Power Steer

 Click here to read this classic 2002 essay from Michael Pollen at the New York Times Magazine

(Editor's note-To vegetarian friends of the Yoga of Ecology, this is a vital piece to absorb.  It may not seem so at times, but this is a situation that is only getting worse, and I commend Pollen for bringing the mass industrialization of cattle breeding to light) 

But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.

The Non-GMO Shopper's Guide

Click here to check it out

Vast Tracts in Paraguay Forest Being Replaced by Ranches

  Click here to read the full article from Simon Romero in the New York Times

At least 1.2 million acres of the Chaco have been deforested in the last two years, according to satellite analyses by Guyra, an environmental group in Asunción, the capital. Ranchers making way for their vast herds of cattle have cleared roughly 10 percent of the Chaco forest in the last five years, Guyra said. That is reflected in surging beef exports.

“Paraguay already has the sad distinction of being a deforestation champion,” said José Luis Casaccia, a prosecutor and former environment minister, referring to the large clearing in recent decades of Atlantic forests in eastern Paraguay for soybean farms; little more than 10 percent of the original forests remain.

“If we continue with this insanity,” Mr. Casaccia said, “nearly all of the Chaco’s forests could be destroyed within 30 years.”

The rush is already transforming small Mennonite settlements on the Chaco frontier into boomtowns. 

The Mennonites, whose Protestant Anabaptist faith coalesced in Europe in the 16th century, founded settlements here in the 1920s. Towns with names like Neuland, Friedensfeld and Neu-Halbstadt dot the map.

Buoyed by their newfound prosperity, the Mennonite communities here differ from those in other parts of Latin America, like the settlements in eastern Bolivia where many Mennonites still drive horse-drawn buggies and wear traditional clothing.

In Filadelfia, Mennonite teenagers barrel down roads outside town in new Nissan pickup trucks. Banks advertise loans for cattle traders. Gas stations sell chewing tobacco and beers like Coors Light. An annual rodeo lures visitors from across Paraguay.

Patrick Friesen, communications manager for a Mennonite cooperative in Filadelfia, said property prices had surged fivefold in recent years. “A plot of land in town costs more than in downtown Asunción,” said Mr. Friesen, attributing the boom partly to surging global demand for beef.

“Eighty-five percent of our beef is exported, to places including South Africa, Russia and Gabon,” he said. Citing concerns in some countries over foot-and-mouth disease, which Paraguay detected in its cattle herd in 2011, he continued, “We are currently focused on some of the less-demanding markets.”

Paraguay’s Chaco forest lies in the Gran Chaco plain, spread across several nations. Scientists fear that the expansion of cattle ranching could wipe out what is a beguiling frontier for the discovery of new species. The Chaco is still relatively unexplored. The largest living species of peccary, piglike mammals, was revealed to science here in the 1970s. In some areas, biologists have recently glimpsed guanacos, a camelid similar to the llama.

More alarming, the land rush is also intensifying the upheaval among the Chaco’s indigenous peoples, who number in the thousands and have been grappling for decades with forays by foreign missionaries, the rising clout of the Mennonites and infighting among different tribes.

One group of hunter-gatherers, the Ayoreo, is under particular stress from the changes. In 2004, 17 Ayoreo speakers, from a subgroup who call themselves the Totobiegosode, or “people from the place where the collared peccaries ate our gardens,” made contact with outsiders for the first time.

In Chaidi, a village near Filadelfia, they described being hounded for years by bulldozers encroaching on their lands. The Ayoreo word for bulldozer, “eapajocacade,” means “attackers of the world.”

“They were destroying our forests, generating problems for us,” one Totobiegosode man, Esoi Chiquenoi, who believed he was in his 40s, said through an interpreter. As a result, he and others in his group, who in photographs taken in 2004 were wearing loincloths, abruptly abandoned their way of lif

The Deadly Scramble For The World's Last Resources

Metropolitan Books

From Julian Brookes at Rolling Stone

For better or worse, a lot of the things we humans like about the way we live now – from electric lighting and indoor plumbing to global travel, advanced medicine, flat-screen TVs, and iPhones – depend on our ability to suck, scrape and blast stuff out of the earth. And not just obvious stuff, like oil, coal, and natural gas; modern life, with all its wonders and comforts, is brought to you by a huge array of natural resources, from metals like copper (used in electric wiring) and iron ore (steel), to minerals like lithium (batteries) and tantalum (cell phones), to so-called "rare earth elements" (lasers, fiber optics, hybrid car engines, iPads and more). Some are more important than others, of course, but if even a few of them were to run out, we'd be in bad shape.

Well, here's the thing: They're all running out. All of them.


The world is hurtling towards what author Michael Klare calls "a crisis of resource depletion." In a new book, Klare drops the stunning news that the earth's easily accessible supplies of oil, coal, gas, metals, minerals, rare earths and even water and food are disappearing fast, plunging governments and corporations into a balls-to-the-wall "race for what's left." And what's left is, above all, hard to get at – it's under the Arctic ice, deep below the ocean floor, in tar sands and shale, and in war zones, like Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Getting at it is becoming more and more dangerous, both environmentally – we can expect to see more Gulf-style disasters as companies breach the "final frontiers" of resource extraction – and politically, as countries clash more and more over who gets what.

Holy crap, right? But there's a (somewhat) hopeful part: For some of these resources, there are substitutes (say, renewables in place of oil), and if we pick up the pace in developing them, we won't have to plunder the planet quite so much; in other cases, we'll just need to learn to do more with less (conservation, efficiency). The essential thing, says Klare, whose new book is called The Race for What's Left, is to start figuring this stuff out right now.

Rolling Stone recently got Michael Klare on the phone to talk about "peak everything," the mad scramble for the world's last resources, and our stark choice of futures.

If I read you right, conflict is pretty much inevitable as countries compete to scoop up as much of what's left as they can. Is this already happening?

There’ve been some testy moments. Russia and Norway have had some naval show of force up in the Bering Sea, but they’ve resolved that for the time being. The East China Sea and the South China Sea, where you have disputed off shore oil and gas fields, are exceedingly tense; we’ve seen naval clashes between Japan and China and between China and Vietnam and the Philippines. And now President Obama has said that the U.S. is going to become more deeply involved in those areas.

And things could get pretty hairy up in the Arctic.

