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You’re Wasting More Food Than You Think

by JonahYIIko Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

America wastes insane amounts of food. Pretty much everyone knows that. It turns out, however, that hardly anyone thinks they’re among those who trash perfectly edible food. In a new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) published this morning in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers surveyed 1,010 nationally representative Americans to better understand the public’s perception of food waste, and discovered that three-quarters of them believe they waste less food than the national average.

Despite the fact that as much as 40 percent of American food goes uneaten—primarily from homes, stores, and restaurants, and at a cost of more than $160 billion a year—”Americans perceive themselves as wasting little,” said study leader and director of the Food System Sustainability & Public Health Program at CLF, Roni Neff in a statement. “But in reality, we are wasting substantial quantities.” The average American family wastes between $1,365 to $2,275 worth of food and beverages annually.

We waste so much, in fact, that New York City’s Sanitation Department wants to require restaurants, catering companies, grocery stores, and others to start composting all of their wasted food by July 1, but is concerned that that the city may not have the capacity to handle it all. Currently, the nine facilities in the area can only compost a measly 100,000 tons of waste. (If all New Yorkers were to start composting, they’d produce an estimated one million tons of wasted food.)

More than a third of the survey’s respondents claimed they don’t throw away food at all or very little. The top reasons listed for wanting to throw out less food were to save money and set a positive example for children. Environmental reasons came in last—despite the profound environmental impacts of wasted food, which accounts for a quarter of the fresh water supply and 300 million gallons of oil a year.

The study, in addition to asking about individuals’ food waste habits, also covered general awareness, knowledge, and attitudes towards wasted food. Read the study to see how all the questions break down here.

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You’re Wasting More Food Than You Think

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Ikea is putting more than a billion bucks into the climate fight

by JeannieSheean Posted on June 4, 2015

Ikea is putting more than a billion bucks into the climate fight

By on 4 Jun 2015 3:14 pmcommentsShare

Ikea announced today that it plans to put 1 billion euros toward fighting climate change — more than $1.12 billion. Sixty percent of that will go to build renewable energy capacity, especially wind, moving the company toward its goal of using 100 percent clean energy. The remaining 40 percent will go toward helping poor countries adapt to climate change.

The furniture superstore’s business is booming as people across North America, Europe, and Asia flock to Ikea stores to purchase cheap, supposedly easy-to-assemble furniture and, sometimes, solar panels. And to watch couples fight. Last year the company made more than $32 billion.

But all of those sales take an environmental toll: Fortune magazine reported last year that Ikea consumes 1 percent of the world’s commercially logged wood, turning it into things like stylish laundry baskets and unobtrusive bedframes. And, according to the company’s own statistics, only 41 percent of Ikea’s customers see the company as one that “takes social and environmental responsibility.” Ikea wants to get that figure up to 70 percent this year.

Still, Ikea’s CEO told Reuters that the company’s primary motivation was fighting climate change, not PR. “Getting that message out to the customers is secondary,” he said.

The money for renewable energy investment will add to the $1.7 billion the company has already invested in wind and solar, including 700,000 solar panels on its buildings and more than 300 off-site wind turbines.

“I am heartened to see corporate leadership in this area,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator on the U.N. climate agreement for the Alliance of Small Island States, which stand to be hit particularly hard by climate change.

Green-minded Ikea customers will also likely be heartened by the news, which is at least as exciting as the vegan Swedish meatballs that started showing up in store restaurants a few months ago.

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey said it will end the use of elephant acts by 2018—a move that follows decades of mounting criticism and public concern over the show’s abusive treatment of the animals. Ringling’s parent company, Feld Entertainment, cited a “mood shift” experienced by circus-goers who have grown “uncomfortable with us touring with elephants” for the decision.

President Kenneth Feld also said local legislation barring certain circus practices, such as the use of bullhooks, made it increasingly difficult for the company to continue including elephants in its performances. “This decision was not easy, but it is in the best interest of our company, our elephants and our customers,” he said in a statement.

