Category Archives: OXO

The newly revived Keystone XL’s future is in the hands of a red state.

by ValerieRix Posted on May 4, 2017

Politico reports that senators from California, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii came out with legislation to give undocumented agricultural laborers a “blue card” — a sort of talisman to ward off deportation.

To qualify, immigrants would need to have worked at least 100 days on farms in each of the previous two years. They would have the opportunity to convert their blue cards to some form of legal residency later on.

This would come as welcome relief to workers who produce labor-intensive products like milk, fruit, and vegetables. On the other hand, it’s an example of government trying to keep farm labor semi-legal and cheap. Because most farmworkers live in a legal gray zone, they have little bargaining power and few options, which keeps wages from rising.

It’s a tough deal: We’d be asking immigrants to keep our food prices down by taking hard, low-paying jobs, and in exchange they’d get an anti-deportation card.

On yet another hand — we need at least three hands to juggle this one! — that kind of tradeoff is inevitable. For now, Congress is unlikely pass any immigrant protections unless the farm lobby can pull in Republican votes.

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The newly revived Keystone XL’s future is in the hands of a red state.

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The Great Barrier Reef has been brutally bleached for the second year in a row.

by JoannWreford Posted on April 10, 2017

Contrary to what you may have heard, the reef isn’t dead — not yet. But aerial surveys show that 900 miles of the 1,400-mile-long reef have been severely bleached in the past two years.

Bleaching occurs when warm water causes stressed-out corals to expel symbiotic algae from their tissues; corals then lose their color and their chief source of food, making them more likely to die.

Last year’s El Niño–induced bleaching event was devastating, knocking out two-thirds of the corals in the northern section of the reef. We’d hoped that 2017 would bring cooler temperatures, giving the fragile ecosystem some much needed R&R.

Instead, temperatures on Australia’s east coast were still hotter than average in the early months of this year, and on top of that, the reef’s midsection took a hit from a big cyclone in March.

ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

This is the first time the reef has experienced back-to-back annual bleaching events. If this keeps happening, it’ll quash the reef’s chances for recovery and regrowth, a process that can take a decade or longer under normal conditions.

Under the abnormal conditions of climate change, though, there is little reprieve — unless we, y’know, address the root of the problem itself.

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The Great Barrier Reef has been brutally bleached for the second year in a row.

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Uncovering the Plot to Kill Lettuce

by IvaRakanrmmjsk Posted on April 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Glossy, beautifully produced cookbooks tend to focus on scenic vacation magnets like Tuscany, Provence, or Napa Valley. But in Victuals, the veteran cookbook writer Ronni Lundy gives that treatment to a place most known in the popular imagination for economic and environmental dysfunction: the Southern Appalachians.

America often underestimates the Appalachian states of West Virginia, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and the western Carolinas—even assuming that the pronunciation of the word “victuals” as “vittles” must be uneducated slang. Not so, reveals Lundy. In fact, the actual accurate pronunciation is “vittles.” “So we’ve been right for all of these years,” Lundy says on a recent episode of the Mother Jones food podcast Bite (interview starts at 14:45). “We’ve been right about the way you pronounce it, we’ve been right about the way you grow them, preserve them, the way you dry them and cure them and eat them, and the way you create community around the table.”

In Lundy’s book, a kind of travelogue with recipes, a different vision of the region comes to life: one of lushly forested mountains and fertile valleys dotted with small farms, blessed with “the most diverse foodshed in North America.” There’s even an ancient tie to the sunny Mediterranean. “What we call the Appalachian Mountains was once part of a larger chain on the ancient super-continent of Pangea,” she writes; and Pangea’s split left today’s Appalachia with “sister peaks” in present-day Morocco.

Lundy and I talked about her own roots in the region, the recent hipsterization of Appalachia, and what a typical dinner table might feature at the height of summer—which I can testify, having once lived in the region for nearly a decade, is a time of great beauty and bounty. And we talked through an irresistible dish called “killed lettuce”—fresh salad greens wilted with warm bacon grease. While the book, like the region’s small farms, teems with fresh produce, the hog and its various products emerge as the hero of Victuals: a reminder of the noble beast’s central place in so many resourceful food traditions across the globe.

Killed Lettuce

serves 4

Ingredients

8 cups torn crisp salad greens (in bite-size pieces)
2 whole green onions, finely chopped
4 bacon slices
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions

Rinse and thoroughly dry the greens, and then toss them with the green onions in a large bowl.

Fry the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until very crisp, and remove from the skillet to drain. Remove the skillet from the heat. Immediately pour the vinegar over the lettuce and toss, then pour the warm bacon grease over that, tossing again. Add salt and pepper to taste. Crumble the bacon over the greens and serve immediately.

*These basic proportions can be used in many variations: Put a soft-cooked egg on top, which becomes part of the dressing, or warm beans. The defining part of the dish is that the greens are not cooked, but are tossed with vinegar and hot bacon grease to wilt them.

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Uncovering the Plot to Kill Lettuce

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Cartoonist Takes On the Sketchiest President Yet

by FernandZylstra Posted on April 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Freelance illustrator Barry Blitt keeps folders and folders of Donald Trump photos on his computer—nearly 400 total, he says. “They’re pictures of him at strange angles, like from the back,” says Blitt, adding that Trump’s head looks like it is “sculpted out of some kind of pudding.” The current president, he says, makes for an endlessly fascinating muse. “I didn’t know anyone could look like that. He’s like an instruction manual for how to caricature.”

“Broken Windows” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

Born in Montreal, Blitt, 58, has been inking illustrations for the New Yorker since 1992 and has also contributed drawings to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones. He has a knack for rendering political moments with dark humor, and the most recent presidential election has meant he’s busier than ever. His most recent cover took aim at President Trump’s frequent golf trips, showing the president lobbing balls at the White House’s shattered windows. Another cover offered a sly commentary on Russia’s influence on the election: Vladimir Putin takes the place of the magazine’s mascot, with Trump as a moth under examination.

As the reality sinks in that Trump will likely be a main subject for four more years, I talked to Blitt about capturing the president’s quirks, how he got his start, and learning to loosen up.

Mother Jones: You have a Connecticut number.

Barry Blitt: Actually I’m living in the house that Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in many years ago. Been here about a year.

MJ: Thank you for agreeing to talk. I’ve always loved your covers.

BB: Okay, well, we’ll see if you can get anything out of me.

MJ: I mentioned by e-mail that if I record our interview it’s not going anywhere outside a computer of mine.

BB: As long as it doesn’t turn up like that Milo interview or like Donald Trump’s infamous bus interview, then we’re fine.

Barry Blitt Angie Silverstein

MJ: As long as you don’t say anything about grabbing things, I think you should be good.

BB: Yeah, haven’t grabbed anything.

