Category Archives: Bunn

Solar power’s not just for roofs anymore: It’s being woven into fabric.

Soon, everything from sneakers to beach umbrellas could suck up the sun’s energy and turn it into electricity.

Marianne Fairbanks, a fabric designer, and Trisha Andrew, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, teamed up to make solar fabric — first invented 15 years ago — a little bit sleeker. They created a layer of polymer-coated fabric that absorbs light and conducts electricity, and can be applied to any type of textile. A four-by-four foot swath of cloth can generate enough power to charge a smartphone.

“I get really excited, because textiles are portable and lightweight,” Fairbanks told Smithsonian. “They could be deployed in the wilderness for a hunter or in the field for medical or military applications in a way that big clunky solar panels never could be.” The duo is working on creating marketable solar-powered products like gloves, tents, and other outdoor gear.

Meanwhile, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology recently developed a different wool textile that harvests wind and solar energy. Who knew the renewable energy fabric industry was so competitive?

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Solar power’s not just for roofs anymore: It’s being woven into fabric.

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Corporate giant Bayer just made a deal to buy Monsanto.

After her husband died from lung cancer in 1969, Hazel M. Johnson started a fight against all the things making her neighbors and loved ones sick. She founded the organization People for Community Recovery, and later met a young organizer named Barack Obama. The two worked together to remove asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, her public housing community — a fight they won in 1989.

Obama later wrote about that fight in his memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. As detailed in Johnson’s Chicago Tribune obituary, Obama was criticized for leaving Johnson out of the story. Johnson passed away in 2011, leaving behind an inspiring legacy that too many people know nothing about. Chicago took a step toward changing that when it renamed 130th Street on the South Side Hazel Johnson EJ Way.

The recognition that marginalized people shoulder too much of the burden from environmental threats inspired Johnson’s life’s work. She was radically ahead of her time. “It’s all very well to embrace saving the rain forests and conserving endangered animal species,” she said, “but such global initiatives don’t even begin to impact communities inhabited by people of color.”

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Corporate giant Bayer just made a deal to buy Monsanto.

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Being a big fish in a small pond (or, uh, the ocean) could get you killed.

Turns out the largest sea creatures are most likely to go extinct, according to research published today in Science.

The research, led by Stanford’s Jonathan Payne, compared modern marine vertebrates and mollusks to their ancestors in the fossil record, all the way up to the last mass extinction 66 million years ago. Today, unlike in any previous time studied, a 10 percent increase in body size means a 13 percent increase in extinction risk.

This differs from a run-of-the-mill mass extinction, when your likelihood of dying off has a lot more to do with, say, where you live in the ocean or where you fall on the evolutionary tree.

And the biggest-is-not-best pattern has human fingerprints all over it — just think of the mastodon and moa.

“Humans, with our technology, have made ourselves into predators that can go after very large animals,” says Payne. But there’s an upside. Unlike the huge environmental changes that spurred mass extinctions in the past (and perhaps the near future), human activity has been known to do a quick 180.

After all, the oceans have seen very little extinction in the Anthropocene. “We still have a huge opportunity to save almost everything,” Payne says.

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Being a big fish in a small pond (or, uh, the ocean) could get you killed.

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Lawyers told House Science Chair Lamar Smith his subpoenas are trash.

Smith will spend Wednesday morning leading a hearing that “may as well be sponsored by ExxonMobil,” according to 350’s executive director May Boeve.

Smith hopes to affirm his power to subpoena the Union of Concerned Scientists, environmental groups, and the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, who have criticized Exxon for allegedly misleading the public on climate science. He claims investigations into Exxon are “a political agenda at the expense of scientists’ right to free speech.”

Legal scholars happen to disagree with Smith’s interpretation of the constitution.

“The Subpoenas, and the threat of future sanctions, themselves threaten the First Amendment—directly inhibiting the rights of their recipients to speak,” 14 lawyers and legal organizations wrote in a letter published Monday. “These Subpoenas violate the separation of powers, exceed the committee’s delegated authority, abridge the First Amendment, and undermine fundamental principles of Federalism.”

Ouch.

