Leaders from more than 100 countries pledged to halt deforestation by 2030, as part of an agreement inked Tuesday at COP26, the United Nations climate summit taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.
The U.S., Brazil, and Russia were among the nations that signed the agreement, which is backed by more than $19 billion in public and private funding. Representing more than 85 percent of the world’s forests, the signatories committed to protecting and restoring forests while promoting sustainable land-use and agricultural practices.
Combating deforestation is seen as a crucial step in limiting the impacts of climate change, as the world’s forests absorb roughly one-third of carbon emissions annually. Agriculture, forestry and other land uses account for nearly a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature — are the lungs of our planet,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a press release announcing the agreement. “Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our very survival.”
In addition to $7.2 billion in private-sector funding, a dozen countries pledged $12 billion to support activities in developing countries such as restoring damaged land, reducing wildfire risk, and supporting Indigenous people and local communities in their efforts to protect their forests.
A group of government and private funders agreed to contribute $1.7 billion to Indigenous communities and organizations, which, according to a study published earlier this year, received less than 1 percent of international funding for climate mitigation and adaptation during the past decade.
In an email to Grist, Wayne Walker, carbon program director at Woodwell Climate Research Center, emphasized the importance of engaging Indigenous communities in efforts to solve the “linked global crises” of forest loss and climate change.
“Bolstering Indigenous land rights and providing communities with much-needed tools and information will continue to be among the most effective approaches we have to addressing these acute global threats,” Walker said.
On Monday, 28 governments announced a plan to rein in agricultural practices that threaten forests, such as the deforestation linked to large-scale oil palm and soybean farms.
Environmental groups were largely supportive of the stated goals of the agreements, though many questioned whether the deforestation targets were realistic and enforceable—while others wondered why they aren’t more ambitious.
“We’re facing a climate emergency so giving ourselves another 10 years to address this problem doesn’t quite seem consistent with that,” Nigel Sizer, former president of the Rainforest Alliance, told BBC News.
Skeptics cited a similar plan adopted in 2014, which sought to halve global deforestation by 2020 and end it by 2030. A later report found that there was “little evidence” the signatories were on track to meet those targets.
Notably absent from that plan was a commitment from Brazil, home to the planet’s largest rainforest, where deforestation has accelerated in recent years. The South American nation was among the signatories of Monday’s agreement, as were multiple Central African nations encompassing the Congo Basin forests, which make up the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest region. Eleven countries, along with the Bezos Earth Fund, agreed to contribute roughly $1.5 billion toward deforestation and restoration efforts in the Congo Basin region.
Climate expert, Australian National University emeritus professor and Climate Council member Will Steffen spoke to Alex Bainbridgeabout climate science and politics in the lead up to the United Nations climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow.
A California startup backed by the shipping giant Maersk wants to turn America’s farm waste into clean fuel for mammoth container ships. The company, WasteFuel, is working to build facilities across the country that produce “bio-methanol” from corn husks, discarded wheat straw, and other agricultural scraps — a low-carbon fuel produced in tiny volumes today.
Bio-methanol from these facilities would then travel by rail car to major ports, Trevor Nielson, chairman and CEO of WasteFuel, told Grist. Methanol-powered deep-sea vessels on, say, the U.S. West Coast would be able to refuel before sailing to China, Japan, or Vietnam with containers full of pet food, cotton, and scrap metal.
WasteFuel’s plans are part of a larger effort to cut emissions in the global shipping industry, whose vessels run almost exclusively on fossil fuels. Cargo ships contribute nearly 3 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions — a number expected to climb as global trade expands. Within shipping, about 80 percent of emissions come from deep sea vessels. These oceangoing ships are particularly tricky to clean up because they often sail for weeks and cover thousands of miles between refueling, and have limited space on board for fuel tanks or battery banks.
“We have a huge opportunity to address the hardest aspects of decarbonization,” including long-distance and heavy-duty transportation, Nielson said from his home in Malibu, which overlooks the ship-clogged waters of Southern California. Record congestion around the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles has driven a spike in air pollution from idling vessels and truck traffic.
For shipowners, bio-methanol is a promising alternative to dirty bunker fuel, because it can be used by converting engines in existing vessels. The problem is, only a handful of relatively small facilities make the fuel worldwide. Bio-methanol is also expensive to produce, costing up to seven times more than conventional methanol from fossil fuels, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
The first of WasteFuel’s planned bio-methanol facilities is expected to be completed within a few years, Neilson said, though the company hasn’t disclosed a location yet. Along with bio-methanol, WasteFuel plans to produce other low-carbon fuels for airplanes and freight trucks made from landfill garbage in the Philippines and Mexico, respectively.
For bio-methanol and other biofuels to play a meaningful role in reducing shipping emissions, clean fuel producers will need to drastically boost output and slash costs in the coming decades, said Eric Tan, a senior research engineer at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, in Colorado. “Scalability is very important,” he said, “and the fuel cost has to be competitive.”
In a recent study, Tan and his colleagues found the United States has ample amounts of feedstock that could be turned into biofuel — enough to supply a significant share of the global shipping industry’s annual needs by 2040. With technology improvements, supportive government policy, and more efficient ways of sourcing raw materials, U.S. producers could achieve the “critical mass” needed to make a dent in shipping’s carbon footprint, researchers said.
Companies will need to start using such fuels soon in order to stay on track for global climate goals, according to industry experts. The International Maritime Organization, the U.N. agency that regulates global shipping, aims to reduce the industry’s total emissions by half compared with 2008 levels by mid-century, and to fully decarbonize by 2100.
Last week, a group of giant retail companies including Amazon and IKEA said that, by 2040, they would only import goods on ships using zero-carbon fuels, including hydrogen and ammonia made with renewable electricity.
Shipping analysts say it’s not yet clear which low- and zero-carbon technologies will prevail as companies work to meet such targets. That uncertainty has prompted some shipowners to postpone ordering new vessels for fear of betting on the wrong solution.
Maersk, by contrast, is betting at least $1.4 billion on methanol-powered ships and supplies.
The toxic alcohol is primarily used to make chemicals for paints, plastics, and cosmetics, and nearly all of it is produced with natural gas or coal. When burned, methanol produces little air pollution. Only about two dozen ships use, or will soon use, methanol for fuel — mainly methanol-carrying tankers that draw supplies from their cargo holds. (In the 1990s, U.S. passenger cars like the Ford Taurus and Dodge Intrepid were built to use a methanol-gasoline blend before the fuel fell out of favor.)
From a climate perspective, however, methanol from natural gas is worse than commonly used fuels, like marine gas oil. So Maersk and other shipping companies are focusing on developing both bio-methanol and “e-methanol,” made with renewable electricity. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, bio-methanol from plant biomass can reduce “well-to-wake” lifecycle emissions by 70 to 80 percent compared with marine gas oil.
In August, Maersk said it ordered eight mega container ships capable of running on methanol, with the first to join its fleet in early 2024. The Danish shipping company also plans to operate a methanol-burning vessel in Europe in 2023. The company has acknowledged one huge complication to those plans: Only about 220,000 metric tons of green methanol are produced annually, compared to the 330 million metric tons of fuel the shipping industry consumes every year.
“It will be a significant challenge to source an adequate supply of carbon-neutral methanol within our timeline to pioneer this technology,” said Henriette Hallberg Thygesen, CEO of Maersk’s fleet and strategic brands division, in a statement earlier this year. (The company did not return requests for comment.)
Maersk is backing WasteFuel and other fuel producers to fill the gap. In September, the company announced that it had invested in WasteFuel for an undisclosed amount, a move that made the shipping giant WasteFuel’s largest investor and put a Maersk executive on the startup’s board. Maersk is also investing in another clean energy startup, Prometheus Fuels, and has signed a contract to buy e-methanol from a facility planned in Denmark.
WasteFuel is talking to around 30 agricultural waste owners in and outside the United States and plans to eventually license existing technology from other developers, Nielson said. Bio-methanol can be made by fermenting organic materials in an anaerobic digester, or subjecting materials to high temperatures to produce synthetic gas, then processing it in a reactor. The latter process is especially capital- and energy-intensive, and neither is widely used in large commercial operations. “The question of scale is one that we all have to address,” he acknowledged.
According to Maersk, green fuels like bio-methanol will be two to three times more expensive than oil-based marine fuels. But because ships are so huge and carry so many containers on their decks, the final cost to consumers will be something like an extra 50 cents on a pair of running shoes, Nielson said.
There are other barriers to scaling up bio-methanol and other biofuels, said Tan, the NREL engineer. Collecting, cleaning up, and storing feedstock adds significant expense for fuel producers. And as chemical companies and airlines turn to biofuels to reduce emissions, the competition for waste feedstocks will heat up.
Nielson said that building bio-methanol facilities close to places where waste is collected, such as farms or landfills, can help reduce the cost of securing the raw materials. It also ensures that corn husks, food scraps, and garbage are fresh when they enter the facility, an important step because decaying organic materials emit methane. The sooner waste hits the system, the more methane can be turned into fuel — and the less winds up in the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas.
Noting the challenges facing WasteFuel, Neilson said a key difference between past and present attempts to boost bio-methanol supplies is that major companies are increasingly responding to pressure from activists to tackle climate change.
“That shifts the economics,” he said. “People in finance, people in consumer products are listening.”
In the center of a residential neighborhood in Detroit, surrounded by empty lots and houses in disrepair, is an oasis of brightly colored flowers, tomatoes, okra, and other crops. Ten years ago, this space was neglected, overgrown with high grass, just one of several city-owned, abandoned lots on Helen Street. But the vacant land made one homeowner feel unsafe, so her great-great-nephew and his wife planted flowers and started taking care of the property.
“Nine years later, we are still planting,” said Erin Cole, the great-great-niece-in-law. The once-abandoned lot has since been transformed into a community garden, called Nurturing Our Seeds, that now stretches across several lots on the street. It has become an anchor for the neighborhood, providing affordable and nutritious produce, hosting events, and reminding the community that people still live on Helen Street, despite the derelict homes, and that they still care.
But for the nearly decade that Cole and her husband tended the land, they never actually owned it.
After the couple inherited the great-great-aunt’s house, they inquired with the city about purchasing the lot next door. But they were told they didn’t qualify for Detroit’s side lot program because of taxes they owed on the house leftover from the aunt.
Cole and her husband later inquired about buying a different abandoned lot across the street, which used to belong to a family member. For years, the answer was, “‘We’re not selling it,’” Cole told Grist. Then, she said, the land was suddenly announced up for auction. It hadn’t been offered to anyone that already lived in the neighborhood.
