Making Our Buildings Disaster-Proof: The Next Green Frontier.

 

 

 

 

The Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at University of California, San Francisco

Photo Credit: Rafael Vinoly Architects

 

Miller-McCune.com / ByBill Lascher

 

 

As the world deals with quakes, storms, tsunamis, and eruptions, builders realize that a building isn't really sustainable unless it can survive the worst.

 

As eco-savvy as the earthquake-prone Left Coast might be, it’s probably safe to bet that going green won’t be the first thing to come to mind when the Big One hits Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco. Nevertheless, green-building advocates and disaster planners are finding common ground as they try to convince cost-conscious building owners that keeping a building operational after a punishing quake or other disaster makes economic and environmental sense. Developers and architects already earn green-building kudos for outfitting structures with solar panels and energy-scrimping lighting. Now some builders wonder whether keeping a building standing should earn them similar credit.

 

“If we’re taking a building and putting it on top of an earthquake fault, and if we haven’t considered and evaluated the lifecycle performance from those earthquake risks, I don’t think we can really call a building sustainable,” says Erik Kneer, an associate engineer who works in the Oakland offices of Degenkolb.


Kneer and colleagues at his San Francisco-based firm, as well as other seismic engineers, are starting to promote the concept of resilience — the ability for a community or structure to survive and quickly recover from a disaster — as essential for green building. Any building, after all, represents tremendous amounts of “embodied energy” from extracting raw materials, transporting them, and ultimately discarding them when a building is no longer usable. What happens if it’s destroyed long before its predicted lifespan? All that energy will again need to be expended.


“For green buildings or something that you’re calling sustainable, it doesn’t make sense to call it sustainable if you haven’t evaluated the long-term risks associated with the natural hazards for that building,” Kneer says.


The latest sustainable construction techniques are useless, he adds, if those high-performance systems are placed in a structure that can’t withstand conditions like extreme seismic shaking or hurricane force winds.


“To me, that just doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “It’s like taking a Ferrari engine and putting it in a Yugo.”


While most clients want to know how much money a disaster might cost them, Kneer says a growing interest in corporate social responsibility motivated Degonkolb to create a tool, called Envisa, to measure environmental impacts. Developed by Matthew Comber, Envisa couples information about the long-term environmental impacts of a structure’s building materials with federal data about the likelihood of various hazards. The results illustrate both how costly quake damage can be for a range of building systems, and what carbon dioxide emissions would be associated with recovery and reconstruction of a building.


“For a new building project that’s going for LEED certification, this provides a quantitative basis to justify decisions on seismic resiliency,” says Kneer.


The certification Kneer refers to — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED — is the widely accepted standard developed by the United States Green Building Council. Kneer, who is LEED certified, sits on the regionalization committee for the USGBC’s Northern California chapter. He wants credits for green building to be more closely tied to a project’s regional context. Along the Pacific Coast, for example, regionalization credits might be based on a building’s seismic performance, while in the Southeast credits might be issued for the ability to withstand hurricanes.
Many regional chapters have advocated for such credits, and chapters can adapt their guidelines somewhat to address regional concerns, but disaster resiliency hasn’t made its way into the organization’s certification rules.


Still, one project has received LEED credit for its seismic performance. Opened last year, the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at the University of California, San Francisco, stands on a base-isolation system designed by San Francisco’s Forell/Elsesser engineers. It operates like a car’s shock absorber. When the Big One strikes from the nearby San Andreas Fault, the base of the building will shake with the quake, but components separating the lab above will keep most of the energy away and, hopefully, prevent significant damage.


It’s not the world’s first base-isolation system. What made it unique, says Steve Marusich, the project’s lead engineer, was that by building a base that could move the system requires far fewer materials than an unmoving base that would absorb as much energy. Cutting down on building materials also means cutting down on the amount of carbon emissions necessary to extract, transport, and fabricate those materials.


In this case, Marusich says, the moving base meant a 43 percent reduction in carbon emissions related to building materials. In addition to requiring less material, the ability to keep the lab operational and limit the need for repairs after a quake means reducing the impacts (and costs) associated with replacing structures and systems that could have been damaged.


These features earned the new research facility one LEED Innovation and Design point (a building can receive up to four for innovation and design). A newly constructed building needs between 39 and 51 points to earn LEED Gold certification, which in turn can qualify the building for tax incentives and other assistance.


“The sustainability isn’t just the structure itself,” Marusich says. “The base isolation protects all the non-structural elements, all the contents of the building.”


No formal LEED resilience points exist, but the building council is starting to pay attention to how green building practices contribute to resilience. In February, the council released a report with the University of Michigan that focused on how green building techniques may help the country withstand the threats expected to accompany increased global temperatures.


Chris Pyke, the building council’s vice president of research, says he thinks there are elements of resiliency to every category of LEED credit. Though resilience won’t become a category of its own until at least the next round of LEED revisions — possibly three or more years away — the February report reminds the public that the ability to withstand disasters is worth attention.


“Resilience is another dimension to think about while you are pursuing green building,” Pyke says.
Resilience planning isn’t limited to buildings. Many entire communities are integrating sustainable futures into disaster plans, inspired by examples like Greensburg, Kansas, where there has been a particularly verdant recovery after a devastating 2007 tornado.


Jim Schwab, a senior research associate at the American Planning Association and the manager of the APA’s Hazards Planning Research Center helped the Federal Emergency Management Agency study post-disaster recovery 15 years ago, and is working on a revision of that agency’s disaster plan.
“Just going through the exercise of thinking about what type of opportunities you might seize as a community to rebuild a more resilient, more sustainable, safer community after a disaster occurs speeds up the process after it does happen,” Schwab says.


Degenkolb’s Kneer says it’s important not to just focus on buildings, but also on infrastructure. Environmental damage can be wrought by sewage spills, broken gas lines, generator use and other urban earthquake damage.


