reading assignment - Environmental science
Unit Group 2 Readings:
Unit 3
Are Natural Resources a Blessing or Curse for Developing Countries? Mark Tran, The Guardian
An Unlikely Feud Between Beekeepers and Mennonites Simmers in Mexico, Nina Strochlic, National Geographic (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/unlikely-feud-beekeepers-mennonites-simmers-mexico)
Unit 4
Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin
Unit 5
How Humans are Making Novel Ecosystems, Riley Black, Natural History Museum of Utah
Can We Restore… Everything? A debate on novel ecosystems and restoration, Bob Lalasz, Cool Green Science
Use the readings from Units 3, 4, and 5 to write a 1 page reading response on the following topic: With information from the readings and lecture, do you think environmental resource use is a blessing or a curse for communities? How does your opinion apply to both the environmental impacts and the socio-economic impacts of resource use?
Unit Group 3 Readings:
Unit 6
Silent Spring is More Than a Scientific Landmark… Rebecca Renner, The Literary Hub
The Green New Deal Explained, David Roberts, Vox
Earth Day 1970… Lola Jusidman Shoshana, The Trouble
Is it Smoky in Here? The Clean Air Act in the 21st Century, Felix Barber
Unit 7
Why Natural Disasters Aren’t All That Natural, Chmutina et al., openDemocracy
Vulnerability to Natural Disasters ‘Soaring’…, Mark Tran, The Guardian
Unit 8
A Map of Where Your Food Originates May Surprise You, Jeremy Cherfas, NPR
Does Democracy Avert Famine?, Michael Massing, The New York Times
Is Fair Trade Finished?, Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian
Use the readings from Units 6, 7, and 8 to write a 1 page reading response on the following topic: With information from the readings and lecture, do you think the Green New Deal is possible? How do you think the Green New Deal will impact the way we approach environmental disasters? How do you think it will impact the way we approach our global food system?
Global development is supported by
About this content
Mark Tran
Are natural resources a blessing or a curse for
developing countries?
The notion of the resource curse goes back to the 18th century, but the realities are more complex than the
term might suggest •
Thu 25 Oct ‘12 14.52 BST
What is the resource curse?
Dating back to Adam Smith, this is the notion that countries with abundant natural resources
do not perform as well economically as those without. Far from being a blessing, minerals have
an adverse impact, the argument goes. This is because commodity exporters face a decline
over time in the relative prices of their products and also because of the Dutch disease,
whereby the resource sector drives up the value of the local currency, hurting the
competitiveness of manufacturing exports.
In an influential study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, covering 97 countries between
1971-89, it was found that natural resource exporters grew at appreciably lower rates than
other countries. More recent work, however, disputes the methodology used by Sachs and
Warner. Daniel Lederman and William Maloney, for instance, have suggested that natural
resources are neither curse nor destiny, asserting instead that its a mixed bag: some resource-
rich countries perform poorly, others do not.
What are the relative growth figures for resource-rich and resource-poor countries?
A recent World Bank study, Africas Pulse, compared growth of Africas resource-rich and non-
resource-rich countries between 1980 and 2010. In the 1980s, both sets of countries
experienced a virtual stagnation in per-capita gross domestic product. Overall, resource-rich
countries were unable to harness resource wealth in the first two decades. Since 2000,
however, it has been a different story: higher growth in all groups, with oil-rich countries in the
lead. The oil producers achieved sustained growth over the past decade, with some growing
faster than others. Angola and Equatorial Guinea experience annual average growth rates of
more than 7\%. At the lower end, Nigeria, Sudan and Cameroon had rates of 3-6\%.
What impact has economic growth had on poverty and inequality in Africa?
Not much. The same World Bank study said strong economic growth over the past decade in
Africa has had little impact on poverty rates. Some countries – Angola, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo and Gabon – have actually seen an increase in the percentage of their population
living in extreme poverty. Overall, the decline in poverty rates in resource-rich countries has
generally lagged that of the regions non-resource rich countries, said the bank. Income
distribution remains highly unequal in most countries in the region … To a large extent, the
benefits of growth have not reached the poorest segments of society.
How do resource-rich countries score on accountability and governance?
Topics
Natural resources and development
Development studies student resources
Africa
features
Poorly. The World Banks governance indicators show that oil-rich countries in Africa
systematically perform worse than other country groups in terms of voice and accountability,
political stability, rule of law and the control of corruption, with Chad and Sudan among the
worst performers. As the World Bank notes, where governments are heavily dependent on
resource rents rather than on direct taxes from citizens, the chain of accountability between
citizens and governments can be weak. Also, natural resource abundance can be associated
with weak checks and balances, because the generation of large rents motivates political elites
and powerful private actors/groups to capture these rents for the benefit of a few over the
common economic interest. Although there may be no resource curse on growth, it seems to
manifest itself in relation to concentration of wealth and accountability (video).
What is being done to improve accountability?
France is making a big push for the EUs directives on transparency and accounting, currently
making their way through the EU. The directives, which were approved by a key European
parliamentary committee in September, require publicly quoted companies in the extractive
industries to publish their payments to foreign governments – not just country by country, but
also project by project – without exception. The directives would be in line with US rules under
the Frank-Dodd act, although are under legal challenge. France wants to broaden these
transparency rules to forestry and fishing eventually.
How much do African economies depend on natural resources?
Oil, gas and mining are important sectors and account for a major source of income. Economic
rents from minerals in sub-Saharan Africa came to $169bn (£105bn) in 2010. In Nigeria and
Angola, two of Africas biggest oil producers, the combined size of the rents was more than
$100bn. Government revenues from natural resources – a combination of tax and royalties –
accounted, on average, for 45\% of total general revenues in resource-rich countries.
The economist Paul Collier says African resource reserves may be underestimated, as less
exploration has taken place in Africa than in other regions. African countries share of global
reserves and production of non-fuel minerals is considerable as well. Zambia and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo have a combined share of 6.7\% of total world copper
production, while Ghana and Mali account for 5.8\% of total world gold production.
6/20/2020 How Humans are Making Novel Ecosystems | Natural History Museum of Utah
https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2019/10/18/how-humans-are-making-novel-ecosystems 2/6
By Riley Black
In 1890, an American ornithologist changed the nature of our continent forever. Enamored with the
birds of Shakespearean plays, Eugene Schieffelin released 60 starlings into New York’s Central
Park. He would try with bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks, too, but those birds
never really took off. The European starlings, however, quite liked their new home. Today they
number more than 200 million in the United States alone, part of novel ecosystems that we
humans are continually creating.
Even though humans have been spurring the genesis of novel ecosystems for the duration of our
existence, it’s only recently that ecologists, philosophers of science, and others have begun to
recognize the concept. To some extent, the nature of evolution itself dictates that new ecosystems
will arise just as species originate and go extinct, but the idea has more to do with our current era
of environmental influence. By introducing species to new habitats, altering environments through
construction, spurring global climate change, and more, we are creating ecosystems that never
existed before. And it’s changing how we think about nature and its future. Writing in 2009
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534709002018), Richard Hobbs, Eric
Higgs, and James Harris noted that “These novel systems will require significant revision of
conservation and restoration norms and practices away from the traditional place-based focus on
existing or historical assemblages.”
By itself, a novel ecosystem is not good or bad. It’s simply a description of new interactions that did
not exist in a place historically. Close-to-shore areas near nuclear power plants are often warmed
by the activities involved in running the reactor, for example, and in turn this results in a different
ecological community that can be a boon to some species. American crocodiles seem fond of the
warmed waters around nuclear power plants in Florida. But a novel ecosystem can also be one
that is new but denuded of its diversity. A department store parking lot built over woodland is a
novel ecosystem, offering garbage for raccoons and pigeons but understandably being
inhospitable to many of the other species that used to live there.
Understanding the creation and evolution of novel ecosystems is part of taking responsibility for our
own actions. When we take a flight to see a friend, mow the lawn, or dump old pills down the drain,
we are making individual changes that can build and alter life on our planet. It’s not as if nature is
some place Out There that we are not connected to. Nature can be as close as a chickadee in your
front yard or the house spider making a web in the corner of your living room. If we can recognize
how our actions are constantly shaping and reshaping the environment, we can make informed
decisions about what we hope the future of nature will look like.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534709002018
6/20/2020 How Humans are Making Novel Ecosystems | Natural History Museum of Utah
https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2019/10/18/how-humans-are-making-novel-ecosystems 3/6
Riley Black is the author of Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, Prehistoric Predators, and a
science writer for the Natural History Museum of Utah, a part of the University of Utah in Salt Lake
City. Our mission is to illuminate the natural world and the place of humans within it. In addition to
housing outstanding exhibits for the public, NHMU is a research museum. Learn more.
(http://nhmu.utah.edu/)
Blog Author:
Riley Black (/blog-author/riley-black)
Category: Natural History (/blog/category/fun)
Tags: conservation (/blog/tag/conservation)
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What Shanl We Mam?
The Tragedy of the Commons
The population problem has no technical solution;
it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
Garrett Hardin
At the end of a thoughtful article on
the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and
York (1) concluded that: Both sides in
the arms race are ... confronted by the
dilemma of steadily increasing military
power and steadily decreasing national
security. It is our considered profes-
sional judgment that this dilemma has
no technical solution. If the great pow-
ers continue to look for solutions in
the area of science and technology only,
the result will be to worsen the situa-
tion.
I would like to focus your attention
not on the subject of the article (na-
tional security in a nuclear world) but
on the kind of conclusion they reached,
namely that there is no technical solu-
tion to the problem. An implicit and
almost universal assumption of discus-
sions published in professional and
semipopular scientific journals is that
the problem under discussion has a
technical solution. A technical solution
may be defined as one that requires a
change only in. the techniques of the
natural sciences, demanding little or
nothing in the way of change in human
values or ideas of morality.
In our day (though not in earlier
times) technical solutions are always
welcome. Because of previous failures
in prophecy, it takes courage to assert
that a desired technical solution is not
possible. Wiesner and York exhibited
this courage; publishing in a science
journal, they insisted that the solution
to the problem was not to be found in
the natural sciences. They cautiously
qualified their statement with the
phrase, It is our considered profes-
The author is professor of biology, University
of California, Santa Barbara. This article is
based on a presidential address presented before
the meeting of the Pacific Division of the Ameri-
can Association for the Advancement of Science
at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June 1968.
13 DECEMBER 1968
sional judgment. . . . Vhether they
were right or not is not the concern of
the present article. Rather, the concern
here is with the important concept of a
class of human problems which can be
called no technical solution problems,
and, more specifically, with the identifi-
cation and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not
a null class. Recall the game of tick-
tack-toe. Consider the problem, How
can I win. the game of tick-tack-toe?
It is well known that I cannot, if I as-
sume (in keeping with the conventions
of game theory) that my opponent un-
derstands the game perfectly. Put an-
other way, there is no technical solu-
tion to the problem. I can win only
by giving a radical meaning to the word
win. I can hit my opponent over the
head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify
the records. Every way in which I win
involves, in some sense, an abandon-
ment of the game, as we intuitively un-
derstand it. (I can also, of course,
openly abandon the game-refuse to
play it. This is what most adults do.)
The class of No technical solution
problems has members. My thesis is
that the population problem, as con-
ventionally conceived, is a member of
this class. How it is conventionally con-
ceived needs some comment. It is fair
to say that most people who anguish
over the population problem are trying
to find a way to avoid the evils of over-
population without relinquishing any of
the privileges they now enjoy. They
think that farming the seas or develop-
ing new strains of wheat will solve the
problem-technologically. I try to show
here that the solution they seek cannot
be found. The population problem can-
not be solved in a technical way, any
more than can the problem of winning
the game of tick-tack-toe.
Population, as Malthus said, naturally
tends to grow geometrically, or, as we
would now say, exponentially. In a
finite world this means that the per
capita share of the worlds goods must
steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?
A fair defense can be put forward for
the view that the world is infinite; or
that we do not know that it is not. But,
in terms of the practical problems that
we must face in the next few genera-
tions with the foreseeable technology, it
is clear that we will greatly increase
human misery if we do not, during the
immediate future, assume that the world
available to the terrestrial human pop-
ulation is finite. Space is no escape
(2).
A finite world can support only a
finite population; therefore, population
growth must eventually equal zero. (The
case of perpetual wide fluctuations
above and below zero is a trivial variant
that need not be discussed.) When this
condition is met, what will be the situa-
tion of mankind? Specifically, can Ben-
thams goal of the greatest good for
the greatest number be realized?
No-for two reasons, each sufficient
by itself. The first is a theoretical one.
It is not mathematically possible to
maximize for two (or more) variables at
the same time. This was clearly stated
by von Neumann and Morgenstern (3),
but the principle is implicit in the theory
of partial differential equations, dating
back at least to DAlembert (1717-
1783).
The second reason springs directly
from biological facts. To live, any
organism must have a source of energy
(for example, food). This energy is
utilized for two puposes: mere main-
tenance and work. For man, mainte-
nance of life requires about 1600 kilo-
calories a day (maintenance calories).
Anything that he does over and above
merely staying alive will be defined as
work, and is supported by work cal-
ories which he takes in. Work calories
are used not only for what we call work
in common speech; they are also re-
quired for all forms of enjoyment, from
swimming and automobile racing to
playing music and writing poetry. If
our goal is to maximize population it is
obvious what we must do: We must
make the work calories per person ap-
proach as close to zero as possible. No
gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports,
no music, no literature, no art. . . . I
think that everyone will grant, without
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argument or proof, that maximizing
population does not max2imize goods.
Benthams goal is impossible.
In reaching this conclusion I have
made the usual assumption that it is
the acquisition of energy that is the
problem. The appearance of atomic
energy has led some to question this
assumption. However, given an infinite
source of energy, population growth
still produces an inescapable problem.
The problem of the acquisition of en-
ergy is replaced by the problem of its
dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has so wit-
tily shown (4). The arithmetic signs in
-t-he analysis are, as it were, reversed;
but Benthams goal is still unobtainable.
The optimum population is, then, less
than the maximum. The difficulty of
defining the optimum is enormous; so
far as I know, no one has seriously
tackled this problem. Reaching an ac-
ceptable and stable solution will surely
require more than one generation of
hard analytical work-and much per-
suasion.
We want the maximum good per
person; but what is good? To one per-
son it is wilderness, to another it is ski
lodges for thousands. To one it is estu-
aries to nourish ducks for hunters to
shoot; to another it is factory land.
Comparing one good with another is,
we usually say, impossible because
goods are incommensurable. Incommen-
surables cannot be compared.
Theoretically this may be true; but in
real life incommensurables are commen-
surable. Only a criterion of judgment
and a system of weighting are needed.
In nature the criterion is survival. Is it
better for a species to be small and hide-
able, or large and powerful? Natural
selection commensurates the incommen-
surables. The compromise achieved de-
pends on a natural weighting of the
values of the variables.
Man must imitate this process. There
is no doubt that in fact he already does,
but unconsciously. It is when the hidden
decisions are made explicit that the
arguments begin. The problem for the
years ahead is to work out an accept-
able theory of weighting. Synergistic
effects, nonlinear variation, and difficul-
ties in discounting the future make the
intellectual problem difficult, but not
(in principle) insoluble.
Has any cultural group solved this
practical problem at the present time,
even on an intuitive level? One simple
fact proves that none has: there is no
prosperous population in the world to-
day that has, and has had for some
1244
time,-p - rate of zero. Any people
that has intuitively identified its opti-
mum point will soon reach it, after
which its growth rate becomes and re-
mains zero.
Of course, a positive growth rate
might be taken as evidence that a pop-
ulation is below its optimum. However,
by any reasonable standards, the most
rapidly growing populations on earth
today are (in general) the most misera-
ble. This association (which need not be
invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic
assumption that the positive growth rate
of a population is evidence that it has
yet to reach its optimum.
We can make little progress in work-
ing toward optimum poulation size until
we explicitly exorcize the spirit of
Adam Smith in the field of practical
demography. In economic affairs, The
Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized
the invisible hand, the idea that an
individual who intends only his own
gain, is, as it were, led by an invisible
hand to promote . .,. the public interest
(5). Adam Smith did not assert that
this was invariably true, and perhaps
neither did any of his followers. But he
contributed to a dominant tendency of
thought that has ever since interfered
with positive action based on rational
analysis, namely, the tendency to as-
sume that decisions reached individually
will, in fact, be the best decisions for an
entire society. If this assumption is
correct it justifies the continuance of
our present policy of laissez-faire in
reproduction. If it is correct we can as-
sume that men will control their individ-
ual fecundity so as to produce the opti-
mum population. If the assumption is
not correct, we need to reexamine our
individual freedoms to see which ones
are defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons
The rebuttal to the invisible hand in
population control is to be found in a
scenario first sketched in a little-known
pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical
amateur named William Forster Lloyd
(1794-1852). We may well call it the
tragedy of the commons, using the
word tragedy as the philosopher
Whitehead used it (7): The essence of
dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It
resides in the solemnity of the remorse-
less working of things. He then goes on.
to say, This inevitableness of destiny
can only be illustrated in terms of hu-
man life by incidents which in fact in-
volve unhappiness. For it is only by
them that the futility of escape can be
made evident in the drama.
The tragedy of the commons develops
in this way. Picture a pasture open to
all. It is to be expected that each herds-
man will try to keep as many cattle as
possible on the commons. Such an ar-
rangement may work reasonably satis-
factorily for centuries because tribal
wars, poaching, and disease keep the
numbers of both man and beast well
below the carrying capacity of the land.
Finally, however, comes the day of
reckoning, that is, the day when the
long-desired goal of social stability be-
comes a reality. At this point, the in-
herent logic of the commons remorse-
lessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman
seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly
or implicitly, more or less consciously,
he asks, What is the utility to me of
adding one more animal to my herd?
This utility has one negative and one
positive component.
1) The positive component is a func-
tion of the increment of one animal.
Since the herdsman receives all the
proceeds from the sale of the additional
animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a func-
tion of the additional overgrazing
created by one more animal. Since,
however, the effects of overgrazing are
shared by all the herdsmen, the negative
utility for any particular decision-
making herdsman is only a fraction of
-1.
