As reported by the BBC, a University of Rochester study found recently that men whose mothers ate lots of beef during their pregnancies had lower sperm counts than the sons of women who ate little or no beef while pregnant:

Among sons of mothers who ate a lot of beef, 17.7 percent had a sperm concentration below the World Health Organization sub-fertility threshold of 20 million sperm per millilitre of seminal fluid. The figure for the sons of lower beef consumers was 5.7 percent.

Lead researcher Professor Shanna Swan said the findings suggested that exposure to growth promoters contained in the beef eaten by the boys’ mothers was to blame.

The researchers admit that they cannot pinpoint what chemical specifically caused the sperm damage. Europe banned growth promoters in beef in 1988 (they’re so civilized over there), so a study of sperm levels in sons born after 1988 to beef-eating mothers could more conclusively pin this on growth promoters.

In the meantime, it’s yet another reason to choose grass-fed, hormone-free beef. Or, hey, just skip the beef entirely (although when I was pregnant, after 14 years of vegetarianism, I had some serious beef cravings. Grass-fed beef cravings, of course.)

Why take this land out of conservation? Yep: ethanol. These groups, who mostly represent livestock producer interests, say they need that land to grow enough corn for both ethanol and livestock.

Most CRP land has been set aside because it’s not well-suited to crop production — it’s prone to severe erosion, it floods regularly, it’s hilly and therefore tough to work, etc. Under current regulations, farmers are penalized for taking land out of CRP before its registration term expires.

Putting corn on marginal land for a minuscule amount of fuel. Not a good idea.

To be fair, we do have to sympathize with the livestock producers who are faced with an increasingly tight corn supply. I mean, we know we can’t feed our cattle anything else.

About twice a day, an email from a mystery man/unflagging anti-ethanol crusader named Ray Wallace appears in my inbox, chock full of excerpts from the latest ethanol slams and, on lucky days, choice quotes from politicos and the like sounding less-than-smart about the whole business. I’m not sure how I got on his listserv, and I can’t quite say how you can (but if you’d really like to, let me know and we can probably work something out).

Anyhow (I’m getting to my point), I mention Ray so as to credit him for alerting me to this quote, contained in today’s edition:

I’m a big believer in ethanol … We’re going to run into a constraint pretty soon, though. It turns out corn is needed for more than just ethanol. You got to feed your cows and feed your hogs.
— From President George W. Bush’s January 30, 2007 speech in East Peoria, Illinois.

The funny thing is, I’d always thought we feed corn to cows and pigs because it’s dirt cheap and needing to be gotten rid of.

It’s not the first time someone has attempted to correct me on this. A few months ago, I was strolling past the meat counter at our regional mid-sized grocery chain and thought, hey, I should ask for grass-fed beef, ’cause they’ll only carry it if they perceive demand.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, do you have any grass-fed beef?
Butcher: Hmm, grass-fed? I don’t think you can feed grass to cows.
Me: Well, they’re ruminant animals, so I think that’s what they’re supposed to eat.
Butcher: [sympathetic-but-authoritative head shake] I don’t think so. They need vitamins and minerals and stuff.
Me: Uh …
Butcher: Now this [points down at large, marbled slab in meat case], this is corn-fed beef.
Me: Yeah, well, um, thanks anyway.

So I don’t know what those so-called grass-fed-beef farmers have been charging me an arm and a leg for, but with the president’s backing, I’m going to call that bluff.

In the meantime, I’m relieved to know that the FDA allows farmers to feed chicken manure to cattle — though I’ll have to ask my butcher about the vitamin and mineral content.

Think this doesn’t belong on an environmental blog? Think again. According to Season Shot’s creators:

Our environment is the basis for the sport of hunting. Without a healthy environment how would our hunting fare? Why damage the very thing that allows us to do what we love? Season Shot is the answer.

This is the first truly environmentally safe ammunition, Season Shot stands out above the rest. Using fully biodegradable shot, Season Shot is the right choice to protect what we love.

Delicious, ecologically-responsible, broken-tooth-free buckshot — I may have to take up arms.

