Adverse Health Effects of Plastics

From The Ecology Center

In addition to creating safety problems during production, many chemical additives that give plastic products desirable performance properties also have negative environmental and human health effects. These effects include

• Direct toxicity, as in the cases of lead, cadmium, and mercury
• Carcinogens, as in the case of diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP)
• Endocrine disruption, which can lead to cancers, birth defects, immune system supression and developmental problems in children.

See the Adverse Health Effects Grid for a list of commonly used plastics and their known health effects.

Chemical Migration from Plastic Packaging into Contents

People are exposed to these chemicals not only during manufacturing, but also by using plastic packages, because some chemicals migrate from the plastic packaging to the foods they contain. Examples of plastics contaminating food have been reported with most plastic types, including Styrene from polystyrene, plasticizers from PVC, antioxidants from polyethylene, and Acetaldehyde from PET.

Among the factors controlling migration are the chemical structure of the migrants and the nature of the packaged food. In studies cited in Food Additives and Contaminants, LDPE, HDPE, and polypropylene bottles released measurable levels of BHT, Chimassorb 81, Irganox PS 800, Irganix 1076, and Irganox 1010 into their contents of vegetable oil and ethanol. Evidence was also found that acetaldehyde migrated out of PET and into water.

Recommendations
Find alternatives to plastic products whenever possible. Some specific suggestions:
* Buy food in glass or metal containers; avoid polycarbonate drinking bottles with Bisphenol A
* Avoid heating food in plastic containers, or storing fatty foods in plastic containers or plastic wrap.
* Do not give young children plastic teethers or toys
* Use natural fiber clothing, bedding and furniture
* Avoid all PVC and Styrene products

• Buy food in glass or metal containers
• Avoid heating food in plastic containers, or storing fatty foods in plastic containers or plastic wrap
• Do not give young children plastic teethers or toys
• Use natural fiber clothing, bedding and furniture
• Avoid all PVC and Styrene products

Plastic	Common Uses	Adverse Health Effects
Polyvinyl chloride (#3PVC)	Food packaging, plastic wrap, containers for toiletries, cosmetics, crib bumpers, floor tiles, pacifiers, shower curtains, toys, water pipes, garden hoses, auto upholstery, inflatable swimming pools	Can cause cancer, birth defects, genetic changes, chronic bronchitis, ulcers, skin diseases, deafness, vision failure, indigestion, and liver dysfunction
Phthalates (DEHP, DINP, and others)	Softened vinyl products manufactured with phthalates include vinyl clothing, emulsion paint, footwear, printing inks, non-mouthing toys and children’s products, product packaging and food wrap, vinyl flooring, blood bags and tubing, IV containers and components, surgical gloves, breathing tubes, general purpose labware, inhalation masks, many other medical devices	Endocrine disruption, linked to asthma, developmental and reporoductive effects. Medical waste with PVC and pthalates is regularly incinerated causing public health effects from the relese of dioxins and mercury, including cancer, birth defects, hormonal changes, declining sperm counts, infertility, endometriosis, and immune system impairment.
Polycarbonate, with Bisphenol A (#7)	Water bottles	Scientists have linked very low doses of bisphenol A exposure to cancers, impaired immune function, early onset of puberty, obesity, diabetes, and hyperactivity, among other problems (Environment California)
Polystyrene	Many food containers for meats, fish, cheeses, yogurt, foam and clear clamshell containers, foam and rigid plates, clear bakery containers, packaging "peanuts", foam packaging, audio cassette housings, CD cases, disposable cutlery, building insulation, flotation devices, ice buckets, wall tile, paints, serving trays, throw-away hot drink cups, toys	Can irritate eyes, nose and throat and can cause dizziness and unconsciousness. Migrates into food and stores in body fat. Elevated rates of lymphatic and hematopoietic cancers for workers.
Polyethelyne (#1 PET)	Water and soda bottles, carpet fiber, chewing gum, coffee stirrers, drinking glasses, food containers and wrappers, heat-sealed plastic packaging, kitchenware, plastic bags, squeeze bottles, toys	Suspected human carcinogen
Polyester	Bedding, clothing, disposable diapers, food packaging, tampons, upholstery	Can cause eye and respiratory-tract irritation and acute skin rashes
Urea- formaldehyde	Particle board, plywood, building insulation, fabric finishes	Formaldehyde is a suspected carcinogen and has been shown to cause birth defects and genetic changes. Inhaling formaldehyde can cause cough, swelling of the throat, watery eyes, breathing problems, headaches, rashes, tiredness
Polyurethane Foam	Cushions, mattresses, pillows	Bronchitis, coughing, skin and eye problems. Can release toluene diisocyanate which can produce severe lung problems
Acrylic	Clothing, blankets, carpets made from acrylic fibers, adhesives, contact lenses, dentures, floor waxes, food preparation equipment, disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, paints	Can cause breathing difficulties, vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, weakness, headache and fatigue
Tetrafluoro- ethelyne	Non-stick coating on cookware, clothes irons, ironing board covers, plumbing and tools	Can irritate eyes, nose and throat and can cause breathing difficulties

Sources:

• Centers for Disease Control Report, "National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals," 2001.
• Dadd, Debra, Home Safe Home, Penguin Putnam, New York, 1997.
• Ecology Center Plastic Task Force Report, Berkeley, CA, 1996.
• Goettlich, Paul, "What are Endocrine Disruptors?," 2001
• National Resources Defense Council website, "Endocrine Disruptors FAQ," 2001.

Power from the People: The developing world generates innovative strategies for renewable energy

From Utne Reader, May/June 2009 by Elizabeth Ryan

At a time when phrases like “climate crisis” and “global warming” are bandied about to the point of fatigue and sustainable energy is becoming a necessity rather than a talking point, perhaps it’s time we took a cue from the developing world, where solutions to dire energy shortages are readily emerging.

Over the past four years, for instance, residents of the Indian village of Kinchlingi (population 75) have used a boxy, bicycle-like apparatus that generates enough energy to supply their village with water for drinking and washing. According to Alternatives Journal (Jan.-Feb. 2009), just three hours of pedaling produces enough biodiesel for a month’s worth of water. The human-powered pedals act as a stirring mechanism that converts seed oil into biodiesel to fuel the water supply pumps. Villagers are also exploring ways to use the fuel for farm machinery and electric lighting.

Bike parts found their way into a very different energy project in Malawi, as part of a hodgepodge windmill built by an innovative teenager. At 14, William Kamkwamba was inspired by a fifth-grade-level U.S. textbook, Using Energy, that he found in the library. He taught himself how to build a windmill that generated enough power for his family’s house, which was previously lit by toxic paraffin candles. Positive Living (Autumn 2008) reports that friends and neighbors expressed little faith in his project, but Kamkwamba believed that “if it was written in the book, then it was true and possible.”

He had to improvise a bit to assemble the parts—gathering broken pipes, old shoes, his father’s bicycle, an oil barrel, and a car’s fan belt, among other things—but the effort paid off. His family switched to lightbulbs, and additional windmills produced enough electricity to power a television. William has since been named a fellow at TEDGlobal and hopes to build a large windmill to power his entire village.