Adding together the component par-
tial utilities, the rational herdsman
concludes that the only sensible course
for him to pursue is to add another
animal to his herd. And another; and
another.... But this is the conclusion
reached by each and every rational
herdsman sharing a commons. Therein
is the tragedy. Each man is locked into
a system that compels him to increase
his herd without limit-in a world that
is limited. Ruin is the destination to-
ward which all men rush, each pursuing
his own best interest in a society that
believes in the freedom of the com-
mons. Freedom in a commons brings
ruin to all.
Some would say that this is a plati-
tude. Would that it were! In a sense, it
was learned thousands of years ago, but
natural selection favors the forces of
psychological denial (8). The individual
benefits as an individual from his ability
to deny the truth even though society as
a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
SCIENCE, VOL. 162
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Education can counteract the natural
tendency to do the wrong thing, but the
inexorable succession of generations
requires that the basis for this knowl-
edge be constantly refreshed.
A simple incident that occurred a few
years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts,
shows how perishable the knowledge is.
During the Christmas shopping season
the parking meters downtown were
covered with plastic bags that bore tags
reading: Do not open until after Christ-
mas. Free parking courtesy of the
mayor and city council. In other words,
facing the prospect of an increased de-
mand for already scarce space, the city
fathers reinstituted the system of the
commons. (Cynically, we suspect that
they gained more votes than they lost
by this retrogressive act.)
In an approximate way, the logic of
the commons has been understood for
a long time, perhaps since the dis-
covery of agriculture or the invention
of private property in real estate. But
it is understood mostly only in special
cases which are not sufficiently general-
ized. Even at this late date, cattlemen
leasing national land on the western
ranges demonstrate no more than an
ambivalent understanding, in constantly
pressuring federal authorities to increase
the head count to the point where over-
grazing produces erosion and weed-
dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the
world continue to suffer from the sur-
vival of the philosophy of the commons.
Maritime nations still respond automat-
ically to the shibboleth of the freedom
of the seas. Professing to believe in
the inexhaustible resources of the
oceans, they bring species after species
of fish and whales closer to extinction
(9).
The National Parks present another
instance of the working out of the
tragedy of the commons. At present,
they are open to all, without limit. The
parks themselves are limited in extent-
there is only one Yosemite Valley-
whereas population seems to grow with-
out limit. The values that visitors seek
in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly,
we must soon cease to treat the parks
as commons or they will be of no value
to anyone.
What shall we do? We have several
options. We might sell them off as pri-
vate property. We might keep them as
public property, but allocate the right
to enter them. The allocation might be
on the basis of wealth, by the use of an
auction system. It might be on the basis
of merit, as defined by some agreed-
13 DECEMBER 1968
upon standards. It might be by lottery.
Or it might be on a first-come, first-
served basis, administered to long
queues. These, I think, are all the
reasonable possibilities. They are all
objectionable. But we must choose-or
acquiesce in the destruction of the com-
mons that we call our National Parks.
Pollution
In a reverse way, the tragedy of
the commons reappears in problems of
pollution. Here it is not a question of
taking something out of the commons,
but of putting something in-sewage,
or chemical, radioactive, and heat
wastes into water; noxious and danger-
ous fumes into the air; and distracting
and unpleasant advertising signs into
the line of sight. The calculations of
utility are much the same as before.
The rational man finds that his share of
the cost of the wastes he discharges into
the commons is less than the cost of
purifying his wastes before releasing
them. Since this is true for everyone, we
are locked into a system of fouling our
own nest, so long as we behave only
as independent, rational, free-enter-
prisers.
The tragedy of the commons as a
food basket is averted by private prop-
erty, or something formally like it. But
the air and waters surrounding us can-
not readily be fenced, and so the trag-
edy of the commons as a cesspool must
be prevented by different means, by co-
ercive laws or taxing devices that make
it cheaper for the polluter to treat his
pollutants than to discharge them un-
treated. We have not progressed as far
with the solution of this problem as we
have with the first. Indeed, our particu-
lar concept of private property, which
deters us from exhausting the positive
resources of the earth, favors pollution.
The owner of a factory on the bank of
a stream-whose property extends to
the middle of the stream-often has
difficulty seeing why it is not his natural
right to muddy the waters flowing past
his door. The law, always behind the
times, requires elaborate stitching and
fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived
aspect of the commons.
The pollution problem is a con-
sequence of population. It did not much
matter how a lonely American frontiers-
man disposed of his waste. Flowing
water purifies itself every 10 miles, my
grandfather used to say, and the myth
was near enough to the truth when he
was a boy, for there were not too many
people. But as population became denser,
the natural chemical and biological re-
cycling processes became overloaded,
calling for a redefinition of property
rights.
How To Legislate Temperance?
Analysis of the pollution problem as
a function of population density un-
covers a not generally recognized prin-
ciple of morality, namely: the morality
of an act is a function of the state of
the system at the time it is performed
(10). Using the commons as a cesspool
does not harm the general public under
frontier conditions, because there is no
public; the same behavior in a metropo-
lis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty
years ago a plainsman could kill an
American bison, cut out only the tongue
for his dinner, and discard the rest of
the animal. He was not in any impor-
tant sense being wasteful. Today, with
only a few thousand bison left, we
would be appalled at such behavior.
In passing, it is worth noting that the
morality of an act cannot be determined
from a photograph. One does not know
whether a man killing an elephant or
setting flre to the grassland is harming
others until one knows the total system
in which his act appears. One picture
is worth a thousand words, said an
ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000
words to validate it. It is as tempting to
ecologists as it is to reformers in general
to try to persuade others by way of the
photographic shortcut. But the essense
of an argument cannot be photo-
graphed: it must be presented rationally
-in words.
That morality is system-sensitive
escaped the attention of most codifiers
of ethics in the past. Thou shalt
not . . . is the form of traditional
ethical directives which make no allow-
ance for particular circumstances. The
laws of our society follow the pattern of
ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly
suited to governing a complex, crowded,
changeable world. Our epicyclic solu-
tion is to augment statutory law with
administrative law. Since it is practically
impossible to spell out all the conditions
under which it is safe to burn trash in
the back yard or to run an automobile
without smog-control, by law we dele-
gate the details to bureaus. The result
is administrative law, which is rightly
feared for an ancient reason-Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?-Who shall
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watch the watchers themselves? John
Adams said that we must have a gov-
ernment of laws and not men. Bureau
administrators, trying to evaluate the
morality of acts in the total system, are
singularly liable to corruption, produc-
ing a government by men, not laws.
Prohibition is easy to legislate
(though not necessarily to enforce); but
how do we legislate temperance? Ex-
perience indicates that it can be ac-
complished best through the mediation
of administrative law. We limit possi-
bilities unnecessarily if we suppose that
the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies
us the use of administrative law. We
should rather retain the phrase as a
perpetual reminder of fearful dangers
we cannot avoid. The great challenge
facing us now is to invent the corrective
feedbacks that are needed to keep cus-
todians honest. We must find ways to
legitimate the needed authority of both
the custodians and the corrective feed-
backs.
Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy of the commons is in-
volved in population problems in an-
other way. In a world governed solely
by the principle of dog eat dog-if
indeed there ever was such a world-
how many children a family had would
not be a matter of public concern.
Parents who bred too exuberantly would
leave fewer descendants, not more, be-
cause they would be unable to care
adequately for their children. David
Lack and others have found that such a
negative feedback demonstrably con-
trols the fecundity of birds (11). But
men are not birds, and have not acted
like them for millenniums, at least.
If each human family were depen-
dent only on its own resources; if the
children of improvident parents starved
to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought
its own punishment to the germ line-
then there would be no public interest
in controlling the breeding of families.
But our society is deeply committed to
the welfare state (12), and hence is
confronted with another aspect of the
tragedy of the commons.
In a welfare state, how shall we deal
with the family, the religion, the race,
or the class (or indeed any distinguish-
able and cohesive group) that adopts
overbreeding as a policy to secure its
own aggrandizement (13)? To couple
the concept of freedom to breed with
the belief that everyone born has an
1246
equal right to the commons is to lock
the world into a tragic course of action.
Unfortunately this is just the course
of action that is being pursued by the
United Nations. In late 1967, some 30
nations agreed to the following (14):
The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights describes the family as the natural
and fundamental unit of society. It fol-
lows that any choice and decision with
regard to the size of the family must irte-
vocably rest with the family itself, and
cannot be made by anyone else.
It is painful to have to deny categor-
ically the validity of this right; denying
it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resi-
dent of Salem, Massachusetts, who
denied the reality of witches in the 17th
century. At the present time, in liberal
quarters, something like a taboo acts to
inhibit criticism of the United Nations.
There is a feeling that the United
Nations is our last and best hope,
that we shouldnt find fault with it; we
shouldnt play into the hands of the
archconservatives. However, let us not
forget what Robert Louis Stevenson
said: The truth that is suppressed by
friends is the readiest weapon of the
enemy. If we love the truth we must
openly deny the validity of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, even
though it is promoted by the United
Nations. We should also join with
Kingsley Davis (15) in attempting to
get Planned Parenthood-World Popula-
tion to see the error of its ways in em-
bracing the same tragic ideal.
Conscience Is Self-Eliminating
It is a mistake to think that we can
control the breeding of mankind in the
long run by an appeal to conscience.
Charles Galton Darwin made this point
when he spoke on the centennial of the
publication of his grandfathers great
book. The argument is straightforward
and Darwinian.
People vary. Confronted with appeals
to limit breeding, some people will un-
doubtedly respond to the plea more
than others. Those who have more
children will produce a larger fraction
of the next generation than those with
more susceptible consciences. The dif-
ference will be accentuated, generation
by generation.
In C. G. Darwins words: It may
well be that it would take hundreds of
generations for the progenitive instinct
to develop in this way, but if it should
do so, nature would have taken her
revenge, and the variety Homo contra-
cipiens would become extinct and
would be replaced by the variety Homo
progenitivus (16).
The argument assumes that con-
science or the desire for children (no
matter which) is hereditary-but heredi-
tary only in the most general formal
sense. The result will be the same
whether the attitude is transmitted
through germ cells, or exosomatically,
to use A. J. Lotkas term. (If one denies
the latter possibility as well as the
former, then whats the point of educa-
tion?) The argument has here been
stated in the context of the population
problem, but it applies equally well to
any instance in which society appeals
to an individual exploiting a commons
to restrain himself for the general
good-by means of his conscience. To
make such an appeal is to set up a
selective system that works toward the
elimination of conscience from the race.
Pathogenic Effects of Conscience
The long-term disadvantage of an
appeal to conscience should be enough
to condemn it; but has serious short-
term disadvantages as well. If we ask
a man who is exploiting a commons to
desist in the name of conscience,
what are we saying to him? What does
he hear?-not only at the moment but
also in the wee small hours of the
night when, half asleep, he remembers
not merely the words we used but also
the nonverbal communication cues we
gave him unawares? Sooner or later,
consciously or subconsciously, he senses
that he has received two communica-
tions, and that they are contradictory:
(i) (intended communication) If you
dont do as we ask, we will openly con-
demn you for not acting like a respon-
sible citizen; (ii) (the unintended
communication) If you do behave as
we ask, we will secretly condemr. you
for a simpleton who can be shamed
into standing aside while the rest of us
exploit the commons.
Everyman then is caught in what
Bateson has called a double bind.
Bateson and his co-workers have made
a plausible case for viewing the double
bind as an important causative factor in
the genesis of schizophrenia (17). The
double bind may not always be so
damaging, but it always endangers the
mental health of anyone to whom it is
applied. A bad conscience, said
Nietzsche, is a kind of illness.
To conjure up a conscience in others
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is tempting to anyone who wishes to
extend his control beyond the legal
limits. Leaders at the highest level
succumb to this temptation. Has any
President during the past generation
failed to call on labor unions to moder-
ate voluntarily their demands for higher
wages, or to steel companies to honor
voluntary guidelines on prices? I can
recall none. The rhetoric used on such
occasions is designed to produce feel-
ings of guilt in noncooperators.
For centuries it was assumed without
proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps
even an indispensable, ingredient of the
civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian
world, we doubt it.
Paul Goodman speaks from the
modern point of view when he says:
No good has ever come from feeling
guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor
compassion. The guilty do not pay
attention to the object but only to them-
selves, and not even to their own in-
terests, which might make sense, but to
their anxieties (18).
One does not have to be a profes-
sional psychiatrist to see the conse-
quences of anxiety. We in the Western
world are just emerging from a dreadful
two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros
that was sustained partly by prohibi-
tion laws, but perhaps more effectively
by the anxiety-generating mechanisms
of education. Alex Comfort has told the
story well in The Anxiety Makers (19);
it is not a pretty one.
Since proof is difficult, we may even
concede that the results of anxiety may
sometimes, from certain points of view,
be desirable. The larger question we
should ask is whether, as a matter of
policy, we should ever encourage the
use of a technique the tendency (if not
the intention) of which is psycholog-
ically pathogenic. We hear much talk
these days of responsible parenthood;
the coupled words are …
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 1/8
Smarter By Nature
BY BOB LALASZ
JANUARY 28, 2015
I D E A S
Can We Restore…Everything? 100 Words from Hobbs, Ellis,
Marvier & Others
Weeds in a vacant lot. Photo © Michael Coghlan/Flickr.
Can a vacant lot be….a dangerous idea?
https://blog.nature.org/science/
https://blog.nature.org/science/profiles/bob-lalasz/
https://blog.nature.org/science/category/ideas/
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 2/8
Yes, argued a paper last fall in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, if you think of that lot
as a place that can’t be restored to a natural state before people turned it weedy and parkable (as
in, “can be parked on by cars” — not “can be turned into a park”).
The paper highlighted one of the biggest scientific fault lines in conservation: Can such “novel”
and “hybrid” ecosystems like that lot — human-altered places that include about 36 percent of
Earth’s ecosystems, everything from farms to aquaculture to the plant-colonized sides of ruined
buildings — ever be restored back to their prehistoric states? If so, which ones — and at what cost?
The paper’s authors, led by Carolina Murcia of the University of Florida and the Orgainzation for
Tropical Studies, said the evidence is clear: Any ecosystem can be restored, given enough
resources.
They argued that the very concept of the irreversible, phase-shifted novel ecosystem is
unsupported by evidence. And they went on to say that the idea of novel ecosystems is a step back
for conservation — providing a “license to trash” or “get out of jail” card for companies or others
who want to sidestep the hard but ultimately beneficial investments restoration and biodiversity
protection require. (Dan Simberloff, a coauthor on the paper, and Murcia have amplified on their
argument in a recent piece for Ensia.com.)
Science is always about the play of ideas. So we asked seven scientists — including Erle Ellis,
Richard Hobbs and Michelle Marvier — for their 100-word responses to the TREE paper. The
answers are as various as ecosystems, novel or otherwise. (Editor’s note: The following should not
be taken as responses to the Simberloff et al. Ensia piece.)
MEREDITH CORNETT
‘The fuss over labeling takes time and energy
practitioners lack.
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347(14)00157-8
http://www.ots.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=359&Itemid=763
http://ensia.com/voices/novel-ecosystems-are-a-trojan-horse-for-conservation/
http://ensia.com/
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 3/8
Meredith Cornett is director of science for The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Follow
Conservation practitioners find it hard to shake the feeling that dallying with “novel ecosystems”
equates to giving up. Murcia et al.’s cautionary tone is therefore reassuring, although their
recurring emphasis on the lack of “proof” of ecological thresholds detracts from a critical point: the
fuss over labeling an ecosystem “novel,” “hybrid” or “historic” takes time and energy practitioners
lack. Our core challenges remain: clearly define objectives, assess progress and adjust course as
needed. No matter what we call them, those objectives should reflect the dynamic nature of the
systems we manage and the emerging stressors that threaten their resilience.
ERLE ELLIS
‘Novel ecosystem science and conservation aim
to expand the view of what “natures” are worth
conserving
Erle Ellis is associate professor of geography & environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
and a visiting associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Follow
I found the paper less than useful, scientifically and for conservation. The novel ecosystem
community already knows, as the authors assert, that detecting “explicit, irreversible ecological
thresholds [that] allow distinctions between ‘novel ecosystems’ and ‘hybrid’ or ‘historic’ ones” may
http://www.meredithwcornett.com/
https://twitter.com/@MeredithCornett
http://www.ecotope.org/people/ellis/
https://twitter.com/@erleellis
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 4/8
be impossible. We also don’t intend to present a “clear message as to what practitioners should do
with a ‘novel ecosystem.’” Novel ecosystem science and conservation instead aim to expand the
view of what “natures” are worth conserving — beyond a return to “pristine nature,” a hopeless
impossibility (e.g., Marris et al 2013) — and to explore all options and reasons to do so.
CRAIG GROVES
‘Decisions about managing ecosystems are
colored mostly in shades of grey
Craig Groves is executive director of Science for Nature and People (SNAP).
Thirty-six years ago I arrived in the western United States to a region dominated by sagebrush
ecosystems that today has been transformed to large landscapes of an invasive Asian grass.
Whitebark pine forests where I had hunted forest grouse only a decade ago are now largely dead or
dying. Climate change is implicated in both cases; successful restoration efforts have yet to
materialize.
Murcia and colleagues make valid points about the value of traditional restoration. Their critique of
novel ecosystems, however, is limited by an impractical, black and white view of ecosystems,
thresholds, and restoration itself. Decisions about managing ecosystems, unfortunately, are
colored mostly in shades of gray.
http://www.snap.is/leadership/craig-groves/
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 5/8
Pallets in a DC lot. Photo © apium/Flickr.
RICHARD HOBBS
‘Restoration and conservation have always
absorbed new insights, challenges and
opportunities
Richard Hobbs is Australian Laureate Fellow with the University of Western Australia’s School of Plant Biology.
Recently I visited a bald cypress swamp in Louisiana — beautiful, but with a floating understory of
non-native water hyacinth that we soon found sheltering a native juvenile salamander. I’ve also
https://19mvmv3yn2qc2bdb912o1t2n-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/science/files/2015/01/5728929650_1ee4f24847_z.jpg
http://www.uwa.edu.au/people/Richard.Hobbs
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 6/8
seen thriving wetlands in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta without a single native
organism.
These are real-world hybrid and novel ecosystems — a world Murcia et al would prefer we ignore
regarding restoration and conservation options (especially when deciding whether something can’t
or shouldn’t be restored). They fear derailing restoration and conservation; but these young
disciplines have always absorbed new insights, challenges and opportunities, becoming better
equipped to manage and restore systems for today and the future. Isn’t that what we all want?
