At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
In the shadow of wooded hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers is Lanes Landing, the 125-acre farm where Wendell Berry tended the land and published the most trenchant appeals in American letters to tame the damage from industrial agriculture. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can, for long, disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature, eroded, wasted, or degraded soils, damaged or …
SALINA, Kan. – In 1976, Wes and Dana Jackson launched The Land Institute as a nonprofit school to teach a small group of students ways to grow food that respected nature, conserved energy and water, and managed wastes. As one of the nation’s first regional nonprofit environmental and farm research organizations devoted to land stewardship, the Institute set sail in the powerful current of alternative ideas and new organizations in that era that were determined …
Real change occurs in America when civic pressures from outside the centers of influence force insiders to retreat. Arguably the most compelling example of systemic change in how a state could operate is now unfolding in Iowa. Severe water contamination from crop and livestock production linked to the nation’s second highest and fastest rising incidence of cancer developed into the election year issues of their time in Iowa, one of the country’s most important farm …
Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, …
Expect the unexpected. That’s the only certainty of planting season across the Corn Belt. Heat. Frost. Insects. Too much rain, or none at all. Now add the distress the Trump administration has cursed farmers with: Broken markets. Tariffs. Rising fuel costs. Never, though, has the unexpected included this spring’s surprise: serious consideration of the harm from industrial crop and animal production. Farming’s mammoth water pollution and its consequences for public health are on the ballot …
Three years ago Chris Jones was a decorated research engineer at the University of Iowa, where he directed Iowa’s network of stream pollution monitors and published details about state water quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Secure in his academic perch in 110-year-0ld Trowbridge Hall, Jones also contributed to his university-sponsored blog, where he prepared aggressive, masterfully written, and widely read reports that identified agriculture as the primary source of the state’s calamitous water pollution. In …
LANSING. Mich. – Because lawmakers and regulators embrace the principle that agriculture’s primary objective is to feed people, farming is a sacrosanct industrial sector in the United States. Understand that every industry in the U.S. except for agriculture is required to limit water pollution. But ever since 1972, when Congress exempted farming from most of the water-cleansing requirements of the Clean Water Act, farms have been perfectly free to discharge into the environment some of the most …
BARCELONA – Go anywhere in the world, and an agricultural mess awaits. Even here in Catalonia, an autonomous self-governing region in northern Spain bordered by the Pyrenees mountain range and glorious Mediterranean beaches. Catalonia, it turns out, spent two generations developing industrial farm practices that turned it into a hog haven. With 8 million hogs, it is the largest producer in Spain, which itself is Europe’s largest pork producer. Readers of Circle of Blue know …
Back in 2003, when researchers began predicting with excellent accuracy how much of western Lake Erie would be coated with the green slime of a toxic algae bloom, there were important points to be made. The annual forecasts, largely funded with $20 million annually from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided water quality regulators and public health authorities in the U.S. and Canada real-time assessments on where the poisonous algae, which is capable of …
In January, executives at Constellation Energy startled the world with their plan to restart the closed and cold 840-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear power station, site of one of the most dangerous meltdowns in atomic history. Not so long ago such news, like the specter of the ruined Unit 2 reactor core that remained after the 1979 accident in southern Pennsylvania, would have attracted more than surprise. It would have generated …
