Reposted from The New Farm.

Beware of Americans Bearing Gifts

Michael Pollan

Americans have been talking a lot about trade this campaign season, about globalism’s winners and losers, and especially about the export of American jobs. Yet even when globalism is working the way it’s supposed to — when Americans are exporting things like crops rather than jobs — there can be a steep social and environmental cost.

Cheap corn from U.S. farms is flooding the Mexican market place and washing its farmers out of the field. Photo courtesy of the USDA

One of the ballyhooed successes of the North American Free Trade Agreement has been the opening of Mexico to American farmers, who are now selling millions of bushels of corn south of the border. But why would Mexico, whose people still subsist on maize (mostly in tortillas), whose farmers still grow more maize than any other crop, ever buy corn from an American farmer? Because he can produce it much more cheaply than any Mexican farmer can. Actually that’s not quite right — it’s because he can sell it much more cheaply.

This is largely because of U.S. agricultural policies. While one part of the U.S. government speaks of the need to alleviate Third World poverty, another is writing subsidy checks to American farmers, which encourages them to overproduce and undersell Third World farmers.

The river of cheap American corn began flooding into Mexico after NAFTA took effect in 1994. Since then, the price of corn in Mexico has fallen by half. A 2003 report by the Carnegie Endowment says this flood has washed away 1.3 million small farmers. Unable to compete, they have left their land to join the swelling pools of Mexico’s urban unemployed. Others migrate to the U.S. to pick our crops — former farmers become day laborers.

	“Mexico’s small farmers still grow hundreds of different, open-pollinated varieties. This genetic diversity, the product of 10,000 years of human-maize co-evolution, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable information on Earth.”

The cheap U.S. corn has also wreaked havoc on Mexico’s land, according to the Carnegie report. The small farmers forced off their land often sell out to larger farmers who grow for export, farmers who must adopt far more industrial (and especially chemical- and water-intensive) practices to compete in the international marketplace. Fertilizer runoff into the Sea of Cortez starves its marine life of oxygen, and Mexico’s scarce water resources are leaching north, one tomato at a time.

Mexico’s industrial farmers now produce fruits and vegetables for American tables year-round. It’s absurd for a country like Mexico — whose people are often hungry — to use its best land to grow produce for a country where food is so abundant that its people are obese — but under free trade, it makes economic sense.

Meanwhile, the small farmers struggling to hold on in Mexico are forced to grow their corn on increasingly marginal lands, contributing to deforestation and soil erosion.

Compounding these environmental pressures is the advent of something new to Mexico: factory farming. The practice of feeding corn to livestock was actively discouraged by the Mexican government until quite recently — an expression of the culture’s quasi-religious reverence for maize. But those policies were reversed in 1994, and, just as it has done in the United States, cheap corn has driven the growth of animal feedlots, which contribute to water and air pollution.

Cheap American corn in Mexico threatens Zea mays itself — and by extension all of us who have come to depend on this plant. The small Mexican farmers who grow corn in southern Mexico are responsible for maintaining the genetic diversity of the species. While American farmers raise a small handful of genetically nearly identical hybrids, Mexico’s small farmers still grow hundreds of different, open-pollinated varieties, commonly called landraces.

This genetic diversity, the product of 10,000 years of human-maize co-evolution, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable information on Earth, as we were reminded in 1970 when a fungus decimated the American corn crop and genes for resistance were found in a landrace under cultivation in southern Mexico. These landraces will survive only as long as the farmers who cultivate them do. The cheap U.S. corn that is driving these farmers off their land threatens to dry up the pool of genetic diversity on which the future of the species depends.

Perhaps from a strictly economic point of view, free trade in a commodity like corn appears eminently rational. But look at the same phenomenon from a biological point of view and it begins to look woefully shortsighted, if not mad.

©2004 The Rodale Institute

Michael Pollan, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is the author of three books, including The Botany of Desire. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he wrote this essay for the Land Institute‘s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.

Visit the The New Farm.

Reposted from BioRegional.

One Planet Living

The world’s first large-scale eco-friendly tourism scheme to be launched in Portugal

28th May 2004 will see a new large-scale eco-tourism scheme launched by BioRegional and it´s partner WWF in Portugal. The development is part of an overall project that covers an area of 5,300 hectares and brings together sustainable housing, nature conservation, reforestation and ecofriendly transport. Work will begin over the next few months on the 6,000-house, Ä1billion scheme in Mata de Sesimbra, just south of Lisbon.

