Life: Disregard for Human Nature connection

In the midst of studying for finals, I've come across 'Life.' I've never seen the series and am at the moment absolutely amazed by the visuals.

I believe that the series would serve as great support for an individual such as Muir wanting to preserve 'natural cathedrals.' My critique revolves around how human communities inhabiting such exotic and pristine places are disregarded. I am only about twenty minutes in, but it already seems as if though there is a huge focus on animals and vegetation, not so much on humans and the more biocentric connection.

Maybe you guys can look for yourselves and develop your own perception. Take a look at the the clip or go out and watch the series at its whole.

Harvesting Cash: A Year-Long Investigation into Farm Subsidies

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/interactives/farmaid/
As I was surfing the net came across this 2006 story by the Washington Post. Dan Morgan, Gilbert M. Gaul, and Sarah Cohen spent more than a year investigating the government's wasteful agricultural subsidy spending. The three concluded, that out of the $95 million spent, more than $15 billion was "wasteful, unnecessary and redundant spending".

The link above send you to the Washington Post where multiple articles on the subject are available for public viewing. These articles cover topics from "$1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm", "Drought Aid Went to Private Interests", to "Crop Insurance Led To Waste and Abuse". When you scroll down, more recent, related articles are accessible.

My plan was to read and analyze one or a two of these articles, but after reading the site I believe the page loses its effect when you pull out one or two stories. The project needs to be read as a whole. Even though the investigation was done 4 years ago, it is still applicable to today's struggles.

In the comment section below feel free to talk about any of the articles on this page.

Greece

In the spring of 2009 I studied abroad in Greece. In 2007, the professor leading the program I participated in, had been in Greece with a group of UW students. The group had been caught in a rural village and had to evacuate because of the close proximity of local fires. Our program's objective was to gather enough film to piece together a documentary in regards to the Greek fires of 2007.

I believe it was estimated that about 20% of Greece's land was burned during the fires. Tons of conspiracy theories were floating around, much involving governmental influence in the fires due foreign interest in much desired wild forest land intended for potential development.

I feel that sharing of my experience is relevant to our blog simply because it is a story of environmental degradation and the displacement of peoples. Although my focus was more on the health disparities that arose because of the wild fires while in Greece, I have come to realize that people, especially those in the rural areas, were greatly affected; traditional ways of life were disrupted leaving behind ashes of what once were virgin forests above Athens and burns on skin of what once were wrinkles of knowledge.

I nailed an interview with Malcolm Brabant of BBC news. Brabant took two other group members and I to the hills of Athens where we witnessed blackened ashy trees covering what was once virgin forests. According to Brabant, with their vast vegitation, these hills served as an 'air conditioner' to the city, especially during the extremely hot summers. Conspiracy theories especially revolved around this particular area as some of the ruined land was now being paved over and thought to have construction start soon. The land has been said to be used for construction of a 'suburbia' away from the city.

One of our group members focused on the harm on animals, particularly farm animals. This quarter in ANTH 211, we've been focusing on humans attachment to nature; nature, I feel, also includes our attachment and also need of commitment towards animals. Many people lost their fair animals in the fires, what wasn't lost was definitely displaced as former inhabited lands were no longer available.

Not related to the fires, but definately related to mans need to exploit natural resources, while at the island of Naxos we noticed mointains being carved in for marble. We had ridden small motorized vehicles around the island and came to a point where we saw a huge slab of a mountain carved off. At the moment, we observed at how cool it looked and perhaps how much money all of the marble was being sold for. Today, I look back and think about the people who live in the area and lives that have been disrupted because of the continous degradation of the mountain. I also think about the landscape, what was once an island inhabited by only Greeks and their traditional ways of living, is now being raped of its resources for possible foreign markets.

My trip to Greece was very momorable. I went there as more than just a foreign student, but as a human being wanting to gain the very Greek perspective for the fires in 2007. The fires of 2007 were of great catastrophe to the Greek people. Individual stories we heard were very touching and exemplified lack of governmental action and support, yet the resilience of the Greek people. My highlights in this post tie into the mission of this blog in the sense that it presents environmental catastrophe and the use of natural resources for man's purposes. Man's purposes too often ignoring the well being of those less fortunate including animals and people of low income or unequal representation in governmental and foreing business interactions.

