Long quote from Jane Goodall

"The very most important thing we can do to try and get out of the mess we've made on this planet, both social and environmental, is to spend a little bit of time learning and thinking about the consequences of the choices we make each day. What did we eat? How was it grown? Where did it come from? Did it affect the environment adversely, or animal welfare? Is it good for human health? What do we wear? Where was it made? Does this involve child slave-labour or sweatshops? How do we get from A to B? Could we do it in a way that is less damaging to the environment? If we start to think like that, inevitably people make small changes, because very often they do things without having the faintest idea of the adverse consequences, and if people start making the small changes, then you start getting the major change that we must have if we care about the future for our children."

(Jane Goodall, in Wisdom: Life by Andrew Zuckerman)

Image from Jane Goodall Institute (Singapore)

If you needed to book roses for tomorrow and you haven't, it's too late, so read this instead

I've never really "got" Valentine's Day. Where I grew up, it was a foreign celebration that opportunistic capitalists quickly picked up as a very easy way to get rich, at least one day a year. It wasn't a part of my family's tradition, or of the faith I eventually came to have. So I have little of my own to say about it.

But hopefully this will provoke some activity in your head this sleepy Sunday.

A picture from my archives that would be wholly unrelated to this post,

if not for the one heart-shaped cake tin I own. That heart-shaped cake,

with some accompaniments, eventually became my cousins' first anniversary gift from me, on the occasion of their first visit to Sydney as husband and wife. That, and the pedestrian everyday sparks of

my life and my friends', is the type of occasion I'd rather commemorate. Who wants to wait for that once a year?

Will 2011 be the year I...

Image from Project: AK-47

• wear a child soldier's dog tag to remember the priceless lives being sold to a waking, 24/7 nightmare?
• finally get my social enterprise, no matter how small, off the ground?
• fall more in love?
• advance in my personal food reform plan, choosing to make more healthful and socially aware diet choices?
• get a pet that isn't composed of pixels?
• live in faith that it makes it normal to feel waves underfoot?
• have clients to counsel?
• have my work published again?
• can play a musical instrument unhindered?

What questions are you asking about 2011?

Buy our chocolate! Save the world!

Image by Salina Hainzl. For illustrative purposes only; I have no idea what brand these blocks are.

But they're making me long for one of Willy Wonka's reach-through-the-screen-and-grab-it contrivances.

Have you seen the posters accompanying the display shelves for a certain Big Brand of chocolate lately?

A grinning, headscarfed woman with a basket, surrounded by a field of green plants. Below that, a sparkling blurb on how Big Brand's signature chocolate product is now Fair Trade certified.

"By buying [Big Brand's Big Chocolate Product] you can help guarantee a better deal for Third World Producers," gushes the copy. Evidently, they want to get across that the money you spend on this one chocolate product that has the Fair Trade mark on it will go towards helping Nature Girl and her family, and we all love the thought of helping others, don't we?

Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the poster before it got covered with the Next Big Thing in pillar advertising so I can't quote it verbatim. But I remember that it mentioned better schooling, housing and living conditions.

Of course, the Fair Trade certification applies only to this one product, which is essentially plain milk chocolate bars. Do you see the double-speak in action here? If they manage to convince me that purchasing their plain milk chocolate has an altruistic benefit, then they've also succeeded in convincing me that all of their other products do not offer a better deal to Third World producers, because not a single one of those other products -- which, by the way, probably sell much better than plain old boring milk chocolate -- has the Fair Trade seal.

Dear Big Brand, you cannot draw my attention to the poor working and living conditions of cocoa plantation workers one moment and then, in the next, expect me to become magically unaware of them when looking at your other chocolate products.

The Fair Trade movement has been accused of selling out to big money and making it too easy for major manufacturers to exploit loopholes in the production line, so that in the end they're still turning a huge profit buying large amounts of non-Fair Trade raw material -- but get to enjoy the public kudos of electing a Fair Trade "poster product" to proudly bear the movement's stamp.

With advertising campaigns like this one out there, it isn't hard to see why such accusations exist.