Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
Do Trump’s ongoing business partnerships make his administration corrupt? I say yes on ABC News. Watch here:
Do Trump’s ongoing business partnerships make his administration corrupt? I say yes on ABC News. Watch here:
Posted by David Frum on Wednesday, May 2, 2018
By Charles P. Pierce May 2, 2018
Getty Images
Let’s talk about a mass shooting. Let’s talk about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. Let’s talk about terrorism. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday terrorism. And, because we are talking about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting, and ordinary, everyday terrorism, let’s talk about guns. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday guns and their ordinary, everyday use. Let’s talk about St. Claude Avenue, in the lower Ninth Ward in the city of New Orleans. From the unconquerable New Orleans Times-Picayune:
“NOPD said the shooting was reported at 12:46 a.m. in the 3200 block of St. Claude Avenue (map), which is between Louisa and Piety Streets in the St. Claude neighborhood. Those shot were ages 25, 37, 34, 35 and 38.”
“According to preliminary information from NOPD, officers were responding to a report of gunfire in the area when they found three victims, which were taken to a hospital via EMS. Two additional victims later showed up at a hospital after they were taken there in private vehicles. A preliminary NOPD report issued Tuesday states the victims were at the same location when they heard gunshots coming from the direction of Piety Street.”
(Why does New Orleans so fascinate writers? Because names like “Piety Street” can appear in police reports. And, just for the record, there are two St. Claudes in the Calendar of the Saints and they have given their name to two cities in Canada and five cities in France, as well as a neighborhood in another part of New Orleans.)
OK, that’s the ordinary everyday use of guns in an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. What about the ordinary, everyday terrorism? That’s the second-day story for Emily Lane of the Times-Pic.
“Three U-Haul boxes sat stacked on top of each other in the living room of a St. Claude Avenue home on Tuesday morning (May 1). The resident at the double shotgun said he bought and filled the boxes with his belongings that morning, hours after opening his front door to find a gunshot victim leaning on his front stoop.”
“The man, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety, said violent crime in his neighborhood has gotten “progressively worse,” in the last two years. He had thought before about moving, he said, but Tuesday’s shooting in his block that left five people wounded “was the last straw.””
“In the four years he’s lived at the St. Claude neighborhood home, he has three times opened his front door to find a person who had overdosed lying unconscious or dead on his front stoop. He estimated hearing nearby gunshots about once a month. Just last week, he said, a car was shot up across the street.”
That is terrorism—disorganized and apolitical, devoid of ideology or even coherent thought, but there’s been so much shooting that this guy is moving away because of it, and that’s terrorism by any reasonable definition, and certainly, by his.
My eye was caught by this story because, three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the simultaneous arrival in the Ninth Ward of Hurricane Katrina and the Industrial Canal, I was walking down St. Claude Avenue. I visited a remarkable place called the All Saints Community Center about 20 blocks from where five people were shot on an ordinary Monday night. But, if it weren’t for that transient connection, this mass shooting would have gone unremarked, at least as far as I was concerned. It was an ordinary, everyday mass shooting in the inchoate terrorism of ordinary, everyday life in America, where so many ordinary, everyday people have ordinary, everyday guns.
RELATED STORY
By Chris Richard – Climate, Farming May 2, 2018
Photo CC-licensed by Allagash Brewing Co.
Don Gale started sugaring as a boy, boiling sap outside on a cinder-block fire stand with old steel road signs for baffles. Later his parents would finish the process on the kitchen stove, cooking off so much steam that it parboiled the wallpaper from the walls.
When Gale started his sugaring business in Vermont’s Green Mountains 20 years ago, he regularly worked in snow so deep that he could snowshoe back and forth between the bed of his pickup and roadside drifts.
He misses that kind of late winter, when the night air was so cold and dry it caused a burning sensation in the nose, when the snow glowed ghostly blue in the moonlight and the days were all impossibly blue sky and brilliant white earth, bright even in the leafless deep woods. The sunlight was just warm enough to get the sap flowing in depth on depth of trees.
“It used to be that when we were tapping, there was three or four feet of snow on the ground,” he said. “We just haven’t seen that recently. This year, we had a lot of rain and the snow was as slippery as the ice.” In place of snowshoes, this year Gale often wore ice cleats on his boots.
Vermont’s maple sugaring season started early this year, with February temperatures hitting the 70s in some parts of the state and trees responding with a surge of sap. Temperatures plunged again later in the month, then rose, then dropped again. It’s a winter weather pattern that Vermont has seen repeated several times in recent years.
The state is by far the nation’s biggest maple sugar producer, delivering more than 40 percent of the country’s total supply of maple syrup in each of the last three years. Many Vermont sugarmakers welcome the balmy weather, saying it will bring more sap. But such good fortune may be fleeting.
Sugar maples evolved to release their sap when nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing. Once a string of days occurs without that nighttime freeze, sap stops flowing at the rates sugar makers require. Even if flows are sufficient to meet their needs, there’s also the risk of trees starting to bud. When that happens, sap quality degrades.
Some studies point to long-term threats to the trees as well. In January, the journal Ecology published the results of research that found young maples will be vulnerable to hotter, drier temperatures causes by the changing climate.
“Maples are more effected by drought than many other species,” says Inés Ibáñez, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and one of the four authors of the study. “They need a moist environment during the whole growing season. Older trees have a deep enough root system that they can withstand stressors better. But we’re going to see the younger maples dying.”
Exactly how quickly the change will occur is still up for debate. In February, the USDA Forest Service published an assessment of likely climate change impacts that predicts deteriorating conditions in the coming decades for iconic New England trees such as the paper birch, northern white cedar, and sugar maple. It projects shorter, milder winters, with less snow and more rain.
The Vermont Climate Assessment project goes further. It cites research models predicting that by the end of the century, the northeastern forests could be dominated by oaks and hickories, with sugar maples and other trees being driven north to Maine.
University of Massachusetts researcher Joshua Rapp points out that individual sugar maples can live for up to 400 years, and that means many mature trees can be expected to hang on even as their environment becomes increasingly inimical to young trees. Similarly, it can take a long time for successor species to move in and take over.
Still, Rapp sees signs that the trees that are alive right now may also be responding to recent high temperatures. He’s noted a correlation in the last several years between hot Julys and comparatively low sugar content in maple sap the following sugaring season.
