Today was a fantastic day! The day started @ 7 am with breakfast, then everyone loaded into 5 vans and off for a day of working. We have 2 projects for the week, The garden project, and the house project. I went to the garden project today, where we shoveled and sifted dirt to be used for fruit trees and vegetables and removed weeds and debris to make way for a privacy fence still to be built.

Everyone’s help is needed at the house project, trying to get it ready for the family to move into it this week. The house needs a lot of TLC - painting, caulking, adding new trim, and the list goes on! I went over and helped with the caulking on the outside of the house, and hopefully if the rain goes away we’ll be able to do some outside painting tomorrow.

My new found friends make each project so much fun!

This is very short and sweet, as supper is ready - pasta night - and I can’t wait to lay down!

- Lynn Woodrum

Photos by MacKenzie Mosca:

The levee.  The Mississippi River is on the other side.

Redevelopment in progress.

Boarded up, but inhabited nonetheless.

Saturday, November 7

Lots of thoughts went through my head as I sat in airports today. What will the other people be like?  Will we all get along? What is New Orleans going to be like?

Well, I am able to answer the first question for now. Everyone has arrived and all are great! Every person is willing to jump in and help with anything, from cooking to decorating.

We had a wonderful dinner tonight to socialize with everyone.  It consisted of chicken tortillas, rice, and some great caramel ice cream. We all had a great time getting to know one another. Cleanup was fast as everyone was willing to pitch in and help.  Now to try to get some sleep (been up since 2 am) and see what tomorrow brings!

Sunday, November 8

Today was a very adventurous day! It started out with a fabulous breakfast, chore sign ups, a tour, and a wonderful dinner!

We toured the Hollygrove Market with our guide, Pam. The market was created last year by the In Good Company team and has really grown! It grows fruits and vegetables for the local community for $25 a week for 1 box — every family has a chance to receive some of the great food.

As we proceeded on the tour, it was just devastating to still see so many homes that were still boarded up, with dates painted on their front doors showing when someone checked the house for residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina . The hurricane hit on August 28, 2005 — and some of the dates we saw on houses were as far out at September 18! We also learned that many building contractors came in following Hurricane Katrina and attempted to refurbish homes, but didn’t always do the grandest job – and that when homeowners then tried to contact the contractors, they had packed up and left without finishing needed requirements. Apparently a large amount of people were overtaken by these contractors, and are now trying to do the best they can with what they have. Our tour was 4 hours long and it really makes you very thankful for what you have.

We arrived at Cafe Reconcile at 6:00 to have dinner, and the food was so great! This cafe is all about giving back to the community and teaching local students the etiquette of the restaurant atmosphere. All the fruits and vegetables served there are grown within the local community, and all the leftovers (if any) are composted back into the garden. Everyone is very big on the whole recycling process and it is so great!

It has been another great day of fellowship, food, and fun. Tomorrow I will be going to a garden to help build a fence around it, weather permitting …

• Lynn Woodrum works in the human resources department at Timberland’s Danville, Kentucky distribution center.  She is bravely leaving four children, ages 17 to 17 months, in the capable hands of her husband as she sets off for a week of restoration and revitalization in New Orleans.  Lynn’s biggest concerns heading into the service week: “Have I taken care of my responsibilities for next week at home, at work?  Am I taking enough supplies for my trip?  Have I remembered to buy all the needed necessities for home?”  A mom’s work is never done …

• MacKenzie Mosca is an associate at Timberland’s factory outlet store in Long Island, New York.  An outdoor enthusiast with a penchant for hiking, the beach and her three dogs, MacKenzie is looking forward to personally contributing to post-Katrina rebuilding efforts in New Orleans.  In her own words, “People working together … are capable of limitless possibilities.”

Please stay tuned, as we’ll be featuring regular updates from Lynn and MacKenzie throughout their weeklong service experience here on the Earthkeeper blog … interested Earthkeepers can also follow MacKenzie on Twitter (Timberland_MacK).  We wish them both safe travels, and applaud their willingness to take time out from their personal and professional lives to devote hours and effort to creating a positive impact for a community in need.

Will you be watching at the plate glass window to see if COP15 gets the final question right?  Share your thoughts with us here .

