The unmasking of a school lunch hero: Mrs. Q speaks

Sarah Wu, aka Mrs. Q.Photo: Jill BrazelSome of you may already know of Mrs. Q, the teacher who blogged anonymously about her adventures eating lunch in the cafeteria of the public school where she worked every day in 2010. Her daily posts included pictures of each day's meal (pizza, chicken nuggets, pasta with meat sauce, etc.) and brief descriptions of how they tasted and made her feel. This simple formula gained Mrs. Q a huge following of teachers, parents, students, and citizens interested in changing the food system (improving school lunch, many reformers say, could be a step toward combating childhood obesity).

Now that her book, Fed Up with Lunch, has been released, the world can finally know Mrs. Q. as Sarah Wu, a speech pathologist working in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) whose first career, in a weirdly ironic twist, was at Kraft Foods ("I knew that it was not right for me at all," she said).

Wu's unlikely rise to food-movement stardom (she's been featured on The View and Good Morning America) began when she simply forgot her lunch one day and ended up buying one from the school cafeteria. Wu still works for CPS, although she has voluntarily transferred from the school where she ate for a year (for "self-preservation"). Just in time to wrap up National School Lunch Week, we recently had a chance to chat with her about what this project means, for her and for school food everywhere.

Q. How did you decide to commit to this challenge, and why did you take this anonymous, Morgan Spurlock-esque immersion approach?

A. At that point [the beginning of 2010], I had worked for CPS for three years. I'd noticed the food, but I think at the time I was just concerned about doing a great job as a speech therapist. I had a little boy who was just turning one, and starting to eat real food at home, and I was really starting to consider, well, what is it that I'm putting on the table? I had always figured that I was a healthy cook; we didn't eat fast food. I would never let my son eat what they served me that day, and I was just heartbroken that my students were going home to potentially not very good food, and a lot of them live in poverty -- it was pretty disheartening to see that.

I think I ended up making more of a dent by doing what I did, instead of trying to do advocacy at the local level. My objective was to put those lunches out there because I was affected by them. But I didn't want to be the kind of person [who is] labeled as a rabble-rouser. I'm not like that.

Q. For people who may have already followed your blog, what more does the book offer?

A. As an anonymous blogger, there's tons that I wasn't able to say. I didn't tell anyone that I'd worked at Kraft, which I think adds an interesting dimension. I didn't tell anybody what the school district was; I didn't get into a lot of detail, even though I blogged every day. So the book really is a journey; it's the story of me going along my little way, and everything that I learned about the food system, and ingredients, and health and wellness topics in general. I talk about recess, because the school I was at last year had no recess. People in power making stupid choices on behalf of kids, that's really the problem.

Q. What's been the most surprising thing throughout this whole experience?

A. What's been the most surprising is the reception from my coworkers. They want to talk to me about these issues. For example, a coworker of mine came up to me and said, "I'm so proud of you, the food they're feeding the kids is crap and we need to change it." He would never have started that conversation with me [before]. That's been most surprising, that people were not angry about what I did. I felt a lot of inner turmoil, because I was struggling with the fact that I want to be a great speech pathologist, I want to be a good employee, I take pride in my work, and I didn't want to jeopardize that. And I didn't want to be labeled as this bitch. So I totally miscalculated their response.

Q. For parents who are aware of or concerned about their kids' school lunches, but aren't sure where to start in terms of making changes, what's your advice?

A. I've changed my son's daycare food slightly by just asking the right questions. It's either parent-teacher night, or report card pickup day (which is what they do in Chicago Public Schools) -- that's when you want to ask those questions. Explore the school -- find the lunchroom manager, find the gym teacher, and people who are invested in health and wellness. Chat them up, start asking those questions, talk to the principal, and be nice about it. [Kindness] goes a lot farther than if you come down hard.

Q. Have your blog and book had any effect on Chicago Public Schools?

A. CPS issued a statement last week saying they are adhering to USDA standards and they have been improving. And they're right -- I [ate school lunch] for a calendar year, January to December, so I saw two different school years. There was improvement; there were more fresh veggies and fruit. I don't want to take credit for it because everyone's thinking about this right now. It's amazing.

Q. So how did eating this food every day make you feel? Did it have any effect on your health?

A. I started eating school lunches and it just completely wreaked havoc on my body. I was so grateful to have summer break for recuperation. In June I went to the doctor and got diagnosed with mild asthma, which was odd, and I got a prescription for an inhaler. But I also lost 20 points on my cholesterol, and I think it's because [I was] eating better than I've ever eaten in my life outside of school lunch.

I had suffered from irritable bowel syndrome for many years, and I felt like I sort of had it under control, so I didn't really think about the fact that if you eat school lunch it's going to aggravate everything. I thought, it's just food, and I think that's how a lot of parents think -- who cares, it's no big deal. But really what I learned is: Food is everything! It's our whole life.

Q. You seem to have gained a particular affection for school lunch ladies (or men, as the case may be). What's that about?

A. The person who feeds you creates a relationship with you, you know? It's not just a transaction, it's that human contact. When I feed my son, it's not just putting food in front of him, there's love involved, and that's exactly what happens with lunch ladies. It's not easy working in the lunchroom -- it's hot, you burn yourself all the time, they're tired, but they're there for the kids. Lots of times lunch ladies have other roles in the school. The lunch lady at [the school where I ate for a year] mentored some of the difficult children who were having tough times behaviorally. She reached out to them. That's something I don't think people realize.

Q. So now that your book is out, after the publicity dies down, what's next?

A. Oh my gosh. I don't have a clue. I just enjoy my work. I guess I'm open to possibilities. I didn't do this because I hated my job, I did this because I love my job. So if everything's the same, that's okay.

Claire Thompson is an editorial intern at Grist. She just graduated from Northwestern University and is happy to be back in her hometown of Seattle, proving that her journalism degree is not worthless.

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Experiment in (e)co-habitation gets the green light

The G•O Logic prototype passive house.Photo: Steve ChiassonScanning through the website for the Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage development in Belfast, Maine, you might find yourself wondering if this is a buncha pinko commies who've just slapped a fresh coat of paint on the '60s commune-in-the-woods routine. Says here there will be extensive common facilities (uh huh), complete resident management (ayup), a non-hierarchical structure (I have heard this all before). But wait, what's this? Separate income sources?

WTF?

"We probably do have some hippie communists [in the group] that have grown up and look a little different now," says Sanna McKim, the project's founder. "But this is really about a return to an old fashioned neighborhood. I want to have more to do with my neighbors, I want to share more -- but I don't want to share everything."

Oh, thank God.

This super eco-groovy condo-development-to-be will function more like an tight-knit, urban neighborhood than the bong-smoking boondoggles of decades past. The houses, many of them duplexes and triplexes, will be clustered together to leave room for farming and forests on the rest of the 42-acre site -- and they'll be small by design, to encourage residents to spend more time in shared spaces both in- and outdoors.

A clubhouse -- "common house" in co-housing lingo -- will serve as a community center where residents can gather and where meals will be served five nights a week for any who want to partake. (Imagine dragging yourself home from work to find that dinner is already served! You cook maybe one night a month, and enjoy the fruits of others' labor the rest of the time. But only if you feel like it!)

"It's a way of bringing more leisure and social life for busy parents," McKim says.

The site is something less than two miles from the grocery store and schools: "It's bike-able, walk-able , draft horse-able," says McKim, who used to farm with horse-power. (Her husband, Alan Gibson, is a former horse logger.)

And the homes themselves will be quite remarkable as well. They will be built under the "passive house" model, developed in Germany, meaning that they will be so snug and airtight that no furnace is required to keep them warm through the New England winters. (Passivhaus fans like to brag that you can heat these homes with a hair dryer.) The company that will design and build the houses, G•O Logic, has won a stack of accolade for its prototype passive house, built just down the road. (Check out the video at the end of this post for a totally geek-tastic home tour.)

The bulldozers cleared the access road just last week, so after a long planning process, building can finally begin. So far, 24 families have bought in as partners in the ecovillage. There's room for 12 more.

McKim says living in a community like this is bound to come with challenges, but apparently we've learned a thing or two about living well together in the last 40 years -- or she hopes so: "If we can't [live peacefully together] with a small group of people, how are we going to do it globally?"

