October 12th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
In a long and serious article on food policy in today’s NYTimes Magazine, Michael Pollan writes that the era of cheap and abundant food is coming to a close. He says the next American president, no matter which man is elected, is going to find that the health of our nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security.
His argument is that, unless we address the industrial food system, we will not be able to make significant progress resolving the three main issues of our day — health care, energy independence and climate change:
Energy Independence:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
October 12th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Time magazine deserves praise for bringing out a special edition devoted to the unsung heroes who are plodding on despite the climate of gloom and doom and, through personal example, carrying on a crusade to save the planet.
The magazine states: “Because solutions do exist — and there are those who are leading us to them. Some are activists like Brazil’s Marina Silva, the godmother of the rain forest, and some are scientists like Germany’s Joachim Luther, the godfather of solar power.
“Some are celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the green Governor of California, and some are obscure like Mohammed Dilawar, the conservationist who guards against the fall of the sparrow.
“Some are financiers, like John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist now funding green projects, and some are holy men like Balbir Singh Seechewal, the Sikh who cleans the corrupted rivers of India. What they have in common is the passion and resourcefulness to confront the threats facing the earth…. (See here…)
“The Austrian bodybuilder turned Hollywood action hero turned California Governor was always an unlikely eco-freak, with his five Hummers and his conspicuous delight in conspicuous consumption.
“But…while President Bush has sat out climate change, denying the problem in his first term and avoiding it in his second, Schwarzenegger has signed agreements with Canada, Mexico and the United Nations encouraging cooperation on clean technology, while pushing greenhouse-gas reductions at home. More here…
October 11th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Recently I was served a kangaroo dish by my daughter at her home in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. It so happens that the fascinating kangaroo is the national animal of Australia and finds a place of honour on the country’s coat of arms.
On seeing my raised eyebrows, my son-in-law explained: “Don’t worry dad, we are also serving a national cause by opting for a kangaroo dish. It seems that the government would soon be encouraging Australians to have more kangaroo meat instead of cattle and sheep.”
And so it seems. Professor Ross Garnaut, Australian government’s top climate change adviser, has in a major report on global warming noted that kangaroos should gradually replace farm animals for meat because the former emit negligible amounts of methane gas.
This suggestion, coming as it does from the government’s top climate change adviser, provides another excuse to make the Australian national animal a standard restaurant fare.
Professor Garnaut notes: “For most of Australia’s human history of around 60,000 years, kangaroo was the main source of meat. It could again become important.
“The researchers have modelled the potential for kangaroos to replace sheep and cattle for meat production in Australia’s rangelands, where kangaroos are already harvested.
October 6th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
The ‘outback’ and the ‘bush’ have an iconic status in Australian life. A recent report for the Pew Environment Group and Nature Conservancy said that Australia had the highest number of endemic mammal and reptile species in the world.
“Three million square kilometres (1.1 million sq miles) — an area 12 times the size of mainland Britain — have been left pristine. We were pleasantly surprised that there were still so many areas which came up in such good condition after 200 years of European settlement. The other two great remaining wilderness areas in the world are the Sahara and the northern Boreal forest in Canada.
“Australia has a total land mass of 2,988,902 sq miles (7.7 million sq km) and a population of about 21 million, most of whom live in the capital cities around the coast.
“The areas of the Outback highlighted in the report were in central Australia and at the top of Queensland, regions that are predominantly unsettled or under the control of Aboriginal communities. Nearly a quarter of Australia is indigenous freehold land.
“The Wild Australia programme, a collaborative project between the Pew Environment Group, which is based in Washington DC in the US, and the Nature Conservancy, would invest $A12 million (£6 million) — raised over three years from private, conservation-minded donors in the US — in maintaining the wilderness areas. ”
September 17th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
This is Galveston in 1900 after a huge hurricane swept through. No telephone system, no television, no internet, no text messaging, no satellites, no weatherscopes. 8000 people died there.
More of Galveston after hurricane in the year 1900. No bulldozers, no cranes, no flatbed 18 wheelers, no huge roll-offs, no electricity. It took years to put the city back to a semblance of what it had once been.
This is the least of the flotsam left by Hurricane Ike 2008. As of yesterday, 45 deaths were attributed to the hurricane. 20,000 people in Galveston were reported to have refused to evacuate.
In Gilcrest, there was once an entire village…
Graves were flooded. Coffins floated out.
