What makes it the Anthropocene?

 As I’ve collected materials cut from magazines or printed from internet documents having to do with environmental issues, I’ve wanted to believe that lessons learned from mistakes will be taken to heart, that humans will find ways to avoid despoiling the natural world. But experience has left me philosophically hard-bitten, for want of a better expression. 

Our evolutionary development has endowed humans with curiosity, ambition, imagination, and competitive predilections, with the capacity to dream of and build the modern world in all its complexity. But though we possess brains with amazing powers, it has become frighteningly clear that we’re chronically unwilling to focus on all the consequences of each and every upward turn of the “progress” ratchet. Those nasty vices such as avarice and lust for power have too often had the upper hand.  It’s becoming commonplace now to speak of the Anthropocene, an unofficial recognition that human-kind is creating a new epoch by causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, pollution of land and waters, and significantly increasing the planet’s surface temperature, among other lasting impacts.

 Whether it's neoliberalism, unregulated capitalism, Chinese authoritarianism, benevolent socialism, or whatever else might be ginned up in the way of a governance system, nearly all of us now live in a globally competitive world in which production and consumption of goods and services is the driving force. Nations make resolutions to reform their practices with respect to environmental pollution, sometimes own up to past failures, and vow to fix things.  Simultaneously, the global economy continues to invent new ways to make money and raise standards of living while continuing and even enlarging upon destructive practices of the past.

Missteps taken in pursuit of short-term goals can have long-lasting consequences. Here are two examples of human invention, initiated in good faith and with optimism about the benefits to humanity that would accrue from their use.  

PFAS.  These letters stand for per- and polyflouroalkyl substances. Invented over the past several decades, for the most part in corporate research laboratories, they collectively possess several desirable properties. They are quite stable, meaning that they don’t break down easily if heated or subjected to radiation.  This makes them useful in such diverse applications as coated cookware and fire-extinguishing foams.  As they’ve increased in numbers and the varieties of use to which they’ve been put, PFAS’s have become ubiquitous. They’ve seemed to be real winners in making the world better. They of course would never have become universally dispersed if they had failed to pass tests for toxicity before being put to widespread use.  This brings us face to face with a moral issue, encapsulated in the precautionary principle, which has four central components:

1. taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; 

2. shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; 

3. exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and 

4. increasing public participation in decision-making.

Not everyone is in favor of applying these principles. For one thing, it’s not possible to quantitatively delineate boundaries. How would these principles be applied to the PFAS family of substances?  Some substances are acutely poisonous, others act more slowly or accumulate over time before manifesting toxicity. In the case of the PFAS, it took some time for their toxicity to show up. It became a big issue when the DuPont Chemical Company was careless about disposing of waste materials.  The movie “Dark Waters'' tells the story of a suit brought against DuPont Chemical by residents of Parkersburg, WVA. The company was accused of dumping toxic wastes containing PFAS, with deadly consequences for those living in the area. Many people sickened and died, children's’ development was stunted. The suit went on for years.   In the end, DuPont, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $335 million to settle the dispute. 

An internet search reveals multiple suits against 3M, Dupont, and other actors, including the U.S. Government, for poisoning water systems with PFAS, causing many health problems in adults and developmental problems in children. The EPA has not set enforceable drinking water standards for perfluorinated chemicals, although they have a 70-parts-per-trillion advisory. It is difficult to find water anywhere (including bottled water, by the way) that doesn’t contain traces of PFAS. The US government continues to use these substances in firefighting foams, and they find their way into water sources on which people depend.  Meanwhile, new PFASs are being invented in research labs. Recent studies have shown that PFAS pollution easily rides the wind; they have been found in soil and groundwater at locations up to 30 miles downwind of a factory in West Virginia in which they were used. 

PFAS technology is employed in COVID-19 testing equipment, and in medical garments, hospital gowns, drapes, and divider curtains. We can be pretty sure that eventually, all of the materials containing PFAS will end up as trash or consigned to an incinerator.  A team of professors from Bennington College recently collected soil and surface water samples from near an incinerator in New York state that had a contract to burn firefighting foam containing PFAS. The study revealed that the incineration conditions didn’t effectively destroy the PFAS.  Instead, it merely spread them into the surroundings.  The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has directed that incineration of PFAS cease until conditions can be established that actually destroy these very stable substances.  They’re termed “forever compounds'' for good reason.