Grist special projects editor Greg Hanscom has been editor of the award-winning environmental magazine High Country News and the Baltimore-based city mag, Urbanite. He tweets about cities and the environment at @ghanscom.

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The brown revolution: increasing agricultural productivity naturally

A hay field in South Dakota.Photo: Lisa M. HamiltonDusk in western South Dakota. A half-hour ago, at sunset, the world here made its last pulse for the day: Birds hurried between fence posts, mosquitoes emerged from the shadows and feasted furiously, the sweet clover turned iridescent yellow in the late light. Now, the movement has ceased. Even by day it is a quiet landscape, inhabited primarily by meadowlarks and grasses. But as night draws its blue self over this place, the silence is profound.

On this particular 8,000-acre section of the Plains there is a single light in view, coming from inside a trailer. Bustling about camp are three men -- cowboys, you'd probably call them. They certainly look the part, dressed in boots and wide-brimmed hats, one of them splitting old fence posts with an axe to build a campfire, another working on some beef for dinner. They call this pasture Horse Creek for the water running down its center, and on it they have 1,100 yearling cattle.

And yet, for these men the bovines are only a means to a greater end. According to the unofficial ringleader, Jim Howell, their goal is nothing less than helping the world to avert a looming global catastrophe. What they're doing here is not just herding cattle; they are starting what they call "The Brown Revolution."

Howell is not revolutionary looking, being of medium height and middle age, with gray spun into his short, blond hair and a bit of John Denver in his face. Back home in southwest Colorado he runs cattle on land that his family has ranched since the 1880s, but over the years he has worked with cattle from New Mexico to New Zealand. He thinks about the world in a vast way, and articulates his globally-minded perspective with clarity and depth, even when sitting by a campfire.

He is the first to offer that the name the Brown Revolution has its drawbacks, foremost of which is that for many it calls to mind a movement based on dung. (Full of conviction, he wonders optimistically if that will spur people to seek more information.) The name is a modern spin on the Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The Green Revolution greatly increased agricultural productivity in developing countries to meet the demands of a growing world population, then one of the world's great challenges; Howell and his group aim to increase agricultural productivity around the world as a way of addressing one of the great challenges of our time, climate change. But while the Green Revolution hinged on implementing new technology, the Brown Revolution relies on restoring natural systems.

The underlying technique is called holistic management, and was developed by biologist Allan Savory in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) beginning in the 1960s. He saw that the arid grasslands on which the region's people, livestock, and wildlife depended were succumbing to desertification. In looking for a solution, Savory recognized that the grasslands had evolved out of a symbiotic relationship with large, grazing herbivores. In time, he saw that the same was true of similar ecosystems around the world, including that of western South Dakota and the rest of the Great Plains, with its once-great herds of bison.

In arid environments, plant matter doesn't degrade easily on its own -- it needs these large animals to break it down in their rumens and stamp it into the ground and generally work the land. This was accomplished naturally: As the herbivores traveled in large herds for safety against their predators, they would cause a great disturbance to the land; then, for their own sake, they would leave and not return until the plants had had enough rest to regenerate.

Now take away the Great Plains' bison, or the equivalent animals elsewhere, and replace them with cattle, property lines, and fences. The equation still includes large, grazing herbivores, but because they are relatively stationary within the landscape, the symbiosis is lost. Certain areas are overused, and elsewhere plants simply oxidize and die off from underuse; microorganisms decline, water cycles fall apart, and the land gradually collapses.

The basic premise of holistic management is to use livestock like wild animals. But whereas bison on the Great Plains moved through the landscape by instinct, now ranchers must supply that direction. Rather than simply turning cattle into a pasture, these ranchers conduct them like a herd, concentrating bodies to graze one area hard, then leaving it until the plants have regenerated. The effect can be tremendous, with benefits including increased organic matter in the soil, rejuvenation of microorganisms, and restoration of water cycles.

Jim Howell and his partners, biologist Brandon Dalton and rancher Zachary Jones.Photo: Lisa M. HamiltonAccording to Howell and his colleagues, there can also be an exponential increase in the land's ability to sequester carbon. Savory explains in his paper "A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change" that there are already 12 million hectares (29.7 million acres) of rangeland managed holistically in Australia, Africa, and North America. Increasing those soils' organic matter by 1 percent would remove 3.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) from the atmosphere. (For context, he offers that "the annual total emissions from all sources for the year 2000 was an estimated 44 gigatons.") Savory goes on to argue that increasing the organic matter by just 0.5 percent across all of the world's 4.9 billion hectares of rangeland would sequester 720 gigatons of CO2e; increasing it by two percent would sequester 2,880 gigatons. In a nutshell, the Brown Revolution consists of sequestering massive amounts of carbon by bringing holistic management to the world's arid grasslands.

"It has to be done on a freaking massive scale," Howell says, "so it's going to require huge flows of capital to make it work. We're not going to own the whole world, but hopefully we're going to be a significant player at the table and influence land management policy on a global scale."

Howell's goal is twofold: to implement holistic management on enough land as to have an impact on climate change, but also to provide a model that becomes the standard for grasslands management around the world. And he and his team intend to go big, fast. More than once, Howell and his partners referred to the Gates Foundation as an example of the level of influence they hope to wield in coming years.

For now, they have partnered with a handful of alternative-minded investors who are fronting the money to buy land that Howell and his crew then manage and transform; Horse Creek's 8,000 acres are less than one percent of what they hope to buy in the western Plains over the next three years. In the long run, they imagine a publicly-traded entity with shares available to even $10-investors. Because Howell feels so confident in the power of holistic management, his predominant attitude is that more or less all that lies between here and there is just buying the land and making it happen.

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Remember when Americans used to care about population? [VIDEO]

These days, when even many environmentalists go out of their way to avoid mention of the P word, it's almost hard to believe that population used to be a mainstream, widely discussed issue. Back in the '60s and '70s, security hawks were worried about global birthrates, average Americans were worried about overcrowding, and enviros were worried about famine and wholesale ecological collapse.

This segment from PBS's Need to Know highlights some of that history, including Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon each pledging to tackle the threat of population growth, and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich making some 20 appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The video also touches on some of the controversial issues that would eventually lead so many people to back away from population: the right-to-life movement, concerns from African Americans and other minorities, and the hot-button topic of immigration. 

Need to Know is a partner with Grist in the Climate Desk project.

This is the latest in a series of GINK videos about population and reproduction (or a lack thereof). It's also part of Grist's 7 Billion series.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist, which she cofounded back in the day. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+. She writes on politics, population, and other green issues. She coined the acronym GINK (green inclinations, no kids) and won a 2010 Population Institute Global Media Award for her writing on the childfree choice. If you're like-minded, become a fan of GINK on Facebook. If you're not, no hard feelings.

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Riding the crimson tide: bicycling when you have your period

For some, it's hard to go with the flow and cycle during the cycle.Photo: OMARPHOTOWORLDAs someone who writes about gender and cycling, I get asked a lot -- why don't more women ride bikes? My answer is usually that sexism is the problem in general, and economic inequality and the division of unpaid labor in particular. There's nothing essentially gendered about transportation choices.

But every month I get blindsided by the reminder that there is one issue that really is ours and ours alone.

Menstruation, while it's something most women deal with for many years of their life, is hardly a singular, universal experience, though.

Many of the women I spoke with for this piece bike right through their periods with no problems. They were surprised that I was even asking. I was surprised that they were surprised. Clearly this is a topic we don't talk about enough. When I pitched the story to Grist's managing editor, Ted Alvarez, he loved the idea. "We like to publish edgy stories," he said.

"I don't think it's that edgy to talk about having your period," I responded. It's an issue, after all, that half of us can relate to directly and the other half can only gain a better understanding of humanity by hearing about. But he has a point: For some reason it's taboo to discuss menstruation in public.

So in the interest of getting the conversation started, I will tell you that for the past 21 years of my life, everything has slowed down to a crawl for two days a month. Heavy flow, exhaustion, hideous cramps, sore muscles, and a brain-sucking sense of doom mean that getting on a bike, much less off the couch, can be a real struggle. This is often when I do my best thinking and writing, but going anywhere is a pure drag.