MJ: Just some pens and brushes I guess.

BB: I grab a lot of pens, yes. If that becomes controversial, then I’m in trouble.

MJ: Okay, here’s a softball: What brought you to cartooning and drawing?

BB: Like all kids I was plopped down in front of crayons and paper when I was quite young. My grandfather used to copy Norman Rockwell pictures, so I had him as a cheerleader. All my drawings always sort of looked funny even if I was trying to do serious stuff and express myself about grim situations. It was always cartoony.

MJ: What did you like to draw as a kid?

BB: I was drawing Popeye a lot. I was a big fan. A lot of the early work I did was sort of hero worship. I remember drawing a lot of hockey players—I’m Canadian. Hockey players and baseball players and Elton John and rock stars and stuff. Only in high school and college, I became more sarcastic and hostile.

MJ: How so?

BB: I felt it was more fun to knock people down than to build them up. I seemed to get a better reaction from my peers and from my friends when I was mocking stuff—which isn’t necessarily anything to be too proud of.

MJ: Did you aspire to be an artist?

BB: I guess for a while I thought I would be drawing caricatures in parks and stuff. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do, actually. Cartooning didn’t seem like a real thing—it seemed like cheating. Letting a sense of humor into the process somehow seemed like an easy way out. I wouldn’t have to paint the Sistine Chapel if I could just make a joke that got a reaction—not that painting the Sistine Chapel was ever an option.

“The Boys of Autumn,” 2012 Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: Do you remember the first piece that got published?

BB: When I was a teenager, I was a rabid hockey fan—I still am—and I ended up doing illustrations for a couple of yearbooks: the Philadelphia Flyers’ and the Pittsburgh Penguins’. I got those published when I was probably 15. A friend of mine, a kid in my 10th grade class, said, “I’ll be your agent.” He typed up a letter and sent it out to a bunch of hockey teams and a couple of them responded and I think I did drawings for $25 a pop and I gave him $5. I was totally full of myself. I thought it was the greatest thing.

MJ: Hey, getting hockey teams that you like to buy your drawings is a big deal at that age.

BB: It’s true. It didn’t help me with girls or anything, but it made adolescence a little less terrible.

MJ: Should we go into your adolescence?

BB: No. Let’s stay away from all of this.

MJ: That’s totally fine. I wasn’t a really great adolescent either.

BB: I’m 58 and I’m still recovering.

MJ: Tell me about your first big break?

BB: I was getting stuff published in Toronto and I made a couple of trips to New York and brought my portfolio. It was all pen and ink and attempted funny stuff. I went to see Chris Curry at The New Yorker. It all just sort of happened organically. I’m not a good businessman and I don’t promote myself particularly well. It’s best I don’t talk to anybody lest I alienate myself. Chris was an art director there and she was using some small drawings. When Françoise Mouly, the cover-art director, was brought on, Chris arranged for me to meet with her. I really didn’t think that I had the right sensibility to be doing New Yorker covers, but I was hired.

I was doing interior color drawings for Françoise. At the end of a conversation she just happened to mention, “You know, that smoker’s cover, the sketch that you sent us, why don’t you go ahead with that? Tina Brown accepted it.”

I guess if we’re looking for a big break, that was one of them, although it almost broke me. I get so nervous often with bigger assignments—I probably drew it 10 or 15 times, the final artwork. It took a lot of art direction to get it out of me. I think it was the first issue of 1994.

MJ: What was the picture?

BB: “Resolute Smokers.” It was right around the time when smokers had to go outside to smoke, and so I had a lot of smokers standing on window ledges on high buildings in New York, stepping outside to smoke. It turned out someone else had done that idea, not only in Time but in the New Yorker in one of their black and white cartoons some years before. Now we always check.

“Resolute Smokers” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: What was it like to get a cover?

BB: Very exciting. When I saw it printed I was sort of, like I often am, “Oh, why didn’t I do this?” or, “Why did I make that that color?” That’s pretty par for the course.

MJ: I think that’s something a lot of creative people feel.

BB: Yeah. It would be nice to be satisfied once in a while, though.

MJ: It sounds like you’re on the obsessive side. Are you a perfectionist?

BB: I’m an adequatist! I would be happy with something adequate. Perfection’s out of the question.

MJ: Do you work mainly for the New Yorker now?

BB: I work for lots of different magazines. I’ve done some kids books. The New Yorker is just about my favorite magazine and it’s incredibly nice to do a cover for them. You get a lot of feedback. When you do a bad one, it’s horrific. It’s a very visible kind of venue.

MJ: How closely were you following this past election?

BB: I was sort of obsessed with it, and living and dying with every new poll that came out. I have to say that I had the sick feeling Trump would win pretty much all the way through it. Even when it seemed like Hillary had it. I went to an election party that night and everyone was really cheerful and I just thought they were crazy. By 9:30 our time, I had to leave. I felt like I was like the one guy on the airplane that knew the plane was going to crash.

“At The Wheel” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: How do you approach the task of drawing Trump? Is there any feature that you focus on?

BB: When I’m online and I see a picture I want to draw of anybody or anything, a unique angle of them or just something that looks very drawable, I slide it to my desktop and put it in a folder. It just seems like every picture of Trump is a revelation. Any angle. I didn’t know a person could look like that. His facial expressions—he really is a cartoon. He’s like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone. I mean it’s just all there.

If you’re asking me what features—obviously his hair. The back of his head is fantastic and his eyebrows are amazing. His overbite and his series of chins and the color of him and the texture. It’s amazing! He’s like an artifact. It’s an amazing head to draw and I have to think it’s got to be part of his success. It’s ready-made for public consumption.

Just look at the back of his head, any angle. There’s some angles that his chin is just, what do I mean? I mean he’s sculpted out of some kind of pudding, I think. It looks like his face is sort of melting slowly. I should talk because my face is melting quickly. He’s some kind of bizarre sculpture. There’s no one really who looks like that.

MJ: How does that compare to Hillary?

BB: Hillary’s not un-caricaturable, that’s for sure. She’s got that mouth low on her face and her eyes are kind of wide apart. I’d be much happier drawing Hillary even if there were more challenges involved with getting a likeness. I’m not sure why we should even mention Hillary now. God bless her, but I don’t know. It feels like a ship that’s sailed.

MJ: I’d love to talk through the process for one of your Trump covers. Which is your favorite?

BB: If I tell you, you’ll see how shallow I am, because the favorite one I have would be the one where he’s in a little kiddie car. The flat watercolor that I got on his jacket, I like the way the color adhered to the paper.

“Belly Flop” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

The first cover I drew of Trump was of him diving into a pool. You always remember your first. It just seemed crazy at the time that he was running and that it was actually happening and that he was insulting people. The whole thing seemed circus-like and crazy.