In July, Smith issued subpoenas to green organizations and the AGs of Massachusetts, and New York because of their investigations into Exxon. A total of 15 AGs are considering action against the oil company.

As for Wednesday’s hearing, it will probably look similar to all other House Science hearings that focus on so-called important issues.

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Lawyers told House Science Chair Lamar Smith his subpoenas are trash.

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

Mother Jones

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It would be impossible to fully replicate the depth of dread and disbelief that Command and Control—Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book chronicling the Air Force’s history of nuclear weapons mishaps—bestows on its readers. This is not to say that the haunting new documentary of the same name, co-written by Schlosser and director Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.), doesn’t pack a punch. While the film’s producers were forced to simplify and trim from the book’s deeper content, any viewer who has not read the original or who, like most Americans, pays little heed to our modern nuclear arsenal, is due for a fine scare.

The contextual backdrop of Schosser’s book incudes plenty of the kind of Cold War insanity that many Americans have relegated to the attics of our memories: the rush-rush nuclear buildup stewarded by the hawkish Strategic Air Command boss Gen. Curtis LeMay, the existential nuclear standoffs between JFK and the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, the WarGames-esque computer glitches that falsely signaled Soviet nukes flying our way, and the shock of General William E. Odom, a national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, upon receiving a briefing on the SIOP, the nation’s top-secret plan in case of a nuclear conflict: “It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context,” Odom said. “The president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep some night.”

But Schlosser’s coup de grâce was a list he obtained (via freedom of information requests) detailing a litany of nuclear fuckups by the Air Force. Although the brass typically blamed human error, the record in its totality suggested that America’s systems for safeguarding its nuclear weapons were profoundly broken, were they ever working in the first place. Some incidents were fairly minor and others reflected organizational ineptitude—an accidental shipment of missile nose-cone fuses to Taiwan, nukes sitting around in barely guarded storage igloos on foreign tarmacs, things like that. But the scariest part by far was the tale after tale of actual near-misses: nuke-laden B-52s fragmenting in midair, crashing and scattering radiation; immensely powerful warheads exposed to fire and intense heat and hurled or dropped into American fields and swamps. Yet somehow, by the grace of God, there was never an accidental nuclear detonation on American soil.

The film—which opens on a scene in September 1980, as young maintenance guys suit up to work on a Titan 2 missile in Damascus, Arkansas—features great archival footage and reenactments shot in a decommissioned silo complex. Command and Control dutifully follows the book’s basic outline. The central narrative thread involves a technician’s mistake at a Titan 2 silo that ended with the explosion of a missile whose warhead was more powerful than all the bombs America dropped in WWII combined, the nukes included. (The warhead didn’t detonate, obviously, but at the time nobody knew that it wouldn’t.)

Air Force maintenance men in a reenactment of the Damascus Incident. American Experience Films/PBS

This part of the story is related onscreen by the same former airmen, commanders, journalists, and politicos who appear in the book—largely men who were there or otherwise involved. Among them is then-Senior Airman David Powell, who was a teenager on an Air Force maintenance team when he dropped a nine-pound socket head down the silo shaft, puncturing the missile’s fuel tank. (To get a taste, read the scene as it appears in Schlosser’s book.) What comes after serves as a potent illustration of the breakdown of the military’s command-and-control structure, designed to prevent such accidents and deal with them effectively should they happen. Spoiler alert: Bad decisions are made by know-nothings up the chain of command, and bad things result.

A film, of course, delivers something a book cannot. We get to see real footage from nuclear detonations, from the actual Damascus Incident, and from some of the past nuclear mishaps, the worst one involved the accidental release of two H-bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1961—such an insanely close call that I still shudder to contemplate it. Better yet, we get to meet and hear directly from the Damascus men, including former Senior Airman Powell, an otherwise cheerful guy who tears up as he recounts how, after more than three decades, not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about that socket slipping from his hand—and the chain of events it set off.

