Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
May 22, 2019
The winds of change are blowing, and they’re bringing clean energy, prosperity, and good jobs to the U.S. (via The Years Project)
The winds of change are blowing, and they're bringing clean energy, prosperity, and good jobs to the U.S. (via The Years Project)
Posted by NowThis Politics on Wednesday, May 22, 2019
“Far too many have suffered the consequences of global warming in recent months, and the political response has so far been woefully inadequate—and the denial is just evil.” — Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario
It will take our planet 3 million years to recover.
📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2RTLCcU
Scientists say humans are causing Earth's sixth mass extinction
It will take our planet 3 million years to recover. 📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2RTLCcU
Posted by World Economic Forum on Monday, March 25, 2019
Coal smoke and steam vapor pour out of the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant overlooking the Ohio River at dawn in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images file
In the latest bit of bad news for a planet beset by climate change, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has climbed to a level last seen more than 3 million years ago — before humans even appeared on the rocky ball we call home.
On Saturday, sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii indicated that concentrations of the greenhouse gas — a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels — had reached 415 parts per million (ppm), meaning that for every 1 million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 415 were of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun, and higher levels are associated with higher global temperatures and other effects of climate change, such as rising seas and unusual weather patterns.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen an average of 2.5 ppm per year over the past decade, reaching 400 ppm in 2013 — and the level appears likely to go higher from here.
“We’re racing toward a state very different from the kind humans evolved in and that civilization developed in,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
The last time levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were this high came during the Pliocene Epoch, which extended from about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago. During that period, average sea levels were about 50 feet higher than they are today and forests grew as far north as the Arctic, said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “Earth was a very different place,” he said. “You would hardly recognize the land surface, and my gosh, we don’t want to go there.”
But there is evidence to suggest the planet is headed in that direction. If the current trajectory continues, levels of CO2 could hit 500 ppm within 30 years, a number that could mean an increase in global temperatures of at least 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
“At the present pace, we could reach that well within a lot of people’s lifetimes,” Keeling said of the grim milestone ahead.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are commonly represented on a graph known as the Keeling Curve, named for Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who began taking daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958 from atop the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The curve shows a steep climb, owing to human-caused climate change.
As the planet inches toward 500 ppm, scientists are sounding the alarm over the potential for catastrophic changes to our environment. “None of these specific numbers are really thresholds in the sense that anything particular happens when we cross them,” Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told NBC News MACH in an email. “But as we go through them, we are putting our foot on the accelerator of climate change, and impacts and damage will continue to rise.”
But it’s hard to say exactly what these changes will bring, or when. Some things, like the loss of vegetation and sea-ice coverage, will grow increasingly visible in the short term. Other things, like the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, occur more slowly. “But these impacts are going to persist for a very long time,” said Dana Royer, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “Once that happens, we can’t really reverse it.”
Even if moving to renewable energy and other measures help stanch the steady flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, our descendants will likely be saddled with the negative consequences of our artificially elevated levels of CO2.
“We’re not going to see the full consequences of 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide today,” Jackson said. “It’ll take a thousand years of people — 30 generations of people — to pay the price of what we’re doing today.”
From bleeding burgers to vegan shrimp, synbio food is backed by billions of dollars in funding, but questions remain about its safety and possible risks.
Impossible’s “bleeding” veggie burger, shrimp made of algae, and vegan cheeses that melt are all making their way into restaurants and on to supermarket shelves, offering consumers a new generation of plant-based proteins that look, act, and taste far more like the real thing than ever before.
What consumers may not realize, however, is that many of these new foods are made using synthetic biology, an emerging science that applies principles of genetic engineering to create life forms from scratch.
Originally used to produce medicines, biofuels, and super bacteria designed to eat oil spills, synthetic biology is increasingly being applied to the production of food and fiber—from vegan burgers to “spider silk,” feed for farmed fish, synthetic flavors, and animal-free egg whites. A California accelerator, IndieBio, is helping to churn out many of these new businesses. Synthetic biology applications span from simple gene editing combined with fermentation processes, to cellular meats that culture food products from animal cells in the lab, to gene drive applications intended to change an organism’s genetics in the environment, such as a mosquito’s ability to spread malaria. For purposes of this discussion, we focus on products and processes that rely on gene editing combined with fermentation.
