The 14 Characteristics of Fascism by Lawrence Britt Spring 2003 Free Inquiry magazine

Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt recently wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The excerpt is in accordance with the magazine's policy.
The 14 characteristics are:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
   Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
   
   
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
   Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
   
   
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
   The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
   
   
4. Supremacy of the Military
   Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
   
   
5. Rampant Sexism
   The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
   
   
6. Controlled Mass Media
   Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
   
   
7. Obsession with National Security
   Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
   
   
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
   Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
   
   
9. Corporate Power is Protected
   The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
   
   
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
    Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .
    
    
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
    Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
    
    
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
    Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
    
    
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
    Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
    
    
14. Fraudulent Elections
    Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Copyright © 2003 Free Inquiry magazine
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.

This article was based upon the article "The Hallmarks of Fascist Regime" by Skip Stone, at www.hippy.com/php/article-226.html.

It’s the End of the World Unless We All Start Cooking.

From The Daily Beast - By Rachel Khong



Is the way we’re eating going to bring about end of the world?

The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.
 

Michael Pollan at Toronto's Live Organic Food Bar in February 2008. (Keith Beaty)

For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.
 

But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.
 

Before World War II every calorie of fossil-fuel energy put into a farm—in the form of diesel energy for tractors, and in fertilizer—yielded 2.3 calories of food. That’s nature’s free lunch—the difference between that 1 calorie in and the 2.3 out, which is the result of solar energy. Now, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food. It’s absurd that we’re now running an energy deficit with food, the production of which is theoretically based on photosynthesis. It should be the one area in our lives that is carbon neutral or even better, because plants are really the only way to take energy from the sun.
 

Our goal should be to eat from the solar food chain to the extent we can and not from the fossil-fuel chain, which is what we’re mainly doing now. The question becomes: how do you do that? We have some powerful models. Grass-fed beef is basically a system where the sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the ruminants, and the ruminants feed us. You’re eating sunlight when you eat from that food chain. Re-solarizing the food chain should be our goal in every way—taking advantage of the everyday miracle that is photosynthesis.
 

We’re not doing that, because fossil fuel has been so cheap. Over time, farms have been substituting fossil fuel for human labor as well as the energy of the sun. Fertilizer made with natural gas or diesel was a huge step away from using the sun. It is only in the last few years that people are starting to realize the role food can play in fixing environmental problems, and the fact that we’re not going to tackle global warming without reforming the food system.
 

‘Cooked’ by Michael Pollan. 480 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
 

Take, for example, Assembly Bill 32 in California. The law is designed to gradually bring down the amount of carbon emitted by our fuel companies, power companies, and our cars, by capping carbon emissions. But the law doesn’t deal with agriculture. They didn’t know how to deal with agriculture, so they simply left it out. But by not capping agriculture, the state will be playing Whac-a-Mole. As all these other industries’ outputs go down, agriculture’s will continue to go up. We have to learn to deal with the effects of agricultural practices—especially cattle feedlots—or we’re never going to get a handle on carbon. We shouldn’t have as much dairy in California as we do—it’s that simple. It’s a desert, and cows need grass. Re-localizing food economies can—not necessarily, but can—help reduce our reliance on fossil fuel.
 

At what point did we start making food worse instead of better?

Up until the 19th century, the history of cooking was all in the direction of making food more nutritious. But in the late 19th century, we learned how to refine grain and make white flour. In the 1880s, in England, we came up with roller mills, which can cleanly separate the endosperm—the pure starch—from the germ and bran, which is where most of the nutrients are.
 

With that “advance,” we began taking cooking too far. (Around the same time, we learned how to do something similar with sugar—turning cane and beets into pure sugar.) Cooking essentially went overboard. It began contributing to public-health problems. We started to have problems with tooth decay; with obesity; with nutrient deficiencies, because people began to eat lots of empty calories.

We basically got too smart for our own good; we moved from cooking to “food processing.” When people talk about processed food as being unhealthy, what they’re really talking about is cooking as it is performed by corporations. Companies cook in a different way. They’re trying to make food that our bodies can absorb as quickly as possible. You could argue that this process is continuous with the history that I’ve been describing, which is to make food progressively easier to digest. But at that point they’ve removed all the fiber, and they’re satisfying only the most basic desire for glucose, for sugar.

 

We love sugar. We’re hardwired to like sweetness. It’s one of the few food instincts we have. We don’t like bitter, because it’s usually a sign of a plant toxin. Most of the toxins in nature are bitter; they’re alkaloids. We’re attracted to sugar because in nature, sugar is a sign of calories, of concentrated energy. In nature, sweetness is a pretty reliable guide to healthy food. It indicates the presence of ripe fruit, which comes with fiber and lots of important nutrients and phytochemicals. But once you’ve crossed over and you’re making processed sugar, it no longer comes with all those good things.
 

The food industry has established a financial model where you take raw materials—corn, soy, wheat—and you “add value” by creating processed foods from those cheap building blocks.

One of the main problems is that there are really two of us to feed: there’s our brain, which loves glucose, and then there’s our gut—the microbiome—which has very different dietary needs than “we” do. We really like sugar, but the gut really likes fiber and other parts of plants. We got really good at finding sugar, because the brain lives on glucose, but we neglect the fact that you have to feed the whole body, that we’re not just eating for one—we’re eating for the 10 trillion microbes living inside us. So in our cooking, we have to learn to cook for all 10 trillion. But it’s hard for us to listen to the desires of those 10 trillion—the brain is much easier to hear.
 

