In theaters Aug. 17—that’s tomorrow!

Poster for Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox

Genius or madman? The late great Dr. Emanuel Bronner, a chemist and third-generation master soapmaker from an orthodox Jewish family in Germany, was likely a little bit of both. In 1947, after escaping from a Chicago mental institution to California, Bronner created the formula for “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap,” a peppermint-infused, all-natural liquid soap with myriad applications—from lathering up in the shower to washing your floors to, according to one customer, self-administering enemas—that was quickly embraced by the flower children of the free-love generation.

Around the same time, the self-declared rabbi (and alleged nephew of Albert Einstein) developed an ever-evolving philosophy—or a trippy set of hectoring and often nonsensical-sounding rants, depending on how you saw them—known as “The Moral ABCs,” the text of which he inserted onto the label of each bottle of his soap, with the goal of “uniting Spaceship Earth.” Waking up people to the fact that we were children of the same divine source and that we were “All-One!” proved, however, more important than his children, who were shuttled through more than 15 orphanages and foster homes, while their father passionately barreled forth on an unending mission to preach his gospel of cleanliness and intergalactic love.

An entertaining and edifying film about the man behind one of the most environmentally friendly and socially responsible businesses in operation, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox leads us on a journey of perseverance, obsession, heartbreak, and faith. Seventy percent of the profits from Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, made from organic and fair-trade ingredients, go toward humanitarian and environmental causes; the top executives of the firm, including Bronner’s son and grandsons, even capped their salaries to never exceed five times the earnings of their lowest-wage workers.

The hub and I—both fans of the good doctor’s lavender bar soap—caught Dr. Bronner’s by chance when we flipped over to Sundance Channel’s The Green, but the film is also screening in theaters nationwide. Check the movie’s Web site for listings. (You can also watch a clip here.)

Spaceship Earth is lifting off—and how.

If you’re in New York City and have a hankering for a cup of java, best head on down to the Village Cinema on 12th Street between University Place and 5th Avenue to catch Black Gold—a documentary all about the farmers who grow the beans that make your coffee.

While you’re shelling out $2 or more for a cup of Starbucks coffee, the prices netted by coffee farmers themselves are so low that in Ethiopia some have been forced to abandoned their fields¹.

Directed by Marc and Nick Francis, Black Gold chronicles the hard work of Tadesse Meskela in Ethiopia, where he manage cooperative of some 74,000 coffee farmers striving just to survive in the grossly unbalanced business of global coffee—a profitable, but skewed, $80 billion industry. (Note: Meskela will be present during screenings tonight and Friday to discuss his Oromia Coffee Union cooperative’s progress and the importance of fair trade in coffee.)

At the crux of Black Gold is the concept of fair trade, which strives to reward farmers outside government subsidies with a fair price for their crops while cutting out the middle men and big business who dip into their profits.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have been a dedicated drinker of the coffee grown by Meskela’s farmers, which is roasted by the fair-trade-supporting Equal Exchange, since my first taste on Earth Day in April.

But that doesn’t make Black Gold any less of a film that should be mandatory for caffeine addicts—especially here in New York—who are so detached in their own daily lives that they rarely stop and think where their coffee, let alone the rest of their food, comes from.

The film is understated, with simple text narration as it follows Meskela’s work in Africa and elsewhere as he struggles to find new markets for his cooperative’s fair-trade coffee—which includes organic and non-organic varieties—overseas. In fact, it is this simple approach to presentation that makes Black Gold’s images, statistics and message all the more clear.

The film also follows individual farmers, trade talks at the World Trade Organization, while giving us a window into industrial coffee tasting and roasting industry. About the only hitch pops up during a look at a coffee roaster that seems out of joint from rest of the film, though I think it’s also aimed at filling in the chasm that seems to separate urban coffee drinkers from the distant rural fields the beans are grown in.

Fair trade isn’t just limited to coffee, but also chocolate, cherries, and a host of other crops and products made or grown in third world countries by artisans or farmers who gain little profit from their labors despite the inflated prices you and I pay at our local malls.