As in the book, the tense Damascus narrative plays out against the backdrop of a nation bumbling its way along the nuclear learning curve. As Schlosser notes in the film, we’ve built some 70,000 nuclear weapons over the years, and the fact that none has detonated by accident is a testament to the smarts of the weapons designers at the Sandia Lab—guys like Bob Peurifoy, a regular presence in the film, who worked their asses off convincing the brass to install failsafe devices on the bombs. But there’s yet another key factor at play, Schlosser says: “pure luck.” And that, my friends, is unbelievably scary. Because, to quote Schlosser, nuclear weapons are simply machines, albeit “the most dangerous machines ever invented. And like every machine, sometimes they go wrong.”

Watching the quaint archival footage, a viewer would be tempted to view this problem as history, but to do so would be to bury one’s head in the sand. We still have plenty of nukes sitting around, and portions of our aging arsenal are essentially babysat, as our reporter Josh Harkinson discovered, by a bunch of disgruntled kids. The military screws things up routinely, of course, even if the public seldom hears about it. “Nuclear accidents continue to the present day,” Harold Brown, who was defense secretary under Jimmy Carter at the time of the Damascus Incident, says in the film. “The degree of oversight and attention has if anything gotten worse, because people don’t worry about nuclear war as much.”

It’s not just the US arsenal we need to worry about, however. North Korea just tested its most powerful nuke to date. And bitter enemies India and Pakistan are still young nuclear powers. Suppose a Pakistani nuke were to detonate accidentally. The first face-saving instinct might be to blame India. Not good. Peurifoy spent his entire career designing nuclear safety devices, and he believes an accidental detonation is inevitable, sometime, somewhere. “It will happen,” he says in the film. “It may be tomorrow or it may be a million years from now, but it will happen.”

Command and Control rolls out in selected theaters starting on September 14 in New York City. Click here for dates, cities, and venues.

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

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5 Questions To Ask When Purchasing Soap

Its no secret that soaps can be hit or miss. Those of us who prefer natural, gentle products have long sought out organic, locally made soaps, but even mainstream shoppers are becoming increasingly aware of the dangerous chemicals that may be lurking in conventional soap products.

When it comes to the soaps we use on our bodies, we all want something strong enough to rid our bodies of germs and dirt, but gentle enough to keep our skin feeling soft and moisturized. The problem is that all too often, antibacterial agents and foaming detergents are added to even the most gentle-looking bath products. Here are a few of the things you should be asking yourself when you go to make your next soap purchase:

Is it Labeled As Antibacterial?

First and foremost, JUST SAY NO to antibacterial soaps. Last week, the FDA made the decision to ban the use of triclosan, a common antibacterial agent, in consumer products. Triclosan has long been controversial, as some research indicates that it may change the way hormones operate in the human body, making it a potential carcinogen. Triclosan has been found in large deposits in human breast milk, raising immense cause for concern.

Even more scary than the idea of a potential carcinogen being found in large quantities of human breast milk is the idea that triclosan could be spreading incidences of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In a recent consumer update, the FDA announced that consumers should skip antibacterial soaps altogether as a result of this danger.

In addition, laboratory studies have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics, the FDA states. Some data shows this resistance may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of medical treatments, such as antibiotics.

Finally, even in the light of all these health risks, theres simply no reason to use antibiotic soap at all. Studies have shown that plain old soap and water is EQUALLY as effective at ridding the body of bacteria.

Does it Contain Fragrance?

Did you know that soap and cosmetics manufacturers are not legally required to disclose the ingredients in fragrances? This means that literally any number of weird, unnatural substances could be used to concoct that parfum in your fancy, sweet-smelling soap.

In fact, fragrances are notorious for containing icky ingredients. If you desire a scented soap, your best bet is to look for one thats fragranced only with essential oils.

Even then, you may decide to skip essential oils as well. Even these natural fragrances can be irritating to those with sensitive skin, and some research suggests that we may not even be aware of our sensitivity. Over time, this can lead to the breaking down of collagen, a substance that maintains skin elasticity.

Does It Contain Sulfates?

Sulfates are detergents that produce a big, creamy lather, and theyre extremely common in conventional soaps. The problem is that these harsh cleansers are SO lathering, they can strip the skin of its natural oils, causing dryness, acne, skin irritation and unbalanced pH.

Is It Cruelty-Free?