Synthetic biologists identify the gene sequences that give food or fiber certain qualities, like the gooiness of cheese or the tensile strength of silk. Often, it’s a protein produced by plant or animal cells that imparts the desired quality. Once identified, the gene sequence for that protein is created chemically in a lab and inserted into yeast or bacteria cells. Then, much like brewing beer, a fermentation process turns the microbes into tiny factories that mass produce the desired protein—which is then used as a food ingredient or spun into fiber. The Impossible Burger, for example, contains an engineered heme, a protein originally derived from soy plant roots, that gives the burger its pseudo-meat flavor, color, and texture.
Most of the companies using synthetic biology are still in the startup phase and may fail to gain traction, just as the earlier applications of synthetic biology for biofuels failed to reach scale. But there are billions of dollars in funding behind these products, and plenty of desire for them to succeed. And while many synbio products promise to use fewer natural resources, similar to cellular “meat,” a general lack of public information and transparency from many companies about their processes and what their supply chains will entail when brought to scale leaves unanswered questions about the safety and ultimate environmental, economic, and social sustainability of these products.
In the interest of trying to track down answers to some of these questions, Civil Eats asked six companies using synthetic biology, as well as two industry associations—including Bolt Threads, Impossible Foods, Gingko Bioworks, and IndieBio—for comment; although many declined to comment, the answers we received—plus the many questions that remain unanswered—suggest how much we still need to know about the potential impacts of this food of the future.
Each synthetic biology process is unique, but take the example of bacteria-based fish feed produced by KnipBio, the first company of its kind to receive U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval as GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”). KnipBio uses a microbe commonly found on leaves that naturally produce carotenoids, anti-oxidants that can be vital for fish health.
Through simple edits to the bacteria’s genetic makeup, KnipBio CEO Larry Feinberg says he can “turn up or turn down the valves to make things of interest,” like variations on the carotenoids. Next, he ferments the microorganisms in a tank, feeding them methanol—an alcohol derived from methane gas—or corn waste by-products to stimulate them to reproduce and make the carotenoids. The fermented bacteria are then pasteurized and dried, which Feinberg says kills them, and formulated into a flour that is milled into fish feed. It has taken KnipBio five years to refine this process.
Critics say that synthetic biology’s dangers lie in the potential release of gene-edited organisms into the wild, human health impacts, and disruption to agricultural communities, should engineered food or fiber displace natural products.
Rebecca Burgess, the founder of Fibershed, which last fall produced a report with ETC Group on the hazards of clothing made from genetically modified or synbio-derived materials, questions the efficacy of methods to keep gene-edited material from getting into the environment. “The concern is that they’re using base life forms that grow rapidly and transfer genes rapidly and they’re not considering the future of genetic pollution.”
Feinberg responded to this concern by saying that ensuring microbes are dead before release outside the lab is “microbiology 101,” like milk pasteurization. Nevertheless, “there should be, and will be, safety redundancy built into containment at an industrial biotech operation,” he adds. Furthermore, Feinberg says that research shows that modified bacteria tend to revert back to their “wild type” when they’re no longer housed in the optimized conditions created in the lab.
Piers Millet, vice president of safety and security at iGem, a non-profit organization that runs a global synthetic biology competition, agrees. “One of synthetic biology’s biggest challenges is getting the new traits to stick past a few generations [which typically last days or weeks]. In almost every case, the alterations you’re making make those organisms less suitable for natural environments.”
That challenge leaves Michael Tlusty, associate professor of sustainability and food solutions at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, “guardedly optimistic” that synthetic biology will have beneficial applications, like the creation of alternative fish feeds to reduce the pressure on forage fish. Tlusty also notes, “we’ve been editing bacteria for a long time, medically, such as for insulin.”
