Dismantle Civilisation

Two recent treehugger articles, discussing 7 Low-Cost, Low-Emissions Foods and the water footprint of your food reinforce the myth that to simply change the actual items that we buy, without considering where they come from and how they are grown, is enough of a change to slow the human impact on the planet and other life. No.

Ok, the list of foods – organic strawberries (bromide, a powerful greenhouse gas, is used extensively to grow strawberries) , beans, potatoes, home made bread, organic tofu, homemade almond milk, and organic rolled oats – are somewhat better than other foods in relation to their carbon footprint, but not if they’ve been transported from the other side of the world. Industrial agriculture is a huge part of our probems. Forests are levelled to make room for monocultures (even if organic), huge amounts of water are used – as shown in the other article, and wildlife and people are dispossessed so that corporate players can funnel fuel, water, biomass, to western consumers, making vast profits so they can buy up even more of the world.

This whole model has to go, and by doing so we take back control of our food supply, provide ourselves with meaningful work, recreate local economies and preserve nature around us. It is not enough to simply buy different stuff, when the whole process of buying, selling, transporting, and ownership is killing our planet, while enslaving and making us sick. And lets not forget the massive concentration of power and wealth that is happening around the world, into ever fewer companies who own and control our entire food system, enabling them to decide who eats and who starves, what huge monocultures will be grown where, and turning more and more forest into desert in the name of corporate profits. This is evil, nothing less.

Not only do we need to take control of our local food supply, and economies, but we also need to get on with the job of helping the earth reforest herself – which is where permaculture comes in. Our natural habitat, before 12000 years ago, is forest or jungle. The earths natural condition is forest. By recreating forests, but using our ability to understand the dynamics of forest succession, we can speed up forest growth and development, and over some years create a food forest par excellence, that can provide us with almost all of our needs.

The water footprint and carbon footprint of home grown smallscale horticulture is far far less than industrial farming, and food forests can regulate their own water needs, while absorbing more carbon than they release.

Another article, by By Karin Friedemann, at rense.com tells us that Industrialized Farming Endangers
World Food Supply.

Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using global food insecurity as a tool for political control. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that “land grabbing” by foreign investors in developing countries has resulted in a new form of colonialism. Spanish NGO, GRAIN reports that rich countries are buying poor countries’ fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home. IFPRI researcher Joachim von Braun states, “About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations.”

Agribusiness imposes a devastating toll on small farmers worldwide. Landowners in African countries, where there are no official land deeds, have no legal recourse against foreign companies that steal their farmland. In the United States ranchers and farmers lose their land to agribusinesses and end up working as employees. American cattle ranchers have the highest suicide rate among American professions. Similar humiliations have also led thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives.

The `Global Food Security Act’ [S384] recently introduced in the US Senate will give USAID $7.5 billion over five years. Arun Shrivastava of the Centre for Research on Globalization reports: “USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest and has little to do with humanism.” There are two other similar pending bills, HR875 and S425.

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, points out that while purporting to address issues of global nutrition and health, “the US Congress is hell bent on introducing laws with global reach that would destroy the very basis of people’s food security and food sovereignty.”

HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009, writes Barbara Minton in Natural News, “would effectively hand over control of America’s food supply to such a nefarious giant as Monsanto and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill.”

Monsanto GMO corn plants, which were designed with a built-in resistance to Monsanto’s weed killers, have already devastated thousands of South African farmers. The corn plants look healthy, but inside the husks there are no kernels! This GMO crop failure highlights the dangers of agribusiness domination of the global food supply.

“To ensure the perpetuation of its near monopoly, Monsanto is helping to install the right people in the right places,” Minton continues. “To that end, Michael Taylor, the ex FDA head who approved the use of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), has just become ensconced in the Obama transition team where he may soon be overseeing food safety. He will join already well placed Tom Vilsack, the pro-GMO Secretary of Agriculture.”

