Water
Brouhaha Over Meat’s Impact on Climate
Published October 29, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The discussion of reducing meat consumption as a means of fighting climate change is ruffling some high-profile feathers in several places. This attention is good news for those of us concerned with sustainable food: clearly the message is gaining widespread traction if people in positions of power are up in arms.
UK’s Times newspaper reported a couple days ago that Lord Stern of Brentford, I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, recommended cutting back on meat intake as an effective method of mitigating climate change.
“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he told the Times. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Not surprisingly, industry leaders and their allies were outraged.
In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2
Published August 28, 2009 @ 02:45PM PT
(This is the second in a two-part response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" article written by Blake Hurst, a self-admitted "industrial" farmer from Missouri, a few weeks back for The Journal of American Enterprise Institute. The first part of my response can be found here.)
To continue my critique of Hurt's article, I'd like to now discuss the way he characterizes the acute need for the continuation of industrial animal agriculture. I purposely chose not to deal with this topic in my first post as I knew it would require its own space and time.
Part of the problem with agriculture today, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, is that the profession has largely lost its soul over the past several decades as industrial farming practices have taken hold. This is not to say that there aren't any family farming operations in this country--in fact, there are many--but the way that we view the production of food has changed dramatically. There is no place where this is more true than in animal agriculture.
It's quite clear from Hurst's article that he is no animal rights activist. In his view, animals are commodities that are to be raised in a manner that maximizes the financial return for farmers with very little (legitimate) concern paid to the environmental and food safety costs incurred by this kind of production.
This is part of the lost soul of American agriculture. Where once farmers treated animals well in order to ensure a long, healthy and productive life, now many farmers choose to treat their animals as badly as possible while still turning a profit. We have lost respect for the key role animals have played (and always will play) in the history of our agricultural progression.
Agriculture's Drinking Problem
Published August 03, 2009 @ 02:47PM PT
The industrial agricultural establishment would like us to save our worries for tomorrow. It being tomorrow, I thought I'd focus a lot this week on the resource depletion issues that threaten synthetic agriculture beyond its directly negative impacts on ecosystem diversity.
The threat, in fact, is that industrial food production is reaching the limits of its ability to do that which is its best selling feature: produce lots of food at minimal direct monetary cost. Its wasteful, negligent consumption of basic, raw materials necessary to growing food are running up against the sort of finite material limits that neoliberal economists and business magnates like to pretend don't matter.
Today, a couple readings on water scarcity from books that I highly recommend picking up when you get a chance:
Border Patrol Plans To Erode the Rio Grande's Banks
Published July 07, 2009 @ 09:52PM PT
Anyway, that's what the headline of this story should read, though the editors chose the following instead:
Border Agents to Dump Agent Orange-Like Chemical to Kill All Plant Life Among U.S.-Mexico Border
From the article:
(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed -- but refused to cancel -- plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers. ...
What happens when you completely defoliate river banks, perhaps with something like a broad-spectrum herbicide, is that the banks themselves start rapidly eroding, which silts up the river, which increases the chance that a freak storm, or one of the Gulf of Mexico's occasional hurricanes, will overrun those banks.
Now granted, we are talking about a river that's so extensively drawn down for irrigation that it doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico all the time. But sometimes, even on the Texas/Mexico border, it does rain.
As to the particular herbicide planned for use, imazapyr, both Mexico and the European Union consider it more toxic than does the US EPA. The EU has gone so far as to ban it.
I wonder when we'll hear the Border Patrol planning to do something this stupid along the Canadian border. Oh wait, right, that'll be never.
Can't we just take it as a compliment that people want to come to our country looking for new opportunities? We should be flattered. Especially if they're looking for work, because every country needs good workers and hardly anyone can better prove their chutzpah than someone who's willing to come to a whole other nation where the customs are different and they stick out in a crowd.
No sense to be made of any of it.
California's Drought Continues
Published June 26, 2009 @ 04:46AM PT
Bad news for the Central Valley:
... Farmer Bob Dietrich said he has planted 300 of his 1,100 acres because his single well isn't enough to water his entire farm. Shawn Coburn apologized for arriving late, saying the $750,000 well he drilled earlier this year "is sucking air" as aquifers shrink under increased pumping. ...
