February 10th, 2010

By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

Over the past year or so, there’s been a velvety, yummy buzz: Chocolate may just save the planet!

Divine Hearts are actually good for your heart

Actually, that’s a stretch. But in the months leading up to the Copenhagen climate talks last December, several chocolate-makers claimed they were venturing further into fair trade practices, including Nestle, Mars and Cadbury.

Add to that the promising method of “cabruca farming” in Brazil — a way of supplementing rainforests with valuable cacao plants to offset wholesale slash-and-burn techniques. Then multiply those happy developments by now-abundant data showing that chocolate — dark chocolates and bittersweets, specifically — are good for our health, and you’ve got a growing body of evidence that semi-sweet, Fair Trade chocolate is not only good for body, heart and soul; it could be good for the environment.

“Chocolate is considered to be a super food,” says Steven Flood, co-owner of Fat Turkey Chocolates, an organic chocolatier based in Austin, Texas. “You could actually live and sustain yourself on chocolate alone and get everything you need. And you wouldn’t get fat. Because there’s not a lot of fat in dark chocolate.”

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September 11th, 2009

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

“Amazon deforestation dropped 46 percent for the period August 2008 – July 2009 when compared to the same period a year before,” according to a report published in Em Questao, the digital newsletter of the Secretariat of Communications of the Presidency of Brazil. The data was collected by Deforestation Detection in Real Time (DETER) and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The results marked the lowest accumulated index since the survey began in May 2004.

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