Winona LaDuke | April 2012
In a true sense of the words, Winona LaDuke is a force of nature.
An environmentalist, farmer, activist, writer, and advocate for native communities and ways of life, she is an Anishinaabe force to be reckoned with. As the Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year (1997), Ralph Nader’s vice presidential running mate on the 1996 and 2000 Green Party tickets, and recipient of the International Slow Food Award, her contributions have been widely recognized. But in January she was honored by an unlikely party—the Tucson United School District board, which became infamous for banning Mexican-American studies. Her response to the ban: “Recently, I had the distinction of becoming one of a select list of authors banned by the Tucson United School District. Now this is no small feat.” She went on to name the essay that had been specifically banned, and then wrote, “Interestingly enough, if I were going to ban one of my essays from a public school, this would probably not be the one.”
A few days ago, I was lucky enough to spend some time with Ms. LaDuke and ask which of her books is more ban-worthy. Read More >
In a talk at the Bloomberg School last week, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R–MD) asked the audience: “I’m not a perfect fit for the Republican mold, am I?”
The talk was about peak oil, a concept that he’s been stumping in Congress for over a decade. A modern-day Cassandra, he’s been “on the floor” in Congress to talk about peak oil and world energy supply 53 times. “I was on the lunatic fringe 10 years ago,” he said, suggesting that the concept is now gaining more ground.
“Peak oil is here,” he said several times during the talk. “We’ve reached the peak and fell off.”
From among many charts and statistics, Rep. Bartlett pointed several times to crude oil production as the indicator of peak oil. Today, he said, we produce half the oil we did in the 1970s. For the last five years, we’ve been “stuck” at 84 million barrels of crude oil a day worldwide. Although about half of the estimated oil in the earth has been pumped, supply is not the problem, he said; discovery, development, and production are the problems because we have taken the low-handing fruit. “We are running out of the ability to pump it fast enough,” he said. The U.S., with 4.5% of global population, uses 25% of the world’s crude oil produced. Read More >
Q & A with Jesse Oak Taylor
A few weeks ago, Jesse Oak Taylor, PhD, visited the Center and spoke about the challenges facing scientists—or anyone—when trying to communicate the urgencies and complexities of ecological crisis to the public. Taylor is Visiting Assistant Professor of English, and American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, at the University of Maryland College Park, as well as a co-author of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change (Oxford UP 2011). His approach to this question as a non-scientist was refreshing, as were his insights into storytelling and the role of art. Here are some highlights from a subsequent conversation.
What can the arts bring to discourse about science, and to discourse about climate change?
Something like climate change is so heavily politicized that the moment you hear “ climate change”—the minute you hear any argument going in that direction—most of us, me included, immediately start making up our minds and listening for the key words about whatever someone is saying and deciding what side they are on. Read More >
It’s possible that we may all be ready to talk about peak oil now—especially if we frame it in terms of public health.
A recently published study on the public’s perception of peak oil has turned up some very interesting data about how Americans view the impact of high oil prices on public health. What’s so fascinating about the data is this: it’s not just those on the left who are worried. In fact, those most concerned about the health consequences of rising oil prices seem to be, in equal numbers, those on both the far right and far left of the political spectrum. Read More >
Along the Keriya River, one of twelve waterways in western China where dam construction began last year, the mood is weary and palpably tense. For those on the bank, what the dams will bring remains uncertain; what they have taken away is already great.
Construction camp along the Keriya River
New York Times journalist Jim Yardley writes, “[Large dams] lie at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy conundrum.” The construction of dams reduces the nation’s reliance on coal-fired power plants, yet it creates enormous human and environmental upheaval. None know this discomfort more than the millions of riverside peoples displaced by dam construction.
“I am a farmer,” a wrinkled man says in Uygur, the local language, “But now I work construction.” Like many of the men sleeping in canvas tents, he once grew millet and herded sheep downstream. His grandfather settled alongside the Keriya, furrowed trenches for irrigation, and eventually passed on the right to water, as is traditional among the Uygur, as a form of property to his son. (He inherited the water from his father.) However, as the river’s conquest by the hydroelectric project began, the water supply downstream dwindled, and the trenches grew clogged. No longer able to sustain his fields, or himself, this man joined on, instead, as a construction laborer with the project. Read More >
In western China, massive dams are being built along 12 waterways. The dams are supposed to aid economic development—but experts are saying it’s likely that the dams will do more harm than good.
Reservoir created by dam, the Pamir Mountains
When China pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40-45 percent of the 2005 levels at the Copenhagen Summit, the latest in a series of UN Climate Change conferences held in 2009, its energy agenda rested on the construction of dams. These dams are emblems of economic development. They create hydropower and control floods. They spread irrigation and, according to their advocates, they increase the nation’s agricultural production via increased irrigation water supply. They are touted as technological marvels, a point of national pride.