Apparently I should listen to these signals, says Dr. Andrea Seiffertt, a health practitioner in Santa Barbara, Calif., who combines Western and Ayurvedic medicine:

Your cycle is when your body is purifying and "re-booting," so taking it easy is the most important thing ... While light exercise and movement makes things flow better and definitely helps with muscle cramping and aches, pushing against or ignoring your body's messages to rest isn't healthy. If possible I'd suggest public transport or carpool on those days, or if you work from home like I do, permission to chill more than a normal day.

While I heard from women who have similar experiences to mine, many other women I spoke with said that they have more energy than usual during the heaviest days of their periods and actively seek longer rides as a way to manage the discomfort of cramps and bloating.

"Definitely listen to your own body," responds Seiffertt.

Some issues are more universally frustrating. "I have a white saddle," says my friend Maria Schur, who works at a local bike shop and races bikes in her free time. "Sometimes it gets red." 

Schur is admirably unflappable, but for those of us who do most of our riding in street clothes rather than easily-changed Lycra, a lack of functional menstrual products can be a messy problem. Pads bunch and chafe -- and reusable ones are worse than thin disposables. Tampons, for those unfazed by getting intimate with nasty toxins, can leak -- and oh, that uncomfortable string.

Writer and bicycling mom Marion Rice voiced this frustration in an article a few years ago, and dozens of responses rolled in giving accolades to silicon cups for use by the menstruating pedalers of the world. The two widely available brands are the Diva Cup and the Keeper. Word to the wise: Several women said the bottom tabs of these cups can chafe unless they are cut short.

For every woman whose period poses a transportation problem -- or at least a wake-up call -- there seem to be several for whom it is just one more minor logistical detail when getting ready to ride out into the world.

One thing that is clear, though -- we don't talk about this stuff enough. And when we do, we all seem to learn something.

For Gristy reviews of sustainable options, check out this two-part series that you and your little friend will love:

Elly Blue is a bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon. She has been the managing editor of BikePortland.org, the lead coordinator of the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland in 2008, and has been an active bike funnist since 2005. She publishes a feminist bicycle zine called Taking the Lane.

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Heritage livestock: Milk ‘em for all they’re worth

A rare Guernsey calf.Photo: Rick HarrisonAs heirloom produce gains a growing cult following among eaters, the more under-the-radar interest in heritage livestock breeds may see a resurgence, too. The first National Heirloom Exposition in California last month featured heritage farm animal breeds in addition to the fruits, veggies, and seeds that get foodies excited. Cheese devotees, especially, should take note -- buying and enjoying cheese made from the milk of certain rare breeds of cattle helps ensure their survival. Over on the blog It's Not You, it's Brie, cheese enthusiast Kirstin Jackson collected notes from dairy farmer and veterinarian Dr. Noreen Dmitri. Here's a condensed version what we learned.

Back in the day, before industrial agriculture was the norm, breeds like the Milking Devon, Ayrshire, and Randall Lineback had traditional uses on the family farm, and each produced cheese of a unique flavor. But many of these breeds are now endangered: America's first cattle breed, the Canadienne, has a population of less than 500 worldwide, while Holstein cows, favored by industrial farms for their large size and milk production, number 19 million and account for almost 20 percent of U.S. dairy cattle.

As the market for locally and sustainably produced food has grown, small dairies and the heritage-breed cows they use have found new life. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy in North Carolina is working to preserve the breeds, and the number of small dairy plants in New York State doubled in the past two years. Something called the Swiss Village Farm Foundation is also using embryo transplants to boost Canadienne reproduction.

Lovers of fine cheese should look for a "Heritage Milk" label when they shop. If you're in the Midwest or on the East Coast, It's Not You, it's Brie's Kirstin Jackson has also collected a great list dairy farms selling heritage-milk cheese.

Claire Thompson is an editorial intern at Grist. She just graduated from Northwestern University and is happy to be back in her hometown of Seattle, proving that her journalism degree is not worthless.

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The Washington Post’s boneheaded conventional wisdom on Solyndra

Get your conventional wisdom right here.Photo: M.V. JantzenA couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about Very Serious Conventional Wisdom on energy. Last week, in an editorial on Solyndra, The Washington Post echoed that VSCW with eerie fidelity.

It begins, as so many vacuous editorials have, with the premise that the president isn't upset enough. He needs to show us more upsetness, so we understand how upset he is. He's just not nailing this scene. Once more, with feeling!

Then the CW, raw and uncut: government is a "crappy" venture capitalist that shouldn't be picking winners. This is something all Very Serious People know. It is bolstered by plucking from the history of U.S. funding for innovation a few well-known failures like synfuels and corn ethanol. Of course, one could just as easily pluck a few spectacular failures from the history of private investment and conclude that private investors are crappy venture capitalists. In fact, government has a pretty good record on technology development. Read Fred Block's State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development.

More importantly, as Block's book shows, we have a pretty good idea of what works in technology development funding. We can do it better or worse. Yet the neoliberal VSCW doesn't conclude that it should be done better. It concludes that we should scrap it. No "picking winners" for us.

To be clear, this CW has not eliminated, nor even dented, existing U.S. industrial policy, which is active and robust, if not particularly coherent, and mostly supports carbon-intensive incumbent industries. Instead, the CW has the effect of directing suspicion and hostility toward new industrial policy, for new industries. Those are always the most visible and contested investments.

Why can't government ever do this investment thing right? Because "bureaucrats ... are generally not full-time investment experts and have no skin in the game themselves." As it happens, the administration hired a full-time investment expert, Jonathan Silver, to run the loan guarantee program. He hired other investment experts. By all accounts he built a smart team and, in the words of George Frampton, a former chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, "put together a total portfolio you could be proud of."

We are to believe, though, that since their own money was not on the line, Silver and his team of investment experts didn't try as hard. They had no skin in the game, so their hearts weren't in it.

It's astonishing that we're so casually willing to believe that about other people. It's not only insulting, it's woefully psychologically reductive. These venture capitalists are some of the most prideful, competitive people you will ever meet. They want to succeed, to be the best, to bet on the game-changing companies, to leave their mark on the world -- they want status among their peers, not just money. The latter is only a means to the former anyway, at least the kind of money these folks make.

The reality is that investment decisions are made by human beings. The process can be more or less thorough, reliable, and informed, but it can never be free of risk. Plenty of private-sector investors bet big on Solyndra too. WaPo editors, whose expertise in venture capital is no doubt equal to their expertise on macroecnomics and geopolitics [cough], second-guess all these investors, saying that some other private-sector investors thought it was a bad bet. But that will be true for any investment in a bleeding-edge company.

Finally, the editorial concludes with a common if fairly obvious error of fact. It says that the $527 million in taxpayer money will simply vanish, it "now cannot be used for any good objective," and the U.S. debt will grow by that amount. But that is nonsense. The money Solyndra paid its employees was spent on goods and services. The money it invested produced physical assets that will outlive it. That plant is still there. Bloomberg says taxpayers may be "stuck with it," but it's a huge, sophisticated manufacturing facility! It's not worth nothing.

The company's assets will be sold and taxpayers will get some of their money back. No one is sure how much -- I've heard close to all, I've heard much less -- but it won't be $0. So the $527 million did not vanish into smoke. A great deal of it was pumped into the U.S. economy. And yes, it was deficit spending, but contrary to WaPo theology, that's the whole damn point. That's what economic stimulus is.

Aside from the details of this "scandal" being so hyped and distorted, the worst thing about all this is the lesson U.S. policymakers are likely to learn from it: Don't take any chances supporting cutting-edge clean energy companies. WaPo editors and U.S. politicians do have a knack for learning the wrong lessons.

David Roberts is a staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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Welcoming invasive species, while keeping terrorists out

Photo: Michael Allen Smith With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks behind us, it's fair to say that all Americans -- not just those who have lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have been affected by the ill-conceived "War on Terror."

Surprisingly, even the food system didn't go untouched. A new investigation by the Associated Press (AP) details how our obsession with stopping terrorists, real and imagined, from entering the U.S. during the decade after 9/11 cost the country and its consumers billions of dollars. In a few cases, this obsession has also led to broad, unnecessary exposure to toxic chemicals.

It was all caused by a mass reassignment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agricultural inspectors and scientists to anti-terrorism duty. People whose jobs it had been to protect our borders from illegal shipments of food, seeds, and plants that might harbor invasive species were replaced by bureaucrats who didn't appear know an invasive species from a bumblebee.

