Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Dan Lashof

Larry Summers,
the Director of the National Economic Council, used his luncheon speech at
today’s Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook Conference to lay out a compelling case for comprehensive energy and climate legislation.
The text of his remarks should be posted on the conference website soon and
will be worth a read as he positioned his points about energy and climate in
the context of an expansive overview of the economic crisis and the Obama
administration’s strategy to get the U.S. economy back on track.

In the meantime, here is an outline of the five key points
he made about the economic importance of enacting comprehensive climate and
energy legislation:

Enacting legislation will create demand and jobs
in the short term, when the economy has idle labor and other economic resources
that can be put to work building the foundation of a clean energy economy.

Enacting legislation will reduce uncertainty and
increase confidence, spurring greater private sector investment.

Enacting legislation will result in a more
efficient policy framework by cutting subsidies for dirty fossil fuels and
increasing reliance on a market-based system to reduce emissions.

Enacting legislation will spur innovation, which
is the key to our long-term prosperity.

Enacting legislation will strengthen America’s
international competitive position by reducing our dependence on oil from
unstable parts of the world and making the United States a leader in the
technologies that will drive growth in the 21st Century.

Press
coverage that I have seen predictably focuses on Summers’ response to a
question about the political priority President Obama places on passing energy
and climate legislation this year. His response, “Going forward for the rest of
this year a bipartisan energy solution is an absolutely crucial priority for
the president,” was certainly a tasty dessert, but the highly substantive
main course should not be neglected.

Related Links:

Coalition of 22 Democratic senators urges floor vote on climate bill this year

The inevitable ‘What Does Health Care Reform Mean for Climate Legislation’ post

Is it a problem that more industry groups are meeting with key regulatory officials than enviros?

by Tom Philpott

Bill Clinton speaks at the UN. What lessons has he learned about agriculture? Photo: United Nations Development ProgrammeWhat have Haiti’s recent calamities taught U.S. decision makers about foreign policy with regard to agriculture?

Haiti imports nearly half of the food consumed there—and 80 percent of its rice, the national staple. In the past two years, the country has undergone two major shocks: the global spike in food commodity prices in 2008, and this year’s devastating earthquake. In both cases, the dearth of domestic food production, combined with the complete absence of rice reserves, translated to widespread hunger and misery.

For a nation to rely on global commodity markets for its sustenance is to depend on forces completely out of its citizens’ control. Actions in other countries—say, the U.S. government’s decision to ramp up ethanol production in 2007—can price millions out of food markets. Natural disasters can quickly morph into monstrous human tragedies. In Haiti, a people with a long history of toughness and resourcefulness become frightfully vulnerable.

For 30 years now, U.S. policy makers and the so-called “Washington Consensus” institutions—the IMF and the World Bank—have goaded “developing nations” to forget about food security and instead focus on leveraging their “comparative advantages” to earn hard currency through foreign trade. Typically, those advantages end up being large pools of cheap labor and natural resources. As for feeding the domestic population, the global commodity market would take care of that.

The 2008 food crisis, which pushed hundreds of millions from mere poverty to flat-out hunger, exposed the absurdity of that policy. No country threw its farmers to the wolves more decisively than Haiti, which just a generation ago grew most of its own food and was a net rice exporter. And now their are signs that U.S, policy makers are rethinking the old advice, as Tom Laskawy recently reported here.

Bill Clinton is a paid-up member of the foreign policy establishment: former President, current UN envoy to Haiti, husband of the Secretary of State. Speaking of his decision in the 1990s to push Haiti to accept cheap, subsidized U.S. rice imports at the expense of its own farmers, Clinton told he Senate Foreign Relations Committee that… (transcription of the Clinton quotes pulled from the Democracy Now website.) 

Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.

That’s a remarkable statement. He later referred to the destruction of Haiti’s rice farmers as a “devil’s bargain. He added this:

And it’s [the old ag policy] failed everywhere it’s been tried. And you just can’t take the food chain out of production. And it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination.

But then in later remarks, Clinton called into questions the lessons he had actually learned. Speaking of Haiti specifically, he said this:

And we—that’s a lot of what we’re doing now. We’re thinking about how can we get the coffee production up, how can we get other kinds of-the mango production up—we had an announcement on that yesterday—the avocados, lots of other things.

By mentioning coffee, mangoes, and avocados, Clinton seems to be indicating an emphasis on export crops. To understand why this is deeply problematic, you have to fully understand the old policies. The idea went like this. Well-capitalized farmers in the globe’s temperate zones—essentially, the U.S., Europe, Brazil, and Argentina—would produce high-volume staple crops like corn, soy, and wheat. In the tropical and sub-tropical zones, farmers would forget staple crops and focus on “high-value” (and labor-intensive) fruit, vegetables, and flowers for the northern countries, where consumers can pay high prices for them. Comparative advantage at work: capital-intensive crops in the temperate zones; labor-intensive crops in the hot zones.

But the idea was always perverse. Global trade in food makes sense in cases of genuine surplus and shortage; but it becomes problematic when it becomes the driving force behind ag policy. Why should Haiti’s farmers focus on growing mangoes, avocados, and coffee for Americans when people there lack access to sufficient food? Why should Chile’s prime farmland be occupied by flower production for the U.S.—instead of food for Chileans to eat?

Moreover, farms that have sufficient scale to profitably reach these markets tend to be huge plantations, as Paul Roberts shows in his 2008 book The End of Food. He cites the case of Kenya. In textbook terms, an emphasis on export crops looks like a raging success in Kenya—the country exports $200 million in horticultural products per year, the engine of Africa’s second-largest export economy.

And yet, smallholder farmers are increasingly iced out of that booming export market. “[T]he share of Kenya’s foreign-bound produce grown by smallholders has fallen from nearly half in 1980 to less than a sixth today,” Roberts reports. The main way most Kenyans interact with such agriculture is as plantation laborers—earning an average wage of three dollars per day.

Such arrangements don’t eliminate poverty; they enshrine it. Indeed, while laborers toil on plantations and Kenya sends literally tons of pristine fruit, vegetables, and flowers north to Europe, “about one-third of the [Kenyan] population is chronically undernourished,” the FAO reports.

So, it’s disturbing to hear Bill Clinton talking about reviving Haiti’s agriculture through export crops, and not through supporting smallholder farmers and linking them with consumers in Haiti’s cities. I love tropical crops like coffee as much as anyone; and if coffee and mango production for export can be structured in a way that boosts small-farmer incomes, then fine. But until Haiti can feed itself, the spectacle of U.S. policy titans obsessing about export markets seems absurd: farce piled on tragedy.

Related Links:

Farm saved by community featured on CNN

A view into the U.S. diet

How export-focused agriculture has failed everyone it was meant to help

by Tom Laskawy

In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related video from around the Web.

————-

Back in November, Grist’s own Bonnie Powell wrote a piece for the Ethicurean about the plight of Soul Food Farm, a Bay Area farm destroyed by a wildfire:

Around 1:30 a.m. on the night of September 3,
engineer-turned-chicken farmer Eric Koefed awoke thirsty, then saw a
terrifying orange glow through the windows. A couple hundred yards
away, just past the creek behind the house, a wall of fire was
devouring the trees and back pasture of Soul Food Farm.

“The farm is burning!” he screamed. “Wake up!”