Roadway products  A few years ago, when a research team from the San Francisco Estuary Institute measured the contents of stormwater collecting from a parking lot near the Oakland Coliseum after a rain event, they found an extraordinary amount of rubbery black fragments in the samples.  These results triggered a three-year-long study of water collected at many sites around the bay.  The team was able to estimate that more than 7 trillion synthetic particles are washing into San Francisco Bay annually. About half of them were the rubbery fragments associated with tires. Tire rubber is a complex mixture of natural rubber, 20 to 60 percent synthetic rubber formed from plastic polymers, and a great many other ingredients such as carbon black, sulfur, oils, steel wires, and fabrics. Other additives, mostly proprietary, are added to extend lifetime, improve flexibility, and serve as antioxidants. Contact with the road in driving causes wear on the exterior surface of the tire, producing particles of complex composition. It’s been estimated that a car in the US could lose up to ten pounds annually in tire wear. Much more will be lost from a huge semi-trailer truck continually on the road. 

For several decades it's been observed that coho salmon in US Pacific Northwest streams have been subject to sudden massive die-offs. Despite strenuous efforts to improve the habitat for salmon in the 1990s, large fractions of adults migrating up certain streams were suddenly dying. Researchers suspected that something was washing off nearby roadways to cause these deaths, which correlated with rainfalls. Just recently environmental scientists at the University of Washington discovered that the primary culprit comes from a chemical widely used to protect tires from ozone. After working their way through several thousand potential candidates the researchers found the culprit. The compound in question is proprietary, so the researchers had to go out of their way to synthesize their own supply. They were able to establish that the compound, labeled 6PPD, is quite poisonous for Coho salmon. 6PPD is of course washing off roadways around San Francisco Bay and all over the world.  The waterways that collect the runoff from the roads may or may not contain life-forms that are poisoned by it. Southwest Florida where I live is very heavily trafficked. The runoff from roadways almost entirely runs into creeks and rivers that empty into the Gulf of Mexico. What is the long term damage to the multiple ecosystems that live in those waters? We don’t know. 

Were precautionary principles applied before 6PPD and its cousins were approved for use? It’s hard to imagine how that could even be done. Thousands of novel chemical substances are discovered in research laboratories every year, and many of them find commercial applications.  Whether it be water plants, bumblebees, coho salmon or human beings, nature suffers at the hands of human creativity. Organisms or ecosystems have mechanisms for coping with novel substances or with environmental changes. In the course of evolution, complex biological systems evolved resiliency, capacities to eliminate or reduce the effectiveness of toxins. When our early ancestors learned to use fire, they huddled around campfires, in hutches or lodges, breathing in smoke rich with carcinogens and other toxins. It wasn’t good for them, but they survived. Similarly, we survive the toxic effects of synthetic materials that find their way through industry into our lives. But is surviving our vision for the future?  Sometimes, as with some industrial dumps, toxic waste materials move into the larger environment at concentrations that override the limited capacity of living systems to cope with them. We read about and see movies about a few notorious examples. But a great many substances pass regulatory requirements set at a certain level, and are distributed globally. Only later does it turn out that, like campfire smoke, they’re not good for us. 

I do not see a way to significantly change the script of our present scenario.  Human society is becoming increasingly global through the agency of shared technologies, which exercise powerful influences on people’s values and aspirations.  Much has been written on the consequences of our having been enthralled by our successes as a species.  Paul Hawken writes, 

It is an understandable vanity for humans to believe that their cells are privileged or unique, but the distinction between human cells and those of a sunflower is shockingly narrow, while between primates and humans the difference is slender as a thread….We live in community, not alone, and any sense of separateness that we harbor is illusion. Humans are animals, albeit extraordinary ones, and have no special immunity conferred upon them. Given the present rate of planetary pollution and destruction, we need to negotiate a dѐtente with nature and ourselves.

Ah, but how do we enter into that negotiation, when most of the human race is unaware that it’s needed, and is disinclined to deal with what promises to be a demanding, even painful, experience?  The illustrious scientist Edward O. Wilson has written extensively on the urgency of acting now to preserve the biodiversity of the planet. In his book, Half-Earth, he’s quite clear: We have entered into a new epoch.  The biosphere is disappearing, species-by-species, at a sickening pace. Many have termed this epoch the Anthropocene, because it's clear that humans are the major causative agents.  Only an enormous commitment to preservation could save most of what is left.  In a final chapter, Wilson suggests ways in which we might employ our intelligence and imaginative capacities to put aside half of planet Earth for the preservation of biodiversity and to reclaim some of what has been lost. He argues that we can still do this by reshaping society. Check out the Half-Earth Project website. 

