My Speech for Earth Day April 27, 2010
AJAMU BROWN
Earth Day Address – April 22, 2010
Times Square, New York City
My name is Ajamu Brown and I am here to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.
In 2009, TogetherGreen, an initiative of the Audubon and Toyota partnership, awarded me a fellowship. It is designed to build the promise of a greener, healthier future through innovation, leadership and volunteerism.
I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant also known as Bed-Stuy located in the heart of North Brooklyn. My neighborhood has many challenges both socially and economically. Despite this, the trend of going green is catching on, and my Bed-Stuy Eco-Mapping Project is designed to highlight some of these local green activities.
For the past several months, I have worked with community residents to promote food justice and advocate a local food economy that is more sustainable and fair to workers and consumers.
On the ground, we’re talking to community gardeners, who have led this movement for decades, and we’re connecting them to the youth that walk by these green spaces every day.
Through my activism I have spoken with many residents who have cultural roots in the rural South and the Caribbean and can remember a time when they were more connected to nature.
The goal of my Eco-Mapping project is to capture those stories and begin and intergenerational dialogue in the community with the hopes of inspiring youth of color to get involved with urban agriculture.
As a native New Yorker, I have seen, and I appreciate, the planting of thousands of street trees, the designation of many needed bike lanes and newly formed farmers markets that are now part of our urban landscape.
Many of these resources we see today derived from years of community organizing by groups and committed activists who advocated for change. Environmental activists such as the late Hattie Carthan, who saved a Magnolia Tree — now the only living landmark in New York City and developed an ecology center for children.
Or the late conservationist and founding member of the Weeksville Society Joan Maynard, whose legacy can be seen in what is soon to become Brooklyn’s second Leed-approved green museum and showplace in Brooklyn. The work of these two women exemplifies local leadership that has inspired others to organize to create sustainable change in their community, proving that everyday is Earth Day. Yet, today the concept of a green community is still an elusive concept in many low-income neighborhoods.
The reason is understandable when you look at these examples: there are bike lanes in my neighborhood but we still have 1 out of 4 children that are obese. In my lifetime, I would like to know that young people in my community and other communities throughout the nation are able to access safe green spaces just as kids do in wealthier communities, and that all residents, regardless of class, can access healthy affordable food.
This can only be obtained through a democratic system that involves community input.
So I ask that we use Earth Day to understand how urban and environmental policies affect all segments of our community and plug into initiatives locally and globally to ensure the we all have an equal opportunity to live, work and play in a clean green environment.
Thank you for listening!
The Bed-Stuy Community Eco-Mapping Project April 21, 2010
Thinking globally. Working locally. On April 11th, I held an orientation at True South Bookstore for 20 local residents participating in the Bed-Stuy Community Eco-Mapping Project. I would like to thank those folks who attended, and for those who wanted to attend but couldn’t, please stay in touch.
Healthcare for more of US March 23, 2010
President Obama will sign the bill today. This means insurance companies will be unable to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and that the young invincibles (those between the age of 21-35) will have to purchase insurance.
The Dream Reborn October 15, 2008
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- Dream Reborn Conference in Memphis, Tennessee
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- The Dream Reborn, Memphis, Tennessee
On April 4-7th, something inspiring happened in Memphis, Tennessee. A group of activist, scholars, artists, educators, students and community-based organizations from around the country came together to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s life and the need for green jobs to lift millions of people out of poverty. The conference was titled “The Dream Reborn” after Dr. King’s historic “I have a Dream Speech” given on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in 1963. This three-day conference attended by over 1000 people, in which 70% were people of color, ushered in a new era of the civil-rights and the environmental movement in this country as a continuum of Dr. Kings efforts to organize around labor and poverty issues before his assassination on March 28, 1968. The Dream Reborn conference also signaled our nation’s need to adopt green equitable economic policies that explicitly target institutional and structural inequities in order for Dr. King dream to be realized.
Organized by Van Jones, founder and President of Green For All, and Majora Carter, Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx, the Dream Reborn sought to remind us all that we still live in a society where race and class are extremely reliable indicators of how resources are disparately allocated, forty years after Dr. Kings death. At the conference, Van Jones spoke about the rising juvenile prison populations in the United States, accounting for 25% of the world’s prison population while also contributing to 25% of the world’s CO2 emissions. There is a strong correlation between poverty and environmental degradation, and the goal of the conference was to bend the discourse about environmental racism towards solutions and policies that could transform America’s economy into one that is sustainable and equitable for all. This means getting marginalized communities active in shaping policy and economic development, thus creating new job training programs and developing more sustainable food systems that are accessible and affordable.
For most low-income families, energy issues often compete with other bread and butter issues. For example, there are many barriers to eating healthy in underserved communities. Residential segregation disproportionately places African Americans in more-impoverished neighborhoods and consequently reduces access to supermarkets. The Dream Reborn conference provided workshops led by community-based organizations whose mission is to improve access to quality food and health outcomes. One of the organizations that presented, The People’s Grocery, is one example of this bottom-up-approach to food security that is working in California. In West Oakland, California for example, there is one supermarket that exists for an entire community while there are forty convenient and liquor stores. The People’s Grocery has been able to develop creative solutions to improve food security in this area by developing local cooperative businesses that help young people become entrepreneurs and leaders. This all works to build an independent food system and stimulate their local economy. They are also in the process of constructing their own community-based supermarket where residents will have access healthy, affordable fruit and vegetables on daily basis. I would love to get something like this started in Bedstuy!
Do You Really Need Another Reason To Stop Eating Meat? October 16, 2008
I recently received this petition in my inbox. (see below)
October 16, 2008
Dear ajamu,
Last spring, USDA officials said they were considering a change in how
the agency tests meat for dangerous pathogens like E. coli. This was
welcome news after some of the largest meat recalls in history. But just a few months later, agency officials were backing off this plan. Instead, the meat industry wants to find a new use for a failed technology- irradiation.
The meat industry wants USDA to let them use irradiation on whole beef carcasses (normally irradiation is done at the end of the line after meat is processed and packaged.) And to make matters worse, they want the agency to change how irradiation is regulated so they won’t have to label meat products that undergo this treatment.
Irradiation is an expensive, impractical technology that lets meat
companies try to cover up their sloppy practices rather than preventing contamination by slowing down their lines and cleaning up their plants. It creates new chemical byproducts in food and the long term health impacts of eating irradiated food are still unknown.
Consumers need USDA to do more testing for contamination in meat
plants, not let the meat industry try to push a quick fix that causes
more problems than it solves.
Tell USDA you don’t want more irradiation!
Sincerely,
The Food Team
For questions email goodfood(at)fwwatch.org
For those unable to wean themselves free of their carnivorous habits, and for those who still love them, please sign the petition and let the government know that irradiation’s is unhealthy, unwise and unethical.
Thanks for asking this question October 26, 2008
Could you write a post on why you don’t believe humans should eat meat? Understandably, there are many sides to this story. As a biologist, the most persuasive argument I find is the moral obligation we have to respect the right to life of other sentient beings. However, from a health perspective well-raised livestock does not appear to have major medical drawbacks. I am interested in your opinion.
You’re right! For instance, grass-fed beef that is raised without growth-promoting hormones is healthier. But we can’t divorce the consumption of meat and the affects it has on other global systems. So the real question is whether the environmental and social cost of consuming beef in the US, even if it is organic, justifies the health benefits by those who can afford it. Wikipedia illuminates this point best when it states,
“Some American beef producers are expanding into the organic beef niche by importing boxed beef from South America. While this is in technical accordance with the rules of the National Organic Program, it does not follow the spiritual status quo of the American organic movement. To make way for more pasture to raise cattle, great swaths of South American rainforest have been clear-cut, which puts South American beef at a disadvantage because most consumers don’t want to be indirectly responsible for deforestation. Additionally, the ecological advantage of raising cattle on clean land without added chemical inputs in their feed is greatly diminished when the beef is shipped within the range of approximately 5,000 to 10,000 miles (8,000 to 16,000 km) to reach American markets.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_beef
The carbon footprint created by US consumer’s demand for meat is adversely affecting biodiversity in other countries. The rapid globalization of our food sources is subsequently threatening many developing countries, a.k.a, the Global South, ability to live sustainably while making local food more expensive to produce. There are two pragmatic yet underutilize solutions that we can be used to slow climate change while meeting our dietary needs. Firstly, we need to eat locally and seasonally and secondly, as Michael Pollan author of In Defense of Food suggest, we need to “eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Quantity is just as important as quality, and if meat is to be consumed it should be used as side, not the main course.
Sunday, Nov 9th 3:56 AM November 9, 2008
I just witnessed a man being savagely beaten by twenty men. Maybe it was fifteen but no less than ten. Black men stomping another black man into the ground. It occurred on Fulton street. I was about to leave but decided to go back and see what was about to transpire. Like an army, a sea of blue uniformed cops piled out of a marked NYPD ( New York Police Department) van and screamed “up against the wall”. You could see those men were all scared, especially the black ones. This is so disheartening to see four days after a black man was elected president, Damn!
Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention November 30, 2008
This guy was zipping down New York Avenue near my house yesterday when something fell off his bike while crossing the intersection. I had to take a picture. He made his own moped. Awesome!
East New York Farms on PBS December 2, 2008
I volunteered with East New York Farms this summer and this organization is truly doing what it takes to address the health and food crisis in Brooklyn. Congratulation Sarita on your interview with PBS! See below for more information.
PBS APPEARANCE!
Last Friday’s Bill Moyer’s Journal (Nov 28) included a great conversation with
Michael Pollan about food systems and the way we eat. It also featured the East
New York Farmers Market, Hands and Heart Garden, and market
gardeners James and Jeanette Ware.
The link is here, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11282008/watch2.html. The
segment about East New York Farms! starts in the second minute of Part II, and
continues until about 8min 30sec.
On another note, I just came across this video of Thomas Friedman -columnist for the New York Times- and author of the book, ” Hot, Flat, and Crowded”. While I found most of his book to be interesting, I was turned off by his apologist stance on America’s role in solving the worlds energy crisis. An example of this can be found in a section titled “Post-Iraq”.
“Up until 9/11, America treated the Arab world basically as a collection of big gas stations-the Saudi station, the Libyan station, the Kuwaiti station. “Guys,” we told them- it was only guys we talked to- “here’s the deal: Keep your pumps open, keep your prices low, and don’t bother the Jews too much, and you can do whatever you want out back. You can treat your women badly. You can deprive your people of what ever civil rights you like. You can print whatever crazy conspiracy theories about us you like. You can educate your children to be intolerant of other faith as much as you like. You can preach from your mosques any venom that you care to…Just keep your pumps open, your prices low, don’t hassle the Israelis too much-and do what you want out back.” p. 107
I hoped Friedman would have also expanded on America’s hypocrisy by highlighting the environmental degradation that our government subjects its poor too, or the accounts of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – but there was no connection made on these points. For example, how can Friedman advocate for “green jobs” but not discuss the prison industrial complex and the correlation between race, poverty and environmental injustice? Despite the obvious bias, the book is worth reading. Below is his spiel on Obama.
