Category Archives: Denial

Carbons Credits and Food Aid: Why Consumption Solutions Won’t Fix a Broken Production System

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A phenomenon that is currently sweeping through the ‘environmental’ movement, is the concept of carbon credits; paying a variety of different merchants for performing carbon offsets. The most recent of these carbon markets are farmers hoping to sell their ability to sequester carbon in the soil through no till agriculture techniques. This is the idea discussed in, “Is carbon farming a climate boon, or boondoggle?” an article reviewed by one of my classmates (Anuras). This Blog post is in response to their blog post expanding on their critique of the carbon credits movement in general.

 

Anuras brings up a good point when they say, “Further, affluent consumers are drawn to climate friendly solutions such as carbon sequestration but do they … simply commend themselves for doing a good deed.” This statement helped me realize the connections this style of response for carbon sequestration has to the response the U.S. has taken

Developed Economy, Max Gustafson

with surplus grain supplies. Rather than address the problem at its source, the policy and production level, the solution the current system comes up with is to expand the consumer market, taking an overproduction problem and selling the solution back to the public as a consumption problem. They tell us that if we just give enough food away in the form of foreign aid, re-capture just enough carbon, simply consume enough, then we won’t have to change the way we live.

However, like we discussed in class, the people most likely to be impacted by the coming climate change are not those doing most of the consumption or emissions, but those in developing countries, the very same group of people most damaged by the processes of dumping surplus crops as ‘food aid’. We can no longer rely on individualistic solutions like carbon credits that inherently rely on consumption, to solve systemic issues. Our ‘perpetual growth’ economy is being fueled at the detriment of developing nations and climate mitigation. To truly address these institutional issues beyond buying some ‘green’ or ‘fair trade’ products we must come together as active citizens instead of passive consumers. It is up to us: we can either voluntarily change the way we live now or let climate change choose for us at a deadly cost in the future.

 

 

I hold my breath and count to ten

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Like I am on a roller coaster going around the loop, I hold my breath and count to ten. In a flash, the ten seconds are over, and I open my eyes to see myself intact. Fresh air floods my lungs, my body regains the energy lost as I sink into the chair. Guilt, anger, and sadness. These were the feelings I had while participating in the fifth contemplative practice: tracing breakfast. Except unlike the gasp of air that so quickly returned to my body, hunger does not afford its hosts with this luxury.

I admit, I was skeptical at first that these practices aided my ability to learn but as my breath became deeper, my stomach started rumbling, and my heart racing, I am brought to a not so distant land of hunger. I lay in bed with closed eyes and my world becomes filled with a dark void which allows my mind to run free. I think about all of the children who starve, all of the families living off rations, and the men and women who work tirelessly to supply food for their families. A ball begins to form in the pit of my stomach as I think about my own food waste, my privilege. I ask myself, am I to blame? Or is it out of my reach? Does blame need to be projected on someone?

Questions I may not know the answers to quite yet, I do know however that a single breath will not ease my mind this time. Thinking about world issues like hunger in an unorthodox way such as a contemplative practice allows me to become grounded in my situation and aware of others. We are interconnected and dependent beings, hunger is just one of many we share.

 

References:

Photo #1: https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/9430128/tallest-double-inversion-rollercoaster-six-flags/

Photo #2: https://nypost.com/2018/12/06/one-in-six-children-throughout-america-live-in-fear-of-hunger/

2018 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/11-09-2018-global-hunger-continues-to-rise—new-un-report-says

Africa hunger crisis: Facts, FAQs, how to help

The New Normal

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In response to Cat Kelly’s “How are You?”

I scrolled through nearly all, and read many, of the blogs thus far posted in search of something to respond to. Many topics, paragraphs and links earned my attention and over an hour later I felt overwhelmed with choice. But then I read Cat Kelly’s reflection on our very first contemplative practice. This meditation was the simplest, Professor Litfin simply asked us to explore our feelings in the present moment. 

Cat’s reflection was piercing to read. I too have felt the need to slow down and (even before this pandemic) the need to “enjoy my life the way I like to enjoy it, not how America trains us to enjoy it”. Cat hit every nerve with me, writing about the desire to not over-achieve or over burden herself with work. She wondered if she could just live for herself right now and peel away all the expectation. 

I want to yell to Cat and to everyone “Do it! Slow down! This is a hard moment! And this is a big moment!!”. You see Cat, I believe that this pandemic has given you the pause and opportunity to let go of some of those socially imposed expectations that you normally hold on to. This is wonderful. But also, I do not believe that the overwork, over-achievement, overproduction and over-consumption you are normally pressured into participating in is a good normal, nor should we be desperate to return to it. 

