Produce Less – Exploring Degrowth

When chemical giant Syngenta hired biologist Tyrone Hayes to study its widely used herbicide atrazine, the company didn’t like the results. Hayes found that atrazine, one of the most common weed killers in America, disrupted hormones in frogs and altered their sexual development. Instead of facing the science, Syngenta went into product-defense mode: pressuring Hayes not to publish, and when he did, launching a full-scale effort to discredit him. Internal company documents later revealed a coordinated campaign to smear Hayes’s reputation and bury his findings.

Even very low levels of nitrate in drinking water—far below the federal government’s safety threshold—may significantly increase the risk of premature birth and low birth weight, according to a new study. Nitrate, a pervasive chemical that enters drinking water mainly through chemical fertilizer runoff and animal manure from farms, is invisible, odorless, and tasteless—leaving many people unaware they’re consuming it. Researchers analyzed more than 350,000 birth records in Iowa from 1970 to 1988 and found that even 0.1 milligrams of nitrate per liter (mg/L)—a mere 1% of the level the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently considers “safe”—was linked to higher risks of babies being born too early or too small.  Prematurity and low birth weight is the leading cause of death in newborns and children under age 5.

A critical yet often overlooked question in the energy transition debate is how much total energy—accounting for materials, services, and other embedded uses—can a society/community/family sustainably consume. While there is no consensus, we can consider models like pre-crisis Sri Lanka or Kerala in India, which achieved high Human Development Index scores with relatively low per capita energy use. Could a renewable-powered world, based on such efficient societies, be achievable, and at what cost?

When Sowjanya Soujanaya goes to her ATM garden in Edulamaddali in the morning, she not only finds enough herbs, spices and tubers to cook a healthy lunch for her family of five, but also always finds something to sell at the market. ATM stands for “Any Time Money” and is a mixed cultivation of more than 20 different kinds of vegetables, berries, roots and herbs on the 800 m² in front of her house.

Such a model promises to protect the environment, achieve climate neutrality, avoid overexploitation of natural resources and enhance biodiversity while boosting the economy by creating jobs and wealth (European Commission, 2018). Thus, the bioeconomy according to its promoters aspires to save the planet without having to give up our current economic model.

Greg Grandin’s new book shows that “America” (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect. He even cautiously welcomed the newly declared Monroe Doctrine as a rejection of European imperialism. Bolívar died without realizing his dream of a Pan-American international order but, Grandin argues, his ideals live on in Latin America today.

In the United States, around half of the food that people eat every day is ultra-processed—industrially manufactured products, like chips or candy, that are made by breaking down whole foods, modifying and combining them with additives to make them more attractive in the way they look, smell and taste. Scientists have linked consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to obesity  and other health issues such as cancer and diabetes. Now they are starting to discover why people eat more UPFs and gain excessive weight.

In “A Southern Panther,” movement elder Malik Rahim talks about his lifetime of battling racism and fighting for peace and environmental justice. Former Louisiana Panther Malik Rahim first came to national and international attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. “This is criminal ” is his harrowing account of how mostly poor Black people struggled without water, electricity, food, or sanitation, many trapped in the upper floors of flooded buildings waiting for rescue if they hadn’t drowned. Mary Ratcliff, Editor of the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper , managed to reach Rahim on the phone two days after the flood and transcribed it. “There are gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed,” he said, “and any young Black they see who they figure doesn’t belong in their community, they shoot him.”

Ancient oak trees rise above gigantic boulders scattered across a high desert mesa in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. This is Oak Flat (Chi’ chil Bildagoteel), a sacred site for Native Americans, including the Western and San Carlos Apache. And like many other lands across the West, it’s under grave threat from multinational mining interests, all in the name of climate mitigation, but most importantly, for the money. “Here is the creation story of where a woman came to be, and where the holy ones came together,” Wendsler Nosie, tribal leader of the San Carlos Apache tribe, explains. “This is where we originated as people.” Beneath this biologically rich landscape, home to a variety of dry-land species including the endangered hedgehog cacti and the ocelot wildcat, lies a rich deposit of copper, the conductive metal vital for the technologies needed to power the world’s green-energy transition.