On the other side of the continent, West African leaders recently gathered in Ghana to consider proposals capitalizing on the area’s “solar riches,” according to Reuters (Sept. 24, 2008). It seems obvious that the sunniest land on the planet—a swath of the Sahara Desert—should use its natural renewable source, which is why one project calls for the construction of a solar-thermal energy plant in northern Niger. The pollution-free power generator would use a combination of mirrors, boiling water, and turbines to harness sunlight, and would transmit that power to the coasts to provide electricity for residents. While initial expenses are high, the plant would help combat the strains of rising fuel costs. Similar technology has already been proven to work in Spain and the United States.

Off the West African coast on the Cape Verde Islands, reports the IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) news service (Jan. 9, 2009), the Serra Malagueta community of Santiago Island is pioneering a technique called “fog harvesting,” which uses giant double-sided netting to collect fog and filter it into the water supply. The area boasts three times as much rain as the country’s annual average, making it an ideal location for the 15 nets. One local water engineer estimates that on a day with ample wind and fog the 200 square meters of netting can capture some 4,000 liters of water—invaluable for a country that’s faced mass emigration and death due to drought conditions.

Beyond targeting specific renewable resources to mine, one community has focused on a model for managing them. Lucia Ortiz writes for New Internationalist (Jan.-Feb. 2009) that some 6,000 people in southern Brazil resisted the region’s mid-1990s shift toward energy privatization and have successfully managed their own energy cooperative for more than a decade. The group holds open assemblies to discuss key decisions, generates its own electricity—mostly from two small hydro dams—and uses sugar­cane to produce ethanol fuel. To determine their bills, community members track their own energy use and report it via an honor system—which eliminates the cost of monthly meter readings (staff members read meters annually for verification).

The group’s move toward independence has inspired other co-ops in the area to localize their energy economies. In Porto Alegre, Ortiz and other residents have formed a movement called “How to live in the city in times of climate crisis and peak oil.” The group’s monthly gatherings cultivate an exchange of ideas about urban and rural living. “Everybody is learning more,” Ortiz writes, “and rethinking the way that we can be organized to be less energy demanding.”

Climate Change in Pictures

By Laura Shin from Green Inc.

In a recently published book, Gavin Schmidt, founder of RealClimate.org, attempts to tell the story of climate change in pictures.

Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climatologist, has in many ways become the news media’s conscience on climate science, exposing exaggeration and opinion in climate coverage on the blog he founded, RealClimate.org.

In a recently published book, “Climate Change: Picturing the Science,” Mr. Schmidt and his co-author, the photographer Joshua Wolfe, attempt to tell the story of global warming with the same no-nonsense approach — albeit this time with photographs.

“There is this tendency in the media to go for the dramatic shots with a very limited palate,” Mr. Schmidt said in a recent conversation with Green Inc. “So any time someone talks about storms, there’s a picture of a wave breaking against a beach, or a picture of a palm tree bending over in the middle of a hurricane, and if you’re talking about the Arctic, then you have to drag out a polar bear.

“In the book, we really tried to expand the range of the imagery,” Mr. Schmidt continued. “We brought in scientists and images of their work, and that humanizes the process enormously. And we also were able to bring out more clearly that the issue about hurricanes or the issue about climate change is that these things are not intrinsically good or bad, but that it is our vulnerability to change that is the real issue.”

Excerpts from our brief chat with the self-deprecating, British-born scentist follow.

•

Why did you decide to do a photographic book about climate change?

It came about by accident. The photographers had put together a gallery show related to climate change, and they asked me to check their captions. That spiraled out of control until we had a book. But the reason we went ahead with it is that people have limited attention spans, and they need to know something is interesting before they invest time in it — and great imagery is a good way to show that.

How did you choose the photographs?

We looked for photographs that stood on their own as photographs. It’s not a textbook where you just pick images just to illustrate a point, sort of, “Well, we’re going to talk about this now, so let’s get an image of that” – where the pictures are subservient to the text.

You founded RealClimate to add context that you found lacking in climate stories by the mainstream media. In the five years since you started RealClimate, have you seen any improvements in media coverage of climate change?

You still see terrible stories and you still see over-sensationalized headlines and unfortunately, you still see completely mendacious Op-Eds, but overall, I think the answer is yes. You can have an article now that’s talking about the cap-and-trade bill going through Congress, or the latest science, without a bunch of quotes by a contrarian who says, “Oh no, carbon dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas,” or something like that.

However, a lot of the imagery used to illustrate climate change stories is not always appropriate.

We had a paper in Nature a few years ago that was talking about changing wind patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly because of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That was illustrated in a couple of newspapers by a woman battling her umbrella in the midst of a huge storm, because our results indicated that winds were getting slightly stronger. But we weren’t talking about storms at all.

Human Nature

by Mark Dowie from Guernica

Is modern conservation linked with ethnic cleansing? In an excerpt from his new book, the investigative historian explores the concepts of wilderness and nature, and argues that the removal of aboriginal people from their homeland to create wilderness is a charade.


One way to guarantee a conversation without a conclusion is to ask a group of people what nature is.
—Rebecca Solnit, University of California

In the course of “preserving the commons for all of the people,” a frequently stated mission of national parks and protected areas, one class or culture of people, one philosophy of nature, one worldview, and one creation myth has almost always been preferred over all others. These favored ideas and impressions are at some point expressed in art. And it is through art that our earliest preconceptions and fantasies about nature are formed.

The mystique of Yosemite, for example, was largely created by photographers like Charles Leander Weed, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, all of whose magnificent images of the place are completely bereft of humanity or any sign of it having been there. Here, they said (and they all knew better) is an untrammeled landscape, virgin and pristine, not a bootprint to be seen, not a hogan or teepee in sight.

Here in this wild place one may seek and find complete peace. They and their friends who sought to preserve an idealized version of nature called it “wilderness,” a place that humans had explored but never altered, exalted but never touched. It was the beginning of a myth, a fiction that would gradually spread around the world, and for a century or more drive the conservation agenda of mankind.

They all knew better, the portrayers of wilderness; in fact, Adams assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance.

One can be fairly certain that Weed, Watkins, Adams, and Weston had all at one time in their lives read George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 classic Man and Nature and recalled Marsh arguing passionately for the preservation of wild virgin nature, which he said was justified as much for artistic reasons as for any other. Marsh also believed that the destruction of the natural world threatened the very existence of humanity. We know that naturalist John Muir read Marsh and so did Teddy Roosevelt. They both say so in their journals and memoirs. So when the topic of a park in Yosemite came up, Muir and Roosevelt were, so to speak, on the same page.


Dueling Sciences
Natural science is just one way of understanding nature.
—Bill Adams, Cambridge University

The Yosemite model of conservation, which still expresses itself in a fairly consistent form, has sparked a worldwide conflict between two powerful scientific disciplines: anthropology and conservation biology.

These two august sciences remain at odds with one another over how best to conserve and protect biological and cultural diversity, and perhaps more perplexing, how best to define two of the most semantically tortured terms in both their fields—nature and wilderness.

Cultural anthropologists spend years living in what many of us would call “the wild,” studying the languages, mores, and traditions of what many of us would call “primitive peoples.” Eventually the anthropologists come to understand the complex native cultures that keep remote communities thriving without importing much from outside their immediate homeland.

“We do not ask if indigenous peoples are allies of conservation or what sort of nature they protect,” write Paige West and Dan Brockington, two anthropologists who have spent most of their careers researching the impact of protected areas on indigenous cultures; “instead we draw attention to the ways in which protected areas become instrumental in shaping battles over identity, residence and resource use.”¹ Their experience has convinced them that the best way to protect a thriving natural ecosystem is to leave those communities pretty much alone, where and as they are, doing what they’ve done so well for so many generations—culturing a healthy landscape, or what development experts would call “living sustainably.”