Some technological advances may help sugarmakers weather such environmental change. At the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, director Tim Perkins first noted more than a decade ago that climate change has shortened the sugaring season by about 10 percent. Nevertheless, syrup production has tripled in the last 15 years, thanks to improved use of vacuum tubing and more efficient taps drilled into the trees to draw out much more sap, Perkins said. The widespread use of reverse-osmosis machines also makes it much easier and faster to remove water and get to syrup, he said. Sugarmakers are investing heavily in such technology. Some still worry for the future of a craft that, for many, remains as much a family tradition as a business.
Adapting to Unpredictable Changes
Gale attributes Vermont’s new winter landscape to climate change. But Buster Grant, who at 80, remembers collecting sap in the iconic metal buckets instead of modern-day plastic tubing, is skeptical. He still enjoys hiking or skiing through the woods, listening to the winter birds, and stopping to look out over the snow-shrouded dairy farms around his stand of trees.
Buster Grant watches as a batch of maple sap boils down to syrup. Grant, 80, has been sugaring for half a century. He’s skeptical about climate change, pointing out that Vermont weather is famous for being unpredictable. (Photo Credit: Chris Richard)
This year, it was warm enough that Grant could have started drawing sap in January. He didn’t, he says, citing that old saw about how if a person doesn’t like Vermont weather, he should wait a minute and it will change. Sure enough, temperatures plunged for several weeks following the warm spell. Had he started early, when the weather turned he would have found his taps drying out. That’s just the business of sugaring, Grant says.
Nearby sugarmaker Tim Bouvier isn’t sure what to blame, but he has certainly noticed strange changes, and not only in the trees. While hunting in February a year ago, he was bitten by a tick, an occurrence he would never have expected as a boy, Bouvier said. Government researchers throughout New England have tied milder winters to a surge in tick populations, prompting cautions about the increased risk of Lyme disease and reports of moose fatally weakened by the parasites in the dead of winter.
Bouvier says the fear of Lyme disease won’t keep him from hunting, but he takes a lot more precautions against tick bites. Likewise, he’s looking into ways to take warmer winters into account at his 288-acre sugarbush—the term Vermonters use for a grove of producing sugar maples. Bouvier has offered a portion of his land for a University of Vermont study on substituting red maples, which are relatively heat-tolerant, for the traditional sugar maple.
Champlain College anthropologist Michael Lange, author of Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring, points out that many Vermont sugarmakers are also dairy farmers, and all farmers give a lot of thought to the weather and to climate. In interviews for his book, climate change came up often, Lange said.
Economics and business prospects played a big part in those conversations, Lange said, and so did people’s hopes of passing along the craft of sugaring. Some recalled columns of dates and sap production figures penciled on sugarhouse walls, from generation to generation. And the constancy of the trees in their family histories.
“If you plant a maple tree, you’re hoping that maybe your kids will tap it someday, and if you tap a tree, it’s one that first germinated 40 years ago, at a minimum, or in some cases 100 years ago,” Lange said.
It reminded the author of another project he’d worked on thousands of miles away, in a Moroccan village beside a lake that had been struck by a draught attributed to the changing climate. Lange remembered the loss on one man’s face when he told him he used to wake up to the singing of the frogs in the lake, and now he wakes up to silence.
When writing about changes to sugaring, Lange says he hit on something universal. “When sugarmakers talk about sugaring, they talk about their woods,” he said. “They talk about knowing the trees: ‘This tree’s a good yielder. This one catches the sun a little bit earlier, so it’s going to start running a little bit earlier, too. You can’t tap this tree on the north side because there’s an old flaw that you can’t really see, but I knew this tree when I was nine years old, so I know that.’”
That might sound sentimental, but it’s not, Lange said. It’s an awareness of where things used to stand, how to apply that now, what the future might hold.
“There’s not a sense of, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is going to be gone tomorrow,” Lange said. “But because of the long timescale that sugar-makers are used to thinking in, three generations feels more immediate.”
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press May 2, 2018
In this April 26, 2018, photo, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt removes his glasses as he testifies at a hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee for the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Alex Brandon / AP)
The lobbyist whose wife rented a condo to Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt at $50 a night sought EPA committee posts for a lobbying client, according to a newly released EPA memo.
J. Steven Hart’s seeking those appointments from his wife’s former tenant, Pruitt, shows “the extent to which the special interests providing him with gifts have sought specific favors from EPA in return,” said Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The memo makes for the latest in a months-long barrage of news reports and federal investigations questioning spending and other actions at Pruitt’s EPA. Pruitt’s former security chief, whose time with Pruitt saw the EPA administrator provided with round-the-clock security and first-class flights in the name of security, was due to appear for an interview with staff on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday.
The New York Times first reported the new memo from Hart, the lobbyist.
Hart wrote the email Aug. 10 to Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff.
“I want to highlight three candidates…who were nominated by our client, Dennis Treacy, the president of the Smithfield Foundation,” Hart wrote, suggesting appointments for the three to an EPA science advisory board.
The foundation is an arm of Smithfield Foods Inc. of Virginia, known for its hams. Smithfield Foods paid at least $280,000 in lobbying fees in 2017 to Hart’s firm, and Hart was listed by name as representing Smithfield as its lobbyist when he wrote the email, according to federal lobbying records.
Asked if the request represented a conflict of interest for Pruitt, the EPA provided a statement from Jackson that did not address that question directly. The suggestions were among hundreds the EPA received for the board, and the three people suggested by Hart were not appointed to the advisory board, Jackson said in the statement.
Pruitt told Fox News in April that, “Mr. Hart has no clients that had business before this agency,” but a spokesman for Hart subsequently acknowledged that Hart actually met with Pruitt in his office in July 2017 — about one month — before Hart’s proposed nominations to discuss efforts to preserve the Chesapeake Bay.
Pruitt’s assertion had been in response to questions about the propriety of his leasing the condo, at a bargain rate, from Hart’s wife.
Pallone, the lawmaker, called the August email “further proof that Administrator Pruitt has consistently misled Congress and the public.”
Incredible creatures! #Jellyfish
Some of the most amazing and unusual jellyfish
Incredible creatures! #Jellyfish
Posted by Hashem Al-Ghaili on Sunday, February 11, 2018
Robert Reich posted a new episode. May 1, 2018
The 5 Biggest Failures of the Trump Tax Scam
The giant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy is the only legislative accomplishment of Trump and his congressional enablers. By any standard, it’s been a complete and total disaster. Our latest video looks at the 5 biggest failures of Trump's tax scam. What do you think?