MICHELLE MARVIER
I thought troublesome ideas were the point of
science
Michelle Marvier is professor of environmental studies and sciences at Santa Clara University and the co-author (with
Peter Kareiva) of Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature (Roberts & Co.)
Murcia and colleagues contend that “[t]he ‘novel ecosystem’ label may provide a ‘license to trash’”
and “scientists should exercise caution” when discussing such ideas. They cite ecosystems’ ability to
recover from past disturbance as evidence that the novel ecosystem idea is misguided.
Ironically, I recently discussed the same studies regarding ecosystem recovery. In response, Miller,
Soule and Terborgh cautioned that “blanket predictions about nature having a high level of
resilience are premature and may promote ecological tinkering.”
Somehow it’s unsafe to say nature sometimes cannot recover and it’s unsafe to say nature often can
recover.
When did scientists start worrying so much about the dangerous implications of ideas? I thought
troublesome ideas were the point of science.
http://www.scu.edu/cas/ess/faculty-staff/michelle-marvier/index.cfm
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.12130/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.12127/abstract
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 7/8
ERIK MEIJAARD
‘Conservation: Let’s just get on with it.
Erik Meijaard is a founder of Borneo Futures.
Follow
The term ‘novel ecosystems’ is an attempt to create a fundamental distinction between old and new
thinking or functioning. Instead, it is nonsense, creating unhelpful polarization. Conservation is
about negating human impacts on ecosystems and species. Murcia et al. are correct: no threshold
exists beyond which we cannot return to a historic state. Leave my office alone for 1,000 years, and
a verdant tropical rainforest replaces it. All ecosystems are in flux, and their ‘stability’ depends on
how closely we look. Similarly, some parts of Earth need new conservation, while others do nicely
with the old style. Let’s just get on with it.
BETH TELLMAN
‘Returning to arbitrary reference points will
require the dislocation or livelihood
transformation of hundreds of millions of people
Seeking to return to “the historical trajectory of ecosystems before human activity” (if we actually
knew what that was) would require the dislocation or livelihood transformation of hundreds of
millions of people in places like Bangladesh, Haiti or Latin America. If we care about people as
much as other species, this line in Murcia et al — “all ecosystems should be considered candidates
for restoration, regardless of the requisite resources” — should instead be about restoring socio-
ecological systems for their ecosystem services. Novel ecosystems like urban wetlands and rain
gardens will be critical to restoring such services as watershed infiltration capacity (Tellman et al).
REFERENCES
http://www.borneofutures.org/about.html
https://twitter.com/@emeijaard
6/25/2020 100 Words on…Can We Restore Everything?
https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/01/28/restore-everything-novel-ecosystems-conservation-strategy/ 8/8
2 COMMENTS
Marris, E., J. Mascaro, and E. C. Ellis. 2013. Perspective: Is Everything a Novel Ecosystem? If so, do we need the
Concept? Pages 345-349 in R. J. Hobbs, E. S. Higgs, and C. M. Hall, editors. Novel Ecosystems. John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd.
Murcia, C., J. Aronson, G. H. Kattan, D. Moreno-Mateos, K. Dixon, and D. Simberloff. 2014. A Critique of the Novel
Ecosystem Concept. Trends in Ecology and Evoloution. 29: 548-553.
Tellman, B, Saiers, J, and Ruiz, O. Participatory watershed modeling: Precision and people in urbanizing
Salvadoran catchments. In prep.
TAGS: Conservation Science
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[…] Can We Restore…Everything? 100 Words from Hobbs, Ellis, Marvier & Others […]
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FEBRUARY 2, 2015
Novel ecosystems are a concept for practitioners who lack a restoration methodology, are
comfortable with describing some unacceptable status quo and then calling for novel approaches.
Its a distraction based on a lack of interest in reality.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118354186.ch41/summary
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347(14)00157-8
https://blog.nature.org/science/tag/conservation-science/
http://outdoorsachievement.com/blog/can-we-restoreeverything-100-words-from-hobbs-ellis-marvier-others/
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http://www.horizonesse.com/
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7/9/2020 Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: Its Literature | Literary Hub
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Silent Spring is More than a
Scienti�c Landmark: It’s
Literature
L I T E R A R Y H U B
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On the Underrated Poetry of Rachel Carsons Masterpiece
By Rebecca Renner April 20, 2018
“�ere was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in
harmony with its surroundings.” �is is the surprising �rst sentence of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, the 1962 book that arguably sparked the modern environmental
movement as we know it. Rachel Carson was a naturalist and science writer whose
early work focused on oceanographic conservation. Her most famous book, however,
details the harm wreaked on nature and humans by the rampant use of chemical
pesticides. One of Silent Spring’s lasting legacies is the grassroots environmental
campaign that it stirred up, leading to, among other achievements, the phasing out of
DDT in the United States in 1972.
While most people have heard of Silent Spring, even if they don’t consider themselves
readers or environmentalists, many fewer have actually read it. �ough it was a Book-
of-the-Month pick in 1962 and serialized in �e New Yorker that same year, the
popular furor for the book has since died down, and it is now largely relegated to
textbooks or other educational contexts.
�at is why its �rst sentence is so surprising: Silent Spring does not read like a
textbook. It begins with a fable and is �lled with lyricism and passion throughout.
Carson accomplished the feat of raising a public outcry against DDT not just with her
research on its deleterious e�ects, but with the descriptive imagery, strong rhetoric, and
poetic language that lift Silent Spring into the realm of other great works of American
literature.
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*
After the idyllic beginning of Carson’s fable, the fortunes of her American any-town
take a dark turn. “Some evil spell had settled on the community,” she continues.
“Everywhere was a shadow of death.” Animals are dying here, and so are humans. “It
was a spring without voices,” she writes. “On the mornings that had once throbbed
with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird
voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the �elds and woods and marsh.”
She ends her introduction here: “What has already silenced the voices of spring in
countless towns in America? �is book is an attempt to explain.”
�ough Carson’s use of this fable at �rst seems out of place in what is ostensibly a
scienti�c treatise, it’s a literary device that e�ectively sums up not just Carson’s subject
but her treatment of it as well. She paints such an evocative portrait of the natural
world that the reader cannot help but sense the gravity of the environment’s presaged
destruction. �e fable signals that a plague of mythic proportions is afoot, but it’s real,
and Carson’s book is an attempt to reveal its true nature.
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“Descriptive imagery, strong rhetoric, and poetic
language lift Silent Spring into the realm of other
great works of American literature.”
�e poetry of Carson’s opening continues into the rest of Silent Spring. �ere is lyrical
language studded throughout the book; even Carson’s chapter titles—“Elixirs of
Death,” “Earth’s Green Mantle,” “�rough a Narrow Window”—are not what we
might expect for a work of dense scienti�c research. But the places where Carson’s
artistry is more apparent are in her chapter introductions. She weaves her most vivid
images in the �rst few paragraphs of each chapter, creating a more tangible experience
for the reader before transitioning into more complex scienti�c writing.
In the section entitled “Realms of Soil,” Carson conjures a geologic history practically
in verse:
For soil is in part a creation of life, born of a marvelous interaction of life and
nonlife long eons ago. �e parent materials were gathered together as volcanoes
poured them out in �ery streams, as waters running over the bare rocks of the
continents wore away even the hardest granite, and as the chisels of frost and
ice split and shattered the rocks. �en living things began to work their creative
magic and little by little these inert materials became soil.
You almost forget that she’s talking about dirt.
After describing the earth’s potential losses at length, Carson pivots the narrative,
showing nature in all its imperturbable force. In the beginning of the section entitled
“Nature Fights Back,” Carson notes humanity’s futile e�orts at controlling the
landscape. She shifts into a series of examples with this light anaphora: “�en we sense
something of the drama of the hunter and the hunted. �en we begin to feel
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something of that relentlessly pressing force by which nature controls her own.” �ese
lines convey a sense of nature’s power from their structure as well as their meaning. �e
repeated beginnings, coupled with the strong �nal words—hunted, owned—propel
these sentences forward into the coming descriptive passage.
What follows is two pages of exquisite imagery:
Here, above a pond, the dragon�ies dart and the sun strikes �re from their
wings. . . . Or there, almost invisible against a leaf, is the lacewing, with green
gauze wings and golden eyes, shy and secretive, descendant of an ancient race
that lived in Permian time. . . . �en this vital force is merely smoldering,
awaiting the time to �are again into activity when spring awakens the insect
world. Meanwhile, under the white blanket of snow, below the frost-hardened
soil, in crevices in the bark of trees, and in sheltered caves, the parasites and the
predators have found ways to tide themselves over the season of cold.
*
While she’s adept at translating the beauty of the natural world, the powerful emotions
Carson elicits with this imagery are rarely rosy. Not only is Silent Spring a descriptive
scienti�c work and a great work of literature—it is also an accusation. She uses the
word “evil” 10 times, the word “sinister” six times, the word “su�er” 35 times, and
permutations on the word death (including dead, deadly, die, died, and dying) a total
of 213 times. �e word “poison” alone appears 248 times. Given that my copy is just
short of 300 pages, Carson’s meaning is hard to miss.
She calls the use of chemical herbicides and pesticides a “chemical war” in which “all
life is caught in its violent cross�re.” Carson isn’t shy either about what she believes has
led to this: “ . . . an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at
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whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some
obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little
tranquilizing pills of half truth.”
“While she’s adept at translating the beauty of the
natural world, the powerful emotions Carson elicits
with this imagery are rarely rosy.”
“As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written
a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but
against the life that shares it with him,” Carson writes, calling on her readers to
question their part in this destructive past. “By acquiescing in an act that can cause
such su�ering to a living creature,” she asks, “who among us is not diminished as a
human being?”
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In all, Carson poses some 116 questions throughout Silent Spring, rhetorical questions
that, taken as a sum, nonetheless call the reader to action.
Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this
ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is
dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves
that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of
many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the
unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the
right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted
that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a
sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in �ight?
Who indeed? Reading this passage, elegantly comprised of Carson’s most e�ective
rhetorical elements, it is di�cult not to question the destructive decisions of those in
power.
With a book full of passages like this, Carson gracefully cemented herself as both a
pillar of modern American literature and a herald of the 20th century’s environmental
movement. Her words are e�ective and convincing, and more so because they are
beautiful. Silent Spring is clearly a tapestry patiently woven—with a cause worth
�ghting for.
Rebecca Renner
Rebecca Renner is a freelance writer from Daytona Beach, Florida. Her work has appeared in The Paris
Review, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She is working on a novel.
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7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/smokey-importance-clean-air-act-21st-century/ 1/7
by Felix Barber
�gures by Hannah Zucker
We live in exceptional times, with extreme weather events in recent memory including
devastating wild�res in California, �ooding and polar conditions in the Midwest USA, and
extreme rainfall in the wake of hurricane Harvey. Such events are predicted to only become
more common with global climate change. In the US, the Clean Air Act (CAA) is a major piece of
legislation in empowering action against climate change by targeting air pollution, a bill with
such bipartisan support that it received only a single vote against when it �rst became law in
1970.
JUNE 25, 2019
BLOG, SCIENCE POLICY
Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of
the Clean Air Act in the 21st century
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/25/camp-fire-deadliest-wildfire-californias-history-has-been-contained/?utm_term=.851b2299d080
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-climatechange/climate-changes-fingerprints-are-on-u-s-midwest-floods-scientists-idUSKCN1R22I8
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/01/30/deadly-polar-vortex-puts-midwest-deep-freeze/?utm_term=.717d6608d9b4
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/climate/hurricane-harvey-climate-change.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/06/02/support-for-the-clean-air-act-has-changed-a-lot-since-1970/?utm_term=.5e34fa4cefc7
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However, recent times have seen substantial challenges to vehicle emissions standards based on
the CAA, and to one of the powers granted by the CAA itself. In August 2018, the Trump
Administration’s EPA proposed a revision of vehicle emissions standards that would freeze the
previously established Obama-era standards at their 2020 levels. The effect of this proposed
rule will be to cancel all planned increases in vehicle ef�ciency beyond this year, representing a
stark movement away from evidence-based policy. The Trump EPA is now also creating a legal
challenge to limit California’s higher emission standards, thereby weakening an ability granted
by the CAA that allowed California to set such higher standards. These changes are clearly
opposed to the purpose of the CAA, whose aims were to protect public health, public welfare,
and to regulate the emissions of hazardous air pollutants. With respect to these goals, the CAA
has been extremely successful, as outlined in Figure 1. Additionally, given California’s recent
history of in�uence and leadership in policy-based approaches to mitigate climate change, these
changes promise to set back air pollution regulation in the USA for many years. Finally, the
above changes threaten to undermine the same car manufacturing industry they purport to
help.
Figure 1: Selected outcomes of the Clean Air Act and CAFE standards by the numbers.
History of the Clean Air Act
The modern CAA dates from 1970, when it was introduced to give minimum standards for air
quality nationwide, empowering the EPA to enforce these standards on an ongoing basis.
However, local governments had already begun to tackle the problem of air pollution in a
number of cases . In particular, smog in the Los Angeles basin had become such a debilitating
issue that during WWII it was suspected to be the result of a Japanese chemical attack. To align
this law with ongoing attempts to regulate smog – and in acknowledgement of the densely
populated cities in California – an exemption was built into the CAA allowing California to
request special waivers from the EPA. These waivers allow California to set its own higher
standards of air pollutant reduction, above and beyond those of the national level. Any other
state is allowed to follow the California standards, with 13 states currently doing so.
https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-air-act
https://i2.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/figure1_final_jpg.jpg
https://www.marketplace.org/2014/07/14/sustainability/we-used-be-china/la-smog-battle-against-air-pollution
https://mde.maryland.gov/programs/air/mobilesources/pages/states.aspx
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In its early stages, the scope of the CAA was limited to poisons like carbon monoxide and
chemicals that contribute to acid rain, such as sulfur dioxide. However, in 2007, the Supreme
Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA expanded the scope of the CAA to include the regulation of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, effectively extending these laws that were initially
designed to regulate conventional pollutants to also address the gases responsible for climate
change. To date, the public health outcomes as a result of the CAA have been outstandingly
positive: an analysis by the EPA estimated that the CAA led to savings of $22 trillion in health
care costs in just the 20-year period between 1970 and 1990. That analysis also predicted
230,000 fewer premature deaths each year by 2020 as a result of CAA amendments.
Present-day emissions standards
We now turn to 2009, when the Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards
were introduced to regulate vehicle emissions in line with the new requirements of the EPA to
regulate greenhouse gases. The CAFE standards were set to dramatically increase the ef�ciency
of new passenger cars nationwide to an equivalent of 54 mpg by 2025, almost doubling the
ef�ciency prior to the new standards. California also chose to align itself with the new CAFE
standards in the goal of setting one single, national standard. The standards were predicted to
create jobs; an analysis by the Blue Green Alliance predicted that these standards would add an
estimated 570,000 new full-time equivalent jobs to the US economy by 2030. Finally, to make
matters easier for auto manufacturers, these standards included a slow ramp period for the
increases prior to 2016, with the standards set to increase dramatically from then until 2025.
However, automakers negotiated for a key provision: that in 2017, these standards could be
revisited by a new administration and revoked if they were deemed to be too onerous for the
industry to manage.
Under the Trump administration, automakers moved swiftly to request a review of the CAFE
standards, and in August of 2018 the EPA proposed its new Safer Affordable Fuel-Ef�cient
(SAFE) vehicle-emissions standards, freezing the standards at their 2020 levels. The proposed
SAFE standards are based on claims of increased safety and cost effectiveness that have been
widely criticized for their inaccuracy, and California and 17 other states have initiated a lawsuit
against the EPA for this move. However, the rule went several steps further, proposing to revoke
both California’s waiver to set higher vehicle emissions standards than those mandated by the
EPA, and California’s waiver for its Zero Emissions Vehicle program (a program designed to
increase the use of zero emissions electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicle technologies). The
legality of removing of a waiver that has already been granted remains subject to debate, since a
waiver that has already been granted has never been removed in the roughly 50 years that the
waiver scheme has operated.
https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/clean-air-act-requirements-and-history
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-1120
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-clean-air-act-has-saved-22-trillion-in-health-care-costs/262071/
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy-basics.html
https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/resources/gearingup/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/epa-to-roll-back-car-efficiency-rules-despite-science-that-supports-them/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/epas-science-advisory-board-to-scrutinize-clean-car-rollback/
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17308056/california-states-lawsuit-suing-epa-scott-pruitt-trump
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100V26M.pdf
https://www.transportpolicy.net/standard/california-zev/
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/trump-admin-attack-on-californias-environmental-authority-is-legally-indefensible/
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Automakers balked – they had advocated for more relaxed standards, but freezing the CAFE
standards at 2020 levels was more than they had bargained for. Additionally, should California
be successful in maintaining its waivers, then automakers’ worst nightmare of two different
national standards would effectively split the US auto market in two. The question of why the
proposed rule went beyond what automakers had wanted was clari�ed by a recent New York
Times investigation that revealed a campaign by the US oil giant Marathon to prevent higher fuel
ef�ciency standards from reducing oil consumption.
The proposed EPA rule justi�es removing California’s waivers because its greenhouse gas and
zero emissions vehicle standards “address environmental problems that are not particular or
unique to California.” However, California’s air pollution concerns and its need for special
provisions to address them are as valid today as they were when the CAA was passed. Not only
are some of the most populous cities in the US located in California, but also the speci�c
geography of the Los Angeles basin retains the same capacity to trap pollutants that it had 50
years ago. The consequent health risks posed by pollutants from motor vehicles are severe in
and of themselves, quite apart from the trapping of smoke from California’s wild�res, whose
intensity is increasing with global climate change. Smog in Los Angeles has certainly improved
relative to levels seen before the Clean Air Act, but such improvements were in part caused by
safeguards like the CAA. To use these improvements as justi�cation for weakening the same
safeguards that produced them appears short-sighted.
The SAFE vehicle emissions standards and the proposed removal of California’s 2013
greenhouse gas and zero emissions vehicle standards have been justi�ed based on opaque
methodology, using data that is the subject of an ongoing legal dispute. In contrast, the ef�cacy
of the CAA in safeguarding public health has been demonstrably proven, with an EPA analysis
estimating trillions of dollars in healthcare savings, and signi�cant reductions in premature loss
of life from air pollution. Given this success, a modest approach to obtaining scienti�cally sound
policy would require that any proposal to limit the scope of current emissions regulations should
at least meet that same public health standard.
