Narrating the Anthropocene: a panel - 19 Nov 2017 - Howard Zinn Book Fair

The fourth annual Howard Zinn Book Fair (HZBF) will converge around this year's theme -- The World We Want -- at City College of San Francisco's Mission Campus the Sunday before Thanksgiving, on 19 November 2017.

I've organized one of the book fair panels, titled "Narrating the Anthropocene" and I hope you can make it! We're on from 1:30 - 2:30 pm.

What's "the Anthropocene," you ask? It's a name proposed for the current geological epoch, signifying an era of Earth's evolution that is characterized by human impacts on the planet, including impacts driving climate change and the Sixth Extinction, changes in biogeography, accretion of the nuclear fallout and radionuclides produced by thermonuclear weapons tests, etc. The "Anthropocene" designation has been formally recommended to the International Geological Congress, but is already in widespread preliminary or informal use among scientists and environmentalists.

When the call went out from HZBF organizers for panel topics I began thinking about commonalities among the most powerful and gripping accounts of threats we and the co-inhabitants of our biosphere are facing in this third century since the Industrial Revolution began. Whether the accounts are fiction or nonfiction, books or articles, text-centric or illustrated (as in comic books and graphic novels), I would say the most moving and influential go well beyond aggregation of facts, figures, and statistical trends: they're centered and grounded in story.

Hence, "Narrating the Anthropocene."

Here's a description of the panel:

In reaching for the heart and the human in books that grapple with dire threats to our only biosphere, narrative -- the art of storytelling -- is a crucial tool for writers working in all genres. As our world spins further out of equilibrium than ever before in recorded history, writers of fact and fiction are calling all hands to overcome denial and paralysis, and to prepare humankind to survive the catastrophes we fail to avert. Join a panel of authors who are narrating the Anthropocene as journalists, novelists, comic book authors, and scientists as they explore the role storytelling plays in rousing humanity to engage with the crises of our current century.

"Narrating the Anthropocene" will include authors with backgrounds as journalists, scientists, and activists, whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and comic book forms. Here's the lineup:

Liz Carlisle, geographer and lecturer in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences; and author of Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America, a work of narrative nonfiction that straddles the border between a case study in building sustainable food systems, and a heroic account of prairieland farmer Dave Oien struggling to sustainably farm his acreage in north-central Montana. 

Michael J. Fitzgerald, journalist and novelist, author of The Fracking War and Fracking Justice, in which a small town newspaper takes on a fossil fuel behemoth to protect land and communities in upstate New York. 

Steve Masover, novelist, activist, and author of Consequence, in which a San Francisco activist loses faith in the impact of non-violent protest and becomes entangled in an eco-saboteur’s desperate conspiracy. 

Jean Tepperman, Bay Area journalist, activist, and author of the comic Warning from my Future Self about building urban community to collectively cope with the effects of climate change.

It's been a delicious pleasure getting to know these authors and read their work as we prepare for next month's panel. I hope you'll have a chance to join us; to check out some of the other panels and panelists at this year's Howard Zinn Book Fair; and wander among the exhibitor tables where you'll find terrific books and opportunities to engage with the authors and publishers who brought them into being.

Again, "Narrating the Anthropocene" starts at 1:30 pm on 19 November, at the Mission Campus of City College of San Francisco (1125 Valencia St, between 22nd and 23rd, a few blocks from 24th Street BART - map). You can RSVP on Facebook if you like ... I hope to see you there in any case!

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Howard Zinn Book Fair returns to San Francisco on Sunday Nov 15th
Radical Storytelling: Howard Zinn Book Fair photos and video

Without Consent: Tar Sands "Valve Turners" visit UC Berkeley

I spent Friday evening on the UC Berkeley campus, in a lecture hall full of activists and community members gathered for dialog with the Tar Sands Pipeline Valve Turners: five brave activists who could have stepped out of Edward Abbey's fiction, or Sunil Yapa's, or Michael Ondaatje's, or my own novel, Consequence. But in real life, these monkey wrenchers collectively stopped the U.S.-bound flow of tar sands crude oil from the so-called "sacrifice zone" in Alberta, Canada (images), where it is extracted in a mode that decimates forests, wildlife, and human communities. They did so by turning off emergency shutoff valves along the pipeline route, in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Washington.

The Valve Turners shut down the flow of tar sands crude on 11 October 2016, in solidarity with a call by indigenous Water Protectors at Standing Rock for International Days of Prayer and Action from 8-11 October. Their action was not announced in advance, but it was performed publicly. In fact the Valve Turners arranged for videographers to record exactly what they did ... and livestreamed the shutdowns in the North Dakota and Montana. Then they waited for sheriffs to show up and arrest them.

All five Valve Turners -- Michael Foster, Leonard Higgens, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Ken Ward -- are facing felony charges. Filmmakers who recorded and livestreamed their action were also arrested and charged; some of those charges have since been dropped. Ken Ward's trial ended in a hung jury the week before last. Ward was not permitted by the trial judge to mount a "necessity defense" but some jurors figured out what had really happened based on the little context Ward was able to provide in his own testimony; and decided that reasoning, motive, and intention excused his burglary and sabotage charges. He will be retried.

Annette Klapstein, a Valve Turner who is also a member of Seattle's chapter of Raging Grannies, explained that it's not hard to shut down an oil pipeline. One can -- as she and her comrades did -- learn all about shutting down oil pipelines on YouTube. It took the group about five months and twelve or fourteen thousand dollars to prepare for and execute their action.

Why this action and not something else? Ken Ward told the crowd in 145 Dwinelle Hall that he was "searching for ways to be effective." That doesn't mean that any of the Valve Turners or their supporters believe that shutting down pipelines carrying the nastiest crude for a few hours or a day is the goal. In fact, as their decision to shut the pipelines down publicly and face legal consequences demonstrates, the opportunity to broadcast their message was the strategic goal of the Valve Turners' shutdown all along. And the core of that message isn't the looming threat of climate change: that information is out there, and anyone listening is aware of it. No, the core of the Valve Turners message is this, articulated in a crisp sound-byte by Emily Johnston:

"These companies cannot operate without consent."

Erica Chenoweth, University of Denver professor and co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict described what she calls the "3.5% Rule" at TEDxBoulder in 2013. Consider this excerpt:

Researchers used to say that no government could survive if five percent of its population mobilized against it. But our data reveal that the threshold is probably lower. In fact, no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that [...] 

The data are clear: When people rely on civil resistance, their size grows. And when large numbers of people withdraw their cooperation from an oppressive system, the odds are ever in their favor.

The secret sauce? Annette Klapstein gave it away on Friday evening:

"You just have to be absolutely relentless, that's how you get it done."

There's a lot to get done in the current era, in which authoritarian, oligarchic government is spreading like highly infectious disease. It can't be scoured away unless and until enough people resist, as the Valve Turners have shown is well within the realm of what's possible.

But you don't have to face felony charges to participate!

For example, have a look at Friday's Washington Post article, Swarming crowds and hostile questions are the new normal at GOP town halls -- particularly if  you live in or near a red state or congressional district. Yup. That could be you...

It's Valentine's Day tomorrow, and you can show the love you feel for fearless work that each of the Valve Turners has done on behalf of our common and humane future by helping to support their legal defense at www.shutitdown.today.

Whether or not you click the Donate link, consider inviting a few friends and neighbors over to work out how you will become a part of the 3.5%.