I remember doing a sketch of Hillary diving into a pool when she announced she was running. It was one of those diving boards where they have a secondary diving board and I had Bill on the lower board diving in as well, doing a flashier dive that was distracting from Hillary’s dive. That didn’t go, but I had that dive idea. Then when Trump started to make a splash I submitted a Trump. I remember it was him doing a cannonball. I think there was some reluctance on the New Yorker‘s part, if I’m remembering this correctly, to show him in any kind of triumphant or successful dive. Then I took that back and said, whatever, a belly flop, which suggests screwing up. That one they went with.

MJ: Tell me about your “Miss Congeniality” Trump cover.

“Miss Congeniality” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: A lot of people seem to like that one. I remember Hillary brought up that beauty pageant contestant whom he had openly mocked. It seemed like an interesting way to draw him.

I don’t remember how I arrived at that during the panic that’s involved sometimes when I’ll get a call from Françoise looking for an idea: “It would be great to do something about Trump” and whatever catastrophe happened last night or this afternoon. I will get into a state of panic and scribble things and send things and somehow what I’ve sent is legible enough and the ink isn’t smeared with my tears and she’s able to see what I’ve sent her and they’ll choose something and I’ll redraw it as properly as time allows.

MJ: Let’s talk through just one more cover. The “Anything But That” cover from before the election.

“Anything But That” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: I remember Françoise getting in touch with me and saying we still don’t have a cover for our politics issue, which is the issue that comes out the day before the election, kind of odd timing.

Hillary’s going to win—obviously—but we can’t really show that yet. It was sort of nice to not draw either of them. I think I had one of Uncle Sam watching with a remote in his hand. You don’t see the television and he’s reacting to what’s going on on the TV. I was sending in those kind of ideas, ones that didn’t favor or even show either candidate. It seemed funny to write headlines that obviously you’d never see, headlines of reaction and dread. I have friends who are right-wing. Most of my friends are not, but all of us were dreading the results of the election. The dread was built into this election—a little spoonful of dread. What was behind it was that it could work no matter who won. Someone pointed out to me that it looked like the person sitting next to the main figure was carrying a parachute and had a pilot’s, not a helmet, on, which really makes me laugh. I wish I had done that intentionally—they were about to leap.

MJ: What it’s like to look back on that cover now or to look at the cover the day after the election?

BB: After the election, I don’t think I was looking at that cover. I was looking at my Canadian passport, was what I was looking at. This was the first election I got to vote in also. I became a citizen a couple of years ago.

MJ: Wow, congratulations!

BB: Thanks. What was it like to look back at the cover? I’ll tell you what I always say, I wish that my verticals had lined up with it more and I wish that yellow of the background subway station had a little less line in it.

MJ: Do you think you’ll ever get tired of drawing Trump over the next four years?

BB: Yes, I probably will. I mean I’m already tired of the bullshit and not just the lying but the way he’s covered. It really seems like a low point. I’m sure this era will be remembered for a long time if there’s still time after it. Just as far as drawing him, that almost seems like the least of it. I’ve been thinking of trying to de-caricaturize him. I thought it would be fun to try and, since he’s already a caricature, to make him normal looking. I don’t know if I’ll get tired of him. It depends what he’s got in store. I don’t know how long it will be either. I don’t know how much more of this he or any of us can stand.

MJ: Maybe he’ll get a haircut.

BB: That’ll never happen!

MJ: I wanted to ask about the 2008 cover with Michelle and Barack Obama.

“The Politics of Fear” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: Mm-hmm.

MJ: A lot has been said around that but what do you think about it now, and has it changed anything about your approach to drawing political cartoons since then?

BB: It probably changed my approach for the first few days it was on newsstands. It sort of freaked me out, but not anymore. I’m still sending crazy stuff that I can’t always justify necessarily. That one attempted to be satire. I can see how people were upset by it but I knew what I was trying to do and so did the New Yorker. It was an attempt at satirizing a voice of someone who wasn’t there, who wasn’t in the picture. I don’t know if it worked or not, but on to the next one.

MJ: Speaking of going on to the next picture, I saw that you’re doing a retrospective of your work.

BB: I do, I have a book. I got a deal but I can’t say deal without thinking of Donald Trump. I’m doing a book for Riverhead. I’m putting together all my years of drawings.

MJ: What does it feel like to look over all of your work?

BB: It’s kind of horrifying, but it is what it is. Some of them are worse than you remember, some are better than you remember. It’s hard to pick a representative number of them. My deadline is around now and I’ve not been feeling well and I’m sure it’s psychosomatic. As soon as I hand the stuff off I will feel better.

A Trump sketch Courtesy of Barry Blitt

MJ: I definitely understand the psychosomatic thing. Happens to me too. Do you feel like you’ve noticed anything about yourself or your drawings when you look back at them over many, many years? Do you feel like you’ve changed?

BB: I see stylistic things. I learned that I wish I had learned more. I look at some drawings and I see I was attempting to try and be too loose and then other ones, I guess I get hung up on the stylistic side of things and the execution of the drawings.

As far as the process, I did one cover of Hillary Clinton as a fighter when she secured the nomination. I was able to sort of document in the book how that got away from me. The very first sketch I did, I made her look, not literally like a bulldog, but like a battle scarred veteran. She’s in the ring, sitting in her corner and she’s got a black eye and she looks toughened as hell. Then you see as it progresses to a tighter sketch she starts becoming a little cuter and more svelte. There was also an issue of not making her look like a battered woman that I suppose played into it. By the end of it the drawing was far too cute and it didn’t express what the first sketch was. If you can learn to convey what you express in the first rough sketch, you’re really saying what you need to say in that.

MJ: It seems like learning to trust your initial ideas is something that takes time.

BB: Right. If only, because that’s where the storytelling is, I think. I think I just learnt that now talking to you.

MJ: Oh really? What do you mean?

BB: I mean you forced me to consider what the hell I’m doing with this book. That’s what I would learn most if I would look at everything that I’ve put together. The choices for the stuff that go in the book weren’t just mine. There was an art director and a designer and editor involved. They chose a lot of sketches. We’ve got a couple of spreads of just 32 Trump attempts, attempts at Trump ideas that didn’t go anywhere. There’s probably more interesting ideas there than necessarily one finished drawing.

MJ: I always like going to retrospectives at the museum because you really do see how things move or how ideas change. I think that thinking about processes or seeing someone’s process is just very fascinating.

BB: Yeah, especially if you’ve already seen the final art. It’s incumbent on me to try and learn something from that, though.

MJ: You might get a flash of brilliance at the end.

BB: I might get a flash of self awareness, and we don’t want that.