The development, which replaces a proposal to build a conventional tourist resort, will be completely powered by renewable energy, dramatically reduce waste to landfill – to just 5 per cent of the Portuguese national average – and use rainwater collection and waste water recycling systems to achieve huge cuts in domestic water consumption and irrigation. Furthermore, more than half the food served in tourist facilities will come from local sources. There are also plans to create a sustainable transport network – featuring for example shared and non-petrol vehicles, and a cycle route encompassing the entire site. The aim is to eliminate the need for private cars in the area.

The project includes a 4,800-hectare nature reserve in which habitat corridors, linking surrounding protected areas will create safe havens for vulnerable nesting birds such as the Bonelli eagle. The site will also be home to one of Europe’s biggest privately financed forest restoration projects which aims to recreate native indigenous woodland – mainly cork oak and umbrella pine – replacing the existing eucalyptus and non native pine forest.

WWF projects that over the next 20 years tourism in the Mediterranean will rise by 50 per cent to an estimated 350 million people visiting the region each year.

“Tourism is eating into our natural capital. It can often have a very negative impact on the environment, “said Dr Claude Martin. “New models such as Mata de Sesimbra are vital if tourism is to go hand in hand with sustainable development.”

The Mata de Sesimbra project is the first of a series of ambitious sustainable development schemes to be launched by One Planet Living, a joint initiative of WWF and BioRegional – development partners in London´s ‘BedZED´ sustainable housing project. The initiative aims to set up “One Planet” living communities of some 5,000 people in the USA, China, South Africa, Australia, and other European countries, such as France. Each community will include schools, offices, factories, transport networks and health and leisure facilities.

“It is time to switch from words to action and put sustainable development into practice,” said Pooran Desai, Director of BioRegional. “One Planet living is about developing solutions to some of today’s greatest challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.”

The One Planet Living Programme – a partnership with WWF

If everyone in the world lived as we do in Europe we would need three planets to support us. Therefore we need to reduce our impact – our ecological footprint – by two thirds to a sustainable and globally equitable level. Different countries however are consuming at different levels. In the USA, five planets would be needed, whilst in China although now living within the one planet level, the current rapid development will lead to a massively increased impact.

The challenge that faces us all is: how can people everywhere enjoy a high quality of life, within the carrying capacity of one planet? One Planet Living is a partnership between BioRegional and WWF which will show how this is possible by establishing five One Planet Living Communities in Europe, USA, China, South Africa and Australia. Each community will be home to more than 5,000 people and include schools, factories, health and leisure facilities, transport and food links.

The goals of this programme are to:

1. Establish a world-wide network of One Planet Living Communities to demonstrate One Planet Living in action, building on lessons learned from BedZED eco-village.

2. Promote One Planet Living through OPL products and services which reduce our ecological footprint, such as local paper cycles.

3. Raise awareness of the imperative for One Planet Living and its guiding principles to catalyse change with governments, business and individuals.

One Planet Living Communities will adopt the following guiding principles:

1. Zero carbon
2. Zero waste
3. Sustainable transport
4. Sustainable and local materials
5. Local food
6. Water efficiency
7. Conservation of flora and fauna
8. Respect for Cultural heritage
9. Equity and fair trade
10. Happy and healthy lifestyles

Visit the BioRegional website.
 

Reposted from The Nation.

Warrior Nation

Katha Pollitt

Should the government bring back the draft? Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has been talking it up, and it has captured the imagination of many liberals and leftists as well. Last year antiwar Representative Charles Rangel of New York and Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina introduced proposals to restore the draft as a way to build opposition to the war: The draft, Rangel argued, would spread the burden of war throughout society and force war supporters in the upper classes to put their children where their mouths are.

On paper, it’s a tempting argument. Universal conscription would certainly be a poke in the eye for Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle and other prowar “chickenhawks” who used their social privilege to avoid Vietnam (“I had other priorities,” said the Vice President, who enjoyed no fewer than five deferments). In theory, the draft would give us an army of “citizen soldiers,” young men–and probably women–drawn from all parts of society, instead of the current Army, which draws heavily on military families, poor people and–to judge by Charles Graner, accepted into the Army in his early 30s despite a long history of violence and instability–wife-beating losers. For many, the draft summons up ideals of valor, adulthood, public service and self-sacrifice–shared self-sacrifice. Those are all good things, but the draft is still a bad idea.