…In the end, it took more than 150 fire fighters to subdue the six-alarm
fire on this ridge and valley in Vacaville. (The cause was later
determined to have been arson.) The fire crew stayed to patrol for two
days, and no houses were affected. The Koefoeds, however, lost roughly
1,200 baby chicks (destined to become broiler chickens representing two
weeks’ income the following month); a barn and mature plum trees dating
to the 1880s; and about 30 acres of lush, diverse green pasture (the
salad bar for their chickens).

But instead of giving up, the Koefoeds soldiered on and with the financial and physical help of the community were able to restart operations.

It is an unquestionably inspiring story—and more than enough to catch the attention of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, whose show, AC360, recently featured the farm’s resurrection. Check it out:

Related Links:

Haiti, U.S. ag policy reform, and Bill Clinton

Underground school lunch blogger hits ‘Good Morning America’

Ask Umbra on Ronald McDonald’s retirement, card games, and a coffee stirring stir

by David Roberts

This weekend, I wrote a somewhat abstract post about how America’s built spaces prevent many Americans from connecting with the supportive social networks essential to health and happiness. Let’s zoom from the lofty down to the concrete. Let’s talk about my neighborhood.

I live in the Bitter Lake area of Seattle. (In the early 20th century, an adjacent sawmill dumped so much tannic acid into the lake that horses wouldn’t drink the water—thus the name.) It’s zoned as an “urban village,” but at least for now that designation is, er, aspirational. Most of it isn’t mixed use, but it’s not quite suburban. I guess it’s one of those “inner-ring suburbs” you hear about. It was developed in the 1950s-‘70s. Here’s my bit (with current public space in green):

68

As you can see it’s a fairly discrete area, bounded on four sides by busy arterials. Inside those arterials, there’s no reason you couldn’t have a thriving community. It already has a decent walkability score. There are a couple of parks; Greenwood boasts several restaurants and cafes; Aurora has an array of big box retailers; there’s a great supermarket just a few blocks north of 145th. There are more people coming in, too, as a series of condos are built along Linden.

But despite all the ingredients … there is no such community. The first and primal cause is that there are no %*#! sidewalks. (You hear me Mayor McGinn? Show me what the new guy can do!) But I think the problems run deeper. Look closely at the map and you’ll note that the development pattern is almost aggressively misanthropic. Everyone is isolated from everyone else! For a simple illustration, consider how my kids and I walk to Bitter Lake park:

Today, we take the route in orange. The shorter blue route would require either a road or a footpath to cut through residential areas. Also, the north end of the lake is private, so the blue path would require opening up at least a stretch of it as public space.

Distance-wise, the orange path isn’t all that much longer than the blue, but it feels like it. It runs along fairly busy streets with only patchy bits of sidewalk (%*#!). Linden is still slightly skeevy; we’d be nervous about letting the kids walk it without us. The blue route would be through a peaceful, heavily wooded residential area, more safely walkable or bikeable.

The seemingly small difference between the blue and orange routes is enough to make a fairly large difference is our daily life: we just don’t go to the park much, and thus don’t interact with the other Bitter Lakers who spend time there.

Making connections

That’s just one example of a pervasive problem. For instance, look at 138th going from Greenwood to Aurora:

WTF? Presumably they wanted to avoid making it into an arterial (which is what happened to 143rd). One way would have been to connect it to the streets above and below it in a grid pattern, narrow it, and install traffic-calming features like traffic circles. Another way would be to … stick a random gap in it. Now the only people who ever see the western chunk of 138th are people who live on it, and they never see anyone else. It’s an impenetrable, neighborhood-dividing peninsula.

The map doesn’t show it well, but see that spur of Dayton Ave N that juts off 138th? The houses on that little cul de sac are within a stone’s throw of my place. There may be all sorts of groovy people living there, but we’ll never know, because to get there we have to go north to 143rd, west to Greenwood, south to 138th, and east to Dayton. Suffice to say: we wouldn’t do that unless we already knew someone there, and we’d never meet anyone there unless we did it. So we don’t.

Consider how the character of the neighborhood might be different if it were more of a grid (additions in blue):

With these new streets (or bike/footpaths), people on 143rd, 141st, 138th, and 137th would actually be part of the same neighborhood. They could have block parties.

I guess in the ‘60s developers were in the grips of some pretty awful ideas about urban development. There was a love affair with cul-de-sacs and an effort to make almost every street in my area into one. Cul-de-sacs may feel safe, but their isolation from the surrounding neighborhood makes crime easier, not harder. They also make it difficult to walk anywhere, pushing people into cars, which prevent rather than facilitate spontaneous social interaction. By and large Seattle has turned against the cul de sac. (See also “The Cul-De-Sac Backlash” from Brad Plumer.) The thorny question is how to retrofit an area that’s already full of them.

Finding a center

One more fantasy-world addition to my neighborhood. Right now, only the very southern tip of Bitter Lake is public space. The west, north, and east sides are lined with private docks and piers, which go mostly unused.

What if a strip around the entire lake were made into a park, along the lines of Green Lake park (about 60 blocks south)? There could be a nice walking/running/biking path,  an area for a farmers market or food stalls, and plenty of greenspace. It could be accessed via Linden on the southeast, Greenwood on the west, or anywhere along the north end for residents of my neighborhood. Something like this, with public areas (including existing parks) in green:

Such a park would actually link the lake to the neighborhood above, offering everyone there a shared public space to walk, ride bikes, and congregate on a day to day basis. The park would also pull in people from outside the neighborhood and increase the property value of the entire area. (Have no fear: Linden is zoned to require a percentage of low-income housing.)

Interestingly, from 1930-1960, the entire south end of Bitter Lake was gathering place—an amusement park called Playland, served by a trolley (the Interurban) from Seattle:

Seattle Times archive

What a shame that the lake went from famous attraction to grubby, forgotten urban pocket.

For me personally, a neighborhood like the one sketched above would mean that once my boys are a little older, I could send them out the front door on a Saturday afternoon and say, “Be back by dinner time.” I’d know there’s a bounded neighborhood for them to explore,  with linked, diverse spaces filled with people they see them regularly, and who can keep an eye on them. It would mean a community.

Here’s the takeaway, for the few hearty souls still reading this logorrheic post: one of the biggest challenges in years ahead, as we attempt to densify and green our communities, will be retrofitting existing neighborhoods to increase walkability, sociability, sustainability, and safety. It’s worth a minute of anyone’s time to ponder how they could make their own surroundings more amenable to spontaneous, non-commercial, human-scale social interaction.

(And then after pondering and making blog posts with pretty pictures, it might even be worthwhile to start engaging with your local neighborhood groups and city council to get the slow, frustrating process of NIMBY-inhibited change underway. Here, for example, is the neighborhood plan for Bitter Lake, waiting around for funding. It looks cool!)

Related Links:

How to improve a Hummer’s mileage and add retro style

Everything you need to know about Obama’s new fuel-economy rules

Do Americans really make the connection between transportation, oil use, and environmental impacts?

by Tom Philpott

PB&J as metaphor: a subsidized lunch served in an Illinois school. Photo: Mrs. Q

Regular readers will have noticed a certain emphasis on school lunch in the Grist food section lately. Veteran journalist Ed Bruske has been doing superb on-the-ground reporting on the topic; I’ve been obsessing about the anonymous teacher blogger Mrs. Q, and writing disappointed critiques of the school-lunch legislation now in the Senate.

A couple of days ago, Lisa Hymas’ great post on green-inclined people who choose to be childless—Lisa has dubbed them GINKs—got me to thinking. Are a lot of people tuning out our coverage—and the school-lunch issue generally—based on the fact that they don’t have kids? (For the record, I don’t either.) For that matter, are people who are fortunate enough to have their kids in private school, or to send them with a decent lunch everyday, employing the same not-my-problem logic?