At the turn of the century, white flour became a huge part—something like 20 percent—of the diet. In the early years of the 20th century, people recognized that white flour was making us sick because of its lack of vitamins. But the beauty of white flour is that it meshes so well with our capitalist economy. It’s a commodity that is imperishable. It is largely indistinguishable: all white flour is white flour. White flour can be transported over great distances; it’s easier to cook with; it lends itself to industrialized baking; it’s a perfect capitalist commodity.
 

Capitalism is most concerned with food not being perishable, being shelf-stable. Whole grains make volatile, perishable flour, so big companies don’t want to rely on it. Instead, they figured out a techno-fix: supplementation. They said, OK, these are the vitamins we lost when we took away the bran and the germ, so we’ll just put them back in in chemical form. Various B vitamins, niacin, thiamine, all those things. And that took care of the problem. Sort of. It took care of the problem for us, but not for the 10 trillion. Your microbes didn’t care much about the vitamins; they wanted the bran.
 

In the history of food processing, you never turn back, you just come up with a technological fix for whatever problems you’ve created. Food gets more and more complex, more processed. The food industry has established a financial model where you take raw materials—corn, soy, wheat—and you “add value” by creating processed foods from those cheap building blocks. So instead of selling nutritious brown rice, we genetically engineered white rice that has vitamin A in it: “golden” rice. The more complex you can make a food product, the more profitable it is. But at the end of the day, all that processing and engineering is achieving is returning what we took out in the first place. Baby formula is the great example. Breast milk is the perfect food, formed by natural selection to have everything the developing child—and its microbiota—needs. We’ve spent almost two hundred years trying to simulate it, because food companies can’t make money when people are nursing their babies.
 

But we still can’t make formula as good as breast milk. There’s still that mystery X-factor because babies raised on formula simply don’t do as well. When we simulate formula, we try to design what the baby needs and once again we forget about the ten trillion. Only in the last ten years or so, did we discover that the oligosaccharides (a kind of sugar) in mother’s milk—a “nutrient” that the baby can’t digest—are vital to a baby’s gut microbes. They encourage the proliferation of bifida, a very important kind of bacteria. It’s human arrogance to think we can outwit nature.
 

How do we go about fixing what we’ve messed up? Is it all bad news?

I sometimes find myself wondering whether we can posit or imagine a food science that is actually improving food in the way that cooking for most of its history succeeded in doing. Theoretically we should be able to do this. We came up with fermentation; we came up with cooking with fire. We’ve had food science and food technology now for a hundred and fifty years, and so far, not so good. So far we haven’t done anything that useful. But we understand a lot more, and we should be able to improve on things, not just make money and entertain people.
 

I can think of some examples of potentially useful food processing innovations. Here’s one that some people are actually working on. For reasons having to do with both our health and the health of our environment, we need really good meat substitutes. So far meat substitutes are really unsatisfying. No one but a vegan can get excited about fake bacon. They seem to think it’s really good. But most people who’ve actually eaten bacon? They don’t really see the point. It’s probably because vegans have forgotten how real bacon tastes, but they have this deep memory of the experience that is stirred by the fake bacon. Mock-meat hamburgers are not very satisfying, either. They’re also much more expensive than real hamburgers, which is odd considering they’re made from vegetable matter.
 

Today there are people using the most sophisticated food science to simulate meat, and it seems to me that if this is done well, it has enormous potential to contribute to our welfare and to the environment. Cheese that is not made with cows’ milk might be something to work on because we’re consuming huge amounts of the stuff, and dairy cows, like beef cows, have an enormous environmental footprint. The whole California central valley—especially Tulare County—is wall-to-wall dairy cows producing low-quality milk for low-quality cheese that’s put on Domino’s pizzas all over the world. Synthesizing this type of cheese is really not a very high bar to hit: all that’s needed is something white and cheeselike that melts. It seems to me that a good nondairy cheese would be a positive contribution to humankind, and something worth working on.
 

As a society this is a very important question we need to pose. How can we cook better—better for our health, and better for the health of the planet? Now we have molecular gastronomy, which is using lots of new techniques. But what has it really contributed? More in the way of novel experiences and entertainment, I would say, and very little toward solving any kind of public-health problem. I haven’t seen anything in that world that says to me, If we popularize this technique, it would have really positive effects. But this is what we need to work on. I have little doubt that if Nathan Myhrvold set that as his goal, he could help solve some of our real nutritional and environmental problems linked to food. But I don’t see that happening right now.
 

Yet there are reasons to feel encouraged. People are much more conscious of food politics and agricultural politics than they were a few years ago. The farm bill used to just be passed without anyone outside of the farm belt noticing. Now we see front-page articles about agricultural policy. We’re making some progress toward politicizing things that were once happening behind closed doors, and that’s a good thing.
 

But we have a long way to go. I want to see the FDA ban antibiotics. I want to see a farm bill that subsidizes healthy food and not just junk food. All that hasn’t come yet. The food movement is still a young movement. I’m optimistic, and I don’t think we should be discouraged. We’re talking about some really entrenched and powerful interests that need to be dislodged. You look at other comparable movements—the environmental movement or civil rights—and you see that change didn’t happen in a decade; it took generations. And this will take generations, too.
 

The food movement needs strong leadership. There are too many writers and chefs, and not enough smart politicians. We don’t yet have the skills we need to organize and force change in Washington. That said, I do think that chefs are playing a really constructive role. They have the cultural microphone right now, and they’re using it to promote good farming and careful thought about food. Part of what we need and what chefs are promoting is the cultural re-evaluation of food: recognizing that food is important both to your health and to your culture, and that it’s worth spending a little money on it if you can.
 