The Arctic has been totally neglected up until now, but it’s seen as the most promising future source of oil and natural gas, so suddenly it has become valuable real estate. Suddenly, national boundaries that nobody cared about before are becoming very important.  Ironically, this is partly because the ice sheet is shrinking thanks to climate change, and so you can drill more of the year. Russia claims almost half of the entire Arctic region as its national territory and is seeking to dominate as much of the region as possible. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he’s going to build up Russia’s military capabilities in the Arctic in years ahead to protect it against anybody else coming in there.

But other countries also have claims in the area: Norway, Canada, and Greenland, which is ultimately controlled by Denmark and the United states, so you could have a very intense geopolitical competition for control over these future resources.

And why are the environmental risks so much greater with these harder-to-get resources?

When you look at what’s being developed today, whether it’s the deep oceans or the Arctic or shale gas and shale oil, you’re seeing levels of costs and danger and environmental risks that are unlike anything we’ve seen before. You see it with hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – which produces a huge volume of toxic waste water, close to heavily populated areas of the Northeast. Or offshore drilling. The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico showed what can happen. Off the coast of Greenland they’re beginning to drill for oil – which is only possible because the ice sheet is shrinking -- but this in turn will increase the risk of environmental damages to the shoreline of Greenland, which is very fragile and is home to a lot of endangered species.

And it goes without saying that as these resources become scarcer, they’ll get more and more expensive.

Right. Take Canadian tar sand. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to get it out of the ground and to convert it into liquid, so it’s only profitable when oil is over $80-$90 a barrel in some cases. In the future, when the easily developed tar sands are depleted, Arctic oil will be even more costly to produce. So we’re entering a period of increasingly high-priced oil.

How does food figure in this story?

Food production requires a lot of energy – plus a lot of fertilizer and herbicides and pesticides, all of which are derived from oil and natural gas. It requires a lot of irrigated water. Those things are becoming more and more scarce and costly, and it’s unclear that the world can continue to provide increased food supplies for people. And certainly poor farmers can’t afford all of these inputs, so it’s only these highly financed operations from the rich countries, these pockets of wealth of food production.

One of the things you write about is the phenomenon of “land grabs,” where rich and developing countries are buying up huge swathes of land in poor ones, especially in Africa. What’s that all about?

Right. China, India, South Korea and oil producers like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are among the countries buying large tracts of farmland in Africa – not to feed the African population, but to produce food to airlifting back to the home country.  They’re afraid they won’t have enough food to feed their population in the future. This is another example of the race for resources in a world where people are fearful there won’t be enough to go around.

What about rare earths?

Rare earths are a group of about 17 elements. They’ve become important because they play a very useful role in green technology, like high-speed magnets for motors in the Prius and other hybrid cars, and in the turbines for windmills, and in solar panels. The problem is, rare earths are not found in concentrated amounts anywhere on the planet. There’s a huge demand and a very limited supply, and mining them is very hard and very environmentally hazardous, because it takes a lot of acids and other solvents to leech them out from other minerals.

The United States once produced a lot of rare earths in California, on the Nevada border, but because of the environmental hazards, that operation was shut down in the 1990’s, and since then China has been the leading producer of rare earths. And they’ve used them to put economic and political pressure on their clients, like Japan.

It’s a little ironic that green technology depends on materials that environmentally hazardous to produce…

Right. Hybrid cars, for instance, are full of rare earths. That suggests we may have to be thinking even more radically in the search for solutions.

So…what to do?

We humans have always behaved as if new sources of energy will come along to replace the ones we use up, so we don’t have to think about conservation or efficiency or alternatives, but we are at the end of that process, we can’t think that way anymore, because there aren’t new abundant pools of energy that are affordable.

Can we replace everything we use now with something else?

It’s not at all clear that we can. We have to think about reusing things much more, holding onto things longer and using them more efficiently; rebuilding our cities, our towns, our landscape to be much more energy efficient and resource efficient. So the innovative research and technologies of the future will really be about efficiency.

What timeframe are we talking about?

The high point of the crisis is still some years away, but I would say that we have to start now if we’re going to avoid really desperate conditions in 10, 20, 30 years, when many of the materials we rely on will become much more scarce. We’re going to have more conflict, more crisis, more poisonous relations with countries like China because of the competition between us. But I also fear we’re going to have more bad environmental crises occurring -- more Deepwater Horizon-like events that will remind us of the perils of relying on these extreme forms of energy and other minerals. That’s what’s in store for us if we don’t begin to change our behavior today.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-mad-scramble-for-the-worlds-last-resources-20120319#ixzz1pfrKzscP

"Yoga and Ecology" by Radhanath Swami

 Click here to see the lecture at Organic Remix

Renowned spiritual leader Radhanath Swami gives a lecture on how a spiritual perspective can have an impact on ecological situation in the world and we can save planet by changing the ecology of the heart.

Is Silence Going Extinct?

Click here to read the full essay from Kim Tingley at the New York Times Magazine

Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too.

Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.”

Projects To Add Wind Power For City Gain Momentum

From Mireya Navarro at the New York Times

Despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long-expressed dream of putting wind turbines on skyscrapers and bridges, the constraints of an urban landscape have so far proved too challenging for reliable wind power in the city, energy experts said. As a result, New York City has been largely inactive — and behind the national curve — in embracing wind power.

But that is about to change. This spring, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection will solicit plans for the first major wind project, the installation of turbines atop the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. And city planners are working on zoning changes, now under review by the City Planning Commission, to allow turbines up to 55 feet high on the rooftops of buildings taller than 100 feet, and even taller turbines on commercial and industrial sites along the waterfront.

But the biggest potential for supplying wind power to the city lies offshore, where the Bloomberg administration is supporting an application filed last September by a coalition led by the New York Power Authority to lease a swath of the ocean floor for a wind farm 13 miles off the coast of the Rockaways in Queens.

City officials say they are ready to take advantage of their coastal proximity to seek bigger renewable-energy projects and quicken the pace toward cleaner air and the jobs and economic benefits that would accompany those projects. A study commissioned by the city last year said wind farms could play a major role in replacing power now generated by the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. The plant supplies up to 25 percent of consumption in Consolidated Edison’s service area, including New York City.

“When you’re talking about huge wind, offshore is really a unique opportunity,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The proposal for the offshore wind farm, which is scheduled for a public hearing before the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management next month, is considered a game changer in that it would start at 350 megawatts but have the potential to double its capacity — eventually generating enough electricity to power a half-million homes in New York City and Long Island.

The plans are in the initial stages, but they are part of a push by states along the Eastern Seaboard to make wind power a significant staple of their energy mix. The region lags behind the West and Midwest, where flat, open spaces are plentiful and wind turbines already supply up to 20 percent of electric power in some states.