Posted by Robert Reich on Tuesday, May 1, 2018
By Amanda Abrams – Farm Bill, Food Justice May 1, 2028
More than 50,000 people struggle with food insecurity in Durham, North Carolina. So when a group of public health workers, farm advocates, and member of the Duke University community came together in 2016 to create a food policy council in the region, access to healthy food was at the top of their list.
First, the council—called the Durham Farm and Food Network—mapped out the resources available to hungry households in order to gain an understanding of the depth of the problem in the 300,000-person county.
Then, when the federal government proposed cutting almost $200 million over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last year, the group mobilized. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, formerly known as food stamps, helps 12 percent of the county’s households get food on the table and is a critical component of the area’s food system.
“We recognized are these federal programs [are effective], and any amount of effort we can apply for hungry people should be put there,” said Neal Curran, one of the Network’s leaders.
Members reached out to another food policy council in eastern North Carolina, which includes the district of House Agriculture Committee member David Rouzer, suggesting that the two collaborate on an advocacy effort aimed at protecting SNAP in North Carolina and nationally.
In the end, 11 food policy councils from around the state joined the effort, co-signing a letter that urged no cuts to SNAP or other federal nutrition programs, and 120 other North Carolina organizations and municipalities signed on as well. Letters were delivered to Rep. Rouzer, both of North Carolina’s senators, and several other members of Congress last month.
It’s not clear what impact the letters will have, if any. In fact, when the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2018 Farm Bill was unveiled earlier this month it included significant changes to SNAP that raised red flags for the council members. But the group will continue pushing for a bill that protects SNAP. The organization just co-wrote an op-ed with several partners and is discussing coordinating with other food councils in key states.
This type of coordinated action marks a big step forward for the state’s food policy councils, and one that’s being echoed throughout the U.S.
Food policy councils have taken root around the country over the past decade, creating grassroots political power to address the specific needs of their communities. And the recent effort to protect SNAP is just one example of the ways these groups have begun to draw powerful connections between their local work and federal-level policies.
Food policy councils, which tend to be city- or county-based, often consist of a range of stakeholders—including unusual allies like longtime farmers, social services staff, and educators—who convene in order to expand dialogue about the local food system and address food insecurity. The first groups originated back in the 1980s, but the movement didn’t reach a critical mass until about 2010.
With 35 councils, North Carolina may be the state with the most in the country (an official tally underway at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, which tracks food councils around the country, isn’t final yet). Much of that growth has been attributed to Community Food Strategies, a North Carolina nonprofit collaborative run by several major food-related organizations; it’s one of the biggest and most active food council networks in the country.
The group itself does not advocate on issues, but it does provide training and information to food councils on topics including how to hold community forums, reach out to elected officials, and conduct advocacy campaigns. It also hosts gatherings that bring the state’s councils together, allowing their members to learn from one another.
“We’re interested in having local councils that have a sense of what’s happening, that can be a go-to group for the community and also for decision makers,” said Abbey Piner, the project lead at Community Food Strategies.
For instance, the organization works with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Food Policy Council, one of the state’s oldest and most active. In 2015 and 2016, the council held candidate forums to draw attention to issues of food insecurity and healthy eating; by 2017, it had become an authority on the subjects. These days, the council works closely with Rep. Alma Adams, a local congresswoman who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, providing her with information about regional needs and receiving regular updates on federal activity.
Community Food Strategies also works with smaller food councils like the one in the town of Alamance, which started out by conducting a community assessment outlining the area’s food system. Three years later, the collaborative is launching a branding campaign, “Authentically Alamance,” to educate residents about supporting local produce.
For the group’s members, who had never engaged in federal advocacy before, signing the letter opposing cuts to the SNAP program was eye-opening—and vital.
“[SNAP] is a very important program for our community,” says Ann Meletzke, director of the Alamance Food Collaborative. And not only because it supports low-income families, she adds. “The farmers [at our farmers’ markets] are running small businesses; there’s a reciprocity between them and those who are using SNAP to shop there. It needs to be cultivated.”
North Carolina is ahead of the game when it comes to federal-level advocacy, but food policy councils around the country are responding, especially when it comes to the farm bill, says Karen Bassarab, a program officer at the Center for a Livable Future. “With reauthorization [of the farm bill], we’re seeing an increased interest—and also since the change in the federal administration.” But local and statewide groups vary greatly in their strategies, she added.
For example, Kentucky’s food council network, the Community Farm Alliance, is launching statewide community forums about the farm bill next month. The Los Angeles Food Policy Council is hosting an awareness-raising party this month; the group will also be working with the mayor’s office to pass a resolution in defense of SNAP. Michigan’s Center for Regional Food Systems, the state’s food council convener, regularly meets with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And the Chesapeake Food Policy Leadership Initiative has launched a series of webinars educating the councils in its network about how to engage with the bill.
Many groups around the country are still getting up to speed on the intricacies around federal nutrition programs and the farm bill, says Bassarab. “Some are not at the point where they can engage immediately,” she explains. And that means they’ll probably have to wait until the next farm bill cycle—or another federal food issue—comes around.
However, given the widening gulf between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ approaches to the bill, there’s a chance the House Agriculture Committee will be too deadlocked to move it forward, and might simply extend the current bill for another year. That might give the country’s food policy councils more experience and clout: In another year, many more councils might just be prepared to go to battle to save nutrition benefits for the country’s neediest.
By Ted Howard, Orig. pub. by The Next System Project April 26, 2018
Ted Howard’s remarks to the Environmental Funders Network in Cambridge, England, on February 2nd, 2018. These prepared remarks have been lightly edited for publication.
Good afternoon.
I want to begin by thanking the conference organizers for extending an invitation to address you during your important annual deliberations.
I come before you today not as an expert on environmental matters, but as someone who has devoted his professional life to social justice concerns, in particular addressing economic and social inequality in the United States and in the Global South.
While much good work has been done on the inequality issue, the very bitter truth is that despite our best efforts, inequality is growing dramatically in nations around the world, including here in the United Kingdom and in most of Europe.
To cite just two figures: in the United States, just 400 people own as much wealth as the bottom 204 million people.1 Globally, just 8 billionaires own as much wealth as 50% of the entire population of our planet.2 And this negative trend – representing a medieval concentration of wealth and power that is deeply problematic for democratic culture – is escalating.
While I am not an expert on environmental issues, it appears to me that very large order negative trends are similarly impacting your field.