Finally last year, Cole and her husband were able to purchase the farmland, buying several lots with the help of the newly created Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. Created in 2020 by three long-time nonprofit organizations in Detroit, the fund aims to address the historical racial land ownership disparity that has affected Cole and Black farmers across the country.
Erin Cole stands in front flowers she grew on a lot she recently purchased through the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund.
Jena Brooker
Black farmers, and Black-owned farmland, are at a historical low. In the 1910s, Black farmers made up 15 percent of all farmers, compared to less than one percent today.
But Detroit bucks that trend, at least in the number of farmers. The city, which is almost 80 percent Black, has more than 1,500 farms and community gardens — a large portion of which are run by Black farmers. Many, however, do not own the land they cultivate. And it’s not for lack of available space. It’s estimated that between 24 to 40 square miles of Detroit land is vacant, out of the city’s total 139 square miles.
In the 1950s, Detroit’s population peaked at nearly 2 million. But in the decades that followed, that number steadily declined due to deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs — leaving behind abandoned houses and land. Today, less than 700,000 people remain in a city that was once the fifth-biggest in the United States.
Black farmers have long struggled with historic and ongoing racial discrimination that has prevented them from buying property, and passing it down, like many white farmers have done for generations. In rural areas, those discriminatory practices occur within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers in urban centers face a slightly different set of challenges: land sales prioritized to big developers and a lack of institutional knowledge and time to navigate the bureaucratic system.
The ongoing hidden barriers to property ownership are evident in the housing mortgage sector in Detroit. A year-long analysis of 2016 data by Reveal and the Associated Press found that Black applicants in Detroit were almost twice less likely to be approved for a mortgage loan than white applicants.
“The legacy of predatory lending practices keeps Black farmers and landowners dispossessed of their land,” said Jillian Hishaw, an agricultural law attorney and founder of F.A.R.M.S, a legal nonprofit that helps landowners keep their land for future generations.
To address the land ownership issue, the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund was created last year on Juneteenth, a holiday that marks the ending of slavery for African Americans in the U.S.
“It’s been liberating, in many ways,” Shakara Tyler, a co-creator of the fund, told Grist.
Tyler, who works for the Detroit Black Food Community Security Network, started the fund alongside Tepfirah Rushdan at Keep Growing Detroit and Jerry Hebron at Oakland Ave Urban Farm. In its first year, the group selected 30 farmers to award money too, one of whom was Cole. Now, in its second year, the fund has raised almost $100,000 and will be able to support 40 Black farmers to buy land.
Courtsey of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund
All of the money raised goes directly to awardees to buy land. The amount each farmer gets is determined by how much their land costs, and how many plots they want to purchase. The Land Fund also helps with the technical parts of buying the property on an as needed basis, such as figuring out who owns the land and navigating the time-consuming bureaucratic process. The Land Fund is supported by small donations from community members, as well asa few wealthy white donors that wanted to do reparations work, Rushdan told Grist.
One of the beneficiaries of the program, Dazmonique Carr, owner of Deeply Rooted, a half-acre farm on the Eastside of Detroit, said the Land Fund helped her “step by step” in purchasing and expanding her property. She grows squash and collard greens, among other crops, and is working with Raphael Wright, who plans to open the city’s first Black-owned grocery store, to provide produce directly to the store from her farm.
“It definitely feels autonomous,” she told Grist, “feeling like you can secure and protect the things that you’ve been working hard to maintain.” She has a son, whom she looks forward to passing the property down to in the future.
Also on the Eastside, long-time farmer Willie Patmon purchased land through the fund to double the size of his farm, to continue giving away produce and expand his free gardening program. On the Westside of Detroit, Tracy Harris purchased two lots through the fund where she intends to grow food for local food pantries.
Rushdan told Grist that the city of Detroit unfairly prioritizes land for certain uses over others, like for big development projects. City officials and the Detroit Land Bank, a public authority created by the city and state that owns a quarter of Detroit properties, have been criticized over the years for who they sell land to, how difficult it can be to get property, and a lack of transparency about the process.
In the more than decade since the Detroit Land Bank was created it’s been wrought with criticism and complaints, from showing favoritism toward city officials, to threatening to seize houses it doesn’t own. There has also been outcry over which properties the Land Bank chooses to demolish. In a federal investigation into the city’s demolition program, several were charged with bid-rigging and bribes.
“Detroit is presented as this urban ag[ricultural] haven, the friendliest urban ag city in the country, and that the government is sort of shepherding it,” Tyler said. But it’s the grassroots organizations making that happen through initiatives like the Land Fund, not the government, she said.
“We’re literally alkalizing the little that we have into all of this abundance,” she said. “Imagine if we had support from the government.”
Courtesy of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund
More land funds are cropping up around the country to support Black farmers — and looking to the Detroit fund as a model, Tyler said. Groups in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are trying to start funds and have reached out to the Detroit program for guidance and support. In New York, a similar model called the Black Farmer Fund was created.
”Funds like Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund and F.A.R.M.S. emergency funds are essential to combating the loss of land in the Black community,” said Hishaw.
Earlier this year Congress promised $4 billion to farmers of color for debt relief, grants, and education. Since the bill’s passage, however, there have been 13 lawsuits filed claiming reverse racism. Now, it’s unclear if Black farmers will ever see the relief — highlighting the importance of local efforts to combat racial disparities in farming.
Cole told Grist that purchasing land with the help of the Land Fund was a big deal, because it meant avoiding jumping through hoops and a years-long drawn out process.
“We’re feeding communities and we are building relationships to bring healthy food systems across Michigan,” she said. “Owning the land is key. It allows people to keep those generational practices going. It’s something that after 10 years, the community is able to say, ‘we’re not going anywhere.’”
Indigenous peoples from 30 villages in Hasdeo Aranya, the densely-forested region of central India, walked 300 kilometres in early October, to demand the protection of their water, forests and land against coalmining, reports Ruchira Talukdar.
In the heart of Arkansas, Abraham Carpenter, a Black farmer, grows fruits and vegetables across 1,500 acres alongside 35 of his family members. The multi-generational farm was started in 1973 by Abraham’s mother, Katie Carpenter, with the planting of just one acre of peas. But this year, heavy rain and floods destroyed hundreds of acres of the family’s crops, including turnips, collards, and watermelon. Before that, COVID-19 and its near shutdown of the economy and food supply chains threatened their livelihood. Carpenter estimates he lost millions during the pandemic.
“It’s been terrible,” he said. “When it comes to farming, anytime you have a difficult year once or twice in a row, that can set you back for many, many years.”
Carpenter owes $200,000 in loans to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. He’s one of an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 farmers of color that was expecting his debt to be erased when Congress passed the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act in March. It was one of the biggest pieces of legislation for Black farmers ever passed — authorizing $4 billion under the American Rescue Plan to forgive 120 percent of USDA loan debt for farmers of color.
The payments were supposed to be made in June. But since the act passed, at least 13 lawsuits have been filed across the country, claiming reverse discrimination and racism. As a result, three injunctions stopping the payouts have been issued and the money has been in limbo ever since. Now, many legal experts say it’s unlikely the debt relief will be paid out as was originally authorized.
“There is a decent to good chance that the lawsuits will invalidate this debt relief program and prevent it from taking effect,” Eric Berger, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Nebraska, told Grist.
Lawsuits against the program were filed in Florida, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Illinois, and Minnesota, all claiming reverse racism and a violation of constitutional rights. “Because plaintiffs are ineligible to even apply for the program solely due to their race, they have been denied the equal protection of the law and therefore suffered harm,” one complaint filed with the U.S. District Court of Wisconsin reads.
Rod Bradshaw stands in a field of wheat on his farm near Jetmore, Kansas.
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel File
The Emergency Relief Act was created to address both the historic systemic racism that has put farmers of color behind their white colleagues, and the unequal distribution of COVID-19 relief money, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told the Washington Post after the bill’s passing in March.
Black farmers received $20.8 million of Trump’s COVID-19 relief money for farmers — just 0.1 percent of the nearly $26 billion in aid. Black farmers, meanwhile, make up 1.3 percent of all U.S. farmers. Some 99 percent of Congress’ COVID-related aid for agriculture went to white farmers.
The USDA previously said it would defend its original plan to erase the debt of farmers of color. But last month, the Department of Justice passed on a chance to appeal one of the three injunctions.
Corey Lea, executive director of the Cowtown Foundation, an organization that partners with law firms to get justice for disadvantaged farmers, says it’s “business as usual” for Secretary Vilsack. “He has no intention of providing debt relief for Black farmers,” Lea told Grist. The USDA did not respond to request for comment.
Legal experts say the situation is tricky.
If the case reaches the Supreme Court, some feel it’s a sure loss given the makeup of the current justices. And there is some concern that the case could inadvertently threaten affirmative action as a whole in other governmental programs. “Given constitutional precedent and today’s very conservative federal judiciary, [the Biden administration] needs to act very carefully when it designs programs that try to offer aid only to particular racial groups,” said Berger.
“Unless Congress can devise a more flexible, nuanced program,” he noted, “this debt relief will be on constitutional thin ice.”
Lloyd Wright, a Black farmer in Virginia and former director of the USDA’s civil rights office, is proposing changing the language of the act so there’s a better shot at farmers actually getting money. Instead of being based on a farmer’s race, debt relief from the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act would be determined in other more flexible ways based on discrimination. “If we don’t change the definition, farmers won’t be getting debt relief,” Wright told the Center for Public Integrity.
For many, the money was a milestone in a decades-long fight for justice for farmers of color. The USDA has a history of disproportionately granting loans and access to governmental assistance programs to white farmers over farmers of color, contributing to a 90 percent decline of Black-owned farm land between 1910 and 1997. (Ownership for white farmers declined just 2 percent over the same period.) And there’s evidence that USDA discrimination continues today. In 2020, 37 percent of Black applicants were granted loans from the agency, compared to 71 percent of white applicants, according to an analysis by Politico.
For Carpenter, the disappointment goes beyond the current holdup. This isn’t the first time he was expecting relief only for it not to show up. Carpenter was part of the class action Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit more than 20 years ago, which claimed discrimination by the USDA against Black farmers. The settlement in that case authorized up to $50,000 plus debt relief for each farmer. But like many of his colleagues, Carpenter never got the money.
“When the American Rescue Plan came into place, I really thought that was a great idea,” he said. “I thought it was something that would be set in stone. I used to always say, ‘It would take an act of Congress for Black farmers to get paid.’ But I did not realize that even [then], they still could throw rocks in your plans and mess up everything.”
Legal experts said it could be months or years before everything is sorted out with the injunctions and lawsuits filed against the relief act.
