Daily Kos - CBS: Jindal holds up deployment of National Guard to fight spill You know how Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal likes to blame the Federal government for the damage caused by BP's oil spill, arguing that he could have kept all the oil at bay if President Obama had only given him the resources he needed to fight it? Well, last night CBS News tore Jindal's argument to shreds, pointing out that while President Obama has authorized up to 6,000 National Guard troops to fight the spill, Jindal has only activated 1,053 of them -- leaving more than 80% sitting idle, doing nothing to protect the state.
Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done - Newsweek A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or “before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate."
Three stories of consequences that follow from human beings' doing what we do best: poking our noses everywhere, fixing things that may or may not be broken, and opening our big mouths. A hot dog stand in Chicago unleashes dark forces in the human soul; and scientists try, unsuccessfully, to create perfect pigs.
The first act is about an Iowa pig farm:
Our film crew goes to Iowa to investigate the ever-increasing role genetic science is playing on the modern pig farm. But once on the farm, some on the crew find out that there are things about pork production that, well, they don't actually want to find out.
We got the idea for this story from a great article in Harper's Magazine by a reporter named Nate Johnson. He came with us on the trip, as we drove all over Iowa to different farms and research facilities.
It's very sad, though there's nothing I didn't already know. But, it gives you a great insight into modern pig farming and how weird and scary it is. The sound guy even says that he's going to stop eating meat, because the circumstances screwed with him so badly.
Sustainable Cities : My Sustainable Design Principles
The second half of Cradle to Cradle has been even more inspiring and enlightening than the first. I think what I love so much about this program is how much I've learned when I thought, naively, that I knew so much about these subjects. The environment and sustainability have been very important to me since early college, but I've only learned more and grown more attached to them as I've progressed through the MALS program.
One of the most interesting examples of problematic design to me was the description of shoes. One company that I mentioned earlier, Simple, is moving in a new direction with shoes.
Ever since I started to learn about products such as shoes, carpet, computers, etc that permeate our everyday lives but whose production wreaks such havoc on the environment, I've been trying to "sell" my dad on more environmentally friendly shoes. He's in downtown Asheville, I tell him, and the folks there will eat them up.
In any case, the principles of design that I think are most important are:
Occam's Razor: The simplest solution is usually the best solution. Now, when I say "simple," I don't mean the easiest, necessarily. It's much cheaper and much easier to make shoes from new, toxic materials than it is to find recycled materials, organic ones, bamboo, etc, but those materials are however the "simplest." They come straight from the earth or are already waste, therefore, they make the most sense.
Go with the flow: This idea really took hold with me in the Slow Food course that Dr. Headington taught last year, at Goat Lady Dairy with Steve Tate. Steve was very adamant about how it makes more sense to, as it's put in Cradle to Cradle, let nature do the work. If nature's already moving energy in one way, why work against it if you can work with it? Why, for instance, use single-location monoculture farming when you can use crop rotation, animal rotation, etc that harness the free power you can get from nature?
Design for re-use: This seems obvious to us by now, but this simply is not done, and I think this course and this book have made that all too obvious. Items being sold today, especially items that contain expensive and rare materials, should be designed to be completely re-used and not thrown to the dump.
Slow Food : global poultry industry is the root of the bird flu crisis
Hah! I love being proven right. You may have seen this post I made a while ago, about how bird flu could be mitigated by using small farmers rather than large, industrial poultry operations. Seemed to make logical sense to me - pretty obvious sense, actually - but it wasn't based on direct research.
WELL, it looks like GRAIN has vindicated me:
Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world.
The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels.
Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out.
To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world.
This new GRAIN report presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.
Hippyshopper: Keep organic food GM free The European Commission has just come out with a proposal to amend the regulation that governs organic farming and food in the EU. Whyorganic are opposed to the proposal which is a major threat to organic food.
Treehugger: Final Word on Ethanol's Efficiency as Vehicle Fuel While earlier studies suggested that the energy to produce ethanol was greater than the actual energy content of ethanol, this overview work argues that those assertions were incorrect.
GrowGuide - Weekend Gardener GrowGuide helps you plan a vegetable garden by informing you what you can sow, harden off, or transplant, week by week, based on your frost dates, in just four easy steps.
Your Last Spring Frost Date: April 11 / Your First Fall Frost Date: October 27
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Torino 2, and Counting Whether or not we acknowledge it, the possibility of an asteroid impact on the Earth continues to loom over us, along with the possibility that humankind may well go the way of the dinosaurs.
