper.

Our trash area, not including the bathrooms, is separated into three small buckets. We don’t have the need to purchase trash bags because we simply use the multitude of plastic bags we acquire from daily living. We do try to carry groceries home in our backpacks and elect to not carry things in bags whenever possible. Most of the time I remember to carry a little Tupperware container when dining out for after dinner scraps and to-go food. We try to be mindful and use as few plastic bottles as possible. Glass bottles are either recyclable or in some cases, you leave a deposit for them at the store and when you  bring the bottle back, the store gives your deposit back and returns the bottle to the factory. That’s how it was when I was a kid in the states, too bad it’s no longer that way.

We separate our waste as it’s generated into a compost bucket, a paper bucket and a tiny trash bin in the kitchen. Leftovers, bones and meat we don’t eat is saved for the dogs. Every bathroom in our house as well as the rest of Peru has another tiny trash bin. The sewer systems here cannot handle paper; you must put all used paper in the trash bin.

The rest is pretty easy. There’s a hole in the backyard for the compost. I know there is an art to composting – that oil, spoiled dairy products and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting about isn’t supposed to go in the compost hole, but we really don’t worry about that out here. Nature takes care of all that – there are numerous dogs who continually visit and clean out much of what goes into the hole. The paper gets burned either as kindling in the fireplace or the outdoor fire pit.

We keep a three liter plastic bottle in the kitchen with a wooden stick next to it. We press small, clean plastic bags into the large bottle with the stick. (We learned through trial and error that dirty plastic bags will turn the bottle into a moldy maggot factory.) Once the bottle is full and solid with compressed bags, we put the cap back on and give it to a local builder who will use it as building material. Anything else that is leftover that cannot be disposed of in any of the aforementioned ways goes in the tiny trash bin. Once a week, along with our ‘doody-paper’ trash, we bundle it all up and take it down to the dump. The dump itself is an eye-opening experience.

The Pisac dump is located on the river and adjacent riverbank, just beyond our line of sight behind the curve of the nearest mountain, only about 1/4 of a kilometer past our house. The free-roaming pigs love it! There are always about ten of them happily rooting around. The wind whips up the scattered trash and carries plastic bags up to the vegetation in the mountain and the surrounding fences, where they get stuck. I was completely disgusted the first time my friend Jeff took me to the dump.

“The plastic bags!” I said, horrified, wanting to cry.

“Ah,” Jeff sighed. “I’ve learned to view them as infinite little prayer flags, whipping around in the wind.”

So, that’s what I do.

I decided to consult a friend who is a chef regarding my trashing the tomatoes rant and his input not only surprised me, but in the end, he offered a brilliant and quite viable solution that would be easy to implement in every home and restaurant.

My friend the chef is passionate about the food he serves; it has to be perfect. He says that his number one concern is giving his customer a meal of gastronomic delight that doesn’t make them sick. In my tomato example he says that as a chef he would never want to spread any disease like Hepatitis, even though the chances of something like this happening in my example are near zero.

“I would eat the tomatoes myself,” he says, “but even if every single person in that hot dog line said, ‘Hey, it’s cool. Go ahead, serve those tomatoes,’ I would not do it. I’d throw them in my compost bin.”

“That’s great!” I roared. And it really is! “But . . . no restaurants have a compost bin.”

It would be the perfect solution. I thought about suggesting composting in that last rant, but really believed it was just wishful thinking. That is, until I spoke to my friend. That’s really the whole point - I don’t care if something gets ‘trashed’ in the compost bin; it’s the mindless waste and filling up our landfills that I have a problem with. Plus, nationwide composting in restaurants would create enough quality mulch to solve alot of our nation’s oil-based fertilizer problem that’s raping the planet of nitrogen reserves.

According to Lester Brown’s book, Plan B (which every single person absolutely should read in my opinion), US agriculture in 2004 produced 11.8 billion bushels of corn and used 10 billion tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer to do it. A bushel is not that big – 35.24 liters - compared to one ton of fertilizer. Incidentally that nitrogen-based fertilizer is made with – that’s right – petroluem products. This is an unsustainable model; composting on a massive scale is not only sustainable, it is viable.

