Having compared the harmful methane gas produced by sheep, cows and other domesticated animals through belching and flatulence, Professor Ross Garnaut contends kangaroo meat is a safer alternative for the environment.

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California passes its first law protecting farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non GE crops.

We’ve all heard the horror stories:  A farmer’s crop is contaminated by Genetically Engineered (GE) seeds, and that farmer is subsequently harassed and brought to court by the biotech patent owners (such as Monsanto) of those seeds.  In some cases, that farmer has also been held liable for contaminating other farmer’s crops with his own unintentionally contaminated crop.  Just this week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark piece of legislation, protecting California’s farmers from just such liability.

It is the first bill to be passed by the California Legislature that brings regulation to the Genetically Engineered (GE) crops.  The bill, AB541 (Huffman, D-Marin/Sonoma)  protects and compensates farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non-GE crop.  AB541 was sponsored by a coalition of agriculture organizations and food businesses, including California Certified Organic Farmers, Earthbound Farm and the California Farm Bureau Federation.

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Of all places to start a greenhouse, the Sahara Desert would likely rank pretty low for many. But someone is working on a plan to make food growing happen there. The Sahara Forest Project aims to use massive greenhouses to direct the sun’s rays for heat and energy, which is planned to regulate the air, filter water and create an environment for plant growth.

Via: greenpacks.org

According to a new study by the University of New South Wales, farming kangaroos instead of sheep or cattle could lower national greenhouse gases in Australia by 3 percent a year.

Methane from burps and farts of cows and sheep is an often overlooked contributor to global warming, but it accounts for 67% of Australia’s agricultural sector methane emissions. It also contributes 11% of Australia’s total emissions. In contrast, kangaroos barely produce any methane.

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The concept works like this: researchers will plant things like cattails and tules (a type of rush that grows in freshwater marshes) in parts of the delta that have been subsiding and giving off greenhouse gases thanks to unsustainable agricultural practices in the area. Over time, the marsh plants will reproduce, die, decompose and rebuild the region’s peat soils … all while also soaking up carbon dioxide and creating new, sustainable wetlands.

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If you answered yes, then I am afraid you have been using a very, very DIRTY word. Yes, you have been using perhaps the worst four-letter word in the English agricultural vocabulary. You have been dissing, dismissing, and dirtying the good, clean, productive resource otherwise known as SOIL.

Or at least some folks would say you have.

This may seem like a trivial question of semantics: Is not “dirt” and “soil” the same thing? You know, the stuff you get under your fingernails and on your pants, the stuff you have to wash off your veggies and your kids. Who cares…dirt, soil, it all amounts to the same brown stuff, right?

Well, perhaps. But a great many mindful agriculturalists, gardeners, and other landlubbers (i.e., land lovers) will take the greatest offense if someone uses the word “dirt” to refer to soil, that complex earthy material in which living things grow and thrive and feed.

Discovery Education’s fun and interesting website The Dirt on Soil offers this very useful distinction:

Dirt is what you find under your fingernails. Soil is what you find under your feet. Think of soil as a thin living skin that covers the land. It goes down into the ground just a short way. Even the most fertile topsoil is only a foot or so deep. Soil is more than rock particles. It includes all the living things and the materials they make or change.1

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Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the LORD. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land. And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee, And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat.1

Like the people and even their God, then, the farmlands were given time to rest from their productive toil, to rebuild their strength in order to be fruitful again after the period of rest so that they might yield bountiful harvests for years to come. As the ancient Hebrews restrained from working their fields, they honored their God and the land itself.

I mention this practice of a “sabbath of the land,” almost entirely forgotten in modern farming (and especially in agribusiness), because it provides a potentially useful paradigm for more than just agriculture. It also provides a good model for us today, for how we might live sensibly and sustainably in a time when natural resources are threatened and the Earth is endangered, at least to some degree, by human actions.

One recent example of honoring/acknowledging the (imperiled) state of nature is in California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call to Californians not to use, heck not even to buy, fireworks this Fourth of July. Gov. Schwarzenegger made this plea for sensibility with wildfires numbering in the hundreds throughout the state and with state resources to fight those fires as threatened as the homes, lives, and habitats themselves.

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Whereas they may swill the grape juice, inhale the aroma and swoon over the subtleties cascading o’er the taste buds, I’m already on my third can and the match yet to start.

But my, how I jolted when I came across a story suggesting that English vineyards may, in decades to come, suffer because our summers are set to become too hot.