Bacterial engineering processes for medicine have been established for 40 years. We’ve also been editing bacteria to create the vegetable rennet in cheeses since 1990. In fact, 90 percent of U.S. cheese today is produced with what’s known as fermentation-produced chymosin, or FPC, a vegetable rennet.
There are no reports of health or environmental impacts from FPC to date, but neither does it appear that anyone has researched the question.
The main health concern with synthetic biology products is that they add new proteins to foods, and those new proteins may be allergenic, says Dana Perls, senior food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “We need to understand the short- and long-term impacts before these ingredients and products enter the market or the environment,” she says of products genetically engineered to replace animal products, and stresses the need for stronger regulations for all genetic engineering.
Most consumers wouldn’t know that the cheese they buy is produced using gene modification, because it isn’t labeled as GMO. The FDA ruled that because FPC was identical to the chymosin found in animal rennet, it didn’t require labeling.
GMO labeling laws in the U.S. don’t apply to products made using synthetic biology, which makes it tough for consumers to make informed choices. Most recently, the FDA announced that labeling isn’t required for ingredients made from GMO crops if no modified genetic material is detectable.
Cell-based meat, which is grown in a lab by multiplying entire stem cells taken from animal muscle, will be regulated by both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), though it’s not yet clear what that means in practice.
Synthetic biology is advancing so meteorically, regulatory schemes are hard pressed to keep up, Millet says, adding that, besides national laws, the industry follows World Health Organization biosafety guidance and other international regulations. But that guidance is updated every five years, so there can be a lag before the newest technology will be considered.
“The new wave of genetic engineering is slipping through very large loopholes,” says Perls. “People who are trying to purchase food or clothing that reflects their values are in the dark.”
As a disruptive technology, advocates fear that synthetic biology may also pose harm to the livelihoods of farmers, particularly in the developing world.
Oakland Institute’s Executive Director Anuradha Mittal is especially concerned that the rise of synthetic biology for products such as vanilla, coconut oil, and silk poses a threat to the livelihoods of smallholder and indigenous farmers if those engineered products replace their natural counterparts. Many of these farmers, like the Filipino coconut growers facing super typhoons year after year, are on the front lines of climate change, and Mittal notes that synbio alternatives could increase their vulnerability at a time when they need solid markets to help them adapt to climate change.
“These artificial solutions that are manufactured in petri dishes threaten smallholder farmers,” she told Civil Eats. “The devastation of women’s livelihoods in particular in India would be huge from these fancy silks.”
Fibershed’s Burgess worries that artisanal farmers and agroecologists could lose their sovereign rights if the synthetic biology world takes over fiber production and patents its processes.
Burgess’ concerns of farmer’s livelihoods being displaced are not unfounded, according to Todd Kuiken, senior research scholar at the Genetic Engineering & Society Center at North Carolina State University. “There are winners and losers. All of that needs to be evaluated and put on the table so people can make informed decisions,” says Kuiken, who previously led the Wilson Center’s Synthetic Biology Project. Companies need to conduct full life cycle assessments of their products, including both environmental and socio-economic impacts, he says. He knows of few companies that have done this, however.
Fermentation requires carbohydrates—think barley or wheat for beer brewing—and that raises a key sustainability concern: What feedstocks will be used, and how much?
U.S. synbio companies are largely using sugar from GMO corn, because of its abundant supply, according to Bolt Threads, a leading manufacturer of Spider Silk, on its website, adding, “It is widely believed that large-scale fermentation will be possible with non-food crops … in the future.”
Some companies like KnipBio, however, are choosing to work from day one with more sustainable feedstocks, like agricultural waste or methane gas. “Feedstocks that don’t compete with humans—that has to be part of the consideration. We have to make things more efficient,” says Feinberg.
FOE’s Perls worries that synbio companies could simply perpetuate “unsustainable, pesticide-intensive, industrial agriculture,” by requiring massive amounts of GMO corn or sugar cane.