A friend recently sent me an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure”. Distilling the message of this piece into a sentence would go something like this: slow down and take a breath because all of your panicked productivity is an expression of your desire that the world get back to normal, but the truth of the matter is we are living through a world-changing-crisis and what we all need to be doing is processing the fact that our world will not go back to what is was before… ever. While this message is tough to swallow and difficult to process, there is also enormous potential in this reality. As the author Aisha Ahmad writes,

Be slow… Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work. And so, may this tragedy tear down all our faulty assumptions and give us the courage of bold new ideas.

What could these bold new ideas hold? 

To turn to our food system, as we all slow down perhaps we will see the world with fresh and adjusted eyes now brave enough to face what is crumbling. Hopefully some of the most unjust, dangerous and corrosive aspects of our food system will reveal themselves to be no-longer ignorable in the fabric of a new world shaped by greater understanding of the potential for catastrophe. As Paolo Di Croce, the secretary general of Slow Food International, said in a recent video “this fight to change the food system is more important now than ever”. 

An Image from a World Economic Forum web page entitled “COVID-19 is exacerbating food shortages in Africa” — Many systemic food problems may come to a head during this crisis, revealing our broken system

Perhaps if we all slow down, as Cat suggested, adjust to the harshness of this crumbling world and emerge on the other side of our individual emotional struggles with renewed bravery, we will then have the courage to take up good fights to change this new world for the better. 

In some ways, this could be a fresh start. But first we must slow down and accept that it is happening.

-Aisling Doyle Wade

Sources:

Ahmad, Aisha. 2020. “Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366.

Contemplating Complicity in Global Food Injustice

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Figure 1: Granlund, 2011

With ever constant demands for my time, energy, and thoughts, I usually don’t stop and think deeply about where and how the food I consume is produced. A reoccurring theme of my feelings after contemplative practices were complicated emotions around my own complicity in global food injustices.

Never was this clearer to me than during the contemplative practice on chocolate. Watching the cocoa farmers experience eating chocolate for the first time, I knew it was just one of the many global food injustices propagated by a global trade system which values consumers in developed countries, over producers in developing countries. From countries experiencing famine contractually forced to export their food (Carolan, 2018), to rice originally smuggled and planted by West African slaves, returned to these countries in the form of contingent and domestically damaging “food aid”(Lecture 4/30), the systemic inequalities that I implicitly benefit from are all around me.

Initially, these contemplative practices filled me with a feeling of guilt and ineptitude considering the miniscule impact my individual actions could make on these globally propagated problems. Yet, as they progressed, I eventually came to a feeling of resolve.

Figure 2: Campesina 2020

While I can’t help cacao farmers in West Africa and may not be able to change global trade agreements on my own, I can still do something. I can acknowledge the privilege that I have and help bring these issues to the attention of my fellow citizens, who collectively can more effectively demand for more equitable international food politics and purchasing agreements such as getting more involved in the Food Sovereignty and Beyond Fair Trade movements.

Overall, these practices have shown me that I can and need to slow down and appreciate all the people whose lives went into supporting my own and do my part to make their lives a little bit better.

Sources:

Campesina, La Via. “Till, Sow and Harvest Transformative Ideas for the Future! Now Is the Moment to Demand Food Sovereignty – #17April.” Focus on the Global South, 16 Apr. 2020, focusweb.org/till-sow-and-harvest-transformative-ideas-for-the-future-now-is-the-moment-to-demand-food-sovereignty-17april/.

Carolan, Michael. “Cheap Food and Conflict.” The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Routledge, 2018, p. 78.

Granlund, Dave. “Dave Granlund – Editorial Cartoons and Illustrations>.” Dave Granlund Editorial Cartoons and Illustrations RSS, www.davegranlund.com/cartoons/2011/07/27/obesity-and-famine/.

North Carolina’s Hog Industry Is A Telling Example of Crumbling Tort Law in America

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After colonial-era tobacco fields gradually fell out of fashion, North Carolina established a rich history of hog farming. What seemed an economic lifeboat has posed serious environmental and health hazards to the people most intertwined in the process. North Carolina produces 10 billion gallons of wet livestock waste annually, most of which resides in uncovered waste lagoons that are prone to flooding during hurricanes- an issue that will only become more prevalent as climate change worsens. To prevent natural overflow, most of the fecal water is used to fertilize crops, which introduces issues of nitrogen concentration groundwater and river runoff.

A rust-colored hog waste basin looks far from any ponds we know. Credit DEFMO via WUNC (Magnus & Stasio, “A Big Look at Big Hog in North Carolina”)

Most of these ponds exist in majority black and latinx communities who, historically, have been disenfranchised through sharecropping, and rarely benefit from the wealth that is generated by multigenerational contract hog farmers. Rather, an experience of lifelong asthma and shortened life spans is steadily present. Community members in Bladen County recently sued Smithfield farms for violating the right to “private use and enjoyment of land” through negligent waste-management practices, and won. Members lamented the lack of mobility, feeling trapped in their houses, as trips outside swiftly caused nausea and headaches- a disadvantage many of us are only recently experiencing. Millions were awarded to plaintiffs, but restrictions on nuisance suits relating to hog operations quickly followed. 