“The end goal isn’t just X client’s building is resilient,” Kneer says. “The end goal is that we have resilient cities that are up and operational after a seismic event.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bill Lascher is a freelance writer and multimedia storyteller whose work appears in High Country News, the Northwest News Network, Portland Monthly and other outlets.

Earth Day: 9 Films That Will Change the Way You Think About the World.

 Photo Credit: Surviving Progress Poster

 

 

 

AlterNet / ByScott Thill

This Earth Day [yesterday] consider adding a few of these these mainstream and indie documentaries to your must-see list.

 

 

 

In an apocalyptic 2012, is there a better time than Earth Day to remind ourselves just how lucky we are to be spinning through the void of space on this life-giving rock? From rapidly acidifying oceans and shortsighted deforestation to perpetually pollutive wars and the propping up of obsolete markets, Earth is taking killer blows that we're going to seriously regret delivering.


Like the worsening news about the future of our planet, the following films have recently arrived in short bursts. They deal out often visually spectacular but emotionally devastating losses of sea ice, as well as the unheard voices of nations beneath the rising waves. Some consider the double-edged sword of technological innovation, whose parasitic profit motive has compromised its earthly host. Others analyze those natural resources that so-called progress continues to exhaust in search of the new shiny.

 

But these Earth Day offerings are timely snapshots, because the slow-dawning realization that we've unplugged from a lethal, consensual hallucination can be screened far and wide in our pop-cultural productions. You've seen it in the post-apocalyptic allegory of The Hunger Games, last seen slaying the box office, whose forthcoming king will no doubt be The Hobbit, which takes place in a bucolic Middle-Earth bouncing its way toward an epochal world war. You can throw in Game of Thrones' murderous power grabs, Don Draper's advertising fetishism and plenty more.

But the mainstream and indie documentaries below pull away that fictional prism for convincing think pieces on sustainability and survival. Thanks to the death of appointment viewing, you'll get to watch them anytime, most likely on any platform, sometime this year.

1. Surviving Progress

Co-executive produced by Martin Scorsese and co-directed by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, this meditative documentary examines humanity's currently crucial crossroads between self-wrought runaway consumption, rapacious economics and natural resource exhaustion through the prism of so-called technological progress. Anchored in author Ronald Wright's 2004 Massey Lectures series A Short History of Progress and fleshed out by theoretical physicist cyborg Stephen Hawking,

dystopian sci-fi author Margaret Atwood, famed primatologist Jane Goodall and others, the visually impressive Surviving Progress analyzes what it will take to dodge a global collapse that is priced into the future thanks to short-sighted past and present mistakes.

It's a poetic analysis, with a spare score that cedes ground to its visionary subjects, and their destabilizing subject matter. But it's also an optimistic exploration, holding out hope that humanity's exponential technological development can discover solutions to stave off what Hawking calls the next two centuries of natural and social disasters we'll have to negotiate to survive as a species. Some answers come from Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics, which is scouring the planet's oceans for microbes whose genes can help us "write software for life." Others can be found in the internet, which Surviving Progress posits as our interconnected planetary brain. If you're looking for a fiery polemic, Surviving Progress, opening in April, is not the film for you. But if you're looking for a sweeping think piece, welcome to the machine.

2. The Island President

Earlier this February, Mohammed Nasheed -- the Mandela of the Maldives, who like his forebear has spent much of his life being tortured in prison -- was allegedly forced from his presidency by gunpoint. A month later, The Island President, a documentary exploring Nasheed's campaign to reverse climate change in order to save the low-lying Maldives from being swallowed by inevitable sea rise, finally debuted in a United States that probably couldn't even locate his country on a Google map. Even so, The Island President's award-winning political and environmental intrigue still managed to capture the consciences of its viewers, critics and even his own country.

Although director Jon Shenk's documentary takes place in a remote corner of climate change's evolving dystopia, it remains a cautionary tale for any nation that thinks its elections are clean and its political and economic priorities are being properly addressed and administered. And the show goes on with Nasheed's one-time ally, vice-president and Stanford graduate Mohammed Hassan -- whose own brother fingered him for helping oust Nasheed in a coup -- now sweating uncomfortably in global warming's hot seat. He'll soon be joined by politicians at the center of power webs in places Americans do know, like Miami, New York and others subject to the ravages of sea rise.

3. Bidder 70

After bidding on 14 parcels of pristine Utah public land near national parks and landmarks during a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction, Tim DeChristopher was taken into custody by federal agents and sentenced to two years in prison by judge Dee Benson, a controversial George H.W. Bush appointee.

Award-wininng director team Beth and George Gage's Bidder 70 tells the compelling, infuriating tale of DeChristopher's conscientious civil disobedience, and the ludicrous legal ruling that has kept him behind bars for longer than anyone involved in the Deepwater Horizon spill or the global economic recession, tragedies much more deserving of judicial overreach. Despite the fact that his brilliant stunt allowed the incoming Obama administration to invalidate the auction altogether in lieu of adequate environmental review, the uncompromising DeChristopher is still unfairly incarcerated, awaiting his moment of triumphant redemption. One fervently hopes that Bidder 70 brings that moment much closer than his scheduled release date of April 21, 2013, which is perhaps not accidentally a day shy of Earth Day.

4. Chasing Ice

You'll have a hard time finding the sobering Chasing Ice in the malls, as it's still on the competitive documentary circuit. But one thing is for sure: There'll be even less ice to find when director Jeff Orlowski's documentary about climate change and vanishing glaciers finds foreign and domestic theatrical distribution later this year. Chasing Ice is produced by the team that brought you the dolphin horror documentary The Cove, and it's just as arresting, as it follows acclaimed National Geographic photographer James Balog to the Arctic in search of something that won't melt away before our eyes.

