You gonna eat that? Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that once planted in the wild, genetically modified organisms, such as bio-engineered fruit, grain or vegetables can change native, wild plant neighbors’ DNA. In the future, food activists worry, you might not even have a dietary choice.

A flurry of news stories, blog posts and Tweets have “cropped up” in recent weeks around this study and related events. Even teenagers are dialed into the debate over the merits and dangers of GMOs, says Jenny Kessler, who founded and directs the Garden Program at The Automotive High School in Brooklyn, New York.

Kessler teaches English, ESL and a class called “Food, Land and You.” Through this coursework or participation in the Garden Program, Automotive students learn about farming and industrial agriculture and gain hands-on experience cultivating and cooking food.

“Some of my students agree with economist Jeffrey Sachs that genetically modified crops should be used to alleviate world hunger now, since they can grow on depleted land in bad conditions,” Kessler says, “but most are concerned that GMOs aren’t tested enough before they enter our mainstream food supply. Or they worry that modified seeds and cross-pollination will make natural products scarce and expensive, or even extinct.”

The Garden Program group (as seen on Flickr.com/autogarden) wishes for – after a personal visit from Anna Lappe or Michael Pollan – better information about the effect of modified crops on human and plant health, and to inspire Americans to buy more locally produced food.

Basic reading:

“A report by a team from the United States and China appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [where] researchers point out that gene flow between crops and their wild relatives is common and difficult to contain. They note concerns that wild plants could, as a result, gain genetically engineered resistances. And these could affect the natural balance in their environment.” -VOA Special English Agriculture Report transcript

“While disease-resistant crops have been a boon to commercial farmers, ecologists worry there might be certain hidden costs associated with the modified crops. There is concern in the ecological community that, when the transgenes that confer resistance to viral diseases escape into wild populations, they will (change) those plants…and impact the biodiversity of plant communities where wild [plants] are native.” -US News And World Report feature

“Bayer CropScience AG is responsible for financial damage sustained by Missouri farmers when their rice crops were contaminated by genetically modified seeds, the growers’ lawyer told a federal court jury in St. Louis…Testing of one of the ‘LibertyLink’ [rice] strains at Louisiana State University was completed in 2001. While there has never been a specifically identified contamination event…studies suggest an event of cross-pollination with ordinary rice or a mixing of regular and genetically modified seed occurred then.” -Bloomberg news story

“The number of people affected by food shortages is starting to rise again. Is the solution a new biotech version of the Green Revolution, or a green Green Revolution based on organic farming?” -BoingBoing.net opinion, discussion

“The debate over genetically modified crops has flared up in India, where critics have stalled the commercial release of insect-resistant eggplant, despite recent approval from the country’s biotechnology regulatory committee.” -Scienceline.org news feature

“This week the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, called for an extra £2bn to be spent on research into global food security. In order to achieve the estimated 50% increase in food crop production that will be required by 2050, the society is calling for a grand plan that involves developing…crop varieties using conventional breeding and genetic modification.” -Small Cap News profile of the company Futura Gene

Further resources:

”..Say No to GMOs” Natural News blog opinion

The website of The Center For Food Safety (CFS) a D.C.-based organization that lobbies for slow food, organic and sustainable farming practices, and against “harmful food production technologies.”

Food activist Anna Lappe’s website

Economist Jeffrey Sachs’ official bio, including recent news by and about him

Changemakers.com GMO competition page soliciting “solutions that educate consumers about what they’re eating, and the effect their food choices will have on the environment and society”: includes profiles of the winning ideas (via Ashoka.com)

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by new EcoSalon writer and columnist Lora Kolodny.

Image: liangjinjian

Porcelained out? Carve your niche with an alternative sink for soaking up greener materials like certified teak, bamboo, recycled metal and glass and friendly painted ceramics. You can even experiment with poured concrete with 50% recycled fly ash, as seen in the striking orange basin by Jeremy Levine Design.

Here is a handful of other options we rounded up:

From William Garvey’s Fusion Line of handmade sinks from certified teak grown in the mixed deciduous forests of South Asia.

Spotted at the Story Hotel in Stockholm, these decorative ceramic bowls make brilliant bathroom basins.

Recycled aluminum and brass vessel sinks from ECO round out the eco bath and are paired well with a bamboo plywood or stone tile counter top.

