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?

Coronavirus, Climate Change and Ecclesiasticus

Jerry Regovoy, born in 1930, was an American songwriter and record producer.  He wrote “Piece of My Heart”, associated with Janis Joplin, but he’s probably better known for “Time Is on My Side”, made famous by The Rolling Stones in 1964.  Jerry died in 2011 following a stroke. I like the way Mick Jagger did that song--his characteristic swagger, his surety that things would come his way if he just waited. 

Like everyone else, I’m preoccupied with the 2019-nCoV pandemic. This latest version of a class of viruses known as coronaviruses, which I’m going to call covid-19, seems to be highly contagious, and it’s nasty in other ways.  Except for the priapic young men and aphroditic sex objects on Florida’s beaches, we’re avoiding close social contacts and taking other precautionary measures. It’s no fun, really.  I’m not a fearful person, but I accept the prevailing medical advice: the temporal development of this infection is such that we are in for a rough period. The federal government seems to be finally beginning to do what it must to slow the spread of the infection, hoping to avoid a disastrous run on medical capacities, of both people and stuff. But the hourly totals of the infected tell a grim tale. Time is not on our side, Mick. 

The enormous attention given to this pandemic has convinced everyone that the sooner we act, the greater our chances for mitigation. This is true for individuals, organizations and governments alike. Everyone needs to buy-in.  The rate at which essential domestic products  evaporate from grocery store shelves is stark evidence that the media have the capacity to get peoples’ attention and stimulate action. Individuals are more likely to act if they feel they can do something concrete that makes a difference, especially when it affects them personally. It’s hard, though, when it means you should do next to nothing.

The almost universal preoccupation with the pandemic can't be ascribed merely to the heavy media coverage. Pandemics are spooky, and rightly so.  You just don’t see it coming. A tiny number of infectious virus units manage to infect one luckless person in a population. The virus begins with a stealth approach, multiplying slowly at first, not making a fuss. Then, at a certain point in its exponential growth in the victim, the infection suddenly announces itself with a roar and spreads at a mad rate. Meantime, the infected person is unwittingly distributing copies of the virus to the outside world, like mail addressed to “whomever”.  A lot of biology is going on and we don’t see or feel it.  If only we could detect an infection early and take steps to curtail the spread--tests, anyone?  

For most of us, right now it’s a matter of self-protection, anything from obsessive hand-washing to social distancing, to prevent contact with the virus,    Individuals take steps in their self-interest, but in taking them cooperatively we can hope to slow the virus’s spread, and maybe also reduce the total number infected. Time is not on our side, either as individuals or as a community, so we do what we can, now.

It’s not unreasonable to be fearful of what might be in store for the spread of covid-19, or for the mortalities it will produce.  It seems still early to make more than a rough guess at how virulent this nemesis will prove to be. Different populations will exhibit differing mortality rates, depending on age distribution, general state of health, availability of medical care and so on.  However, the preliminary estimates based on moralities in nations that have been hard hit are ominously high.  Wikipedia has a table showing the numbers of cases and deaths worldwide, nation by nation.  The total number of confirmed cases across all nations as of March 21, 2020, is 282,000, resulting in about 12,000 deaths.  That works out to a mortality rate of about 0.04, a truly horrible number.  The vast majority of those deaths have occurred in China, Italy and Iran, in that order. 

To put those numbers into perspective, consider the famous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.  With the exception of the Black Plague in the 14th century and beyond, it was the most deadly infestation in human history. It infected 500 million and killed an estimated 17 to 50 million people worldwide.  If we take the lowest estimate of deaths, that amounts to an overall 0.035 mortality rate. Is it possible that we now face something with that power to kill?  We can see from the numbers that we’re in the very early stages of the current pandemic; we can hope that mortality rates will decline as nations come to grips with containment measures such as social distancing.  On the other hand, when covid-19 makes its way into highly populated population centers, many of them with only the most basic and limited medical facilities--well, it will not be pretty. In 1918 the world population was about 1.8 billion; today we’re about 7.7  billion.

I’ve been writing this blog for the past couple of years and attempting in various other ways to raise awareness of the dangers posed by climate change. Scientists with many different special skills, working with different tools and models, have been steadily building a model of the global climate system. The myriad of studies, coming from all parts of Earth’s environment: land surface, atmosphere and the ocean, all point to a global warming in full swing and growing faster with each passing year. Nearly all scientific experts are confident that the changes to come will cause the extinction of many of the planet’s species and lead to the widespread suffering of humans. The science has grown increasingly clear and more precise over time. And yet, societal responses have been slow, not even close to matching the urgency we should be feeling. 

