Eco-Politics

New Report: Doubts Grow about Global Warming

jkraft — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

If you thought the red state/ blue state divide was extreme in our nation’s politics, now there’s evidence for increasing polarization between green states and grey states… of mind.

How you feel about global warming these days largely depends on your demographic. The more conservative you are, the less likely you are to trust Al Gore and his cohort of climate change scientists.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a report on May 8 showing that while 84% of Democrats and 75% of independents say there is evidence of global warming, only 49% of Republicans do.

The partisan divide also holds when Americans consider the cause of purported global warming. While nearly 60% of Dems and half of Independents blame human activity for the atmospheric sauna, only 27% of Republicans agree that we’re the cause.

Yet when the believers in both parties were polled about possible solutions to the problem, they both attest that we’ll be able to curb its potentially disastrous effects. But despite the optimism, nearly half the public believes that “major sacrifices” will be required to roll back climate change.

Overall, global warming seems to be slightly less of a priority concern for both parties than it was one year ago; however, Republicans put it at the bottom of the list of their top 21 issues.

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Is The End Near?

scleaver — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

To put it lightly: the food system is out of whack. So much so that we're conjuring up Thomas Malthus, a British economist not known for optimism. At the turn of the 19th Century, he predicted that a growing human population would be kept in check by food supplies, and predicted experiences like a “long night of hunger and drudgery.” For decades, even centuries, we thought we’d escaped Malthus’s ideas, with a seemingly endless increase in food, grain, meat, and convenience products (soup that fits in a car cupholder comes to mind) and it was all cheap too! (Take that Malthus.) But, as Bee Wilson writes in The New Yorker (“The Last Bite,” May 19, 2008), that "hunger and drudgery" that Malthus predicted is now upon us. That includes:

1. Thirty-three countries in food crisis,

2. Rapid increase in the cost of food staples (rice, corn),

3. 100 million people on the brink of poverty because of food prices, and

4. Hunger riots (Haiti), ration cards (Pakistan), and armies baking bread for the general population (Egypt), to name a few.

Recently, Paul Roberts published The End of Food, part of a “second wave of food-politics books,” writes Wilson. The first wave, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, wasn’t as apocalyptic as the current tidal surge that includes In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Bottom Feeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe, and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel.

The one thing that all these food writers agree on: the Western food system must change and, I think, better to change now than be forced to change in a few years. Roberts predicts that in the next four decades demand for food will exceed supply, and we're not dealing with a basic supply and demand graph—demand is increasing when our population is staying the same. So it’s not how many people we’re feeding (as Malthus predicted would be the cause of our demise) but what we’re eating. The richer we are, the more we eat (see rising rates of obesity), and the more we eat of the wrong thing, mainly inefficient meat products (it takes four pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat).

Bottom line: we’ve created a food market that’s out of whack from what you learn in economics 101. As Wilson writes, “Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce way too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.”

Wilson continues on to break down this market of bottomless stomachs and the enemy of cheap food with typical New Yorker thoroughness (read the full article HERE) and I can warn you that it’s not pretty, but what’s the solution?

Well, Wilson doesn't provide many. There's Pollan’s solution: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” something most of us could do to get behind. Or, as a country, we could stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by using crop rotations and mixed-livestock farming, and split our huge industrial farms into smaller cooperatives. The only downside is that the best example of this (it’s already been done) is Cuba, so its unlikely that many countries will follow their lead.

Fine, so Wilson doesn’t give easy fixes, but he does provide a lot to think about, especially next time you’re in the grocery store and deciding what to cook for dinner (farmed salmon vs. industrially grown beef vs. a nice big salad with fresh veggies). Because, it seems, we're speeding into a food apocalypse, where everyone is susceptible, there are few "healthy" options left (thank you industrial farming), and every food choice we make has huge ramifications. Thank goodness its farmer's market season.

Book cover from Amazon.com

Solving The Food Crisis

scleaver — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Food riots, protests, and rising food prices across the globe are now common news fare. But, even as food prices force Americans to eat more peanut butter or eat out less, there are larger discussions at stake, like: how do we farm and is that contributing to food unrest?

