By Grist staff

Trying to get some work done? Banish the thought. It’s National Bike Month, it’s spring, and these lovely people obviously need company.

By Bryan Barney

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Rodolfo Dirzo. (Photo by Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.)

If you think all ecologists are focused on the gloom and doom of climate change, think again. Some of them have even bigger things on their minds.

“I think that, given time and political will and political savviness, we might be able to fix the climate change situation,” says Rodolfo Dirzo, the Bing Professor in Ecology at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies. “But biological extinction is not a reversible thing. To me — and I know that this might be controversial — I think that biological extinction is the most dramatic global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene.”

I met Dirzo while preparing for my first class at Stanford: Field Ecology and Conservation. We were organizing the materials for experiments that we would be performing in Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve, the northernmost tropical rainforest in the Americas, located in Veracruz, Mexico. Dirzo, many years prior to his arrival at Stanford, was the director of research at the reserve. His observations there have led him to study not only the effects of deforestation, but his new line of thinking around “defaunation,” or how the loss of medium and large animals have restructures the forest understory, and ultimately shape a whole tropical ecosystem.

“Go to Los Tuxtlas and you walk in this amazing forest — it looks so lush and green and exuberant,” he says. “We don’t really see what is happening to the animals, unless you begin to really carefully start monitoring.”

In this interview, we talk about the rise of “rodentation,” the ecological version of “the living dead,” and the ethical implications of wiping out the results of 3.5 billion years of evolution.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

By Chip Giller

Dear Grist readers,

Please give to Grist today. It’s our last shot at $25K!

My staff has been struck by a curse:
We have to keep speaking in verse.
But a timely donation
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Give now, or this curse will get worse!

Grist readers, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the raven that put this curse upon us, I’m going to break from speaking in verse for just a moment so I can ask you, in all earnestness, to support Grist today with as little as $5.

We gotta get just a few more gifts by midnight to earn an additional $25,000 from a generous donor. We are so close to our goal of 3,000 gifts, and we don’t want to leave that money on the table. Please help us meet our goal and capture the gold. We don’t want to be doomed to meetings like this:

If you value our clever reporting,
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If we’ve made your life better,
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P.P.S. If we reach our goal by May 15, Grist will receive $25,000 from a generous donor.

By Douglas Gayeton

Editor’s note: If you liked the series of photos we featured from the Lexicon of Sustainability this winter, you might enjoy this video — which is one of three currently running on PBS.org.

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By Scott Rosenberg

When we do these semiannual fundraising appeals here at Grist we sometimes look over at our peers in public broadcasting with envy.

When they don’t meet their goals, they extend their deadlines. They just keep going. They’re machines! We’ll just keep torturing you, they say, until you give.

We’re nicer than that. We’ve never extended our deadline. We live by the deadline here. But we don’t want to die by it.

So the deadline for this appeal is fast approaching. And, to be honest, the involuntary poetry slam that Grist has become over the last 10 days? It’s just exhausting. But you can do something about it! Give now, and put an end to our misery.

Here’s what I mean:

My first week at Grist a few months ago, this gull decided to make a home on my windowsill for the better part of a day.

It stared at me. I stared at it. It made noises at me. I tried not to make noises back.

I thought of that bird when I watched our first appeal video — the one with the Muppet-style raven harassing Grist’s founder while mouthing droll Poe parodies.

And then it hit me — the curse!

If I post here tomorrow
Things just couldn’t be the same
‘Cause Grist’s so plagued with this nonsense
And this verse you cannot change!

Yes, it has come to this: Our lyrical disease has reached an advanced stage, and Lynyrd Skynyrd has infected my brainstem.

In the next stage, I fear, it’s gonna be “Surfin’ Bird,” and we just don’t want to go there.

So take pity on us wretches. Give to Grist now — and it’ll all be over soon.

By Tove Danovich

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Photo by Idit Narkis Katz.

Every July since 1926, Traverse City, Mich., has hosted a national cherry festival. The event attracts tourists to the city, which in turn calls itself “The Cherry Capital of the World,” an epithet that might seem hyperbolic if Michigan didn’t grow nearly 75 percent of the nation’s tart cherries. Also known as sour or “pie cherries,” tart cherries are bright red fruit that are traditionally frozen and processed. Most sweet cherries, on the other hand, are eaten fresh and grown in Western states.

This year it’s looking unlikely that the Cherry Festival will feature any Michigan cherries. Two 80-degree weeks in March caused blossoms to bud early, before the Midwestern winter returned with its standard frosty, below-freezing temperatures. Though many growers are still a few weeks from knowing the full extent of the weather damage, they’re looking at what could be a total loss.