Felix Barber is a Ph.D. student in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.
Hannah Zucker is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University.
For more information:
CAFE Standards: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/fuel-ef�ciency/fuel-economy-
basics.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/vehicles-air-pollution-and-human-health
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-smoke24oct24-story.html
https://www.kcet.org/history-society/how-los-angeles-began-to-put-its-smoggy-days-behind
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/04/california-sues-trumps-epa-to-see-data-that-informed-fuel-economy-rollback/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-clean-air-act-has-saved-22-trillion-in-health-care-costs/262071/
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy-basics.html
7/9/2020 Is it Smoky in Here? The importance of the Clean Air Act in the 21st century - Science in the News
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Clean Air Act: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/solutions/reduce-emissions/the-
clean-air-act.html
Marathon’s campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-
rollback-oil-industry.html
Challenges to the CAFE standards and California’s waivers:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/trump-california-clean-air-act-waiver-
climate-change/518649/
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Jan
JANUARY 14, 2020 AT 4:23 AM
Clear air should be a human right, to think these capitalists think they have the right to pollute
our planet like this is inexcusable!
I always use this site to help me �gure out whether i need to be concerned or not o leave the
house, especially in the last few weeks!
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https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/solutions/reduce-emissions/the-clean-air-act.html
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7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2019/4/22/earth-day-1970-a-forgotten-key-to-the-green-new-deal 1/12
April 22, 2019 · Lola Jusidman
Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten
Key to the Green New Deal
This country ought to recover the memory of the first Earth Day: a 20-million
strong grassroots demonstration that won basic environmental policy as we know
it.
The Green New Deal’s rise to the top of the political agenda has revived
debate on the original New Deal and the wartime mobilization that
closely followed it. What did it take to bring about its unmatched scale
and sweeping vision? What will it take to force its second coming while
avoiding the original’s weaknesses? With an eye toward the historical
record, commentators are proposing recipes for these outcomes, and
asking whether the climate movement is up to task.
The general prognosis seems grim. Sunrise Movement, master of
conversation-setting and politician-targeting, has put forth a plan which
aims to “reach the millions of young people who are scared about
the trouble.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content?author=5cbe5b088165f5bd15f39419
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/gnd-strategy
https://www.the-trouble.com/
7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2019/4/22/earth-day-1970-a-forgotten-key-to-the-green-new-deal 2/12
climate change.” Most other organizations in the climate movement
have likewise taken up the GND as an opportunity for coalition building
and popular participation. Some democratic socialists warn that
Sunrise’s preferred strategy, though powerful, will fall short: “While
confrontations with elected elites are certainly a step in the right
direction, they won’t be sufficient to win a GND on the scale—and at
the pace—we so desperately need.” A New Deal, they claim, is outside
the realm of possibility without “a mass revolt of the working class” that
divides capital and makes “the costs of inaction so high that political
obstruction becomes cost-prohibitive.”
Eric Levitz, columnist for New York Magazine, is even less taken by
another of the climate movement’s preferred historical analogies, the
“WWII-scale economic mobilization” or “Victory Plan for the climate,”
premised on the shared status of the Axis powers and climate change as
existential threats. Victory for the Axis powers, Levitz argues,
immediately and clearly threatened the overseas investments of
American capitalists, and so taking a short-term hit to win the war was
clearly in their interests. Climate change poses a slower and more diffuse
threat, and a rapid state-led decarbonization effort would not exactly pay
off for some of the most inf luential sectors of U.S. business. If it took
repeated occupations of Nancy Pelosi’s office for a portion of
Democratic legislators to support a Green New Deal, it makes sense to
ask, as Levitz does, if anything short of a social revolution could win
“100 percent renewable social democracy atop the ruins of the fossil fuel
industry” in this country.
All of this may risk sapping the valuable motivation of activists, but the
movement can benefit from offerings of historical perspective. Here’s
another: the making of the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air
Act, and a suite of other lesser-known environmental statutes in the
the trouble.
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/green-new-deal-class-struggle-organizing
https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/solution
https://www.the-trouble.com/
7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.
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1970s is as important to understanding the work ahead as FDR-era class
politics. Not only are these laws the foundation for existing climate
policy; there are now efforts to revive guarantees for clean air and water,
which through environmental racism and agency corruption, were never
fully realized. Perhaps on the premise that these guarantees have faded,
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez centers her GND program on the
promise of clean air and water. And, like the New Deal, the
environmental policies of the seventies did not issue from the political
ether, or even from a handful of sparse protests in the coastal cities. It
took a mix of top-down coordination and bottom-up mobilizations of
record-breaking magnitude.
“The most famous little-known event in modern U.S. history”
Earth Day wasn’t always a routine observance on which the Lisa
Simpsons of the world collect green merchandise and kill the lights for
an hour, amid eye-glazing commercial tokens of environmental concern.
The first Earth Day, which fell on April 22, 1970, was and is the largest
political demonstration in U.S. history. Twenty million people—ten
percent of the U.S. population at the time—participated in grassroots-
organized teach-ins and actions at schools, colleges, streets, and outside
corporate headquarters and government buildings. Adam Rome, Earth
Day’s de facto historian, describes it as “the most famous little-known
event in modern U.S. history.” An extraordinary event in which a tenth
of this country took part has been wiped clean from its collective
memory.
Earth Day was a big-tent
phenomenon, with a level of
political inclusivity and diversity
that would seem strange today. It
demonstrated a long building
the trouble.
https://www.the-trouble.com/
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demonstrated a long-building
popular consensus of
environmental concern in the
U.S.: Hosts and speakers hailed
from existing environmental
groups, socialist organizations,
schools, civil rights organizations, unions, churches, women’s
organizations, the household, government, but also Republican
organizations and chambers of commerce. Its breadth, though, did not
translate into greenwashing or corporatist uniformity. Instead, the
mobilization was full of debate, openness, and dissension against existing
“sham” pollution policy. There were large marches presided over by
high-profile speakers, but they shared the day with more contentious
activity. Protestors crashed a General Electric shareholder meeting, and
delivered “dead, oil-soaked ducks” to the Department of the Interior. A
paranoid President Nixon had sent the FBI’s COINTELPRO program
to spy on the college mobilizations, resulting in a ridiculous memo
which, labeling the event “very benign,” was left to report on the
participants’ style of dress.
Environmentalism itself was sometimes an object of interrogation. Rome
writes that in one of the Earth Day gatherings at University of Michigan,
during what was called a “scream-out,” “participants debated whether
the environment would def lect attention from the Vietnam war, the
civil-rights struggle, and the movement for woman’s liberation.” The
announcement for Earth Day had brought environmental organizing to
areas like like the South, where difficult questions began to reveal
themselves. In Birmingham, where much of the working class were
employed in the coal and steel industries, the question of pollution
control as a cost to industrial production, and therefore as a threat to
investment and employment, was confronted directly by activists and
working families These newly opened tensions attest to the fast
Earth Day celebrations in Union Square Park
included cleanup crews composed of school
children. From NYC Department of Records
and Information Services
the trouble.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0422/Earth-Day-1970-How-President-Nixon-spied-on-Earth-Day
https://www.the-trouble.com/
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working families. These newly opened tensions attest to the fast
expansion of environmentalism far beyond the contexts where it was a
convenient and uncontroversial cause.
An uncontrolled explosion
Earth Day’s grassroots quality rings even stranger considering that it
came about through the initial efforts of Gaylord Nelson, an
environmentally-minded U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. Hoping to pull
off something similar to the mass teach-ins against the Vietnam War,
Nelson announced the plan for a national environmental teach-in in the
fall of 1969, rented a headquarters in D.C., assembled a staff of
volunteers, gathered up funds from unions and conservationists, and
began publicizing the event in the media. But this was about the extent
of Nelson’s control. Rome, in a radio interview, recounts:
The genius of Nelson was he rejected advice to create a top-down organization and
just said, ‘Let’s do something that everyone who wants to participate in can. They
can do whatever they want.’ He wasn’t a helicopter parent, even though he gave
birth to this (idea). That unleashed the creativity and vision and the energy of
thousands and thousands of people at the grassroots (level).
Nelson struck at a counterintuitive hybrid of leadership and
decentralization, and Earth Day got the most out of both. As Rome
wrote in an article, the planning rapidly shifted from top-down to
bottom-up.
The original idea was that the national staff would help local organizers by
providing ideas and contacts. But the flow of information quickly reversed. In
many communities, organizers already were at work before the national office
opened. With each week of publicity, more people became involved around the
country, and the national office became less a center of organizing than a
clearinghouse for the media—the quickest place to find out what people were
planning in Biloxi Dubuque Hartford San Antonio and Walla Walla
the trouble.
https://www.wpr.org/historian-explains-making-earth-day
https://www.the-trouble.com/
7/9/2020 Earth Day 1970: a Forgotten Key to the Green New Deal — THE TROUBLE.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2019/4/22/earth-day-1970-a-forgotten-key-to-the-green-new-deal 7/12
g
This is not a call to restore Earth Day itself to its original scale and spirit.
Today, the “mainstream” or “white environmentalist” coalition it
produced is not only impossible but undesirable. Its guarantees of clean
air and water were mostly reserved for the white middle class. The
climate movement, now guided by a recognition of environmental
injustice, must take every opportunity to stand behind black, brown,
indigenous and other frontline environmentalists. But we can still learn
from Nelson’s hands-off, inclusive approach and apply it to the climate
movement as it stands today.
Contemplating the difference between local industrial pollution and
climate change in 2010, Nelson’s top organizer, Denis Hayes, reasoned
that back in 1970, “...Pollution was a visible thing that you could taste
and you could smell and was linked to rivers catching on fire…[this] was
something that you could mobilize people around much more easily
than you can an invisible gas that has no smell, has no taste. I mean
heavens—every time we breathe, we emit carbon dioxide.”
But beyond the pollutants at issue, we are working with a civil society
vastly different, even unrecognizable, from the mass politics that Earth
Day organizers harnessed. First, there is of course an experienced
countermovement with agents of obstruction and denial infesting the
federal government. Second, the U.S. environmental movement has
completely transformed over the last half-century: the “nonprofit
industrial complex” (NPIC) has reshaped in the image of the firm.
Previously radical and grassroots environmental movement has ossified
into a highly professionalized, expert-driven expanse of 501(c)3s
controlled by boards and executive directors, producing mission
statements, model legislation, and annual reports instead of manifestos
and propaganda.
Activism has entered an age of mechanical reproduction The public is
the trouble.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/NATL-Earth-Day-Pioneer-Looks-Back-on-4-Decades-of-Environmentalism-203611561.html
https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/earth-day-1970-2/
https://www.the-trouble.com/
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planning in Biloxi, Dubuque, Hartford, San Antonio, and Walla Walla.
The result was a proliferation of actions unique to each community,
without the need for readymade messaging, targets, visuals, or slogans,
and with no particular policy or declaration to get behind. Images from
that day show young people basking in expressive autonomy, in the
novelty and scale of the crowd, and in the opportunity to communicate a
grave and urgent appeal. Each teach-in and action took weeks or months
of dedicated DIY organizing. The process, as Rome documented, armed
thousands of new activists with the ability and the networks to continue
environmental organizing beyond the teach-in itself. They would go on
to build layers of environmental protections, organizations, institutions,
and knowledge throughout the country. As this happened, U.S. polls
registered a twenty-five fold increase in environmental concern between
1969 and 1971, and a decade of massively transformative environmental
laws followed.
Earth Day 1970 Part 2: Gaylord Nelsons Speech (CEarth Day 1970 Part 2: Gaylord Nelsons Speech (C……
A second coming?
the trouble.
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/earth-day-1970/
https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/spirit-first-earth-day.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL3480E41AA956A42B&v=y3RCPAtmpv8
https://www.the-trouble.com/
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Activism has entered an age of mechanical reproduction. The public is
invited to “plug in,” in narrow, impersonal, and repetitive ways while
getting little say in the direction of most organizations. Our inboxes pile
up with calls-to-action on one hand and brands selling products on the
other, but the two are often hard to tell apart. Both the mass
organization and brand promotion offer a catchline and a list of selling
points, with a level of hyperbole just sensational enough to desensitize.
Both link to a Squarespace page where you can click one of three
buttons and dispense with some of your money, or else “plug in” to the
next big thing in an endless cycle of next big things. Our eagerness to
provide streamlined services that facilitate civic participation risks
actively repelling the mass enthusiasm and creativity commanded by
Nelson’s hands-off approach.
What comes closest today to his permissive style of leadership might be
that of Greta Thunberg. Her approach turned out 1.5 million students
worldwide, more than any climate organization in recent memory. But
she is the exception. Today’s national and international climate
movement is a diverse set of discrete, mostly top-down campaigns, each
with its own entrepreneurial policy vision and strategic formula. These
groups vie to individuate themselves and demonstrate their success in
contrast to the alternatives. The ability to create new organizations, or to
have a say in the existing movement, is out of reach for the vast majority
of people.
For various structural and cultural reasons, the temptation for vertical
control–“helicopter parenting,” as Rome calls it–has come to dominate
climate organizing. Even campaigns powered by unpaid volunteers and
small-donation crowdfunding make maximal use of centrally-directed
marketing efforts. This produces actions and initiatives that look and feel
unmistakably uniform, but it also risks draining mobilizations of
bottom-up and grassroots vitality. Such tendencies affect most climate
the trouble.
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groups, from 350.org to Sunrise to Extinction Rebellion.
Aesthetic nostalgia aside, the more basic problem for the climate
movement is one of interorganizational competition. Almost every week,
a different campaign is leading a national day of action. I suspect this
produces fatigue among the general public. With these staggered, short-
cycle and under-coordinated efforts, we won’t reach the rate of protest
participation that was key to winning radical national policy in 1970. If
the first Earth Day is any guide, we need a long buildup to a single
event. We need an open invitation for all to participate in planning,
whoever and wherever they are.
Protest size is not the only measure of a movement’s success and
strength, and it isn’t the only consideration informing the decisions of
climate organizers. They are working in a challenging environment and
playing a longer game. They should be proud of their breakthroughs,
from f lipping seats to court victories to hegemonic change, which–
considered together– bring the possibility of radical policy closer with
each passing day. But if we all agree that scale matters, and if our
movement as a whole intends, as it often claims, to mobilize millions or
tens of millions at once, we need to make adjustments.
In a sense, the stars are aligning for an echo of the massive 1970
mobilization. The invisibility of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse
effect are giving way to the glaring and ever-present signs of ecosystem
collapse, extreme weather events, and infrastructural breakdown. There
exists rapidly broadening demand for environmental policy that has not
been satisfied through federal action.
This was not so just a few years ago. In 2014, the People’s Climate
March, organized by the Climate Justice Alliance as well as big greens
and labor unions, drew half a million participants worldwide, the largest-
ever climate mobilization up to that point It was more choreographed
the trouble.
http://ggjalliance.org/sites/default/files/The\%20Peoples\%20Climate\%20March\%202014\%20\%7C\%20A\%20Climate\%20Justice\%20Story.pdf
https://www.the-trouble.com/
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ever climate mobilization up to that point. It was more choreographed
than Earth Day in 1970, involving a single march per city or town
instead of a wild aggregation of teach-ins and actions. But it also lacked
the tireless support of high-profile politicians or heavy coverage from the
press that led up to Earth Day in 1970. Today, the movement’s
newfound allies in public office and increased press attention could
combine with an adoption of Nelson’s strategy and produce something
orders of magnitude bigger. Our Senator Nelson might be found in
Ocasio-Cortez or her Green New Deal co-author Sen. Ed Markey, if like
him, they work not to control but to announce.
Scaling up a mobilization is no science, and Earth Day’s organizers were
surprised by the numbers they drew in 1970. But we can’t really know
the limits to popular participation until we unite and give their strategy a
try. I invite experienced climate organizers to look back at Earth Day
1970 and consider how we can use existing movement infrastructure—
today’s constraints and obstacles in mind—to attempt a mobilization of
millions. With history as my guide, I suggest that as a movement we aim
for coordination without hierarchy, that we agree on a single day far in
advance, and that we throw out the tools of narrow control and self-
marketing. We must find ways to redistribute ownership of our
movement to all people. Only thus will we win the Green New Deal and
save our life-sustaining climate from perdition.
Lola Jusidman Shoshana is a politics grad student at NYU and a longtime
student activist for divestment, climate justice and decarbonization.
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the trouble.
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7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
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Sunrise Movement protesters urging Democrats to back a Green New Deal in late 2018. | Sunrise Movement
Update, 3/30/2019: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7 that lays out the goals, aspirations,
and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. Read about it here, and read about
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The Green New Deal, explained
An insurgent movement is pushing Democrats to back an ambitious climate change
solution.
By David Roberts @drvox [email protected] Updated Mar 30, 2019, 8:23am EDT
https://www.vox.com/
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/7/18211709/green-new-deal-resolution-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-markey
https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.gov/files/Resolution\%20on\%20a\%20Green\%20New\%20Deal.pdf
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/7/18211709/green-new-deal-resolution-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-markey-resolution
https://www.vox.com/pages/support-now
https://www.vox.com/pages/support-now
https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts
https://www.twitter.com/drvox
mailto:[email protected]
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 2/40
the criticism that followed here and here. The Senate voted the resolution down on March
26, but Ocasio-Cortez is now drafting a series of smaller, related bills. Our initial explainer,
first published on December 21, follows.
If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed,
humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before
catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.
The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party
claims to accept and understand it.
It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.
Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in
2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since
then, there’s been nothing to replace it.
Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution —
renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do
not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.
Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this
upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND)
— a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the
1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past
few months:
Google
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/23/18228142/green-new-deal-critics
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/3/28/18283514/green-new-deal-climate-policy
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/26/18281323/green-new-deal-democrats-vote
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/436171-democrats-to-move-on-from-green-new-deal
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/8/17948832/climate-change-global-warming-un-ipcc-report
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/there-is-no-democratic-plan-to-fight-climate-change/543981/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=green\%20new\%20deal
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 3/40
For this story, I talked to wonks and political activists who are working on the GND, and
without exception, they expressed surprise at the speed and intensity with which both
media attention and activist energy have centered on it. There is a sense among those
involved that they have caught a tiger by the tail.