It’s a bit comforting to see larger markets beyond small specialty stories, like Whole Foods (in Houston, its HEB offers coffee from South American cooperatives; in Cape Canveral, Florida, look for the Green Section at Publix) carrying fair trade—and organic—coffee.

But just a couple hours and $10 for Black Gold will provide a better window into how your coffee choice affects much more than your own personal morning pick-me-up.

¹Ed.’s note: One of the more-heartrending parts of the film was watching scenes of malnourished children in one of the regions in Africa where Starbucks sources its coffee from; “semi-malnourished” children were being turned away from severely underfunded medical clinics because their conditions weren’t as life-threatening as others’. Obviously, Starbucks isn’t the socially responsible messiah it makes itself out to be.

Additional resources:
1. Locate a theater playing Black Gold near you
2. Tadesse Meskela’s Oromia Coffee Union of cooperatives

Millions of sophisticated coffee drinkers relish a good cup of coffee. But for every $3 cup of coffee, a coffee farmer typically receives only 3 cents. Most of the money goes to the four giant conglomerates which control the coffee market.

Black Gold follows Tadesse Meskela, General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia as he tries to secure a living wage for the 70,000 coffee farmers he represents. Tracing the tangled trail from the 2 billion cups of coffee consumed each day back to the coffee farmers who produce the beans, Black Gold exposes how international commodities markets are rigged against the nations of the global South.

After seeing Black Gold, coffee will never taste the same. A sip of cappuccino will remind viewers of the farmers who grew the beans and of their own power to pressure corporations where it hurts most—the bottom line.

Watch the trailer here.

Opening dates/locations:

Oct. 6, 2006
*New York NY - Cinema Village
(with brief discussion and Q & A with Scott Codey of the NYC Fair Trade Coalition and Rodney North of Equal Exchange)
Seattle, WA - Landmark Metro
Bellevue, WA - Lincoln Square

Oct. 13, 2006
Chicago, IL - Gene Siskel Film Center

Oct. 27, 2006
Boston, MA - Coolidge Corner

Nov. 10, 2006
San Francisco, CA - Roxie

Nov. 12, 2006
Savannah, GA - Reel Savannah

Dec. 8, 2006
Washington, D.C. - Landmark E. St.

To learn more and take action, visit www.oxfamamerica.org/blackgold.

I highly recommend watching Who Killed the Electric Car, even if the documentary does drag on in places. You’ll leave the theater pumping your fist into the air, screaming epithets at Big Oil and the government, while being filled with a sudden, unquenchable desire to T.P. the GM headquarters.

On a slight tangent, has anyone seen that ridiculous Hummer ad on TV? You see a frail twig of a woman meekly trying to protest when someone else’s kid cuts in front of her son at the playground slide. The bullied mother can only stare with her mouth agape as the line-cutter’s mom brushes her sputtering aside with a snide comment. Cut to a scene of the forlorn woman signing the papers for a brand new Hummer. The slogan “Get Your Girl On” appears in big white letters as we watch the now-happy woman driving off in her monstrous hunk of combat-ready metal, while the crooner in the background tells us that “this little girl’s gonna rock¹.” What is she going to do, run over the mother and son who crossed her? Flatten the playground so nobody else gets to play? Oh I know, instead of actually developing a backbone or learning to assert herself, she is going to use her global-warming-in-a-can to foul up the air with 13 times the killer-smog-forming pollution of your average 2006 SUV because THAT WILL SHOW THEM ALL. HAHA I PITY THE FOOL WHO TRIES CUTTING IN FRONT OF ME NOW! SO LONG, BIATCHES!

That ad makes my eyes bleed.

¹ “Little girl” is an incredibly condescending and sexist term, especially in light of the typical phoney machismo associated with the Hummer brand.

D’OH. They have Blue Vinyl at my local library, and so I’ve placed a hold on it instead of dropping cash on a purchase. Verily, a lifetime of conditioning is hard to shake—my first impulse was to order the movie online because I belong to a generation that is used to, and lo, demands, instant gratification. (And, until I realized how much fuel and packaging went into feeding my online-shopping fix, I was so out of control that the hub was thisclose to staging an intervention. With sock puppets, because that’s the only way you can guarantee my attention.)