Michigan’s $17 billion tourism industry will find ways around the worst of this weather-induced crisis. The National Cherry Festival’s organizers have already made plans to order the fruit from Yakima, Wash., and Cherry Republic, a Michigan-based store offering products based around cherries, went all the way to Poland to build this year’s inventory. But for growers and farmworkers who depend on summer orchard crops, a year like this means a lot more than a change in sales strategy — it’s a huge loss of income.

King Orchards is one of many family farms affected by the weather. The owner, John King, isn’t optimistic. “This year we don’t know if we’ll have any fruit at all,” he says. King explains that while insurance is available through the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program to subsidize his failed apple harvest, there is no such thing for his farm’s cherries. “An insurance payment would be less than our labor bill for the year,” he said. With a typical profit margin of 10-20 percent, it could take growers like King three to five years to recover.

While the farmers get most of the attention in the event of a failed harvest, it’s the agricultural workers who are hurt the most. A recent study by Michigan State University [PDF] showed that agriculture brings $91 billion and 923,000 jobs into the state. Michigan may be frequently cited as an example of the nation’s poor economy, but its agricultural industry, responsible for a quarter of all state income, does well when the weather cooperates.

Unfortunately for fruit-lovers, Michigan cherries are not going to be the only affected crops this year. This past March, residents of the entire Great Lakes Basin area were trying to remember how to put on shorts and sunscreen before buttoning back up in late April. Low fruit yields for New York, Pennsylvania, and Ontario are almost certain. Unseasonable weather, however nice for our tans, is rarely good for our farms. As John King said, “We had two weeks of 85-degree weather. That should frighten anybody who likes food.”

A bad year is not unheard of in agriculture. When dealing with nature, any number of factors must be in place for fruit to grow — weather conditions, pollination, and proper pest control being among the most important. In fact, Michigan faced a similar occurrence as recently as 2002 — a warm spell that decimated the tart cherry crop but left other survivors behind. But this year’s prolonged good weather is estimated to damage 50 to 90 percent of all orchard crops.

While one year of unseasonable weather could be blamed on Mother Nature’s strange whims, two of them occurring within a decade is cause for concern. If these warm springs do prove to be the start of a pattern, it could cause spiraling consequences for our food supply. In the last decade, there has been a lot of interest in funding climate-based research into the cherry industry — tart cherries in particular, since they tend to be most sensitive to weather variations. The Pileus Project and Climark started in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and both are working to study the current and potential effects of climate change on Michigan cherry production. The energy and financial backing behind such projects implies a certain amount of worry should weather events like this year’s become commonplace. Orchard crops take years to mature and require a much longer investment than row crops, or annual agricultural products like corn, which are planted every year and mature in a matter of months. Depending on the findings of these studies, growers and others relying on the cherry industry for their livelihoods may start replacing their orchards with more resilient crops.

In an interview with Great Lakes Echo, Roy Black, agricultural economist, said, “From [the grower’s] point of view, this has not been a very profitable industry for quite a while. So the bigger picture is, is this industry at a point where we ought to be reinvesting?” In other words, if this unpredictable weather keeps up, we may need to name a new Cherry Capital of the World.

By Lisa Hymas

Don’t expect the environment to be in the spotlight in political campaigns this year. The economy will be the star in 2012, with the culture wars singing backup.

Still, environmental issues are getting talked about, often obliquely as part of larger discussions about energy — though the words don’t always mean what you might think they mean. And the words politicians don’t say can tell you as much as the words they do.

Here’s a guide to energy and environmental buzzwords you’ll be hearing, or not, this election year:

Gas prices
Republicans thought they’d get a lot of mileage out of this phrase, but now it looks like it might not get them too far. When gas prices were trending upward earlier this year, Republicans went all out blaming Obama and the Democrats. Now that gas prices have come back down, the Republican messaging has gotten muddled.  Still, the GOP is not quite ready to drop the issue.

Never mind that the president and Congress can’t do a damn thing to control prices at the pump.

Energy subsidies
“Subsidy” is a bad word in Washington these days, synonymous with “taxpayer giveaway” and “crony capitalism.”

If a politician wants to steer money to an industry, s/he’ll instead use words like “investment,” “support,” and “job creation.” See: Republicans defending oil and gas subsidies (an increasingly awkward endeavor), and Democrats defending clean energy subsidies.

If a politician wants to cut off money to an industry, that’s when the word “subsidy” comes out. See: Obama railing against oil and gas subsidies and other Democrats pushing the new End Polluter Welfare Act, and Republicans railing against subsidies for renewables and fulminating about Solyndra (more on that below).

