Rebecca Clarren

In recent weeks, as revelations of Horizon’s farming practices have come to light, a collection of consumer groups and organic dairy farmers have erupted in protest. Horizon and similar dairies are capitalizing on the boom in organic foods, they say, but diluting the true meaning of the term. Contrary to genuine organic practices, which entail raising cows on open pastures, where the animals feed on grass, experts say that a substantial percentage of cows at farms like Horizon’s are confined to pens, fed a diet of proteins and grains, and produce milk that, while free of hormones, is not as healthy as it could be.

At a recent meeting of the United States Department of Agriculture’s organic advisory board, 25 dairy farmers gave public testimony, and 8,000 farmers and consumers sent letters, claiming that by allowing “confinement dairies” such as Horizon and Aurora Organic Dairy, a 5,300-cow operation outside Denver (started by the founder of Horizon), to continue to market themselves as organic, the label’s original promise of excellence is lost.

“People are paying more for organic products because they think the farmers are doing it right, that they’re treating animals humanely and that the quality of the product is different,” says Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, a network of 600,000 organic consumers. “There has never been farms like Horizon or Aurora in the history of organics. Intensive confinement of animals is a no-no. This is Grade B organics.”

Cummins and other critics stress that the USDA has been lax in enforcing current organic standards, which remain vague, and in creating strict new ones. To them, federal organic standards should mandate that cows be raised on pasture and fed grass. Given the USDA’s failures, they attest, confinement dairies like Horizon continue to profit at the expense of the nation’s small, independent dairies — ones that do follow organic principles and produce the healthiest milk possible for people, cows and the environment.

Despite its folksy image, Horizon is emblematic of 21st century agriculture. It’s a brand of White Wave Foods, itself a division of $10 billion Dean Foods, the largest milk bottler in the country. Yet big business doesn’t have to be a dirty word, says Steve Demos, president of White Wave Foods and overseer of the Horizon brand, who resigned from the company not long after our interview.

“There’s a certain idealistic appreciation for a farm with 10 cows grazing on a hill at sunrise,” he offers. “But there are 280 million people in the Unites States. If moms and consumers care about avoiding hormones and antibiotics, then it’s our job to fill that need as much as possible. And if profits are rooted in noble causes and honorable intentions, then honesty pays. Long ago they said that small was beautiful; they forgot to tell you it’s not profitable.”

Here’s a little primer on the cash cow that is organic milk. It sells for nearly double the price of regular milk (approximately $4 to $2 for a half-gallon). Although it currently constitutes less than 3 percent of the American milk market, sales have increased 23 percent every year between 1997 and 2003. At its current trajectory, organic milk is poised to become 6 percent of the market by 2010 — a $2.4 billion industry. Horizon, with annual sales of $218 million, is already the country’s largest organic milk producer.

And, yes, building market share requires a clever sales pitch. “Nobody doubts the pure wholesome milk of the early American heritage dairy farms,” Demos says. “We are marketing the very myth about early milk.”

It’s a myth that has certainly caught on. “Consumers always mention the happy cow,” says Blanca Hernandez of the Hartman Group, a market research firm for natural foods. “Its brand reinforces their decision that they’re buying something that’s good for their family.” Yet mainstream consumers, she adds, aren’t aware of what qualifies as organic. “They don’t know how exactly a product should be grown to be certified. It’s not imperative to them. To them, the organic label simply means that their milk has been produced without the use of hormones or antibiotics. Those are the things they look for. It’s what gives them peace of mind.”

What most consumers don’t know is that at Horizon’s big dairies, such as the one in Idaho, the cows are raised in a manner that most experts don’t consider organic. According to former Horizon Idaho dairy workers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardizing their current jobs, Horizon cows graze for only four or five hours a day and during only three months in the summer. While Horizon claims the cows get plenty of fresh air, that’s because the barns are open structures. Their cows can see the fields but mostly aren’t walking around in them. “Most of the time, the cows are inside the barn,” says one former employee, who worked on the Idaho farm for eight years.

Like the steady stream of Mexican immigrants who milk them every eight hours, Horizon cows work hard. In Idaho, they are fed a steady diet of alfalfa hay, oats, soybeans, and grains such as barley and corn (all organic!), according to a Horizon spokesperson. This starch diet pushes the bovines to produce extra milk. While dairy cows on many pasture-based farms are milked twice a day, Horizon’s cows produce enough to be milked three times daily.

In general, says Dr. Hubert Karreman, a dairy cow veterinarian, “grain-heavy diets aren’t good for cows.” Karreman is an animal husbandry expert who also serves on the National Organic Standards Board, a federal advisory board. Cows have evolved to eat grass, which is why their four stomachs, filled with an array of anaerobic bacteria, function like fermentation vats at a brewery. When the majority of a cow’s diet comes from grain and other readily fermentable carbohydrates, their rumen, the first of those four stomachs, becomes acidic and the cows can become sick and die prematurely.

Former employees say they have no evidence of this happening at Horizon. The company, according to its spokesperson, generally sells its cows at an average age of 6 years old to butchers, while in general many organic dairy cows can live to be 13.

“It’s fundamental to organic that cows are eating grass that’s rooted in the ground,” says Karreman, based in Lancaster County, Pa. “I’m not in favor of large confinement farms. I like to see cows out on grass, eating in the sunshine, enjoying the landscape. Organic should mean that pasture is the true source of nutrition for the animals.”

Linda Tikofsky, a veterinarian at Cornell University, agrees. “Cows are healthier when they’re out on grass,” she says. Tikofsky explains that while there’s nothing in Horizon milk that would hurt anyone, for her, an organic label would mean a sustainable system where the health of the animal and the environment is more important than manipulating cows to maximize milk production. “I feed my kids organic milk but not Horizon,” she says.

There remains a serious debate about just how good milk is for anyone. Ask any vegan. Regardless, many nutritionists say the most nutritious glass of milk comes from cows that eat fresh grass. Studies in the Journal of Dairy Science suggest that grass-fed cows produce milk that is higher in beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E, and has five times more cancer-fighting properties. This also contains an equal ratio of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Even amounts of these two fats result in lower risk of cancer, allergies, obesity and diabetes, according to a 2002 study in Biomed Pharmacotherapy.