In the wake of the move, the number of people intercepting pest-infested packages and products dropped by nearly 30 percent. Meanwhile, as recently as 2008, one-quarter of the inspector jobs at DHS remained vacant. And the effects of this failure were impressively broad. As entomologist Mark Hoddle from the University of California, Riverside told the AP:

Whether they know it or not, every person in the country is affected by this, whether by the quality or cost of their food, the pesticide residue on food, or not being able to enjoy the outdoors because beetles are killing off the trees.

But it isn't just people who might be hurt. In California, a common response to a pest that threatens agricultural crops is often aerial spraying -- even over residential areas. That happened in the Monterey Bay area during an attempt to stop a New Zealand light brown apple moth infestation. 1,600 pounds of pesticide were used, which "drew complaints that it caused respiratory problems and killed birds." Despite a $110 million price tag, the effort was a failure and the moth infestation persisted.

Most disturbingly, however, is the report of the inspector who uncovered an illegal shipment of citrus cuttings infected with canker -- a fungus considered powerful enough to threaten California's entire citrus industry should it become established:

He showed it to a supervisor, who, according to the Congressional Record, replied: "Look, we are here to protect the country from acts of terrorism. What do you expect me to do?"

The inspector sidestepped the supervisor and called the USDA. The resulting investigation ended with arrests and the incineration of 4,000 potentially infected trees that had been growing at an unregistered nursery in a prime citrus region.

But within a month, the whistleblower was demoted to search through the dirty laundry of passengers returning from foreign trips.

Oy. The good news is that DHS has recognized its past failures and is committed to putting more resources into battling invasive species. Of course, that won't help farmers affected by the 30 species who snuck in to the country last year (compared to eight in 1999).

It's likely that we will always be "under attack" from invasive species. Two of the biggest threats -- the Asian carp in the Midwest and the brown marmorated stink bug, which lives throughout the country -- came in before 9/11 and will be with us for years to come. But what happened with the Department of Homeland Security, like so much of post-9/11 anti-terror government policy, can only be described as a self-inflicted wound.

A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom is a Contributing Writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom's long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in the American Prospect, Slate, the New York Times and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him on Twitter.

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Street artists see the city as their canvas

Photo: Allison SamuelsOne night in June, a young artist in cutoff jeans and paint-spattered Nike high-tops was walking down Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In his hand, he carried one of the main tools of his trade: a bucket brimming with wallpaper adhesive. He planned to use the stuff to affix a giant copy of one of his linoleum-cut prints to a nearby building.

Suddenly, up drives one of New York City's finest, lights flashing and sirens blaring. "I told him I was going to my studio," says the artist, who works under the pseudonym Gaia. "But he knew what I was up to -- I mean, why the fuck else would I be walking around with five gallons of glue? He looks at me and says, 'You know what you're doing is graffiti.'"

In New York, graffiti has been a code word for vandalism since the 1970s, when city hall kicked off a campaign to scrub the place clean of "style writing." But Gaia is among a young generation of artists who are once again decorating the walls of this city and others, using street smarts and considerable artistic talent to "reactivate" urban spaces.

Street artists don't think of themselves as graffiti writers -- and they don't fit neatly under one umbrella. They use a variety of media, including paint, yarn, block and linoleum prints, and photographs. Artists such as Shepard Fairey (best known for his ubiquitous Andre the Giant stickers and his poster of President Obama) and Banksy (the director of the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop who once built a Stonehenge replica from portable toilets) have earned international notoriety. And now there are younger artists like Gaia, who bring environmental consciousness and an ethic of community engagement to the craft.

"They consider their work a dialog with the city," says Martin Irvine, an associate professor at Georgetown University and owner of the Irvine Contemporary Gallery, which has shown Gaia's work and that of numerous other street artists. "They're saying that you can't separate out where the art is made and where it is received ... All art is site-specific ... It's as revolutionary as Pop Art's redefining of what an art object can be."

Photo: Gaia

Gaia, a 23-year-old who spent his formative years on the Upper East Side and is now based in a factory-turned-semi-legal-artist-hive in Baltimore, says much of his early work was inspired by a sense of looming environmental calamity. "I wanted to express this strange un-locatable feeling of fear about the end of the world -- my generation's zeitgeist of global warming," he says.

Four years ago, his haunting, intricately carved linocut prints of animals and animal-human hybrids began to appear on the sides of derelict buildings, in alleys, and abandoned billboards around Baltimore. They were signed only "Gaia," a name he took from the Greek earth goddess, though it was also appropriated in the '70s by a couple of mad hippie scientists to describe their theory that the earth is a single living organism.

Eventually, Gaia's encounters with the people who lived in these places, and his curiosity about urban history and planning, set him on another course. His recent work, he says, engages specific questions about the places he works: "Why is this neighborhood rotting? Who built these projects? Why are they being demolished? What was the history of this site?"

Earlier this year, he did a series of portraits of well-known urban planners, architects, and developers, including Robert Moses, Minoru Yamasaki, and James Rouse, pasting them up in areas where these men worked -- though they may be largely forgotten by the people who pass their days there. To help raise money for Baltimore's ragtag Edgar Allan Poe museum, he created a print of a raven, donating copies to the museum for sale and affixing a giant double print to the side of the nearby Poe Homes low-income housing projects.

Photo: Gaia

"He got to know the people in the neighborhood, and the ravens became a place where people went to get their pictures taken," says Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, who has followed Gaia's work. "Unlike graffiti artists and paint bombers, who use their work to mark territory, in meaning and in method, he becomes part of the community."

Of course, Gaia has had his share of run-ins with law enforcement over the years. He has, on occasion, had to take down an installation -- or abandon one he'd planned to put up, as was the case that summer night in Williamsburg. But he has talked his way out of many a tight spot, and he has never been arrested for putting up his work.

And oddly enough, Gaia's nocturnal mischief has propelled him into the inner sanctum of the art world. Galleries from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A. have exhibited his work. In September, he spent several weeks in Miami, contributing a mural to Wynwood Walls, a project underwritten by developer Tony Goldman.

"Miami was cushy. The cushiest thing that has ever happened," Gaia says, describing his hotel room on Ocean Drive and "$400 per diem just to spend on Cuban food and cigarettes."

Photo: Gaia

His Wynwood Walls mural is a portrait of oil tycoon-turned railroad magnate Henry Flagler. To house Miami's largely African American workforce, Flagler created a neighborhood called Overtown in the shadow of his burgeoning shipping enterprise. The neighborhood saw something of a renaissance following World War II (Muhammad Ali once trained there) but was drawn and quartered during the age of "urban renewal" by an expressway and an interstate.

By accepting the sweet assignment at Wynwood Walls, isn't Gaia contributing to the very kind of urban redevelopment and gentrification he has criticized in the past?

"Gentrification is seen as a dirty word," he says. "But we're getting better at gentrifying neighborhoods. The least sensitive was urban renewal, where they cleared entire swaths, displacing entire populations of people. We tried corporate downtowns, stadiums, high rises, all different incentives ... We're coming to a more nuanced vision of revitalizing a neighborhood, and that is something that Tony Goldman embodies."

Once again, he manages to talk himself out of a tight spot. Can it last? Time will tell. For now, he's off to Europe, where he'll take part in the lively legal mural scene that is spreading across that continent in the bright light of day.

In the meantime, his work stateside, protected from the elements only by a crust of dried wallpaper paste, fades. "His materials deteriorate and crumble. His work is as fragile as the city," says Bolger. "It just disappears."

This is the first of a series of stories about street art. Later this week, we'll meet a doctor-turned muralist who has taken the art form to the Navajo Nation.

Grist special projects editor Greg Hanscom has been editor of the award-winning environmental magazine High Country News and the Baltimore-based city mag, Urbanite. He tweets about cities and the environment at @ghanscom.

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Food Studies: Try this at-home smell training course

Aroma training.Photo: Isabelle Pinzauti

Food Studies features the voices of 11 volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

Wine tasting gets a bad rap. We all know the classic stereotype of the arrogant wine snob swirling and sniffing his glass. Roald Dahl captures it perfectly with the voice of Richard Pratt in his short story Taste:

"A prudent wine," he would say, "rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent." Or, "A good-humored wine, benevolent and cheerful -- slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humored."

