Author Archives: WinnieBachman

Here’s The Real Problem With Almonds

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Almonds: crunchy, delicious, and…the center of a nefarious plot to suck California dry? They certainly have used up a lot of ink lately—partly inspired by our reporting over the past year. California’s drought-stricken Central Valley churns out 80 percent of the globe’s almonds, and since each nut takes a gallon of water to produce, they account for close to 10 percent of the state’s annual agricultural water use—or more than what the entire population of Los Angeles and San Francisco use in a year.

As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson put it, almonds have become a scapegoat of sorts—”the poster-nut for human wastefulness in California’s drought.” Or, as Alissa Walker put it in Gizmodo, “You know, ALMONDS, THE DEVIL’S NUT.” It’s not surprising that the almond backlash has inspired a backlash of its own. California agriculture is vast and complex, and its water woes can’t hang entirely on any one commodity, not even one as charismatic as the devil’s nut almond.

And as many have pointed out, almonds have a lot going for them—they’re nutritious, they taste good, and they’re hugely profitable for California. In 2014, almonds brought in a whopping $11 billion to the state’s economy. Plus, other foods—namely, animal products—use a whole lot more water per ounce than almonds.

So almonds must be worth all the water they require, right? Not so fast. Before you jump to any conclusions, consider the following five facts:

1. Most of our almonds end up overseas. Almonds are the second-thirstiest crop in California—behind alfalfa, a superfood of sorts for cows that sucks up 15 percent of the state’s irrigation water. Gizmodo‘s Walker—along with many others—wants to shift the focus from almonds to the ubiquitous feed crop, wondering, “Why are we using more and more of our water to grow hay?” Especially since alfalfa is a relatively low-value crop—about a quarter of the per-acre value of almonds—and about a fifth of it is exported.

It should be noted, though, that we export far more almonds than alfalfa: About two thirds of California’s almond and pistachio crops are sent overseas—a de facto export of California’s overtapped water resources.

2. While alfalfa fields are shrinking, almond fields are expanding—in a big way. The drought is already pushing California farmers out of high-water, low-value crops like alfalfa and cotton, and into almonds and two other pricey nuts, pistachios and walnuts. This year, California acreage devoted to alfalfa is expected to shrink 11 percent; and cotton acres look set to dwindle to their lowest level since the 1920s.

Meanwhile, the market is pushing almonds and other nuts in the opposite direction. At a recent confab in California’s nut-rich, water-challenged San Joaquin County, Stuart Resnick, chief of Paramount Farms, by far the state’s largest nut grower, explained why in a speech, as documented by an account in the trade journal Western Farm Press. Almonds, he said, deliver farmers an average net return of $1,431 per acre. Pistachios, another fast-expanding nut hotly promoted by the Paramount farming empire, net even more: $3,519 per acre.

Given that Paramount reportedly manages 50,000 acres of combined almonds and pistachios, it’s safe to say there’s big profits in growing those nuts. And the company, which also buys and processes nuts from other farmers and sells them under the Wonderful brand, plans to expand by fifty percent in the next five years. Currently the company farms 30,000 acres on its own and buys pistachios from farms occupying another 100,000 acres. By 2020, the company’s “goal is 150,000 partner acres, 33,000 Paramount acres,” which would be a 40 percent jump in just five years. And that’s on top of the 118 percent expansion in pistachio acres over the past decade, according to figures Resnick delivered at the conference.

3. Unlike other crops, almonds always require a lot of water—even during drought. Annual crops like cotton, alfalfa and veggies are flexible—farmers can fallow them in dry years. That’s not so for nuts, which need to be watered every year, drought or no, or the trees die, wiping out farmers’ investments.

Already, strains are showing. Back in 2013, a team led by US Geological Survey hydrologist Michelle Sneed discovered that a 1,200-square-mile swath of the southern Central Valley—a landmass more than twice the size of Los Angeles—had been sinking by as much as 11 inches per year, because the water table had fallen from excessive pumping. In an interview last year, Sneed told me the ongoing exodus from annual crops and pasture to nuts likely played a big role.

4. Some nut growers are advocating against water regulation—during the worst drought in California’s history. “I’ve been smiling all the way to the bank,” one pistachio grower told the audience at the Paramount event, according to the Western Farm Press account. As for water, that’s apparently a political problem, not an ecological one, for Paramount. “Pistachios are valued at $40,000 an acre,” Bill Phillimore, executive vice president of Paramount Farming, reportedly told the crowd. “How much are you spending in the political arena to preserve that asset?” Apparently, he meant: protect it from pesky regulators questioning your water use. He “urged growers to contribute three quarters of a cent on every pound of pistachios sold to a water advocacy effort,” Western Farm Press reported.