This viability is key. The oil-government powers that be, who incidentally subsidized those same 2004 farmers to the tune of $4.5 billion in taxpayer dollars (to enrich their oil empire), would say that composting on a massive scale is not viable and too complicated and that restaurants would never be able to implement such a system.

My friend the chef says otherwise. He worked for two years at a four star restaurant in Yellowstone Park and they composted every single scrap available. What’s more is that the corporate restaurant he worked for actually made money in the composting business. Lots of money, according to my friend.

So, guess what corporate restaurant America?? Lots of money can be made on trash. And a four star, sustainable and massive composting model is already in operation.

Until our society comes to it’s senses, insanity will abound . . . all in an effort to side-step the possibility of financial fallout or social faux pas. While thankfully what I witnessed last week at Pink’s hot dog stand in Hollywood wasn’t life-threatening in nature, it was ridiculously wasteful – all because of society’s perception of litigation. Oh yeah, that and germs.

We were happily standing in the historically famous, possibly hours-long line for some of tinsel town’s most sought-after chili dogs. The hustling crew endlessly cranked out specialty dog after specialty dog, continuously dropped fries into grease vats  and restocked the dog toppings en masse. Not long after our arrival into the line, one of the harried workers tossed two gallon-sized containers of chopped tomatoes onto the side counter and turned her back for two seconds in an effort to multi-task.

A semi-scraggly guy came around the corner just at that moment with a plastic ounce sized container, dipped it into the tomatoes and walked away. I should mention this man appeared to be neither homeless nor dirty; he just wasn’t as . . . shall we say . . . upscale in appearance as the majority of people who frequent Melrose Avenue.

Someone called out, “Hey! That guy just dipped his hand in the tomatoes!” He did not, for the record, dip his actual hand into anything.

Ten seconds later, the same worker who’d put the containers on the counter dumped both of them into the trashcan with a loud thud. This kind of mindlessly wasteful behavior appals me. I said to Matt, “I can’t believe they just dumped that stuff out . . . ”

Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one. People on either side of us in line indeed had their own opinions and did not hesitate to share them with me. The guy in front of us said with a chuckle, “Well, you know they gotta throw that stuff out or else they could get sued for serving it after that guy messed with it.”

“But you and I both know that his actions didn’t contaminate two gallons of perfectly fine tomatoes,” I said. The man in front of us sort of guffawed and turned back to his newspaper. And of course, I understand that they had to actually toss the stuff in the can in front of the crowd just so all eyes could confirm that the offending tomatoes were properly disposed of.

The couple behind me (who I believe were the same ones who alerted the staff to the actions of the tomato-contaminator) began to chat. The man said, “You just never know what germs people carry.”

“On their . . . ahem . . .  mouth area. On their hands. Who knows where that cup has been . . . ” said his over-perfumed lady friend.

Seriously?! People . . . I hate to mention it, but c’mon,  we live in the richest, most wasteful country on the entire planet. And because an establishment has to factor in the possibility of lawsuits from germophobic patrons, we help create and contribute to a culture of waste. It saddens and sickens me to the core.

I was raised by elderly people who remember the Great Depression. The media today tells us that we are now facing a possible depression of even greater enormity. The increase in food prices is alarming. Throwing away two gallons of tomatoes may not sound like a big deal to a group of people who don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, but in my mind, it is a big deal and it’s indicative of a much bigger problem.

One of my best friends tells a story about his aunt who found half a donut in the street when she was a child during the Great Depression. She picked up the half donut out of the dirty cobblestone street, took it home and shared it with her six family members, who all remember that half-eaten donut as a very special treat.

I hope that spoiled rotten Americans don’t have to scrounge the streets for food necessities ever again. I’ve certainly never had to do it, even though my family did spend several winters with no heat and little more than government cheese and rice to eat. As this article explains, don’t believe for one minute that America is immune to food shortages, because just the opposite is true – if anything, we are susceptible to them. Certainly there can be a happy medium. That includes re-educating the masses about perceptions about germs, wastefulness and litigation, because I assure you the kind of seemingly innocent event I witnessed last week happens quite often all over the developed world.

