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Warren Buffett is Everything That’s Wrong With America
Warren Buffett is Everything That’s Wrong With America
I think I’ve never understood the American – and international – fascination with money, with gathering wealth as the no. 1 priority in one’s life. What looks even stranger to me is the idolization of people who have a lot of money. Like these people are per definition smarter or better than others. It seems obvious that most of them are probably just more ruthless, that they have less scruples, and that their conscience is less likely to get in the way of their money and power goals.
America may idolize no-one more than Warren Buffett, the man who has propelled his fund, Berkshire Hathaway, into riches once deemed unimaginable. For most people, Buffett symbolizes what is great about American society and its economic system. For me, he’s the symbol of everything that’s going wrong.
Last week, Buffett announced a plan to merge a number of ‘food’ companies in a deal he set up with Brazilian 3G Capital. For some reason, they all have German names (I’m not sure why that is or what it means, if anything): Heinz, Kraft, Oscar Mayer. Reuters last week summed up a few of the ‘foods’ involved:
His move on Wednesday to inject Velveeta cheese, Jell-O, Lunchables, Oscar Mayer wieners, and Kool-Aid into his portfolio, stuffs an already amply supplied larder. The additions came from the acquisition of Kraft Foods Group Inc by H.J. Heinz Co, which is controlled by 3G Capital and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. His larder already included everything from Burger King’s Triple Whopper burgers, Coca-Cola soft drinks and Tim Horton donuts to See’s Candies and Dairy Queen icecream Blizzards, as well as such Heinz brands as Tomato Ketchup, Ore-Ida fries, bagel bites and T.G.I. Friday’s mozzarella sticks.
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WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR FOOD?
WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR FOOD?
Often we focus on what animals such as cows or chickens were fed prior to becoming our dinner meat or producing milk and eggs. But how often do we question what plants were fed before we consumed them? For those of us growing our own produce or acquiring locally grown food, it is relevant to know what the plants have eaten. What should I be feeding my food?
I am approaching this with the same question I ask when supplying all our needs. What are the healthy answers and how can we provide and make it ourselves? Not surprising to me at this point, my answers came after sifting through many conversations and articles on the web which, as usual, firmly repeat opinions as statements of fact both from one side of the pro-chemical GMO side versus the organic and heirloom foodies on the other. It requires invoking Cognitive Dissonance Rule #4: believe nothing but consider everything.
For those like me who have close to zero training and knowledge about growing plants, especially under the pressure of attempting to regularly supplement the family’s food supply, allow me to share the beginnings of my education in shedding my brown thumb. When filtering through information on the web and in books, it is easy to become intimidated by the complex explanations describing fertilizers, compost and soil amendments. Scaling it back to my level of comfort, here are the basics.
I thought all that was needed to grow food were sunshine, water and dirt with good drainage. It turns out there are three other vital factors. The first is the NPK available to the plants. NPK are the symbols for Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium. The second is other trace elements which plants need, much the same way humans need a variety of vitamins and minerals to thrive. The third is considering the pH level of the soil and understanding what the pH needs are for various plants.
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With ten billion coming, sustainable is not enough
With ten billion coming, sustainable is not enough
Stephen Emmott is a chief techno-wizard at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. His brilliant young scientists are doing research in complex natural systems. Their objective is to invent miracles. They want to program ordinary cells to perform photosynthesis, so we can produce food from sunlight, without plows and seeds. Agriculture can’t feed ten billion. The goal is to delay the onrushing planetary emergency, and push aside annoying obstacles to perpetual growth.
Much of the public seems to be paying little attention to the emergency, if they are aware of it at all. Biking around the university town where I live, I don’t sense a crisis of overpopulation. I don’t sense that global carbon emissions have increased 400 percent in my lifetime. The squirrels, opossums, ducks, and blue jays have not gone extinct. Life seems normal. Everything is OK. Right?
A wealth of information can be found online, but many internet factoids are generated by slippery gangsters who accumulate riches by accelerating the planetary emergency. You see their work hundreds of times every day. Among their favorite tools are magical rubber stamps that imprint [SUSTAINABLE] with subliminal green ink — [SUSTAINABLE] soil mining, [SUSTAINABLE] forest mining, [SUSTAINABLE] fish mining, [SUSTAINABLE] growth, [SUSTAINABLE] development, and on and on.
Emmott’s clan of brilliant scientists is an oddity. They do not have the rubber stamp. They are not wearing choke chains that will be jerked if they express ideas that offend the mighty. They will not lose their jobs if they conclude that we are in the midst of a planetary emergency. When thinkers are free to learn without blinders and hobbles, they come to perceive reality as an intense whirlwind of out-of-control juju. This can be a head-snapping experience.