This Is Beautiful December 13, 2008
One of the most prolific minds of our time honors one of the most prolific voices of our time. Dr. Cornel West presents Big Boi with the National Black Arts Festival 2008 Renaissance Award in Atlanta. Check it out !
By the way, here’s Barack Obama discussing his plan to deal with affordable housing and improve urban America. What’s your thoughts!
And to top it all off, here’s Cornell West providing an eloquent, passionate and critical analysis of Barack Obama.
and I think this might be one of the best interview’s I’ve seen with Barack Obama during the primaries.
Corporate Politics, Green Jobs and Hip-Hop December 18, 2008
“Oppressed communities are particularly dependent on their young people – who else will achieve all those murdered dreams? But, what happens when a generation of the oppressed is disconnected from its immediate past and left to the tender mercies of its direct enemies? This is the prospect facing the Black hip-hop generation, many of whom have been rendered politically impotent through an enthusiastic embrace of their own commodification.”Hip Hop and the Hard Right -Glen Ford http://www.blackcommentator.com/22/22_commentary_2.html
As the Obama adminstration looks to expand green jobs across the nation one has to wonder how his new green agenda will effect the existing “War on Drugs”. This idea came to me while recently watching a video of a burgeoning hip-hop artist from LA named “Nipsey Hussle” who beyond the surface represents another young black artist caught within the paradox of thuggin’ on the streets and getting paid by corporate America.
It seems like the corporate exploitation will be in full effect regardless of who is president. But the artists and fans need to realize that even their idols, idols like N.W.A had a social justice component to their message. Remember the lyrics of “Express Yourself”. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how underserved communities of color can develop sustainable communities through the creation of green collar jobs. Groups like Green For All want the Obama administration to invest $33 billion over five years to develop a Clean Energy Corps which will provide money for job creation (primarily through a loan fund for retrofits), job training and national service is a wonderful start. (http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/van-jones/) But there are still too many industries that benefit financially from disfranchised communities of color, who if allowed, will undermine any attempt coming out out of the social justice community to “retrofit America”.
Mainstream hip-hop is a $10 billion per year industry that profits off of negative racial stereotypes, materialism and urban poverty. But few of us seriously understand how our government’s perverse educational, economic, housing, food and environmental policies buttress corporate America’s ability to sustain a lucrative business of institutionalizing black poverty. Corporate America and its media have been very successful in sensationalizing violence, and convincing young black men that their only pathway out of poverty is through hip-hop, sports or drugs. These negative perception will make it harder to inculcate to many youth of color about their options outside the status quo but must be addressed if green collar jobs are to achieve its social justice mission.
To illuminate this point let’s look at race, politics and the efforts to green California’s economy. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who professes to be “green”, puts forth disjointed policies that do not redress the underlying causes of poverty, institutional racism, lack of quality affordable housing, job and food insecurity, educational and health disparities, and the high rates of incarceration of poor and mostly Black and Latino youth, he is only undermining the efforts of those working to create sustainable, just communities. For example, by denying clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams in 2005-the Crips gang co-founder who later became an anti-gang activist- Schwarzenegger missed an opportunity to connect his green agenda to a high profile individual who had the street credibility needed to jumpstart the green collar job initiative in California.
Instead, Schwarzenegger exacerbated malcontent among LA’s poor youth of color by taking the life of a visible and influential figure who turned his life around behind bars. Hopefully President-elect Obama can restore some hope needed to get folks interested in participating in the new green economy. But it will take more than inspiration to unravel what institutional racism took hundreds of years to produce; cynicism, distrust of government, and self-defeatism. Whether its freeing political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal or reaching gang members through Stanley Tookie Williams legacy, reversing the pipeline to prison trend will be crucial for any sustainable change to occur in America. For more information about hip-hop in the 21st century read “It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation” by M.K. Asante Jr..
Also check out http://thebrooklynsocialite.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/angela-davis-recap-anyspacewahtever-pictures-halloween/ for a review of Angela Davis Abolition Democracy and Global Politics lecture at Cooper Union
BTW, I thought this passage taken from the Drug Policy Alliance sums up what’s wrong with America’s drug war.
What’s Wrong With the Drug War?
“Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of drug prohibition’s distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.”
http://www.drugpolicy.org/drugwar/
President Obama’s Weekly Address January 25, 2009
President Barack Obama in his first weekly address discussed how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will jump-start the economy.
World Economic Forum January 25, 2009
The heads of the world’s 1,000 largest corporations, producing 80% of the worlds industrial output and pollution, will be meeting in Davos, Switzerland in a few days at the World Economic Forum to ski, smoke big cigars and figure out a way to regulate the global economy. Most of the participants will be uber wealthy, old and white, but hopefully there will be a few activist who can inculcate upon these business leaders the importance in investing in and promoting green jobs that protect the environment and lift poor countries and poor people out of poverty .
Thought this brother had an interesting point on business ethics.
R.I.P Oscar Grant January 30, 2009
The fatal shooting of an unarmed man named Oscar Grant on Jan. 15, 2009 by a police officer on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train illuminates the war on Black men across the country. Our communities are turning into a police state. Instead of investing in creating unionized green-collar jobs and strengthening America’s public educational system our government uses our tax dollars to purchase high-tech surveillance equipment and fund privately-owned prisons. I’m glad President Obama won House approval on Wednesday for an $819 billion economic recovery plan even without a single Republican vote. More on that later but in the meantime check out this video.
More on Davos January 31, 2009
George Soros, global financier and philanthropist, expressed his views on developing of another World Bank (bad bank) to manage the current financial crisis, and the impact $40 a barrel oil will have on “petrodictators” at the World Economic Forum.
Reflections On Community Gardens And The Legacy Of MLK by Tom Phillpot February 4, 2009
This is a version of a speech he delivered at Duke University’s Sara P. Duke Garden at the invitation of the student group Farmhand on Jan. 19
I want to congratulate the members of Farmhand for their brilliant idea of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy at a garden. And not just any garden, but a culinary garden, one whose produce not only delights the eye but actually feeds people; and not just a culinary garden, but a community garden, one that brings people together across race, class, and age lines to grow things together.
I doubt that Dr. King found much time to hang out among the flower buds, but I don’t doubt he would have approved of the practice of community gardening. And of course, as an African American from the Deep South, he was exposed to the tradition of home gardening and smallholder farming, and he saw how cooks, both white and black, built a food culture out of the resulting bounty of collard greens, butter beans, okra, and other flavorful and highly nutritious foods.
Since King’s time, “soul food” has undergone a process of industrialization; it is now demonized as unhealthy, a view based more on the “Southern fried” stereotypes than the multitude of ways cooks in the South actually prepare these foods.
Meanwhile, the brutal economics of farming in the 20th century, along with a heavy dose of official racism at the USDA, all but wiped out a vibrant tradition of black farming in the South. And as African Americans emigrated from towns to cities, the practice of keeping a kitchen garden waned — and, like other Americans, blacks grew more and more reliant on the budding convenience-food industry.
None of this gets much play in the mainstream commentaries on King’s legacy that come out around his birthday. In typical accounts, a narrative of triumph often holds sway. King went from obscure preacher to civil rights leader and adviser to presidents, in the process helping overturn hundreds of years of racist ideology in the United States. King’s “dream” reached its culmination in the Voting Rights Act and the integration of lunch counters and schools.
Yet when you read biographies of King — I’m thinking of Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy — you find that King himself rarely saw the drama of his life as a triumph. He lived in a constant state of doubt and uncertainty about what to do next; he knew many defeats; he constantly had to fear for his life; and in the last years, he grew increasingly pessimistic about the class divide that he feared would only reinforce the racial divide. That’s what led him to Memphis in 1968 to lend support to an effort to organize black garbage workers. And then, of course, he got shot.
King left behind a magnificent legacy, but we don’t do his memory justice unless we acknowledge that his work was profoundly unfinished. The class divide he feared has persisted and, in fact, grown more powerful. Perhaps most insidiously, that divide has entrenched itself in our food system.
King died at the end of the great post-World War II economic boom, a period when real median wages grew robustly. Since then, wages have stagnated. According to University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin’s Contours of Descent, the median hourly wage (in 2000 dollars) peaked at $15.73 in 1973 and by 2000 stood at $14.15. Since then, the median wage has flatlined. With wages stuck in neutral, growth in household incomes since King’s time has come from more family members entering the workforce, leaving less time for cooking at home.
Under these austere conditions, African-American families have not come close to closing the wage gap with their white counterparts. In a recent article in The American Prospect, the economist William Rogers shows that black families still bring home just 72 cents for every dollar earned by white families.
In the decades since King’s death, the food system underwent a transformation. Starting in the early 1970s, the federal government began to pursue a policy of cheap grain, tweaking farm policy to push farmers to maximize production of animal-feed crops like corn and soy. The food industry leveraged the bounty of corn and soy to intensify meat production, giving rise to the concentrated-animal feeding operation (CAFO). But even an explosion in CAFOs couldn’t absorb all the cheap corn that farmers were churning out; and one company, Archer Daniels Midland, figured out how to turn government-subsidized corn into a dirt-cheap but highly profitable sweetener. These developments led to sharp declines in food prices compared to incomes — putting a bounty of low-quality meat and subsidized soft drinks and other junk food within nearly everyone’s reach.
Of course, these trends coincided with an emerging backlash against industrial food — a movement toward farmers markets, natural-foods supermarkets like Whole Foods, and other sources of fresh, unprocessed fare. But here, too, African Americans were largely marginalized. In cities across the country, “food deserts” persist: areas where almost no fresh food (much less local or organic fare) is available, forcing residents to either travel great distances to supermarkets or rely on overpriced processed fare from corner stores.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that African Americans face significantly higher rates [PDF] of diet-related diseases such as Type II diabetes. And these maladies tend to fall harder on blacks than whites. One recent study found that black children with diabetes are twice as likely to die from the disease as white children. Another study found that the black diabetes rate continues to rise faster than the rate for whites — and that blacks tend to be stricken with the disease at younger ages.
In our society, there’s a strong focus on individual solutions to the problems I’m laying out here. Commentators focus on personal choice; we are urged to “transform our food system one bite at a time” by exercising our consumer power to buy fresh, local, sustainably raised food.
But the choices we have are limited by structural forces. Yes, people need to take responsibility for their food choices, but if we’re really going to throw off the dead hand of industrial food, we need to transform the conditions under which people make their food choices.