I hate to cry out cliches about starving children, so I won’t, because we’ve all heard them ad nausem, but with the problems our world faces right now with food shortages and inflated prices (just ask any Zimbabwean how much a loaf of bread costs) and foodstuffs being used as agrofuels, we’d all better start realizing just how important every little bit of precious food is increasingly becoming. By the way, it costs a $10 billion Zimbabwe note (worth less than $20USD) for a loaf of bread.

The canary is singing in the coalmine of our backyard, but we’re too plugged into our I-pods to even notice. If our ancestors were here to witness commonplace acts of American wastefulness, the faux pas would be on our society. I hope we don’t have to worry about something as basic as where we’re going to get our next meal. And maybe, just maybe if we all have an about-face in our perceptions of what is acceptable, we won’t have to worry. But if we do, at least it will be a sobering lesson for all of us spoiled rotten Americans. I’m not so sure that those lessons would be a bad thing.

Do I blame the busy worker at Pinks? No. I blame our perception of what is acceptable. Did I continue to stand in the line that day? Certainly not. I wandered on in search of my next meal elsewhere on the streets of America.

Matt and I went to Applebee’s a few nights ago to say hello to an old friend of his who works there.

We waited at the bar until his friend got off work. The bar faucet was gushing out steaming hot water at full blast, draining out of a teeny, tiny little sink that never filled up. The water was on when we sat down, so who knows how long it had been on before our arrival? The entire time, the lone bartender ran around frantically texting, I-phone in hand, screaming every detail of the Ebay bid she was trying to win.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, when I could stand it no more, I said gently, “You know, I come from a place where we have to conserve water. Can you turn the faucet off? Please?”

I should mention that this bartender seems to be a very nice lady. She’s a friend of the friend we were there to meet. She talked about how she had signed up for a bell-ringing shift for the Salvation Army. We even had a few beers together later in the night, where she apologized a second and third time about the faucet. I cannot help but wonder if she apologized because she realized the need for water conservation or if her reason revolved around the social pressure of my pointing it out.

Just one state over from South Carolina, where this runaway faucet event occurred sits Atlanta. Lake Lanier is it’s main water source. Just one year ago Lake Lanier was so low from drought, mis-management and overuse that Atlanta measured it’s quickly dwindling available water supply in terms of weeks and officials declared an emergency.

Only when the faucets run dry will people realize that there is no more water. We’ve got the technology at our fingertips, literally, so that we don’t have to lug water from wells anymore. But this technology has contributed to our mindlessness.

I’m not perfect; I’m here to educate and bring awareness. Guess what? Everyone is from a place that has to conserve water.

The FDA is for sale too. All the real scientists were fired years ago, obviously. Why else would a government agency originally designed to protect the health of the citizens of our country declare that mercury is safe for consumption by children, infants and pregnant women?

Please read this article by Evo Morales, President of Bolivia. Our Mother Earth is in critical condition. Keeping status quo, living in the same failed system that we mindlessly engage and perpetuate will completely destroy our species.

I’m at a coffee shop right now. The TV blares a CNN Special Report to get all of America riled up about our economic meltdown and how “our malls are at risk.” Seriously, we have to start caring RIGHT NOW about how we’re going to fix the biggest problem: how we are going to sustain the planet that sustains us. She’s not a salable commodity. And she’s sick. And don’t think for a minute that she can’t shake humanity off like a couple of pesky fleas.

And I’ll say one more thing before pasting Evo Morales’ article in full within this post. There was an assassination attempt on him discovered about three hours ago.

Here’s what the president of Bolivia has to say:

Sisters and brothers, today our Mother Earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years.

Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather: the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps; the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas, where approximately 60% of the world population live; the increase in the processes of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources; a higher frequency in natural disasters that the communities of the earth suffer[1]; the extinction of animal and plant species; and the spread of diseases in areas that before were free from those diseases.

One of the most tragic consequences of the climate change is that some nations and territories are the condemned to disappear by the increase of the sea level.

Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries.

Capitalism

Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world. In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the developed countries and economies in transition committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below the 1990 levels, through the implementation of different mechanisms among which market mechanisms predominate.

