Legalizing Marijuana Would Hinder the Multi-Billion Dollar Empire of Mexican Drug Cartels

By Jonathan Benson
The prohibition of marijuana in the US has led to an "underground" cannabis industry in Mexico run primarily by violent gangster cartels like the ones wreaking havoc at the southern borders of Texas, Arizona, and California.

These cartels reap anywhere from $1 to $20 billion a year illegally selling marijuana to Americans, but advocates of reform and legalization say the crime and terror associated with the illicit drug trade would largely end if marijuana was simply decriminalized.

Just a few weeks ago, Mexican soldiers burned a 300-acre field of marijuana some 200 miles south of San Diego, Calif., near Tijuana, Mex. Operated by drug cartels, the field contained a potential yield of around 120 tons of marijuana, which is worth about $160 million, according to reports. And back in October, soldiers performed another burning on 134 metric tons of vacuum-packed marijuana discovered in the same region.

The constant pursuit of cartels that grow and sell marijuana, as well as raids and burnings of marijuana fields, have led to massive cartel backlash. After the Tijuana raid and burning in October, for instance, cartels murdered 13 recovering drug addicts at a rehabilitation center.

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America's Environmental Garden Spot: Would You Believe Manhattan?

What's the greenest place in America? If you answered something like the granola-crunchy, Rocky Mountain-high town of Boulder, you'd be wrong. If you guessed the sea breezes and warm sunlight of Santa Barbara, you'd be wrong again. The greenest place in America is almost devoid of nature - the buildings outnumber the trees - and the air isn't all that great. But what it has is density and efficiency - the twin qualities that ultimately define green in the global warming era. Applying those standards, the greenest place in America is New York City - specifically, the overcrowded, overpriced and sometimes overwrought island of Manhattan, which has a per-capita greenhouse gas footprint less than 30% that of the national average.

It's that density - the sheer number of people living in such a small area, often literally on top of each other - that makes Manhattan, and New York City as a whole, so green. Manhattan's population density is 800 times the national average. Density comes with negatives, certainly - small living spaces, air pollution, lots and lots of concrete - but it also enables amazing efficiencies. More than 80% of Manhattanites travel to work by public transit, by bike or on foot - compared to an average of about 8% everywhere else in the country. The vertical apartment buildings that Manhattanites live in are far more energy-efficient than single-dwelling housing in the suburbs. "Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams," wrote David Owen in his 2009 book Green Metropolis. "But in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility."

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What Would the World Look Like If We Relied on Industrial Agriculture to Feed Everyone?

By Ari LeVaux
The world's population will probably hit 9 billion by 2050. That's about the only thing agreed upon by partisans in a long-waged debate over how best to feed all those bellies. 

On March 8, Dr. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, released a report arguing that the use of small-scale, diverse farming methods, which he calls "agroecology," can double agricultural production in poverty-stricken areas, increase the economic prospects of the inhabitants, and improve their local environment. 

This argument refutes a common dismissal of sustainable agriculture: that it could never feed the world. That's the contention of those who believe in agriculture methods that involve the intensive use of energy, water, machinery, and chemicals to grow cash crop monocultures. I recently discussed these competing paradigms with De Schutter, in the context of what it might look like if industrial agriculture were, in fact, to feed the world. 

"I'm surprised at the simplistic diagnosis that appears to be dominant in public discourse," De Schutter said. "The official mantra is we need a 70 percent increase in agricultural production to feed the world. But this completely oversimplifies the debate. It only pays attention at the supply side of the equation, when we must also work on demand -- for instance the overconsumption of meat in industrialized countries. By 2050, if the current curves continue, 50 percent of global cereal production will go either to feeding cattle or to the irresponsible push towards biofuels production and consumption through fiscal stimuli and subsidies." 

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