Green Humanist

Quarantine: My Favorite Word Origin Story

26 May 2019 –

In the mid-1300’s, the Black Death was raging in Europe. It killed at least 30% of Europe’s population, and killed as many as 100 million people in both Europe and Asia. It would take 200 years for the earth’s population to recover to pre-plague levels. The pandemic spread to many areas of Europe by ships landing in ports and introducing flea-bearing rodents to the adjacent town.

The word “quarantine” originated from one of the ways in which ports attempted to protect themselves from plague outbreaks. The city of Ragusa, which is located in modern Croatia, was a major port for merchant ships in the 14^th century. It takes 37 days for an individual infected by the bubonic plague to die. Therefore, Ragusa required any ships that wanted to dock in its port to be moored offshore for 40 days to make sure that they weren’t carrying diseases. If the crew survived at the end of this isolation period, that meant they were safe to dock. In Italian, 40 days is quaranta giorni, which led to the word quarantine!

Now this post seems pitifully short in comparison to some of my other ones, so I’ll just add a postscript.

The Black Death had lasting consequences for Europe’s entire economic system. In the early 1300s, feudalism was alive and well in Europe, but the pandemic of the mid-14^th century was one of the driving factors in moving beyond this societal system.

Because so much of the peasant population in Western Europe had been devastated by the disease, that meant that there was now a shortage of labor. Peasants were able to demand better wages and better working conditions from the nobles. Wages indeed increased and land also became cheaper, which was good news for the quality of life of the peasantry.

The story in Eastern Europe is a little different. Because Eastern Europe was less densely populated than the lands to the west, it was not as affected by the Black Death. Therefore, there was not a shortage of labor and peasants were not able to get the leverage needed to demand better working conditions. In fact, seeing the uprisings occurring in Western Europe, nobles in Eastern Europe actually passed more stringent rules for peasants during this time. Feudalism in Eastern Europe was far more persistent than in Western Europe.

The fall of feudalism in Western Europe and the associated rise in the merchant class meant that mass wealth was able to accumulate in England, France, and the Netherlands – but the rise of the Modern World System is a topic that deserves its own post.

Uh oh, this postscript was longer than the main part of the blog. Is there a law against that? I hope not.

The Impossible Burger & Other Vegan Foods: Facts and Some Speculation

19 May 2019 –

My family has been vegan for many years, and during this time we have endured much criticism and ridicule from relatives and friends. (Hmm, maybe the friends in that sentence deserves to be in quotes.) We were often told that we were damaging our health, and that we were stupid for following a “draconian diet.” Eating out on vacation was always very frustrating since so few restaurants had vegan options.

After many years of hearing snide comments and being annoyed at restaurants, we have been overjoyed to see so many news stories coming out each week about new vegan foods coming out both at the supermarket and at major chain restaurants. Every week it seems like there is a major new development in the vegan foods market. All of a sudden in 2019, vegan foods in the US have exploded, and veganism is inching closer towards becoming mainstream. With every one of these stories we feel vindicated, knowing that we were ahead of our time.

What are some examples of this news I am talking about? My family probably follows vegan news more closely than most people, so I’d like to share some of these major developments below.

All of a sudden oat milk has become very popular and is more than just a specialty item at high-end supermarkets. Starbucks has started to offer oat milk at some US locations, and several new brands (such as Oatly) are sold at places like Target. The nondairy milk section in many supermarkets is as big as the dairy one! Global dairy consumption has dropped by 22% since 2006, and this has been accompanied by the rising consumption of dairy alternatives. It’s not just plant-based milks that have been on the rise. Danone, a major dairy company, opened the largest vegan yoghurt factory in the US earlier this year, and Wal-Mart now sells vegan cheese slices in refrigerator cases.

One particular vegan food that has experienced a meteoric rise is the Impossible Burger, the soy-based vegan burger that “bleeds” just like a real one. Burger King has pledged to sell the Impossible Whopper nationwide by the end of the year. In early May there was a shortage of Impossible Burgers across the US because of how many people were ordering them. On Beyond Meat’s first day of initial public offering (IPO), the stock value increased by 163%, which was the best IPO in the US since 2000.

It is clear that even meat companies believe in the plant-based future. Tyson, one of the major American meat companies, recently sold its shares in Beyond Meat in order to develop its own vegan products. The CFO of that company recently admitted that plant-based meat is vital to the planet’s future. And that leads me to part of the reason why we are seeing this sudden explosion in vegan-related news.