“Whitewashing Guernica” Courtesy of Barry Blitt

MJ: Who are some artists you admire? Where do you find inspiration or what are some things that you love, that you really enjoy?

BB: I love Steve Brodner‘s work and I love John Cuneo‘s work and I love Ed Sorel‘s work. And Edel Rodriguez. Where do I get inspiration? I like John Oliver and I’ll see clips of Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show. Bill Maher. I go to right-wing sites as well, as hard as that is to stomach sometimes.

MJ: What do you love about your work?

BB: I like to make myself laugh. When I’m just sitting with a sketchbook and trying to make myself laugh or trying to come up with ideas, I try not to worry about aim right away. I’m just sort of shooting in all directions.

I will sometimes scribble things no one should ever see. Several ideas for the New Yorker, I’ve had conversations with Françoise after I’ve sent her some sketches and she doesn’t like what I’ve sent her and she said, “You didn’t have any more?” I say, “Well you know, there are a couple of other things I’ve thought of but you don’t want to see them, believe me.” She’s really an advocate for not self editing and she’s got it out of me. A couple of times things have made it to the cover, just things I thought, “There’s no way that they would do that.”

If you’re asking me what I love, it’s that point where I’m just scribbling and trying to make myself laugh and trying to outrage myself. Getting in that frame of mind where the more you laugh the more you laugh—I think that’s what I’m attempting to do. It’s just like loosening up basically.

MJ: Do you ever have someone that you show your pictures to as a base?

BB: You mean like a sounding board? Sometimes my wife, but not always. Sometimes I get precious about ideas and I’ll send them to the New Yorker first. But I can be a little precious about them sometimes. You show it to someone and if they don’t get it right away or it’s not legible and you have to explain it, then you lose confidence in it. I’m very neurotic, let’s just come out and say that, about the process. I just don’t trust myself or anyone else. That sounds healthy, huh?

MJ: No, I understand. I get really neurotic with my stories. I should send them out to more people but I protect them, like little babies.

BB: Good. Don’t send this one to anybody!

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Cartoonist Takes On the Sketchiest President Yet

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Sass, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

by MiraHarricks Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

Forty years ago, when Julia Negron was married to a rock star and addicted to heroin, ODs were so common in her household that she kept a paramedic on call. When someone nodded out, he would dispense emergency injections of naloxone, a drug with a reputation for bringing seemingly lifeless bodies back from the dead. Today, the back of Negron’s black SUV is loaded with the drug as she pulls into a Sarasota, Florida, parking lot and pops the trunk. A trickle of people approach to grab doses of the drug, which may one day revive a friend, a spouse, or a child.

Drugs Kill More People Than Cars or Guns

Naloxone, which has been around since 1971, reverses the effects of overdoses from opioids like heroin, OxyContin, and fentanyl. It has saved countless thousands of lives. Between 1996 and 2014, more than 26,000 potentially fatal overdoses were stopped, not by medical professionals, but by users, family members, or strangers who quickly administered a nasal spray or injection of naloxone. Yet it isn’t widely available in many places where the opioid epidemic has hit hardest—like Negron’s backyard.

Negron runs the Suncoast Harm Reduction Project, a scrappy group that’s pushing to make naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, more accessible in Florida. The 68-year-old “former injection drug user cleverly disguised as a nice grandma” oversees a team of about 15 volunteers, mostly stylish suburban moms whose children have struggled with drug use. They give away free naloxone and conduct trainings on how to administer it, using Facebook to announce “pop up” distributions. Negron estimates her group has given out more than 500 naloxone kits, though she doesn’t keep track. “I’m like a Johnny Appleseed who doesn’t remember how many trees he’s planted,” she says in a raspy voice. Over the past three years, her giveaway program has saved 25 lives that she knows about—and likely many more.

Negron lives near Manatee County, which has the highest number of opioid overdoses in Florida. In just three months last year, there were 550 overdoses in the county. The local morgue got so full that it had to transfer bodies to another location. “My life is spent feeling like I’m trying to stop a tornado or stick my finger in a dam,” says Mark Sylvester, a young psychiatrist who was Manatee County’s only addiction doctor until 2015. Sylvester, who also serves as Suncoast’s medical adviser, says he routinely loses three or four patients to overdoses each week.

“And yet I go to a lot of meetings and town halls and it’s like they don’t get it,” says Negron. “It’s an overdose epidemic! Why isn’t naloxone on every corner?” Naloxone is readily available in some places: Billboards throughout Ohio read, “Stop Overdoses. Carry Naloxone.” Baltimore runs a how-to website called DontDie.org. New York state prisons have given out 5,000 kits to inmates and staff members. When San Francisco was hit with a lethal batch of heroin in the fall of 2015, naloxone reversed more than 340 overdoses in four months. But it can be hard to come by in Florida. Only 11 of the state’s 400-plus police departments have officers carrying the drug. Though the state has asked local CVS and Walgreens stores to stock it, many do not. In 2014, there were 644 community programs nationwide that distributed free naloxone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There was only one distributor in Florida: Julia Negron.

I Went to a Town Hall Meeting in a County Ravaged by Opioids. What I Saw Broke My Heart.

Before Sylvester joined her group, Negron would only say that “naloxone fairies” supplied her pop-up giveaways. That’s because handing out free naloxone if you’re not a doctor is legally tricky. Under federal law, the drug can only be acquired with a prescription. To get around this, Florida and 43 other states let pharmacists sell the drug without a doctor’s order. Making naloxone available over the counter would require a lengthy review by the Food and Drug Administration. It would also require the cooperation of one of the pharmaceutical companies that make the drug, whose price has shot up more than tenfold in a decade. (Two doses cost about $150.)

Drug-related deaths have skyrocketed

A major reason naloxone is scarce in the Sunshine State is that not everyone sees it as a miracle drug. Critics say naloxone, like needle exchanges, further fuels the opioid epidemic by enabling users to overdose without consequences. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” wrote Maine Gov. Paul LePage last April as he vetoed a bill that would allow pharmacists to dispense the drug.

Negron and Sylvester don’t buy the argument that stopping overdoses enables users. While some people may be saved by naloxone several times before they seek treatment, Sylvester says, “I can’t treat a dead patient.” Negron adds that the stigma surrounding addiction compounds the problem. Though drugs kill more Americans than cars or guns do, there is no equivalent of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the parents of OD victims. “When your kid dies of an overdose,” she says, “people don’t show up with casseroles.”

Julia and Chuck Negron Courtesy of Julia Negron

Negron learned about addiction the hard way. At 12, she was put into foster care because of her mother’s barbiturate addiction. She promised herself she would never follow in her mom’s footsteps. But as an 18-year-old in the late ’60s Sunset Strip scene in West Hollywood, California, she started snorting coke and dancing at the Whisky a Go Go. It was there that she met a handsome man with big blue eyes and shaggy hair named John Densmore, the drummer in an up-and-coming band called the Doors. As Jim Morrison and other stars sang “Here Comes the Bride” at her wedding to Densmore, Negron thought to herself, “How could anything possibly go wrong?”