I’m heartened by Wilson’s readiness to embrace new technologies.  Futurists have been talking of the inevitability of massive shifts in how and where people will live, of producing food from cellular bases, thus freeing land for a return to a biodiverse natural state, of dramatic reductions in per capita energy consumptions, and more.  But even if society can learn to think differently about planet Earth, reforms won’t go as they should unless our species adopts an ethic that overrides all other claims on our fealty: we are nature ourselves and must live in it.  Darwin argued that, in keeping with other species, humans evolved to have a moral sense.  How can we evince it with respect to nature? Among other things, we think ahead, envisioning a holistic, soil-supporting agricultural system, weaning ourselves away from animal-focused diets, supporting community-based education and practice. When we’re able, we get our hands in the dirt. We become devoted stewards of the planet’s freshwater. We constantly urge elected officials and those in government to pay attention to the ecology of the bioregion they represent. Just maybe, we’ll succeed in preserving a good bit of Gaia for our progeny. 

There is no going back to nature as it was. People think of the Anthropocene in terms of warming oceans, rising sea levels, and other climate-related changes.  But if we could somehow forestall or reverse many of those changes, there will still be PFAS, 6PPD, countless other man-made chemical substances, and mind-boggling quantities of plastic and other waste.  These may prove to be the greatest drivers of change in the Anthropocene Epoch.

Don't throw away your two shots!

 Despite the fact that vaccines have been hands-down the greatest life-saving invention of science, there is a persistent theme borne of conspiracy theories and false stories spread with the intent to cause social chaos, that vaccines are dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.  Yes, the history of vaccination contains stories in which things went wrong.  Vaccination began back in 1796 when Edward Jenner inoculated a young boy against smallpox. Since then, we've learned so much. Vaccination against diptheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, polio and many other diseases has saved countless lives and prevented crippling aftermaths.  

Now we are on the leading edge of a new generation of vaccines as we look to stop the spread of Coronavirus-19.  Predictably, some are already crying out that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and others coming along, are dangerous.  Simply put, there is no evidence that they are not suitable for all but a tiny percentage of the population that is immunocompromised; that is, they have an underlying condition such as cancer or HIV.  All these people know who they are, so there is no prospect that they would inadvertently be vaccinated. For nearly everybody else, vaccination is highly desirable. 

The new vaccines differ from the traditional ones in that they are neither alive nor contain any proteins, just RNA, DNA’s close relative.   The messenger-RNA vaccines, as they're called, will likely be the future of vaccines. They can be developed and tested without having to deal with whole viruses or proteins. And, very much in everyone's mind at present, they can be developed and manufactured much more rapidly than the traditional vaccines. 

The job of a vaccine is to give your body a warning signal, a small exposure to something that could be highly toxic.  When you receive a vaccine you should always expect that your body will react: sore arm, headaches, maybe even a fever for a day or so.  That's not fun, but rejoice in it--your body is working up a defense system against what it perceives as an unwanted intruder.  You may have a bit of discomfort, but that vaccination could save your life.  Don't let the know-nothings lead you astray here.  Stand up for Science!  

Has Regenerative Agriculture's time arrived?

 In The Social dilemma, a documentary featured on Netflix, a group of young tech-savvy veterans of the social media world lay out their concerns about the undesirable influences exerted by social media giants on individual lives and on society writ large.  It’s a long and complicated story, but it comes down to this: These companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others, consider your web presence, if you have one, almost entirely in terms of its capacity to draw “eyeballs”. They don’t make it their business to care about content per se. Ultimately, they’re selling ad space based on viewership.

A thought that occurred to me in the midst of my morose ruminations about social media: they might just be useful in telling us indirectly about the salience of a particular topic or person in society.  It goes without saying, of course, that having a high level of visibility on social media is not a figure of merit except in some narrow sense.  With that rather ill-formed thought in mind, I googled “regenerative agriculture”.  It took less than a second for Google to come up with 19,800,000 results.  Wow, I thought, that’s an impressive number!  Then I searched for links to Lady Gaga, whose music I often like, and came up with 210,000,000 results. Actually, the comparative results made me feel pretty good.  As a serious, non-entertainment topic, regenerative ag is doing pretty well. I feel a measure of confidence that regenerative agriculture is becoming a thing in the social universe. So what is it?