Wildlife biologists also spend much of their careers in remote natural settings, but tend to prefer landscapes void of human hunters, gatherers, pastoral nomadics, or rotational farmers. They find anthropologists somewhat “romantic” about indigenous cultures, particularly tribes that have become partly assimilated and modernized; which generally means the tribes are in possession of environmentally destructive technologies such as shotguns, chainsaws, and motorized vehicles, conveniences that Western naturalists know from their own civilization’s experience can wreak havoc on healthy ecosystems.

These two disciplines are also at odds over what they mean by nature and the degree to which humanity is part of it. And they have a different sense of wildness and wilderness. It is in this regard that one is more likely to hear anthropologists calling naturalists “romantic.” Listening to this exchange of insults one might conclude one is witnessing a clash of romantic tendencies.

William Cronon, an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin, has spent much of his intellectual career grappling with these conflicts. His thinking on the subject eventually came together in 1995 with publication of a widely read and controversial essay titled “The Trouble with Wilderness, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”

“The time has come to rethink wilderness,” Cronon begins his essay. He goes on to challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of environmentalists that “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.” That concept, Cronon believes, gives credence to “the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.” That fiction, which Cronon believes is based on a profound misunderstanding of nature, and our place in it, creates a force that is antagonistic to conservation. “The myth of wilderness,” he writes, “is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage.” He goes on to challenge the shopworn and often misunderstood shibboleth of Henry David Thoreau that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

The removal of aboriginal human beings from their homeland to create a commodified wilderness is a deliberate charade.

Cronon concludes: “The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization.”

These are fighting words to a “civilization” that has set millions of square miles of valuable land aside as “wilderness,” passed a national law—the 1964 Wilderness Act—to both define and protect wilderness, and still supports a dozen or so well-heeled national organizations to lobby for more wilderness set-asides and convince the public that figuratively walling off large expanses of unoccupied land is the only way to preserve nature and biological diversity. But how natural is wilderness? To Cronon, not as natural as it seems.

“Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural,” he says. By glorifying pristine landscapes, which exist only in the imagination of romantics, Western conservationists divert attention from the places where people live and the choices they make every day that do true damage to the natural world of which they are part.

So the removal of aboriginal human beings from their homeland to create a commodified wilderness is a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for the enchantment of weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier that their ancestors “discovered,” then tamed, a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead.


So What is Wild?

What counts as wilderness is not determined by the absence of people, but by the relationship between people and place.
—Jack Turner, philosopher

On several occasions during my research, an interview would be brought to a dead stop after I included the word wild or wilderness in a question. The word simply didn’t exist in the dialect of the person I was interviewing. My interpreter would stare at me and wait for a better question.

When I tried to explain what I meant by wild to Bertha Petiquan, an Ojibway woman in northern Canada whose daughter was interpreting, she burst out laughing and said the only place she had ever seen what she thought I was describing as wild was a street corner outside the bus station in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Tarahumara of Mexico have no word or concept meaning wilderness. Land is granted the same love and affection as family.

In Alaska, Patricia Cochran, a Yupik native scientist, told me “we have no word for ‘wilderness.’ What you call ‘wilderness’ we call our back yard. To us none of Alaska is wilderness as defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act—a place without people. We are deeply insulted by that concept, as we are by the whole idea of ‘wilderness designation’ that too often excludes native Alaskans from ancestral lands.” Yupiks also have no word for biodiversity. Its closest approximation means food. And the O’odham (Pima) word for wilderness is etymologically related to their terms for health, wholeness, and liveliness.²

Jakob Malas, a Khomani hunter from a section of the Kalahari that is now Gemsbok National Park, shares Cochran’s perspective on wilderness. “The Kalahari is like a big farmyard,” he says, “It is not wilderness to us. We know every plant, animal, and insect, and know how to use them. No other people could ever know and love this farm like us.”

“I never thought of the Stein Valley as a wilderness,” remarks Ruby Dunstan, a Nl’aka’pamux from Alberta. “My Dad used to say ‘That’s our pantry.’ Then some environmentalists declared it a wilderness and said no one was allowed inside because it was so fragile. So they put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.”³

The Tarahumara of Mexico also have no word or concept meaning wilderness. Land is granted the same love and affection as family. Ethnoecologist Enrique Salmon, himself a Tarahumara, calls it “kincentric ecology.” “We are immersed in an environment where we are at equal standing with the rest of the world,” he says. “They are all kindred relations—the trees and rocks and bugs and everything is in equal standing with the rest.”⁴

When wildness is conflated with wilderness, and wilderness with nature, and nature is seen as something separate and uninfluenced by human activity, perhaps it’s time to examine real situations and test them against the semantics of modern conservation. Are Maasai cattle part of nature? Perhaps not today, but when they wandered through the open range by the thousands, tended by a few human herdsman whose primary interest was to keep the biota healthy for their livestock and other wildlife, one might say they were “wild,” certainly as wild as the springbok, eland, elephant, and buffalo that daily leave the open pasture to ravage Maasai farms for fodder.


And Who Is Nature?

We forget the reciprocity between the wild in nature and the wild in us.
—Jack Turner, philosopher

In one of the many conversations about nature I have been part of over the past three years, I said to a man—an educated, erudite, and generous supporter of international conservation, whose view of nature differed considerably from my own—“You are nature.” He looked at me and laughed nervously. I had not insulted him, he assured me. He just didn’t appreciate the notion that he was part or product of a system that also created “snails, kudzo, mules, earthquakes, grizzly bears, viruses, wildfires, and poison oak.” It turned out also that his younger sister had, years before, been badly mauled by a mountain lion.

Well, how do you convince someone with that experience that he is kin with the lion? Perhaps you can’t, I thought, but he seemed interested in continuing the conversation. Others joined in, and by the end of the evening he had accepted himself as an equal in the same creation with the lion that mauled his sister, a creation he was willing to call “nature,” a creation of which he was not apart, but a part.

When one perceives humanity to be something separate from nature, it becomes easier to regard landscapes in their “natural state” as landscapes without human inhabitants and aspire to preserve wilderness by encouraging the existence and survival in landscape of as many species as possible, minus one—humans.

The valuable contribution anthropology has made to conservation is perhaps best expressed by Paige West and Dan Brockington, who advise conservationists to be more aware of “local ways of seeing,” and that the practice of conservation will be more successful “if practitioners learn local idioms for understanding people’s surroundings before they begin to think about things in terms of nature and culture.” There is a need, they say, for conservationists “to grasp the complicated ways that people interact with what they rely on for food, shelter, as well as spiritual, social and economic needs.”⁵

Enrique Salmon believes that “language and thought works together. So when a people’s language includes a word like ‘wilderness,’ that shapes their thoughts about their relationship to the natural world. The notion of wilderness then carries the notion that humans are bad for the environment.”⁶

Certainly someone who regards the forest as his “pantry” is going to see the flora, fauna, soil, and water in a somewhat different light than the tourist, biologist, miner, or logger. But is there not something that can be seen by all of them, some common ground on which the forest’s intrinsic value can be considered and agreed upon?