Still, while the milk from Horizon and Aurora’s confinement dairies may not be the cream of the crop, it’s far from the milk produced by conventional factory dairies such as Borden, Alta Dena and Meadow Gold, all bottled by Dean, Horizon’s parent company. These days, regular dairies can have up to 30,000 cows that are raised in huge contained barns with big lagoon ponds of manure out back. To keep all those cows healthy in such a confined space, they’re pumped full of antibiotics. They’re fed hormones to increase their milk production, and these conventional cows eat a tasty array of pesticide-laden feed. As calves, they’re fed chicken manure because it’s high in protein. Such milk is laced with a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and hormones such as rGBH, a controversial drug produced by Monsanto.

Horizon is on a populist mission to produce milk without hormones and make it accessible and affordable to everyone. In Idaho and at a 3,000-cow farm in California, from which Horizon buys milk, cows eat feed produced without pesticides; while producing milk, they are given no hormones or antibiotics. Horizon also buys milk from several hundred small dairies where cows do graze on pasture. A company spokesperson estimates that 30 percent of its milk comes from the company’s farm in Idaho and a similar operation in Maryland.

But because that figure doesn’t include the additional milk it purchases from the California dairy, and a 5,300-cow dairy in Colorado, critics say that’s a low figure. Based on its own market analysis, the Cornucopia Institute, an agricultural think tank, says it’s more likely that nearly 50 percent of Horizon’s milk comes from cows that are not raised on pasture.

Given that significant percentage, critics say the dairy is disregarding the intention of the organic laws. “Factory dairy farms are playing loose with the organic rules,” says Mark Kastel, director of the Cornucopia Institute. “We cannot allow corporate profiteering to besmirch the organic marketplace. When consumers buy organic, they think they’re supporting family farms with a higher environmental and animal husbandry ethic.”

Over the past several months, the institute has filed three formal complaints with the USDA, alleging that the agency is being lax in its enforcement of the pasture regulation at Horizon’s dairy in Idaho and at the other dairies in Colorado and California, where Horizon buys milk. While there is no timeline for when the USDA must respond, if the government fails to take this issue seriously, Kastel says his group may sue.

His position was bolstered this past March at the meeting of the National Organic Standards Board. A federal advisory panel recommended that the USDA clarify its regulations so that they more explicitly state that organic dairy cows be confined in bad weather to protect the safety of animals, often during birthing. It also advised the USDA to interpret the pasture rule to mean that all animals over six months of age graze grass for at least 120 days of the year.

This rule is controversial because big dairies like Horizon’s Idaho operation currently don’t meet that standard. It would also require big dairies to invest in more land and new milking procedures. It is now open to public comment and will be voted on in August. Yet whether the USDA will heed these recommendations is another matter entirely. Horizon has been able to get away with a creative interpretation of the pasture standard because the USDA hasn’t been clear with the public or farmers about just what it means to be an organic cow.

The USDA doesn’t actually go out to every farm and give it a stamp of organic approval. Rather, such grunt work is done by a hodgepodge of state agricultural agencies, nonprofit groups and for-profit companies; there are 97 different organic certifiers in total. These entities verify all aspects of a dairy’s organic plan by inspecting records to ensure, for example, that the fields have been chemical free for at least three years and by visiting the farm to examine the conditions of the cattle, the milking parlor and the surrounding pasture.

While there are hefty federal penalties for illegally stamping a dairy organic, the system is fraught with potential conflict of interest. Kevin Elfering, a director of dairy food and meat inspection for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, states that the pell-mell certification process lacks rigorous and transparent oversight. He says it’s too easy for certifiers to bend the rules, allowing dairies to stay in business and keep the certifiers in the black as well. “There are always a small percentage of people looking to amass higher profits without following the rules,” Elfering says. “You have any number of certifying organizations and they want business. The certifier would be biting the hand that feeds them if they enforce the regulations.”

Indeed, John Cleary, certification director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, a 20-year-old nonprofit certification organization, says he would never stamp Horizon with an organic label. “It doesn’t appear to me that they [Horizon] have access to pasture in the way we understand the rules,” he says. “Organic is about balancing the amount of land with the amount of animals and the health of the animals. I don’t see how these confinement operations can do that.”

Cleary faults the USDA for not doing a better job of overseeing the certification process. “I’ve asked [Horizon and Aurora] how they’re meeting these standards and they say, ‘We’re certified and we couldn’t be doing this if we weren’t meeting the standards.’ The USDA needs someone with a backbone to stand up and say if you don’t raise your cows on pasture, it just doesn’t qualify as organic. There’s an uneven playing field out there now.”

According to Cleary and a host of consumer groups, the USDA has been about as vigilant as cops at a doughnut shop. Since the final organic rule was released in December 2000, the USDA hasn’t implemented any of the organic standards board’s more than 50 policy recommendations. It has yet to create a peer review panel to oversee the accreditation process, as is required by law, or to create a program manual for certifiers that specifies all of the rules and regulations.

“The staff at the USDA that is running the organic program continues to be cagey. The lack of transparency makes us wonder what they have to hide,” says Urvashi Rangan, of the Consumers Union. Rangan wonders whether certifiers all follow the same standards for ensuring that milk is organic. “The quality of some milk may be less than others and the USDA needs to rectify the situation. I think the envelope is being pushed as wide as it actually can.”

Even without overalls or a red barn (his are green), third-generation dairy farmer Jon Bansen evokes the days when milk really did arrive on our doorsteps at dawn. With his wife and four young blond children, Bansen raises 200 Jersey cows in the shadow of Oregon’s coastal mountains. On a recent clear morning, as frost melts beneath a bright sky, cows with names such as Eileen and Trish crowd around Bansen, rubbing their noses on his jeans.

“I’m a grass farmer first — if I don’t grow grass well, there’s nothing for the cows,” Bansen explains. “It’s all about the health of the cow; it starts with healthy soil, and that relates to a healthy plant, and it just goes all the way up the food chain. Really, if people just use common sense, it’s an absolute no-brainer. If an animal is healthier, what they produce will be healthier.”

Bansen describes how he rotates his cows to graze different sections of his 310 acres of grass so that the land isn’t overgrazed and trampled. During the winter months, when the Oregon rains make grazing dangerous for the cows, Bansen feeds the animals pickled grass that he cut last season. Today, Bansen sells his milk to Organic Valley, a cooperative owned and run by nearly 700 families with an emphasis on pasture. In 2004, it sold $208 million worth of milk, butter and yogurt. He and his wife make an income comparable to that of doctors or lawyers and he has three employees who make up to $35,000 annually.