Why is it that we can really get going on an urgent crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic and at the same time be slow to react to the threats of climate change?  The answer lies in our evolutionary heritage, which has endowed us with a capacity to respond to immediate threats to ourselves or the communities in which we live. The spectacle of heavily clad medical workers moving infected patients into special isolation units, hourly updates on those infected or dead, the need for self-isolation, governmental mandates to close down commerce, and the endless drum of media coverage are enough to provoke us into action to ward off an invisible viral infection that can kill within a few weeks of infection. In contrast, our attention is drawn to climate change via stories about faraway places: floods in Nebraska, drought in Ethiopia, a hurricane of unprecedented fury hitting Japan.  The climate crisis announces itself in bits and pieces, in slowly deteriorating weather conditions in California, drought on the Australian subcontinent, in the loss of Solomon Island nations to sea-level rise.  By comparison with a viral pandemic, climate change is slow. As Lise Van Susteren wrote recently, “The climate crisis is much more psychologically demanding. ... It requires compassion to imagine what is going to be down the road and to drive ourselves to take action now for the benefits that we may not personally receive.”

But focusing on the notion that humans are not programmed to think long-term misses the most important causes of our responses as a nation to the covid-19 pandemic and global warming: the growth of global neoliberalism, an economic model that aims to pare away unwanted governmental oversight and regulation to make way for an unfettered capitalism operating largely free of governmental control. Many economists have been warning over the past few decades about the rise of neoliberalism. I recall reading a book by Dan Shiller, Digital Capitalism, copyright 2000, in which the development of global networks is linked to neoliberalism.  Shiller’s warnings and those of many of the world’s most eminent economists, have not been heeded. It can fairly be said that

Gordon Gekko’s motto, “Greed is Good” has been allowed to make a home in the hearts of the big corporations and banks.  The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that to cure what ails us, “we need reform at both the national and global levels. The US, for example, clearly needs a new social contract that is capable of fostering solidarity among all demographic groups and across generations. The new social contract, in turn, will require a larger and revised economic role for government. We need less corporate welfare and more progressive taxation with which to fund social policies for those in need and investments in the welfare of all. Most important, we must rewrite the basic rules of the economy to reverse the toxic legacy of neoliberalism – which made its own revisions to the rules during its long reign of error.  Looking back, there is no denying that the neoliberal era increased inequality, accelerated many forms of environmental destruction – not least climate change – polarized electorates, and sowed the seeds for pervasive discontent. ….The obsession with quarterly earnings and executive compensation led corporations to direct their energy toward creating more unemployment and holding down wages for unskilled workers.”

Because capitalism works on the notion of maximizing profits, it’s about driving down costs.  The American and global economies undergo periodic crises arising from greedy reaching that goes astray for any number of reasons.  Here’s Stiglitz again: “Indeed, research in behavioral economics has shown that bankers, particularly traders and investment bankers, tend to be less honest than their colleagues in less competitive areas of finance; they become even less honest when they are primed to think of themselves as bankers. Behavioral research has also identified why economies with extreme levels of inequality have deficient social solidarity.” 

Because we have been operating in an economic system grounded in the philosophy of maximizing profits and minimizing contributions to the common good, we find ourselves with a government unprepared for the covid-19 emergency we face.  The Trump administration, following the edicts of greedy capitalism, has systematically stripped the agencies in the executive branch of many offices and programs, such as the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense.  There’s been no one there to point out our vulnerability to a pandemic, nor were any of the many unqualified political appointees put in charge of major agencies inclined to think in those terms. The president often replies to questions about how his domain is run with the claim that, “I don’t know anything about that”.  Sadly, it usually seems to be true.

The twin challenges of the viral pandemic and impending climate change call for a time of truth-telling. We will be hearing and reading a lot of it from sources that have been pretty quiet heretofore. Here’s a recent example from Peter Georgescu, writing in  Forbes magazine:

“Economically, we are not one nation. And this pandemic is screaming at us to recognize this truth and act accordingly. If we are willfully denying or flat out ignoring the existential problem of inequality we now face, how are we going to demand the actions necessary to preserve our democracy and any sense of justice?”

Amen.  At the moment all is focused on how the viral pandemic has highlighted the cracks in our social structure.  The focus on short-term profits and marginalization of the public good, will continue to be stumbling blocks as we confront climate change. As it bears down on us in the decades to come, who will suffer the most?  