In 2011, Mother Jones published an explosive, yearlong investigation looking into Ringling’s treatment of elephants, including the regular employment of electric shocks and whippings to control them:

Several of the beatings targeted Nicole, a twentysomething elephant named after Kenneth Feld’s eldest daughter. Sweet-natured but clumsy, Nicole would frequently miss her cues to climb atop a tub and place her feet on the elephant next to her, Stechcon said in his videotaped statement. “I always rooted for her, ‘Come on, Nicole, get up,'” he said. “But we left the show, brought the animals back to their area, and…we took the headpieces off, and as I was hanging them up, I heard the most horrible noise, just whack, whack, whack. I mean, really hard. It’s hard to describe the noise. Like a baseball bat or something striking something not—not soft, and not hard…I turned around to look, and this guy was hitting her so fast and so hard with the ankus, and sometimes he would take both hands and just really knock her, and he was just doing that. And I was, like, I couldn’t believe it.”

The investigation also exposed that Feld Entertainment had spent millions of dollars on PR campaigns to hide such abuse from the public and fend off lawsuits:

It was part of a multimillion-dollar spy operation run out of Feld headquarters to thwart and besmirch animal rights groups and others on the company’s enemies list, according to a stunning Salon piece by Jeff Stein. Feld had even hired Clair George—the CIA’s head of covert operations under President Reagan until his conviction for perjury in the Iran-Contra scandal. (George, who died in August, received a pardon from President George H.W. Bush.)

Thursday’s announcement to phase out the elephants, which have been a staple for the Ringling brand for more than a century, has been met with praise from animal rights activists. Feld Entertainment said the elephants will be transitioned to the company’s elephant conservation center in Florida.

For more, read our in-depth investigation here.

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

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This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

by JeanettHowie Posted on December 4, 2014

This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

By on 4 Dec 2014 1:15 pmcommentsShare

The worst storm of 2014 is moving across the Western Pacific, headed for the Philippines. There’s a chance it will just graze the island nation — but there’s also a chance that Super Typhoon Hagupit is headed straight for the area hit so hard last year by Super Typhoon Haiyan.

Writes USA Today:

Hagupit strengthened into a typhoon Tuesday and continued to strengthen Wednesday, with sustained winds of 150 mph, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said.

That is equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. A typhoon is the same type of storm as a hurricane but is called a typhoon in the western Pacific Ocean.

The storm was about 800 miles east of the Philippines and could be near the island nation by Saturday.

When Haiyan struck last year, 7,000 were killed or went missing, and, more than a year later, the country is still recovering. Many people still live in temporary shelters, made homeless by the most powerful typhoon to ever hit land.

At the time, there was also a U.N. climate conference underway in Warsaw, Poland. The Philippines’ climate change commissioner, Yeb Saño, had his hometown destroyed, and went on a hunger strike during the conference in hopes of spurring “meaningful” progress.

Now, as Hagupit bears down, there’s another U.N. climate conference underway, in Lima, Peru. This time, Saño is at home. He is again trying to raise awareness about his vulnerable country’s plight in the face of climate change. Notably, on Twitter:

And sometimes, with a sense of humor about the whole thing:

Fingers crossed that this year’s summit won’t get the same kind of deadly and urgent reminder of the threat of climate change that Haiyan delivered in 2013.

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This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

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Heartbreaking Photos From the Latest ISIS Attack

by WalkerEgerton Posted on October 8, 2014

Mother Jones

A man sits and watches the Kobani border from afar. Kazim Kizil

The ongoing fight for Kobani, a strategically important city on the Turkey-Syria border, has become the latest front in ISIS’s crusade to create an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. For weeks, ISIS fighters have been battling Syrian Kurds for control of Kobani. If the jihadist rebels win, ISIS would gain a direct route into Turkey and consolidate its grip on territory stretching across the northern areas of Syria. Kobani has been ravaged by air strikes, shelling, drones, and suicide bombs. It is now surrounded on three sides by ISIS forces. Syrian refugees have been fleeing the city into neighboring Turkish towns, where Turkish citizens have provided them with food, water, and shelter. Yet the situation for thousands is grim.

Kazim Kizil, a young man from Izmir, Turkey, has traveled to several border towns in the area, taking pictures of the refugee crisis and posting them on Facebook and Instagram. Here are some of his heartbreaking photos:

Young men in Suruc, Turkey watch on the border between Turkey and Syria. Kizil says that these men are Turkish civilians who are “giving moral support to YPG guerillas,” the Kurdish army that is defending Kobani. Smoke from air strikes billows in the distance.

A young girl carries her belongings on the border. Kizil says that refugees often arrive on the border and must sleep in the streets because other shelters are too crowded. Some refugees—especially mothers and children—are suffering from malnutrition, diarrhea, and vomiting.