I love wine and I've done my share of formal tastings, but even I roll my eyes at the extravagant way some people describe what they supposedly smell and taste. With descriptions like lemon meringue pie or a forest after a rainstorm, it's no wonder wine tasting is simultaneously intimidating and obnoxious.

But in my recent wine sensory analysis class, professor Ann Noble taught us that there is a way to describe wine without succumbing to snobbery -- and, better yet, it's something you can easily do at home, following this description.

Noble is a sensory chemist, a retired professor from the University of California, Davis, and creator of the Aroma Wheel, a nifty tool for identifying the smells and flavors in wine. She started class by explaining that most of the flavor notes used to describe wines are better detected with our noses than our tastebuds. Although up to 1,700 different volatile compounds make up a wine's aroma, you can actually train yourself to recognize a lot of them!

The aroma wheel.Photo: Yvonne de ZeeuwOur class split into groups and sat at tables with rows and rows of black wine glasses. It's a blind exercise, so the black glass prevents us from seeing inside. We were instructed to sniff each glass and guess what we were smelling. I put my nose into glass after glass, inhaling deeply, and concentrating as hard as I could -- it was tough! The problem is that detecting a specific aroma is easy, but identifying it is tricky. The whiff of spice is obvious, for example, but which spice -- cinnamon, black pepper, clove, or something else altogether?

Noble's Aroma Wheel helps because it prompts you with broad categories you might recognize: fruity, nutty, woody, spicy, etc. If you smell fruit, the Wheel prompts you to narrow it to berry, tropical, or citrus fruit; then you can drill down to lemon, lime, or grapefruit. But it starts with just smelling fruit.

I quickly learned that I have difficultly distinguishing between tropical fruits. I didn't grow up eating pineapple, lychee, or mango, so I don't have a strong memory association for those aromas. And I'll admit, I cheated a few times and peeked in the glass. I was surprised to find bits of green bell pepper, whole lychee, cinnamon sticks, or wood chips placed right into the wine. In the wine-judging world, these are called "standards." I thought the aroma came from some chemical tincture added to wine, but in fact, it's the actual thing you're using as a descriptive analogy, placed in a neutral red or white base wine. Why didn't I think of that? I could have done this at home years ago and shown those wine snobs a thing or two.

This exercise is easy and fun to replicate at home. You can make your own standards using a neutral, inexpensive wine. For example, prepare glasses of base white wine with a few pieces of bell pepper, a drop of vanilla or butter extract, or a teaspoon of citrus juice or peach puree. It's an easy way to train yourself to recognize and identify the smell of key wine descriptors.

Wine standard.Photo: Isabelle PinzautiDuring the next session, we were presented with eight unlabeled white wines, no funny stuff added, and asked to describe the aroma and taste. The labeled standards were still on the table to use as a smell reference. Moving back and forth between the wine and the standards definitely helped me with the tricky tropicals, and it got easier and easier as we moved on to a batch of unlabeled red wines alongside standards of oak, black pepper, berry jam, cocoa, etc.

After we assessed each wine individually, we discussed among our group and came to a consensus on the aroma and flavor properties. What's amazing is that the only reason we were able to come to consensus is because we were working with the same vocabulary. I should note that none of our standards were labeled things like "cheerful," "evasive," or "good-humored." Aside from sounding pretentious, these terms are subjective and not universally shared.

Once you have the vocabulary, all it takes is practice. I recently tasted an Italian white wine aged in oak barrels. I detected citrus (lemon to be specific), a toasted or burnt sugar aroma, and a bit of butter. I could say it was reminiscent of lemon meringue pie, but I won't.

Kathryn is studying food culture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. She's also a co-founder of Eat Retreat, a creative workshop for leaders in the food community. You can find more of my food musings online on genkigusto.com

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Fake scalp, fake scandal: DOE official didn’t resign ‘over Solyndra’

Yes, he's leaving -- but not because of Solyndra.Last Thursday, Politico blasted out the kind of grabby headline that has helped it dominate insider political media: "Silver resigns over Solyndra loan." Scandal! An administration in crisis! Dems in disarray! It was tailor-made to win the morning.

But it was fiction. The story itself offered no evidence that the resignation of Jonathan Silver, the director of the Energy Department's loan office, was related to the Solyndra affair. Indeed, the available evidence points the other way. Silver was brought on by DOE after the Solyndra loan had received final approval. When it became clear there would be no more funding for the Section 1705 loan-guarantee program, Silver told Energy Secretary Steven Chu he'd be leaving around Sept. 30, when the program expired. That was back in July.

By all accounts, Silver transformed the loan-guarantee program, taking the staff from 35 to 180 and professionalizing the operation. When it looked like Solyndra was in trouble, he tried to give it a boost by restructuring the loan to draw in more private capital. Republicans said he "should have withdrawn support from the company as signs of financial distress began to emerge," as BusinessWeek puts it, but as numerous people have pointed out since, a program that only makes risk-free investments isn't going to help innovative, fledgling industries.

It's not like the administration didn't know there were risks. This is how Biden aide Ron Klain put it in an email to fretting Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett on the eve of the Solyndra factory event:

The reality is that if POTUS visited 10 such places over the next 10 months, probably a few will be belly-up by election day 2012—but that to me is the reality of saying that we want to help promote cutting edge, new economy industries.

Obama knew this. Chu knew this. Why would they fire a venture capitalist over the failure of 1 percent of his portfolio? If private-sector investors were judged that way, it would render markets paralyzingly risk averse. Under Silver, the program has put together $35 billion in loans for 39 clean energy projects, including all sorts of cutting-edge sh*t that the political media can't be bothered to cover. (Just as an appetizer, greentech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher has a list of five of the cooler ones.) DOE expects the projects to fund more than 60,000 direct jobs across 35 states. There are bigger things at stake than Solyndra.

Later on Thursday, Politico added a "clarification" to the bottom of the story -- "the headline on an earlier version of this story misstated the reason for Silver's departure" -- and tweeted: "Clarified headline: Department of Energy loan program official steps down." Huffington Post quietly changed its original headline -- "Solyndra's first scalp?" -- to something more factual as well. But the implication had already been released into the wild and entered into conventional wisdom.

Anyway, the idea that Silver resigned "over Solyndra" -- or is a "casualty" or a "scalp" -- isn't the most important episode in this story, but it's a particularly clear example of what an insider circle jerk it has become.

David Roberts is a staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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Local solar could power the Mountain West right now, all of America in 2026

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's New Rules Project.

The Germans have installed over 10,000 megawatts of solar panels in the past two years, enough to power 2 million American homes (or most of Los Angeles, Calif.). If Americans installed local solar at the same torrid pace, we could already power most of the Mountain West, and could have a 100 percent solar nation by 2026, while enriching thousands of local communities with new development and jobs.

The following map shows what could have happened had the U.S. kept pace with Germany on solar power in the past two years (installed the same megawatts on a per capita basis). Sunshine could power 10 states!

The spread of solar has also been in harmony with environmental goals. Rather than covering natural areas or fertile land with solar panels, 80 percent of the solar installed in Germany was on rooftops and built to a local scale (100 kilowatts or smaller -- the roof of a church or a Home Depot store). Solar in the U.S. also can use existing space. The following map shows the amount of a state's electricity that could come from rooftop solar alone, from our 2009 report "Energy Self-Reliant States":

While the local rooftop solar potential of these states varies from 19 to 51 percent, there's much more land available for solar without covering parks or crops. Once again, data from "Energy Self-Reliant States" (p. 13):

On either side of 4 million miles of roads, the U.S. has approximately 60 million acres (90,000 square miles) of right of way. If 10 percent of the right of way could be used, over 2 million [megawatts] of roadside solar PV could provide close to 100 percent of the electricity consumption in the country. In California, solar PV on a quarter of the 230,000 acres of right of way could supply 27 percent of state consumption.

Such local solar power also provides enormous economic benefits. For every megawatt of solar installed, as many as eight jobs are created. But the economic multiplier is significantly higher for locally owned projects, made possible when solar is built at a local scale as the Germans have done.

With local ownership, making America a 100 percent solar nation could create nearly 10 million jobs, and add as much as $450 billion to the U.S. economy.

The Germans have found the profitable marriage between their energy and environmental policy. It's time for America to discover the same.