South Africa repeats the pattern of Iraq and of Afghanistan, where new laws prohibit farmers to save or trade their own seeds. These laws being promoted within the US would also block access to non-GMO seeds.

“Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilized world,” writes Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard of India. According to the Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Farm-saved seeds and the free exchange of planting materials among farmers have long been the basis of agricultural practice in Iraq.”

The Oil-for-Food program in Iraq forced the large-scale importation of food after the first Gulf War. Devastated Iraqi farmers then became the victims of USAID.

Under US occupation, Iraqi farmers must pay a “technology fee” plus an annual license fee to agribusinesses supplying the seeds and equipment. Similar policies exist in Afghanistan, which compel dependency on supplies from multi-national agribusinesses while industrial agricultural training courses provide the US military with opportunities to gather intelligence from the local population. A US Special Forces civil affairs manager in Afghanistan explains, “The presence of this agricultural center is a security measure in and of itself.”

GRAIN reports, “The war provides these corporations with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming “reconstruction” industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global production networks and markets in the long term.”

Industrial agriculture is based on mono-cropping, use of GMO seeds, fertilizers, lethal pesticides, and expensive farm machinery. Environmentalists say these methods cause topsoil erosion, depleted soil fertility, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, decreased nutritional value of food, and serious health risks. Iowa State University biotech researchers are putting flu vaccines into the DNA of corn, reports Bryan Salvage in the Meat and Poultry Journal. This genetic manipulation is likely to increase the rate of viral mutation, rather than to reduce disease as claimed.

French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, molecular endocrinologist at the University of Caen found that Monsanto’s GMO corn damages the liver and kidneys like pesticides. Hungarian biology professor Bela Darvas of Debrecen University discovered that Monsanto’s corn endangers protected insect species. Spiegel reports that because corn is a wind-pollinated plant, GMO crops inevitably contaminate nearby farms. Because of these dangers, Germany has banned GMO corn.

Unfortunately she also advises us to ‘buy organic’. Its not enough. It is time we all pulled out of this failed experiment of civilisation, started getting our hands dirty and taking responsibility for our lives, our food, our communities and begin to create a world that we can all truly be happy, healthy and joyful in. all the while that we buy stuff, we are reliquishing power over our lives and our food supply, handing it over to evil grey men who aim to own and control all of us and everything. And they dont know any better than turning life into desert.

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By Tara Lohan, AlterNet

Vandana Shiva says industrial agriculture has left Indian farmers indebted and destitute, and explains how to stem the tide of suicides.

Last month, the world got a glimpse of an epidemic that has hit India in the last decade when news reports alerted readers to the suicides of 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh.

But this has been only a fraction of the suicides committed by farmers since 1997, says Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., a physicist, environmentalist, feminist, science policy advocate and director of Navdanya and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

While initial news reports blamed the recent suicides on falling water levels, Shiva explains that the suicide epidemic in India is a lot more complicated and far-reaching.

“Rapid increase in indebtedness is at the root of farmers’ taking their lives,” she wrote recently. “Debt is a reflection of a negative economy. Two factors have transformed agriculture from a positive economy into a negative economy for peasants: the rising of costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization.”

At the heart of this is a circle of indebtedness that has resulted from the so-called Green Revolution, which exported industrial agricultural practices to places like India and in doing so, made seeds, a once-renewable resource for farmers, into something that had be bought from corporations.

“In 1998, the World Bank’s structural-adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta,” Shiva wrote. “The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm-saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved. … The shift from saved seed to corporate monopoly of the seed supply also represents a shift from biodiversity to monoculture in agriculture.”

In an interview with AlterNet, Shiva explained how Monsanto’s Bt cotton has exemplified what can go wrong with industrial agriculture; what happens to farming communities when traditional farming methods are replaced by corporate sponsored mono-cropping; and how to stem the tide of farmer suicides.

