The Forecast has gone home to Railroad Earth's new website! See you there!

29 December 2008

Climate Change: what we've learned in 2008

from Nature Reports

What we've learned in 2008

1. Other greenhouse gases are also worrying
Scientists have long been aware of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, but CO2 has received most of the scientific and public attention owing to its prevalence in fossil fuel emissions and its long atmospheric life. However, scientific research published this year suggests that other heat-trapping gases also provide cause for concern. In July, scientists led by Michael Prather at the University of California, first proposed that nitrogen trifluoride, a gas produced in the manufacture of gadgets such as MP3 players and flat screen TVs, was likely to become a much greater contributor to climate change than previously assumed, mainly because of the growing demand for such products (Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L12810; 2008). Their hypothesis was confirmed in October when Ray Weiss at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, and colleagues found that the atmospheric concentration of the gas has increased 20-fold over the past three decades (Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L20821; 2008). Also this year, several independent research groups reported a surge in emissions of methane (Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L22805; 2008 and Nature 456, 628–630; 2008), a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than CO2. The exact source of the methane emissions remains a mystery.

2. Arctic summer sea ice is in rapid decline
Arctic sea ice saw some recovery this summer, compared with the record-breaking low set in 2007. However, the 2008 summertime minimum was still the second lowest level recorded since 1979, when the first satellite data of sea ice became available (National Snow and Ice Data Center 16 September 2008; http://nsidc.com/arcticseaicenews/2008/091608.html). In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that at the current level of emissions, summer sea ice could vanish completely anytime from 2040 to beyond 2100. But the extensive losses during the past two summers have led scientists to speculate that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free in the summertime much sooner than anticipated. In October, scientists reported that the thickness of winter sea ice plummeted after the 2007 minimum, showing that the ice pack is not only shrinking but is decreasing in overall volume (Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L22502; 2008). This is worrying because thin ice is more vulnerable to melting and creates a feedback effect: as the ice melts, dark, open water soaks up more of the sun's rays and further accelerates melting. Loss of Arctic summer sea ice could have not only regional, but global, effects and is widely regarded as a potential 'tipping element', in which a 'kick' to the system, driven even by natural variability, could lead to rapid, runaway warming.

3. Warming is already having an impact
The effect of human-induced warming on biological and physical systems, such as patterns of species migration and seasonal shifts, came into clear focus this year. An international team of researchers conducted a sweeping analysis of nearly 30,000 biological species and physical phenomena, such as timing of pollen release and bird nesting, and trends in ice melting. For the first time, researchers attributed pronounced, worldwide changes in these systems to human-caused climate change (Nature 453, 353–357; 2008). Spurred on by concerns that species and ecosystems may not survive such shifts, conservationists began to talk seriously about relocating species to help them adapt (Science 321, 345–346; 2008). And threatened by the loss of its icy habitat, the polar bear became the first species to be listed as climate-threatened under the Endangered Species Act, following a protracted legal battle by environmentalists.

4. The hockey stick holds up
A follow-up to the infamous 1998 'hockey stick' curve confirmed that the past two decades are the warmest in recent history. Climatologist Michael Mann's contentious graph has become a symbol of the fierce debates on evidence for global warming, to the extent that an independent investigation into the study was performed at the request of US Congressman Joe Barton. The 2006 report that resulted from the Barton enquiry criticized Mann and colleagues for their reliance on tree-ring data from bristlecone pines as a proxy to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1,000 years. Although their earlier work had been largely vindicated, in September the same team revised their global surface temperature estimates for the past 2,000 years, using a greatly expanded set of proxies, including marine sediments, ice cores, coral and historical documents (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 13252–13257; 2008). The team reconstructed global temperatures with and without inclusion of the tree-ring records: without their inclusion, the data showed that recent warming is greater than at any point in at least the past 1,300 years; inclusion of tree-ring data extended this period to at least 1,700 years. According to the Christian Science Monitor: "It still looks a lot like the much-battered, but still rink-ready stick of 1998. Today the handle reaches further back and it's a bit more gnarly. But the blade at the business end tells the same story."