Democrats would seem to have the upper hand with the subsidy buzzword this year, as most Americans are sick of supporting Big Oil and eager to support renewables.

Big Oil
Speaking of, “Big Oil” is a phrase you’ll only hear from Democrats this year. Obama’s particularly fond of it. Republicans don’t have a great rejoinder, as Big Solar and Big Wind don’t yet exist.

Keystone
If you hear a politician say the word “Keystone” this year, you can bet s/he’s a Republican.

Obama has been trying to please everyone on the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline — denying it a permit in January, then praising its southern leg in March. Predictably, he’s just managed to piss everyone off, so expect him to avoid the topic from here on out.

Republicans, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to keep the issue in the news — and they’re getting help from pipeline builder TransCanada, which recently reapplied for a permit. The GOP argues that Obama’s unwillingness to rubber-stamp the pipeline is hampering the economy and making America less energy secure — even though those arguments are false. Currently the GOP is trying to force Keystone approval into a big transportation bill.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are walking on eggshells around this one. They don’t want to anger the green wing of the base, which showed its might by elevating Keystone into a national issue last year. But they also don’t want to be painted as anti-job or tick off any of the unions that want to help build the pipeline (the labor community is split on the issue). A poll released by Hart Research in February suggested that the Keystone fight is winnable for Dems if they articulate a clear message — say, that the pipeline would create as few as 50 permanent jobs, according [PDF] to researchers at Cornell University, and that much of the oil it transports would be shipped overseas. But savvy, strategic messaging is not a Democratic strong suit of late.

Solyndra
If you hear a politician say the word “Solyndra” this year, you can know s/he’s a Republican.

Republicans will keep harping on the bankruptcy of solar company Solyndra, which got a federal loan guarantee of more than half a billion dollars. They say it shows the folly of the federal government trying to pick winners in the energy sector and boost the economy through stimulus spending, and recent ads from GOP groups go further with salacious (and bogus) Solyndra-related charges. Romney slipped up earlier this year and said “Solyndra” when he meant “Keystone,” betraying the fact that Republicans see both issues primarily as cudgels with which to bash Obama.

Obama has been defending his administration’s Solyndra investment, albeit without mentioning the company’s name. His first TV ad of the campaign season went after his Solyndra critics. In March, he said, “Each successive generation recognizes that some technologies are going to work; some won’t. Some companies will fail; some companies will succeed,” echoing language from his State of the Union address in January. Other Dems have been less sure-footed in their responses to the Solyndra mess. Expect them to avoid the topic like the plague.

Clean energy
“Green jobs” is soooo 2008. “Clean energy” is now the phrase du jour if you want to talk about shifting to an economy based on renewables and efficiency — and so far, only Democrats do.

Obama is running hard on this theme: “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he’s said more than once. The president regularly visits cleantech companies and highlights the economic promise of cleantech jobs.

Republicans counter by talking about “energy jobs” — the kind that come from building pipelines and mining coal and fracking. “Drill baby drill” talk continues to resonate with the GOP base, while right-wing groups are trying to spark an anti-wind movement. Still, a handful of Republicans from states with big wind potential are calling for extension of a wind-energy tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of the year, recognizing that clean energy can be a job creator.

Poll after poll finds widespread support from voters across the spectrum for renewable power, so you’d think smart politicians would try to tap that vein.

Climate
In 2008, from the presidential candidates on down the ticket, Democrats and Republicans alike offered up plans for combating climate change. But you won’t be hearing “climate change” or “global warming” in many of this year’s stump speeches — and that absence speaks volumes.

President Obama recently told Rolling Stone that he thinks climate will become a campaign issue, but even he doesn’t seem to believe it. He didn’t even bother to mention climate change in his most recent Earth Day address. The president thinks he’ll reach more independents by talking about clean energy, energy innovation, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy (snatched right from the Republican playbook). Many of his fellow Democrats are following his lead and shunting climate into the shadows, still smarting from the ignominious death of climate legislation in 2010.

Mitt Romney doesn’t like to talk about climate change either because he’s flip-flopped on the issue. Most other Republican politicians bring up climate change only if they want to voice their skepticism. Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) is launching a new group to promote conservative solutions to climate change, but don’t expect that effort to gain much traction this year.

Yes, that’s right, the most critical issue ever to face humanity is getting less attention this election season than dogs.

A version of this post was originally published in SEJournal.

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By Sarah Henry

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Dan Susman (driving) drove around the country documenting urban farms with his co-filmmaker Andrew Monbouquette.

Fresh out of Dartmouth College and with time on his hands, Dan Susman and his childhood friend Andrew Monbouquette set out on an excellent, edible adventure — a road trip to document many of the innovative urban agriculture efforts sprouting up all over the country.