Unfortunately, most mainstream soap brands still test their products on animals. Even if you purchase an all-natural brand like Toms, you may be unwittingly supporting cosmetic animal testing, as many of these natural brands are owned by larger conglomerates that test on animals. The choice is yours to make, but if animal rights are an issue for you, be sure to look for the Leaping Bunny symbol in order to verify the companys ethical standards in this regard.

Is It Hard?

Lets be realwhile many of us like to make ethical decisions, we also want a great soap thats going to last over time! Soaps that feel harder when dry are going to last longer and do a better job at cleansing away dirt and debris than soft soaps. Soft soaps are likely to wash away quickly, giving you a bad return on your investment.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Questions To Ask When Purchasing Soap

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What Everyone Can Learn from Tiny House Dwellers

For some homeowners, bigger is better. Even as household size shrinks, square footage hasn’t followed suit. The median size of a new single-family home in 2015 was 2,467 square feet up by almost 1,000 square feet compared to homes built just 10 years ago.

But, not everyone has dreams of decorating a second dining room. Plenty of tiny house dwellers are finding that they can live large with less, downsizing to homes that are anywhere from 100-500 square feet. Sure, the financial perks are sizable (69 percent of tiny house people have no mortgage, compared to 29.3 percent of all U.S. homeowners), but there’s plenty more to love about about a smaller space. You don’t need to ditch your home and shack up in a 200-square-foot studio to incorporate some of the lessons of living lightly.

A place for everything.

Think there’s room for a junk draweror a junk closetwhen you’re living in 100 square feet? Keep clutter from piling up by designating a spot for everything in your home. Not only will it make it easier to find things, tidying up will get easier (and faster) when you’re not just moving piles of things next to other piles of things.

Think before you buy.

Once you have a designated spot for everything in your home, bringing in something new becomes a more deliberate decision. Do you like that cookie jar shaped like a dancing rooster enough to make room for it?

One in, one out.

Still undecided about that rooster cookie jar? Or about adding another plain black t-shirt to your overstuffed closet? Try implementing a “one in, one out” rule to help you decide about a purchase. One rooster cookie jar in, an old cookie jar set aside to donate.

Be picky about freebies.

One man’s trash is sometimes another man’s treasure. But sometimes one man’s trash should stay just that. Yes, it’s hard to say no to your aunt’s offer to pass down her wicker basket collection, even if you’ve never had any desire to own a collection of wicker baskets. But tiny house dwellers are great at saying “thank you, but I don’t have room for that” and there’s no reason you can’t say it, either. Tiny home or not, you’re not obligated to take in everyone else’s castoffs.

Master multitasking.

Whether you live in a studio apartment or have a little more space to spread out, you can minimize clutter and maximize space by choosing furniture that multitasks. Swap your dining table chairs for a bench that offers both storage and seating, mount shelving or a small desk to walls to clear floor space or choose a large ottoman that doubles as a coffee table.

Make a list.

Whether you’re stocking your fridge or shopping for furniture or home decor, avoid impulse purchases by writing down just what you need. Fall in love with something on the way to the checkout line? Snap a photo and sleep on it before you buy.

Choose quality over quantity.

In the words of Marie Kondo, tidying expert and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, hold onto the items that spark joy, and donate or throw away the rest. How you interpret the advice is up to you, but if your shelves and closets are packed with items that spark guilt, dread, and dust bunnies, start there.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What Everyone Can Learn from Tiny House Dwellers

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Earth Week Daily Action: Adopt the Right Pet

What do Earth Week and Earth Day have to do with dogs, cats and maybe even snakes?

As it turns out, a lot.

* Wild cats kill billions of birds and mammals each year. In fact, “feral” cats are the number one cause of death for both, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Ecology.com says that, “over the years…cats have brought about the extinction of 33 bird species.”

* Free-ranging dogs, which can include dogs born into the wild, feral dogs and street dogs, may carry rabies; in fact, more than 55,000 people die from rabies bites mostly inflicted by dogs each year.

* Pet snakes, released into the wild when they get too big, are threatening biodiversity in places like the Florida Everglades. The Burmese python is preying on birds, mammals like raccoons and opossum, and even alligators.