The GND push has thrust climate change into the national conversation, put House
Democrats on notice, and created an intense and escalating bandwagon effect. Politicians
(most recently 2020 presidential aspirant Cory Booker), advocates (most recently Al
Gore), wonks, and activists — everyone involved in green politics is talking about the GND.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC
US House candidate, NY-14
...and we have #GreenNewDeal lift-off!
Never underestimate the power of public imagination.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cory-booker-green-new-deal_us_5c1415ffe4b05d7e5d81f322
https://www.axios.com/al-gore-on-board-with-green-new-deal-climate-change-poland-e28b5fb7-9a55-4751-8d0e-c12cd6d71939.html
https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1073685921156005888\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
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https://help.twitter.com/using-twitter/election-labels
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1073685921156005888?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1073685921156005888\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
https://twitter.com/hashtag/GreenNewDeal?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1073685921156005888\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez&src=hashtag_click
https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1073685921156005888/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1073685921156005888\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1073685921156005888?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1073685921156005888\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 4/40
But ... WTF is it?
As we will see, the exact details of the GND remain to be worked out, but the broad thrust
is fairly simple. It refers, in the loosest sense, to a massive program of investments in
clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but
the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make it fairer and
more just.
But the policy is only part of the picture. Just as striking are the politics, which seem to
have tapped into an enormous, untapped demand for climate ambition.
When I think about the social status of the GND, I am struck by an analogy: It’s a bit like
concentrated solar power. (I’m an energy nerd. Sue me.) In a concentrated solar power
plant, large arrays of mirrors reflect sunlight onto a single tower, heating the fluid inside it.
The fluid transfers heat to water, the steam from the boiling fluid drives a turbine, and the
turbine generates electrical power.
4:07 PM · Dec 14, 2018
16K 3.1K people are Tweeting about this
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7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 5/40
The GND is the tower, and all the sudden, all the mirrors are aligned, focused on it. The heat
is building, the water is rapidly reaching a boil. Meanwhile, its owners are racing to build a
turbine.
DOE
http://energy.gov/articles/5-big-wins-clean-energy-loan-programs-office
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 6/40
There is immense potential energy in the GND, a concentration of social attention and
intensity. But converting that heat to power — to real results on the ground — will involve a
great deal of political and policy engineering, almost all of which lies ahead.
The GND has great potential, but then, American political history is a long story of wasted
potential, of waves of progressive enthusiasm breaking on the rocky shores of
Washington, DC, to no lasting effect. Whether that fate awaits the GND depends on many
things, among them whether President Donald Trump — the culmination of a history of
total Republican intransigence and ugliness the stretches over young activists’ entire adult
lives — has changed the political landscape enough that Democrats might leave behind
their long defensive crouch and voice some ambition.
Before jumping in, it’s worth noting that a number of great journalists have blazed the trail
on this story already. See, in particular: Kate Aronoff’s work, here and here but especially,
for the big picture, here; Hannah Northey and the crew at E&E are all over the daily
developments; Alexander Kaufman at Huffington Post keeps track of the politics; and
Rob Meyer at the Atlantic always has good thoughts. (There are no doubt many others I’m
forgetting.)
To get a handle on the GND, let’s take a spin through its history, the role it’s playing in
current politics, the effort to back it up with a real policy program, and the many, many
challenges facing it before it can become legislation.
The GND concept is not new
The first use of the term “GND” in the US may trace to New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman, who called for one in a 2007 column (and in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded)
as a kind of green globalism. (Funny thing, politics.) As Kaufman notes in a story on this
history, none other than Barack Obama was taken by Friedman’s idea and included a GND
in his 2008 platform. (It can also be argued that Obama’s stimulus bill was a proto-GND in
itself.)
Around the same time, in 2007, British economist Richard Murphy began discussing a GND
and founded the Green New Deal Group, which funneled some ideas to the Labour Party.
The UN also took up the idea, calling for a global GND in 2009.
But then Tories won in the UK in 2009, the Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, and the
idea mostly went quiescent, at least among politicians.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/california-fire-democrats-control-house-it-s-time-get-serious-ncna936976
https://theoutline.com/post/6616/we-need-a-green-new-deal-and-we-need-it-now?zd=1&zi=2xjb4ewf
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/green-new-deal-proposal-impacts/
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060106501
https://www.eenews.net/search/stories?utf8=\%E2\%9C\%93&sort_by=date&keyword=\%22green+new+deal\%22&commit=go\%21&date\%5Bfrom_month\%5D=12&date\%5Bfrom_day\%5D=18&date\%5Bfrom_year\%5D=2017&date\%5Bto_month\%5D=12&date\%5Bto_day\%5D=17&date\%5Bto_year\%5D=2018
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/alexander-c-kaufman
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-winning-climate-strategy/576514/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/opinion/19friedman.html
https://prospect.org/article/way-new-world
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/green-new-deal_us_5b3146c3e4b0b5e692f0912e
https://grist.org/politics/obamas-stimulus-package-was-a-ginormous-clean-energy-bill-says-michael-grunwald/
https://www.greennewdealgroup.org/
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&type=400&nr=670&menu=1515
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 7/40
In 2016, a GND became the centerpiece of the Green Party presidential campaign of Jill
Stein; indeed, a GND has been part of the US Green Party’s platform for over a decade. (It
is also central to the platform of the European Greens — see this study from the
Wuppertal Institute.)
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign included a GND. And then, in the 2018 midterms,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a representative-elect, took it up.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But that capsule history of the term itself, the brand, somewhat sells short the intellectual
lineage. Many pieces of the GND have been worked on by many people over the years. The
constituent ideas — 100 percent clean energy; a just transition to a new, better economy;
massive public sector investments — are not new.
Talk of a “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists, built around public
infrastructure investments and new jobs, goes all the way back to 2000 presidential
candidate Ralph Nader; real work has been underway at least since 2006, when the, er,
Blue-Green Alliance was established. The AFL-CIO has its own big infrastructure plan.
Van Jones wrote a book about green jobs back in 2008 and even worked briefly as an
Obama green jobs adviser, before a right-wing smear campaign drove him from the
| The Washington Post/Getty Images
https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2018/12/04/stories/1060108647
https://europeangreens.eu/content/green-new-deal
https://wupperinst.org/en/p/wi/p/s/pd/276/
https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/
https://aflcio.org/issues/infrastructure
https://www.amazon.com/Green-Collar-Economy-Solution-Problems/dp/0061650757?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=e8b999eb-37c8-118f-fa3&tag=curbedcom06-20&linkCode=w50
https://grist.org/article/2009-09-02-cleaning-some-of-the-fox-off-of-van-jones/
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 8/40
administration. The whole green-economy frame almost took root, but once the Dems
went on the defensive in 2010, it faded to the background.
In Washington state this year, activists ran a ballot initiative that coupled a carbon tax
with a GND-style program of investments, but, in the face of $30 million of oil money, it
went down to defeat.
Nonetheless, the basic GND ideas have persisted. And their appeal only grew as climate
warnings became more dire. They were in the collective water, like an oversaturated
solution, just waiting for a particle around which to crystallize.
That particle came in November.
The GND comes to Washington
After the 2016 race, some of the folks who worked on the Sanders campaign started an
organization called Brand New Congress, with the audacious (some might say insane)
goal of recruiting 400 fresh new faces to run for, and take over, Congress. Part of the
shared platform was an ambitious, WWII-style mobilization on climate change (though not
yet branded GND).
That effort did not result in a congressional takeover, but it was not without fruits. Brand
New Congress spun off a group called Justice Democrats that went on to recruit several
winning candidates like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley.
Among them was Ocasio-Cortez, the young bartender who ran against incumbent centrist
Democrat Joe Crowley in the New York’s 14th District primary. The co-founder of Brand
New Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti, became Ocasio-Cortez’s co-campaign manager. (As of
January, he will be her chief of staff.) And Ocasio-Cortez, who was already committed to
putting climate change at the top of her agenda, eagerly embraced the green mobilization
plan and began using the GND branding.
Then came the first week of orientation for new members of Congress.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/28/17899804/washington-1631-results-carbon-fee-green-new-deal
https://brandnewcongress.org/
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 9/40
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her campaign manager, Saikat Chakrabarti.
Several things came together that week. Shortly prior, the IPCC had released its latest
report, with the ominous news that humanity has just over a decade to peak and begin
rapidly reducing global carbon emissions if there is to be any hope of hitting the (already
inadequate) international target of limiting global temperature rise to no more than 2
degrees Celsius.
There was already enormous energy and mobilization on the left, thanks to the election,
and young activists were keen to push climate change to the top of the agenda.
Then a piece in the Hill reported that House Democrats had no plans to move on climate
change, which appeared nowhere in their list of priorities. Meanwhile, House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi started talking the day after the election about a “bipartisan
marketplace of ideas,” which is not exactly what you’d call reading the room.
Pelosi signaled that she planned to revive the Select Committee on Energy Independence
and Global Warming (2007 to 2011, RIP), but activists and the incoming class of social
democrats wanted something much bolder.
They didn’t see any point in pursuing cooperation with Republicans, a strategy that has
proven fruitless for a decade. And they didn’t want climate policy tucked away in a
| AP
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/8/17948832/climate-change-global-warming-un-ipcc-report
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/411766-dems-damp-down-hopes-for-climate-change-agenda
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/665635832/democrats-say-their-first-bill-will-focus-on-strengthening-democracy-at-home
https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.newyorker.com\%2Fnews\%2Four-columnists\%2Fa-night-for-pragmatism-and-nancy-pelosi
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/nancy-pelosi-victory-speech-bipartisan-marketplace.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/democrats-said-to-plan-revival-of-climate-change-panel-in-house
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Energy_Independence_and_Global_Warming
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 10/40
committee that would do nothing but hold hearings and discuss how real global warming is
(spoiler: so real).
But it gave them something to ask for. They couldn’t very well demand the full GND before
the new Congress was even sworn in. But they could ask for a commitment.
So the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization organizing around a GND, planned a
sit-in in Pelosi’s office, to demand a committee with teeth — a committee that would be
charged with actually developing a plan to meet the ambitious targets implied by the IPCC
report.
Sunrise approached Ocasio-Cortez to ask if she might help publicize the event, perhaps
with a tweet. Instead, she vowed to show up. She and her team had been casting around
for some early way to push the GND into the public consciousness and onto the
Democratic agenda.
Working together, Sunrise, Ocasio-Cortez, and the Justice Democrats quickly hashed out a
proposal for a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, outlining their vision for the kind
of plan such a committee would produce.
Sunrise brought close to 200 young activists to Pelosi’s office on November 13. Ocasio-
Cortez, taking a break from orientation, stopped by to rally them and show her support.
The media swarmed.
In retrospect, though it came together on the fly, the timing was fortuitous. The elections
were over; there was no presidential election yet; Trump hadn’t tweeted in a few whole
minutes; the political press was bored. The IPCC had put climate change in the news. And
the prospect of a young, newly elected, not-yet-sworn-in progressive representative
leading a youth protest against her leader-to-be proved irresistible.
In the ensuing weeks, Ocasio-Cortez and Sunrise pushed incoming members of Congress
to sign on to the GND Select Committee plan. On December 10, there was another sit-in
in Pelosi’s office, this time with activists stretched out the door. By the end, 40 members
of Congress — including several notable senators like Booker, Sanders, and Jeff Merkley,
each a potential 2020 presidential candidate — signed on to support the committee.
Sunrise Movement
@sunrisemvmt
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060108439
https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/14/18094452/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-nancy-pelosi-protest-climate-change-2020
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/protesters-arrested-nancy-pelosi-office-climate-demonstration_us_5c0ea39ae4b08bcb27eb2842
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1074765370806992896
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1075411614860492805\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt?ref_src=twsrc\%5Etfw\%7Ctwcamp\%5Etweetembed\%7Ctwterm\%5E1075411614860492805\%7Ctwgr\%5E&ref_url=https\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww.vox.com\%2Fenergy-and-environment\%2F2018\%2F12\%2F21\%2F18144138\%2Fgreen-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
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7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 11/40
It was an activist campaign building momentum for serious climate action, and it was
making headlines.
Dem leadership gives activists the stiff arm
40 Representatives now back the Select Committee for a
#GreenNewDeal -- one of the most ambitious economic and
climate policies ever discussed in Congress.
Our organizing is working. Were changing politics in
America.
10:24 AM · Dec 19, 2018
1.2K 453 people are Tweeting about this
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7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 12/40
Nonetheless, it seems Democratic leadership was not particularly happy about a group of
upstarts laying claim to a major issue and instructing the caucus how to approach it. Pelosi
largely gave Ocasio-Cortez and activists the cold shoulder. They were not warned before
Steny Hoyer announced on Wednesday that the committee will not have subpoena
power. And they were not warned before it leaked on Thursday that Rep. Kathy Castor of
Florida had been chosen to head the committee, which would in fact be the same old
select committee on climate change.
As for the GND? “I think they have some terrific ideas,” Castor said, all but patting activists
on the head. “But that’s not going to be our sole focus.”
What about the activists’ other major demand, that no one who accepts fossil fuel money
be allowed on the committee? “I don’t think you can do that under the First Amendment,
really,” she said.
She later admitted to Kaufman at the Huffington Post that this peculiar bit of
constitutional interpretation was “inartful,” and she just doesn’t know if she can do that as
chair of the committee. She says maybe she’ll talk it over with the caucus.
This is a clear rebuke from Pelosi and Hoyer, not only cutting short a growing activist
campaign, without warning, on the eve of the holidays, but also appointing a committee
chair who isn’t briefed on the debate around the committee, is reliable but undistinguished
on environmental issues, and clearly hasn’t been prepared for the activist fury that awaits
her. (It doesn’t seem particularly fair to Castor, either.)
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/422132-house-climate-change-panel-unlikely-to-have-subpoena-power
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060110295
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kathy-castor-climate_us_5c1c0843e4b08aaf7a869cfd?chl
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 13/40
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) on the far right and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in the center. Between them is Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH).
“They’re not willing to go out on a limb unless they’re confident that they have the full
support of the caucus,” says Evan Weber, a co-founder of Sunrise, “which for us is
disappointing but not all that surprising.”
“What we thought was, let’s try to get the smallest possible thing done, which is get all
Democrats to agree that we should make a plan,” says Chakrabarti, but even that “isn’t so
easy.”
Here’s a revealing fact about this clash.
Though Chakrabarti may consider it the “smallest possible thing,” anyone who glances at
Ocasio-Cortez’s document will realize that it is far from small or easy. It doesn’t just call for
a committee. It says that no one who receives any fossil fuel funding may serve on the
committee (which would rule out a good swath of senior Democrats).
It requires that the committee produce a plan that fully decarbonizes the economy, invests
trillions of dollars, and provides a federal job guarantee, while addressing and mitigating
historical inequalities. (Oh, and it might also include such “additional measures such as
basic income programs [or] universal health care programs.”)
|
Alex Wong/Getty Images
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/edit
7/9/2020 The Green New Deal, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez 15/40
thing for the draft legislation was always to have a platform for candidates to run on in
2020.”
But in the end, the dispute was less about concrete issues of jurisdiction than a message
to newcomers. As E&E reports, “many Democratic lawmakers say the panel could be a
landing place for many of the freshmen members who have said they’d like to be on Energy
and Commerce.” The youngsters can have a committee to hold hearings and make
headlines. As for legislation, we adults have got that covered.
Would Ocasio-Cortez …
7/9/2020 Why natural disasters arent all that natural | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-natural-disasters-arent-all-that-natural/ 1/9
H O M E
Why natural disasters arent all that natural
Disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes result from a combination
of natural hazards and social and human vulnerability. Calling them
natural disasters artificially naturalises the harms they cause.
K s e n i a C h m u t i n a
J a s o n Vo n M e d i n g
J C G a i l l a rd
L e e B o s h e r
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A rescue worker and his dog search at the building collapse site after an earthquake
hit in Juchitan, Oaxaca state, Mexico, Sept. 9, 2017. Dan Hang/PA Images. All rights
reserved.Summer 2017 has been full of stories about (not so) ‘freak’ weather events.
Floods in Japan and Italy and hurricanes in the USA have been extensively covered
in news broadcasts (while other disasters in low-income countries such as
Bangladesh, Nepal and India have been largely ignored). Disasters and the risks they
pose are thus becoming more and more prominent on political and media
agendas as the damages caused by these disasters are on the increase.
In May 2017 over 6,000 policy makers, local governments’ representatives, NGO,
community leaders, researchers and academics from around the world gathered
together for the UN’s Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Cancun, Mexico.
A week of discussion and debate focused on the global agenda to reduce disaster
risk.
A number of key messages were presented under the slogan ‘From Commitment to
Action’. These highlighted the importance of continuing work on the Sendai
Framework for Action’s priority areas and identified other areas that should be
mainstreamed in the implementation of disaster risk reduction. This includes
ensuring coherence with the sustainable development and climate change agendas,
gender-sensitive and inclusive disaster risk reduction, and international cooperation
initiatives for critical infrastructure.
http://www.unisdr.org/conferences/2017/globalplatform/en
http://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/publications/43291
http://www.unisdr.org/files/53989_chairssummaryofthe2017globalplatfor.pdf
7/9/2020 Why natural disasters arent all that natural | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-natural-disasters-arent-all-that-natural/ 3/9
Words alone are not enough to reduce disaster risks. What’s more, some words and
phrases may actually have a negative impact.
Whilst impressive, these messages were largely tokenistic: spoken at the audience
from ‘ivory towers’ of elitism and privilege by high-level (and largely male) panellists,
the discourse remained largely aspirational and did not provide clarity on how the
actions should (and will) be delivered. Words alone are not enough to reduce
disaster risks. What’s more, some words and phrases that have been widely used by
such high level panels may actually have a negative impact. One such widely used
but now highly contended phrase is ‘natural disasters’.
Over 40 years ago O’Keefe et al. (1976) stated that the term ‘natural disaster’ was a
misnomer, and questioned how ‘natural’ so-called ‘natural disasters’ were. They
highlighted that many disasters result from the combination of natural hazards and
social and human vulnerability, including development activities that are ignorant of
local hazardous conditions. Nevertheless 40 years on, politicians, media, and INGOs
further disconnect the ‘ivory tower’ of decision-making and the reality of the most
vulnerable by continuously blaming “nature” and putting the responsibility for
failures of development on ‘freak’ natural phenomena or “acts of God”.
The explanation is simple: a hazard cannot be prevented, disasters can be.