 

The state has a history of restricting suits and issuing moratoriums in relation to swine litigation, as public officials receive sizable campaign donations from contracting companies who control the market, enacting a tort law that, little-by-little, chips away individual capacity to address industry malfeasance- a national pattern in tort law that was exponentially embraced after the famous Liebeck v. McDonald’s hot coffee case. Another product of the litigation required individual farms to significantly reduce odor in ten days, through the installation of pond covers and methane energy converters at their own expense- a demand that farmers under Smithfield felt impossible. With many farmers soon in violation of court demands and breach of Smithfield contract, they saw their pigs carted off and livelihoods destroyed. 

Source: Yeoman, Barry. (2019, Dec 20). Here are the rural residents who sued the world’s largest hog producer over waste and odors— and won. Retrieved from The Fern.

The Right to Privacy, Free Speech, and a Humane Life

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The family farm. Rolling green pastures, a red barn, and calves running around with their moms before stopping to suckle. This is where Americans picture their food comes from. What they don’t realize, however, is how many carefully crafted laws there are to keep farming and ranching out of the public eye and away from accusation. I recently went to a family dairy farm. The reality was they owned 3,000 dairy cows, the males sold to an industrial beef farm, the mothers spent 4-5 years standing on wood, sand, and manure before being sold for to an industrial slaughterhouse, and the calves were separated from their mothers the day they’re born.

The news about what is happening and how misleading this industry is gets exemplified through Ag-gag laws. Ag-gag laws are laws that essentially prohbit any recording of what happens on these farms and in slaughterhouses. As per the persecutor’s discretion, filming what happens, even if the footage displays illegal treatment of the animals, can have you tried for terrorism. Many states have begun overturning these ag-gag laws as being unconstitutional due to the first amendment’s freedom of speech as well as offering protection for when abuse is discovered.

https://fernnews-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/01.Slider-Texas-dust.jpg

Yet this year, an article came out on Food and Environment Reporting Network stating that it is now illegal to take drone footage of feedlots in Texas. You are allowed to charter a plane to film, but that is an incredibly expensive venture compared to a drone. The industry argues it is to protect themselves and their private properties. The reporters argue it is still a violation of the first amendment and keeps the public blind to the conditions the animals live in so they don’t have the opportunity to make educated choices when shopping.

What do you think? After reading personal and professional perspectives, do you believe these laws are just? Or do you believe they are in violation of the first amendment and prevent consumers from learning exactly where their food is coming from? Are they there for the small family farmers? Or the industrial agriculturalists who dominate the American meat and dairy market?

Personally, I believe this is just one of the real costs of cheap food.

“Essential Workers”: Heroes or a Sacrifice to Capitalism ?

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In the face of major shifts and/or unrest both global and domestic, the US has historically relied on the most marginalized groups to uphold the status quo; an aspect of our history that is too often left out of, or skewed within, popular narratives. An example ringing with familiarity, was the onset of WWII (when swaths of the agricultural labor force migrated into war production factories) the 1942 Mexican Farm Labor Program Act systematically promoted the exploitation of immigrant labor as a means to keep meeting food demands on the backs of “cheap” labor. Our immigrant workers are a labor force that has been consistently condemned, ridiculed, and cast out. And again, today, in the face of a global pandemic, we are turning to the numerous undocumented immigrants that make up our 2.4 million farmworkers to continue to supply us with our demands (Honig, 2020). They are essential to keeping America fed.

Yet, as the choir of bells ring through our cities in gratitude to those who are on the front lines, these essential workers continue to work unprotected in close quarters, high risk conditions, and extremely limited access to testing or health care. And when calls are made to solve these issues, and to provide adequate provisioning, they are too often being met with no answer. Ultimately, they are being ignored. Still though, the faces of leadership turn to the media to give praise and show appreciation of our essential workers… our “heroes.”

Is this the way to treat our heroes? Do we truly believe that these people put themselves at risk everyday, in-spite of the love of their families and own lives, to be our “heroes?” Or have they been given no other choice, no other option to sustain themselves, or their families? And, in knowing this well, the faces of leadership can chose to tend to their need or not. The migrant workers, who have always been an essential labor force, are treated as if they are disposable. This pandemic is not an independent actor, it is constantly being fed by the conditions that were already established, long before it’s outbreak. Vulnerable living conditions, limited access to health care, muted voices, and insufficient ground to establish self-determination are the by-products of our capitalist structure that continues to sustain itself through the most marginalized people, who tend to fill our most essential positions.

 

This blog post was inspired by the FERN article: https://thefern.org/2020/04/as-pandemic-spreads-and-growing-season-ramps-up-farmworkers-deemed-essential-but-still-largely-unprotected/