FactoryFarming.com the environmental and human health costs of factory farming
72% of US troops in Iraq want us to withdraw in a year 72% advocate a U.S. pullout within a year, with only 23% for staying as long as necessary, reports Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column today. Some 29% urge withdrawal immediately.
Republican Party distributes Sony--type spyware CD This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. The problem - the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of us
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075 While 85% of soldiers in iraq said the U.S. mission is mainly to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks, 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.";
Or would we? I often waver between my humanitarian side and my gaian side. As a human, I do have certain desires, like electricity and being able to travel anywhere in the world while listening to my ipod. On the other hand, if we had a drastic drop in the energy sources available to us, we'd have to live in a more sustainable fashion and slow the hell down. It's tough to fight against myself there!
Slow Food : GB #10 - Cultural Effects Of Globalization
The globalization of the agriculture system and the previously noted ecological and economic changes have led to cultural changes in the third world. The rise of contract farming in the Dominican Republic has led to a rise in nontraditional farming, which is supplanting traditional farming. Thousands of peasant homes have gone into contracts with private corporations, which changes the entire cultural dynamic of families and population centers (Raynolds 2000:443).
Slow Food : GB #8 - Globalization's Effects On Economies
Globalization affects the economies of developing nations profoundly. Laborers in these countries are hardly ever paid a living wage, making the purchase of those necessities, not to mention food and shelter, difficult or impossible. Contract farming, wherein smallholders produce for private corporations, is used often in the developing world, and it certainly doesn't help the position of the small growers (Raynolds 2000:442). The private corporations usually "loan" the necessary capital to the growers, which is then subtracted from the payment they receive for the end product when it is sold back to the corporations. In the Dominican Republic, the prices for tomatoes are set by the government and the corporations, often at harvest time. This means that sometimes, a grower will get nothing for the tomatoes he grows. He may even end up in debt (Raynolds 2000:445).
NAIS is one of several programs that have become necessary because of problems created by confinement animal operations that the government is currently pushing onto small family farms. Is the goal the safety of Americans or is it saving agri-business from the unfair competition created by, as Kathy says 'Food that tastes like it used to"? It's amazing how greedy corporate bean counters are, pushing to recollect any crumbs that fall to small farms. Since keeping clean, living food out of the hands of anyone but the rich helps creates profits for corporations invested or integrated in the 'health' sector, it's hard to imagine that this continual and painfully obvious push to make farming too expensive or difficult except at [large] scale doesn't have larger payoffs in mind.
NAIS is just one of many.
Best source of NAIS and anti-NAIS info is at noNAIS.org (which, btw, is also an excellent example of how the internet can be put to work for the betterment of everyone).
The following is quoted from there.
NoNAIS Logo
"The National Animal ID program was originally designed to give the big beef producers help in getting export markets which required disease controls. The idea is that every single livestock animal in the United States will be identified and tagged. All livestock animal movements will be tracked, logged and reported to the government. The benefit is to the big factory farms who probably do need this type of regulation. They get to do single ID's for large groups of animals. Small farmers, pet owners and homesteaders will have to tag and track every single animal.
"There are no exceptions - even small farms that sell direct to local consumers will be required to pay the fees and file all the paper work on all their animals. Even horse, llama and other pet owners will be required to participate in NAIS. Homesteaders who raise their own meat and grandma with her one egg hen will also have to register their homes as 'farm premises' and obtain a Premise ID, tag all their animals and submit all the paperwork and fees. Absurd? Yes - There are no exceptions under the current NAIS plan. The USDA has slipped this plan in the back door without any legislation. This is going to be very expensive and guess who is going to pay for it in higher food prices...You!"
The Future is Green points to a not-so-green future for Greece. A conference in Thessalonika revealed that 84 percent of Greece's land is at risk of desertification, and another 8 percent is already arid but is still being cultivated by farmers reluctant to lose their subsidies.
In ancient Greece, claims Ponting, something similar occurred. Cutting down forests for fuel and for shipbuilding caused erosion, leaving just a thin topsoil in much of Greece. This explains why olives are such an important crop in Greece still today. Olive trees, unlike most other trees, can take root and thrive in thin, poor soils.
Plato himself, in the fourth century BCE, lamented this devastation of his homeland Greece:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left. (Plato, Critias, quoted in Ponting 1992:76)
Hopefully something will be done to stop this. I love Greece.