“We certainly have an ocean in our backyard that can host these turbines,” said Katherine Kennedy, clean-energy counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If we can develop wind and solar, all of a sudden we look like a European city.”

Through most of the last decade, turbines have been springing up all over the country, including in dairy farms in upstate New York. As a result, New York State, which has set a goal of deriving 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2015, now ranks 12th among the states in wind power installations, with 1,400 megawatts, or enough to meet 2 percent of the state’s electricity demand, says the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.

Some states got a lift this month when federal officials from the Department of the Interior cleared the way for companies to seek federal leases in wind-energy areas off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, speeding the process to approve wind projects.

Environmental groups say New York has been less focused on tapping into wind than some of these neighboring states but this year the New York Department of State is expected to identify the most viable locations for offshore wind farms with an eye toward protecting shipping, commercial fishing and ocean habitats — an approach that experts say should save time and red tape and help attract developers looking to begin such a project.

Long processes to win approvals and the higher cost of wind compared with less sustainable sources of electricity are not the only obstacles to developing wind installations. The projects must also withstand public scrutiny. Despite support from environmental groups, the only federally approved offshore wind project to date, Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, has been stalled, in part by opposition over aesthetics and the impact on American Indian artifacts and burial grounds, among other issues.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, opposed a proposed wind farm three-and-a-half to five miles off Jones Beach in Long Island over concerns about the potential harm to fish. The project was ultimately derailed in 2007 by high costs. Ms. Brady said the proposal off the Rockaways, while farther offshore, was still worrisome. It calls for at least 70 wind turbines that could each soar 430 feet above the water.

“The biggest problem we have is that there’s really no science to either support or negate wind power as something that wouldn’t affect the fish negatively,” she said. “If there’s a problem, once you’ve done the damage, who’s responsible?”

While more expensive to produce than wind power, solar energy is more suited to cities, energy experts said, because it can be harnessed more discreetly from thousands of rooftops. New York City has so far grown its solar production to seven megawatts, a modest amount but well over its practically nonexistent wind production. This runs counter to what is occurring in the rest of the state and the country, where wind installed capacity, 46,000 megawatts, vastly outpaces the 3,800 megawatts of solar.

Some New York buildings are already experimenting with private wind production, like the Eltona apartments in the Melrose section of the Bronx. But they have found that they do not get enough wind to make turbines a reliable source of power. City planners are revising zoning regulations to allow more private turbines, but still concede that wind turbines may not thrive here unless they are on or near the shore.

City officials say the former environmental wasteland known as Fresh Kills is an ideal location. The Department of Environmental Protection will, in the next two months, ask for wind and solar proposals to develop 75 acres of the landfill, with the goal of adding 15 megawatts of energy, enough to power 3,300 homes. Officials said at least a third of the production would be wind power.

The Fresh Kills plan could double the city’s solar output, but it is the wind turbines that excite the Staten Island borough president, James P. Molinaro, who has lobbied for a wind farm for years, and persuaded the state to finance a study that showed the site could support seven 400-foot turbines.

City officials say it has taken them this long to evaluate the challenges of installing wind turbines on the landfill’s unique subsurface.

Fresh Kills closed as a landfill handling the city’s residential garbage more than a decade ago and is now undergoing a transformation into a 2,200-acre park.

“It’d change the biggest tragedy that ever happened to Staten Island and convert it to something wonderful,” Mr. Molinaro said. “Windmills that would give us clean energy in a beautiful park. It’d be a model for the rest of the world to look at.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 29, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Projects to Add Wind Power for City Gain Momentum.

GMO Meltdown: The Round-Up Pathogen

From Farm And Ranch Freedom

For more, click here for Dr. Huber's letter to the European Commission
And watch and share this video

One of the nation’s senior scientists alerted the federal government to a newly discovered organism that may have the potential to cause infertility and spontaneous abortion in farm animals, raising significant concerns about human health.  Dr. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, believes the appearance and prevalence of the unnamed organism may be related to the nation’s over reliance on the weed killer known as Roundup and/or to something about the genetically engineered Roundup-Ready crops. In a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the professor called on the federal government to immediately stop deregulation of roundup ready crops, particularly roundup ready alfalfa.

Below is the full text of the letter.  FARFA received an electronic copy of the letter from Dr. Huber and we have spoken with him directly to confirm its authenticity.

The letter was intended as to alert the government about preliminary research results that indicate serious problems.  As Dr. Huber himself clearly states, more research is needed. 

Dr. Huber wrote a second letter, in March, to European officials, explaining the issue in more depth.  Click here to read the second explanatory letter.

January 16, 2011

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn—suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup.  This organism appears NEW to science!

This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen’s source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.

We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.

For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman’s terms, it should be treated as an emergency.

A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario:

Unique Physical Properties

This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.

Pathogen Location and Concentration

It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.

Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease

The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income—sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss’ wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).

Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure

Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.

The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.

For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.

Recommendations

In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA’s participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.

It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.

I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure.

Sincerely,
COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber
Emeritus Professor, Purdue University
APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS) 

King Kamsa's Bhoga-Mart: Why Are We Still Nourishing The Infrastructure Of Dependency

 

Editor's Note: This blog began in 2008 as a chronicle of the sustainable farming efforts, led by Terry Sheldon (Tapahpunja Dasa), at the Small Farm Training Center at the New Vrindaban Spiritual Community in West Virginia.
We return to that original spirit with a report from the Small Farm Training Center on its 2012 projections, proposals, and challenges
"The Small Farm Training Center (SFTC) is a land based educational center and a hands-on working organic farm. Our purpose is to create community—a web of supportive relationships—by making locally grown organic foods readily available and affordable with the use of simple technology."
Click here to learn more.

King Kamsa's Bhoga-Mart:

Why Are We Still Nourishing the Infrastructure of Dependency?

Dispatches from The Front Lines of Rural KC Development
By Tapahpunja Dasa (Terry Sheldon)

The Small Farm Training Center’s (SFTC) is a land based educational center and a hands-on working organic farm within the boundaries of New Vrindaban Community.  Pursuant to Srila Prabhupada’s specific instructions for New Vrindaban, its mission is to create a green economic model that makes organically grown food affordable and available. The Training Center has expanded it’s activities to include an urban gardening outreach project, called the Green Wheeling Initiative, which was recently awarded $70,000 in grant monies for it’s work in addressing the looming issue of food security.