When Grist first reached out to Carpenter for an interview, it took a while for him to respond. He was hesitant about talking to the media. “I’ve been discouraged by the fact that I’ve done probably over 200 interviews,” he said, “and have been vocal about all the wrong that’s been going on, and nothing has really happened to change anything.”
Meng Wanzhou is released and returns to China. Corporate corruption is punished. Power supply prioritized for the basic needs of people. A new hybrid species of giant rice is featured.
The ad blitz was impossible to miss walking into the light rail station in Seattle’s bustling Capitol Hill neighborhood, where dozens of red-orange signs were plastered along the walls. “Seattle, carbon-neutral milk is here,” a billboard-sized advertisement declared, showing two milk cartons perched on a skateboard. One man paused to consider one of the ads for a solid 10 seconds before walking up a staircase that, if you looked at it straight on, spelled out the message “This milk fights climate change.”
Those are big promises from Neutral, the Portland startup behind the product. After all, the dairy industry isn’t exactly known for being climate-friendly: Livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, two-thirds of which come from cows raised for meat and milk products. Cows burp a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently singled out for its big contributions to global warming, second to carbon dioxide.
So is it possible that Neutral’s milk “fights climate change”? It depends how you interpret it.
“I think there’s an increasing awareness that agriculture has a very big footprint, and most of that footprint is in animal proteins, and a big piece of that is a dairy,” said Marcus Lovell Smith, Neutral’s CEO. Formerly Google Fiber’s chief technology officer and a recent entrepreneur in residence at Harvard, Smith is uniquely positioned for his new role, having run an actual dairy farm in addition to a handful of startups.
Neutral works to reduce emissions on dairy farms by changing the way feed is grown and the way cows eat, by managing manure and fertilizer differently, and through practices to improve soil, like reducing tillage and planting cover crops. That doesn’t cover all of the emissions from its dairy projects, so the company relies on carbon offsets to cancel out the rest, hence “neutral.”
A carton of Neutral milk at Whole Foods in Seattle.
Grist / Kate Yoder
The company’s milk got early support from bougie grocery stores in the Pacific Northwest, showing up in New Seasons in Portland and Metropolitan Market in Seattle. In August, Neutral’s milk got a bigger platform, landing in more than 170 Whole Foods stores across the West, including a handful in the Midwest and South. Later this year, it’s expected to roll out to the rest of the chain’s stores around the country.
“The initial target audience, not surprisingly, is a strong overlap with your Whole Foods consumer,” Smith said. “But in order to get to scale, we need to have this milk available to all Americans.”
The milk aisle has gone through some changes in the last few years, with more and more fridge space devoted to non-dairy alternatives, which tend to have a lighter ecological footprint. Consumption of dairy milk has fallen 40 percent per person in America since 1975, for a variety of reasons. Soy milk started taking off in the 1990s, and much more recently, oat milk has soared in popularity in fancy coffee shops. But most Americans still prefer whole or 2 percent milk, with just 12 percent keeping cartons of almond, oat, or other non-dairy milk around, according to a Morning Consult poll from earlier this year. The poll shows that the environment is a concern for about half of alternative milk drinkers, with taste topping all other considerations.
The idea behind Neutral is to convince environmentally-conscious dairy lovers that they don’t have to give up their favorite beverage for the climate — they just need to pay extra. When I stopped by a local Whole Foods in Seattle last week, there were only two cartons left, even though organic whole milk was among the more expensive milks on display, at $5.49 for a half-gallon (the attached $0.75 coupons might have helped).
Other food companies have started to go the carbon-neutral route. Maple Leaf Foods, a Canadian company that produces meat and meat alternatives, claimed to be the world’s first carbon-neutral food company in 2019. The nonprofit company Climate Neutral, which certifies companies’ carbon-neutral promises, has certified more than 40 food and beverage companies.
Grist / Kate Yoder
As for Neutral’s slogan that its milk fights climate change, “It could be true or it could be really disingenuous,” said Isaac Emery, the founder and principal consultant at Informed Sustainability Consulting in Seattle. Neutral’s promise relies on “avoided emissions” — meaning that by swapping a high-emissions milk for a low-emissions one, presto, you’ve avoided some emissions. It’s not actively drawing carbon down from the sky, he pointed out.
“It’s a question of how you look at it — do you look at it as in ‘buying this product benefits the climate,’ or do you look at it in terms of ‘buying this product instead of the other one is a net benefit’?” Emery said.
Critics note that the climate crisis isn’t really a problem we can shop our way out of by buying “green” products.
In general, Emery said, it seems like Neutral is taking the right approach with lowering emissions on dairy operations. “They’re talking about reducing climate impacts through pretty reliable and important ways,” he said. The company says it measures its carbon footprint “obsessively” and has enlisted the help of Greg Thoma, a professor at the University of Arkansas who studies how to improve the sustainability of food products.
On the other hand, Emery said, you can look at what Neutral is doing — managing the land, animals, and manure more responsibly — as sort of the “bare minimum” of what dairy companies should be doing. “We have not been good stewards of the land for the last 50-plus years,” he said. “Basically, we’re undoing damage.”
And offsetting emissions requires some careful accounting. You can plant forests, but sometimes they go up in flames, releasing all that carbon back to the sky. Emery said that Neutral appears to be “doing their due diligence” by getting third-party verified, accredited offsets “through some of the really robust marketplaces out there.” (Neutral’s offsets come from investing in improvements on other dairy farms.)
Jude Capper, an animal scientist and livestock sustainability consultant, said in an email that the company’s choice to buy carbon offsets was “laudable,” but not “quite the same as being actually carbon neutral at the farm level.” She envisions a future where the dairy industry as a whole “can be carbon neutral without having to rely on offsets,” by improving cow nutrition, genetics, management, and efficiency.
For now, at least, as Emery says, “The cows are still there — they’re still burpin’ and poopin’.” He adds that beyond methane emissions, cow’s milk has a large “land footprint.” The space required to grow cattle feed, for instance, could otherwise be used for growing carbon-capturing prairies.
“Is Neutral milk lower carbon, fundamentally, than other dairy competitors? Yeah, it probably is,” he said. “If you’re going to drink dairy milk, that’s probably the responsible carbon way to do it. But if all you’re drinking is some kind of milk, then it’s probably more climate-friendly to get your store-brand oat milk or soy milk.”
Last week, the United States and European Union launched the most ambitious plan to date to slash global methane emissions. The Global Methane Pledge, which reportedly already has the support of at least six of the world’s 15 largest producers of the greenhouse gas, aims to slash methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. But despite it being lauded as a major success, some environmental justice groups are pointing out that the pledge is vague on one key issue: How it will enforce cutting emissions from the largest source of methane globally — agriculture.
Food production is responsible for 25 percent of global methane emissions every year. In the U.S., the sector accounts for 36 percent of the country’s methane, surpassing the coal and gas industry, which generates 30 percent. Yet, the global reduction pledge launched last week only mentions voluntary programs to reduce agriculture’s climate impacts.
“They’re giving agriculture a free pass,” said Brent Newell, a senior attorney at the environmental justice advocacy group Public Justice Food Project. In a joint statement with 24 other groups, the Public Justice Food Project called the pledge a “positive if insufficient step.”
In accordance with the new pledge, the Biden administration announced it will set new regulations to cut emissions from the oil and gas industry and enforce stronger pollution standards for landfills, another major source of the gas. The administration, however, has not announced any kind of enforceable standards for the agricultural industry. Instead, a White House statement called for the “voluntary adoption” of climate-smart agricultural practices and partnerships between farmers, ranchers, and the government to meet pledge targets.
Since the 1990s, emissions of methane — a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period — from agriculture have been climbing worldwide. A major contributor to this trend, particularly in the U.S., are large-scale livestock operations, which can hold up to 10,000 animals per facility. Methane emissions from manure management at U.S. farms jumped from 37 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 1990 to 62.4 million metric tons in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.
For a long time, the solution for all this waste has been to simply dump the manure in giant, open-air lagoons and spray it on nearby fields. Liquifying manure — the technical term for the management practice — disproportionately burdens Black, Latino, Indigenous, and white rural communities. The manure pools pollute the air, and when sprayed on nearby fields, it can pollute groundwater with nitrates, arsenic, coliform bacteria, pesticides, and disinfectant byproducts, as has happened in California’s San Joaquin Valley. As early as 2000, researchers documented that Black communities, especially rural ones, were up to five times more likely to live near an industrial hog facility in North Carolina. Other studies have found that residents living near these facilities are more likely to suffer anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, tuberculosis, and have higher infant mortality rates and low birth weight among newborns than other ZIP codes in the same state.
To address its rising methane emissions, the industry has championed “biogas,” the result of capturing methane from waste ponds and feeding it into natural gas pipelines to power nearby homes and businesses. This “renewable natural gas” is seen as a zero-carbon solution. One of the largest operators of industrial hog facilities, Smithfield Foods, allied with Dominion Energy on a $500 million project to plug in farms in North Carolina, Virginia, and Utah to gas pipelines. However, food and environmental justice groups have legally challenged the project because it doesn’t address the whole system’s health impacts on vulnerable communities.
Farmers managing large-sized livestock operations are increasingly harvesting methane from cow manure te sell as gas.
Scott Strazzante / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
The Global Methane Pledge announced last week doesn’t mention any of these environmental justice issues — or lay out any enforceable standards for reducing methane from agricultural facilities. Instead, it promises to incentivize “the deployment of improved manure management systems, anaerobic digesters, new livestock feeds, composting, and other practices.”
“Our concern is that [the pledge] not only encroaches, but expands a system that creates all sorts of environmental issues,” said Phoebe Seaton, co-director and attorney at the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability in California. “Furthermore, it incentivizes the production of manure-created methane to convert it into gas when we’re supposedly transitioning off of it.”
Environmental justice groups believe the solution lies in leaving behind this type of industrial facility. In April, 25 organizations asked the EPA to regulate methane and other pollutant emissions from hog and dairy facilities under the Clean Air Act, a decision the agency has been putting off citing the need to gather additional information. The agency hasn’t responded to their petitions. (The EPA did not respond to Grist’s inquiry about its regulations for industrial agriculture.)
Earlier this year, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker reintroduced the Farm System Reform Act, which imposes a moratorium on these facilities and creates federal financial assistance for farmers to transition to pasture-based dairy and hog farming.
“President Biden has said that he wants to follow science and that he wants to center environmental justice in the nation’s climate policy,” Newell said. “But allowing industrial agriculture to continue with the status quo, and continue to reward that system with more public dollars, does not build back better. It does not follow science. And it does not place environmental justice at the center of climate policy.”