Balog's project to photograph the region's warming climate is not called the Extreme Ice Survey for nothing. For the last five years, it has mounted 30 time-lapse cameras across three continents to chronicle the jaw-dropping loss of Arctic sea ice, drawing a sharp, immediate focus on the ramifications of that nearly unprecedented warming. The EIS has published these results in National Geographic, but the still photographs are nothing compared to the existential terror and environmental beauty of Chasing Ice, one of 2012's most important documentaries. Watch it by any means necessary.

5. To the Arctic

Chasing Ice may be a more wide-ranging documentary analysis of the entire Arctic region, but it is To the Arctic's tale of a mother polar bear and her twin cubs that is getting the 70mm IMAX treatment this April. It's also boasting narration from Meryl Streep, as well as songs from Paul McCartney, in case you were looking for further pop crossovers. But this is not to say that To the Arctic is a lightweight crowd-pleaser.

Directed by outdoor IMAX filmmaker Greg MacGillivray, To the Arctic is an eye-popping exploration that hangs its environmental message on three live animal leads, hoping their modest story of solitary survival can teach us all a lesson about living in an interdependent system at the mercy of the natural world's disruptively real-time changes. That it does so in stunning visual fashion doesn't derail that message, so much as couch it in an empathy perhaps more suitable to a much less cynical era. But if every parent in the world took their kids to see To the Arctic instead of The Lorax, the world might be in a lot less of a mess.

6. Facing the Storm: Story of the American Bison

Being extraordinarily large nomads who like to graze on open land, bison stick out of our light-speed 21st-century technopolis like sore reminders of times long past. For this reason and others, we haven't been able to stop killing them. Or worse, privileging the unsustainable factory-farming of cattle, consumption of which drastically raises our chances of illness and death, all while hypocritically crying about the tragic loss of the West in the process. This April, Public Broadcasting System's Independent Lens series airs High Plains Films' Facing the Storm: Story of the American Bison as a timely remainder of this historically problematic human-animal relationship.

It's an intricate analysis, brought to life by archival imagery, original animation and wildlife photography that will hopefully compel its viewers to get out of their cubicles into open spaces where existence takes on more dimensional meaning. Facing the Storm also examines not just the ages-old battle between cattle ranchers and Native Americans and like-minded conservationists, but also suspicious domestication strategies designed to strip bison of their nomadic instincts altogether, so that we may better contain and eat them.

7. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

A long-time poster child for the failure of public-policy planning and urban renewal, St. Louis' ambitious Pruitt-Igoe housing project opened its doors in the mid-'50s and was spectacularly demolished by 1968. (That iconic demolition was included in the cult film Koyaanisqatsi.) But now that our new century has experienced the ravages of unsustainable suburban sprawl and a predictably collapsed housing market, Pruitt-Igoe's primary example of modernism's architectural death is undergoing a suitably postmodern reevaluation.

Director Chad Friedrichs' The Pruitt-Igoe Myth arrived on the festival circuit in 2011, but premieres theatrically in April and will no doubt head to on-demand alternatives shortly after. For good reason: It examines the white flight, political opposition and economic decline that doomed its "poor man's penthouse" to controlled demolition and historical scorn. With the help of Pruitt-Igoe residents and a desire to rid urban renewal of its arguably undeserved stigma, Friedrichs' award-winning documentary is a compelling interpretive history reminding us that a planet with a population of seven billion and counting, is eventually going to have to learn to live in closer quarters than ever before.

8. Windfall

Given all of the fearsomely mounting resource shortages we're facing, alternative energy should instead be called necessary energy. And wind power is one of its promising components, despite the fact that it's capable of tearing communities apart, for good and bad reasons. Released in February, Laura Israel's visually impressive feature documentary Windfall analyzes its potential for profit at the expense of the people it is purportedly trying to wean off of fossil fuels with no future. Thanks, of course, to out-of-town investors with ties to Wall Street financial stratagems.

Israel focuses on two upstate New York towns, Meredith and Tug Hill, whose turbine farms, and their startling sounds and strobing effects, cause all kinds of problems for residents invested in renewable energy for one reason or another. But it's ultimately a dispiriting affair, given that wind farming and solar arrays will inevitably claim not just the bucolic pastures of upstate New York but territories across the world as the fossil fuel industry inevitably collapses. If anything, Windfall calculates the human costs of renewable energy, which should be mandatory math for greens worldwide.

9. Dirty Energy

The irony that the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred two days shy of Earth Day in 2010 is so perverse as to seem purposeful. But while we know that none of its major-failure players are innocent -- from Transocean to Halliburton to British Petroleum to the Gulf region power players whose deregulated framework allowed it all to happen -- there are plenty of dirty hands. Director Bryan D. Hopkins' independent documentary Dirty Energy attempts to examine the spill's human aftermath by watching as the region's inhabitants struggle to put their lives and livelihoods back together in the shadow of economic turmoil and health risks the rest of us too easily ignore.

Unlike most of the films on this list, Dirty Energy is a resolutely indie affair that wouldn't have happened were it not for the galvanized activism of Hopkins and the Facebook donations that kept his film alive. The fact that he didn't find the alternative energy happy ending he had originally envisioned illustrates just how far off the deep end we have gone in the name of the status quo. As such, Dirty Energy is a localized dystopia lost in a sea of macro-environmental messaging. Here's hoping its personal message gets heard, and seen.

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

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

Millions Against Monsanto: The Food Fight of Our Lives.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/Zvonimir Atletic

 

 

 

 

AlterNet / ByRonnie Cummins

Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry's contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We're fighting back.

 

 

"If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." -- Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994.

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." -- Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1998.


For nearly two decades, Monsanto and corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American agriculture, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and regulatory agencies, supermarket chains, giant food processors, and the so-called “natural” products industry.
Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry’s contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We’re fighting back.


This November, in a food fight that will largely determine the future of what we eat and what we grow, Monsanto will face its greatest challenge to date: a statewide citizens’ ballot initiative that will give Californians the opportunity to vote for their right to know whether the food they buy is contaminated with GMOs.