In the 1980s the Rodale Institute began using the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ in their publications and formed the Regenerative Agriculture Association. No one can give a definition that will leave everyone happy, but this one, borrowed from Wikipedia, should serve:

Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm by placing a heavy premium on soil health with attention also paid to water management, fertilizer use, and more.

The consequences of a century of reliance on industrial methods of farming have been devastating to the soils of America’s great plains. It all began when the U.S. passed the Homestead Acts of 1862 to encourage agricultural development of the Great Plains. A settler could claim ownership of up to 160 acres of land, provided that he lived on it for a period of five years and cultivated it. People had no idea how to farm the virgin plains as they became settled. As tractors and farm machinery became available, they did all the wrong things -- careless of maintaining the soil, deep-plowing the grasslands with abandon.  In the 1930s, droughts in the plains set up the conditions for the Dust Bowl, dust storms that proved to be the greatest single ecological disaster the nation has known. Unfortunately, the lessons of the Dust Bowl were not well learned.  A recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focusing on land details how the forced conversion of natural landscapes in the interests of increasing crop yields has worked havoc across the globe. 

 We don’t have many years left to halt soil degradation and to restore desertified land, to restore natural landscapes. The way back to restored, productive soil is at the same time a pathway toward lowering the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Regenerative agricultural practices involve no-till management of the soil, discontinuance of pesticides, herbicides and industrially produced fertilizers. Soils are kept with something planted year-round. Cover crops include legumes such as vetch, clover, radishes and peas, and annual grains such as winter rye. These cover crops are managed so that they protect the soil from erosion and build a soil rich with root systems that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Regenerative agriculture is in effect, a restoration project, an obeisance to nature. Cash crops, such as corn or soybeans, are sown into soil that maintains its cover crops. You can learn about all this by watching the beautiful and inspiring film, Kiss the Ground. You’ll learn about regenerative agriculture from people like Gabe Brown, in my book a star right up there with Lady Gaga.

You can’t but wonder after watching Kiss the Ground why there hasn’t been a massive shift to regenerative ag practices.  One clue is that Gabe makes a point of not accepting money from the government. That might seem surprising, given that federal subsidies for agriculture are plentiful; on the order of $30 BILLION dollars annually.  A big fraction of that money goes into the pockets of large-scale farming operations and into the coffers of the big ag companies. All of that fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides, genetically modified seed varieties, and cash price support money, just for starters, has produced an enormous lobby invested in keeping the party going.  In 2019 the government spent $22 BILLION on farm aid related to the trade wars.  Farmers were getting checks that seemed to come out of the blue.

Remember all the fierce debates in Congress and in the public back in 2008 when the government bailed out the auto industry? I’m mystified why we don’t hear loud objections to the much larger recent subsidies to agriculture, much paid out by the USDA without the agency even going through Congress.  Agriculture seems to be built on one subsidy after another.  Many large landowners, already rich off federal money, wondered why they were getting unexpected checks.  Those billions might have been spent on other urgent social programs, instead of mollifying the farm block over potential losses resulting from President Trump’s trade wars. What a wasted opportunity!  What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality, wildlife, and climate change. The USDA could have mounted effective programs that pay farmers to improve the environment, restoration of wetlands, and switching to regenerative methods of farming.

The saying goes that the present is but the child of the past. Let’s take a step back and ask why so much corn is grown across America’s heartland. An article written by Jonathan Foley in 2013 is still relevant today.  Foley points out that only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, mainly for high-fructose corn syrup.  A big portion is fed to animals, which we then slaughter and eat.  The fraction of available food calories in feed corn that ends up in the meat and dairy we humans eat is really small. Perhaps the largest single market for corn is a conversion into ethanol. The notion of all the plowing, planting, discing, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, storing, and transporting, then converting the corn into alcohol in an energy-intensive, inefficient process, only to burn it in a car engine, never did make sense. It’s now just a way to dispose of the huge excesses of corn produced by farmers who want to get in on free money the government is handing out. It’s no surprise then that in 2019 total corn production in the U.S. increased by 17.5%.   By the way, the folks converting the corn that no one can use into ethanol that can’t rationally be justified as a fuel also receive subsidies for that work since it makes no sense economically. 