But things went wrong quickly. Negron soon left Densmore and took up with Berry Oakley, the bassist of the Allman Brothers Band. In 1972, while Negron was pregnant with their son, Oakley died in a motorcycle accident. As a single mother in her 20s, Negron started using the drug du jour: heroin.

In 1976, Julia Negron married Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron, a fellow heroin user. The drug worked its way into the couple’s every waking hour. In the mornings, Julia dosed at a glitzy methadone clinic attended by the Hollywood elite, and in the afternoons she injected or snorted heroin with Chuck. They burned through money, taking out multiple mortgages and selling off furniture. Just before Negron gave birth to her second son, the couple snorted heroin in the delivery room. “We had a great marriage because every drug we got was split 50-50,” she later told People. Negron overdosed twice, waking up in a hospital bed feeling like she’d been run over by a fleet of trucks.

Meet the 33-Year-Old Genius Solving Baltimore’s Opioid Crisis

Meanwhile, the people she knew and loved “started dropping like flies.” Morrison died in 1971 from a possible drug overdose, followed by Negron’s mother a year later. “Now that I’m an old broad, I spend a lot of time thinking what it would be like to still have her and be old broads together. We would have worn Golden Girls outfits and hung out,” she says. Quietly, she adds, “That’s gone. No family.” An overdose took her sister in 1984. Her youngest son is in recovery.

Once sober, she split with Chuck and went to school to become a drug counselor. By the mid-2000s, she had become a prominent advocate of “harm reduction,” which emphasizes making illicit drug use safer so users may seek treatment. Three years ago, she moved from Los Angeles to Florida for the low taxes and the weather. Stunned by the lack of drug treatment options, she began the Suncoast Harm Reduction Project. She’s testified in support of opioid-related bills, and she made news last fall when she grilled Sen. Marco Rubio in a town hall meeting about federal funding for opioid treatment and overdose prevention drugs.

For Negron, any concerns about the legality of her operation are trumped by the avoidable overdoses she constantly hears about. “Do you mean to tell me,” she recalls the mother of one overdose victim asking her in disbelief, “that when I heard him making those noises, that if I’d had naloxone, I could have saved him?”

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Sass, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

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I Went to a Town Hall Meeting in a County Ravaged by Opioids. What I Saw Broke My Heart.

by DemetriBurbidge Posted on March 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week I’m spending time in two counties in Northeast Ohio. Like so many places in the Rust Belt, Ashtabula and Trumbull counties have been ravaged by the opioid epidemic. I’m talking to people here about what the drugs have done to their communities. I’ll be tweeting about what I’m seeing.

Two weeks ago, Brian Reed read on Facebook that there had been another overdose in his hometown of Warren, Ohio—this one in a supermarket parking lot. Police warned residents of the Rust Belt town to avoid the area. “Prayers to the family,” Reed wrote in the comments section of the article.

Later that afternoon, two detectives knocked on the door to tell him that the victim was his son, David. The 29 year old had been the father of two, with another on the way.

David’s death was one of 16 fatal overdoses so far this March in Trumbull County, a monthly record in a northeast Ohio region that has been devastated by the spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid far more potent than morphine or heroin. The county is decidedly rural—farmland studded with small towns of chain stores and vacant mom-and-pop shops, country music, and sermons on the radio. On Monday night, 275 residents made the drive to a town hall about the epidemic. When asked who had lost a loved one to overdose, many people raised their hands.

The exact cocktail of drugs that killed David won’t be known for several more weeks; with so many deaths, there’s a backlog in toxicology testing. But all signs point to fentanyl: Increasingly, drug users checking into treatment are testing negative for heroin but positive for the synthetic opioid, said Dr. Daniel Brown, the chief medical officer of local drug treatment center Meridian Healthcare. “There’s no naturally occurring opiate in their system—it’s all fentanyl,” he said. “I don’t foresee us going back to having naturally occurring opiates such as heroin. It’s probably here to stay.”

After each overdose death in Trumbull County, Humphrey Garmaniuk, the county coroner, receives a phone call and his team examines the scene. “I did one this morning, he was found by his son,” he said. “I have a 31-year-old lady waiting for me tomorrow.”

Despite the barrage of bad news, there were some reasons to be hopeful. Due to an aggressive county-wide effort to distribute the overdose reversal drug naloxone to drug users and their families, 132 overdose victims were successfully revived by community members last year. Medication addiction treatments are increasingly available, said county mental health board executive director April Caraway. Brian Reed encouraged attendants to spread the word about Ohio’s Good Samaritan law, which protects those who call 911 in overdose cases from being arrested.

Participants asked questions on note cards: What kind of addiction treatment is best to start with? Are there support services for the children of users? Does using naloxone over and over just enable drug users? And, finally: “Story of hope: Beauty and beast. Daddy was the beast when he was doing drugs. Now he’s my prince. My father’s been clean for three years.”

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I Went to a Town Hall Meeting in a County Ravaged by Opioids. What I Saw Broke My Heart.

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The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

by CaitlinRudd Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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The fake Russians met the Codfather on June 3, 2015, at an inconspicuous warehouse on South Front Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The Codfather’s lair is a green and white building with a peaked roof, fishing gear strewn across a fenced-in backyard, and the words “Carlos Seafood” stamped above the door. The distant gray line of the Atlantic Ocean is visible behind a towering garbage heap. In the 19th century, New Bedford’s sons voyaged aboard triple-masted ships in pursuit of sperm whales; now they chase cod, haddock, and scallops. Every year, more than $350 million worth of seafood passes through this waterfront, a significant slice of which is controlled by the Codfather, the most powerful fisherman in America’s most valuable seafood port.

“The Codfather” is the local media’s nickname for Carlos Rafael, a stocky mogul with drooping jowls, a smooth pate, and a backstory co-scripted by Horatio Alger and Machiavelli. He was born in the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands scattered in the Atlantic. As a teenager in 1968, he emigrated to New Bedford, where he later took a job in a fish-processing plant. (More than a third of New Bedford’s residents have Portuguese ancestors; many can trace their heritage back to the days when Yankee whalers picked up crew members from the Azores during trans-Atlantic voyages.) Rafael rose to foreman at a seafood distribution facility and later founded his own company. He bought his first boat in 1981, and then another and another, until he owned more than 40 vessels, many christened with Hellenic names—the Athena, the Poseidon, the Hera. Local newspapers hung on his pronouncements, dubbing him the “Waterfront Wizard” and the “Oracle of the Ocean.”