What I’m trying to do in this new book is make a case for cooking as a valuable way to spend your time. I want to lure people into the kitchen with the promise of pleasure, and not because it’s an obligation, or something you should do. I happen to believe cooking is as interesting as watching TV or being on the computer, which is what people seem to be doing with the time they “save” by not cooking. Cooking isn’t drudgery. It takes real mental engagement; it offers sensual pleasures; it’s very enriching to cook. My book has all these detours into microbiology and the science of flavor because truly amazing things are going on when you cook. As a cook, you are a chemist and you are a physicist and you are a cultural historian all at once. And what can seem boring to people is often just a failure to use their imaginations and intellect to understand what’s actually going on, what is at stake. It’s the same with gardening. Cooking and gardening to me are very similar activities on many levels; you could argue that pulling weeds is boring and you’d rather be looking at a screen. But I usually feel better after I’ve weeded my garden than after plowing through another hour’s worth of email. Ironically enough, I think there is actually more mental space for this kind of work now—our lives are so mediated by technology, so mediated by screens, that there’s a real hunger to recover the use of our hands, and our senses.
 

We’re sensorially deprived right now, in modern life. Our eyes are engaged—sometimes our ears—but our bodies? Not so much. These aren’t just bags of bones we’re carrying around. When we cook, when we garden, when we make things with our hands, we’re engaging all of our senses and that has—in ways we don’t really know how to quantify—deeply positive effects on our mental and physical health. We’re hungry for the all the complex sensory information that cooking can provide when approached in the right spirit.
 

An excerpt from the “Apocalypse” issue of Lucky Peach magazine, published by McSweeney’s. To learn more, click here.
 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rachel Khong lives in San Francisco. She edits cookbooks for McSweeney's, and is the managing editor of Lucky Peach.

Why Tar Sands Pipelines Guarantee Disaster

We just don't know what the exact magnitude of the disaster will be.

Oiled areas between homes (EPA)
Photo Credit: EPA

AlterNet / By Michael Brune

It's now been almost two weeks since ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spill put at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and contaminated water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower. Many of the evacuated families still haven't been able to return to their homes.

Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up about 20 miles southeast of Mayflower, in Gravel Ridge, attended a meeting for the displaced families at Mayflower High School: "I had to really stare down some ExxonMobil goons who told me to leave because it was a private meeting. I politely explained that it was a meeting in a public building about a public subject with numerous public officials in attendance, and that I was planning to stay."

Glen's soft-spoken, but he's not easily intimidated. Arkansas Business Journal named him an "Eco-Hero of the Year" for his work in helping to stop new coal-fired power plants. During the Mayflower meeting, Glen listened as an ExxonMobil executive apologized to the families and said that the focus was on safety and helping the homeowners. "The meeting then moved into a phase where ExxonMobil met with individual family members about their claims in a side room guarded by no fewer than six uniformed police officers."

Here's something that ExxonMobil probably didn't tell those homeowners: In 2010, it was fined $26,200 by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway.

This is a pipeline that crosses under the Mississippi River (just one of the places ExxonMobil failed to do inspections). It's hard to say which is more shocking: That "safety first" ExxonMobil has been so cavalier about pipeline inspections or that it was fined such a pittance for its irresponsibility. By my calculation, $26,200 comes out to about .00009% of ExxonMobil's net income for 2010. Let's put that in perspective. If ExxonMobil's income were the same as the median family income in Faulkner County, Arkansas, which is where its pipeline leaked, then ExxonMobil's fine for putting the Mississippi River at risk would have been not quite four cents.

No matter how much ExxonMobil ends up spending to clean up the mess in Mayflower, the impact on its profit statement will be miniscule. Unfortunately, no amount of cash can buy peace of mind for the families whose homes were violated by tar sands. Tar sands crude is both more toxic and much harder to clean than ordinary crude. Just ask Enbridge, which has now spent almost $1 billion and two years trying to clean up the Kalamazoo River after the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge has experience, too. There were 804 spills on its pipelines between 1999 and 2010.

No wonder ExxonMobil is doing everything it can to keep reporters and everyone else as far away from the Mayflower disaster as possible. The more the American public learns about the real cost of tar sands crude, the more opposition to the Keystone XL and other tar sands projects will increase.

Keystone XL opponents often point out that Americans assume all the risk of tar sands pipelines, while oil companies will rake in all the profit from tar sands exports. But let's be clear about the sort of risk we're talking about. If the pipeline is built, it's not a question of whether it will fail, but of when and where. We're not risking a disaster. Disaster is certain. We just don't know what the exact magnitude of the disaster will be. What if the Pegasus pipeline had failed under the Mississippi rather than in Mayflower?

Here's something we do know: The first Keystone XL disaster will be far worse than what happened in Mayflower, since TransCanada's pipeline will pump ten times as much tar sands crude as the Pegasus does.

I wish the disaster in Mayflower had never happened. Now that it has, though, I hope we heed its two biggest lessons: 1. How oil companies talk about safety has no connection to how they act. 2. The last thing you want to wake up and find in your backyard is a tar sands spill.

We have a few days left. Tell the president to keep his climate promises. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Michael Brune is executive director of the Sierra Club.

Nanoparticles Are in Our Food, Clothing and Medicine -- And No One Knows for Sure How Dangerous They Might Be.

