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Milan Fashion Week closed on Sunday with the second annual "Green Carpet Fashion Awards" to promote sustainability in the fashion industry, Reuters reported.
The event, promoted by Italy's fashion association CNMI and the sustainability consultancy Eco-Age, gathered celebrities like Julianne Moore, Colin Firth and Cate Blanchett with fashion icons like Cindy Crawford and Anna Wintour to award 13 statuettes made from ethically mined gold, The Guardian reported.
"People called last year's Green Carpet awards the Oscars of sustainable fashion," Eco-Age founder Livia Firth said. "I hope that soon we will just be the Oscars of fashion."
Winners included model Elle Macpherson, who took home The Wellness Award, new this year to acknowledge the importance that human wellness plays in environmental sustainability, Eco-Age reported.
"Fashion can be very beautiful and lucrative, but to be here for a real purpose for me is important," Machpherson told Reuters.
Other winners included Donatella Versace, who took home The CNMI in Recognition for Sustainability Award for Versace's commitment to going fur free, as well as its designing of green retail spaces and attempts to create a people-centered company culture, Cameron Russell, who won The Changemaker Award for fighting back against harassment in modelling and Sinéad Burke, who won The Leader Award for "changing the fashion conversation for good," Eco-Age said.
Burke, who has dwarfism, campaigns to make fashion more inclusive.
"The influence of fashion shapes culture," she asked the audience, according to The Guardian. "What will you do with your privilege to make this space more accessible?"
The awards also honored sustainable production techniques. The Australian Woolmark farmers won The Eco Stewardship Award for their sustainable wool production. Frumat Leather won the Technology and Innovation Award for a leather made from apple waste that is "of such quality and appeal that it can displace animal leather," Eco-Age said.
The awards, however, came days after a New York Times story cast doubt on the ethical practices of Italian fashion, The Guardian reported.
The investigation, published Sept. 20, reported how home workers in the region of Puglia, Italy were doing sewing for luxury garments without contracts or insurance, sometimes earning as little as a euro per hour.
CNMI President Carlo Capasa said he was "saddened and concerned" by the report, according to The Guardian, but that the problem was larger than Italy.
"Rather than 'this is Italy'," he said, "I would say 'this is the world'."
However, there was a recognition among participants and award winners that they were part of a powerful industry working to right its past wrongs.
Renzo Rosso, along with Diego Della Valle, won the CNMI in recognition for Community and Social Justice Award for reinvesting in communities, including those devastated by earthquakes, according to Eco-Age.
"People like all of us destroyed the world. But now, we are trying to make it better for our children," he said, according to The Guardian.
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Tuna auctions are a tourist spectacle in Tokyo. Outside the city's most famous fish market, long queues of visitors hoping for a glimpse of the action begin to form at 5 a.m. The attraction is so popular that last October the Tsukiji fish market, in operation since 1935, moved out from the city center to the district of Toyosu to cope with the crowds.
gmnicholas / E+ / Getty Images
Kristan Porter grew up in a fishing family in the fishing community of Cutler, Maine, where he says all roads lead to one career path: fishing. (Porter's father was the family's lone exception. He suffered from terrible seasickness, and so became a carpenter.) The 49-year-old, who has been working on boats since he was a kid and fishing on his own since 1991, says that the recent warming of Maine's cool coastal waters has yielded unprecedented lobster landings.
The climate crisis is getting costly. Some of the world's largest companies expect to take over one trillion in losses due to climate change. Insurers are increasingly jittery and the world's largest firm has warned that the cost of premiums may soon be unaffordable for most people. Historic flooding has wiped out farmers in the Midwest.
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano could be gearing up for an eruption after a pond of water was discovered inside its summit crater for the first time in recorded history, according to the AP.
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'We Should Be Retreating Already From the Coastline,' Scientist Suggests After Finding Warm Waters Below Greenland
Andrew Yang's assertion that people move away from the coast at the last Democratic debate is the completely rational and correct choice for NASA scientists in Greenland.
By Johnny Wood
The Ganges is a lifeline for the people of India, spiritually and economically. On its journey from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, it supports fishermen, farmers and an abundance of wildlife.
The river and its tributaries touch the lives of roughly 500 million people. But having flowed for millennia, today it is reaching its capacity for human and industrial waste, while simultaneously being drained for agriculture and municipal use.
Here are some of the challenges the river faces.
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Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
By Jake Johnson
As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry's success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors.
Speaking during a conference in Washington, DC in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted "model legislation" that states across the nation have passed in recent months.
AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
"We've seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017," said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. "We're up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet."
Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure.
— Friends of the Earth (@foe_us) August 19, 2019
"This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment."https://t.co/bmiHjONEhy
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression.
"Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May.
As The Intercept's Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks "has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in ... Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota."
"The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support," according to Fang. "In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, 'We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.' The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session."
Many of the state bills restricting the right to protest have been "drafted by companies and passed through groups like ALEC, the secretive group of corporate lobbyists trying to rewrite state laws to benefit corporations over people." @greenpeaceusa https://t.co/ZxpTjWdrwT
— Stand Up To ALEC (@StandUpToALEC) May 6, 2019
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
Wildfires raging on Gran Canaria, the second most populous of Spain's Canary Islands, have forced around 9,000 people to evacuate.