5. Skeptics are still out there
Despite a near-universal scientific consensus to the contrary, climate change sceptics continued this year to insist that global warming is a farce. Although the Republican party officially acknowledges the role of humans in climate change, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin remained unconvinced during her campaign as Senator John McCain's vice presidential running-mate, asserting "I'm not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being manmade". The NBC late night show Saturday Night Live famously satirized Palin: when asked about her views on global warming, Palin's double Tina Fey responded, "I believe it's just God hugging us closer." More recently, climate bloggers have been up in arms over two articles published by the website Politico. One calls into question the science behind global warming and the other suggests that extreme cold-weather events coincide with appearances by former US Vice president Al Gore. Little wonder that American public opinion still fluctuates over whether climate change is a serious problem (Wired Science 14 May 2008; http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/the-climate-cha.html).

And what we're still working on

1. How much warming and by when
Although there is wide agreement that we will see a warming trend in atmospheric and sea surface temperatures over the next century, just how climate will change in the short term is less certain. One of the first studies to address this concluded that warming may slow for a decade before rapid climate change takes off (Nature 453, 84–88; 2008). Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Germany, and colleagues found that owing to changes in ocean circulation that occur on decadal time scales, global average surface temperatures in parts of the ocean may not increase over the period from 2005 to 2015, compared with 2000 to 2010, and that some surface waters could even cool slightly. Their findings do not imply that global warming is not happening, but instead that natural oscillations in the climate system could lead to short-term changes that temporarily eclipse manmade warming. However, unconvinced by the temperature forecasts of Keenlyside et al., a group of esteemed climate scientists on the Real Climate blog staked euro dollar5,000 against the prediction that falling temperatures in some regions will cause a slight slow down in global warming. We'll have to wait until 2015 to know for sure.

2. Where to stabilize
A muddy point that perhaps only became muddier in 2008 is the concentration at which we must stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gases to avert a dangerous degree of change. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations today hover around 385 parts per million (p.p.m.), and many scientists have settled on 400 to 450 p.p.m. as the upper limit to keep warming below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. But NASA climatologist James Hansen is one of a group of scientists now saying that more stringent limits of approximately 350 p.p.m. will be necessary to avoid "irreversible catastrophic effects" (Hansen, J. et al. Columbia University 2008; http://www.columbia.edu/approxjeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf). Others are veering in the opposite direction: in a report for the Australian government this year, economist Ross Garnaut reiterated Professor Nick Stern's 2006 recommendation to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at up to 550 p.p.m. (Garnaut, R. The Garnaut Climate Change Review; Cambridge University, 2008; http://www.garnautreview.org.au/index.htm). There may be remaining scientific uncertainty about just how much CO2 is too much, to avoid disaster, but if the current state of play is anything to go by, reaching a final figure in any agreement will also be a question of what is politically achievable.

3. Where the missing carbon is going
Surprising as it sounds, scientists still do not have a clear grasp of where carbon is coming from, where it's going and in what amounts. Yet, under the Kyoto Protocol, developed nations that have ratified the agreement are to receive credits for sequestering carbon through improved land management practices and reforestation. About half of the CO2 that wafts into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion is absorbed by the oceans, plants, forests and croplands, but how much of the carbon is swallowed up by the oceans versus land is still unclear. (Global Change Biol. 14, 2910–2922; 2008, Nature Geoscience 1, 569–570; 2008 and Eos Trans. AGU 89, doi:10.1029/2008EO430001; 2008). One reason for the dearth of information is that ground-based monitoring stations are few and far between, and until now, the technology hasn't been available to obtain fine-scaled, precise measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. But the launch next year of two carbon-detecting satellites, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the Japanese Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, should soon help to fill in this knowledge gap, which is critical to establishing a reliable carbon accounting system.