In one of his most famous statements, King declared that “no one is free until everyone is free.” Our food system drives home that maxim. For 30 years, a combination of virtuous personal consumption choices and gritty organizing has given rise to a robust sustainable-food movement in the United States. Yet for all the hard work, less than 3 percent of food consumed in the United States is grown under ecologically sustainable conditions, the Kellogg Foundation estimates.
The dominant trend remains toward environmentally destructive monocultures — and is contributing to catastrophic climate change that will affect virtuous and privileged eaters just as much as junk-food junkies. No one is free from industrial food until everyone is free from industrial food.
Now, if I argue that an emphasis on personal virtue is inadequate, I can’t claim that creating structural change is easy. The forces I’ve laid out here — wage stagnation, corporate consolidation, farm subsidies, monoculture agriculture — are vast. They’re well designed to make individuals feel impotent.
And that’s where community gardening comes in. Community gardening is an individual act that puts people into direct contact with their neighbors — inviting people to interact, make decisions by consensus, hash out differences. And by collectively transforming urban land into a resource for growing fresh, healthy food, community gardeners are creating small-scale, on-the-ground solutions to the large-scale and abstract problems I’ve laid out here.
King often rhapsodized about what he called the “beloved community” — a society based on the principles of brotherhood and reconciliation. Community gardening brings that vision from field to plate. Alone it can’t save our food system — or save us from our food system. But I can’t think of a more promising place to start than outside in the field with neighbors.
R.I.P Amadou Bailo Diallo February 4, 2009
Today marks the tragic death of Amadou Diallo. On Feb. 5, 1999, Amadou Diallo, a 22 years old unarmed West African immigrant with no criminal record, was savagely shot at 41 times by four New York City police officers in front of his home. These officers were acquitted of all charges. Amadou Diallo would have been 31 year old today if he were alive.
New York’s Green Building History February 4, 2009
Found this piece of information on U.S. Green Building Council’s website. http://www.usgbcny.org/leed/history.html.
New York’s first comprehensive green building project was a series of renovations to the historic Schermerhorn Building in 1992. The seminal New York-based firm Croxton Collaborative Architects designed the project, which now serves as the National Audubon Society headquarters.
Croxton Collaborative also was behind renovations to several floors of the Natural Resources Defense Council building in Manhattan in 1998, New York’s first green construction project. Addressing energy efficiency, light, air quality and the health and well-being of the buildings occupants, this project was a watershed moment in the green building movement.
Four Times Square, developed by the Durst Corporation developed and designed by architects Fox & Fowle, became the first green skyscraper in North America in 1999. The property was fully leased within four months of opening, adding significant momentum to the green building movement in New York and nationwide.
Laying The Foundation: Office of Sustainable Design and Battery Park City
In an effort to identify and implement cost-effective ways to promote environmental responsibility in building design, the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) formed the Office of Sustainable Design (OSD) in 1997. The OSD published DDC’s High Performance Building Guidelines in 1999, which helped introduce sustainable design to DDC project teams and to the entire city. This led to a companion piece for infrastructure published in 2005, which became the groundbreaking High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines.
The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) embraced the LEED Green Building Rating System early on and now runs one of the world’s greenest neighborhoods. It is home to the Solaire, a LEED Gold-certified building, and the first green high-rise residential project in North America. Goldman Sachs’ new headquarters is also registered to achieve LEED Gold. In addition, BPCA has seven other green residential buildings under construction, three of which are expected to achieve LEED Platinum.
Not to be left behind, the New York City Transit Authority has developed green design guidelines and constructed a number of sustainable projects. Among the most prominent is the Stillwell Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, featuring one of largest thin-film, building-integrated photovoltaic installations in the world.
The New York City chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council was established at this crucial juncture in 2002, and is one of the Council’s most active and dynamic branches in the nation. The USGBC’s regional network of local chapters and affiliates serve as the USGBC’s “front door,” providing green building resources, education, and leadership in communities across the country.
Greening The World Trade Center
In 2006, five years after the 9/11 attacks, Governor George Pataki announced that the Freedom Tower, World Trade Center Office Towers 2, 3, and 4 and World Trade Center Memorial and Memorial Museum would all be designed to achieve LEED Gold certification. Nearby, 7 World Trade Center has already earned LEED Gold certification and will house one of the largest fuel-cell installations in the world.
Bold Steps Toward the Future
New York City enacted Local Law 86 in 2005, requiring most city-owned and city-funded buildings to achieve LEED Silver certification. One of the strongest in the United States, the law was passed due in part to advocacy by USGBC New York, and is expected to green more than $12 billion worth of city construction by 2017.
In December 2006, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg committed New York City to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30% by 2030. Meeting this challenge will require substantial changes to building infrastructure. This makes USGBC New York’s activities and initiatives, and the city’s commitment to LEED, all the more important.
Insight: The new order? By Bridget Kendall, BBC Diplomatic Correspondent February 10, 2009
Very informative article.
The annual Munich security conference that took place this past weekend often serves as a moment to pinpoint important shifts in global perspectives.
This was where President Bush’s Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, lashed out at America’s European allies in the run up to the Iraq war in 2003, laying bare the gaping hole in Transatlantic relations.
This was where Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivered a full-scale rhetorical attack on the foreign policy of the United States in 2007 that sent shivers across Europe and made some wonder if a new Cold War was looming.
So this year’s high level delegation from President Obama’s security team, spearheaded by his vice-president Joe Biden, brought with it high expectations.
Were those hopes met? Well, judging by the applause worldwide that followed his speech, Yes. His promise of a new American tone, rooted in a listening, consulting presidency that believed in strong partnerships in an ever more complex world was given a warm welcome from Europe to the Middle East, from Russia to China. In most continents those with their ear cocked to Munich were largely enthusiastic.
Mood music
That’s perhaps not surprising. In troubled times, it is natural to be hungry for a bit of positive certainty to light the way ahead. Many people want to believe that Barack Obama’s hopeful campaign message of change can somehow deliver a magic formula.
But many have also noticed there was more mood music than concrete specifics.
Echoing President Obama, the vice-president declared it was time to “press the reset button in relations with Russia” to halt “a dangerous drift”.
But there was no unequivocal announcement of a strategic rethink over the controversial stationing in Europe of the missile defence shield that Russia is so opposed to, as some had predicted.
There was even a veiled warning to Russia that the United States would not accept the principle of a world divided into “spheres of influence” and that nations – like Georgia and Ukraine – should make up their own minds which alliances – like Nato – they decide to join.
And to Iran, though the offer of direct talks still stands, Mr Biden reinforced the same familiar policy line, that Tehran faces a clear choice between pursuing an illicit nuclear weapons programme or suspending it to enjoy the benefits of collaboration.
Sounds a bit like business as usual
Bush legacy
The truth of the matter is that we still don’t really know how the Obama administration plans to tackle a multitude of foreign policy problems. Some officials are only just starting their jobs.
Across the board policy reviews are still being conducted. And the new administration’s envoys and aides are still getting to grips with the legacy the Bush administration has left them, making early visits to hotspots on the ground to test the quagmire of detail that makes any solution so elusive.
“I’ve never seen anything like the mess we have inherited,” said Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s new point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“In my view it’s going to be much tougher than Iraq. It’s going to be a long, difficult struggle.”
In theory, it appears there is plenty of room for policy shifts. Not because the Obama team needs to be particularly radical. But because the Bush Presidency (now it is possible to look back over his eight year’s in office as a whole) was – in the view of many experts- an extraordinarily conservative era in American foreign policy.
Even given the modified version of policy during Mr Bush’s second term, with Condoleezza Rice in charge as chief diplomat, the basis for dealing with the rest of the world still adhered to unusually clear-cut precepts.
Remember the simple language of so many presidential speeches?
That there is a clear black and white view of what is right or wrong
That to talk to America’s enemies would be to legitimise them and admit to weakness, (although North Korea, of course, successfully subverted that principle by dropping a heavy hint of nuclear blackmail, and for the same reason the Bush administration did begin to unbend on the issue of direct talks with Iran)
That when it came to securing US national interests, or making sure that it retained its global lead, the United States retained the right to walk out of international treaties or bypass international organisations
And in extreme cases, the US was prepared to exercise its global power to use military force, even on occasion unilaterally.
Compare that with the nuanced, multilateral approach being promised by the new administration. Surely it does suggest a real change of direction in global politics.
But will it really?
The abyss
The doubt over what any new American global leadership will mean does not only come from President Obama’s newness. It also comes from the uncertainty that spills over into every crevice of policy in every country, given the gravity of the world’s economic crisis.
Mr Obama is understandably distracted by the economic crisis at home. It ties his hands when it comes to funding. (Though some say squeezed federal finances could be an excuse to be turned to diplomatic advantage. Note that Mr Biden in Munich carefully said the US would continue to develop the missile shield “provided the technology is proven and it is cost-effective”.)
For Mr Obama to spend time and money on the rest of the world may be hard to explain to the American people when they survey mounting closures and rising unemployment.
But those strains, too, are beginning to tell on the rest of the world. Economic and political confusion have combined to create an abyss that none of us wants to peer into.
The frightening conclusion of the gathering of business and political elites in Davos last month was not only that they had in no way foreseen this financial crisis, but that they had no idea how deep it would go or how far its tentacles would pull the entire globe into a downward spiral.
And the political knock-on effects of the economic downturn are already beginning to display unexpected strains and shifts.
The recent strikes in France, wildcat walkouts in Britain and street protests in Russia are all a reminder of the new domestic pressures governments are coming under which feed a potential growth in protectionist xenophobia.
Bargaining chip
In theory all governments agree with the head of the World Trade Organization that putting up trade barriers will only worsen the economic crisis for all.
In practice, in many countries urgent measures to shore up local industries – like the national car giants in the USA – are already being denounced by competitors as thinly veiled protectionist policies.
This just goes to show how swiftly domestic pressure to save jobs can contradict the noble intent to pursue a global agenda for common good.
In elections, we are told, time and time again, people “vote with their pocket books”. In times of economic duress, the instinct is surely to look after number one.
What is more, economic pressures intertwine with security considerations.
Think only of the dramatic announcement last week that Kyrgyzstan has decided to close the last remaining permanent American military base in Central Asia – a vital supply route to Afghanistan at a time when the new US administration is planning to double its military presence there, and when overland supply routes from the south through Pakistan and the Khyber Pass are now facing a growing threat from an invigorated Taleban.
Kyrgyzstan denies that its decision is linked to Russia’s recent promise to allocate it $2bn in aid. But – like many of the former Soviet republics – Kyrgyzstan is suffering from economic woes.
And we know why Russia would want to take this step. Last year it even publicly warned the United States not to take its northern supply route through Russia’s backyard to Afghanistan for granted. Now Moscow may calculate it has given itself a useful bargaining chip when it comes to negotiations with the new team in Washington – and Nato -on a host of thorny disagreements.