Finally, it's environmental catastrophe/degradation that brings to a halt people's ability to cultivate and grow their own foods in their own lands. In turn, not being able to grown native foods in native lands brings to a halt traditional ways of living.

"Food Inc."

Academy Award nominated "Food Inc." documents America's capitalistic consumerism and the resulting consequences to our environment and food nutrition. Previous to watching this film I had some understanding about the food business. We have all been made aware animal cruelty exists and the fight to stop this violence, stories of large companies suppressing the small business, and other issues. This film highlights these problems and more. "Food Inc." unveils the underbelly of the corporate American food industry and the environmental injustices they practice.

The average supermarket holds 47,000 different products presenting them as though they all come from some "pastoral fantasy". The supermarket has no seasons. One can get plump, red tomatoes year around. "Food Inc." rips away the superficial coating companies want us to see and dives deep into the actual inner workings of food production.

"Companies don't want farmers talking. They don't want this story told.", a quote taken from the film. Carole Morison, a Perdue Grower, was one to tell her story. She says, "This isn't farming. It's mass production like an assembly line in a factory." Morison was a chicken farmer disgusted with Perdue for leaving her in perpetual debt. She goes on to explain how companies lend small time farmers money to start small businesses. All is going well until these corporations come back demanding upgrades, new equipment, costing these farmers more money, leaving them in debt for as long as the Big Man want them there. It is degrading, "Like being a slave to the company" - Morison.

Smithfield Hog Processing Plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina is the worlds largest slaughterhouse in the world. It is located in an economically depressed area, discriminating and targeting a lesser community. This is a prime example of structural violence that in the end, will result in historical trauma. The slaughterhouse has mastered the art of picking a work force they can exploit. They hire a local work force of poor white and black individuals and bus them from their homes to the plant. Smithfield has the same mentality towards the works as they do the hog. Employees get diseases because of proximity to the dead animals, are treated as human machines, and the company isn't worried about the longevity of the worker because everything is going to end at some point. People can't afford to leave the company and know this. It is a perpetual cycle of oppression and "company slavery".

Large companies like Tyson need laborers and they get cheap work from illegal immigrants. Majority used to be African American, but there has been a shift to Latino undocumented workers. These people feel they have no rights, so they aren't going to complain. The "perfect" worker. These companies and the government have an understanding so production is unaffected. Every week law officials get to arrest x amount of individuals and they call it even. Workers are being arrested, not managers/companies who had their hand in the hiring. Corruption behind every chicken and every banana bought. If the government is already in cahoots with these unjust corporations who will put an end to the injustice?

"Food Inc." goes on to say "You can change this system. Three times a day. Buy from companies that treat workers, animals, environment, with respect. Buy foods that are grown locally. Shop at farmers' markets. Plant a garden. (even a small one)". This film is worth sparing two hours to watch. You can check out http://www.takepart.com/foodinc for more information about the movie and ways to help the cause.

From inner city concrete blocks, to rural vegetable garderns

As Mariko mentioned, last week our class hosted Teresa Mares. One item that resonated in my mind as Mares conducted her presentation was the impact that older family member's were having on children in palces such as the Marra Farm.

Work in a garden teaches children the value of growing food. In turn, it's considered that this action contributes to children wanting to eat fruits and vegetables more readily.

Furthermore, I feel that children are able to reevaluate their role in society, whether they are able to recognize this impact or not. In other words, children are able to in a sense work with the earth to produce. For inner city children, being out in a garden environment allows them to cultivate a relationship with land that would not be possible if these children were secluded to run down playgrounds surrounded by concrete spaces.

Finally, I hope that children such as the ones in the video below are able to retain the lessons they've learned in their NY garden and implement them in their life and continue to perhaps contribute to a sense of future intergenerational equality.

The Earth Without People

The environmental debate over global warming is generally couched in terms of saving the planet which does not seem to be instigating a mass shift in consciousness among the inhabitants of Earth. Perhaps a better dialectical approach would be to speak of global warming in terms of saving humanity (from) itself.