What will it take to really change things? Maybe, just maybe, newly elected President Biden will do the right thing and appoint Representative Marcia Fudge as Secretary of Agriculture. She’s shown that she’s ready and able to turn USDA into an effective and socially conscious tool for reform of American agriculture.

Let’s return briefly to Google search. Near the top of the list of the 19.8 million results of the search for “regenerative agriculture” are organizations of all sorts involved in one way or another with agriculture.  Bayer, a corporation at the top of the list, manufactures weedkillers, pesticides and the like. Another, the French company Danone, sells prebiotic yogurts such as Activa, and dairy-free drinks such as soy milk. They must have found their way onto the list via some sort of google algorithm magic.  Neither company has much investment in regenerative ag, though Danone has a few stories to tell. They hardly offset its sorry record as one of the top ten producers globally of packaged water, a global blight in its own right.  I’m left wondering about how profit works its way into decisions about how things pop up in searches. 

The fact that many corporations are feeling their way into regenerative practices, if only by loose association, in an effort to look good could be taken as a sign of progress, I suppose. But those serious about the promise of regenerative agriculture as a suite of disruptive technologies, with the power to improve agriculture’s environmental impact and make a significant contribution to lowering the rate of increase of greenhouse gases, know that the journey is just beginning, and the road ahead will be rough. 

But we needn’t focus only on big ag in our search for promising change. In my next blog, I’ll write about regenerative ag at local levels. That will be more fun and it’s actually quite important.

 

 

Standing up for Nature's Rights

I’ve been living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the past two months. I’ve come here every summer for the past 50 years. The UP, as it’s called, is a sparsely populated region, mostly forest.  We’re on a small lake about 25 miles from town, with only a few other, usually vacant, homes on the lake. We’re out of cell phone range, though we do have satellite internet service. In the time we’ve been here we’ve not watched TV, but I’ve read several books that I would not have otherwise gotten to. I’ve walked nearly every day, on

sand roads and logging trails. I’ve heard the occasional crash of a falling dead beech tree or its limbs, sat at the shore of the lake watching a pair of trumpeter swans move majestically past. Now, in early October the leaves are falling; a rich palette of maples, beech, white and yellow birch, as nature moves into another season.  I’ve been happy here, because I'm with a beloved daughter and her spouse, and because I’ve been able to simply be in nature.  Every day brings something fresh.

 

I’ll be returning to Southwest Florida in a few weeks. There COVID-19 continues to inflict dangerous illness and death upon thousands. On a recent walk I found myself mulling over the irony that though humans are victims of COVID-19, there’s a sense in which we are analogous to it. Like an invasive pathogen, modern humans have inflicted damage and destruction on ecosystems all over the globe.  We’ve had the mistaken notion that the natural world belongs to us; it’s really all just property. Now, nature itself is telling us that we must change our outlook if we hope to thrive, perhaps even to exist. The legendary biologist and natural philosopher E. O. Wilson has written “The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.” 

The journey back to the consensus that we must live in a sustainable balance with the natural world will be difficult. There is much to be relearned. Among the first things is this: that nature is not just property.  All of it—trees, waters, stones, rabbits and ravens, the atmosphere—has inherent rights to existence. Artists of all persuasions: poets, painters, sculptors, composers, have known and celebrated the truth that we are meant to be in commensal relationships with nature.

In 1972 Christopher Stone, a law professor, published an essay,

“Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, which played an influential role in an important pending legal case. The essay became a book, now in its third edition; it's widely regarded as a classic in legal annals. Stone addressed the frustrations of citizens' efforts to obtain redress of injuries to public interests in the environment. He argues that natural objects—a tree or stream or the Everglades—should have legal standing on their own in the courts. At first blush, the notion of legal rights for natural objects in their own right seems a bit crazy. How can a tree or a stream have legal standing? But in the succeeding half-century the proposition has received serious attention in the courts. 

The difficulty we encounter in considering this proposition arises in part because it’s difficult to imagine a tree or stream pleading its case in court.  But all sorts of inanimate objects, for example, corporations, which exist only as objects of the law, mere pages of paper, are treated as having “rights” and the prerogatives of personhood. Corporations have lawyers who plead on their behalf. Stone tells us that, in a similar sense, trees must have guardians to plead for them. 

