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More little resonant treats from the disastrous Bush administration: a ruling was just made by Judge Stanwood Duval which accuses the Army Corps of Engineers of neglicence for its shameful mismanagement of the Hurricane Katrina flooding.

It’s a well-supported idea that much of the damage and lives lost in New Orleans could have been prevented by timely acting from the Corps. The Judge ruled after an examination of three cases of families whose livelihoods were crushed by the hurricane. The ruling opens the possibility of a potential 100,000 victims seeking settlements that could amount to an estimated 100 billion dollars. Read the rest of this entry >>

The increasing severity of global displacement creates the need for a responsive use of the world’s advancing digital technologies. The tangle of humanitarian crisis might be severely truncated if crowdsourcing, like that of Ushahidi, which developers created in the immediate wake of 2008’s Kenyan electoral crisis, were strategically employed by the communities and cultures victimized by forced scattering. What Ushahidi did for Kenya was provide an anonymous module of user documentation of violence and displacement via SMS, or text message.

Colombia has one of the largest populations of IDPs (internally displaced people) in the world: the government states that since 1997, 3.2 million Colombians have been driven from their homes, though CODHES–the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement in Bogota–contends this figure is closer to 4.2 million. The massive discrepancy speaks to the complexity of the crisis that’s burdened the country since the 1960s. This gulf presents a massive problem for both the government and NGOs to dismantle.

Much of what has caused Colombia’s mass migration to its overcrowded urban centers has been violence in and around rural communities, which are caught in the crossfire between FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) members and the Colombian government. Additionally, criminal gangs seeking reign of the massive cocaine trade  force civilians near coca production from their homes. Also—and embarrassingly—the US government’s war on drugs contributes to displacement with its approval of spraying the coca farmers’ land to quell the trade, a tactic that crushes livelihoods, and is no doubt also ecologically damaging. (Some would contend these individuals aren’t IDPs, but rather ethnic migrants.) Read the rest of this entry >>

U2’s Bono and his wife Ali Hewson have launched a new collection for their eco-fashion line, Edun, which they founded in 2005. A percentage of proceeds from the new T-shirt collaboration with British lifestyle publication Dazed and Confused will benefit the charity War Child International, a global network of independent organizations helping children affected by war. The network uses creative methodologies for psycho-social trauma recovery and assistance based on musical, creative, and sports activities, coupled with counseling. Hewson’s contribution aims to enable the charity’s projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most of Edun’s manufacturing is done in sub-Saharan Africa with the aims of driving sustainable employment there. It’s a great model: raise consumer awareness with style, and engine that with localized, sustainable production.

Another manufacturer that outfits leading apparel and style makers, LITE leather, champions these aims; its tannery, newly opened in Vietnam, is the first ecologically low impact kind of its size and output. LITE Leather has reduced its carbon emissions by 35% compared to conventional tanneries, which can often be awful for the environment and its many global workers by proximity. Read the rest of this entry >>

Context is everything, for everyone. So say the scientists. Classical music, for example, can greatly shape cognitive development in infants. But we can’t all be reared beneath Baby Einstein mobiles, swaddled in fair trade cotton. Enhanced personal development via music, however, needn’t cease at infancy or be exclusive to a slivered population of the planet.

One organization substantiating aural equality for all is Youth Music, the UK’s biggest children’s music charity, which has given over 2 million young people free access to music-making projects and activities. The charity has created 21 Youth Music Action Zones–workshops, performances, rehearsals, and mentoring– throughout the UK to foster opportunities for disadvantaged youth.

For next month’s Youth Music Week, to celebrate their 10th anniversary, Youth Music is showcasing a book they’re soon to release, Destroy / Rankin, a collaborative photography project engined by the iconic fashion and portrait photographer, filmmaker, and publisher Rankin (John Rankin Waddell), who founded English lifestyle magazine Dazed and Confused with Jefferson Hack nearly twenty years ago, and has gone on to photograph a multitude of public influences, including Kate Moss, Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth II, and Naomi Campbell. Read the rest of this entry >>

Though global migration and commodity exchange has slowed, consumer behavior, at least in the West, is still arguably fixated on the newest and best, and maybe even sweetest. Digital leaders are still chalking gains, and hell, even British confectionary giant Cadbury–whose soon likely to takeover Kraft Foods of America–saw a 7% third-quarter sales jump.

A forefront organization working out of Los Angeles that’s aiming to reshape and contextualize these creative communities is EcoGift, founded by Tommy Rosen. I think their mission statement is pretty rad: Our mission is to produce large-scale eco-conscious gift shows that provide people with an uplifting experience and a solution to the difficult emotions, inconveniences and terrible waste associated with the holidays and holiday shopping.

An adviser to EcoGift, Robert Graham Ganger, appears to be dynamically honing the need to incorporate sustainability into glamour industries; another project of his is EcoNoveau, which has played a major component part for the last two years of Downtown LA Fashion Week

Salman Rushdie has long employed an activist voice in the creative community, and while his recent decree from the book Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen to our little 6 billionth addition is surely the stuff of religious group contention, its derivations on “freedom” present an irrefutable truth for our future. Freedom, “that space in which contradiction can reign,” has never been as illumined, yet muddled, owing to an increasingly mediated, populated planet consuming itself from the inside out.

While Sir Rushdie’s own exercising of modern freedom couldn’t depict the complexities of celebrity voice meets global affairs any better (he was seen out this week at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony Gala with writer Min Lieskovsky), his letter is a reminder that arenas of abundance and intellectualism have a responsible role in shaping how we as a planet are to cope with the coming changes.

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In 2005, the International Energy Agency concluded that 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity. Other means–kerosene, candles, gasoline-run generators–strain the minimal budgets of this population, which is often rural, and can be dangerous and ecologically harmful. Jeff Frame, an activist-entrepreneur based in San Francisco, began his involvement in solar energy, and eventual collaboration, with non-profit One Million Lights–a solar-powered lantern distribution organization–after witnessing nomadic Mongolians effectively using solar energy panels and batteries, attained cheaply from neighboring China, to light their tents, or gehrs.

“Anymore, there’s all this talk about ‘The Digital Divide.’ I think a Darkness Divide is just as pressing,” Frame says. “This injustice is leaving people behind. You can’t have fence building around the developed world. If these Mongolian herders–some of the most remote and poor people on the planet–are doing this, why can’t whole communities around the world? And why can’t the richest nations make that happen?” Read the rest of this entry >>