Tara Lohan: Farmer suicides in India recently made the news when stories broke last month about 1,500 farmers taking their own lives, what do you attribute these deaths to?

Vandana Shiva: Over the last decade, 200,000 farmers have committed suicide. The 1,500 figure is for the state of Chattisgarh. In Vidharbha, 4,000 are committing suicide annually. This is the region where 4 million acres of cotton have been grown with Monsanto’s Bt cotton. The suicides are a direct result of a debt trap created by ever-increasing costs of seeds and chemicals and constantly falling prices of agricultural produce.

When Monsanto’s Bt cotton was introduced, the seed costs jumped from 7 rupees per kilo to 17,000 rupees per kilo. Our survey shows a thirteenfold increase in pesticide use in cotton in Vidharbha. Meantime, the $4 billion subsidy given to U.S. agribusiness for cotton has led to dumping and depression of international prices.

Squeezed between high costs and negative incomes, farmers commit suicide when their land is being appropriated by the money lenders who are the agents of the agrichemical and seed corporations. The suicides are thus a direct result of industrial globalized agriculture and corporate monopoly on seeds.

TL: Suicides of Indian farmers unfortunately is not news — how long has this been a problem, how serious is the problem, what are the underlying causes?

VS: The first suicide that we studied took place in Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh in 1997. This region is a rain-fed dry region and used to grow dry land crops such as millets, pigeon pea etc. In 1997, the seed corporations converted the region from biodiverse agriculture to monocultures of cotton hybrid. The farmers were not told they would need irrigation. They were not told that they would need fertilizers and pesticides. They were not told they could not save the seeds. The cotton seeds were sold as “White Gold,” with a false promise that farmers would become millionaires. Instead, the farmers landed in severe unpayable debt. This is how the suicides began.

TL: You said that 200,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1997 — where does that statistic come from? Are there numbers to compare suicide rates for farmers pre-Green Revolution with the numbers we are seeing today?

VS: The statistics on farmers suicides are kept by the National Crime Bureau. Since there were no large-scale suicides prior to 1997, the statistics was not maintained before that. The combination of the spread of nonrenewable seeds and globalized trade has triggered the epidemic of suicides.

TL: What role does water and water management play in the problems Indian farmers are facing?

VS: India is a land of varied climates, from rainforests to deserts. Seventy percent of Indian farming is rain-fed (dependent on rain not irrigation). Introducing inappropriate crops and cropping patterns has aggravated the water crisis and precipitated more frequent crop failure. Ecological agriculture needs 10 times less water than chemical farming. Green Revolution varieties, hybrids and GM crops are all bred for irrigation. On the one hand, this puts pressure on farmers in low-rainfall zones to drill tube wells, which fail — on the other hand, it leads to more frequent crop failure.

TL: How has the Green Revolution changed things for farmers? Is the most significant change in the ownership of seeds by corporations?

VS: The Green Revolution was the name given to the introduction of chemical/industrial farming in India in 1965-66 under the pressure of the U.S. government and World Bank. The Green Revolution was based on seeds bred for responding to chemical inputs. Companies made money from sale of agrichemicals, the seeds were in the public domain.

Genetic engineering is often called the second Green Revolution. Now, the seeds are owned by corporations through intellectual property rights. This leads to a very drastic change in how farming is done and who controls decisions in agriculture.

TL: How have companies like Monsanto, Cargill and others created what you call a “suicide economy” for farmers?

VS: Monsanto’s contribution to the suicide economy is by extracting super profits from farmers in the form of royalties and by intentionally transforming seeds from a renewable resource that farmers can save to a nonrenewable resource that they must buy in the market every year. Monsanto had a big role in shaping the TRIPs agreement [on intellectual property] of WTO.

Cargill’s contribution to the suicide economy is as the biggest controller of agricultural trade. Cargill was responsible for the Agreement on Agriculture, which has promoted dumping and denying farmers of the Third World their right to fair prices.