Rivalry?
Are we glimpsing the start of a new and unsettling pattern of “pocket book diplomacy”?
It is not just Kyrgyzstan that is suffering. Belarus is in trouble economically. Kazakhstan, once so confident of rich takings from its energy supplies, has seen its profits subside as oil prices have plummeted.
The Russian economy is on shakier ground than it was too. But this has not stopped the Kremlin moving swiftly to offer aid packages to its neighbours.
Mr Biden may warn that the United States disapproves of the notion of spheres of influence for Russia.
But if in hard economic times, money talks – in the shape of loans and aid packages, can the US afford not to get into the same game as its old Cold War adversary?
But there is an even bigger concern when it comes to the impact of economic strains on international ties.
Mr Biden’s outreach to America’s allies in Europe was also the promise of a new and stronger partnership. But he made clear the United States would expect more in return. So far, European nations lining up to offer more troops for Afghanistan or offering to take the unwanted prisoners from Guantanamo Bay have not been exactly resounding.
It doesn’t bode well.
The ideal is a new spirit of collaboration, whether to re-forge a new financial order at the G20 summit in April or to lay the groundwork for a new era of peaceful coexistence. “We are all in the same boat,” goes the argument. “We must pull together.”
But the reality might be that in tough times, competition and rivalry is more likely to be the new order.
Buckshot Shorty February 13, 2009
Anyone that really knows me can tell you that Buckshot is one of my favorite Hip-Hop MC’s. It’s good to see an artist I grew up with still making music that’s relevant and soul moving. KRS-1 and Buckshot, now that’s a great combination!
Check Out K’Naan’s “Somalia” February 13, 2009
Last October I read an article in the New York Times describing why Somalians were increasingly turning to pirating ships. I discovered that years of illegal fishing and dumping in Somalia’s waters by Western countries had devastated their local fishing industry. As a response to this, initially, Somali men resorted to pirating to protect their fishing industry and livelihood. But now holding ships for ransom has become an industry in itself. Instead of Western countries and the United Nation addressing the underlying problems creating poverty and environmental degradation in Somalia, they are looking to exert more control over the area by patrolling the Somalian coastline . What ostensibly is being characterized as pirating by the mainstream press is clearly an environmental justice issue, and K’Naan’s video questions the U.S. involvement as well as the labeling of Somalians as “pirates”. Check it out!
Solution For The World’s Water Woes by David Molden: BBC News February 16, 2009
Rising populations and growing demand is making the world a thirsty planet, says David Molden. In this week’s Green Room, he says the solution lies in people reducing the size of their “water footprints”.
Today, one-third of the world’s population has to contend with water scarcity, and there are ominous signs that this proportion could quickly increase.
Up to twice as much water will be required to provide enough food to eliminate hunger and feed the additional 2.5 billion people that will soon join our ranks.
The demands will be particularly overwhelming as a wealthier, urbanised population demands a richer diet of more meat, fish, and milk.
The water required for a meat-eating diet is twice as much needed for a 2,000-litre-a-day vegetarian diet.
Cities and industries will also demand more water. Ironically, even new endeavours pursued in the cause of environmental preservation, such as producing biofuels, will place even more pressure on dwindling water supplies.
Clearly, we are heading toward a tipping point that could soon bring us to a day of reckoning when we will have literally made one too many trips to the planetary well.
Given the current rate of development, we will not be able to provide water for producers to grow enough food and sustain a healthy environment.
The only solution is to learn how to live with less water by making much better use of what we have.
Better water management is good for farmers, good for the environment and good for all of us. We already know many of the ingredients to make this happen; the big question is why isn’t it happening?
Trickle effect
The good news is that it does happen.
People are reaching for tools – new and old – to produce more food with less water.
They are adopting more precise irrigation practices, such as drip and sprinkle irrigation.
For example, many farmers in Nepal and India now regularly use low-cost drip irrigation to grow vegetables.
In sub-Saharan Africa, just a little water – combined with improved crop varieties, fertiliser and soil management – can go a long way.
Farmers can double the yield per hectare they currently harvest, and double the amount of food produced per unit of water.
Over the last two decades in Asia, sales of pumps that allow farmers to more reliably and precisely apply water to their crops, have skyrocketed.
Rice farmers in the region are now also saving water by a practice known as “wet and dry” irrigation, rather than following the traditional practice of keeping rice fields constantly flooded.
Also, many farming communities are getting organised into associations for more effective irrigation management.
But the bad news is that change isn’t happening fast enough.
For example, there are still far too many ill-maintained and poorly operated irrigation systems across Asia that use two times more water than is really needed.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the problem is not water being wasted, but the simple yet devastating issue of access.
Despite water being available in nature, many farmers routinely lack enough water to produce food to feed their families.
‘Water miles’
Why is it that some areas use water so carelessly?
One problem lies with public policies that fail to connect the interests of different user groups.
For example, farmers may see little self-interest in being more conservative with water if the benefits flow to cities and not to them.
Although, broadly speaking, water is a precious commodity, for many users its costs are negligible, so there is no incentive to conserve.
Many countries do not invest enough in water to enable poor rural communities to grow more food.
In the US and Australia, annual per capita water storage is more than 4,000 cubic metres. Yet in much of sub-Saharan Africa it is less than 100 cubic metres; poor countries simply cannot afford investments in large hydraulic infrastructure.
Nonetheless, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and other research organisations have identified new and more affordable opportunities for low-cost water investment.
For example, resource-poor farmers can afford low-cost drip irrigation kits, whereas conventional irrigation, which costs more than $4,000 per hectare, is well beyond their means.
Unfortunately, while we think we know the answers, reality is more complex.
We have dramatically altered natural water systems in the quest for more water control.
Unwittingly, we have created salinity problems, dried up rivers and have caused groundwater tables to decline.
Institutions that govern water have not adapted to address these issues. Added to this is the fact that we don’t fully understand what new water problems will result from climate change.
While we desperately need to know more about water resources, basic data and knowledge are hard to get because of a lack of investment.
The industrialised world is quick to point its finger at agricultural producers, blaming them for water woes, but it is our food habits that drive the problem.
When 50% of food is wasted after it leaves farmers’ fields, it leads to an equivalent water waste of 50% because wasted food is also wasted water.
Action is urgently required on several fronts: we must continue to encourage the many local actions that are having a positive impact now; we must establish policies that create incentives for farming communities to invest in better water management; and we must invest in the infrastructure and the knowledge systems needed to manage complex water systems for the benefit of all.
Each of us can make a difference if we first consider the water implications of our lifestyles and the “water footprint” we are leaving behind.
Dr David Molden is deputy director of research for the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
GM Battles Rage Down On The Farm By Jean Snedegar BBC World Service February 19, 2009
Genetically Modified Food (GM) is evil: Don’t believe the hype! Support your local organic farmer and CSA.
Pressure is mounting from some scientists for Europe to end its resistance to genetically modified (GM) crops but fears remain about the impact of such technology on the rights of farmers.
Many American farmers like the ease of operating a GM system which involves regular spraying of chemicals which kill weeds but don’t hurt their crops.
The problem is that GM pollen can blow across fields and anti-GM campaigners say the fear of being prosecuted for growing GM accidentally leads many farmers to give up traditional methods and take the GM route for a quiet life.
David Runyan, who has 400 hectares in eastern Indiana where he grows maize, wheat and soybeans, says he feels intimidated by the tactics of the biggest GM seed firm, Monsanto.
Although Mr Runyan plants some genetically-engineered corn, he grows only conventional soybeans – something he admits is now rare.
“Approximately 90% are growing GMO soybeans,” he says, “Although when the first-generation of glysophate-tolerant soybeans came out the yields were not there.
“My neighbours like them because there’s less management,” he says.
“They don’t have to walk out to the fields. A lot of them don’t even feel the dirt.
“They plant it; they hire somebody to spray it; hire somebody to fertilise it and they just go and harvest it,” he says.
“They’re not farmers like we used to be.”
Mr Runyon says he is not allowed to buy any products from Monsanto.
“I’m on what you call a Monsanto black list – a few years ago they came out and tried to investigate and search my farm and I prevented that,” he says.
“I’ve never signed a contract. I do not use their products and it will be a cold day before I ever buy Monsanto products.”
He believes that Monsanto’s past history has not been good for the world or for the people.
“They’re only out for Number One. Most farmers in the United States do not care for Monsanto but they stand in line to buy their products,” he laments.
“I think it’s just because it’s easy for them – that’s the only reason I can think of, there’s less management.”
In 2005, investigators sent by Monsanto arrived at Mr Runyan’s farm unannounced.
“They came to my house and wanted all my production records,” he says.
They asked questions about his farming operation and wanted to know who he was selling his food-grade soybeans to.
“They wanted to know who I’d bought all my herbicides from and they wanted records and phone numbers,” Mr Runyan recalls.
Three months after the investigators left empty handed, Mr Runyan received a letter stating that he had seven days to turn over all his production records to Monsanto.
One reason why Mr Runyan refused was because the letter stated that Monsanto had an agreement with the Indiana Department of Agriculture, but the department didn’t exist at that time.
Mr Runyan hired a lawyer to deal with his case.
David vs Goliath
David Runyan’s story is not an isolated one.
To protect their patents, biotechnology companies have fiercely pursued farmers they suspect of saving and replanting their seed and farmers who may have biotech crops growing in their fields accidentally.
Either way, companies like Monsanto call it “seed piracy”.
Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety says Monsanto will force farmers to sign a technology use agreement which basically forbids the farmer from saving seeds from his harvest for planting the next season.
“Seed-saving is a long tradition in agriculture dating back millennia and it’s actually still practiced quite a bit even in the United States and other developed countries,” he says.
Thousands of farmers who have been pursued by Monsanto in the US have paid the company at least $85m (£59.4m) in damages for the so-called crime of saving seeds from their harvest.
When asked about their tactics, Monsanto directs people to the “For the Record” section on their website.
Biotech scientist Michael Fromm believes these lawsuits are fair practice on Monsanto’s part.
“They do have patented technology,” he says. “The farmers sign agreements not to save the seed as a way for Monsanto to make money on their crop.
“They’ve gone after a few farmers pretty hard in terms of litigation. If somebody doesn’t enforce their property rights – the market tends to abuse it more.”
The big fear of consumers in Europe has been safety.
After 10 years of Americans eating GM crops, many in the industry say this proves they must be safe, but even in the US some critics are not convinced.
“There really have been no long-term studies and especially in the US – our regulatory system is extremely lax,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC.
“I certainly don’t believe that all GM crops would be harmful to eat.
“The question is: will the regulatory system detect them? And my answer in short is, ‘maybe sometimes’ and that’s not really very comforting to me.”
What worries Mr Gurian-Sherman is that no scientific long-term studies have been conducted comparing groups of people who eat GM and those that do not, to see if the GM eaters get more allergies or other medical problems.