 The following report was submitted to New Vrindaban’s management team in advance of the 2012 agricultural cycle. It outlines the challenges faced by agrarian devotees attempting to create a genuine rural Krishna conscious lifestyle. For information about the Small Farm Training Center’s projects and apprentice training programs, check out their website at www.farmeducation.org. or email Tapahpunja dasa at info@farmeducation.org.

Small Farm Training Center

2012 Production Projections, Proposals and Challenges

Contents

1), Assessing The Need By Asking The Right Questions

2).   Three Steps Towards Local Food Production

         a). Recognizing Climatic Limitations

         b).  Differentiating Between Small Scale vs Mass Production

         c).  Mixed Spiritual Messages: Separating Rhetoric from Reality.

3). Plan of Action and Projections for 2012

          a). Targeted Vegetable Production for 2012

          b). Key Factors Affecting Vegetable Production Goals

          c). Missing Links in The Food Supply Chain

          d). Prioritizing Basic Infrastructure Development

4). Summary Statement

     

1). Assessing the Need By Asking The Right Questions

New Vrindaban Community management recently submitted a twelve month vegetable “wish list,” divided into two, six month consumption periods, namely a peak consumption period—April through October—and the off-season consumption period—November through March. The vegetable wish list reflects what the temple and snack bar kitchens are accustomed to purchasing from a local wholesale outlet, Jebia’s Market in Wheeling.

Can local agriculture—the Small Farm Training Center and a combination of area growers—satisfy two large kitchens dependent on a twelve month supply of certain vegetable varieties?  The short answer is “No!,” not easily. We can grow some specialized vegetables in limited amounts (Deity quantities). We can also grow large quantities of greens like chard, root crops like potato and certain “in season” specialties like tomatoes. To consistently supply the most favored varieties—eggplant, cauliflower, and broccoli for example—is beyond the reach of our current production capacity. Why is it beyond our production capacity? What are those challenges? How do we boost production, cater to diversity, address our weaknesses and stimulate dialogue about the role of agriculture in shaping New Vrindaban’s future? Please read on.

2). Three Steps Towards Local Food Production

a). Recognizing Climatic Limitations: The most obvious reason we cannot match Jebia’s year round availability is weather. Imported vegetables from Mexico or California are grown in mild climates. Our growing season of 145 days is interrupted by weather extremes. Incessantly long, wet Springs, followed by blistering hot early summers have become the norm. In the late summer of 2011, for example, record setting amounts of rainfall soaked New Vrindaban’s growing fields for eleven consecutive weeks from August 21^st until November 15^th.  That eighty day wet spell seriously impacted the fall harvest, spoiled the opportunity to plant annual cover crops and called into question the hope for a successful 2012 growing cycle.

b). Differentiating Between Small Scale and Mass Production When vegetables are grown under favorable conditions, farm workers are repeatedly reseeding and re-transplanting the next generation of crops in large plots of acreage. Even before a mature crop of broccoli is harvested and packed for shipment, a new crop of broccoli transplants is readied to replace them. The new production field is spray saturated with chemical fungicide, followed by a blast of herbicides for pre-emergent weed suppression. Finally, a planting crew poke the baby broccoli transplants through a layer of black plastic mulch that stretches as far as the eye can see. This is not family farming. This is mass production agribusiness, pumping out chemical broccoli for Jebia’s customers—ISKCON New Vrindaban included—365 days per year.

Industrial agriculture—Big Ag.—is a nexus of complex relationships and enterprises. To insure market share, Big Ag. requires contractual agreements, full time office personnel, law firms to guard against liability suits, flat farmland in the thousands of acres,  greenhouses pumping out a continuous supply of new transplants, a flotilla of gigantic farm equipment, dump trucks worth of toxic chemicals and a small army of wage slave migrant laborers. When all these ducks are lined-up—a complexity of relationships antithetical to New Vrindaban’s plain living high thinking mission—you’ll find broccoli on Jebia’s shelves all year long. Broccoli is there consistently and predictably because Big Ag. has declared war—chemical warfare—on mother nature.

New Vrindaban’s topography, climate and culture are not conducive to agri-business.  Instead of wasting time hoping to imitate a mega-scale production model not suited to our small scale mountainous bio-region, we should zero-in on foods we can grow, store and depend on without defying the laws of nature.  If—and only if—there is surplus, should the excess production be sold in the marketplace. That, in a nutshell, is how Srila Prabhupada described the tone and tenure of Krishna conscious rural life.

c). Mixed Spiritual Messages: Separating Rhetoric from Reality

The third step—and biggest hurdle—in attaining a local food supply is ideological. We’re not reallyconvinced that we want food independence…or put more succinctly, we don’t really want to pay the price. Compared to just picking up the phone and calling in an order to Jebia’s Market, the challenge of mapping out the route towards an authentic agrarian Krishna conscious lifestyle is a great inconvenience.

 It’s a challenge that requires an oceanic shift in priorities and a serious commitment to take responsibility for our ecological foot print, especially our waste stream. To insist on eating out-of-season is to invite the consequences of that habit. Getting our ideology on the same page with our purchasing and consumption patterns—and then realigning those habits around our farming practices—is hard work.

Failing to do so, however, is a lapse of consciousness and a sobering confession that we’re not seriously committed to enacting Srila Prabhupada’s mandate for plain living. We long for “seeing Krishna everywhere” and “in all things” but not if it disrupts our international food supply. From a farmer’s point of view, “seeing Krishna everywhere” means recognizing boundaries. It implies not challenging the natural order because that natural order is ….”working under My (Lord Krishna’s) direction…..” (BG 9:10).

The rhetoric: Purchasing produce from anywhere is acceptable because everyone along the supply chain is purified when the bhoga is offered to Lord Krishna.

The reality: At what point does “needing certain vegetables” sour into complicity with chemical warfare against nature? At what point does “Everything can be used in Krishna’s service,” replace local self reliance? Some outside purchasing of vegetables is unavoidable at this point in time.  A review of New Vrindaban’s purchasing pattern over the past 15 years, however, reveals the flight of close to one million dollars ($1,000,000,000) to outside vendors. When the money you’re spending on food from the outside, exceeds the money spent on developing your own food growing capacity by hundreds of thousands of dollars, something is dramatically wrong.

