Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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New Jersey horse farmers fueled by hay, not oil
Steed for the tillerman: New Jersey farmer Tom Paduano at work(Photos by Jared Flesher) For the past year, I’ve been following around farmers in New Jersey with a video camera. For the most part, they are young, broke, landless, and optimistic. “I’ve hit the jackpot. I’m getting rich. I’m farming,” deadpanned Aubrey Yarbrough, age 28, […]
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Oil spill may fatally wound Gulf fishing industry
Among the more than 600 animal species at risk from the massive oil spill in the Gulf are their bipedal predators. May usually marks the start of the Gulf fishing season, Capt. Kip Marquize tells the Natural Resources Defense Council in this video, but he and other Louisiana fishers are cooling their heels on the […]
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CJR puts Philpott in the hot seat
(Bart Nagel Photography)Grist Food Editor and indefatigable reporter Tom Philpott recently spent some quality time on the other side of the tape recorder, for an in-depth Columbia Journalism Review interview about class and the U.S. food system. In the piece, titled “Food Fighter,” Philpott fields the de rigeur “is organic too expensive” question with aplomb […]
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Chemical dispersants being used in Gulf clean-up are potentially toxic
Coast Guard workers spray Corexit in a 2007 Berkeley, California, cleanup. It is not yet being used on Gulf of Mexico beaches. (U.S. Coast Guard photo)We finally know the main two dispersants that BP and the U.S. government are using to treat the ongoing Gulf spill. Both, by their maker’s own admission, have the “potential […]
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A farm by any other name
Our new farmhouse and outbuildings.Photos: Steph Larsen In Green Acreage, Steph Larsen chronicles the sprouting of a small but sustainable Nebraska property. ——————————— Last December, I bought the farm. Clearly I mean this in the literal, not euphemistic, sense. (Although I’ve spent some time pondering why the phrase “bought the farm” means “to die,” but […]
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Under the wrong conditions, oil spills are forever
The massive clean-up efforts for the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound. (Photo courtesy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council) “A senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 […]
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NYT’s superweeds coverage is welcome but myopic
iStockphoto It’s a happy day when the New York Times treads some of Grist’s well-worn paths. This time, it’s about how overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide has given rise to “superweeds” and an exhausting chemical treadmill: Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of […]
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What’s in your food that’s destroying orangutans?
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.Have you bought soap in the past week? How about lipstick? Cheerios? Soy milk? Today, a new report reveals that the nation’s largest private agribusiness company — Minneapolis-based Cargill — is a major culprit behind rainforest destruction. It turns out that Cargill, who both owns their own palm oil plantations and buys and […]
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Corn industry brazenly turns Gulf disaster into marketing opportunity
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (the dull gray color southeast of the Mississippi Delta) seen by satellite on May 1 Photo: NASAAs if being bombarded with oil from below and chemical dispersants from above weren’t enough, the Gulf of Mexico also has to endure marketing rhetoric from a long-time tormentor: the corn industry. Industrial corn […]
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Choosing sustainable sushi more important than ever, post-spill
In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related videos from around the Web. ————- There are lots of reasons to choose your sushi carefully: most salmon, shrimp, tuna, and eel come hooked to ecological disaster. Now, with the Gulf oil spill threatening the entire marine ecosystem that provides the bulk of U.S. shrimp and […]
