Eating for the Climate

Ever wonder if there's something to environmental pressure to change your way of eating for the sake of the planet? Salon examines the issue of global warming and food in an article excerpted briefly below and offers some (tentative) answers and advice in the process:

The No. 1 cause of global warming is burning fossil fuels for electric power. Still, the group raises an important point. A November 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report found that livestock accounts for 18 percent of global warming emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector.
Here in the U.S., livestock's impact is not quite so extreme: Six percent of our greenhouse gases come from livestock production, compared with 19 percent from cars, light trucks and airplanes. Still, for conscious eaters, those statistics are worth fleshing out.
According to the FAO, livestock production is a top cause of the world's many environmental problems: deforestation, acid rain, dead zones in the ocean, land degradation, water pollution, species extinction and, most threatening of all, global warming. "We looked at every step of the commodity chain, from feed production to consumption," says Henning Steinfeld, chief of the FAO's livestock policy branch.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm
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Support Your Local Farmer

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a growing phenomenon, thanks in part to local congregations like the one featured in this article excerpted from the San Mateo County Journal.

On Wednesday evenings, faith and produce mingle at Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel synagogue.
As parents gather to collect their children from Hebrew school or attend lectures, many also pass through the social hall, where they collect boxes of tomatoes, peaches, spinach and other organic produce.
It’s a blending of physical and spiritual sustenance that Rabbi Hillel Norry calls the best of Jewish values in action, and it’s just one of a growing number of faith-based community supported agriculture (or CSA) programs nationwide.
“We’re taking Jewish ideals of justice, economics, health, ecology, well-being and responsibility and putting them to work in the real world in a way that makes our lives and the life of the farmer better,” Norry says.
Fueled by growing interest in local food, CSAs have gone from just a few during the 1980s to about 2,000 today. They operate on the simple premise of enlisting community support for area farms, then rewarding that support with food.
In most cases, people buy shares in participating farms, paying a set amount upfront. For the Atlanta group, it’s $700, though most CSAs cost between $400 and $600. In exchange, the farmer delivers to them a weekly share of the crops, usually for 20 weeks or more. Consumers get good, local food; farmers get guaranteed income.
Of course, interest is contingent on caring about where one’s food comes from. But for some faiths, that concern is built in. Many Jews and Muslims follow kosher and halal tenets, which detail how foods can be raised, processed and stored.
For others, it’s a natural extension of existing concerns about the ethics and values of food and eating, issues important to groups such as the Iowa-based National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
Under the group’s leadership, several organic farms with CSAs have been established on or are planned for church-owned land in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, many of them operated by orders of monks and nuns.
“We’re still at the beginning of this ethical food system revolution,” says Brother David Andrews, the conference’s executive director. “Only a small percentage of our institutions and dioceses are doing this, but as consciousness of things like global warming, the obesity epidemic and diabetes grow, support for this will continue to grow.”
Launched this spring, Shearith Israel’s program is one of 10 Jewish CSAs created during the past three years as part of a project called Tuv Ha’aretz, Hebrew for both “the best of the land” and “good for the land.”
Under the auspices of Hazon, a New York-based nonprofit that also runs Jewish environmental bike rides and a blog on Jews, food and contemporary issues, Tuv Ha’aretz was started at New York’s Congregation Ansche Chesed.
“We needed 40 families to start, and we had 80 sign up,” says Nigel Savage, Hazon’s founder and director.
And interest elsewhere is strong, too. Tuv Ha’aretz coordinator Leah Koenig says she frequently gets e-mails from people around the country asking for information on starting a CSA in their synagogue or Jewish community center.
In Atlanta, Aaron Marks, a law student, said he and his wife joined the CSA for their 16-month-old son. “We’d heard a lot of scary reports about growth hormones and pesticides and wanted to try to keep his diet as chemical-free as possible,” he said. “We’re both concerned about the environment, and the fact that we’re doing something that might have a direct effect is good.”
Frieda Socol, a member of Shearith Israel since before her wedding 57 years ago, says the fresh CSA produce has started to take center stage at her Friday night dinners, when her family comes together to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath.
“I’ve learned a lot, finding out just exactly what can be done with some of these sometimes rather strange vegetables we have,” she said. “They’ve made Friday night dinner more interesting.”
Tuv Ha’aretz also runs CSA programs in St. Paul, Minn., Houston, Berkeley, Calif., Philadelphia and Washington, and even provides them with relevant biblical passages and other Jewish texts for inclusion in weekly CSA newsletters.
Hazon hopes to share its CSA model with other faiths and is seeking funding to launch joint efforts with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Faith In Place, an ecumenical environmental group in Chicago.

Climate Change Could Harm Crops

According to an AP story that appeared in the New York Times online,

Climate Change could drive many wild relatives of plants such as the potato and the peanut into extinction, threatening a valuable source of genes necessary to help these food crops fight pests and drought, an international research group reported.
During the next 50 years, more than 60 percent of 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of 108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct because of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
Surviving species would be confined to much smaller areas, further eroding their capacity to survive, the report said.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid

According to the New York Times, the mystery of the disappearing honey bees is becoming a cause for greater and greater alarm in the scientific community. Here is an excerpt from today's article:

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.

The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome.

“Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.”

Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.
About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers.

“There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said.

The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis.

So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses.
Genetic testing at

Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.

“That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.

Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials.

“There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.”
So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the

National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.

Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a

diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.

So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Thar's Gold in Them Thar Ears

Welcome to the corn rush of 07 (pronounced ot-7, of course.) According to the New York Times, US farmers plan on planting the most corn since 1944, hoping to cash in on the increasing popularity of ethanol.

The rush to plant corn comes at the cost of other crops, particularly soybeans and cotton. The Department of Agriculture said that if farmers followed through with their stated intentions, soybean acreage would drop 11 percent and cotton acreage would fall 20 percent.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

New Crops needed to combat climate change

"A group of leading agricultural research institutes will on Monday launch a major drive to prepare the most vulnerable people in the world for the devastating effects of global warming.
With large parts of the world facing dramatic crop losses from rising temperatures and changed rainfall patterns, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) says action is needed immediately and at all levels."