Given our ever more stratified and atomized society, why expect the draft to be equal or fair? In the l960s, the draft was famously open to evasion and manipulation, as that large flock of chickenhawks proves. The new draft would be too. The Army doesn’t need every high school graduate–there are 612,836 men 18 to 26 in the Selective Service registry for the state of Ohio alone, more than four times the number of US soldiers in Iraq–so it will be able, as in the past, to pick and choose. When one loophole closes, another will open: If Rangel succeeds in banning student deferments, we’ll see 4Fs for college-bound kids with “attention deficit disorder” or “learning disabilities.” Privileged kids will be funneled into safe stateside units, just the way George W. Bush was.

What about the argument that the draft will produce opposition to war? (“Parents and children would suddenly care,” as historian of the 1960s Jon Wiener told me.) It’s true that the draft will make it harder for kids and their families to live in a golden bubble–in the l960s, the draft concentrated the minds of college students wonderfully well. But mostly what the Vietnam-era draft produced was the abolition of the draft: That was the immediate form that opposition to the war took for those who most risked having to fight it. Abolishing the draft was a tremendous victory for the antiwar movement. If draftees were used in an unpopular war tomorrow, wouldn’t opponents demand that kids not be forced to kill and be killed in an unjust and pointless cause? Nor is it entirely clear that a draft would raise antiwar sentiment overall. Conscription might make it harder, not easier, for many people to see a war’s wrongness: It’s hard to admit your children died in vain.

Supporters of the draft are using it to promote indirectly politics we should champion openly and up front. It’s terrible that working-class teenagers join the Army to get college funds, or job training, or work–what kind of nation is this where Jessica Lynch had to invade Iraq in order to fulfill her modest dream of becoming an elementary school teacher and Shoshanna Johnson had to be a cook on the battlefield to qualify for a culinary job back home? But the solution isn’t to force more people into the Army, it’s affordable education and good jobs for all. Nobody should have to choose between risking her life–or as we see in Abu Ghraib, her soul–and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. By the same token, threatening our young with injury, madness and death is a rather roundabout way to increase resistance to military adventures. I’d rather just loudly insist that people who favor war go fight in it themselves or be damned as showboaters and shirkers. I’m sure the Army can find something for Christopher Hitchens to do.

The main effect of bringing back the draft would be to further militarize the nation. The military has already thrust its tentacles deep into civilian life: We have ROTC on campus, Junior ROTC in the high schools, Hummers in our garages and camouflage couture in our closets. Whole counties, entire professions, live or die by defense contracts–which is perhaps one reason we spend more on our military budget than the next twenty-five countries combined. (Did you know that the money raised by the breast cancer postage stamp goes to the Defense Department?) Conscription will make the country more authoritarian and probably more violent, too, if that’s possible–especially for women soldiers, who are raped and assaulted in great numbers in today’s armed forces, usually with more or less impunity.

If we want a society that is equal, cohesive, fair and war-resistant, let’s fight for that, not punish our children for what we have allowed America to become.

Today, the price of regular gasoline exceeding $2.00 a gallon in the United States, and the price of crude oil reached $41 a barrel, maybe it time we think seriously about a future without cheap energy. … Sometimes the simple solutions are best.

From the SynEARTH Archives.

Solving the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis

Timothy Wilken, MD

Buckminster Fuller, writing in Critical Path published in 1981, explained:

ìScientifically faithful, synergetically integrated, time-energy, electrochemical process accounting shows that it costs energetic Universe more than a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum when the amount of energy as heat and pressure used for the length of time necessary to produce that gallon of petroleum is charged for at the New York Con Edison Company’s retail kilowatt-hour rates for that much electricity.

ìAbout 90 percent of all U.S.A. employment is engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth. These non-life-support-producing employees are spending three, four, and more gallons of gasoline daily to go to their nonwealth-producing jobs-ergo, we are completely wasting $3 trillion of cosmic wealth per day in the U.S.A.”

We could save trillions of dollars in real life support wealth by paying all those individuals engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth to stay home and keep off the roads.

Should we pass a law?

No! It would be a complete waste of time to expect big government and big business to help us. They are the problem. They are invested in a model of society that depends on separation and scarcity. Big government wants only to get re-elected and big business wants only to make a buck. Together they completely dominate our current political-economic system by their reality of one dollar = one vote.

They cannot solve our human crisis. They don’t have a clue. They can only make it worse.

Its up to us. We can only rely on ourselves. We need individuals of integrity to join with us to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence  and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance of matter-energy even within the finiteworld we inhabit.

Modern society is currently ruled by a political-economic  system that is controlled and determined only by money. Remember  one dollar = one vote. The only votes that count in our modern human society are the dollar votes you exercise by buying or not buying products.

Products found in today’s market can be divided into three categories. These are synergic products, neutral products and adversary products.