Our Serv-a-palooza volunteers spent their day cleaning out the old fort’s tunnels filled with thousands of gas masks, filters, rusty tubes and rotted boxes.  Once cleaned out the tunnels are used, essentially, as "bat caves" – providing shelter for bats seeking a safe, comfortable spot where they can hibernate out of harm’s way for the winter.

Congratulations to our Benelux Earthkeepers for a creative "recycling" effort — creating new purpose for an old fort,  and providing much-needed wildlife habitats for winter-weary bats.

As I sat on the back steps of the renovated Victorian house, a line cook caught my eye as he hopped over the salvia and lunged around the basil to snip a few sprigs of mint. At any other restaurant, if you are out of an ingredient, you are out of luck- but not Primo. Primo restaurant , co-owned by Chef Melissa Kelly and Pastry Chef Price Kushner, strives to pleasantly blend the ideals of sustainability with palate-savoring pleasures.

Like many students desperate for a quick financial fix, I have made my circulations in restaurants across the nation, often experiencing the same harrowing episodes: a chef with a large ego, quick hands to dump “waste” from plates, customers oblivious to the substandard food cultivation, piles of the same-ole, imported Sysco ingredients, and a sort of impassive, nightly performance by the wait staff. But at Primo, diners receive an unparallel experience of local, organic Portland fare.

The cuisine brilliance begins and ends on the four-acre garden. Unlike other restaurants, Primo’s gardeners decide each morning what seasonal produce is ripe for the evening’s delights. Pulsing with life, the garden also provides chickens, herbs, grapes, edible flowers, honey, and even hops. True to their commitment to local ingredients, Primo also purchases its seafood from Portland fishermen. By the end of the night, the pigs feast on the ensuing compost of uneaten food or organic waste from the kitchen.

Primo’s garden provides much of the bounty that ends up in its dining room

In addition, Primo invites guests to explore the garden so they may come into contact with the elements that will later arrive at their table. As Melissa remarked, so often chefs will put their ego on a plate. Her philosophy, however, is to fashion her dishes so they teach others about where food comes from and how it is grown.

Inside the kitchen, Primo hosts several line cook stations, a pastry prep area, expo tables, a wood fired oven, and a downstairs prep room complete with storage and a batch of brewing beer. The chalkboard-painted door at the top of the stairs lists the specials for the night as well as displays a flyer on “How to Become Green”.

Primo’s décor pleasantly complements the organic, robust flavors of each dish. Downstairs exhibits rustic merlot colored walls and a traditional dining set up along with several art pieces while upstairs has a contrasting chicness with wrap-around couches, rectangular shaped designs, and a copper bar. Primo also seamlessly excels at energy efficiency and water conservation through their use of Maine produced biofuel as well as dual flush and waterless urinals.

After a long afternoon of dodging the staff while filming the high action atmosphere of the kitchen, Green Living Project was able to relax to fork fulls of scrumptious fresh cuisine, such as the house special baked oysters and the black spaghetti with braised cuttlefish and heirloom tomatoes, knowing that a majority of the ingredients were sustainably harvested only yards away from our table.

Adrienne Rosenberg
Green Living Project

During the first week of October, Timberland invited 23 key customers and franchise partners from Italy and Spain to the Dominican Republic for a special “Timberland experience” – including a visit to both our manufacturing facilities in Santiago, DR and a local tannery, and a day of community service.

Timberland partners get a hands-on lesson in bootmaking in our DR factory

The service day took place in Villa Gonzalez, a town close to the Timberland factory. The project consisted of painting and repairing a basketball court used by the Villa Gonzalez community. In addition to the European visitors, other community members also participated in the activity.

Repairing and repainting the community basketball court

The service day was hot and sunny … but at the end of the afternoon, all of the volunteers had the satisfaction of making a difference for the young people of the community — some of whom were present at the service event, working shoulder to shoulder with the European group and at the end of the day were excited and grateful for the work accomplished.