One example of a very different local idiom that Western naturalists have difficulty understanding is that of the Gimi, one of the hundreds of remote, Stone Age cultures in central Papua New Guinea. The Gimi “have no notion of nature or culture,” say West and Brockington. “They see themselves in an ongoing set of exchanges with their ancestors [who they believe are] animating and residing in their forests, infusing animals, plants, rivers, and the land itself with life. When people die their spirits go back to the forest and infuse themselves into plants, animals and rivers. When the living use these natural resources they do not see it as a depletion but rather as an ongoing exchange” of energy and spirit.

The final arbiters in this scientific conflict should be indigenous peoples themselves.

When the Gimi kill and eat an animal, “they understand it to be generated by their ancestors’ life forces and it will work to make their life force during this lifetime. When they die that force will go back to the forest and replenish it.”⁷ This is an admittedly difficult cosmology for the Western mind to contemplate or accept. But the fact that every atom in every living thing has existed since the beginning of time gives some scientific grounding to the Gimis’ belief that spirit is simply reorganized force and matter. That said, their understanding “of the relationship between humans and their surroundings [remains] extremely difficult to reconcile with arguments about the decline and loss of biological diversity.”⁸

However, if Western conservationists in central Papua New Guinea know that the Gimi believe all matter is here for eternity, that it simply changes form over time, they will be better equipped to work with local communities in the preservation of biodiversity. But if they dismiss that cosmology as primitive animism and seek to impose Western science and religion on the Gimi people, their conservation initiative will almost certainly fail.

Of course, the final arbiters in this scientific conflict should be indigenous peoples themselves, the very people that early advocates for Yellowstone Park said had no interest in raw nature or the park area.

They were alleged to be afraid of the geysers and fumaroles. (Not true. They cooked over them.) The truth is that much of what the rest of us know about nature and have incorporated into the various sciences we use to protect it—ecology, zoology, botany, ethnobotany—we learned from the very people we have expelled from the areas we have sought to protect.

Mark Dowie is an investigative historian living in Point Reyes Station, California. His last piece for Guernica, Harm Subsidies, appeared in March. The above is excerpted from Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples by Mark Dowie, to be published by The MIT Press on May 8. ©2009, Mark Dowie. All rights reserved.

Editors’ Recommendations:

Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples by Mark Dowie

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature by William Cronon

Yosemite and the High Sierra by Ansel Adams

To contact Guernica or Mark Dowie, please write here.

Notes
¹ P. West and D. Brockington, “An Anthropological Perspective on Some Unexpected Consequences of Protected Areas,” Conservation Biology 20, no. 3 (2006): 609-616.
² Gary Nabhan, Cultures of Habit (Counterpoint Press, 1997).
³ World Rainforest Movement, Protected Areas, Protected Against Whom?, p. 14.
⁴ John Roach, “Indigenous Group Keeps Ecology All in the Family,” National Geographic, June 29, 2006.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ World Rainforest Movement, Protected Areas, Protected Against Whom?, p. 14.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.

Illustration by Emily Hunt

We Believe Global Warming is Happening, Just Not Necessarily to Us

by April Streeter, Gothenburg, Sweden from Treehugger (April 27, 2009)

The inverted pyramid shows we believe climate change is affecting everyone more than us.

A survey of 2,164 adults by George Mason University and the Yale Project on Climate Change discovered some of the distressing ways in which we humans just can't see to think very long term: just 32 percent of the Americans surveyed believe global warming will personally harm them "a great deal" or a "moderate amount." Contrast that with the same group's opinion on the rest of the animal kingdom: nearly twice the number of respondents, or 62% believed that plant and animal species would be harmed by climate change. In fact, as the graphic shows, people somewhat ironically believed that everyone around them - their families, communities, and countries - will be more in harm's way than they themselves. How's that for optimistic, (perhaps even magical?) thinking?

Economy Dwarfs Environment...for now
The survey that the graphic is based on, conducted in September and October of 2008, found the economy to be American's biggest worry, dwarfing all others. This is not so surprising, in light of the economic implosion coming to light at that time, but also the feature of human brains that seems to make us unable to hold too many worries in our heads at once. And of course, the truth of the matter - some communities may suffer disproportionately from global warming, though there is a certain unpredictability that people can't seem to account for.

Political leaders...are you listening?
What the survey found in addition to this tendency to think of climate change in the abstract is fairly massive support for action to reduce global warming. Ninety-two percent of respondents supported more money for research into alternative forms of energy such as solar and wind; eighty-five percent wanted tax rebates for people buying energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels; and 80 percent said the government should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Of course, those results are also in the abstract, as people tend to say they want more wind turbines and solar panels until their NIMBY instincts pop up when the equipment arrives near their back yards, and they don't mind paying a little more in taxes for clean energy, until those taxes actually happen and then they are in the streets having a tax tea party.

Belief in reality of global warming is growing
The George Mason and Yale University researchers believe their survey points out that Americans' believe in the reality of global warming (Sarah Palin notwithstanding) is growing - that we as a majority, think it is happening, is human caused, and is a serious threat. A rising number, the researchers said, also believe the United States should do something. Conversely, less than half believe that a cap-and-trade carbon system is what we should do. And, hidden among the data sets was a statistic pointing to ongoing erosion of the public trust: only 47% of those polled trust mainstream news media to deliver reliable global warming information, while 48% trust religious leaders to do so! Via: FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right

Download the survey here.

Wolves back in the crosshairs after Salazar decision to remove federal protection in the Northern Rockies

From Defenders of Wildlife, April 1, 2009

WASHINGTON – Tomorrow, the rule removing wolves in the Northern Rockies from the list of endangered and threatened species is expected to be published in the Federal Register. It will take effect on May 4, after which wolves throughout Idaho, Montana, and parts of Utah, Oregon and Washington will no longer receive any protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The following is a statement by Rodger Schlickeisen, president for Defenders of Wildlife:

"We're on the eve of a tragic event in the history of the conservation of endangered species. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's decision to adopt the Bush administration's plan to remove Endangered Species Act protection for wolves in the Northern Rockies is a loss for the wolves, a loss for their ecosystems and a loss for sound science serving as the backbone of the Endangered Species Act.

"Wolves will once again be in the crosshairs to be needlessly killed starting May 4. Under the inadequate federal delisting rule, as much as two-thirds of the current Northern Rockies wolf population can be killed. Defenders of Wildlife will not stand by and let this go unchallenged.

"We turn now to the federal courts to save these wolves and ensure the future of wolf restoration in the region. It is deeply disappointing that Secretary Salazar missed a major opportunity to work with conservationists, scientists, ranchers, hunters and other stakeholders to resolve the issues that must be resolved to ensure that wolf recovery continues and the requirements of the Endangered Species Act are met. Instead, he has forced us to return to the courts to again challenge the same flawed plan that was rejected by the courts just last summer."

The following is a statement by Suzanne Stone, Northern Rockies Representative for Defenders of Wildlife:

"We look forward to celebrating the transfer of wolves to state management but not until a federal delisting rule is developed that ensures the future of wolves in the region. This plan ignores current science on what wolves need to maintain a healthy population over the long term. It also ignores the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have asked for a better plan."

Take Action!

Call the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 1-800-344-9453, select option “3” (for endangered species) and hit “0” to speak with the operator. Once you are connected, just deliver this simple message:

My name is [Your Name] and I am calling from [Your City], [Your State] to express my extreme disappointment in Interior Secretary Salazar’s decision to eliminate Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies states of Idaho and Montana.

If his decision is allowed to stand, nearly two-thirds of the wolves in the Northern Rockies could be killed. I strongly urge Secretary Salazar to stop the implementation of his awful rule and reconsider his approach to wolf conservation in the Northern Rockies.