Such concerns have not so far worried most Americans or Michael Fromm, at the University of Nebraska.
In the 1990s he helped develop genetically-engineered crops for Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of genetically engineered seed.
“I absolutely believe that genetically engineered crops are safe and the industry record over the last 12-plus years has absolutely proven that.
“To my knowledge there’s not a single instance of any health risk for any of the commercially-sold genetically engineered crops.”
World Economic Forum Analyzes Green Investment By Debra Hazel: GlobeSt.com February 19, 2009
DAVOS-KLOSTERS, SWITZERLAND-Add sustainability to the list of matters discussed by political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum, which announced that $515 billion, as well as government action and regulation is needed annually for “green” investments to avoid a disastrous carbon emissions level.
The announcement came in the report “Green Investing: Towards a Clean Energy Infrastructure” report, which was released at the conference. Written by the Forum, Geneva, and London-based New Energy Finance, the report discusses the move to clean energy infrastructure, the potential return of various technologies and their implementation. But it cannot happen by business means alone, the report added.
“As the cost of clean energy technologies decreases and policy support is put in place, the shape of the eventual energy system is emerging. But the investment demand is substantial,” the report said. “Despite the recent turmoil, the world’s financial markets are up to the financing challenge, but they will need continued action from the world’s policy-makers and leading corporations.”
The report identifies eight emerging, large-scale clean energy sectors that are expected to significantly contribute to creating a clean energy infrastructure of the future: onshore wind, offshore wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal electricity generation, municipal solar waste-to-energy, sugar-based ethanol, cellulosic and next generation biofuels, and geothermal power.
The importance of energy efficiency also “cannot be underestimated,” the report says, citing a McKinsey Global Institute study that estimates growth in energy demand could be cut in half by 2030 simply through such means. The greatest number of global efficiency opportunities lies in the industrial sector (49%), followed by residential (23%), transportation (15%) and commercial (13%).
“Buildings can be even made energy positive, meaning they produce more energy than they consume by using integrate solar PV (roof, facade, window), chromic glass, heat-exchangers/pumps, smart devices, and smarter architectural building designs,” the report says. “In the residential sector, nearly 80% of the investment would be directed at just one area–installing more efficient heating and cooling systems in existing and new homes.”
But governments must become involved on a variety of levels and for a long period of time, to ensure these new tools are used. “Policy-makers should enforce energy efficiency standards. Utilities and energy-intensive industries will respond to carbon prices and other price signals, but many individuals and businesses will simply not do so,” the report says. “As a result, there will always be a role for regulation to mandate certain changes in behaviour, such as appliance efficiency and standby power limits, corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards and building codes.”
Utilities that make a profit selling ever more amounts of gas or electricity will not be inclined to encourage their users to reduce energy demand, the report continued. Utility regulatory frameworks must be changed. It also suggested the Energy Service Co. model be revived, allowing third parties–including the utilities themselves–to underwrite the cost of improvements and share in the resulting savings.
The commitment to efficiency must be long-term: Denmark and Japan demonstrate that exploiting efficiency opportunities require sustained policy support over an extended period. And governments themselves also should purchase clean energy and require those they work with to do the same.
“With central, regional and local government accounting for 35% to 45% of economic activity in all of the world’s largest economies, public sector purchasing can be a powerful force,” the report says. “Clean energy use should be mandated in public procurement, which would create guaranteed markets for leading innovators in transport, heat and electricity.”
The move to investments has already begun: Clean energy investments increased from around $30 billion in 2004 to over $140 billion by 2008. That might be because it’s profitable. The report shows that despite the economic disasters of 2008, an index of the world’s 90 leading clean energy companies had a five-year compounded annualized return of almost 10%.
The report was mandated by last year’s World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the Geneva-based not-for-profit organization that brings together business, political, intellectual and other leaders of society to work on projects “that improve people’s lives.” That included analyzing where to invest on green technology despite the current economy.
“It is crucial that the environmental challenges are not left aside when focusing on stabilizing the global financial system and reviving global economic growth,” the report says. “Waiting for economic recovery, rather than taking decisive action now, will make the future climate challenge far greater.”
The Future of Food – Introduction February 24, 2009
This documentary offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods in the U.S. for the past decade.
BARRY ESTABROOK “POLITICS OF THE PLATE: THE PRICE OF TOMATOES” March 3, 2009
Found this article in Gourmet magazine.
Driving from Naples, Florida, the nation’s second-wealthiest metropolitan area, to Immokalee takes less than an hour on a straight road. You pass houses that sell for an average of $1.4 million, shopping malls anchored by Tiffany’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, manicured golf courses. Eventually, gated communities with names like Monaco Beach Club and Imperial Golf Estates give way to modest ranches, and the highway shrivels from six lanes to two. Through the scruffy palmettos, you glimpse flat, sandy tomato fields shimmering in the broiling sun. Rounding a long curve, you enter Immokalee. The heart of town is a nine-block grid of dusty, potholed streets lined by boarded-up bars and bodegas, peeling shacks, and sagging, mildew-streaked house trailers. Mongrel dogs snooze in the shade, scrawny chickens peck in yards.
Just off the main drag, vultures squabble over roadkill. Immokalee’s population is 70 percent Latino. Per capita income is only $8,500 a year. One third of the families in this city of nearly 25,000 live below the poverty line. Over one third of the children drop out before graduating from high school. Related links Read more by Barry Estabrook on gourmet.com Read a follow-up on the plight of the tomato pickers Learn how Burger King refused to pay one penny more per pound of tomatoes Catch up on the latest food politics news in Politics of the Plate Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.” The beige stucco house at 209 South Seventh Street is remarkable only because it is in better repair than most Immokalee dwellings. For two and a half years, beginning in April 2005, Mariano Lucas Domingo, along with several other men, was held as a slave at that address. At first, the deal must have seemed reasonable. Lucas, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had slipped across the border to make money to send home for the care of an ailing parent. He expected to earn about $200 a week in the fields. Cesar Navarrete, then a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, agreed to provide room and board at his family’s home on South Seventh Street and extend credit to cover the periods when there were no tomatoes to pick. Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off. But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50.
Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000. Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free. What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried. “Unlike victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy, who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us in plain sight.” And for what? Supermarket produce sections overflow with bins of perfect red-orange tomatoes even during the coldest months—never mind that they are all but tasteless. Large packers, which ship nearly $500 million worth of tomatoes annually to major restaurants and grocery retailers nationwide, own or lease the land upon which the workers toil. But the harvesting is often done by independent contractors called crew bosses, who bear responsibility for hiring and overseeing pickers. Said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, “We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it. We want to make sure that we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation, harassment, and violence.” Growers, he said, cooperated with law-enforcement officers in the Navarette case. But when asked if it is reasonable to assume that an American who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or food-service company during the winter has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave, Molloy said, “It is not an assumption. It is a fact.” Gerardo Reyes, a former picker who is now an employee of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a 4,000-member organization that provides the only voice for the field hands, agrees. Far from being an anomaly, Reyes told me, slavery is a symptom of a vast system of labor abuses. Involuntary servitude represents just one rung on a grim ladder of exploitation.
Reyes said that the victims of this system come to Florida for one reason—to send money to their families back home. “But when they get here, it’s all they can do to keep themselves alive with rent, transportation, food. Poverty and misery are the perfect recipe for slavery.” Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For every 32-pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about 45 cents—almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care. Leaning against the railing of an unpainted wooden stoop in front of a putty-colored trailer, a tired Juan Dominguez told an all-too-familiar story. He had left for the fields that morning at six o’clock and returned at three. But he worked for only two of those nine hours because the seedlings he was to plant had been delivered late. His total earnings: $13.76. I asked him for a look inside his home. He shrugged and gestured for me to come in. In one ten-foot-square space there were five mattresses, three directly on the floor, two suspended above on sheets of flimsy plywood. The room was littered with T-shirts, jeans, running shoes, cheap suitcases. The kitchen consisted of a table, four plastic chairs, an apartment-size stove, a sink with a dripping faucet, and a rusty refrigerator whose door wouldn’t close. Bare lightbulbs hung from fixtures, and a couple of fans put up a noisy, futile effort against the stale heat and humidity. In a region where temperatures regularly climb into the nineties, there were no air conditioners. One tiny, dank bathroom served ten men. The rent was $2,000 a month—as much as you would pay for a clean little condo near Naples. Most tomato workers, however, have no choice but to live like Dominguez. Lacking vehicles, they must reside within walking distance of the football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a combination grocery store, taqueria, and check-cashing office. During the predawn hours, the lot hosts a daily hiring fair. I arrived a little before 5 a.m. The parking lot was filled with more than a dozen former school buses. Outside each bus stood a silent scrum of 40 or 50 would-be pickers. The driver, or crew boss, selected one worker at a time, choosing young, fit-looking men first. Once full, the bus pulled away.
Later that day, I encountered some of the men and women who had not been picked when I put in a shift at the Guadalupe Center of Immokalee’s soup kitchen. Tricia Yeggy, the director of the kitchen, explained that it runs on two simple rules: People can eat as much as they want, and no one is turned away hungry. This means serving between 250 and 300 people a day, 44 per sitting, beginning at eleven o’clock. Cheerful retirees volunteer as servers, and the “guests” are unabashedly appreciative. The day’s selection—turkey and rice soup with squash, corn, and a vigorous sprinkle of cumin—was both hearty and tasty. You could almost forget the irony: Workers who pick the food we eat can’t afford to feed themselves. The CIW has been working to ease the migrants’ plight since 1993, when a few field hands began meeting sporadically in a church hall. Lucas Benitez, one of the coalition’s main spokespeople, came to the group in its early years. Back then, the challenge was taking small steps, often for individual workers. To make the point, Benitez unfolded a crumpled shirt covered in dried blood. “This is Edgar’s shirt,” he said. One day in 1996, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edgar briefly stopped working in the field for a drink of water. His crew boss bludgeoned him. Edgar fled and arrived at the coalition’s door, bleeding. In response to the CIW’s call for action, over 500 workers assembled and marched to the boss’s house. The next morning, no one would get on his bus. “That was the last report of a worker being beaten by his boss in the field,” said Benitez. The shirt is kept as a reminder that by banding together, progress is possible. Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40 cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.
The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns. When the Navarrete case came to light, there were no howls of outrage from growers. Or from Florida government circles. When Cesar Navarrete, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 12 years in prison this past December, Terence McElroy of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services offered his perspective on the crime: “Any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity. But you’re talking about maybe a case a year.” Charlie Frost, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office detective who investigated and arrested Navarrete, disagrees. With one case wrapped up, he and prosecutor Molloy turned to several other active slavery cases. Sitting in his Naples office and pointing his index finger east, toward the fields of Immokalee, he said, “It’s happening out there right now.” Lucas, who received a temporary visa for his testimony, is now back in the fields, still chasing the dream of making a little money to send back home. Buying Slave-Free Fruits In the warm months, the best solution is to follow that old mantra: buy seasonal, local, and small-scale. But what about in winter? So far, Whole Foods is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Fair Food, which means that it has promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses and, when buying tomatoes, to a pay a price that supports a living wage. When shopping elsewhere, you can take advantage of the fact that fruits and vegetables must be labeled with their country of origin.
