Environment

Today, the nation's major sustainable food writers and bloggers will converge on Monterey, California for an incredible, invitation-only sustainable food conference. The event, Monterey Bay Aquarium's Cooking for Solutions, which those who attend say is spectacular, has a new sponsor this year: Kellogg Garden Products. Yes, that Kellogg Garden Products. The very same company that has contaminated "organic" school gardens in Los Angeles with sewage sludge. The company's Chief Sustainability Officer, Kathy Kellogg Johnson, has a knack for befriending "green" organizations and using them to promote her toxic, misleadingly-labeled products to unsuspecting gardeners. In this case, she's listed as a "Silver Sponsor." How much did her company pay to give her such a nice platform, sitting on a panel with Grist's sustainable food writer, Tom Philpott, and telling an all-media audience about the sustainability of Kellogg Garden Products?

While a transnational corporation asserts its "right" to extract gold from El Salvador under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a grassroots anti-mining movement fights for self-determination and its leaders are turning up dead. In recent weeks, death threats have also been sent to radio journalists at Radio Victoria, the sister radio station to Madison, Wisconsin's WORT-FM.

A story has been developing over the past month involving lies, toxic sludge, Hollywood celebrities, and poor, inner city school children. It centers around the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group of environmentally-conscious Hollywood celebs, and the "organic" school gardens they've been volunteering at for the past past couple years.

Stars like Rosario Dawson, Amy Smart, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Nicole Ritchie have generously adopted Los Angeles schools, visiting the schools and helping the children garden. What the celebs didn't know is that their organization's corporate donor -- Kellogg Garden Products -- sells both organic compost and soil amendments, and ones made from sewage sludge. Seventy percent of Kellogg's business is products made from sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is not allowed on organic farms and gardens.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oversees aquaculture, or fish farming, in the U.S., both in freshwater and marine environments. Since the U.S. imports 84 percent of its seafood, about half of which is farmed, there is need for growth in the domestic fish-farming industry. Thus the NOAA has proposed a set of policies to guide American aquaculture. But a group of about 30 organizations, including the Center for Media and Democracy, has sent comments to the NOAA (pdf) expressing dismay that the proposed aquaculture policies fall short, in part by failing to maintain a neutral view of aquaculture. The draft policies seem more aimed at boosting the aquaculture industry at any cost than rationally and scientifically evaluating the pros and cons of this type of development in any given circumstance, place and time.