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Yet for this woman, the area is a considerable step up. She, like most of the other women farmers here, is from a refugee camp in Somalia. A place where armed guards stand by the few water taps to prevent fights among the refugees trying to secure enough drinking water for the day. Where the main food served is a tasteless gruel of corn and soy. As hard as it is for many of us to imagine, the refugee camps are places that make even this most desperate of American neighborhoods a source of hope.

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A few summers ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time in Willits, CA. This small, progressive town in Mendocino County harbors one of the best relocalization efforts in the United States, if not the world.

“Relocalization” is the idea that communities should produce food, energy, and goods locally. The movement developed in response to peak oil and climate change concerns, and may just be our best hope for surviving our current environmental crises.

The Willits Economic Localization organization (WELL) was founded in 2004 by a concerned local climate scientist named Jason Bradford. While the organization started out by showing the peak oil film “The End of Suburbia” (an excellent film that I highly recommend), it soon expanded its efforts into a number of areas, including business, education, energy, food, and health.

Despite the small size of Willits, WELL has made incredible strides towards its goals in the past few years.

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Confession time. I have to admit that I may have been a bit of a grumpy environmental blogger, failing to give due credit where credit is due..

In particular, I have frequently complained about bio-fuels driving up world food prices in absence of a few wider considerations, I’ve been dismissive at the EU’s lack of ability to actually implement anything that makes a real difference to the environment, and most recently I described an environmental tax levied on cows as the most stupid idea ever. So it is maybe time to examine these issues in a more positive light – negativity is, after all, the enemy of progress.

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Michael Miller Fabrics is co-sponsoring a Baby Bootie contest with Craft Magazine. I would love to see a green crafter win this with organic or recycled materials.

I do suspect there’s some kind of craft hive mind episode going on here, because I’ve planned to write about their organic fabric line this week - and just last week, Autumn posted here at Crafting A Green World about recycled handmade shoes. I fully intend to investigate this set of coincidences, but first let’s talk about Michael Miller Organics.

Michael Miller Fabrics launched its organic line at the beginning of the year. The sneak peek on their blog last fall included a shot of the supercute booties shown here. That blog post gave a snapshot of some of the challenges facing folks who want to bring organic cotton to market:

Did you know that organic cotton has to be grown for at least three years without chemical pesticides, defoliants, or fertilizers? It costs more because organic farms are more labor and management intensive. They’re also usually smaller and do not receive federal subsidies like conventional farming.

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Asia

Working the land the natural way: Organic farming in China

It’s been almost four years since the project was launched, and of the nine households who have tried organic farming, only four are still at it. The others decided it just wasn’t worth it. Organic farming requires much more labor, the yield can be half or less of that of conventional farming, and besides, hardly anyone in Chengdu is eating organic. Our stock broker-turned-farmer estimates their customer base to be only 0.01% of Chengdu’s population.

Anlong farmer Gao Shengjian believes there’s a link between the use of pesticides and fertilizers on farms and the growing incidences of various diseases among the rural population.

Source: Crossroads China. Vote for this article in social media: StumbleUpon.

China down to 12 days worth of coal

China only has enough coal for 12 days of consumption, three days less than a month ago, state media reported Wednesday, sounding the alarm bells over the nation’s most important source of energy.

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The farmers’ market season may not yet be in full swing so we don’t see — nor appreciate — the flurry of farm activity going on across the country as growers get ready to keep us freshly stocked all summer. But Bradbury, a fledgling Oregon farmer starting her growing venture this season, along with thousands of small-scale, family farmers across the country, have been putting in long work days for weeks.

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It comes as rather a shock to see New Zealanders in the news, arguing amongst themselves about the missing chapter of a report - questioning their very own green credentials. The chapter in question is unfortunately number 13.

(Not overly unfortunate that it was chapter 13, granted, but it allows me to clumsily shoehorn the word triskaidekaphobia into a piece of writing for the first - and hopefully - last time.)

Included in a statement by the country’s Green Party is the following:

“Chapter 13 states some inconvenient truths about the causes of environmental decline in New Zealand – causes such as dairy intensification, increased car use, and consumption. And it makes some inconvenient recommendations for action such as national environmental regulation and more public transport. Moreover it warns our economy is threatened by our poor environmental performance.”

The Green Party’s reaction has been thorough as the accompanying YouTube video shows.