A growing corps of food, health, and environmental activists - supported by the Millions against Monsanto and Occupy Monsanto Movements, and consumers and farmers across the nation - are boldly moving to implement mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods in California through a grassroots-powered citizens ballot initiative process that will bypass the agribusiness-dominated state legislature. If passed, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act will require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods and food ingredients, and outlaw the routine industry practice of labeling GMO-tainted foods as “natural.”


Passage of this initiative on November 6 will radically alter the balance of power in the marketplace, enabling millions of consumers to identify - and boycott - genetically engineered foods for the first time since 1994, when Monsanto’s first unlabeled, genetically-engineered dairy drug, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), was forced on the market.

As Alexis Baden-Mayer, Political Director for the Organic Consumers Association, pointed out at an Occupy Wall Street teach-in in Washington DC in early April: “The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act ballot initiative is a perfect example of how the grassroots 99% can mobilize to take back American democracy from the corporate bullies, the 1%. By aggressively utilizing one of the last remaining tools of direct democracy, the initiative process (available to voters not only in California and 23 other states, but in thousands of cities and counties across the nation), we can bypass corrupt politicians, make our own laws, and force corporations like Monsanto to bend to the will of the people, in this case granting us our fundamental right to know what’s in our food.”


Moving the Battleground
This is not the first time Monsanto has been challenged by citizens’ initiatives or state and local legislative efforts. But this time, the momentum is in our favor.


In the past, GMO “right-to-know” activists have been outmaneuvered and outgunned by Monsanto and its minions in every state, except Vermont and Connecticut, where passing a labeling bill is still, at least theoretically, a long-shot. (Monsanto recently threatened to sue the state of Vermont if legislators there pass a GMO labeling bill).


Efforts to pass GMO labeling laws at the federal level have gone nowhere, despite the fact that more than one million consumers have emailed “Just Label It” petitions to the FDA, demanding mandatory labeling. (The FDA counted only 394 of the signatures, claiming that the main petition was submitted as a single document, or docket, and therefore counted as only one signature.)


Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has introduced his perennial GMO labeling bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, though everyone knows it will never make it out of committee and come to a full House vote on the floor. Similar symbolic bills have been introduced in 18 state legislatures.
The battle has been raging for decades. But this time, it’s different.


Behind this historic California initiative is a broad, growing and powerful health, environmental, and consumer coalition, which includes the Organic Consumers Association, Organic Consumers Fund, Food Democracy Now!, Mercola.com, Nature’s Path, Lundberg Family Farms, LabelGMOs.org, Eden Foods, Alliance for Natural Health, Dr. Bronner’s, United Farm Workers Union, American Public Health Association, Cornucopia Institute, Institute for Responsible Technology, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, California Certified Organic Farmers, and scores of others.


This time, the industry faces informed – and alarmed - consumers who understand the danger of allowing out-of-control chemical and biotech companies like Monsanto, Dow, or Dupont - the very same corporations that have assaulted us with toxic pesticides and industrial chemicals, Agent Orange, carcinogenic food additives, PCBs, and now global warming – to dictate their food choices.


Keeping Consumers in the Dark, Keeping Farmers and Scientists Intimidated
Why has it taken so long to get this far? How have Monsanto and its cohorts been able to grow and maintain market supremacy while force-feeding unlabeled “Frankenfoods” to the public for decades?
By buying off politicians, bullying farmers and scientists, and keeping consumers in the dark.
Monsanto has sued more than 150 farmers across the US and Canada, and threatened thousands of others, for refusing to pay for “intellectual property theft” after their fields were contaminated by Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered crops.


The company has harassed and used the media to bully scientists who have exposed the public health and environmental hazards of genetically engineered foods and crops in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe. The renowned scientist Dr. Arpad Pusztai from the UK, was pressured and discredited for reporting on the dangers of genetic engineering until he was eventually fired from his job. The same thing happened to the UK’s Environmental Minister, Michael Meacher.


In a number of other cases, scientists such as Ignacio Chapela, have received death threats. Chapela also said he received death threats to his children from “a high government official” in Mexico after he showed contamination of native corn with Monsanto’s GMOs. Other scientists, most notably Andres Carrasco from Argentina, have been assaulted by thugs. Monsanto has even hired the notorious mercenary gang, Blackwater, to spy on its opponents worldwide.


Why has Monsanto gone to such great lengths to thwart GMO labeling laws and initiatives? Because it understands the threat that truth-in-labeling poses for GMOs – and biotech industry profits. As soon as genetically engineered foods are labeled in the U.S., millions of consumers will read these labels and react. They’ll complain to grocery store managers and companies, they’ll talk to their family and friends. They’ll switch to foods that are organic or at least GMO-free. Once enough consumers complain about GE foods and food ingredients, stores will eventually stop selling them. Farmers will stop planting them.


Europe Shows Labels Can Drive GMOs off the Market
In Europe, there almost no genetically engineered crops, while here in the US, nearly 75% of all supermarket foods - including many so-called “natural” foods - are GE-tainted. Why? Because Europe requires labeling of genetically engineered foods – and the US does not.


This is exactly why activists have launched the California Ballot Initiative. Passing mandatory GMO food labeling in just one large state, California, the eighth largest economy in the world, where there is tremendous opposition to GE foods as well as a multi-billion dollar organic food industry, will ultimately have the same impact as a national labeling law.


If California voters pass the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act, the biotech and food industry will face an intractable dilemma. Will they dare put labels on their branded food products in just one state, California, admitting these products contain genetically engineered ingredients, while withholding this ingredient label information in the other states? Will they allow their organic and non-GMO competitors to drive down their GMO-tainted brand market share?
The answer to both of these questions is likely no. What most of them will do is start to shift to organic and non-GMO ingredients, so as to avoid what the Monsanto executive 16 years ago aptly described as the “skull and crossbones” label.


