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. 

 

 

The voice of science in the time of covid-19

In 2009 I wrote a book, Imperfect Oracle: The epistemic and moral authority of science, in which I explored the complex relationships of science and technology with other sectors of society: the courts, religion, government, the public sphere written large.  It’s a complex subject; science is but one of many social sectors, and it often has to compete with one or more other sectors in attempting to have its voice heard.  Whether it succeeds or not depends in large measure on its authority; the capacity to have what one says be accepted. In the book, I argued that science has two forms of authority, epistemic, and moral. Epistemic refers to knowledge.  Science has unrivaled epistemic authority over vast domains of knowledge: the time that shows on your cell phone, the molecular structure of vitamin C, the origins of the El Nino effect—no one argues about that sort of thing.  On the other hand, science’s epistemic authority is not complete. For example, what it has to say regarding the efficacy of vaccination, or the age of the planet, are challenged by some. In general, though, it’s fair to say that science speaks with a great deal of authority in telling a believable story of how the world is.

On the other hand, science’s moral authority is the capacity to convince others of how the world should be.  That’s not a very useful definition, so let’s try this: Moral authority encompasses the capacity to motivate others to work toward achieving goals that will change the world in some desired way.  The Dali Lama has loads of moral authority, as do environmental heroes such as E. O. Wilson and Paul Hawken. Moral authority is earned, you can’t buy it off the shelf.  Science does not automatically have moral authority on every issue that comes to the fore—it earns it by establishing an accepted knowledge base and then speaking from that.  The two major crises facing the world today, global warming and the covid-19 viral pandemic, are proving to be tests of science’s authority, both epistemic and moral. 

The Pachamama Alliance community has been featuring a series on Resilience and Possibility in These Times. One of the first speakers in the series was Dr. Zach Bush, a multi-disciplinary medical and biological scientist, recognized widely as an educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future. Bush founded the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint to promote regenerative agriculture, an effort that has gained considerable traction.  I’ve followed Bush’s work on regenerative agriculture, and admire what he’s doing. It’s evident that he has an aggressive and somewhat confrontational approach, as evidenced by the opening paragraphs from Farmer’s Footprint:

“A century of monocrop farming and reliance on pesticides has damaged our nation’s once-fertile soils and the health of every American. The rapid increase in pesticide use over the past few decades has coincided with this explosion of chronic disease.

A profound change in the demographics of chronic disease is underway in the United States. Independent research from private laboratories and universities around the world, are implicating glyphosate – the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.” 

Zach Bush’s stances on agricultural enterprises that arose during the Pachamama video interview reveal a strongly anti-establishment tone. I share many of his reservations regarding practices in the pharmaceutical industry and especially big ag, with its industrial methods of raising crops, including applications of pesticides and herbicides, land management practices, raising of food animals, and the impacts on water resources entailed by them. I agree with his strong emphasis on restoring soil to its natural richness using regenerative agriculture. In this endeavor he has a lot of company; regenerative agriculture is gaining adherents as never before. 

All that said, I was disappointed in his remarks during the Pachamama interview on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic. I was mystified by his seemingly offhand way of dismissing the pandemic as just one more way for nature to make natural adjustments. He refers to Covid-19 as a shift in the virus’s structure, as distinct from smaller changes, drifts, of the sort that occur in the influenza virus on a more or less continuous basis. He suggests that these shifts, being natural events, should not greatly concern us. The number of deaths from covid-19 is not all that notable, he says, as compared with deaths due to respiratory failures generally.  Covid-19 is a mere bump in the road.  If it were not for our being in a compromised condition as a result of air pollution, pre-existing conditions, and an over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, deaths from the virus would be minimal. The virus is a largely innocent bystander, a natural force for adaptation in nature.  

For some reason, in his eagerness to assure his listeners that covid-19 is not that much of a threat, Bush said in his video interview that viruses can’t replicate, seemingly to play down the dangers that covid-19 presents. This is just sophistry; of course viruses replicate, or they wouldn’t swell in numbers from a small initial infection to the point where they threaten the life of the host organism. That they replicate differently from say, bacteria, is not of significance for assessing the threats covid-19 poses. At the time of this writing, the pandemic has infected about 4 million people, and the formally recognized global death total stands near a half million. We are only just in the beginnings of the covid-19’s march across the planet. We now know that its reach extends to many organs, including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain. Despite the fervid efforts of thousands of biomedical researchers, a clear picture of how this virus works is elusive. As cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University is quoted as saying in the April 24 2020 issue of Science, “Its ferocity is heartbreaking and humbling.” Bush brushes this aside in his eagerness to lay the blame for the magnitude of this pandemic on humankind’s environmental and social sins. They become the center of attention, and the deep scientific truths about the virus fade into the background.  

