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Public Land Enemy No. 1

White House wants to auction off 300,000 acres of public land The Bush administration has proposed a sell-off of over $1 billon worth of public land over the next five to 10 years. Proceeds from the auctions of more than 300,000 acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management holdings would largely go to […]

Poverty & the Environment

Grist launches a seven-week special series In much of popular and political culture, the environmental movement is dismissed as the pet cause of white, well-off Americans. And yet, the population most affected by environmental problems in the U.S. is the poor. Today we kick off a seven-week series that looks at the intersection of economic […]

A virtual walking tour of Columbia, Miss., with Charlotte Keys of Jesus People Against Pollution

In 1977, a factory in Columbia, Miss., that had been manufacturing Agent Orange was rocked by an explosion. The owner, Reichhold Chemical Inc., shuttered the facility and abandoned or buried thousands of barrels of toxic waste near the water supply of the predominantly poor, African-American neighborhood where it had operated; flooding and leaks followed. In […]

Introducing a seven-week series on the intersection of economic and ecological survival

Consider this central paradox of U.S. environmentalism: In much of popular and political culture, the movement is dismissed as the pet cause of white, well-off Americans — people who can afford to buy organic arugula, vacation in Lake Tahoe, and worry about the fate of the Pacific pocket mouse. And yet, the population most affected […]

Monsanto’s move into veggie seeds shakes up small organic farmers.

Here at Maverick Farms, a foot-thick blanket of snow swaths the cover crops and garlic beds, insulating them from sub-freezing temperatures. In the depths of the field, a big compost pile smolders. As at small farms all over the country, we've been been flipping through seed catalogs as we plan what to plant this coming season.

At this time of year, optimism burns bright, sparked by the glowing prose of the seed catalogs. Here is my favorite catalog, Fedco, engaging in a bit of beet poetry:

The genius of Alan Kapuler at work, this [root grex beet] is an interbreeding mix of Yellow Intermediate heirloom, Crosby Purple Egyptian heirloom and Lutz Saladleaf heirloom. It absolutely wowed me in my 2004 trial and aroused considerable interest at our Common Ground Fair booth display last fall. The term "grex" is commonly used in orchid breeding. There are 3 distinct colors in this gene pool: a pinkish red with some orange in it, a bright gold and a beautiful iridescent orange. We were impressed by the unusual vigor, glowing colors and length of these gradually tapered elongated roots.

Farmers have to work hard to avoid way overbuying seeds, with tempting descriptions like that dominating the catalogs.

This year, however, a new statement confronts us throughout the Fedco book: "This is the last year we will be offering this Seminis variety." Many venerable varieties bear this unhappy statement. Last year, Monsanto bought Seminis, the world's largest vegetable-seed purveyor, shaking up the small-scale organic farming world. (Here is an analysis of that deal I posted a while back.) Fedco, responding to outrage among its growers, decided to stop buying seeds from Seminis/Monsanto. And that means many varieties people have come to love in their CSA boxes and at the farmers market won't be available for much longer.

Now on to humans!

At least public transportation is catching on somewhere.

(via BB)

Gulf oil production remains hobbled

Oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico didn't get much attention during the 2005 hurricane season. Thankfully none were so catastrophic as to overtake any of the catastrophes unfolding on land during Katrina and Rita. But as the folks at SKYTRUTH document, there were still plenty of spills.

And according to the Minerals Management Service (the part of the Department of the Interior responsible for overseeing production in federal waters), Katrina and Rita were the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf.

Furthermore, the impact hasn't stopped. Due to the oil infrastructure wreckage, three boats have been damaged, including one that led to a massive spill back in November.

Klare on the permanent energy crisis

Energy analyst Michael T. Klare has been busy lately. There was his great piece on natural gas in The Nation, an op-ed in the L.A. Times this weekend about how it's not just us but the whole world that's addicted to oil, and -- most deserving of your attention -- a new piece on Tom's Dispatch arguing that the world is on the brink of a more-or-less permanent energy crisis:

Although we cannot hope to foresee all the ways such forces will affect the global human community, the primary vectors of the permanent energy crisis can be identified and charted. Three such vectors, in particular, demand attention: a slowing in the growth of energy supplies at a time of accelerating worldwide demand; rising political instability provoked by geopolitical competition for those supplies; and mounting environmental woes produced by our continuing addiction to oil, natural gas, and coal. Each of these would be cause enough for worry, but it is their intersection that we need to fear above all.

Yup.

Read the whole thing.

Bush and Crichton

Todd Gitlin brings us this quote from Frank Barnes' Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush:

Though he didn't say so publicly, Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming....He avidly read Michael Crichton's 2004 novel State of Fear, whose villain falsifies scientific studies to justify draconian steps to curb global warming....Early in 2005, political adviser Karl Rove arranged for Crichton to meet with Bush at the White House. They talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement. The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more.

Sigh.

My review of Crichton's book is here.

Back to switchgrass

According to a guest op-ed in today's NYT, switchgrass is the road to world peace. And a pony.

I'm ready to be convinced about this stuff. If switchgrass really flourishes on marginal land, soaks up pesticides, absorbs CO2, looks great in floral arrangements, and -- this is key -- could eventually be scaled to compete with the abundance and price of corn, count me a cheerleader.

I think biofuels will be only a small part of the long-term energy solution, but low-impact crop fuels are necessary and comparatively unobjectionable as a bridge technology.