After decades of negotiations, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) have finalized a $1.9 billion water rights settlement that resolves thousands of tribal claims tied to waterways throughout western Montana.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed the long-pending water compact last week, executing a complex agreement that confirms CSKT’s water rights and authorizes funding to modernize a federal irrigation project comprising 1,300 miles of aging canals also known as the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project. The agreement, which was initially introduced in Congress in 2016 before being passed last year, also provides funding for habitat restoration and transfers control of the National Bison Range to the tribes.
Although the compact requires CSKT to relinquish thousands of off-reservation water rights claims, the final agreement received broad support from both the tribes and many of the non-Native water users who rely on rivers that flow through tribal lands in Montana.
According to attorneys involved in the negotiations, the $1.9 billion being put into trust represents the largest amount ever awarded to a tribe as part of a water rights settlement.
“Our elders continually remind us to protect our water and this day marks the beginning of the water compact implementation that will protect the water for all generations to come,” CSKT Chairwoman Shelly R. Fyant said in a prepared statement. “The many people who worked on this, especially those who are no longer with us, I’d like to honor them for their efforts allowing us to reach this point. They were all instrumental in realizing this long-awaited vision.”
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland signed a historic Indigenous water rights settlement last week. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna, she has made such rights a priority in her administration.
Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Native Organizers Alliance
The dispute stems from the 1855 Treaty of Hellgate, which created the 1.25 million-acre Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. Arguing that a provision of the treaty gives the CSKT exclusive water rights for fishing in streams both on and off the reservation, the tribe made more than 10,000 water rights claims throughout the state — all of which would have had to be litigated in court.
To avoid years of costly litigation, the tribe chose to negotiate the settlement, which quantified extensive water rights for both consumptive and instream uses both on and off the reservation, including co-ownership of certain rights with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
“The settlement provides water to fulfill the purpose of the reservation — which is a permanent homeland for the tribes,” said Ryan Rusche, an attorney for the CSKT, “while at the same time protecting existing non-Indian uses of water on the reservation, where there is a significant irrigation-based economy. It really epitomizes the creativity that can be involved in a negotiated settlement as opposed to a decision by a court.”
The agreement also establishes the Flathead Reservation Water Management Board to govern all aspects of water use within the reservation. Two members of the board will be chosen by the tribe, two will be chosen by the governor of Montana, and a fifth will be chosen by the four appointed members.
Rusche said the new water board will regulate both federally reserved tribal water rights and state-based water rights. The new framework is key to regulating the 127,000-acre Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, where the majority of water users are non-Native, Rusche added.
Noting the regulatory deadlock that existed prior to the settlement, water rights attorney Jay Weiner said the joint regulatory body is a unique solution that will avoid disputes that would arise if the tribe and the state operated under separate legal frameworks.
“It’s an entirely new regulatory framework for the state of Montana and the Flathead Reservation,” said Weiner, who represented the state in the CSKT settlement negotiations from 2004 to 2013. “So, for the first time in basically 25 years, there is going to be a regulatory scheme on the reservation that allows for new water rights to get recognized.”
A slew of anti-Indigenous legislation, escalated violence against and assassinations of Indigenous land defenders, and the COVID-19 pandemic threaten the existence of Brazil’s original people, reports Nick Estes.
5Mins Read Veganic farming, a quiet yet vital trend can not only help regenerate fertility in the soil but also replenish biodiversity. But what is it?
Almond plantations are guzzling so much water from the Murray Darling Basin that even the Almond Board of Australia wants new orchards to be put on hold until the water supply can be assured. Daniel Pedersen reports.
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.
Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.
If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”
Amazon’s corporate practices
In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.
Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services. Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.
Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.
According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.
The Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its members represent more than 100 national groups, including major trade, workers’ and farmers’ organisations.
JACAFRE issued a statement in 2018 on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart, arguing that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihoods of millions in India. The committee said the deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. It would also allow them to own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.
In January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws, passed by parliament in September 2020, centre on enabling and facilitating the unregulated corporatisation of agriculture value chains. This will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce become subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.
Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.
What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.
Bezos not welcome
Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever greater profit.
Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.
Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.
This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:
I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.
In response, US congresswoman Nydia Velazquez wrote on Twitter:
While Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let’s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.
Little wonder that when Bezos visited India in January 2020, he was hardly welcomed with open arms.
Bezos praised India on Twitter by posting:
“Dynamism. Energy. Democracy. #IndianCentury.”
The ruling party’s top man in the BJP foreign affairs department hit back with:
Please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise, your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money.
A fitting response, albeit perplexing given the current administration’s proposed sanctioning of the foreign takeover of the economy, not least by the unscrupulous interests that will benefit from the recent farm legislation.
Bezos landed in India on the back of the country’s antitrust regulator initiating a formal investigation of Amazon and with small store owners demonstrating in the streets. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced that members of its affiliate bodies across the country would stage sit-ins and public rallies in 300 cities in protest.
In a letter to PM Modi, prior to the visit of Bezos, the secretary of the CAIT, General Praveen Khandelwal, claimed that Amazon, like Walmart-owned Flipkart, was an “economic terrorist” due to its predatory pricing that “compelled the closure of thousands of small traders.”
In 2020, Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) filed a complaint against Amazon and Flipkart alleging that they favoured certain sellers over others on their platforms by offering them discounted fees and preferential listing. The DVM lobbies to promote the interests of small traders. It also raised concerns about Amazon and Flipkart entering into tie-ups with mobile phone manufacturers to sell phones exclusively on their platforms.
It was argued by DVM that this was anti-competitive behaviour as smaller traders could not purchase and sell these devices. Concerns were also raised over the flash sales and deep discounts offered by e-commerce companies, which could not be matched by small traders.
The CAIT estimates that in 2019 upwards of 50,000 mobile phone retailers were forced out of business by large e-commerce firms.
Amazon’s internal documents, as revealed by Reuters, indicated that Amazon had an indirect ownership stake in a handful of sellers who made up most of the sales on its Indian platform. This is an issue because in India Amazon and Flipkart are legally allowed to function only as neutral platforms that facilitate transactions between third-party sellers and buyers for a fee.
Under investigation
The upshot is that India’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Amazon must face investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged anti-competitive business practices. The CCI said it would probe the deep discounts, preferential listings and exclusionary tactics that Amazon and Flipkart are alleged to have used to destroy competition.
However, there are powerful forces that have been sitting on their hands as these companies have been running amok.
In August 2021, the CAIT attacked the NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) for interfering in e-commerce rules proposed by the Consumer Affairs Ministry.
The CAIT said that the think tank clearly seems to be under the pressure and influence of the foreign e-commerce giants.
The president of CAIT, BC Bhartia, stated that it is deeply shocking to see such a callous and indifferent attitude of the NITI Aayog whch have remained a silent spectator for so many years when:
… the foreign e-commerce giants have circumvented every rule of the FDI policy and blatantly violated and destroyed the retail and e-commerce landscape of the country but have suddenly decided to open their mouth at a time when the proposed e-commerce rules will potentially end the malpractices of the e-commerce companies.
Of course, money talks and buys influence. In addition to tens of billions of US dollars invested in India by Walmart and Amazon, Facebook invested US$5.5 billion last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested US$4.5 billion.
Since the early 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which ride roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration and the NITI Aayog.
The CAIT has urged the Consumer Affairs Ministry to implement the draft consumer protection e-commerce rules at the earliest as they are in the best interest of the consumers as well as the traders of the country.
Meanwhile, the CCI will probably complete its investigation within two months.
More and more US transnationals have opened up in Mexico over the past few decades, taking advantage of unfair trade agreements, super-exploitative labour conditions and cheap utilities, reports Tamara Pearson.
The primary inspiration for The Red Deal was the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, adopted at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010, writes Simon Butler.
Pembroke Township, population less than 2,000, is the last historic Black farming community left in Illinois. And at one time, it was the largest such community in the northern United States. Founded in the 1860s by runaway slaves, it soon became an agricultural hub, producing tons of hemp during World War II and later feeding Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland during the Great Migration from the South to the North.
And now Nicor Gas wants to run a natural gas pipeline to it.
Earlier this summer the Democrat-controlled Illinois General Assembly passed HB 3404 — a bill that will help fund the proposed gas line, in part by allowing for a 250-percent increase to customers’ gas bills statewide. It would cap a years-long push to bring cheaper natural gas heat to an area, an hour’s drive south of Chicago, that now gets its heat from a mix of propane, wood-burning stoves, and electric space heaters. Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, has until August 29 to sign the bill into law.
But many local farmers and environmentalists are pleading with Pritzker to veto the bill, arguing that the pipeline would threaten agricultural land and rare black oak savanna habitat, and that the time has passed for new fossil fuel infrastructure.
“The community wants renewable energy,” said Fred Carter, a co-founder of the Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living in Pembroke who also grows swiss chard, eggplant, cantaloupes, okra, and other crops on his farm. “This pipeline is a direct assault to the agricultural potential of this community.”
Environmental advocates also argue that the pipeline would undermine Pritzker’s commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Pritzker has pledged to slash emissions in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement and has also committed to ending emissions from the gas industry by 2045.
The case for building the pipeline focuses on the area’s deep poverty. Advocates say it would increase economic opportunities for the mostly Black village of Hopkins Park in Pembroke, one of the poorest areas of the state with a poverty rate more than double that of Illinois overall. It has garnered the support of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has organized meetings between Nicor executives and government officials to make the project happen. Hopkins Park’s mayor, Mark Hodge, has said it would help alleviate poverty for its 500 residents by attracting business. Hodge has reportedly said that switching to renewable energy would be too expensive.
Fred Carter, his wife, and his son stand with a farm apprentice in front of solar panels on their farm. Courtsey of Fred Carter.
Peter Christensen, an assistant professor of environmental economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sees the merits of both sides. “We also have to consider the needs of the local community that really has been left out of energy infrastructure in the past,” he said.
Local farmers and environmental advocates see another way to bring the town out of “energy poverty.” They envision Pembroke as a hub of solar power and sustainable agriculture, carrying on the stewardship of the land. Pembroke has plenty of other needs that could be a priority for economic development, like emergency services or broadband internet.
“This legislation only offers a false solution to the very real problems faced by a community disinvested for decades,” the Illinois Environmental Council wrote in a letter to lawmakers.
If passed, the $10 million plan would lay more than 30 miles of natural gas pipeline through Pembroke Township and hook up hundreds of residents.
Carter worries about a spill contaminating the town’s water and threatening his health and livelihood. He relies on an aquifer on his property for drinking water and watering his crops, like many others in the area.
State regulators have cited Nicor for contaminating water as recently as 2019, when the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued a violation to the company for dumping carcinogenic wastewater into farming fields near aquifer recharge zones. The company is also under investigation by the state attorney general for potential contamination at a dozen sites around Illinois.