I’m disappointed by Zach Bush’s manner of addressing the covid-19 pandemic. He beclouds the immense tragedies it has already caused and those to come, in the service of his agenda regarding personal health and planetary wellness.  I fear that he has compromised his epistemic authority to advance other objectives. The covid-19 pandemic has opened a tempting ground for crossing that line. Every day we see examples of subverting—some would say weaponizing—the scientific and technical knowledge and skills gained from fighting the disease, using them as tools; in politics at all levels of government, in economics in the competition for the flood of government money for medical needs, economic relief and so on.  For weeks, who was at fault for a shortage of swabs, masks and ventilators, whether to test and who should administer tests, to lock down or open up, have been mainstays in the national news. In the blame games, the epistemic authority of science has been barely visible. 

I’m disappointed that this subversion of science comes from a scientist. I would have liked Zach Bush to say in his Pachamama interview that covid-19 is a viral pandemic of unparalleled nastiness--highly infectious, with a capacity to attack organs throughout the body; to kill or leave the victim permanently impaired in body or mind. It represents a threat to the continuation of world order we know it, to our national life, to the cohesion of communal life. We will make it through this pandemic only if we focus all the resources we can on responses grounded in science and implemented globally in the most freehearted way. The public needs to be reassured that the work of scientists all over the world working on one aspect or another of the large problem is on behalf of us all. That bustle of work will get messy at times. There will be many tests vying for use, more than one vaccine offered as the most effective. In the final analysis, if we come out of this with the world still intact socially and the virus kept at bay, it will be because the best science was put to work in open global cooperation, with special interests put aside. 

Moral leadership for addressing the huge challenges before the nation in getting the covid-19 pandemic under control should be coming from the Executive branch of government.  Donald Trump has failed to take on that role.  Instead, out of fear for his political future, he has lied and misdirected, decimated the ranks of many in his administration who could have provided sound guidance, muzzled the publicly visible few who might have told us anything interesting, and cast about wildly for a suitable target onto which to shift blame.  Apparently, none of that has worked well for him, so he seems to be shifting toward ridiculous rosy predictions now and then and pretending that the problem is about solved.  In the meantime, thousands of scientists and technicians around the world are working to find short-term ameliorative measures that will save lives and to develop vaccines. They’re building the epistemic grounds on which to base society’s way forward.

 

 

 

Earth Day, meet Covid-19

This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In 1970 the environment was a mess: big cities were beset with pollution and industrial environments were creating literally unliveable surroundings; Los Angeles was thick with a choking smog; wastes in the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland were burning; the natural world was suffering from the effects of pesticide use; chemical dumps seemed to be everywhere.

That first Earth Day was a huge success. Millions of people participated in parades, teach-ins, tree plantings, and other activities in a show of support for a cleaner, healthier world. In 1990 Earth Day became an international observance. It’s the most widely observed secular holiday on the planet. But have we made progress in those 50 years?

In some areas, we’ve done pretty well. Air pollution, for example, is less prevalent in urban environments than in past times. But air pollution is a comparatively easy target for mitigation--just turn down the source! Catalytic mufflers and limits on emissions from smokestacks have made a big difference, but we still have a long way to go.

Solid and liquid waste dumpsites scattered across the nation are not so conveniently dispensed with. The federal law officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, termed the federal Superfund program, mandates the identification and cleanup of contaminated sites. The parties responsible for the contamination are required to pay for the cleanup or reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for doing the job. About 40,000 federal Superfund sites, large and small, across the country have been targeted for cleanup. Approximately 1,600 of those sites considered the most highly contaminated have been listed on a National Priorities List (NPL).

As a cynic would have predicted, the government has found it difficult or inconvenient to dun the polluters for cleaning up their messes. Corporations come and go, right? It’s not clear who should receive the cleanup bill. The result has been that lately, taxpayers are paying for most of the cleanup. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for this work has declined. During 2000-2015, Congress allocated about $1.26 billion of general revenue to the Superfund program each year. That’s chump change in comparison with the magnitude of the problem, and it’s been reduced still further under the Trump administration. After all these years, cleanup is proceeding on a mere handful of the more than 1200 sites on the NPL list that await cleaning. By the way, the US government may be the largest polluter, with the most intractable sites.

It will come as no surprise that low income and minority populations have suffered most from the adverse effects of toxic waste dumping. Back in the day, local authorities found it easy to grant permits for waste disposal on lands in proximity to low-income neighborhoods. In 1994, President Bill Clinton proposed a new Superfund reform bill, Executive Order (E.O) 12898, which called for federal agencies to make achieving environmental justice a requirement by addressing low-income populations and minority populations that have experienced disproportionate adverse health and environmental effects. The work goes on--at a snail’s pace.


While slow progress is being made in cleaning up past environmental messes, new ones appear. They don’t look like most of the old ones, those piles of full barrels, ground sites soaked with toxic materials, poisonous ponds. Consider the aftereffects of the frenzied drilling for gas and oil in the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania. This is not old stuff; it’s a 21st-century story. It would take more space and patience than I have to recite the litany of environmental misdeeds done in the exploitation of this formation. What remains are thousands of played-out or abandoned wells, signified to the passerby by a mere stub of iron piping or an abandoned pumping station. But those thousands of wells, with their networks of horizontal drilling holes, will continue to leak oil, gas, and brines contaminated with a host of chemicals, spoiling the water in aquifers that people have depended on as their primary water source. Potential problems were evident from the very beginnings of the Marcellus development, but in the rush to make a financial killing, residents’ concerns were ignored by regulators and politicians. Now, people are often unknowingly living virtually on top of abandoned, plugged wells that leak inflammable methane. Who is responsible for cleaning up these messes? We seem not to have learned how to head off environmental disasters in the rush to make money.