4. Whether warming worsens storms
The jury is still out on whether hurricanes will increase in intensity, frequency or duration as a result of global warming. Globally, the number of major hurricanes has shot up by 75 per cent since 1970, but the role of human activity in this rise has remained contentious. This year, new evidence has caused leading experts to reassess their positions on this key issue. Weighing in on the debate early on, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a bespoke model to show that warming should reduce the frequency of hurricanes globally, although hurricane intensity may increase in some locations (Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 89, 347–367; 2008). Supporting these predictions was a paper in May (Nature Geosci. 1, 359–364; 2008) that projected fewer Atlantic hurricanes during the twenty-first century. In September, James Elsner of Florida State University and colleagues concluded that in the Atlantic, the strongest tropical cyclones will grow even stronger in a warming world (Nature 455, 92–95; 2008). One explanation for the smattering of results is that scientists do not yet have a clear understanding of the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane formation on local or global scales. A team of researchers led by Gabriel Vecchi of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently summarized the difficulties in predicting hurricane activity (Science 322, 687–689; 2008). Ultimately, they argue that relative, rather than absolute, warming of regions such as the Atlantic Ocean is probably behind the recent surge in hurricane activity. And predictions show that relative warming will remain fairly constant throughout the remainder of this century. If their hypothesis is right, the worst hurricane seasons may already be behind us.

5. How fast Greenland is melting
One of the greatest wild cards in predicting how the climate system will respond to warming is the Greenland ice sheet. Complete melting of Greenland could raise sea level by seven metres and spell catastrophe for coastal cities and millions of inhabitants. Scientists previously assumed that this melting would happen gradually over 1,000 years or more, but this is being re-examined in light of new evidence, including a study showing that Greenland could experience rapid melting over centuries, rather than millennia, and that sea level could rise by 1.3 metres by 2100 as a result (Nature Geoscience 1, 620–624; 2008). A recent study reported in Science looked closely at the possibility of large sea level rise by 2100 and concluded that sea level could rise by a maximum of two metres by 2100 if all variables were accelerated and pushed to the extreme, but that sea-level rise of 0.8 metres by 2100 is a more likely outcome (Science 321, 1340–1343; 2008). Scientists know that the Greenland Ice Sheet is undergoing dramatic melting, but accurately capturing its status in climate models and predicting future behaviour in response to warming is difficult due to a lack of long-term observations and data. In addition, scientists don't yet have a handle on ice sheet dynamics, including how subsurface melting contributes to slipping and sliding of the ice sheet. Two studies this year shed light on how meltwater may lubricate the bottom of the ice sheet, contributing to its slippage towards the ocean (Science 320, 778–781; 2008 and Science 320, 781–783; 2008). But by far the most disturbing question that remains is whether Greenland has already endured enough warming to push it to the point of no return.

Amanda Leigh Mascarelli is a freelance science writer based in Denver, Colorado.

22 December 2008

How Green Can a Christmas Tree Be?


Locally grown, pesticide-free food is gaining sway these days because it is fresh, healthy and supports area farmers. But how many of us give the same kind of thought to the Christmas trees we bring home? Can you decorate your Fraser fir without getting pesticide residue in your lungs and on your skin?

Sure, if the tree is certified organic by the Department of Agriculture. Or if it is a Certified Naturally Grown tree, which meets the same basic requirements: it was raised without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, using sustainable methods like composting and erosion control.

Certified Naturally Grown, a national organization with 500 members from 47 states, was founded in 2002 (the same year as the Agriculture Department’s organic certification program) by small farmers looking for an alternative that didn’t require a licensing fee and complicated record-keeping. State groups like the Farmer’s Pledge, sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, can also provide assurances that a tree has been grown sustainably.

Or if you buy your tree from a local grower, like Mike Ludgate, who manages Ludgate Farms, a natural foods and farm store on the outskirts of Ithaca, N.Y., you can simply ask how the trees were raised.