John Farrell is an Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) senior researcher specializing in energy policy developments that best expand the benefits of local ownership and dispersed generation of renewable energy. He has written extensively on the economies of scale of renewable energy, the benefits of decentralized energy generation, and the policies and rules that support locally owned and distributed generation of renewable energy. His seminal work - Energy Self-Reliant States gave a vision of states meeting their energy needs with in-state sun and wind and spawned a rapidly expanding distributed generation resource: http://bit.ly/esrs-jf. He also wrote one of the leading summaries of feed-in tariffs for the U.S. electricity policy market titled, Feed-in Tariffs in America: Driving the Economy with Renewable Energy Policy that Works.

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Can we make nature even better?

New York City's High Line Park. Nature is everywhere, if you know where to look.Photo: John Dalton.What’s more ecologically valuable -- national parks, or median strips and vacant lots? Could dreaded invasive species actually be more beneficial than native ones? Are environmentalists clinging to a timeless notion of nature that science has thoroughly discredited? Can we actually make nature better than it is in its "natural" state?

Emma Marris asks these and other icon-busting questions her new book Rambunctious Garden -- potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years. Marris, a former correspondent for Nature magazine, takes big issue with enviro doom-and-gloomers and last-great-places conservationists, arguing in Rambunctious Garden that pristine wildness has been a myth for at least 13,000 years and that we live on a thoroughly domesticated planet whose nature it’s up to us to manage ... and even improve upon. It sounded so heretical that I had to call her up and ask her to explain.

Q. The title of your book -- Rambunctious Garden -- encapsulates your vision for nature, as a garden that we as humans firmly control, consciously making decisions about which kind of nature goes where. You know that’s going to raise the hackles of a lot of environmentalists, don’t you? It has connotations of playing God and engineering nature solely for our benefit.

A. Yes. I decided to go for it and be provocative, because the title is meant to describe what the Earth is and can be. Because the planet already is a garden, and we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t admit the depth of human influence over nature. We’re in charge about where plants and animals are, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s our space that we’re landscaping now.

Q. Like a farm?

A. It doesn’t have to be a sterile, formal garden that doesn’t have any sort of oomph or spirit to it. It can have this rambunctious and free side to it. We can let parts of the garden go feral, and it can have a lot of energy and beauty to it, but it’s still ultimately a garden. We’re still ultimately in charge.

The flip side of that phrase also describes the future home garden. I’m sitting at my desk right now, looking across the street at my neighbor here in Columbia, Mo., and her front yard is a very short, neat, tidy lawn and about half-a-dozen hybrid, sterile, ornamental flowers in a row. If you replace that with something much more biodiverse, much more untended, weedy-looking, buggy, your biodiversity is going to go way up. Your conservation value can go way up, and you get a more rambunctious kind of garden aesthetic. So I meant for the phrase to work on both scales -- the whole planet, and your backyard.

Q. That’s a big theme for the book -- that nature is everywhere, and why don’t we embrace that? That nature isn’t just some spectacular landscape, the way most conservation organizations talk about it, but that it’s your backyard, the sliver of median strip you drive by every day, and in vacant lots and industrial waterways, and that’s the sense of nature that we should be cultivating, as background to our everyday lives. But doesn’t that argument really reemphasize the marginality of nature, a nature that’s weedy and degraded and that no one will really fight for?

A. When you use the phrase "marginal" to describe this kind of nature, that’s a tip-off as to where you’re coming from. Because nature isn’t marginal. Dirt is underneath everything -- the built landscape floats like islands on the sea of nature. Some of that nature pokes through in skinny bits, but when you connect those together, there’s a lot of nature.

And just because I want people to get out and get excited about the vines growing in the alley doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also get excited about going to national parks, or that conservation should swerve away from having big interconnected pieces of undeveloped nature for some species. What I’m really proposing is a shift in our value system. What we value and don’t value can change. "Weedy" is an interesting cultural concept -- in reality, weeds are successful plants. We should celebrate them, because they’re the plants we don’t have to worry about it. They’re gong to be fine. They’re the resilient part of nature.

But you’re right -- we do have a long road to go before we look at an empty lot and, instead of thinking "neglected," "weedy," "trash," we instead think: "Oh, I wonder what species are here. Gosh, there must be lots of pollination going on in this area, and, boy, if I come here at a certain time of day, maybe I can see some neat bird species. And, oh, gosh, isn’t this pretty?" But the weeds are the nature we’re beating back constantly.

Q. Is there enough of that kind of nature around to make a difference, both for biodiversity and for what nature gives us?

A. My argument comes down to acreage. Big national parks have an impressive amount of acreage, but if you look at doing conservation in all these little spaces, the combined acreage of those could kick the ass of the acreage of the big parks. It’s just a huge playing field that we can do conservation on. It’s practically everything. Getting a certain amount of conservation value out of farm management, for instance -- that would be a huge victory globally.

Q. You write a lot about conservation in Europe versus how it’s practiced in America. Is Europe ahead of America in understanding this?

Emma Marris.

A. Yeah, absolutely, and not necessarily because they’re massively enlightened. It’s because they don’t have the Grand Canyon to distract them. They don’t have the grand wildernesses to take over their mental space, so they’ve been able to see the beauty and complexity of nature in these much smaller canvases. And they’re constantly fiddling with their conservation efforts. Management of nature is just second nature to them. They have to work really hard not to manage things, whereas we have to sort of grit our teeth to admit to ourselves that we do have to manage things.

Q. You have this fascinating chapter on the Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve outside of Amsterdam in which an entire landscape has been designed by an ecologist to run as it did 10,000 years ago, except the predators are largely gone, so it’s been created for nothing to look as if nothing had ever changed. Except, of course, that it’s one of the most intensely managed places you could possibly find outside of agriculture. How do you feel about re-wilding projects like this? Are they valuable? Are they curiosities? What are they saying to us?

A. I love that place. I mean, here you are, in one of the tidiest, densest, most organized countries in the world, and then you go through these gates, and all of a sudden, you’re in the savannah, with huge herds of animals running around. It’s fascinating and just unbelievable.

And if part of what we value about nature is that sense of awe that it can give us, I was awed by that place. They’ve also had a lot of success attracting animals that have showed up voluntarily and responded well to the habitat. So I think that if that keeps happening, then the Oostvaardersplassen is an argument that re-wilding projects are not just curiosities but can be really valuable conservation tools.

Q. Back to the garden idea: You’re advancing a radical idea in this book -- that people can make more nature or better nature than we have now. That cuts directly against the usual pessimistic paradigm of environmentalism -- as advanced by Bill McKibben and others -- which assumes that there is a set amount of nature, that nature left alone is the ideal, and all we can do is defend it against the ravages of rampant development. How did you come to this idea?

A. Partly because I was never classically trained as either an ecologist or an environmentalist. So I came to the ecology and conservation beat at Nature as an outsider, and while I sort of casually held a number of the sort of common beliefs about what is wilderness and what counts as nature, I wasn’t really wedded to them culturally. So it was easier for me to see where some of the more traditional ideas of conservation and environmentalism are starting to come apart at the seams a little bit, the more we learn about paleoecology and the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how nature has always been changing. And this thinking has been popping up at ecology conferences over the last few years.

I also had a childhood where I spent a lot of time in really crappy ecosystems and had a ball -- in badly maintained city parks and third-growth forests -- and it just never occurred to me that I wasn’t in nature.

Q. But you’re basically saying there is no wilderness anymore -- that nature as we once thought about it, a place apart from humanity, untouched by it -- doesn’t exist.

A. That’s now generally acknowledged in the literature. I have to add: My personal experiences in nature have always been pretty close to the road, and when I started hanging out with ecologists, I found that they were sticking pretty close to the road, too. Then it sort of suddenly hit me: Everything is now close to the road. You have to work really hard to get away from it.

Q. Conservation doesn’t come off really well in your book -- it seems dogmatic, nostalgic, sometimes even anti-scientific, and not ready to take up the challenge of the economic and cultural forces that seem to be arrayed against it. In your view, how can conservation catch up?

A. First, I hope I don’t come across as really beating up on conservationists, because I admire them very much, and I feel that what they’re trying to do is a really important thing.

One priority I think conservation has to focus on more is genetics. I’ve very fond of using a genetic lens -- genes are the raw material of what we have to work with for the future, so it seems a smart move to throw out as few genes as possible.