Here’s another example: The covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has produced upheavals in global markets for petroleum products. Overcapacity has driven the price of oil to near zero. Not only is the market saturated with available stocks, but there is also a lack of storage capacity. Texas, the nation’s largest oil and gas producer, has seen thousands of layoffs and there will be more to come.
The flaring of excess methane gas at the wellheads is wasting billions of cubic feet of methane because it’s uneconomical to ship to market. Uneconomical? The message clearly is that if it isn’t economical, we’re just going to flare away, and in the process increase greenhouse gas concentrations. They could stop these affronts to the environment with strong regulation, but we’re talking Texas politics. "Environment" doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary.

Yet another one: What do we do when chemicals widely used in various applications come to be regarded as profoundly toxic? The family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) developed largely at 3M and DuPont chemical companies seemed like miracle substances because of their ability to repel water, protect surfaces, resist heat, and many other useful properties. They were soon found everywhere: nonstick cooking ware, repellents in fabric, firefighting foams, shaving cream, the list goes on. These compounds are useful largely because they’re chemically quite inert. But the downside of that useful characteristic is that when they enter a living system they take something like 5 years to excrete. Early studies of toxicity in animals did not reveal toxic effects in chemical workers exposed to low concentrations in manufacturing facilities. But prolonged exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), one of them in particular, known as C8, was eventually seen as harming health: developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy, low birth weight, accelerated puberty and distorted bones. The EPA website links PFASs to kidney and testicular cancer, liver tissue damage, impaired production of antibodies, and cholesterol changes. This presents a tough challenge; a family of chemicals that persist in the environment for long times, and are everywhere. They’re not very toxic, but enough so that over time they cause medical issues. Getting the genie back in the bottle looks like an intractable problem. We can’t undo what has been done, much of it without an understanding of how these substances could prove to be toxic. But we can be aggressive about not allowing the problem to get worse. While we’re at it, we might want to ask whether such problems can be anticipated. It’s strange: a search of the web turns up a lot of hits for the prudential rule as it applies to financial decision- and rule-making, but none found a prudential rule for environmental rule-making. Maybe I’m just not searching assiduously enough.

The global profit-oriented capitalist system that has called the shots for decades has brought the world to a bad place. Neoliberal capitalists want to run their shows with minimal regulation, and in the US they’ve pretty much had their way. But corporations’ frequent disregard for the larger social welfare as they focus on profits has begun to arouse palpable resentment. The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the indifference of corporations and many of the ultra-rich to the economic stresses many people face. People have begun to ask why society should run as it does. When people are being forced out of the labor market and pressed into homelessness and hunger, who comes to rescue them? When the environment teeters on the brink of runaway global warming, who will call a halt to continued pumping out of greenhouse warming gases? 

Some people have the notion that the new generation of really big business is comparatively innocent in terms of producing adverse environmental effects. What environmental harm could Google, Facebook, or Amazon produce? Aren’t some of them actively at work in addressing environmental problems? We know for sure that they are all enormous consumers of energy. The “absurdly quick delivery” madness among large sellers, particularly Amazon, but including copycat services from Target, eBay and Walmart, is sure to have negative impacts in terms of global warming. Google presents itself as embracing sustainability and environmental stewardship, but it is a massive consumer of energy.

The company is no doubt running its data centers as efficiently as possible, but the sheer enormity of their energy consumption requires millions of gallons of water per day. Water is becoming a critically stressed resource; some Google’s facilities are located in locales in Texas and South Carolina where water is already scarce. Legal battles over water rights have ensued. What will take priority, water for a data center, or water for peoples’ homes? Facebook seems to have a strong vision of how to minimize its environmental footprint, though, like Google's, it’s data centers are large consumers of energy. I’m making these points about the new giants simply to point out that they, like all large commercial enterprises, entail strong impacts on the environment. It would be too bad if they become the images of the bad guys in the poster for Earth Day 2030.

In many respects, it’s a scary time for ordinary people--financially, in terms of health, and the prospects of young people coming up through the school systems. We’re being prompted to ask questions about our personal lives and the society we’ve been living in. This viral disruption will require more than a patchwork response. We’re in the early days for the covid-19 pandemic. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm points out that in the US only about 3% of the population has shown itself to be infected. Before the infection plays itself out probably 60% or so will have been infected. As he says, “we’re only in the second inning of a nine-inning game”. A long way to go and a lot we will have to learn. 

Back to the title of this blog: What would Earth Day have looked like environmentally on its 50th anniversary if the Covid-19 pandemic had not occurred? The almost magical effects of the virus have been remarked upon everywhere. My local paper, The Fort Myers News-Press, rhapsodizes on the clarity of the urban skies; wild animals allowing themselves to be seen; the eerie quiet. As the paper writes: “When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.”

Will humans get the message?