Then, the greenie part of me kicked in, and my next impulse was to buy it in person from a store. No packaging, right? I’d probably wouldn’t even need to whip out the canvas bag I keep folded up in my tote. But then I broke one of my cardinal rules—stopping to think if I needed to own this movie, if I couldn’t support their cause in a more direct way. And only then, like a radiant burst of sunlight after its been obscured by storm clouds—accompanied, of course, by the Singing Chorus of Dawning Realization—it hit me: You dumbass, check the library first.

(The Corporation was a loaner from my friend Nisha—thanks Nisha!—because friends don’t let friends enlarge their ecological footprint without just cause.)

Reader Ingrid turned me on to the 2002 Sundance Film Festival documentary winner, Blue Vinyl. (I was about to order it online, but will check around my local Barnes & Noble first.)

If you don’t know how EVIL PVC is already (and that’s not lower-case, sotto voce evil, it’s EEEEEV-EEEEEEL; pretend you’re Antonio Bandaras really working the bile), trust me it is. The production of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC (also commonly known as “vinyl”) releases a cancer-causing compound known as dioxin during its manufacturing process, the life of the product, all the way to its final disposal. Dioxin is very persistent carcinogen that settles in our fatty tissues and those of other animals. Besides causing cancer, exposure to dioxins can also lead to neurological damage, respiratory problems, liver and kidney failure, plus all kinds of reproductive- and immune-system damage, including birth defects.

If you have PVC flooring or the ubiquitous vinyl siding, chances are your children will develop asthma, too. Fun stuff. It’s the plant workers and low-income families living near PVC factories who have it the worst, however.

Since dioxin is a bioaccumulative toxin that doesn’t breakdown easily and can be rapidly dispersed by winds, dioxins from a PVC manufacturing plant could migrate and land up in fish, increasing in concentration as they work their way up the food chain to the top-dog predator of them all—us.

Plus, when you heat PVC, the chlorine is released as hydrogen chloride, which turns into hydrochloric acid. This is also why you shouldn’t mix PVC with your plastic recyclables.

When PVC is made, it needs to be stabilized by chemical additives such as lead, cadmium, and pthlates. This is why there was so much concern about the presence of lead in children’s vinyl lunchboxes, since these toxins can leach, flake, or outgas from PVC over time, resulting in anything from asthma to lead poisoning to cancer. (Don’t let your kids play with PVC toys especially—it will only bring you to a dark place of tears and the gnashing of teeth.)

Disposing of vinyl is tricky—you can’t burn it as I noted before, nor can you stick it in the landfill because it could leach into the groundwater and release toxic emissions in landfill gases. Trying to recycle it will only contaminate the entire plastics-recycling process. The best you can do is call your municipal waste-disposal office and have them divert your PVC waste to landfills specially marked for hazardous waste. (This is where our faketastic Christmas tree is headed soon.)

Bill Walsh, founder of the Healthy Building Network wrote in Grist that “the weight of available evidence tells us that … it may well be the single most important source of many of the worst toxic chemicals plaguing the global environment today.” The full report is here.

More about the life cycle of PVC here.

In this acclaimed documentary from the co-director of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomksy and the Media, 40 corporate insiders and critics—including Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, No Logo author Naomi Klein and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman—explore the nature and spectacular rise of the most pervasive institution of our time. Combining analysis with footage from advertising, television news and industrial films, The Corporation is an entertaining and provocative look at the inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures of the modern global conglomerate.

Noam Chomsky: “[For The Corporation], the ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another, who don’t care about anyone else … whose conception of themselves, their sense of value is ‘just how many created wants can I satisfy?’”

You want to watch The Corporation because The Corporation wants you to. We did.

View the trailer here.

Have you joined the virtual march against global warming?

Helping the cause can be as simple as not leaving the water running. (Other tips here.) Because Jake Gyllenhaal? As cute as he is? JUST AN ACTOR, i.e., he will not break into a Russian freighter in the frigid cold and fend off wolves to get you penicillin for your gangrenous leg because you were too stupid to tell anyone you got hurt even though you speak a gajillion languages.