For years, plant-based foods were a threat to the meat and dairy industries. These corporate giants did whatever they could to keep the vegan food market from expanding, spreading misinformation about the health benefits of the vegan diet, denying the link between animal product industries and climate change and running “scientific” studies to show how an animal-product intensive diet is good for people. However, I think that now all of these companies have realized that they cannot squash the vegan movement. Too many people are waking up to recognize the health, environmental, and humanitarian benefits of the vegan diets. And if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?

There haven’t just been stories about new vegan products. Major news networks have features stories about how a plant-based diet is key to good health, and how animal agriculture is driving climate change. On 3 May, CNN ran a story about how beef production causes deforestation and climate change, and how the Impossible Burger is a solution to this! CNN!! These networks used to slyly promote animal products throughout their entire shows. On CBS, one of the anchors often said in the past how “milk is nature’s perfect food.” But all of a sudden these networks have changed how they view vegan foods and the plant-based diet.

The reason they have changed their views is that meat companies are now allowing this information to get out there, because they know that they can produce plant-based burgers for cheaper than meat ones. Because they now know that they have to change their business model, they are allowing the corporate-owned news networks to champion the health and environmental benefits of the plant-based diet.

So thank you to all those doctors such as T. Colin Campbell and John McDougall who promoted the health benefits of the whole foods, plant-based diet despite the ridicule of their colleagues. Thank you to all the regular people who educated others on the benefits of the vegan diet and stuck by what they knew was right, even if it meant a social stigma and hate from people who you thought were friends. Together we changed enough minds so that veganism did not just become a fad. It became a movement that forced meat and dairy companies to begin changing their business model to one that provides a healthier and kinder future for this planet.

The Future of Agriculture II: Participation

The Green Revolution was a set of agricultural techniques that were spread around the world in the 1960s that included the use of artificial pesticides, fertilizers, machinery, and high-yield varieties. The result of these technologies was that agricultural yields on the same amount of land increased dramatically, and the increased mechanization slashed the number of people necessary to support the agricultural production chain. However, these gains in efficiency have not come without serious costs to ecological health and food sovereignty.

First, phosphorous, a major ingredient of synthetic fertilizers, is a nonrenewable resource. The costs of mining and refining phosphorous are increasing, and remaining deposits of phosphorous are of ever-decreasing quality. Furthermore, the Haber-Bosch process used to synthesize fertilizers is a major source of greenhouse gases. The highly mechanized nature of modern agriculture is another way in which this sector of the economy is reliant on nonrenewable resources; most of the equipment is powered by fossil fuels.

Over 55 years after Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of the overuse of pesticides, we have done little to heed her warning. The global consumption of pesticides is now over 6 billion pounds per year. Not only are these chemicals toxic to humans, they are also very harmful to nontarget insect populations. You may have seen news coverage about declining bee populations, and the reporters or news anchors throw up their hands and say “what can we do? We don’t know why this is happening.” Except we do. A class of pesticides called neonicotinoids is toxic to bees, and represents about 24% of global pesticide sales. Even though the link between these chemicals and the collapse of bee populations is known, little is being done to curb neonicotinoid use. Only three states in the US have taken measures to restrict the application of these pesticides.

Another issue with the Green Revolution is how it increased the stranglehold of international companies on the global food chain. Just a handful of companies own many of the world’s seed stores and own much of the land. Bayer-Monsanto alone owns 29% of the global seed supply and 25% of the world’s pesticides. The powerful lobbies associated with these large companies shape agricultural policy in many of the world’s countries so that outcomes are far more favorable for corporations than the nations’ citizens. Market forces associated with this agricultural system often force farmers to sell cash crops on the global market, which takes away food sovereignty (ability to produce food for subsistence purposes) as well as food security in many developing countries.

Now that I’ve ranted about the faults of our agricultural system for long enough, what am I proposing as a solution? To fix our unsustainable model of food production, we need to shift from a capital-intensive system to a labor-intensive agroforestry (see last week’s for the definition and benefits of agroforestry) system. This would involve dramatically increasing citizen participation in agriculture, especially in developed countries. A radical proposal? Yes, but let me take some time to defend this position.