Earthquakes, droughts, floods, storms, landslides and volcanic eruptions are natural
hazards; they lead to deaths and damages – i.e. disasters – because of human acts
of omission and commission rather than the act of nature (UNISDR, 2010; Wisner et
al. 2011). The Haiti earthquake in 2010 was particularly devastating due to the
extensive damages caused to the built environment, which largely resulted from a
low quality building stock and lack of enforced building standards. Structures were
often informally constructed in an ad-hoc manner and some buildings were built on
slopes with insufficient foundations or steel supports.
In contrast, the Chilean (Maule) earthquake that occurred one month after the Haiti
earthquake was a higher magnitude (8.8.Mw) event but it killed far fewer people
(525 deaths in Chile compared to approximately 160,000 -200,000 deaths in Haiti).
This significant difference is commonly attributed to more sophisticated building
7/9/2020 Why natural disasters arent all that natural | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-natural-disasters-arent-all-that-natural/ 4/9
codes in Chile that incorporate seismic design and the historic enforcement of
those codes. A hazard becomes a disaster because its impact threatens the lives
and livelihoods of people.
The Haiti earthquake in 2010 was particularly devastating due to extensive damage
which largely resulted from a low quality building stock.
Once we establish that there is a difference between a “natural hazard” and a
“disaster”, it becomes clearer why so many argue that disasters are not natural. A
disaster does not happen unless people and cities are vulnerable due to
marginalisation, discrimination, and inequitable access to resources, knowledge and
support. These vulnerabilities are further – intentionally or unintentionally –
enhanced by deforestation, rapid urbanisation, environmental degradation, and
climate change.
Moreover, vulnerabilities are too often enhanced not because the information about
dealing with hazards does not exist, but because decision makers (and those
responsible for the development of the built environment) do not use this
information appropriately (or at all). For example, 30 years of hydropower
development in Vietnam has displaced thousands, degraded the environment and
forced many ethnic minority communities into an ever more tenuous situation.
Although these most marginalised people are routinely killed during disasters, the
development approach is not altered.
But this situation is also pertinent in the high-income countries. In England in the
last 30 years nearly one in ten new houses have been built in areas with known high
flood. Hurricane Harvey also presented a prime example of this: instead of
introducing and enforcing more stringent land use plans and building codes, for
years the preferred approach to urban development has been focused on
expanding population density – and therefore built-up – flood-prone areas.
What these examples show is that occurring in the context of neoliberal policy-
making, urban areas have been rapidly developing thanks to the state’s focus on
enabling investments in construction through the provision of infrastructure,
https://theconversation.com/in-vietnam-poverty-and-poor-development-not-just-floods-kill-the-most-marginalised-82785
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09613218.2014.858203
https://www.dezeen.com/2017/09/01/urban-design-caused-hurricane-harvey-disaster-houston-flooding-ilan-kelman-opinion/
7/9/2020 Why natural disasters arent all that natural | openDemocracy
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financial mechanisms and making land available for development. Neoliberal
reforms have been a great motivator for the intense growth in urban populations
and have produced an ideological trilogy of competition, deregulation and
privatisation. Such ideology is hostile to all forms of spatial regulation, including
urban and regional planning, environmental policy and economic development
policies.
Powerful interests have suggested that what is needed is complete reliance on
market mechanisms for planning and regulation of urban processes. Regulatory
controls have simultaneously been reduced (or ineffectively applied) to enable the
‘free market’ to work, meaning that disaster risks (and other environmental
concerns) have been often poorly considered in urban development decisions.
Inadequate land and policy planning leads to the creation of ‘parallel societies’:
some parts of the cities enjoy the benefits of urban life, whereas others live in worse
conditions than those in the rural areas, increasingly left to provide their own water,
energy and food supply.
Inequality, poverty, political ideology, class and power relations are the root causes
of vulnerabilities that turn natural hazards into disasters.
Inequality, poverty, political ideology, class and power relations are the root causes
of vulnerabilities that turn natural hazards into disasters, making some more
vulnerable than others. Women die more frequently than men in coastal storms and
tsunamis; they suffer domestic violence and other forms of gender violence and
insecurity after disasters; and they bear large work burdens during recovery as well
as barriers such as those faced by widows in Nepal trying to obtain grants to rebuild
houses when all documentation was in the husbands name.
At the the Global Platform, whilst many national and international organisations
acknowledged that inequality and social injustice intensify the impacts of disasters,
these issues were largely discussed under the banner of ‘natural disasters’. Here
semantics matter: by saying ‘natural disasters’ the responsibility for destroyed
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livelihoods lies on nature; instead such responsibility should be taken by us –
humans.
The public at large will never comprehend the complex root causes of disasters if
media messaging constantly reinforces the “natural” aspect. In order to contribute
to this shift in thinking and discourse, the “experts” in the field, including individuals
and organisations, need to be more deliberate on this issue. The lack of consistency
fuels a cycle of misinformation.
We must push back against short-term profit oriented thinking. One thing we can do
is communicate more clearly and accurately.
Labelling disasters as “natural” enables those who create disaster risks by accepting
poor urban planning, increasing socio-economic inequalities, non-existent or poorly
regulated policies, and lack of proactive adaptation and mitigation to avoid
detection. It is important to events like the Global Platform promote and encourage
the use of terminology that actually helps the disaster risk reduction community to
reduce risk. It is also important to remember that nature is natural; disasters are
not.
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Vulnerability to natural disasters is soaring,
scientists warn
Sir John Beddington says governments must act in face of climate change, more older
people and rapid urbanisation
Global development is supported by
About this content
Mark Tran
A beach in Nakhon Sri Thammarat province, south of Bangkok, after heavy storms. Flooding is an increasing risk for coastal
cities. Photograph: Reuters
Tuesday 27 November 2012 12.37 GMT
Ageing populations and urbanisation could leave the worlds poorest countries
increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters, the UKs chief scientific adviser warned on
Tuesday.
Vulnerability will go soaring, said Sir John Beddington. Extreme events will happen
every five years instead of every 20. Vulnerability will come from changing climate,
Vulnerability to natural disasters is soaring, scientists warn | G... https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/nov/27/...
1 of 3 Vulnerability to natural disasters is soaring, scientists warn | G...
demography and most people living in cities.
Beddington spoke after the release of a government report, Reducing risks of future
disaster, which calls for risk reduction to be routinely built into urban infrastructure,
ecosystem protection and mobile telephone regulation, for example. Such measures
would help reduce the cost of disasters, which has outstripped international aid over the
past 20 years and led to the loss of 1.3 million lives and caused $2tn of damage.
Between 2010 and 2040, the number of people over 65 in less developed countries is
projected to nearly triple, from 325 million to 948 million. In emergencies, older people
are a vulnerable group, although they may have skills and experience that enable them
to cope.
Eight out of the 10 most populous cities in the world are at risk of being severely affected
by an earthquake, and six out of 10 are vulnerable to storm surge and tsunami waves.
The urban population in developing countries is projected to rise by 65 million a year
from 2.6 billion in 2010 to around 4.7 billion in 2040.
The speed of urbanisation in developing countries means that the future vulnerability
and exposure of cities will be disproportionately important. Urban design and planning
that both improves the quality of life for residents and makes expanding cities resilient
to natural hazards is therefore a key priority, said the report.
Earthquakes in megacities pose a major threat, as does flooding for many cities in coastal
areas. Despite advances in forecasting, preparing for earthquakes will be a challenge as
both their timing and severity are difficult to forecast.
Nevertheless, scientific advances in the understanding of natural disasters can be
expected to continue in the next decades. How fast and how far such improvements will
take place is uncertain, said the report, but if progress continues at the current rate,
there will be increasingly reliable forecasts identifying the timing and location of some
future natural hazards.
Together progress in these areas will improve the forecasting of disaster risk and
provide opportunities for effective disaster risk reduction, provided that those who need
to take action have ready access to the information, said the report.
It recommended governments emulate the approach of the insurance industry in using
science-based risk models to take a wide range of data from a wide range of sources to
calculate where risks come from and what weight to put on them.
Natural disasters hit those in the developing world particularly hard. But the developed
world is not immune, as we saw with Hurricane Sandy in the US and the Caribbean last
month, said Justine Greening, the secretary for international development. Resilience
is about boosting a countrys ability to deal with disasters – whether it is helping people
in earthquake zones build to withstand shocks or helping poor farmers to grow drought-
resistant crops. Reducing the impact of natural disasters saves money, lives and
livelihoods, especially in developing countries.
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2 of 3 Vulnerability to natural disasters is soaring, scientists warn | G...
Topics
Global development
Urbanisation
news
Only 1\% of overseas development aid was spent on disaster risk reduction from 2000 to
2009. The report is part of the governments response to Lord Ashdowns Humanitarian
Emergency Response Review commissioned by the Department for International
Development, released last year.
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3 of 3 Vulnerability to natural disasters is soaring, scientists warn | G...
7/9/2020 A Map Of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You : The Salt : NPR
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H O U R LY N E W S
L I S T E N L I V E
P L AY L I S T
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The Salt
A Map Of Where Your Food Originated May
Surprise You
June 13, 2016 · 2:25 PM ET
JEREMY CHERFAS
A new study reveals the full extent of
globalization in the worlds food supply.
The researchers put together a series of
interactives that visualize the results.
Heres a screen grab, which shows
crops that originate in South Asia. Click
here to see more interactive maps.
Screenshot from CIAT
Some people may be dimly aware that Thailands
chilies and Italys tomatoes — despite being central
to their respective local cuisines — originated in
South America. Now, for the first time, a new study
reveals the full extent of globalization in our food
supply. More than two-thirds of the crops that
underpin national diets originally came from
somewhere else — often far away. And that trend
has accelerated over the past 50 years.
Colin Khoury, a plant scientist at the International
Center for Tropical Agriculture (known by its Spanish acronym CIAT) and the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, is the studys lead researcher. Khoury tells The Salt that
the numbers affirm what we have long known — that our entire food system is
completely global.
Previous work by the same authors had shown that national diets have adopted new
crops and become more and more globally alike in recent decades. The new study
shows that those crops are mainly foreign.
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The idea that crop plants have centers of origin, where they were originally
domesticated, goes back to the 1920s and the great Russian plant explorer Nikolai
Vavilov. He reasoned that the region where a crop had been domesticated would be
marked by the greatest diversity of that crop, because farmers there would have been
selecting different types for the longest time. Diversity, along with the presence of that
crops wild relatives, marked the center of origin.
The Fertile Crescent, with its profusion of wild grasses related to wheat and barley, is
the primary center of diversity for those cereals. Thai chilies come originally from
Central America and tropical South America, while Italian tomatoes come from the
Andes.
Khoury and his colleagues extended Vavilovs methods to look for the origins of 151
different crops across 23 geographical regions. They then examined national statistics
for diet and food production in 177 countries, covering 98.5 percent of the worlds
population.
For each country, we could work out which crops contributed to calories, protein, fats
and total weight of food — and whether they originated in that countrys region or
were foreign, Khoury says.
T H E S A LT
In The New Globalized Diet, Wheat, Soy And Palm Oil Rule
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The great Russian plant explorer Nikolai
Vavilov reasoned that crops originated
in the region of the world where they,
and their wild relatives, show up in
greatest diversity. This map plots the
center of origin and primary region of
diversity for 151 different crops. (Some
crops, like wheat, have more than one
primary region of diversity.)
The Royal Society
Separately, the researchers looked at what farmers
were growing in each country and whether those
crops were foreign in origin.
Globally, foreign crops made up 69 percent of
country food supplies and farm production.
Now we know just how much national diets and
agricultural systems everywhere depend on crops
that originated in other parts of the world, Khoury
says.
In the United States, diet depends on crops from
the Mediterranean and West Asia, like wheat,
barley, chickpea, almonds and others. Meanwhile,
the U.S. farm economy is centered on soybeans from East Asia and maize from Mexico
and Central America, as well as wheat and other crops from the Mediterranean. The
U.S. is itself the origin of sunflowers, which countries from Argentina to China grow
and consume.
Paul Gepts, a plant breeder and professor at the University of California, Davis, who
was not involved in the study, called the findings very important.
Professionals are aware of global interdependence, but this is not something most
people have thought about, he says.
CIAT researchers have produced an interactive graphic that allows you to explore the
results — Gepts says this could really help people understand where their food comes
from. It shows up on the screen very nicely, he says.
http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/origin-of-crops/
7/9/2020 A Map Of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You : The Salt : NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/13/481586649/a-map-of-where-your-food-originated-may-surprise-you 4/16
This screenshot of an interactive graphic shows that, on average, crops that originated in tropical South America contribute
821.6 calories per person per day to West African diets. See more interactive maps.
Screenshot from CIAT
http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/origin-of-crops/
http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/origin-of-crops/
http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/foreign-crops-from-maize-to-mangoes-dominate-national-food-consumption-and-farming-practices-worldwide/
7/9/2020 A Map Of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You : The Salt : NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/13/481586649/a-map-of-where-your-food-originated-may-surprise-you 5/16
Regions far from centers of agricultural biodiversity — such as North America,
northern Europe and Australia — are most dependent on foreign crops. By the same
token, countries in regions of diversity that are still growing and eating their
traditional staples — for example, South Asia and West Africa — were least dependent
on foreign crops. But even countries like Bangladesh and Niger depend on foreign
crops for one-fifth of the food they eat and grow. Tomatoes, chilies and onions (from
West and Central Asia), for example, are important in both countries.
Furthermore, over the past 50 years, the worlds dietary dependence on foreign crops
has increased from around 63 percent to the current 69 percent. Khoury says this was
a bit of a surprise.
Cultures adopt foreign crops very quickly after coming into contact with them, he
says, pointing out that potatoes were being grown in Europe just 16 years after being
discovered in the Andes. Weve been connected globally for ages, and yet theres still
change going on.
Crops grown for fats and oils have seen the greatest change: Brazil now grows
soybeans from East Asia, and Malaysia and Indonesia grow oil palm from West Africa.
Global interdependence also extends to the future of crops — for example, to combat
the threats of climate change and new pests and diseases. The genes needed to face
those challenges are most likely to be found in the primary regions of diversity, but
will be needed wherever those crops are grown.
That is a crucial point for Cary Fowler, former executive secretary of the Global Crop
Diversity Trust and an author of the paper. He says the study presents scientifically
rigorous evidence for interdependence within the global food system.
That means we need to start behaving as if we are interdependent, Fowler said in an
interview.
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is
supposed to ensure that countries can get hold of the plant diversity they need to
7/9/2020 A Map Of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You : The Salt : NPR
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develop new varieties so they can withstand future challenges. But most countries,
Fowler says, are not providing the facilitated access promised by the treaty.
The problem is usually political, as countries ignore the shared access offered by the
seed treaty (which about 120 countries have adopted) in an effort to keep any potential
benefits to themselves.
For example, during the International Year of Quinoa in 2013, researchers attempted
to compare as many different varieties of the Andean grain as they could, to see which
might be best in different environments. Of more than 3,000 different known
varieties, the researchers could obtain only 21, and none of those came directly from
gene banks in the countries of origin.
Other researchers who conducted a deliberate test of the treaty genteelly concluded
that, after nearly 10 years, facilitated access is not straightforward.
Fowler says that this kind of attitude undermines the good intentions expressed in the
treaty: Its time for the International Treaty to be observed and enforced.
Jeremy Cherfas is a biologist and science journalist based in Rome.
globalization crop diversity
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpls.2016.00850/full
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10722-013-0029-6
http://www.jeremycherfas.net/about/
https://www.npr.org/tags/155995674/globalization
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ARTS
Does Democracy Avert Famine?
By MICHAEL MASSING MARCH 1, 2003
Correction Appended
Few scholars have left more of a mark on the field of development economics
than Amartya Sen.
The winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Mr. Sen has
changed the way economists think about such issues as collective decision-making,
welfare economics and measuring poverty. He has pioneered the use of economic
tools to highlight gender inequality, and he helped the United Nations devise its
Human Development Index -- today the most widely used measure of how well
nations meet basic social needs.
More than anything, though, Mr. Sen is known for his work on famine. Just as
Adam Smith is associated with the phrase invisible hand and Joseph Schumpeter
with creative destruction, Mr. Sen is famous for his assertion that famines do not
occur in democracies. No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in
a functioning democracy, he wrote in Democracy as Freedom (Anchor, 1999).
This, he explained, is because democratic governments have to win elections and
face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert
famines and other catastrophes. This proposition, advanced in a host of books and
articles, has shaped the thinking of a generation of policy makers, scholars and relief
workers who deal with famine.
Now, however, in India, the main focus of Mr. Sens research, there are growing
reports of starvation. In drought-ravaged states like Rajasthan in the west and Orissa
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in the east, many families have been reduced to eating bark and grass to stay alive.
Already thousands may have died. This is occurring against a backdrop of endemic
hunger and malnutrition. About 350 million of Indias one billion people go to bed
hungry every night, and half of all Indian children are malnourished. Meanwhile, the
country is awash in grain, with the government sitting on a surplus of more than 50
million tons. Such want amid such plenty has generated public protests, critical
editorials and an appeal to Indias Supreme Court to force the government to use its
surpluses to feed the hungry.
All of which has raised new questions about Mr. Sens famous thesis. In an article
critical of him in The Observer of London last summer, Vandana Shiva, an ecological
activist in India, wrote that while it is true that famine disappeared in India in 1947,
with independence and elections, it is making a comeback. The problem, she
added in an interview, has not yet reached the scale seen in the Horn of Africa, but
if nothing is done, in three or four years India could be in the same straits.
To Mr. Sen, though, it is not the thesis that needs revision but the popular
understanding of it. Yes, famines do not occur in democracies, he said in a phone
interview, but it would be a misapprehension to believe that democracy solves the
problem of hunger. Mr. Sen, who is the master of Trinity College at Cambridge
University, said his writings on famine frequently noted the problems India has had
in feeding its people, and he was baffled by the amount of attention his comments
about famine and democracy had received. The Nobel committee, in awarding its
prize, did not even mention this aspect of his work, he said, adding, however, that
many newspapers had seized on it and misrepresented it.
Mr. Sens views about famine and hunger have recently been put to the test by
Dan Banik, an Indian-born political scientist at the University of Oslo. Mr. Banik has
spent much of the last several years in India, studying the parched, desperate
Kalahandi region of Orissa. In that area alone, Mr. Banik said by phone from India,
he found 300 starvation deaths in six months. And they are hardly unique. I have
collected newspaper reports on starvation for six years in Indian newspapers, he
said, and theres not a state where it hasnt happened. Starvation is widespread in
India.