“If we now have to scale monoculture 2,4-D corn to feed these fermentation tanks,” notes Fibershed’s Burgess, “what does that mean for the [U.S.] Midwest or the Cerrado in Brazil?”
Until recently, life cycle assessments that could answer the feedstock question were hard to come by. Recently, Impossible Burger became the first to release an environmental life cycle analysis of its burger. Peer-reviewed and produced by independent auditor Quantis, the assessment found that the Impossible Burger requires 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent beef burger.
The heme protein that’s synthetically produced is but one ingredient of the burger, which is made from plant-based proteins, fats, oils, and binders. Spider silks or other products that are principally made from proteins produced by synthetic biology will likely have a different footprint that may or may not be as environmentally beneficial.
And while Impossible Burger has taken initiative on environmental transparency, its life cycle analysis didn’t consider potential socio-economic impacts. That’s important, says Kuiken, because “say Impossible Burger takes over the world: You’d reduce the number of animal products; you need to understand all of [the] socio-economic interaction[s]” of a reduction in demand for products from farmers and ranchers and the resulting impacts on their livelihoods.
For those raising these questions, the lack of information and transparency on the part of most synbio companies fuels mistrust and prevents broader dialogue about the best solutions for the future of food, much like the lack of transparency on the part of cellular ag startups.
Garrett Broad’s 2017 essay in Civil Eats, “Why We Should Make Room for Debate about High-Tech Meat,” speaks to the dilemma. “I find myself with mixed feelings about the whole enterprise,” Broad wrote. “On one hand, I’m skeptical that these technological fixes will automatically lead us to some sort of agricultural utopia. But I’m also concerned that many who identify with the food movement might be missing out on the chance to shape the future of food because they’re turning their backs on food science altogether.”
iGEM’s Millet acknowledges there is some consumer distrust. “My feeling is that a lot of the leftover concerns about genetic modification has to do with the nature of power relationships, about very powerful companies controlling technology,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a different type of relationship.”
Dialogue with impacted communities is key, he says. Furthermore, Millet believes that synthetic biology can be used “to create a much fairer world, where people have more access to the tools they need to solve the problems challenging them, as opposed to mega-corporations selling the solution to them.” He cites an iGEM project in Sumbawa, Indonesia, where a poor community used synthetic biology to develop a genetic test to stop the pirating of its famous honey, a key revenue source for the island.
That vision of a fairer future is shared by others, like Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs, a “community supported microbiology maker space,” but not necessarily by the synbio companies remaining tight-lipped about their enterprises.
As in any industry, there are a range of players, with some more focused on sustainability than others. Whether synthetic biology can meet its promise by helping address some of agriculture’s biggest impacts and feeding the world—without causing harm—remains to be seen and will likely be project-dependent.
In the meantime, “people want real food, they want transparency, and nobody wants to be an experiment,” says Perls.
Shares of SunPower Corporation (NASDAQ: SPWR) jumped as much as 14.4% in trading Friday after the solar manufacturer reported first-quarter 2019 results. Shares gave back some of those gains midday, but at 12:15 p.m. EDT shares were still up 9.5% on the day.
Quarterly revenue was $348.2 million and net loss was $89.7 million, or $0.63 per share on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis. On a non-GAAP basis, revenue was $411.6 million and the loss was $57.4 million, or $0.41 per share. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $23.8 million, down from a gain of $32.3 million a year ago.
Management also said it continues to expect 1.9 to 2.1 gigawatts of solar deployed with $1.9 to $2.0 billion of non-GAAP revenue for 2019. What investors likely gravitated to was management increasing the lower end of adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2019 from $80 million to $90 million, while keeping the $110 million top end of the range the same.
There weren’t any huge surprises in the quarter, but investors are likely relieved that operating conditions are expected to get better as the year goes on. The solar industry has been very competitive in the last few quarters, and price wars can lead to lower margins across the board. SunPower says it’s expecting margins to improve as new high-efficiency solar panels are rolled out and U.S. residential and commercial markets grow. That’s why there’s optimism today, and now the company needs to execute on rising expectations.
During Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign, the upper echelons of the German government began to unravel into a free-for-all, with officials wrangling against one another. Photograph by Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis via Getty
One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite. Since Wilhelm was notably indiscreet, people always knew what he was saying behind their backs. Ferdinand had his revenge. After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.
Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia—the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered.
About a decade ago, I published “George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” a book that was, in part, about Kaiser Wilhelm, who is probably best known for being Queen Victoria’s first grandchild and for leading Germany into the First World War. Ever since Donald Trump started campaigning for President, the Kaiser has once again been on my mind—his personal failings, and the global fallout they led to.
Trump’s tweets were what first reminded me of the Kaiser. Wilhelm was a compulsive speech-maker who constantly strayed off script. Even his staff couldn’t stop him, though it tried, distributing copies of speeches to the German press before he’d actually given them. Unfortunately, the Austrian press printed the speeches as they were delivered, and the gaffes and insults soon circulated around Europe. “There is only one person who is master in this empire and I am not going to tolerate any other,” Wilhelm liked to say, even though Germany had a democratic assembly and political parties. (“I’m the only one that matters,” Trump has said.) The Kaiser reserved particular abuse for political parties that voted against his policies. “I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Fatherland,” he said, and he denounced the German Socialist party as a “gang of traitors.” August Bebel, the Socialist party leader, said that every time the Kaiser opened his mouth, the party gained another hundred thousand votes.
When Wilhelm became emperor, in 1888, at twenty-nine years old, he was determined to be seen as tough and powerful. He fetishized the Army, surrounded himself with generals (though, like Trump, he didn’t like listening to them), owned a hundred and twenty military uniforms, and wore little else. He cultivated a special severe facial expression for public occasions and photographs—there are many, as Wilhelm would send out signed photos and portrait busts to anyone who’d have one—and also a heavily waxed, upward-turned moustache that was so famous it had its own name, “Er ist Erreicht!” (It is accomplished!)
In fact, Wilhelm didn’t accomplish very much. The general staff of the German Army agreed that the Kaiser couldn’t “lead three soldiers over a gutter.” He had neither the attention span nor the ability. “Distractions, whether they are little games with his army or navy, travelling or hunting—are everything to him,” a disillusioned former mentor wrote. “He reads very little apart from newspaper cuttings, hardly writes anything himself apart from marginalia on reports and considers those talks best which are quickly over and done with.” The Kaiser’s entourage compiled press cuttings for him, mostly about himself, which he read as obsessively as Trump watches television. A critical story would send him into paroxysms of fury.
During Wilhelm’s reign, the upper echelons of the German government began to unravel into a free-for-all, with officials wrangling against one another. “The most contradictory opinions are now urged at high and all-highest level,” a German diplomat lamented. To add to the confusion, Wilhelm changed his position every five minutes. He was deeply suggestible and would defer to the last person he’d spoken to or cutting he’d read—at least until he’d spoken to the next person. “It is unendurable,” a foreign minister wrote, in 1894. “Today one thing and tomorrow the next and after a few days something completely different.” Wilhelm’s staff and ministers resorted to manipulation, distraction, and flattery to manage him. “In order to get him to accept an idea you must act as if the idea were his,” the Kaiser’s closest friend, Philipp zu Eulenburg, advised his colleagues, adding, “Don’t forget the sugar.” (In “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff writes that to get Trump to take an action his White House staff has to persuade him that “he had thought of it himself.”)
More sinisterly, Wilhelm’s patronage of the aggressive, nationalistic right left him surrounded by ministers who held a collective conviction that a European war was inevitable and even desirable. Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany’s Naval chief—who realized at his first meeting with the Kaiser that he did “not live in the real world”—consciously exploited Wilhelm’s envy and rage in order to extract the astronomical sums required to build a German Navy to rival Britain’s, a project that created an arms race and became an intractable block to peace negotiations.