Plus, “puppy mills” run horrible, factory-style breeding facilities that often put profits above the welfare of the dog. These breeders may turn out “picture perfect” canines, but in reality, with so many millions of dogs in shelters and on the streets, isn’t it more humane to adopt a stray than to order up a brand new dog?

During Earth Week, being kind to our pets is a good way to be kind to the planet. Here’s what you can do:

* Adopt a pet from a shelter rather than a breeder. Shelter pets need homes, so adopting a pet that’s already alive is a wonderfully humane action to take. In fact, you may prevent that animal from being euthanized. You’ll definitely get it off the street. Contact your local animal rescue league or find a nearby shelter through your local Humane Society. The Shelter Pet Project also makes it easy to find a pet or pet adoption group.

* Take a stray dog or cat to a shelter where it can be put up for adoption. If you see a stray dog or cat, don’t leave it on the street. Alert the nearest shelter so the animal can be picked up, hopefully cleaned up and fed, and made available for adoption.

* If you get a pet, have it spayed or neutered so it will not reproduce. The Humane Society estimates that “in every community, in every state, there are homeless animals. In the U.S., there are an estimated 6-8 million homeless animals entering animal shelters every year.” Spaying or neutering your pet will help prevent more animals from becoming homeless. It’s also good for the animal, both in terms of extending its life span and reducing its risk of contracting various diseases.

* Keep cats indoors so they won’t wander off and become strays; keep dogs on a leash when you walk them outdoors. If you do let your dogs off leash or your cat out for a stroll, consider having the vet embed an electronic ID chip. It’s a relatively painless process that will help you locate your animal in the event it gets lost.

* Clean up after your pet. Dogs and outdoor cats generate a large amount of fecal waste. You probably won’t be able to find the cat waste, since it’s often buried, but clean up after your dog to reduce foul odors, habitat for flies and other insects, and a big mess if you happen to step in it.

Avoid the following pet phaux-pas:

* Don’t adopt or buy an exotic pet, like a snake, bearded dragon, iguana or other reptile. Smaller reptiles are hard to keep alive. Larger reptiles, like snakes, will soon become too much too handle.

* Don’t release exotic pets into the wild. Most of them cannot survive when they’re left to fend for themselves, especially if they’re used to a warm climate but you release them into the cold. In particular, don’t release large snakes like pythons and boa constrictors; they will quickly decimate local animal populations.

* Don’t overfeed your pet. By some estimates, 53 percent of dogs and 58 percent of cats are overweight or obese.Producing all the food that pets eat takes a similar environmental toll as producing food for people. Plus, it’s bad for the animals’ health. Keep your pet alive longer without wasting excessive natural resources by feeding Fido or Fluffy only as much as it needs to stay well.

* Don’t buy from a puppy mill. Don’t encourage ruthless breeders to turn out millions of animals that may never find a home. Most well-treated dogs and cats will be wonderful, loving pets, regardless of their pedigree.

* Don’t follow the fads. Remember, bunnies grow up to be rabbits and chicks turn into chickens. Don’t buy an animal just because it’s Easter and it would be fun to have a live bunny rabbit around!

What recommendations do you have for adopting and raising pets so you can minimize their impact on the environment while still giving them a loving, humane home? Please share!

Related
9 Reasons to Stop Eating Meat in Honor of Earth Day
5 Reasons Not to Buy a Puppy for Christmas

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Earth Week Daily Action: Adopt the Right Pet

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

Mother Jones

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In late November 2015, New Orleans police arrested a man named Joseph Allen for attempted murder in relation to one of the bloodiest nights the city had seen in years. Shots had broken out at a party in Bunny Friend Park, wounding 17 people. Allen was the first of several suspects to be detained after an eyewitness named him as a shooter.

Except that Allen hadn’t been in town at the time. Within a week of his arrest, his private attorney had tracked down footage of the 32-year-old shopping for baby clothes with his pregnant wife at three stores in Houston, Texas, putting him far from the crime scene. A week or so later, Allen learned that no charges would be filed against him—he was released from jail the next day.