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He quickly added, however, that the toll was nowhere near the hundreds of
thousands that constitute a famine. In fact, Mr. Sens theory about famines not
occurring in democracies applies rather well to India, he said. There has not been
a large-scale loss of life since 1947. At the same time, he said, there have been
many incidents of large-scale food crises that, while not resulting in actual famines,
have led to many, many deaths.
While the Indian bureaucracy responds well to highly visible crises like famine
threats, Mr. Banik observed, starvation occurs in isolated areas and so isnt very
visible. India has done an even poorer job of addressing the problem of chronic
malnutrition, he said. Its so shocking, Mr. Banik added. Theres so much food in
the country, yet people are starving.
Indias huge food stocks reflect the power of the farm lobby. It has pressed the
government to buy grain at ever higher prices, making bread and other staples more
and more expensive. To help the hungry, the government has a national network of
ration shops, but they have been undermined by widespread corruption and
distribution bottlenecks. Whats more, the government, under pressure from the
World Bank and other institutions, has reduced its once-generous food subsidies.
On a visit to New Delhi in early January, Mr. Sen participated in a forum to
publicize the recent starvation deaths and to promote a new right to food
movement. While such events show how democracies can provide opportunities for
public agitation to redress injustices, Mr. Sen said, they also highlight how poorly
India has done in meeting basic social needs. We must distinguish between the role
of democracy in preventing famine and the comparative ineffectiveness of
democracy in preventing regular undernourishment, he observed.
That Mr. Sen would end up as the foremost thinker on this subject is somewhat
surprising, for he initially paid little attention to the link between hunger and
democracy. When the International Labor Organization asked him to look into the
causes of famines in the mid-1970s, Mr. Sen decided to focus on the Great Bengal
Famine of 1943, in which as many as three million people died. As a 9-year-old boy
in a privileged Bengal family, he had seen the suffering first hand. At the time of his
research, it was widely assumed that famines were caused by sudden food shortages.
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Examining records, however, Mr. Sen found that food production in Bengal had not
declined. Rather, food prices had soared while farm wages had sagged, making it
hard for rural workers to buy food.
Examining more recent famines in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, Mr. Sen found that
they, too, were caused not by food shortages but by lagging rural incomes. In his
landmark Poverty and Famines (1981), he argued that most famines could be
readily prevented by mounting public works projects for those most in peril.
That book did not consider the role of democracy. Soon after it appeared,
however, Mr. Sen began hearing reports about the Chinese famine of 1958 to 1961.
The full dimensions of that calamity had remained hidden from the outside world,
but after Maos death it became clear that tens of millions had died. To Mr. Sen the
reason seemed clear: the absence of a free press and opposition parties meant there
was no one to sound the alarm. By contrast, India had been free of famine since
independence. In a 1982 article for The New York Review of Books, Mr. Sen argued
that even a fraction of the Chinese death toll would have immediately caused a
storm in the newspapers and a turmoil in the Indian parliament, and the ruling
government would almost certainly have had to resign.
The question of food and starvation, he wrote, could not be divorced from the
issue of liberties, of newspapers and ultimately of democracy. Since then, though,
Mr. Sen has frequently referred to Indias failures in combating everyday hunger. In
his book Hunger and Public Action (1989), Mr. Sen (along with the co-author,
Jean Drèze) noted that nearly four million people die prematurely in India every
year from malnutrition and related problems. Thats more than the number who
perished during the entire Bengal famine.
It is Mr. Sens writings on democracy, not famine, that have troubled some
scholars. Throughout his prolific career, the 69-year-old economist has been very
bullish on democracy. In Development as Freedom, for instance, he wrote that
developing and strengthening a democratic system is an essential component of the
process of development. The book had little to say about the high rates of
malnutrition, illiteracy and infant mortality that persist in India and many other
democracies, and how they can be overcome.
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This has led some to conclude that Mr. Sen is naïve about how democracies
work in the real world. Democracies are often run by ethnically based groups
prepared to do terrible things to other ethnic groups, said Frances Stewart, a
professor of development economics at Oxford University. Or they can be very
corrupt, dominated by elites. She added: Capitalist, democratic states put the
emphasis on the private sector, which doesnt always deliver on social goods. The
free press is good on major disasters like classic famines, but it tolerates chronic
hunger as much as anyone else. To be fully represented, she said, the poor need
institutions like trade unions and political parties that speak for them.
Stephen Devereux, an economist at the Institute of Development Studies at
Sussex University who specializes in food security in Africa, faulted Mr. Sen for not
dealing with the big political questions. For him, he said, public action consists
of public works programs -- limited transfers to the poor to help them through a
crisis. Its important to look more at fundamental reforms, like land reform.
Currently, Mr. Devereux said, more than a half-dozen countries in Africa face a
famine threat, including such democracies as Ethiopia.
There, he said, conditions are as bad as in 1984, when famine deaths were
estimated at one million. Ethiopia was then ruled by a Marxist dictator. Today it is
democratically governed, but as many as six million people remain dependent on
food aid from abroad. Having a free press and a democratic process is important for
all kinds of reasons, Mr. Devereux noted, but that doesnt address poverty and the
conditions that lead to famine. With the spread of laissez-faire economic policies,
he added, governments have less ability to step in and provide food security.
Other scholars, however, say that government itself is the problem. T. N.
Srinivasan, a professor of economics at Yale University, says that political freedoms,
to work, need to be complemented by economic freedoms. Mr. Sen, he said, doesnt
emphasize enough the importance of free markets, trade and access to world
markets and capital. The reason authoritarian China has grown more rapidly than
democratic India, he said, is its embrace of economic liberalization. Mr. Sen, he
added, seems to have a much dimmer view of globalization than people like me,
who see open markets as the best opportunity of the last century for countries to
grow and develop.
Does Democracy Avert Famine? - The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert...
5 of 6 Does Democracy Avert Famine? - The New York Times
What unites Mr. Sens liberal and conservative critics is their belief that
democracy, while desirable, is no cure-all for problems like hunger and illiteracy. In
fact, in his more recent writings, Mr. Sen has paid more attention to the
shortcomings of democracy and how they can be addressed. The key, he said, is not
to jettison democracy but to find ways of making it work better for societys
underdogs.
Correction: March 3, 2003, Monday An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday
about the economist Amartya Sen and his thesis that democracy prevents famine
misstated the title of a book of his and misidentified its publisher. The book is
Development as Freedom, not Democracy as Freedom. Its publisher was
Knopf; Anchor issued the trade paperback edition.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Does Democracy Avert Famine? - The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert...
6 of 6 Does Democracy Avert Famine? - The New York Times
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Main image: Photograph: Guardian Design/Getty
Tue 23 Jul 2019 01.00 EDT
I
t wasn’t very long ago that a banana was just a banana – just a curved, yellow fruit. All you
knew, if you bought a bunch in 1986, was that they cost around 97p per kilo. You weren’t
told if they were organic or pesticide-free. You didn’t know if they came from Costa Rica
or the Dominican Republic. And you certainly weren’t invited to worry about the farmers
who grew them – or if their children went to school, or whether their villages had clinics.
You just picked up your bananas and walked to the next aisle for your coffee or tea or
chocolate, none the wiser about where they came from either, or about the people who farmed
them.
Back then, the countries that grew these commodities and many others were still known as the
Third World, and the habit of not caring about their farming conditions was a legacy of their
colonial past. For centuries, trade propelled the colonial project, and exploitation was its very
purpose. The farmers of Asia, Africa and South America were forced to raise the crops that the
empire’s companies wanted, to work the crops in abject conditions, and to part with them at
ruinously low prices. In the last century, the empires melted away but the trade remained
lopsided – with the imbalance now rationalised by the market, which deemed it “efficient” to pay
farmers as little as possible. In the 1970s, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer often received less than 10
cents out of every dollar his beans earned on the commodities market; as a proportion of the retail
price of a chocolate bar, his take was smaller still. Child labour was common. The chocolate
companies prospered and their customers shopped well; the farmers stayed poor.
Then, in the late 1980s, you began to hear more about these farmers, encountering their stories on
television or in newspapers or even on the labels of the packages you bought. The reasons were
manifold. Environmental awareness was on the rise. The prices of some commodities were
crashing, placing agricultural incomes in even more acute peril than usual. There had already
been small groups pushing for more equitable trade: “little do-good shops scattered in cities
around Europe, selling products … bought at fair prices directly from small producers abroad”, as
one pioneer described it. By the early 1990s, these disparate initiatives began to coalesce into a
larger international struggle to radically reform our relationship with what we bought. Trade had
long been unfair by design, but now there was a growing movement to make consumers care
about that unfairness, and even to help rectify it.
Fairtrade changed the way we shop. But major companies have started
to abandon it and set up their own in�house imitations � threatening the
very idea of fair trade.
By Samanth Subramanian
s fair trade finished?
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/samanth-subramanian
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The crown jewel of this movement was Fairtrade International, an umbrella body formed in 1997
out of various national chapters that had sprouted over the previous decade. Fairtrade was
founded on the conviction that consumers could make the marketplace more moral. The spine of
Fairtrade’s philosophy has always been price: simple, clean, the kind of measure that economists
like to deal with. If companies pay farmers equitably, Fairtrade believes, other benefits cascade
out as well. Farmers can hire adult workers, rather than employing children; they can send their
kids to school, and buy medicines; they can improve the yields of their farms by using better
fertilisers. Producers must meet a number of standards to qualify for Fairtrade: rules about labour
conditions, for instance, or waste disposal. But for companies, the core of their ethical
responsibility towards their producers is defined by price.
So Fairtrade works by forming a kind of “virtuous triangle” of ethical business. It recruits farmers
and farming cooperatives as members, asking them to meet its standards; periodically, Fairtrade
sends inspectors to these farms around the world, ensuring they are still compliant. At another
vertex of the triangle, Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price for commodities from
these member farms if market prices plunge, and offers to certify products made from such
ethically sourced commodities. The final corner is the customer, who can, with a little counsel, be
galvanised to shop consciously, and to buy Fairtrade-certified products even if they cost a few
pence more.
The Fairtrade certification mark has become widely familiar: a green-blue-black logo, resembling
a yin-and-yang with a tear in its middle, soothing the consciences of shoppers the world over.
Roughly $9bn worth of Fairtrade products were sold in 2017, their raw material sourced from 1.66
million farmers. Around 2,400 companies, including multinational giants such as Tesco and
Marks & Spencer, pay licence fees to their national Fairtrade chapters to use the mark on their
products. Fairtrade has become a byword for ethical consumption; 93\% of British shoppers now
recognise its mark.
But its two real triumphs are in the realm of ideas, not numbers. First, and most obviously,
Fairtrade challenged the entrenched model of the commodities business – the belief that a
farmer’s lean income was just an unavoidable reality of trade economics. Second, somewhat more
stealthily, it cemented the notion that the modern corporation would be ethical if only someone
held up a lamp and showed it the way. Capitalism didn’t have to be feared; the market would
figure out its own checks and balances, through labelling agencies such as Fairtrade and
Rainforest Alliance, without having to be regulated by any higher authority. Persistent and
egregious inequality could be solved by deft pleats and tucks to the garb of trade, rather than by a
full reconsideration of its fabric and seams.
Now, though, Fairtrade’s success in helping to build a world of heightened expectations of
sustainability is perversely paving the way to its own demise. Companies are losing faith in labels
such as Fairtrade – losing faith in their ability to secure the future of farming and the future of
commodities that drive corporate profit, but also losing faith that these independent stamps of
sustainability carry any value at all any more. Instead, the world’s giant food multinationals are
taking matters into their own hands – setting up their own in-house certification programmes,
appraising their own ethics to their own satisfaction.
Although the fate of Fairtrade is not necessarily the fate of fair trade, the former has kept the
latter alive as an object of aspiration. A weakened Fairtrade portends the enfeebling of the very
idea of fair trade. This poses a serious problem, because Fairtrade relies on companies to
constitute one half of its virtuous bazaar. Without the buyers, the Fairtrade bazaar folds up, and
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companies return to their own devices, to pursue only what’s best for themselves. Increasingly,
companies are finding it easier and more expedient to produce their own certifications, said
Trishna Shah, a Euromonitor analyst who tracks ethical labels: “A big change is happening.”
What we’re looking at, in short, is something like a corporate capture of fair trade – and it comes
at a time when agriculture is already in crisis. The world’s population expanded from about 4.4
billion in 1980 to more than 7 billion by 2011, but the proportion of people employed in
agriculture shrank by 12\%. Globally, the average age of a coffee farmer is 55. No one from a
younger generation seems to want to grow crops any more. The work is difficult and, in the
developing world, nearly always unrewarding. And the coming decades, with all the challenges of
a changing climate – waves of heat, virulent pests, droughts and floods – appear grimmer still. The
lives of farmers are already poised to get worse. A move towards unfairer trade will only push
them back towards the exploited miseries of the past.
he single most damaging blow to Fairtrade came two summers ago, and it was
delivered by Sainsbury’s, which once proudly boasted that it was the world’s largest
retailer of Fairtrade products. In May 2017, without any warning, Sainsbury’s broke
the news that its own-brand teas would no longer be certified by Fairtrade.
“It was a bombshell,” Paul Tiony said. He had travelled to Nairobi that month, from
his tea farm in Nandi Hills, in western Kenya, to take part in a half-day workshop run by Fairtrade
Africa. Other tea farmers, from Malawi, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, were there as well, at the
Pride Westlands hotel; so was a team from Sainsbury’s. The company called a meeting at the end
of the workshop, and Tiony grew excited. Sainsbury’s must have some kind of good news, he
thought. But after gathering almost 50 workshop participants in a conference room of the hotel,
Sainsbury’s revealed that its in-house tea brands were abandoning Fairtrade. Instead, an
executive said, it was piloting its own ethical label – and calling it “Fairly Traded”. Later, Fairtrade
estimated that these changes would affect nearly 250,000 farmers and workers.
Among these were the 8,000 members of Sireet, the tea-farming cooperative to which Tiony
belongs. Sireet’s produce is certified by Fairtrade, and Sainsbury’s used to be, by far, the largest
buyer of Sireet’s Fairtrade tea. So Tiony was dumbstruck at the shock announcement. “Even
Fairtrade Africa officials didn’t seem to know much about it,” he recalled. “They were asking:
‘Why are you doing this?’” Someone inquired: “Are you moving out of Fairtrade because of
Brexit?”
http://www.worldwatch.org/asia-and-africa-home-95-percent-global-agricultural-population
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Sainsbury’s had no real answers, Tiony said – but it seemed to be doubting that Fairtrade was
working as promised. One Sainsbury’s executive singled out one of the central principles of
Fairtrade’s model: the so-called “premium” above the minimum price that companies must pay,
and which cooperatives must use to build schools, or run clinics, or improve their communities in
other ways. Sainsbury’s was concerned that the premium was being poorly used, and that it was
money wasted. “But just a few days earlier,” Tiony said, “someone from Sainsbury’s had come to
look at all our projects.” The farmers tried to argue with the executives; the executives insisted
they weren’t going to change their minds. “The meeting ended just like that.”
The announcement kicked off an immediate storm. In an open letter, Fairtrade’s tea producers in
Africa accused Sainsbury’s of seeking “power and control” over farmers in a manner “reminiscent
of colonial rule”. A coalition of British non-profits urged consumers into a weekend of action
under the rubric: “Don’t Ditch Fairtrade”. Buy a pack of “Fairly Traded” tea and then give it back,
they suggested: “Let the sales assistant know you are returning it because it’s not Fairtrade.” In
Parliament, MPs pressed Sainsbury’s to reconsider; one accused the company of lying, and
another complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the name Fairly Traded would
mislead shoppers who confused it for Fairtrade. (Sainsbury’s declined to comment for this story.
“The launch of Fairly Traded was a bit of a disaster,” a former executive told me with a sigh.)
The Fairly Traded experiment ignited fears of a full divorce, in which Sainsbury’s would abandon
the rest of its Fairtrade products – its coffee and sugar; its flowers; the 650m bananas it sells every
year – and move out of the Fairtrade house altogether. That would, the Guardian wrote at the
time, bring Fairtrade “crashing down”. So far, this hasn’t happened, but Sainsbury’s is still only a
couple of years into its experiment with Fairly Traded. The divorce could still come.
The departure of Sainsbury’s wasn’t a one-off. Around the world, the largest agribusiness
companies are quitting independent certification, either because they think they can do
sustainability better in-house, or because they see an opportunity to craft standards that fit their
own purposes. Soon after Sainsbury’s, the global confectionary giant Mondelēz – whose vast
holdings include Cadbury and Toblerone – pulled several of its chocolate bars, including Dairy
Milk, away from Fairtrade and into an in-house certification scheme called “Cocoa Life”. Nestlé
had launched a similar programme, “Cocoa Plan”, back in 2013; between them, Nestlé and
Mondelez control roughly 40\% of the British chocolate market. Starbucks has “CAFE Practices”;
Human tea bags protest outside Sainsbury’s AGM. Photograph: Andy
Aitchison / Oxfam
https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/Media-Centre/News/May-2017/Open-letter-to-Sainsburys-from-Fairtrade-producers
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-10-18/debates/16FD6EF6-FEE8-4882-BAA3-D7CA61B9326C/EndingExploitationInSupermarketSupplyChains#contribution-CF1BA453-23A6-4901-A40F-446FADD0341D
https://www.about.sainsburys.co.uk/making-a-difference/our-values/our-stories/2017/a-decade-of-100-fairtrade-bananas
https://www.about.sainsburys.co.uk/making-a-difference/our-values/our-stories/2017/a-decade-of-100-fairtrade-bananas
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jun/24/fairtrade-crashing-down-sainsburys-tesco-tea-growers-nairobi
https://www.theguardian.com/business/mondelez
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/03/green-blacks-new-uk-chocolate-bar-not-organic-fairtrade
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Barry Callebaut, the Swiss cocoa producer, has “Cocoa Horizons”; US giant Cargill has “Cocoa
Promise”; McDonald’s has its own “McCafé Sustainability Improvement Platform”.