For all others, there is devastation for the people, their creatures, their livestock.
Contact your local Red Cross to help. Google Red Cross and your city’s name. Google ‘Feed the Children,’ for an alternative. I witnessed both organizations doing merciful, swift, careful, tireless work when 4000 Katrina survivors were suddenly sent into a forced migration and airlifted to Denver after the hurricane.
If the latest reports hold true, it looks like the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region in general have dodged a bullet. Thanks to the fact that Gustav moved more quickly than expected, it was not able to pick up as much energy as had been feared. As a result the storm landed as Category Two and now has been downgraded to a Category One.
Although there is certainly lots of wind and rain damage, it does not appear that the levees will be breached and that is a wonderful blessing. At this point it looks like Gustav will lose hurricane status sometime today and will then become a tropical storm and then tropical depression.
Of course, the storm will still bring lots of rain to Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma and there will probably be localized flooding. But given the possible outcome of a major Category 4 or 5 storm slamming into the region, things look to be fairly positive - all things considered.
But things are not over yet.
When we saw Katrina come through 3 years ago, it looked like we had dodged the bullet then but we soon discovered that this was not the case. This year the problem may turn out to be Hurricane Hanna.
Right now Hanna is a Category One storm and it is expected to make landfall somewhere along the Georgia/South Carolina coast sometime on Friday.
Now according to current projections Hanna will probably be only a Category 1 or 2 storm when it makes contact because it will not hit the warm waters of the Gulf. Since we are relieved with the fact that Gustav was only a Category Two storm when it landed, you might wonder why Hanna is such a big deal.
Well the problem is, ironically enough, the same one as we faced three years ago. There is a very good chance right now that Hanna will land very near Savannah, Georgia. Savannah is a large city with many trees and lots of 19th-century homes and, like New Orleans in 2005, it has not been struck by a hurricane in many years.
In fact, the last time there was a direct hit was nearly 30 years ago, in 1979, and the last time a really-bad storm struck was back in 1940. Hurricane Hugo landed to the north in 1989, but even that was almost 20 years ago.
As a result, Savannah may be in the same boat that New Orleans was in 2005, unprepared for a major storm and no time at this point for a lot of the preparations to be made. Louisiana and the Gulf Coast have been preparing for a major storm for three years, Georgia may only have a week.
Hopefully, of course, the planners in Georgia have taken heed of what happened in New Orleans and are ready to swing into contingency plans, but it may well be that Hanna is the storm we have all been dreading.
100 PM CDT SUN AUG 31 2008…GUSTAV WEAKENS A LITTLE MORE…BUT STILL A MAJOR HURRICANE…
A HURRICANE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FOR THE NORTHERN GULF COAST FROM CAMERON LOUISIANA EASTWARD TO THE ALABAMA-FLORIDA BORDER…INCLUDING THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. A
HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED
WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO
PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.
and
AT 100 PM CDT…1800Z…THE CENTER OF HURRICANE GUSTAV WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 25.9 NORTH…LONGITUDE 86.6 WEST OR ABOUT 270 MILES…520 KM…SOUTHEAST OF THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.
GUSTAV IS MOVING TOWARD THE NORTHWEST NEAR 17 MPH…28 KM/HR. THIS
GENERAL MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE WITH A DECREASE IN FORWARD
SPEED DURING THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS. ON FORECAST TRACK…GUSTAV
SHOULD MAKE LANDFALL ON THE NORTHERN GULF COAST ON MONDAY.
and
AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STORM SURGE OF 12 TO 16 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDAL LEVELS IS EXPECTED NEAR AND TO THE EAST OF WHERE THE CENTER OF GUSTAV CROSSES THE NORTHERN GULF COAST.
Holly already updated you on Hurricane Gustav, which is shaping up to be monster and setting its sights on the Gulf Coast. (Right on its heels, we may have Hurricane Hanna shooting up the same pipe, sadly.) And John McCain is already hinting that he may either postpone the GOP convention this week, or drastically alter the format and schedule to reflect the serious nature of the possibly impending crisis. One would be hard pressed to argue with the wisdom of such a decision if our attention is needed elsewhere during a possible national disaster.