Like most, perhaps all, of you, I remember the landmark 1972 study “The Limits to Growth” by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. I was blessed in the 1980s to work closely with Donella Meadows on the issue of the persistence of hunger, and to call her friend before her untimely death. “The Limits to Growth” study showed that if we continued along the same path we were on over four decades ago we would eventually reach a breaking point: what the authors called environmental overshoot. Knowing what we knew back then, and despite the important victories won over the years, it’s astonishing to see that we are very much still on the same path projected in the study despite all the efforts since to get on a different track.3
Simply by way of example:
Today, soil depletion has destroyed one-third of all arable land, which means we have only sixty harvests left,
Natural resources are being consumed at around 1.5 times the Earth’s ability to regenerate them,
We’ve already lost nearly two-thirds of all vertebrates since 1970 – the sixth mass extinction.4
And even the most progressive and far-reaching climate agreement (the Paris Agreement), in the unlikely event that we adhere to it, puts us on course to a three to four degree increase in temperature, instead of limiting the increase to below two degrees, the clear and agreed-upon threshold to keep us within a climate safety zone.
I do not intend to dwell on this difficult news, but simply to indicate that there are very large order trends taking place that are negative and that are escalating. Rather, I would like to focus the remainder of my remarks on the question of “Why?” Why are these trends seemingly impervious to our ability to alter within the context of the work we do? And how might we create a new approach that addresses the root cause of these trends – be it escalating inequality or environmental degradation and destruction?
Let me be clear: I recognize that everyone in this room is doing extraordinary work, has devoted your lives to this cause, and are making some real difference – but in the main the difference is being made at the margin. The inconvenient truth is that we face a problem beyond politics and reform, beyond good projects and initiatives and campaigns – ours is a systemic crisis at the very heart of our 21st century political-economy.
One of my colleagues is James Gustave Speth – an esteemed environmentalist who founded leading U.S. organizations such as the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and who served as chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and as the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. As Gus Speth has said “We have won many victories, but we are losing the planet.”5
In my view, whether we are working on inequality or the environment, our activities, even when successful, essentially amount to slowing bad things from happening as fast as they might without our efforts – we are trying to hold back the tide, at least for a bit, as best we can. But at the end of the day a tsunami is coming and it threatens to overwhelm all of the good work we have done. Deep in our hearts we know that somehow while what we are doing is absolutely necessary, it is also woefully insufficient, because the longer term negative trends continue unabated.
When long, long trends get steadily worse (or get no better), year in and year out, it is clear that something more profound, something systemic is at play.
As the ecological rift widens, we must recognize that core features of the current system – unrestrained growth, measuring our success by the growth of GDP, ever greater concentrations of wealth and power, a commitment to short-term and even negative results to maximize the corporate bottom-line – are simply incompatible with a sustainable, just, and equitable future. We are trying to go up the down escalator, which is moving faster and faster against us.
We will never be able to go far enough, or fast enough, doing the right things on climate – or equality – without addressing the defining features of our political economic system, which continuously work against equitable, sustainable solutions.
This conclusion – that we must address the nature, design, and implications of the system – by which I mean extreme forms of corporate capitalism, may sound radical to some. But in fact it was the very conclusion reached by much of the environmental movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, when many of the leading environmental thinkers and practitioners of the period concluded that deep economic and societal transformation was needed if we were to succeed in saving our planet. Gross Domestic Product and the national income accounts were challenged for their failure to tell us things that really matter.
The overall point of these early environmentalists was that we should strike at the root causes of environmental decline. They saw that doing so would require us to seek fundamental changes in our prevailing system of political economy – to proceed down the path of system change. In other words, they believed that the problem was the system itself.
They realized that what was needed was to step outside the system to change it before it is too late.
The good news is that the two major systemic problems I am addressing today – economic and environmental – are two sides of the same coin. To solve one, we must solve the other. And there are ways that hold promise for solving both at the same time.
The starting point, I believe, resides in our communities. A community that is not economically secure cannot be ecologically sustainable.
It is very difficult for communities to deal effectively with ecological issues if they are overwhelmed with issues related to economic instability.
When a community is at the mercy of the investment decisions made by corporations concerned primarily with their bottom line and maximizing shareholder value – and at the mercy of government decisions that are unduly influenced by corporate power – that community can neither be certain of its economic future nor self-confident enough to undertake aggressive local sustainability initiatives.
There are many examples of this in practice. The evidence suggests that economic stability is good for environmental legislation: it tends to reduce the fear of job loss that may come with regulation. Conversely, the same fear—as we are experiencing in our own day —keeps those negative trends moving in the wrong direction when the economy falters. One analysis shows that only six major environmental laws were enacted since 1970 in the United States when annual unemployment was over 7 percent, and none at all with unemployment greater than 7.7 percent.6
As studies have found over and over again, at the end of the day economically successful regions and localities have stronger and more effective environmental regulations and outcomes.
Furthermore, for a community to sustain its environmental gains it also needs to be economically sustainable. Economic stability is not only important to get us where we need to go, but also to keep us there.
Lack of economic stability will eventually lead to rollbacks despite years of our hard work and progress achieved.
Negative political feedback loops can come and throw all the progress away, as we have seen with the election of Donald Trump – who in less than one year in office has been able to undo decades of environmental gains in the United States,7 not to speak of withdrawing the world’s largest economy and polluter from the Paris Agreement.
So let us talk about the system question and how to address it.
My view is that we have entered what is best understood as an unusual form of systemic crisis, not simply a political crisis. Which is to say that the large system of our form of corporate capitalism is in trouble, not simply its political system. Long, long trends of growing inequality, of ecological destruction – trends that do not bend in more than token ways to the politics of reform – these define problems that have their origins much deeper in the political-economic design of the system itself. These trends – including climate change – are not aberrations. They are logical outcomes of the nature, values, and construction of our system.
System change is essential because our environmental problems are rooted in defining features of our current political economy. Again, to quote my colleague Gus Speth:
An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at virtually any cost; […] powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to generate profit and grow, including profit from avoiding the social and environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize these costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred endlessly by sophisticated advertising; social injustice and economic insecurity so vast that they paralyze action and empower often false claims that needed measures would costs jobs and hurt the economy; economic activity now so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet – all these combine to deliver an ever-growing economy that is undermining the ability of the planet to sustain human and natural communities.8
It’s clearly time for something different – a new kind of environmentalism. And here is the core of this new environmentalism: it seeks a new economy. It seeks to escape from the system just described and move to a next system.
When you live within a system, it looks like it will never fundamentally change – that we can tinker around the margins but not really change the heart of the system. It has been said that it is easier to envision the end of life on our planet than it is to envision the end of capitalism.