Handblown recycled glass emerges as sensuous craft for the bath with the clear tortoise trim Classic design (above) and Ocean shell (below) from Bear Creek Glass.

Main Image: Jeremy Levine Design

It’s not your grandmother’s wine box!

This 3-liter tube contains a premium, rich and structured California Cab – the first release by winemaker Barry Gnekow, who went looking for a way to drink outside the box and to entertain without the waste.

“My goal was to produce the equivalent of a $25 bottle of wine that could be delivered to the consumer at under $10 per bottle,” he says.

At $40 a tube, The FOUR Cabernet scores many eco points. It eliminates expensive traditional glass-and-cork packaging, cutting wine bottle landfill waste by 85%. The vino package is 100% recyclable and the label is produced by windpower. The cardboard tubes weigh 20% less than glass and can be transported using less gas.

And it’s not just the package that defies the throw-away mentality. The wine, itself, also endures until all 24 glasses are poured.

“The great thing is that it holds about four bottles worth and stays fresh up to 4 weeks after opening,” explains James Robinson of WineStyles, a retail wine store and tasting club in San Francisco. “Often with red wine, people toss out what they don’t drink after a day or two, because it goes bad.”

Robinson poured me a taste out of the spout, and I found it to be delicious, medium-bodied, plummy and lightly oaked, even on its last legs, about two weeks opened.

The wine maker also promises to deliver white wine in a tube, including Chardonnays, at some point this year.

There’s a sad sight. After they’ve lugged your belongings from one corner of the world to the other and obviously won’t last another mile, the final stop for your careworn companions is the trash. There’s no alternative. It’s a fact.

Nonsense, says the team at Junktion!

If you’re keen to make your life a trashless one (particularly on Tuesdays), there are many ways to upcycle your garbage – but there’s a limit, surely? There are some items that you can’t do anything with – like empty gas bottles…?

No trying this at home, please. Junktion are professionals and know how to get into gas bottles safely!

Based in Tel Aviv and founded in 2008, this upcycled design company is interested in all the everyday things folk leave behind (rather like the Wombles, then). They’re keen to challenge our concept of “junk”, and they think there’s quite enough stuff in the world already for their creative purposes.

A car trunk door becomes a sofa. A chopper bicycle reforms itself, Transformers-style, into a stool. Metal piping becomes a classy-looking towel rail.

And if it’s attention-grabbing decor you’re after, how about this industrial-style octopus of a lamp, made from a metal cooking pot writhing with swarms of illuminated teapots? Or desklights make of bakelite-style phones?

Junktion trades out of their shop in Tel Aviv, asking locals to supply them with the raw materials. If they opened near you, would you be a regular customer?

Images: Junktion (via Haute*Nature) and Phineas H.

Kevin Baum, CEO of Sust and Moriah Carlson of Feral Childe at the recent NOW Showcase in NYC

October marches on with another look at men in eco-fashion.

Kevin Baum, CEO of sustainable label Sust, is one of many men carrying a well-lit torch for the eco-designing movement. He’s made great strides in laying the groundwork for the Sustainability Across America Tour (of which EcoSalon is a sponsor).

I caught up with him in the midst of markets and orders recently. Here’s what he had to say:

I know you come from a Fortune 500 background. How is it similar or different being the CEO of Sust, a sustainable clothing line?

Managing a start-up is an amazing and wonderful opportunity. The functional aspects of the business (concept, branding, strategy and infrastructure) are the same, regardless of whether or not you’re an eco-fashion or conventional company.

What are some ways you’ve drawn from your collection of experiences and put them into SUST?

This is a tough question, probably because the complete answer would be the foundation of a semester-long course at many fashion or design schools. In short, running a business (restaurant, retail store, etc.) is much the same in principle. It’s about designing or creating great product that is focused on a target market with enough disposable income and interest to purchase the amazing goods you’ve produced. Of course, the distribution model, price points, capital and infrastructure all come into play when you’re building a new business from scratch. All of these complicating factors are what makes a start-up such a great experience.

Tell me about some challenges that have entered your path that you couldn’t have foreseen?

I don’t think there really have been too many surprises in the basic day-to-day business. Of course, no one really understood the impact of the recession back in 2007 when Tristan & Marion started the company. I joined in early 2009, so I had a pretty good idea of what we were up against and we’ve adjusted our model to be more price competitive with conventional brands that we benchmark ourselves against the specialty store space. I feel strongly that we would have done the same thing, economic downturn or not, and the current macroeconomic climate may have expedited the exercise.

