Manipulation, anyone?

In the case of genetically engineered food, it is not only genes that are being manipulated.

To American environmentalists, accustomed to watching Monsanto get its way time and time again with the Congress and the Supreme Court, it must have seemed awesome that the company has given up hope of selling its GM seeds in Europe. The European Union bans the growing of nearly all GM crops. The reasons are many, but fear of this new technology in a field related to people’s health and eating habits stands out in first place.

Arguments about whether or not this fear is warranted rage back and forth across the Atlantic.

On the don’t worry, be happy side is the statement from Monsanto that they test the transgenic protein that is produced in the genetically manipulated crop, so they don’t need to test the food itself in humans. The US Food and Drug Administration, responsible for the safety of food and drugs, points to the fact that virtually all the companies making GMOs do voluntary testing. There are statements by any number of individuals and organizations that GM crops have now been around for long enough so that serious problems would have shown up by now.

On the negative side, however, are a number of compelling arguments. The protein tested by Monsanto is made by a bacterium and may differ from the actual plant-produced one, which may also act differently in situ. There has been no long-term research and little research on animals, such as is required by the FDA for drugs and food additives. Well-established practices for scientific testing are not followed. These include testing by independent parties, made extremely difficult by genetic engineering companies’ refusal to sell seeds to independent laboratories, hiding behind intellectual property laws. The serious protocols established for most testing are replaced by loose guidelines.

What about the claim that no serious negative effects of eating GM food have appeared in the US population? The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has stated that the introduction of GMOs into US food has coincided with the recent rise in chronic diseases and food allergies, and sees a connection. There is, after all, the fact that during the thousands of years that agriculture has been practiced, the small amounts of toxins and mutagens present in all plants have been reduced or weeded out in the plants that make up our ordinary, non-genetically engineered food supply. Are we to repeat the process now with GM plants?

Scientific testing is complex and very expensive. There are different protocols, some more apt to give reliable results. As it is quite possible to make an experiment come out the way the experimenters want it to; it is important to know who did an experiment, just how was it done and who paid for it. Red flags go up when the testing was done by a corporation with an interest in a favorable result, when the company refuses to hand over certain information for public review or refuses to allow its products to undergo independent testing, all of which are happening in the present GM food situation.

So here we have a country with a population of 314 million taking part in a huge scientific experiment without their express consent. Because it is unlawful in nearly all states to label GMO food, they don’t know whether they are eating it or not, but the probability is extremely high, given that it is estimated that 80% of American corn is GMO corn and corn appears everywhere in American food products. There are severe doubts about the stringency of the testing for safety. The corporations making genetically engineered food have the US Congress, the Supreme Court and the FDA on their side.

Small wonder that the European Union wants its food GMO free. 

Summertime!

It’s vacation time, relaxation time, living-is-easy time, and just the

occasion for a fun eco-potpourri post. I’m writing on the balcony, surrounded by flowers, some of which you see in the picture to the right. One of the blessings of the IT age is the ability to be outside and working at the same time. Another blessing is online enjoyment when the weather turns against one and one is driven inside, so let’s take a look at a few websites for rainy day fun and/or enlightenment – the two are not mutually exclusive!

On a gloomy day with antsy kids in the house, visit the kids activities pages of the EPA website, www.epa.gov/epawaste/education/kids_activities.htm. There’s other stuff for students and other games as well.

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is this more true than on the website of artist Christ Jordan, www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/‎, who shows us several thousand words worth of eco-truths in a creative and effective way.

Readers in Switzerland, are you looking for an unusual present? Visit a site that gives entirely new meaning to the concept of recycling, www.ryterdesign.ch/recycline, for amusing and useful items made from green PET bottles. There is a vase, a candleholder, a very clever bank etc. There are other recycled items elsewhere on the site, made, for instance, from Douglas fir left over from covering a couple of the tracks and platforms in the Zurich main station. And while we’re on the subject of recycling art, you’ll find novel, clever and useful items at www.recyclingart.ch, magnets made from computer keys, for example.

Looking for unusual hanging planters? Look no further than this idea from the Umweltarena in Spreitenbach, Switzerland. Lay a plastic bottle, small or large size, on its side and cut away most of the top half, leaving the bottom and “shoulder” area intact. Add stones for drainage, soil and hanging plants. Suspend in the same sideways position. The Umweltarena is a worthwhile attraction to visit, particularly if you are planning to do any remodeling. On weekends and some other times you can try out electro-bikes and electric cars as well.

Want to surprise a hostess with an unusually wrapped present? Check out the following website for a video on furoshiki wrapping – a Japanese gift-wrapping technique: www.care2.com/greenliving/eco-friendly-wrapping.html.

When the weather clears and you get outside, celebrate summer by opening your eyes to the fabulous abundance of nature, available for the looking, hearing, smelling and tasting! Even more appreciated after a stay-in-the-house spell.

Imagine That!