Two young refugee girls on the border.

A sick, elderly man from Kobani is evacuated on a stretcher as a sandstorm approaches. Kizil says that many elderly people cannot leave the city because they are not strong enough to make the trip.

A child, dirty and running out of water, who migrated across the border from Kobani.

According to Kizil, thousands of people created a human chain on the border in solidarity with the Kurdish fighters.

The border vigil near Kobani goes on, as the sun sets on Wednesday night.

A refugee woman living on the street in a “tent city” in Suruc, Turkey. Kizil says many refugees are crammed into mosques, wedding halls, and empty shops, but most are living in tents or in the open.

A boy from Kobani waits at the border, clinging to a police fence.

A child from Kobani in the makeshift tent city.

Kizil captions this photo “I am looking at Kobani,” as a coalition air strike hits the town.

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Heartbreaking Photos From the Latest ISIS Attack

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Should Doctors Ask You About Your Guns?

by MargareKorth Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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

In Florida, it’s illegal for a physician to ask you if you own a gun. Pediatrician Aaron Carroll thinks this is ridiculous:

When pediatricians ask you about using car seats, they’re trying to prevent injuries. When they ask you about how your baby sleeps, they’re trying to prevent injuries. When they ask you about using bike helmets, they’re trying to prevent injuries. And when they ask you about guns, they’re trying to prevent injuries, too.

….When I ask patients and parents whether they own guns, if they tell me they do, I immediately follow up with questions about how they are stored. I want to make sure they’re kept apart from ammunition. I want to make sure they’re in a locked box, preferably in a place out of reach of children. Doing so minimizes the risks to children. That’s my goal.

When we, as physicians, ask you if you drink or smoke, it’s not so that we can judge you. It’s so we can discuss health risks with you. When we ask you about domestic violence, it’s not to act like police detectives. It’s so that we can help you make better choices for your health. When we ask you about what you eat or whether you exercise, it’s so we can help you live better and longer. We’re doctors; it’s our job.

I don’t often disagree with Carroll, but I think I might here. Not about Florida’s law: that really is ridiculous. The state may have an interest in making sure doctors don’t give demonstrably bad advice, but it certainly doesn’t have a legitimate interest in preventing them from asking simple, fact-oriented question. This represents prior restraint on non-commercial speech, and as such it’s beyond the pale.

That said, should physicians ask about gun ownership? I’m not so sure. Carroll says he only wants to discuss “health risks,” and that’s appropriate. Doctors have expertise in the area of human health: that is, the biology and physiology of the human body. But that’s not the same thing as the safety of the human body.

Not only do doctors have no special professional expertise in this area, but it’s simply too wide open. Does your car have air bags? Do you ever jaywalk? Have you checked your electrical outlets lately? Is your house built to withstand an earthquake? Do you know how to work safely on your roof? Do you make sure to watch your kids in the pool? Are you planning any trips to eastern Ukraine?

I could go on forever in this vein. These are things unrelated to human physiology. If you define them all as health risks, you’re simply defining every aspect of life as a health risk, and therefore your doctor’s concern. That goes too far, and I don’t blame people for sometimes reacting badly to it. There are certainly gray areas here, but generally speaking, if I want advice about my health, I’ll see a doctor. If I want advice about gun safety, I’ll talk to a gun pro. I think it might be best to leave it this way.

FULL DISCLOSURE: My view is almost certainly colored by the fact that I’m all but phobic about doctors. I hate visiting them, I hate talking to them, and I hate the fact that they never seem to really, truly respond to what I tell them. I would be very annoyed if a doctor suddenly veered off and started quizzing me about general safety issues.

I’m keenly aware that this is an obvious overreaction on my part, and I do my best to restrain it when I’m actually talking to a doctor. Nonetheless, it’s there.

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Should Doctors Ask You About Your Guns?

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Obama to create largest marine protected area ever, because bigger is better

by XVNEmilqkoj Posted on June 17, 2014

Obama to create largest marine protected area ever, because bigger is better

By

Shutterstock

Say what you will about the U.S., when we do something, we do it supersized.

So when Obama decides to make a marine reserve, he doesn’t just put your average patch of ocean off-limits to commercial fishing, energy exploration, and other shenanigans. No. It’s a massive portion of the Pacific that more than doubles the total amount of protected ocean. In the world. From The Washington Post:

[T]he Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument would be expanded from almost 87,000 square miles to nearly 782,000 square miles — all of it adjacent to seven islands and atolls controlled by the United States. The designation would include waters up to 200 nautical miles offshore from the territories.

