Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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GM’s My Anti-nutrient. What’s Yours?
Genetically modified food could contain excessive amounts of dangerous compounds because of the government’s failure to adequately regulate the production of such foods, according to a report being released today by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The report says the Food and Drug Administration made “obvious errors” in reviewing some GM crops, […]
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The Rain in Lesotho Caused Mainly Lots of Pain
Rain. Drought. Hailstorms. Tornadoes. Frost. You’d be hard-pressed to name a weather phenomenon that hasn’t afflicted the African kingdom of Lesotho in recent times, destroying its crops and leaving one-third of its 2.1 million people on the brink of starvation. Now, many scientists are saying that those people, along with nearly 40 million other Africans […]
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Filling Up Wide Open Spaces
Forget about urban sprawl; the new menace facing the U.S. landscape is rural sprawl, according to some experts. In seeking refuge from city life, Americans started by moving to the suburbs; then they started building beyond the suburbs, creating “exurbs”; now, they’re gradually expanding into some of the country’s most remote areas. Growth rates of […]
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Drain, Drain, Go Away
Now, back to typically depressing fare: California’s Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board said yesterday that it would extend exemptions on pollution limits for farmers, meaning that pesticides, salts, and other pollutants will continue to drain from agricultural fields into the region’s watershed. The exemptions were set to expire on Dec. 31, a deadline […]
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The Science of the Lambs
It ain’t easy being a scientist in farm country: Researchers studying the health effects of agricultural pollution say they are being silenced by fearful superiors and harassed by individual farmers, farm groups, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds and controls much of the research done on farming. One example: JoAnn Burkholder, a […]
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Very Slow Food Movement
After months of heated debate, the 15 farm ministers of the European Union agreed last week on labeling rules for genetically modified (GM) food and animal feed. Under the plan, all food and feed containing 0.9 percent GM ingredients or more would need to be identified as such; below that threshold, no labeling would be […]
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Umbra on vegetarianism
Dear Umbra, I have been a vegetarian for a pretty long time, but my uncle told me that if the human is not supposed to eat meat then why do we have teeth. He left me a little confused. Is the human being naturally vegetarian? LaidaSomerville, Mass. Dearest Laida, Your uncle is unkindly denigrating your […]
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I Double Dairy You
Got pollution controls? Five dairy farms in California soon will — and environmentalists hope the new rules will eventually apply to dairies nationwide. To avoid legal action by environmental groups, the five farms in the Inland Empire region of the state have agreed to modernize their operations by developing greener plans for manure lagoons and […]
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Corn at the Right Time
The activist-friendly town of Takoma Park, Md., unveiled an inspiring (albeit funny-looking) monument to the clean energy movement yesterday: A silo that holds 21 tons of organic corn. The corn will be used as an alternative fuel to heat a dozen homes in the town’s Save Our Sky Home-Heating Cooperative, keeping more than 100,000 pounds […]
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Prairie Dogged
Faced with drought and plunging profits, Colorado farmers are under growing financial pressure to hawk their land to developers. Between 1993 and 2001, about 1.5 million acres of farmland in the state were put on the market and developed; 300,000 of the acres were sold in 2001 as a drought began to take hold. State […]