Slow Food : Industrial Agriculture and Vertical Integration
Modern, industrial agriculture is a massive, global force. Most money spent on food today goes to one industrial food producer or another. The Phillip Morris and Nabisco conglomerate Altria alone gets 10% of all the money consumers spend on food. Three Canadian companies control 70% of all fertilizer sales, five banks control agricultural credit, two companies control 70% of beef packing, and five companies hold most of the control over food sales (Halweil 2004:65). This kind of control over the food system would be very difficult or impossible without industrial, centralized agriculture and vertical integration.
Industrial agriculture is typically highly specialized and involves farms that grow only a few crops at a time, usually to be sold. This is in contrast to traditional farmers, who are self-sufficient and grow a multitude of crops, only the surplus of which might be sold or shared with others. Specialization of this kind requires significant capital investment in order to acquire and use multitudinous inputs and resources such as fertilizers, machinery for planting and harvesting, hired labor, and pesticides (Solbrig 1994:205). The point of this is to produce large quantities of cheap food to feed an ever-growing population. This has been accomplished, although it doesn't do much to end hunger for those who can't afford to buy that food.
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Because of an increased dependence on these fertilizers and other inputs, industrial agriculture is sometimes called "subsidized agriculture." Fertilizer is not the only input that is required in large amounts. Energy is essential to modern farming in order to run machinery, in the form of food to feed laborers, and to transport the food from centralized locations. The system is actually energy unsustainable, because one calorie of production costs 2.5 calories of fossil fuels. Most fertilizers are actually made from fossil fuels as well, which is part of why this number is so high (Barlett 1989:261).
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Industrial agriculture threatens biodiversity, sustainability, and food security. If only a few large, powerful companies own everything in our agricultural system, including the farms, it could lead to their working harder to make money than to secure resources. These firms, since they control the farmland and choose what is grown on it, put the citizens of the world at their mercy as far as food prices, selection, and security. This system is unsustainable, because if the same crop is grown by a large company in one area of the world, and blight or other disease effects that particular crop, a large portion of the world's supplies of it could dwindle or vanish (Grey 2000:146). Because corporations clear large swaths of forest for farmland, cattle grazing land, and the like, biodiversity and the stability of natural systems are at risk. How many species that we've never even seen might be going extinct because of this?
When it comes to the industrial food system, vertical integration is the most impressive and possibly the most dangerous tactic. Vertical integration is the bringing together of two or more successive steps of production or distribution under one ownership. It can be achieved by directly purchasing the resources necessary to control each step or through contract farming, wherein a contract is made between farmers and companies specifying conditions of production and/or marketing (Goldschmidt 1978:xxvi). Vertical integration also allows the passing on of risks to lower levels by outsourcing. Contracts "provide control over production methods and inputs, assuring standardization and quality controls" (Grey 2000:145).
The control inherent in vertical integration allows a corporation to make most or all decisions about a product's life cycle from what fertilizers are used, what seeds are planted, and how they are grown to packaging, advertising, and pricing. An example is the partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, "which controls seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain processing, livestock feed processing, livestock production, and slaughtering, as well as some well-known food brands." This leaves farmers little to no control. If the area where you want to grow corn has feedlots or mills or elevators controlled by a certain company who also owns the bank that makes loan decisions, owns the hog farms, owns the food you eat, and owns the fertilizers and pesticides, you're hard-pressed to use anything but that company's brands of basically everything you need (Halweil 2004:65-66). You won't be producing much organic food there, that's for sure. The consumer also suffers from a lack of retail choices in this situation.
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Though industrial agriculture has produced large supplies of cheap food, the way the system works in the U.S. is not as efficient as we may be told. Japan's productivity per acre is approximately 10 times America's (Goldschmidt 1978:xxxii), and small farms produce as much as 1,000% more output per unit of land (Halweil 2004:75). Considering this inefficiency and the environmental and social problems caused by industrial agriculture and vertical integration, it would seem that considering alternatives would be a good idea.
References Cited
Barlett, Peggy F.
1989 Industrial Agriculture From Economic Anthropology. Pp. 253-291. Stuart
Plattner, ed. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.
Goldschmidt, Walter
1978 As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social
Consequences of Agribusiness. Pp. xxiii – 54. Allanheld, Osman & Co Publishers Inc. Montclair, NJ
Grey, Mark A.
2000 The Industrial Food Stream and its Alternatives in the United States: An
Introduction. Human Organization. Vol. 59, No. 2. Pp. 143-150.
Halweil, Brian
2004 Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. Pp.
59-78. W.W. Norton & Co. New York
Solbrig, Otto T. & Dorothy J.
1994 So Shall You Reap: Farming and Crops in Human Affairs. Pp. 204-252.
Island Press.