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As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, Two Towns Face the Fallout
As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, Two Towns Face the Fallout
Recently, Buddhists at a nunnery in Zanskar Valley, a 30-mile-long alley of gray stone high in the Himalayas of northwest India, took the unprecedented step of planting an apricot tree. The valley is known as a “cold desert,” because just half an inch of rain falls a year. Temperatures in Zanskar’s highest villages drop to 40 degrees F below zero during long winters, and heavy snowfall shuts down the road linking the valley to the rest of India. Yet, to the surprise of nearly everyone in this valley of 14,000 people, the tree blossomed and then bore fruit, finally convincing local residents, who are mostly farmers, that the valley is gradually warming.
It’s not just the unusual fruit tree that has signaled a change in the climate, however. Milder weather has reduced snowfalls, stretched out the growing season, and pushed up the sowing date of fast-growing wheat, barley and lentils. Now seeds are planted in May, a full month earlier than before. Harvests are becoming a bit more reliable, too. But warmer weather has also eroded glaciers that loom thousands of feet above the valley and which provide a crucial source of water to the farmers’ irrigated fields. Accelerated melting has swelled some streams beneficially, meaning more water for some. Elsewhere, streams have dried up with dire consequences for others living in this isolated valley.
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SOLVING CRIME AND INEQUALITY, WITH A SEED
SOLVING CRIME AND INEQUALITY, WITH A SEED
A sense of community itself goes a long way towards building the kind of trust and equality necessary for safer and more just communities. [1] Indeed, many of today’s social improvement programs, from arts to sports, to jobs, housing and political forums, are choosing to base their efforts on community cultivation, as strong communities are often springboards for social and economic well being. [2]
But what if this kind of trust and community could be built while simultaneously undertaking another type of cultivation, the kind where individuals work gently and carefully together to cultivate the land. What would the benefits be?
Is it possible for a humble seed and a patch of soil to be the catalysts for stronger, healthier, more equal urban communities?
Countless studies have shown — and frankly if they didn’t, then common sense should show — that through cultivating a relationship with the land, individuals and communities learn how to be better connected to each other, and more appreciative of life at a basic level. [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
— Mahatma K. Ghandi
In the years we have spent producing the Final Straw film, Suhee and I have seen repeatedly, that in the community garden in general — and the natural farm mentality specifically — there is an understanding of self paired with anappreciation for all life which can not be learned anyplace else. As an active participant in this learning where we create harmonious relationships and nurture other living things, individuals are also, sometimes unknowingly, creating the building blocks for a society which has far less crime and conflict.
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Food democracy South and North: from food sovereignty to transition initiatives
Food democracy South and North: from food sovereignty to transition initiatives
When the idea of food sovereignty emerged twenty years ago, from the mobilisation of campesinos in Costa Rica and from the protest marches of small farmers in the Indian state of Karnataka, it had one important lesson to teach us: policies in the areas of food and agriculture should not be taken hostage to the exigencies of international trade. This idea was central to the establishment in 1993 of the Via Campesina, which was soon to grow into the largest transnational social movement in existence, now spanning 164 local and national organizations in more than 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and representing an estimated 200 million farmers.
As an antidote to the globalization of food markets, food sovereignty was very much a product of its times. The Uruguay round of trade negotiations launched in 1986 was nearing its conclusion, and at the request of major developing countries, agriculture had been placed at the centre of the table of the big bargain to be struck: food, it was becoming clear, was set to become the next frontier of the great mill of commodification, and farmers from the world over were asked to compete against one another — and let the least competitive disappear.
Food sovereignty was, first and foremost, a story of solidarity against adversity, of cooperation against competition. The trade negotiators wanted their farmers to compete: instead, rallying behind the new slogan, they decided to unite. A strange ballet of words occurred: those talking about trade « liberalization » were condemning farmers to new forms of pressure and coercion from the global marketplace and from the large agrifood companies that dominate it, while those speaking of food « sovereignty » meant in fact the opposite of food wars — they meant alliances across national borders.
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How agriculture grew on us
How agriculture grew on us
The Neolithic revolution was neither Neolithic, nor a revolution.
— Colin Tudge
Human beings of the race that calls itself Homo sapiens lived in relative equality, in small foraging bands all its existence from the time they emerged about 200,000 years ago. Then, around 30,000 years ago, during a bit more clement time within the last ice age, glimmerings of inequality arose at sites known in Europe — in places that were unusually plentiful in game.