But I’d like to just concentrate for now on dairy farming. It isn’t perhaps at the forefront of many people’s minds when we think of environmental decline. Conjure up the word “cattle” and more often, it is intensively reared beef rather than milk production that causes a reaction.

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Scientists studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when global carbon dioxide levels spiked rapidly, found that plant fossils from that time show noticeably more insect damage than plants from before or after the PETM. They found no evidence that the plants themselves had become more appetizing to insects, or that insect species themselves changed. Rather, it appears that the PETM simply was a time when insects became more voracious and destructive.

Part of the reason might be that plants grown in high-carbon dioxide conditions are less nutritious than they otherwise would be. Some scientists have speculated that might have been the reason dinosaurs grew so large: to be able to take in large enough volumes of plant material to sustain them.

The high-temperature PETM lasted about 100,000 years.

“Our study convincingly shows that there is a link between temperature and insect feeding on leaves,” said Ellen Currano, the study’s lead author and a researcher with Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution. “When temperature increases, the diversity of insect feeding damage on plant species also increases.”

Today’s tropics already illustrate that phenomenon, as insects there eat more plants than do their temperate-zone counterparts. Insects are also among the warm-weather species now expanding their ranges as average temperatures around the globe rise.

The researchers’ findings suggest that insects could wreak greater damage to crops and forests around the planet as the climate continues to change.

Turn on the TV and you’ll see one of them drizzling olive oil over some preposterous dish hardly suitable for a family of four on a tight budget.

But recently, there’s been a refreshingly unsavoury turnaround.

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1

Rank of shrimp in popularity among all types of seafood Americans eat

4.4

Pounds of shrimp the average American consumed in 2006

10%

Share of shrimp sold in the U.S. that comes from the Southeast U.S. (Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean), where fisheries and farms are held to stricter standards

90%

Share of shrimp sold in the U.S. that comes largely from Southeast Asia and Latin America, where environmental regulations are sometimes lax and often not enforced

33%

Share of U.S. shrimp imports that come from Thailand, our largest single supplier

$4.1 billion

Value of U.S. shrimp imports in 2006, nearly one-third of all seafood imports, compared with coffee imports of $3.1 billion and fossil fuels worth $300 billion

44%

Percentage of worldwide shrimp production that came from farms in 2005

12,000%

Increase in farmed shrimp production between 1975 and 2005. Production ballooned from just over 22,000 tons to more than 2.6 million tons.

3.7 million

Acreage of tropical coastal mangroves estimated to have been converted to shrimp farms, destroying important habitat for fish, birds and people

2

Number of pounds of wild fish it generally takes to produce one pound of farmed shrimp

More on eco-friendly farmed shrimp.

Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Sarah Lozanova to the Green Options writing team. A native of Chicago, Sarah holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from the Presidio School of Management, and also writes for Worldchanging Chicago. Along with fellow Windy City resident Jason Phillip, she’ll be covering green issues in Chicago, as well as the broader Midwest.

The average bite of food on our dinner plates tonight has traveled more than 1500 miles from where it was cultivated. This was not true, however, from September 10-16 for participants of the Chicago-based Localvore Challenge, who only ate foods grown in their region. The event sponsor, the Green City Market, created a list of restaurants that serve meals that are localvore-friendly and a blog site for support from fellow localvores. In addition to reducing their carbon footprint, many participants likely gained awareness of where their food comes from. Such a challenge did limit the food choices that were available to them, as they were not able to snack on mangos and sip on Chilean wine.

The United States imports food from more than 130 countries. The quantity of food has been increasing annually by about 15% since 1991, according to the FDA. Even though Illinois is covered largely by farms, it is estimated that the state imports more than 90% of its food. Corn and soybeans are the most widely grown crops in the state, but the majority of these harvests are not consumed by humans. For example, more than 80% of the corn grown in this country is used for cattle feed, while 1/6 of Illinois corn is utilized for ethanol production. Roughly 80% of the corn and soybeans grown in Illinois are genetically modified. Illinois is built on fertile farmland that is among the richest in the world thanks to glaciers, yet this natural resource is increasingly being developed and covered by concrete. Unfortunately, the rich Illinois soils rarely benefit the inhabitants of Illinois directly, as little of their food is cultivated here.

The demand for local foods in Illinois has grown considerably, and some are saying it is greater than the supply. As the price of fossil fuels increase, this trend may shift. In the meantime, some are voluntarily taking on the challenge of eating local foods. This is a concrete way to influence land use and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, while strengthening the local economy.