The Kaiser was susceptible but never truly controllable. He asserted his authority unpredictably, as if to prove he was still in charge, staging rogue interventions into his own advisers’ policies and sacking ministers without warning. “You cannot have the faintest idea what I have prevented,” his most obsequious aide, Bernhard von Bülow, complained to a friend, “and how much of my time I must devote to restoring order where our All Highest Master has created chaos.”
The Kaiser’s darkest secret was that every few years—after his meddling and blunders had exposed his incompetence or resulted in a crisis—he would suffer a full-blown collapse. His entourage would scrape him off the floor, and he would retire to one of his palaces, where, prostrate, he would weep and complain that he’d been victimized. After the moaning came the pacing, in uncharacteristic silence. Occasionally he would give way to tears. Gradually he would recalibrate his sense of reality—or unreality—and after a few weeks would bounce up again, as boisterous and obstreperous as ever.
I spent six years writing my book about Wilhelm and his cousins, King George V, of England, and Tsar Nicholas II, and the Kaiser’s egotism and eccentricity made him by far the most entertaining of the three to write about. After a while, though, living with Wilhelm—as you do when you write about another person over a long period—became onerous. It was dispiriting, even oppressive, to spend so much time around someone who never learned, and never changed.
The Kaiser wasn’t singly responsible for the First World War, but his actions and choices helped to bring it on. If international conflict is around the corner, it would seem that you really don’t want a narcissist in control of a global power. Wilhelm’s touchiness, his unpredictability, his need to be acknowledged: these things struck a chord with elements in Germany, which was in a kind of adolescent spasm—quick to perceive slights, excited by the idea of flexing its muscles, filled with a sense of entitlement. At the same time, Wilhelm’s posturing raised tensions in Europe. His clumsy personal diplomacy created suspicion. His alliance with the vitriolic right and his slavish admiration for the Army inched the country closer and closer to war. Once the war was actually upon him, the government and military effectively swept the Kaiser aside. And the gravest damage occurred only after Wilhelm abdicated, in November of 1918. (He spent the rest of his life—he survived until 1941—in central Holland.) The defeated Germany sank into years of depression, resentments sharpened, the toxic lie that Germany had been “robbed” of its rightful victory in the war took hold. The rest, as they say, is history.
I’m not suggesting that Trump is about to start the Third World War. But recent foreign developments—the wild swings with North Korea, the ditching of the Iran nuclear deal, the threat of a trade war with China—suggest upheavals that could quickly grow out of American control. Some of Trump’s critics suppose that these escalating crises might cause him to loosen, or even lose, his grip on the Presidency. The real lesson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, may be that Trump’s leaving office might not be the end of the problems he may bring on or exacerbate—it may be only the beginning.
April 6, 2019
This desert farm is harvesting food using nothing but sunlight and seawater.
Harvesting food using sunlight and seawater
This desert farm is harvesting food using nothing but sunlight and seawater.
Posted by Mashable on Wednesday, April 3, 2019
April 24, 2019
Go, Sweden! (via World Economic Forum)
Go, Sweden! (via World Economic Forum)
Posted by Climate Reality on Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Most labels address how food is grown. The Agricultural Justice Project also focuses on how the people behind the food are treated.
By Lela Nargi, Farm Labor, Food Justice April 29, 2019
There’s an ever-growing preponderance of “eco-labels” in the food marketplace—203 in the U.S. alone, by one count. Inspired by an “increased demand for ‘green’ products,” according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Business Ethics, these labels alert consumers to everything from animal welfare to whether the food was grown without chemicals, GMOs, or harm to forests and birds. American consumers can seek out a fair trade label ensuring the well-being of banana and coffee growers and communities in Southeast Asia, South America, or Africa. But very few labels make such claims for food workers here in the United States.
