Here I am, just back from a weekend in San Jose, California, at BlogHer, a conference for blogging women. My host and friend Heather of Very Commerce also spoke, and we roomed with the other third of the Very Empire, Jessica.

I volunteered to give a case study of Firefly Diapers as a business blog at a business blogging (un)panel. Moderators are compiling notes from the session to draft a business blogging best practices document.

My main contribution will be my suggestion to have a plan before starting. I spoke about the fact that, before I started the Firefly Diapers blog, I created guidelines for what should and should not be included. I told the 50-75 people present what worked and what didn’t work with my plan and with this blog.

That’s the news behind the news!

Have you heard the philosophical question asking, would you continue to live your life as you do now if we faced certain doom in a short time—a year, four years, half a lifetime?

For some, the answer is no. This is what evidence suggests as farmers commit suicide in Uttaranchal, a state in the far northeast of India on the southern slope of the Himalayas. More than 10,000 farmers are believed to have committed suicide in India in the past five years, and awareness of the problem of farmer suicides has been spreading around the world for decades.

Farmers in northern India are encouraged to use branded seeds from trans-national corporations, seeds requiring particular chemicals to grow (pesticides and fertilizers) and seeds that can’t be saved for the next year’s crop—saving seeds considered “backward” by their government agricultural network. To save the farmers from being traditional and backward, the government offers a plan to transition to soyabean monofarming. Most of the farmers resist this as they try to maintain the biodiversity of the region.

Some farmers, however, have been seduced by promises of short-term gain from the trans-national corporation’s seeds. Many of those farmers found themselves trapped in a situation where their yield is not enough to allow them to buy the required chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

NGOs and organizations emphasizing sustainable agricultural methods see hope in traditional crops grown for organic markets in India’s urban areas, but this comes after the debt and despair leading to more than 10,000 farmers’ suicides.

• Read the full story on farmer suicides in Uttaranchal at Common Dreams, posted yesterday.
• This is not a new story. Farmer suicides have been recognized for years as a major problem in India, Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US. “The Number One cause of death for farmers in the United States is suicide!” Some suicides are related to general stress disorders, others to mad cow, but by far the heaviest burden is in India due to agri-business practices.
• The idea of organic farming as a solution is not new, either.
• For big picture stories on farmer suicides, read an article by Dr. Vandana Shiva, “The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation” and watch a 13-minute PBS Frontline program from last year on “Seeds of Suicide: India’s desperate farmers.”

How can we allow ourselves to go down a path where those whose life-sustaining work in the fields despair? Surely I’m not the only one to see the nasty irony in Monsanto’s suicide seeds or terminator seeds and their broad effects as well as other ills of corporate agri-chemistry driving farmers to their own suicides. I guess some people don’t want better living through chemistry.

What to do? Join the Organic Consumers Association and other organizations that support traditional, sustainable agriculture and make your voice for clean agriculture known to those who can support in locally, nationally, and internationally.

Apparently Arthur Harvey (the Maine blueberry farmer and National Organic Program inspector who sued the USDA over its management of the program) is not yet satisfied.

You may recall that in a June 2005 ruling, synthetics were effectively banned from products labeled organic. Congress passed amendments to the Organic Food Products Act in late 2005. Then, the list of allowable synthetics was restored earlier this year, 2006.

Now, Arthur Harvey has again taken legal action. He claims “that the Secretary of Agriculture failed to meet the requirements of the Consent Judgment and Order of the District Court” (according to OTA).

That’s it. That’s all I have. But, if you would like a little light reading, I have plenty of articles to offer.

• “Harvey v. Veneman’s spectre of unintended consequences roils organic waters,” by Dan Sullivan in New Farm (Rodale), March 2005.
• “Women Lead Demand for What’s Really Organic,” by Kristin Bender in Women’s eNews, April 25, 2005.
• Letter “To the OTA and to the Community,” signed by a long list of community members, including OTA members, at National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, November 18, 2005.
• “Higher standards: Blueberry farmer Arthur Harvey continues to stir national debate over organic food rules,” by Sean Donahue in Maine Biz, November 2005.
• “Ruling Prompts Controversy: Organic Trade Association proposals opposed by consumer organizations,” by Cissy Bowman in Cooperative Grocer, November-December 2005.
• “So You Want to Sue the USDA?” Audio tape of panel from Acres USA 2005 conference. Panel includes Arthur Harvey, Jim Riddle, Margaret Scoles & Cissy Bowman (moderator) . 120 minutes of fun.
• “Food Fight,” by Jason Mark in Earth Island Journal, Spring 2006.
• “USDA Criticized for Helping “Industrialize” Organic Farming.” Press release from The Cornucopia Institute at Common Dreams, May 10, 2006.

Happy reading until we hear more about the National Organic Program and the tug over standards.

In the Diaper Underground, I have watched several cloth diaper generations* reinvent the same diapers several times. It is fascinating to see mothers meet similar situations with similar solutions. I don’t see a problem with us all finding personal solutions to the fact of babies’ elimination, but I would suggest that we don’t necessarily need to reinvent the solutions. Women (and, yes, I mean women) have been creatively addressing this need for a long time before the internet made the Diaper Underground possible. We may not be able to reach easily into the deep past, but we have several generations of knowledge just waiting for us to ask. Even if your mother diapered you in the passing era of throwaway diapers, your grandmother should know cloth diapers. Ask her.

Asking your grandmother, interviewing her, and collecting a cloth diaper oral history from her is the point of Real Diaper Association’s project Your Grandmother Should Know. This year-long project is the RDA’s annual educational campaign to fulfill the mission of the organization. This year, we “connect current cloth diapering parents to the long history of cloth diapering.” We will support members in collecting interviews during this year, then collect those interviews in various formats the following year. What we do depends on what we get, but we have an active DJ looking for audio and a Real Diaper Circle creating an instructional video already.

We don’t have to convince ourselves that it is necessary to reinvent cloth diapers. The knowledge was never lost. You can learn about cloth diapers the same way your grandmother and her grandmother did, face-to-face from the women with experience.

Would you like to participate in the project by interviewing your grandmother, your mother, or any other person who remembers using cloth diapers? Join us. You don’t need to be an RDA member to participate (though we would love to have you join). To start, read about the project and make a plan. I have created Project Guidelines available as a book ($10.95) or as a free download for you to print yourself.

* A diaper generation is about 2 years — the time it takes one child to grow out of diapers.

Your Grandmother Should Know:
An Oral History of Cloth Diapers from RDA