Thanks to TastyCakes and Jamitzky via Wikipedia Commons for the public domain image of Syncrude's base mine 25 miles north of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada.



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A half-dozen things to consider three weeks after electocalypse

Here’s a 2600 word post in a six-bullet, tl;dr listicle:

• We don’t know yet which awful things will happen. Let’s stay focused.
• An audit of the vote won’t stop Trump.
• There is no mandate. There was no landslide.
• Drop “Trumpism”: don’t personalize this government.
• The term “alt-right” is a surrender to white supremacist propaganda.
• You have two choices: pitch in to resist the Republican program, or help enact that program.

And here’s an opening epigram from the close of Charles Blow’s 23 Nov Op-Ed in the New York Times, addressed to the president-elect:

For as long as a threat to the state is the head of state, all citizens of good faith and national fidelity … have an absolute obligation to meet you and your agenda with resistance at every turn.

Indeed. Details below the cartogram.

We don’t know yet which awful things will happen. Let’s stay focused.

There are portents aplenty in the president-elect’s (often contradictory, or since contradicted or walked-back) campaign promises, vicious bombast, and contemptible dog-whistling. There’s a lot to read into in his staff and cabinet selections to-date. There’s an appalling body of information being fleshed out about the conflicts of interest with which Donald Trump as a businessman will stain a Donald Trump presidency, and into how those conflicts have already begun flesh out what U.S. kleptocracy will come to look like, in Argentina for example -- with plenty more waiting in the wings.

Still. At this point, a forever-seeming three weeks since Election Day, nobody has a clear vision of how a G.O.P. led by the Trump administration will function.

Nobody knows yet what deals that administration will cut to appease establishment Republicans, who have for decades pursued policies in direct conflict with Trump’s stated ambitions; or whether and how a minority Democratic Senate will obstruct predatory, destructive, and inhumane Republican initiatives; or how well-funded advocacy groups (ACLU, SPLC, Sierra Club, et al.) will be able to tie up the G.O.P.'s signature deliverable -- regress -- in court; or what kinds and quantities of sand rank-and-file federal employees, from the National Park Service to the Postal Service to the Air Force, will throw into which governmental gears; or how powerful state and local governments, which are far more influenced by local mores and pressures than the federal government, will act decisively to curb the dismantling of progress and small-d democracy in the U.S. (starting with California and New York -- regarding climate change, for example).

What’s called for today is circumspection about predicting the future. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to prepare for. That doesn’t mean there aren’t appointments and nominations to oppose, duplicity to expose, and audits to demand. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lines to be drawn to corral the white supremacist deplorables who have been emboldened by the president-elect’s vicious campaign.

And it absolutely does not mean that anybody ought to stand down because the incoming government is in any way “normal” or because of any misguided fantasy that if we bury our heads in the sand “our institutions” can withstand the incoming government’s intended corrosion.

What’s called for right now is focus on the threats posed by the incoming government and what we can do about them. That’s different from predicting which are going to come to pass, and when, and in what form. Donald Trump’s narcissistic, bullying behavior is chiefly characterized by unpredictability used to sow dissention and maintain control. So what’s called for right now is attention, agility, responsiveness, and evaluation of long-term, strategic strengths and options.

Above all: focus. Tweets about a Broadway musical are not among our chief concerns, and paying attention to such twaddle is the antithesis of focus. Baseless twitter-tantrums about fictional voter fraud are not about the election of this month, they’re both a distraction from the evolving bribery-state and part of a long-term, coordinated, Republican Party assault on voting rights, the bedrock of (small-d) democracy.

Just because Donald Trump never met a squirrel he wouldn’t point at to distract from his own reflexive lying, cheating, ignorance, and selfishness, doesn’t obligate anyone to follow his misdirection.


An audit of the vote won’t stop Trump

Audits and recounts won’t stop Trump from assuming the office of President; and neither will the Electoral College or the emoluments clause. It’s not hard to understand the desire to disclaim him, even to sympathize with that desire ... but Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States come 20 January.

The recounts that Jill Stein is initiating will at best and at worst function as a kind of catharsis, and the Clinton campaign’s tepid, strictly-formal involvement now that Stein has gotten the ball rolling doesn’t change anything. The election’s outcome will not change.  While the popular vote matters a lot (see next section), it has nothing to do with who won the presidency earlier this month: no one is going to retroactively abolish the Electoral College.

Let’s be clear: no one in despair over the election of a strongman to the U.S. presidency -- for whom more than sixty million U.S. citizens cast their ballots, plus or minus the few tens or hundreds of thousands that any audit might possibly reallocate -- no one in despair over Trump’s election has any reason to be mollified by better bean counting. The U.S. is in deep, deep trouble following the 2016 election. Full stop. U.S. citizens will be struggling with the fallout of this month’s election for many, many years. Even if ...

Imagine -- for a moment, if you haven’t already -- the inconceivable possibility that some combination of vote audits and recounts and Elector misgivings push enough electoral votes into the Clinton column, and result in her assumption of the presidency in January. What happens then? Riots on the streets and in the statehouses across the South and the Rust Belt? Civil war, waged in Washington? Military uncertainty about which civilian is its commander-in-chief? Worse? It would be a different civil war than the one we face when Trump takes office, sure: but a civil war nonetheless. If, inconceivably, the election results were reversed and Clinton assumed the office of POTUS in January, she would accomplish little to nothing in her presidency beyond fighting opposition to her very occupancy of the office (which might have been the outcome even if she’d won the electoral vote in the first place). And that’s the best-case scenario.

Bottom line: no functioning crystal ball would dare forecast sweetness and light for 2017.

Is there a positive spin on audits and recounts? Sure. A conceivable good that might come of this effort is amped-up examination of what fair, (small-d) democratic elections ought to look like, how that differs from current practice in the U.S., and, consequently, the implementation of federal audit requirements on state boards of election (e.g., all votes must produce a paper record). Will Democrats will have to fight for that? I think so. Republicans are well-practiced and quite successful at winning office by gerrymandering and voter suppression: transparent elections would diminish their power, and they know it.


There is no mandate. There was no landslide.

Any statement to the contrary, by @realDonaldTrump or his minions, is bombastic rhetoric, false on its face. The sixty-some million Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton, a clear and significant majority, need to loudly and firmly ridicule that rhetoric. Third-party voters have a heightened responsibility to join in: they may not have voted for the only candidate who had a prayer of defeating Trump, but they didn’t contribute to a fairy tale “mandate” or “landslide” for the incoming president.

Donald Trump lost the popular vote. Donald Trump lost the popular vote even among the fraction of eligible voters who (a) bothered, and (b) weren’t denied their right as citizens to cast a ballot (the latter, most frequently, by ongoing, deliberate, and acknowledged voter suppression tactics employed by the anti-democratic -- small-d -- Republican party). That Donald Trump lost the popular vote is not going to change, no matter how anyone counts, recounts, or audits the ballots.

And his electoral victory? 306 to 232? In fractions, that’s 7/12 to 5/12, an arithmetical approximation in which rounding error overstates Trump’s lead.

Not a landslide. Not a mandate. Not by any stretch of the imagination.


Drop “Trumpism”: don’t personalize this government

What if we agreed to stop screaming sound bytes about who is or is not our president in some abstract, preferred moral space, and held the entire Republican Party responsible for the actual incoming government’s program, mendacity, and corruption? How about if we held the Democratic Party as a whole responsible for failure to resist Republican initiatives that threaten safety, health, civil rights, our shared environment, truthful transparency, democracy (small-d), and economic well-being?

