Jay Kilby's Blog (6)

In “Creating a Personal Plan for Confronting Climate Change: Part 1,” I argued that if people are serious about confronting climate change, they need to stop reading lists of tips on how to reduce their carbon footprint and gather a few reliable resourc… Continue

As one new climate study after another crosses our headlines, most of us have come to understand that the problem is real, but we are uncertain about what we need to do about it. In Creating a Personal Plan for Confronting Climate Change: Part 1 – Sources o… Continue

Although climate change denial is alive and well, most of us are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom in Governor Schwarzenegger’s analogy: denial of climate change is like taking your sick child to 100 doctors and siding with the two who tell you that nothing needs to be done against the 98 who say that the child must take medicine or die (Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, 138). Most of us are on board in recognizing the threat posed by climate change and our responsibility to do… Continue

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade This is the third article in a five-part series that compares fair trade coffee, direct trade coffee, and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. program. The first article in the series, Why Do We Need Fair Trade Coffee?, explains how conditions in the traditional coffee industry gave rise to fair trade coffee. The se… Continue

This is the second article in a five-part series that examines three alternatives for the socially responsible coffee drinker: fair trade, direct trade, and Starbuck’s C.A.F.E. program. There are other labels such as certified organic, Rainforest Alliance certified, and UTZ certified coffee. If you would like an overview of these and other certification labels for coffee, they are nicely explained in a recent article entitled… Continue

This is the first in a five-part series of articles that compare three alternatives to the traditional coffee trade industry: fair trade, direct trade, and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. program. However, before we compare these three alternatives to one another, let’s take a look at why fair trade coffee was created in the first place. What conditions in the traditional coffee industry have created the need for fair trade, or some alternative that resembles it? Over the past fifteen years, prices paid to… Continue