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Dude, Where’s My Crop?

USDA failing to keep track of gene-mod crop experiments The U.S. Department of Agriculture has failed to adequately monitor thousands of acres of experimental biotechnology crops, according to, um, itself. A two-year internal investigation yielded a report released quietly — that is to say, buried — in the days before Christmas. In it, the department’s […]

Village riot highlights stress between development and rural land in China.

Like all rapidly developing nations, China is ripping into its countryside to develop industry and Western-style infrastructure (e.g., superhighways).

Over the weekend, cops cracked heads in a village in south China, not far from Hong Kong. Here's how the NY Times article on the story opened:

A week of protests by villagers in China's southern industrial heartland exploded into violence over the weekend with thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and using electric batons to put down the rally, residents of the village said today.

The lead emphasizes that the riot took place in an "industrial heartland." A few paragraphs down, though, we get the real story: rural villagers upset over unchecked development.

[T]he latest confrontation between villagers and a large-scale deployment of security forces has occurred in a rural enclave encircled by some of China's biggest and fastest growing industrial cities. Indeed, demonstrating residents of Panlong village said their anger had been sparked by a government land acquisition program they had been led to believe in 2003 was part of a construction project to build a superhighway connecting the nearby city of Zhuhai with Beijing. Later, the villagers learned the land was being re-sold to developers to set up special chemical and garment industrial zones in the area.

The article doesn't say, and I'd like to know, if Panlong is a farming village. I wish the villagers luck in stopping the government from turning their area into yet another production point for the global consumer and industrial markets.

A UK study links dietary change over the past 50 years with rising menl-illness rates.

I've written a lot about the environmental depredations built into our industrial food system.

Over in Britain, researchers are making a link between the ubiquity of processed food and rising rates of mental illness, BBC reports.

Here's the BBC:

The report said people were eating 34% less vegetables and two-thirds less fish - the main source of omega-3 fatty acids - than they were 50 years ago. Such changes, the study said, could be linked to depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Alzheimer's disease.

Sounds perfectly plausible to me. Then again, maybe my ability to reason has been compromised by all the Big Macs I ingested as a youngster.

Dolphins on a flippery slope

This is a photo of an eight-year-old female Homo sapiens hugging a five-year-old female Tursiops truncatus. According to my daughter (a dolphin enthusiast), killer whales are just big dolphins with really sharp teeth, and there are thirty-something species of oceanic dolphins and five river dolphin species (found in five different rivers).

Not too many years ago biologists were whining that this or that species was going to be extinct in the next forty or fifty years. The time frame has now shrunk to about ten years for many of these same species (gorillas, river dolphins, you name it).

How the UN’s FAO tacitly supports environmentally and socially ruinous commodity agriculture

This post originally appeared on Bitter Greens Journal.

In business terms, a commodity is a useful item, produced in bulk, with no characteristics that distinguish it from others of its kind. What brand of DVD player do you own? Few people know. DVD players have become a commodity; they're all pretty much the same.

In commodity markets, prices tend to drop over time. Personal computers, for example, have steadily fallen in price over the past 15 years. Remember when "IBM or Macintosh?" meant something? Now it's "PC or Mac," and PC controls upwards of 90 percent of the market. In commodities markets, the producer that can churn out the most product at the cheapest price wins. Dell clawed its way to the top of the PC market by streamlining production and squeezing its suppliers for price breaks as it gained heft. Producing a great, innovative product had nothing to do with it.

It's counterintuitive to me that we would surrender something as sensual and poetic as food production to the brutal economics of commodity markets. Food a commodity? Nonsense!

Well, it is. Last year, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization released a report called "The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets." It provides an interesting look at what happens when food is treated as a commodity, and what role international aid organizations play in propping up the system.

The imperative to fight climate change cannot trump all other concerns

Unlike, apparently, 150 other environmentalists, I don't know enough about the proposed Cape Cod wind farm to venture an opinion on it.

Bill McKibben says "when [other environmental] efforts come into conflict with the imperative need to act urgently on global warming, they have to take second place." It's a common sentiment these days, but I'll be honest that it makes me a bit nervous.

My inclination, of course, is to support wind farms. But they are industrial development, and as such deserve reasonable regulation, smart siting decisions, and community involvement.

I like to think I "get" global warming, but I don't necessarily accept that it's the One and True Problem, the overwhelming existential threat before which all other considerations must go overboard -- any more than I believe the same of terrorism.

The clean coal and nuclear power lobbies would love to use global warming as a trump card. GE would be all over it. So would the ANWR-hungry Republican Congress.

But even in light of global warming, we still owe ourselves honest debate about other issues. Biodiversity matters. Wilderness matters. Human culture, democracy and rule of law matter. The economy matters. If you go far enough down the matters scale, eventually you find the pastoral ocean views of American aristocracy on Nantucket, and hell, even they matter a little bit.

Giving any issue the status of get-out-of-jail-free card is an invitation to abuse. Not abuse by Bill McKibben -- a veritable secular saint -- but by hangers-on. Everybody with a project to fund, political favor to call in, tax break to push, or axe to grind.

Of course, this discussion is a bit moot in light of the fact that global warming receives nothing near the attention it deserves in most contexts. I just don't want to end up saying, "You're with us or you're with the global warmists," to batter down all local or countervailing concerns. That kind of Manicheanism is for the other side.

Dogs are leftover from a time when we needed them, and now they suffer

Dogs have been in the news lately -- poisonings from tainted dog food and less than respectful treatment by a baggage handler. We have a lot of shared history with dogs. Dogs were once extremely valuable survival tools, used for the tracking of game, the herding of other domesticated animals, and most of all for the detection of dangerous predators, usually upright walking ones. That last use is still the most common. Modern burglar alarms have yet to emulate a dog's keen sense of hearing and smell.

You can just look at a dog to see how we have altered their genes. But, how have they altered ours? The alterations have to be there, given so much intimate contact over so much time. I am going to hypothesize (as I have done way too many times before) that the good feelings many of us get from dogs are the result of selective pressure, implying once again that dog lovers may have had a slight reproductive advantage over a long period of time. What else could explain the intense attachment some people develop for their pet dogs? Similarly, both of my daughters developed strong attachments to soft fuzzy objects as small children (a blanket named DeeDee, still providing great pleasure, and a sheepskin named Woooly).

Readers talk back about hookers, condoms, and biofuels

  Re: OK, We’ll Just Drill Over Here Instead Dear Editor: I thought your statement that Cheney and the energy task force treat ecosystems like a “two-bit hooker” was inappropriate, unseemly, slanderous, and entirely out of line. I’m sure those guys treat their hookers much better than that. Laura K. Oakland, Calif.   Re: Buenos […]

Pope

Carl Pope explains why the U.S. is not yet Syria. I think he means it to be optimistic.

Landscaping for water-runoff management

Not quite two months ago, my wife and I became homeowners. We love it. But in addition to the pride of ownership, there are also the worries: Can we really afford this house? Should we get earthquake insurance? Why does a small lake appear in the backyard when it rains?

That last one has been on our minds a lot lately. After 26 consecutive days of rain (and counting) here in Seattle, there's a frighteningly large pool of water that has swamped the roses and turned the lawn into something resembling the Everglades. My dad jokingly suggested that we stock it with trout. But I have a better idea: I'm going to landscape my way out of the problem.