While this next topic is absolutely trivial in comparison to a category five hurricane hitting the coast again, it is one to give some thought to. My co-host on Mid Stream Radio, Cindy, is on her way to the convention. If it is postponed she, along with many other already financially-strapped bloggers and Blogtalk Radio Hosts will find themselves with non-refundable airline tickets and reservations at sold-out hotels and will take a serious hit in the wallet. This is rather sad, as one of the highlights for me regarding this year’s conventions has been the unprecedented increase in access for new media representatives. But if a bunch of them are suddenly faced with cancellations and drastic changes in schedule, it may well put the screws to them to the point where they will not be able to attend and provide us coverage outside, above and beyond the MSM pablum.
Let’s hope all of this goes as well as possible and these storms decide to just go away and dissipate over the gulf. And if not, that we have learned our lessons from the past and that everyone is saved and damage is minimized.
Mayor Ray Nagin is ordering the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, turning informal advice to flee from the approaching Hurricane Gustav into an official order to get out.
Mayor Ray Nagin late Saturday warned that Gustav is the “mother of all storms” and ordered a mandatory evacuation for the West Bank of New Orleans for 8 a.m. Sunday and noon for the East Bank.
“We want 100 percent evacuation,” said Nagin. “It has the potential to impact every area of this metropolitan.
Katrina had a footprint of about 400 miles, he said. Gustav is about 900 miles and growing, Nagin said.
“This is worse than a Betsy, worse than a Katrina,” Nagin said.
The mayor speculated that Gustav is so fierce Baton Rouge likely will experience 100 mph winds.
“You need to be scared and you need to get your butts out of New Orleans right now,” Nagin said.
“I am strongly, strongly encouraging everyone in this city to evacuate,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said at a news conference Saturday. “Start the process now.”
John McCain has taken what seems in this highly energy-conscious election year a prudent view about energy. We have to use all our options, he says. Drill, drill, drill for more oil offshore. Use more clean coal. And yes, develop alternative energy resources if and when this seems possible.
It’s a safe-sounding policy. But that’s all it is. A policy. A way to plod along as we’ve been plodding, and hope that one way or another things will gradually get better.
Barack Obama takes a more radical approach. He is emphasizing alternative energy resources to not only solve our long-term energy problems, but as the best way to meet the short-term ones as well.
It’s an approach favored by many of those who have looked closely at alternative energy resources, and understand they are not just futuristic dreams. Understand that countries such as Denmark and Germany expect to meet 20-30 percent of their total electrical needs with provem windmill technology within 10 years; that countries like Iceland aleady meet all their own electricity needs with proven geothermal technology; that amazing advances in solar technologies are aleady making both solar heating and solar-generated electricity very cost competitive for many applications; and that all such alternative energy resources offer better near-term hopes to help us become energy independent than offshore oil drilling.
This Obama view isn’t just a policy, however. It’s a vision of a new way to do things for a new century, a new millenium, a new world economic order. A way that uses the “live” energy of sun, wind, water and the earth itself to replace the long “dead” and buried energy we have depended on for so many years.
This policy versus vision notion is something for all Americans to consider. But perhaps its most dramatic potential appeal is to Americans of a religious bent.
The Bible doesn’t say that without a policy the people are lost. It says that without a vision the people are lost. Take it from The Guy who knows. Tapping live energy is the right vision for these times. Basing our future on dead and buried energy sources is just another version of being eyeless in Gaza.
During World War II, Americans grew tons of produce in government-sponsored Victory Gardens. With a 21st century twist, the idea is back, paired with an anti-lawn movement that decries the waste of water, use of an ingredient in Agent Orange and expenditure on fuel for power mowers to make front and back yards look like golf courses.
In New York City, Portland, Oregon and in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, vegetables are growing, thanks to a new operation called MyFarm, which does the planting, weeding and harvesting and, for less than it costs to hire people to cut lawns, leaves a box of fresh organic produce on the doorstep.
At the same time, an organization name SALT (Smaller American Lawns Today) has been preaching the virtues of less grass and more trees and meadows, according to the New Yorker, which reports on a number of new books such as “Edible Estates” and “Food Not Lawns” to make American yards more productive.
In the New York Times blog “Designs,” a New Yorker describes her own experiences in “swapping out blades of grass for bushels of beans” and recommends sources of information and help for what seems to be a rapidly growing movement.
Al Gore’s work to protect and preserve not only this country’s but the world’s natural environment has found a great many useful expressions. He is, in fact, the best-known spokesman in this realm.