The Rights of Nature movement is founded on two principles:  

·       Nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.

·      Humans are not apart from, but inextricably in nature.

The French philosopher/scientist Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is generally credited with formulating the concept of a mind/body dichotomy: “I think, therefore I am.” He worked diligently to separate the human person from a physical presence: “From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist.”  Descartes did western society a disservice by disavowing our embodied nature. In his view nature is something apart from us, we have no a priori obligations to it. Couple that with the human predilection to place itself at the top, and you have a species with way too much hubris.  Even today, referring to a high-achieving person as a Master of the Universe does not cause people to scratch their heads—they get it, there’s no limit to what humans can accomplish, right?  I’m sure that in the boardrooms of large corporations there sit people today who still think that’s a nifty byname. 

But those who worship before the charts of GDP and feed on the ever-increasing powers of technology goliaths have been driving us toward our collective doom. We are not Masters of the planet’s natural world.  In this era of climate crises and threats to the global social order, humans must accept a different job title: guardians of nature. It will take a long time and much discomfort to drive that message home.

Guardianship takes learning, and we will all have to learn it in the context of wherever our life situation places us.  Even today there are many indigenous cultures whose immersion in nature is much deeper than our own. As an important example, in the Amazon rainforest, spanning the borders of modern-day Ecuador and Peru, the Achuar people have lived and thrived for centuries. But their centuries-old ways of life have been threatened by developers who mean to strip away the forests in the pursuit of oil. The Achuar reached out to sympathetic people in the developed world for help.  Thanks to the work of John Perkins and Bill and Lynne Twist, and others, an international nonprofit, the Pachamama Alliance, was created to represent the Achuar people in their battles against powerful developers. The Alliance has been successful in representing the Achuar in the courts and in the halls of governments. Meantime, The Pachamama Alliance has been holding symposia around the world to discover the value of ancient wisdom in addressing our modern crises. They ask what personal roles individuals might play in bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet. 

 

Emboldened by that noble aspiration, I’ll offer a few thoughts on what you and I can do: spend time in nature: in a park, in gardening, walking the beaches—embracing our role, reflecting on our duties as guardians of nature. If you’re not able to be about in nature, spend some TV time with PBS, BBC and National Geographic programs devoted to nature.  Even if you’re not naturally a joiner, consider that there is strength in numbers and sign up with environmental organizations committed to saving the environment and preserving what we have: friends of wildlife and forest, warriors going to court to represent nature, such as The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Earth Justice, Natural Resources Defense Council on the national scene, many with local chapters.  In Southwest Florida, The Calusa Nature Center and Planetarium, The Calusa Waterkeeper, Citizen’s Climate Lobby, the Pachamama Alliance Community of Southwest Florida, The SWFL RESET Center (full disclosure: I’m on the Board)  and Florida Rights of Nature Network are steadily adding members. And there are many more. Listen to webinars to learn more about the environmental issues confronting us. Write your representatives at state and national levels. Not little chatty letters, but reminders of their obligations to preserve nature, not contribute to its destruction. Use social media for good by liking, tagging, and sharing sites and people who support the environment. 

Believe me, I know: this all takes time.  But as Mary Oliver writes,

"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

Photos by M.M. Coffield

 

 

And who shall feed us, one and all?

 

The nation’s continuing crises around food and farming intersect with every aspect of our lives. Agricultural activity accounts for about 11% of total global emissions of greenhouse gases. What if that could be reduced by 50%?  What a dent that would make in the rate of global warming.  But it will not be easy. The global agricultural system is home to some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us today; and where battles will be fought as we confront climate change in the future.

 

The pandemic has shone an unflattering light on a U.S. food system that was in crisis before COVID-19 came along to make matters much worse.  During the past several months, about 10 percent of American families are reported to have experienced hunger. At the same time,  millions of animals have been euthanized because there is no market for them, and lakes of milk have poured down drains. Migrant farmworkers, on whose labor the food system depends, are getting infected because of inadequate housing and lack of access to medical care. All this within a context of entrenched racism and inequality that determines who does and doesn’t experience food insecurity.

