Ode Magazine has a beautifully photographed story this month on cotton in India — on conventional, pesticide-laden cotton in India. The farmer suicides continued at a rate of one every eight hours as the photographer was visiting. Expensive pesticides and genetically modified seeds (which mean they can’t save seed for planting next year) have meant soaring costs, leaving the farmers in debt they can’t overcome.

Add to this the rising cost of water, decreasing soil quality, health problems caused by chemical exposure and the absense of other jobs in the rural areas, and it’s easy to see why India’s farmers are desperate.

They don’t see any other way out. The situation is not better in other cotton growing countries.

At London Fashion Week a couple of weeks ago, Kathrine Hamnett (known for many slogan T-shirts in the 1980s) did not show a new collection. She showed a film on the impact of the global cotton industry’s pesticide use. The film is part of the Environmental Justice Foundation’s Pick Your Cotton Carefully campaign. Why whitewash cotton? The true of child labor, slavery, and health and environmental degradation is nasty.

• White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton – short film with Uzbekistan focus. (The You Tube link works better for me.)
• Pick Your Cotton Carefully PSA. Quick wake-up call to middle class.
• The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton. Report.

Cotton is a serious choice, not a pleasant way to make yourself feel good about your environmental choices. When you choose cotton, organic cotton is essential to the well being of other humans.

Pick your cotton carefully. Ode could only manage to list a couple of high-profile celebrity designers using clean cotton. You can find many more organic sources than that. Ask for organic cotton. DEMAND organic cotton.

As Kathrine Hamnet said, “It’s not about choosing something else, it’s about choosing the right cotton.”

I just entered my bottled water’s label into Environmental Working Group’s database for Project Bottled Water. They are going to study where bottled water comes from, how it’s processed, and if it’s really worth the expense — but they need your help and a few minutes of your time.

Grab the nearest bottle and go here to enter in its label information: http://www.ewg.org/issues/bottledwater/

This is part of the Environmental Working Group’s larger project to investigate drinking water, which they do in addition to many other environmental issues.

What does this have to do with diapers? It doesn’t take much to connect many diapering choices to environmental toxins. I’m interested to see how we will end up stepping away from the industrial age choices like buying our drinking water in plastic bottles and covering babies bottoms with super absorbent polymers. It is all related. Once the inevitability of embracing renewable resources really dawns, diapering will again mean cloth diapering.

No, I’m not necessarily suggesting you try it on your baby, but I find it fascinating to know what was used for diapers historically.

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From the west coast to the east coast, you can find cattails growing in wetlands and at the edges of ponds. Native people used the down from mature female cattail flowers around their babies for warmth and for absorbency. The fluff of cattails was used as a natural baby diaper.

When the cattail flower is green, it can be boiled and eaten like corn on the cob. (Just in case you are looking to expand your diet.) The mature female flower is the soft brown part that looks like the tail of a cat. When this flower is picked mature, it can be torn apart or left to explode into a mass of soft bits that allow the seeds to float on the air and spread far and wide.

I had heard about people using cattail down in diapers, and I wanted to see how well cattails absorb fluid. You can see the steps I took in images below.

• Down (catch it before it blows away). Very silky.

• Pour water out and use the cattail down to sop up the water.

• The outside doesn’t feel very wet, but the inside absorbs.

• When I squeeze, the water drips out and the outside feels dry again.

• As I try to get the sopping fluff off my hands, it starts to dry at the edges and blow away.

• The down that is soaked the most is difficult to get off my hands. For those who used cattail down for diaper and menstrual absorption, I can’t quite imagine how difficult it must have been to get rid of it all again. Maybe you just get in the river and let it wash away.

I can see that cattail down would make an absorbent baby diaper. It even feels like it could be dried out and used again. It’s sticky when wet, though. If I had a choice, I would rather use it away from the skin as stuffing for a toy or inside a pillow or mattress for fluffy bedding.

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.