Jebia’s produce is chemical produce—vegetables that cannot be grown without dependency on the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer and toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Those toxic residues cannot be washed off. They are systemically permeating every cell of the plant. By choosing to farm organically, we’ve chosen the path of integrity, a spiritual commitment to honor our seven mothers, most notably Mother Earth and mother cow. Poisoning the soil is Bhumi aparadha. When we offer vegetables to our Deities that are grown in glycophosphate contamination soils, are we committing seva aparadha? To depend on Lord Krishna for what grows easily, organically and locally means to humbly accept those yields and vegetable varieties with gratitude and appreciation.

The rhetoric: Organic is too expensive to buy and too expensive to produce, Jebia’s   retail and wholesale vegetable are affordable.

The reality: Jebia’s wholesale and retail prices are artificially low because they are subsidized by tax payer money. Whether you buy a bundle of broccoli or a box of broccoli, the price you pay does not reflect the actual production costs. The consumer is actually paying twice: once at the cash register and again through hidden taxation This may sound inconsequential to a New Vrindaban housewife who feeds her family on food stamps or to a temple manager looking for food bargains, but it’s a death blow to developing a real rural economy or the ability to grow what we eat, eat what we grow, and transmit those values and location specific skills from one generation of devotees to another.  In truth, we are insensitive or unaware—Krishna unconscious, if you will—about where and how our current food supply comes to us.

The rhetoric: We trace our ideological origins and understanding of environmental wholesomeness to the ancient Vedic culture, the remnants of which are still partially visible in modern day India.

The reality: We’re quick to eulogize India’s Vedic culture but slow to admit that Vedic culture operated within an agrarian social and an agrarian economic context. The backdrop of everyday civic life was the presence of flourishing food production and cow care.  That is, in essence, Srila Prabhupada’s image of what he wanted for New Vindaban.

If we fail to understand this point, we’re not really living in New Vrindaban, the Western replica of Krishna’s original Vrindaban.  Instead, we’re living in the city limits of Kamsa’s Mathura, where every food purchase serves to fatten King Kamsa’s treasury.

Commodity based agriculture—the system that produces King Kamsa bhoga—and community based agriculture are irreconcilably opposed world views. Small scale independent farming—the core activity that engenders Srila Prabhupada’s New Vrindaban--cannot compete with a system that hides the real cost of food while destroying the productive capacity of the soil.

As Vaisnavas, we have a moral obligation to reject a food system that represents violence to the land, the cows and land based culture. That may mean taming our tongues by eating a simpler, local diet. It may mean not offering eggplant sabji to our Deities when we know that the production schedule of a California grown eggplant involves spraying the plant with pesticides seventeen times before it’s picked and shipped to Jebia’s.

3). Plan of Action and Projections for 2012

a). Targeted Vegetable Production for 2012: The Small Farm Training Center plans to grow the following vegetables in large quantities in the 2012 growing cycle. The bracketed numbers represent the number of transplants we hope to put out. The numbers in bu (bushels) and boxes is the anticipated harvest of those varieties.

1). Tomato   (400))                                                                  

2). Peppers   (1000)                                                                                           

3).  Okra        (500)                                                                           

4). Cucumber  (200)                           

5). Lettuce (30 boxes)             

6).  Broccoli              (600)                                                   

7). Summer squash   (30 bu)

8). Cabbage (600)

9). Spinach (15 boxes)

10). Radish (15 boxes plus greens)

11). Chard (60 boxes)

12). String beans ( 25 bu).

13). Lettuce (30 boxes)

14) Winter squash (50 bu)

*note: For the past 4 years, 2007-2011, West Virginia State University (WVSU) has donated the seed, the greenhouse bench space, the labor, the starting medium, the containers and even the delivery (450 miles round trip) of approximately 130 flats

of vegetable transplants per year. The retail value of WVSU’s donation was over $2,500/yr. Due to budgetary constraints, WVSU is no longer able to render that service.

b). Key Factors Affecting Vegetable Production Goals:

New Vrindaban Community currently has no available greenhouse for starting either early season or late season vegetable transplants. For this reason, the Small Farm Training Center has hired Nichole Shipman, the vocational agriculture teacher at John Marshall High School, to start 75 vegetable flats of early season transplants including pepper plants, kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts and cabbages.

The remaining late season vegetable transplants will be grown in the now damaged high tunnel greenhouse adjacent the Garden of Seven Gates. Repairs on the greenhouse will begin in mid February. Money in needed for paying outside help to grow our early transplants.  Funds are also needed for starting our own on-the-farm  transplants,. This includes funds for seeds, potting soil and repair materials for the damaged greenhouse.  

In addition to capitalization—money for the right things at the right times—the  2012 production plan cannot be executed without a reliable labor force—the right people doing the right things at the right time. As vegetables emerge and grow, they require protection from insects, weeds and ground hog attacks. Daily vigilance coupled with a rapid response to potential problems is imperative. The absence of any one link in this chain of stewardship—namely, capitalization, labor and vigilant maintenance—spells failed crop production.

c). Missing Links in The Food Supply Chain: Foods not mentioned in the 2012 projected production list are basic staples like dry beans, grains and fruits.  Berries and other perennials such as asparagus are also absent. The reason for this omission is that there is no acreage (besides the ½ acre Teaching Garden and 6.5 acre Garden of Seven Gates) developed to support expanded production. Newly developed growing zones will require nutrient management, a crop rotation scheme and fortification from the ever present deer pressure. 

 d). Prioritizing Basic Infrastructure Development: No crop plan, however ambitious or modest, can prevail without a well financed infrastructure to support it. “Land, capital, management and labor,” Srila Prabhupada noted, must precede any successful endeavor.  New Vrindaban currently has:

-no root cellar facility.

-no grain silo storage.

-no bean silo storage.

-no canning facility.

-no heated greenhouse for starting vegetable transplants.

-no high tunnels for season extension.

-no composting facility to transform raw cow manure into field ready compost.

-no recycling facility.

-no seed storing facility for cover crop seed.

-no designated area (free from deer invasion) for grain and legume production.

-no dependable labor force, except for volunteer apprentices, to supply manpower.

In 2012, we hope to enhance production by retrofitting the 6.5 acre Garden of Seven Gates with field drainage, irrigation, and the erection of two pole barns for maintaining and sheltering farm implements. We are also working on a program of nutrient management and soil structure improvement.

4). Summary Statement: My purpose in documenting the status of the Small Farm Training Center’s food growing capacity, is two fold: First, I wanted to provide a measuring stick to future growers and managers to evaluate performance.  Secondly, I wanted to paint a human face on the act of food production—an occupation that Srila Prabhpada called “the most noble profession.”