Can you imagine Kellogg’s selling its Corn Flakes breakfast cereal in California with a label that admits it contains or may contain genetically engineered corn? This would be the kiss of death for their iconic brand. How about Kraft Boca Burgers admitting that their soybean ingredients are genetically modified? How about the entire non-organic food industry (including many so-called “natural” brands sold in Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s) admitting that a large proportion of their products are GE-tainted?


Once food manufacturers and supermarkets are forced to come clean and label genetically engineered products, they will likely remove all GE ingredients, to avoid the “skull and crossbones” effect, just like the food industry in the EU has done. In the wake of this development American farmers will convert millions of acres of GE crops to non-GMO or organic varieties.


What Now? The Campaign Needs Volunteers and Money
Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association – under the guise of its front group, the so-called Coalition Against the Costly Food Law - are building up a massive war chest up to defeat the California Ballot Initiative. They will literally spend millions to spread lies and disinformation that GMO foods and crops are perfectly safe - and that we need more, not less GMO food and biofuel crops in this era of climate change and growing population.


They will lie and say that GMO labels will be costly to the food industry and raise food prices. They will say that it is the job of the FDA to decide whether GMOs are labeled, not the states. Yet we already know that this battle will never be won in Washington DC, where Monsanto and Food Inc. lobbyists have politicians in their back pockets. It will only be won in places like California (or Vermont), vital centers of organic food and farming and anti-GMO sentiment, where 90% of the body politic, according to recent polls, support mandatory labeling.


This citizens initiative in California is a battle all of us. Please contact the campaign if you are willing to volunteer to join a national phone bank to contact California voters this fall or provide other support.


It’s time to take back control over our food and farming system. It’s time to stand up to Monsanto and the Biotech Bullies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including "Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers" (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).

Let us not be dragged back into the “working mom versus stay-at-home mom” dialogue. By Roseanne Barr.

Roseanne Barr on Ann and Mitt Romney and the Mommy Wars

(Page 1 of 2)

I almost got sick to my stomach when I heard Hilary Rosen’s unfortunate words regarding Mrs. Mitt Romney.

It’s a shame that Rosen lobbed the Romney campaign a fat political softball they could smack over the gender fence. It’s especially unfortunate because Romney was on the ropes with American women, at least the ones with an IQ higher than Ramblin’ Rick Santorum’s. After the Republicans had alienated at least half the voting public by all but condemning birth control, suddenly Rosen’s remark enabled them to self-righteously assume the role of defenders of American motherhood. Mitt Romney, who’s shown himself to be the empty suit that even most Republicans know he is, had proven it by making ridiculous statements like “Not the language I would have used” when asked what he thought of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting, insulting tirade directed at a young woman testifying before Congress. Limbaugh called her a slut and suggested that she owed the tax-paying public a sex tape. Mitt the Twit rolled that around in his tiny brain, and then, when pressed, he announced that he thought Rush, the painkiller lush, was just a bit over the top. God, he’s brave! Limbaugh’s insane comments were barely a blip on Romney’s radar, but the Rosen comment is a huge deal in Mitt’s world.

I say let’s find that “cleaning lady” (if she is documented) and ask HER how many hours she worked per week over the years.

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, last month in Illinois, Nam Y. Huh / AP Photo

The media, which are completely clueless about every single issue that affects American women, must have had a shiver run down their nonexistent spine when they realized they could dig out the old “stay-at-home mom versus working mom” script that worked so well to divide and conquer mothers and women along class lines to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment back in my 20s.

Mrs. Mitt Romney and one of her adult sons took to the airwaves in defense of countless stay-at-home mothers whose husbands are billionaire insurance-company hucksters and corporate raiders, and both represented a decadent and crumbling empire well. Mrs. Mitt Romney claims to have worked her toned ass off, raising five Romney males all on her own, as privileged wives often do—but, no, Ann, I call bullshit on your Big Mama story, girlfriend. Your son may flash that “I adore my mother” grin on cable TV all day as he backs up your claims that you did it all on your own with no help—except from a “lady” who comes in one or two hours a week to help with housework. Of course neither Mrs. Mitt Romney nor her son knew the name of the “cleaning lady,” either, because like 99 percent of rich people, they are oblivious to those women who do work outside the home, even when they work inside the home of the Romney family. I say let’s find that “cleaning lady” (if she is documented) and ask HER how many hours she worked per week over the years.

The son seemed quite vacuous, like his father, really, but perhaps I am mistaken in my judgment of him and of Mrs. Mitt Romney. These were just my perceptions as I watched the son she raised speak on AC420 or whatever they call it. It doesn’t seem she did too good of a job, given that her son exhibits such a low level of moral awareness. Was he a passenger in the car with the dog roped in a cage on top?

Hilary Rosen should not have attacked the Leisure Class’s women—does Romney pay her, too? What a great opportunity she has given the vast right-wing conspiracy—suggesting that their women don’t work, when everybody can see that the Women of the Right are large and in charge. The picture of Ann Romney “manning” the phone banks in front of a campaign poster that reads “Mitt Romney is good for business” tells me all I need to know about her contributions to her family, her church, and her country—convincing other privileged white women that defeating feminism is necessary to save the confederacy of dunces called the GOP, which steals bread from the mouths of widows and orphans and workers’ retirement funds as it congratulates itself for dismantling all that social-safety-net, entitlement, nanny-state load of socialist insurrection and places that money instead into private hands, so that the filthy working sluts can’t get any of it for their selfish selves. They will just use it to pay for abortions and other fun things if given half a chance.

As my friend Gail Zappa pointed out: what we really need now is a party that likes women.

But why bring out this fake issue again now? Could it be to divert the conversation from the continued restrictions being placed on women’s reproductive rights and make us forget that both parties are socialists for their own causes whose joint policies of redistribution of wealth have made it nearly impossible for anyone to “choose” the stay-home option and not feel that the system is rigged against 99.9 percent of the population, no matter how hard they work?


 

Let us not be dragged back into the “working mom versus stay-at-home mom” dialogue. Let us stay on topic, working to create new solutions that work for the majority of all people in the U.S. instead of getting caught up in these silly, divisive audibles both parties employ as their Hail Mary attempts to throw us off task.

