2011 September 13

Interview with Tiffany Shlain, Director of ‘Connected’ (Video)

That we humans are all ever-increasingly connected with one another [as cell phones and the internet foster still-further-reaching institutions, as global trade networks continue to expand, etc] is beyond dispute. What the sum total impact of this dizzying array of newfangled connections will be is, on the other hand, entirely disputed. Some hold out hope that a world in which we are 'interdependent' on the millions of people we've never met will be a world in which we take better care of each other, as well as our resources. Others see a world of festering apathy, of populaces glued to screens and voracious consumerism abetted by an uncaring online marketplac...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Renovated Airstream Trailer Showcases Stylish Off-Grid Living

Photos: Y Studio for On the Green Road An off-grid, mobile lifestyle may be a far-off dream for some of us settled schmucks. But not for Cece Reinhardt and Brenda Daugherty, who realized that dream by getting sponsors to help renovate a 2003 Airstream Safari into an impressive mobile eco-home. The enterprising pair are now taking it on the road to demonstrate how simple, off-grid living can still be stylish. To see how they transformed a ho-hum RV into a green dream, check out the 'before' and 'after':...Read the full story on TreeHugger

WWF Encouraging Destructive Shrimp Farms?

A shrimp pond in South Korea. Image: Wikimedia It's true that shrimp farming has become so devastating to the environment that almost any standards created for the industry will be an improvement. But that doesn't mean they will be sustainable or that environmental groups should support them....Read the full story on TreeHugger

GOP Congress Has Made 125 Anti-Environment Votes This Year So Far.

Image: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr/CC BY I posit the following as general truisms: The average citizen enjoys living in places with clean water and blue skies. The average citizen values public health and safe drinking water. The average citizen hopes that its government will help protect him or her from air pollution, water contamination, and exposure to toxic materials. Ergo, The average citizen would say WTF in all caps if he or she were ever to read in one sitting the Read the full story on TreeHugger

Why Won’t Big Oil Subsidies Die?

Photo: Feathered Tar via Flickr/CC BY One More Time With Feeling: Obama Calls to Kill Big Oil Subsidies Every year, the American taxpayer writes a check to Big Oil -- and that's on top of buying petroleum-based products and paying through the nose for increasingly expensive gasoline. Uncle Sam also directs billions of dollars to the likes of ExxonMobil and Chevron, despite the fact that they're some of the most profitable companies on earth. These companies receive $4 billion in what Read the full story on TreeHugger

Maria Rodale: Organic food is the answer

“If you do just one thing–make one conscious choice–that can change the world, go organic….No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”

That’s a bold statement. Is eating organic more important than avoiding meat, stopping coal plants, biking instead of driving or donating to worthy causes?

Yes, declares Maria Rodale, the CEO of the Rodale Inc. publishing empire (Mens Health, Prevention, Runners World) and author of the aptly-named Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep Us Safe (Rodale Books), from which the quote is drawn.

“There’s so many benefits that come from that one choice,” Maria explains. “You’ve removed a bejillion pounds of dangerous, synthetic, disease-causing environment-destroying chemicals from the soil, the water our bodies. We would all immediately be healthier. Our children would be healthier.”

Farmers and their families and farm workers would be better off, too, she goes on: “And our kids would be smarter. There are actually studies that show that a lot of these chemicals do reduce intelligence.”

I arranged a phone interview with Maria after meeting her last spring during Cooking for Solutions, a great conference and food fest on sustainable agriculture and fishing organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’d read her book and wanted to delve deeper into the issues surrounding organics. Tomorrow, I’ll offer a dissenting view from Steve Savage, an agricultural consultant who is dubious about many of Maria’s claims.

Maria, who is 49, is the scion of America’s first family of organics. Her grandfather, J.I. Rodale, started Organic Farming and Gardening magazine, which is now known as Organic Gardening, in 1942. He put his ideas into practice on a 60-acre farm near Emmaus, Pa. She was raised nearby. “I grew, I weeded, I picked, I cooked,” she said. “I was very aware that we were a little different from everyone else, at least once I started going to school.” The family farm became a tourist destination. “For many people, it was like a pilgrimage,” she remembers. Those were the days when organic food could be purchased only in health or natural food stores.