Farming, if it is real farming, is not about yields and dollars and cents. It is an art form revealing a portal into Lord Krishna’s creation. The Brajabhumi farmers and cowherders in the original Vrindaban are not shilling and pence men, their motivation is growing foods to offer to Krishna with love and devotion.

In the act of thinking deeply about how to make this report meaningful, I learned a valuable lesson, a lesson I needed to be reminded about. Most New Vrindaban residents know very little about where their food comes from, and even less about the challenging conditions under which it is grown.

May the information harvested here serve as fertile ground for growing  a community of devotees native to the Holy Dhama.

Tapahpunja Dasa

Small Farm Training Center

New Vrindaban Community

February 6^th, 2012

Tech Conversion: India's Richest Shrine Goes Green

By Shilpa Kannan for BBC News on 10 Feb 2012

Surrounded by seven hills, high above lush green forests is the temple town of Tirumala.

The crown jewel is the dazzling gold-plated temple of Lord Venkateshwara. Located in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, this is not just one of Hinduism's holiest shrines, but also one of the richest.

It has an annual income of $340m - mostly from donations.

Between 50-100,000 people visit this temple every day. This puts enormous pressure on water, electricity and other energy resources.

Now the temple is using its religious influence and economic might to change the way energy is used here.

Sustainable sources

Developing reserve forests around the temple to act as carbon sinks, the management has transformed the environment.

They are promoting the use of sustainable technologies and hope to influence public opinion.

LV Subramanyam is the executive officer of the temple trust.
"While we currently use a mix of conventional and non-conventional energy sources, our aim is make the place more reliant on sustainable sources of energy," he says
"Most of our devotees are progressive. In a religious place like Tirumala, we can set the example by going green. Probably the impact will be much more than normal government advertisements or publicity."

Inside the temple complex, a large multi-storey building is dedicated to just one thing - cooking free meals for pilgrims.
Several cooks work in tandem stirring large pots of rice, curry and vegetables. Nearly 50,000 kilos of rice along with lentils are cooked here every day.
Open all day, this community kitchen is the biggest green project for the temple.

Located on the roof of this building are rows of solar dishes that automatically move with the angle of the sun, capturing the strong sunlight.
Generating over 4,000kgs of steam a day at 180º C, this makes the cooking faster and cheaper. As a result, an average of 500 litres of diesel fuel is saved each day.

Credit score

By switching to green technologies, the temple cuts its carbon emissions and earns a carbon offset, or credit, which they can sell.
"This was the first project to get a gold standard certification - it's a registered project and it is issuing carbon credits," he says.
"From a monetary value, carbon being a tradable commodity - the prices keeps going up and down ... we sold the carbon credits of this and various other projects to the German government."
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16746656

Related Stories:

• Hindu Groups Agree To Address Climate Change
• ISKCON Entrusted With Two Laddu Counters in Tirumala
• Minister Offers US$8.8m Crown at Tirupati Temple
• Hindus Rally Against Government Control of Temples

Read more: http://news.iskcon.com/node/4190/2012-02-09/tech_conversion_indias_richest_shrine_goes_green#ixzz1n2n3iipx

The GMO Battle: Does Whole Foods Support Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Alfalfa?

If you’re a health nut like I am, you’ve likely already heard about the allegation that Whole Foods Market has apparently surrendered to the agricultural giant, Monsanto, and agreed to support the introduction of genetically modified alfalfa into our ecosystem. Genetically modified organisms (specifically, those which are being created for the sole purpose of human consumption) is one area of Holistic Nutrition in which I am exceptional passionate.

So the recent turmoil has prompted me to write this piece and hopefully explain the occurrences for those who may otherwise not be aware.

First of all, the controversy brewing in the United States over genetically modified alfalfa is not a new subject. It has simply reached a critical cross-road and the developments that have been unfolding over the last week or so have begun to aim a spotlight on the topic.

Monsanto, a corporation driven purely by financial gain with no regard for the human or environmental impact of its products, continues to push for the introduction of more genetically modified organisms. Why is this important to them? Because they hold the patents to the seeds. But why would farmers want to use these seeds? Because they are genetically modified to be resistant to RoundUp herbicide, meaning the farms can spray their crops to kill off other organisms, but allow the alfalfa to survive. But there’s a catch (actually, there’s many catches, but I’m just writing an article, not a book). Genetically modified organisms will not properly reproduce for future generations. With traditional farming practices, farmers would breed crops and keep the best seeds in order to have successful subsequent growing years. They would also practice crop rotation techniques to allow the soil to regenerate and replenish the nutrients used by the previous year’s crops. But this art is slowing dying as a direct result of the greed of Monsanto.

Once a farmer begins using Monsanto seeds, they are essentially hooked for life. They cannot easily go back to using traditional methods because the cross-contamination of their seeds with those from Monsanto results in an infringement of the patent and trademark laws. Many farmers who have never even used Monsanto seeds have fallen victim to these laws due to the cross-pollination effect of wind, that occurs naturally. Percy Schmeiser is probably the most famous of these farmers. His crops were contaminated when a truck drove passed his property carrying Monsanto seeds. Monsanto came after
Percy claiming he was in violation of using their patented product intentionally. Once genetically modified organisms have been unleashed into the environment, there is no way to control them or take them back. They will spread. Nature knows no borders.

As I mentioned, the battle of genetically modified food is not new. Monsanto has been trying to get approval from the USDA to allow them to provide farmers with alfalfa seeds for many years. Fortunately, there has been enough public protest and companies, such as Whole Foods, to stand up and fight against this abomination. Currently, 93% of soy, 86% of corn, 93% of cotton and 93% of canola (rapeseed) seed planted in the US in 2010 was genetically engineered. If we continue to allow more GM food to be grown, there will be little we can do to avoid consuming it even if we don’t want it. Not only will crops become cross-contaminated, but organic livestock (which would otherwise be GMO-free) could be fed genetically modified grains, threatening the integrity of the organic meat and dairy industries. We will inevitably be consuming more gmo in one form or another, without knowledge or consent.

As I mentioned, some companies like Whole Foods have attempted to stand up and be the voice for the public. Whole Foods has always been opposed to all GMO… until recently, it would seem. The USDA put forth a proposal to allow GM alfalfa to finally make its way to farmland. According to Whole Foods, the USDA presented the industry with two options: total deregulation of Genetically Engineered alfalfa, or deregulation with some conditions to facilitate coexistence and protection of non-GE farmers. Wholefoods reluctantly opted for the latter.