 

 

 

 

Orion Magazine / By Heather Millar

      

Inside nanotechnology’s little universe of big unknowns.     

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This article first appeared at Orion Magazine under the title "Pandora's Boxes." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.
 

A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them—the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.

 

Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.

The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke’s Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.
So far the questions about whether nanoparticles are an environmental risk outnumber the answers, which is why the Duke scientists take the precaution of wearing clean-suits while dosing the boxes—no one’s sure what exposure to a high concentration of nanoparticles might do. Among the few things we do know about them are that they sail past the blood-brain barrier and can harm the nervous systems of some animals.

The regulation of nanoparticles has been recommended for more than a decade, but there’s no agreement on exactly how to do it. Meanwhile, the lid has already been lifted on nanotechnology. The use of man-made nanoparticles has spread into almost every area of our lives: food, clothing, medicine, shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen, and thousands of other products.

Regulatory structures, both here and abroad, are completely unprepared for this onslaught of nanoproducts, because nanoparticles don’t fit into traditional regulatory categories. Additionally, companies often shield details about them by labeling them “proprietary”; they’re difficult to detect; we don’t have protocols for judging their effects; and we haven’t even developed the right tools for tracking them. If nanotechnology and its uses represent a frontier of sorts, it’s not simply the Wild West—it’s the Chaotic, Undiscovered, Uncontrollable West.

And yet, when I visit the boxes on a warm spring day filled with the buzzing of dragonflies and the plaintive call of mourning doves, they look perfectly benign and could easily be mistaken for a container garden. But there are hints that more is going on: each “mesocosm” (a middle ground between microcosm and macrocosm) is studded with probes and sensors that continually transmit data to CEINT’s central computer.

As I instinctively squint my eyes to try and locate evidence of the silver nanoparticles inside each box, I realize I might as well be staring down at these research gardens from another arm of the galaxy. The scale of these two worlds is so disparate that my senses are destined to fail me.

As with many things that are invisible and difficult to understand—think subatomic particles such as the Higgs boson, muons, gluons, or quarks—any discussion of nanoparticles quickly shifts into the realm of metaphor and analogy. People working in nanoscience seem to try to outdo each other with folksy explanations: Looking for a nanoparticle is like looking for a needle in the Grand Canyon when the canyon is filled with straw. If a nanoparticle were the size of a football, an actual football would be the size of New Zealand. A million nanoparticles could squeeze onto the period at the end of this sentence.

But what is a nanoparticle? The very simplest explanation is that a nanoparticle is a very small object. It can consist of any bit of matter—carbon, silver, gold, titanium dioxide, pretty much anything you can imagine—that exists on the scale of nanometers. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter. A nanoparticle may range in size from one nanometer to one hundred nanometers, although the upper boundary remains a matter of debate among scientists.

Nanoparticles exist in nature, but they can also be manufactured. One way is top-down: grinding up things that are big until they are really, really small, an approach used in nanolithography for electronics. Or you can make them from the bottom up, following instructions that read like a chemistry textbook: mixing one chemical with another by pyrolysis (heating a material in a partial vacuum), or with electrolysis (running a current through a liquid), or by other means.

But what do they look like? Raju Badireddy, a postdoctoral researcher, is happy to satisfy my curiosity. He greets me with a smile at the door to one of CEINT’s basement labs and guides me around his little domain. For much of his work, Badireddy uses a “dark field” microscope that excludes certain wavelengths of light, reducing the “noise” in the image to provide unparalleled clarity. Sensing my anticipation, he doses a slide with silver nanoparticles similar to those in the mesocosm boxes in the forest, and slips it under the lens.

As I look into the scope, it fairly takes my breath away. There are so many dots of light that I’m reminded of staring up at the Milky Way on a trip across the Tibetan Plateau years ago. Yet the silver dots throb and undulate as if alive. Here and there, giant spheres of dust, as large as Goodyear blimps, porpoise through the nanoparticles. I pull back from the oculars, feeling as if I’ve intruded upon something private. This world is so close—it’s even inside me—yet it looks so other, so mysterious.
Scientists don’t really have a full theoretical foundation to explain reality at this scale. But all agree that one of the most important aspects of nanoparticles is that they are all surface. Consider a conventional chemical process: When one element is reacting with another, it’s really just the surface molecules that are involved in the lock-and-key dance of classical chemistry. The vast majority of the molecules remain interior, and stable. But there are many fewer molecules in a nanoparticle, so most of the molecules are on the outside, thus rendering nanoparticles more reactive.

Myriad surface imperfections cause randomness to dominate the nano world. If you hit a billiard ball with a clean shot at the macro level, you can have a good idea where it will go. But at the nano level, a billiard ball might shoot straight up, or even reverse direction. These bits of matter are hot to trot: ready to react, to bond, and to do so in unpredictable ways.

This makes life at the nano scale more chaotic. For instance, aluminum is used everywhere to make soda cans. But in nanopowder form, aluminum explodes violently when it comes in contact with air. At the macro level, gold is famously nonreactive. At the nano level, gold goes the opposite way, becoming extremely reactive. Bulk carbon is soft. But at the nano level, if you superheat it, the molecules bend into a tube that is very strong and semiconductive. In the nano world, gravity fades to the background, becoming less pronounced, the melting temperature of materials changes, and colors shift. At 25 nanometers, spherical gold nanoparticles are red; at 50 nanometers they are green; and at 100 nanometers they’re orange. Similarly, silver is blue at 40 nanometers and yellow at 100 nanometers.

