Sustaining Lives through Organic Farming

Association for India's Development, Columbus, along with the EARTH Center and Students for Food Sovereignty welcomes AID Fellow and organic farming expert, Ms. Revathi.

Revathi has worked with more than 32,000 farmers in the organic movement in Tamil Nadu and her work has been recognized by the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. She has hands-on knowledge in the importance of rejuvenating the soil using a holistic approach towards soil restoration, seed selection techniques, methods to create organic pest repellent and herbicides. She described the use of Sesbania ("dhaincha") to reclaim soils made saline by the tsunami as well as conventional agriculture.

More info.

Soybeans as a Nitrogen Sink?

"Field Investigations of Manure and Synthetic Fertilizers on Agronomic Crops in Ohio" a talk by Keith Diedrick, OSU School of Environment and Natural Resources Soil Science Graduate Program.

This talk described the problem of too much fertilizer: large factory farms produce huge amounts of manure, which then must be disposed of. Whereas city and municipal biosolids (human waste) must be handled with extreme caution including up to a year of filtration, settling, fermentation, and more filtering, animal waste is treated differently. It is spread directly on conventional farm fields. Current agricultural practice includes spreading manure on top of snow (which then melts directly into local streams).

This research aimed to determine how much of this goop could be applied before the fields became over fertilized. This research should help farmers know when and how much animal waste they can apply to their fields. Ironically, the research was conducted on crops that actually require no fertilizer: soybeans. Because soybeans are legumes, they fix their own nitrogen and increased fertilizer has not shown increased productivity. While there may have been some productivity increase with increased use of manure, the limiting factor appears to be the production of dissolved forms of nitrogen in the soil. If farmers hypothetically wanted to limit the amount of fertilizer running off their fields, how much manure can they apply? Unfortunately, given that no groundwater or runoff samples were taken, it is not clear that this research can answer this question.

Maybe when will we stop researching factory farms and Roundup Ready soybeans and start researching solutions to the ecological and agricultural problems of today there will be better news to report here. This talk completely omitted the issue of antibiotics, surfactants, and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in manure and what effect these compounds might have on downstream ecology. I'm not just questioning the blatant narrow mindedness of this research, but the entire mindset that could lead someone to claim that this toxic manure is "just NPK" [nitrogen, phosphate, potassium] and that those three chemicals are the only thing important to plant nutrition and ecosystem functioning.

Environmental Causes of Cancer

from: Environmental Health News and World Wire News

The President's Cancer Panel reported that "the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated" and strongly urged action to reduce people's widespread exposure to carcinogens.

The panel advised President Obama "to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."

The 240-page report by the President's Cancer Panel is the first to focus on environmental causes of cancer. The panel, created by an act of Congress in 1971, is charged with monitoring the multi-billion-dollar National Cancer Program and reports directly to the President every year.

Environmental exposures "do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer. However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program," the panel said in its letter to Obama that precedes the report. "The American people --even before they are born-- are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures."

The panel, appointed by President Bush, told President Obama that the federal government is missing the chance to protect people from cancer by reducing their exposure to carcinogens. In its letter, the panel singled out bisphenol A, a chemical used in polycarbonate plastic and can linings that is unregulated in the United States, as well as radon, formaldehyde and benzene.

"The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm." - Dr. LaSalle D. Lefall, Jr., chair of the President's Cancer PanelEnvironmental health scientists were pleased by the findings, saying it embraces everything that they have been saying for years.

Richard Clapp, a professor of environmental health at Boston University's School of Public Health and one of the nation's leading cancer epidemiologists, called the report "a call to action."

Environmental and occupational exposures contribute to "tens of thousands of cancer cases a year," Clapp said. "If we had any calamity that produced tens of thousands of deaths or serious diseases, that’s a national emergency in my view.”

These include:

* Malignant melanoma of the skin in adults has increased by 168 percent due to the use of sunscreens in childhood that fail to block long wave ultraviolet light;

* Thyroid cancer has increased by 124 percent due in large part to ionizing radiation;

* Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has increased 76 percent due mostly to phenoxy herbicides; and phenylenediamine hair dyes;

* Testicular cancer has increased by 49 percent due to pesticides; hormonal ingredients in cosmetics and personal care products; and estrogen residues in meat;

* Childhood leukemia has increased by 55 percent due to ionizing radiation; domestic pesticides; nitrite preservatives in meats, particularly hot dogs; and parental exposures to occupational carcinogens;

* Ovary cancer (mortality) for women over the age of 65 has increased by 47 percent in African American women and 13 percent in Caucasian women due to genital use of talc powder;

* Breast cancer has increased 17 percent due to a wide range of factors. These include: birth control pills; estrogen replacement therapy; toxic hormonal ingredients in cosmetics and personal care products; diagnostic radiation; and routine premenopausal mammography, with a cumulative breast dose exposure of up to about five rads over ten years.

"America is the Saudi Arabia of negawatts"

Amory Lovins goes on to say that "more productive use of energy is not, strictly speaking, a physical "source" of energy, but is only a way to displace physical sources. This distinction is rhetorical, since the displacement or substitution is real and makes supply fully fungible with efficiency."

Consensus, Controversy, and Deviance

The national press, despite its power and occasional hobbyhorses, sees its role as “witnessing,” as serving up a “daily diary of debate,” as offering “a platform for independent inquiry and investigation” — but not as setting the terms of public discussion.