I asked the question on Twitter “Do you know of any men involved in the eco-fashion industry?” and all said they didn’t know any. Does that surprise you?

Not really. In the past 20 years I’ve always seen the core population in retail, merchandising and design positions primarily held by women. I don’t have a statistic, but I would venture to say it is 75% or more in the industry. Spend one day at any major trade show and you’ll see it’s an industry run by women. Yes, there are “other men” in eco design. Many of them happen to be focused on the men’s space or have companies that have multiple product categories.

Are you a part of the design team for Sust?

Marion McKee is our Creative Director. In most companies, there is an intersection between Creative, Sales and Production. In other words, how to take great design and match it up with what can be made with the right value proposition to ensure it will be successful in the marketplace. I handle the Sales & Production side, so Marion and I collaborate daily on how to build the right product each and every season.

What do you think is the hardest part of being a sustainable designer?

The market is nascent, but really very small in the overall retail landscape. Combine that with the macroeconomic climate and it is clear that most customers will not pay “more” for eco products. Our challenge is to find a way to make beautiful products cost effectively, so we can sit side by side with conventional brands and remain price competitive. The current environment has helped us to focus on this aspect of the business. It all starts with great product, but if you are not competitive on price, then you’ll have amazing goods with no place to go.

It’s Saturday and you know what that means!

We’ve given you a best-selling wrap dress from Mountains of the Moon and a statement necklace by muichic crafted from tagua nuts and braided hemp. Today we’re bringing you a grab at something sweet and perfect for lounging from the designer Meadow.

Made from bamboo and organic cotton with cotton twill tape as trim on the boy shorts, you can tie the top’s shoulder straps and throw a cardigan over it in colder weather or wear as a stand alone top in warmer months.

The set is perfect as sleep wear, too, and the boy shorts can be worn as comfy undies.

A multi-tasking lounge act? You got it baby, but in this venue, you get to be sustainably sound and cozy at home rather than stuck listening to bad Barry Manilow covers in a smoke-filled room.

The set comes in black and cream for those of you feeling more copa than cabana.

For more styles and information on Meadow designs go to her site: meadow-designs, or see the Etsy page.

The kitchen could be considered the hub of a home. It’s the spot where people congregate at parties, despite protests from the hostess; it’s the place a family gathers to break bread as often as three times a day.

There are all types of kitchens. We’ve shown you recycled or sustainable parts and entire islands of green. But I can’t recall setting my eyes on living or growing.

The Flow2 kitchen isn’t for the faint of heart. It gets down and dirty; it reveals the cycle of life from potted plants to edible food to composted waste to fertile fertilizer to potted plants. And round we go.

It’s a cool, cutting edge concept by the Oregon-based Studio Gorm team of John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong. And it’s their second go of it. The first kitchen, Flow or the kitchen of terrestrial mechanics, was Arndt’s graduate degree project.

Updated and more flexible, the designers have taken the idea of conservation and efficient living (or eating or cooking or growing) to a new level.

Case in point (see image above): The hanging dish rack drips water on the herbs and plants arranged below. The refrigerator is cooled via an evaporation cooling process (sounds fancy, but it involves H2O and not much more), rejecting the need for a large energy-guzzling fridge. There’s a cutting board that slides away to reveal a composting bin below with live worms read to nosh. And the list goes on.

The flow of Flow2 is indeed seamless, but is it feasible or just a fantasy? Whatever it is, it’s cutting edge…and just a concept for now. Time will surely tell.

- via Dezeen

We recently discovered jewelry designer Andres Arango of muichic and loved his attention to detail.

The kolas necklace is one of our favorite pieces.

A sustainable statement for sure with sexy braided hemp to hang down in back, Arango creates his bold jewelry from tagua nuts, a botanical alternative to ivory (a.k.a. vegetable ivory), a seed that comes from the ivory-nut palm or tagua palm which grows in the humid tropical forest of South America.

Leave a comment here to be entered for our second (in a series) of  EcoSalon fashion giveaways.

If you win, there’s no telling how much others will want to covet and touch this piece every time you wear it.

Believe me, I know.

If you’ve already downloaded the Top 10 Green iPhone Apps and are itching for more ways to stay sustainably entertained, here’s a list of 10 more to keep you busy:

MyMPG
$2.99
Similar to greenMeter, MyMPG helps drivers maximize their fuel efficiency. It evaluates braking forces and acceleration, and even tracks statistics and improvements to your gas mileage over time. Best of all, it’s half the cost of greenMeter.

Green Lemur
Free
Green Lemur is just like Get Green, both offering eco-friendly advice on how to lead your lifestyle sustainably. Check out the tip of the day or browse by a specific topic. It’s a cinch to navigate and costs nothing.

MeterRead
$2.99
If your jaw drops upon opening your electrical bill, MeterRead is the app for you. It monitors your electric meter, enabling you to track your energy consumption and ultimately choose more efficient habits.

Gorgeously Green Survival Guide
$0.99
This green app is all you’ll need to avoid the harmful chemicals in beauty products like makeup and sunscreen. Use it along with GoodGuide, which identifies eco-friendly household products, to protect you and yours from toxins.

Go Organic!
Free
Comparable to iLocavore, Go Organic helps you find nearby organic grocery stores. Use it when you’re traveling in unfamiliar places to maintain your healthy, organic diet.

Greenpeace Tissue Guide
Free
Our dependency on paper products like toilet paper and tissues is unavoidable, but the Greenpeace Tissue Guide is a great research tool. This app finds the safest brands that use recycled materials and avoid bleaches that contain toxic chlorine compounds.

Carticipate
Free
Carticipate makes it easy to organize carpools with other environmentally concerned individuals in your area. Just punch in your departure time and destination and choose from a list of options.

iRecycle
Free
Don’t know where to toss it? With iRecycle, you choose from over 100,000 recycling and disposal sites from coast to coast based on either your location or the item you are looking to recycle.

Green Card
Free
Save paper by digitally sharing your business card with any of your iPhone contacts. If you change your address or phone number, Green Card automatically distributes the updated version to past recipients.

Yowza!
Free
This app is sure to make coupon clipping a thing of the past. Yowza finds coupons for nearby retailers that you present digitally in an effort to save paper.

For more green iPhone apps, visit Grist.

Image: bredgur

Getting back to nature – same thing as roughing it? If you find yourself loathe to ditch your oh-so-self-indulgent rituals like “warmth”, “being clean” or “eating actual food” you’ll be delighted to pitch in with a hot new approach to the great outdoors – glamping. Luxury without ostentation, eco-tourism without eco-terrorism – and everything catered for so you can enjoy your surroundings without worrying if you’ll survive the night in them.

Solar-powered lighting, rainwater reuse and an organic menu make Canvas Chic an eco-friendly lodging, while antique décor, four-poster beds and oriental rugs make it luxurious. Located along the Ardeche River gorge in the Rhone-Alps region, the scenery is awe-inspiring.

At Ecocamp Patagonia in Chile, you can stay in domes that resemble the ancient dwellings of the native Kaweskar and soak in the stunning landscape of Torres del Paine National Park with activities like hiking, horseback riding and kayaking.

Looking for something a little closer to home? Just an hour outside San Francisco, Costanoa is set in the heart of nature among 30,000 acres of protected wilderness. Their spacious canvas bungalows seem more like cabins than tents with queen beds, windows and hardwood floors. (Image via Jazz Violin)

Built above the ground to catch the breeze off Jervis Bay, the safari style tents at Paperbark Camp in Australia are extravagant and eco-friendly, with spacious verandas, solar-powered lighting, insect screening and hardwood floors. Plus, guests can explore the bay and surrounding forest with complimentary canoes and bikes.

At Clayoquot Wilderness Resort, tents are equipped with their own fireplace, cozy bed, antique dresser and composting toilet. This stunning destination on Vancouver Island provides plenty of activities for its guests with library, lounge, spa, dining and games tents.

The Resort at Paws Up is nestled along the beautiful Blackfoot River in Montana. Lavish tents with king beds, stylish wall art and a personal butler make for a pampered stay, while activities like horseback riding and mountain biking cater to your adventurous side.

Not exotic enough for your seasoned taste? Take a journey into the Gobi Desert and stay at the Three Camel Lodge. Their deluxe gers feature wood stoves, hand-painted furniture and a king bed. Plus, they come stocked with Mongolian-style bathrobes, felt slippers and locally produced toiletries.

Main image: notsogoodphotography

Unless otherwise noted, images are the property of the corresponding, respective facilities.