So chemistry and physics work differently if you’re a nanoparticle. You’re not as small as an atom or a molecule, but you’re also not even as big as a cell, so you’re definitely not of the macro world either. You exist in an undiscovered country somewhere between the molecular and the macroscopic. Here, the laws of the very small (quantum mechanics) merge quirkily with the laws of the very large (classical physics). Some say nanomaterials bring a third dimension to chemistry’s periodic table, because at the nano scale, long-established rules and groupings don’t necessarily hold up.

These peculiarities are the reason that nanoparticles have seeped into so many commercial products. Researchers can take advantage of these different rules, adding nanoparticles to manufactured goods to give them desired qualities.

Scientists first realized that nanomaterials exhibit novel properties in 1985, when researchers at Rice University in Houston fabricated a Buckminsterfullerene, so named because the arrangement of sixty carbon atoms resembles the geodesic domes popularized by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller. These “Buckyballs” resist heat and act as superconductors. Then, in 1991, a researcher at the Japanese technology company NEC discovered the carbon nanotube, which confers great strength without adding weight. Novel nano materials have been reported at a feverish pace ever since.
With these engineered nanoparticles—not even getting into the more complex nanomachines on the horizon—we can deliver drugs to specific cells, “cloak” objects to make them less visible, make solar cells more efficient, and manufacture flexible electronics like e-paper.

In the household realm, nanosilica makes house paints and clothing stain resistant; nanozinc and nano–titanium dioxide make sunscreen, acne lotions, and cleansers transparent and more readily absorbed; and nanosilicon makes computer components and cell phones ever smaller and more powerful. Various proprietary nanoparticles have been mixed into volumizing shampoos, whitening toothpastes, scratch-resistant car paint, fabric softeners, and bricks that resist moss and fungus.

A recent report from an American Chemical Society journal claims that nano–titanium dioxide (a thickener and whitener in larger amounts) is now found in eighty-nine popular food products. These include: M&Ms and Mentos, Dentyne and Trident chewing gums, Nestlé coffee creamers, various flavors of Pop-Tarts, Kool-Aid, and Jell-O pudding, and Betty Crocker cake frostings. According to a market report, in 2010 the world produced 50,000 tons of nano–titanium dioxide; by 2015, it’s expected to grow to more than 200,000 tons.

At first some in the scientific community didn’t think that the unknown environmental effects of nanotechnology merited CEINT’s research. “The common view was that it was premature,” says CEINT’s director, Mark Wiesner. “My point was that that’s the whole point. But looking at risk is never as sexy as looking at the applications, so it took some time to convince my colleagues.”
Wiesner’s team at CEINT chose to study silver nanoparticles first because they are already commonly added to many consumer products for their germ-killing properties. You can find nanosilver in socks, wound dressings, doorknobs, sheets, cutting boards, baby mugs, plush toys—even condoms. How common is the application of nanoparticles? It varies, but when it comes to socks, for example, hospitals now have to be cautious that the nanosilver in a patient’s footwear doesn’t upset their MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines.

Wiesner and his colleagues spent several months designing the experiments that will help them outline some general ecological principles of the unique nanoverse. He knew they wanted to test the particles in a system, but a full-scale ecosystem would be too big, too unmanageable, so they had to find a way to container-ize nature. They considered all sorts of receptacles: kiddie pools (too flimsy), simple holes in the ground (too dirty, too difficult to harvest for analysis), concrete boxes (crack in winter). Finally, they settled upon wooden boxes lined with nonreactive, industrial rubber: cheap to build, easy to reuse, and convenient to harvest.

They built thirty boxes and a greenhouse to hold them. The large number would make it easier to replicate experiments, and to answer the spectrum of questions being posed by CEINT’s interdisciplinary team. The ecologists were interested in community diversity and how the biomass shifts over time. The biologists wanted to know whether the nanoparticles become concentrated as they move up the food chain. The toxicologists wanted to track where the particles went and how fast they got there. The chemists wanted to know about reactivity.

Whatever the goal of the experiment it houses, each mesocosm features a slanted board upon which a terrestrial ecosystem slowly gives way to an aquatic one. It’s a lot more complicated than a test tube in a lab, but it remains an approximation. The team had hoped to run streams through the mesocosms, but the computing power and monitoring vigilance necessary to track nanoparticles in the streams proved prohibitive.

In 2011, the team dosed the boxes with two kinds of nanosilver made on campus: one coated in PVP, a binder used in many medicines, and the other coated in gum arabic, a binder used in numerous products, including gummi candies and cosmetics. Both coatings help to stabilize the nanosilver. In some boxes, the researchers let the silver leach slowly into the box. In other boxes, they delivered the silver in one big pulse. In some, they introduced the silver into the terrestrial part of the box; in others, they put the silver into the water.

Then the researchers watched and waited.

Reading through descriptions of nanoparticle applications can make a person almost giddy. It all sounds mostly great. And the toxicology maxim “Dose makes the poison” leads many biologists to be skeptical of the dangers nanoparticles might pose. After all, nanoparticles are pretty darn small.
Yet size seems to be a double-edged sword in the nanoverse. Because nanoparticles are so small, they can slip past the body’s various barriers: skin, the blood-brain barrier, the lining of the gut and airways. Once inside, these tiny particles can bind to many things. They seem to build up over time, especially in the brain. Some cause inflammation and cell damage. Preliminary research shows this can harm the organs of lab animals, though the results of some of these studies are a matter of debate.
Some published research has shown that inhaled nanoparticles actually become more toxic as they get smaller. Nano–titanium dioxide, one of the most commonly used nanoparticles (Pop-Tarts, sunblock), has been shown to damage DNA in animals and prematurely corrode metals. Carbon nanotubes seem to penetrate lungs even more deeply than asbestos.