(thanks, Arion)

According to “A funny place to store carbon,” a report issued today by the World Rainforest Movement, villagers living along the edges of Mount Elgon National Park in east Uganda, the site of a Dutch-owned carbon offset project, have been beaten, shot at, and repeatedly denied access to their land by armed park rangers guarding the “carbon trees” inside the park.

The FACE (Forest Absorbing Carbon-dioxide Emissions) Foundation’s carbon credits are sold to European offset companies with clients that include Amnesty International and the Body Shop.

I mean really, whether it’s carbon offsets, biofuels, coal-to-liquid, whatever, how long will we continue to think that we can buy our way out of this mess? The cost of our refusal to make actual changes to our lifestyles is beyond our imagining.

He starts the truck–well, gets it rolling–by releasing the emergency brake and putting the gearshift in neutral before jumping out and pushing the 3,330-pound vehicle down his sloping driveway with the engine off. He jumps in and, without braking, turns right, swerves around a dead skunk in the road, and then takes a left turn–again without braking–to a stop sign. Ahead, the light is red. “This is a long light,” he says. “I’m screwed. We have to throw it away.” “Throw it away” is the phrase Wayne uses to describe what most of us do with gasoline. We throw gas away when we accelerate fast, when we turn on the air conditioning, when we leave heavy stuff in the trunk, when we drive with a roof rack, when we don’t change the oil, when we underinflate our tires, when we roll down the windows, when we speed, when we brake, or when we idle. Wayne might seem a radical at times, but he’s really a conservative: He doesn’t want to throw anything away.

I don’t know about riding around with the a/c off and the windows closed in the middle of the Iowa summer with my two-year old in the backseat, but I could stand to employ a few other of these methods to reduce the fuel consumption of my handed-down-from-grandma, grad-student-budget-friendly, gas-hog V-6 Mercury Sable.

The world may soon be facing the highest food prices in history, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. The group released a missive today that says increased corn demand caused by the ethanol boom will dramatically raise food costs in the near future:

The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue. Soaring food prices could lead to urban food riots in scores of lower-income countries that rely on grain imports, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, and Mexico. The resulting political instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress, directly affecting all countries. It is not only food prices that are at stake, but trends in the Nikkei Index and the Dow Jones 500 as well.

This is more than a little alarmist and extreme, and a nice argument could be made that the dumping of subsidized, overproduced U.S. corn in “lower-income countries”, which undermines local markets and forces small farmers out of business, could stand to be staunched.

But choosing to produce more corn, and diverting that corn to ethanol production, is having and will have serious consequences, not only environmentally, as I’ve talked lots about here, but yes, probably on food prices too.

What I think will have an even greater impact on the lives of the less-fortunate residents of this planet (and ultimately, probably on all of us) is the destruction of tropical ecosystems to make way for fuel crops like oil palm.

It’s funny, I’ve always viewed soybeans sort of on par with corn — a lesser evil, since they’re legumes and therefore fix nitrogen, but a vile member just the same of the two-punch agricultural nightmare we live here in Iowa. But lately, as farmers are increasingly going all-corn, all-the-time, I’ve been finding myself pining for the good old diverse days of corn and beans. Sigh.

The president of Uganda asked the National Forest Authority boss to quit after he refused to license a palm oil company to destroy a pristine rainforest on an island in Lake Victoria, according to his resignation note.

According to the article, a palm oil plantation would offer economic benefits that outweigh environmental concerns. They’ll need to break the law to move ahead, but according to the president’s office, they have to act fast to beat out other countries that might also try to court the palm oil company.

Clearly this is an incredibly short-sighted act, as the ecological damage that ensues could soon not only make the island’s soil untenable for palm trees, but alter the lake’s ecosystem in ways that disrupt other income-earning activities it supports.

But we can’t really blame the Ugandan government for scrambling to grab a piece of the gold rush that global demand for biodiesel has created. Our do-gooder feelings (and low fuel prices!) at the expense of their rainforest. That’s not such a bad deal, is it?

Yes, it seems that medical “evidence” has finally shown homosexuality is not genetic at all. It is, in fact, your momma’s fault for giving you soy-based formula.