The Earth will survive with or without us. If we, as a species, were to die out tomorrow Earth would simply continue along its merry way reclaiming the land. Remaining species of all kinds would adopt the new paradigm, reestablish relationships without humans and inhabit the landscape on their own terms – not ours.

What will it take to snap humanity out of its stupor? Is it necessary to be faced with imminent disaster to spur collective action? I don’t believe this is the case. Rather, what needs to occur is a reframing of the discourse by (and this is not an exhaustive list) scientists, world leaders and their political cadre, the media, institutions of learning beginning in primary school and within civil society.

There are signs that this process is beginning with the emergence of programs like the Transition Initiative (launched in the U.K. and picking up steam across the globe). Locally, a new social movement, Seattle Innovators, is gathering like-minded individuals who possess a wide range of talents and abilities. Here are their core tenants:

Our Idea

Climate change is a wake-up call to a system in decline, and the future of Puget Sound – our economic structures, government policies, and culture – will be determined by how we deal with this challenge. Addressing climate change means fundamentally re-thinking many of the big questions of civilization: where we live, how we move, what we eat, what really makes us happy. The greatest opportunities for economic development will be to create regional hubs of innovation focused on developing new approaches to these widely-shared questions.

Key Structure

The primary objective of this project is to provide a platform for collaboration that unleashes the creative potential of Seattle’s innovation scene in a sustained manner. Working across sectors, we must pool our talents in a way that leads to high levels of economic productivity for the region.

The Dynamic Triangle

The Seattle Innovators project itself is a playground for innovative design. We are actively developing a process that combines three essential functional elements:

Communities of Varied Expertise
Tool Building for Cross-Sector Collaboration
Knowledge Capture for Iterative Learning

It begins with a set of activities that bring people together. These “innovation socials” come in many forms – happy hour gatherings, open space conferences, evening salons, and design sessions – all of which bring together people with diverse perspectives around provocative themes that stimulate creativity.

These events provide the “social glue” for sustained effort among this ever-growing community of world-changers. Through the myriad conversations and interactions, opportunities appear to tackle chronic challenges and promote high-leverage positive outcomes.

Ultimately, we want to create action. This is done through a set of “innovation creations” of the Seattle Innovators’ CrowdSource Collective – a dynamic community of experts who come together as design teams, tool builders, and project teams that create together the capacities that aren’t possible on their own.

Projects are identified through the web of social activities and implemented either by internal development (e.g. a project team arises to pool human and financial capital for strategic action) or external request (e.g. we are approached by a client seeking special tools that the collective is uniquely situated to build).

All the while, knowledge is captured for “researching the innovation ecosystem” in the form of case studies, best practices, prototyping new models, and mapping efforts. Insights from these resources are fed back into the process to stimulate continued learning and improvement.

Our success depends on the talents and networks of many communities – including business, research institutions, finance, government, and media. We welcome strategists, visionaries, implementers, researchers, and technology evangelists.

There are some glaring omissions in this list. I see no representation being sought from individuals from low-income population groups. There is no mention of building bridges with Native Americans for the purpose of accessing Traditional Environmental Knowledge, or for linking up with Environmental Justice activists who are in the trenches and familiar with fundamental stumbling blocks for change – particularly with respect to the biggest resisters of all – big business and government.

There is also no mention of inviting or tapping into migrant communities in the Seattle area. Not only is there a substantial population of Hispanics, there is also a sizable population of individuals from Africa which is immediately accessible through the Southern Sudanese Community of Washington. There are visionaries and implementers within these groups and to not access their wealth of knowledge and manpower leads to a waste of creativity, talent and Traditional Environmental Knowledge.

Seattle Innovators are also neglecting groups sprouting up in the Pacific Northwest through the Transition Initiative, which is a grassroots community-based movement that should be hooked into and cultivated in order to harness a wider audience of like-minded innovators.

Barring existing omissions, Seattle Innovators demonstrates that there is a burgeoning awareness of the need to save humanity from itself and from the contrary impact of globalization on regional capacity and by extension resiliency.

Climate Change, Melting Glaciers and Thawing Permafrost

The greenhouse effect isn't a recent development, without it, life on Earth would not exist. Without the layer of carbon dioxide and other gases keeping the warmth in, our average global temperature would be -18 degrees celsius.