TL: Is there a particular area of the country that has been hardest hit? Which are the worst off and what are they growing? Are other areas more successful and if so, why?

VS: The worst-hit suicide areas of the country are Vidharbha, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Karnataka. These are also the cotton-growing areas, and these are the areas where Monsanto has established a monopoly on seed supply through Bt cotton. Areas where farmers have their own seed, where they are growing diversity of food crops and are practicing organic farming are areas free of debt and farmers suicides.

Navdanya has started a seeds-of-hope program in the suicide belt of Vidharbha. Creating seed banks, training farmers in organic agriculture and helping farmers with fair trade has helped farmers increase their incomes tenfold compared to farmers growing Bt cotton.

TL: What should the government of India be doing, and what can the world community do?

VS: The government of India should be playing a major role in public seed supply. Before Monsanto’s entry, 80 percent of the seed used to come from farmers’ own fields, and 20 percent came from government seed farms. Under privatization, government seed breeding has been wiped out. Seed is a public and common good, and hence seeds should stay in the hands of farming communities and public-sector institutions.

The government should also impose a moratorium on GMO seeds such as Bt cotton until full independent assessment of its performance in small farmers’ fields has been completed. The government should also promote organic farming, since from the perspective of farmers this is the only way to get out of the debt and suicide trap.

At the international level, the world community needs to defend seed as a common good and build a strong movement against seed patents and seed monopolies. People can also contribute to Navdanya’s Seeds of Hope Campaign.

To learn more, you can also read Shiva’s most recent article on the subject.

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Another inspiring video from PeakMoment TV.

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By Kari Lydersen, article on alternet.

From the mining of raw materials to energy production to the manufacturing process itself, industry guzzles tons of water.

…..The rampant waste of freshwater for general public use — lawn watering, the creation of suburban fake lakes, excessive bathing and household washing — has been well documented, as has the politically charged use of water in US agriculture. But the use and abuse of water in various parts of the global industrial economy is often overlooked. From the mining of raw materials for manufacturing to energy production, to the manufacturing process itself, the US industrial economy uses a significant amount of water every year.

Exact numbers for the amount of water used outside of agriculture or home consumption are difficult to come by. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that industry uses about five percent of all the water in the US, but does not include mining or electricity generation in that figure. A report from Dow Chemical puts the figure much higher, at around 20 percent. And perhaps more importantly, neither number takes into account the volume of water pollution that occurs in the course of industrial processes. At the very least, it’s clear that every year, billions of gallons of water are used — not to grow food or to meet physical human needs — but to quench our society’s thirst for the modern conveniences and technological devices we have come to rely on.

Water Equals Power

Nothing gets manufactured without electricity — and manufacturing electricity often requires water. Power generation is the thirstiest sector of the industrial economy, slurping up 195 billion gallons per day, according to the USGS. While about a third of this is saline (either ocean water or brackish groundwater), the rest is freshwater from lakes and rivers.

About 70 percent of US electricity comes from coal and nuclear plants, each of which produce power by heating water to make steam, which spins a turbine. Typical coal-burning or nuclear power plants have “open” or “closed” cooling systems. Closed systems reuse the same water multiple times and therefore require much less water. An open system runs water just once through the plant and then returns it to the source. In plants that use “once-through” water systems, the water is returned to the lake, ocean, or river it came from about 30 degrees warmer.

This increase in water temperature can cause fish kills, algae blooms, or otherwise greatly alter the natural biological makeup of the water body. Meanwhile, the intake pipes for such open cooling systems can be lethal for fish and aquatic microorganisms; electricity plants must sometimes be shut down when the pipes are clogged by fish, debris, or ice. Nuclear energy is an especially water-intensive technology.

A 1,400-megawatt nuclear reactor requires enough water to fill 5,000 Olympic swimming pools per year, according to a 2006 Australian study. The study, commissioned by the Queensland government, warns that the country’s severe drought could be exacerbated by building more nuclear power plants, which use about 25 percent more water than coal plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists calls nuclear power plants’ need for water “insatiable.”

