With the warmer weather (89 degrees for us today) comes the season of the sustainability fair.

Last Fall I went to the national Green Festival with Real Diaper Association and Mothering Magazine. While I can’t deny that it was great to see what the bigger national companies are doing to promote greener living, I find myself more excited about my local sustainability fair, Live Green in Salt Lake City, which is coming up in a couple of weeks.

Rather than a focus on the tightly LoHaS marketed national brands, I get to see and chat with the same people who cook food I like to eat, who grow the plants I put in my yard, who write articles I read, and even people with whom I sit through meetings as we plan local educational programs. These are my people, and they are all gathering together.

Do you have a local sustainability fair? Check local free weekly papers, the Buy-Local council, or farmers market if you don’t already know whether you have a local green fair.

All of our regular diapers are currently in stock — even Extra Small (preemie) and Extra Large (toddlers). This doesn’t happen very often. We are usually running to catch up, but we’ve been pushing production harder recently. We arrived!

We’re here, we said. Now what? Have some fun! We created colorful Clown Diapers. We used the colors we had on hand, which happen to be strong primary and secondary colors. Check out our home page for swatches.

Right now, in the moment of my writing, we have a bunch of Clown Diapers in Small ($24), Medium ($26), and Large ($26). We will update stock both here and the Firefly Diapers home page.

Call to order: 800/597-0561. We ask you to call to order these so we can be completely accurate about what stock we have left. You call, it’s yours.

UPDATE: Since there are just a few of these beautiful Clown Diapers left, we’ve posted them for sale on our website. You don’t have to call — though you are always welcome to call to place any order. ORDER CLOWN DIAPERS. (If you don’t see Clown Diapers and a nice “Buy It” button on our home page, all of the diapers are gone.)

I notice more publicity lately on eating organic food. This is not new, but more organic food in the news does mean more mainstream saturation. This is what has happened with global warming awareness. The fact of global warming is certainly not new, but enough people, organizations, businesses, and governments are now well informed about the facts that the way forward becomes more clear. Maybe the movement to encourage organic food will reach that same kind of educated saturation in time.

For now, we have the organic industry organization on a mission to encourage us to buy 10% organic food by 2010 — not a bad thing but definitely a movement with sellers in mind, making us not people who want to eat but just consumers. Means to profit. Others are encouraging us to consider clean food, too. The Environmental Working Group’s FoodNews.org is offering a list of which foods are most important to buy organic because USDA pesticide tests show they are most likely to have trace pesticides. Peaches, for example, had the highest pesticide load with a score of 100.

I look forward such a saturation of information on organic fibers that a mainstream audience will know the basic facts and the way forward to lower-impact clothing, including diapers, will be clear. Until then, keep talking about organics so we can reach that tipping point.

Did you Step It Up over the weekend? Next comes Earth Day. A lot of Earth Day events are focusing on climate action. If you haven’t done so already, how about calculating your carbon footprint or your ecological footprint. I did this recently for a discussion class I took on global warming, and I was surprised what a difference it made to visit Granny and Grandpa in England. Ouch. 75% of our family’s carbon emissions for the year.

One thing I have noticed in the dozen or more calculators I’ve seen is: no diapers. You and I both know that using environmentally sound renewable resources to create reusable diapers makes a difference. Where is this choice in all of the detailed calculators? If you use a calculator and you don’t see diapering choices listed, write a note to mention it to the calculator authors. Maybe they hadn’t considered what an impact reusable diapers have, especially when compared with the massive solid waste problem of throwaway plastic diapers.

Step It Up : http://stepitup2007.org/
Earth Day Network : http://www.earthday.net/
Carbon Calculator (one of many): http://www.safeclimate.net/calculator/