Important: Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund will be closely tracking the number of calls in order to ensure that our voices are heard on this important issue. Please make sure to let them know that you called.

Our wolves can’t speak out, but we can! Secretary Salazar’s wolf rule could appear in the Federal Register as soon as this week, paving the way for the massive killing of wolves next month.

Please call the US Fish and Wildlife Service today at 1-800-344-9453 and let federal officials know that you oppose efforts to eliminate vital protections for these wolves.

We don’t have much time to prevent the killing, but with your help, I know that we can save the lives of these special animals.

Thanks!

P.S. After you call the Fish and Wildlife Service at 1-800-344-9453, please make sure you tell Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund about your call.

More Information about Salazar’s Plan

• Salazar’s decision violates the Endangered Species Act and allows more than 1,000 out of the roughly 1,500 wolves in the region to be killed.
• Delisting wolves is contingent upon two things that have not yet been achieved: 1) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's delisting plan must be based on current, credible science that ensures a healthy wolf population level that is sustainable and well connected. 2) All of the states in the delisting area must have wolf management regulations that provide for a sustainable and well connected wolf population after federal protections are lifted.
• Salazar’s decision fails to adequately address biological concerns about the lack of genetic exchange among wolf populations in the Northern Rockies. These concerns led a Federal court to overturn the same delisting rule late last year when the Bush Administration issued it. Salazar's decision also fails to address concerns with Idaho’s state wolf management plan and regulations that undermine the goal of a sustainable wolf population by killing massive numbers of wolves.

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Defenders of Wildlife is dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities. With more than 1 million members and activists, Defenders of Wildlife is a leading advocate for innovative solutions to safeguard our wildlife heritage for generations to come. For more information, visit www.defenders.org.

Breaking the silence about Spring

By eric from RealClimate

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

The brilliant title of Seidl’s book was one of the reasons that it caught my attention. The other was that I have realized I need to better educate myself about the impact of climate change on everyday life. I’ve been dismissive of the idea that the average person can really detect the impacts of recent warming on, for example, the timing of the apple-blossom season, but I’ve been taken to task by several of RealClimate’s readers for this. If you are paying attention, they have argued, the changes are actually rather obvious.

Of course, Amy Seidl is not the average person. Rather, she’s a trained ecologist with a Ph.D. (as well as an avid gardener) and she’s clearly paying extremely close attention. Her book is the first one I have read that effectively brings home the tangible impacts that global warming will have – is having – on our everyday lives. “We are increasingly familiar,” she writes, of images of melting glaciers, “but how do we give them relevance in our lives? From my window I see no glaciers.” She answers her own question with a series of vignettes, some from her own experiences, many more from her extensive research (well referenced throughout the book).

Cardinals, robins and cowbirds are all arriving earlier in Vermont than they did a century ago. Kingfishes, fox sparrows and towhees are not. Why the difference? The answer, as Seidl explains, is that the former group has the ability to respond ecologically to the changes, because these birds cue their arrival to temperature. The latter, it appears, respond more directly to temporal cues, that won’t change even as climate does. It’s obvious from this example that the make up of bird life in Vermont – the species distribution – will change over time. This may not necessarily be a bad thing of course. On the other hand, it turns out that the robins are the most important host for West Nile virus; the early bird gets the worm, so to speak, and passes it along to humans.

Maple seedlings need about 100 days of below-freezing weather. As this becomes rarer, fewer maples will populate the forests. This, Seidl explains, is why species-range models predict the decline and eventual loss of sugar maple (at least in New England) in the future. But, she notes, the models don’t take into account the full complexity of the system, such as the impact of competition among different species. So we don’t really know what will happen, or how fast. What we do know is that maple-sugar farmers have noticed – and documented – an earlier maple sugaring season over the last few decades.

There are many other examples in Early Spring both of clear climate-related changes (such as the early arrival of robins), and of less clear-cut changes (the maple sugaring season). Seidl doesn’t make the common mistake of assuming that the more ambiguous examples are necessarily due to climate change. For example, she quotes a maple-sugarer who points out that technological changes have allowed them to tap maples earlier, and hence that the timing of sugaring is a weak measure of climate change. The point though, is that even rather minor changes are, after all, being noticed. And if much larger changes do occur, as predicted, they will most certainly have impacts we can’t ignore, even if we don’t live in the Arctic or in Bangladesh. In other words, Seidl tells us, listen to the farmers and gardeners, and the observations of regular people: they are meaningful.

The soberness of Seidl’s approach to the subject of climate change impacts contrasts starkly with that of many books before it. It couldn’t be further, for example, from Mark Lynas’s book, Six Degrees, which is a truly alarming read. In my comments on Six Degrees, I said that it wasn’t an alarmist book. I stand by that characterization, because – and this is what I liked about it – it doesn’t go beyond what is in the scientific literature. However, while Lynas’s book is a straightforward reading of the scientific literature, it is a somewhat uncritical one, and hence tends to emphasize what might happen in the future over what will happen; this is a point that many readers of my review seem to have missed. Seidl’s book, on the other hand, is focused on the more certain – and often less dramatic — things, and on the impacts we are likely to see in our own lifetimes.

The calm demeanor of Seidl’s book, and the very personal nature of it, could lead one to think that it is primarily just a philosophical reflection on the climate change story. Indeed, Bill McKibben, in his introduction to Early Spring, says that in the face of changes we may not be able to prevent, “one of our tasks is simply to bear witness”. Certainly, the book is partly that. But Seidl’s voice, like Rachel Carson’s before her, has the authentic and authoritative voice of a scientist, made all the more compelling for being very much rooted in the author’s own story and experiences. And she doesn’t pull punches when she has something definitive to say: “One thing is clear:” she writes, “we will not be able to manage the climate”.

Early Spring has the potential to be immensely influential, a real turning point in the popular appreciation of climate change impacts among laypersons and scientists alike. Read it.

The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat

By Richard Manning from Mother Earth News

Converting cropland to perennial pastures produces healthier meat, builds better soil and combats climate change.

I have been fascinated by the permanence and healing power of grassland for 15 years now. If we respect the great original wisdom of the prairies, I’m convinced we can heal the wounds inflicted on the American landscape by industrial agriculture.

But in America, the question is always does it scale up? This is the critical test of any potential solution to a major environmental problem. Is a given practice feasible, and are there mechanisms for spreading it to cover a whole landscape?

I first had a hint as to how this might work for America’s farms when a friend explained to me why he chose to raise bison for slaughter, marketing the meat with the guarantee the animals had eaten nothing but native grasses. He thought if he could make such a model pay on his own land, he could do more to save native landscapes than any amount of activism, litigation or regulation. Profitable solutions self-replicate. Like viruses, they creep from one farm to the next, eventually exploding in exponential growth. They scale up.

Now there is big news on this front. A diverse collection of pioneers across the nation is raising not bison, but mostly grass-fed beef and dairy — an enterprise that can scale up quickly. They have a working model. It is not unrealistic to expect that we as a nation could convert millions of acres of ravaged industrial grain fields (plus millions of acres of land in federal conservation programs that cannot currently be used for grazing) to permanent pastures and see no decline in beef and dairy production in the bargain.

Doing so would have many benefits. It would give us a more humane livestock system, a healthier human diet, less deadly E. coli, elimination of feedlots, a bonanza of wildlife habitat nationwide, enormous savings in energy, virtual elimination of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on those lands, elimination of catastrophic flooding that periodically plagues the Mississippi Basin, and most intriguingly, a dramatic reduction in global warming gases.