The place of imagination in the green energy revolution

The green energy revolution is beginning to pick up steam (renewables-produced, of course). Solar power technology is burgeoning in many US states, although stalled in others, Germany plans to produce 80% of its energy from renewables by 2050 and both Germany and Switzerland will abandon nuclear energy in the foreseeable future. Getting recalcitrant US states on board and enabling Germany and Switzerland to act on their future scenarieos will require fairly heroic measures. It would seem that a few effective threads running through the situations are needed. 
Enter imagination

One such is imagination, valued in science labs and a major contributor to the progress that has taken place in developing renewable energy sources. Let’s start with solar, which got its start in the brain of Einstein. He is responsible for our understanding of the photoelectric effect, which depends on the supposition that light consists of photons, discrete packets of energy. As light had been considered up till then to be waves and only waves, this example of Einsteinian imagination led to a revolution in scientific thought and…. to the production of electricity in solar panels from the light of the sun.
All of the other alternative energy sources can be traced back to ingeneous ideas in the minds of brilliant scientists. No dearth of imagination here, nor in the painstaking engineering that has gone into innovative applications of those ideas. So far so good – where does it all break down? 
Start-up vs battening down
It is at the production stage that there is wildly varying aproach to innovation. On the one hand, the oil companies frantically turn to fracking and tar sands to keep their government subsidies and the status quo of a fossil fuel-oriented society, giving new meaning to the term “fossil”. At the other end of the scale are the start-up companies producing everything from algae farms to window solar chargers for cell phones to malls with natural light.
Enlightened business leaders realize that a focus on rapid production of clean energy would provide a positive motivation for local innovation, energy security, job creation and economic competition, and this brings us to business models.  

Business models of ingenuity 
Imaginative solutions are not limited to technology; they are also found in clean-tech business models. Investors in solar energy concerns, for example, receive dividends of as much as 10% a year on their investments, paid out of the savings on energy costs. Individual owners of solar panels and windmills are increasingly able to inject excess energy into the grid – “running the meter backwards”. There are considerable technical challenges to be met before the smart grid will be fully in operation, but the idea is so enticing, so fair, so citizen-oriented that power companies the world over are putting resources to work to make it happen.

Politics as usual
Here is the real sticky wicket. Every year there is a climate change conference and every year the results are disappointing. The United States is afraid of commitments, the developing nations feel the developed nations should pay for the pollution they have caused; more energy is spent in wrangling than in finding innovative measures.
On the country to country level, national governments are often concerned with political fallout; with the US congress at a standstill it falls to individual states and cities to come up with workable plans. To their credit, many are doing so. Meanwhile, in Europe, Denmark leads the way with livable cities, wind power and a biking culture that features imaginative cargo bikes that hold several children or lots of stuff.
The Big One
Most disconcerting, however, is the general agreement that a new, now-unkonwn energy produciton breakthrough will be needed in the long run. Alternative sources will do the job for a while, but energy needs are expanding exponentially, and present technology can’t keep up. A US Energy Department task force report released early in 2009 urged a sharper focus on basic science research in the energy production area.  Such research is grossly underfunded; in 2012 less than one percent of the federal budget, $30.2 billion, went to fund basic science research. As a comparison, Exxon-Mobil revenue in 2012 was 44.9 billion.
We need a new industrial revolution. If we look back at the original industrial revolution and the subsequent IT and electronic revolutions, what is most apparent in all of them is the application of human imagination to the problems at hand. Technology is indeed one manifestation of the marvels of human ingenuity and inventiveness. The electric motor and the transistor, for example, have revolutionized society; they were once the brainchildren of original thinkers. Oil and coal are on the way out; human imagination is as fresh as ever, with a huge new challenge to sink its teeth into: a transition from fossil fuel based energy production to one using renewable energy sources and on to one using an as yet unknown technology.
To sum up the above in one simple thought, here is the comment of Dave Chameides in his article Hope for a New Decade:
“Someday, perhaps, we’ll look back and realize all the energy we used fighting over Global Warming would have been better spent bringing a renewable energy future to fruition.”

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The EcoRefugee…

...or  is there no such person?    

They number well over a million by now, the Syrians who have fled the civil war in their country and moved into Jordan and other neighboring countries. On the other side of the world, the 100,000 people of Kiribati, Alaska, are reluctantly preparing to leave their village before the rising ocean floods their homes, which lie only 10 feet above sea level. Similar and yet entirely different, these Syrians and native Alaskans are both victims of events way beyond their control, both fitting the category of displaced – or soon to be displaced – persons. Refugees, one political, the other environmental.

But there the similarity ends. Political refugee status is well defined in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. According to this definition, refugees have crossed political borders because of fear of persecution as members of one of five particular groups: racial, religious, national, social or political. They do not feel their home country can protect them from such persecution. The environmental refugee, on the other hand, does not fit this neat categorization, and there are other problems as well:

• Statistics of displacement vary wildly depending on who is collecting them
• Modern migrants tend to have several reasons to flee their homes
• Much environmental migration is voluntary rather than forced
• Much such migration comes about because of gradual change like desertification, not sudden events like floods  

This question is pressing and will become more so, as desertification, rising sea levels, changing agricultural patterns and severe flooding become more commonplace. Meanwhile, the international community struggles to cram the term “environmental refugee” into a neat box. One expert, for example, recommended that the term should be apply only to those fleeing rapid or drastic changes to their environment. Poor farmers in Sudan, unable to make a living in on-going drought conditions, are not going to be very impressed by this definition. Desertification is gradual. Neither are they going to be happy to be classed as that bugaboo, “economic refugees”.

It is easy to become exasperated with such niggling and to think that the energy going into defining these unfortunates could sure be put to better use. This is to simplify the very real mushiness of the term “environmental refugee”, but it does suggest an entirely different approach. If this type of refugee needs a persecutor, suppose we start with the fact that the global north has practiced destructive environmental practices for so long that they have led to the plight of such refugees the world over. Just accepting responsibility ought to create a foundation on which practical solutions can be based. Not in the sense of assigning guilt, just making use of the very wealth that often accompanied those destructive practices. Think big, in other words, both internationally and morally. Realize that the environmental refugee is an entirely different animal from his political brother.  Create different types of help for those who flee sudden disaster, on the one hand, and those who need to be resettled gradually, but do not ignore the real need of the latter “new” type of refugee.