If so, I fully understand. The world is full of trouble; one has to choose one’s battles—and causes—carefully, to avoid being overwhelmed. But I want to make the case that everyone concerned about the future of the food system—with its vast influence over public health and climate stability—should care deeply about school lunches.

School lunches are our society’s most concrete, tangible way of transmitting foodways to rising generations. Sure, we pass on foodways in home kitchens and in our built infrastructure of restaurants/eateries, and well as through advertising; but those are in the private sphere. The public-school cafeteria is where we create a public vision of what the food system should be like. In short, it’s the public contribution to the formation of kids’ eating habits. And the eating habits we develop as kids largely determine the food choices we make as adults. If that weren’t true, the food industry wouldn’t be dropping $1.6 billion every year marketing to kids.

Foodways are an expression of habit. True, habits evolve and can be transformed. Most people who now populate the sustainable-food movement—including me—grew up eating bad school food, McDonald’s, TV dinners, etc. But habits also have tremendous momentum. The vast majority of people in my generation—I’m 44—remain hooked on highly processed junk. In other words, they follow the societal norm with regard to food. And the school cafeteria helps establish that norm.

There are about 75 million children enrolled in public schools. About 31 million of them rely on free or reduced-price lunches. Almost all of them have easy access to so-called “competitive foods”—the often-brand-name junk food offered as “lunch” alongside cafeteria fare.

Ed Bruske’s report on Mendy Heaps, the Colorado school teacher who was censured for trying to make fresh fruit accessible in her school, illustrates the “competitive food” problem. Here’s what’s offered to kids in this typical public school:

Pizza, corn dogs, Subway sandwiches, Chick-fil-A, Cheetos, nachos, fruit rollups, ice cream sandwiches and …  “healthy” fries. “They call them ‘healthy’ because they’re baked!”

And this is what the kids with money have access to! For the 31 million kids who rely on free or reduced-price offerings through the National School Lunch Program, that junk is an indulgence for when they have some change jingling in their pockets. What they get in the cafeteria line is no better—or even worse. For a firsthand, on-the-ground account of what those kids get, there’s no better source than Mrs. Q’s blog. In solidarity with her school’s students, most of whom rely on the free-lunch program, Mrs. Q has been eating in the cafeteria. Here’s what she got last month:

17 school lunches eaten:
4 – pizza lunches
3 – burger-like lunches
3 – chicken lunches
2 – chili lunches
1 – hot dog lunch
1 – pasta lunch
1 – cheese croissant
1 – cheese lasagna
1 – mac and cheese

Now, none of that has to be dreadful. With some nice ingredients, some cooking skills, and fruits and veggies on the side, any of those could be the center of a decent kids’ lunch. But when your read Mrs. Q’s posts and check out her pictures, you see that her school’s cafeteria is serving up dismal heat-and-serve versions of these dishes. And we also know that, under severe budget pressure, schools have to seek the cheapest ingredients possible—too often, quality notwithstanding.

As an organizing metaphor for what school lunch has come to, I can think of no better example than when Mrs. Q found herself being served a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. While the merits of such a dish as lunch fare are debatable—I ate more than my share of PB&Js as a kid—you’d think preparing them would be within the competency of any cafeteria crew: slather peanut butter on one slice of bread, jelly on the other. Combine. Instead, Mrs. Q got something vile and unholy, pre-packaged and branded. It literally made her sick.

With such garbage being served in the lunch line, it’s no wonder kids grope for Chick-fil-A and Cheetos when they get the chance.

What we’re doing in public-school cafeterias is helping brutalize the palates of today’s children. We’re helping mint literally millions of customers for a food industry that generates tremendous profit selling cheap, abysmal, and, indeed, ecologically ruinous food. We are helping to shape the food system that we’ll have in 10 years and beyond: a food system that builds health within communities and ecosystems—or one that does the opposite.

Transforming the cafeteria alone will not transform the food system. The food industry has built up tremendous cultural and economic momentum over decades; having seized control of school lunches is only one facet of its domination over our food culture. But the school cafeteria is the public aspect of that domination—the one ostensibly controlled by citizens through our elected representatives. We all have a stake in it—whether we have children or not, whether we are privileged enough to shelter our kids from the nightmare of the cafeteria or not. And by transforming the cafeteria, we put public weight behind the ongoing grassroots effort to create an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and ecologically sound food system.

As I’ve argued so many times before, the National School Lunch program is pathetically underfunded—it could literally be doubled for the equivalent of one month’s spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. For cafeteria operators, our paltry outlay for school food makes buying quality ingredients and cooking them virtually impossible—creating a vacuum to be filled by corporations that know how to turn a profit while churning out cheap food. Pending legislation doesn’t commit nearly enough extra money to remedy that situation—and, insult to injury, it finances its ultra-modest funding boost by cutting important (and cash-strapped) conservation programs. 

For information on how to make your voice heard on school-lunch legislation, go here and here. And stay tuned on Grist for more reports from the front lines of the cafeteria debates.

Related Links:

A teacher openly crusades for better school food—and gets seared

We need birth control, not geoengineering

What a D.C. private school can teach us about public-school lunches

by Umbra Fisk

Dearest
readers,

Great thread
yesterday on the varying viewpoints surrounding issues of independence,
financial culpability, the 9-to-5 rat race, and being possessed by our possessions—all inspired by Dolly Freed’s Possum
Living circa 1978.

For today’s
starting point, I thought we’d delve into the blood and guts—literally—as in
raising, killing, cleaning, and eating your own meat like Freed and her father
did during their five years of living off the land. Do you think it’s possible
to lead this type of subsistence lifestyle without eating animals? What do you see as
the difference between killing your own meat and buying it? Is it ethical to
eat meat if you wouldn’t kill the animal yourself?

My stomach
admittedly lurched a tad at the thought of creamed catfish, fried grasshoppers,
and snapper (as in turtle) soup. What are your thoughts on meat eaters who draw
the line beyond standard fare like cows, chickens, and pigs?

Let your reflections
spill forth in the comments below. I’ll be checking in shortly.

Fishballsily,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Does your job own you?

Ask Umbra chews the fat with Moby

Why are we propping up corn production, again?

by Jonathan Hiskes

Bicycling Magazine released its annual list of America’s most bike-friendly cities today, and Grist’s hometown Seattle comes in at No. 4. Great, right?

Well, sort of: The mag bases its praise on the city’s 10-year, $240-million bike master plan, which is intended to triple the number of journeys made by bike and add 450 miles of bike paths. But that lovely plan is currently underfunded by nearly $165 million, or 70 percent. While the local media caught the discrepancy, Bicycling Magazine didn’t, and Seattle is once again praised based on its promises, not its actions.

I haven’t fact-checked the rest of the bike-friendly list, but suffice to say, this sort of coverage encourages politicians to make grand pledges without following through. Roger Valdez proposes the term “sustainability gap” for the troublesome gulf between what politicians say and what they actually do to sustain-ify their cities, states, nations, school districts, etc.

Another pertinent example: The Seattle City Council recently adopted a goal to become carbon neutral. At the very same meeting, a council member tried to greenlight a massive, $4.2 billion downtown tunnel that includes no space for transit lines, only roads.

“[It’s] like John F. Kennedy telling Congress in 1961 that we would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then signing legislation defunding NASA,” writes Valdez, a researcher at Northwest sustainability policy shop Sightline.