“It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to the pristine ocean,” said Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence who has researched the area’s reefs and atolls since 2005.

Marine protected areas are widely acknowledged as one of the most effective tools to fight back against overfishing, habitat destruction, and ecological loss. By roping off some of the most productive waters, we give fish a fighting chance. In this case, the proposed boundaries encompass a number of “underwater mountains,” habitats which are important as fish nurseries and centers of marine biodiversity.

The potential expansion area would quintuple the number of underwater mountains under protection. It would also end tuna fishing and provide shelter for nearly two dozen species of marine mammals, five types of threatened sea turtles, and a variety of sharks and other predatory fish species.

There will likely be the usual sighing about the pushiness of a president who refuses to work with his old pals in Congress. And the American tuna industry is likely to be one of the more vocal opponents, as about 3 percent of the U.S. catch comes from the area proposed for protection. But as Pacific bluefin tuna are one of the most overfished species in the sea, they could use the break. If all goes well, this sanctuary could actually help ensure that there are lots of fish out there for us to catch.

It’s a little early to declare victory — this announcement is merely a proposal, to be followed by a public comment period that will end later this year, hopefully with the official expansion of the reserve. But today’s announcement — coming on the tails of Capitol Hill Ocean Week and John Kerry’s “Our Ocean” conference in D.C. and the announcement of a new public nomination process for marine sanctuaries and a crackdown on seafood fraud — might signal a turning of the tides. (What, you thought you’d get out of this without seaing a pun?)

Or you could look at it another way: Small island nations like Palau and Kiribati have set aside their own swaths of sea as marine sanctuaries, and the U.K. is considering doing the same to the area around the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific. We may have taken our time about it, but it looks like we’re finally embracing the healthy spirit of competition to massively outdo all of them.


Source
Obama will propose vast expansion of Pacific Ocean marine sanctuary, The Washington Post

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 5, 2014

by KaraMilest Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Cpl. Daniel Hopping, assaultman, Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, and a native of Rogers, Arkansas, shields himself from dust being kicked up from a CH-53E Super Sea Stallion lifting off during a mission in Helmand province, Afghanistan, April 28, 2014. The company’s mission was to disrupt Taliban forces in Larr Village and establish a presence in the area. Five days prior to the helicopter-borne mission, the company confiscated two rocket-propelled grenades in the vicinity of the village. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Joseph Scanlan/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 5, 2014

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Here’s a shorebird’s-eye view of the Galveston oil spill

by ClaritaPBNK Posted on March 27, 2014

Slick Vid

Here’s a shorebird’s-eye view of the Galveston oil spill

By

When an oil barge collided with a container ship on Saturday in Galveston, Texas, as many as 168,000 gallons of fuel were spilled into the estuary, threatening wildlife and shutting down the busy port for days.

Yadda yadda. Different spill, same old spill news.

Here’s a slightly different view than you might be used to, from Project Survival Media. Turns out that oil is less beautifully troubling, and more palpably gross, from the shorebird’s-eye view, where it churns in the waves like salad dressing gone wrong.

That lumpy goodness is probably IFO-380, or what’s left after all the gas and diesel and kerosene have been taken out of crude oil. “It’s commonly referred to as bottom of the barrel stuff,” as Greg Pollack, a local oil spill prevention commissioner, told the Galveston Daily News. It usually floats near the surface, which is good for cleaning crews, but sometimes sinks when it gets close enough to shore to start picking up sediment. Unlike crude oil — which is what spilled the last time this area got slicked, by Deepwater Horizon in 2010 — this heavy fuel oil won’t evaporate, so leftovers may circulate far and wide.

Texas officials released a map of the spill’s probable extent on Wednesday. (Just to be clear, the “safety zones” are the ones where you’re NOT safe from getting oiled.)

KHOU
Source
What is the tarry stuff washing up shorelines?, Galveston Daily News

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 26, 2014

by KristenWhatley 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”>

An U.S. Special Forces soldier assigned to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan fires a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle system after receiving small-arms fire during a clearance of Denasaro Kelay village in Mizan district, Zabul province, Afghanistan on March 8, 2014. 3rd SOK, assisted by USSF soldiers, conducted the clearance to disrupt insurgent movement in the area. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Sara Wakai/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 26, 2014

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