Tuesday 30 November 2010

Cities, States Start to Adopt Climate Change Survival Strategies

As it becomes ever more clear that Congress has retreatedfrom climate change legislation faster than a Greenland glacier, cities andstates are starting to focus on adapting to the inevitable.

A report released this week by the California Adaptation Advisory Panel laid out themyriad threats climate change poses to the Golden State -- as well as strategies toanticipate and prepare for rising sea levels, along with more wildfires, heat waves, andwater shortages.

"Failure to anticipate and plan for climate variability andthe prospect of extreme weather and related events in land development patternsand in natural resource management could have serious impacts far beyond whathas already been experienced," the report states.

In short, California needs to deploy monitoring technologyalong its 1,100-mile coastline and overhaul its approach to land usedecision-making.

Eight cities and counties across the United States,meanwhile, have joined what is being called the nation's first climate adaptationeffort. The participants are Boston, Cambridge, Mass.,  Flagstaff, Ariz., Tucson, Ariz., GrandRapids, Mich., Lee County, Fla., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and the San FranciscoBay Conservation and Development Commission.

Created by the ICLEI-LocalGovernments for Sustainability, a Washington nonprofit, the ClimateResilient Communities program gives the cities and counties planning and database tools to prepare for rising temperatures and sea levels.

"Local governments have a responsibility to protect people,property, and natural resources, and these leading communities wisely recognizethat climate change is happening now, and that they must begin planning forimpacts that will only become more severe in the coming decades," MartinChávez, ICLEI USA's executive director and a former mayor of Albuquerque, saidin a statement.

The idea is to create a standardized municipal planningprocess to prepare for climate change.



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Monday 29 November 2010

Canada's Transgenic Enviropig Coming at Us After GE Salmon?

Canada's transgenic Enviropig is stuck in a genetic modification poke The small herd of pigs in a research barn in Guelph look like ordinary pigs.

They act like ordinary pigs, and presumably, they would even taste like ordinary pigs if anyone dared to break the law and sample one.

But these are Enviropigs. The transgenic creations of university researchers, they are the world's most controversial environmentally sensitive swine, and they're not legally fit to eat. At least, not yet.

Under development for more than a decade, the University of Guelph's 20 Enviropigs are close behind a Canadian-made supersized salmon in a race to become the first genetically modified animals allowed into the food system.

Starting with the discovery that an E.coli gene could produce a digestive enzyme that regular pigs lack, the Guelph scientists realized they could introduce genetic material from that bacterium into pigs to minimize the environmental impact of the animals' waste, reducing a major pollutant from large-scale production - and allowing pork producers to cut operation costs.

The market may soon need Enviropig. To feed the projected world population of nine billion in 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 per cent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Genetically engineered organisms will have to be part of the equation, according to the globe-spanning community of experts concerned with meeting those looming targets.

"You cannot feed the world at affordable prices without using the modern arsenal of inputs," said Marco Ferroni, head of the Syngenta Foundation, a Swiss-based non-profit established by its namesake seed company to pursue sustainable improvements in farm yields.

Among those "inputs" are controversial genetic modification techniques that enable faster and more environmentally friendly production of food, including intensive aquaculture and livestock, which are blamed for a significant amount of global greenhouse gas emissions. Critics say that genetic modification is a backward solution, one that papers over the problems of industrial food production.

But with mounting pressure to meet the world's food needs, the developers of the salmon and the Enviropig - both Canadian innovations - are taking their technology to countries where demand, commercial opportunities and the chances of regulatory approval are greatest. Although research in this country is responsible for both animals, the first country to commercialize them isn't likely to be Canada. 


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Wednesday 24 November 2010

Making Geography Fun for Little Ones

One of our favorite family activities is locating new countries on our globe and learning about the people and cultures of said countries. Margaret and I hope that our boys grow up to appreciate the beauty and diversity of our world and its living creatures, and what better way to encourage this than to spend family time tracing our fingers all over our globe.

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Tuesday 23 November 2010

How to Prevent and Treat Achilles Tendonitis

As you age, all of your ligaments and tendons become more susceptible to injury. This is just a fact of life. Once you stop growing, you start degenerating; all you can control is the rate at which you degenerate.

One of the most powerful ways to slow down the rate at which you experience degeneration is to regularly stretch your muscles and tendons. Stretching these tissues helps prevent scar tissue buildup and promotes healthy exchange of nutrients and waste products via steady blood circulation.