What little we know about the environmental effects of nanoparticles—and it isn’t very much—also raises some red flags. Nanoparticles from consumer products have been found in sewage wastewater, where they can inhibit bacteria that help break down the waste. They’ve been found to accumulate in plants and stunt their growth. Another study has shown that gold nanoparticles become more concentrated as they move up the food chain from plants to herbivores.

“My suspicion, based on the limited amount of work that’s been done, is that nanoparticles are way less toxic than DDT,” says Richard Di Giulio, an environmental toxicologist on the CEINT team. “But what’s scary about nanoparticles is that we’re producing products with new nanomaterials far ahead of our ability to assess them.”

As a society, we’ve been here before—releasing a “miracle technology” before its potential health and environmental ramifications are understood, let alone investigated. Remember how DDT was going to stamp out malaria and typhus and revolutionize agriculture? How asbestos was going to make buildings fireproof? How bisphenol A (BPA) would make plastics clear and nearly shatterproof? How methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) would make gasoline burn cleanly? How polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were going to make electrical networks safer? How genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were going to end hunger?

The CEINT scientists are trying to develop a library that catalogues all the different kinds of engineered nanoparticles. They’re designing methods for assessing potential hazards, devising ways to evaluate the impact nanoparticles have on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and creating protocols that will help shape environmental policy decisions about nanoparticles.

Wiesner says the boxes in the forest provide “ground truth” for experiments in the lab. Sometimes, he says, environmental research leads to generalizations that become so abstracted that they have no relationship to reality. The example he likes to give is Freon: if you were to study the toxicology of Freon in the traditional way, you’d never get to the ozone hole. “Nature changes things,” Wiesner says. “So we need to be able to understand those transformation processes, and we need to understand them in complex systems.”

The first large set of CEINT experiments ended about a year ago, and the team spent most of last year figuring out where the nanoparticles went, what they did, and how they added up. They superimposed a grid on each box, then harvested the plants and animals section by section. They clipped the grasses, sorted them by type, and ground them up. They took bore samples of the soil, the water, and the rocks. They anesthetized and flash froze the vertebrates. Then they started measuring the nanoparticle concentrations in the plants, the animals, and core-sample slices.

But consider the magnitude of the scientific problems that face the scientists at CEINT, or anyone else trying to answer a multitude of questions as nanotech applications gallop into the market and man-made nanoparticles begin to litter our world. Just try tracking something a billion times smaller than a meter in even a modestly sized ecosystem, say, a small wetland or a lake. Do carbon nanotubes degrade? And if not, then what? And how do you tell the nanotubes from all the other carbon in your average ecosystem? Even if we did regulate nanoparticles, how would we detect them? There’s no “nanoprobe” that could find them today, and given the challenges of developing such a thing, the team at CEINT considers it unlikely that there will be one any time soon. Thus, gathering evidence of nanoparticles’ effects—whether positive or negative—turns out to be a titanic task. Simply finding them in the experiment samples seems about as complicated as finding that needle in a haystack the size of the Grand Canyon.

Lee Ferguson, a chemistry professor who directs the nanoparticle analysis, meets me in the basement of the CEINT building and leads me on a tour of all the hulking, pricey instruments the researchers use. Despite the cutting-edge aura of this machinery, none of it is fully up to the task of locating and analyzing the proverbial nanoneedle.

“With nanoparticles, we’re playing catch-up as a scientific community—not only to ask the right questions, but to have the right tools to investigate them,” Ferguson says as he pushes through a door into the first lab. “We were well prepared to answer questions about PCBs—we’d spent half a century refining the chemistry and the instruments that were used to analyze the molecules in those chemicals. But simply measuring nanoparticles is a challenge. It’s one thing if they’re concentrated, but if you’re looking for nanoparticles in soil, for instance, you just can’t find them.”

He spends the next hour showing me how the CEINT team has back-engineered methods to detect and characterize nanoparticles. The fluorometer aims three lasers at carbon nanotubes. Another instrument uses ultrasonic waves to flush out its tiny quarry. Across campus, huge electron microscopes train electron beams on the nanoparticle samples, projecting their images onto a charge-coupled device camera, like the ones used on the Hubble Telescope, and atomic force microscopes form images of them by running a probe over samples like a hypersensitive, high-tech record player.
As the team’s methods continue to advance, their experiments have resulted in some surprising data. “After we dosed the water, we took some of it to the lab and exposed fish to it,” says Wiesner’s research assistant, Benjamin Espinasse. “Some of the particles turned out to be more toxic in the lab. And the reverse also happened: some things didn’t appear to be toxic in the lab, but they were more toxic in the boxes. It seems that the organic matter in the mesocosms changed the coatings of the particles, making them more toxic or less toxic,” Espinasse continues. “We could never have imagined that.”