Tools grew more elaborate, trade widened, grave goods accompanied certain burials, jewelry and other prestige items became notable, and evidence of control over significant labor was in evidence (viz, for example, the stupendous numbers of sewn-on ivory beads in the Sungirgraves).
It has been hypothesized that at some locations, the fabled painted caves in France and Spain turned into places where elite children underwent their initiations. But when game grew sparse, humans went back to tight egalitarian cooperation.
Significant inequality kicked off around 15,000 years ago, after the end of the ice age, during the Magdalenian culture. By now, the dog, horse, and possibly the reindeer had been tamed by these stone-age foragers, thousands of years before the domestication of plants. The delicious pig was bred, also by foragers, in Anatolia about 13,000 years ago, while their Syrian neighbors may have tinkered with rye. A couple of millennia later, foragers built the impressive ceremonial center of Göbekli Tepe which shows the command of vast labor pools, not only to build the center, but eventually to bury it under a hill of gravel.
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In Global Food War, Monsanto Trips Over Mexican Judge
In Global Food War, Monsanto Trips Over Mexican Judge
The global food wars are heating up. As I reported last September, Mexico is on the frontline of one of the most important global battles – the battle for the control and ownership of seed stocks.
In 2013 a collective of 53 scientists and 22 civil rights organizations and NGOs brought a lawsuit against some of the biggest players in the biotech industry. To everyone’s surprise the presiding judge in the case – a man by the name of Jaime Manuel Marroquín Zaleta – ruled in the litigants’ favor, suspending the granting of licenses for GMO field trials sought by Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, Pionner-Dupont, and Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Ministry (Semarnat).
In defending his ruling, Zaleta cited the potential risks to the environment posed by GM corn. If the biotech industry got its way, he argued, more than 7000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico could be endangered, with the country’s 60 varieties of corn directly threatened by cross-pollination from transgenic strands.
In a world in which Monsanto is long-accustomed to pushing its weight and getting its own way, especially in Washington, Zaleta’s ruling represents a rare snub. Because of the ruling’s judicial nature, Mexico’s unashamedly pro-GMO government has little choice but to grudgingly respect Zaleta’s decision, writes Antonio Torrent Fernández, the president of Mexico’s Union of Scientists Committed to Society (ACCS), one of the organizations that brought the original lawsuit against Monsanto & Co:
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Perennial Rice: In Search of a Greener, Hardier Staple Crop
Perennial Rice: In Search of a Greener, Hardier Staple Crop
Ten thousand years ago, China’s ancient inhabitants harvested the grains of wild rice, a perennial grass growing up to 15 feet tall in bogs and streams. The grains were small and red, maturing in waves and often shattering into the water. Their descendants transformed that grain into the high-yielding annual crop that today feeds half the world’s population. When agronomist F. H. King toured China’s meticulously maintained rice terraces in 1909, he called the men and women who tilled them “farmers of forty centuries.” To him, they seemed to have unlocked the secret to conserving soil and maintaining agricultural fertility indefinitely.
Today, with the climate changing and far more land under intensive cultivation, rice farmers face a less certain future. In parts of Asia, melting glaciers threaten to dry up water supplies for irrigated paddies, while higher temperatures and unpredictable rainfall stress rain-fed fields. In uplands worldwide, where farmers grow rice on steep hillsides using slash-and-burn techniques, fallow periods are growing shorter and severe erosion is undermining both productivity and ecosystem health.
An international network of scientists is working toward a radical solution: perennial rice that yields grain for many years without replanting. By crossing domesticated rice with its wild predecessors, they hope to create deep-rooted varieties that hold soils in place, require less labor, and survive extremes of temperature and water supply. Plant breeders have been trying to do the same for wheat, sorghum, and other crops for decades.
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Climate change is likely factor in Syria’s conflict
Climate change is likely factor in Syria’s conflict
Researchers say climate change probably caused the savage drought that affected Syria nearly a decade ago − and helped to spark the country’s current civil war.
LONDON, 2 March, 2015 – In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.
And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011.
The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago. The conflict has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.
The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors are quite clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability, but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.
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Do Warmer Winters Mean Less Fruit?
Do Warmer Winters Mean Less Fruit?
Californians have been enjoying summer weather in the dead of winter, but the downside is that unseasonably warm temperatures could threaten many of our favorite foods. The state experienced its warmest winter on record last year, and according to current reports, this year could shape up to be another record breaker, compounded by a four-year drought.