Even when they are hollow, however, splashy promises from civic and business leaders amount to invitations to accountability. They are tools that citizen watchdogs can use to leverage change—as long as they pay more attention to performance than promises.

Related Links:

Energy trumps the environment, poll finds

A firestorm of comments over LaHood’s big bike speech

The Seattle project

by Miles Grant

HEAR the buzz of dread! FEEL the rash of terror! SEE the creatures of despair!

WATCH … They Came From Climate Change!

The National Wildlife Federation created the Climate Invaders report and accompanying video to bring attention to a very real problem—global warming giving a boost to some very unsavory critters, helping them settle into areas where once they were unable to survive. Some are creeping up from lower elevations and into warmer areas, while others are finding it easier to invade from foreign soil.

As climate change causes winters to warm and seasons to shift, a host of exotic invasives and destructive natives are marching their way into our lives at an ever increasing rate. These climate invaders will continue to spread disease, destroy valuable natural resources and push out the native plants and wildlife Americans cherish if global warming continues unabated.

According to the report:

Milder winters are projected to increase the range of deer
tick populations by 68 percent in North America by later this
century. 
Within the lifespan of a child born today, the range of the red
imported fire ant in the United States could expand northward
by about 80 miles and expand in total area by 21 percent as climate
change makes new areas suitable for their survival.
Poison ivy is expected to become more “toxic” as a
result of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
If summer precipitation declines significantly, this could expand
the amount of suitable land for cheatgrass by up to 45
percent, bringing increased wildfire risks with it.
Several species of the water-hogging salt cedar shrub
are poised to take full advantage of a changing climate in the western
United States, where water is already scarce.
Absent the severe winter cold which kills over-wintering beetle
larvae, pine bark beetle populations have exploded to
unprecedented levels across the Western United States, killing billions
of trees.
Climate change is likely to aid further range expansion northward
in the United States of the Asian tiger mosquito,
increasing disease transmission potential.

But it’s not too late to stop the invasion. “To meet the challenge before us, Congress must pass climate
legislation that includes a significant dedicated investment to protect
and restore the rivers, coasts, forests, and wild lands threatened by
climate change,” says NWF’s Derek Brockbank.

Related Links:

The future of freezing

Without affordable clean alternatives, South Africa turns to coal

Revkin: “The idea that we’re going to fix the climate change problem or solve global warming has alw

by Samantha Thompson

The majority of Americans prioritize the development of energy supplies over the protection of the environment, a new Gallup poll has found, the first time this has happened in the question’s ten-year history. Conducted in early March, before President Obama’s announcement that he would open much of America’s coastlines to offshore drilling, the poll’s results are consistent with the recent historical support for environmental issues, which peaked in 2007 and has been steadily declining ever since. Looking at the complete reversal of environmental and energy priorities over just three years, it’s hard not to wonder if Obama was in tune with the shift—and if it played a role in his decision to reneg on his campaign promise to ban offshore drilling.

Related Links:

America’s most bike-friendly cities and big green pledges

A firestorm of comments over LaHood’s big bike speech

The Seattle project

by Jonathan Hiskes

LaHood steps up at the National Bike Summit on March 11.Courtesy BikePortland via FlickrFour weeks ago Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood climbed on a table and declared the reign of the almighty auto was finished. Federal transportation funding would no longer favor cars at the expense of bicycling, walking, and mass transit, said the 65-year-old Republican from downstate Illinois. A few days later he followed up with details and an explanation that this is what Americans have been asking for.

The effects of his words have been rippling out ever since. Gleeful, perceptive, wary, and downright stupid responses are floating about on bike blogs, Streetsblog network members, and other transportation forums. Here are some of the most entertaining ones:

“Finally we have a Secretary of Transportation and not a Secretary of the Automobile,” says one of many enthusiastic commenters on LaHood’s Facebook page.

“A subtle cultural shift is underway,” says Keith Laughlin of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy: “We are witnessing a transition from the auto-dominated American lifestyle of the post-war years to something new.”

The secretary’s on drugs if he thinks biking and walking should count as real transportation, says Ohio Rep. Steven LaTourette: “If it’s not a typo, is there still mandatory drug-testing at the department?”

Auto-dependency makes our economy great, says National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) advisor Carter Wood: “Treating bicycles and other non-motorized transportation as equal to motorized transportation would cause an economic catastrophe.”

“As I think back to major economic catastrophes of the last 40 years, I am having a hard time finding any tell-tale trace of bicycle tire tracks,” responds League of American Bicyclists director Andy Clarke: “On the contrary, my recollection of significant recent economic crises is that they are invariably caused by our predeliction for foreign oil – the 1973/74 oil embargo; 1988 oil crisis; 2008 gas price increases…”

“Livability means having a decent highway,” Missouri Senator Kit Bond argues. Nothing like walking the kids and the dog down to the interstate for a game of catch on a summer’s eve…

Run them down, says ESPN radio host Tony Kornheiser, in a slightly related and thoroughly stupid rant: “Three or four of these people start riding abreast, and I swear to you it’s all you can do to not run them down, like Wile Coyote’s, run them over. Just stay on the right. Stay on the right. I’m happy to share the road with you, but by share the road what I mean is you have room on the right and I have room on the road. Get the hell out of my way. Am I wrong on this?”

“There’s a certain amount of Small Penis Syndrome evident in [Kornheiser’s] tone,” Chris Baskind says in a takedown plus constructive analysis on moreminimal.com. “A middle-aged man lamenting the end of his ‘large, powerful’ automobile’s highway primacy…”

 Oh, and Ray LaHood commented on Ray LaHood too. From his Green Inc. interview yesterday:

People are always going to drive cars. We’re always going to have highways. We’ve made a huge investment in our interstate highway system. We’ll always continue to make sure that those investments in the highways are maintained.

But, what Americans want is to get out of their cars, and get out of congestion, and have opportunities for more transit, more light rail, more buses, and some communities are going to street cars. But many communities want the opportunity on the weekends and during the week to have the chance to bike to work, to bike to the store, to spend time with their family on a bike.

Related Links:

The Seattle project

A movement far larger than the Tea Party

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

by Ashley Braun

The buns should have bread the writing on the wall: They’re nothing but the vehicle for Americans’ daily meat-to-mouth resuscitation. Which is why KFC said buh-bye to bread in order to shove even more gross industrial chicken Double Down hungry throats. KFC is shooting for a more manly vehicle for getting meat to the gullet, opting for the Hummer of the food world: more meat.

The recipe for total organ failure? Two slabs of bacon, along with Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese, between two fillets of chicken (this is where the buns get the middle finger), all slathered with the Colonel’s special sauce. That’s 32 grams of grease that KFC’s Double Down will get ya. Because the Colonel isn’t too chicken to add more chicken.

Psst … for a meaty bonus, scroll down to the bottom of this story for the fictional precursor to the Double Down chicken-on-chicken sandwich. Compliments of 30Rock’s Tracy Jordan!

Related Links:

How much renewable juice does it take to power an Apple iPad?

How to improve a Hummer’s mileage and add retro style

What to make of the Pollan/Schlosser agreement with Wendy’s?

by Jeff Biggers

All coal mining safety laws have been written in miners’ blood.

My grandfather, who barely survived an explosion in a coal mine in
southern Illinois, taught me this phrase. He also taught me about the
150-year-old battle in the coalfields over reckless production at the
cost of responsible safety measures.

As our prayers and condolences go out to the many coal mining
families in Raleigh County, W.Va., I think about the needless
safety violations and subsequent disasters that have taken place over
the past century.