Why is it the case that in the United States, arguably the richest nation in the world, people with children are struggling to feed their families? Like air and water, food is absolutely essential to life. Surely it is one of the primary roles of government to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.  But something is woefully out of whack;  we should not have millions of people going without enough to eat when there is food in abundance on all sides.  Unequal access to nutritious food has long been a problem in America. Why has food insecurity persisted as our capacity to produce food at lower cost increases?   A recent article relating to hunger in the state of Minnesota highlights the incongruities in the nation’s highly efficient food-producing methods on the one hand and widespread food insecurity on the other.  In the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis, where George Floyd lived before he was killed by police, a large fraction of the residents live below the poverty line. The social unrest following his murder has made a bad situation there much worse. Volunteer organizations such as Second Harvest Heartland, which with others operate so-called pop-up grocery stores in the neighborhoods, are just about all that stand between most residents and daily hunger.  Second Harvest Heartland has been distributing about 350,000 lb of food daily. What a heartwarming tribute to the community’s sense of generosity!  But where is the government in this picture?  Billions in new agricultural subsidies have flown into the pockets of  rich landowners and corporations already protected by regular doles.  Why do congressmen shake their heads and say no when it comes to enlarging food subsidy programs for needy families? 

 

It’s ironic that food insecurity should be prevalent among agricultural workers.  Before the pandemic, there was already a lot of hunger among this group. In 2016, about 2.8 million, or 13% of America’s food workers were food insecure, relying on the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known as food stamps. That’s about 2.2 times higher than in other industries.  Now things have grown dire for many of those workers. Here’s an example, taken from Bloomberg: 

“Alicia Rojo Rocha is a farmworker in Idaho’s Canyon County, laboring in fields of carrots, onions, alfalfa, and potatoes. She gets paid $12 an hour, and the last time her wage went up was about two years ago. The pandemic led to layoffs.  Expenses started to pile up, Rocha was late with rent payments and fell behind with other bills. While out of work, she started visiting a local food bank, where she got bread, meat, beans, rice, and some produce. Now that she’s working again, she hasn’t returned to the food bank, because she says, other people need it more. …..There are days Rocha eats nothing more than an apple, or maybe a single tortilla with beans throughout her almost 10-hour, physically demanding workday. When she returns home, she might have some eggs or potatoes. She sometimes feels helpless “being in abundance and not being able to have it,” she said.” 

The food crisis sweeping the nation is not a question of inadequate food supplies. The country is in a time of historic abundance, with plentiful grains, meat and dairy, so much so that farmers have been plowing over excess crops and dumping milk. So what’s gone wrong? With the nation pitched in fierce debates over entrenched and systemic inequalities, the most basic divide—who eats well and who goes hungry—is becoming more acute every day.  It’s important to look at this in terms of politics. At the national level, state-by-state, congressional district by district, those of us who will be voting in November should ask candidates for office: Have you taken notice of the forgotten families, sitting in long food lines in their old trucks and cars, hoping there’ll be something left when their turn comes? Do you recognize that they exist?  What’s your plan for how to make things better for them? If you can’t speak with a candidate in person, leave your name and number along with your views. 

We’ve only begun to face the fights that must be fought; against big ag, which has exploited worker families in the furtherance of corporate profits; against politicians that do the bidding of the corporate giants; against federal agencies that set or roll back rules and procedures at the behest of corporate lobbyists. We need food to live. Shouldn’t that fact somehow be reflected in a special sense of responsibility on the part of food companies? But we can see that their goal is not to promote life, health, or happiness--it’s to make money for executives and shareholders. The United Nations declares that humans have a right to food:  “The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman, and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”  But that’s not how unfettered capitalism works. The kind of capitalism we’ve come to take for granted turns food—a life essential—into a commodity, as unattached to moral and ethical values as furniture and vacation cruises.

 

The nature of the food supply system has been changing.  The four largest food-producing companies in the world are Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Heinz Company.  And what do these behemoths produce?  Well, for starters, a tremendous amount of beverages, and a big flow of snack food to go with the drinks. The aisles on both sides in most grocery stores are loaded with prepared, heavily processed food: just heat’-n-eat. People have been taught to deem animal protein an essential component of their diet.  Huge beef, pork, and chicken production operations dominate.  