And yet systems change. I imagine that during almost 3,000 years of Pharoah’s Egypt, people thought life would always be dominated by pharaohs and priests, with slaves building Pyramids. And now that system is in the British Museum. The same is true with Medieval Europe – who could envision a system beyond the nobility, the church, and serfdom?
What holds a system in place, often, is a failure of imagination that things can fundamentally change, and that there are real, viable alternatives for organizing a new or a next system.
In our own day, can we envision bringing forth a new system in our countries and world that, as a matter of the daily functioning of the system, produces greater equality and more rational environmental outcomes? Imagine that! We take for granted that our current system produces enormous negative outcomes. Can we imagine a system that does quite the opposite – regularly produces better environmental outcomes, produces more equality – just as part of the natural functioning of the system?
How do we establish the basis of something far more transformative beyond our current system and situation?
How might it be possible to move forward, especially in difficult political times, to lay foundations for a transformation in the direction of a serious new systemic answer? Part of the answer – part – lies in on-the-ground experimentation and model building that embraces the design and principles of a new systemic alternative. There is precedent for this.
As the Great Depression took hold in the United States in 1929 and the early 30s, the levels of pain across the country grew. But the ideology of the then Federal government was that the government should do nothing to address the growing depression – the market would correct itself. And so in community after community, people began to address their problems themselves. Historians call this period in the life of the United States, the “Laboratories of Democracy” … when new approaches were devised that could eventually be lifted up and scaled when there is a new political opening.
America’s primary social safety net – the Social Security system – began in Alaska and California communities as people grappled with their challenges. When the politics changed nationally, when the Roosevelt Administration came into power, these small models were lifted up into a comprehensive national system of support for older Americans.
In Britain, when health minister Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew as inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community-based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was scaled up into one of the great health systems in the world.
As former Labour leader Neil Kinnock later wrote:
As he [Bevan] testified, the experience of a local working model that embodied all the principles of universal donation during fitness for universal provision during illness was invaluable. It made the rapid establishment of a national system feasible because that task was then more a matter of refinement and enlargement rather than one of raw invention.9
What are some models and ideas that start to point to the outlines of a next system approach in our own time? And that might have the opportunity to move toward much larger scale over time?
Boulder, CO: local residents and city officials have embarked upon a long and ambitious project to replace the existing giant for-profit electrical utility that produces much of its energy from coal with a democratically accountable, publicly-owned utility to speed up the green transition. Rather than try to impose regulations on the corporate utility, the community has decided to own its own green power source for energy. This reinforces democratic control, will produce wealth in the community as money is not siphoned off to outside investors, and will improve environmental conditions.
Cleveland, OH: the Evergreen Cooperatives, a linked network currently consisting of three worker-owned businesses located in severely disinvested neighborhoods, that focuses on providing green and sustainable goods and services to local “anchor institutions” like hospitals and universities. This is beginning to bear fruit for roughly 140 local workers – many with serious barriers to employment – who are building their capital accounts in addition to receiving living wages, profit-sharing, and good benefits. Evergreen anticipates that it will double the number of its employee owners in 2018.
Each of the three cooperatives was purposefully designed to be green–from the decision to use some of the most efficient laundry machines to operating out of LEED certified and energy efficient buildings to focusing one business line on solar panel installation and lighting retrofits, to producing millions of heads of leafy greens locally, thus eliminating 1,500 miles of carbon based transportation – the localization of the services have in itself a great direct impact in reducing transportation emissions as services are no longer coming from out of state or even out of the country, but rather a few miles away from where they are needed.
These initiatives are not only happening in traditional Blue, democratic states across the Atlantic. Red states, very conservative areas of America, Trump voting areas, are also leading the way with initiatives such as:
Greensburg, Kansas several years ago was leveled by a tornado. In rebuilding after the devastation, this community in America’s heartland became—in a deep red state, under a Republican mayor—one of the greenest towns in the country when the government acted as partner and catalyst to rebuild the town.
Similarly, in the heart of coal country, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized for participatory economic planning around a post-coal future in Appalachia, fighting for the Clean Power Plan when it was blocked at the state level. Citizen action creating a more sustainable and economically viable future.10
Next system models that build equality and produce better environmental outcomes are also growing in the United Kingdom.
Preston: Another opportunity is currently taking place in NW England in the city of Preston. You may have read about what is being called the “Preston Model” in The Guardian.11 The Preston Model is being built in the de-industrialized area of England, an area that expressed itself against the status quo through Brexit – I believe every single district of Lancashire voted to leave the EU.
When a large retail investment that was going to be made in Preston fell through in 2011, local city councilors embarked upon a bold system changing plan to rebuild the Preston economy. This has included:
Enlisting local anchor institutions – UCLAN, the city government, the local police authority and more – to refocus their supply chain to buy locally: repatriated 70 million pounds; 1,648 jobs supported
Development of a public bank to get out from under the power of the five large banks
Cooperative businesses being incubated by the university to put people to work
Fairer Power Red Rose, a public energy supplier
$100 million pounds of pension funds locally invested
and much more
This is more than a project. It is a system changing approach to taking control of their own future and to build community wealth for the many, not just the few.
These are examples of how people and groups and local governments can come together to take control of their communities’ futures and plant the seeds of change through innovative initiatives that provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities.
Beyond these very place-based, on-the-ground “laboratories of democracy” models that are being put in place today, and can be scaled up to help build the next system – we also need to work on bigger order things, bold new proposals that can intervene in the current system.
Here are two examples of what we at The Democracy Collaborative are doing:
Quantitative Easing for The Planet: More than anything else, due to the climate emergency we need to buy time. At a science conference ahead of the December Paris meetings in 2015, the dean of climate science, Joachim Schellnhuber argued that:
In order to stay below 2 C (3.6F) [the internationally agreed limit for global warming], or even 3 C, we need to have something really disruptive, which I would call an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20 to 30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous, climate change.12
In that spirit – creating something truly disruptive of the carbon economy – a year ago my colleagues at The Democracy Collaborative proposed a unique and important idea that if rightfully implemented can, at once, keep the vast majority of US fossil fuels in the ground – an essential step to limit temperature increases to a safe level– and remove the opposing interests of energy industry against the 3rd energy revolution. The idea, which we refer to as “Quantitative Easing for the Planet”, proposes a Federal Reserve-financed $1 trillion buyout of the US fossil fuel industry using QE (not tax dollars) on the model of the rescue of the banks and of past crisis interventions, nationalizations, and buyouts, which have been common in US history. In effect, buy out the fossil fuel industry and strand the reserves of carbon in the form of coal, gasoline, etc. in the ground.13
2 Degree Lending: But buying time is just one of several steps needed. We also need to move capital away from fossil fuels and into building the array of institutions so green initiatives can reach the critical mass and allow us to break through on climate and other issues.