This has been your 'sustainability moment' for today, wherein it behooves one to wonder if we can possibly continue doing what we've been doing and not suffer a major crash.
We're going to have to stop using fossil fuel and fossil water one way or another this century. We can either plan ahead for it and find other alternatives, or we can be cut off abruptly, dramatically, with little in the way of time or resources to prepare.
It's up to us. For now.
Update: Link added.
Sustainability
Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:42AM PT
A refresher for the interested:
... Since the 1980s, the idea of sustainable human well-being has become increasingly associated with the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres. In 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ...
What does this mean for food? At its simplest, that we should feed ourselves today without compromising the ability of future generations to feed themselves, or otherwise meet their basic needs.
As I wrote yesterday, it also seems a very contrary to the basic human instinct to create a better future for one's children to leave future generations with a diminished ability to care for themselves. In political terms, to leave them with a worse standard of living than we now enjoy. It seems worth drawing attention again to Lakoff's point about the dominant corporate perspective:
... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.
The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.
As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth! ...
The presumption that future people will be, in essence, infinitely richer than we are and capable of solving any problems we leave behind seems overly optimistic.
In regards, once again to agriculture, industrial agriculture promotes erosion and degradation of the soil. It promotes the rapid drawdown of fossil water and surface water supplies in regions where the overall trend is towards increasing droughts, as well as maintaining soil conditions such that water is more likely to immediately be drained to open waterways. It continues to put chemicals that we haven't evolved to metabolize or excrete into the food chain, where they circulate and bioaccumulate - chemicals and heavy metals whose lifetime burden for an adult human may only markedly decrease in women who breastfeed, as they pass their toxins on to their helpless infants. It's made farming such an unappealing profession that its median age has steadily climbed in the US, depriving us slowly but surely of the human capital needed to maintain a diverse food supply.
In the decades since the industrialization of agriculture, a system of practice relating as much to distribution and purchasing concentration as to means of production, US citizens' health has flatlined, then declined. We are already worse off than our parents, but there are those who want to stick with this disastrous present course and see how it goes. Maybe even more profits can be had by making the next generation sicker than the present.
The best that defenders of industrial agriculture can say is that people aren't always made worse off by it. Oh, only some people get cancer and diabetes from what we're doing. Only some ecosystems are ruined. We can't do any better, they say.
How sorry, unimaginative, uninspired, and morose a perspective.
I'd rather like to think that we could have a future where our food system was an aid to maximum attainable health, for ourselves as well as the habitat we depend on for clean air and water. I like to think that we could preserve our current biodiversity, with all its many beauties and benefits, and still eat well.
I like to think that we're creative and intelligent enough to overcome the obstacles in the way of achieving these goals. We did figure out how to land people on the Moon, build the Internet, map the genome, put up skyscrapers, maintain satellite broadcast and cell phone networks, etc. I think we're up to the challenge.
The industry responsible for Agent Orange and DDT thinks that this is an unserious and irresponsible view. They have shareholders to think of, after all.
(Photo credit: Brooke on Flickr.)
Late Snack, Glass of Water
Published May 04, 2009 @ 11:24PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- McJoan gives the film Blue Gold: World Water Wars, a mixed review, but concludes that it's probably worth watching to get an idea of the scope of the world's water crisis and guide people towards more reasonable choices, like giving up bottled water.
- The Daily Green has a list of 15 foods that you don't have to buy organic in order to avoid the nasty chemicals, and a complementary list of 12 foods that are veritable pesticide sponges.
- Just in case you wanted to start growing your own bread from scratch, Gene Logsdon, who wrote the book on small-scale grain cropping, gives you an overview.
- The Ethicurean alerts us that the USDA is holding its listening sessions on the National Animal ID System and their public comments are open for feedback.
- I do love eggs, but I'm with the folks at CivilEats in hating battery cages for hens.
- Jill Richardson has been writing up a storm at LaVidaLocavore, and while she's got a great primer for those considering raising backyard chickens in the future, she would like you to take action now to help organic dairy farmers.
