More than 270,000 organic farmers are taking on corporate agriculture giant Monsanto in a lawsuit filed March 30. Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the family farmers are fighting for the right to keep a portion of the world food supply organic—and preemptively protecting themselves from accusations of stealing genetically modified seeds that drift on to their pristine crop fields.

Consumers are powerful. For more than a decade, a cultural shift has seen shoppers renounce the faster-fatter-bigger-cheaper mindset of factory farms, exposéd in the 2008 documentary Food, Inc. From heirloom tomatoes to heritage chickens, we want our food slow, sustainable, and local—healthy for the earth, healthy for animals, and healthy for our bodies.

But with patented seeds infiltrating the environment so fully, organic itself is at risk. Monsanto’s widely used Genuity® Roundup Ready® canola seed has already turned heirloom canola oil into an extinct species. The suing farmers are seeking to prevent similar contamination of organic corn, soybeans, and a host of other crops. What’s more, they’re seeking to prevent Monsanto from accusing them of unlawfully using the very seeds they’re trying to avoid.

“It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement,” says Public Patent Foundation director Dan Ravicher in a Cornucopia Institutearticle about the farmers’ lawsuit (May 30, 2011), “but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement.”

Even as the megacorporation enjoys soaring stock, the U.S. justice department continues to look into allegations of its fraudulent antitrust practices (The Street, June 29, 2011):

Monsanto, which has acquired more than 20 of the nation’s biggest seed producers and sellers over the last decade, has long pursued a strict policy with its customers, obligating them to buy its bioengineered seeds every year rather than use them in multiple planting seasons. Farmers who disobey are blacklisted forever.

It’s a wide net Monsanto has cast over the agricultural landscape. As Ravicher points out, “it’s actually in Monsanto’s financial interest to eliminate organic seed so that they can have a total monopoly over our food supply.” Imagine a world devoid of naturally vigorous traditional crops and controlled by a single business with a appetite for intellectual property. Did anyone else feel a cold wind pass through them? Now imagine a world where thousands of family farmers fight the good fight to continue giving consumers a choice in their food—and win.

Source: Cornucopia Institute, The Street 

Image by NatalieMaynor, licensed under Creative Commons. 

My neighborhood coffee shop, housed in a historic red brick edifice on a shady intersection, no longer sells bottled water. The barista posted a small, handwritten sign explaining why:

Nina’s Coffee Café took the pledge to think outside the bottle and serve St. Paul’s finest tap water. Join us in this effort. Fill your own bottles at the watering hole.

Thank god, I say. Or more accurately: Thank you, café owner June Berkowitz. Inviting customers to drink their fill of free water is such a novel concept after decades of cafés, fast food joints, and movie theaters, when asked for “just water,” either handing over a tiny Dixie cup that lasts two gulps or making patrons pay for a disposable plastic bottle.

It will have to be a tandem effort between patrons and businesses if we are to break our dependence on bottled water, writes Peter Gleick in his book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water(Island Press, 2010):

An increasing number of restaurants have also been in the front lines of the campaign against bottled water, despite the fact that bottled water can be a significant source of revenue. Restaurants know that they can boost profits, and servers can boost tips, by making water another commodity. Yet more and more restaurateurs are shifting to encourage healthy foods and sustainable agriculture grown nearby—a campaign many call “local food.” Maybe it is time to launch a “local water” campaign as well to encourage consumers to turn away from bottled water and back toward local sources of supply.

I’ll leave it up to someone else to come up with the “local water” version of locavore, but in the meantime, a loud round of applause to Nina’s café for taking the tap water pledge, regardless of its effect on their bottom line. With plastic water bottles leaching cancer-causing toxins and being disposed of at a heart-stopping rate of 85 million bottles per day in the United States alone, I am thrilled to bring along my BPA-free, stainless steel bottle and fill it at your watering hole.

Source: Bottled and Sold 

Image by Dan4th, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Today kicks off a four-part series on climate change at The Atlantic. Part one comes from Paul R. Epstein, co-author of the book Changing Planet, Changing Health. Epstein tells us just how changing temperatures in the oceans can lead to more severe weather in the middle of the U.S., like the calamitous tornado earlier this year in Joplin, Missouri.

So global warming is thus causing climate change, including altered weather patterns, and the engine of change is the heat building up deep inside the world's oceans. Water is warming, ice is melting, and water vapor is rising. How does this help explain tornadoes? …

It's all about contrasts and gradients. Warmer temperatures over land surfaces create low-pressure systems (since hot air rises, creating "lows"), while cold fronts from the north come with high pressures. Weather "flows downhill," as it were—from highs to lows. When temperature and pressure gradients between highs and lows increase (as they do naturally in spring), the clash can twist to form tornadoes. The greater the contrasts, the greater the force of the twisters.

This spring, especially warm and moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico met up with especially cold fronts from the north, driven by melting Arctic and Greenland ice.

Epstein cautions against assuming that any of this means a predictable increase in severe weather. In fact, the unpredictability is the point here. There may be years when severe flooding and tornadoes seem much milder than the previous year. “But,” Epstein writes, “it is clear that changing atmospheric and oceanic conditions underlie the changing patterns of weather—and that the stage is set for more severe storms, including even more punishing tornadoes.”

Keep an eye out for the other three parts in this series from The Atlantic.

Source: The Atlantic