To do so, we recently launched the 2 Degree Lending project. Through this project we aim to help create the “green” financial ecosystem at scale that is required to quickly close the climate finance gap. The idea here is to promote an unprecedented shift on how bank lending – the world’s largest source of finance – and investment decisions are made. Initiatives include promoting the creation of a new International Climate Bank on the model of the UK’s Green Investment Bank and also to create an accelerator to help advanced cities and metropolitan regions get over the line in creating new banking institutions locally, including public and community banks, that can finance the transition to a climate-positive local and regional economy.
These are just some approaches and models and innovations that begin to rise to the level of systemic interventions. I’m sure you all have other examples. But the point is to move beyond tinkering at the margins to address head on the nature of the systemic crisis we face, and build the alternatives now that can move to scale over time.
Let me conclude with some brief thoughts about your role in all of this – the role of philanthropy. I have been on both sides of the equation. As CEO of an NGO that is largely grant-funded, I interact with funders in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and continental Europe to raise money for my organization. I have also served as a Senior Fellow with the Cleveland Foundation, the oldest community foundation in the United States, and I have advised numerous foundations on strategies to foster systemic change of the kind I have been speaking about with you.
The role of philanthropy in helping to catalyze deep systemic change is key: We are only going to be able to reboot our vision and strategies to make breakthrough changes in the current trends if philanthropy is ready to invest in meaningful, bold, systemic action. This means moving beyond projects – what I call “project-itis” – to promote serious systemic disruption.
Philanthropy needs to be ready to invest in ideas that go beyond conventional projects that may achieve limited short-term results but are woefully insufficient to the need for a long-term solution.
The reason we at The Democracy Collaborative have been able to do this kind of thinking and work on-the-ground is because we have been fortunate to partner with several funders who believe in this vision and the need for systemic change – work in which results may not able to be measured immediately but that nonetheless has shown successful outcomes and openings over time.
Are we as individuals, and is philanthropy as a sector, ready to go beyond the current approach and invest in ideas and innovations that are truly capable of producing sustainable, lasting, and more democratic outcomes?
For at the end of the day, each of us must ask again the basic question: “What is an environmental issue? Air and water pollution, of course. But what if the right answer is that environmental issues include anything that determines environmental outcomes.”14 Then surely we must look to transform our system that gives rise to the environmental challenges our planet faces.
Thank you.
1.Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies (2017), accessed March 28,2018, https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BILLIONAIRE–BONANZA-2017-Embargoed.pdf
2.OXFAM, “An Economy for the 99%” (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://d1tn3vj7xz9fdh.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf
3.Graham Turner, “Is Global Collapse Imminent?,” Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute Research Paper No. 4 (2014), accessed March 28, 2018 http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
4.Mathew Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Carys Roberts, “The Road to Ruin: Making sense of the Anthropocene,” Institute for Progressive Policy Research volume 24, Issue 3 (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/editorial-the-road-to-ruin-making-sense-of-the-anthropocene
5.James Gustave Speth, Angels by the River: A Memoir (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).
6.Daniel J. Weiss, “Anatomy of a Senate Climate Bill Death”, Center for American Progress (201, corrected on May 7, 2013), accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2010/10/12/8569/anatomy-of-a-senate-climate-bill-death/
7.For a full list of Trump’s Administration environmental rollbacks, please visit Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s Climate Deregulation Tracker at http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker/
8.Gus Speth, “The Joyful Economy: A Next System Possibility,” Next System Project (2017), accessed March 28, 2018, https://thenextsystem.org/the-joyful-economy
9.Jones, Gareth. The Aneurin Bevan Inheritance : The Story of the Nevill Hall and District NHS Trust. Abertillery: Old Bakehouse Publications, 1998.
10.To learn more about the initiative, please visit https://www.kftc.org/
11.Aditya Chakrabortty, “In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control,” The Guardian, January 31, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control
12.Damian Carrington, “Fossil fuel industry must ‘implode’ to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist,” The Guardian, July 10, 2015, accessed March 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/fossil-fuel-industry-must-implode-to-avoid-climate-disaster-says-top-scientist
13.For more information please see Gar Alperovitz, Joe Guinan, and Thomas Hanna, “The Policy Weapon Climate Activists Need,” The Nation, April 26, 2017, accessed March 28, 2018 https://www.thenation.com/article/the-policy-weapon-climate-activists-need/
14.Gus Speth, “The Joyful Economy”, https://thenextsystem.org/the-joyful-economy.
D. Parvaz May 1, 2018
President Trump claimed that the unverified contents of Israeli prime minister’s presentation on Iran’s “secret” nuclear weapons program proved that he has been “100 percent right” in wanting to scrap the deal. Credit: Screenshot of CNN broadcast.
Israel and the United States have issued a steady volley of statements against Iran over the past few days that have built a familiar case for war against Tehran, culminating in a bizarre presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in which he used old information to argue that the Iran deal was based on lies.
A stream of news and analysis pieces cropped up Thursday about Israel’s willingness to strike back against Iran if Tehran struck first — as if Iran was seriously considering a first-strike against Israel.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Thursday went so far as to say that war between Iran and Israel is “very likely,” even though he wasn’t sure how this war would start. This is the beat of a drum that has been played before, most loudly in 2007, when Vice President Dick Cheney pushed for a war against Iran, Israel openly threatened Iran after bombing Syrian nuclear facilities, and Sen. John McCain sang about bombing Iran.
Subtle: Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech on Iran’s nuclear program in Tel Aviv on April 30, 2018. Credit: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.
Following that familiar script, over the weekend, newly-minted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited U.S. allies in the Middle East and Iran was, of course, at the top of his agenda in Saudi Arabia and in Israel, where he emphasized President Donald Trump’s view of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and accused Iran of being a threat to regional security.
Pompeo even managed to squeeze in a shot against Iran in his meeting in Jordan.
By Monday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the United States of waging an economic war against Iran, while encouraging other states to take military action against the country.
“Today, the war room against us is the U.S. Department of Treasury,” said Khamenei, according to the semi-official Mehr News Agency. “One way of confrontation with the Islamic Republic establishment is an economic one; another way is the provocation of certain dim-witted and ignorant states in our region [against us],” he said, referring to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
“The [Americans] seek to shift onto others the costs of confrontation with the Islamic Republic establishment and the powerful Iranian nation,” he said. “What Washington does best is cause insecurity. Everywhere they have set foot in, they caused insecurity and brought misfortune for the people,” he added.
