Back to the serious stuff

Commercial Whaling. Ugh. What can we say?

Back in 1975, Greenpeace started the world's first-ever Save the Whales campaign that eventually led to the International Whaling Commission's decision to ban commercial whaling (1986 to be exact). Apparently President Obama's delegation to the IWC has decided to back a plan that would legitimize commercial whaling for the first time since that ban was passed more than 20 years ago.

The Greenpeace Activist Network is right on top of the issue and headed to Washington next week but they still need your support. Please take a few moments to sign this petition to keep whales safe and out of politics!!

Dogs in China

Adam Minter wrote an interesting albeit disturbing article for Foreign Policy about the newest class struggle in China between rich dogs and poor dogs. The debate on whether to care for or to eat dogs pits younger, educated pet owners against the traditional rural Chinese. I am far too biased to offer an opinion on this issue but nonethessless it is a topic worth following and if you can stomach it, find the article here.

Call me crazy...

...but I don't believe that water should be treated as a commodity, being called "the new oil" and "blue gold." Water is a human right. The WSJ reports:

Water has become a booming $500 billion industry, by some estimates... Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, who has bought water rights for a chunk of the Ogallala aquifer in Texas and owns more water than any individual in the United States, has said the natural resource should be treated like any other commodity -- bought and sold for a profit... The world is running out of fresh H20, which accounts for just 3% of the earth's water. Recent moves by multinational corporations to privatize water sources could spell disaster for poor countries and residents with no means to pay... Geopolitical experts warn that water scarcity poses not just a public health risk, but a threat to global security. Currently, some 1.1 billion people, one-sixth of the world population, lack safe drinking water. Global water consumption is growing at unsustainable rates, doubling every 20 years, according to a March 2008 report by Goldman Sachs. A study by International Alert, a London-based conflict-resolution group, listed 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion that have a "high risk" for violent conflict over water in the next two decades.

Not cool, folks. Not cool. The WSJ sat down with the newly appointed United Nation's first senior advisor on water issues, Maude Barlow (Canadian water activist who has opposed privatization for 20+ years and author of Blue Covenant) to discuss the "corporate takeover of the world's water." Read highlights from their interview here.

Must Read Michael Pollan

Can't even begin to express how grateful I am for Michael Pollan and essays/articles like this one that appeared in last week's NY Times magazine. Pollan's letter to the President-Elect focuses on the major issue underlying health care, energy Independence and climate change: the food issue.

Any attempts I would make to paraphrase Pollan's article won't do his points justice - so I urge you to read the article. I can attempt to summarize by saying: Pollan examines the past, present and possible future food system as well as the political relationship between food and just about every other sector of our world in such as way as to remind us that food is the core of our existence and well-being. It is essentially a condensed version of his latest book but with a stronger and bigger message regarding what to do next. In Defense of Food educated and empowered the individual. This piece picks up where the book left off and addresses the system from the top down by way of some brilliant, if a *tad ambitious, proposals:


I. Resolarizing the American Farm

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

A few excerpts from the article:

"...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them..."

"We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine."

"First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change."

"Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial."

*tad ambitious = Pollan's suggestion to "tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden."

Will the world be flat, crowded, and hot?

Lots of buzz about The World is Flat author Thomas L. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. And apparently lots of buzzwords within its text. I'm hoping to pick it up soon but for the time being, here are some reviews:

The director of the energy and sustainable development program at Stanford University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, David G. Victor, calls the book a call to arms for an American-led green revolution in his recent NY Times article. It's hard to tell if that is his endorsement or criticism. From the article:

Mr. Friedman’s strength is his diagnosis of our energy and environmental nightmares. But blind spots appear when he turns to remedies. One is renewable power. Like most observers, Mr. Friedman assumes that the road out of today’s mess is studded with wind turbines and solar plants. Maybe that’s true, but maybe not. Such renewable resources account for only a tiny fraction of current power supply, and when the titans of today’s energy industry think about cutting carbon dioxide, they are more likely to imagine building carbon-free nuclear power plants or advanced coal plants that safely bury their pollution underground.

Victor's mention of carbon-free nuclear power plants has sparked my interest for the book he himself is writing on these subjects at hand. My father did a series of lectures across the country back in the 70s about nuclear energy that I'd hoped to retrieve the transcripts of but, unfortunately, I get the sense he's not too interested in jumping into eco-politics these days.

Gregg Easterbrook is less impressed with the book and takes a poke at Friedman's doomsday attitude in his review for Slate. But critics are by nature critical, right?

So thanks to the NY Times, you can read the first chapter of Hot, Flat, and Crowded here