Until 2006, greenhouse effect gases, far from being reduced, have increased by 9.1% in relation to the 1990 levels, demonstrating also in this way the breach of commitments by the developed countries.

The market mechanisms applied in the developing countries[2] have not accomplished a significant reduction of greenhouse effect gas emissions.

Just as well as the market is incapable of regulating global financial and productive system, the market is unable to regulate greenhouse effect gas emissions and will only generate a big business for financial agents and major corporations.

The Earth is much more important than the stock exchanges of Wall Street and the world

While the United States and the European Union allocate $4100 billion to save the bankers from a financial crisis that they themselves have caused, programs on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only $13 billion.

The resources for climate change are unfairly distributed. More resources are directed to reduce emissions (mitigation) and less to reduce the effects of climate change that all the countries suffer (adaptation)[3]. The vast majority of resources flow to those countries that have contaminated the most, and not to the countries where we have preserved the environment most. Around 80% of the Clean Development Mechanism projects are concentrated in four emerging countries.

Capitalist logic promotes a paradox in which the sectors that have contributed the most to deterioration of the environment are those that benefit the most from climate change programs.

At the same time, technology transfer and the financing for clean and sustainable development of the countries of the South have remained just speeches.

The next summit on climate change in Copenhagen must allow us to make a leap forward if we want to save Mother Earth and humanity. For that purpose the following proposals for the process from Poznan to Copenhagen:

Attack the structural causes of climate change

1) Debate the structural causes of climate change. As long as we do not change the capitalist system for a system based in complementarity, solidarity and harmony between the people and nature, the measures that we adopt will be palliatives that will limited and precarious in character. For us, what has failed is the model of “living better”, of unlimited development, industrialisation without frontiers, of modernity that deprecates history, of increasing accumulation of goods at the expense of others and nature. For that reason we promote the idea of Living Well, in harmony with other human beings and with our Mother Earth.

2) Developed countries need to control their patterns of consumption — of luxury and waste — especially the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Subsidies of fossil fuel, that reach $150-250 billion[4], must be progressively eliminated. It is fundamental to develop alternative forms of power, such as solar, geothermal, wind and hydroelectric both at small and medium scales.

3) Agrofuels are not an alternative, because they put the production of foodstuffs for transport before the production of food for human beings. Agrofuels expand the agricultural frontier destroying forests and biodiversity, generate monocropping, promote land concentration, deteriorate soils, exhaust water sources, contribute to rises in food prices and, in many cases, result in more consumption of more energy than is produced.

Substantial commitments to emissions reduction that are met

4) Strict fulfilment by 2012 of the commitments[5] of the developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least by 5% below the 1990 levels. It is unacceptable that the countries that polluted the planet throughout the course of history make statements about larger reductions in the future while not complying with their present commitments.

5) Establish new minimum commitments for the developed countries of greenhouse gas emission reduction of 40% by 2020 and 90% by for 2050, taking as a starting point 1990 emission levels. These minimum commitments must be met internally in developed countries and not through flexible market mechanisms that allow for the purchase of certified emissions reduction certificates to continue polluting in their own country. Likewise, monitoring mechanisms must be established for the measuring, reporting and verifying that are transparent and accessible to the public, to guarantee the compliance of commitments.

6) Developing countries not responsible for the historical pollution must preserve the necessary space to implement an alternative and sustainable form of development that does not repeat the mistakes of savage industrialisation that has brought us to the current situation. To ensure this process, developing countries need, as a prerequisite, finance and technology transfer.

Address ecological debt

7) Acknowledging the historical ecological debt that they owe to the planet, developed countries must create an Integral Financial Mechanism to support developing countries in: implementation of their plans and programs for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change; the innovation, development and transfer of technology; in the preservation and improvement of the sinks and reservoirs; response actions to the serious natural disasters caused by climate change; and the carrying out of sustainable and eco-friendly development plans.

This Integral Financial Mechanism, in order to be effective, must count on a contribution of at least 1% of the GDP in developed countries[6] and other contributions from taxes on oil and gas, financial transactions, sea and air transport, and the profits of transnational companies.