5. Mostly, it’s not small-scale farmers that are getting rich off the almond boom. With their surging overseas sales, almonds and pistachios have drawn in massive financial players hungry for a piece of the action. As we reported last year, Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, an investment owned by the Canadian insurance and financial services giant Manulife Financial, owns at least 24,000 acres of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts, making it California’s second-largest nut grower. TIAA-CREF, a large retirement and investment fund that owns 37,000 acres of California farmland, and boasts that it’s one of the globe’s top five almond producers.

Then there’s Terrapin Fabbri Management, a private equity firm that “manages more than $100 million of farm assets on behalf of institutional investors and high net worth clients” and says it’s “focused on capitalizing on the increasing global demand for California’s agricultural output.” In a piece late last year, The Economist pointed out that Terrapin had “bought a dairy company and some vineyards and tomato fields in California, and converted all to grow almonds, whose price has soared as the Chinese have gone nuts for them.” The magazine added that “such conversions require up-front capital”—e.g., to drop wells—”and the ability to survive without returns for years.” Those aren’t privileges many small-scale farmers enjoy.

Visit source: 

Here’s The Real Problem With Almonds

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s The Real Problem With Almonds

Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

by WinnieBachman Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
ClaudioVentrella/Thinkstock

It’s self-evident that embryos, fetuses, and babies are vulnerable. We have strict laws protecting children because they cannot fend for themselves. And yet, too often, we ignore the impact that environmental disasters have on the very earliest stages of life. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein examines the effect that our reliance on fossil fuels has on the most helpless members of the animal kingdom—as well as on our own children.

“In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines,” Klein writes. “Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”

Take the case of the leatherback sea turtles. These ancient creatures have been around for 150 million years, making them the longest-surviving marine animals on earth. As Klein points out, they’ve survived the “asteroid attacks” that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. But now they are threatened by a combination of poaching, fishing and climate change. One recent study found that as temperatures rise over the next century, “egg and hatchling survival will rapidly decline” for sea turtle populations in the Eastern Pacific.

The leatherback turtles have “survived so much,” says Klein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to survive even incremental climate change, because what’s happening already is that when the eggs are buried in the sand, even if the sand is just marginally hotter than it used to be, that the eggs are not hatching; they’re cooking in the sand.” What’s more, turtles don’t have sex chromosomes—they turn into males or females based on the ambient temperature of the sand in which they are born. Hotter sand means more female turtles hatch. And the danger is that warming could eventually result in a significant imbalance between males and females, ultimately decimating the species.

While writing the book, Klein was going through her own fertility crisis, so she says she was particularly attuned to the fragility of new life and the impacts that stressors can have on reproduction. And she began to notice a common theme in the after-effects of environmental catastrophes. In the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, she toured the Louisiana marshes. With Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, guiding the way, Klein and a few others set out to investigate whether the oil from the Deepwater Horizon had permeated the bayous. It was the fish jumping in dirty water and the coating of reddish brown oil that impressed Klein and her companions.

But what most concerned Henderson, recalls Klein, was the nearly invisible cost of the disaster: the tiny zooplankton and juveniles that grow into the shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that are the bedrock of the Gulf fisheries. “What he was preoccupied with was the fact that this was spawning seasoning,” says Klein. “And that even though we couldn’t see it, there was just a huge amount of proto-life surrounding us, and this was spring in the Gulf and everything was spawning.”

Drifting in the marshlands, Klein writes that she “had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”

These effects, she argues, may be felt years later, when those juveniles should be reaching maturity. “Looking into it in the context of the Gulf, we’ve heard a lot of really concerning stories directly from fishermen saying that they’re not seeing baby fish out there,” says Klein. “Or they’re seeing female crabs without eggs.” In her book, she recounts a 2012 interview with a Florida fisherman named Donny Waters who had noticed the absence of small fish in his catches. This hadn’t yet cut into his income, since small fish are thrown back. But Waters was worried that the impact would be felt in the years to come—specifically, in 2016 or 2017 when those fish that were in the larval stage during the spill would have grown up.

This wouldn’t be the first time that an oil spill had a delayed effect on the fishing industry. “The greatest and most lasting impacts on the fish in Alaska had to do with this delayed disaster,” says Klein, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. “It wasn’t until three or four years after the spill that the herring fishery collapsed.” Twenty-five years later, it still hasn’t recovered.

