Food and Faith

Paddle for the Planet finds hope on the Mississippi River

When my 76-year-old mother, 19-year-old nephew and I joined four high school juniors and leaders David and Sam T., they had already paddled 439 miles from Lake Itasca at the headwaters of the Mississippi to St. Cloud, Minnesota. We joined them for the final 81 miles of this 518-mile Paddle for the Planet.

Mary, Colby, Sophia and Jamiah; juniors at Scattergood Friends School

These students, plus Sam C. who left midstream when he got news that his best friend had died in a car accident ["Everyone, please drive defensively!"], had set out into the wilderness for four weeks with the gear they could lug on their capable backs, including water testing equipment to see how human activity was affecting the Mississippi River.

Minneapolis TV, WCCO, covered the story on the last day of paddling.

To prepare for the the trip, Jamiah had done a Dead Zone Report to explore how what folks do in Minnesota affects the health of the river and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. To find out for themselves, they took nitrate samples each day from the river.

To their surprise, they found very few nitrates - almost none - in the river water!

Why is that important? Because it means that very little fertilizer run-off from farmland is flowing into the river during the weeks they tested. Potassium nitrate is used in chemical fertilizers to supply crops with nitrogen, along with the other key nutrients of potassium and phosphorus. I was eager to learn about the impact of agriculture along the river, and the fact that regulation could make a positive difference was very encouraging.

Here is trip leader, David Abazs, doing the nitrates test and talking about the revival of the Bald Eagle and other wildlife along the river.

Background on Paddle for the Planet:

As captured in the Paddle for the Planet bulletin insert (pdf) from Valley Community Presbyterian Church, who welcomed the group to join their Pentecost worship service and picnic last Sunday, the goals of Paddle for the Planet were to:

1) BUILD COMMUNITY along the river banks and within our international crew celebrating each other, the river and the planet
2) CONDUCT RESEARCH on water quality and watershed issues along the full length of the river
3) EDUCATE ourselves, the community and planet about our connections between the river, energy and agriculture.
4) FUND RAISE for non-profit organizations working on energy and agricultural issues.

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Other Paddle For The Planet Student Projects!
Renewable Energy Report Learn about Colby's thoughts on how renewable energy could play an important role in the future health of the river. 

Mississippi River Fish Report Sophia's interest in fish will look below the surface and some things may surprise you...

Phenology Report What is phenology? Well, Mary didn't know until she put together this report. It has currently been lost in the elctronic world, but the time for her story is not ready!

Useful Plants Report Jamiah found some interesting plants and more that can help clean the water and save the planet. Some of his links are amazing! 

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This slide show with music, prepared by paddler Colby Abazs, will give you a feel for what they saw and experienced while canoeing the mighty Mississippi.

face-off over Africa

The industry and their devotees tell us that genetically modified crops are the way to feed Africans. Whether they truly believe it or not, they apparently see GM in Africa as the way to feed their future bottom line.

So they are using the billion hungry people as the rationale to espouse, promote and market high-tech and genetically modified food as part of US foreign policy and development agenda. Last month, they had their day in the sun as Ministers of Economy lined up next to Bill Gates to promote a new 'Green Revolution' for Africa. Canada too announced it will contribute $230-million (U.S.). 

At least when it comes to Haiti, there is a degree of skepticism about the promises of GM technology. A colleague says she has found an article stating that the Haitian government has ensured that Monsanto can never bring GMOs into Haiti. I hope she is right. Seems Monsanto, USAID and the Haitian government knew civil society would be outraged by this. 

In contrast to the hoopla in Washington, Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, of Zurich's Institute of Integrative Biology declared the following in her excellent article about the IAASTD (find out what this important acronym is all about here):

Post-war industrialized, chemical-based agriculture and food production is coming to an end – it has to if we are to reach the millennium goals and keep the planet in a livable condition. Food (including water) and the environment are issues of global peace and justice – no more and no less.

The lines in the sand are drawn and the transgenic biotech lobbying machine is roaring around the halls of Congress at full speed. As people of faith who care deeply about impoverished people, we must stay engaged in public policy advocacy and the anti-trust hearings happening this year. In this way, we have the possibility of limiting the power of giant agribusinesses and perhaps preventing decisions from being made that may harm tens of millions of people in Africa for decades to come. Contact [email protected] to learn how you can help.

New evidence for 'chemical cocktail' effect in bee deaths

You might feel differently if you've been stung by one, but there are few things I find sadder than honey bees dying in mass numbers. So why are they dying?  Pesticides Action Network provided this explanation.