Gilbert Michaud, an environmental policy expert at Loyola University Chicago, says he supports bringing rural, lower income communities onto a level playing field, but is skeptical about promises that the pipeline will increase economic opportunity.
“At some point this industry is going to bust,” Michaud said. “Should we be building costly pipelines for a resource that isn’t renewable?” The same reasons Pembroke is good for farming — it’s flat, large, with a lot of sun — would make it good for renewable energy, he said. “From a technical feasibility perspective, something like utility scale wind or solar makes a lot of sense.”
According to the Illinois Environmental Council, despite residents’ long-time interests in renewable energy, the state hasn’t looked at whether solar would work in Pembroke Township.
In March, Pritzker visited Pembroke to celebrate a sweeping new law he signed that provides job protection for people with criminal records, expands access to state contracts for minorities and women, and benefits Black farmers. Carter hopes the governor continues his support by vetoing the bill, which would authorize the local government to seize private property for the pipeline using eminent domain.
“That’s been a fear for the community,” Carter said, “that we will be forced to move from the homes that we’ve been living in for generations.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened global food insecurity. An estimated 132 million more people have been tipped into acute malnutrition since the pandemic began, writes Barry Healy.
The IPCC’s latest report should be a wake-up call to governments everywhere, but it’s going to take more than science to force action by the biggest global emitters, writes Barry Sheppard.
Most of the time carbon dioxide gets all the attention as the most villainous of greenhouse gasses, and the industries that pollute the atmosphere with methane would like to keep it that way. The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, presents the data on this secondary greenhouse gas that makes its impact inescapable.
The panel of scientists singled out methane for special attention in this report saying that, in addition to eliminating carbon-dioxide pollution, “strong, rapid and sustained reductions in CH4 [methane] emissions would also limit the warming effect resulting from declining aerosol pollution and would improve air quality.”
It’s easy to play statistical games and downplay the role of methane when figuring out its contribution to climate change, because — while it is much more potent than carbon dioxide — it can break down after a decade, while CO2 can last in the atmosphere for thousands of years. The IPCC report cuts through that complication by zeroing in on the warming observed so far, and showing which greenhouse gases have captured that excess heat. As you can see in the graph below, carbon dioxide is the primary problem, but methane has played a big role.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment
This caught the eye of Matthew Hayek, who researches the environmental effects of food production at New York University, because agriculture — his area of study — is the largest source of methane emissions (with livestock the chief culprit).
“There’s no brand new information in the report, but there are important refinements and new emphasis. And part of that new emphasis is on methane,” Hayek said.
As a 2020 study showed, methane leaks out of gas pipes and oil wells. It bubbles out of swamps and rice paddies. It seeps from landfills. It gurgles out of the stomachs of livestock, and rises off their manure.
Courtesy of the Global Carbon Project
It’s nearly impossible to stop the methane emissions that naturally come from plants rotting in wetlands, but there are ways of solving most of these problems. Regulators could crack down on leaks, or simply crack down on fossil fuel use. Landfills can capture the gas and use it for fuel. When it comes to agriculture, one of the biggest solutions would be to shift diets away from beef, dairy, and other methane-producing foods. But that last proposal draws immediate backlash from the folks who work in animal agriculture, not to mention meat lovers.
“Meat is an intensely personal issue in a way that fuels are not,” Hayek said, “so you have corporate lobbying playing with societal norms.”
Animal agriculture lobbyists like to point out that methane emissions, though high, have remained steady even as ranchers turn out more hamburgers, milk, and steak. But as the new IPCC report makes clear, it’s not the change in emissions from year to year, but the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that determines how much the world heats up.
The human cost of 1.5°C or even 2°C warming are unimaginable; leading to unprecedented numbers of people having to relocate — internally and across borders — to escape its devastating impacts, writes Susan Price.
The fourth of John Talbott’s criteria is the need for cultural sustainability: Satisfying our need as human beings to be creative and expressive; to learn, grow, teach and be; to have a diverse, interesting, stimulating and exciting social environment and range of experiences available.
― Christine Connelly, Sustainable Communities: Lessons from Aspiring Eco-Villages
And, we can take what Connelly states in her book to the level of — There is relatively little sharing of facilities, faculties, things, social capital, land, farming, cooperative everything, largely due to the dispersement of collective action capitalism has welded to the capitalist consumer, err, citizen. In one sense, many people in this Western society like the idea of big familial situations, and dispersing extra “things” and extra “time” in a cooperative sense, but the systems of oppression, the systems of dog-eat-dog, the systems of malformed educations and coocoo histories, all of that and the retail mentality AND the psychological fears (real, imagined, post-hypnotically suggested through a debt society) of losing home, health, humanity with the wrong throw of the mortgage and employment dice, we have now mostly a society that is not a sharing society, not a sharing economy, not a cadre of millions who believe in a genuine progress index as a marker of a democracy’s overall health.
But to allude to the title, specifically, I am looking at more and more systems of shutting out the ground-view of things versus the global view, or the international view. I am seeing more and more web sites forgetting the lynch-pin of humanity — the family, the community around a family, and the attempt to create tribes and communities of similar purposes and communities of place. Leftist websites spend countless miles of digital ink repeating what the take is on Imperial power, what the take is on the perversities of the American Chaotic diseases, what the world is in those white nations (sic) of more and more poverty, fencing out solutions and global bullshit tied to hobbling literally China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and any country where a social contract with the people and the land is emerging. Important, sure, but some of us are Marxists because we look at the ground as a way toward the larger truths.
Keeping it Local for Global Perspectives
The reality is that, like Thoreau, most do not have to travel far geographically or scholastically to understand systems from one example or a limited set of examples. If a community, or town or county can’t stop job-killing, physiology-killing, ecological-killing things/ideologies/processes coming into said community, such as, say, aerial sprays of mountains and valleys and hills that have been razed by industry, then, what sort of hope do people hold out in the larger view that your country will do the right thing with say, oh, Cuba. You know, stopping the plague of economic and financial and shipping sanctions/blockades. You can see in plain view the results of stealing countries’ bank accounts or stopping the shipping of valuable life saving “stuffs.”
So, how can that Lincoln County, OR, attempt to go to the State Supreme Court to lobby these shyster judges to do the right thing — stop the spraying of neurological and gut killing sprays to inhibit the unnatural grown and profusion of noxious weeds and opportunist shrubs and bushes on a part of mother earth that once was a dynamic forest with dynamic species, with shaded creeks, with ground food for subsoil, terrestrial and avian creatures.
I get why web sites that carry leftist news and reports go for the international gut wrenching or elitist view, but we need balance. We need proof of life and hope and action at the human level. We need writers like me to take one example of humanity doing humanity right, and giving it to the world.
That is the world here, for a moment — less than 72 hours on a plot of forest land I happen to own with my sister. Nothing fancy, just 20 acres of white pine and cedar and Douglas fir. Turkeys and bears, and the amazing skies. It is near Pahto, or Mount Adams. What should be wet soil is something like I’d find in Colorado near Durango. Snow for the season, more than one fifth the average snowfall. And there has been no rain since June 17.
We are talking Oregon, in the viewshed of Pahto and Wy’east (Adams and Hood). Things on those 20 acres and my neighbors’ adjoining 75 acres are not right. Fire, as one of the brothers told me, will be — unless climate models change 180 degrees — a bigger and bigger part of the land. The landscape. The people’s trial and tribulations. Throughout the west. Throughout the globe.
As we are in a 24-7 loop of being entertained (distracted) to death with sports, Trump Beatification Syndrome/Trump Derangement Syndrome, the politics of perversity, Corona Crisis Number 999, and all the junk that occupies the brains of Homo Retailopethicus.
Land Ethic
I’ve been coming to this property for going on 30 years. Not regularly since I have lived and worked in such places as El Paso, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Gladstone, Beaverton, Estacada, Vancouver, and down here on the coast. It is a three and three-quarters of an hour trip from our house on the Pacific (Central Coast) to the place eight miles north of a town called White Salmon.
I met the neighbor landowners, let’s call them Rita and Ron, before they had put down the concrete footings to their house. Now, some 30 years later, they have a garden, tapped into water, have a nice modern house, lots of out buildings, a Cat for grading, and other things to make life in the woods pretty nice. Ron’s got a degree from U of Washington in geography. He is from Seattle. His brother (we’ll call him JW) put in 30 years at Boeing, and he spends time up on some acres he owns next to my property. A motor home that is nothing fancy, a SUV and he has juice, water and a septic system. There is a lot to do, and not a lot to do. He has a condo in Scottsdale, and he has kids in Spokane and Florida. He is living the good life, and it isn’t a huge ecological footprint. He’s a dyed in the wool democrat.
There are robust and real discussions with these two guys and Ron’s wife Rita. She has been married three times, has childhood trauma, had major drug addictions and she is a big time worker, gets things done, and is in recovery. Her gigs include not just taking care of rich people’s linens, scrubbing and cooking. She’s done this sort of work so long that she gets requests from really sick spouses, or individuals. She is there as caretaker, first responder, nutritional coach, travel agent, companion on some of those trips, and navigator for finances, health care concerns, family issues, and more.
Heavy things taking care of people who once were robust, skiers, surfers, outdoors folk, who are now bed-ridden and stroke paralyzed. There are plenty of issues tied to family members of the people she cares for wanting their cut of the goods, and those who want to outright steal from their moms and dads, grannies and papas.
This is a job we call “caring for people” angels. While Rita doesn’t buy into any heaven/hell theme, she jokes about being both an angel of mercy and of death. Many have died on her watch due to advanced stages of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the like.
I worked as a union organizer in Seattle, for part-time college faculty, but my union, SEIU, was and is all about health care workers. I spent time with women and men in Seattle and surrounding communities who were the licensed caregivers — the care home owners and the care home workers. Those workers are many times employed by the state to work the low paying, hard hours jobs of assisting people, old or young, who are incapable of thriving on their own without help with any number of things. Many of the people I represented in the union did the bathing and the feeding.
What I learned in those microcosms (again, the big picture stuff was always at the forefront in the union, with them beating the drum to support Obama-2 and Insley for WA governor) was again ramifying how mixed up Capitalism is under Democrats or the Demons of Republicanism. In Seattle, post-Occupy where I got to teach a few times in those famous street teach-ins, all of the Trayvon Martin protests, and those against Amazon, the fabric of that disjointed concept of those who have and those who do not have was in plain sight.
The levels of inequity were in plain sight in that backyard of mine. And, those people from African nations, those Latinx, working as personal care support, or CNAs, and those managing houses where the old, tired, sick would end up, now that was yet another lesson, and all the world is a stage was there as the underlying theme in that Diaspora of people from poverty-stricken post (sic) colonial lands, where war and murder by despots were daily concerns. These humble people were/are the caregivers, the end-of-life shepherds for “our” people — citizens.