The Grass-fed Beef Boom

The best evidence of this potential meat production revolution is a label that began showing up on packages of grass-fed beef across the nation early in 2009. The American Grassfed Association, a network of almost 400 graziers, is behind this effort. The label certifies the beef came from cattle that ate only grass from pastures, not feedlots; received no hormones or antibiotics in their feed; and were humanely raised and handled. It signals the emergence of a marketing network that already has placed grass-fed products in virtually every region of the nation in co-ops, health food stores and, in the case of the Southeast, in Publix Super Markets, a chain of more than 900 stores. The grass-fed label is evidence that the idea has reached critical mass. It’s been a long time coming, but what is driving it is profit, plain and simple.

Todd Churchill runs Thousand Hills Cattle Co. in Cannon Falls, Minn., which buys about 1,000 head a year from local producers, then processes and sells them to natural foods stores, restaurants and three colleges in the Twin Cities area. He says demand for his product always exceeds supply, and he sees no leveling for its growth curve.

Churchill’s operation is, in fact, a sort of model, a regional company that buys animals from a handful of graziers and meets a local need. Carrie Balkcom, executive director of the Grassfed Association, says consumers can now find quality grass-fed beef just about anywhere in the United States. All of this has been fueled by demand. Consumers are willing to pay a premium for grass-fed beef and other meat simply because they know it’s healthier than its conventional grain-fed counterpart, and because they don’t like the filth, cruelty and antibiotics inherent in the “concentrated animal feeding operations” that are now so prevalent.

The health claim is not speculation. Grass-fed beef and dairy products are leaner, but more importantly, lower in omega-6 fats that are linked to heart disease. Grass-fed meat and dairy products also are higher in beneficial omega-3 fats and conjugated linoleic acids. Both reduce the risk of heart disease.

Besides, grass-fed beef tastes better. I know because I eat it. However, it only tastes better if it’s raised right. Churchill tells me that when he first considered going into the business, it was because he missed the taste of beef he remembered as a child. So as an experiment, he bought two quarters of grass-fed beef from local farmers. One was the best he had ever eaten; the other so rank he fed it to the dogs.

To be sure, there currently are variables in the quality of grass-fed beef, for instance, genetics. A major problem for today’s graziers is that the industrial beef system has monopolized the gene pool, and for more than 50 years has selected for cattle that are adept at standing in a feedlot and eating grain as efficiently as possible. It may sound odd to say so, but this has left us with cattle not very good at eating grass. That’s pretty much all cattle ate from domestication 8,000 years ago until mid-20th century. But Churchill says it’s virtually impossible to find Herefords, the classic beef animal, that finish well on grass. His operation has done best with Red Angus, and over the years, he has been able to select for a set of traits that now yields animals that fatten well on grass. This selection for appropriate genetics is a key element in building the infrastructure of a scalable solution. We now have the correct foundation traits.

Better Grass and Rotational Grazing

The most important factor in quality beef, however, is the quality of the grass itself. Specifically, the grass should have a high sugar content. That quality is not automatic. It is not as simple as pointing cows at pasture and waiting for results. In fact, a trained eye will notice a similar scene at virtually any modern grass-fed beef operation: a couple of strands of electric fencing running around a bunch of cattle grazing in a clump. In fact, you could argue that the current revolution in grass-fed beef would not be possible without poly-wire electric fencing, which is cheap and easy to move.

For thousands of years, the dominant big grazer of North America was the American bison. It is the rule of co-evolution that when species evolve together they come to thrive on each other’s presence, and this is true of bison and the grasses, forbs and shrubs of the American landscape. But great herds of migrating bison grazed very differently than the way cattle graze on pasture today.

This has led graziers to develop a system that has many names but is often called “managed intensive rotational grazing.” Many people think of intensive grazing as negative, because we’re so accustomed to seeing the erosion that results from destructive overgrazing. But, intensive grazing is actually beneficial for grassland. It works this way: Graziers use the temporary electric fences to confine a herd of perhaps 50 calves or steers to an area the size of a small suburban front lawn for a short period, often as short as a half a day. Then the grazier arranges the easily movable fence to surround an adjacent small plot, on through a series of paddocks in a cycle of maybe 30 days, depending on conditions.

The result is the cattle graze all the plants down to a few inches, and then are moved to fresh grass. Each paddock is allowed to rest until the grass fully recovers. This roughly simulates the tactics of bison and in turn stimulates sweet, highly nutritious and palatable new growth, controls weeds and promotes biodiversity. In short, intensive grazing forces cattle to graze grassland the way bison used to.

Go With Grass, Not Grain

Churchill’s producers are raising cattle this way on converted corn and soybean land in Minnesota, which is a bit like building a mosque at the Vatican. They take this plowed-up landscape and plant it to permanent pasture — permaculture modeled on the tallgrass prairie that was the native cover. Many of Churchill’s producers, in fact, don’t own tractors; they don’t need them. It takes a couple of years for the land to recover sufficiently to produce high-quality beef, but it does recover. And after that initial setup, his producers begin showing a profit; in fact, more profit than the corn and soybeans yielded before. Part of this is a result of lower or no costs for inputs such as fertilizer, fuel, pesticides and machinery. This profit is one of the factors that will allow this system to scale up.

Churchill says that on properly recovered land, he can finish about two steers per acre. That is almost precisely the acreage it takes to grow the grain to finish those same steers in a feedlot. This whole system makes economic sense, acre by acre. More than half of our total grain crop goes to feed livestock, so it follows that we can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy  to permanent pasture and lose not one ounce of meat production. At the same time, we can produce healthier meat and shift the massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production to a better use.

Yet there are even more benefits to intensive grazing systems. Consider that the upper Midwest was flooded in the spring of 2008, an inundation that caused catastrophic dislocations, massive erosion of topsoil and billions of dollars in damages. This is the landscape of corn and soy agriculture. Iowa, for instance, has been almost wholly converted to row-crop agriculture, maintaining only about 1 percent of its native habitat, which was largely prairie and oak savannah. A plowed field sheds rainwater almost as fast as a parking lot does; the soil can absorb, at most, about 11⁄2 inches of rain in an hour. A permanent pasture can suck up as many as 7 inches of rain in an hour. That’s the difference between floods and no floods.

Most astonishing of all is what happens after the land is restored to grassland. Grass, like most plants, reacts to changing conditions. It builds a root system to support its leaves and stems, but when a cow munches off the top of the plant, there’s not enough energy left to support all its roots. The plant reacts by sloughing roots, then builds back deeper roots as aboveground parts regrow.

Deep rooting is, in fact, an overlooked factor here. All of our row crops are shallow-rooted and so for generations they have worked a narrow layer of the soil. Constant harvesting of these crops has depleted this topsoil of essential elements such as magnesium and calcium. As a result, both are now lacking not only in our diets, but also in the diets of livestock. This is a human health issue, but veterinarians say it also creates a mineral imbalance in grain-fed livestock that lies at the root of many of their health problems. In contrast to shallow-rooted row crops, deep-rooted grasses dig down to fresh minerals. Those minerals then become available to everything up the food chain, supporting the overall health of the entire system.

The roots that are sloughed-off after every grazing rotation are equally important; they become decaying organic material that feeds microorganisms, restores subsoil health, creates water-absorbing voids, and ultimately steadily increases the organic matter — or carbon content of the soil. There are big implications here both for building fertile soil and fighting climate change.