Most of the fresh tomatoes in supermarkets during winter months come from Florida, where labor conditions are dismal for field workers, or from Mexico, where they are worse, according to a CIW spokesman. One option during these months is to buy locally produced hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes, including cluster tomatoes still attached to the vine. Greenhouse tomatoes are also imported from Mexico, however, so check signage or consult the little stickers often seen on the fruits themselves to determine their source. You can also visit the CIW’s information-packed website (ciw-online.org) if you are interested in becoming part of the coalition’s efforts
“Way Down,” N.A.S.A. feat. RZA, John Frusciante March 7, 2009
Pretty morbid video but still cool. Man, I can’t wait for Spring to arrive! Just rode my bike around Prospect Park today. It was beautiful. I stopped by the Farmers’ Market and there were a few brothers selling a variety of plants near the corner of the market. That was the first time I’ve ever seen Black folks selling anything at that market. Maybe it’s the Obama effect.
The Obama Effect Continues… Van Jones Special Advisor For Green Jobs March 10, 2009
…and so the magic continues (lol). Just received this news of Van Jones departure in my inbox.
Dear Ajamu,
Great news! I’m going to the White House! And Green For All has an amazing new leader!
Special Advisor For Green Jobs: Me
I will be at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. My job will be to help shape the administration’s energy and climate policy, so that climate solutions produce jobs and justice for all Americans.
I am going to be the Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.
Dispelling Some Rumors
If you’ve had your ear to the blogosphere in the past few days, you may have heard some rumors. The most prevalent call me the new “Green Jobs Czar.”
But I am not going to be any kind of “Czar.” If anyone were to be the “Green Jobs Czar” (a position that does not exist), it would and should be Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. She was an original sponsor of the Green Jobs Act of 2007. Obama appointed her as the first Latina – and first green leader – to head the Department of Labor. Can anyone say “Green Jobs Czarina”?
Also, rumors that I will be handing out big piles of Recovery Act cash are utterly false. Unfortunately. 
But enough about me. My new position with the Obama White House is not the only miracle that we are celebrating this week.
Green For All’s New Leader: Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
The other magical development is the leader who will replace me at Green For All’s helm: Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins.
If you were writing a script or a novel, you simply couldn’t invent a better leader than Phaedra to take Green For All – and the entire movement for green jobs – to the next level.
As nearly everyone who lives in California already knows, Phaedra is a true superstar – widely recognized as one of America’s most brilliant, creative and successful social justice leaders. She helped to expand health care access in San Jose and across California. She also helped to raise the minimum wage for low-income families in theSouth Bay - twice.
As a result, San Jose Magazine named her one of the 100 most powerful people inSilicon Valley. The Silicon Valley Business Journal called her one of “40 leaders to watch under 40.” Presently, she is the head of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council and also of Working Partnerships USA. She will join Green For All this month as itsChief Executive Officer.
Green Jobs: Moving From Inspiration to Implementation
Phaedra is the right leader to move Green For All forward. The movement for green jobs is shifting from a focus on inspiration to a focus on implementation.
And Green For All needs a top leader who has the practical know-how to get the job done.
For example, the green aspects of the recovery package will put billions of dollars on the table to repair our economy and restore our environment. But those dollars must travel a long way from the signing ceremony, through various levels of government, to get to communities across America. There are a thousand ways that folks from disadvantaged communities could be left out and left behind.
Phaedra knows how to translate public dollars and promises into good jobs for everyday people. She has a track record of winning real results. She commands the respect of labor leaders, elected officials, business leaders, social justice champions and environmentalists. Most importantly: she understands the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of tools that will get real work to real people on the ground – workforce development, community economic development, project labor agreements, community benefits agreements and more.
Vertical Farming March 12, 2009
I meant to blog about the idea of a vertical farm months ago and it popped into my head again today so I figured I would go ahead and write about it.
So, what is a vertical farm?
Well, it’s a farm inside a building. More specifically, vertical farming is large-scale agriculture in skyscrapers aka “farmscrapers”. Through the use of recycle resources and greenhouse methods like hydroponics these farmscrapers would produce fruits and vegetables year-round.
For more info check out http://www.verticalfarm.com/index.html.
Prof. Dickson Despommier of environmental health sciences and mircobiology at Columbia University has been working on this concept for years. He’s even proposed building a vertical farm on Ground Zero, which I coincidentally happen to work across the street from and think is an excellent use of the space.
More on vertical farming…
It’s Crazy How They Change Brooklyn All Around-Big Daddy Kane March 13, 2009
If you grew up in Brooklyn then you know Big Daddy Kane. Before Brooklyn became gentrified, before MTV, Ikea, Metrocards, ipods, graffittiless trains, the internet and the globalization and commodification of hip-hop there was a local show called Video Music Box hosted by Ralph McDaniels on one of New York City’s public access channels (free) that gave urban Black youth a space and a voice to be creative and would be the beginning of would later be the foundation of what we know today as hip-hop music. Back then it was just rap and Kane was king!
Below is a trailer directed by Anthony Marshall (co-founder of Lyricist Lounge). Kane talks about his years growing up as a kid in New York, his life in the rap game, his influence on fashion and his lyrical superiority. about Big Daddy Kane.
Things That Make You Say Hmmm. Obama, 50 Cents March 17, 2009
Somewhat of an interesting juxtaposition between the two men.
Missouri and Monsanto March 26, 2009
I met someone at a meeting this afternoon who was born in Brooklyn but raised in St. Louis, Missouri. All I knew about Missouri is that it’s home to the Cardinals and hip-hop artists like Nelly and Chingy. However, I discovered that Missouri is also home to the infamous Monsanto Company, the world’s leader in genetically modified crops. Who knew?
For those who are not entirely familiar with the company, here’s a brief bio taken from Wikipedia.
- Monsanto was founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, by John Francis Queeny, a 30-year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry.
- It has over 18,800 employees worldwide, and an annual revenue of USD$11.365 billionreported for 2008.
- The company’s first product was the artificial sweetener saccharin, which it sold to the Coca-Cola Company.
- Monsanto is also by far the leading producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed, holding 70%–100% market share for various crops. (Isn’t that a monopoly and aren’t monopolies illegal.)
- The 1940s saw Monsanto become a leading manufacturer of plastics, including polystyrene, and synthetic fibers. Since then, it has remained one of the top 10 US chemical companies. Other major products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, DDT, and Agent Orange used primarily during the Vietnam War as a deforestation agent (and later proven to be highly carcinogenic to any who come into contact with the solution), the excitotoxin, aspartame (NutraSweet), bovine somatotropin (bovine growth hormone (BST), and PCBs
- Throughout 2004 and 2005, Monsanto filed lawsuits against many farmers in Canada and the U.S. The lawsuits have been on the grounds of patent infringement, specifically the farmer’s sale of seed containing Monsanto’s patented genes–which require the farmer initial purchase of the seed and its technology–unknowingly sown by wind carrying the seeds from neighboring crops.
- Monsanto has been identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as being a “potentially responsible party” for 56 contaminated sites (Superfund sites) in the United States and has been sued, and has settled, multiple times for damaging the health of its employees or residents near its Superfund sites through pollution and poisoning.
- In June 2007, Monsanto acquired Delta & Pine Land Company, a company that had been patented a seed technology nicknamed “Terminator”. This technology produces plants that have sterile seeds so they do not flower or grow fruit after the initial planting, requiring customers to purchase seed from Monsanto for every planting in which they use Monsanto seed varieties.
- Last but not least, Monsanto is responsible for the introduction of Bovine somatotropin, abbreviated as rBST and commonly known as rBGH. It is a synthetic hormone that is injected into cows to increase milk production. IGF-1 is a hormone stimulated by rBGH in the cow’s blood stream, which is directly responsible for the increase in milk production. IGF-1 is a natural hormone found in the milk of both humans and cows causing the quick growth of infants.
- IGF-1 behaves as a cancer accelerator in adults and non-infants; this biologically active hormone is associated with breast cancer (corellation shown in premenopausal women), prostate cancer, lung cancer and colon cancers.
Check out this piece on YouTube. Fox News Kills Monsanto Milk Story.
Lupe Fiasco- “Hip Hop Saved my Life” violin cover March 27, 2009
Pretty cool in a elevator music kinda way!
But this song is one of my favorite from Lupe’s last album.
Dalai Lama Banned from Entering S. Africa March 27, 2009
Riz Khan – South Africa after apartheid – 16 Aug 07
Old interview and the disparities in South Africa has only gotten worse. It doesn’t seem like President Jacob Zuma will do much to improve the lives of the growing poor in that country. But hey, there’s always soccer and boy do Africans love their football. Go Bafana Bafana!
Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting… March 30, 2009
Below is a trailer for a documentary on the sustainable-food movement call “Food Fight”.
Less Water= More Food April 4, 2009
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the connection between our water use and food production and I’ve noticed these two issues are rarely discussed when promoting local and organic food. I’m not sure why this is the case, but I know that we gotta break out of this silo thinking about food and energy, especially water efficiency. Think how cool it would be to have hydroponic farming occur in every neighborhood in Brooklyn or wherever you reside. With the right incentives and infrastructure, we could expand access to fresh fruits and vegetables, feed more people in large cities while creating more green collar jobs that can move people out of poverty. Start up cost are expensive, but some of that stimulus money could be used to support these efforts nationally until they become profitable enterprises.