The Associated Press ran an article on just that subject over the weekend (David Koop’s “Behind the Food Riots: A Debate On How Best to Farm”). Governments, writes Koop, are applying “Band-Aid” solutions left and right—sending in troops, raising wages, banning exports, suspending trading, promising food aid—when what we should be doing is figuring out how to change how the world gets its food so that we’re not re-bandaging the food industry in the future. “However,” writes Koop, world leaders are “deeply divided about which way to go.”

1. Invest in small farmers, not in “letting them sink in a free-trade world.” The U.N. would “level the playing field” by cutting subsidies to agri-business, reducing tariffs, and upping investment in small-farms, one at a time. "This could be a window of opportunity for governments to relaunch the small-farming sector and traditional farming," Fernando Soto, the policy chief for Latin America and the Caribbean with the [Food and Agriculture Organization’s], told the AP.

2. Increase free-trade policies like NAFTA so that the current farm subsidies don’t increase and make everything worse.

Whether you’re for free-trade or against it, small farmers seem to get the brunt of this—they’re growing food, but can’t afford foreign food imports, and eventually leave farming as a result. In Mexico, since NAFTA, 200,000 Mexicans leave the country each year for cities or the U.S.

3. Get used to it: biofuels, oil prices, huge developing countries will keep demand and prices for food high.

4. Innovate: After the last 1970s food increase, the “green revolution” reduced costs. “If we don’t mess this up,” Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University told the AP, “we can expect the same today.”

In the meantime, “the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people go hungry in the developing world, and … the crisis could force as many as 100 million people deeper into poverty,” according to the AP. The world has 420 million farms that are smaller than five acres, out of 525 million farms total. So, what should we do with those small farms and the farmers who work them, and how?

Photo from a World Bank article about Food Prices in Africa.

Building The Doomsday Vault -- Seeds to Save the Human Race

scleaver — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Doomsday Vault, a tunnel in the Arctic that will eventually be lined with concrete and fitted with blast-proof doors, may be the key to human survival post world disaster. The vault will be able to withstand global warming, terrorism, and nuclear war. To save our human race, we’re going to fill it with seeds.

The idea, according to Claire Hope Cummings’ new book Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds is that those seeds will be used to recreate agriculture as we used to know it after a global attack or after our world crumbles. And, the Doomsday Vault is something that’s more immediate than we may realize. As Cummings wrote in an excerpt from her book on Alternet.org, “the integrity of the seeds are threatened, in the wild and on our farms.” Technology, patents, corporations, and the overall “degradation of the environment” are all putting our seeds in peril.

Outside of biology 101, we tend to take seeds for granted, yet, wrote Cummings, “[s]eeds are essential to the regenerative capacity of the planet. We will need their natural resilience and adaptability even more as the temperature rises.” All together, seeds and the plants they produce are how the planet breathes, not to mention the food, cloth, and now fuel that they provide us.

As we move a world of seeds that’s more sci-fi than Mendel, biodiversity is decreasing, and we’re at a crossroads in life where, Cummings ominously forecasted: “Whoever controls the future of seeds controls the future of life on earth.” So, who do you want to control life? Industrial agriculture (Monsanto and other giant ag companies) or someone else…us, perhaps?

Read Cummings’ five reasons that industrial ag doesn’t cut it in the article: Artificial Foods and Corporate Crops: Can We Escape the 'Frankenstate'?

Photo of heirloom seed packets from Veggie Gardening Tips.

Blue is the new Green?

ellen — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:53 -0400

I don't know about you but I am SO SICK of the word Green. Yes, we use it all the time to connote earth-friendly products and services (actually, I prefer "future-friendly" which I saw on 3R's storefront in Park Slope).

Maybe this is the year of BLUE, meaning water conservation, water purity, finally getting rid of megatons worth of plastic bottles filled with tap water...