While CEINT has only published the results of the preliminary mesocosm experiments, the team has been able to make a few conclusions: When the nanoparticles come in a burst, they tend to stay in the soil. But if they bleed into the system slowly, they filter into the water column. Regardless, nanoparticles seem to have a tendency to stick around—that was also the case with DDT.
Meanwhile, CEINT has begun a new set of experiments in the boxes: testing nanoparticles that have been combined with various other substances.
“The materials we most see now are nanomaterials incorporated into other products: textiles, foams, mattresses, nanotubes in display screens,” Wiesner explains. “How it will get out into the environment will be very different than just the pristine particle.”

And then there are the nanobots to plan for. “As we get closer to even simple nanobots, we will need to understand how to do research on them, too,” Wiesner says. Although they remain a marvel of the future, scientists are working toward nanomachines that may someday be able to replicate red blood cells, clean up toxic spills, repair spinal cord injuries, and create weapon swarms to overwhelm an enemy. Researchers are already working on simple versions of nanobots using the chemical principles of attraction and repulsion to help nanostructures arrange and build themselves in a process akin to the way DNA works: a strand of DNA can only split and rebuild in one particular way, and the desired structure is preserved, no matter how many times the DNA replicates.

As if trying to figure out the effects of simple nanoparticles weren’t enough of a futuristic challenge, concerns surrounding nanobots that replicate like DNA are so theoretical they’re spoken about in narratives resembling science fiction. Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy famously warned that, if released into the environment, self-assembling and self-replicating nanomachines could spread like pollen or bacteria, and be too tough and too small to stop before invading every part of the biosphere, chewing it up and reducing all life on earth to “gray goo.” In nanotech circles, this is called the “gray goo problem,” but no one really knows if this vision is prophetic or simply hysterical.

Down the basement hallway, postdoc Badireddy motions to me to join him at a computer monitor next to the dark field microscope in his lab. He clicks on a movie he’s made from images he’s captured. It shows silver nanoparticles interacting with bacteria.

At first, the nanoparticles don’t seem to be doing much. Then, all of a sudden, they start to clump to the outside of a bacterium. The nanoparticles build up and build up until the bacterium’s cell membrane bursts. Then the nanoparticle clumps dissolve into small units before clumping back up again and attacking more bacteria. “The whole cycle happens in about thirty minutes,” Badireddy says. “It’s so fast. If you leave the nanoparticles overnight, when you come back in the morning, all the bacteria are ground mush.”

If you’re looking for stink-free athletic socks, maybe this is a good thing. But could that same process someday turn out to have some sort of nasty biological effect? We just don’t know yet.
“The fact that they re-cycle suggests they might persist for a long time,” Badireddy says as we watch the movie a second time. “They might enter the food chain. And then, who knows what will happen?”

For more on the topic, listen to theaudio recording of the forum Orion hosted with Millar, a researcher, ethicist, and consumer advocate on the topic, here, which expanded on several themes Heather didn't have room for in this article. 
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Heather Millar has covered science, health, and technology for twenty years, contributing to magazines such as Sierra, Smithsonian, and The Atlantic. She lives with her family in San Francisco.

How the Economic Quacks Promoting Austerity Will Increase the Deficit.

 

By Marshall Auerback            

      

  

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

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 The deficit has been falling, but cuts in government investment will only blow it back up.

 

 

Congress will not avert the dreaded sequester – the government’s latest wheeze to deal with the phony “deficit crisis.” Never mind that the very same deficit is projected to fall under $1 trillion this year for the first time since 2008, according to the CBO. Politicians and the chattering classes rail about the deficit, while in the meantime, Americans can’t find jobs. Our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens have suffered from a persistently high unemployment rate of 8 percent through 2012, and worse, an underemployment situation of around 15 percent. Why doesn’t this very real crisis generate concern? Why all of the fuss about a nonexistent emergency?

Conservatives talk indignantly about government profligacy to justify their deficit obsession. But our large deficits (which peaked some three years ago) can almost always be expected to result from recessions because of what economists call “automatic stabilizers.” These are safeguards that have been in place since the Great Depression – things like unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps and the like. These programs were introduced precisely to avoid the kind of human misery a great many of our citizens experienced during that earlier catastrophe. These income transfers are also the reasons -- not the bailouts to our banks -- why the economy has escaped the kind of freefall experienced in the early 1930s.

A major consequence of this policy choice, which is supported by the vast majority of Americans, is that budget deficits in the US are largely automatic and non-discretionary. So recessions create budget deficits, much as private sector booms reduce deficits.

True, we are not booming by any stretch today. But even against this sluggish backdrop, over the last three years, the deficit has experienced a 30 percent drop as a percentage of GDP. That suggests the patient is slowly recovering, but not fast enough. The current rate of job creation is not only insufficient to replace the jobs lost since the crisis, but can’t even keep up with labor force growth. At the recent pace of job creation, we only fall further behind. Withdrawing the medicine prematurely risks creating a relapse in the economy.

And there is much more to do. We need to use this period of historically low interest rates to borrow so as to improve our productive capacity as an economy going forward. As anybody who wanders around major American cities can see, the country has fallen into disrepair. Just ride in any New York City taxi cab and see how well your back survives the journey. But before we can rebuild our pothole-ridden roads, repair our decaying grids, or deal with energy or climate change, we must challenge and reject all of the nonsense about long-term budget deficits, national bankruptcy or insolvency, and even “fiscal responsibility” that we are hearing from Congress and the chattering classes.

The real fiscal responsibility lies in understanding how we invest in the future with jobs, education and decent roads and bridges. Letting our country fall apart, on the other hand, is the height of irresponsibility.