“We buy and resell our trees from one of my neighbors, who doesn’t spray,” said Mr. Ludgate, who also sells greens for wreaths and swags from trees he has grown himself for 20 years without chemicals.

But many Christmas trees — which, after all, are sold for their beauty — are sprayed with pesticides, especially those grown on the large tree plantations in Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan and Canada. How much residue is left once the trees are cut down is a matter of some dispute, as is any risk that might be associated with it.

“Many of the pesticides, particularly the organophosphates and pyrethroids, will break down in rain and UV light,” said Dr. Thomas Arcury, a professor and research director for the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C., who is studying the effects of these chemicals on farm workers. “Some residues would probably remain, just as they remain on the food we eat. How much that is — how dangerous that is — nobody knows.”

Christmas trees are big business: more than 31 million were sold in the United States last year, for $1.3 billion, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.

Oregon, the country’s No. 1 producer, ships mostly Noble and Douglas firs; North Carolina, the second largest, specializes in the Fraser fir. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington State, New York and Virginia are also big producers; depending on soil and climate, they grow Scotch pine, Douglas fir, Noble fir, Fraser fir, Virginia pine, Balsam fir, white pine and blue spruce.

In each of these states there are small growers who do not spray their trees. Cut-your-own tree farms are usually less likely to use pesticides, and farmers’ markets often sell trees that have been sprayed minimally, or not at all.

Getting a tree at a city lot, a large garden center or a big box store, though, generally means buying blind. These trees are most likely shipped in from plantations where they are grown in vast monocultures subject to insects and disease.

When buying a tree at a big box store, said John Kepner, the project director at Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit group in Washington, you “have no idea where it’s coming from, so you have to worry a little bit. A lot of stuff growers are using can’t be used in the home anymore. And you can’t wash a tree off like a tomato.”

Large growers like Cline Church, in Fleetwood, N.C., who ships about 60,000 Fraser firs a year up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, dismiss the idea that there could be enough leftover pesticide on trees to pose a significant health risk. “As far as residue on these trees,” Mr. Church said, “there’s nothing that’s been found, to my knowledge.”

He added: “We use them according to the label, and what the E.P.A. tells us. What else have we got to go on?”

Whatever the risk, the good news is that pesticide use has been cut in half over the last 10 years, said Jill Pennington, a plant pathologist and forestry specialist at North Carolina State University, who surveyed 336 growers in western North Carolina in 2001 and 352 in 2007, and compared those figures with a 1995 survey of 294 growers in the same region by Steve Toth, a pesticide specialist at the university.

Integrated pest management, a technique increasingly used to monitor pests and to limit spraying, has reduced the use of pesticides, Dr. Pennington said, as has the cost of petroleum-based pesticides, fuel and labor, and an increased awareness of health and environmental risks.

In New York, tree farms may be smaller, but spraying is still viewed as a necessity.

Gary Couch, an integrated pest management specialist at Cornell University, surveyed 150 New York State Christmas tree growers last year. Because of needle-cast disease, “a fungus that affects new growth early in the spring,” he said, most growers still feel compelled to spray with chlorothalonil, “the only fungicide registered against that disease in New York State.” (According to Extoxnet, a pesticide information service run by five universities, including Cornell, chlorothalonil is toxic to fish.) But Mr. Couch noted that small farmers are increasingly aware of the health and environmental risks.

Thirteen years ago, Curtis Buchanan, who runs Glen Ayre Tree Farm, in Mitchell County, N.C., stopped using pesticides because he was concerned about the runoff. Mr. Buchanan, 55, now grows organic Christmas trees with his father, John, 85, on about five acres, between fallow strips of native weeds and wildflowers, where natural predators keep the pests down. This year he expects to sell about 190 trees.

After he made the change, Mr. Buchanan said, he noticed people coming back for health reasons. “Customers would say, ‘Yours is the only tree my kids can have in the house, because they’re allergic to chemicals.’ ”

Some large producers are making similar changes and marketing those efforts.