But I do think that keeping conservation and environmentalism separate from other progressive movements like human rights and global human development has made environmentalism just another special interest fighting for its place, almost in competition with some of these other positive movements. That’s got to change. You can’t just care about nature and not care about humanity. So an ideal mix would be a conservation movement that was also strong on human rights and human development, with a mix of priorities that was decided on in a very fair, democratic way.

I also think that there will be change toward the directions I outline in the book -- whether the conservation field wants them or not -- just on the basis of generational turnover of its scientists. There’s that old chestnut about there are no revolutions in science, you just wait for the old guard to die, and I think there’s probably a bit of truth to that in this case, too.

Q. In the book, you talk about a number of bêtes noire for conservation -- including assisted migration of species in the face of climate change to other geographies where they might have a chance of surviving. That’s still a really controversial topic with conservationists.

A. Conservationists should get on board with assisted migration, because the industry is going to lead the way. What is industry going to move? Timber species, crop species. They might, if they’re clever, move the wild ancestors of crop species, so that we’ll still have good pools of them to play with, and they might move horticultural species. But who is going to move everything else? Who is going to move the little squiggly guys that aren’t as glamorous or aren’t commercially valuable? If conservationists find the whole thing too distasteful because it’s meddling with nature, then they might as well stand back and watch those squiggly guys turn to charcoal.

Q. Final question: What’s your favorite place on Earth, and does it match up with the kind of nature that in Rambunctious Garden you’re asking people to revalue?

A. I grew up in Seattle, and I really like the forests in the Pacific Northwest. They don’t have to be old growth. What I really love is the bounce of the turf in a forest with lots of cedar and Douglas fir, because of all the needles that have accumulated in the turf.

Q. So not necessarily a managed place?

A. No, although I’m also thinking about a place I haven’t been to in years in the Cascade Mountains, which a childhood friend’s parents owned, which had third-growth forest with mostly alders and salmonberries and other early successional stuff, and then some big, old stumps from when it had been logged. I spent many happy summers there just really enjoying the space. It never really occurred to me that the nature there wasn’t good enough.

Robert Lalasz is the director of science communications at The Nature Conservancy. A long-time editor and writer, he was previously the Conservancy's associate director of digital marketing and the editor of Cool Green Science. He now blogs on Cool Green Science about the Conservancy's scientific research and on-the-ground work as well as larger conservation science issues.

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McKibben asks Occupy Wall Streeters to join Keystone pipeline protest [VIDEO]

Climate activist Bill McKibben brought his message to a big Occupy Wall Street crowd gathered in Washington Square in New York City on Saturday. Watch his teach-in about the threat of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline:

As Matthew McDermott of Treehugger explains, “Regarding the call-and-response, for those not up on OWS, the police have prohibited all methods of electronically amplifying sound. The protestors have developed what they call the ‘human microphone,’ where the crowd repeats the words of the speaker so that all in attendance can hear what’s being said.”

McKibben invited the activists to come to Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6 and encircle the White House in a protest against the Keystone pipeline, which would carry filthy tar-sands oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of the U.S.:

[We’re] going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to D.C. to find out where they’ve locked that guy up. We have to free Obama because there’s some kind of stunt double there now.

The Obama administration is starting to feel the heat on this issue, thanks to McKibben and the other 1,252 activists who were arrested in front of the White House while protesting against the pipeline in late August and early September. “Keystone XL pipeline becomes a political headache for White House,” Juliet Eilperin reported in The Washington Post on Friday.

McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist, which she cofounded back in the day. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+. She writes on politics, population, and other green issues. She coined the acronym GINK (green inclinations, no kids) and won a 2010 Population Institute Global Media Award for her writing on the childfree choice. If you're like-minded, become a fan of GINK on Facebook. If you're not, no hard feelings.

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Buy a dozen, give a dozen

We get it. Organic food typically costs more than conventional, and that's a significant barrier for people under financial strain. Food activists are working toward big-picture, systems-wide changes that could make organic food more affordable, but in the meantime one company in New York State is trying to make organic food more affordable and accessible -- one dozen eggs at a time.

Dean Sparks is already working hard to scale up the organic dairy and egg market in New York. His NYFoods company makes organic farming a viable option for farmers -- and organic options more available for consumers. The eggs, cheese, butter, and milk sell in nearly 30 stores throughout the region and supply all the milk and cream for Brooklyn's adored Blue Marble Ice Cream. But after reading Start Something That Matters by TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, Sparks wanted to do more.

If Mycoskie could give away a pair of shoes for every pair he sold, could NYFoods give away a dozen eggs for every dozen it sold?

Sparks is trying out this model at the Mott Haven Farmer's Market in the South Bronx. Working in partnership with fresh food distributor Regional Access and local community organizers, NYFoods gives away a dozen eggs to every shopper at the market. This not only delivers free organic eggs to the community, it also provides an enticement for the community to shop at the market in the first place. It didn't hurt that at the program's launch on Sept. 28, shoppers got samples of Blue Marble Ice Cream as well.

"Organic eggs from pastured hens are a healthy source of protein that's so hard to find in many food-desert communities, even in New York City," says Dean Sparks of NYFoods. "Free, certified organic pastured New York eggs from our small, family-owned farms in upstate New York are full of protein, vitamin E and omega 3 fatty acids. Any family in need can use them at home, regardless of their cooking skills or kitchen tools."

How is this a viable business model for NYFoods? By making judicious use of what the hens produce. The company selects only extra-large eggs for the cartons sold for a premium at stores like Whole Foods. But those pastured hens are also laying smaller eggs -- a bit too small for retail but still high-quality and nutrient-dense. There is little market for these eggs (which would otherwise be sold as egg whites), so farmers are paid the same market rate as they would get from a conventional egg processor, only they're collected in pulp cartons for the free egg program. Then NYFoods is giving them away for free.

The food news has been devastating, lately -- with widespread contamination outbreaks emerging seemingly every day. But food companies working on positive change can offer a bit of hope for our food system. As more people consider how to balance sustainable practices with food access, it seems entirely possible that similar programs will begin popping up in other parts of the country.

A version of this article originally ran on Civil Eats.

Adriana Velez is the communications coordinator for Brooklyn Food Coalition and a freelance writer who most recently contributed to Cookie Magazine's online content. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.

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Keystone-pipeline protestors link their movement to Occupy Wall Street

McKibben rallies a crowd in D.C.This post is coauthored by Jessica Goad, manager of research and outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

In keeping with the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement, activists took to the streets in Washington, D.C., on Friday to protest the Keystone XL pipeline outside the State Department, where the final public hearing on the project took place.

Pipeline opponents are drawing a clear connection between the movements, calling their overnight stay at the building where the Keystone hearings were held #OccupyStateDepartment. As activists explained to Climate Progress on Friday, the climate movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are both made up of a diverse group of people who feel shut out of the political system by the financial and corporate elite.

Tar Sands Action founder Bill McKibben told us that the pipeline is “sort of the poster child for the kind of arrogant corporate power that people are rightly taking to task on Wall Street and elsewhere”:

"You could even say Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempt to do anything about climate change always runs afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet,” says McKibben. So it's a damned good thing the tables are starting to turn.”

The increasing opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline (already 2,000 people have signed up to protest at the White House on Nov. 6) mirrors the Occupy Wall Street and “The Other 99 Percent” movements that have been sweeping the country over the last two weeks.

As climate activists explained, the Keystone XL pipeline is a symbol of everything protesters around the country are concerned about: profits over people and the environment. Bill McKibben, who also co-founded 350.org and is a board member at Grist, described the sentiment in Climate Progress’s exclusive interview:

We’ve already proved this thing’s an environmental disaster. Now it’s becoming clear, it’s sort of the poster child for the kind of arrogant corporate power that people are rightly taking to task on Wall Street and elsewhere. When we find these emails ... saying that TransCanada and its lobbyists are working hand and glove with the State Department, when we hear that the State Department has hired to run this hearing a company ... one of whose main clients is TransCanada, the first thing you do is your mind kind of explodes ... and the second thing you do is say, "Damn it, I completely understand why people are going crazy. This is just not fair." I guess the way to say it is, we’ve been concentrating on how environmentally dirty this project is, and we’re going to spend a lot of time now also talking about how politically dirty it is.

