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 >
Plastic on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii
The documentary entitled Bag It is not explicitly a “food system film,” but its range of topics includes both the sea of plastic waste created by our food packaging and the effects of plastic waste on marine life, some of which we eat.
I was introduced to Bag It this past weekend when it was screened at the Chesapeake Film Festival on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was paired with a film that I produced entitled Out to Pasture: The Future of Farming?, which profiles sustainable food animal farmers and compares them with industrial-style animal producers. Read More >
Which is the culprit? Ethanol or corn?
This is the third blogpost in the series, “Corn-Fed Cars: On the Road with Ethanol.”
When environmentalists complain about ethanol, they complain about the negative impacts of an ethanol economy: increased levels of nitrate, sediment and pesticide pollution, as well as decreased biodiversity and fewer small farms. Are these valid complaints? Or are they actually complaining about corn? Are we talking about “failed agronomy?”
First, some facts. The amount of land dedicated to corn today is at an all-time high. And so is the land in soybeans. The reason is clear: corn and soybeans are at all-time high prices and returns. The USDA is putting less emphasis on conservation reserve programs, and so farmers with their eyes on the bottom line are putting more land into corn and soybeans. Read More >
Last Wednesday while executives from the Marcellus Shale Coalition met inside the Philadelphia Convention Center, I joined several hundred activists outside to rally against high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, aka “fracking.” This relatively new natural-gas extraction process is at the center of a growing tension: the urgency to discover new, “unconventional” fuel sources to replace diminishing conventional fossil fuel supplies, and the process required to adequately assess potential environmental and human health risks before embracing new energy sources.
In some communities where fracking is underway, alarm has been raised because fracking has been implicated in public health risks, tainting drinking water supplies and more recently even poisoning animals raised for food. (This chart explains fracking’s potential impacts on agriculture.) Read More >
Many public health hazards are too small to see. This is especially true of engineered nano-materials, or ENMs. As their name implies, these materials are small—no more than a few hundred nanometers in diameter. (For perspective, one nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or one human hair split lengthwise 80,000 times!)
Sounds cool, right? But consider this: ENMs’ small size could increase the health risk they pose for humans exposed to them. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Significantly smaller than most toxicants, some ENMs may be able to pass more easily through cell membranes, thereby reaching tissues other toxicants cannot. (For an overview, see this lengthy 2009 review from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.)
ENMs are probably in thousands of products. I say “probably” because no one, including government regulators, knows for sure how many—let alone which—products contain them. One estimate, from the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, put the minimum number at 1,300 and predicted an increase to 3,400 by 2020. Read More >