Carlos Seafood, owned by fishing mogul Carlos Rafael, in New Bedford, Massachusetts

The Codfather also ran afoul of the law. In the 1980s he was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion, and in 1994 he was indicted—and acquitted—for price-fixing. In 2011, federal agents confiscated an 881-pound tuna that had been illegally netted aboard his Apollo. “I am a pirate,” he once told regulators. “It’s your job to catch me.” Law-abiding rivals resented him and grudgingly admired him. “He has no compunction about telling you how he’s screwing you,” says one ex-fisherman.

By 2015, though, Rafael was 63 years old, with assets worth tens of millions of dollars, and he was ready to cash out. According to court documents, that January he let slip that he was selling his boats and dealership; five months later, three men appeared at his warehouse to negotiate. It was an unsavory trio: two members of a Russian crime syndicate and their broker. That was fine by Rafael, who swiftly divulged his business’ fraudulent underpinnings. Carlos Seafood, he said, was worth $175 million—more than eight times what he’d claimed to the IRS. To prove it, Rafael reached under his desk and procured an envelope labeled “Cash.” Each year, he boasted, he sold thousands of pounds of under-the-table fish to a New York dealer named Michael, who gave Rafael a “bag of jingles”—cash—for the contraband. “You’ll never find a better laundromat than this motherfucker,” the Codfather bragged.

Rafael’s fraud, which he termed “the dance,” was a triumph of vertical integration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires fishing boats to report the species and weight of their catch, among other information, each time they return from sea. Seafood dealers, meanwhile, have to submit their own reports detailing what they purchase from incoming vessels, which NOAA uses to verify fishermen’s accounts. Rafael, though, was exploiting a gaping loophole: Because he owned both boats and a dealership, he could instruct his captains to misreport their catch, and then he could falsify the dealer reports to corroborate the lie. A corrupt sheriff’s deputy named Antonio Freitas allegedly helped him smuggle the cash to Portugal through Boston’s Logan International Airport. (Freitas now faces charges for his role in the operation.)

As the Codfather described his fraud to his new acquaintances with glee, he seemed to catch occasional glimpses of his own carelessness. “You could be the IRS in here. This could be a clusterfuck. So I’m trusting you,” he said. Then again, he rationalized, the IRS wouldn’t be clever enough to use Russians as rats. “Fuck me,” he said. “That would be some bad luck!”

A view of New Bedford, Massachusetts

Indeed. The man posing as the Russians’ broker was Ronald Mullett, an undercover IRS agent. Over the next eight months, Mullett’s team built its case, repeatedly meeting with Rafael and the mysterious Michael in New York City. (According to the affidavit, that was Michael Perretti, a Fulton Fish Market dealer once busted for peddling bass illegally taken from polluted waters­—though he hasn’t been charged for his connection to Rafael.) On February 26, 2016, federal agents arrested Rafael in a raid on his South Front Street warehouse, and in May he was indicted on 27 counts of fraud and other charges covering more than 800,000 pounds of fish. It appeared that the Cod­father’s kingdom had come crashing down.

The Bizarre and Inspiring Story of Iowa’s Fish Farmers

From Point Judith, Rhode Island, to Penobscot, Maine, Mullett’s affidavit received Zapruderlike scrutiny from industry observers. How could the Codfather have master­minded such a massive, undetected scam under the waterfront’s collective nose? New Bedfordians speculated about Rafael’s political connections, while environmentalists blamed neutered enforcement. To many fishermen, though, the crime’s roots ran even deeper, to a system that benefited empire builders like Rafael at the expense of small boats. Like farming, banking, and a host of other industries, commercial fishing has always been subject to consolidation and concentration, the accumulation of power and capital in the hands of a few at the expense of many. In some places, regulations have forestalled the process; in others, they’ve accelerated it. New England falls in the latter category: In 1996, about 1,200 boats harvested groundfish—that’s cod, haddock, flounder, and a suite of other white, flaky bottom-dwellers—from Connecticut to Maine. By 2013, that number had dwindled to 327. “Most of the boats just rusted to the dock, like looking at a graveyard,” says Jim Kendall, a seafood consultant and ex-fisherman. “More than anyone else, Carlos was big enough to survive.”

For centuries, unchecked overfishing had devastated the schools of cod that once teemed in the northwest Atlantic, and various rules had failed to stem the crisis. So in 2009, desperate officials voted to instate a new form of regulation, called catch shares. Under catch-share systems, biologists determine the “total allowable catch,” an inviolable limit to how many pounds of, say, flounder can be extracted annually from New England waters. Managers then divvy up slices of that pie to local fishermen, who are typically free to catch their slice—or sell it or rent it out to competitors—whenever they see fit. (Think cap and trade for fish.) When each fisherman owns a stake, the rationale goes, he has an incentive to conserve: The more fish in the sea, the bigger the pie and its slices.

Catch shares can make a notoriously risky industry safer and more profitable by letting fishermen capture their share when markets and weather conditions are most favorable. After catch shares came to the West Coast sablefish industry, captains cut down on fishing during perilously windy days. Research by Tim Essington, a marine scientist at the University of Washington, suggests that while the system doesn’t always create bigger fish stocks, it produces more stable populations and catch rates. “By ending the race to fish, that may allow our monitoring and science to keep up,” Essington says.

David Goethel, front, and Justin MacLean, of Dover, New Hampshire, unload their day’s catch.

Today, catch shares cover about two-thirds of the fish caught in US waters, from red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico to king crab, the industry immortalized by Deadliest Catch, in Alaska. Catch-share programs have proliferated overseas, too, in developed countries like 27 percent of the pie.

That consolidation isn’t all bad—after all, the presence of too many boats is often what caused overfishing in the first place. Still, most catch-share programs have rules to prevent concentration. No halibut fisherman in southeast Alaska, for instance, can own more than 0.5 percent of the pie. Other fisheries reserve slices for local communities. Still others require boat owners to go to sea with their vessels, preventing armchair fishermen from stockpiling shares.

David Goethel pulls his boat into the Yankee Fishermen’s Coop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, one of the few places to access local seafood from local fishermen.

But when the New England Fishery Management Council voted for catch shares in June 2009, such safeguards weren’t part of the plan. The program already promised to be a headache—it proposed to organize fishermen into groups, called sectors, that would split their cumulative groundfish shares among members. Sectors whose members had caught more in the past would receive larger slices, an arrangement that malcontents called “rewarding the pigs.”

The council had to sort out the details in a hurry: The 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a sort of maritime Farm Bill, mandated that all American fisheries establish catch limits by the end of 2011, and the Obama administration, a big catch-share booster, offered $16 million to help New England nail down a system. Setting accumulation limits would gum up the works: How many pounds of fish should one boat owner be allowed to acquire, how could the system prevent families from sidestepping the rules, and how should it handle fishermen whose holdings exceeded the bar? “Any kind of catch-share program should’ve come with meaningful consolidation caps, but the council punted that ball,” says David Goethel, a New Hampshire fisherman who sat on the council. “They had so much pressure to get this program done.”