Yet, for reasons that seem incomprehensible to me, he still seems to be missing the key point that could advance this end far more effectively—the fact that environmentally sound behavior is almost always now also economically sound behavior. That making “the hard choices between the environment and the economy” is a basically a 19th century view that should no longer has a place in the thinking of 21st century planners.
This strange failing was again heard in Gore’s recent comments about freeing the U.S. from dependence on petroleum by 2020. He said this “would cost trillions of dollars,” the kind of statement that makes it sound as if this money would take away from something else, lower living standards, be a kind of pot-latching to Mother Gaia.
No, Al. That kind of statement is just plain misleading. The trillions of dollars going toward this hoped for objective isn’t destroyed. It is invested in new infrastructure. It will not “cost the economy” anything, any more than money that went toward converting from a horse-drawn economy to a car-based economy “cost” our economy anything when it occurred in the early part of the last century.
Words are important in winning arguments. “Costs” is a bad word in the energy context. “Investment,” “new jobs in new industries with great export potential,” “savings on fossil fuel achieved through the use of renewable resources,” those are the good words and phrases that should always be employed.
We have been using the wrong words about the environment-economic interface far, far too long. Use the right wording and desirable policy shifts will occur much, much sooner.
[P.S. I was an environmental adviser to the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, and was saying this back then. And frankly, I feel it’s really about time that folks in Washington finally got this stuff right!]
July 7th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has emerged as the first leader in the world who seems to have understood the implications of the looming food crisis and taken a practical step. Brown has issued a clarion call to his countrymen to wake up and stop wasting food. Will the G8 leaders support him in making this a worldwide campaign?
(More than 1,300,000 tonnes of food grain - worth millions of dollars - went rotten in storage over the past decade in India, officials admit.) (Read the BBC report here…)
The Independent reports: “Supermarkets (in Britain) will be urged to drop ‘three for two’ deals on food that encourage shoppers into bulk-buying more than they need, often leading to the surpluses being thrown away. The scandal of the vast mountains of food that are thrown away in Britain while other parts of the world starve is revealed in a (British) Cabinet Office report today. It calls for a reduction in food waste: up to 40 per cent of groceries can be lost before they are consumed due to poor processing, storage and transport.”
Ironically, a top British leader is now acknowledging the accuracy of the vision of Mahatma Gandhi, the arch foe of the British empire, that mindless consumerism would create a crisis sooner than later. Gandhi’s oft quoted words: “There is enough for everyone’s need…but not enough for everyone’s greed.” (For more on Gandhi pl click here…)
Let’s get back to The Independent story: “The (Cabinet) report says UK households could save an average of £420 per year by not throwing away 4.1 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten. The Government is to launch a campaign to stamp out Britain’s waste food mountains as part of a global effort to curb spiralling food prices.
“Gordon Brown said he would make action to tackle the soaring cost of food a priority at the G8 summit starting today in Japan. At his first G8 summit as Prime Minister, Mr Brown will argue that the world’s richest nations must do more to tackle the food price crisis. He will urge them to halt the decline in funding for agricultural projects in Africa, so the continent can boost farm production by 6 per cent a year.” More here…
“World leaders are not renowned for their modest wine selections or reticence at the G8 summit’s cheese board. Shortly after calling for us all to waste less food, Gordon Brown joined his fellow G8 premiers and their wives for an eight-course Marie Antoinette-style ‘Blessings of the Earth and the Sea Social Dinner’.” More here…
For those of you who may not know, I’m currently off on vacation. The picture above is the view from my window in the evening, just as the moon was coming up. It is only through the miracle of modern satellite technology that I’m able to check in with you, as the word “remote” only begins to describe my current location. It’s on the rocky edge of a mountain lake at the northern reaches of the Adirondack Range, not far from the Canadian border. Just getting here involves an extensive trip which includes phrases such as, “after the paved roads end” and a significant journey by boat after vehicles can go no further.
The place is hauntingly beautiful in a savage, untamed way, and very special to our family. All around the lakes, the land - such as it is - is characterized by massive expanses of stone where trees find only tenuous purchase in thin amounts of soil. This is a lake that was carved out by glaciers some ten thousand years ago, and the massive granite foundation is pure bedrock. It’s like standing on the very Bones of the Earth which, incidentally, is a loose translation of the name given to this area by the indiginous Native American tribes.