Omega Garden Hydroponic System
MARCH 24, 2009, 9:05 AM Tracking the ‘Water Footprint’ By AZADEH ENSHA ( New York Times)
“Water neutrality” was a hot topic in Turkey last week. Last week, delegates from over 100 countries converged in Istanbul for the Fifth World Water Forum. Among the many topics of discussion at the weeklong conference, which ended Sunday (World Water Day), was one that has been gaining steam for the last couple of years: “water neutrality.” The idea — conceptually analagous to minding one’s carbon footprint — is that companies ought to be tracking their water footprints as well. “Water neutrality is a relatively new idea put forward by a small number of corporations to try to address their use of water,” said Peter H. Gleick, a co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, which is working with the United Nations to develop more robust corporate reporting of water use. There is little agreement over how water footprints should be measured. “At its simplest, the idea is that a corporation that is trying to be water-neutral will somehow compensate for the water they use in their processing — and on net, not use any excess water,” Mr. Gleick said. “That’s the theory,” he added, “but the practices are going to be more difficult.” The U.N.’s CEO Water Mandate is attempting to develop, implement and disclose water sustainability policies and practices — though some critics have dismissed the program as greenwash: “It is a devious initiative by some of the global water giants to position themselves as environmental stewards while also exercising even more control over water management,” wrote Richard Girard of the Polaris Institute, a group that aims, according to its Web site, to “unmask and challenge the corporate power.” However legitimate those charges, several companies are making at least a token effort to adress their water use — and some are claiming bolder ambitions. E. Neville Isdell, for instance, the chairman of Coca-Cola — which sells 1.5 billion beverages a day in over 200 countries and, in 2006, used 80 billion gallons of water to produce its beverages — has pledged, “to replace every drop of water we use in our beverages and their production, to achieve balance in communities and in nature with the water we use.” Whether or not the company will achieve that goal remains an open question — particularly given that it’s unclear where to attribute responsibility for water use along a product’s supply chain. Does a beverage maker, for example, account for the water used to grow the sugar that is eventually used in their products? Or is that part of the supplier’s water footprint? Meanwhile, the World Water Forum’s sustainability efforts hit a message-snag early on last week, when Turkish police fired water canons at crowds of protesters. The officers said water was “the cheapest way” to keep the crowds at bay.
Water and Your Carbon Footprint
Learn To Breathe. That’s An Art! John Forté April 8, 2009
Check out John Forté’s video for Style Free.
No More Swag April 10, 2009
It’s funny to see a political rapper turn commercial, but cool video!
stic.man (of dead prez) – My S.W.A.G. Is Up (feat. Young Noble
Lesotho – Make a Keyhole Garden April 11, 2009
I just learned about Keyhold Gardens yesterday. Pretty awesome! Check out how it got started in Lesotho.
Growing Power Wisconsin-Madison April 21, 2009
Shout out to Will Allen for using food to fight for social justice! My head is spinning reading an article in YES magazine about his urban farm called Growing Power. Below is piece about the farm I found on youtube. http://www.growingpower.org/
The Sad Life Of A Plastic Bag May 14, 2009
San Francisco is the only city I know that has effectively banned the use of petroleum-based plastic bags. Under their legislation, which passed 10-1 in the first of two votes in 2007, large markets and pharmacies have the option of using compostable bags made of corn starch or bags made of recyclable paper.
Food, Inc. May 15, 2009
I heard this film is really good and will be theatrically released starting June 12th.
Mother*#@$ Gentrification June 5, 2009
I love this scene from Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing”. Ironically, this movie came out in 1989, but the elements of police brutality, racism, prejudice, gentrification, the generational divide, underemployment, love, hate, soul, hip-hop, Black determination and self-sufficiency are still apart of my neighborhood of Bed-Stuy in 2009.
Example Of A Grassroots Organizer June 8, 2009
“If I could help a kid out, that’s cool”. That’s what I’m about. Thanks Steve Rodriguez!
Dr. Cornel West On Martin Luther King Jr. June 10, 2009
Black History Month Ceremony With Dr. Cornel West @ Brown University Feb. 2nd 2007 Lecturing on Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy.
Peak Oil June 13, 2009
I’ve think we’ve reached our peak, what do you think?
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. The concept is based on the observed production rates of individual oil wells, and the combined production rate of a field of related oil wells. The aggregateproduction rate from an oil field over time usually grows exponentially until the rate peaks and then declines—sometimes rapidly—until the field is depleted. This concept is derived from the Hubbert curve, and has been shown to be applicable to the sum of a nation’s domestic production rate, and is similarly applied to the global rate of petroleum production. Peak oil is often confused with oil depletion; peak oil is the point of maximum production while depletion refers to a period of falling reserves and supply. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil)
Beginning Farmer Rates Make Land Affordable June 22, 2009
USDA is offering big benefits to beginning farmers: Who else can
qualify for 1.5 percent, 20-year fixed interest rates on a big chunk
of any farm mortgage? No, that’s not a typo. The Farm Service Agency’s
Down Payment Program for beginning or limited resource farmers may be
the best deal in decades for someone interested in buying land at the
moment.
“That’s the best rate I’ve ever seen for a USDA loan program, and I’ve
worked in farm credit for 27 years,” says Greg Beachy with Farm Credit
Services of Mid-America in Louisville, serving Ohio, Indiana,
Tennessee and Kentucky. Borrowers who’ve stumbled onto the offer are
already backlogged, but he expects a surge of applicants as word
spread. “USDA really is looking for ways to get young people into
farming,” he tells me.
Thanks to the 2008 farm bill, minimum rates on USDA’s entry-level Down
Payment Program loans were lowered from 4 percent to 1.5 percent, just
in time to ride the wave of rock-bottom Treasury costs that collapsed
last fall. The deal won’t last forever, though, as Treasury rates are
beginning to climb again and the wait list for USDA’s matching funds
is growing. So study up.
A beginner is defined as someone with less than 10 years of farming
experience and who has a substantial interest in the operation. What
they qualify for is pretty special:
The borrower must pay at least a 5 percent down payment on a property;
FSA will fund up to 45 percent of a $500,000 purchase ($225,000
maximum) at its subsidized interest rates with a loan term of 20
years; commercial lenders who finance the balance of the mortgage must
stretch amortization 30 years. Realistically, that means the borrower
will pay a blend of 1.5 percent interest on 45 percent of a loan and
possibly about 7.7 percent (a typical rate today for a high risk
borrower) on the remainder.
FSA says 400 borrowers have been approved for the program so far this
year, up from 30 this time a year ago. But funds have been depleted
fast, and Congress will not authorize more money until the fiscal year
begins next Oct. 1, at the earliest.
As a result, Phil Kimmel, Farm Credit Services of Mid-America senior
vice president for credit, worries that some real estate purchases may
fall through without some extra help from private lenders. “We are
considering a position to offer bridge financing based on FSA’s
commitment until funds are available, but we haven’t done that yet. We
have provided bridge loans for FSA’s portion if we could get security
or maybe a parent to cosign until the money is available,” Kimmel
says.
All Farm Credit institutions are required by law to lend a certain
percent of their funds to young, beginning and small farmers. In 2008,
young farmers under 35 made up 26 percent of FCS of Mid-America’s new
loans or leases, and beginning farmers about 40 percent of that
portfolio.
Rates change periodically on FSA’s loan programs; for details see
http://www.fsa.usda.gov/…
Posted at 08:31 AM CDT, June 11, 2009 by Marcia Zarley Taylor
Ending Poverty? July 15, 2009
Excerpt from an interview with Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, in which he discusses the unacceptability of allowing people to remain in poverty.
President Barack Obama addresses the 2009 NAACP Convention July 17, 2009
President Barack Obama addresses the 2009 NAACP Convention in New York, New York at the 2009 Freedom Fund/Spingarn Awards.
Help Save Bed-Stuy Farm! August 1, 2009
I volunteered with this farm’s food pantry and I know Mr. & Ms. Jackson personally. At a time when families are in need of food and are unable to access quality affordable food in their community, it is wrong and irresponsible for the City of New York to allow for sale of Bed-Stuy Farm during a food and economic crisis. This farm is an extremely important asset that needs to be protected, and the Jackson’s should be looking into expanding rather than defending their community project from developers. Our elected officials should not be complicit in allowing Bed-Stuy Farm to be removed for the sake of paying off debtors. If Mayor Bloomberg can find the time and money to pay for waterfalls in New York City, or allow developers to build a basketball arena in downtown Brooklyn at taxpayers expense, then he can allocate resources to support urban agriculture in New York City and save this farm.
Help sav the Bed-Stuy Farm by signing a petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/save-bed-stuy-farm
Why Bed-Stuy Farm Is Important
Grocery shopping in Bedford-Stuyvesant can be a real challenge. Fast food joints abound, but if you want fresh vegetables and fruits you have to take the subway or bus to other neighborhoods. If you’re an elder or sick, the trip might be more than you can do. If you’re a kid, you probably think food is always wrapped in plastic and full of salt and corn syrup.
Grocery shopping in Bedford-Stuyvesant can be a real challenge. Fast food joints abound, but if you want fresh vegetables and fruits you have to take the subway or bus to other neighborhoods. If you’re an elder or sick, the trip might be more than you can do. If you’re a kid, you probably think food is always wrapped in plastic and full of salt and corn syrup.
The two Reverends Robert and DeVanie Jackson were running an emergency food program in the neighborhood. They realized the donated foods they were handing out often weren’t fresh…which wasn’t helping people’s health.
Behind their building lay a vacant lot, strewn with trash. The Jacksons got GreenThumb status from the City and went to work. They cleaned the lot up, trucked in good soil and started planting. Twice, contractors broke the locks at night and dumped truckloads of construction debris atop the cleaned lot. The Jacksons were slapped with fines for someone else’s illegal dumping, but they cleaned up the lot again, and replanted. Now they have a working farm that produces over 7000 pounds of produce per year and feeds 3000 people a month. It’s called Bed-Stuy Farm and it’s a magnet for the community. It’s also an educational center, offering courses in farming and nutrition. It supplies the emergency food program as well as a farmers market. This thriving urban farm attracts people from all over the world — farmers, filmmakers, restaurateurs, food activists, and a busload of delegates to a UN food conference.
Why Bed-Stuy Farm Is Being Threatened
No longer a vacant lot and a dumping ground, the farm has become desirable to others. It is in danger of being sold by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to developers to repay a debt incurred by Neighborhood Partnership Housing Development/Direct Building Management.
How You Can Help
We want 1200 signatures so our elected officials know this farm is important and shouldn’t be destroyed for gentrification. HPD has its choice of many other vacant lots. It would do well to consider them before this lot, which in its current form is contributing to the neighborhood in such a positive and healthy way. Please sign our petition and help us save Bed-Stuy Farm.
Whereas, the Bed-Stuy Farm is in danger of being sold by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to developers to repay a debt incurred by Neighborhood Partnership Housing Development/Direct Building Management.
Whereas, the Bed-Stuy Farm produces over 7,000 lbs of fresh produce every year and is a serious agricultural training center for farmers and gardeners young and old. The Farm’s emergency food program has been feeding people fresh, nutritious foods and created educational projects that encourage healthy eating. Organizations that serve the people’s needs are most effective when they come from the people of our neighborhoods
We, the undersigned, support the integrity of the Bed-Stuy Farm and ask you to help stop the NYC HPD from threatening to dissolve the Farm and find other ways to pay its debts. We ask you to support the Bed-Stuy Farm and the many people it serves. (More at Save the Bed-Stuy Farm)
signature
goal: 1,200
goal: 1,200
Cooking Is Theraputic August 15, 2009
August has been a strange month for me so far. I lost a favorite uncle and I feel jaded about not being able to connect with him sooner. But today was slightly different because for three hours I was able to smooth out my undulated thoughts about life, love and friendship for small talk with local farmers and neighborhood residents at my cooking demonstration at East New York Farms! in Brooklyn. Using locally sourced fruits and vegetables, I prepared a variation of an Asian Style Malabar Spinach Salad which everyone enjoyed. My demo gave me temporary relief from this month’s summer time blues. Rest in Peace Uncle Mike!
me slicing away
If she says my salad is good, it's good!