In his office down the street from the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, chief public defender Derwyn Bunton couldn’t help but think about what might have happened to Allen had he ended up with a public defender. In the wake of a budget crisis that had ravaged the Orleans Public Defenders Office several years earlier, Allen would’ve been lucky even to talk with one of the office’s overworked lawyers—there were 42 at the time—within any reasonable time frame. Only then would one of the office’s eight investigators have received a request to look into Allen’s case.

Bunton suspects his investigators wouldn’t have made it to Houston in time to obtain the store security footage that exonerated Allen. “I’m not going let people believe that everything is okay, that they get assigned a public defender and we’ve got that kind of resources,” Bunton told me, adding that two of the 10 Bunny Friend Park co-defendants are being represented by his office. “We don’t.”

Here’s how one Florida public defender’s office turned things around. Tristan Spinski

This past January, with more budget cuts looming, Bunton’s office did something drastic: It began turning away clients. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly responded with a federal lawsuit against the Orleans Parish defenders and the Louisiana Public Defender Board that oversees them. The suit alleges that rejecting new cases amounts to leaving people languishing in jail without counsel in violation of the Constitution. Late last month, Bunton told the Times-Picayune that his office cannot afford to represent itself in the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit itself can’t change anything,” concedes Brandon Buskey, an attorney for the ACLU. “The political actors in Louisiana have to step up. The lawsuit can put pressure on them. It can point out that the system is unconstitutional. But if the state wants a better system, it has to fix it.”

In a court filing—and an interview with Mother Jones—Bunton denies that his actions were unconstitutional. “Is it better to violate the constitution by being incompetent and ineffective?” he says. “I think where we would be violating the Constitution and ethics and professional standards would be to continue to take on cases we don’t have the resources to handle.”

Bunton’s move was just the latest in a string of decisions since last July designed to keep the lights on at the struggling defenders office, which represents more than 80 percent of New Orleans’ criminal defendants. It has been a rough turnabout for an office that as recently as five years ago was cited by the Southern Center for Human Rights as “an inspiration” for its “vigorous client-centered representation.” Even then, the office was looking at a shortfall for 2012 and had begun to cut back on staff. “Louisiana is an extreme at this moment,” says Marc Schnidler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “How they got to where they are—that tells the story of indigent defense in this country.”

Like many of their peers around the nation, the Orleans Parish public defenders are saddled with massive caseloads on a shoestring budget. In 2014, the office’s 51 attorneys juggled more than 22,000 cases—a whopping 431 per lawyer—which included nearly 8,000 felonies and nine death penalty cases. And while rejecting clients was seen as a last resort, Orleans is not the only one doing it. Fourteen of the state’s 42 judicial districts have cut back on their defender services and six have stopped taking certain cases, according to James Nixon, chair of the Louisiana Public Defender Board.

The way the state funds defense for its poor is deeply flawed, criminal justice experts agree. Louisiana is the only state where public defenders rely heavily on income sources that fluctuate significantly. In its 2015-16 fiscal year, Orleans Parish got just 40 percent of its budget from the state—which faces a new shortfall of at least $800 million for the upcoming fiscal year. The rest of the money had to be found locally. Nearly 40 percent of the defenders budget relied on local court fines and fees. But according to a state Supreme Court report, the number of traffic tickets filed in Louisiana courts—already low post-Hurricane Katrina—has dropped by 29 percent since 2009. This has translated to a shortfall for public defenders. “What you have is a local funding crisis,” Nixon told me.

The chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court noted in a recent annual report to the legislature that numerous defender offices could face insolvency. “We’re funding public defenders offices off the backs of folks who can’t afford a lawyer,” explains Clarke Beljean, a Plaquimines Parish defender who worked at the Orleans Parish office for six years. The Defender Board’s 2014 report called the situation “unstable, unreliable, and untenable.”

And this system was supposed to be an improvement.

Prior to Katrina, impoverished defendants in Louisiana didn’t even have access to full-time public defenders. Instead, parish-level defender boards enlisted private lawyers to handle those clients. New Orleans was served by the Orleans Indigent Defender Program, which consisted of 54 attorneys with a slim $2 million budget, working part time out of a room in the courthouse.

