Our Planet, Ourselves

So, what exactly does the current price jump in commodities have to do with women and the environment?  It's a complex and somewhat subtle link, not as in-your-face as direct pollution or chemical exposure. The environmental link is perhaps the easiest to see.  To reduce a complicated chain of events to its most basic: global warming and ensuing droughts in big agricultural production nations like Australia have caused a shortage in available grains.  Add to that changes in the economies of net food importers like China, whose population increasingly has the means to buy more food (including grain-intensive red meat, which costs 3 times ... Read Full Story

I was listening to the podcast on the environment and reproductive health again the other day and I was struck by the effects of carrying water on girls physical development. In the podcast the representative from One By One, one of the campaigns associated with Green-Pink, discussed how repeated collection of water changes a young girl's body. We first have to take a step back and look at the reasons why it is women and girls who collect the water in the first place. This is seriously hard work, but it is relegated to "household" chores, which fall to women and girls. In addition, ... Read Full Story

Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and One by One have teamed up to raise awareness of the linkages between reproductive health, the environment, and women's health in the developing world. You can read more about the Green Pink campaign on the Sierra Club's website: http://www.sierraclub.org/population/greenpink/ . One by One, an international campaign to end obstetric fistula, describes the links in these movements as follows: The Green-Pink Project One By One has joined together with the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organization, to protect women and the environment, worldwide. One By One and the Sierra Club recognize that women’s voices and access ... Read Full Story

(this was written for another class and posted on my personal blog) Reducing maternal mortality will require tackling the politics of reproductive health Promoting women's health holds the key to development. Two years ago, Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, stated: “The Millennium Development Goals, particularly the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, cannot be achieved if questions of population and reproductive health are not squarely addressed. And this means stronger efforts to promote women's rights and greater investment in education and health, including reproductive health and family planning.” Millennium Development Goal #5, reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015, has ... Read Full Story

Earth Day is tomorrow, and I've been thinking a lot about what an amazing makeover the environmental movement has had over the past few years.  My background is in marketing for non-profits.  How do you make a movement or a mission appealing to masses of people?  How do you garner the most support from the most diverse base of people?  Now, with its newfound eco-chic and mainstream appeal, will environmentalism really want to be public bedfellows with the reproductive rights movement? Over the next few posts, I'll be exploring the issue of how environmentalism went mainstream while the reproductive rights movement has seen its support ebb and flow, and ... Read Full Story