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Monday 22 November 2010

How to Stretch and Massage Your Inner Hip Muscles

There are many potential causes of hip pain and stiffness, and as anyone who has experienced significant trouble with a hip joint will tell you, inability to walk or even sit cross-legged without pain is a real quality-of-life-killer.

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Sunday 21 November 2010

How to Keep Your Hip Flexors Healthy

If you have tight hip flexors, you can expect to have problems with your hip joints and lower back, if not now, then almost certainly at some point in the future.

Your hip flexors are a group of muscles that enable you to bring your knee up towards your trunk. Though several muscles contribute to this action, the two primary players are your iliacus and psoas major, which come together to form the extremely strong ilipsoas tendon, which attaches your hip flexor muscles to your thigh bone.

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Saturday 20 November 2010

How to Foam Roll Your Hip Abductors

Your hip abductors are muscles that lie on the upper and outer portion of your buttocks. These muscles - called your gluteus medius and minimus - allow you to move your lower extremities out and away from your midline. They also allow you to rotate your legs inward so that the toes of one leg face your opposite leg.



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Friday 19 November 2010

Obama's Cheerleaders Fall on their Faces

The electoral debacle suffered by the Obama Administration and its Democratic Party will be blamed on many things, especially the secret wealth behind the myriad of coordinated campaign front groups dominating TV advertising in the wake of the Supreme Court's horrific decision in the Citizen United case, a Right Wing coup that essentially drove the nail into the money coffin encasing American democracy.

But let the blame be laid instead with the Obama Administration itself, the phony rhetoric of change and populism it embraced to win in 2008, and the betrayal of its promises of fundamental reform, openness and peace, ideals that so excited new and independent voters just two years ago. I've been writing since 2007 about the sell-out of the peace movement by MoveOn and its co-option as a campaign tool by Democratic Party. Web-centric, navel-gazing fundraising operations such as MoveOn and the liberal millionaires behind the Democracy Alliance fooled themselves into thinking that the election of Obama meant the Republicans were vanquished. But the pro-war, pro-Wall Street, anti-Single Payer reform antics of Obama and the Democrats undercut their reform rhetoric and revealed the hypocrisy of Democratic corporate liberals, or "progressives" as they have come to be called.

Obama's great email list of over ten million contributors, controlled by the Democratic National Committee and renamed Organizing for America, and the five million strong list of MoveOn, and the hundreds of millions spent in the past half decade by the elite wealthy funders behind the Democracy Alliance, were futile in this election. The phony health care reform bill and the idiotic and suicidal ratcheting up of the war in Afghanistan, a war doomed to failure in the years ahead, sealed the fate of the Democrats as they labored to paint lipstick on the pig that is the health insurance law, while sitting on their hands in the face of the counterproductive escalating war. The economy was put in the hands of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, a bit like handing Bonnie and Clyde the keys to the bank vault and a new get away car.


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Thursday 18 November 2010

Marijuana Legalization: Not If, But When

California's marijuana legalization initiative, Proposition 19, didn't win a majority of votes, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana.

What's most important is the way its mere presence on the ballot, combined with a well run campaign, has transformed public dialogue about marijuana and marijuana policy. The media coverage, not just in California but around the country and even internationally, has been exceptional, both in quantity and quality. More people knew about Prop 19 than any other measure on the ballot this year -- not just in California but nationwide.

The debate is shifting from whether marijuana should be legalized to how. Public opinion polls in California consistently reveal that a majority of the state's citizens favor legalizing marijuana. One "No on 19" campaign spokesman admitted that even his own supporters were divided between those who oppose legalizing marijuana and those who favor legalization but were wary of either Prop 19's specific provisions or the federal government's threats to block it from being implemented.

Prop 19 both elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana. It's the small but growing number of elected officials who endorsed Prop 19 or said they'd vote for it -- and the increasingly frequent private expressions of support by candidates and elected officials who said they wished they could be public about their position. It's the growing number of endorsements by labor unions, including SEIU California, and civil rights organizations, including the California chapter of the NAACP and the National Latino Officers Association.