I see the holes in both parties’ stories.

That is why I am running for POTUS—to be sure that the national debate includes talking about the issues we all face instead of going to the old playbook to energize the vocal minority on fringe issues. We do not have time to fall for these distractions anymore.
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Roseanne Barr is running for president of the United States.

My 14 Year Old Son Has Brain Cancer -- Without Obamacare, We May Have Been Dropped By Our Insurance Company.

Salon / ByJanine Urbaniak

My then 13-year-old son would have reached his lifetime limit of health insurance had such limits not been eliminated by Obamacare on April 1, 2011.

 

This originally appeared on Janine Urbaniak's Open Salon blog. It was written in a response to a call for essays about people's personal experiences with the Affordable Care Act. Have an Obamacare story of your own? Blog about it on Open Salon.

Mason is my 14-year-old son, who is adorable and funny, and happens to have a very stubborn and large brain tumor. We discovered the tumor four years ago, and we have been monitoring and treating it with the help of some of the finest doctors around. Mason has lived a somewhat “normal” life, despite frequent MRIs and even chemotherapy. He did his homework and hung out with friends until the fall of 2010 when his headaches became debilitating. Scans revealed that Mason’s tumor had grown for the first time since we had discovered it. Then days before we were scheduled to meet with the neurosurgeon to discuss a surgery we had tried to avoid, Mason had a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

My boy spent 65 days in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at one of Northern California’s best hospitals; during that time he underwent two brain surgeries, along with operations to insert a tracheostomy and a feeding tube. We stayed with him 24 hours a day, my husband, Alan, and I, his grandparents, and his 16-year-old brother, watching his oxygen levels on a screen, tracking his heart rate in beats per minute. The doctors kept him sedated, but every morning they turned down the propofol (Michael Jackson’s drug of choice) when the neurosurgeons came to do their examination. Three to five doctors circled Mason’s bed, one of them yelled his name into his ear. When he didn’t wake up right away, they apologetically pinched him and yelled louder.

When I was alone with Mason I put a white earbud into his ear and tuned my iPod to a song I knew he liked, “Airplanes” by B.O.B. I said it was time to wake up. “You need to come back, now,” I told him in my firm mommy voice.

During our first three weeks of hospitalization Mason racked up $1.1 million in medical bills. I worried about butting up against the $5 million lifetime limit on Mason’s health insurance policy. We had a good policy with a good company. We always paid our premiums on time and in full. But Mason wasn’t getting out of the hospital at any time soon, and there were months of rehab ahead. My then 13-year-old son would have reached his lifetime limit of health insurance had such limits not been eliminated by Obamacare on April 1, 2011. That date felt like a birthday or anniversary, something to be celebrated, when it finally arrived and we weren’t yet dropped by our health insurance company.

After two months in the PICU, we moved to a sunny room on one of the hospital’s regular floors. Our boy had just regained consciousness, though he still couldn’t talk or move his arms and legs. When the neurosurgeons came for their daily exam, we cheered when Mason managed a half-mast thumbs up. It was a huge victory.

As we celebrated our first day out of the pediatric ICU, Polly, the hospital discharge planner, introduced herself. Her job was to get the necessary approvals from our insurance company and make sure every moment of our stay was covered. This meant that she needed us to be ready to leave at any time. We needed a plan. She talked about Mason’s options for rehabilitation facilities. I soon realized that it would be challenging finding a place for a 6 foot tall 13year-old with a neurological injury. I scoured the Internet on my laptop for options.

A few days later, Polly stopped by to let me know that our insurance company representative had told her that Mason no longer needed hospitalization. Someone (she wasn’t naming names but they were clearly not a part of our medical team) suggested that we send our boy to an “interim” facility in a rundown city 40 miles away from our hospital and about 60 miles away from our home. I looked at Mason, who was enjoying his lunch through a feeding tube in his abdomen and breathing through another tube attached to a ventilator. I reminded her that Mason needed to be where he had access to neurosurgeons for emergencies. She smiled blankly and repeated something about medical necessity and pre-authorization. It was out of her hands.

Mason bought us a reprieve with a high temperature and a series of seizures. It started when his eyes fluttered from left to right, then his body stiffened. I rang the emergency button and the nurse ran for the appropriate drug. I held Mason’s hand and told him we were riding a big wave. It was pulling us under but we would always emerge. It would pass. I kept my voice low and even.

When my husband arrived later that day, I told him that at least they were not going to kick us out of the hospital now. I was aware my thinking had taken on a new and undesirable twist.

I avoided Polly. If I saw her at the nurse’s station, I ducked back into Mason’s room and locked myself in the bathroom. If she called, I let her leave a message. I spent all of my time caring for my child. Did the nurse wash her hands when she came into the room? Had Mason received his 3 p.m. meds? It’s not that I wanted to spend any extra time in the hospital, it was just that Mason was still so fragile and we had nowhere to go yet.

The insurance company appointed one of their staff nurses to support us through our medical crisis. I believe she was a compassionate and concerned human being, but I never trusted her. I imagined that her notes would go into Mason’s file for the utilization department to examine and find reasons why they should cut back on his care, or lose him from their roles entirely. Any time she called, I heard the voice of Sgt. Joe Friday from Dragnet reminding me, “Anything you say can and will be used against you.”

Several people mentioned that TIRR in Houston was one of the best neuro-rehabilitation facilities in the U.S. Footage of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords arriving at TIRR was airing on every news channel. I don’t believe in coincidences, especially when thousands of people were praying for us. I called to see if TIRR was a part of our health insurance network. It was. It turned out that TIRR had expertise working with teenagers and there was excellent neurosurgical care available less than a mile away at Texas Children’s Hospital. It seemed like this was meant to be until Polly burst into our hospital room and told us that we couldn’t go. Though the insurance company approved the rehabilitation, they refused to pay for the air ambulance. We dipped into our savings, grateful that we could, and chartered our first airplane; this one came with a crew of paramedics.