Finding an average of 8 different pesticides -- at times up to 31 -- in honeybee hives, a new study illuminates the "unprecedented" pesticide load place on bees and other pollinators, according to ScienceNews. Noting that the mix, or synergistic effects, of the pesticide burden borne by bees may be much more harmful than any one chemical exposure alone, scientists from the American Chemical Society called "for emergency funding to address the myriad holes in our scientific understanding of pesticide consequences for pollinators."

Past Food and Faith posts on bee deaths (most recent at top):

• Why are the bees dying? They call it Colony Collapse Disorder
• Bee deaths linked to Bayer pesticides
• Got food? Check for bees

And here is the video from that latest post:

Getting back to the study -
Over two years, scientists analyzed pollen, wax, and live bees from both healthy bee colonies and those suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder - a mysterious disease responsible for decimating over a third of the U.S. honeybee population since 2006. The results show that not only are hives contaminated by record numbers of crop pesticides and mite-killing chemicals, but that these chemicals may be interacting in very harmful and unknown ways. In beeswax samples, the study found that "87 pesticides and metabolites were found with up to 39 different detections in a single sample," including the breakdown products of the contaminants, some of which do more damage their the chemicals in their original forms. Among the pesticides most commonly found: chlorpyrifos, endosulfan and atrazine.

Researchers also found that in may cases, the bees' homes (wax and pollen) were far more contaminated than the live bees themselves, but supposed that the difference was due to the fact that the sample bees were mostly queens, brood nurses and adolescents - not the worker bees who are, "on the chemical frontlines, foraging in pesticide treated fields." In fact the study found very few healthy worker bees in the hives, indicating that the poisoned foragers likely die before they ever make it home. And direct mortality, the researchers noted, is not the primary risk of this toxic load. Little is known about how miticides, a chemical applied to kill parasitic bee mites, interact with crop pesticides, and the scientists involved say that, "these miticides may, when paired up with other classes of pesticides, act synergistically to poison insects." Even the healthy colonies that were studied, only 1 wax sample, 3 pollen samples and 12 bees were found to be free of detectable pesticides. Even the sub-lethal impacts of these chemical cocktails, which affect honey bee learning, orientation and immune system functioning, will have devastating effects on the $14 billion worth of U.S. crops that depend on these pollinators each year.

Pesticides Action Network is asking its members to advocate for a ban on Chlorpyrifos

You can subscribe to Pesticides Action Network's Updates here.

A Better Way to Feed the Hungry?

By Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe

Bill Gates thinks he's got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition abroad by fortifying food.

The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in part encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris' Kraft, and other companies to develop vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It then facilitates their entry into Third World markets.

Gates seems to believe we don't have time to address the complex social and political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this single-focus, top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up hurting the very people he wants to help.

His strategy ignores a crucial reality: Many, if not most, of the hungriest people in the world are themselves farmers. They eke out a living by selling what they grow, and eating it. Helping foreign food purveyors penetrate their markets will only further rob them of livelihood. For example, India's dairy cooperatives -- many run by poor women -- would be hard-pressed to withstand the onslaught of Kraft's marketing power.

The Gates approach also hurts the poor if it shifts tastes toward processed foods -- typically adding fat, sugar, and salt while removing needed fiber and micronutrients. This diet trend already contributes to the spread of diseases currently burdening the industrial world. Obesity and diet-related diseases including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are becoming a global crisis. In the Third World, grossly insufficient health care budgets are now being diverted to treat these conditions, and away from treating deadly infectious diseases.

hot enough to fry an egg

Computer generated version of a quark-gluon plasma

Despite the reference to eggs, this has nothing to do with food. Eggs no; hot yes. Some fellow human beings have achieved and measured a quark-gluon plasma at 4-trillion degrees Celsius. In case you can't fathom that, imagine 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Protons and elections would simply melt.

If that isn't wild enough to fry your brain, what gets me is the speeds they get these gold nuclei circling around their handy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. They collide these invisible-to-the-eye gold specks after accelerating their speed to 99.995 percent the speed of light.

You can do the math, right. One lap of this underground track is 2.4 miles. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, I think. So in one second, this gold speck goes around that track 77,500 times. In ONE SECOND.

If we can do stuff like that, we should be able to figure out how to end hunger.

Do you think we can?

Good farms capture carbon!

Hearing the word 'data' may not thrill you, but this is juicy!

Data from the Rodale Institute’s long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil.

Consider this fact: If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.

Right now, I'm on an initial conference call of the ad hoc Interfaith Food and Agriculture group convened by Rodale. We are sorting through who else should be part of the conversation and what we might do together... 

In the meantime, check out this exciting article from Rodale!

Organic farming combats global warming -- big time