Susman, now 24, grew up in Omaha, Neb., gardening in the backyard with his mom and dad. He planted pumpkins, named them things like “Big Max” and “Atlantic Giant,” and always hoped come fall he might end up like James and the Giant Peach. No such luck: Evil squash bugs, and ever-looming drought, meant from all those seeds he carefully tended he’d typically end up with just one pumpkin weighing more than he did. But it was enough; a farmer was born.

Since then, Susman has worked on a small-scale farm in Venezuela and for the urban ag-focused Zenger Farm in Portland, Ore. He grew to realize not all kids are as lucky as he: Many never get a chance to plant a bean or taste a watermelon straight off the vine. But with the forthcoming film Growing Cities, Susman hopes to change that.

The independent filmmakers are currently seeking distributors and funding for the feature, which they hope to have ready to screen in 2013. Susman recently shared details about the project and what it’s taught him.

Q. Why did you make Growing Cities?

A. Growing up together in Omaha, Andrew and I were surrounded by some of the country’s most fertile farmland, yet only a fraction of a percent of that land is used to grow produce. As with so many other cities across America, Omaha is filled with fast food restaurants and not many places that offer fresh, healthy food. We wanted to search out alternatives.

Q. There are a lot of food films about urban farming right now — Edible City and Food Forward come immediately to mind. How is your film different?

A. Growing Cities will be the first feature-length documentary to look at urban farming in a national context and weave together farmers’ stories from as diverse places as New York City and New Orleans.

Our film doesn’t just tell the story of the farmers and their communities, but the tale of our trip across America discovering things ourselves. We might have had a preconception that urban farmers are all similar types of people. But we learned on our trip that the community is diverse: We’ve met or known an urban farmer of every age, race, class, and economic situation who is growing food in the city for reasons as diverse as they are. This is not a hippie — or hipster — movement, though there are plenty of each.

Q. You visited with 80 urban farmers; who stood out and why?

A. Something incredible is happening down in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans with Our School at Blair Grocery, a food justice academy. Nat Turner and company are working to empower youth by engaging them deeply with their food system, including planting, harvesting, and selling food to local restaurants. Those kids have stories of struggle — guns, gangs, violence — and every day they work on the farm is a new day for them, in a safe place where something positive happens with their hands. It doesn’t get much better than that.

In terms of a model for financial sustainability, which seems to be the question on many farmers’ minds, Carol Ann Sayle of Boggy Creek Farm has got it down. She and her husband Larry have been farming for over 20 years in Austin — since before there was “urban farming.” They started selling produce to Whole Foods before it became a national brand. She’s inspired three other urban farms to start up within a few blocks, creating an urban agricultural district about a mile from downtown [Austin] that rivals anything we’ve seen.

The best urban farmers work creatively and collaboratively to achieve their goals. A great example of this is City Farm Chicago. They work closely with the city to identify vacant lots that can be farmed in the interim as the land waits to be developed. Once land is identified, they work with neighborhoods to figure out their needs, whether it’s creating green space, growing fresh produce, or providing job opportunities. When it comes time to develop, they pack up their compost and move on to the next site, working to help another part of the city grow.

Q. Did any places stand out?

A. I remember rooftop farmer Ben Flanner of Brooklyn Grange telling us how it was practical to be growing food on a rooftop in N.Y.C. Although it seemed a little strange at the time to think it was practical to take an elevator to a farm and harvest raspberries with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline, Ben had a point. As we looked across the cityscape, there was an incredible amount of un-utilized space; all of which seemed like a waste when we saw how much food you could grow on a single rooftop.

In Seattle they have an incredible community garden program, and a whole city department devoted to getting people the land and resources they need to grow food. Detroit has some great urban farm models for economic development, and Milwaukee is becoming the hub for all things aquaponic.

Q. What are some of the challenges that an urban (versus rural) farmer faces?

A. One of the biggest is all of the different tasks an urban farmer must do by default. They not only have to grow food, but they have to be educators, spokespeople, policy advocates, and much more. The degree to which they can juggle all these tasks and still stay focused on their goal, the more effective they are.

Every farmer we met had neighbors (sometimes lots of them) and had to work to get along with them in one way or another. The better the farmers embed themselves and work with their community, the more successful they are. That could mean making partnerships with local restaurants, youth organizations, and rural farmers, or just taking the time to educate their neighbors about what they’re up to.

Q. Each region must have its own unique set of challenges, but what are the common threads?

A. Communities like Detroit and Oakland have seen rampant disinvestment and literally a hundred years of unfair policies that have caused massive social and economic inequality. So, the reasons people are getting into growing food there are different than in communities that haven’t had the same struggles.