I originally saw this invention on the Stephen Colbert show a while back. Dean Kame, the inventor of the Segway has come up with a water regnerator that can turn any kind of disgusting, dirty water into clean, drinkable water and generates a small amount of electricity to boot (enough to run 70 energy efficient lightbulbs). It works via vapor condensation distillation and my favorite part is that it runs on cow dung. This is a world changing invention and I agree with the author of the post on Apartment Therapy - Green, that this has not gotten the press it deserves.

You can see the Colbert segment on newlaunches.com.

See The Silent Tsunami

scleaver — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The food crisis hit hard this month. The price of wheat and rice has doubled; corn is up by one-third, in some areas, according to the U.N. In some areas, the price of food has increased by 80 percent. People have died in riots in Egypt and Haiti. And it’s all predicted to get worse.

To show us what this really looks like, Newsweek Magazine posted a slide show with photos from a protest in India, a devastating harvest in Zimbabwe, and images of all the ways people are searching to meet their basic need for food or are fighting back against a global food market that isn’t working for them. View the slideshow HERE.

Then, learn why your milk prices are increasing by watching “The Crunch: Got Milk?” video at the Newsweek Magazine Home Page.

Photo from the World Food Programme.

Biofuels And Grocery Bills

scleaver — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In case you’re wondering exactly why and how food prices are going up (and, having just come back from the grocery store, I certainly am), The Agricultural Advocate posted an extensive blog about the what and why behind food prices using graphs, charts, and analysis of USDA data. The bottom line: biofuels and energy do matter. Not only are farmers growing more corn for biofuel, but they’re also planting fewer acres of other crops to make room for corn. Energy pops up throughout the Agricultural Advocate’s analysis, but it’s not the only factor.

So, next time you’re at the grocery store, here’s what you should know heading to the register:

The Bread Aisle

Wheat has doubled in price in the last few years, and the cost of bread has risen from $1.02 in 2001 to $1.32 in February 2008. But that 30-cent increase in price isn’t only about wheat prices (according to the Agricultural Advocate’s calculation, only six-cents can be attributed to wheat prices). The other 26-cents comes from the increase in the price of fuel when it comes to processing, packaging, and shipping the wheat to retailers. The message: buy local bread when you can to cut d own on some of those fuel costs.

The Meat Counter

In 2007, The Washington Post blamed the meat price ($10 per 100 pounds in a year) increase on corn (read the full article at The Ag Advocate post). But, farmers aren’t making bank on their meat products, according to the USDA monthly retail meat price tracking, nor are increased corn prices having a substantial impact on the cost of meat—most of the cost increase comes after the meat leaves the farm. Again, the increasing price of energy to move product from farm to processing plant, to store, and a vote for eating local meat.

The Dairy Case

The increase in milk prices prompts another economic lesson—supply and demand. As more people in developing countries rise into the middle class, they demand more milk. According to the International Herald Tribune, the average Chinese citizen drank two gallons of milk in 2000, now they drink more than six gallons each year. Add to that a decrease in supply because of a drought in Australia and other factors, and it’s a double whammy for milk prices.

So, it may not be biofuels that’s causing all of those high prices at your local Kroger, but one thing we can agree with is that increased food prices are here to stay. (Photo from the Europe food blog http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/fischer-boel/.)

Global Food Crisis Reaches Code Red

scleaver — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

The world’s food crisis has become an emergency, and a crisis that we’ll likely face for a while. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development released a United Nations-sponsored report this week that presents a disturbing promise: the world will continue along the path of social unrest and environmental disaster unless and until we reform our food system.

Poor countries have staggering numbers of hungry citizens, 850 million people are hungry or malnourished, and each year four million more are added to that roster. If we continue our current production and distribution practices, according to the report, we will “exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.” This is a global issue: “the increasingly globalised food market and ever-increasing food imports mean that no country can assume itself to be immune.”

The report advises that farmers focus on producing food for local markets and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, rather than focus on trade, which can have long-term negative effects on alleviating poverty and food security. Right now, the UN needs more money to address the current crisis—the UN food program received $14 million after asking for $500 million to deal with higher food prices.