Yet if the USDA continues to allow big companies like Horizon to play by different standards, Bansen says his livelihood will be at stake. If large dairies don’t invest in the cost of land for pasture, they can sell their milk for less. While the large demand for a limited supply of organic milk has kept prices high for everyone, Bansen worries that when more large confinement dairies like Horizon enter the market, they will dictate cheaper prices.

“We can’t compete with somebody milking 6,000 cows who’s doing it in a manner that doesn’t cost as much,” he says, sitting in his living room that overlooks a broad green field. “Big dairies threaten the structure of rural America, which is contingent on living-wage jobs. Organic has provided for small family businesses.”

Already, some small dairy farmers say the big dairies are squeezing them off the shelf. About 30 miles southeast of Bansen’s farm, Franz Wenz, owner of Noris Dairy Inc., the only independent organic milk producer and bottler in the Northwest, says only large operations like Organic Valley and Horizon can afford to spend big bucks on flashy marketing and offer supermarkets exclusive deals at lower prices.

“The big guys can bury us,” says Wenz, an Austrian native with bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls. “They can make exclusive deals and say, ‘You just take our product and we’ll give you a good deal.’ The stores don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves when they depend on just one company that can then control the price.”

To stay in business, Wenz and his family have carved out a niche by selling and personally delivering their glass-bottled milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream and sour cream directly to more than 300 customers in the Portland and Eugene area. Wenz says he and his family intend to stick it out, despite hard financial times.

As the sun rises high above the morning’s cloak of white fog, before us stretches the mythic American heritage dairy. Happy cows graze in a broad pasture of green grass. Only this time the picture is real.

As a coalition of more than 40 national and local environmental organizations put it in a letter to EPA administrators this past April: “EPA, under pressure from the Bush White House, has given the foxes the keys to the environmental protection henhouse.”

So meet lifelong San Antonio residents Robert and Lupe Alvarado. For decades, the Alvarados, whose modest home sits around two miles from Kelly, have lived with toxic chemicals underfoot. This is the poor part of town, adorned with chain-link fences and black metal bars concealing the windows. Many houses lack a proper foundation and rest on simple concrete slabs.

Beneath the Alvarados’ house and those of their neighbors are shallow pools of groundwater that are polluted with tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, a chemical associated with cancer, liver and kidney disease. Before the Kelly base closed in 2001, mechanics used PCE to degrease parts on airplanes and fighter jets. For decades, they chronically dumped the solvent into poorly sealed or unsealed waste pits on the base, where it seeped underground, forming a plume that sprawls over four square miles under 23,000 homes and businesses. Locals refer to the area as “the toxic triangle.”

On cool or rainy days, when the Alvarados close the windows and shut off the air conditioning, a sweet chemical smell floods the house. When they eat dinner during these times, says Robert, 66, it’s like tasting something acrid. “We drink bottled water but there’s nothing we can do about the air except go outside and wait,” says Lupe, 64.

Robert, a handsome man with almond skin, limps across his cramped living room with a black metal cane. He shows me a letter that recently arrived from the local hospital, congratulating him; he’d qualified for a kidney transplant. A few years ago he suffered a brain aneurysm, causing him to become nearly blind. His wife and one of his daughters both have battled thyroid cancer. “We know at least 15 people on this street alone who have some sort of cancer,” says Robert, a former labor relations employee at Delta Air Lines. “We call ourselves the living dead.”

In the Alvarados’ front yard, a purple cross sticks out of a cluster of banana trees. The crosses, distributed by a local community group, punctuate front yards throughout the neighborhood. They mark homes where people are battling cancer or other illnesses, an estimated 25 percent of households, according to local activists.

Surveys conducted by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry have found elevated levels of kidney, liver and cervical cancer, leukemia and low birth weights in the neighborhoods that surround Kelly Air Force Base. A survey by the University of Texas found that 91 percent of adults in the area experienced multiple illnesses, including chronic sinus infections, nausea, heart and lung disease. Based on these studies, the area qualifies as a cancer cluster (with a higher rate of terminal illness, per capita, than areas of a similar size), says Wilma Subra, a chemist and environmental health activist based in Louisiana, who has consulted with Kelly community activists.

Although it has conducted limited testing, the EPA acknowledges that it’s possible for PCE vapor to rise from groundwater into people’s living rooms and kitchens. Yet it says the Alvarados and their neighbors have nothing to fear. Based on EPA air quality tests inside five area homes, the nation’s environmental guardian claims that it’s safe for residents to live above the plume for the next 40 to 100 years, or the amount of time it will take for the chemicals to naturally dissipate.

The fact is, EPA scientists haven’t completed an updated scientific assessment of PCE, including its health risks, for a decade. Worse, a comprehensive review of the carcinogenic chemical may never be coming. Anti-regulatory crusaders inside the Bush White House have peopled the EPA with top officials apparently more concerned with limiting government spending than public health. According to critics within and outside the EPA, the agency has stifled independent research and compromised scientific assessments of all manner of toxins and carcinogens that Americans breathe, drink and touch.

“It feels like Stalin-era Russia, like the administration set themselves up to decide what’s allowable science and what isn’t,” says a high-ranking staff scientist at the EPA, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Until the recent economic crash, this has been such an anti-regulatory administration. One of the ways to undermine regulations is to undermine the science behind them. It’s absolutely shocking what’s going on.”

Public health officials say this attempt to derail the scientific evaluation of toxins is one of the most damning legacies of the Bush administration. In late September, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing critique of the EPA’s new toxic-assessment procedures. It concluded that the secretive procedures compromise scientific credibility and sacrifice the public’s trust in government. Despite such hefty criticism, public officials fear that because the new procedures have been instituted at the EPA so far below the public radar, their harmful impact will survive long after Bush leaves office. It will take a bold and expedient move by Barack Obama or the next Congress to curtail the influence of the Pentagon and other government agencies on the EPA.

It sounds like just another mind-numbing acronym: IRIS. Although not widely known, the Integrated Risk Information System is a database that houses the scientific analyses of toxic chemicals. It’s the foundation for most environmental regulations in the U.S. and beyond. Created in 1985 to be the final word on how specific chemicals impact human health, IRIS assessments are subject to review by both EPA scientists and independent experts. EPA regional offices, states and governments worldwide use this data to set standards for drinking water, air emissions and cleanup of chemical spills by both industry and agencies such as the Department of Defense, the National Air and Space Administration and the Department of Energy.