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Wednesday 17 November 2010

Why New GIPSA Rules Support Family Farms

The USDA has a law on the books that levels the playing field between family farmers who raise cattle, hogs and poultry and the large meat packers who purchase their livestock and bring it to market. It's called the Packers and Stockyard Act, and its overseen by the USDA's Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration or GIPSA. But don't tussle with that mouthful because it doesn't explain what you need to know about the complex livestock market system. Just keep reading. GIPSA makes sure small producers have equal access to market that larger producers do. It's fair competition, which is, of course, the American way.

Sounds great, right? And just in time for the good food revolution. But instead, this law has been gathering dust because the USDA hasn't enforced it. New proposed rules (previously covered here on Civil Eats) amending the act would prevent large meat packers from artificially lowering the price of cattle, hogs and lamb. But four companies control over 80 percent of the U.S. meat market, and these "Big Four" are fighting an effort to strengthen the rule.

For all you urban food geeks who've never ridden the North Dakota range or shoveled chicken manure in central North Carolina, here's some context. When you're raising livestock, timely access to market is critical because a meat animal is a perishable product. When the animal has reached optimal weight, it must be sold in a narrow window of time, typically within two to three weeks. If it cannot be processed, it begins to degrade in quality, and a producer is subject to a significant price deflation. If a packer won't purchase your animals for slaughter, you're stuck selling your animal either too early or too late, competitive bidding isn't possible, and the packer conspires to give you a ridiculously low price for your labors.



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Tuesday 16 November 2010

Taking the 'Waste' Out of Human Waste

We do it every day.

But how many of us think about what happens after we pull the toilet lever?

Increasingly, people in Chicago and across the world are. They're questioning the sustainability of a system built on using clean water and a lot of energy to process waste, and reimagining the possibilities for what we flush away.

Call it taking the "waste" out of human waste - a movement that includes transforming sewage sludge into fuel, heating buildings with it, using composting toilets to produce fertilizer. It all adds up to a major point: Change is on the horizon, even if that horizon seems far away.

The United States used about 410 billion gallons of water each day in 2005, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. More than 30 percent of those gallons flush our toilets, which we do five times a day on average, according to the nonprofit American Water Works Association and its Research Foundation in Denver.

Dick Lanyon, executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, said it costs $747 per million gallons to treat the water. The district serves 5.25 million people.

Added Reed Dring, operations manager for Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, blowers have to pump almost 500,000 cubic feet of air per minute using 20,000 horsepower. "That takes a lot of energy," Dring said. "Our monthly electric bill is $1.8 million."

Though the plant offsets some of its costs by using methane gas generated by sewage sludge to heat its buildings, receiving less water would make the job easier, Dring said. "The less (wastewater) to pump, the less motors I have to run."

Rose George, author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters," said one of the problems with the current sanitation model, one she and others believe is unsustainable, is thinking of "human waste as waste and not a resource."



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Monday 15 November 2010

How the Places We Live Make Us Sick, and How They Could Heal Us Instead

The news came out a couple of weeks ago, and then it got swept away in the ongoing torrent of information: The Centers for Disease Control projects that by 2050, one in three American will have diabetes.

One. In. Three.

If we needed any more of a wakeup call about the catastrophic state of American public health, this should provide it.

Why is this happening? According to the report, "These projected increases are largely attributable to the aging of the US population, increasing numbers of members of higher-risk minority groups in the population, and people with diabetes living longer."

Fair enough. But why are people -- minority or otherwise -- getting diabetes in the first place? Scientists have proven the link between diabetes and obesity. And we have become a society where the road to obesity is quite literally built into our environment. Studies have shown that more vehicle miles traveled result in more obesity. Our broken food system is another huge contributing factor, but even there, the built environment factors in -- our inner cities are quite often "food deserts" where no healthy nutrition is available.

So if the places we live are making us sick, could they heal us instead -- if only they were designed better?

That's the fascinating question being raised by the Healing Cities Working Group of planners and health professionals in Vancouver.



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Agribiz BFF Bill Northey Defeats Reformer Francis Thicke for Iowa Ag Secretary

Republican Bill Northey was reelected Iowa secretary of agriculture, defeating organic farmer Francis Thicke 63 to 37 percent, despite being roundly criticized for his handling of the Wright County Farms 500 million salmonella-tainted egg fiasco.