Let’s keep that “devil’s food” out of the mouths of babes and in our fuel tanks!

Seriously, though, soy products (that aren’t fermented) do contain high levels of phyto-estrogens, which are analogous to the female hormone estrogen. Studies are mixed as to the effects of soybeans’ chemicals and metabolites on infants, as well as on adults. But none of them point to a link between soy and homosexuality.

If you’re leery of soy formula’s possible effects on babies (and want to give your baby the best start all around), stick to breastfeeding.

Nothing but blue skies from now on?

Photo: house.gov

Great news! We can finally scratch “driving less” off our list of ways to curb global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil! Biofuels will soon not only replace much of our petroleum, but improve soil fertility and save the American farmer as well!

Sound too good to be true? Well, yes. But you could be excused for buying the hype.

Ethanol and biodiesel are being promoted as cures for our energy and environmental woes not just by flacks for corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, BP, and DuPont, but by many eco-minded activists and some prominent environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council as well.

As intuitive as it may seem that fuel from plants would be more benign than petroleum-based fuels, the ecological impacts of biofuel production are more complicated, and wider-reaching, than an environmentalist might first imagine.

For years, some critics have claimed that corn-based ethanol has a negative “net energy balance” — that is, that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it delivers as fuel. But as biofuel production efficiencies have improved, critics have turned their focus to broader sustainability issues.

“Even if corn and soy biodiesel have positive energy balances, that’s not enough,” says Andy Heggenstaller, a graduate student at Iowa State University researching biofuel crop production. “Large-scale production of corn and soybeans has negative ecological consequences. If biofuels are based on systems that exacerbate soil erosion and water contamination, they’re ultimately not sustainable.”

Stalk in Trade

Corn is one of the planet’s most energy-intensive crops. Industrial corn production requires huge quantities of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (derived primarily from natural gas) and petroleum-based pesticides like atrazine, a known endocrine disrupter. Soybeans need less nitrogen, but farmers douse bean fields with other nutrients and with chemicals like Roundup to keep them pest-free.

You can’t make a biofuel omelet without breaking ags.

Photo: nrel.gov

The effects of corn and soybean production in the Midwest include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen from a portion of the Gulf of Mexico called the dead zone that has, in the last few years, been the size of New Jersey.

As ethanol use pushes corn prices higher, farmers are increasingly abandoning the traditional corn-soybean rotation to what’s known in farm country as corn-on-corn. High prices have encouraged farmers to plant corn year after year, an intensification that boosts fertilizer and pesticide requirements.

Water use has also become a concern as corn production expands into drier areas like Kansas, where the crop requires irrigation. The ethanol boom has sent water demands skyrocketing, putting pressure on already suffering sources like the Ogallala aquifer.

And according to a recent report by the World Resources Institute, stepped-up corn ethanol production means not only increases in soil erosion and water pollution, but increases in greenhouse-gas emissions. “If your objective is reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, you need to be aware of what’s happening in the agricultural sector,” says Liz Marshall, coauthor of the WRI study.

Ethanol proponents say the fuel emits up to 13 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline. But an increase in emissions on the farm could cancel out benefits from emission decreases at the tailpipe.

A Kinder, Gentler Crop?

These environmental concerns have led researchers like Heggenstaller to join a wave of interest in a new generation of biofuels, the much-hyped but yet-to-be-seen-on-the-market cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic differs from grain ethanol in that the fuel comes from the fiber in the plant, rather than the starches in the grain. Any type of plant material can be a source of cellulose, and even cow manure could be processed into fuel.

Fans of cellulosic ethanol are interested in perennial grasses like prairie native switchgrass and towering miscanthus, which require much lower quantities of fertilizers and pesticides than corn and eliminate the need to plow fields annually, a major cause of soil erosion. They say these crops could produce much greater quantities of biomass than corn, and on lands less suitable for crop production.