It’s a place which can push a person - even a cynical old, obsessive political hack like yours truly - towards dangerous levels of introspection. Last night, after most of the family had retired for the evening, I went out onto the rocky point the camp sits on, lay down upon the stone and just stared up into the night sky. If you live anywhere near a populated area of the lowlands, you tend to forget what the night really looks like. The haze in the atmosphere and the ambient light of civilization blurs and dims the view. Up here in the mountains, far from the nearest collection of buildings which could only charitably be called a “town” with a population breaking three digits, the view changes. To call it breathtaking doesn’t really do it justice. The number of stars that are visible boggles the mind, and the belt of the milky way is clearly in view. The absolute silence, broken only softly and occasionally by the lapping of water on rock or the nocturnal scurrying of unseen wildlife, quickly drags my mind off on seldom travelled paths. Read the rest of this entry »
For the past couple of weeks I have been spending more and more time inside as the air outside has gotten worse and worse. Looking into gray skies caused by literally hundreds of fires all over Northern California caused me to take a look at the causes of these fires.
Of course the primary cause of the fires was a freak thunderstorm that produced hundreds of lightning strikes. Also at fault was an unusually dry spring (one of the driest on record). But there is a deeper cause which allowed for the buildup of tons of fuel for this fire to grab hold of.
Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has made it clear: although he has called for renewed offshore drilling as a way to help get America out of the energy crunch and has shifted his position on that — he is not dropping his opposition to drilling in ANWR:
Senator John McCain reiterated his opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Thursday, a day after his statement that he would be willing to “go back and look at it again” sparked speculation among both opponents and proponents of drilling that he might change his mind.
“My position has not changed,’’ Mr. McCain said here on his campaign bus.
“People have said to me, ‘I’m going to bring you new information about ANWR, how environmentally we can make it safe,’” he said. “I’ll be glad to accept new information but my position has not changed.’’
Mr. McCain did change his position this week by proposing lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling – in which he was quickly seconded by President Bush – but he said his position on drilling the the wildlife refuge was unchanged.
It’s actually a very smart position for McCain, going into the general election. It means he is not appearing to be Bush Lite on the drilling — taking a middle-stance between those who want unfettered drilling and always mention ANWR in the same breath and those such as Democratic presumptive Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama who oppose drilling.
The issue is more complex than it may appear at first glance: despite a widespread perception that most Americans remain opposed to drilling in once-taboo areas, a recent Gallup poll found “57 percent of Americans would support drilling in the nation’s coastal and wilderness areas that are currently closed to exploration if it helped reduce gasoline prices and if the drilling was conducted under strict environmental controls,” US News reports.
But the wildlife refuge?
Those who oppose it have pointed to experts who say it would do little for a short or even long term fix, and mostly be a big, fat ladle of gravy handed over to the oil companies. Here’s one of the websites arguing against it. Some mainstream news media also reached the same conclusion — as you can see here and here.
“One reason why I’m now far more in favor of off shore drilling is the price of oil,’’ he said. But he said that he did not believe that the price was so high that he would reconsider his position on drilling in the wildlife refuge.
Bush and his talk show and web supporters have made ANWR a kind of rallying cry, but have been thwarted repeatedly. And to environmentalists, perhaps more than the thorny issue of offshore drilling, it has become a kind of line in the ice.
Add to that a slew of images of the preserve that are online — images showing pristine scenery and endangered Polar Bears — and it’s hard to believe any Republican who claims to be a descendant of conservationist President TR Roosevelt could ever advocate drilling there.
McCain often likes to paint himself as a modern day Teddy Roosevelt. And while he’ll take lots of heat for changing his position on offshore drilling, and will have environmental groups working against him, sticking with his position on ANWR will set him apart from both packs — and maintain some of the independent image he had that eroded as he has tried to please the GOP’s conservative base and show loyalty to George Bush.
McCain again when asked about changing his position:
“No, but again, if somebody says, ‘will you look at this information,’ that the guy stood up at the town hall meeting, `I know how you can make it environmentally and totally safe,’ I’ll be glad to look at that information,’’ he said. “I think it’s incumbent on me to review it. But I certainly haven’t changed my position.”
And unless he changes his position, his current position now puts him between the viewpoints of establishment Republicans (yes on offshore drilling and drill in ANWR) and most Democrats (no on offshore drilling and don’t drill in ANWR).
So McCain’s precarious political tightrope walk continues — shaky, but it continues..