Joe Sharp, the owner of Yule Tree Farms in Aurora, Ore., which ships 600,000 trees a year, teamed up last year with Holiday Tree Farms, which ships more than a million trees a year out of Corvallis, Ore., to form the Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers.

The trees grown in this program must follow specific sustainable practices: planting buffer zones near wetlands and streams; keeping records of pests, diseases and pesticide application; analyzing soil and nutrient needs before fertilizing, and recording methods of weed control. The group now has four member farms and expects to sell more than two million trees this year.

So those of us looking for that perfect tree have a lot of options. And not surprisingly, despite disagreements about the use of pesticides, most growers can agree on one thing: fresh trees are preferable to fake ones. Artificial trees are “made of oil-based products, they often contain lead and they’re not recyclable,” Mr. Sharp said.

Real trees hold the soil, purify the air and can be used after Christmas, to mulch your roses.

And another thing: they are beautiful.

Organic Roots

If you are looking for a Christmas tree that has been certified as organic or chemical-free, there are several Web sites that can help you.

  • Local Harvest, a national network of local products, in Santa Cruz, Calif., lists sources for Christmas trees and wreaths, both organic and conventionally grown; localharvest.org, (831) 475-8150.
  • Toxic Free North Carolina, in Raleigh, N.C., lists sources for sustainably grown trees in the state, and has information about pesticides commonly used on Christmas trees; toxicfreenc.org, (919) 833-5333.
  • Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit group in Washington, provides sources for organic and naturally grown trees, as well as up-to-date information on pesticides; beyondpesticides.org, (202) 543-5450.
  • Green Promise, a group in Pingree Grove, Ill., that distributes information about sustainable products, lists sources for organic trees around the country on its Web site, greenpromise.com.
  • Agricultural extension offices often keep lists of local growers; consult the Department of Agriculture’s Web site, csrees.usda.gov/Extension.
  • The Council on the Environment of New York City keeps a list of farmers’ markets, many of which sell Christmas trees; cenyc.org/greenmarket, (212) 788-7476.

16 December 2008

Farmer in Chief

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals — if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason — save current policy and custom — that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses — without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will — as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy — one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda — as well as the food security of billions of people around the world — will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of “Food.” It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.” We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible — the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

08 December 2008

Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop


By Brigid SchulteWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, November 30, 2008

The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.

Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.
But Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

"I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe," he said. "But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It's a zero year. There's zero production. I've never seen anything like this before."

The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather, Simmons thought. But he hoped it wasn't a climatic event. "Let's hope it's not something ghastly going on with the natural world."

To find out, Simmons and Arlington naturalists began calling around. A naturalist in Maryland found no acorns on an Audubon nature walk there. Ditto for Fairfax, Falls Church, Charles County, even as far away as Pennsylvania. There are no acorns falling from the majestic oaks in Arlington National Cemetery.

"Once I started paying attention, I couldn't find any acorns anywhere. Not from white oaks, red oaks or black oaks, and this was supposed to be their big year," said Greg Zell, a naturalist at Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington. "We're talking zero. Not a single acorn. It's really bizarre."

Zell began to do some research. He found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called "No acorns this year," reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. "We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird," wrote one. "None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser."

Jennifer Klepper of Annapolis even blogged about it. "Last year our trees shot down so many acorns that you were taking your life into your own hands if you went outside without a crash helmet on," she wrote this month. "But this year? Forget it."

Louise Garris lives in an Arlington neighborhood called Oakcrest, which is home to towering oak trees. When she couldn't find any acorns, she began putting out peanuts for the squirrels. Last year, oaks in metropolitan Washington produced a bumper crop of acorns, and squirrels and other urban wildlife produced an abundance of young. This year, experts said, many animals will starve.