What’s more, scientists say the spill might also help explain the deaths of an unusual number of young bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a paper published in PlosONE in 2012, Ruth Carmichael and her colleagues examined whether the spill contributed to a “perfect storm” of events that killed 186 dolphins—46 percent of whom were perinatal calves (that is, babies)—in the first four months of 2011.

An unusually high number of young bottlenose dolphins died in the Gulf of Mexico between January and April 2011. Graham Worthy/University of Central Florida

“When we put the pieces together,” explained Carmichael in a 2012 press release, “it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater from heavy snowmelt coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore.”

By April 2014, 235 stranded baby bottlenose dolphins had been found, “a staggering figure, since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the ‘true death toll,'” Klein writes.

Of course, this research isn’t conclusive. A BP spokesperson notes that dolphins in the Gulf began dying off before the oil spill and that unusual mortality events “occur with some regularity.” For its part, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the “direct or indirect effects” of the spill are being “investigated as potential causes or contributing factors for some of the strandings” but that “no definitive cause has yet been identified.”

Dolphin strandings by age group for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. Reprinted with permission from Carmichael et al., PlosONE, 2012.

Further up the food chain, Klein is also concerned about the potential impact of environmental pollution on human fertility. During the same trip that took her through the marshlands of Louisiana, she also visited Mossville, the historic African-American town notorious as a case study in environmental racism.

“This was a town formed by freed slaves, and after being established, it was surrounded by 14 massive petrochemical factories, and the land and water was just poisoned, and most of the people have already left,” says Klein.

While worries about cancers and other illnesses in Mossville have been covered fairly extensively in the media, the issue of fertility problems is less well known. “When I spoke to women who had lived in Mossville, what I heard about was just an epidemic of infertility and that just so many women had hysterectomies,” Klein says. These stories are anecdotal, but Klein hopes more research will be done. “This is often just an understudied part of science,” she says.

Klein also points to emerging research that links the fracking boom with various reproductive problems. In a Bloomberg View column earlier this year, Mark Whitehouse reported on data presented at the annual American Economic Association meeting from a yet-to-be published study of Pennsylvania birth records that apparently found a correlation between proximity to shale gas sites and low birth weight in babies. Babies born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of gas drilling sites were almost twice as likely to have a low birth weight (increasing from 5.6 percent to 9 percent of births) or a low APGAR score, the first evaluation of a baby’s health after birth. And a study published this year examining birth outcomes and proximity to natural gas development reported that mothers who lived within 10 miles of the highest number of fracking sites (125 wells within a 10-mile radius) were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects and twice as likely to have babies with neurological problems compared to mothers whose homes were at least 10 miles away from any fracking site.

Then there’s the threat that climate change itself poses to children. Last year, UNICEF warned that “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives” and that by 2050, climate change could result in an additional 25 million children suffering from malnourishment.

“For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn,” writes Klein, “our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

Taken from: 

Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dolphin, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Friday, Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported that the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug from nearly the day it was introduced:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said….Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Henry Farrell explains just how bad this is here. But later in the day, the NSA denied everything:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. “Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence echoed that statement Friday, saying neither the NSA nor any other part of the U.S. government knew about Heartbleed before April 2014….The denials are unusually forceful for an agency that has historically deployed evasive language when referring to its intelligence programs.

You know, I’m honestly not sure which would be worse. That the NSA knew about this massive bug that threatened havoc for millions of Americans and did nothing about it for two years. Or that the NSA’s vaunted—and lavishly funded—cybersecurity team was completely in the dark about a gaping and highly-exploitable hole in the operational security of the internet for two years. It’s frankly hard to see any way the NSA comes out of this episode looking good.

Excerpt from:  

Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

Posted in Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

by WinnieBachman Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Illustration: Michael Klein

China is in the midst of a love affair with pork. Its consumption of the stuff has nearly doubled since 1993 and just keeps rising. The Chinese currently eat 88 pounds per capita each year—far more than Americans’ relatively measly 60 pounds. To meet the growing demand, China’s hog farms have grown and multiplied, and more than half of the globe’s pigs are now raised there. But even so, its production can’t keep up with the pork craze.

