Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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Tell California lawmakers to say ‘no’ to cancer-causing fumigant
Farm workers harvest strawberries in California. Photo: Holgerhubbs, under a Creative Commons licence. To grow strawberries on an industrial scale, you’ve got to sterilize the soil ahead of planting with harsh chemical fumigants. For years, growers have relied on a highly toxic, ozone-destroying fumigant called methyl bromide. The stuff is so awful that it was […]
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Denver busts urban farming’s yuppie stereotype
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. When we were still in Seattle, preparing for this project, a few friends asked if this was a tour of ‘yuppie urban farm projects.’ Isn’t […]
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Hey, White House — how about ‘Eat Lunch with Your Kid Day’?
If Michelle Obama and Sam Kass were to eat this recent DC school meal, it would cause a sensation.(Ed Bruske) The one thing never mentioned at all these White House events around childhood obesity is the food kids are actually eating at school every day. Let’s see, we’ve had loads of kids to the White House […]
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Fun with herbicides!
“The herbicide business used to be good before Roundup nearly wiped it out. Now it is getting fun again.”— Dan Dyer, an executive at agrichemical/GMO seed giant Syngenta, on the rise of “superweeds” engendered by the broad use of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” GMO crops.
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Urban farms don’t make money — so what?
City Slicker Farms in West Oakland does more than just grow food for the local residents.(Bonnie Powell photo)Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based […]
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Being prepared — to grow your own meat
(Steph Larsen photos)Everyone knows the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be Prepared. While my immediate inclination is to ask “For what?”, it’s as good a command as any to live by. One at which I failed miserably last week. I came home from work and went out to the sheep paddocks to make sure they looked healthy […]
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Sustainable seafood takes center stage at Seattle dinner theater
Servers and stowaways at Bounty!Photo: Amani Ellen LoutfyAt Seattle’s Café Nordo, the wait staff quotes Jack London, the soup is served from fish tanks, and there’s enough alcohol to ease the pain of the BP oil spill momentarily. Nordo’s odd coupling of an oceanic musical production, “Bounty! An Epic Adventure in Seafood,” with a five-course […]
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California poised to approve deadly pesticide for strawberry crop
The continuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico helps one see other regulatory controversies in a different light. Take, for example, the battle in California over the use of the pesticide methyl iodide, a chemical so toxic, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “that even chemists are reluctant to handle it.” Methyl iodide, which according […]
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Louisianans take a break from oil-spill angst to celebrate local seafood
Seafood abounds at the Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival.Photos: Emily PetersonThe sixth annual Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival, held this past weekend, had the usual fixings one would expect at a South Louisiana festival: fried seafood, a solid lineup of live local music, and plenty of cold beer to beat the high humidity and 90-degree temperatures. One […]
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Leaving biodiesel Shangri-La for a farm amidst suburbia
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. By David Hanson A grease bus breaking down in Berkeley is like having a Mac glitch at Steve Jobs’ house during the Apple Chirstmas party. […]