In the year 1800, 83% of the US population was employed in the agricultural industry. Now that figure stands at a mere 1%. That’s progress, right? Not exactly. This dramatic decline in the percentage of the population needed to produce our food means that there is very little democratic control left in our system of food production. Only a small fraction of the American population are responsible for producing the very stuff that keeps us alive, and often these farmers are renting land leased by a huge corporation instead of owning their own property. The average age of a US farmer is 58, so it is also not a profession that is attracting a lot of young people. That is not a good trend. However, two places in the US are experiencing an increase in young farmers: Maine and Puerto Rico. These two areas have many agricultural startups initiated by people of a younger age bracket, and often these operations use agroforestry or are organic.

Dramatically increasing citizen participation in farming would create millions of jobs that would actually be doing something productive for society, instead of studying how to get more people to click on online ads. By implementing agricultural systems that preserve ecosystem health rather than maximizing profit, we ensure that our agricultural system can be sustained for generations to come. Labor-intensive systems support local food sovereignty. People have control over what foods they are producing and consuming, and are better able to dictate what practices take place on their own land.

What do we need to do to achieve this vision of mass increase in agricultural participation? As our economic system is structured now it simply cannot allow for labor-intensive agroforestry systems to become the norm. Here is a list of changes that would need to be made in order to make this vision happen.

1. Plant-based diet. There are productivity losses from not using pesticides and fertilizers. This loss in yield per acre can be offset by switching to plant-based diets, which use resources far more efficiently.

2. Restructure farm subsidies. Currently our far subsidies go to subsidizing the environmentally destructive meat and dairy industries, as well as commodity crops like corn. Very few subsidies go towards fruits and vegetable production. We should be putting more money into the crops that are healthy and less into the ones that are killing us.

3. Grants for agroforestry projects and other state-level incentives. Many states in the US offer grants or cost-sharing practices for famers that enact practices on their properties that improve water quality. Agroforestry definitely qualifies as one of those. These programs should be strengthened and hone in on agroforestry.

4. Eliminate farming stigmatism. Often in the US farming is thought of something as what people who aren’t successful do. This ridiculous way of thinking needs to stop.

5. Use technology. Although it’s important to have more people participating in agriculture and to eliminate the reliance on fossil fuel inputs, we should still use technology if it means making the farming process less arduous and risky.

6. Redefine work. What should work be? Are we content to live in a world where people working to get other people to waste their money on useless commodities are paid more than the individuals producing the food that sustains us? We need to rethink how we define work. If we were to implement a universal basic income system, then we could redefine work as “contributing actively to one’s community.” Agriculture is a perfect way to do this.

We are obviously a long way from achieving this Utopian system, and for it to come into being there needs to be a complete overhaul of our political and economic systems. However, I wanted to present a vision of the future that isn’t often considered, especially since so many people think about sustainable futures in terms of shiny technology.

Interesting Agroecology in Europe report related to this post: https://www.iddri.org/en/publications-and-events/study/agroecological-europe-2050-multifunctional-agriculture-healthy-eating

Sorry for letting the word count of this post get out of hand. Next week will be a little more low-key.

The Future of Agriculture I: Agroforestry

Agriculture is an important topic that is too often ignored in discussions of sustainability. However, it does take up a significant fraction of the earth’s surface, uses a huge sum of resources each year, and produces the stuff that keeps us alive, so our system of food production should receive more consideration by policymakers. This week I’d like to focus on one particular sustainable agroforestry system: agroforestry.

Agroforestry is a type of farming where trees and shrubs are planted alongside regular crops, or within pastureland. The trees and shrubs can potentially be used for additional income by selling their fruits or wood. What exactly does this practice to for us humans? Well, it turns out that agroforestry comes with myriad benefits for environmental health.

Typical industrial agriculture involves a system known as monocropping, which is where one type of crop is planted across the entire field. Unfortunately, this unnatural arrangement of plants comes with a variety of issues, including vulnerability to pests and disease, necessity of pesticides and fertilizers, and loss of soil fertility.

Because agroforestry involves more than just one type of plant, it is a more biodiverse system that more closely mimics a natural ecosystem. Because of the greater biodiversity inherent to these systems, they are not vulnerable to pests and disease in the way that monocrop operations are. When just one type of plant is present on a plot of land, it is easy for a single insect infestation or disease to devastate that crop. However, including more types of plant species as agroforestry systems do reduces this chance of catastrophic crop failure.