The Yankee Fishermen’s Coop in Seabrook, New Hampshire

Other catch-share programs have taken pains to dilute fishing power: When the West Coast groundfish industry, long dominated by a giant company called Pacific Seafood Group, transitioned to catch shares in 2010, no boat was allowed to hold more than 2.7 percent of the total catch. After the program began, fishermen who exceeded that limit had to divest by 2015. But in insular New England, similar controls would have required busting up the Northeast’s most powerful fishing enterprise: Carlos Seafood Inc., the Codfather’s company. “He didn’t influence the process in an outward way,” says Goethel, the council’s sole dissenting vote. “But his corporation loomed over everything.”

When New England instituted its catch-share system, the Codfather was the big winner. Rafael’s initial slice was more than 12 million pounds, about 9 percent of New England’s total. Many small fishermen soon sold or leased him even more—some were eager to cash out, while others hadn’t received enough groundfish to make a living. By 2013, three years after the program began, the Codfather was raking in more than a full quarter of New England’s groundfish revenue. When a reporter from Vice visited the South Front Street warehouse that year, he found that Rafael had adorned his office with pictures of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin from Scarface. His aggrieved small-boat competitors, the Codfather said, were “mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant.”

And anyway, the new system, along with the disappearance of cod, took many of those small competitors out of the equation. In 2010, the first year of catch shares, more than 440 boats were catching groundfish in New England; by 2013, about 120 of those vessels had left the game. Although stringent catch limits aimed at rehabilitating cod stocks downsized the entire industry, small boats dropped out at around twice the rate of larger ones, according to federal reports. The poster child for disaster was Sector 10, a cluster of small-scale fishermen scattered along the coast south of Boston who received only a tiny slice of the pie. The collective’s groundfish revenue fell by more than half during the program’s first year. Some guys switched to other species, like lobster and squid, that weren’t subject to quotas; others dropped out. Some lost their homes. “Now there are some days when I’m the only boat out there fishing,” says Ed Barrett, a fisherman based in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and Sector 10’s former president. “It’s like, where the fuck is everyone?”

Ed Barrett, a member of the Massachusetts fishermen’s association

To be clear, the catch-share system didn’t create inequity—Rafael began swatting the mosquitoes decades before it came into play. But it drove the gap into “hyper­speed,” Barrett says. And while the Codfather’s scheme may well have predated catch shares—Rafael told Mullett he’d been conducting the dance for 30 years—consolidation can expand the scope of existing fraud, by dragging once-independent fishermen, and fishing access, into the orbit of a deep-pocketed cheater. In 2014, American Seafoods Company, the biggest player in Alaskan pollock, paid $1.75 million for skewing its scales to fool the feds. “Any industry is susceptible to corruption, and the lack of controls against consolidation is the Achilles heel of the groundfish quota system,” wrote the magazine National Fisherman after Rafael’s arrest.

And the program’s structure produced a new incentive to cheat. As you’d expect, fishermen are allowed to catch more of comparatively common species than rare ones. That can quickly become a problem: You might own a big slice of the haddock pie, but if your net happens to catch flounder, you must either stop fishing or rent more flounder quota from your peers. Rafael simply mislabeled the other kinds of groundfish as haddock, an abundant species for which he owned millions of pounds. “This is the shit we painted all week,” he told the IRS, pointing to his cooked ledgers. “See? Seven hundred…We call these haddock.”

New England’s lax enforcement created still more opportunity. While all West Coast groundfish boats carry government-­paid observers whenever they leave port, just 14 percent of groundfish trips in New England are similarly monitored. The Nature Conserv­ancy and others are experimenting with onboard electronic monitoring systems—cameras with GPS and sensors—that would supplant human overseers, but they’re years from implementation. And while the catch-share program originally called for dockside agents to prevent fraud, NOAA curtailed its efforts in 2010 after an inspector general report rebuked the agency for overzealous policing. The lack of enforcement frustrates Joshua Wiersma, the Northeast fisheries manager for the Environ­mental Defense Fund. “Unless we have effective monitoring, the odds that something like Carlos is going to happen again are pretty good,” he says.

In fact, something like Carlos is already happening again—and it’s still Carlos. In August 2016, with Rafael out of prison on a $1 million bond, his Lady Patricia was boarded by the Coast Guard for illegal fishing, according to an incident report. He’s also continued to acquire vessels. Because the Codfather has stashed control of his boats within a warren of companies all listed at the same address, it’s difficult to know exactly what he owns—but in June, his wife, Conceicao, purchased a new boat under the auspices of yet another company. The company’s name seemed to raise a middle finger at critics: Nemesis LLC.

Carlos Rafael’s arrest has, by most measures, upended New England’s fishing industry. To account for years of unreported catch, NOAA will likely recalibrate its population estimates, which could lead to further cuts to quotas. “The biggest victims are the fishermen themselves, the honest operations that are trying to make a living,” says Peter Shelley, the Massachusetts senior counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that Rafael’s arrest offers a giant reset button for a beleaguered fishery, an opportunity to redistribute the catch in a more equitable way.

On a steel-gray November morning, I drove down South Front Street, not far from the Codfather’s green warehouse, to meet a fisherman with a different approach to business.

I found Armando Estudante by his 120-foot boat, the Endurance. Estudante is a bowling ball of a man, with hands and wrists swollen by years of labor and a brushy gray mustache dangling over his upper lip. He moved to Massachusetts from Portugal in 1978 and purchased his first boat in the early ’80s.

John Tomac

These days, the Endurance fishes for scallops, shellfish that are managed by a different system. Estudante still owns a groundfish quota, but he leases it to other fishermen, often at below-market rates. “To have someone profit by staying at home while someone else goes fishing, to me, is a disgrace,” he said. “You remove the incentive for new blood to come into the fishery. That’s what you’re seeing here in the Northeast—who the fuck wants to go fishing? Because you have to pay rent to people that don’t go.”

Far better, Estudante said, to have a “boots on deck” rule that forces boat owners to run their own vessels. You don’t have to look far for an example, he added. Maine’s lobster industry is governed by such a provision and is famously self-regulating and sustainable. “It’s not such a radical idea,” Estudante insisted.