So where is China looking to supply its demand for chops, ribs, loins, butts, and bellies? Not Southeast Asia or Africa—more like Iowa and North Carolina. US pork exports to China surged from about 57,000 metric tons in 2003 to more than 430,000 metric tons in 2012, about a fifth of all such exports. And that was before a Chinese company announced its intention to buy US pork giant Smithfield Foods in 2013. The way things are going, the United States is poised to become China’s very own factory hog farm. Here are a few reasons why:

It’s now cheaper to produce pork in the US than in China. You read that right: Our meat industry churns out hogs for about $0.57 per pound, according to the US Department of Agriculture, versus $0.68 per pound in China’s new, factory-scale hog farms. The main difference is feed costs. US pig producers spend about 25 percent less on feed than their Chinese counterparts, the USDA found, because the “United States has more abundant land, water, and grain resources.”

Americans are not as fond of “the other white meat” as we once were. You wouldn’t know it from the menus in trendy restaurants, but US consumers’ appetite for pork hit a peak in 1999 and has declined ever since. Yet industry, beholden to shareholders demanding growth, keeps churning out more. According to its latest projections, the USDA expects US pork exports to rise by another 0.9 metric tons by 2022—a 33 percent jump from 2012 levels.

Much of China’s arable land is polluted. Fully 40 percent has been degraded by erosion, salinization, or acidification—and nearly 20 percent is tainted by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff. The pollution makes soil less productive, and dangerous elements like cadmium have turned up in rice crops.

Chinese rivers have been vanishing since the 1990s as demand from farms and factories has helped suck them dry. Of the ones that remain, 75 percent are severely polluted, and more than a third of those are so toxic they can’t be used to irrigate farms, according to a 2008 report by the Chinese government. According to the World Bank, China’s average annual water resources are less than 2,200 cubic meters per capita. The United States, by contrast, boasts almost 9,400 cubic meters of water per person.

Chinese consumers are losing trust in the nation’s food supply—and will pay for alternatives. A spate of food-related scandals over the past half decade has made food safety the Chinese public’s No. 1 concern, a 2013 study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University found. Judith Shapiro, author of the 2012 book China’s Environmental Challenges and director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development program at American University, says she expects Smithfield pork to command “quite a premium” in China, because it’s perceived as safer and better than the domestic stuff. Already, “US pork is particularly popular and commands premium prices, as it is viewed as higher quality due to our strict food safety laws,” a Bloomberg Businessweek columnist reported last July.

But what’s good for pork exporters may not be good for the United States: More mass-produced pork also means more pollution to air and water from toxic manure, more dangerous and low-wage work, and more antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to ramping up foreign meat purchases, China is also rapidly transforming its domestic meat industry along the US industrial model—and importing enormous amounts of feed to do so. The Chinese and their hogs, chickens, and cows gobble up a jaw-dropping 60 percent of the global trade in soybeans, and the government may soon also ramp up corn imports—because while Beijing currently limits foreign corn purchases, meat producers are clamoring for more. And where does a third of the globe’s corn come from? You guessed it: The good old USA.

Visit site:

Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

Green Label Guide: What Is EcoLogo?

by WinnieBachman Posted on January 10, 2014

The EcoLogo label helps manufacturers and consumers easily identify environmentally preferred products. Photo: EcoLogo.org

EcoLogo is one of the oldest and most trusted eco-labeling programs that you’ve probably never heard of. So what is EcoLogo, and why should consumers care?

Established more than 20 years ago and acquired by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) in 2010, EcoLogo is currently the only North American eco-labeling program approved by the Global Ecolabelling Network (GEN), an association of third-party labeling organizations dedicated to improving transparency in environmental products and services.

The label helps manufacturers and consumers easily identify environmentally preferred products and is used for everything from building materials and furniture to cleaning products, paper products and toys.

A multiattribute certification, EcoLogo tells the story of a product’s environmental performance throughout its entire life cycle. This allows shoppers to pinpoint holistically greener products and provides supply-chain traceability to manufacturers seeking to meet sustainability goals.

The voluntary standard indicates a product has undergone rigorous scientific testing, exhaustive auditing or both to prove its compliance with stringent third-party performance standards, according to UL Environment.

These standards set metrics for a wide variety of criteria including energy, manufacturing and operations, health and environment, product performance and use, and product stewardship and innovation.

Visit UL Environment online to learn more about the criteria for attaining EcoLogo certification, or check out their Sustainable Product Database to search for certified products.

From the Vault: Top 10 Green Labels Guide

earth911

Read this article – 

Green Label Guide: What Is EcoLogo?

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Green Label Guide: What Is EcoLogo?