The options presented by the USDA were essentially to either allow Monsanto full control to do as they want completely unregulated, or to allow Monsanto to do what they want, but implement some regulation and attempt to control Genetically engineered alfalfa so it can co-exist with non-GMO varieties.

This is where the recent controversy really takes off. Upon hearing this news, the Organic Consumers Association immediately published an article detailing how Whole Foods Market (as well as Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm) surrendered to Monsanto and began supporting genetic modification. The information spread through the industry like wildfire. Within hours, Whole Foods was being bombarded with vicious attacks from loyal customers.

In an attempt to explain their position, Whole Foods has released a few statements and responded to countless angry inquiries. Their decision was not one that was made lightly. As I mentioned, Whole Foods has made it very clear that they do not support the USDA’s choice to allow for the introduction for Genetically Engineered alfalfa. However, they were forced to make a decision between the 2 options listed above, or else sacrifice their seat at the table and have no voice at all. The position in which Whole Foods was placed was not an easy one.

And so the dilemma continues to move forward. Thousands of angry consumers feel helpless. Many are upset with Whole Foods and argue that the company should have taken a harder stance in their position and not allow the USDA to bully them into making a decision between 2 evils. Why couldn’t Whole Foods have simply said “No, we do not support either of these options” and continue fighting the battle against GMO through other means? Or perhaps it was the right decision for them to keep their voice with the USDA so they can continue to fight from the inside? These are incredibly difficult questions to answer and begin to get very political, too.

There are many aspects of genetically modified food which could be discussed. For now, though, this article is merely intended to explain why there seems to be so much controversy surrounding this subject at the moment.

Want to read more:

• http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2011/01/no-regulations-ge-alfalfa/
• http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/01/30/stonyfield-farm-takes-a-swing-at-monsanto-and-the-oca/
• http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22449.cfm
• http://www.organicvalley.coop/community/organicsense/article/article/gm-alfalfa-whats-happening-now
• http://www.facebook.com/vancouvernutritionist#!/note.php?note_id=485295751970&id=24922591487

How you can be help and take action:
Despite the efforts and recommendations of Whole Foods (and other organic companies), the USDA fully deregulated GE alfalfa on January 27, 2011. This means that farmers can plant the Frankenfood with no restrictions. But the fight is not over. President Obama has the power to overrule the USDA’s decision, and it’s important that he do so in order to protect the organic meat and dairy industry.
Please sign this petition to voice your opinion:

• http://www.change.org/petitions/ask_president_obama_to_protect_organic_and_stop_monsantos_ge_alfalfa

Here are some other resources for you to help:
If you’re interesting in helping organize or coordinate a Millions Against Monsanto and Factory Farms Truth-in-Labeling campaign in your local community, sign up here:

• http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/index.cfm

To pressure Whole Foods Market and the nation’s largest supermarket chains to voluntarily adopt truth-in-labeling practices sign here, and circulate this petition widely:

• http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22309.cfm

What do you think Whole Foods should have done (or should do now)?

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Filed Under: Food & Nutrition, Green & Healthy Living, News, Spotlight Tagged With: alfalfa, genetically engineered, genetically engineered alfalfa, genetically modified, gmo, monsanto, whole foods

About Rich Ralph
As a Registered Holistic Nutritionist in Vancouver, Rich took his passion for health and wellness to the extreme in 2007 when he became the first man to successfully roller-blade across Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, in support of cancer research. He is committed to educating and encouraging people to make powerful and sustainable nutritional adjustments which will provide the greatest impact to your well-being.

Activists Crack China’s Wall of Denial About Air Pollution

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Zhang Hao, 9 months old, has been diagnosed with rhinitis, a condition that may be caused by air pollution.

Click here to read the full article from Sharon LaFraniere at the New York Times

BEIJING — Weary of waiting for the authorities to alert residents to the city’s most pernicious air pollutant, citizen activists last May took matters here into their own hands: they bought their own $4,000 air-quality monitor and posted its daily readings on the Internet.

That began a chain reaction. Volunteers in Shanghai and Guangzhou purchased monitors in December, followed by citizens in Wenzhou, who are selling oranges to finance their device. Wenzhou donated $50 to volunteers in Wuhan, 140 miles inland. Officials have claimed for years that the air quality in fast-growing China is constantly improving. Beijing, for example, was said to have experienced a record 274 “blue sky” days in 2011, a statistic belied by the heavy smog smothering the city for much of the year.

But faced with an Internet-led brush fire of criticism, the edifice of environmental propaganda is collapsing. The government recently reversed course and began to track the most pernicious measure of urban air pollution — particulates 2.5 microns in diameter or less, or PM 2.5. It decreed that about 30 major cities must begin monitoring the particulates this year, followed by about 80 more next year.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection also promised to set health standards for such fine particulates “as soon as possible.” Last week, after years of concealing its data on such pollutants, Beijing began publishing hourly readings from one monitoring station.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing nonprofit group, credits the Chinese public for the breakthroughs. “At the beginning of last year, we had almost lost hope that the PM 2.5 would be integrated into the standards,” Mr. Ma said. “But at the end of the day, the people spoke so loudly that they made their voice heard.”

The fine particulates, caused by dust or emissions from vehicles, coal combustion, factories and construction sites, are among the most hazardous because they easily penetrate lungs and enter the bloodstream. Chronic exposure increases the risk of cardiovascular ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer. The Chinese government has monitored exposure levels in 20 cities and 14 other sites, reportedly for as long as five years, but has kept the data secret.

It sought 18 months ago to silence the American Embassy in Beijing as well, arguing that American officials had insulted the Chinese government by posting readings from the PM 2.5 monitor atop the embassy on Twitter. A Foreign Ministry official warned that the embassy’s data could lead to “social consequences” in China and asked the embassy to restrict access to it. The embassy refused, and Chinese citizens now translate and disseminate the readings widely.

While China has made gains on some other airborne toxins, the PM 2.5 data is far from reassuring in a country that annually has hundreds of thousands of premature deaths related to air pollution. In an unreleased December report relying on government data, the World Bank said average annual PM 2.5 concentrations in northern Chinese cities exceeded American limits by five to six times as much, and two to four times as much in southern Chinese cities.

Nine of 13 major cities failed more than half the time to meet even the initial annual mean target for developing countries set by the World Health Organization. Environmental advocates here expect China to adopt that target as its PM 2.5 standard.