Using Intensive Grazing to Store Carbon

When American settlers first busted Midwestern prairies, they worked highly fertile virgin soil that was about 10 percent organic matter. On average, 150 years of agriculture has cut that vital organic matter by more than half and released huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the leading driver of global warming, into the air. Permanent pastures managed correctly can tap solar energy to pump about 1 percent of organic matter back to the soil each year. If we convert from grain-fed to grass-fed meat, we can turn millions of acres of row crops into carbon sinks, and use permanent pasture to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow global warming, as well as conserve water.

The carbon balance of any given enterprise is a complicated matter. We’ve understood some of this in looking at the carbon footprint of farming, but in fact, we have not made it complicated enough. There is a complex energy stream feeding industrial agriculture, both in fuels for transportation, tillage, storage and processing, and also in the natural gas used to make chemical fertilizers. All this makes modern industrial agriculture energy intensive and therefore gives it a pretty big carbon footprint.

Yet focusing only on the energy flow of farming greatly understates the problem, because it doesn’t take into consideration the natural vs. unnatural cycling of organic matter. In corn and soy production, tilling adds oxygen which causes organic matter to decay, or oxidize, and be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Researchers have taken a closer look at this and found that tillage not only releases carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide (both greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming). True enough, a growing corn field sucks up a lot of carbon dioxide, but then releases it all back almost immediately when the disced down stalks and leaves decay. Without exception, all of the tillage systems examined in one study published in Science were net contributors to global warming, and the worst offenders were the annual crops corn, soybeans and wheat farmed with conventional methods. Meanwhile, fields of perennial crops in the same study pulled both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashed it safely in the soil. There is even some evidence that perennial grasslands are, under certain conditions, even better at sequestering carbon than forests.

A conventionally farmed corn or soybean field is a source of global warming gases, but a permanent pasture is a pump that pushes carbon back into the soil where it increases fertility. Even though we harvest meat from the pastures each year, still the soil grows richer and holds more carbon. We get all these benefits thanks to solar energy, plant photosynthesis and natural cycles of grasslands and grazing animals.

So just how powerful could this tool be, were we to think as big as transforming American agriculture? Collecting data on the carbon storage potential of intensive grazing involves numerous variables, and overall estimates are not yet available. But using figures for annual and perennial crops reported in the recent Scientific American article “Future Farming: A Return to Roots?” we can get a rough idea of what effect the grassfarming revolution could have on global warming. Production of high-input annual crops such as corn and soybeans release carbon at a rate of about 1,000 pounds per acre while perennial grasslands can store carbon at roughly the same rates. This suggests that if we converted half the U.S. corn and soy acres to pasture, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds, and that’s not even counting the reduced use of fossil fuels that would also result. That’s not a bad side benefit to a transformation that makes sense on so many other levels as well.

A conversion on an enormous scale is not out of the question. In fact, we have already done a massive land use change just in recent decades. After the great plow-ups of the 1970s and ’80s (conducted at the federal government’s urging) the country saw an enormous increase in soil erosion, so taxpayers began paying farmers to plant the most highly erodable acres back to grass. This Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) now costs us about $1.8 billion a year, and peaked at a total of about 36 million acres a couple of years ago. That’s exactly the sort of scale we need.

Intriguingly, though, the rules prohibit grazing on CRP lands under ordinary conditions. Imagine what could be accomplished with some creative changes in the rules to allow carefully managed grazing and connect CRP to the market driver of grass-fed beef and dairy!

All this raises the very point missed by industrial agriculture. Intensive rotational grazing offers a corrective to the narrowing diversity on the farm landscape. We are slowly learning that human enterprises work best when they mimic nature’s diversity. Early on, especially in organic farming and with the rise of vegetarianism, we began thinking we could approach that diversity by raising a variety of a dozen or so tilled crops (never mind that an acre of pure prairie contains hundreds of species of plants). But it seems obvious now that this line of thinking needed to step up a couple of levels on the taxonomic hierarchy. Why did we think we could in any meaningful way mimic nature’s biodiversity by excluding the animal kingdom?

Over the years, organic farmers have told me they relearned this important point: Many found out the hard way that they could not make their operations balance out — both biologically and economically (they’re the same in the end) — without bringing animals back into the equation. Handled right, animals control weeds and insects, cycle nutrients, and provide a use for waste and failed crops. Healthy ecosystems — wild and domestic — must include animals. Now there’s a chance we may realize how very important this idea is to the life of the planet.

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The Multiple Benefits of Grassfarming

• More humane animal treatment
• More nutritious meat and dairy products
• Reduced flooding and soil erosion
• Increased groundwater recharge
• More sustainable manure management
• Less E. coli food poisoning
• More fertile soil and more nutritious forages
• More diverse and healthier ecosystems
• Reduced use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow unsustainable corn and soy

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Considering Cattle Burps

Any discussion of cattle and the environment will move quickly toward the unsavory subject of belching. Simply put, during digestion, a cow’s rumen breaks down lignins in feed, releasing methane, which happens to be 24 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So would a grass-fed beef and dairy system mean more methane?

Not necessarily. First, I am not arguing for an increase in numbers of cattle, just moving the existing numbers from filthy feedlots to pastures. So the real question is, do cows produce more methane on grain or on grass?

There are studies to suggest grain produces less methane, but those studies, by and large, compare conventional pastures with feedlots. However, conventional pastures contain high-fiber, low-quality forage, which produces more methane. On the other hand, studies of rotational grazing have shown decreases of as much as 45 percent in methane production, when compared with conventional pastures. All studies seem to agree cows produce less methane when nutrition is best, and the very reason for rotational grazing is to improve forage quality.

Nor do those studies take into account such factors as methane produced by corn and soybean cultivation, which we know is significant, as well as releases from manure festering in feedlots, as opposed to manure cycling immediately into pasture soils.

To further complicate matters, singling out cattle blames them for their position in the grand cycle of nutrients. Remove them from the food chain, and other methane-producing organisms — termites, deer, elk, grasshoppers, not to mention an unimaginable array of microbes — would cheerfully assume the niche.

The world is a big place and cows are a small part of it. Stated another way, in 2004, ruminants — cattle, sheep and goats — accounted for only about 1.6 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A massive expansion of rotational grazing is not likely to increase that number by much and could well reduce it. It certainly would reduce carbon dioxide to a much larger degree, and would lead to a net reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions. No doubt, at least some environmental good would come from reducing the world’s consumption of beef, but the trend is in the opposite direction. Humans and cattle have worked together for almost 8,000 years, and that is not likely to change soon. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t learn to raise cattle better.

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Resources

Eat Wild
Learn more about the benefits of grass-fed meat and find local sources for grass-fed products.

Polyface Farms
Grassfarmer Joel Salatin’s website includes information about his farm and his books on pasture-based livestock.

The Stockman Grass Farmer
Subtitled “The Grazier’s Edge,” this publication is the go-to source for information on grassfarming.

ATTRA
The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service provides detailed information on rotational grazing and sustainable pasture management.

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Richard Manning is the author of eight books, including Rewilding the West and Against the Grain. He lives in Missoula, Mont.

Food scare! Would new food-safety legislation 'criminalize organic farming'?