The hurricane disrupted everything. In Katrina’s wake, according to a 2012 evaluation, only six attorneys were left to handle more than 6,000 open cases in Orleans Parish. The local defender board resigned, a new reform-minded group took over, and the Indigent Defender Program became the Orleans Public Defenders office. In 2006, it won a $3 million Justice Department grant for rebuilding efforts and to fund 40 positions for two years. New lawyers were recruited, salaries were increased, and the original lawyers were told to give up their private practices and focus on public defense. The office, which was adorned with donated furniture and equipment, found new digs and shifted its philosophy to a client-based model, meaning that public defenders would now be connected with defendants within a day of their arrest and stick with them throughout their case—instead of being assigned to a courtroom and handling whatever cases came through in a given day. In 2007, the legislature established the state Public Defender Board to oversee similar district offices.

Bunton was named Orleans Parish chief public defender in late 2008. Bolstered by grants and city and state funding, the office grew into a 72-attorney shop with 20 investigators and a $9 million budget. “If we were a stock, we were trending up,” Bunton says. But four years later, the office was hit with large cuts at both the state and local level—including a drop in traffic-ticket revenue. Bunton tearfully broke the news to staff: He would have to lay off 27 people.

The remaining attorneys, who already worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, had to pick up the slack. “It’s like, you’re already trying to keep your head above water while holding however many pounds of weight on your back and then they throw you a baby. You’re like, ‘What do I do?'” says former Orleans defender Clarke Beljean, who survived the cutbacks that day. “And then they throw you another one. And then they throw you a few more, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean, you can’t hold these seven babies above water?’ Honestly, that’s the feeling.”

Bunton’s lawyers routinely exceed the maximum recommended caseloads that many experts view as excessive. In 2015, the office had four attorneys handling roughly 9,500 misdemeanors—a rate nearly six times the recommended limit of 400 per lawyer. The offices’s 55 felony defenders had 7,705 cases that year, which falls within the 150-felony limit, but the office recently lost more lawyers, including veterans whose high-level cases had to be redistributed. Three months into 2016, the office projects that the 39 remaining felony attorneys are already exceeding the 150-case limit, its spokeswoman told me. As of April 3, the office had refused 53 cases and put another 56 on a waiting list.

A 2009 Department of Justice report noted that, to properly defend 91 percent of the city’s indigent defendants—private attorneys working pro bono would presumably handle the rest—the Orleans office would need an $8.2 million budget and 70 staff attorneys. In real life, Bunton’s office is projected to end up with just $5.9 million—$1 million less than it expected. About 30 percent of the shortfall is expected to come from subpar revenue from fines and fees. Meanwhile, the office has one-third fewer attorneys than the DOJ recommended, and about half as many as the DA’s office employs.

In a letter to city and state officials last June, Bunton outlined a cost-cutting plan he said would “likely cause serious delays in the courts and potentially constitutional crises” for criminal justice in New Orleans. A month later, his office imposed a hiring freeze. To make ends meet, the defenders office even resorted to crowd-funding. In September, after the comedian John Oliver did a segment about the problem on his HBO show, it raised just over $86,000 to help the office narrow its budget gap. At a November 20 hearing, Bunton asked the courts to stop sending his office new cases. In January, hoping to stave off further hardship, the New Orleans City Council shelled out $200,000 for the defenders. Jo-Ann Wallace, executive director of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, says that Orleans Parish’s decision to turn away clients as a last resort is consistent with “their ethical obligation to provide zealous representation.”

On the state level, the Public Defenders Board is facing cuts that could range from 30 percent to 62 percent, Nixon told me. Under the latter scenario, two judges wrote in an op-ed, the board could “force the complete elimination of juvenile defense services statewide.” A final budget is due from the legislature in July.

As the Orleans office waits for the ax to fall, Bunton is ethically torn about the choices he’s been forced to make. “It sucks,” he says. “I don’t do this job to tell people no.” In fact, he’s embraced the ACLU lawsuit as a way to pressure state officials. Indeed, over the past decade, deluged defenders’ offices in Florida, Missouri, and Montana have turned away clients as a way to get legislators’ attention. It has worked, too. In 2013, Florida’s Supreme Court ruled that Miami-Dade County’s efforts to turn down cases was justified.