Over 104,000 Americans and immigrants have died in our coal mines.
According to one inspector, many, if not a majority of those
“accidents” should not be considered mishaps, but acts of negligent
homicide.

As a coal miner’s widow from Raleigh County, W.Va. told me
on the phone last night, every time she sees a miner just off his
shift, draped in coal dust, standing at the convenience market, she
knows that mine is rife with violations.

Three coal miners still die daily from black lung disease—one of the most flagrant safety issues and scandals overlooked in our nation.

While we are still waiting for the details on the Performance Coal
Co. Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, and whether methane gas buildup—the release of highly flammable and toxic gas that has haunted coal
miners for centuries—led to the explosion that has taken at least 25
lives, reports are now coming out of the mine’s history of safety
violations. According to Ry Rivard in the Daily Mail:

In March alone, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration

officials cited the mine, which is owned by Massey subsidiary

Performance Coal Co., for failing to control dust; improperly planning

to ventilate the mine of dust and the combustible gas methane;

inadequate protection from roof falls; failing to maintain proper

escapeways; and allowing the accumulation of combustible materials.

Since 1995, there have been more than 3,000 violations at Upper

Big Branch, though it was not immediately clear how that compared to

other mines of its size.

Massey, of course, has become infamous for its devastating mountaintop removal operations.

But the company also pleaded guilty to criminal violations for a
January 2006 fire at the Aracoma mine in Logan County, W.Va., which took
the lives of two miners. As Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward noted:

A huge problem at Aracoma was also that Massey officials

had removed key ventilation walls, or stoppings, allowing smoke to

enter that primary escape tunnel in the first place—a move that U.S.

District Judge John T. Copenhaver later said “doomed two workers to a

tragic death.”

In a now infamous internal memo to employees that was used in the Aracoma mine trial, Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship
openly declared: “If any of you have been asked by your group
presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything
other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or
whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal,” the complaint quotes
the memo. “This memo is necessary only because we seem not to
understand that coal pays the bills.”

Nonetheless, Massey is ramping up its mine productions and profits, especially in its hurry to export coal to India and China.  Last year, nearly 3,000 coal miners died in China’s own mines.

When my grandfather was in the mines in southern Illinois, a group
of UMWA miners from Centralia, Ill., outraged by the political
machinations in the Department of Mines and Minerals, wrote a letter in
1946 urging the governor to take action on clearly dangerous buildups
of coal dust. The letter described the mine’s situation, the politics,
and then made a desperate request for intervention:

In fact, Governor Green, this is a plea to you, to please

save our lives, to please make the Department of Mines and Minerals

enforce the laws at No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Company at

Centralia, Ill., at which mine we are employed, before we have a

dust explosion at this mine like just happened in Kentucky and West W.Va.

Despite numerous inspections, recommendations, and noted violations,
the mine owners did not consider the dust situation to be of imminent
danger. On March 25, 1947, an explosion ripped through the Centralia
mine and killed 111 miners. Half of them died from carbon monoxide
poisoning. Three of the four men who had written the governor also died
in the explosion.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out, a crime was
committed at Centralia. Just like modern operators, the Centralia Coal
Company had made it a habitual practice to violate mining safety laws
and simply pay the fines.

And the violations and the deaths continue today.

I can’t get the words of an old Welsh coalfield ballad out of my mind:

Oh what will you give me, say the sad bells of Rhymney
Is there hope for the future, say the brown bells of Merthyr
Who made the mine owners, say the blackbells of Rhondda
And who killed the miners, say the grim bells of Blaenau …

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Obama’s mountaintop-removal crackdown could mean more than offshore drilling

Appalachians hail EPA’s great victory for Clean Water Act and justice

by Jonathan Hiskes

Courtesy Michael @ NW Lens via FlickrOn a wintery, gusty morning last Saturday, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn rode his bicycle down from his north-side home to a downtown architecture and design firm for a rather unmayoral event. Some 60 or 70 people had gathered for a daylong “unconference,” a loosely organized bring-your-own-lunch affair, to plot how Seattle can become the first carbon neutral city in North America.

Here’s the background, quickly: Last fall, at a two-night lecture at Seattle’s Town Hall, Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen invited the city to adopt a goal of complete carbon neutrality by 2030. This drew attention. Saturday’s event was an attempt to flesh out the plan.

Steffen opened it by showing a slide of a unicorn. “The rest of the world sees us as magical,” he said. If Seattle can’t figure out urban sustainability, no one can, he said. If we can, other places will imitate us.

The rest of the day was an exchange of ideas led by the sustainability thinkers and organizers (Seattle’s green rock stars, if you will): people like Sightline’s Eric DePlace and Roger Valdez, waterfront defender Cary Moon, scientist Peter Erickson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and Walkscore developer Jesse Kocher.

One panel explored to make car-free living more attractive. Another looked at radical building efficiency. Sustainability-minded neighborhood organizers talked about “how to take your neighborhood council.” City council member Mike O’Brien suggested turning drivers’ licenses into transportation licenses by embedding ORCA (regional transit) card technology into them.

This stuff was impressive enough. I thought the mayor’s presence was even more interesting.

McGinn has been in office just three months, after a local organizing career with the Sierra Club and Great City, an urban advocacy group he co-founded. Saturday’s group seemed to accept him as a co-conspirator, and he seemed to know what the roomful of wonks and ideas people needed to hear.

He focused on the success of the Alki Foundation—the political arm of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce—in convincing city politicians to support its priorities.

“It’s about politics, folks,” he said. “It’s not about having the best ideas.”

Despite the rich aroma of wonkery in the room, McGinn told the crowd that he needed hacks, not wonks, to push their shared dreams through the machinery of city politics. “Helping elect people matters. It’s about having access,” he said.

There was tremendous energy for this work, in the room and around the city lately too. It brought to mind Paul Hawken’s ode to social change last year: “Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement.”

Related Links:

A firestorm of comments over LaHood’s big bike speech

A movement far larger than the Tea Party

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

by Jeff Goodell

Editor’s note: We are very pleased to welcome author Jeff Goodell, who will be blogging for Grist while on tour with his new book: How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate.

For a writer, publishing a book is like letting an animal
out of a cage—you never know how it will behave in public, whether people
will be charmed by it, or scared by it. Or
bored.

This is
doubly true with book about geoengineering—an issue that is volatile, profound,
and morally fraught. Is it
a sci-fi nightmare writ large, or a sensible back-up plan in case our climate
spins out of control?

I have my own ideas about all this—and wrote about them in my new book, How
to Cool the Planet. But now, as I
travel around the country for the next month, I get to hear your
ideas. Are you scared by geoengineering? Worried about rogue nations—or rogue billionaires—taking the fate of the
planet into their own hands by launching a geoengineering project? Is geoengineering another way for rich,
technologically-advanced nations to exert their will over the rest of the
world? Does geoengineering the planet necessarily mean the end of nature as we know it?

I’d like to talk about all this—both on the road, and here in this blog.

I’d also
like to test a whole bunch of assumptions that scientists and academics who
have been thinking about geoengineering tend to make, but that might not in fact be true.

But before we get to the assumptions, here’s a
quick backgrounder on geoengineering: The British Royal Society defined
geoengineering as “the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s
climate system in order to moderate global warming.” We could intervene with technologies that
reflect sunlight away from the earth, or with technologies that pull CO2 right out of the air. Sucking out CO2 tends to be slow, expensive,
and uncontroversial; reflecting sunlight is fast, cheap, and dangerous.

