Category — Living Things

The Telegraph reports that — surprise! — we humans are consuming our natural capital  (food, fuel, and other resources) faster than the earth can either replenish them or absorb our wastes. Last year, we began eating into our capital on September 23; this year’s Overshoot Day will fall on August 21 (according to the New Economic Foundation, humanity first went into global ecological debt on December 19, 1987). For a fuller explanation of this grim metric, read here.

Environmental Science & Technology reports on new findings that chemicals in food wrappers can migrate into food and convert, in human blood, to perfluorochemicals (also known as C8, a chemical used by DuPont to make Teflon and other nonstick and nonstain products; C8, which is on the EPA’s contaminant candidate list, contaminates drinking water in numerous communities).The ES&T link brings you to an abstract; you can read the Charleston Gazette’s summary of the report here. And you can read about a possible EPA conflict of interest on C8 here.

When I give water talks, I tell my audience that in 2007, 88.9 of the nation’s community water systems (there are about 53,000 of them) met or exceeded federal safe-drinking-water standards, which left twenty-four million people drinking  sub-par water. Everyone wants to know: Who are those people? Well, 156,498 live in small Colorado towns that don’t have the money or personnel to look after aging water systems. As David Olinger reports in today’s Denver Post, one town had a salmonella outbreak (probably from animal waste leaking into a cracked water tank, which contained six inches of sediment), another had dead squirrels in its water tank (the top wasn’t bolted on), and live birds fouled another. Statewide, there were 62 boil-water alerts in 2008 (I’ve been tracking boil-water alerts over at my other blog: royte.com/badwater). The breakdowns stem from a combination of aging infrastructure (tanks and pipes more than 50 years old), stricter federal rules, and population growth,  Olinger writes. The state’s drinking-water program manager said most of the current 120 inspection-based violations — inadequate maintenance or incorrect water sampling, for example — are not directly health-related. Reading that, I remembered something an EPA water specialist told me: incorrect sampling or reporting is often an attempt to hide a health-based violation.

The cost to repair Colorado’s failing systems, in hundreds of cities, towns and districts, has geysered from $800 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion today. The federal stim, expected to bring $32 million to the state’s health department, ain’t going far. All of which makes me wonder: should the state spend over a billion to clean up water, of which less than five percent is actually consumed? If you’re rebuilding entire systems, why not provide dual plumbing, and treat water to the appropriate level for consumptive (drinking and bathing) and nonconsumptive (toilet flushing, lawn watering, car washing) use?

Last week I went to a screening of Food, Inc., a celluloid version of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma directed by Robert Kenner. Pollan and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) narrate the story of where our food comes from, why it’s so cheap, and the high price it exerts on food workers, the nation’s health, and the environment (though I would have liked to have seen a lot more on agricultural impacts to our soil, water, and air). Like Fuel, which I’ll eventually get around to blogging about, Food, Inc. has high production values (lots of aerial shots, propulsive music, snazzy graphics and animation). It reminds us how little we know about our food and, even worse, how little we’re allowed to know about our food: our regulatory agencies do a better job protecting the increasingly concentrated and powerful food industry than they do consumers. One woman left the screening muttering, “I’ll never eat ground beef again.”

One thing irked me. In the beginning, we meet the Orozcos, a family of four with no time to cook or shop (the parents may work two jobs; dad has diabetes) and little money to spend. But the family can buy dinner at a burger joint for around twelve bucks. They know the food’s no good for them (let alone the earth), but you can’t beat the price. The Orozcos are later shown in the produce aisle of a grocery store, fretting about the high price of broccoli and oranges.

When you show a gun in the first act of a play, aren’t you supposed to use it by the 3rd? Well, the Orozcos’ problem is never solved. Subsidies keep prices for meat, corn, soy, etc, artificially low. If other vegetable growers received those subsidies, would they bring down the price of leafy greens? Possibly, but the idea is to make the cheap food, the Orozcos’ happy meal, reflect reality, not a broken system.  What I’d like to see is Pollan go onto Craigslist or Freecycle and get the family a crock pot, a pressure cooker, and possibly a rice cooker. (Yes, all energy-burning devices but there’s a greater good at stake here.) Then teach the family to start their legumes and grains — which they can buy cheaply, in bulk — in the morning, before they head out to work and school.  This won’t solve all their food and budget problems, but it may keep them off burgers and fries a few nights a week. (For ideas about how the government, through procurement programs, could encourage sustainable agriculture and make better food available to more people, read David Corn in this month’s Mother Jones.)

The filmmakers’ prescription is to vote with our forks, eat with our families, demand wholesome food, and work to change federal food policies. Somehow, even the Boss singing This Land Is Your Land, as this advice rolls at the film’s conclusion, couldn’t counteract the depression that had been creeping over me for the last hour. Omnivore was one of the most important books of the last decade; I hope this movie reaches even more people than the book did.

