asides: green edition 6

Asides is an occasional feature in which I post interesting tools and links I've recently discovered. I've started grouping them in categories.  You can find them all by clicking on the category archive for Blogs, links, and the like.

This edition is the sixth collection of green/environment links.

• Having a hard time keeping track of who owns what organic brand of food? Here is an amazing page of graphics showing linkages between major food processors, investment firms, retailers, and organic brands. Each chart is available in PDF format, too. I have had this bookmarked for awhile, and just recently the NYT mentioned it on their Well blog.
  
• I recently registered two sites at Project BudBurst, a citizen science phenology tracking database. There is a pretty extensive list of native plants that you can choose to monitor, and the site will save your information so you can see any changes over the years. This will replace all my stray calendars and spreadsheets where I've tried to keep this data the last ten years.
• In an effort to stay away from conventionally-grown cotton, I've purchased bed sheets and some clothing items made of bamboo, touted to be a much "greener" fabric. Alas, bamboo is not as green as we have been led to believe.
• In a similar vein, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), certifier of sustainable forest products, has been roundly -- and justifiably, in my opinion -- slammed for recently certifying Brazilian eucalyptus monocultures owned by an international company with a dismal environmental record. This is just the latest in a series of situations for which the FSC has come under fire. Can't trust that certification now.
• And to top off the hat trick of it-isn't-easy-being-green news, a scathing and scary summary of the sorry state of salmon farming in Chile. The equivalent of 7 to 11 pounds of fresh fish are required to produce 2 pounds of farmed salmon, along with tons of antibiotics, pigments, and hormones. Further, the farms are killing marine life, spreading disease, and escaped salmon are invading ecosystems. I could eat fish every day, but it looks like a luxury now.