The rehab doctors weaned Mason off of pain medication and fitted him for a wheelchair. He was out of bed every morning and dressed in sweat pants and a T-shirt. He began occupational, physical and speech therapy, though in the early days he often nodded off halfway through a session. A neuropsychologist said Mason’s prognosis was good. The healthy brain tissue had not been harmed by the hemorrhage. It was just a matter of getting the wiring back online in Mason’s brain, retraining his muscles and building his strength.

The insurance company rationed out Mason’s rehab approvals two weeks at a time. To meet their standards, Mason had to strike the balance between needing ongoing therapy and showing continued progress. If he stopped getting better, the insurance company would stop paying for his therapy, which presents a problem because brain injury patients typically hit plateaus in their recovery. I prayed daily for the faceless insurance company doctors who parsed out Mason’s approvals, wishing them insight and compassion.

A rehab hospital is not the place to visit if you want to pretend that awful things can’t happen to blameless people. In addition to stroke victims of all ages, there was a 30-year-old woman who was rear-ended at high speed on an interstate highway. Her mother brought her 2-month-old baby to visit whenever she could, though the young woman stared ahead her eyes not seeming to focus. There was a naval officer who suffered oxygen deprivation due to an illness he suffered on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. His mother brought me strawberries when she came to visit one Saturday. Then there were two other teenage boys, like Mason, with different varieties of brain tumors. One didn’t survive his stay, though I’m not sure what happened. The other walked out of the rehab to the cheers of his therapists and all the rest of us.

We never saw congresswoman Giffords, though I found the presence of the Secret Service reassuring. Nancy Pelosi toured the gym one afternoon when Mason was having physical therapy. I introduced myself. She smiled and complimented my beautiful boy who was walking in a harness mechanism. I meant to thank her for the healthcare bill, but it was too disorienting speaking to someone I usually watch on CNN. John Boehner didn’t stop by, maybe it was too much, seeing all these folks flaunting their preexisting conditions, exceeding their lifetime insurance limits with such brazen determination to pull themselves upright again.

P.S. Mason is back in school, finishing 8th grade. He is walking, talking and working out at the gym three times a week. He received an A- on his paper on “Of Mice and Men.”
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Janine is a San Francisco Bay Area writer. She is currently working on a collection of essays about surviving her son's brain tumor and the odd reality that comes with a diagnosis of childhood cancer.

BPA in Your Food? The FDA's Still Okay With That.

greenkozi/Flickr

By Tom Philpott

 

 

Bisphenol A, a controversial chemical used in the lining of nearly all cans used by the food and beverage industry, got a reprieve from the government last week. Responding to a court order to decide on the Natural Resources Defense Council's petition to ban the stuff on the grounds that it causes harm even in tiny doses, the Food and Drug Administration rejected the petition and upheld its approval of BPA.

That's good news for some of the globe's biggest chemical companies. According to Bloomberg News, the global BPA market is worth about $8 billion, with about a quarter of total production going into cans. (The rest goes into polycarbonate plastics, which end up in everything from water bottles to DVDs.) Bloomberg adds that the three biggest suppliers of BPA to the American market are the chemical/steel giant Saudi Basic Industries Corp.—which is 70 percent owned by the Saudi government—the German chemical giant Bayer, and Dow, its US rival. Globally, reports the US Department of Agriculture, Bayer and Dow produce "the bulk" of BPA.

While their executives had reason to cheer the FDA's decision, consumers have reason to groan. The FDA's own research shows that BPA leaches from can linings into food, and a 2011 Harvard study found BPA at heightened levels in people who regularly consume canned soup.

 

BPA is what is known as an endocrine disrupter, meaning that it has a range of effects on human development at minute doses. And Friday's decision comes less than a month after the release of a major study of endocrine disruptors by a range of scientists, including some from the US Department of Health and Human Services, who found "strong evidence" that BPA negatively affects the prostate at low doses and "undisputed evidence" that it does so for mammary glands.

And that's not all. A 2008 study published in the Journal of American Medicine looked at urinary BPA levels in 1,455 US adults and examined health outcomes controlling for "age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, income, smoking, body mass index, [and] waist circumference." The result: the higher the BPA concentration in people's urine, the higher their incidence of cardiovascular trouble and diabetes. Of course, correlation is not causation—something besides BPA could have caused the increase in health troubles. But given that the scientists controlled for a range of obvious factors, and that that BPA has proven hazardous in the laboratory, those results give plenty of reason for alarm.

Now, it's true that there remains a good amount of uncertainty in the science of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which is relatively new. The FDA seized upon that uncertainty to justify its decision. "While evidence from some studies have raised questions as to whether BPA may be associated with a variety of health effects, there remain serious questions about these studies, particularly as they relate to humans," the agency wrote in a statement following the decision. But as Time's Bryan Walsh put it, "For most public-health advocates, chemicals like BPA should be guilty until proved innocent—and they feel there's more than enough data out there to cast doubt on BPA's innocence."
It's worth noting that alternatives to BPA are already out there and working, as my colleague Kiera Butler showed back in 2010:

In 1999, Eden Foods, which sells organic goods, began lining most of its cans with a plant-based oleoresin. CEO Michael Potter calls the switch a "no-brainer," even though the new cans cost 14 percent more. "I eat this stuff," he says. "And so do my kids." Canning trade rep [John] Rost dismisses oleoresins as impractical due to shelf-life concerns, but Potter says Eden hasn't had a single case of contamination. For high-acid foods like tomatoes, which can eat away at oleoresins, companies have turned to those paper-and-aluminum cartons already used to package certain soups. But Potter says he's not surprised that major food companies and canners are resisting the new options. "They have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in BPA," he says. "They do not want to change anything."