To end on the question of how we use our time in the days ahead, here are a few lines from a spiritual, Ain’t Got Time to Die,  by the African-American choir director and composer, Hall Johnson:

                Aint got time

                Cause when Im healin de sick

                When Im healin de sick

                When Im healin de sick

                Cause it takes all o ma time

                All o ma time

           

           

Ag subsidies are contributing to global warming

It's been nearly two months since I wrote an addition to this blog. Since that time I suffered a terrible loss; my beloved wife Audrey developed a sudden illness and died on January 10th, 2020.  We had a joyous 69 years and 5 days as a married couple. At a time when consolation is hard to come by, I am cheered by the outpourings of others’ shared sorrow and the love and affection expressed for Audrey.  Now it’s time for me to find my way back to some of the things we shared and others that she left me to pursue on my own. That brings me to my abiding concern over global warming.

For me personally, this may be a time to reassess what I’m about. I want to start with a question, “Where the heck are we with respect to slowing or even reversing the levels of greenhouse gases?”  If I look at any of the many graphs published online, I see that things are not looking good. For example, here’s a graph of global carbon emissions up to 2014:

To appreciate the significance of this graph, you’ve got to realize that it is showing us how much new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  Every year we add more, and the planet becomes still warmer.  We’re told that that the advanced economies are polluting less,  slowing down just a bit, as the graph below shows, but still at suicidal rates:

The advanced economies (black) are showing a slower rate of emissions; still pumping out lots of carbon emissions, but not so rapidly.  At the same time, the rest of the world (green) is adding carbon dioxide at a higher rate than ever.  As to where we are on slowing greenhouse gas emissions--we’re in a bad place. If we don’t improve  substantially from the status quo over the next couple of decades, harmful changes in the global climate will occur at an accelerating pace.

Awareness of climate change has grown in the general population, but we are nowhere near a level of concern that would provide the impetus for major economic and social moves starting right now.  Simply put, we humans have got to up our game. In the U.S.,It’s time to shift the conversation from talking about lifestyle changes that smack of “green”: veggie burgers, fewer airline trips, electric cars, conferences that don’t seem to progress beyond channeling the mantras of ecological good works and the like. Lifestyle changes are good, we’ll be better off and healthier for adopting them, but as Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist recently wrote in Time Magazine:

 “[F]ocusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. We need systemic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care. The good news is we have tactics to bring environmentally friendly (and non-lifestyle-disrupting) options to fruition­: pricing carbon emissions and creating incentives for renewable energy and reduced consumption.”

Mann identifies two major initiatives that could lead to significant reductions in the emissions we see graphed above, but they’re not the only ones.  I keep fairly close track of the literature on climate change; everything from the science involved to the politics and economics.  It’s a veritable blizzard of stuff!  I have good friends working on initiatives different from those that preoccupy me, and I feel guilty that I don’t know more about those areas, or that I’m not  making contributions there. I’ve come to realize, though, that if I’m going to be effective I must look for just one or two areas in which to concentrate my attention and advocacy. That won’t mean ignoring all the others; I do  need to stay in community with many others whose goals with respect to combating climate change I share. 

So I’m going to try to focus in the near term on land conservation, agriculture, and food.  I acknowledge that isn’t really a sharp focus. Whole areas within those topics could call for intense inquiry, but anything I look at will be of sufficient breadth and depth to bear significantly on greenhouse gas emissions; for me that’s the coin of the realm.

So let’s dive into this complex, hugely important subject with a report published in December, 2019, by Politico, of a closed-door, highly selective meeting of the big wheels of American agriculture.  Hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, about 100 attendees, including the current and past Secretaries of Agriculture, the American Farm Bureau Federation, CEOs of major food companies, representatives of green groups and anti-hunger advocates--a truly broad array of interests. The Politico article reported that the topics covered included many that would not have been on the table a couple of years ago.  Climate change has been a politically fraught topic in farm country, which tends to be strongly Republican. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reported in a survey conducted in November 2019 that although 73% of registered voters think that global warming is happening, only 41% of conservative Republicans agree. But for the Politico meeting, though heavily Republican and rural, climate change was in the room.

I’ve not been able to locate recent survey data on how farmers today view climate change.  A 2013 survey showed that at that time, farmers were strongly inclined to think of dramatic changes they’d recently experienced in the fields as a manifestation of just variable weather. It’s a safe bet that fewer farmers today accept that view. Though they don’t seem all that ready to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, they’re reluctantly coming to  recognize that large and persistent change is in progress. Recent insights into the views of rural America on the environment and conservation come from the Nicholas Institute of Duke University: “Broadly, our study suggests that the urban/rural divide on the environment is not a function of how much rural voters care about the environment. Nor is it a function of how knowledgeable they are—rural voters appear relatively sophisticated about environmental issues.”  