BigBelly Trash Compactors August 19, 2009
We could definitely use these trash compactors throughout New York City.
In our cities, waste collection can be pretty wasteful itself. Garbage trucks have to make near constant trips to keep public trash bins from overflowing—contributing to traffic and pollution. To keep our cities in harmony, we’ll have to figure out a better system for urban waste collection. The people at BigBelly Solar already have one solution. Video Produced by Good Magazine.
Dead Citizens August 23, 2009
Ever wonder where your sugar comes from? Haitian sugar cane workers working for poverty wages in the Dominican Republic to provide the United States with cheap sugar. Another ugly reminder of how race, class and food are connected in maintaining our global food system. Tell a friend!
Haiti struggle is apart of a worldwide struggle throughout the African diaspora for economic independence and racial equality.
Activist Jean Dominique -The Agronomist is a great film about Haiti’s struggle for equality, self-sufficiency and food sovereignty. So if you haven’t seen this film you should pick it up!
Dead Prez Summertime Music Video August 23, 2009
Anytime Bed-Stuy is featured positively in a video I got to throw it up my blog. Love the shot of the Harlem Juice Bar on 125th street too. Enjoy the rest of the summer!
Green Collar Job Backlash September 8, 2009
Van Jones departure and the media fiasco that occurred this weekend is another reminder of the ugly side of politics, corporate money and racism in and outside of the ‘Green’ movement within the United States. Below is a great critique by Ludovic Blain of what occurred. I hope-but doubt- there will be more discussion about this issue in the future.
The Van Jones Saga: White Liberals Need to Keep Their Eye on the Prize When Racism Comes a Knockin’ By Ludovic Speaks , AlterNet Posted on September 6, 2009, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/142459/
I’ve been disappointed by white liberals and progressives’ unwillingness and incompetence combating racism for 20 years. The inaction of large green groups in Van Jones’ resignation is yet another example. The NAACP , Equal Justice Society and Color of Change explicitly supported Van Jones before his resignation. On the white side, Treehugger , Grist and a few other small white organizations did. But the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, and NRDC, who together must represent more than $100 million of mostly liberal and progressive foundations, big donors, and individual contributors money, were MIA. These groups either took a dive because the attacks on Van were racist, or they incompetently let the right set the terms of debate before entering. Either way America deserves better greens. Here’s today’s Color Line Question: are there organized white liberals that can be trusted to maintain their commitment to their issue when the right attacks with racist wedges? I appreciate white fellow travelers, like Tim Wise, and small white anti-racist organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, on the racial justice path. But they seem to have no influence on larger white groups like the Sierra Club, NOW, Common Cause, Moveon, and other staples of the white left.
To be clear, I’m not discussing whether white groups will take on issues of people of color, as I’m setting the bar much lower–can organized white liberals keep their eye on THEIR prize when the right’s racism comes a calling? It’s been easy for progressives to attack President Obama for not defending Van–but do they really expect Obama to be out in front of the white left? It seems hypocritical to attack the White House for being spineless without attacking NRDC, Sierra Club, EDF and Greeenpeace for being spineless as well.
Lets remember–the most radical thing said by any national figure about racism in the recent past was Obama saying the white cop acted stupidly. The left certainly didn’t counter the right’s racist framing of Obama’s articulation of a racist incident. In addition to this situation, in my political lifetime people of color have been let down by white national liberal organizations on mid-1990s welfare deform by white feminist groups, on prop 8 by white gay groups who blamed black voters for it’s passage, by white communications organizations on any number of issues including California propositions 187 (anti-affirmative action) and 209 (anti–immigrant), and many other times. Although some examples are from a decade ago, I see no indication that white liberals are any better on racism now.
Although whites will be a minority by around 2050, America has to survive that long. If white progressives either can’t or won’t oppose racism, then we’ll need a new set of white progressive funders and leaders to do something better. And if white liberals continue to be unable or unwilling to challenge the right’s racist attacks then we are truly on the path to fascism. If white liberals ultimately fail to oppose racism we have a bigger disaster on our hands than climate change, because America’s commitment to white supremacy, if left unchallenged, will prevent us from dealing with the other important issues of the day, like climate change. As long as white liberals think these are parallel, rather than continuous tracks, they will continue to fail miserably. And the world and it’s humans of all races can’t take too many more failures. Or, more accurately, the world and all it’s races can’t take many more white failures.
Ludovic Blain is a program manager at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development . © 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/142459/
Solar Panels On The White House! Go Figure September 14, 2009
It’s hard to believe but it’s true.
Jimmy Carter had them installed and Ronald Reagan took them down seven years later. Not surprising! Below is a trailer for Earth Days- a documentary about the environmental movement in the 70′s.
CAPITALISM: A Love Story & Soul Food Junkies September 25, 2009
“CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY” by Michael Moore is a reminder of Adam Smith’s own criticism of our political economy. It was Smith who stated that ” people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices.”
On another topic, below is a short video tease for Soul Food Junkies, a new film project in development by Byron Hurt. I think the problem isn’t just about soul food, but as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his op-ed Food for the Soul, that our food also often contains dangerous pathogens that result from the overuse of antibiotics. On second thought, perhaps capitalism and soul food are interrelated after all?
not related to the film, but I thought homegirl was funny!
Do You Dream About Farming October 4, 2009
A Single Seed in North Carolina. Love the suit!
Community Egg Co-op
This is why we need to invest in urban farming. Can you say B-o-d-e-g-a.
Reparations & The Black Middle Class – Conversations from Penn State October 4, 2009
Dr. Mary Pattillo discusses the rarely studied and often overlooked African American middle class.
Dr. William A. Darity Jr., speaks about reparations for African Americans to compensate for past wrongs.
Chemical Agriculture Is Like A Drug Trade. October 8, 2009
It takes more and more every year to get the same kick! Joel Salatin. You gotta love this guy! These films are becoming a bit cliche by using the same folks, mostly white men like Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin to narrate how to address the food crisis in America. At least Will Allen got some attention, but there are others men and women of color struggling to make a living by growing locally in America too. It’s time to tell their story as well! Nevertheless, go check out the movie or host a screening. See website for more info. http://www.freshthemovie.com/
When I Shine, U Shine. October 15, 2009
Fun times on Fulton Avenue this weekend at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation’s 3rd Annual Restoration Rocks Music Festival.
Jesse Boykins III – Tabloids (live)
Jesse Boykins III – Pantyhose (Live)
Brooklyn Food Conference (BFC) volunteers outreaching at event.
Jesse rocking the mic!
THE BROOKLYN FARMERS BALL October 20, 2009
~ The Food Security Roundtable Presents ~
THE BROOKLYN FARMERS BALL
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 from 7:00 pm – 12:00 am
At the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Avenue
Eat, drink, and celebrate Brooklyn’s Urban Agriculture and Food Justice Community with the Food Security Roundtable. All proceeds support the New York Delegation to the Growing Food and Justice Initiative gathering in Milwaukee, WI. Tickets are $12-$25 at the door, and include a local, seasonal dinner and live music. Featuring: The Rude Mechanical Orchestra Brooklyn’s Finest Radical Marching Band Spanglish Fly The only band in NYC recreating the sounds of El Barrio circa 1968: Latin soul and bugalu. Apocalypse Five & Dime A little bit brassy, a little bit folky dancealisadance Beautiful, soulful indy-folk music featuring piano and acoustic guitar Organizations and individuals from throughout NYC are working together to send a delegation to the Growing Food and Justice Initiative gathering in Milwaukee at the end of October. This year GFJI is not just an event, it’s the beginning of a national coaliton dedicated to building leadership, growing food justice, dismantling racism, and empowering communities. The New York delegation and their northeastern colleagues will be in attendance in Milwaukee this year learning how to bring that movement home. The delegation is a diverse collection of folks ranging from organizers with Mothers On the Move in the South Bronx to Just Food staff and volunteers working for (you guessed it) food justice all around NYC. From the farmers who grew organic vegetables for MOM in Vermont this year to New York City farmers and community food justice organizers, the bus will be packed with grassroots food people, eager to return home and share the Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative with their community. More at www.growingfoodandjustice.org Growing Food and Justice for All has offered a partial scholarship for the thirty or so delegates, who must raise an additional $5,000 to pay the remaining costs and travel. This event is an opportunity for Brooklyn and New York City to show their will to have a better food system and their support for those hard working people who are making it happen. Sponsoring Organizations include: Community Vision Council Just Food Mothers on the Move Vehicles for Radical Organizing and Other Madness (VROOM) The Food Security Roundtable Those who cannot attend the Farmers Ball but would still like to support this work can do so easily at the Food Security Roundtable Website – www.foodpower.org. Contacts: Jen Datka, BK Farmers’ Ball coordinator jen@justfood.org cell: 646.498.4682 Henry Harris, GFJI Delegation Co-organizer henry@foodpower.org cell: 917.922.5430 Please forward widely!
Soul Food Junkies Fundraiser-Tell A Friend October 26, 2009
Byron Hurt is embarking on an online fundraising campaign to help complete Soul Food Junkies. The goal is to get 100 people per month (for the next six months) to donate $25 each. Your donations will be tax-deductible through Byron Hurt’s fiscal sponsor Third World Newsreel. You can donate online at (http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=2026DONATE) or mail a check to the address below. If donating online, please enter your donation amount and then make sure to scroll down to “additional options” and designate your donation to Soul Food Junkies. If donating by check, please make your check payable to my fiscal sponsor, and send to: Third World Newsreel 545 Eighth Avenue – Floor 10 New York, NY 10018 Memo Must Read: “SOUL FOOD JUNKIES” FILM PROJECT
Green Maps November 14, 2009
I’m currently working to create a green map of Bed-Stuy. Really exciting stuff so stay tuned!
What if Martin Luther King Jr. Were Alive in 2010 January 16, 2010
If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive in 2010 he would be unable to work for the New City Fire Department since he had been arrested, even though it was for just causes. Even if he were hired, he would be employed by an agency that continues to be 90% white and male in a city the is majority people of color. I wonder what Dr. King would say if he were alive to see Obama war’s in Iraq and Afghanistan and an escalating unemployment rate in our community of over 15% and as high as 50% in some cities in America. What we would he say about the recent earthquake in Haiti, and our countries policies towards the Haitian people including removing a democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile in South Africa. Just some thoughts!