Garris started calling nurseries. "I was worried they'd think I was crazy. But they said I wasn't the only one calling who was concerned about it," she said. "This is the first time I can remember in my lifetime not seeing any acorns drop in the fall and I'm 53. You have to wonder, is it global warming? Is it environmental? It makes you wonder what's going on."

Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust here is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. "It's sort of a mystery," Zell said.

* * *

A word about the mighty oak. Long before people paved over the area, much of the Washington region was covered by oak and hickory forests. There are at least 20 different species of oak trees in the region, and they produce acorns on different cycles: white oaks every year and red oaks every two years. Each tree, too, has its own two- to four-year cycle, producing many acorns one year and few in other years. Stressed trees, including those trying to survive extended drought conditions in the Washington region, often wildly overproduce acorns to ensure the survival of the species.

Oaks are one of the few trees that can self-pollinate and "clone" themselves. But they prefer the genetic variety that comes from the flowers of male trees pollinating the flowers of female trees. That's a dance that takes place every spring, usually in May, for anywhere from seven days to two weeks, depending on the weather.

And the weather is critical. A late frost can kill the flowers and any chance of pollination. But there was no late frost in this area last year, according to the National Weather Service. Gypsy moths and other insects can damage trees, but because the pollen is airborne, insects don't play much of a role in oak reproduction.

That leaves Simmons's theory. Last spring was so wet, he reasoned, perhaps the pollen was washed out of the air and down storm drains before it had time to do its work.
Ed Zimmer, regional forester for the Virginia Department of Forestry, doesn't buy that.

"It would have to be Noah's flood kind of rain for me to believe that. Forty days of constant rain," he said. "I don't think that could be a factor because there's so much pollen and all these trees release it at different times, depending on if they're in full sun or partial sun, or even from different places on the tree."

But last May, when the oak trees would have been busy flowering, coating cars and sidewalks with a thick dusting of golden pollen, the National Weather Service logged 10.6 inches of rain at Reagan National Airport -- three times the normal amount, making it the third wettest month on record since 1871.

Whatever the reason for no acorns, foresters and botanists are paying attention.
But they say they're not worried yet. "What's there to worry about?" said Alan Whittemire, a botanist at the U.S. Arboretum. "If you're a squirrel, it's a big worry. But it's no problem for the oak tree. They live a long time. They'll produce acorns again when they're ready to."

White oaks can live as long as 300 years. Faster-growing red oaks can reach 200. And it takes only one acorn to make a tree, he said, which in an urban area with little open space is often more than enough.

"This is probably just a low year, a biological event, and it'll go away," Zimmer said. "But if this were to continue another two, three, four years, you might have to ask yourself what's going on, whether it is an indication of something bigger."

Foresters survey acorns, nuts and berries for their annual "mast" report that helps wildlife managers figure out how much food there might be for deer, bear and other wildlife. Those reports can fluctuate, and the foresters have noticed how "spotty" it is this year in parts of Northern Virginia.

"This is interesting enough to ask some questions and pay attention to," said Adam Downing, forestry and natural resources agent with the Virginia Cooperative Extension. "Fortunately, natural systems are resilient. Oaks are tough."

* * *

Rachel Tolman, a naturalist at Long Branch, smeared a big glop of peanut butter on one of the nature center's trees. She grabbed handfuls of store-bought hazelnuts and placed them atop boxes to attract the tiny, nocturnal flying squirrels that tend to mass in the oaks every winter. Within seconds, the squirrels dive-bombed in from nearby trees, legs outstretched like fist-size silvery-gray sky divers. "They're so much more willing to be seen this year," Tolman said. "It's because they're so hungry."

Tolman was the first naturalist to notice that there were no acorns or hickory nuts this year. Each fall, starting in September, she takes daily walks through the forest to collect nuts and acorns to feed the flying squirrels and other animals at the center through the winter. This year, she found nothing. "I'm hoping this is just some weird anomaly," she said.

Hazelnuts gone and peanut butter licked clean, the still-hungry flying squirrels scampered high into the tree canopy and chirped angrily for more.