All these firms still have a few products that are certified by third parties – by Fairtrade, or by
other agencies such as Rainforest Alliance or UTZ. (The latter two merged in January 2018.) But
the ratio is dwindling. The great energies of these corporations, said Trishna Shah, the
Euromonitor analyst, are being lavished upon their own, bespoke schemes – each with its own
little logo, its own definition of fairness, its own explanatory literature on a web page somewhere.
For shoppers, this promises bewildering times ahead at the supermarket: more and more
instances of what people in the industry call “label fatigue”. The shelves already crawl with
sustainability logos: more than 460 of them on food and beverage packages, and a third of them
created over the last 15 years. There are little chromatic decals to testify that tuna is dolphin-
friendly; that coffee is bird-friendly; that “wild-collected natural ingredients” are up to FairWild
standards; that a slice of salmon is Salmon-Safe and follows Best Aquaculture Practices; that a
bottle of wine is LIVE, which means that it fulfills Low Input Viticulture and Ecology benchmarks.
One logo promises a carbon-free product, another a carbon-neutral one, and a third a carbon-
reducing one. The more labels there are, the less we know about them – about what they stand
for, and about how meaningful they are.
In a crowd, there’s room to hide. When Fairtrade began, labels were rare and precious things;
when you bought a product with a label on it, you knew what you were getting. In contrast, a
company today can launch its certification logo into the large ocean of labels, confident that most
shoppers will not know what the logo guarantees, but that it will nonetheless salve their
consciences. “I think companies are hoping that label fatigue is an enduring trend,” said Elizabeth
Bennett, a political economist who co-edited the Handbook of Research on Fair Trade. “They’re
hoping that consumers are tired of learning what 30 different labels in one sector mean, and that
we’ll all just think: ‘Any claim of sustainability is an improvement over no claim.’” This makes it
easy for companies to resort to the ruse of “greenwashing” – pretending to be ethical without
really being anything of the sort.
Several people in the corporate world offered an even more depressing version of this story:
companies are sidling away from third-party certifiers because their optimistic project – the idea
that the market can be heedful of its own abuses and correct itself – has, in a grand sense, failed.
After decades of work, these certifiers have been unable to truly alter the imbalance in global
trade; they have struggled to protect farmers, or to arm them for their various social, economic
and environmental battles.
The proof is in the dire projections for the future of farming, showing how vanishing agricultural
biodiversity, the warming climate and the ageing and impoverishment of farmers are all
endangering the world’s crops – which means they are also endangering the supply chains of
companies who rely upon farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to manufacture chocolate
bars, coffee pods, or cotton T-shirts. By launching all these in-house programmes, companies are
trying to take matters into their own hands – if only to secure their sources of commodities, and
their bottom lines.
he Fairtrade movement was born in 1988, when a Dutch non-profit introduced the first
certification for ethically traded coffee. The label was named Max Havelaar, after a seminal anti-
colonial novel by the Dutch writer Eduard Dekker, published in 1860. In the novel, Dekker
described how the Dutch in Indonesia, having made themselves “masters of the country”,
http://www.ecolabelindex.com/ecolabels/
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1180463/icode/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/natural-resources-environment/climate-change/agriculture-and-climate-change/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/feb/04/global-food-security-old-age-timebomb
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compelled the Javanese farmer to grow sugar and coffee, instead of rice for his
family. The government “punishes him if he sells what he has produced to any
purchaser but itself; and it fixes the price actually paid”, Dekker wrote. “And because
the entire trade must produce profit, that profit cannot be got in any other way than
by paying the Javanese just enough to keep him from starving.” Naming the label
after the novel was a blunt acknowledgement of the straight line connecting colonial
exploitation to corporate exploitation. When the label launched, three Dutch coffee brands signed
on to source their beans from a farmers’ cooperative in Mexico, paying a rate above market price
that was agreed to be fair. The following year, coffee prices crashed following a breakdown of
trade talks: the cost of a pound of coffee on the commodities market fell to rates last seen in the
1930s. Coffee farmers faced ruin. The universe seemed to be emphasising the urgency of Max
Havelaar’s mission.
The label was a swift success; within a year, 65\% of Dutch consumers had heard of Max Havelaar,
and the certified coffee found its way on to shelves at the biggest supermarkets. In tandem with
the coffee crisis, Max Havelaar inspired other “alternative trade” initiatives across Europe. In
Britain, the Fairtrade Foundation was set up by NGOs and church groups in 1992. By 1997, the
various national Fairtrade chapters were gathered into an umbrella body, now called Fairtrade
International and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.
In the voluminous literature on its website, Fairtrade sets out the prices it calculates to be “fair”.
As of mid-July, the minimum price for a metric tonne of cocoa beans was $2,000; for an 18.14kg
box of bananas from Cameroon, €6.40; for 1,000 fresh coconuts from the Windward Islands, $112.
But Fairtrade doesn’t stop with ensuring these minimum prices; it also demands that producers
be paid an extra premium – $11 for the Windward Islands coconuts, for instance – and that these
premiums be spent to benefit the community.
Fairtrade insists that producers make these investment decisions democratically, which means
that farmers have to organise into collectives such as Sireet. There is an undeniable power in
Fairtrade bringing these collectives to the negotiating table, said Pauline Tiffen, the editor of the
Journal of Fair Trade. “The tea industry used to be so hierarchical until quite recently that it was
like something out of Dickens,” she said. “And cocoa still felt like it was operating in the 18th
century. Until 20 years ago, if you went to any big trade meetings on cocoa, you’d see no women,
no people of colour.”
Fairtrade cocoa farmers in Ghana, Africa. Photograph: Karen
Robinson/The Observer
https://www.theguardian.com/food/coffee
https://www.fairtrade.net/fileadmin/user_upload/content/2009/standards/documents/Fairtrade_Minimum_Price_and_Premium_Table_EN_PUBLIC.pdf
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The debate over whether Fairtrade’s systems truly transform the lives of farmers has raged for
nearly all of Fairtrade’s lifetime. Its numbers, in relative terms, are still puny. The 1.66 million
farmers in the Fairtrade network form a speck within the 2 billion or so people who make their
living from agriculture. The sale value of Fairtrade’s products may add up to $9bn, but the global
market for coffee alone is worth $200bn.
A more dramatic sign of Fairtrade’s struggles is that it can’t sell, on its terms, all the volumes of
commodities it certifies. In 2016, of all the coffee grown as Fairtrade, only 34\% of it could be sold
at the minimum price. There were no takers for the rest; farmers had to unload the surplus into
the standard “unfair” market, at the lower prices that the market determined. For cocoa, the rate
is a bit better, 47\%. For tea, it’s much worse, only 4.7 \%. There are tonnes of harvest for which
Fairtrade fails to find any fair-minded buyers at all.
Even the benefits that Fairtrade promises to deliver to farmers have been called into question. In
2014, Fairtrade entered into a public squabble with a team from Soas University of London, which
had examined how well Fairtrade did in shrinking poverty in Ethiopia and Uganda. The study,
funded by the British government, found that schoolchildren had worked on Fairtrade-certified
farms. The researchers compared wages on Fairtrade-certified tea and coffee estates – always
owned by smallholders, in keeping with Fairtrade’s belief in championing the small farmer – with
wages on larger, uncertified plantations. Workers on the Fairtrade estates were paid less and often
laboured in worse conditions, they concluded. Fairtrade called these “distorted comparisons”
and rejected the researchers’ conclusions.
In Kenya, the tea farmers of Sireet have experienced some of the frustrations of Fairtrade, but also
the sudden precariousness of life without it. The cooperative came together 14 years ago, when
6,230 farmers raised money to buy nearly 1,000 hectares of land to cultivate their tea. Sireet has
been a Fairtrade producer from the very beginning, its chairman, Wilson Tuwei, told me. Sireet’s
farmers worked hard to meet Fairtrade’s rules and standards, he said, but even so, the cooperative
was never able to sell more than 13\% of its harvest at Fairtrade rates.
Even that feels like a bonanza, though, compared to what has happened over the last two years.
After Sainsbury’s stopped its purchases, Sireet’s sales of Fairtrade tea plummeted. “Last year, we
were at not even 1\%,” Tuwei said. Sireet’s careful plans started to go up in smoke. “We’ve stopped
most of the projects we were funding with the Fairtrade premium. There were dispensaries. We
were paying school fees for some children. There were irrigation projects. They’ve all become
white elephants now. It has really affected us.”
he rupture between Sainsbury’s and Fairtrade over tea has become the most
prominent case of a large company concluding that Fairtrade wasn’t quite cutting it
any more. The details of that rupture convey why Sainsbury’s was dissatisfied with
Fairtrade, but also why replacement corporate schemes such as Fairly Traded feel
flimsy or stifling to those meant to benefit from them.
Two people who have worked with Sainsbury’s told me that the company had been unhappy with
Fairtrade for years. When I spoke to these anonymous sources in April, both sounded exasperated
at the way Sainsbury’s had handled its exit, but they made the case that its reasons were sound.
“We were paying these premiums, but it wasn’t clear where the money was going. Fairtrade isn’t
good at keeping tabs on it,” one of them said. “It wasn’t always going to medicines and schools
and things like that, as we found through our own investigations.”
http://clac-comerciojusto.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/SMALLHOLDER-COFFEE-FARMERS-ARE-MOURNING.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/may/24/fairtrade-accused-of-failing-africas-poor
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Other Fairtrade partners had raised this as well, she added. “We wanted more data … Instead,
there was just a systemic inefficiency.” Sainsbury’s, as a corporation, was constantly pressured to
be transparent, she said. “But it turned out that Fairtrade wasn’t quite as transparent. That was
frustrating.” The other Sainsbury’s source confirmed this. “If you wanted to find out what a
cooperative had done with a whole wad of Fairtrade premiums, or what the impact of that had
been over the years, nobody could tell you. Or you’d get some anecdotal stuff.”
A Fairtrade spokesperson told me, in response to these claims, that the organisation wanted
farmers to spend their premiums the way they wished, setting their own goals and monitoring
their own progress. She added that, since April, Fairtrade has “strengthened the requirements on
Fairtrade premium use, management, and reporting, in order to promote best practices and
increase transparency”. Now, if a cooperative’s annual premiums exceed $150,000, it must hire an
external auditor to inspect the way it accounts for the money.
Even as Sainsbury’s was stewing over the premiums it was paying out, the second Sainsbury’s
source told me, it had begun to “rain down with standards” over the past decade. Companies and
non-profits introduced a fleet of new labels and certifications, their names all seeming to blend
hazily into each other. Pasture for Life. New Forest Marque. Food Made Good. Soil Association.
Free Range Dairy Pasture Promise. LEAF Marque. “Then Fairtrade starts to look just like a sliver of
the pie – an expensive and not very satisfactory one,” said the source. “And Sainsbury’s thinks:
‘I’m sure we can do this ourselves, I’m sure we know what needs to be delivered.’”
Fairtrade didn’t think so. Under Fairly Traded, farmer collectives no longer receive their
premiums directly, or decide how to spend this money. Instead, they must work on “action plans”
and convince a Sainsbury’s board of experts in London to release their funds. In their open letter,
Fairtrade’s tea producers protested that the company was characterising these premiums as
“donor money” rather than earnings that rightfully belonged to the farmers. Fairtrade called the
board “a further layer of bureaucracy …
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aragraphs (meaning 25 sentences or more). Your assignment may be more than 5 paragraphs but not less.
INSTRUCTIONS:
To access the FNU Online Library for journals and articles you can go the FNU library link here:
https://www.fnu.edu/library/
In order to
n that draws upon the theoretical reading to explain and contextualize the design choices. Be sure to directly quote or paraphrase the reading
ce to the vaccine. Your campaign must educate and inform the audience on the benefits but also create for safe and open dialogue. A key metric of your campaign will be the direct increase in numbers.
Key outcomes: The approach that you take must be clear
Mechanical Engineering
Organic chemistry
Geometry
nment
Topic
You will need to pick one topic for your project (5 pts)
Literature search
You will need to perform a literature search for your topic
Geophysics
you been involved with a company doing a redesign of business processes
Communication on Customer Relations. Discuss how two-way communication on social media channels impacts businesses both positively and negatively. Provide any personal examples from your experience
od pressure and hypertension via a community-wide intervention that targets the problem across the lifespan (i.e. includes all ages).
Develop a community-wide intervention to reduce elevated blood pressure and hypertension in the State of Alabama that in
in body of the report
Conclusions
References (8 References Minimum)
*** Words count = 2000 words.
*** In-Text Citations and References using Harvard style.
*** In Task section I’ve chose (Economic issues in overseas contracting)"
Electromagnetism
w or quality improvement; it was just all part of good nursing care. The goal for quality improvement is to monitor patient outcomes using statistics for comparison to standards of care for different diseases
e a 1 to 2 slide Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on the different models of case management. Include speaker notes... .....Describe three different models of case management.
visual representations of information. They can include numbers
SSAY
ame workbook for all 3 milestones. You do not need to download a new copy for Milestones 2 or 3. When you submit Milestone 3
pages):
Provide a description of an existing intervention in Canada
making the appropriate buying decisions in an ethical and professional manner.
Topic: Purchasing and Technology
You read about blockchain ledger technology. Now do some additional research out on the Internet and share your URL with the rest of the class
be aware of which features their competitors are opting to include so the product development teams can design similar or enhanced features to attract more of the market. The more unique
low (The Top Health Industry Trends to Watch in 2015) to assist you with this discussion.
https://youtu.be/fRym_jyuBc0
Next year the $2.8 trillion U.S. healthcare industry will finally begin to look and feel more like the rest of the business wo
evidence-based primary care curriculum. Throughout your nurse practitioner program
Vignette
Understanding Gender Fluidity
Providing Inclusive Quality Care
Affirming Clinical Encounters
Conclusion
References
Nurse Practitioner Knowledge
Mechanics
and word limit is unit as a guide only.
The assessment may be re-attempted on two further occasions (maximum three attempts in total). All assessments must be resubmitted 3 days within receiving your unsatisfactory grade. You must clearly indicate “Re-su
Trigonometry
Article writing
Other
5. June 29
After the components sending to the manufacturing house
1. In 1972 the Furman v. Georgia case resulted in a decision that would put action into motion. Furman was originally sentenced to death because of a murder he committed in Georgia but the court debated whether or not this was a violation of his 8th amend
One of the first conflicts that would need to be investigated would be whether the human service professional followed the responsibility to client ethical standard. While developing a relationship with client it is important to clarify that if danger or
Ethical behavior is a critical topic in the workplace because the impact of it can make or break a business
No matter which type of health care organization
With a direct sale
During the pandemic
Computers are being used to monitor the spread of outbreaks in different areas of the world and with this record
3. Furman v. Georgia is a U.S Supreme Court case that resolves around the Eighth Amendments ban on cruel and unsual punishment in death penalty cases. The Furman v. Georgia case was based on Furman being convicted of murder in Georgia. Furman was caught i
One major ethical conflict that may arise in my investigation is the Responsibility to Client in both Standard 3 and Standard 4 of the Ethical Standards for Human Service Professionals (2015). Making sure we do not disclose information without consent ev
4. Identify two examples of real world problems that you have observed in your personal
Summary & Evaluation: Reference & 188. Academic Search Ultimate
Ethics
We can mention at least one example of how the violation of ethical standards can be prevented. Many organizations promote ethical self-regulation by creating moral codes to help direct their business activities
*DDB is used for the first three years
For example
The inbound logistics for William Instrument refer to purchase components from various electronic firms. During the purchase process William need to consider the quality and price of the components. In this case
4. A U.S. Supreme Court case known as Furman v. Georgia (1972) is a landmark case that involved Eighth Amendment’s ban of unusual and cruel punishment in death penalty cases (Furman v. Georgia (1972)
With covid coming into place
In my opinion
with
Not necessarily all home buyers are the same! When you choose to work with we buy ugly houses Baltimore & nationwide USA
The ability to view ourselves from an unbiased perspective allows us to critically assess our personal strengths and weaknesses. This is an important step in the process of finding the right resources for our personal learning style. Ego and pride can be
· By Day 1 of this week
While you must form your answers to the questions below from our assigned reading material
CliftonLarsonAllen LLP (2013)
5 The family dynamic is awkward at first since the most outgoing and straight forward person in the family in Linda
Urien
The most important benefit of my statistical analysis would be the accuracy with which I interpret the data. The greatest obstacle
From a similar but larger point of view
4 In order to get the entire family to come back for another session I would suggest coming in on a day the restaurant is not open
When seeking to identify a patient’s health condition
After viewing the you tube videos on prayer
Your paper must be at least two pages in length (not counting the title and reference pages)
The word assimilate is negative to me. I believe everyone should learn about a country that they are going to live in. It doesnt mean that they have to believe that everything in America is better than where they came from. It means that they care enough
Data collection
Single Subject Chris is a social worker in a geriatric case management program located in a midsize Northeastern town. She has an MSW and is part of a team of case managers that likes to continuously improve on its practice. The team is currently using an
I would start off with Linda on repeating her options for the child and going over what she is feeling with each option. I would want to find out what she is afraid of. I would avoid asking her any “why” questions because I want her to be in the here an
Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research (Comp 2.1) 25.0\% Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psych
Identify the type of research used in a chosen study
Compose a 1
Optics
effect relationship becomes more difficult—as the researcher cannot enact total control of another person even in an experimental environment. Social workers serve clients in highly complex real-world environments. Clients often implement recommended inte
I think knowing more about you will allow you to be able to choose the right resources
Be 4 pages in length
soft MB-920 dumps review and documentation and high-quality listing pdf MB-920 braindumps also recommended and approved by Microsoft experts. The practical test
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One thing you will need to do in college is learn how to find and use references. References support your ideas. College-level work must be supported by research. You are expected to do that for this paper. You will research
Elaborate on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study 20.0\% Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is missing. Elaboration on any potenti
3 The first thing I would do in the family’s first session is develop a genogram of the family to get an idea of all the individuals who play a major role in Linda’s life. After establishing where each member is in relation to the family
A Health in All Policies approach
Note: The requirements outlined below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. At a minimum
Chen
Read Connecting Communities and Complexity: A Case Study in Creating the Conditions for Transformational Change
Read Reflections on Cultural Humility
Read A Basic Guide to ABCD Community Organizing
Use the bolded black section and sub-section titles below to organize your paper. For each section
Losinski forwarded the article on a priority basis to Mary Scott
Losinksi wanted details on use of the ED at CGH. He asked the administrative resident