But what to do with those defendants in the meantime? Last week, private attorneys assigned to represent seven poor clients in Orleans Parish filed court motions requesting compensation—or permission to withdraw from the cases. Tulane law processor Pamela Metzger told CityLab that the clients in custody should be released: “You can’t make lawyers do this for free, or ask them to spend out of their own pocket for overhead and costs.” Assistant DA David Pipes countered, “It is their job to protect the rights and interests of their clients in their individual cases…If that means that a private lawyer must defend the poor without the certainty of knowing they are going to be paid, that is preferable to seeing justice denied, criminals turned loose, or victims and defendants languishing in uncertainty.”

On April 8, New Orleans Judge Arthur Hunter ordered the release of the seven clients, concluding that their rights to an effective attorney should not rest on “budget demands, waiting lists, and the failure of the legislature to adequately fund indigent defense.” He added,› “We are now faced with a fundamental question, not only in New Orleans, but across Louisiana. What kind of criminal justice system do we want? One based on fairness or injustice, equality or prejudice, efficiency or chaos, right or wrong?”

“There’s no such thing as Cadillac justice and Toyota justice. There’s justice, and there is injustice,” Bunton says. “And we are not going to be complicit in any injustice.”

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

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How to Make Sure What You’re Buying is Cruelty-Free

Its unfortunate that cosmetic animal testing is still legal in the United States. Some countries banned the practice long ago (in fact, in 2013, the entire European Union made it illegal to sell any products whose manufacture had included cosmetic animal testing), but the U.S. is still trailing behind.

If you are passionate about reducing and preventing animal cruelty, chances are you do your best to avoid purchasing products from companies that perform animal testing. Theres more to shopping cruelty-free than simply relying on a label, though. Heres what you need to know in order to shop cruelty-free:

Look for the Leaping Bunny

The most reliable and well-known way to find cruelty-free products is to select items that feature the characteristic Leaping Bunny symbol (bonus tip: You can download the Leaping Bunny app, which allows you to quickly check whether or not a product is cruelty-free). Created and bestowed by the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics, this symbol shows that the product is distributed by a company you can feel good about supporting.

In order to earn the certification, companies must pledge not only to preclude animal testing internally, but also to only purchase their ingredients from other cruelty-free companies. They must promise not to sell to countries that make animal testing compulsory (Ill get to that in a minute), and must do thorough screenings and upkeep to ensure that none of their partners have begun animal testing practices. They must also commit to renewing their certification every year.

Shopping for products that have this certification is a really good way to avoid accidentally supporting companies that test on animals, becauseas I’m about to explainthings can get complicated.

Do Your Research on Parent Companies and Affiliates

Many, many companies that arent cruelty-free own all-natural product lines that claim to be. For example, while the popular toothpaste and personal care line Toms of Maine might not test on animals, it’s owned by Colgate-Palmolive, which is decidedly not cruelty-free. The same can be said of Clinique, which is owned by EsteLauder.

Some people believe that purchasing a cruelty-free brand from a large conglomerate can help shift the parent company toward better values, while others decide not to support the company or its affiliates at all. That decision is yours to make.

Get to Know Countries’Individual Animal Testing Requirements

The Chinese government requires that many cosmetic products be tested on animals before they can be sold to the general public. This means that if a cosmetic product is available in China, it’s most likely being tested on animals.

By contrast, no cosmetic products sold in the European Union can ever have been tested on animals. Buying a European-made product is a great way to know that your cosmetics are cruelty-free.

It takes a lot of time to sift through the information out there about animal testing. There are definitely signs that things are getting betterthe EU law and recent changes to Chinese laws are big victories for animal rights activists. But were not done yet! Make your voice heard by supporting companies that consider animals well-being. Be choosy about your cosmetic purchases, ask your favorite companies to take the cruelty-free pledge, and do your research about animal testing laws and issues.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Make Sure What You’re Buying is Cruelty-Free

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