At least that’s how the process used to work before Bush administration appointees arrived in Washington, determined to snap shut the government’s wallet. Chief among them was John Graham, appointed in 2001 as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a powerful but little-known division within the Office of Management and Budget, an agency that controls the White House purse strings.

Before arriving at OMB, Graham headed the industry-funded Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a conservative think tank known for proposing legislative reforms to limit government. Upon arrival in Washington, Graham demanded that agencies make greater use of cost-benefit analyses in formulating regulations. In his first six months on the job, Graham rejected 17 proposed rules submitted to OMB for review, due to the overriding costs of such regulation to industry and the economy.

Graham’s anti-regulatory sentiment found an ally at the EPA. George Gray, a former director of the Harvard Center, became assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development, a position that gave him direct management power over the EPA’s chemical assessment program, in 2006. Inside the bags he packed for his new job was a staunch determination to expose uncertainty in scientific studies. At the top of his agenda, Gray told the journal Environmental Science & Technology in 2006, was an overhaul of IRIS assessments.

Historically, EPA scientists would apply a single number to the toxicity of a compound. That number reflected how much exposure a person could take before getting sick. But, explained Gray, because the human population is so diverse, there’s always an inherent uncertainty of how one person may react to low levels of exposure versus his neighbor. “I think recognizing uncertainty is sort of a sign of this kind of humility,” Gray told the journal.

Instead, he added, the agency would categorize the toxicity of a compound in a range. “We are going to recognize that the levels of exposure that we are [expecting] in the environment are usually hundreds to thousands of times lower than what we know about now.”

This line of thinking is not humble but concerning, says Adam Finkel, a professor of public health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and an expert in the field of risk assessment. “The problem with creating a range is that you can home in on the middle of the range or the low end of the range — that’s been George’s hobbyhorse for a long time,” says Finkel. “But why would you want to be only in the middle range? The reason for the range is that people are diverse. Homing in on the middle only protects half the people and leaves the other half unprotected.”

Not incidentally, under Gray’s tenure at the EPA, the agency has lowered the economic value of human life by nearly $1 million, or 11 percent. A human life is now worth just under $7 million. Such calculations are critical when government determines whether a proposed regulation is financially cost-effective to enforce.

For the Pentagon, the arrival of Gray and Graham couldn’t have been better timed. Since the early 1990s, the EPA has been conducting a toxic assessment of perchlorate, a major component in rocket fuel, used by the military and its contractors in bases throughout the country.

The chemical is incredibly widespread. It shows up in the groundwater of 35 states from New England to California; it has contaminated 153 public water systems in 26 states. Between 17 million and 40 million Americans are exposed to perchlorate at a level many scientists consider unsafe. According to a 2006 CDC study, 36 percent of American women are iodine deficient, putting them at risk for perchlorate-related thyroid problems. Due in part to perchlorate-contaminated irrigation water, most Americans who eat lettuce in the winter ingest the chemical. It has also appeared in melons, spinach and milk, according to 2005 and 2006 studies by the Food and Drug Administration.

A 2002 IRIS assessment led the EPA to call for a safe exposure dose of one part per billion — roughly the equivalent of a drop of water in a home swimming pool. That finding was expected to propel a stringent cleanup policy, one that could cost the Department of Defense billions of dollars.

But when the Pentagon and OMB saw the IRIS assessment, they were furious, says Kevin Mayer, a California-based EPA Superfund manager, who had been involved with the perchlorate review. “The Defense Department was openly upset, not only with the conclusions the scientists at EPA had drawn, but with the external peer review,” says Mayer. “I don’t think the Defense Department was hiding any motives. Anyone can see they have a lot at stake. They’re already spending millions of dollars a year on Superfund sites in California, and groundwater is really hard to clean.”

Concurrently, a preliminary EPA review of trichloroethylene (TCE), used by the military to degrease jets and metal parts, found that the chemical was up to 40 times more likely to cause cancer than was previously believed. Military activities have contaminated some 1,400 sites nationwide with TCE. Again, the Pentagon was staring down a hefty price tag for cleanup.

Fortunately for the Pentagon, it had a sympathetic ear in Graham and Gray. In 2005, the EPA distributed a proposal to revise the chemical assessment process; officials at the Office of Management and Budget sat down with the IRIS blueprint and pulled out a red pen.

The plan that emerged calls for expanding the role of other federal agencies in determining which chemicals are assessed each year. It allows agencies like the Pentagon, Department of Energy and NASA to identify “mission critical” chemicals to the agency’s operations.

Significantly, the new process affords OMB more oversight and involvement in what critics say should be a purely scientific assessment. Now OMB and other non-health agencies have three additional opportunities to comment. Such comments are off-limits to public scrutiny and not available to congressional review unless subpoenaed. If OMB doesn’t agree with certain scientific findings, it can effectively block EPA from moving forward with the assessment.

Longtime EPA officials were astounded by OMB’s audacity. Implementing such a plan is “like industry selecting its own cleanup standards,” an EPA scientist told Inside OSHA in August 2005.

Regardless, this spring, EPA officials and OMB adopted the Pentagon’s suggestions for the new IRIS process. The new plan, says Gray, results in higher-quality risk assessments. This sets up a process that “allows others to bring in scientific information and expertise,” Gray writes in an e-mail. “We’ve heard the criticisms that this is somehow allowing a backdoor, but it should be noted that all draft IRIS assessments are peer reviewed by outside experts. If it doesn’t pass scientific muster, we won’t accept it, and all final decisions on IRIS content remain with EPA.”

Paul Yaroschak, an official with the Department of Defense’s Emerging Contaminants initiative, says it’s important for the Pentagon to be involved. “We wouldn’t be serving the public very well if we didn’t bring studies to bear on this,” he says. He and others within the Office of Management and Budget underscore that they are not interfering with the EPA’s assessment but providing valuable information.

“All we do is provide them with written comments and scientific studies,” says Yaroschak. “We have no influence on the decisions that the EPA makes. EPA makes the judgment, EPA controls the process.” Graham, now dean of the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, says that participation by other federal agencies is crucial to ensuring that the IRIS process has “scientific quality and credibility.”

However, even after peer reviews, the OMB and other federal agencies have one last opportunity to review the document. If the agencies don’t like the scientific findings, they can convene with the EPA, again in private, and reject the findings. These secretive meetings undercut the scientific credibility of IRIS assessments, says Lynn Goldman, an EPA administrator under Clinton, who now teaches environmental health at Johns Hopkins University.