That’s not to say the reasons why residents of Berkeley are growing food are less meaningful than those in Oakland, it’s just that it’s more likely they are doing it for health or environmental reasons, rather than to make money or to revitalize their community. And that’s really why I’m working on this film — to make growing food accessible to everyone.

Q. Why do you think urban farming has captured national attention?

A. It allows people to reimagine what’s possible in cities. City farms challenge us to get beyond the urban/rural divide and really think about how we can all be producers in a society that is driven by consumption. I think it’s this quality that is capturing so many people’s hearts and minds, especially during this rough economic time.

It also doesn’t hurt that the scenes of urban farms are really photogenic — think tomatoes sprouting from concrete or chickens on a roof. It all makes for a visual story, where people’s imaginations can run wild.

By David Roberts

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By David Roberts

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Not that long ago, some folks were arguing that clean energy — unlike climate change, which had been irredeemably stained by partisanship (eww!) — would bring people together across ideological lines. Persuaded by the irrefutable wisdom of wonks, we would join hands across the aisle to promote common-sense solutions. It wouldn’t be partisan, it would be … post-partisan.

Some day, I will stop mocking the people who said that. But not today. The error is an important one and it is still made regularly, especially by hyper-educated U.S. elites. They think clean energy is different from climate change, that it won’t get sucked into the same culture war. They are wrong.

On clean energy, the material/financial aspects of the conflict are the easiest to understand. Wind, solar, and the rest threaten the financial dominance and political influence of dirty energy. Last week, the Guardian broke the story of a confidential memo laying out a plan to demonize and discredit clean energy, meant to coordinate the plans/messages of several big right-wing super PACs funded by dirty-energy money.

At the bottom of that same piece, though, is one of the best expressions I’ve ever seen of the cultural and psychological aspects of the conflict. Witness:

Opposing Obama’s energy policies was a natural fit for conservatives, said Marita Noon, a conservative activist from New Mexico who was at the meeting. “The American way, what made CostCo and Walmart a success, is to use more and pay less. That’s the American way.” The president’s green policies however were the reverse, she said.

“President Obama wants us to pay more and use less.”

Not for the first time, it strikes me that conservatives understand the stakes of this struggle much better than liberals and centrists do, especially at a gut level. They’re on the wrong side of it, but at least they get it.

Photo by Walmart.

Noon is more or less correct: The American Way has been to carelessly consume high quantities of cheap energy, much of it embedded in disposable plastic crap at Walmart. Conservative leaders are telling their flock that there are endless deposits of fossil fuels all around them, if only those pesky Democrats and their regulations would get out of the way. The message is that the American way of life can continue forever, indeed that it is our patriotic birthright, but that Democrats want to take it from them. That goes deeper than energy. It’s about home and hearth.

And Noon is right that the alternative — barely hinted at by Obama’s policies, but sure to come into sharper relief in coming years — is to use much less, and more expensive, energy. You and I know that even if the per-unit price of energy goes up, consumer bills can go down, through efficiency. You and I know that it’s possible to use less energy while still enjoying the same high quality of life. You and I know that there’s no other choice, that cheap, abundant fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

But Noon and her ideological cohort are hearing otherwise. They’re hearing that American abundance, the bounty available to even the poorest Americans at Walmart, is under threat. They’re hearing that Democrats want to make America, the land of plenty, into Europe, the (imagined) land of tiny cars, cramped apartments, and high prices. Again, that’s about more than prices or watts. It’s about cultural identity.

Clean energy supporters can try, if they want, to convince people like Noon that clean energy can offer the same abundance — “use more and pay less” — that fossil fuels offered, through the magic of technology or innovation or whatever. But it’s dishonest. Reducing emissions enough to substantially slow climate change will inevitably involve being more judicious and intelligent in our energy use. Profligate, heedless consumption of disposable crap is going to have to be reined in. That will mean changing habits and land-use patterns. Insofar as those habits and land-use patterns are viewed as constitutive of a “way of life,” many will view that as a threat.

Remember, unlike wonks, average folk don’t think in terms of discrete political “issues.” They think in terms of broad cultural associations and identities. For the conservative base — about which I’ve written many times, see especially here — the issue of energy is wrapped up in a way of life that they view as under threat from multiple directions.

As I’ve said before, it’s unlikely that such people can be persuaded with evidence and reason. What they will eventually do is die off. In the meantime, the job is to define a new American way of life for young people, so when they take over they won’t view Walmart as akin to church.

See also: More on clean energy and the culture war