Then what are the important factors at work?  Interviews and surveys reveal that a key factor for those living in rural settings is their strong feeling of place. Where they live is an important part of how they define themselves, which in turn shapes their views. They’re rural, country--definitely not into an urban perspective. They don’t trust the federal government, even though it currently spends more than $20 billion a year on agricultural subsidies. At first this seems surprising, but consider this: about 39 percent of the nation's 2.1 million farms receive subsidies, with the lion's share going to the largest producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. Estimates vary, but it appears that more than 60 percent of farmers are not directly benefiting from subsidies. 

The story of how subsidies originated, and the rationales for them can be traced to the historical fact that as the nation expanded westward in the 19th century, agriculture was the major driver.  Through the Morrill Act of 1869, the Federal government took an active role. Agriculture was the dominant industry in  the expanding nation, but people needed help in learning how to farm and build farm-based communities.  Decades later, during the years of the Great Depression, the government enacted many programs that would sustain farm owners through complex, far-reaching legislation covering commodity price supports, supply regulations, import barriers, and crop insurance. Those programs have been expanded, modified, and expanded over the decades, even as agriculture has metamorphosed from small farm operations into ever-larger businesses and corporate operations. The result is that the huge amounts currently spent on agricultural subsidies have had distorting effects, and are a poor use of public funds.  But proposals to shift from practices supported by subsidies to more environmentally friendly, less polluting, alternatives are seen by powerful interests as an assault on a time-honored way of life, an economic threat. 

So what is the justification for farm subsidies as they are today?   I’ve drawn some figures from the Cato Institute blog, Downsizing the Federal Government. We’re going to get into a lot of numbers here, but bear with me. Subsidies go mainly to high-earning households. The average income of all farm households was about $118,000 in 2016, 42 percent higher than the $83,000 average of all U.S. households. In that same year, the median income of farm households was around $76,000, 29 percent higher than the U.S. median of about $59,000. It is sometimes claimed that farm subsidies help to alleviate rural poverty, but that’s obviously not the target of most of the  billions expended annually.  Just 2 percent of farm households fall below the poverty line, compared to 14 percent of all U.S. households.  USDA data show that while less than one-third of farms with revenues of less than $100,000 received federal subsidies, three-quarters of farms above that threshold did. I’m not a fan of the philosophy that informs the libertarian Cato Institute, but Chris Edwards’s blog seems to be well researched, with solid referencing. It has me convinced that the Federal Government’s agricultural policies as they apply to subsidies are misguided. The 2018 article in Forbes on agricultural millionaires, courtesy of the federal government, makes me grind my teeth. 

Most farm subsidies are wasteful of money and they’re largely bad for the environment. Climate change is producing ever more unpredictable weather phenomena, from flooding to drought. We’ve got to move away from past practices toward conservation, regeneration  of the soil, massive reductions in use of nitrogen fertilizer, and much more. The needed changes are slow in coming, in part because farmers can’t accept that widely accepted growing practices could be producing all the alleged environmental destruction, and in part out of a sense of being blamed unfairly. But the average farmer could, I believe, come to understand that federal programs designed to promote regenerative agricultural practices and the like would be to their advantage.  Our problem is to somehow force the millionaire beneficiaries to let go of  cushy subsidies designed to make wealthy interests even richer.

 Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is reported by the Des Moines Register as having received more than $367,000 in disaster, corn, oat and soybean commodity subsidies over a recent 21 year period. Grassley is one of six House and Senate leaders that sit on committees that draft the farm bill that renews every five years. Grassley’s take is not a lot in comparison with the $5.3 million haul taken in by California Representative Doug LaMalfa and his family.  I do wonder just what public good is served by paying subsidies to public servants who are already well paid, comparatively wealthy, and stand to eventually collect nice pensions from the federal government.   Grassley and LaMalfa, who have been farming (though not active farmers, obviously) most of their work lives, did nothing illegal; they just followed the rules.  And who made the rules?  There is a moral conflict of interest here that cannot be papered over by saying only that the laws are being strictly obeyed.  To Grassley’s credit,  he’s been espousing farm subsidy reforms that would cut into the profiteering of large corporations and wealthy absentee landlords who take in billions in federal money.  The fact remains that substantial reductions in farm subsidies will be an important step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

One final point:  That green area in the figure above, the emissions from developing and underdeveloped nations, is growing in part because of misdirected subsidies paid out to underdeveloped nations by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as I discussed in my previous blog of December 25.  Please read it if you haven’t done so. We have work to do on both the domestic and global fronts.