In so many cases, the people who come from poor countries, they were the only people in the lives of these American citizens who were languishing in their sadness as their families had abandoned them in many instances. Some woman from Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, there she was, bathing, soothing, singing to and holding the lives of white people who were stuck in a room, slowly or rapidly dying.
Caregivers, and SEIU represented them as a unit. All the training these caregivers have to undergo, at the state and county levels. Black women and men, and those of Muslim faith, in the Seattle area, tending to the lives of the dying, or the developmentally disabled, that is the reality of capitalism as throwaway society. Capitalism of the impersonal, Capitalism of the scam after scam. Each layer of Capitalism is like a tree riddled with termites and beetles and all manner of disease eating it from the inside out.
That’s the real world stage — what a society does to assist the old, young, vulnerable, failing, too weak to move. What a society does to collectively build safety nets, to look at the “all the world as a stage” perspective from a macro lens, in order to widen the scope to the county, regional, national, global level. Rita taking care of super vulnerable people who do not worry about how they are paying for her private services. Aging in place — in these big homes overlooking the Columbia Gorge. Aging at home before all things go south.
In some cases, Rita is their only confidant, their only set of ears and eyes. Twice weekly visits are the only human touch they receive in their lives. Her job is that multiplicity of jobs in a patriarchal disaster capitalism society — nurse, PT provider, social worker, psychologist, taxi service, health navigator, nutritionist, legal consultant, errand person, cook, mover, travel consultant, companion, financial planner, and more. to end up as a symbolic friend and quasi-daughter or sister.
Rita and Ron live a good life out in the woods, with turkeys jumping into the trees, deer coming to the great garden they have, and the seasonal bear pushing over stumps to look for grubs. A riot of hummingbirds. Snakes and lizards. Butterflies we don’t see in suburban areas anymore. And those trees.
Ron works the land, tends to the canopies, looks for crowded trees, or dying ones, and has learned how to shepherd the land so the trees on the property thrive. Canopies where the crowns don’t touch. A better than park-like feel to the land. And now, with the changing precipitation, the nighttime temperatures last week in the nineties, all that desiccating climate heating, we have yet another “world is a stage” with the poor management of the land, the lack of state resources, the lack of collective will to mitigate fire suppression, and how to bring these forests into some manageable fire dampening state.
Yes, Ron is 68, still capable of logging and stacking trees, but his shoulder a few years ago was operated on, and a knee replaced this year. And, just a week ago, a reminder that the other knee will be chopped out with a titanium replacement to come.
Rita and Ron save money, use the Washington state Medicaid system, they are not consumers — Ron saves the old Ford sedan, cannibalize parts from old washers and dryers, and he knows how to tune up chainsaws, and how to build. His degree in geography and his deep regard for American history keep him sane. He likes golf, he plays dozens of types of cards, including Texas Hold’em, and he does Scrabble. He knows the native names of the two mountains in his geographic area.
This is the small fry of America, and a hidden gem. I know for a fact that old aging in place infirm people, or chronically unhoused folk, or people on the more untenable end of the Autism Spectrum, as well as people who do not fit in, who have intellectual disabilities, or those with complex or simple PTSD, would thrive here.
Again, setting up communities that are multi-generational, with residents possessing multiple avocations and occupations, people with varying skills, those who want community big time, and those who need community in their lives to do some checks and balances. Horse therapy, or dogs. Healthcare and PTSD recovery through gardening. Skills of building a tiny home from logs to end product. Designing microhomes that are in kits, packages that a couple could put together. Imagine that, housing people, and getting abandoned farms or degraded farms into the hands of intentional and healing communities.
So, that one 72 hours on the land, my land shared in title with my sister (it’s really never OUR land, now is it), the small things of just regular people spark, again, from this socialist, Marxist, communist, the deep well of experience and deep learning to a much higher ground, something worthy. But imagine, a thousand, or ten thousand farming centered healing communities, with Native American elders/wisdom, with that wounded veteran to farmer ethos, with all the markings of communitarian outposts of real healing and body-mind-spirit functioning. You know, all those yellow buses that are no longer road worthy. Think of them in the millions, taken to some of these places to be stripped, insulated, interior designed, made into HOMES, with amazing artistic touches, in a big circle, like a sunflower, with a community gathering place in the center, commercial kitchen and food processing center, healing center, and arts center. Imagine that, Bezos and Gates and all the other Financial Stormtroopers who have gutted communities from the bottom, up.
Alas, that’s what the small generates — the systems thinking approach to communities, which need food security, water security, direct health care, even living, aging and dying in place. This does work, will work, and should be scaled up to the thousandth degree. But in this scorched earth and scorched body capitalism, nothing can be moved unless there are a thousand lawyers, ten thousand contracts, and one hundred thousand overseers-code enforcers-middlemen/women in the mix, denigrating human agency, deconstructing the value of people and ideas, and destroying hope.
Bear, turkey, deer, on the deck sipping tequila, and the four of us talking about life, aging, the intricacies of lives so different yet here, on this plot of land, with a common humanity beyond just the intercourse of money and exchanges a la capitalism. The land, that is, the mountains and hills, all those animal trails, each tree a testament to these people, Rita and Ron, caring for the place for more than three decades.
Got a Few Million for this Real Solution?
So, the state of affairs is rotten, to the max, in every aspect of Capitalism. Sure, JC and Rita and Ron have a more middle of the row belief in this country’s exceptionalism. They are not versed in Howard Zinn, W.E.B. DuBois, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and so many others who have pried open this country’s evil roots, it’s so-called founding, and the wars, the expansionism, all of that. It’s much easier to look at the past with rose tinted glasses, and to believe that something was right, with Eisenhauer or Truman, FDR, any of them. That is the limitation of Americans, even good ones like Ron, Rita and JC. Truly, but they are in their own world, so to speak, a bubble, and yes, they get the world around them is harsh, that some (sic) of USA’s policies have kinked up the world. But to have those limits, to not see how the US has always been Murder Incorporated, or that this is Rogue Nation, a nation of chaos, a nation run by CIA-DoD and the secretive cabal of banks-industrialists-AI fuckers.
And, lo and behold, another friend, we’ll call her Betty, sent to me this other chunk of land, in Oregon, near wine country, 205 acres, up for sale, with amazing infrastructure, up for sale for 6.9 million dollars. The possibility of a developer coming into 205 acres, setting the torch for 5 acre dream (sic) homes for the rich, in a planned and gated community of millionaires, well, that is the rush she had to ask me if I had ideas.
Of course, I have ideas. Look at the list above. This place is called Laurelwood — Look at it here. Link.
Here, the low down via the realtor —
$6,945,000.
205 +/- acres zoned AF-5
Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
Science Classroom Building with Library
Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
Ahh, the place is now a retreat, in retreat, as the Yoga enthusiasts are old or aging, and the place was closed due to the corona insanity/lockdown, and the people are giving up, and now it’s on the market: It is Ananda of Laurelwood. I present the basic website verbiage:
What Is Ananda?
Ananda is a global movement to help you realize the joy of your own highest Self.
Ananda Oregon
Living Wisdom School
Temple & Teaching Center
Yogananda Gardens
Conscious Aging
Our Inspiration
Paramhansa Yogananda
Swami Kriyananda
Ananda Worldwide
Education for Life
There you have it — water, a spring, land, buildings, the potential of being not just this 205 intentional-healing-farming-tiny home building community, but a model for many others to spread across the land. I know I could get dozens of groups to come to this property for workshops, test kitchen work, growers, even wine producers, horse therapy folk, music healers, and even entomologists to create insect and pollinator fields. Students from the dozens of colleges around the Pacific Northwest, doing projects on aging, on healing, the dog and horse therapy works.
Take a look at this —
Our retreat center is located southwest of Portland in a beautiful pastoral valley. There are numerous places to walk and connect with nature throughout our gardens, orchards, and grounds. Our guest rooms are simple, decorated to create an uplifting space to rejuvenate. Each room has its own sink with bathrooms just down the hall. Three delicious vegetarian meals served each day are included as part of your stay. Your retreat includes morning and afternoon yoga and meditation.
So, how do I, well trained, well educated, well versed, find the money? My proposal to Betty is to send a letter to, well, that famous ex-wife, McKenzie Bezos, now McKenzie Scott Tuttle. Billionaire who has pledged to give away half of her wealth, in the billions, tens of billions. Oh, there is Nick Hanauer, and other billionaires, so, imagine, just putting 6.9 million down, owning the property, shelling out for two or three years the monthly upkeep and insurance shit that this property would need while people like me and others build this community, pulling in all those actors, business women and men, the nonprofits, the outside the envelope people who could help design this place as a place of healing.
For me, it is a quick writing prompt, and what follows it that letter to McKenzie Scott Tuttle. First draft. You can never get this to Abigail Disney or Melinda Gates, others, including the Phil Nike Knights. That is Capitalism on steroids — lies, flimflam, propaganda, marketing us to death, layer after layer of buffering, check systems, until good ideas and a good piece of land go the way of the dodo — extinct. This project I could spark into action. I have no problem talking with McKenzie or her handlers with her there, of course. Anyone. There are 2,800 billionaires in the world. Hundreds of philanthropies. A few million angel investors. Collective action and stakeholder building. But the property needs to be held in a trust, a placeholder to allow for a group of people to design its future, to get entrepreneurs involved, to get this thing going so it can be self-sufficient. A model for thousands of other places around the USA and Canada, being scarfed up by the evil ones, the developers.
Below my letter to Scott-Tuttle, see Nick Hanauer. McKenzie Scott gets wealthier even giving away billions below that. Abigail Disney below that. Below her, the author of Dream Hoarders. Better yet, Michael Parenti on Capitalism below the hoarder talk. Below that, Michael’s son, Christian, speaking about Tropic of Chaos, his book climate chaos/heating fueling violence and war.
Here, my letter to McKenzie Scott Tuttle (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates started the Giving Pledge in 2010. It encourages those billionaires to pledge to give away 50% of their earnings to charity. By 2012, over 81 billionaires joined the Giving Pledge. That number is now over 120 billionaires, as of May 2014, according to the Giving Pledge’s official website.)
Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.
— Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.
We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.
This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda, into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.
We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.
It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.
Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.
Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.
Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development
So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.
We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal, by, land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland. Or in so many other locations across this country.
We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.
We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.
We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”
This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”
Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.
Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.
The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.
Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.
This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaires. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.
Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”
We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agro-ecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.
The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is — to paraphrase and level a composite point,” We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.