One organization bucking this trend is the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP), a non-profit in Gainesville, Florida, that’s committed to the fair treatment of workers all along the food chain. AJP has been offering worker-justice-related certification and labeling since 2011, before the Equitable Food Initiative or Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) dipped their toes into the domestic arena, certifying their first farms here in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
Regardless of the size of a farm or other food-related business, AJP’s Food Justice Certification program requires that an employer offer workman’s comp, disability, unemployment coverage, social security, unpaid sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, “comprehensive requirements to ensure safe working conditions” even for migrant and seasonal workers, in addition to environmental standards—all with USDA Organic certification as its baseline.
Last November, AJP granted certification to its sixth business, Grafton, New York-based Soul Fire Farm, whose co-founder Leah Penniman recently received a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation for her commitment to tackling racism in the food system. AJP’s rigorous audit can be daunting, and its label is largely unknown to consumers. So, the decision to get certified was not a decision that Soul Fire’s founders took lightly. A firm belief in the concept, and a desire to see more farms engage in the process, convinced them to put in the time and effort.
“As thought leaders who are becoming more of a recognizable name, part of doing this certification was to say, ‘we believe in the values this represents,’ and to uplift the process,” says Soul Fire’s co-director, Larisa Jacobson.
Most of the Soul Fire Farm team. (Photo credit: Soul Fire Farm, courtesy of AJP)
Certainly, more farmers, food workers, and consumers are likely to now learn about AJP through Soul Fire’s connection to it. As a result, it’s possible more farms and food business will deem AJP certification a worthy pursuit, and more consumers will seek out its label. But the label is not AJP’s stand-alone goal. Much of the organization’s heavy lifting occurs behind the scenes, where it seeks to influence discussions about food worker rights in ways often less visible than its quiet (for the moment) third-party certification scheme.
Farm work ranks as one of the most exploitative and dangerous jobs of the 21st century, responsible in the U.S. for the second-highest number of deaths in 2017 (260) after truck driving. About 20,000 workers on American farms contract acute pesticide poisoning every year. Additionally, since many farm workers are migrants, they’re exempt from labor laws meant to protect against wage theft, poor living conditions, and poor treatment—including physical and sexual abuse—according to a report by fair-trade nonprofit Fair World Project. Similar dangers exist in restaurants, too, and in grocery stores.
Leah Cohen, AJP’s general coordinator, first cottoned to the cause at the root of the organization’s mission after driving a mobile dental clinic around migrant worker camps in Oregon. “I thought I was making a difference, but as I started to peel back the layers, I realized a dental van doesn’t do anything [about] the pesticide-drenched earth, holes in unheated [residential] shacks, living in fear of being separated from your family and deported, or wage theft,” she says. “Likewise, it’s not going to do anything for farmers who can’t make enough to cover the cost of production, regardless of whether they pay a working wage to their employees.”
These issues were top of mind for AJP’s five founders from the beginning. Elizabeth Henderson, who’s also a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), currently sits on AJP’s board. She and her collaborators fought to write worker rights into the fabric of the USDA’s National Organic Program. When they failed, in 1999, they decided to write up their own standards. They intensively researched the issue and reached out to a wide swath of stakeholders in the early aughts, conducted pilot audits in 2006 and 2007, then officially began offering certification in 2011.
Still, the certification process—which Henderson calls “very much against the grain”—is not the main point. Rather, it’s the “bigger impacts on the consciousness of the organic movement” that is the true measure of what she and her partners set out to achieve.
For example, the new Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), which is led by a coalition that includes the Rodale Institute, Dr. Bronner’s, and Patagonia and is currently in its pilot phase, did not originally include rights for farmers in its social fairness pillar. “Because of the advocacy of our AJP team members and allies, [ROC] added farmer rights standards,” says Cohen. Other examples of AJP’s influence are found in the evolution of Whole Foods Market’s Responsibly Grown program, Fair Trade USA’s standards, and Ben & Jerry’s Caring Dairy Program. “This work takes years of organizing, and sometimes results in official organizational transformation if we are patient and persistent,” Cohen says.
Another way change comes to pass is when farms and food businesses hire AJP to provide technical assistance to various aspects of their operations. Even though they might not make it all the way through to certification, according to Cohen, “they take bits and pieces and incorporate them to make improvements” to bringing their workers into the decision-making process, for example.