(And just one more quibble, if I may: why did Kenner show the horrors of the industrial slaughterhouse but then, when he moved to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, turn the camera away from the chicken at the crucial moment? If Kenner is comparing the inhumane slaughter of Beef Products Inc. to the conscious cutting of Polyface, he should have given this shot equal treatment.) Okay, enough: go see this movie when it opens in selected cities on June 12. Bring the person responsible for food shopping in your household.

Writing in Mother Jones, David Corn tells the murky story of federal inaction on the regulation of perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel, in drinking water. He focuses on Richard Bryan, a somewhat green-leaning former Nevada senator turned lobbyist for perchlorate manufacturers. In a preliminary decision last October, the EPA declined to regulate perchlorate (Massachusetts and California have  their own standards); an EPA advisory board protested; and enviros now pin their hopes on Lisa Jackson, Obama’s pick for EPA administrator, to reopen the debate.

Perchlorate has been linked with thyroid dysfunction, particularly in infants, and it comes to us not only in water but in foods — like lettuce and spinach – grown with perchlorate-laced irrigation water.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports on Washington’s first hard look at how global warming will affect the state’s economy, agriculture, human health, storm water, fisheries, etc.  I haven’t read the report, conducted by 64 scientists, many affiliated with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington, but this article mentions larger numbers of heat-related deaths from higher summer temps and higher population.  I’m curious to see if the scientists were thinking of in-state population growth or considering an influx of climate refugees from drought-stricken, sun-crisped states in the Southwest (see my post from February 9 [The chickens are coming home to roost] on James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool).

Four scary stories today on climate change. But first, toward the end of his truly excellent Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West, James Lawrence Powell describes a not-so-distant future of water shortage. With the Colorado River already over-allocated, the drought continuing and temperatures rising, he writes, Lake Powell drops to the point where it can no longer provide cooling water for the Navajo Generating Station, which shuts down. When the reservoir drops to 3,520 feet in late 2012, “whirlpools and eddies form on Lake Powell’s surface, sucking air into the precisely machined turbines and causing them to shudder and vibrate.” Managers close the generator intakes: no more power from Glen Canyon.

Meanwhile,  states within the Colorado River Basin fight over water allocation: Albuquerque is shut off, and the city falls back on its dwindling groundwater supplies. New housing developments are halted, and the upper Colorado River basin, facing similar cutbacks, falls into a depression (though not before spending gazillions trying to overturn the Law of the River). Phoenix, with more than 6 million people by 2020, is drinking groundwater again. Heat island effects keep nighttime temperatures in the triple digits. Roads buckle, rails expand. Wildfires, which quadrupled from the mid-80s to 2007, have double again by 2020. The smoke and dust from the Salton Sea create “a daily air-quality emergency.” Electricity prices spike, brownouts and power outages become the rule, armed water police enforce rationing. The real estate market collapses. “Long lines of vehicles clog the freeways, heading east toward Mississippi and north toward Oregon and Washington. Burning hot, parched, and broke, the city that rose from the ashes achieves its apogee and falls back toward the fire.”

Does 2020 feel far off? Here are the stories that caught my eye today:

Australia’s recent wildfires are being called the nation’s “greatest natural disaster ever.” Some fires may have been set by arsonists, but the area’s combustible conditions are “consistent with what is forecast as a result of recent shifts in Southern Hemisphere climate patterns linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases,” said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the United States’ National Center for Atmospheric Research, as reported in today’s New York Times.

Even “water rich” Canada is scared: “We Need a Plan for Water” reports the Edmonton Journal.

Argentina’s drought has, since October of 2008, killed 1.5 million cattle, reports the Washington Post.

China’s drought is “the worst in half a century”; “wheat fears rise,” reports the Financial Times.

The New York Times has a story today on folks who’ve decided they can do without their refrigerators, mostly for environmental reasons, though economics figures in as well.  Energy Star appliances get a big plug, but I’m mentioning the story mostly because I just read a terrific new book called Fresh: A Perishable History, by Susanne Freidberg. I’d never really thought about how the advent of cold storage (starting with ice and moving to fridges) subverted our ideas of freshness. It also shifted power from consumers and producers to middlemen and virtually eliminated seasonality. The book won’t be out till April, from Harvard University’s Belknap Press, but you can preorder it today.

Natalie Angier has a neat piece in the New York Times today about the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s field station, Barro Colorado Island, in Panama.  She even quotes one of the scientists who appears in my 2001 book about BCI, The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest. It’s good to know Stefan found a good job.