Indeed, if biofuels are going to make a substantial dent in meeting our fuel needs, processors will need to look beyond corn. If all the corn currently grown in the U.S. were turned into ethanol, it would replace only 15 percent of our annual gasoline demand. (By way of comparison, we could eliminate 15 percent of our gasoline demand by increasing average fuel efficiency of U.S. cars by just four miles per gallon — an attainable goal using on-the-shelf technology.)

Soy has problems of its own.

Photo: nrel.gov

Due to soybeans’ relatively low oil yield, soy biodiesel production in the U.S. has already been written off as marginal by most researchers. So many academic and industry leaders are intensely optimistic about the transition to cellulosic sources.

“There’s no doubt cellulosic ethanol can supply our energy needs,” says Emily Heaton, manager of Energy Crop Product Development at Ceres, Inc., a California-based plant biotechnology company that’s working to develop high-yield biomass crops. She agrees with projections from the U.S. Department of Energy that say fuel from perennial grasses could replace more than a third of our petroleum needs by 2030. “We’ll be producing more than a billion tons of biomass a year in an environmentally sustainable way,” Heaton says.

But even the advent of cellulosic ethanol — which is not expected to come on line for at least several more years — could mean more corn, according to Charles Brummer, a professor of plant breeding at the University of Georgia who works with switchgrass and other perennial biomass plants. Corn stalks and other residues from the corn harvest could be used to make cellulosic ethanol just as readily as switchgrass.

“Farmers will produce what makes money,” Brummer says. “As long as farm programs support corn production, we’re not going to see them growing much of anything else.”

Meanwhile, in the Rest of the World

The hype over biofuels in the U.S. and Europe has had wide-ranging effects perhaps not envisioned by the environmental advocates who promote their use. Throughout tropical countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Colombia, rainforests and grasslands are being cleared for soybean and oil-palm plantations to make biodiesel, a product that is then marketed halfway across the world as a “green” fuel.

Socking it to an African palm in Myanmar.

Photo: myanmar.gov.mm

In Southeast Asia, and increasingly in the Amazon, plantations of the African oil palm have become wildly lucrative. After monocropping the palms on recently cleared rainforest land, growers press the palm fruit and kernel for oil that can be used in both food and industrial applications, including — and increasingly — as biodiesel.

The palm oil industry is booming: global exports increased more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2004. To meet the growing demand, producers in Malaysia and Indonesia have ramped up production by clearing thousands of square miles of rainforest for new plantations.

In Indonesia, rainforest loss for oil palms has contributed to the endangerment of 140 species of land animals, while in Malaysia animals like the Sumatran tiger and Bornean orangutan have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Fish kills have become common in waterways surrounding plantations and palm-oil mills, as soil erosion from the cleared land and mill effluents have left waterways clogged with sediment and unviable.

The boom hasn’t been limited to Southeast Asia. In one of the most disturbing examples of the biofuel hype’s hidden effects, right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia — a country mired in a four-decade-old civil war — have in recent years begun planting oil palm plantations over wide swaths of the territory they control. These areas of tropical forest, which lie in the northwestern coastal region known as the Chocó and rank among the planet’s key storehouses of biodiversity, have been almost entirely expropriated through violence, including massacres of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that have forced those populations out of the region.

Farther south, another biodiversity hotspot is being rapidly cleared to plant a biodiesel crop. Nearly 80 percent of Brazil’s Cerrado region — a woodland savanna mix — has been cleared for agricultural production, mostly for soybeans, according to a Conservation International report.

Despite being home to thousands of endemic plant and animal species, the Cerrado has been promoted as “the last agricultural frontier” by green-revolution hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug. Low land and labor costs and high yield potential have sent investors from as far away as Iowa scrambling to buy up these Brazilian grasslands, frequently in collaboration with U.S. agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, whose first Brazilian biodiesel production facility is currently in the works.

Tad Patzek, a professor in UC-Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who’s known primarily as a critic of corn ethanol, says what’s happening in tropical ecosystems is much more serious than the biofuel situation in the U.S. “We’ve already destroyed the prairie, and the topsoil in the Midwest is going, going, gone,” Patzek says. “But the expensive noise we’re making here is being translated there into the total obliteration of the most precious ecosystems on earth.”