Here’s one assumption I’ll explore in upcoming posts: does taking geoengineering seriously—investing in research, setting up possible governance structures—undercut our collective will to cut greenhouse gas
pollution?

One of the most commonly expressed
fears about geoengineering is that it’s likely to be promoted by Big Coal and
Big Oil as a “quick fix”—in other words, we don’t have to change our lives or
rebuild our energy infrastructure, we can just spray some sulfur particles in
the air and be done with it.

First, let me be blunt and say
unequivocally that geoengineering is not a quick fix for global warming. It
could very well cause many more problems than it solves. (Of course, that may not matter. Diet pills often cause more problems than
they solve, but that has not stopped the pharmaceutical industry from turning
them into a multi-billion dollar business.)

That’s why you could just as easily make the case that taking geoengineering seriously might in fact be a really good idea. It might turn out to be the
climate equivalent of those crack-up movies they show in driver’s ed classes—the theory being that if you see enough blood splattered on the dashboard, you’ll
think harder about drinking a case of tall boys before climbing behind the
wheel.

Maybe if you knew that reckless
geoengineering could shift the Asian monsoons, which hundreds of millions of
people depend on to grow their crops, you’d be more likely to
buy a Nissan Leaf, give up beef, and march on Washington to demand tough
climate legislation.

What do you think?

Related Links:

Sole “Strategic Partner” of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia’s “dirty coal” state of

Jeff Goodell: ‘It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room’

Adding iron to sea boosts deadly neurotoxin, study finds

by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from Think Progress.

Massey Energy is actively contesting millions of dollars of fines
for safety violations at its West Virginia coal mine where disaster
struck yesterday afternoon. Twenty-five miners were killed and another four are missing after a explosion took place at 3 pm Monday at Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co.‘s Upper Big Branch
Mine-South between the towns of Montcoal and Naoma. It is “the most people killed in a U.S. mine since 1984, when 27 died in a fire at Emery Mining
Corp.‘s mine in Orangeville, Utah.” This deadly mine has been cited for
over 3,000 violations by the Mine Safety and Health Administration
(MSHA), 638 since 2009:

Since 1995, Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine has been cited for 3,007 safety violations. Massey is contesting 353 violations, and 127 are delinquent. [MSHA]

Massey is contesting over a third (34.7 percent) of the
516 safety citations the Upper Big Branch-South Mine received in 2009,
its greatest count in the last 15 years. [MSHA]

In March 2010, 53 new safety citations were issued for Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine, including violations of its mine ventilation plan. [MSHA]

Massey is now contesting $1,128,833 in fines for safety violations
at the deadly Upper Big Branch-South Mine, with a further $246,320 in
delinquent fines:

Over $2.2 million in fines have been assessed against Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine since 1995, with $791,327
paid. Massey is contesting $1,128,833 in fines. Massey’s delinquent
fines total $246,320. [MSHA]

Massey is contesting $251,613 in fines for citations for Upper Big Branch-South Mine’s ventilation plan. [MSHA]

Before yesterday’s tragic explosion, there have been three
fatalities at Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine in the last 12
years—one each in 1998, 2001, and 2003. Massey’s corrupt CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce board member Don Blankenship, has previously told employees that it was more important to “run coal” than follow safety regulations.

In 2002, President George W. Bush “named former Massey Energy official Stanley Suboleski to the MSHA review commission that decides all legal matters under the
Federal Mine Act,” and cut 170 positions from MSHA. Bush’s MSHA chief, Dick Stickler, was a former manager of Beth Energy mines, which “incurred injury rates double the national average.” On Oct. 21, 2009, the Senate confirmed
President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Stickler, Joe Main, a “career union official and mine safety expert.” Massey’s Suboleski is still an active review commissioner.

Related Links:

‘Britain’s Appalachia’ engineers a brighter post-coal future

More evidence that Sen. Byrd sees the writing on the wall for coal

Citizens gather in Washington to end ‘mountain bombing’ of Appalachia

by Ed Bruske

Colorado teacher Mendy Heaps: dangerous lunchroom radical—or fruit-cart-pushing concerned citizen? Mendy Heaps, a stellar English teacher for years, had never given much thought to the food her seventh-graders were eating. Then her husband, after years of eating junk food, was diagnosed with cancer, diabetes ,and high blood pressure and suddenly the french fries, pizza and ice cream being served in the cafeteria at rural Elizabeth Middle School outside Denver, Col., took on a whole new meaning.

Heaps was roused to action. She started teaching nutrition in her language-arts classes. She bombarded colleagues, administrators and the local school board with e-mails and news clippings urging them to overhaul the school menu. She even took up selling fresh fruits and healthy snacks to the students on her own, wheeling alternative foods from classroom to classroom on a makeshift “fruit cart,” doling out apples for a quarter a pop.

Finally, the school’s principal, Robert McMullen, could abide Heaps’ food crusade no longer. Under threat of being fired, Heaps says she was forced to sign a personnel memorandum agreeing to cease and desist. She was ordered to undergo a kind of cafeteria re-education program, wherein she was told to meet with the school’s food services director, spend part of each day on lunch duty recording what foods the students ate, and compile data showing the potential economic impact of removing from the menu the “grab and go” foods Heaps found so objectionable.

“It was humiliating to stand in the cafeteria in front of the kids and the other teachers every day ‘collecting data,’ ” Heaps says. “I called it my penance.”

Heaps’ husband, Robert Heaps, a retired police officer, said his wife is paying the price for rocking the boat in a small town. “Unfortunately, she works in a semi-rural district in a tight-knit community where change isn’t always at the top of the list of things to do,” he said. “My only concern for Mendy is that it seems she is fighting a losing battle. I don’t care to see rifts created between her and the school board or the administration over an issue as important as this. I suspect she could become a target and subjected to hostile work conditions. But she appears to be up against a brick wall.”

McMullen, the school’s principal, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The case of Mendy Heaps is a stark reminder that at least one voice is largely missing from the debate over school food that’s getting so much attention lately: the voice of teachers. Teachers see what kids eat every day. They have opinions about the the food and how it impacts children’s health and school performance. Yet they are almost universally silent.

With one notable exception: An Illinois teacher recently created an internet sensation by blogging anonymously and publishing photos about her self-imposed diet of cafeteria food. Calling herself “Mrs. Q,” she frequently writes about her fear that she could be fired for exposing what kids are eating every day at school.

As I was gathering information for this report, Heaps said her local teachers union urged her to stop talking to me. “The union rep in my building came to my classroom and ‘begged’ me to stop everything I was doing,” Heaps wrote in an e-mail. “She insisted they will find a way to ‘get rid of me’ and there is nothing the union will do to help me. HOW’S THAT FOR SUPPORT!!!”

Heaps says it isn’t so much the food served in the federally subsidized cafeteria line that concerns her most, although that’s bad enough: “Mashed potatoes and corn are usually served more than anything else, along with breaded chicken nuggets, chicken patties, and chicken tenders,” she said. “Hamburger patties are also served a lot—drenched in canned gravy with mashed potatoes sitting on top of a slice of bread or on a bun with a serving of corn or green beans.”

Students who choose the subisidized meal are also entitled to a salad bar. But only a small percentage of students at the school qualify for free or reduced-price meals based on family income and apparently fewer still choose to pay for the federally supported food. According to Heaps, some say they are embarrassed to be seen in the subsidized food line.