Today, while the acreage farmed organically remains small–less than 1% of U.S. farmland–organics are a big business. U.S. sales of organic food and beverages have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association. Organic fruits and vegetables represent more than 10% of all sales of fruits and vegetable, the group says.

Conventional foods are worse for us than we realize, Maria argues. The government responds to problems after the fact and is overly influenced by big agricultural firms, which also shape university research. In her book, she writes:

There is enough evidence to know now that synthetic chemicals are destroying our health and our ability to reproduce and, thus, our ability to survive as a species. Agricultural chemicals have statistically and significantly been implicated in causing all sorts of cancers, behaviorial problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, Parkinson’s disease, reduced intelligence, infertility, miscarriage, diabetes, infant deformities and low birth weight.

No specific studies are cited in the book, so I asked Maria for a couple of references. She sent me a link to Beyond Pesticides,  website, where a blog with headlines like Low Doses of Pesticides Put Honey Bees at Risk. Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York provides a fact-sheet about pesticides here which says, among other things, that

Pesticides have been shown to cause a wide range of adverse effects on human health including acute and chronic injury to the nervous system, lung damage, injury to the reproductive organs, dysfunction of the immune and endocrine systems, birth defects, and cancer; these effects can manifest as acutely toxic effects, delayed effects, or chronic effects.

For its part, the agricultural industry says pesticide residues on food are harmless and regulated by the government.

The picture is darker when it comes to farm workers. A long-term government study of more than 80,000 farmers and their wives from Iowa and North Carolina, called the Agricultural Health Study, offers some warnings. While the farmers studied are generally healthier than the general population, pesticide exposure has been  linked to Parkinson’s disease, prostate cancer, lung disease and some brain disorders. (Details here.) One study found that farmers who “used pesticides longer and more often said they had more neurological symptoms than those who had not used pesticides or had used them less frequently and for fewer years.”

What’s more, anecdotal evidence on the impact of synthetical chemicals on birth defects is downright scary, as Barry Estabrook reported in Tomatoland. [See my July blogpost, Rotten tomatoes.] Tom Philpott of Mother Jones recently reported on methyl iodide, which is sprayed on strawberry fields and has been called “reliably carcinogenic” by the Pesticide Action Network.

That’s probably reason enough, for many of us, to choose organic. But what about the costs? Maria makes a couple of good points in that regard. First, she says: “If you can, grow a garden, which is fun and good. It’s great exercise, and kids love it.” If not, shop carefully and cook more: “Eat less processed food. Do more cooking. Every step of processing food add more cost.” In Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen, she offers gardening tips, recipes and political commentary:

Stop wasting American tax dollars supporting, subsidizing, and encouraging the toxic chemical and GMO farming that are promoted by unethical companies who spread lies and poison around the world in order to line their own pockets. We’ve been ripped off and contaminated long enough.

I asked Maria about evidence that organic growers are less productive that conventional farmers. That’s not so, she says, noting that most big farms in the U.S. produce corn and soy for non-food use.

“Most people don’t eat that corn and soy,” she says. “It’s made into high fructose corn syrup. It’s made into feed for factory grown animals. It’s made into biofuels that do not feed people.” She’s right about that–more than a third of the US corn crop goes into the making of ethanol. Something’s wrong, she says, when “a farmer who is growing chemical corn is getting subsidized and a farmer who switches to growing food that people need to eat gets no help whatsoever.”

What do you think? Should we be subsidizing organic farmers? Or not?

Come back tomorrow to learn why Steve Savage believes that organic food, whatever its virtues, can’t meet the world’s growing demand for food.