1) There are synergic products.  The use of these products makes the user more happy, more effective, and more productive than they would be without the use of the product. The product is good for the user. The user must win, but even more importantly, everyone else must win. I win, you win, others win, and the Earth wins. Synergic products are good for humanty.

Vote your dollars wisely by only buying those products that help humanity. Buy only synergic products.

Some products are conditionally synergic. They are beneficial only if and when used carefully and/or under the supervison of an expert. These are products that can help or hurt depending on the condition of their use. Examples would include prescription medications, power tools, heavy construction machinery and equipment, etc, etc.,etc..

For products, that have utility only if used carefully or under the supervision of an expert, vote your dollars wisely by making it a condition of purchase that those products be used carefully or under the supervison of an expert.

2) There are neutral products. The use of these products are without benefit or harm. The users of these products would be equally happy, equally effective, and equally productive without the use the product.

Scott Meridith writing on the Energy Resources Group , an internet discussion group in March and April of 2001:

ìFor example, I’ve often observed that the entire global “soft drink” industry could and would be eliminated in any rational world, as this is a collossal waste of energy and resources, with only two outcomes:

- a brief and mildly pleasurable stupefaction of the senses
- tooth decay

ìSo, is the energy involved in the soft drink industry doing “useful work” or not? From a rational point of view, obviously no. Completely and absolutely useless. Just rots your teeth. Now calculate how much energy it uses, in all aspects, and how many people it directly indirectly employs.”

A neutral product is one that has no effect on the happiness, effectiveness, and productivity of the user of the product. No one wins. No one loses. Neutral products are of no benefit for humanity.

Since these neutral products have no benefit, buying them is a complete waste of time, energy, and resources. So don’t buy neutral products.

3) There are adversary products. The use of these products are harmful. The users of adversary products are less happy, less effective and less productive than they would be without the use of the product. An adversary product is one that reduces the happiness, effectiveness, and productivity of the user of the product. The user loses, and even worse everyone else loses. I lose, you lose, others lose, and the Earth loses. Adversary products are bad for humanity.

Don’t buy adversary products.

I am often asked, “What I can do to help. How can I make the world work better for all humanity.”

All of us could develop our own Buy/Don’t Buy lists.

And certainly, we could work together. I am gifting space at the CommUnity of Minds website as a place to think together and co-Develop Buy/Don’t Buy lists. By working together, we could bring the power of community as leverage to steer our society towards synergic products.

We strongly encourage our readers to use Buy/Don’t Buy lists as the determining guidelines for all purchases.

Don’t Buy
Don’t buy those products that are bad for humanity.  Don’t buy products that hurt people. Don’t buy products that damage the Earth. Don’t buy products that waste the Earth’s finite resources.

Conditionally Buy
Conditionally buy those products that when misused can be bad for humanity. Conditionally buy potentially dangerous products only when they are used undersupervision or very carefully to help people. These are products that sometimes help people, and sometimes hurt people. They need to be used carefully and/or only used under the direction of an expert.

Buy only the Dymaxion Three
Dymaxion means the product that offers the user the  most for the least. It provides the greatest value for least expenditure of time, energy and resources – More for less.

Do buy those products that are good for humanity. Do buy products that help people. These are products that help people. These are products that don’t damage the Earth. These are product that don’t waste the Earth’s finite resources. You are encouraged to buy these products, but not all of these products. Buy only the best of these products. Buy only the Dymaxion Three. By limiting your buying to only the agreed on best of  class, you are not buying less than the best. This shifts your voted dollars to those manufactures make the best products. It also shifts your voted dollars away from those manufacturers making the worst products. This will greatly reduce the waste of time, energy and resources now expended making mediocre products.

The Dymaxion Three is an evolving list of the best of class of those products on the Buy/Conditional Buy Lists. The three best products of each class will be listed. Inclusion in the list will be by consensus decision based on their achievement of dymaxion status.

Dymaxion is that design that gives the user the most value at the least cost. Factors of dymaxion worth include quality, ease of use, safety, durability, efficiency and elegance. If two products are otherwise equal, the one that is least expensive in time, energy and resources to create, operate and maintain is the more dymaxion. If two products are otherwise equal, the one that has the longest usable life is more dymaxion. Utilization of the dymaxion three will provide an enormous savings in time, energy and resources as efficiency is a strong determinant of dymaxion status.

My argument in this proposed solution for our fossil fuel depletion crisis is that we humans could do without most of the products now sold in our modern industrial “uncivilization” without any loss of meaningful lifestyle.

Understanding ‘Wealth’

What Is Wrong with Making Money?

Reposted from World Scripture.

Unity and Community