No, what really makes her blood boil are the alternate foods sold in what the school calls the “deli” line or “grab and go”:  Pizza, corn dogs, Subway sandwiches, Chick-fil-A, Cheetos, nachos, fruit rollups, ice cream sandwiches and especially the “healthy” fries. “They call them ‘healthy’ because they’re baked!” Heaps says. According to numbers she compiled while assigned to the cafeteria, somewhat fewer than half  the 170 students in seventh grade bring lunch from home. Only a very small number—15 to 24—eat the reimbursible “hot lunch,” she said. Between 25 and 30 do not eat, and the rest—58 to 78—purchase food at the “grab and go.”

It reminded Heaps too much of her husband’s lousy diet. “When I met him about nine years ago, the only liquids that passed his lips were Pepsi and coffee and sometimes orange juice. He never ate fruit or vegetbles or dank water. The folks at McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme knew him by his first name,” Heaps said. “If he did cook for himself, it was processed food—[frozen] pizza, pot pies, hot pockets, hot dogs, canned soups and chili, lots of chips and Hostess cupcakes…Bob had no knowledge of nutrition—tomato sauce and french fries were vegetables, Wonder bread was vitamin fortified, and apple pie was the same thing as eating an apple.”

Robert Heaps was diagnosed with kidney stones and while he was being treated for that he was found to have bladder cancer. He underwent surgery three times to remove tumors, each time followed by weeks of chemo-therapy. Subsequently he was found to be suffering Type II diabetes and high blood pressure.

Mendy Heaps’ concern about the food being served at school became urgent. “I started feeling guilty that I had never really done anything to change what was going on, even though I knew it was wrong.”  Heaps said she could not understand why the school condoned students eating so much “junk” food. “Why do we serve or sell ANYTHING that isn’t good for the kids?” she said. “I hate the food they serve, but I hate even worse that they sell so much JUNK along with the bad food they serve.”

According to Heaps, food services director Susan Stevens and other school officials respond that students are entitled to “treats,” and should be free to choose their own food. “They feel like my ideas are too radical and you should not ‘restrict’ kids,” Heaps said.

Stevens did not respond to requests for comment. In an e-mail she sent to Heaps on April 28, 2009, she said, “My job is to provide each student with a healthy meal that adheres exactly to CDE [Colorado Department of Education] mandated nutrition guidelines. Our kitchens and staff are regularly audited to prove that we follow these guidelines and that we are all in compliance with state safety and health regulations.”

Ron Patera, who oversees food services as the school system’s finance director, said in a statement, “Ms. Heaps and I are both in support of providing nutritious and safe meals to Elizabeth’s students so they have every opportunity to enhance their academic peformance. Elizabeth’s schools meet and exceed the Federal and State laws governing the National School Lunch Program.”

Federal nutrition guidelines currently do not cover foods sold outside the subsidized food line. Legislation making its way through the U.S. Senate would, for the first time, give the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture authority to regulate all foods available in public schools. That measure reflects growing sentiment that schools need to address a nationwide epidemic of childhood obesity and stop selling nutritionally inferior food to students.

Heaps said one of her students was unable to use a standard-size desk in class because she was so heavy and had to be outfitted with a special table instead. That student habitually ate choco-tacos for lunch from the “grab and go”—two or three of them, according to Heaps—“and washed them down with a big Gatorade.”

Klondike brand choco-taco is an ice cream dessert folded inside a cookie and dipped in chocolate. A single choco-taco contains 290 calories (40 calories more than a McDonald’s cheesburger), 11 grams of saturated fat (four grams more than a BallPark beef hotdog) and 24 grams of sugar, (slightly less than a one-cup serving of Coca-Cola). “Of course the kids loved them and I’m sure the cafeteria made a boat load of money selling them,” Heaps said. “They were meant for dessert, but what middle school kids do—when they have money and there is a ‘concession stand’ open at lunch—is they buy only ‘dessert’ and eat it for lunch. Duh—they’re kids.” Heaps said the school no longer offers choco-tacos.

Heaps said she was told that sales from foods such as nachos and ice cream were needed to support the lunch program. But student behavior after meals was so disruptive, classes following lunch were rotated so that no single teacher would be forced to bear the brunt of it every day. “They were hyper and crazy…and then they crashed,” Heaps said.

At one point, Heaps began teaching nutrition with seventh-grade science teachers but found she could not reconcile what they were telling the children in class with what the children were being served in the cafeteria. In an e-mail she sent to the entire school staff, Heaps wrote: “When I started teaching nutrition a la language arts/science, I realized everything I was teaching did not go along with what is happening at our school when it comes to eating healthy. Do I simply tell the kids we need the money more than they need their future health? Or should I tell them that maybe only ‘some’ of them will get diabetes or cancer or have heart attacks—so go ahead and play the odds!”

Finally, Heaps took matters into her own hands and started selling what she considered healthier foods from her “fruit cart.”

“I used the cart that my overhead projector sat on,” Heaps explained. “Once I started selling fruit in my classroom and the kids knew, they kept coming to my room to buy it…I decided to take the fruit to them. I got some kids to help. We piled the fruit on the cart (we also had cheese sticks, granola bars, peanuts) and the kids pushed it around from room to room.”

Heaps said the parents of one of her students were local produce distributors and started delivering fresh fruit to her on Wednesdays. “My sister gave me a small refrigerator for my classroom so I could keep things cold. The fruit they delivered was awesome. They let me buy it at a discount so I was getting strawberries, blueberries, pears, all different kinds of apples. It was great.”

But Heaps made a mistake one day, taking the cart into the cafeteria during lunch. Federal rules forbid competing food being sold alongside the subsidized meal. “I had taken the Fruit Cart in the cafeteria because the kids wanted to have some fruit for lunch and the cafeteria either wasn’t selling any, or the fruit I had was so much better, the kids wanted it instead.” Then she sent an e-mail to the school staff—except the principal and assistant principal—in which she referred to the kichen workers as “evil lunch ladies.” Heaps said she meant it as a joke, but the gaffe was her undoing.

In a personnel memo dated May 1, 2009, principal Robert Mcmullen wrote, in part, “Your continued campaign has caused dusruption to the normal operatons of the district Food Serivce Director, district Finance Director, myself, your colleagues and the school…Therefore, I am issuing the following directive:

“You will support and treat all school and district personnel and departments with respect.

“You will include Mr. Westfall [assistant principal] and myself on all mass emails from or to school accounts.

“You will cease the fruit cart sales after the end of the school year.

“You will spend at least 15 minutes each day on lunch duty for the remainder of the 2009 school year. This will give you an opportunity to observe what our students are truly eating at lunch.

“You will bring me hard numbers regarding the percentages of EMS [Elizabeth Middle School] students who do eat hot lunches each day. These numbers will include both the full lunch as well as the pizza, Chick-Fil-A, Subway, etc. served in the hot line.

“You will meet with Susan Stevens, before the end of this school year, to better understand the realities of the economics of Elizabeth Food Services. Let me know when that meeting will take place and report to me your findings.

“You will bring to me the data showing the economic costs of eliminating the ‘Grab and Go’ line as you have proposed.

“You were hired to teach Language Arts. You will ensure that all your units, lessons and materials focus on the Language Arts standards and benchmarks.”

Heaps says she no longer teaches nutrition in her classes. But she does talk to her students about her husband and “how much our life changed when he got sick.”

“When I got the memo, everyone became afraid,” said Heaps. “If I tried to talk about the memo, no one wanted to listen. I got a little support from a couple of teachers, but not very much. Everyone wanted to forget about it and they wanted me to forget about it too…The only thing I still do is write letters and try to get someone interested! I’m working on one for Michelle Obama right now.”

