Yesterday, a federal magistrate ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to move ahead with a decades-old effort to withdraw approvals for several uses of antibiotics considered “critically important” to human health by the World Health Organization. This is a solid win for public health advocates and comes as FDA has proven unwilling to take seriously the threat of antibiotic resistance.
In 1977, FDA proposed withdrawing approvals for the use of penicillin antibiotics for growth promotion and the use of several tetracycline antibiotics in animal feed. Research showed then—more than three decades ago—that these uses were likely to select for antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect humans. Unfortunately, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical and animal agricultural industries persuaded Congress to delay the restrictions pending additional research. FDA did more research but took no further action for the next 34 years. 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 >
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
News media outlets throughout the nation were abuzz last week with the report of new scientific research showing, for the first time, how a strain of infectious Staph began life in humans, then spread to livestock where it became MRSA, and then jumped back to humans. The study was published Tuesday in the online journal mBio.
National Public Radio’s popular blog, The Salt, noted in its lead story Tuesday, that “Researchers have nailed down something scientists, government officials and agribusiness proponents have argued about for years: whether antibiotics in livestock feed give rise to antibiotic-resistant germs that can threaten humans.”
“Finally, a smoking gun connecting livestock antibiotics and superbugs,” said a headline in the online environmental publication Grist, written by contributing writer Tom Laskawy. As one who has covered the topic for years, Laskawy was not understating the importance of the research. Read More >
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has been filthy for centuries, and city residents are accustomed to its grim sights and smells: floating islands of trash, fish die-offs, and raw sewage. Can a new coalition of Baltimore business heavy-hitters usher in a new era for the city’s waterway?
The Waterfront Partnership thinks it can. Last week, the coalition, supported by local industry executives such as Bill Struever (Cross Street Partners) and officials from Marriott and Morgan Stanley, unveiled its plan to transform the Harbor. The partnership’s primary goal: “to make the Baltimore Harbor fishable and swimmable by 2020.” Read More >
Rep. Eshoo at hearing
Since the new Congress began in January, a record number of votes have been taken in attempts to weaken environmental regulations. According to a useful database maintained by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the U.S. House of Representatives has voted 170 times since the beginning of the year to strip key environmental and public health protections from the law. This number does not include—not yet, anyway—a vote on the legal authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate particulate matter (PM) in rural areas under the Clean Air Act. That will soon change, however, as the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act of 2011 (H.R. 1633/S. 1528) makes its way to the House floor. The bill defines a new category of PM—one established without scientific rationale—and effectively exempts all PM within that category from EPA regulation. If passed, this bill could have serious consequences for the health of rural communities, so CLF has been tracking the legislation closely. We recently sent a letter to Congress that outlined the scientific literature on exposure to PM in rural areas. The bill—and our letter—took center stage recently at a meeting of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee. Read More >
This is the sixth blogpost in the series, “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol.”
While increased food prices is the most contentious of the many controversies surrounding the rapid increase in ethanol production from corn, the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from what is termed “indirect land use change” (ILUC) ranks a close second in the debates. (Here is a one study on ILUC.)
The controversy was triggered by a 2008 paper in Science by Searchinger et al. that stated, “Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. Read More >
Transporting ethanol is risky business
This is the fifth blogpost in the series, “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol.”
Discussions about the environmental impacts of corn ethanol often come around to the inputs and outputs associated with growing the corn and processing it into a fuel. In fact, in this series’ third post, “Does Ethanol Pollute the Environment… Or Does Corn?,” we tackled this topic.
Understanding the environmental impact of growing the corn and producing the ethanol fuel is obviously very important—but it is not the only critical piece of an exceedingly complex puzzle. Another important component of the ethanol supply chain is the so-called distribution infrastructure. In other words: What happens after the corn is grown, transported to the production facility and processed into ethanol? How does it get from the plant to your gas tank, and what are the possible environmental and health concerns along the way? Read More >
Olivier De Schutter (center) with Brother David Andrews (left) and Robert Lawrence.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter recently spoke at the Bloomberg School, as the Center’s 11th Annual Dodge Lecture. In his presentation, he re-framed hunger by redefining the hungry and by identifying the roots of hunger, which are more often than not political (as opposed to technical). De Schutter insisted that hunger—and famine—is not a crisis of productivity but a crisis of power. “We’ve produced hunger over the years by depriving peasants of their ability to produce,” he said. CLF correspondent Leo Horrigan and I were able to talk with him about his research and recommendations.
What does the “right to food” mean to you, and how does the idea of accountability play into that?
The right to food is primarily about an obligation of governments to explain decisions that they make in light of the impact of these decisions on the most vulnerable segments of the population…. The right to food is, essentially, showing that hunger is not a purely technical question that agronomists or economists should answer to, but a political question that shall only be sustainably addressed if governments are held to account, and if independent bodies, including courts, can step in, to censor decisions that are not going in the right direction. Read More >
Sahib Punjabi's recirculating farm in Winter Park, Fla.
The United States needs better food systems, and it needs more jobs. Aquaponics, a relatively new type of urban food production model, can give us both—sustainable food and green jobs.
Currently, the U.S. imports about 85 percent of our seafood, a large fraction of which is produced in overseas fish farms, by a process called aquaculture. Another 10 percent is “domestic wild catch,” which is made up of seafood caught by U.S. fishermen (NOAA). The remaining 5 percent comes from U.S. aquaculture. As global wild catch declines, aquaculture is steadily increasing as a viable replacement, although some aquaculture operations are criticized for being sited in open water or rivers, where fish escapes, exchange of fish diseases between farmed and wild fish, and environmental pollution are of concern.
But there is a different approach to aquaculture that addresses many of these concerns: aquaponics. Aquaponics is typically land-based, closed-system farming that is designed with the principles of agroecology in mind— fish species and vegetable crops are raised together in harmony— because fish waste serves as liquid plant fertilizer and plants strip the water of chemicals that are harmful to fish.
Agroecology, a method for integrating biological systems into agriculture, is widely recognized as a potential solution for increasing farm productivity and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, is strongly in favor of the agroecology approach, in which farmers create “complex farming systems that replicate the complexities of nature.” Read More >