First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.
This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.
We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.
Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.
Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan, buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.
This is what this property would also “house.”
All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing
The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.
Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks — that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.
Here, the cart (before the horse): this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.
It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.
There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity — called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:
learning spaces, inside and outside
buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
husbandry
learning food systems, from farm to plate
ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
speakers’ bureau
farmers, restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
healing center
Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
sustainability practicum’s for students
low income micro home housing
day care center, early learning center
How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.
There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.
There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism. Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?
Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity — with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels. We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.
We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.
It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:
Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:
Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.
How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”
Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:
Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.
We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of describing “loss, decline, death,” this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.
We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Tierra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration. This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.
We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.
Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?
Sincerely,
Paul Haeder
205 +/- Acres southwest of Hillsboro, OR
The Ananda Center at Laurelwood is considered an educational nonprofit. It started as a retreat center with workshops including yoga and energy healing. It also offers a non-credit residential study program and a non-accredited (but state authorized) college offering bachelor and associate degrees and educational certificates.
Apologies are, more or less by custom, the end of things.
Say sorry, and don’t mention it again.
As warm and moving as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s apology was over the immigration Dawn Raids of the 1970s, it will mostly fade away. At the function, standing under an Auckland Town Hall plaque honouring one of New Zealand’s worst administrators of Samoa (and Tokelau), no one I spoke to, knew who he was.
And yet nine years ago Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised for his actions and others.
Apologies are a bit of a sugar rush; something else is needed.
Which brings me to Australian-based academic Katerina Teaiwa who, during the dawn raid apology, tweeted it was great to hear, and added: “We’ll have to work on some specific recognition and support for Banabans from Kiribati & Fiji whose island was sacrificed for NZ, Aus & UK development/agriculture/farming/food security.”
Understanding what happened to Banaba is vital for Pacific futures; not just for correcting historical wrongs that can be dealt with a glitzy Town Hall confession of guilt.
Tragic story of Banaba
That said, the tragic story of Banaba and New Zealand’s role in it – and in Nauru – justify a formal state apology but Teaiwa is right to suggest a rather more ongoing process.
Banaba is vitally important for a number of reasons.
First there is the brutal business of not only robbing a people of their land, but also of enforced exile to another part of the world. Sea level rise, alone, may well make this more the norm, than unusual. Banabans, how they were treated and their response, offer much to an endangered low lying Pacific.
And as Pacific states move toward the business of seafloor mining, Banaba offers lessons in issues as diverse as “beware strangers offering lavish gifts” to “and where do we live after the strangers have taken all the riches….?”
What is also alarming about the Banaba story (and Nauru’s) is that their corrupt, illegal and deceptive plunder was done to make, in particular, Aotearoa and Australia rich. The soils of Banaba and Nauru contain motherlodes of phosphate which is needed to grow grass for agriculture.
Here is the rub: almost no New Zealanders know the story of Banaba or Nauru. And when pressed, some will say, reflecting colonial propaganda, that “we paid a fair price for the phosphate”.
No ‘fair price’
A simple reply: no we did not. Never did.
An apology to Banaba is necessary but only after Aotearoa and others come to terms with what they did to around a thousand people who, for centuries, have lived peacefully on a beautiful island.
Its stark ruins today should remind us that just saying sorry is mostly not enough.
Great to hear. We’ll have to work on some specific recognition and support for Banabans from Kiribati & Fiji whose island was sacrificed for NZ, Aus & UK development/ agriculture/ farming/ food security https://t.co/DndnKPvIiv
“Equality before the law” — for a constitutional principle, it is one of the most basic, perhaps the most important.
It is also the idea (at least the one openly stated by right-wing law firms, such as the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) that is driving the legal injunctions blocking President Joe Biden’s $4 billion debt relief initiative for farmers of color. The effort is part of the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 stimulus package.
As the argument runs, it is not fair for any specific group of farmers, although they may belong to historically marginalized groups of people, to be singled out for special treatment.
We are told that farming is tough for everyone in the occupation. White farmers also have debts that could be forgiven. Everyone should have equal access to the same resources. Therefore, Biden’s proposal is being decried as unconstitutional. Yet, as simple and logical as this line of reasoning sounds, the arguments provided are deeply flawed.
What these injunctions really display is a ploy by right-wing political actors and the conservative law firms that give them cover, to gin up the support of rural white people.
There have been three separate injunctions filed — in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. Each represents white farmers not only from those three states but around the country.
The filing from Wisconsin roots its argument in individual rights. Here, the reasoning is based on the 1995 case Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, which held that group-based allegations of racism must be scrutinized with respect to the effects on individuals.
Specifically, the plaintiffs take a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurring opinion from Adarand, which reads, “Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.”
There is an interesting bit of constitutional philosophy here but also one that is problematic: Basically, it’s debatable whether there is a “focus upon the individual” in the Constitution.
The fact is that there are many references to group rights in our country’s founding document. Look no further than the First Amendment, with respect to the freedom to practice religion free of discrimination. As far as I know, a religion comprised of one individual does not exist.
The same could be said of the Second Amendment and militias. Again, this is a clear “focus,” not on individual, but rather on group rights. So, for the plaintiffs filing these injunctions to base their arguments on the idea that the U.S.’s magna carta is rooted solely on individual rights is incorrect.
The Florida injunction, which the Texas plaintiffs claim is the basis for their case, takes issue with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) designation of “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” (SDFRs).
Here, the reasoning goes that direct evidence needs to be shown as to the experiences of racism. The plaintiffs argue that, “although the government argues that historical discrimination against SDFRs also included things such as higher interest rates, less advantageous loan terms, and delayed approvals, the record evidence does not appear to show that SDFRs with current loans suffered such discrimination.”
The problem is that evidence is not the issue; or rather, claims that evidence of racism must be provided are not required for the USDA to act with respect to historically marginalized farmers and ranchers.
It is worth noting that the SDFR designation was created as part of the 1990 Farm Bill, referring explicitly to producers who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their group identity. Included are not only African Americans, but also Latinos, Indigenous people, and Asian and Pacific Islanders.
With the designation, the USDA secretary of agriculture was granted the power to “carry out an outreach and technical assistance program to encourage and assist socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and veteran farmers or ranchers, in owning and operating farms and ranches, and in participating equitably in the full range of agricultural programs offered by the Department.”
The main point here is on “participating equitably.” Specifically, the USDA has the power, in ways that it sees fit, to directly work with historically marginalized groups of people to counter systemic discrimination.
Debt forgiveness is one such initiative. After all, if people are in debt, then they are less likely and able to participate in other programs. For instance, Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) loans — which provide resources to farmers to practice farming in ways that improve soil, water and animal health — in part depend on having sound financials. So, the case coming out of Florida misunderstands the SDFR designation, which has been on the books for over 30 years.
But really, these injunctions have little to do with sound reasoning. Digging into the actual forces behind these cases, we find Donald Trump loyalists including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller. They started the nonprofit that filed the injunction in the Texas case.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the injunction in Florida, is bankrolled by various conservative and libertarian groups such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Donors Trust, which is tied to the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Additionally, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is behind the case filed in Wisconsin, draws most of its financial support from the Bradley Foundation. This foundation is behind funding several right-wing nonprofits around the country that are hostile to unions and skeptical of climate change.
In line with this strategy, leaders of the Wisconsin Institute — a recipient of Bradley foundation grants — have publicly stated that they have political objectives in mind with this injunction, intending to expand nationally in projects that target leftists and anti-racism.
The point is that these lawsuits against farmers of color have little to do with “equality before the law.” Bankrolled by conservatives with political ambitions, this race-baiting, white-identity politicking is all about maintaining a conservative base of voters heading into 2022 and beyond.
Instead, what we have are nothing but right-wing ploys that do nothing but divide rural people and distract them from working on creating meaningful change in our communities.
Stu Smith got an email from his insurance company last summer with some bad news: His premium was more than quadrupling.
Smith is the co-owner of Smith Madrone, a wine operation in the mountains of California’s Sonoma Valley, and he had held a wildfire insurance policy with the company for more than 30 years. Now, though, the insurer had decided Smith’s property was too risky to keep on its customer rolls at anything close to its longtime price. If Smith wanted to renew his policy, he would have to pay annual premiums of more than $55,000, up from just $12,000 the year before.
The following week, as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire began to spread in the hills just east of Sonoma County, Smith scrambled to find a new insurance company. No private insurer seemed willing to issue him a policy, so at the last moment, he resorted to a state-run insurance plan that covered a portion of his property. The price was still orders of magnitude greater than what he’d grown used to: He would now have to pay $46,000 for an insurance plan that offered a fraction of the coverage his previous plan did.
After a few weeks, with the LNU fire still burning nearby, Smith gave in and signed up for the state-run plan, but many of his neighbors in Sonoma Valley did not. Hundreds of farm owners in California have found themselves forced to go without insurance coverage this past year, from ranchers along the Central Coast, nut growers outside San Diego, and winery ownerslike Smithin Sonoma and Napa Valley. Nobody knows for sure how many farm owners have lost coverage, but what’s clear is that the trend has sent shock waves through California’s agricultural regions.
A strawberry picker uses a bandana she used to cover her nose and mouth to avoid inhaling smoke while working in the fields in Oxnard, California, during a recent wildfire season. Philip Cheung for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Insurance companies in California have taken a staggering blow from wildfires — the industry’s losses in 2017 and 2018 eclipsed its total profits from the previous 25 years — and have started to drop customers by the thousands, leaving wineries and ranches unable to find insurance for properties worth millions of dollars. The state has stepped in to provide a short-term fire insurance solution of last resort, but the crisis foreshadows a larger confrontation over so-called managed retreat in one of the country’s all-important breadbaskets.
California plays a crucial role in the food economy, producing more than 80 percent of the country’s wine and more than 80 percent of fruits like strawberries and raspberries. If a lack of fire insurance helps usher these farmers out of business, the rest of the country might pay for it at the grocery store. The decline of a farming region like Napa would also create knock-on effects for the service-sector workers who support the agricultural economy, as well as the thousands of migrant workers who pick grapes during harvest season.
Brent Burchett, the head of the San Luis Obispo Farm Bureau on the state’s central coast, said that he’s not sure how much longer his members are going to hang on.
“I think it was serious already, and then the notion that they cannot get insurance is pushing them to say, ‘I’ve got to make a decision,’” said Burchett. “If you’re packing up and moving, I would say the threat of a fire is pretty much top of mind.”