Related Links:

What a D.C. private school can teach us about public-school lunches

Underground school lunch blogger hits ‘Good Morning America’

Ask Umbra on Ronald McDonald’s retirement, card games, and a coffee stirring stir

by Grist

Related Links:

Abu Dhabi bailed out Dubai—is the world next?

Plastic bags are the enemy of the ocean

Seattle’s bag-fee supporters still smiling despite setback

by Umbra Fisk

Dearest readers,

How did you like our first book club selection, Dolly Freed’s Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money? I thoroughly enjoyed it—aside from some mild retching at the thought of removing a turtle’s gallbladder (a necessary step for a proper snapper soup)—and came away feeling amused, inspired, and challenged. But enough about my insights; I’m much more interested in your inklings.

In the first chapter, Freed writes, “People don’t own possessions, their possessions own them,” and, “We have and get the good things in life so easily it seems silly to go to some boring, meaningless, frustrating job to get the money to buy them, yet almost everyone does. ‘Earning their way in life,’ they call it. ‘Slavery,’ I call it.”

What do you think about what Freed’s saying here? Do you think you’re a slave to your job or possessions? I saw a distinct connection between this concept and Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, in which Leonard describes the neverending treadmill of working to buy stuff, collapsing exhaustedly after work in front of the TV, where we’re told to buy more stuff, going back to work to earn more money to buy said stuff, and so on. What do you think about the relationship between Freed’s and Leonard’s messages?

Let’s get the discussion rolling in the comments below. I’ll pop in with feedback throughout the day. And stay tuned tomorrow for more queries and conversation starters. We’ll stick with the Possum Living discussion through Friday, when I’ll announce the next book selection, which we’ll be dissecting in May. (You can follow along with all the book club posts here.)

Rat racily,
Umbra

Related Links:

New Jersey to put ex-strippers to work weatherizing homes

Chu: “A price on carbon is essential”

‘The Story of Bottled Water’ and big fun learning about water

by Lisa Hymas

I’ve written about my
choice not to have children.  What’s
all too easy to forget is that many women still don’t have any reasonable choice about their fertility. 

An estimated 200 million women around the world don’t have
access to family-planning tools.  If they
did, 52 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute [PDF]. 

I’m not talking government mandates or coercion or
heavy-handed tactics—those approaches aren’t just ethically dubious, they’re
wholly unnecessary.  We just need to give
every woman everywhere contraceptive options so she can have basic control over
how many children she has and how close together she has them—something that
we in the developed world take completely for granted.  If we did so, many women would choose on
their own to have fewer children, or to space them further apart.  Not only would there be fewer new
bodies on our already crowded planet, but the lives of women and the children
they do choose to have would be
improved.

Most green groups don’t like to talk about all this—population
has become the third rail of the environmental community (more on that in a
future post). 

Technologists don’t like to either—they’d rather talk
about traveling-wave
nuclear reactors and CO2-sucking
machines and space
sunshades. We do need to explore and invest in cleantech options; climate change is serious enough that it requires all of our best efforts in all arenas.

But it may be that many of the technologies with the most
potential for averting climate change already exist—the Pill, the condom,
the IUD.  We just need to spread them far
and wide. 

GINK: green inclinations, no kidsBetter still, providing contraception to women who lack it
is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.  Each $7 spent on basic family planning over
the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a metric
ton, while achieving that same reduction with the leading low-carbon technologies would
cost a minimum of $32, according to a recent study by
the London School of Economics [PDF], commissioned by the Optimum
Population Trust.  And if you compare
contraception to the potential costs of geoengineering,
the potential savings are even more massive. 

As Laurie Mazur puts it in
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

[T]he developed countries’ share of
the cost to provide reproductive health services for every woman on earth is
$20 billion—about what the bankers on Wall Street gave themselves in bonuses
[in 2008].  The U.S. share of the cost is
$1 billion, less than 2 percent of what the United States will spend on the war
in Afghanistan [in 2009].  In contrast,
the scheme to launch mirrors into space is estimated to cost a few trillion
dollars.

When you look at those numbers, paying for condoms and IUDs
looks to be not just a huge bargain, but startlingly sane. It may not be as
sexy as space mirrors, but when’s the last time sexy solved a pressing global
problem? 

Related Links:

Debunking the “you’d be a great green parent” argument

Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud

Population growth should be curbed, argues Jane Goodall

by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

Senators drafting comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation are negotiating with polluters, and talking about combining a cap on carbon with public incentives for nuclear plants, “clean coal,” and offshore drilling.
Should supporters of strong, progressive action to solve the climate
crisis give up on Congress and work within the existing legal framework
of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and other environmental
legislation?

We would then rely entirely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s
existing authority to set rules for greenhouse gas pollution. However,
the EPA is subject to the same outside political pressures as lawmakers, who control the EPA’s purse-strings. Single members of
Congress or single committee chairmen can interfere quite effectively
with agency activities if they put their mind to it.

In addition, polluters have all kinds of legal tools they can—and
already are starting to—use to tie up, slow down and otherwise impede
the implementation of EPA rules. Without a Congressional mandate behind
it, the EPA will not have the political power it needs to implement
rules with the kind of strength activists want and the science demands.
The success of EPA rules absent Congressional action would depend on
the politics of whatever administration is in power.

By abandoning legislative reform, climate advocates could instead spend their resources on litigating against sources of global warming pollution.
But it also takes a lot of money and time to litigate against a coal
plant, and even more to win at it. Even if we could knock out all the
new coal plants through litigation, that isn’t going to be a workable
strategy for dealing with the ones that are already chugging away, not
to mention the refineries, chemical plants, and the rest of the
industrial sector, or the transportation sector.

If climate legislation reaches President Obama’s desk with a robust
framework, and gets core elements in place, we will come back to it and
keep making it better over time. We couldn’t get Congress to get the
Clean Air Act right the first time. So the original 1967 law was
amended—in 1970, then again in 1977, then again in 1990. This is why
strong—and rapid—scientific review provisions are an important
element.

It is a travesty that political reality makes it is incredibly
difficult to get even a watered-down climate bill even into the
ballpark of passage. To change that situation, we need to mobilize grassroots activism to change the political calculus for key states like Arkansas, Missouri, the Dakotas, Indiana, West Virginia, and so on.

At the same time, the federal legislative push shouldn’t be the
basket where all the eggs are placed either; policymaking at the local, state, and regional levels have always led the federal level, and the traditional Clean Air Act
framework is well-designed and understood. New climate legislation
should integrate with existing policy through amendment, not blanket
preemption.

Anyone who wants to see a stronger bill can help make it happen by putting meaningful pressure on the senators who are sitting on the fence or near it to support strong climate legislation, and being descriptive in naming what you’d like to see legislation do.

That’s the only way to reduce the number of unappetizing deals that
are going to get made. Telling people that the vehicle that’s moving
right now is hopeless and worthless makes the sponsors’ jobs that much harder—which means they’ll just cut more deals in order to get the bill done.

What’s critical for activists—including professional environmentalists—to remember is that the goal of climate activism isn’t comprehensive climate legislation, or strong
EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Our shared, common goal is a
green economy that rewards work, not pollution, and saves the natural
gifts of the world without which we all perish.

Related Links:

Lindsey ‘Green Economy’ Graham bashes the Clean Air Act

Reminder: the U.S. already has cap-and-trade—in the Northeast

American Enterprise Institute accidentally makes the case for climate legislation