It’s tempting to personify enmity because it lessens the need for difficult thinking about a complex political landscape, hard analysis, and risky strategizing. In doing so, however, personification neuters effective opposition. So let’s not take short cuts. They don’t lead anywhere we desperately need to go.

The dismantling of President Obama’s achievements will not be quick or easy. Many of the most corrosive promises of the Trump campaign will require congressional cooperation. The current POTUS (in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker) has correctly stated: “as a practical matter, what I’ve been saying to people, including my own staff, is that the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat.” To effect agendas that Trump, his fellow Republicans, or both have articulated, the elected G.O.P. establishment will have to continue to cooperate with the Trump administration; the Democratic Party would have to abdicate or fail in its responsibility as opposition; a vast network of advocacy organizations would have to abdicate or fail in their responsibility to oppose Republican regress, from the courts to the streets; and countless federal employees would have to go along with the dismantling of the government they are sworn to protect.

It’s not just Trump.

Let’s all step up and shine a bright, unforgiving light on those who collaborate with the incoming administration, and hold them irrevocably accountable for their collaboration.

And let’s oppose -- with vigor and ingenuity commensurate with the truth that our physical, moral, and national lives depend on it -- the attacks the incoming government will wage on the people of the United States, in assaults categorized by novelist Barbara Kingsolver in The Guardian last week:

Losses are coming at us in these areas: freedom of speech and the press; women’s reproductive rights; affordable healthcare; security for immigrants and Muslims; racial and LGBTQ civil rights; environmental protection; scientific research and education; international cooperation on limiting climate change; international cooperation on anything; any restraints on who may possess firearms; restraint on the upper-class wealth accumulation that’s gutting our middle class; limits on corporate influence over our laws.

And -- special shout-out  to my progressive and radical comrades -- not one iota of fighting to retain partial, isolated, and/or incremental gains realized during Obama’s eight years in office and earlier precludes fighting for much, much more. But no magical thinking, please. First things first. You can’t rule the universe when you’re pinned to the ground by monsters holding spears to your windpipe.


The term “alt-right” gives in to white supremacist propaganda

Don’t let fascists set the boundaries of discourse. Why cave in to white supremacists? Call them what they are: white supremacists, fascists, neo-nazis. If you’re not personally certain what the “alt-right” is, who they are, what they want, how they act, watch a three minute video and get started judging for yourself.

Then refuse to call them “alt-right” and refuse to stand by when others do.

If the newspapers you read or your local TV news station calls white supremacists “alt-right,” write letters and make phone calls to object. Not just once but every time, until the supposedly-credible media tells the truth.

Matthew Phelan of Jacobin Magazine, writing earlier this month on the “alt-right” in a history of the “House of Breitbart” concludes that “terrifying as this coalition seems, it bears repeating how niche it really is. [...] The alt-right is quite literally a political sideshow.” Maybe yes, maybe no. In any case, calling scum what it is can only consign it more quickly and more certainly to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

Note that this is a specific instance of every responsible person’s two-part duty to (a) amplify only credibly-researched, honest, thoughtful news and commentary; and to, (b) avoid spreading “fake news,” which too-frequently pollutes, diminishes, and distracts from longstanding, more-or-less responsible sources of information. In an age of distributed, social-media driven dissemination of information, nobody will fix this for us. Do it yourself, or we’ll all sink together in a swamp of distraction, misinformation, and outright deception.


You have two choices: pitch in to resist the Republican program, or help enact that program

There’s room for a wide spectrum of tactics, improvisation, and long-game strategies to resisting the corrupt and corrosive program of a Republican party that has selected Donald Trump as its leader.

Maybe you have an appetite for local, state, or national electoral politics (and yes, to stop the dismantling of our government and society, progressives need to step up and win political offices).

Maybe you can pitch in to organize the people in your own community: your neighbors, your classroom, the PTA at your kids’ school, your book club, your place of worship, or people who shop at your local grocery store.

Maybe you can organize your community to make phone calls, or write letters, or participate in marches, or support advocacy organizations in legal and legislative fights, or offer sanctuary to people under attack by the U.S. government or its emboldened vigilante wingnuts, or physically stand in the way of those attacks, or come out for mass demonstrations, or participate in boycotts, or attend city council meetings to advocate for what you believe is right and just.

Maybe the thing you’re best at -- or willing to get better at -- is talking with people who don’t agree with you about something important … face-to-face, not through the flattening, distorting lens of social media. Maybe you won’t convince anyone the first time you talk with them. So what? There aren’t any switches to instantly flip. By engaging with people who think differently from you, you’ll be laying a foundation for future understanding, empathy, and compromise among the vastly diverse people and interests that are all part of the cities, states, and regions in which each and every one of us shares a national fate.

All of that, all of the above, is necessary.

You need not (and you cannot) do it all.

Neither can you avoid doing some of it. Not if you want to stand tall, and look your kids (or your sibling’s kids, or your neighbors and their kids) in the eye and know you helped to save not just your own world, but theirs.

Barbara Kingsolver has some sound advice here -- again, from that piece in last week’s Guardian, Trump changed everything. Now everything counts:

We refuse to disappear. We keep our commitments to fairness in front of the legislators who oppose us, lock arms with the ones who are with us, and in the words of Congressman John Lewis, prepare to get ourselves in some good trouble. Every soul willing to do that is part of our team, starting with the massive crowd that shows up in DC in January to show the new president what we stand for, and what we won’t.

There’s safety in numbers, but only if we count ourselves out loud.

Be counted. Out loud.



Thanks to Professor Mark Newman of U. Michigan for the cartogram of 2016 presidential election votes by county (Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0); see Prof. Newman’s post for details about how the cartogram was constructed, and additional maps.


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Protest is dead. Resist, or be eaten.

The United States of America has demonstrated that Americans choose to live in an ungoverned country. I don’t mean a lawless country. I mean a country in which self-interest trumps [sic] the common good. Ungoverned, according to Merriam-Webster: “not capable of being governed, guided, or restrained.” Id über alles.

This choice is painted vividly on this morning’s electoral maps, on the front page of every newspaper and every news website. Considering the thin margin of 2016’s popular vote for president of the United States, no matter which candidate comes out a hair’s breadth ahead when the last ballot is counted, this choice is also evident among eligible voters at large, beneath the geographic, population, and demographic distortions of the Electoral College. In my view, the popular vote includes those who were eligible but didn’t vote: it would be foolish to pretend that standing aside has any meaningful effect other than to enable the decisions of that fraction of us who cast ballots.

One of many things yesterday’s national election implies is that protest is dead.

Protest is a tactic that presupposes the prospect of a critically-fragmented nation is unthinkable. If an incoherent society is unacceptable, the threat of social disintegration into ungovernability can force a political elite to dial back on issues that polarize and mobilize a significant population, even if that population is a numerical minority.

That’s what has made protest an effective tactic—not always, but sometimes—over the past century and change, from India to the United States to South Africa to Argentina.

But this tactic has only worked where and when and because the prospect of an ungovernable society was unthinkable.

Among Americans—in the aggregate, on 8 November 2016—that wasn’t the case.