“The new process is an open invitation for interested parties to meddle with IRIS in secret,” Goldman told members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last spring. “Their involvement in the IRIS interagency process gives the appearance — if not the reality — of providing a back door through which industry groups can exert pressure to modify EPA’s conclusions or to subject the process to endless delays.”

Such manipulation and delays aren’t a possibility, they’re already happening, says an EPA staff scientist who agreed to speak on a condition of anonymity. “OMB has created de facto vetoes all over the place,” the scientist says. “If we don’t make the changes they want, the assessment doesn’t go any further. They’re trying to take our assessments and change the science so that a chemical looks much less risky.”

The EPA scientist asserts that the OMB modifies language in EPA reports to put qualifiers on the science. “Every time there’s a dispute with OMB, the debate comes to the desk of George Gray, and he of course always agrees with OMB, so we end up doing a lot of things we feel are incorrect, but that George Gray directed us to do.”

Already, say critics, it’s possible to determine how the influence of the Pentagon and other agencies will play out. In the past two years, since Gray has been at the agency, the EPA has produced more than 40 chemical assessments. Yet only four evaluations met OMB approval and were finalized. The EPA, which should be completing 50 per year to stay current, faces a backlog of 70 chemical assessments in need of updating.

TCE, the solvent used to degrease airplanes, still lacks a finalized assessment, despite the conclusions of a 2006 National Academy of Sciences review of EPA’s assessment, which found a strong connection between the chemical and cancer, and urged the EPA to finalize the analysis so that comprehensive exposure standards could be complete.

In the case of perchlorate, after six years of political thrashing back and forth between the EPA and OMB, the environmental agency announced in early October that it wouldn’t regulate perchlorate in the drinking water. Instead, the agency issued a “health advisory,” which is non-mandatory, due to be finalized by Dec. 1. The advisory is 15 times less strict than the agency’s original proposal in 2002.

OMB heavily edited the perchlorate proposal, eliminated key passages and requested that the EPA use a computer modeling approach to calculate the chemicals risks, rather than the broad scientific data available, reported Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post. Among the studies deleted by OMB officials was one conducted by the CDC, which describes the impact of the chemical on infants, the most sensitive population.

“If you look at the body of literature [about perchlorate], it would lead to a different conclusion than EPA is making,” says Tom Zoeller, a University of Massachusetts endocrinologist, specializing in thyroid hormone and brain development. “They’re not using all of the information that they have available to them to derive a number. The effect of it is to set a standard that isn’t as strict.”

The Alvarados and their neighbors in San Antonio, who want to know whether the PCE in their groundwater is making them sick, must wait several years for an answer from the EPA. The IRIS database currently contains PCE data that’s 20 years old. Although the EPA completed an updated assessment three years ago that found that low doses could cause cancer, Gray directed his staff to reanalyze the cancer risk, using an unvetted risk analysis computer model, which staff scientists say would lead to a less-protective assessment. According to the GAO, since 2006, EPA staff have gone back and forth with Gray; the assessment remains unfinalized.

With a flick of a pen, Obama could reinstate the old IRIS process. Whether this will happen remains to be seen. His transition office didn’t return calls and e-mails asking if it would be likely to reverse the Bush administration changes to the IRIS process.

“If the Obama administration is serious about protecting poisoned communities, fixing the IRIS program is the place to start,” says Jennifer Sass, a toxicologist at Natural Resources Defense Council. “This should be the top priority at EPA. It’s really fundamental.”

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science and Technology, has taken matters into his own hands. In September, he introduced legislation that would make EPA solely responsible for the IRIS process. The agency would be barred from consulting with any agency, including OMB, that had a conflict of interest in the scientific review.

“This bill gets the process back on track and in the sole hands of EPA where it belongs, so scientists can make important decisions for public health and ultimately help save lives,” says Miller. “The current system is fundamentally broken and cried out for this reform.”

Yet because IRIS is so obscure, it’s doubtful there will be a national clamor demanding restoration of EPA control. And that makes it easy for politicians to maintain the status quo, says David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health, and author of “Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.”

“Power usually wants to hold on to power,” says Michaels. “The Defense Department will fight like crazy to maintain their ability to influence EPA’s deliberations. I believe these changes were made to limit EPA’s independence long after the defense industry-friendly Bush administration leaves office.”

In the meantime, the Alvarados continue to sit in their living room, breathing contaminated air. “How many more people are going to die because they don’t want to release this information?” asks Lupe Alvarado, referring to the EPA. Several of her friends have died recently of cancer. She struggles to stop crying as she talks, but it’s a losing battle. The brown napkin she presses to her eyes darkens with tears. “We’re all casualties of war,” she says. “We’re dying out here, one by one.”

Thanks to David Armstrong, bureau chief of the National Security News Service in Washington, D.C.

These pigs have been modified to carry a gene from an innocuous strain of E. coli that has been spliced with a protein from a mouse. This doesn’t give the pigs a newfound affinity for cheese. Rather, the added gene enables the animals to produce the enzyme phytase in their saliva. This enzyme, say Guelph researchers, could solve one of the major environmental problems associated with industrial pig farms.

Normal pigs can’t break down phytate, a phosphorus-rich compound in their gut. When manure lagoons on hog factories overflow or breach into nearby rivers or seep into groundwater, the high phosphorus content creates algae blooms, killing fish and other marine life. Trademarked the Enviropig, these genetically modified pigs produce 60 percent less phosphorus in their manure than their conventional cousins.

Although they’ve been raised at Guelph for seven years, the miracle pigs haven’t made it out of the lab. They have been hogtied by American and Canadian regulatory agencies, which have not written regulations for genetically engineered animals’ entrance into the marketplace. But thanks to a landmark law recently passed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, these little piggies may soon be headed to market.

In January, when the FDA declared that cloned animals and their progeny are safe to eat, it opened the door to genetic engineering, a prospect that hasn’t been widely reported, but one that has plenty of consumer advocates concerned. “In my opinion, the FDA approved animal cloning only to open the door to genetic engineering of animals,” says Jaydee Hanson of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington, D.C., group.

The U.S. agency reached the decision after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies that found no significant nutritional or toxicological differences in the composition of the meat or milk of cloned cows, pigs and goats from those of their more traditional brethren. In the short term, that means that breeders of cows, pigs and goats can now genetically copy their most prized animals as a way to take the guesswork out of breeding. Within an undisclosed period of time, food from clones and their descendants can be sold at grocery stores and restaurants without any special labels. In the long term, the decision is the first step to the regulation and commercialization of genetically engineered animals.