If the US continues to make headway on the jobs front, it will do even better on the deficit front, which is why any sensible economist will tell you that deficit reduction per se should never be an object of government policy. In a market economy, employment is the main source of income for most of the population. Economic growth creates jobs. Without paying jobs, individuals are unable to pay taxes.  In capitalist, wage-labor societies, therefore, joblessness creates a long list of other kinds of waste that Congress never talks about—the breakup of families, rising alcoholism and drug addiction, higher crime rates, absolute and relative poverty, damage to social status and self-respect, adverse psychological and physical health effects, stress, suicide, crime and other anti-social behavior.

During WWII, the government’s deficit -- which one year reached 25 percent of GDP -- raised government’s public debt ratio above 120 percent, much higher than the ratio expected to be achieved by 2015. Further, in spite of the siren songs warning of the evils of high national public debt, US growth in the postwar period was robust—it was the golden age of US economic growth. And guess what? The debt ratio came down rather rapidly, mostly not due to budget surpluses and debt retirement, but rather due to rapid growth that raised the denominator of the debt ratio.

There isn’t, in fact, a “long-term deficit problem.” So long as interest rates stay below the growth rate, as they are, debt-to-GDP levels eventually stabilize and even decline. But if we start reintroducing cutbacks just as the US economy is beginning to show faltering signs of recovery, all of the recent gains on the budget deficit will go by the wayside. Why? Because fiscal austerity deflates economic activity, causing tax revenues to plunge and social welfare payments – unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps – to explode.  The perverse impact, then, is that deficits get larger – precisely the opposite of what the “austerian” brigade desires, but which is happening in earnest in places like Greece and Spain.

At the end of the day, deficits are a symptom of a problem, rather than the problem itself. That is, when the economy slides into a recession, tax revenues start falling as economic activity declines. Social transfer payments, particularly unemployment benefits, on the other hand, increase, again automatically, as more people lose their jobs.Calling the deficit a “national security problem” is akin to blaming the thermometer when it records the temperature of a patient suffering from the flu. Similarly, cutting government investment at a time of still high unemployment is as futile as breaking the thermometer, rather than treating the underlying illness. Your doctor would be rightly sued for medical malpractice if that was what he recommended. Shouldn’t we have a similar penalty in place for economic quacks who advocate policies designed to augment human misery?
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Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot.

 

   

By: Robert Reich

Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Beyond Outrage'  

 Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public's business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what's been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you'd be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the "sequestration" cuts beginning today (Friday). "This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington," says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.
Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government -- "drown it in the bathtub," in the words of their guru Grover Norquist -- slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we've had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States -- notwithstanding the Constitution's instruction that the public debt of the United States "not be questioned."

To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary "sequestered" spending cuts if they couldn't come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.

Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January's fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year - dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government's spending authority, which expires March 27.

A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government -- blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government's size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.

They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they've sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.

What is the President's response? He still wants a so-called "grand bargain" of "balanced" spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance -- $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans' $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.
And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP -- where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.

I suggest the President forget about a "grand bargain." In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality - as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.

Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are -- a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.
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ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

 

Would You Halve How Much Meat You Eat?

 

        

by Kristina Chew



We need to halve the amount of meat we eat or risk causing even more damage to the natural world than we already have, says a new report from the United Nations Environment Program. Entitled Our Nutrient World: The challenge to produce more food and energy with less pollution, the report underscores the unpleasant truth about how modern farming practices are creating more food, and more meat in particular, at lower cost but at a terrible price to the long-time health of the planet.

Eating less meat is a challenge many may shrink from, but it is one that people in wealthy nations must take up, says Professor Mark Sutton, the lead author of the report. Just a generation or two ago, people ate quite a bit less meat. The U.N. report asks people not to stop eating meat entirely, but presents the case for a more measured approach, urging people to go “demitarian” and cut the amount of meat they consume by half.

Raising Livestock Consumes Precious Natural Resources
Previous studies have underscored how many more resources — water, arable land, grain — are used up in raising livestock rather than in cultivating crops. In addition, to provide plenty of meat at cheap prices, the farming industry has come to rely on an ever-larger arsenal of techniques and tools (pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, fertilizer, cages so small that animals cannot move) that are unethical and inhumane.

Our insatiable demand for meat has actually “caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health.” The numerous chemical substances we have devised to improve the quality of meat has only done so in the short run. Run-off from chemicals has played a role in “dead zones in the seas, causing toxic algal blooms and killing fish, while some are threatening bees, amphibians and sensitive ecosystems,” says the Guardian.

We need look no farther for evidence of what is wrong with the modern meat industry than the ongoing horse meat scandal in Europe. Just this week, Nestle announced that it was withdrawing some of its products over concerns about horse meat, which has turned up in other manufacturers’ frozen meals and “extra value” — cheaply priced — burgers. “The attention this meat scare has drawn [highlights] poor quality meat. It shows society must think about livestock and food choices much more, for the environment and health,” said Sutton in the Guardian.

Can You Be a “Demetarian”?
Nonetheless, billions of people in developing countries should still increase their meat consumption, says Sutton. In order for this to happen, people in wealthy nations need to reduce their consumption of meat, in a sort of global give-and-take with the goal of extending the nutrition benefits of animal protein to those whose diets are insufficient.

The UN report is a wake-up call to take a good, hard look at how our taste for meat, and lots of it, has created a product that is not exactly appetizing and is endangering the world’s food supply. The report’s call to many in richer countries to “do the demetarian thing” is a call to consider what we consume and to ask, do we really need to eat all that?