The mining of the coal and uranium needed to feed these electricity stations is also highly destructive to local water sources. Until it was shut down by a lawsuit in 2005, the infamous Peabody Western Coal Company used precious groundwater from the dry Navajo and Hopi Nations to mix with pulverized coal and piped the slurry all the way from its Black Mesa mine in Arizona 275 miles to the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada. In Appalachia, many residents are no longer able to drink from their wells because blasting for coal has fractured their water tables and left their wells dangerously contaminated.

In 2003, Maria Gunnoe, a West Virginia mother who gained national attention for her activism against coal strip-mining, found her well contaminated from runoff from two nearby containing ponds storing waste from coal processing — waste that included selenium, lime, arsenic, and other toxins. “I had a 55-gallon fish tank, and I changed the water and this albino catfish I had had for eight years died instantly,” she said. “The water was all green. This happened overnight. When I turned on the shower, the smell was so awful I couldn’t take it. My kids and I all got skin reactions.”

Gunnoe started buying bottled water for all their household needs, to the tune of $250 a month. To add insult to injury, the road to her house was so damaged from blasting at the mine that she had to walk long distances to carry the heavy store-bought water home. And once-lovely Appalachian river valleys have been “in-filled” with waste from mountaintop removal mining. That is, the rivers essentially have been filled up with jumbled earth and ore sliced off to get at the lucrative coal seams. Regional activists have been fighting a loophole in the Clean Water Act that currently allows this destruction to occur.

Uranium mining poses similar environmental risks. Record-high prices for uranium in the past year mean that companies are hoping once again to mine uranium in the American Southwest, home to a thriving uranium industry from the 1940s to the 1980s. Much of the mining was done on or near Navajo land, and many of the miners were Navajos. The government is still processing compensation claims for miners suffering from lung cancer and other diseases caused by uranium exposure. Navajo Larry King remembers seeing his cows’ coats turn yellowish and their hooves brittle, and even seeing them keel over and die after drinking from uranium-contaminated wells on his land.

“Before, even people drank water from the windmill,” says King, referring to the well that is pumped by wind power. “We bathed in it and everything. Then they told us it wasn’t good for humans, so we had to start hauling water from Gallup. But some families still let their livestock drink there. They’re drinking uranium.” King remembers the day in 1979 when the Rio Puerco River, which runs by his land, was inundated with 90 million gallons of radioactive uranium-laden liquid from a waste pond after a barricade burst.

“Cattle drank from the wash, and they just started dropping dead for a few years,” he says. “Even now I find bones there.” This time around, companies want to use a method called “in situ recovery.” Instead of hauling the uranium-laced ore out of the ground, they would inject water into uranium-laced aquifers, mobilizing the uranium so it can be pumped out along with the water. Companies aiming to use this process say they will use reverse osmosis to clean the water to its original baseline condition. But critics are doubtful.

Eric Jantz, a lawyer challenging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to allow in situ mining in New Mexico’s Navajo country, says there is a “100 percent chance” the aquifer will be radioactively contaminated from in situ mining. Like coal and uranium mining, oil extraction can also require vast amounts of water. With the current oil crunch, companies are taking extreme measures to squeeze every last drop of oil from sources that previously would have been considered unprofitable or inefficient. In older oil fields, water is often injected into the wells to help pry the last sticky remnants out of the ground.

One of the most water-intensive petroleum extraction methods occurs in the gooey tar sands of Alberta, where it takes three to six barrels of water to harvest each barrel of oil, a process that sucks Canadian rivers and aquifers dry. Low river levels have already been attributed to tar sand excavation, and the industry is only in its nascent stages. As the Canadian organization Global Research put it in a December 2007 article: “While Canada has more water than any other country — it is the Saudi Arabia of water — polluting the planet’s largest supply of freshwater for a short-term burst of energy production is one of the most insane behaviors imaginable.”