As I wrote here in September, if Thicke (pronounced "TICK-ee") managed to unseat Northey, it would have been a huge win not only for sustainable agriculture in Iowa, but for the nation as we begin gearing up for the next Farm Bill. "The triumph of a reform candidate like Francis Thicke would demonstrate to Washington that a change in agricultural policy would in fact be welcome in much of the farm belt," Michael Pollan, food-system journalist and UC Berkeley professor, told me by email.

Well, with a margin that wide, it's safe to say that the opposite message has been sent. Agricultural reform may have been collateral damage from a different kind of cultural war, however: Iowa voters turned out in droves to remove three state Supreme Court judges who had ruled that same-sex marriage was legal. But while they also elected a Republican governor, they mysteriously voted in three Democratic congressmen in contested districts and approved an environmentalist-backed constitutional amendment.

The ag-sec race seems to have been about preserving the status quo. Incumbent Northey is a fourth-generation corn and soybean farmer whose reelection campaign was endorsed by the Iowa Farm Bureau (his grandfather was its president) and also, at the last minute, a Democratic Party power broker and former Monsanto lawyer. Thicke, meanwhile, was endorsed by such sustainable agriculture bigwigs as Pollan, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, along with Robert Kennedy, Jr. -- which may have ended up hurting him in the eyes of Iowa voters.



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Sunday 14 November 2010

Plenty Of Foods Harbor BPA, Study Finds

Some communities have banned the sale of plastic baby bottles and sippy cups manufactured using bisphenol A, a hormone-mimicking chemical. In a few grocery stores, cashiers have already begun donning gloves to avoid handling thermal receipt paper out of fear its BPA-based surface coating may rub off on the fingers. But how's a family to avoid exposure to this contaminant when it taints the food supply?

It's a question many people may start asking in response to data posted online November 1 in Environmental Science & Technology by a team of university and government scientists. Indeed, the last author on the paper is Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

In recent years, she's teamed up with toxicologist Arnold Schecter of the University of Texas School of Public Health on market-basket analyses of foods for various potentially toxic pollutants. Like Birnbaum, Schecter initially gained renown for studying dioxins. Now, both have moved into the BPA arena.

In their team's new paper, the Texas contingent locally purchased three samples of each of 31 types of canned or plastic-packaged foods. Another four examples of fresh meat and eight different types of pet food were also collected. All were analyzed for BPA - and 60 percent of the different food products hosted measurable quantities. Ironically, pet food contained less of the pollutant than did most of the items destined for human consumption.



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Saturday 13 November 2010

Where Has All The Water Gone?

Mankind is moving buckets and buckets of water from land to the ocean.

Sometimes science moves slowly and sometimes quickly. This is an instance of quick.

A couple of weeks ago TheGreenGrok covered a paper by Tajdarul Syed of the University of California, Irvine, et al who used hydrologic data to estimate the rates at which water flowed from the continents to the sea. They found that the rate rose over the study period from 1994 to 2006 and that the strongest component of that increase was an increase in evaporation over the ocean. The authors noted that such trends, if they continue into the future, would be evidence of an intensification of the hydrologic cycle, in which increased evaporation over the ocean leads to increased precipitation over the continents and subsequently more river discharge into the ocean.

While I had some reservations about the study -- recognizing, as the authors did, that the time period wasn't sufficiently long enough to draw conclusions about changes in the hydrologic cycle, and finding there were uncertainties in the numbers they derived -- I generally saw the paper as but another confirmation of the fact that our climate is changing. (To be clear, the findings of Syed et al were and are in no way central to the climate change issue but in line with it.)

But a new piece of the puzzle has been added with a report just out in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by Yoshihide Wada of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues. And that new piece calls into question the conclusions of Syed et al.

The Wada et al paper is about groundwater, but before we get to the specifics, a little background.



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Friday 12 November 2010

What the Midterms Mean for Federal Ag-Policy Reform

The House and Senate ag committees, that two-headed monster that dominates federal ag policy, both have a new look after the midterms.

In short, the Senate committee is getting a new chair, while the rest of it remains largely the same. The House committee's transformation is much deeper -- not only has it shifted from Democratic to Republican leadership, but more than a third of its members were ousted by the electorate.

What does this mean for farm policy ahead of looming 2012 Farm Bill negotiations? First, the details.

The Senate: Power struggle at the top

Senate Committee chair Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), a Blue-Dog Democrat with fierce loyalty to her state's industrial meat and cotton interests, is out (as expected).