As Tar Sands Action puts it on its website, “#occupywallstreet and the Keystone XL -- One Movement, One Goal”:

#occupywallstreet was called by a small group with impeccable timing. Americans have seen three years of hard times now and many are at the end of their savings, their unemployment benefits, and their patience. The economy collapsed and our government funneled massive bailouts toward the richest among us while cutting our services and benefits. Republicans and Democrats alike have sold out the people. Those individuals within the government who work hard to make good policies that help Americans are like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. They can’t do this alone. They need the support of the people and they need us to take some responsibility for creating this change ourselves.

That’s why I participated in the Tar Sands Action and it’s why I’m participating in #occpuywallstreet. We’re fighting the same fight, the fight to restore our democracy, the fight to end corporate influence and rebuild a society based on cooperation, trust, and brotherly love. We can’t solve the carbon problem until we solve the power problem. And history has shown time and time again that the only way to solve a power problem is for citizens to join together in the street and bring the great machine to a halt. Only then can we find a way forward together. Only then can we begin enacting the policies we need to build our new carbon-free economy.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that a decision on the pipeline will be made at the end of the year. But the president has the sole authority to decide whether to approve the pipeline. So the question is: Will President Obama stand with “the other 99 percent”?

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Spokes Patrol: Bike cops out in force at Occupy Portland

My hometown got in on the occupation on Thursday, as a few hundred people came out for an Occupy Portland march downtown. Last week, I wrote about the interplay between the Occupy Together movement in cities like New York and Chicago and the monthly bicycle rally, Critical Mass. The topic was on my mind as I headed down to the march, half expecting to find the same symbiotic relationship between people on two wheels and those on two feet. It was there -- but not in the way I expected.

As I approached the heart of the protest, I saw bicycles -- hundreds of them -- locked to every railing, fence, and signpost available. People had arrived by bike, but the crowd was so tightly packed as to make bicycling through it impossible, and few rode bikes in the march that followed.

Several clusters of people stood by their bikes, ready to ride when the call to march came -- but they all came with identical black Trek mountain bikes and sported the telltale black and yellow uniforms of Portland's bicycle-mounted police squads.

Photo: Elly Blue

The bike police stood and sat in varying states of boredom and congeniality. One posed for photos with a baby. Occasionally, rally goers approached them with friendly words and smiles; others edged away with wary looks. As I photographed one assembly of officers with bikes, a protester said to me quietly "good work." Perhaps he was thinking that I was, like many others, there to document any potential police malfeasance.

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by the presence of the badged bike brigade. In Portland, the tradition of Critical Mass, strong throughout the '90s and early aughts, has faded from the vernacular of political action and organizing. Meanwhile, Portland's police department has been honing the use of bicycles in policing peaceful protests -- particularly marches on foot. It's typical of any political action around here to see a cadre of bike officers waiting in the wings, ready to whip around the block to strategically channel the slowly marching crowd along predetermined routes.

The demise of Critical Mass and the renaissance in bicycle policing are related. Back in 2005, a group of Portland Critical Mass participants, including myself, met with police. We asked that they not send police along on the peaceful rides. They demurred. The compromise -- or so it seemed at the time -- was that bicycle-mounted officers would join the rides on the last Friday of the month, rather than the usual squad of motorcycle police, unapproachable behind their helmets.

As a result, I got a firsthand, up-close view of Portland Police learning the fine art of crowd control by bike, via trial and error. The technique that they finally stuck with was riding side by side with Critical Mass participants, demanding that we ride single file in the door zone, regardless of the hazardous presence of streetcar tracks. The requests weren't legally binding, but because we were trying to work together, we tried.

But we weren't in a mass anymore -- and the ride quickly ceased to be any fun at all. It was as though your dad crashed your party and sat inches away from you all night, smiling in a friendly way while insisting that you dump out your beer. Eventually everyone moved on to Portland's wealth of other bike events.

I've yet to see another bicycle event policed by pedal-powered riders. But these days, the bicycle cops are out in force at other events, with friendly smiles and a determined presupposition that your mug contains more than just root beer.

Elly Blue is a bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon. She has been the managing editor of BikePortland.org, the lead coordinator of the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland in 2008, and has been an active bike funnist since 2005. She publishes a feminist bicycle zine called Taking the Lane.

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Will new LEED standards allow for clearcut timber?

The green building gurus must have spit their coffee across the table when they saw the full-page ad in the Toronto Star this week. The U.S. Green Building Council and its Canadian sister organization had rallied hundreds of architects and developers to the city for their annual love-in, Green Build. Forest conservation groups seized the opportunity to plant ads in the local paper, with the USGBC logo photoshopped to read "U.S. GreenWASH Building Council."

OK, not the cleverest of PR ploys. (We'll have to reserve that title for one of PETA's many gags.) But it had to smart just a little.

So what's up? "They're on the brink of taking the second E out of LEED," says Todd Paglia, executive director of the nonprofit Forest Ethics. (For those who haven't been paying attention, LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Created by the Green Building Council, it's the most widely accepted measure of a building's greenness in the states right now.) Well, Paglia clarified, "LEED will at least be irrelevant as far as forests are concerned."

He's referring to proposed changes to the rules that would, he and other green groups argue, allow developers to use just about any old two-by-fours -- including wood "from some of the worst clearcuts in North America" -- and still get their houses LEED certified (as long as they still meet the gazillion other requirements, of course).

Up to now, the LEED rules have given points ("credits" in green building speak) to homebuilders who use lumber that is certified by the nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which ensures that the trees were grown and harvested sustainably. The new rules could allow builders to get points for lumber that is certified through other less strict outfits, such as the timber-industry-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative -- and, the greens argue, wood that is not certified at all.

But don't think this is just about forests, ‘cause it's not. It's also about money, and keeping sustainable logging operations in business. You see, the market for certified lumber was limited in the days before every developer dreamed of having the LEED stamp of approval (which comes in silver, gold, or platinum, depending on how groovy the building is). LEED has helped pump up demand for FSC-certified wood.

But if the new rules open the playing field to any schmoe with a green Husqvarna hat, the truly forest-friendly timber outfits would take a serious hit. Paglia says it's reminiscent of the debate over the U.S. organic standards nine years ago, when small farmers watched in horror as Big Ag tried to allow irradiation and sewage sludge and all manner of industrial nastiness in "Certified Organic" food production.

The Green Building Council takes great exception to all this, of course. Brendan Owens, the council's vice president of LEED technical development, points out that there's no rule against using clearcut wood in your LEED-certified house right now. You're not going to score any points for your old-growth Douglas fir trim, but if you do everything else right, you still might earn the badge of approval. (In fact, clearcutting is even allowed under the Forest Stewardship Council's guidelines, though there are strict rules for protecting streams and wildlife.)

Owens explains that the proposed changes to the rules are meant to take what the council has learned about sustainable timber and apply them to all the other materials that go into a new house or office building, including concrete, glass, and steel. Much of the steel used in the U.S. is mined in Brazilian rainforests, then shipped to China for processing before being floated across the ocean yet again to get to U.S. markets. Meanwhile, much of the steel still being produced in the U.S. is recycled.

"The effort and the oxygen that we've spent talking about [timber certification] has been extraordinarily valuable, but we've largely allowed the other industries to go unnoticed," Owens says. "It's not OK."

Good on them for trying to clean up other industries, says Paglia, but that's no excuse for lowering the standards for sustainable wood. "The rub here is that [the Green Building Council is] focusing on LEED becoming a large part of the market, instead of LEED producing really sustainable buildings," he says.

The proposed changes to the LEED rules will go out for another round of public comment this year. The Green Building Council hopes to unveil the final rules at Green Build 2012, in San Francisco.

Side note: For those who really want to build the ultimate eco-house, you now have yet another standard to work with: At the conference this week, the International Living Future Institute rolled out its new Net Zero Energy Building Certification. This one is for houses that use no fossil fuels for heating, cooling, or electricity. (David Gottfried, founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, owns a "net zero" home, and claims it's the greenest home in America.) No word yet on whether this certification comes in all kinds of fancy colors, but for now, at least, it looks like you'll probably just get a straight pass or fail.

Grist special projects editor Greg Hanscom has been editor of the award-winning environmental magazine High Country News and the Baltimore-based city mag, Urbanite. He tweets about cities and the environment at @ghanscom.

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