01 December 2008

Oregon Forest Heritage on the Bush Administration's Chopping Block

from Sierra Club, Oregon chapter

The Bush Administration has just released its final plan to significantly increase logging on 2.6 million acres of public land in western Oregon by clearcutting and reducing protections for salmon-bearing creeks and streams. Rising out of an agreement between the timber industry and the Bush Administration, the Bureau of Land Management's 'Western Oregon Plan Revision' is the gravest threat to Oregon's ancient forests in years.

The Final Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) will mean the loss of ancient forests from the northern Willamette Valley to southern Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains.

When the BLM released the WOPR draft plan in 2007, 30,000 members of the public commented; over 90% asked the BLM to save the remaining older forests, protect clean drinking water, and concentrate forest management on restoration. The BLM ignored this common ground, common sense approach to forest management.

The final plan boosts clearcut logging across hundreds of thousands of acres. This would be an unprecedented and unsustainable increase in clearcut logging Oregon's forests and by the BLM's own admission will open up currently protected streamside forests and 'old-growth reserves' to new clearcutting.

Across western Oregon, during the first decade, the Bush Administration's plan will:
  • Remove BLM forests from the scientific framework of the Northwest Forest Plan.

  • Ramp up clearcut logging across hundreds of thousands of acres and get over 70% of the timber volume from clearcuts.

  • Reduce streamside buffers that protect clean water and fish by 50%.

  • Log some of the last remaining older forests in western Oregon.

  • Increase logging by nearly 400% compared to current logging levels.

  • Add 180 million tons more carbon to the atmosphere compared to no logging. (equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 1 million cars driven for 132 years).

  • Result in 1,300 miles of new logging roads.

Take Action Today!

1) Call the Governor - Urge Governor Kulongoski to reject the BLM's Western Oregon Plan Revision and ask him to stand up to the Bush administration and prevent them from logging Oregon's old growth forests and threatening clean water and wild salmon. Call the Governor at 503-378-4582 or send an email at http://www.governor.state.or.us/Gov/contact_us.shtml. Sample letter below.

2) Write a Letter to the Editor - Make your voice of opposition to the Bush Administration's old growth logging plans heard in your local newspaper. Call on Governor Kulongoski to take a strong stand against BLM's latest clearcut logging plan. You can email the Oregonian letters of up to 150 words at letters@news.oregonian.com

You could also contact your Senators and Members of Congress and tell them to stop the Bush Administration's attempts to sell off Oregon's ancient forests and stop the BLM's Western Oregon Plan Revision.

**Sample letter** - feel free to personalize and send in.

Dear Governor,
I am very concerned about the 2.6 million acres of forest managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Oregon. The BLM is moving forward with the Western Oregon Plan Revision, which will increase logging in Oregon’s forests by 400% by clearcutting in currently protected old growth forest reserves and sensitive salmon bearing rivers and creeks.

The Northwest Forest Plan's protections should remain in place for BLM lands, not sacrificed in an out-of-court deal between the timber industry and the White House. Oregon ancient forests deserve permanent protection and should be managed to maintain important public assets such as clean drinking water, habitat for fish and wildlife, diverse recreation opportunities, stunning scenery, and jobs in forest restoration, fire safety and tourism.

Ancient forests in Oregon also serve as an important carbon storage and sequestration resource to help mitigate global warming. The BLM's plans for increased logging in these ancient forests under the Western Oregon Plan Revision will take America backwards in efforts to prevent global climate change. Clearcutting and damage to soils from logging has been shown to release tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while old forests absorb and store carbon dioxide.

I am concerned that the changes the BLM has proposed in its Western Oregon Plan Revision will lead to the loss of Oregon's irreplaceable ancient forests, water pollution, degraded habitat, and increased conflict and controversy.

Much of the BLM forests in western Oregon are adjacent to private landowners who would like to see nearby forest managed to protect their home from wildfire and to preserve their water supply, scenery, and recreation opportunities. Additionally, these forests are owned by Americans across the nation, who would like to see them strongly protected for future generations to enjoy.