The FDA's scientists may truly believe that it's prudent public health policy to preserve a status quo in which Americans, including children and pregnant women, continue consuming BPA in everyday foods. Then again, it's an election year, and as this blockbuster New York Times story demonstrates, the Obama White House has not been shy about pushing the agency around for political purposes. And the companies that make BPA, as well as the major food and can-making companies that have come to rely on it, are no political lightweights.

How Train Travel Could Make a Comeback.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ hfng

AlterNet / ByJames McCommons

Riding the rails has more advantages than just avoiding rising gas prices.

In all the chatter over $4 gasoline, the Keystone pipeline, dueling House and Senate transportation bills and the president's proposed infrastructure investments, it would be instructive for some politicians, and even a few journalists, to board a long distance train -- not because Amtrak's ridership will soar to new heights this summer (it surely will), but because on a train you hear the zeitgeist of America.

Recently I rode the Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle across the northern Plains and through the oil booms towns of western North Dakota. Amtrak is transportation for the masses and community-based seating rules in the dining car. I lunched with Mennonites, grandmas, public school teachers, gang bangers, a computer programmer, a scientist, golf pro, and a man who just lost a kidney. On trains, people talk to one another because there's time and there something about being adrift on the landscape that puts passengers into a reflective mood.

The fragility of the economy clearly concerned these Americans, but generally they were a hopeful bunch and surprisingly stoic about energy prices. I heard a few shrill diatribes about the conspiracy of the oil companies or the obstructionism of the "greenies," but most conversations were thoughtful and measured. No one believed Newt Gingrich can guarantee $2.50 a gallon gas or that President Obama can solve the situation by opening the spigots of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

These folks have been through gas crises before -- going back to the early '70s -- and they've heard the same bromides from the politicians.

They understand that inertia more than oil addiction is America's real affliction. "How many times does this have to happen? What can we do? I still have to drive."

Their sentiments regarding air travel were just as resigned. No matter how claustrophobic the seating, how intrusive the security, or how much the carriers nickel and dime the passengers, we all have to board airplanes occasionally. Of course, we were riding a train, which naturally led to discussions of rail transportation. Few passengers were rail fans and knew much about the industry or that BNSF Railway owns the tracks beneath our seats, or that Warren Buffet bought the entire railroad a couple of years ago for $34 billion calling it great long term bet for America.

Yet, they could look out the windows, watch dozens of BNSF intermodal freights rushing past and grasp the fuel efficiency of trains loaded with hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers and truck trailers. Railroads enabled the big box stores and their Asian supply chain and in the future, intermodal trains running between American cities could remove tens of thousands of long-haul trucks from the interstates. But we need to build out the capacity of the rail system, which was reduced from 300,000 miles in 1960 to the current 150,000 miles. Amtrak runs a 22,000 mile network but owns just 700 miles, mainly the Northeast Corridor. The freight railroads who "host" passenger trains elsewhere worry that more of those silver trains on their infrastructure will jam up freight traffic and cost them money.

The buildout will require a private-public partnership between the big railroads, the federal government, the states, and Amtrak. Several states including Illinois, North Carolina, Michigan and California are already using matching federal funds for both freight and passenger improvements. Some DOTs are buying their own trains and bringing in Amtrak as the operator. Although there's lots talk about high speed trains what America really could use are more conventional trains running on the shared infrastructure.

Long distance trains, such the Empire Builder, are often criticized as romantic holdovers from another era, but those trains are the connections for a nationwide system. In the 1960s, government didn't build interstate highways through North Dakota and Montana because many people lived there. It was done to connect the more populous regions and extend good transportation to rural areas. Rail is no different. These nuances of transportation policy were superfluous to my fellow passengers. They were just trying to get to a doctor, to grandchildren, to work or home or a few hundred miles down the line because winter driving on the plains can be downright dangerous.

At dusk, we stopped in Williston, North Dakota, the heart of the oil patch where fracking and horizontal drilling of the Bakken Formation has virtually eliminated unemployment. Hundreds of motor homes and trailers squatted on the frozen prairie. Pickup trucks jammed the motels. Roughnecks with too much money and attitude boarded the train and drank heavily in the lounge car. Most hadn't seen girlfriends and wives for weeks. Natural gas being burned off as waste cast an eerie orange glow over the coulees and buttes.

Up close, "Drill baby drill" wasn't so pretty, and from the train, it looked apocalyptic.
That night, I ate a steak dinner with a muscular young army veteran, a month out of the infantry, and headed home to Minnesota from Seattle. He'd done two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan and was looking for work. I suggested the oil fields, but he had already talked with some of the roughnecks on the train who told of the frigid isolation of the drill rigs and the culture of the "man camps' housing thousands of workers.

"I had enough of that life in the army," he said. Proud of his service but seared by combat he added, "Whatever I do, I just hope the biggest mistakes in my life are behind me."

Everywhere in this land, there is work to be done and people who need the work. I didn't meet anyone who thought it was a dumb idea to invest in water and sewer systems, rehabilitated schools, bridges and roads, electric cars, smart grids, alternative energy and, yes, railroads.

Some rail experts promote Interstate II-- a plan to double and triple track 20,000 to 30,000 miles of existing freight right of way. The tracks would be grade separated -- meaning intersecting roads would run under or over rather than across the tracks. Intermodal freights could run 90 mph, passenger trains up to 125 mph, and heavy coal and grain trains could go their own slow speed. Initially, power would come from diesel locomotives, but eventually the corridors could be electrified, getting juice from greener sources, such as natural gas, wind, solar, and biomass.

As I explained the concept, more than a few of my dinner mates were willing to pay for it -- including through higher gas and user taxes. They aren't obtuse. Transportation is a public good that speeds the delivery of goods and people. Civilization has costs. We all have to pay.

The only question is whether we begin to build now or fritter away more decades of infighting and lack of purpose and argue about who is responsible for $4, maybe even $5 a gallon gas.
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James McCommons is author of Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service (Chelsea Green, 2009).