It certainly hasn’t been the case for those Americans who, over the past quarter century, have continued to elect obstructionist legislators into office. It isn’t the case for anyone who cast a vote to send the president-elect—a loathsome, ignorant, narcissistic bully—to the White House come January 2017.

And it’s not the case for anyone who failed to act positively to prevent yesterday’s disaster at the polls. Individuals who didn’t bother? They could have voted, or voted differently, to put better candidates at the head of the Democratic and Republican tickets; and, having failed in that endeavor, to send that loathsome, ignorant, narcissistic bully selected by the G.O.P. down to reeling defeat.

Too late, folks.

Our physical world continues to spin. The planet’s polar ice continues to melt. Earth’s sixth extinction, the one properly called “Anthropocene,” proceeds unabated. Our military industrial complex continues along its poisonous, rent-seeking arc, just as President Eisenhower warned on his way out the White House door nearly fifty-six years ago.

Yet, come January 2017, there will be no national government in the United States of America against which effective protest can be mounted.

Either the government of those who refuse to be governed will be deposed, in a future election or otherwise; or the ideals of democracy, equality, and stewardship—to which the United States has long purported to aspire—will have failed.

Translation: while protest is dead, resistance and opposition are very much alive.

Robert Reich wrote last night, before the election was called but once it had become pretty clear where the finish was heading:

It was always going to be a contest between authoritarian populism and progressive populism, eventually. For now, authoritarian populism has won. But if we are united and smart, progressive populism will triumph.

In other words: all hands on deck.

We have failed to elect a national government that might have been influenced—albeit in limited areas, to an insufficient degree—while we continued to organize the conduct of social, political, economic, and environmental business in the United States differently.

So now? If we fail to neutralize the government we just elected, and fail to decisively trash it at the next electoral opportunity?

Then it’ll be time to kiss your kids’ futures goodbye.

Me, I don’t have kids. But I weep for yours.


This blog is cross-posted on Medium.com


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Michael Pollan, food futures, and a dearth of Michael Moore moments

I was surprised and gratified to see Michael Pollan’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times: Big Food Strikes Back: Why Did the Obamas Fail to Take On Corporate Agriculture?

Why surprised? Because so much of what passes for political reporting in this election season is undermined by boorishness, hypocrisy, dog-whistling, race-baiting, and misogyny; whereas Pollan’s essay is carefully developed, illuminating, and actually useful to those who seek to responsibly understand and influence humankind’s shared-fate future.

Pollan is playing the long game. Yesterday’s essay follows-up on an open letter of similar length and depth published eight years ago, a month before the election that sent Barack Obama to the White House. The NYT titled the open letter Farmer-in-Chief, and addressed it to the President-Elect. Yesterday’s essay is a disappointed but clear-eyed assessment of how and why President Obama failed to take Pollan’s 2008 advice nearly far enough. It wasn’t because the President-Elect didn’t get it.

A few days after the letter was published, Obama the candidate gave an interview to Joe Klein for Time magazine in which he concisely summarized my 8,000-word article:

“I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity.”

(It warms my heart that the POTUS-to-be prefigured the title of my 2015 novel in his 2008 interview. Emphasis added. It’s the little things.)

I was interviewed a few days ago by Joanna Manqueros on her “Music of the World” program on KPFA, a public radio station broadcasting from studios in Berkeley, not far from where I work. Joanna read a passage from Consequence, and we discussed how the passage she read from addresses the complexity of communicating the essentials of agricultural politics and policy — complexity that led Michael Pollan to write 8,000 words in 2008 on the topic, and nearly 6,000 more yesterday in follow-up and reassessment.

Here’s a transcription of that part of my interview with Joanna (starting just shy of 16 minutes into her show if you want to listen):

Joanna: Let me read a little bit of what the character sees, and why he starts to get pulled in this direction of doing this radical action. It says:

Christopher watched out the window as they accelerated onto Highway 101 and sped south, following a steady march of telephone wires strung atop pocked wooden poles. He tried to visualize the surrounding acres as wetland, teeming with wildlife in the centuries before the state was logged, drained, burned, and given over to cattle and monocropping. At least the farms were smaller here, he thought. And a lot more of them grew organic than in the Central Valley. It was a start.

What’s going on there?

Steve: Well, Chris is — letting go of exactly what’s happening in the plot there — Chris is driving through … I guess it would be Sonoma County at that point … and looking at the small farms there. And what he’s observing, if you’d read a little bit further, is that really there’s nothing obvious about these small farms, that they tend more toward organic, and that they tend less toward monocrop — although I suppose you can see that it’s not the same plant for acres and acres and acres on end, as you would see, say, if you drove through, Nebraska, where corn or soy are pretty much your only choices.

But one of the things he’s reflecting on is how difficult it is to convey in a dramatic way, in a way that penetrates the teleconsciousness of the nation, that penetrates the chatter of the news cycle, to talk about the kind of long term and deep problems that evolve in environments that are monocropped, or where pesticide is leached out of soil into aquifer or into water that feeds cities. You don’t see that right away. There’s not a Michael Moore moment that you can film, or dramatize in a demonstration, in some kind of guerilla theater.

And so he’s reflecting — Christopher is more than anything else a propagandist. He’s been asked to write a manifesto to justify this vaguely-defined — to him — action that Chagall is going to take. And he’s thinking about how hard it is to vividly explain to people what’s wrong with monocropping, what’s wrong with putting genetically engineered creatures into an evolved biosphere that has taken, literally, hundreds of millions of years to come to its equilibrium.

There might be science, politics, and policy that can still avert the most horrific effects of the accelerated poisoning that humans have inflicted on our biosphere over the last couple of centuries. Pollan lays out some key, deeply intertwined threads of the answers we need to be looking for in his paired essays’ 14,000 words. Consequence depicts characters engaged across a spectrum of diverse approaches to correcting our species’ broken trajectory, tactics that range from reasoned dissent to all-out disruption or even destruction.

From where I sit, humankind would do well to wrap our collective minds around the objectives laid out by Pollan, and the paths he suggests toward turning ourselves in constructive directions; and likewise would benefit from explorations of actively-engaged characters, hearts, and moral frameworks that could move us to grapple with the enormity of threats to our common future. I hope that readers find in Consequence an example of such an exploration — one among many.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Should we care how crops are grown *before* food insecurity spreads?
Facts vs understanding in GMO propaganda wars
Asking the wrong questions about GMOs for disinformation and profit
Monoculture v complexity; agribusiness and deceit
Mutant food: agribusiness vs. everybody else
Broken food chains



Thanks to Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa for his image Cornfield in South Africa — sxc.hu, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia). This post was originally published on Medium, under the title Michael Pollan, Michael Moore Moments, and Humankind’s Future.

Oakland coal ban: real politics amid the Drumpfoolery

Last night the Oakland City Council held its scheduled second reading of a ban on coal handling and storage that was originally approved in late June. It's worth a mention that on the same night, Alameda County's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban fracking: the fifth county in California to to so. Oh, and more ridiculous sh*t went down in Cleveland.

The two Oakland measures banning coal were placed on the council’s consent calendar: an ordinance to prohibit storage and handling of coal and coke throughout the city, and a regulation that applies the ordinance specifically to the proposed Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, from which developers were planning to ship coal from Utah and other western states to Asia. The council's single vote on the consent calendar multiple measures was unanimous: 8 ayes, with all council members present. Following more than an hour of citizen and community testimony on a range of issues, the consent calendar was passed in a single vote, no roll call, so quickly that the couple dozen coal activists in the council chambers missed our chance to cheer.