Please protect western BLM forests and maintain the Northwest Forest Plan reserve system. Please use your power to rein in the Bush administration and prevent them from spending money to log old growth forests, and stop the BLM from selling off Oregon's ancient forest heritage.

Sincerely,

Other useful information:
Visit http://sierraclub.org/forests/ to find out more about the Sierra Club's positions on forest issues and useful information on effective community protection from wildfire
Visit http://www.oregonheritageforests.org/ to learn more about the background of BLM's 2.6 million acres and the major issues at stake. This site is not maintained by the Sierra Club and not all views expressed are necessarily those of the Sierra Club.
View the BLM's Western Oregon Plan revision web page at http://www.blm.gov/or/plans/wopr/.
To order a DVD on the history of the BLM in Oregon (Boom, Bust and the BLM) email tsuga@efn.org.
For more information, please contact Ivan Maluski with the Oregon Chapter Sierra Club at 503-238-0442, x304 or ivan.maluski@sierraclub.org.

Background on the BLM's Western Oregon Plan Revision...
In the early planning stages for the BLM's Western Oregon Plan Revision, over 90% of the nearly 3,000 comments submitted to the Bush Administration asked for protection of mature and old-growth forests. Most Oregonians want the federal government to safe-guard communities from wildfire while protecting what remains of our nation's ancient forests.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration's preferred alternative outlined for the BLM would manage over one million acres as Timber Management Areas - managed solely for rotation forestry - where hundreds of thousands of acres of currently protected ancient forests would be converted into industrial tree farms over time. Under this plan, wildlife, salmon, recreation and clean water would be secondary to timber industry profits.

Losing ancient forests
The Western Oregon Plan Revision covers six districts of the BLM: Medford, Roseburg, Eugene, Salem, Coos Bay and the Klamath Falls area of the Lakeview District, which is approximately 2.6 million acres of public land in western Oregon. This is an area larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Forests in the Rogue, Umpqua and Willamette River basins are primarily affected, as well as many of Oregon's coastal watersheds.

The WOPR has three primary alternatives, including the Bush Administration's 'preferred' alternative: Alternative 2. Under this plan, the BLM would clearcut 139,700 acres (over 200 square miles) of mature and old growth forest while building 1,000 miles of logging roads per decade, converting pristine ancient forests into monoculture tree farms. Clearcutting would become the preferred logging method, and 24% of all logging would target trees 200 years and older.

The WOPR effectively pulls the BLM forests out from the scientific framework of the Northwest Forest Plan. The Northwest Forest Plan was enacted in 1994 and set aside old growth forests and sensitive areas along streams and rivers to protect them - while allowing some continued logging. Every alternative in the WOPR, however, would greatly increase the logging of mature and old-growth forests to levels before the Northwest Forest Plan.

There is a better way
Oregonians don't have to choose between a healthy timber industry and their old-growth forest heritage or clean water. The timber industry in Oregon is prospering, in 2006 marking the highest levels of logging since the early 1990's primarily from vast private land holdings in Oregon. At a time when public consensus over old-growth protection has never been stronger, the Bush Administration is handing over our public ancient forests to the timber industry, which is prospering without having to log ancient forests and public lands.

There is a better way. Some Oregon forest managers are beginning to move beyond the conflicts of the past by focusing on removing old logging roads and restoring damaged tree plantations created from past clearcutting. Others are focused on thinning brush and small trees from areas near communities to protect them from wildfire. Protecting communities from fire and creating jobs in restoring damaged landscapes, while protecting ancient forests, should be the top priority of federal land management agencies. Unfortunately, the Bush administration wants to put the chainsaws and bulldozers back in the old growth forests instead of protecting communities from fire and creating jobs in restoring damaged landscapes.

The Forecast from The Keswick Theater on 3/7/09 from Phrequency.com: