where did your roses come from? i didnt get any so i am not worried

(Feb.13) --This weekend, Americans will buy dozens and dozens of roses to prove to their loved ones that they don't not care about them. But beauty comes with a price: a human price and an environmental price.

Getting local roses in February is nearly impossible in much of the country. Those being distributed Sunday will be coming from factory flower farms in Colombia and Ecuador.

"The trick is, once you're buying flowers from far away, they're wildly less regulated," says the director of the Sustainable Food Project at Yale, Melina Shannon-Dipietro, who runs a subscription flower service from the school's urban garden.

Patricio Realpe, LatinContent/Getty Images

A worker holds a bunch of roses at a flowers plantation last month in Cayambe, Ecuador. Many of the Valentine's roses sold in the U.S. this weekend came from flower farms in South America.

According to the AFL-CIO, there are 100,000 workers on flower farms in Colombia who cut, trim and package flowers for $8 a day -- less than some of the cheapest Valentine's Day bouquets in America. About two-thirds of those workers are women, and according to a 2005 study by the International Labor Rights Forum, 19 percent of flower workers had been forced to have sex with a co-worker.

Organizations like the independent union Untraflores have been fighting for increased wages and improved conditions, but unionization can be dangerous in a country where 2,697 unionists have been killed in the past 23 years.

In addition, flower workers are exposed to a broad spectrum of dangerous pesticides used to ensure pristine blossoms.

Shipping flowers from South America also consumes excess energy. To ensure freshness, flowers have to be shipped in refrigerated planes, sometimes racking up a large carbon footprint as they are transported from South America to distributors in the Netherlands and then back across the Atlantic to the United States.

Some independent organizations that monitor production practices of flower growers include Florverde, Veriflora and Fair Trade.

For a greener winter alternative, try forcing narcissus bulbs. Just buy a bulb or two from any number of online distributors or local flower shops, then put them in a container filed with small rocks. Fill them up with enough water so the plant can reach it with some short roots, but not so much that the bulb is sitting in water. Don't worry about soil; the flower has all the nutrients it needs stored in the bulb. Put it in a sunny place, and within a few days, you should see a green shoot that will blossom in a few weeks.