Read an article about the report from the Gulf Daily News HERE.

Learn more about the UN World Food Program and donate HERE. (Photo taken from the WFP website’s Fill the Cup donation page: http://www.wfp.org/english/.)

Take it to your community with 40 ways that individuals, local governments, and others (grocery stores, colleges) can help address the food shortage in their areas by growing and eating local at the 100-Mile Diet’s How to Change the Food System.

Corn-Based Ethanol Is Causing Hunger Around the World

scleaver — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

If you've noticed that food prices are rising every time you go to the grocery, you are not alone. It's happening around the world, resulting in serious shortages and social unrest. And some poeple are pointing the finger at something we heoped would solve some of our energy problems -- corn-based ethanol.

The Wall Street Journal just reported on this inflation of food prices (Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders by Bob Davis and Douglas Belkin). Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said that 33 countries are at risk of social unrest and upheaval because of the rising price of food staples like rice and beans. Already, there have been protests over rising food prices in Haiti, Cameroon, and Sengal, among other countries.

And people aren’t rioting over a small increase: according to the Journal, food prices have increased 83% in the last three years. Why are food prices rising so fast? U.S. policies emphasize and encourage corn-based ethanol and other biofuels and are using what could be food into energy instead.

It costs more to transport food and pay for energy overall. Countries that are developing rapidly (China) have ever higher demands for food (and, I’m sure, there’s no reduction in the demand for food from countries that are already highly developed, like the U.S.).

So far, there’s no consensus about how to approach the problem. Zoellick asked rich countries to add more money to the UN World Food Program, but so far has only received commitments for half of the $500 million that he wanted.

Some other possible solutions:

1. Working together: The U.S., Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan got together last week to discuss the food problem and possible solutions, including trade, technology, and short-term aid for poorer countries.

2. Import and export policies: Fifty eight countries have adjusted their own trade policies (reducing food import tariffs whileincreasing export tariffs) to try and move to self sufficiency.The problem: export barriers increase food prices even more.

3. Cutting deals: Countries are cutting deals with other countries to share land or maximize exports. So far, China is working with New Zealand, Ukraine with Libya, Brazil with Egypt, and Uganda is working with India.

4. More, better subsidies: Zoellick wants to target food subsidies to better provide food for those in need, like giving food in exchange for work, or targeting school programs so kids can bring food home with them.

5. Develop new biofuels that use grass or agricultural waste, not corn or food, to produce energy. Whatever the causes or solutions, this issue isn’t going away, so get in on the discussion at the WSJ poll: Are you surprised by the prices you're paying for food lately?Photo credit: the Farm Policy Blog where you can learn more about corn policy.

The Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)

akronheim — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:00:00 -0400

From Monday, March 31, through Sunday, April 6, the 11th annual edition of FLEFF will be offering open forums, music, films and multimedia events in order to get the Ithaca, NY community and beyond to think about our relationship to sustainability. Organizing this year's FLEFF are Ithaca College professors Patricia Zimmerman, in the cinema, photography and media arts department, and Thomas Shevory, chair of the politics department.

Even though one of the main focuses of sustainability is in the environmental sector, FLEFF examines sustainability from all realms of thinking and issues. The festival this year will focus on four content streams: Camouflage, Counterpoint, Games and Gastronomica. In these categories there are 150 presentations which could include films, essays, digital art, minicourses, silent films with live music, art exhibits, and community discussions.

Most of the events are on Ithaca College's campus and will be free and open to the public. But there will also be 25 feature-length film screenings at the independent movie houses downtown, Cinemapolis and Fall Creek, that are not free. You can get a discount for six passes at the Ithaca College bookstore and the theaters themselves. (The two theaters are merging into one soon, so if you haven't been, it's the perfect time to still catch them!) Many of the downtown films will feature visiting filmmakers and guests.

And if you're still in Ithaca around April 22 (Earth Day!) make sure you come to Leondardo DiCaprio's Documentary, The 11th Hour screening in the Park Auditorium at Ithaca College starting at 7:30pm...shameless plug for my event I know.