For livestock professionals like Kelley, the FDA’s decision, and a meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture held in late November to seek guidance on how to work with transgenic animals, signal that the U.S. is primed to consider the public’s appetite for G.E. animals. They say it is a sign that the agency is beginning to take more seriously the job of creating regulations for G.E. animals. And that’s a necessary assurance for potential investors, says Barb Glenn of Biotechnology Industry Organization, an international trade organization. “This is huge,” says Glenn. “Without cloning, we wouldn’t be able to advance genetic engineering research. It allows us to better study G.E. animals and really helps us get the benefits from G.E. research. This contributes to the long stewardship we have in the agricultural industry to improve the animal.”

To clone an animal, a cell nucleus is taken from an “elite” animal, implanted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed, cultivated into an embryo in a lab, and then implanted in the womb of a surrogate “mother” of the same species. To genetically engineer an animal, scientists splice foreign genes, generally from some other type of animal, into a nucleus, and then implant the modified embryo into a host mother.

Creating a transgenic animal is incredibly difficult and expensive, prone to mistakes that can cause the premature death of animals. “Genetic engineering doesn’t work all that well,” says Hanson. He points out that once genetic farmers produce the perfect animal through trial and error, they will save a tremendous amount of money by cloning its genotype — which is why they welcome the FDA ruling. “When they find it works in an animal, they want to copy it with cloning,” Hanson says. “Cloning is how you Xerox your success.”

Hanson and other watchdog groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Consumers Union, have been critical of the FDA’s research review that led to its approval of cloning, claiming that the agency dismissed studies that raised questions about safety. “It was a pathetic risk assessment,” says Michael Hansen of Consumers Union. “There were small sample sizes and the studies weren’t designed properly. For controls, they used cows in other fields, not raised under the same husbandry conditions.”

Despite the criticism, labs throughout North America are betting that genetic engineering will be the norm in the future. They include Revivicor in Blacksburg, Va., working on animal tissue transplants for humans. Remember the 1993 movie “Untamed Heart”? As you recall, human biology prevents the acceptance of animal organs and tissue. (Quick reminder: Christian Slater dies because his body rejects his transplanted monkey heart.) Human blood circulates high levels of an antibody to a particular sugar that rests on the surface of all pig cells and tissues, spurring people to reject pig hearts or livers.

At Revivicor, researchers have deleted the gene in pigs that causes the placement of this sugar on pig tissues. In tests, they are transplanting these genetically engineered pig hearts, kidneys, livers and pancreas cells (to treat diabetes) into non-human primates, mostly baboons. Within three years, the company plans to begin human trials. Aside from bridging the gap between human demand for transplants and available organs, Revivicor chief executive officer Dave Ayares says such G.E. pig organs and cells would also be safer than human organ transplants, since they would be free of HIV or hepatitis.

Near the golden cornfields of Sioux Falls, S.D., another experiment in genetic modification is abloom. Hematech, a decade-old biotechnology company, has genetically manipulated cows that produce disease-fighting human antibodies in the plasma of their blood. The clones of these transgenic cows, born with human antibodies in their systems, are “hyper-vaccinated” against specific diseases, explains chief operating officer Eddie Sullivan, so that the plasma from their blood can become human drugs.

“It’s exactly the same way you get vaccinated; we give them a little shot in the hind end,” says Sullivan. “Their plasma has extremely high concentrations of the antibody, so the cows become plasma donors two or three times a month, using the same machines we humans use to donate plasma to people.”

Such antibodies could be used to develop drugs that combat infectious and neurotoxin disease, and even bioterrorism; Hematech has received federal funding to develop antibodies to counteract the toxicity of anthrax. Hematech now has more than 300 head of modified cattle and hopes to begin clinical drug testing by 2010.

Enviropigs aren’t the only transgenic animals being developed as a way to eliminate the problems associated with large-scale industrial farms. Scientists at Virginia Tech are trying to clone cattle that would be genetically incapable of developing mad cow disease, a deadly brain-wasting illness spread by feeding cows, normally herbivores, the meat and bone meal of infected cattle. Researchers in Virginia would protect cattle from the fatal disease by producing animals that lack prions, a naturally occurring protein that appears to be the main conductor of the pathogens.

The subtext of any discussion about the science of G.E. animals is whether this is something the public wants or is ready for. Regulation, if done well, would increase consumer confidence in the efficacy and safety of the animals. But the ways government has proposed regulating such new “products” raises concerns from consumer and environmental groups, and a 2002 National Academy of Sciences Commission.

A policy paper issued by the White House in 2001 implied the FDA would regulate transgenic animals the same way the agency considers new animal drugs. Such an approach would entail a rigorous review of each individual G.E. animal or product to assess food safety and animal welfare, and would require pre-market approval from the FDA before being available for commercial use.

However, under this law, the process by which the government would approve one of these transgenic animals as fit for the market would happen in secret to protect the proprietary interests of companies from their competitors. There would be no opportunity for the public to provide comments or be involved in a discussion until after the G.E. animal was given the stamp of approval.

Moreover, the FDA has almost no experience regulating environmental impacts that could be associated with transgenic animals. That includes the ecological impact of a transgenic animal getting loose in the environment and breeding with native or conventional populations.

“The FDA’s in a tough spot on cloning and transgenic animals,” says Michael Taylor, a former FDA and USDA official, who now teaches public health at George Washington University. “All the heat is on FDA but it’s not empowered to deal with all the questions being raised. The FDA is put in a position of making a decision, but it’s not empowered to address the broader societal issues.”

The FDA issued a boilerplate response that it’s “working closely with producers of genetically engineered animals to ensure that they do not enter the food supply unless they have been shown to be safe.”

In reality, even the three locked doors of the Enviropig research facility haven’t always succeeded in preventing the pigs from getting to market. In early 2002, the carcasses of 11 stillborn Enviropiglets were accidentally taken from a freezer where they were waiting to be incinerated, as is required by law, and shipped to a rendering plant. While there, they were turned into palletized food and fed to chickens and turkeys on Ontario farms. The government didn’t destroy any of the eggs or birds because it believed there were no human health concerns.

The week after the FDA decision in January, the Guelph researchers who developed the Enviropig flew to meet with regulators in Washington. There’s no timeline at this point for when their green pigs might arrive on our dinner plates as pork chops.