Fishy Story: Our Faux Fish Problem

For some fishermen, though, transferable catch shares evoke Winston Churchill’s quip about demo­cracy: They’re the worst form of fisheries management, except for everything else that’s been tried. Making the existing system more equitable—as some regions already have done—has long been the crusade of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a Gloucester, Massachusetts-based group that advocates on behalf of small-scale fishermen and local seafood. NAMA’s efforts are spearheaded by Brett Tolley, a lanky, bearded descendant of four generations of Cape Cod fishermen. Tolley has spent years campaigning for systemic reforms that, among other measures to protect small boats, would include consolidation limits. In October 2015, he organized a protest in which dozens of irate fishermen stormed out of a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council. But when the council finally published the long-awaited safeguards last year, it capped ownership at 15.5 percent of the total quota—far higher than many other fisheries, and too high to rein in even the Codfather. And while the new rules limit the amount of quota that fishermen can own, there’s no constraint on how many pounds they can rent from their peers. “To us, that’s a complete failure to deal with the problem,” Tolley says.

For all the angst that catch shares have caused, New England’s fishermen have bigger concerns. Cod, the fish that launched a thousand boats, hover at catastrophically low levels—5 percent of the target in the Gulf of Maine, and climate change is thwarting their recovery. Off-brand species like dogfish and black sea bass have flourished in New England’s warm new world, but they’ve struggled to find a niche in markets saturated with farmed salmon, shrimp, and tilapia. Resourceful small-scale fishermen have begun vending their catch through community-­supported fisheries, launching co-ops, and peddling their wares directly to restaurants—approaches that have lighter environmental impacts than industrial fishing. Yet none of this has slowed the industry’s erosion. A Trump administration proposal to slash NOAA’s budget by 17 percent—including a 5 percent cut to its subdivision, the National Marine Fisheries Service—could make fishermen’s lives more difficult by impairing the agency’s ability to provide satellite weather forecasts and reliable fish population assessments. “You see small pockets of fishing boats here and there that make great backgrounds for postcards, but this business is collapsing, piece by piece,” says Scott Lang, New Bedford’s former mayor.

Brett Tolley, a community organizer with Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, an organization that promotes the symbiosis between a healthy environment and local fishing economies

Although Rafael faced up to 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines if convicted, no one expected the case to reach trial—and, sure enough, Rafael will plead guilty before a federal judge in Boston on Thursday, March 16. Yet many New England fishermen are less concerned with the Codfather’s fate than with the fate of his property. According to the indictment, Rafael may be forced to surrender the boats he used to commit his fraud—and the fishing permit and quota attached to each vessel. The disbursement of those forfeited assets will be contentious. Jon Mitchell, New Bedford’s mayor, has lobbied NOAA to keep the Codfather’s shares in his home port, arguing that innocent fishermen’s “livelihoods depend on the continuation of the business,” according to a local newspaper. In other places, environmental groups have swooped in to snatch up fishing shares and remove them from circulation.

Neither option sits particularly well with Brett Tolley, who advocates making the Codfather’s property available to the fishermen who have been most disadvantaged by regulations—small boats, for instance, or young people who weren’t grandfathered into the catch-share system. There’s precedent for such a “permit bank” concept: The Penobscot East Resource Center, an organization devoted to the rehabilitation of Maine’s flagging fisheries, owns two permits and leases out access to fishermen. Several states run banks, too. From the ashes of the Codfather’s empire could rise a more equitable distribution of the catch. “How do we protect fleet diversity? How do we prevent excessive consolidation? How do we ensure multiple generations of fishermen get access?” Tolley demands. “All communities have a stake in how this turns out.”

This article was produced in collaboration with FERN, the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

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The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

Posted in alo, aquaculture, Bragg, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, OXO, PUR, Ringer, Safer, Springer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

Cutting food waste helps companies profit.

by MartaMarko Posted on March 7, 2017

Mustafa Ali helped to start the EPA’s environmental justice office and its environmental equity office in the 1990s. For nearly 25 years, he advocated for poor and minority neighborhoods stricken by pollution. As a senior adviser and assistant associate administrator, Ali served under both Democratic and Republican presidents — but not under President Donald Trump.

His departure comes amid news that the Trump administration plans to scrap the agency’s environmental justice work. The administration’s proposed federal budget would slash the EPA’s $8 billion budget by a quarter and eliminate numerous programs, including Ali’s office.

The Office of Environmental Justice gives small grants to disadvantaged communities, a life-saving program that Trump’s budget proposal could soon make disappear.

Ali played a role in President Obama’s last major EPA initiative, the EJ 2020 action agenda, a four-year plan to tackle lead poisoning, air pollution, and other problems. He now joins Hip Hop Caucus, a civil rights nonprofit that nurtures grassroots activism through hip-hop music, as a senior vice president.

In his letter of resignation, Ali asked the agency’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, to listen to poor and non-white people and “value their lives.” Let’s see if Pruitt listens.

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Cutting food waste helps companies profit.

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What would Teddy Roosevelt have to say about new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?

by TeresaMcGoldrick Posted on March 1, 2017

A New Jersey startup called Bowery grows leafy greens stacked in columns five high under the watchful eyes of an AI system.

The operation, which officially launched last week, uses 95 percent less water than traditional methods and is 100 times more productive on the same footprint of land, according to the company.

Bowery calls itself “post-organic,” a label to describe its integration of tech and farming practices and its pesticide-free produce. That distinguishes it from large-scale organic farms, which do use pesticides — they’re just organic ones.

Bowery

Its AI system automates ideal growing conditions for crops by adjusting the lighting, minerals, and water, using sensors to monitor them. It can alter conditions to tweak the taste — emphasizing a wasabi-like flavor in arugula, for instance.

More than 80 crops are grown at the farm, including baby kale, butterhead lettuce, and mixed greens. The produce is delivered to New York stores within the day after harvest, and the greens go for $3.49 a box — on par with the competition.

Continued – 

What would Teddy Roosevelt have to say about new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, oven, OXO, PUR, Ringer, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What would Teddy Roosevelt have to say about new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?

Robots are raising your kale now.

by RochellDaecher Posted on February 27, 2017

A New Jersey startup called Bowery grows leafy greens stacked in columns five high under the watchful eyes of an AI system.

The operation, which officially launched last week, uses 95 percent less water than traditional methods and is 100 times more productive on the same footprint of land, according to the company.

Bowery calls itself “post-organic,” a label to describe its integration of tech and farming practices and its pesticide-free produce. That distinguishes it from large-scale organic farms, which do use pesticides — they’re just organic ones.

Bowery

Its AI system automates ideal growing conditions for crops by adjusting the lighting, minerals, and water, using sensors to monitor them. It can alter conditions to tweak the taste — emphasizing a wasabi-like flavor in arugula, for instance.

More than 80 crops are grown at the farm, including baby kale, butterhead lettuce, and mixed greens. The produce is delivered to New York stores within the day after harvest, and the greens go for $3.49 a box — on par with the competition.

More here: 

Robots are raising your kale now.

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