French president aims to talk President Trump out of bailing on Iran nuclear deal
Mehrzad Boroujerdi, professor of political science at Syracuse University told ThinkProgress he’s worried that the stage is being set for military action against Iran.
“What is happening, in light of the missile attacks [by Israel against Iranian forces] in Syria, it really seems like we are entering a stage whereby the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia have really decided to take it a notch up in terms of militarily challenging Iran and making sure that the recent victories scored there can be nullified to some extent,” he added.
Boroujerdi said that what’s in play is a more orchestrated plan to provoke Iran — or the force it supports in Lebanon, Hezbollah — to retaliate against Israel in some way. This could also set the stage for further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah territories.
Trump: “I’ve been 100 percent right”
A potential military action would complement Trump’s likely plans to pull out of the JCPOA, as Pompeo indicated last week.
The president has until May 12 to extend sanctions waivers to Iran under the JCPOA, which, in exchange, requires that Iran continue to limit its enrichment activities and allow inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, to inspect its facilities on a regular basis.
But the president is unlikely to do so, and said as much the last time he extended the sanctions in January. He has repeatedly accused Iran of not complying with the deal, even though the IAEA has repeatedly — and consistently — said that Iran is compliance with the terms of JCPOA. So too has the U.S. State Department, and Pompeo, a vocal opponent of the deal.
European partners try — and fail — to pass new Iran sanctions to appease Trump
On Monday, after his visit with Pompeo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a presentation in Tel Aviv in which he alleged — as he has many times in the past — that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. While Israeli officials claimed the presentation was based on new intelligence, the IAEA was aware of the information Netanyahu spoke of well before the Iran deal and published material about it in 2011.
Shortly after that speech, President Trump took questions from reporters on the deal. He praised Netanyahu’s presentation, and said that he remains convinced that the deal is not worth keeping.
“We’ll see what happens. But I think, if anything, what’s happening today and over the last little while and what we’ve learned has really shown that I’ve been 100 percent right,” said Trump.
But there has been zero evidence of that, according to the United Nations.
In the lead up to his U.S. visit, Saudi prince continues to say dangerous things about Iran
Given that Iran has not actually violated the deal, the Trump administration has, for the past several months, taken an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to trying to dismantle the deal.
Last October, the president accused Iran of violating the “spirit” of the deal. Earlier this year, he alleged that Iran is providing missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen, where the United States has supported the Saudi Arabia-led coalition to bomb the country for over two years, triggering a massive humanitarian crisis. During German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit last week, Trump said, “Wherever there’s a problem, Iran is right there.”
President Trump has asked the European partners in the deal — France, the United Kingdom, and Germany — to “fix” the deal. But they fell short of passing new sanctions against Iran, which has repeatedly indicated that it would not renegotiate the deal three years after it was struck, nor would it remain in the deal without the United States.
In October, President Trump also refused to recertify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, as he is required to do under U.S. law every 90 days. That decertification left the door open for Congress to snap back economic sanctions on Iran with 60 days, which did not happen.
But if it does this time around, and if the banking sanctions snap back, things will become dire in Iran. And that’s not good for anyone, said Boroujerdi. To start, Iran will have to turn to China, because they’re the only country offering the no-strings-attached funds Iran will need.
Iran will also face other hard choices — and some of them might prove to be destabilizing, which, said Boroujerdi, is the Trump administration’s “game plan.”
“They are hoping that by pulling out of the nuclear deal, with the formidable challenges that Iran is experiencing, in terms of the water crisis, the currency situation, lack of foreign investment, etc., will lead to some sort of popular uprising,” he said.
“This can really set the region ablaze. Having a country like Iran becoming unstable, in this situation, when the whole Middle East is imploding in one way or another, can really raise the stakes, considering Iran’s size, population, and the geopolitical position it occupies,” said Boroujerdi.
“I’m not sure Washington really wants to see that happen, but they are perhaps naively hopeful that this will be a self-contained regime change.”
By Annelise Jolley – Farmer Profiles, Local Eats April 30 2018
The organic, family-run operation relies on numerous by-hand processes and 100+ free-ranging animals to produce seven varieties of the sweet fruit. Since 2011, their mail-order operation has developed a fanatical following of date-lovers from around the country.
If you want to have the best date of your life, you’ll need to visit 7HotDates.com. Before you balk, you should know the Bautista family—owner of the Bautista Family Date Ranch and the aforementioned website—was a little unsure about the name at first.
“A customer thought of it,” explains Alvaro Bautista, one of five Bautista siblings. “We discussed the name because it seems like a double-entendre, but she convinced us that it was going to work. She said, ‘When they see it, they’re going to remember [you].’”
The name, along with a logo of puckered lips, has done its job. Today the family of date farmers lives and works on a 14-acre property of 1,000 date palms, each of which produce 200 pounds of fruit every year. Their dates are a staple at farmers’ markets from Santa Monica to Palm Springs, and their online store regularly sells out for four months out of the year.
The Bautistas farm dates in the Coachella Valley of California, where more than 90 percent of America’s dates are grown. In contrast to many commercial growers, they practice a more labor-intensive style of cultivation, hand-pollinating their trees instead of relying on mechanized pollination, and harvesting multiple times a year.
While most growers allow their dates to ripen to a drier texture on the tree before harvesting once in early fall, the Bautistas begin climbing their trees in August to hand-pick individual fruits at peak ripeness. This attention to variance in flavor and texture has earned them a cult following at farmers’ markets and, with the launch of their online store, around the country.
Different varieties of dates await packaging in the Bautista’s processing house.
The Bautista Family Date Ranch sits in a desert town called Mecca at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unlikely landmark in the middle of Southern California’s desert. Driving east from San Diego, the 15- by 35-mile Salton Sea appears as a wash of blue against the beige expanse. The sea was formed when the Colorado River flooded its banks in 1905. Cities on its banks enjoyed a short heyday as resort towns, but when the sea’s salinity became inhospitable, and fish started rotting on its shores, vacation destinations transformed into polluted ghost towns. But date palms thrive in this desolate, sandy landscape, with the scorching, 110-plus-degree temperatures, extreme sunlight, and deep underground aquifers producing tender, syrupy dates.
Dates were first introduced to America in the early 1900s, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored global excursions to bring back exotic foods; explorers traveled to the Middle East and returned with offshoots of date palms which they introduced to the Saharan-like valley.