Associated Press is reporting that her likely successor is either Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) or Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the subject of speculation last week, now has only an "outside chance" of grabbing the gavel, AP reports.


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Thursday 11 November 2010

Reducing Urban Water Use Around the World with Compost Toilets

Theodore Roosevelt once noted that "civilized people ought to know how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water." But that's what we're still doing every day.

The one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages. Yet it is still common around much of the world. Water enters a city, becomes contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted. Toxic industrial wastes discharged into rivers and lakes or into wells also permeate aquifers, making water -- both surface and underground -- unsafe for drinking.

The current engineering concept for dealing with human waste is to use vast quantities of water to wash it away, preferably into a sewer system, where it may or may not be treated before being discharged into the local river. The "flush and forget" system takes nutrients originating in the soil and typically dumps them into the nearest body of water. Not only are the nutrients lost from agriculture, but the nutrient overload has contributed to the death of many rivers and to the formation of some 405 "dead zones" in ocean coastal regions. This outdated system is expensive and water-intensive, disrupts the nutrient cycle, and can be a major source of disease and death. Worldwide, poor sanitation and personal hygiene claim the lives of some 2 million children per year, a toll that is one-third the size of the 6 million lives claimed by hunger and malnutrition.

Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment in India argues convincingly that a water-based disposal system with sewage treatment facilities is neither environmentally nor economically viable for India. She notes that an Indian family of five, producing 250 liters of excrement in a year and using a water flush toilet, contaminates 150,000 liters of water when washing away its wastes.


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Wednesday 10 November 2010

How Lead Gets Into Urban Vegetable Gardens

If you're a vegetable gardener in a lot of older cities, there's a fair chance you have a significant amount of lead in your soil. One common mitigation approach is to build a raised bed and fill it with freshly composted, low-lead soil from elsewhere, right? Maybe not, according to researchers studying the mysterious case of the lead contamination found within raised beds in community gardens in the Boston communities of Roxbury and Dorchester.

"Raised beds are surrounded by a sea of contaminated soil," said Daniel Brabander of Wellesley College. Brabander, his students and colleagues have been studying the lead in 144 backyard gardens in coordination with The Food Project, an organization committed to food security, nutrition and sustainable urban agriculture. Eighty-one percent of the gardens they studied were found to have lead levels above the U.S. EPA limits of 400 micrograms of lead per gram (µg/g) of soil.

To solve that problem, raised wooden beds with freshly composted soil were installed in backyard and community gardens by the Food Project. But the researchers have found that the soil in raised beds that starts with as little as 110 micrograms of lead per gram of soil rose to an average of 336 µg/g of lead in just four years.

Just how this is happening is the focus of a Nov. 1 presentation by Emily Estes at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

"We're trying to get a better handle on the mode of transport and the source," said Estes. That means some pretty detailed monitoring and chemical analyses of the minerals in the soils as well as the kind of lead that's in the soil.


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Tuesday 9 November 2010

USDA Issues Draft Environmental Assessment of GM Sugar Beets

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has prepared a draft environmental assessment (EA) of genetically modified sugar beets, including an option to permit planting of the beets under certain conditions.

A federal district judge ruled in August that the planting of GM sugar beets should be halted until the USDA completes an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), expected to be completed by the end of May 2012. However, the USDA said that it would allow limited planting of the sugar beets while the EIS was prepared and issued permits to four companies, which are understood to have already planted seedlings to produce seed for the 2012 crop - a move that the court ruled was illegal last month.

The USDA said its EA has been drafted in response to a request from KWS SAAT AG and Monsanto - currently the only supplier of GM sugar beets - for administrative action to allow continued cultivation of Roundup Ready sugar beets under certain conditions.

Deputy administrator for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service APHIS biotechnology regulatory services Michael Gregoire said in a statement: "APHIS takes its role in protecting plant health very seriously and is well aware of the importance of this decision for sugar beet growers and processors. We are issuing this environmental assessment to share our decision-making process as transparently as possible and allow for public comment."

Three alternatives

The draft EA puts forward three alternatives: Deny the request for partial deregulation or similar action, halting production until the EIS is completed; authorize production under APHIS-imposed conditions to limit potential plant pest risks; or allow partial deregulation "under conditions imposed by Monsanto/KWS through technology stewardship agreements, contracts or other legal instruments."

Under this third alternative, APHIS would no longer regulate Roundup Ready sugar beets. 


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