This “vampire energy loss” represents between 5 and 8 percent of a single family home’s total electricity use per year, according to the Department of Energy. On average, that’s the equivalent of one month’s electricity bill. Taken across the United States, this adds up to at least 68 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually; that’s the equivalent output of 37 typical electricity-generating power plants, costing consumers more than $7 billion. This wasted energy sends more than 97 billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; on a global scale, standby energy accounts for 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to Alan Meier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, based in California.

“When a consumer thinks the device is off, it should be using as little power as possible,” says Meier. “But in their haste to get products onto the market, manufacturers don’t make those modest design improvements, and we, the consumers, pay the price in unnecessarily high standby power use.”

Luckily, there are a number of new gadgets that make it easy to thwart vampire energy loads. For places with clusters of cords like a home office or entertainment center, use a Smart Strip. By monitoring power consumption, the strip detects when computers or stereos are off and powers down, eliminating energy usage in all peripheral devices such as printers. Another option is the Isolé power strip, which uses a motion sensor to turn off six of its eight outlets if it hasn’t detected anyone in the room for up to 30 minutes.

To ascertain what appliances are sucking the most power, you can buy a Kill a Watt power meter, a nifty gadget with a wall outlet that measures the watts, volts, amps and kilowatt-hours of a given device when off or on. I bought one and spent a fun-filled few days discovering the power my appliances were wasting. While my electric toothbrush and cellphone charger suck less than a kWh per day (around $5 a year), my VCR, which I seldom use, takes three times that much. I don’t have a plasma TV, but if you do, it’s likely using over 1,400 kWh per year (the equivalent of about $160) if plugged in but not technically “on,” according to a 2005 Department of Energy report. A Federal Energy Management Program Web site supplies information about the standby power wattage of office equipment such as computers, fax machines and printers.

To measure whole-house electricity consumption, try a monitor called Energy Detective. It costs around $190 and provides cost estimates of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Like a scale, it doesn’t help you lose weight or cut back on power. But by providing immediate feedback of how much money you are spending each day on energy, and how much you are likely to spend next month, it’s a solid motivator to unplug appliances and turn off lights. Consumers who used such monitors cut back their energy use by around 5 percent, according to a July 2007 report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Currently, there are no simple devices to thwart the biggest users of phantom energy in our homes — the appliances that we unknowingly never turn off. The biggest such offenders are TV set-top boxes with a digital video recorder such as TiVo. Made without a standby mode, most models remain on even when you’re not watching or recording a show, consuming up to 400 kWh per year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That’s enough energy to emit 0.05 tons of carbon dioxide per year (roughly the total emissions of an average citizen of Burundi), reported the New Scientist in November. While energy-efficiency advocates have been trying to get cable and satellite companies to reduce the energy use of these boxes, they’ve had limited success so far.

“A family with several such cable boxes may use more energy per year than to power their new refrigerator,” says Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist with NRDC, based in San Francisco. “The cable or satellite company provides the box, but they don’t pay the electric bill, you do. People should be calling their service provider in anger, saying there’s no reason these things need to be at full power all the time.”

Computer-game consoles are also often left on. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, for example, use only less than 1 watt of power when turned off, but when left on (in order to not quit an unfinished game before dinner or bedtime, for example), they use roughly 150 watts. Although the Xbox 360 does have an automatic power-down feature, it arrives disabled. Users need to dig into the menu to enable the “auto off” feature.

Finally, an easy fix for saving additional power from your TVs and computers is to reduce the brightness of your screen by half, and watch power consumption of the entire machine drop by about 30 percent. And by using computer screen savers, you’re wasting as much as $100 per year. These constant displays don’t save energy or prevent the display disfigurement for which they were created 15 years ago; new technology fixed that problem long ago.

A major solution to vampire energy, say experts like Meier, will arrive when manufacturers design more efficient appliances. Even so, by using power strips and maintaining vigilance about unplugging the TV and devices that get little use, we can help those insomniacs get some rest.

While certified organic cotton makes up only an estimated 1 percent of the total cotton grown worldwide, the demand for organic cotton is so great that suppliers report escalating prices across the world. Grown primarily in Turkey and India, organic cotton must adhere to the same USDA standards as organic fruits and vegetables. It must be produced without synthetic pesticides on fields that have been managed organically for at least three years and certified by an accredited third-party certifier.

The drive toward organic jeans and other organic clothes is good news for dyed-in-the-wool greens. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies eight of the pesticides used in nonorganic U.S. cotton as possible carcinogens. While cotton represents only a fraction of all crops in production, it uses 25 percent of the world’s insecticides, according to nonprofit Pesticide Action Network North America. In California alone, nearly 6 million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton fields in 2005. In India, 91 percent of men who work in cotton fields get sick, reports Stephen Yafa, author of “Big Cotton,” a comprehensive look at the plant.

However, organic bluejeans aren’t exactly saving the planet one pant leg at a time. Organic textiles aren’t like organic apples; they don’t roll off the farm ready to wear. There are no laws that regulate how a garment made from organic fiber must be processed — that is, dyed, washed and sewed. The Fair Trade Commission regulates textiles but has no specific laws for organic labeling; manufacturers are expected to make truthful claims. But “truthful” can lead to some surprising omissions.

The USDA sprays all raw fiber (which hasn’t been spun into yarn or fabric) brought into the U.S. with fumigants such as methyl bromide and aluminum phosphide to ensure that foreign bugs don’t sneak into the country. Such chemically laden cotton could be sold as “organically grown cotton,” according to Terry Young at Organic Exchange, since it technically was grown without pesticides. Another misleading aspect of the lack of product standards is that a garment labeled “made with organic cotton” could contain minuscule amounts, say 3 percent, of organic cotton.

On average, nearly a pound of chemicals goes into every pair of jeans, according to Yafa. Regular denim is dyed with petroleum-based dyes that don’t easily break down in wastewater-treatment facilities. To finish jeans, making them look worn and soft, as if they’ve been worn by people who work in mines or ride motorcycles, requires a number of toxic bleaches. And rinsing these “finishers” from the garment uses on average 10.5 gallons of water per garment, says Tony Rodriguez, owner of Blue River Denim Laundry, a finishing house based in Los Angeles that works with Levi’s and Banana Republic. Most troubling, says Rodriquez, are the gluelike resins used to seal color in place. Because these products contain formaldehyde, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration regulates them as carcinogens. Jeans marketed as eco and organic might use any of these processes.