AJP receives grant money from ecologically conscious organizations such as Dr. Bronner’s and the Clif Bar Family Foundation (CBFF). (Editor’s note: Civil Eats has also received funding from CBFF.) “There are not that many groups out there trying to create market incentives for social change in the food system, and we felt that was worth investing in,” says CBFF director of programs for food systems and economics Allen Rosenfeld.
Would Clif Bar also consider adopting AJP’s label for its own products? “Our cross-functional sustainable sourcing team has met with AJP and we continue to evaluate their certification program, as well as others that could meet our social justice goals,” Clif Bar & Company communications manager Dean Mayer explained by email to Civil Eats. “We’re also exploring the development of our own proprietary programs for smallholder farmers.”
One way or the other, with or without formal adoption of its Food Justice Certification label, AJP seems to be managing to steer the conversation toward greater worker fairness.
Eco-labels pose something of a conundrum; the more of them turn up in the marketplace, the wider the so-called “credibility gap” grows, as consumers struggle to understand what the labels’ promises effectively mean (if anything).
As the Business Ethics study pointed out, “an eco-label may or may not involve an open- and consensus-based standard-setting process…may or may not be under government control…can be first-, second-, or third-party [certified], by verifiers who may or may not be accredited.” Additionally, since “labeling schemes are voluntary standards that are developed by private institutions … there is no commonly accepted legal standard” for them.
The confusion is compounded when it comes to social justice issues, says Magali Delmas, director of the UCLA Center for Corporate Environmental Performance and author of The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet. “The question is, what is the tangible benefit, and how can we clearly convey [that] to the consumer? This is still a work in progress,” she says, “because it’s more difficult to measure and communicate social impact than it is environmental [benefit].”
But for consumers willing to do a little independent research, this is becoming easier. Consumer Reports rates food labels on its Greener Choices site. It calls AJP’s Food Justice Certification, conducted by third-party certified entities accredited in organics, “highly meaningful,” and confirms that its standards set a high bar.
Fair World Project (FWP) published a report called Justice in the Fields in 2016, specifically to evaluate seven farmworker justice certification labels—including AJP’s.
“Labor justice labels are important; just because something is grown organically or comes from a ‘local’ farm, that’s no guarantee that the people who grew it were treated well,” says FWP’s executive director, Dana Geffner. Her organization gave AJP a top rating because of what it calls the meaningful impact of its standards: “It’s one of the only certifications out there in the hired labor category looking to eliminate piece rate work”—paying per piece or per pound of produce picked rather than hourly—and “they also consider all the participants in the supply chain: farmers, workers, and retailers.”
Higher Level Organics in Viola, Wisconsin, became the seventh AJP-certified farm this month—the first hemp producer in the world to certify as fair trade. “It’s simply the right thing to do [a]s hemp production continues to rise…[and] an increase in agricultural labor [becomes] necessary,” founder Luke Zigovits said in a company press release.
Photo credit: Swanton Berry Farm (courtesy of AJP)
Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California has a union for its workers—a deeper commitment to the tenets of their AJP food justice certification. For Nancy Vail and husband Jered Lawson, co-owners of Pie Ranch in nearby Pescadero, AJP certification is deeply linked to their farm’s outreach to local youth and its partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose ancestors once worked the surrounding land before “suffering the most outrageous trauma, genocide, and exploitation you can imagine” at the hands of white colonists, says Vail.
AJP certification doesn’t translate into a price premium for the food Pie Ranch grows, like an organic label does, and Vail says the pore-scouring process takes an enormous time and resource toll. But, she says, “We still feel committed to staying certified, to keep the conversation alive.”
For Brandon Kane, general manager of the GreenStar Food Co-op in Ithaca, New York (currently in the process of recertifying), “AJP was a natural extension of expressing our values—marketable proof that we are living up to our self-imposed expectations around a living wage [for our 225 employees] and supporting [over three dozen] farmers.”