By Tom Philpott from Gristmill

The Internets are abuzz with accounts of a House bill, allegedly sponsored by Monsanto and pushed through Congress by its lackeys, that would "criminalize organic farming" and even backyard gardening. The object of frenzy: H.R. 875, known as the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, a bill that attempts to bolster the broken food-safety system.

Here's how one critic, whose work circulates widely on sustainable-food listservs, characterizes it:

The bill is monstrous on level after level -- the power it would give to Monsanto, the criminalization of seed banking, the prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers, the 24 hours GPS tracking of their animals, the easements on their property to allow for warrantless government entry, the stripping away of their property rights, the imposition by the filthy, greedy industrial side of anti-farming international "industrial" standards to independent farms -- the only part of our food system that still works, the planned elimination of farmers through all these means.

Wait, did she just say "the planned elimination of farmers"?

I've been reading hysterical missives about H.R. 875 for weeks. I could never square them with the text of the bill, which is admittedly vague. For example, the bill seeks to regulate any "food production facility" which it defines as "any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation."

But then again, the USDA already regulates farms. And "24 hours GPS tracking of ... animals"? Not in there. "Warrentless government entry" to farms? Can't find it.

More recently, reading around the web, I found more reasoned takes on H.R. 875. The bill may not be worth supporting -- and from what I hear, it has little chance of passing. But it hardly represents the "end of farming," much less the end of organic farming. The Organic Consumers Association, an energetic food-industry watchdog, recently called the paranoia around H.R. 875 the "Internet rumor of the week."

The Organic Consumers Association has this to say:

The Organic Consumers Association is not taking a position for or against this bill, but encouraging its members to write to Congress to urge it to enact food safety legislation that addresses the inherent dangers of our industrialized food system without burdening certified organic and farm-to-consumer operations.

Quite sensibly, the OCA wants Congress to avoid "one-size-fits-all legislation." Regulations that make sense for a 1000-acre spinach farm could push a diversified operation that includes spinach in its crop mix out of business. Sustainable-food advocates should oppose H.R. 875 until it adds scale-appropriate language.

But effective opposition does not mean indulging in fictional rants about it. There's no evidence that the bill aims to end farming; insisting that it does destroys credibility.

Meanwhile, Food & Water Watch, a group that does generally excellent work, has issued a statement debunking myths around H.R. 875. Anyone who's been lashed into a frenzy by doomsday accounts of this bill should read the F&WW statement.

Breathing Queasy: Improving Indoor Air

by Laura Sevier, from the Ecologist

So much for home sweet home. When it comes to air quality, chances are you’re better off wandering the fume-filled streets of any major city than sitting at home in front of the television.

Take your favorite sofa, for instance. Particles of the fabric can abrade and be taken up by your nose, mouth, and lungs. These particles are likely to contain “mutagenic materials, heavy metals, dangerous chemicals, and dyes that are often labeled as hazardous by regulators—except when they are presented and sold to a customer,” write German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

Braungart has performed experiments on everyday products to analyze their gaseous emissions. Some of the worst offenders include vinyl wallpaper and flooring, laser printers and photocopy machines (the toner dust can easily be inhaled), glues, paints, and household appliances. He’s concluded that indoor air is, generally, much worse than outdoor air. “Inside, you have chemicals in a sealed building,” he says.

It’s a view supported by a growing body of scientific evidence. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first blew the whistle on poor indoor air quality in 1987; the U.K.’s Building Research Establishment published devastating findings in 1996. And yet, while there are standards for pollutants in outdoor air, still there are none for indoor air.

Most indoor air pollution comes from sources inside the building. Nearly everything we use sheds particles or gives off gases, particularly when it’s new. The stuff and staples of daily life—carpets, upholstery, manufactured wood products, electronic devices, cleaning supplies—emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs). VOCs are liquid or solid substances that turn into or emit gases at room temperature (a process known as off-gassing). They are the most common type of gases found indoors. Adverse health effects can include eye, nose, and throat irritation, headaches, loss of coordination, nausea, and damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. Some are known or suspected carcinogens.

We spend 90 percent of our time indoors, according to the EPA. In homes, offices, schools, or shops. Awake with our families, friends, and coworkers, or sleeping in our beds. Everything in the air ends up in our bodies, so good-quality air is of vital importance.

In a sentence: We are what we breathe.

The good news is there’s plenty you can do to improve the quality of your indoor air.

Freshen up the air—naturally. Unless you live next to a highway, the cheapest and most effective way to allow fresh air in and toxic air out is to open a window. Ban air “fresheners,” a source of VOCs, and use natural odor eaters such as a bowl of baking soda or naturally fragranced alternatives. Avoid using perfumes, deodorants, and products containing parfum, a catchall term that hides the identities of dozens of potentially persistent or allergenic chemicals.

Clear out cleaning chemicals. Recent studies have linked cleaning sprays with a new surge of asthma in adults, and have tied use of cleaning products by pregnant women to their children’s persistent wheezing in early childhood. Use products made from natural plant ingredients or experiment with simple cleaning solutions made from lemons, vinegar, and baking soda.

Suppress breathable particles. Dust is just dust, right? Wrong. A 2002 Greenpeace U.K. analysis of house-dust samples vacuumed from 100 homes showed that hazardous chemicals such as phthalates, brominated flame retardants, and alkylphenols were widespread contaminants. Regular cleaning can help keep down levels of breathable particles along with dust mites, pollen, and other allergy-causing agents. Keep humidity to a minimum, too, to discourage the growth of mold—which has the potential to cause allergic reactions when it is inhaled.

Plug into plant power. Living green plants can remove toxic chemicals including formaldehyde, benzene, and carbon monoxide from the air, according to a two-year study by NASA scientists. [Check out “Leafy Clean” on p. 73 for suggestions on the best plants to cleanse indoor air and how to care for them.]

Control contaminated carpet. A 2001 Greenpeace U.K. report, “Poisons Underfoot,” found that new carpets contain significant levels of flame retardant chemicals, pesticides, and formaldehyde. Carpets also are reservoirs for dust. Choose carpets and rugs made from natural fibers like organic wool or cotton, coir, or jute, but check to make sure they haven’t been treated with unnecessary chemicals or glues. Avoid toxic cleaners; use a steam cleaner instead. And always take off your shoes at the door to keep dirt and bacteria from the streets at bay.

Know what not to paint with. Conventional paints can include polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride, and VOCs. Choose natural and nontoxic water-based or clay-based paints instead. [Utne Reader illuminated ecofriendly paints in its July-Aug. 2006 issue. Read “A Cleaner Coat” online at www.utne.com/Paint.]

Place electronics carefully. Ban electrical appliances from the bedroom. A computer, for instance, contains toxic gases, metals, acids, plastics, and chlorinated and brominated substances. The dust from some printer toner cartridges contains harmful substances such as nickel and mercury. Greenpeace’s online “Guide to Greener Electronics” ranks the top manufacturers.

Protect babies and children. Expecting a child? Go easy when you’re creating a nursery. Often people paint walls and put in new carpets and curtains—so when the baby arrives it ends up in a room full of off-gassing substances and products. Instead of plastic playthings, consider handcrafted natural wooden toys in water-based colors, finished with natural oil blends.

Choose better bedding. Traditional mattresses and pillows are often packed with synthetic chemical batting and made from equally toxic fabric. Cut down on off-gassing where you sleep by choosing chemical-free natural latex, coir, or wool mattresses and organic cotton bedding.

Excerpted from the Ecologist(Nov. 2008), a London-based publication of environmental news and issues; www.theecologist.org.