Recently, the textile industry has developed a number of voluntary standards to ensure a green manufacturing footprint. Launched in late 2006, the Global Organic Textile Standard has emerged as what industry experts call the most comprehensive certification. GOTS requires companies to create safe working conditions for workers, restricts the amount of heavy-metal dyes and bleaches allowed in production, expects companies to meet certain water- and air-quality standards for factory emissions and tests final products for toxic residues. So far, however, there’s no label to identify the standard or a Web site to list companies that adopt it.

According to major certifiers, no American jeans company employs a voluntary organic manufacturing standard for all aspects of production, although some report that they are “environmentally sensitive.” For its fancy Capital E 501 jeans, which retail for around $250, Levi’s insists it uses nonpetroleum, plant-based dye and few or no finishing agents. Patagonia claims that it uses minimal finishers in its organic cotton jeans. Del Forte reports that it reduces the use of chemicals by hand-sanding its denim for that weathered look.

For now, until textile processing gets an organic certification standard, those concerned with their environmental impact should buy darker jeans, which generally are made with many fewer chemicals. Just one more reason to stay far, far away from those unattractive acid-washed jeans.

Alchemy Goods turns old bike tire tubes and seat belt straps into hip messenger bags. Eli Reich, a former mechanical engineer, started the company in 2003 after his messenger bag was stolen and he noticed a bunch of old bike tubes collecting dust in his apartment. He now collects old tire tubes from bike shops along the West Coast. Waterproof and stylish, his bags come in three sizes. The Messenger ($148) is good for bike commuting or trips to the gym, the Urban ($138), a bit smaller, is better for carrying laptops, and the Haversack ($88) is a good unisex purse, big enough for a book and your lunch, and it has a handy front-zippered pocket for a wallet or iPod. (Memo to my friends and family: I really want one.) Look for a new line of men’s wallets ($32), made from recycled billboard banners and, of course, old bike tires.

Kid swings

When I was young, my dad followed instructions from Sunset magazine and turned old car tires into bucket swings. Don’t get me wrong, they were the best; but, sorry, Dad, these handcrafted tire swings, made from recycled tires, are the Porsches of the playground. Works of art, they’re crafted in the shape of a horse with a mane or a longhorn steer or even a motorcycle. If I had one of these — even now — I’d never come inside for dinner. Compatible with swing sets, they can also be hung inside on a ceiling beam or from a strong tree limb; they hold up to 200 pounds. The swings, made by the Palumbo family in Kunkletown, Penn., are constructed without glue, and every nut and bolt is covered with a smooth, spoon-shaped surface so they’re safe for kids. Lab tested, they follow home playground equipment safety standards. Prices range from $90 to $200.

Wool mittens

From the base of the West Elk Mountains in tiny Paonia, Colo., Elisabeth Delehaunty turns vintage wool sweaters into unique and colorful mittens. Washed in hot water to felt the wool and make the materials denser, these mittens don’t unravel like most handmade knitwear. No two pair are alike, making them great for those who likes their clothes to convey their individual and arty nature. Delahaunty and her four employees sew everything themselves at their studio, a former livery stable built in the early 1900s. The mittens ($56) come in one size that fits men with average hands and most women.

Local food deliveries

For foodies, Michael Pollan fans and people committed to buying local, a regular delivery from a nearby farm is a fantastic present. An increasing number of farms throughout the country offer weekly or monthly subscriptions where members receive baskets of vegetables, flowers, fruit, eggs or milk. Community Supported Agriculture keeps farms local, decreasing the distance food travels from the field to your plate. It also sustains small family farms instead of the agribusiness giants that stock most grocery stores. To find a local farm near you that delivers, visit Local Harvest.

Bamboo skateboards

Ever been in a bamboo stand during a fierce storm? The woody grass doesn’t easily snap — it bends with the wind. This flexibility and strength make it a great material for skateboards. Loaded Boards from Los Angeles transitioned its entire line of long boards to bamboo in January of 2007. Loaded gets its bamboo from China, but manufactures its boards in Southern California, using a glue that has doesn’t emit formaldehyde and an epoxy that emits no volatile organic compounds. Their five models all come in different flexes, meaning they have boards for lighter riders like women and kids. Expect to spend between $250 and $300.

Women’s purses and wallets

Ever wonder who’s wearing that Michael Jackson-style red leather jacket you used to sport in the early ’80s? If Ashley Watson’s found it, that old coat may now be one of the hippest new handbags on the market. Watson, 28, scours charity thrift stores for leather jackets — the more pleats and zippers, the better — from which she makes purses of all sizes, wallets and daily planners. Her bags, named after birds like the thrush or plover, are one-of-a-kind, with varying dimensions, details and colors. Steeped in a do-it-yourself mentality, Watson, a former art student, and her two seamstresses make every bag themselves from her apartment. Available at Beklina.com, Shopfatal.com or in 30 stores throughout the U.S. Check out Watson’s Web site. Wallets and clutches cost around $100; purses start at $280.

Organic textiles

Twin sisters Dawn Oliveira and Deborah Olson have great eyes for pattern and color. Their debut line of textiles, the Ocean Collection, is made from a blend of organic cotton and hemp, which makes the fabric incredibly strong, says Oliveira, a former designer for Ralph Lauren and Emanuel Ungaro. The sisters import the hemp from China and Romania because American drug laws prohibit it from being grown here. The mill where they print their fabric is based near their home in Bristol, R.I. Great for upholstery, pillows or draperies, these textiles are gorgeous but not cheap. Prices start at $120 per yard.

Chain bracelets

These tough-looking bracelets ($12), made from old bike chains, appeal to urban hipsters and bike enthusiasts. Made by the guys at Resource Revival, based in rural Oregon, the bracelets come in both men’s and women’s sizes. The chains are cleaned with mild detergents, so you don’t have to worry about hurting the environment or greasy wrists.

Eco-groovy wrapping paper

For some greens, wrapping paper is a call to arms. (What a waste! Why didn’t you use newsprint?) But if you enjoy the aesthetic of a well-packaged gift, check out Fish Lips Paper Designs. Made from a coated 100 percent post-consumer recycled content, Fish Lips prints its luxurious papers in Southern California with soy-based inks, which it claims emit vastly less volatile organic compounds than petroleum-based inks during the drying process. The $4 oversize sheets come in a collection of groovy holiday prints and can be shipped to your door within two or three days.