Unsurprisingly, Oaklanders filling the chambers, overflow rooms, and hallways didn't seem to regret missing the chance to monitor the Republican Party convention's second evening of crashing and burning, live and simultaneously, in Cleveland. There was plenty of actual governance beyond the coal ban on the agenda: the council was taking testimony on a ballot measure to fundamentally strengthen citizen oversight of it's much-worse-than-problematic police department (the council will vote on 26 July whether to put the measure on the ballot); and two proposals to "sharply limit property owners' ability to raise rents" as protection against displacement driven by the the current tech-bubble economy were passed later that night. The meeting ended around 1:20 a.m.

The scene at City Hall, my own participation in the No Coal in Oakland work (a campaign more sharply focused on nuts-and-bolts local politics than most of the many forays I've made into other issues and movements over the decades), and a nagging awareness of the ongoing celebration of cesspool-politics in Cleveland, recalled to mind a piece Adam Gopnik penned about the Obama presidency in The New Yorker about two months ago. From Liberal-In-Chief, 23 May 2016:

His words have been varied, but his purpose has been consistent and his point simple: liberalism isn’t centrism. It isn’t a way of splitting the differences between two sides, and finding an acceptable soft middle. Liberalism of the kind he practices, the President has been saying, is the most truly radical of ideologies, inasmuch as it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last. Someone proposes a more equitable world—the enfranchisement of working people, or of African-Americans, or of women, or marital rights for homosexuals—and then makes it endure by assuring those who oppose it that, while they may have lost the fight, they haven’t lost their dignity, their autonomy, or their chance to adapt to the change without fearing the loss of all their agency. “The civil-rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday,” Obama told Stephanopoulos. “But it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation, and sought to understand the views—even views that were appalling to them—of the other side.” Liberalism is a belief in radical change made through practical measures.

How does that happen at a local level, in ways that engage hundreds and thousands of unelected citizens in determining the future of their own communities -- in ways that stand a chance of realizing progressive twenty-first century goals, many of which were lent fire and urgency by Bernie Sanders' recent successful run at the presidency (and I mean successful -- by any measure other than winning the Democratic Party nomination)?

Following last night's City Hall victory, Margaret Rossoff, one of No Coal in Oakland's principal organizers, circulated to NCIO campaign activists a report summarizing how the group won a citywide ban on coal (I am excerpting rather than linking to the whole report, as it has not been made public at this time). She noted:

NCIO attracted people with long histories of political organizing in a wide variety of contexts, who between them had deep and broad knowledge of Oakland politics, successful campaign strategies, environmental justice struggles, legal analysis, environmental science, and more. The group included members who were vehemently anti-establishment and cynical about the possibility of success with the elected council, along with a couple of people who had served as elected city officials. We included at least one Republican and quite a few socialists working together, deeply religious people alongside atheists, and a few folks with histories of past conflict who focused on our shared goal. Our passionate commitment generated mutual respect within the campaign and widespread appreciation for the campaign.

The rails were no-doubt greased for this kind of broad-based coalition building by the Bay Area's general environmentalist tendencies, and the blinding obviousness of damage done to planet and people by digging, transporting, and burning coal. As Rossoff put it:

Coal already had a terrible reputation.  A widely recognized imperative to close existing coal-fired plants, including a national campaign by the Sierra Club, provided context for our local struggle.  The local dangers of coal dust escaping from railroad cars and the exacerbating effects of burning coal on climate disruption were intuitively obvious to people we spoke with.  Of course, we needed to amass scientific data to justify the ordinance banning coal, but in our community work we were building on a pre-existing narrative.

But ... go back and follow that link to Robert Reich's post on Bernie's 7 Legacies that I snuck in a couple paragraphs up.

I fully acknowledge the urgency of defeating, on November 8th, the jackbooted buffoon who has now hijacked the Republican Party. But "urgent" doesn't mean "only." There's plenty to be done locally (including but not limited to campaigning for progressive candidates in down-ballot races across the U.S.) as The Donald goes down to his rightful place as World's Loudest Loser. And we can succeed locally -- and, eventually, more broadly -- if we attend steadily to the work at hand, without getting derailed by national media spectacle and the likes of Pokémon Go.

I'd say that sealing last night's legislative victory keeping coal out of Oakland gave hope to the prospect that we might yet win still bigger contests than a presidential election, so long as we keep our eyes on the prize.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Coal hazard "protection" fallacies exposed by Oakland public health experts
Oakland doesn't need an oil train disaster, thanks but no thanks
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes
Oil trains, coal trains: extractive economics vs. people and place

Coal hazard "protection" fallacies exposed by Oakland public health experts

The City of Oakland will rally on the afternoon of Saturday 25 June outside City Hall, in opposition to the prospect of coal storage and handling in the city. Coal transport proposed by developer Phil Tagami would funnel up to nine million metric tons of coal through the city's proposed Oakland Bulk and Oversize Terminal (OBOT) each year, sending mile-long trains of Utah coal through West Oakland every day for the duration of Tagami's 66-year lease of the OBOT site.

Immediately upon learning of this threat to the community's health and waterfront, city residents have organized to push elected leaders to take a stand against this misuse of publicly owned space. The City Council will vote on a proposal to ban coal storage and handling at the Oakland Bulk and Oversize Terminal (OBOT) at a special meeting on Monday, June 27 at 5 pm (rally at 4).

As debate over the terminal unfolded over this past year, coal proponents have advertised they will use new technology to shield port workers and their West Oakland neighbors from the toxic, corrosive, and explosive dangers of transporting coal through the former Oakland Army Base. But fantasies can't protect Oakland's workers and families from coal's frighteningly real threats.

A Public Health Advisory Panel on Coal in Oakland figures in their report, An Assessment of the Health and Safety Implications of Coal Transport through Oakland , that up to 620 tons of dirty coal dust could be blown into West Oakland every year if the coal terminal proceeds [p. 17].

And that's just for starters.

As the Health and Safety report explains, coal isn't easy to transport or to handle [p. 43]:

• It can spontaneously burst into flame in its solid form (in fact, combustibility is why coal is dug out of the ground in the first place).
• It's highly explosive when suspended as dust particles in confined spaces, such as covered railroad cars and enclosed coal terminals.
• Coal is toxic to humans, especially when inhaled as dust.
• Coal dust is filthy: if coal is shipped through Oakland, 90-620 tons of black, sticky particles will get into and onto everything in its path -- from homes to cars to clothing to playgrounds -- each and every one of the 66 years the Oakland Bulk and Oversize Terminal (OBOT) is leased to coal profiteers.

Can these hazards be mitigated by technology? Here's what Oakland is up against:

Export of coal through Oakland requires that coal be transferred from the mine site to rail cars, transported by rail over many hundreds of miles to the port facility, transferred from rail cars into the port facility, transferred into storage heaps pending shipment, transferred out of the storage heaps to the wharves, loaded into ships, and then shipped out to the destination. Each step creates opportunities for release of dust and for hazards to adjacent workers, residents, businesses, and communities. [p. 43]

Coal proponents claim that technology can protect against potential harms. But the proposed technology is unproven, and in some cases has never been tested in real-world conditions (i.e., has not been field-tested).