The greater biodiversity of agroforestry systems also means that soil nutrients are cycled more effectively and soil fertility is preserved. This benefit to soil health as well as the agroforestry farm’s resilience to pests means that fertilizer and pesticide use can be dramatically reduced, or even eliminated, under this agricultural regimen.

Because there are trees and shrubs permanently holding soil in place on an agroforestry farm, this reduces rates of soil erosion, which has positive effects on water quality in the streams surrounding the farm. The presence of trees also makes these systems more resilient to severe weather events such as droughts or floods, which will be an important characteristic in a world with a greater frequency of these natural disasters. Lands where agroforestry is practiced also store more carbon, so this system should be considered important in addressing climate change.

Where are agroforestry systems currently used in the world? There are many examples of these systems being utilized in sub-Saharan Africa, rural Latin America, and Southeast Asia, where they have been used for centuries. However, these systems are increasingly being studied by universities in Western countries, and being implemented in those same countries. The southeast US has been a leader in beginning to use agroforestry systems since the shrubs and trees can grow year-round. However, about 30 miles north of where I live in Wisconsin, there is an agroforestry farm that has been operating profitably for 20 years.

One barrier to spreading this amazing agricultural practice is that few farmers or natural resource professionals know how to do it, so the diffusion of agroforestry information can be slow. I’m hoping that more university agronomy and forestry departments will make agroforestry a major part of their programs. Agroforestry is a key component of a sustainable agricultural future.

To be continued next week.

Railroads and National Parks: A Hidden History

28 May 2019 –

Hello there! Thank you for stopping by. Here it is, the post that started it all, whatever limited thing “all” might be. I don’t climb El Capitan without ropes, search for rare abyssopelagic fish, or have any other hobby in my personal life that is really worth blogging about. Still, I like an audience, and that is why I started a blog on history, science, and politics. I also don’t attempt to conceal my political views whilst doing this, as you may have gathered from the blog’s title.

This week I’ll start off with a fairly noncontroversial topic. No calls for revolution in this post. There’s plenty of time for that later. I’ll also endeavor to keep these entries from becoming long essays. Okay, that’s it for the intro. Now for the interesting stuff.

This featured first blog reflects two major interests of mine:

Railroads
National parks

There were many forces involved in the creation of the first national parks. One little known player in the establishment of the Parks system was the large railroad industry that held great political power in the mid-1800s. The financial motives of these railroad industries played an important role in protecting majestic areas such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, places that today are enjoyed by millions of visitors each year.

In the 19^th century, the Homestead Act of 1862 gave settlers the right to claim 160 acres of land as their own in the western territories. When the first railroad lines to the west were being constructed, the railroad companies foresaw the difficulty of building routes through the properties of many different individuals. To streamline the process of building a railroad, it made sense for the rail companies to try to negotiate with as few landowners as possible. In addition, the companies saw the huge profits that could be made through having a monopoly in transporting tourists to scenic western areas.

The Northern Pacific Railroad took the first initiative in preserving the area that would eventually become Yellowstone National Park. The company financed expeditions to the Yellowstone area, and paid for the famous artist Thomas Moran to join a geological expedition in the region. The artwork created by Moran was distributed throughout the eastern states, motivating the public to petition for the protection of Yellowstone. The Northern Pacific Railroad was also highly influential in proposing the legislation that would make Yellowstone a national park. As this legislation was debated in the halls of Congress, the railroad company built its own hotels around Yellowstone, shuttling large numbers of people to see the splendor of this area.

The Northern Pacific Railroad’s connection to Yellowstone is far from the only example of a rail company that lobbied for the creation of a National Park. The Great Northern Railway pushed for the protection of the region that would become Glacier National Park, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s projects included Yosemite and Sequoia, and several other railroads in the southwest lobbied for the Grand Canyon’s status as a national park after building luxury hotels along the South Rim. The goals of railroad corporations aligned so well with those of environmentalists that the two groups forged an alliance that impelled Congress to create the National Park Service in 1916.

In an unusual turn of history, the greed of railway barons led to the preservation of many of America’s treasured national parks. Many of the original railroads with routes leading into the national parks are now managed by a company called Amtrak, but the parks themselves have endured to be appreciated by generations of nature enthusiasts.

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