 

 

Odds Are Better For Winning The Lottery Than Being Poisoned By A Leaking Carbon Capture Project

Of all the potential problems with carbon capture and storage projects (financial viability, scaling them to the level necessary to actually capture enough our prodigious carbon emissions to make a difference, being just two), a new study says that leaking CO2 killing people isn't one of them. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Edinburgh say that the risk of death from p...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Summer In A Mason Jar: 3 Simple Recipes and Tips for Getting Started with Preserves

Photos by Jaymi Heimbuch Two Jams and a Pickle I decided this month that it is high time I learn to make preserves, and just in time since the fruits of summer are starting to dwindle in the farmers' markets. Last Sunday I grabbed my camera and spent the entire day in the kitchen of a good friend who knows how to jar properly. Here are the scrumptious results, including three recipes, that will inspire you to pick up your tongs and a nice big pot, and put the last of summer in a mason jar. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Deforestation Making Somalia Famine Worse, Forestry Experts Say

photo: Oxfam East Africa/CC BY Some background on one factor contributing to the severity of the famine in the Horn of Africa, from the Center for International Forestry Research: Deforestation CIFOR's Frances Seymour say, "Forests and trees frequently form the basis of livelihood diversification, risk-minimization and...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Infographic on Peak Oil – Who Uses How Much, and Where We Go From Here

We've all heard of peak oil. At the rate we're consuming oil, we will either begin tapping into pristine wilderness (i.e., Alaska), drilling in areas that are entirely unsafe for drilling (i.e., even farther off-shore in even deeper waters), or we will be forced to make changes in our oil consumption patterns. Carsort, a newly launched website that helps people find "the perfect car" has put together an infographic on Peak Oil. Yes, it's entirely odd for a peak oil infographic to come from a...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Multi-Storey Prefab Office Building Delivered By Barge

Images Credit NEAPO Normally, prefabricated buildings are limited by the rules of the road; in this case, the Finnish prefabber NEAPO built the entire building in a shipyard and delivered it by barge to a site on Hirvensalo island near Turku, Finland. NEAPO normally builds more conventionally sized modules out of FIXCEL, a load-bearing steel honeycomb panel that can carry weights equivalent to a 15 storey tower. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

How to Build a DIY Solar Oven (Video)

Image credit: Popular Mechanics From a heat-storing solar grill to solar ovens created for an international market, we've seen plenty of commercial models of sun-powered cooking devices. And from a solar oven death match to an Read the full story on TreeHugger

Why Masturbation is an Economic Act

Image credit: Quinn Dombrowski, used under Creative Commons license. From the economics of happiness to David Korten's focus on real wealth, it's no secret that many greens believe we must move beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a primary indicator of our well-being. The fact is that our money economy, and the...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Wood Industry Opposes Biomass Power Too

Image credit: Land Rover Our Planet, used under Creative Commons license. Only yesterday Matt posted a video on why replacing coal with forest-based biomass fuels is no climate solution. And now we hear news that the UK wood industry is raising serious concerns about the use of biomass as a replacement for coal. Surely though, folks who sell wood would be happy about a new ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

New York Fashion Week: John Patrick Organic For Spring 2012 (Slideshow)

Photo: Jennifer Barckley/EcoSalon John Patrick Organic showed his 19-piece, spring 2012 collection for New York Fashion Week on a rainy New York morning, just steps from the Hudson River. With a diverse troop of models looking relaxed and even happy, Patrick's presentation was in stark contrast to what one usually identifies with New York Fashion Week shows. --by Jennifer Barckley <...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Planting Deer-Resistant Gardens is Possible

Photo: timberpress This book is dedicated to "all gardeners who tend gardens in deer country"--it is pretty clear about its target audience. Called "50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants", it is a lovely compendium of the fifty prettiest annuals, perennials, bulbs and shrubs that deer don't eat. Even if you don't have deer in your garden, it is a beautifully-photographed guide to some little known, and quite stunning plants. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Recycle Old CDs with Murfie, Buy Used Music for Cheap

Photo by Dave Morris/CC Do you have music guilt? Music glut? Rows and rows of old CDs that haven't been played in years? If you're like a lot of people, you rip a CD to your mp3 player or smartphone as soon as you buy it. That's if you buy the CD at all, since music is available digitally from places like iTunes and Amazon. Not to mention the (illegal) downloading and sharing that goes on online. Still, what do...Read the full story on TreeHugger