Most commercial growers in the region focus on two popular date varieties: deglet noor and medjool. But the Bautistas’ relatively small-scale operation produces seven varieties: medjool, khadrawy, halawy, honey, deglet noor, zahidi, and barhi, each with its own characteristics and flavors.
The ranch, which has been farmed organically for more than 50 years, feels like an oasis. Thickly growing palms shade the property. Roosters crow, and a warm breeze rustles the fronds. Pecan, guava, and mango trees supplement the family’s date intake—up to a pound a day during harvest—and a herd of animals roam the ranch freely.
“That’s the best part of my job,” says Alvaro. “I go to Los Angeles [for markets], and then I get to come back here.”
The Bautista family’s success has been decades in the making and has not come without its share of suffering. The five siblings’ father, Enrique Bautista, and his wife, Graciela, immigrated to the Coachella Valley from Michoacán, Mexico in the early 1970s. Enrique got his start in agriculture working with grapes and citrus plants and eventually began farming dates.
By the late 1990s, Enrique was working as foreman on a date ranch and living across the street with Graciela and their five kids: Alvaro, Maricela, Alicia, Jaime, and Enrique, Jr. When the owners of the ranch retired, they offered the business to him, extending a private loan that made the purchase possible.
Agriculture was in the Bautistas’ DNA—the family had spent seasons processing grapes and harvesting apples side by side—so it was only natural that Enrique’s wife and children would join him on the date ranch. His wife and daughters managed the packing house and administration, while his sons oversaw the growing and farmers’ market sales. During harvest season, everyone went up into the trees.
Enrique and Alvaro check up on trees at the edge of the ranch.
Then in 2004, a car wreck on the way home from a market left Enrique paralyzed. After the accident, the family hunkered down on the ranch. They cut back on markets and sold palm trees, hiring more people to take over Enrique’s work. They created paths between the rows of trees so he could still manage his property from an electric wheelchair. Alvaro took over sales, driving hours every day to farmers’ markets across Southern California. Even though the Bautistas banded together, they still struggled to keep the family business afloat.
It was a customer’s belief in the value of their fruit that saved the ranch. Pro bono, she designed the website 7HotDates.com, a play on the high temperatures that coax the palms into producing. The new name and website, launched in 2011, created a buzz at farmers’ markets and directed a surge of customers to the online store.
Once the Bautistas could field orders online, they discovered a community of date aficionados around the country who were eager for fresh dates of all varieties. Their five to six mail orders per week shot up to dozens per day—and now they sell up to 90 orders a day during harvest season to customers as far away as Canada.
While most customers pay online with credit cards, the Bautistas still offer to take payments by an honor system, a return envelope tucked in each box of dates. And they still work together. Alicia is the office manager; Alvaro is a farmer and farmers’-market salesman; and Maricela runs the packing house. Enrique’s other two sons live and work nearby, and Enrique continues to oversee the ranch from his scooter-friendly pathways.
Reflecting on how his family weathered the aftermath of his accident, Enrique says, “You have to work hard. That is the best recommendation.”
“And enjoy,” adds Alvaro. “It’s a lot of work, but if you enjoy it and know that you are doing it for the best of your family, it’s a lot easier.”
Although many things have changed since the Ranch’s early days, the Bautistas have remained committed to certain practices, like minimal processing. While many commercial date growers subject their fruit to hydrating, dehydrating, steaming, and glazing to maintain the fruit’s appearance and shelf life, the Bautista’s dates are never steamed, frozen, or heated and are packaged in their natural, pit-in state.
Additionally, one of Enrique’s first decisions as owner was to pursue organic certification. The ranch’s first farmers registered the property as organic, and having worked on conventional orchards around chemicals and pesticides, Enrique wanted his own ranch to be free of toxins. The Bautistas began the organic certification process in 1999 and received their official certification in 2002.
Alvaro demonstrates the by-hand thinning technique for young medjool buds.
As a certified organic operation, the Bautistas use free-ranging goats, cows, sheep, chickens, and even peacocks—known for killing snakes—to manage the property. Rather than relying on the pesticides used by conventional date farms, the ranch relies on animals to keep pests and date predators at bay. “We have a zoo,” says Enrique of the more than 100 animals that do their part to eat pests, trim weeds, graze on the cowpeas cover crop, and fertilize the soil with organic matter. The animals’ manure alone accomplishes 80 percent of the soil building.
On the ranch—which functions as an interconnected system whose distinct parts serve a whole—the work rarely abates. “With date palm trees, there’s always something to do,” says Alvaro. “It takes about seven months from blossom to harvest, so it’s almost like a baby.”
Not only is the work demanding because of the dates’ long growing cycle, but the Bautistas also inject specialized care into every farm task. “[When] everything you do is for the trees, they’ll produce more,” says Enrique. “The more you invest, the more they give.”
Whereas since the 1970s, many commercial growers—certified organic as well as conventional—have turned to mechanized pollination methods to save time and labor, the Bautistas hand pollinate every tree on the property each spring. When the male palms that ring the ranch begin to blossom, Alvaro and other employees harvest their pollen and dust it on the stalks of the female trees individually —a more labor-intensive method, but one that ensures thorough pollination of every palm. Once pollinated, in lieu of using pesticides, they hand-tie cloth bags around their dates to protect them from birds and bugs.
Pollinated date bunches are covered in paper to contain the pollen.
Other days, they walk through the palms and hand-thin every medjool tree. Because the medjool date is larger, the fruits easily grow too tight, causing fermentation. Picking three date buds off the stem for every bud they leave on prevents insects or infection from multiplying inside the dense bunch. “[Medjools are] a little more labor,” Alvaro admits, “but everyone loves them because of their size.”
This attention to their customers’ preferences is what sets the Bautista’s dates apart. While most date producers harvest only once in October, the Bautistas are up in their trees by August, as soon as the dates are ripe.
This makes for trickier packing—younger fruit is sticky and retains moisture—but it also means they capture a flavor and texture rarely found elsewhere. After August, they harvest once or twice more, allowing them to monitor the fruit and pick every date at peak ripeness.
This isn’t the most efficient way to harvest, but the Bautistas aren’t after efficiency. They’ve built a successful ranch and a loyal fan base out of two things: hard work and care—for both their customers and their trees.
Top photo: Enrique Bautista, owner of the Bautista Family Date Ranch, sits in front of his children Alicia (L), Alvaro (middle), and Maricela (R).
All photos © Annelise Jolley.