While the greenhouse effect is essential to life on Earth it becomes problematic when anthropogenic greenhouse gases (those created through human activity) act as a trigger to fire-up greenhouse processes. Anthropogenic activities are related to heightened releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels, changes in land use, emissions of methane from livestock and nitrous oxide from agriculture (and other processes).

There are several examples of the ways that the increasing greenhouse effect impacts the Earth's ecology. One example are thawing permafrost terrains in Southeast Siberia that is exposing sequestered animal waste and other organic material left behind by creatures that used to roam this region. As the exposed organic material comes into contact with the air, methane gases are released into the atmosphere. Some scientists believe that the released gases will accelerate global warming faster than some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

Another prominent side effect is the melting of icecaps and glaciers. Below are a couple of before and after images taken in the Glacier Peak Wilderness.

The Glacier Peak Wilderness, created by Congress in the original 1964 wilderness legislation, is located within portions of Chelan County, Snohomish County, and Skagit Counties in the North Cascades of Washington. The area, 572,000 acres (2315 km²) in size, 35 miles (56 kilometers) long and 20 miles (32 kilometers) wide, lying within parts of Wenatchee National Forest and Mount Baker National Forest, is characterized by heavily forested stream courses, steep sided valleys, and dramatic glacier-crowned peaks.

The first image is an image of the glacier taken in 2006 and the one just beneath it was taken in 1973. In the top image the glacier has retreated 1.2 miles.

A view down the Whitechuck Glacier in Glacier Peak Wilderness in 1973

There are other impacts viz global warming. Permafrost in Alaska and Canada and are also thawing. In Alaska this had led to abandonment of some roadways and houses where permafrost has warmed to such an extent that the ground has become unstable and methane gas releases have become hazardous to wildlife and humans.

So what are safe limits? Scientists suggest that if we break the one degree celsius barrier Mount Kilimanjaro will become completely bereft of ice and the Great Barrier Reef will collapse and a number of island nations will be submerged (Southeast Asia's Maldives is one example). A two degree celsius would cause heatwaves and draughts. Breaking the three degree celsius mark would bring about the collapse of the Amazon ecosystem and intensifying heat waves and draughts would create conflict over water supplies around the world. Sounds grim.

It is impossible to talk about climate change without discussing the subject of our addiction to fossil fuels. It is impossible to discuss our addiction to fossil fuels without talking about Peak Oil and the decline in the availability of this natural resource around the globe, which leads to what some are calling energy descent. We can think of energy descent as "the continual decline in net energy supporting humanity, a decline that mirrors the ascent in net energy that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution, which relies on the use of oil to fuel industrial processes.

Thinking in broader terms, the current neoliberal marketplace and globalizing economy is a deeply integrated system of trade that relies upon the movement of commodities around the globe. Declining access to fossil fuels will make movement of commodities on such a massive scale increasingly difficult in the coming decades.

One of the significant hallmarks of this globalized marketplace is the over-networked and highly interconnected systems that allows for the flow of capital, and commodities - but this also allows shock to travel rapidly through them with unpleasant and disturbing effects. One has only to tune into the local or international news to see the way in which Wall Street is reacting to the economic woes on the other side of the pond (U.K.)

The alternatives to the globalized marketplace is a retreat to more regional models. When I was young (in the 1950s) and you looked at the label in your clothes, or on the items that you purchased or foodstuffs carried by the store it read "Made in the U.S.A." If it said made in Japan, China, India, Peru, England or anywhere else in the world - it was really special. Well, here we are sixty years later and finding a label on clothing or other household items that reads "Made in the U.S.A." is now the oddity. Am I suggesting that we stop purchasing imported items cold turkey - nope.

What I am suggesting is that we need to start gearing up to break away from our addiction to fossil-fuel based purchasing on such an massive basis. We should start reading labels and attempt to purchase those things that say "Made or Grown in the U.S.A."

A heavy reliance on imported goods is a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. A heavy reliance on fossil fuels acts as a trigger for global warming which results in rapid changes to the Earth's biosphere. We should all live as though we will live again.