• Claims that the coal terminal would be wholly enclosed is not how existing coal terminals are designed or implemented, and these claims run contrary to design documents submitted by coal project advocates. For example, by the developers own admission (in its “Basis of Design” document), the stockpiles of coal will be moved from the domed terminal to be stored outdoors for unspecified lengths of time before being loaded onto ships. [p. 47] In the description of its enclosed conveyor system, the Basis of Design document reveals that different types of conveyors will be used, depending on the phase of coal transfer, and not all of them will be covered. All indicators point to the likelihood that a “wholly enclosed” terminal is at best an untested fantasy, and at worst a bait-and-switch lie.
• If coal dust is contained in an enclosed terminal, it will present “potential for suspension of coal dust in the air, which can be explosive and ignited by spark, static electricity, or heat.” [p. 47]
• Filtering technology creates potential for fires like one reported earlier this month in a dust collection system at the John Twitty Energy Center in Springfield, Missouri. Though filtering and wetting strategies may be used if coal ships through Oakland, “no safety analysis has been conducted for the potential transfer of bulk coal through OBOT” [p. 47-48].
• Coal advocates have asserted that no review is necessary for environmental impacts such as air pollution, water pollution, production of solid wastes, noise levels, or safety & traffic hazards, but their claims regarding regulatory compliance appear to be shaky at best. For example, wastewater disposal plans are not specified in OBOT plans, raising concern about the potential for coal processing to significantly poison the San Francisco Bay ecosystem. [p. 48-51]
• “The project area has seismic vulnerabilities that could create hazards in the likely event of an earthquake, as the soils are in highest category for liquefaction.” Replacement of soils near the OBOT wharf has been proposed, but this remedy may be insufficient and requires additional review. [p. 51]

The Public Health Advisory Panel on Coal in Oakland report offers 145 well-researched and footnoted pages of reasons to distrust assurances that grievous hazards can be magically neutralized by technology that is unproven, uneconomic, or 'optional' at the discretion of profit-motivated coal proponents.

There is only one way to protect our workers and communities from coal hazards: banning its transport through Oakland and its OBOT.



A version of this post was originally published on the No Coal in Oakland web site. Numbers in square brackets refer to page numbers in the report An Assessment of the Health and Safety Implications of Coal Transport through Oakland. Thanks to Toni Morozumi for the image of Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre marquee advocating "No Coal in Oakland."



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Oakland doesn't need an oil train disaster, thanks but no thanks
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes
Oil trains, coal trains: extractive economics vs. people and place

Oakland doesn't need an oil train disaster, thanks but no thanks

Come 27 June 2016, Oakland, California's city council will vote on an ordinance to ban shipment of coal through the city's port.

The text of the ordinance is not yet drafted, and may not ban coal at all: it may instead require mitigations that are unlikely to be achievable, enforceable, and/or effective in protecting the health of people who live near the proposed bulk terminal that developers hope to use to ship coal mined in Utah and slated for dirty combustion in Asia. The ordinance may or may not also address a ban on or mitigations for shipping crude oil, fuel oil, and gasoline.

To call the city's mayor, Libby Schaaf, and the councilmembers' attention to just how crazy-dangerous it would be to permit oil transport through a port surrounded by communities they were elected to protect and serve, No Coal in Oakland activist Michael Kaufman sent to Oakland's elected officials yesterday afternoon a partial list of tanker car spills and pipeline explosions that have occurred over the past three years.

Here's what Michael Kaufman wrote to Oakland's Mayor Schaaf, nine councilmembers, and city staffer Heather Klein:

Dear Ms Klein, Mayor and Council Members

Please consider [this] list of tanker car spills of fossil fuels and other hazardous commodities that have been endangering our citizens in the last three years.

These spills, explosions and pollution of neighborhoods and water ways will continue without end, until our elected leaders ban fossil fuels from being loaded or off loaded in our communities.Below is a very incomplete list of just some of the spills and explosions that have occurred in North America during the last three years. Oil pipeline capacity is maxed out in North American. Consequently oil rail car use has expanded forty fold from 2008.

The prior NTSB chair said that the overwhelming majority of oil train cars are not built to carry the toxic oil now being massively produced.  The rules to control this form of oil transportation must be updated quickly; more quickly than is happening on the federal level.

The current rail cars for fossil fuel, DOT 111 type rail cars, are not crash resistant.  This type of car is being banned and replaced in Canada but not in U.S.  However some of the crashes and spills are also coming from newly designed, CPC-1232 type cars, which are supposed to be more crash resistant.

Normal fire departments don't have the capacity to deal with oil rail car spill, explosions and fires.

[...]

1. 03/27/13 Parkers Prairie, MN; 30,000 gallons of oil spilled
2. 03/29/13 Arkansas Exxon Pegasus Pipeline burst, 5,000-7,000 barrels of crude spilled
3. 05/21/13 Jansen Saskatchewan; 24,000 gallons of oil spilled
4. 06/27/13 Calgary, Alberta; oil train derailed on a bridge over Bow River, emergency crew prevented a spill
5. 07/06/13 Lac Magantic, Quebec; Explosions from derailed oil cars killed 47 people and destroyed 30 buildings in town center
6. 10/19/13 Gainford Alberta; 4 derailed oil tankers. evacuations were required due to explosions and fire
7. 11/08/13 Aliceville, Pickens County, Alabama; 90-car derailment, 749,000 gallons spilled. Fire burned for 2 days.
8. 12/30/13 Casselton, ND; 400,000 gallons of crude spilled, explosion caused evacuations of 2,000 people
9. 01/07/14 Plaster Rock, New Brunswick; explosion and fire caused 150-person evacuation for 3 nights
10. 01/20/14 Philadelphia PA; 6 train cars carrying Bakken crude derailed over Schuylkill River near university of PA and major hospitals, no spill
11. 02/13/14 Vandergrift PA; 4 tankers spill nearly 3,000 gallons of oil
12. 04/30/14 Lynchburg, VA; 17-car derailment, +29,000 gallons of oil spilled into the James River, threatening the Richmond, VA water supply
13. 1/13/15 In Mississippi pipeline burst and put out smoke seen by satellites
14. 1/17/15 Yellowstone River, Glendive, Montana Oil Spill, 40,000 gallons of oil
15. 1/26/15 North Dakota Williston 3 million gallons of brine leaking since 1/6/15.  Leak has reached the Missouri River
16. 1/27/15 Natural Gas Pipeline explosion in Brooke County, West Virginia from Pennsylvania Fracked Gas moving to Texas
17. 2/14/15 Timmons, Ontario 100-car Canadian National train carrying crude oil derailed.  30 cars caught fire.  The tankers were the newer, CPC-1232, "safer" kind.  The fires burned for days blocking a main rail line for three days.
18. 2/16/15 Mt Carbon, West Virginia Bakken Crude 109 car train, 27 tanker cars, the newer CPC 1232 cars, derailed and spilled crude into the Kanawha River.  Vapor pressure in tank cars was 13.9, higher than allowed by N Dakota. laws.   Tanker  cars exploded catching house on fire. 1.5 mile circle of evacuation.  Fire crews let fires burn for days.
19. 3/4/15 North Dakota Tioga spill 19,000 gallons of brine saltwater chemical petroleum mix
20. 3/5/15 Galena Illinois near Dubuque Iowa a unit oil train, 103 tanker cars derailed and exploded along the Galena River.  1 mile evacuation
21. 3/7/15 Gogama, Ontario 94 car oil train had 35 CPC-1232 oil tanker cars derail, with 5 falling into the Makami River, explosion and fire.
22. 5/6/15 Heimdal, ND another train blew up with 6 tankers carrying 180,000 gallons of Bakken Crude exploding.  Heimdal was evacuated.  Four separate fire department were dispatched and two Hazmat teams.  The EPA is monitoring air quality.  It is the fifth explosion in 2015 to date.  This one was using the updated tanker cars, CPC-1232.
23. 7/1/16 Maryville Tennessee just south of Knoxville, one CSX car derailed, broke an axle and punctured the tanker and sparked a huge fire, which burned for over a day.  The car was carrying Acrylonitrile, used in making plastics.
24. When it burns it releases cyanide gas, which can be fatal.  Evacuated a 2 mile radius, and 5,000 people.  Ten cops were hospitalized due to exposure.  55 were hospitalized with 25 admitted to the hospital.
25. 11/7/15 Alma Wisconsin 25 cars derailed and fell into the river with 20,000 gallons of ethanol spilled into the Mississippi River, highways closed, residents evacuated
26. 11/8/15 Watertown Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, 110 car oil train, 13 cars derailed, 100s of gallons of crude oil spilled, Homes Evacuated