Wang Yuesi, the chief air-pollution scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated this month that Beijing needed at least 20 years to reach that goal. 

The embassy’s monitor showed that fine particulate concentrations over the past two years averaged nearly three times that level, and 10 times the World Health Organization’s guideline, said Steven Q. Andrews, an environmental consultant based in Beijing.

In fact, Mr. Wang told Outlook Weekly, a magazine owned by China’s official news agency, Xinhua, that Beijing’s PM 2.5 concentrations have been increasing by 3 to 4 percent annually since 1998. He said the finer particulates absorbed more light, explaining why Beijing so often is enveloped in a haze thick enough to obscure even nearby buildings. Air pollution in the city and in nearby Tianjin is so severe that “something must be done to control it,” he wrote on his blog.

Such sentiments are increasingly common on weibos, the Chinese version of microblogs like Twitter, especially among elites. International schools here are doming their athletic fields because pollution so often requires that students stay indoors.

In November, Pan Shiyi, a Beijing real estate tycoon, asked his seven million microblog followers whether China should employ a stricter air-quality standard. Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist who left Princeton University in 2008 to lead Tsinghua University’s life sciences department, complained in a December blog post that air pollution was the single “most upsetting and painful thing” about life in China.

Some Chinese citizens remain stoic or unaware. One afternoon last week when smog cloaked Beijing and the American Embassy monitor edged toward the top of the chart, parents flocked to the Capital Institute of Pediatrics, a children’s hospital in downtown Beijing, towing children with respiratory ailments.

One mother of a 6-year-old awaiting treatment for her child’s chronic cough said: “I think it’s good for the child’s immune system to be exposed to tough weather like today’s. It will make them tougher.”

Organic Can Feed The World

From Barry Estabrook at The Atlantic

Given that current production systems leave nearly one billion people undernourished, the onus should be on the agribusiness industry to prove its model, not the other way around

"We all have things that drive us crazy," wrote Steve Kopperud in a blog post this fall for Brownfield, an organization that disseminates agricultural news online and through radio broadcasts. Kopperud, who is a lobbyist for agribusiness interests in Washington, D.C., then got downright personal: "Firmly ensconced at the top of my list are people who consider themselves experts on an issue when judging by what they say and do, they're sitting high in an ivory tower somewhere contemplating only the 'wouldn't-it-be-nice' aspects."

At the top of that heap, Kopperud put Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, a contributor to Atlantic Life and the author of Food Politics, the title of both her most well-known book and her daily blog.

"There's a huge chunk of reality missing from Dr. Nestle's academic approach to life," Kopperud wrote. "The missing bit is, quite simply, the answer to the following question: How do you feed seven billion people today and nine billion by 2040 through organic, natural, and local food production?" He then answers his own question. "You can't."

What is notably lacking in the "conventional" versus organic debate are studies backing up the claim that organic can't feed the world's growing population.

As a journalist who takes issues surrounding food production seriously, I too have things that drive me crazy.

At the top of my list are agribusiness advocates such as Kopperud (and, more recently, Steve Sexton of Freakonomics) who dismiss well-thought-out concerns about today's dysfunctional food production system with the old saw that organic farming can't save the world. They persist in repeating this as an irrefutable fact, even as one scientific study after another concludes the exact opposite: not only that organic can indeed feed nine billion human beings but that it is the only hope we have of doing so.

"There isn't enough land to feed the nine billion people" is one tired argument that gets trotted out by the anti-organic crowd, including Kopperud. That assertion ignores a 2007 study led by Ivette Perfecto, of the University of Michigan, showing that in developing countries, where the chances of famine are greatest, organic methods could double or triple crop yields.

"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can't produce enough food through organic agriculture," Perfecto told Science Daily at the time.

Too bad solid, scientific research hasn't been enough to drive that nail home. A 2010 United Nations study (PDF) concluded that organic and other sustainable farming methods that come under the umbrella of what the study's authors called "agroecology" would be necessary to feed the future world. Two years earlier, a U.N. examination (PDF) of farming in 24 African countries found that organic or near-organic farming resulted in yield increases of more than 100 percent. Another U.N.-supported report entitled "Agriculture at a Crossroads" (PDF), compiled by 400 international experts, said that the way the world grows food will have to change radically to meet future demand. It called for governments to pay more attention to small-scale farmers and sustainable practices -- shooting down the bigger-is-inevitably-better notion that huge factory farms and their efficiencies of scale are necessary to feed the world.

Suspicious of the political motives of the U.N.? Well, there's a study that came out in 2010 from the all-American National Research Council. Written by professors from seven universities, including the University of California, Iowa State University, and the University of Maryland, the report finds that organic farming, grass-fed livestock husbandry, and the production of meat and crops on the same farm will be needed to sustain food production in this country.

The Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute is an unequivocal supporter of all things organic. But that's no reason to dismiss its 2008 report "The Organic Green Revolution" (PDF), which provides a concise argument for why a return to organic principles is necessary to stave off world hunger, and which backs the assertion with citations of more than 50 scientific studies.

Rodale concludes that farming must move away from using unsustainable, increasingly unaffordable, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides and turn to "organic, regenerative farming systems that sustain and improve the health of the world population, our soil, and our environment." The science the report so amply cites shows that such a system would

• give competitive yields to "conventional" methods
• improve soil and boost its capacity to hold water, particularly important during droughts
• save farmers money on pesticides and fertilizers
• save energy because organic production requires 20 to 50 percent less input
• mitigate global warming because cover crops and compost can sequester close to 40 percent of global CO2 emissions
• increase food nutrient density

What is notably lacking in the "conventional" versus organic debate are studies backing up the claim that organic can't feed the world's growing population. In an exhaustive review using Google and several academic search engines of all the scientific literature published between 1999 and 2007 addressing the question of whether or not organic agriculture could feed the world, the British Soil Association, which supports and certifies organic farms, found (PDF) that there had been 98 papers published in the previous eight years addressing the question of whether organic could feed the world.

Every one of the papers showed that organic farming had that potential. Not one argued otherwise.
The most troubling part of Kopperud's post is where he says that he finds the food movement of which Pollan and Nestle are respected leaders "almost dangerous." He's wrong. The real danger is when an untruth is repeated so often that people accept it as fact.

Given that the current food production system, which is really a 75-year-old experiment, leaves nearly one billion of the world's seven billion humans seriously undernourished today, the onus should be on the advocates of agribusiness to prove their model can feed a future population of nine billion -- not the other way around.
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