The industrialization of American farming, with its emphasis on just two crops—corn and soybeans—has led to a system in which there's little incentive to grow much else. The larger the operation, the more profitable, it seems. Practices commonly used in industrial agriculture degrade the soil, directly increase emissions of greenhouse gases, and cause pollution of natural waters.  By contrast, environmentally friendly practices like "no-till" farming and crop rotation lead to long-term storage of carbon in soils, making new soil and rejuvenating exhausted land. But with short-term profit as the reigning measure of success, the shift to regenerative agricultural practice is coming slowly. 

Though this all seems pretty discouraging, we should be hopeful.  Agriculture is in something of a crisis mode. Leaked stories from secret meetings show that the big players are facing up to the fact that global warming, and not just some playful teasing from Zeus, is exacting huge tolls in the form of flooded fields, punishing droughts, awful hurricanes, and now, something new and different: the derecho. One of those violent fast-moving thunderstorms recently moved through Iowa and damaged nearly half the state’s crops. That will likely lead to more government bailout money. How much in the way of gigantic government agricultural bailouts will voters stand for?  Public outcries over spoilage of towns and neighborhoods, over stink and bad water are forcing local authorities to take action. 

But people don’t need to wait for the ag industry to reform, nor for the government to act in the public interest.  Participants in home-grown, community-level initiatives understand that the big corporations are not likely to respond to peoples’ wishes for wholesome nutritious food grown in a sustainable manner on soil-rich land free of pesticides. Food cooperatives, community gardens, and other forms of community action are springing up and working successfully in many communities. This may seem a rather quixotic venture. After all, how much food can a few earnest gardeners produce in comparison with the needs of millions of people? But economies of scale work to the benefit of local efforts. Locally grown, locally sold, locally consumed.  In terms of health, sustainability, and community building, what could be a better formula?  

But there’s a lot more involved than just garden plots; it takes skill and understanding of how to grow food sustainably, how to care for the soil, how to distribute the food to those who need it. It's important to include as many people in the venture as can be accommodated. What better sense of accomplishment for people to know that they have laid hands on soil, or that they have supported those who have produced the conditions for good quality gardens?  Community gardens don't thrive in isolation; they must be integrated with other aspects of the community’s social structure. For example, children should be taught the qualities of healthful food, and given roles to play in the process of producing it. Community gardens should be educational centers. People with special skills working together are needed to make a true community garden an agricultural success. Here’s one example of what I mean. 

Columbia, MO located in the center of the state, has a population of about 12 5,000.  It’s the home of the University of Missouri and two good liberal arts colleges.  It’s a pleasant community, with outdoor amenities such as parks and trails.  On the debit side, there is a shortage of affordable housing, and the fraction of the population falling below the poverty level is higher than average. The Columbia Community Garden Coalition was founded in 1983 to help lower-income families meet their nutrition needs by growing food at a garden within range of their neighborhood. At present, the Coalition maintains about 12 gardens throughout the community at which individuals may apply for a garden plot.  In addition, the Coalition supports two dozen gardens associated with specific groups such as schools, churches and housing developments. The Coalition’s services are provided by volunteers;  support and community action is essential to the garden coalition’s broad outreach. 

The Coalition itself owns just one garden, purchased when a lot came up for sale in an extremely poor neighborhood.  The funds all came from volunteers. This is what one section of Claudell Lane Gardens looks like today: 

 

Stories such as the Columbia, MO example can be found all over the nation.  It takes the combined actions of many people with different talents and resources to bring them into being and to maintain them. The growth in the number of such initiatives and of the volunteers needed to operate them is itself an organic process.   

For the past several years I’ve been in community with a small group of like-minded friends who share common concerns for the health of the planet, and the environmental status of southwest Florida where we live.  We have founded a not-for-profit organization, The SWFL RESET Center,  in Fort Myers. Our core aim is to facilitate Restorative, Ecological, Social and Economic Transformation through cooperative initiatives.  Food gardens, farming practices, permaculture and educational activities related to regenerative agriculture will be among our initiatives. Our aims for agricultural transformation are captured in this photo. 

Imagine that these are your hands. You can smell the rich complexity of soil, see the worms wiggling, the tiny beetles scuttling.  You can feel life itself in your hands.  The little starter plant in the middle is the first entry in a growth sequence: 1, 2, 4… However it goes, it will grow larger.   Each enterprise of the food garden, tree planting, community-based education, may seem inconsequential.  When shared and disseminated to others, though, virtuous networks are extended and enlarged.  In time the many can overcome the mighty. 

 

Keep in touch with RESET via our facebook page, and -soon to come - our website.