[I've added links to news sources for the first ten. You get the idea, and readers can search the intertubes no less effectively than I can.]

No Coal in Oakland -- whose state senator, Loni Hancock, found that 92% of her district's constituents oppose the proposed Oakland coal-export terminal -- is asking city residents to stand up and be counted at the 27 June council vote ... and to turn out for the first half-hour of tonight's City Council meeting to speak to the folly of shipping fossil fuels through the city's port.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes
Oil trains, coal trains: extractive economics vs. people and place
Northern California mobilizes for climate action as Paris talks near



Thanks to Sûreté du Québec via Wikimedia Commons for the image of the Lac-Mégantic oil train derailment disaster.

GMO labeling and a dearth of principled discourse

Does a two-week interregnum between the Wisconsin and New York primaries leave a window to post about something other than elections? I'd like to try. Personally, I find the cacophony around the presidential primaries dispiriting, but there's a thing or two to say now about the feeble level of discourse over another very hotly contested question, one for which a lot of the action is also coming out of the state of Vermont.

GMO labeling, coming to a supermarket near you

Yep. I'm talking about labeling food that contains GMO ingredients.

You may already know that beginning on 1 July Vermont's Act 120 will require that GMO ingredients be called out on labels of food sold in that state (the nitty-gritty is delineated in the Vermont Attorney General's Consumer Protection Rule 121). The imminent deadline made March a pretty lively month in this particular corner of the struggle between What People Want and What Megacorporations Wish People Wanted.

You may have already seen, for example, that corporate-backed federal legislation to neuter Vermont's labeling requirements moved to the U.S. Senate's front burner last month. Here's how, way over here on the Left Coast, San Francisco's newspaper reported how that has turned out thus far (GMO food labeling bill does not pass in Senate, SF Chronicle, 16 Mar 2016):

Following an emotional debate, the Senate blocked a bill that would prevent states from requiring labeling of genetically modified food Wednesday.

The Biotechnology Labeling Solutions Act (S2609), authored by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., which would create a national voluntary labeling standard for genetically engineered foods, did not pass. Roberts had hoped to pass the bill before Vermont’s mandatory labeling law goes into effect July 1.

Despite getting support from Democrats such as Agriculture Committee members Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitcamp of North Dakota, he didn’t get the 60 votes he needed. California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein voted against the bill.

The game's not over, of course: another bill may yet make it through.

But with July approaching and clear evidence that nearly 90% of people in the United States want to see GMO food labeled, a number of key corporate giants appear to be throwing in the towel. General Mills, for example, a conglomerate with $17.9bn in 2014 revenue, announced two days after that Senate vote to label its products (see General Mills to add GMO labeling on its products, SF Chronicle, 18 Mar 2016):

In a striking reversal for big food manufacturers, which have spent millions fighting state efforts to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food, General Mills announced Friday that it would voluntarily add that information to its labels.

General Mills’ move is a reaction to a law due to go into effect July 1 in Vermont that will require mandatory labeling of foods with genetically modified organisms. On Wednesday, the Senate blocked efforts by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to preempt Vermont’s law by making that labeling voluntary nationwide.

Mars, ConAgra, Campbell Soup Co., and Kellogg are also printing new labels to be used nationwide.

Health effects caused by GMO food: the narrow view

General Mills may be throwing in the towel, but the discourse on genetically engineered crops and animals in mainstream media (MSM) is, generally speaking, narrowly and poorly focused. The sound-byte battle is consistently and most visibly framed around questions of food safety: will humans be adversely affected by consuming food with genetically modified ingredients?

Some examples of this framing:

[Kansas Senator Pat Roberts] emphasized that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration have all deemed genetically engineered foods safe. “It’s not about safety. It’s not about health. It’s not about nutrition. It’s all about marketing,” he said. (GMO food labeling bill does not pass in Senate, SF Chronicle, 16 Mar 2016)

[Executive vice president and chief operating officer for U.S. retail at General Mills Jeff] Harmening also noted that “every major health and safety agency in the world agree(s) that GMOs are not a health or safety concern” — though he acknowledged that some consumers want to know about their presence in food. (General Mills to add GMO labeling on its products, SF Chronicle, 18 Mar 2016)

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that labels would inherently suggest something is wrong with foods containing GMOs, even though major scientific bodies — from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the World Health Organization to the American Medical Association — insist genetically modified foods are safe to eat. (Bill Blocking GMO Labels Stalls In Senate, But Battle Is Far From Over, NPR, 16 Mar 2016)

The Food and Drug Administration says they are safe, and there is little scientific concern about the safety of those GMOs on the market. But advocates for labeling say not enough is known about their risks. (Senate blocks bill to make GMO labeling voluntary, Fox News, 17 March 2016)

Others sometimes emphasize transparency (something that General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening gave a nod to in the second excerpt above). One transparency advocate is NYU Professor Arthur Caplan, who wrote, in an NBC News post of 15 September 2015, GMO Foods Should be Labeled, But Not for Safety: Bioethicist:

The case for labeling is tied up with arguments about safety. Safety concerns would trigger Food and Drug Administration labeling requirements. But, ironically, that is entirely the wrong issue when it comes to labels. The reason GMO food should be voluntarily labeled by the food industry is that it is clear some consumers want to know what they are eating and they have a right to know what is in their food.

A more honest discourse

I'm all for transparency. But:

We'd be having a more honest discourse, less susceptible to flak sprayed into the debate from all quarters, if journalists ferreted out and responsibly reported on the most serious and consequential questions around GMO agriculture and bioengineered animals.

What questions are those? For example, quoting myself from a post of 9 September 2015:

• How does GMO agriculture encourage or discourage monocropping, and what impact does that have on land productivity, herbicide use, and soil sustainability?
• How do GMO crops influence use and costs of farming inputs (seeds, fertilizer, energy, machinery, water) and what short- and long-term effects does this have on sustainability of soil, farms, and family farming?
• How does GMO farming affect biodiversity and the relationships of plant, insect, and animal species that influence or are influenced by the production of food for human consumption?
• How do the economics and legal constraints of using patented seeds affect farming, farmers, and farm communities? 