But, is it really possible for the media to be objective?



"A long-term focus on shifting the Overton window allows a think tank to follow its ideals and perform a genuinely positive public service, instead of being constrained to merely advocating those policies that are currently possible. When the window of political possibilities is moved along the political spectrum, the impossible becomes desirable and the simply desirable becomes imperative. This is the true influence of a think tank — shaping the political climate of future legislative and legal debates by researching, educating, involving and inspiring."

Ideas and topics can shift up and down the scale of acceptability:

• Unthinkable
• Radical
• Acceptable
• Sensible
• Popular
• Policy

Climate Change: Outside Natural Variation?

Basically, the question is whether the climate has changed sufficiently to push some ecosystems beyond resilience into active adaptation, ie change in vegetation type. Variation has increased, but many stop short of saying that the climate has actually changed. I have included a number of papers to peruse, none of which makes a complete argument in favor of climate over biological factors. Obviously both occur, and grazing and fire-suppression have exacerbated climate-driven changes. The hard question is to what extent each factor has "driven" the observed changes.

The old school of thought on climate change (which is still prevalent among scientists today) argues that climate change is happening but isn't here yet. In other words, that we are still within natural ranges of variability. However, my recent research has convinced me that the changes that are being predicted are already here, all around us.


Large forest die-offs have occurred in old-growth Amazonian and Indonesian rainforest, in addition to other undisturbed forests around the world (Allen 2010) and in the Western US (van Mantgem 2009). Here in the Southwest, Pinon die-off has been linked to an increase in temperature that increased the severity of an otherwise normal drought (Breshears 2005). Dr. Gutzler here at UNM has created a map showing what a 3 degree increase in temperature would do if precipitation variability remains unchanged (see below; Gutzler 2010). The trend is, indeed, toward unprecedented warming (Kaufman 2009). This kind of increased ET could also explain the increase in stand-replacing Ponderosa forest fires, which have occurred without 20th century overgrazing and fire supression (Meyer and Pierce 2003). Indeed, Dr. Archer at University of Arizona, an authority on shrub invasion of grasslands, also points out situations where differing grazing and fire regimes fail to modify climate-driven shrub encroachment (Fensham 2005). Dr Fredrickson (Fredrickson 2006) has shown that climate change can explain loss of Black grama grasslands on the Jornada in the absence of grazing pressure.


In a particularly interesting rebuttal to a long-held 'sacred-cow', Dr. Meyer at UNM recently used stratigraphy to show that beaver have not significantly affected hydrologic processes during the Holocene, but instead, that climate determined beaver abundance (Meyer 2008). I could include other papers, but I particularly like several of these. I intentionally saved papers on historic arroyo cutting for another time, but could have cited Leopold, Shumm, and many others to argue for climate-driven processes.

Bill McKibben has written a new book with essential the same argument: "Most accounts terrifically underplay what’s actually going on already. " Tim Flannery's book The Weather Makers makes a similar argument, even though it was published in 2006: "the first victims of climate change have already died".

Why aren’t more economists backing win-win climate solutions?

David Roberts at Grist.com points out that climate change legislation would reduce the federal deficit while boosting production. Yet mainstream economists, and hence politicians, are stuck in the old paradigm wherein the economy and the environment are inherently opposed: you can't have one without sacrificing the other. Isn't it time we realized how absurd that is?

The Ohio Country

East of the Appalachian Mountains, East and North of the Ohio River, and South of Lake Erie, lies a rich country of farms and forest. It is my new home. I think Michael Pollan's description of a farm in Virginia could equally describe Ohio:

"The wail of farm machinery had fallen silent, and in the space it left I could hear the varied sounds of birds: songbirds in the trees, but also the low gossip of hens and the lower throat singing of turkeys. Up on the green, green shoulder of hill rising to the west I could see a small herd of cattle grazing, and, below them on a gentler slope, several dozen portable chicken pens marching in formation down the meadow. Laid before me was, I realized, a scene of almost classical pastoral beauty -- the meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all...."

The War Next Door: Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border.

High Country News p. 15 March 1, 2010. Vol. 42, No.4
The War Next Door. Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border. Charles Bowden.

"If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs."

"The border should not be an issue in American life, but rather our window on the world. All our foolish beliefs are refuted here. Free trade is creating the largest human migration on earth. The migration of the Mexican poor should be seen as a natural shift of a species. We need ecologists on the border; the politicians have become pointless."

"The official line of the U.S. government, one most recently voiced bny Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that drug consumers in the United States are responsiuble for drug murders in Mexico. Only someone who is drugged could believe this claim. The sole source of the enormous amount of money in the drug business and the accompanying violence is the U.S. prohibition of drug use by its citizens."

"On the border, Adam Smith meets magical realism. Here the market tenets of supply and demand, the basic engine of both the migration and the drug industry, are supposed to be overturned magically by a police state."

But that's not what's intended: The Border Patrol, DEA, the world's largest prison industry, "are literally failure-proof -- the more Mexicans that migrate, and the more drugs that arrive, the more agents that are hired."

Supreme Court hears arguments over GMO Alfafa

http://gmo-journal.com/index.php/2010/05/18/ge-alfalfa-at-the-supreme-court-analyzing-oral-arguments/