Under the New Socialist Countryside program, the Chinese government has pledged $62 billion (U.S.) to construct 12 large dams on China’s western, alpine rivers. In a 2010 paper for the Chinese Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, government engineer Ming-Jiang Deng describes the construction as “an effective measure to control and regulate rational allocation of water resources.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry adds that China is “carrying out [all dam construction efforts] according to the principles of sustainable development.” Dams promise the export of food and power to the heavily populated eastern coast, and therefore the sustained maintenance of the nation. And while all China’s populations deserve food and power, the Ministry’s aerial view fails to acknowledge the ways in which dams degrade riverbeds. Read More >
Peak oil will challenge oil-dependent agriculture.
Peak oil is inevitable. At some point, global oil supplies will peak and then decline (it may be happening already), driving up the cost of oil and petroleum products.But what happens to our food systems, which rely heavily on oil, when oil becomes scarce? We can anticipate higher food prices, undernourishment, and hunger—unless we start preparing now.
Today the American Journal of Public Health has published online ahead of print “Peak Petroleum and Public Health,” as part of a special AJPH supplement, to be published in September, that will examine peak oil health threats.This paper, co-authored by CLF faculty Roni Neff, PhD, Robert Lawrence, MD, and colleagues, makes the case for pre-emptive changes that can help public health adapt—ahead of the curve—to the inevitable.“Certain social and policy changes could smooth adaptation. Public health has an essential role in promoting a proactive, smart, and equitable transition that increases resilience and enables adequate food for all,” write the authors. Read More >
New from EWG
You know what you ate this week—but do you know how it will affect climate change and the planet? As of today, you can use the Environmental Working Group (EWG)’s newly launched website to get information on food carbon footprints.The “Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health” helps users quantify the impacts of their current diets.Try adding up your meals’ impacts—you may be shocked, especially if you ate beef or cheese.
The carbon footprint of beef, for example, is 24.5 times higher than that for tomatoes. A 2008 study found that red meat and dairy comprise 48 percent of U.S. food-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).EWG’s analysis suggests that if the whole U.S. population committed to Meatless and cheeseless Monday (or otherwise gave up meat and cheese one day a week), the reduction in GHGs would be the same as that for driving 91 billion fewer miles, or taking 7.6 million cars off the road.Meatless Monday sounds to me like an easier goal, and I say that not only because CLF is affiliated with the program.Of course it is not either/or, and we need to cut all forms of GHGs. Read More >
The FY 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill, voted out of the House Appropriations Committee last week, includes an amendment that would severely limit the authority of FDA to regulate the use of antimicrobials, including antibiotics, in food animal production-a key concern of public health researchers. Sponsored by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), the amendment would prohibit the agency from spending any money appropriated by the bill on actions “intended to restrict the use of a substance or a compound” unless certain conditions are met. Although the amendment is broad-affecting any “substance or compound,” notably including tobacco-Rep. Rehberg has told The Washington Post that his goal was to block FDA action on the use of antimicrobials by food animal producers. Indeed, the amendment would, among other things, preempt upcoming FDA restrictions on the misuse use of cephalosporin-the antibiotic of choice for serious Salmonella infections in children. (Researchers have reported increased incidence of cephalosporin-resistant Salmonella infections [Foley and Lynne, 2008].) Joining many others in the public health community, researchers at the Center for a Livable Future recently sent a letter to Congress , urging members to strike the amendment from the legislation before final passage.
The Rehberg amendment reads as follows (we have broken it into numbered and lettered points to make the language easier to follow):
None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Food and Drug Administration to write, prepare, develop or publish a proposed, interim, or final rule, regulation or guidance that is intended to restrict the use of a substance or a compound unless the Secretary
- bases such rule, regulation or guidance on hard science (and not on such factors as cost and consumer behavior), and
- determines that the weight of toxicological evidence, epidemiological evidence, and risk assessments clearly justifies such action,
- including a demonstration that a product containing such substance or compound
a. is more harmful to users than a product that does not contain such substance or compound, or
b. in the case of pharmaceuticals, has been demonstrated by scientific study to have none of the purported benefits. Read More >
I recently was asked in an interview to name the one thing I would change in the world if I had the power to do so. Surprising even myself, I replied quickly “the Haber-Bosch (H-B) process for industrial nitrogen fixation. Imagine – a world without synthetic N! One can imagine the blank look I got when I pulled that one out of the blue.
My response came from a professional lifetime studying the good and bad of fertilizers, especially nitrogen. And it comes from much reading of the literature on food production and the ills of our advanced society. So, bear with me as I look into a reverse crystal ball for what-if, realizing all the while that there is no way of going back, but examining whether the reverse crystal ball could help us move forward.
Carl Bosch
Much of my background material comes from Vaclav Smil’s book, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and The Transformation of World Food Production (2001), sprinkled in with Smil’s Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000) and L.T. Evans’s Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth (1998). There are many other books and papers I could cite, but most are repeating much of the same material.
So, what is the H-B process anyway, and how did it come about? A bit of history:
The world, especially Europe and China, had gained population in bursts, but around 1500 farming moved from subsistence to commercial. Farmers owned their land and developed cropping rotations centered on increasing carrying capacity for animals with fertility supplied through manures and nitrogen coming from clover. Soon, high-yielding cereals were introduced and population headed toward the first billion. Read More >