Or, more circumspectly if you prefer, quoting from the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

While the risks of genetic engineering are often exaggerated or misrepresented, GE crops do have the potential to cause a variety of health problems and environmental impacts. For instance, they may spread undesirable traits to weeds and non-GE crops, produce new allergens and toxins, or harm animals that consume them.

At least one major environmental impact of genetic engineering has already reached critical proportions: overuse of herbicide-tolerant GE crops has spurred an increase in herbicide use and an epidemic of herbicide-resistant "superweeds," which will lead to even more herbicide use.

How likely are other harmful GE impacts to occur? This is a difficult question to answer. Each crop-gene combination poses its own set of risks. While risk assessments are conducted as part of GE product approval, the data are generally supplied by the company seeking approval, and GE companies use their patent rights to exercise tight control over research on their products.

Speaking truth to mainstream media: a steep uphill climb

Contrary to general appearances, it's not impossible to report responsibly in the MSM. Bio-engineered fish are target of lawsuit is another article published at the tail end of last month in the SF Chronicle. The subject is the AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon. Excerpting:

Government regulators and the manufacturer insist the product is safe. But the notion of genetically altered seafood has created a furor among environmentalists, who have dubbed the species "Frankenfish" and say it could spread mutant genes and circulate diseases in wild salmon if an accident or sabotage ever set it loose.

"Our main concern is that the FDA approval was done without any consideration for what these Frankenfish might do if they escape into the wild in places where wild salmon live," said John McManus, the executive director of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, which joined the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the Center for Food Safety and eight other environmental organizations in the suit.

"What has ended up happening in every place where there are farmed salmon is the nets rip and the fish escape," McManus said.

John McManus is on point when he describes a main concern about genetically modified salmon. And he was permitted in this article to express it. Alas, in the mainstream U.S. press, the systemic picture is more often obscured in favor of focus on sound-bytes to do with direct, individual health effects of human consumption of GMO food.

Why does this happen?

Lots of reasons, I suppose. But in this post, rather than follow-the-money (that is, the argument that capitalists or corporations own both the government and the press), I'd like to suggest that principal reasons include the fact that direct, individual health effects make for more easily digestible news about complex subjects. Here are three qualities that make this so:

1. Individual health effects fit our familiar (U.S.) legal framework, and thus become the focal point of efforts to regulate the Monsantos and Du Ponts of the world. As Dr. Caplan, quoted above, put it, "Safety concerns would trigger Food and Drug Administration labeling requirements." Individual health effects give individuals and classes of individuals standing to bring lawsuits aimed at constraining (through regulation) or punishing (through economic penalties) those who cause those effects by harming the environment. From Cornell University's Legal Information Institute: "Standing, or locus standi, is capacity of a party to bring suit in court. State laws define standing. At the heart of these statutes is the requirement that plaintiffs have sustained or will sustain direct injury or harm and that this harm is redressable." American newspaper reporters and readers understand how this works.
2. Individual health effects are a simpler concept to grasp and more concrete than systemic harms. From Wikipedia on literacy in the U.S.: The 15% figure for full literacy, equivalent to a university undergraduate level, is consistent with the notion that the "average" American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level which is also consistent with recommendations, guidelines, and norms of readability for medication directions, product information, and popular fiction.
3. Individual health effects directly threaten individuals, which means it's easier to induce people to consider their own personal stake in an issue than it would be if the threat were more abstract, indirect, long-term, or diffuse. Having a personal stake in a story or issue is key to generating interest in it. The MSM, in order to sustain itself, favors publication of stories in which it can generate interest (duh...).

It's worth noting that these qualities apply to other environmental issues, not just questions of genetic engineering.

Opposition to the transport of coal and tar sands oil, for example, are easier to sell (and thus more commonly 'marketed' and argued in regulatory hearings, courtrooms, and environmental activists' appeals to the grassroots) as community health and economic issues (coal dust causes respiratory disease, volatile oil trains threaten cities with massive explosions) than as activity that causes long term harm to our planet's biosphere (leaving fossil fuel "assets" in the ground rather than burning them is necessary to mitigate the massive and lethal effects of human-induced climate change). This is not to say that environmental activists don't see the bigger picture. Of course we do. But effective arguments skew toward harm to individuals and local communities, so those are the arguments most frequently and prominently promoted, especially to regulatory officials and non-activists.

In California, where I live, advocacy for the health of salmon fisheries and delta smelt quickly devolves in the mainstream press into arguments about harm to people who make their livings in fishing vs. farming sectors of the human economy.

And so on.

Does it have to be this way?

So news in mainstream media is reported in simple terms, framed by near-term and close-to-home and legally-effective stakes.

But a path out of this (literal!) dead end is emerging. Right here in the U.S. of A., even, though the path seems to be better paved in the Global South thus far.

Here, from the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Orion Magazine, in If Nature Had Rights by South African attorney Cormac Cullinan (co-author of Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice):

On September 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, passed a sewage sludge ordinance that recognizes natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. It also strips corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as "persons" and consequently of their civil rights. One of its effects is that the borough or any of its residents may file a lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem to recover compensatory and punitive damages for any harm done by the land application of sewage sludge. Damages recovered in this way must be paid to the borough and used to restore those ecosystems and natural communities.

According to Thomas Linzey, the lawyer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund who assisted Tamaqua Borough, this ordinance marks the first time in the history of municipalities in the United States that something like this has happened. Coming after more than 150 years of judicially sanctioned expansion of the legal powers of corporations in the U.S., this ordinance is more than extraordinary — it is revolutionary. In a world where the corporation is king and all forms of life other than humans are objects in the eyes of the law, this is a small community’s Boston tea party.

And more recently, from Jason Mark in Spring 2012's Earth Island Journal:

[...] even among card-carrying environmentalists the idea of putting humanity on an equal footing with the rest of nature remains a minority conviction. The twenty-first-century environmental movement is focused almost exclusively on “sustainability” – which essentially is the idea that we have to keep Gaia just healthy enough to maintain human civilization. Mostly, we are “saving” the planet for ourselves.

Placed in this context, the new activism demanding legal rights for nature marks an important development for the global environmental movement.

Several factors have spurred the reinvigoration of the idea that we are not the center of the universe. Climate change is an obvious one. As some see it, a new ideology is needed to counter what appears to civilization’s drive to swallow the planet whole. In the US, the push for rights of nature is part of the broader attempt to push back the power of corporations. It’s a way of arguing that the environment should come before corporate earnings.

These developments beg the question: what will it take to advance the idea that humans must acknowledge the gravity and responsibility implicit in long-term, complex, systemic effects of human activity -- by appropriately acknowledging and valuing the standing of every thing and being affected by that activity?

And: how do we embed that responsibility in our legal system, our journalism, and in many more hearts and minds?

I'm not asking these questions rhetorically. I don't know the answers.

I do, however, believe that we ought to be thinking, talking, and writing about these big-picture questions.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:

Facts vs understanding in GMO propaganda wars

Asking the wrong questions about GMOs for disinformation and profit

Monoculture v complexity; agribusiness and deceit

Mutant food: agribusiness vs. everybody else

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Thanks to Bibi Saint-Pol via Wikimedia Commons for the image from a Roman floor mosaic, circa 200-250 C.E.: Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs, in between a green tree and a bare tree (summer and winter, respectively). Sitting in front of him is the mother-earth goddess, Tellus (the Roman counterpart of Gaia) with her four children, who possibly represent the four seasons. Also, thanks to NASA via Wikimedia Commons for the image of our planet, Earth.