This insurance dilemma has been simmering for decades. After a rash of wildfires and earthquakes in the 2000s, the largest private insurers became more conservative about writing new policies in fire-prone areas. It wasn’t until after the historic fire seasons of 2017 and 2018, though, that regulators began to notice a rise in so-called “nonrenewals,” wherein a private insurer refuses to renew an existing customer’s insurance plan. An estimated 400,000 residential customers received nonrenewal notices in 2018 and 2019, with numbers spiking by more than 200 percent in the most vulnerable counties in California. Thousands of commercial businesses and farms have also been dropped.
Unable to secure insurance on the private market, thousands of households began turning to the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, known as FAIR, a state-run “insurer of last resort” that provides limited and expensive fire coverage. The program had been created in the 1960s after a series of brush fires, and was designed to provide only the most basic coverage, so it excluded a farmer’s agricultural buildings, tractors, and other equipment, which together could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When insurance started dropping customers a few years ago, this gap in the state plan left many farmers with no coverage options for much of their property — a potential death sentence for their business. Farms rely on bank loans for the capital they need to expand their operations, but they can’t get bank loans without insurance. Many farmers began to worry that banks would soon cut them off.
After a lobbying push by the largest trade association of California farmers, the California state legislature passed a bill earlier this month that expanded the FAIR Plan to cover farm structures, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it a few days later. (The state insurers’ association also supported the bill.) The new insurance won’t be available until the end of the year, though, which means that many farmers will have to “go naked,” as Smith calls it, through a fire season that experts believe could be one of the worst in history.
Cattle graze as the 2021 Tamarack fire burns unchecked, exacerbated by drought conditions and gusty winds. Ty O’Neil / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
The worst-case scenario here is as bad as can be imagined: If another wildfire like the LNU Lightning Complex strikes Smith’s part of Sonoma this summer, it could not only destroy outbuildings and drip irrigation equipment but contaminate all the local grapes with smoke as well, making them impossible to sell. Smith can count himself lucky. Because he’s enrolled in the FAIR Plan, he can expect a minimal payout if a fire destroys his operation, but some of his property is still de facto “naked.” For his neighbors, those who’ve gone without coverage altogether, any kind of fire damage would likely mean bankruptcy.
Even if farmers do make it to next year, the insurance problem isn’t going away any time soon. The FAIR plan’s coverage caps out at around $4 million, and many wineries and ranches are worth much more than that. It also doesn’t cover damage to crops (federal crop insurance typically doesn’t either). That can be painful for winery owners like Smith: The smoke from last season’s wildfires contaminated many grape vintages in Napa and Sonoma, rendering them unusable for wine.
To protect the long-term interests of California’s agriculture industry, the state government will have to cajole private insurers into offering coverage at something like the price and scale they used to, most likely by assuring them that property owners will take steps to reduce wildfire risk. The state could also try to funnel more rejected customers into the FAIR program, but that would create an ultra-expensive risk pool that might prove unsustainable.
Smith, for one, is optimistic about getting private insurers to return to the Wine Country market. He has spent thousands of dollars to clear flammable forest vegetation and create “defensible space” to buffer against blazes. If a private insurer looked at his property rather than at his ZIP Code, he says, they’d be sure to offer him a better deal.
Others in Wine Country are less optimistic about the future of the industry.
“If you’re repeatedly hit by wildfire and you’re not insured for it, then most likely you’re going out of business,” said Ryan Klobas, head of the Napa County Farm Bureau, which represents winery owners one valley over from Smith’s winery in Sonoma. Klobas estimates that around 85 percent of his 1,500 farm bureau members have received nonrenewal notices from insurers in the past few years.
Even if private insurers do offer coverage again, Klobas says, it’ll likely be too expensive for many small operations to afford — the few wineries that didn’t lose coverage last year saw their rates spike as much as fourfold overnight. “How do you keep funding an insurance policy where the rates have tripled or quadrupled?” he says. “That doesn’t make any sense. They’re essentially just sitting there waiting for something to happen, but [they] don’t have the resources to really deal with it.”
To understand why Klobas is worried, it helps to think about why an insurance company would drop customers in the first place. If an insurance company is paying out more money in claims than it is taking in from premiums, the logical solution is to raise premiums to cover the difference. When an insurance company drops thousands of customers, though, it is saying that it cannot raise prices high enough to turn a profit off those customers — saying, in other words, that their farms are impossible to insure.
“No group is working harder to understand fire risk and mitigation efficacy than insurers,” said Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, in a statement to Grist. “I’m not aware of anyone that can credibly state they understand how to stop a large fire from taking homes and businesses.”
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has extended both the length of every fire season and its geographic range, which means that each year is likely to bring new destruction to a place that isn’t ready for it. If insurers continue to lose money, some companies might withdraw from parts of California altogether. Something similar happened in the Midwest almost a century ago when private flood insurers abandoned the region following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Frazier noted that given the scale of fire risk in California, simply raising premiums might not be enough to protect insurance companies from going out of business: “An insurer also has to guard against solvency issues from over-concentration to regional fire risk and avoid taking a disproportionate share of an individual fire’s damage,” he said.
For the past two years, California has issued one-year moratoria that prohibit insurers from dropping customers in areas that saw severe fire damage that year. This has slowed the pace of displacement for those in the highest-risk regions, but it has not slowed down the pace of nonrenewals in other areas, nor does it protect homeowners after the moratorium expires. This temporary solution has only delayed a reckoning that many states will have to face: California must decide whether it should continue issuing moratoria in disaster areas or let the market take its course.
“On the one hand, we might say that people who live in these wildfire risk zones absolutely should have insurance, it’s sort of a basic ability of them to have some resilience to stay where they are, so maybe governments should step in to subsidize or require insurance companies to make it available,” said Lisa Dale, a Columbia University professor who has studied the viability of managed retreat from fire zones. “On the other hand, we could say that if insurance companies [believe] that an area is too risky to insure, then we should allow the private marketplace to reflect that risk, [because] it’s providing incentives that lead us in the right direction.”
In other parts of the country, the growing threat of sea-level rise has spurred a conversation about “managed retreat,” the coordinated withdrawal from low-lying regions and other vulnerable areas. The insurance crisis could force a similar conversation in California as residents find themselves unable to secure sufficient coverage. If growers like Smith start to go under, it will not be easy to replace them.
The UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), including a ‘pre-summit’, will take place in September 2021 in New York. The Italian government is hosting the pre-summit in Rome from 26–28 July. The UNFSS claims it aims to deliver the latest evidence-based, scientific approaches from around the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through coalitions of action and mobilise new financing and partnerships.
Despite claims of being a ‘people’s summit’ and a ‘solutions’ summit, the UNFSS is facilitating greater corporate concentration, unsustainable globalised value chains and agribusiness leverage over public institutions. As a result, more than 300 global organisations of small-scale food producers, researchers and indigenous peoples will gather online from 25-28 July to mobilise against the pre-summit.
The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) for relations with the United Nations Committee on World Food Security is working to eradicate food insecurity and malnutrition. According to the CMS, the UNFSS – founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) – is disproportionately influenced by corporate actors, lacks transparency and accountability and diverts energy and financial resources away from the real solutions needed to tackle the multiple hunger, climate and health crises.
The CMS argues that the UNFSS is not building on the legacy of past world food summits, which resulted in the creation of innovative, inclusive and participatory global food governance mechanisms anchored in human rights, such as the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).
Promoting industrial agriculture
It seems the UNFSS is now dominated by corporate front groups and corporate-driven platforms, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the International Agri-Food Network, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the EAT Forum as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation. The President of AGRA, Agnes Kalibata, was even appointed as UN Special Envoy for the summit.
According to the CMS, those being granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health.
The industrialised food system that these corporations fuel does not even feed the world, despite corporate claims to the contrary. For example, the 2021 UN Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition indicates that the number of chronically undernourished people has risen to 811 million, while almost a third of the world’s population has no access to adequate food. Furthermore, the Global South is still reeling from Covid-19 related policies which have laid bare the inherent fragility and injustices of the prevailing food system.
Those who contribute most to world food security, smallholder producers, are the most threatened and affected by the corporate concentration of land, seeds, natural and financial resources and the related privatisation of the commons and public goods.
And these processes are accelerating: the high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants in a quest to impose a one size fits all type of agriculture and food production on the world. Digitalisation, artificial intelligence and other technologies are serving to promote a new wave of resource grabbing and the restructuring of food systems towards a total concentration of power.
Under the guise of saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers and feeding the world, what Gates and his corporate associates are really doing is desperately trying to repackage the dispossessive strategies of imperialism wrapped in the language of ‘sustainability’ and ‘inclusivity’.
Through various aspects of data control pertaining to soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, and land use, for example, and e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy, patents, synthetic food and the undermining of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, global agricapital seeks to gain full control over the world’s food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is under threat as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, genetically engineered (GE) soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies. The model being promoted desires farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GE seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The CMS notes that these are false ‘solutions’ that seek to bypass and undermine the peasant food web which currently produces up to 70% of the world’s food, working with only 25% of the resources. Moreover, these false solutions do not address structural injustices such as land and resource grabbing, corporate abuse of power and economic inequality. They merely reinforce them.
Towards food sovereignty
More than 380 million people belong to the movements protesting against the UNFSS. They are demanding a radical transformation of corporate food regimes towards a just and truly sustainable food system. They are also demanding increased participation in existing democratic food governance models, such as the UN Committee for World Food Security (CFS) and its High-Level Panel of Experts. The UNFSS threatens to undermine CFS, which is the foremost inclusive intergovernmental international policy-making arena.
There is an intensifying fight for space between local markets and global markets. The former are the domain of independent producers and small-scale enterprises, whereas global markets are dominated by increasing monopolistic large-scale international retailers, traders and the rapidly growing influential e-commerce companies.
It is therefore essential to protect and strengthen local markets and indigenous, independent small-scale producers and enterprises to ensure community control over food systems, economic independence and local food sovereignty. With this in mind, the CMS is calling for a radical agroecological transformation of food systems based on food sovereignty, gender justice and economic and social justice.
Agroecology is practised throughout the world. As numerous high-level (UN) reports have argued over the years, this approach improves nutrition, reduces poverty, contributes to gender justice, combats climate change and enriches farmland. With no need to purchase proprietary inputs (chemicals, seeds, etc) and its outperforming of industrial agriculture, agroecology represents a shift towards genuine food sovereignty and thus a direct threat to corporate agribusiness.
During the online mobilisation against the pre-summit, participants will share small-scale food producers and workers’ realities and their visions for a human rights-based and agroecological transformation of food systems. In doing so, they will highlight the importance of food sovereignty, small-scale sustainable agriculture, traditional knowledge, rights to natural resources and the rights of workers, indigenous peoples, women and future generations.
More information about the online mobilisation from 25-28 July can be found on the FoodSystems4People website .
(@KTeaiwa) 