California produces the vast majority of our country’s fruits and nuts, and farmers are worried because they depend on water and winter chill for their trees to produce.
The drought has been a top concern for Stan Devoto at Devoto Garden & Orchards, who grows nearly 100 heirloom varieties of apples in Sebastopol. Many of his trees are dry-farmed, meaning they receive no irrigation besides what falls from the sky and is stored in the soil. His farm has received about 27 inches of rain this season (compared to the usual 40 to 50).
Right now, though, Stan is more concerned about the lack of cold than he is about the drought. “We don’t anticipate a good crop this year unless we start getting some really cold temperatures,” he says. “During winter we sometimes get down into the mid to low twenties, but this year there’s been no frost on the roofs, no frost on the grass. It’s scary.”
The Big Sleep
Winter chill is a vital part of the annual cycle of most fruit trees, including stone fruit (cherries, apricots, plums, and the like), pome fruit (such as apples and pears), and nuts. To bear fruit each year, the trees must undergo a period of winter dormancy, when the tree essentially goes to sleep, dropping its leaves and slowing its metabolism to conserve energy and protect itself from the cold.
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Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus
Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus
There is growing concern over future food production and increasing competition for resources in the food, energy and water nexus are reflected in a new interest for investment in land and water. “I cannot farm myself out of this water problem,” says Mark Shannon, a farmer who in 2010 had to let his land in the San Joaquin valley be converted into a solar power field. This is a vivid illustration of the shortage of resources that will be a permanent feature in the future, and how land, water and energy interplay.
Eagle Ford in Texas is one of the fastest-growing shale oil and gas plays (a group of fields in the same geological zone) in the United States. It is also located in one of the driest parts of the country. Following the severe drought of 2011, concerns are mounting that oil and gas extraction is competing with irrigation for scarce water supplies. Drilling and fracturing rock formations to release oil and gas (fracking) uses enormous quantities of water: according to most estimates, each well in Eagle Ford consumes between fifteen to nineteen million liters of water. The economic returns from using groundwater for fracking are enormous and easily outstrip the returns of agriculture, so frackers can easily outbid farmers. If the groundwater owner can claim royalties on the output from oil and gas wells, using groundwater to frack wells could earn more than two thousand times more than growing maize.[i]
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The state of our soil
The state of our soil
Jointly published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and theInstitute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, the Soil Atlashighlights the current state of our soils and the ways in which we are draining this precious resource:
“We are using the world’s soils as if they were inexhaustible, continually withdrawing from an account, but never paying in.”
Soil is an ecosystem in itself, made up of mineral particles, water, air, plant roots, organic matter, earthworms, lice, spiders and of course microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. The failure to protect our soils has led to the loss of around 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil each year. Without fertile soil, we risk failing to ensure that everyone has the right to adequate food.
The Soil Atlas uses infographics to present an in-depth and accessible look at the current global situation of our soils and the challenges we face in maintaining them. It includes the impact of industrial farming and the overreliance on fertilisers, which have resulted in long-term damage to the soil. But it’s not too late: farmers can adopt methods that have been used by smallholder farmers throughout the world for centuries to restore soil that has been degraded.
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The Time Has Come For Local Agriculture
The Time Has Come For Local Agriculture
Joan Dye Gussow will be 87 this year. I visited her last August at her lovely home on the Hudson River north of New York City. The house, designed by her and her late husband, the painter Alan Gussow, abuts the road at the front. Most of Joan’s energy, however, goes into the narrow lot running behind the house down to the Hudson. The lot is all garden—vegetable and flower beds and fruit trees. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy decimated her garden, drowning it under six feet of water. At 83 she rebuilt her garden beds, raising them a foot and constructing a small dike to withstand frequent flooding. I did not paint Joan Gussow for the Americans Who Tell the Truth series because she is an octogenarian heroically struggling to save her gardens from climate change and its effects on a massive river. I chose to paint her because for longer than almost anyone else in this country she has been preaching the necessity—for human health, ecological health, and energy health—of local, organic agriculture. About Joan Gussow, Michael Pollan, author or The Omnivore’s Dilemma and whose portrait I have also painted, said, “Once in a while, I think I’ve had an original thought, then I think and read around and realize Joan said it first.” The New York Times calls her, “The matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement.”
An idea whose time has come is a curious phenomenon. What prepares a culture to adopt a new idea, an idea that precipitates a change in values and lifestyle? A change in language, a change in perceived wisdom? A change in how we instruct and raise our children?
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