Earthkeeping volunteers leaving their footprint on the Villa Gonzalez community

To understand Greenpeace’s assertion that our business practice directly leads to deforestation in the Amazon, you’ve first got to know that it is cattle ranching that is causing the deforestation — ranchers cutting down the forest in order to allow livestock to graze. That livestock is raised primarily for tailgate hotdogs or your mom’s meatloaf recipe — not for leather.  Leather is a co-product of beef which accounts for less than 10% of what a farmer gets paid for his cow.  The hides that result from raising cattle for food become the raw materials which Timberland’s suppliers turn into leather for our footwear.  Further facts — we source about 7% of the leather for our products from Brazil — obviously, a small percentage of our overall need.  And finally, in our industry, best practice for diligent brands that focus on the social/civic aspects of their value chain audit and manage processes and materials back to the tannery — but not all the way back to the cattle production process.  To accurately assess our role in the issue requires working backward up the supply chain, through the tannery who is our supplier, to another company, the beef processor in Brazil, in order to know where the cows grazed.

Given that we don’t have “trace-ability” in the value chain back to the cow grazing in the field, it would have been infinitely easier, when Greenpeace first brought the issue to our mailbox, to simply stop doing business with our Brazilian supplier.  No more leather from Brazil, no more issues with tracing hides which may have come from cows grazing in deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest.  We’re only talking about 7% of our production — so cut and run, right?

Tempting, but not the right thing to do. Disengaging would have solved OUR problem — no more headaches or emails from angry activists — but would do nothing to solve the problem of deforestation.  Even as we fumed at the way Greenpeace had approached this issue we asked ourselves, what is the responsible thing to do?  Do we walk away and let the beef processors sort this out with Greenpeace, or do we risk further ire, by staying in the conversation and engaging the leather tanner and the beef processor to solve the real environmental challenge?  What would you choose to do?

We decided to stay engaged.  We pressed our Brazilian leather supplier, Bertin, for a plan that would answer the challenge posed — demonstrate that the cattle grazing in the field were not contributing to deforestation.  Find a way to ensure trace-ability back into the value chain — now.  For a brand with only the leverage of our small percentage of overall Brazilian leather purchases, we tried.  And to Bertin’s credit — they have engaged with us to the same end.

Three months later, real progress to report. Bertin has made great strides in its commitment to supporting the deforestation moratorium, including meeting face-to-face with both Timberland and Greenpeace to better understand the problem and discuss proposed improvements.  Last month Bertin publicly announced their official Amazon cattle moratorium (meaning they will no longer source cattle from protected areas of the Amazon) and is working aggressively to meet traceability targets to ensure the origin of all the cattle they source is acceptable and not contributing to Amazon deforestation.

Prodded by Greenpeace, and encouraged by Bertin’s willingness to make real change, we have bent our efforts to address the issue of Amazon deforestation on an industry level, working with other members of the Leather Working Group (LWG) – a multi-stakeholder group which seeks to promote sustainable environmental business practices within the footwear leather industry.  The LWG recently proposed creating an HWG (Hide Working Group) [I’m not making these acronyms up!]  to create an assessment process specific to hide traceability – similar to the process the LWG uses to work with tanneries on environmental issues within the tanneries themselves.  Bertin has indicated that they will engage in the HWG, as will other tanneries and many brands, including some of our arch competitors like Nike and Adidas.

It’s easy to provide a neat summary of progress against a complex issue in a few short paragraphs; the work behind the words has been much more challenging, demanding tons of time, effort and resources — from the CEO and a whole group of activists within the company. For its part, Greenpeace has done an outstanding job gathering data, creating a complete and compelling case for the issue, and mobilizing its tens of thousands of supporters to call for action from brands like ours on an issue they care about.  Their effort has driven change into the system.  We applaud their activism, even as we wish next time—and there will be a next time, in the complex global value chain — they would seek to engage brands like ours before they pull the “let’s confront ‘em” lever.

As for our supplier, Bertin – now one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of animal products – to implement concrete changes in its own policies and processes in such short order is nothing less than impressive.  We’re proud to partner with an organization that views environmental responsibility as critically and urgently as we do.

Business can be a force for positive environmental change … collaboration yields more powerful outcomes than the effort of one … learnings reinforced by our experience to date on the Amazon deforestation issue.  We’re not closing the book on this topic yet – we’ll continue to monitor progress through regular reports from Bertin and through our work with the LWG and HWG, and we’ll continue to share milestones and challenges with you here on Earthkeepers.

CEO thanks Greenpeace for full frontal email assault?  Next thing you know, world leaders will actually come up with a meaningful global agreement at Copenhagen…

Jeff Swartz
President & CEO, Timberland

Our thanks to the team at Big Think for sharing with us.