9) Contributions from developed countries must be additional to Official Development Assistance (ODA), bilateral aid or aid channelled through organisms not part of the United Nations. Any finance outside the UNFCCC cannot be considered as the fulfilment of developed country’s commitments under the convention.

10) Finance has to be directed to the plans or national programs of the different states and not to projects that follow market logic.

11) Financing must not be concentrated just in some developed countries but has to give priority to the countries that have contributed less to greenhouse gas emissions, those that preserve nature and are suffering the impact of climate change.

12) The Integral Financial Mechanism must be under the coverage of the United Nations, not under the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and other intermediaries such as the World Bank and regional development banks; its management must be collective, transparent and non-bureaucratic. Its decisions must be made by all member countries, especially by developing countries, and not by the donors or bureaucratic administrators.

Technology transfer to developing countries

13) Innovation and technology related to climate changes must be within the public domain, not under any private monopolistic patent regime that obstructs and makes technology transfer more expensive to developing countries.

14) Products that are the fruit of public financing for technology innovation and development of have to be placed within the public domain and not under a private regime of patents[7], so that they can be freely accessed by developing countries.

15) Encourage and improve the system of voluntary and compulsory licenses so that all countries can access products already patented quickly and free of cost. Developed countries cannot treat patents and intellectual property rights as something “sacred” that has to be preserved at any cost. The regime of flexibilities available for the intellectual property rights in the cases of serious problems for public health has to be adapted and substantially enlarged to heal Mother Earth.

16) Recover and promote indigenous peoples’ practices in harmony with nature which have proven to be sustainable through centuries.

Adaptation and mitigation with the participation of all the people

17) Promote mitigation actions, programs and plans with the participation of local communities and indigenous people in the framework of full respect for and implementation of the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The best mechanism to confront the challenge of climate change are not market mechanisms, but conscious, motivated and well organised human beings endowed with an identity of their own.

18) The reduction of the emissions from deforestation and forest degradation must be based on a mechanism of direct compensation from developed to developing countries, through a sovereign implementation that ensures broad participation of local communities, and a mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verifying that is transparent and public.

A UN for the environment and climate change

19) We need a World Environment and Climate Change Organisation to which multilateral trade and financial organisations are subordinated, so as to promote a different model of development that environmentally friendly and resolves the profound problems of impoverishment. This organisation must have effective follow-up, verification and sanctioning mechanisms to ensure that the present and future agreements are complied with.

20) It is fundamental to structurally transform the World Trade Organiation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the international economic system as a whole, in order to guarantee fair and complementary trade, as well as financing without conditions for sustainable development that avoids the waste of natural resources and fossil fuels in the production processes, trade and product transport.

In this negotiation process towards Copenhagen, it is fundamental to guarantee the participation of our people as active stakeholders at a national, regional and worldwide level, especially taking into account those sectors most affected, such as indigenous peoples who have always promoted the defense of Mother Earth.

Humankind is capable of saving the Earth if we recover the principles of solidarity, complementarity and harmony with nature in contraposition to the reign of competition, profits and rampant consumption of natural resources.

Notes:

[1] Due to the “Niña” phenomenon, that becomes more frequent as a result of the climate change, Bolivia has lost 4% of its GDP in 2007.

[2] Known as the Clean Development Mechanism

[3] At the present there is only one adaptation fund with approximately $500 million for more than 150 developing countries. According to the UNFCCC secretary, $171 billion is required for adaptation and $380 billionis required for mitigation.

[4] Stern report

[5] Kyoto Protocol, Art. 3.

[6] The Stern Review has suggested one percent of global GDP, which represents less than $700 billion per year.

[7] According to UNCTAD (1998), public financing in developing countries contributes with 40% of the resources for innovation and development of technology.

A conversation with a friend of mine has prompted me to take a look at the history of an ordinary household product – paper towels. Her complaint was that paper towels, along with many other household goods, have become very expensive. Although I couldn’t agree more, I was a bit confused by the comment. While I do always have a roll of paper towels on hand, I personally don’t have need to buy them regularly because I use old kitchen rags for everyday uses like soaking up spills and cleaning.

