Topic: Environment
Michael Pollan on Stop-Animation Video
“Food Rules” by Michael Pollan – RSA/Nominet Trust competition from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
In the forty years since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, a movement dedicated to the reform of the food system has taken root in America. Lappé’s groundbreaking book connected the dots between something as ordinary and all-American as a hamburger and the environmental crisis, as well as world hunger. Along with Wendell Berry and Barry Commoner, Lappé taught us how to think ecologically about the implications of our everyday food choices. You can now find that way of thinking, so radical at the time, just about everywhere—from the pages of Time magazine to the menu at any number of local restaurants.
Wendell Berry’s Wisdom
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the paper’s agriculture reporter, said that “after being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House.”
Mass Natural
“Elitist” is just about the nastiest name you can call someone, or something, in America these days, a finely-honed term of derision in the culture wars, and “elitist” has stuck to organic food in this country like balsamic vinegar to mâche. Thirty years ago the rap on organic was a little different: back then the stuff was derided as hippie food, crunchy granola and bricklike brown bread for the unshaved set (male and female division).
The Year In Ideas: A to Z; Precautionary Principle
New technologies can bring mankind great benefits, but they can also cause accidental harm. How careful should society be about introducing innovations that have the potential to affect human health and the environment? For the last several decades, American society has been guided by the “risk analysis” model, which assesses new technologies by trying to calculate the mathematical likelihood that they will harm the public. There are other ways, however, to think about this problem. Indeed, a rival idea from Europe, the “precautionary principle 2/3” has just begun making inroads in America.
Is This Country Living? Ask the Cows
MY town’s annual agricultural fair fell on the Saturday after the attacks on New York and Washington, and I think everyone was relieved when the selectmen decided to go ahead with the event. The turnout, 500 people at least, was huge for a town our size, all of us more pleased than usual to come together as a community.
Poison
“This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the 20th century’s most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chlordane, benzene and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape. Antonetta, the author of three collections of poetry, spent her childhood summers in a bungalow on Barnegat Bay in southern Ocean County, one of the relatively low-income “sacrifice communities” where the toxic wastes of postwar civilization have pooled. We know a little about these places from the news, from books and movies like “Erin Brockovich” and “A Civil Action,” but for the most part we’ve glimpsed them only from a distance, through the eyes of crusading reporters and lawyer
The Way We Live Now: Land of the Free Market
I live just beyond the dilating fringe of the New York metropolitan area, in the kind of place that was called “the country” until a few years ago. That’s when the ratio of urban refugees to farmers shifted in a way that made that designation feel self-conscious, so people began calling it “the exurbs,” a
Playing God in the Garden
Planting Today I planted something new in my vegetable garden — something very new, as a matter of fact. It’s a potato called the New Leaf Superior, which has been genetically engineered — by Monsanto, the chemical giant recently turned ”life sciences” giant — to produce its own insecticide. This it can do in every
Breaking Ground; Seed. Reseed. Secede.
WHERE do you go to shoot a movie about a perfectly ordinary American whose whole life, unbeknownst to him, is a scripted show for television? Ideally, you’d find a place that looked so stereotypically small-town America, so thoroughly front-porched and picket-fenced, that it could pass for a movie set. This is what the producers of