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By Tara Lohan, on Alternet.

Can anyone really own water? That was the questions that got French filmmaker Irena Salina inspired to take on a mammoth project — chronicling the global water crisis and solutions — from privatization to politics to pollution.

Her creation, the award-winning film “FLOW: For Love of Water,” was a Sundance hit and now is making its theatrical debut in theaters across the country. Her film includes interviews with some of the world’s leading activists, scientists and policy makers. But it also looks at how everyday people are affected around the world — from the United States to South Africa to India and the growing network of grassroots activists that are coming together.

While the film is alarming, it is also empowering.

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Environment News Service

The world’s supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain today’s “profligate” use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm today.

“Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly worsen as climate change impacts intensify,” Leape said. “Irrigation-fed agriculture provides 45 percent of the world’s food supplies, and without it, we could not feed our planet’s population of six billion people.”

Leape warns that many of the world’s irrigation areas are highly stressed and drawing more water than rivers and groundwater reserves can sustain, especially in view of climate change. At the same time, he said, freshwater food reserves are declining in the face of the quickening pace of dam construction and
The World Water Week fountain in Stockholm (Photo by Alex de Sousa) unsustainable water extractions from rivers.

Experts seem to be telling us what many of us already know, but at least the issue is being looked at! No industry should be allowed to contaminate fresh water, and maybe if people lived closer to the land and had more idea of where things came from, they’d care more!

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Sharon Astyk looks at how to get water off your roof, out of the ground or otherwise when things get difficult.

Why do you need to know this? Isn’t it just crazy talk to imagine us not having *WATER*? Well, how much is your water bill right now? Are you sure you’ll always be able to pay it? Will you be able to pay for all the water you need for irrigating your garden? Or do you have a well? Are you certain you’ll be able to keep paying the electric bill? If you live in a dry place, are you sure there will always be water coming out of the tap? These are questions worth asking ahead of time, because water matters. Some of us have no choice but to be aware of that already – those who live in very dry places may already be struggling with water issues.

You need water. You will be very unhappy without it. And while we’re a long way from people dying from dehydration, not having it can be very tough on you and your body. So how do you get it if the normal routes get disrupted? The very first step on this is to begin to research your local watershed. Where does your water come from? What are the long term planning issues facing your region or community in regards to water? What impact does climate change seem to be having? What projected impact might it have? What issues are there with contamination? How safe is surface water? Do you have problems with acid rain? Pesticide runoff? PCB contamination? Mercury? What about your well? What about the local reservoirs? What are the legal issues of your water use? Can you collect rain? Can you make use of surface water? These are things you need to know.

Damned right they are. Water is the source of life, and we cannot live for long without it, or very comfortably without enough of it. Its all very well starting to grow your own food, but if your water supply is interrupted it will all die.

http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/ is a very useful resource.

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Says Diane Francis on Alternet.

Bottled water is a joke, one of the biggest consumer and taxpayer ripoffs ever. I applaud California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown who said recently that he will sue to block a proposed water-bottling operation in Northern California by Nestle.

Next, Attorneys General everywhere should require recycling of all plastic bottles and containers by requiring deposits to be paid to encourage returns, as is the case with aluminum cans. Not only do society and the environment pay an unfair price for this consumer hoax, but consumers are being hoodwinked. They are paying from 300 to 3,000 times more than the cost of tap water without any benefit.

But, we dont agree with her comment about flouridation. Poor diet causes tooth decay, and flouride does not prevent it. That is another scam by big companies, who had a problem, ‘what do we do with this highly toxic by-product of many industries?’ ‘oh, we’ll convince dentists, or even pay some to agree with us, that flouride in the water would be a good thing!’

Problem gone. What was once a dangerously toxic waste that cost for disposal, is now a beneficial resource, that can be sold…. amazing.

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