The conversation caused me to wonder how many rolls of paper towels the average American household purchases in a month and what they use them for. I’ve decided to compare paper versus cloth products in price, usage, convenience,  aesthetics and sustainability.

First I dug up some interesting history on paper towels. The invention of the paper towel was actually a serendipitous accident. In 1907, a rail-car shipment of the wrong thickness of paper was delivered to the Scot company, the premier toilet paper manufacturer in the US. The president of the company remembered reading an article about a school teacher who gave a small, soft square of paper to each of her students as an alternative for wiping their hands on the communal bathroom cloth towel in hopes of stopping the spread of colds in her classroom.

Instead of taking a loss on the errant paper shipment, Mr. Scot decided to introduce the concept of a disposable sanitary towel, which was marketed to the medical industry. It’s of great interest to me that the actual consumer grade paper towel was not introduced to market until nearly twenty-five years later, in 1931. The simple fact was that people had no use for such a product because they used washable cloth rags.

I priced a roll of Bounty paper towels at $2.50, while a pack of white bar rags are about $10/dozen and you only buy them once. The paper industry needs you the consumer to absolutely believe that their product is not only indispensable but also that there is no alternative. Check out this old Bounty commercial. How many diners do you know of that rely solely upon paper towels to address their cleaning needs?

Watch Old Bounty Paper Towel at EncycloMedia.com

Ads are aggressively marketed to create a *perceived* convenience factor, but in the long run, the boasted conveniences are really an illusion – we the consumer throw that paper directly into our over-taxed landfill system. And don’t forget that a tree was most likely chopped down to make the pulp for that paper towel and millions of gallons of chemical-laden waste water was flushed directly into the water supply from the paper towel factory.

Kimberly-Clark is the global giant of the paper industry and also the leader in setting standards for paper industry sustainability, so I decided to check out the Kimberly-Clark 2007 Corporate Sustainability Report. K-C spent millions in 2007 to update the water systems at their factories and to convert their power systems to utilize methane gas from local landfills. They also buy virgin wood only from reputable sources to ensure that their raw materials aren’t coming from the rainforest. I applaud Kimberly-Clark’s efforts, but their report isn’t completely undisturbing.

In 2007, the company used 31% recycled paper, so that means that nearly an alarming 70% of all the material they require to make paper towels, facial tissues, diapers and dinner napkins came from trees, otherwise known as ‘virgin wood resources.’ Also, their most water conserving plant, located in Beech Island, South Carolina, recycles 60% of it’s water. They only flush a mere 40% of their waste water into the Savannah River, which is an important public water source. And another note of extreme interest to me is that the K-C’s Emerging Market division has it’s sights set on changing the way that half the world’s population views the use of paper products. Here’s a direct excerpt from the report:

We are seeing our fastest growth in developing and
emerging (D&E) markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and
Latin America. Within these markets, we continue to
focus on the BRICIT countries (Brazil, Russia, India,
China, Indonesia and Turkey). The BRICIT countries
represent half of the world’s population, but only six
percent of K-C sales.

 Our range of semi-durable paper towels,
developed to meet cultural norms in Latin America where
disposable paper towels are rarely used, have been highly
successful.

I suspect that families with small children use the most paper products, because a busy Mom will tell you her *perceived* truth – that it’s just less hassle and more sanitary to throw a snot-covered paper towel away rather than wash a cloth. That’s one way the utilization of paper becomes the norm within a household.

The Bounty website helps perpetuate the modern trend of American germophobic thinking by encouraging the belief that  rags are a breeding ground for billions of household germs that are just lurking, waiting to attack. While hygiene is truly of utmost importance, germs are not only ubiquitous in our world but a necessity for the existence of life. Be smart instead of fearful; washing your kitchen rags and towels regularly will keep you out of harm’s way.

I urge you to look at your household habits. By making the switch to durable cloth rags, dishtowels, napkins and handkerchiefs, you will not only save more green paper from your wallet, but you’ll be using a lot less in the way of resources. I *perceive* that a few extra hundred bucks in your household could go a long, long way.