United Nations announced that the world’s agricultural needs can be met with localized organic farms.in World Change Cafe
Kathy Faldt
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Date: Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 11:22 AM
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World Change Cafe |
- United Nations Calls for an End to Industrialized Farming
- How Our Brains Transform Remote Threats Into Crippling Anxiety
- The Myth of Human Progress
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United Nations Calls for an End to Industrialized Farming Posted: 27 Nov 2014 06:16 PM PST
In 2013, the United Nations announced that the world’s agricultural needs can be met with localized organic farms. That’s right, we do not need giant monocultures that pour, spray and coat our produce with massive amounts of poisons, only to create mutant pests and weeds while decimating pollinators and harming human health. Don’t believe the hype: We do not need genetically modified foods “to feed the world.” From my experience, many of these – how shall we say it – “worker bees” (i.e the GMO salesmen) who spread this propaganda, actually believe conventional tactics are necessary to ensure food security. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and cannot envision another possibility. The changes threaten their very existence. Organic agriculture, which has gone from a fringe movement to a multibillion industry, IX can IX produce high yields and withstand disaster and duress much better than chemical-reliant crops, according to reports coming out of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement (IFOAM), which held its 18th annual world congress in Istanbul this past October. And a 30-year study from the Rodale Institute, showed that organic farm fields yielded 33 percent more in drought years compared with chemically managed ones. In an article titled “Yes Organic Food Can Feed the world,” Anna Lappe, author and educator, known for her work as an expert on food systems, writes that “organic agriculture is taking off around the world, especially where it’s needed most.” She reports that 80 percent of all organic producers are based in developing countries, with India, Uganda, Mexico and Tanzania leading the charge. To date, 162 nations are now home to certified organic farms, and in 2012, the 37.5 million hectares of farmland produced a harvest worth $63.8 billion. Paradigm Shift Food security, poverty, gender inequality and climate change can all be addressed if we adopt a significant paradigm shift, according to the UN’s Trade and Environment Review (TER), a 320-page report written by 63 authors from organizations around the world. They provide evidence with numerous coherent case studies and surveys. The solution to all these interrelated problems is establishing a conglomerate of small, bio-diverse, ecological farms around the world and a localized food system that promotes consumption of local/regional produce. “I try to raise awareness about the need to shift away from globalizing to localizing,” Helena Norberg-Hodge recently told actor and activist Russell Brand on his internet show “The Trews” (truth+news= trews). Norberg-Hodge is an analyst on the impact of the global economy and on cultures in agriculture worldwide. “Localizing is a systemic alternative that has incredible power.” In fact, small farms are known to be two to 10 times as productive as large industrial farms and much more profitable, not just in the developing world, but also in the developed world, reports the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS). “Smaller diversified farms employee more people and use less land and water and produce more foods,” says Norberg-Hodge in her interview with Brand. She explains that localization also shortens the distance between consumers and producers, which helps the environment and also ensures that you do not eat produce that is pretty much dead traveling such insane distances. “Industrial agriculture and our globalized food system is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, up to 50 percent if proper account is taken of emissions from land use change and deforestation, most of which are due to agriculture, and for food-related transport, processing, storage and consumption,” writes ISIS. Listen to the full episode “TTIP – How We’re Lied To About Food: Russell Brand.” TTIP And A Conspiracy of Silence Unfortunately, it is difficult to implement changes on a local or national level because there are global trade agreements that prevent us from doing so. These agreements serve giant corporations and corporate greed only. Enter the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is a controversial series of trade negotiations currently being negotiated in secret between the European Commission and the US government in the name of so-called “free trade.” TTIP, which Brand sarcastically refers to as the “best thing to happen to planet Earth since Jesus,” has only corporations’ best interests in mind. And if it passes, corporations will literally be able to sue governments if and when they attempt to protect their citizens or our environment. Not only does TTIP threaten our food supply and environment, but public services, workers’ rights, and online privacy as well. A story in The Independent outlines six reasons why TTIP should scare you. Or check out this TTIP infographic from Action for Solidarity Environment Equality and Diversity. Unfortunately, we have no direct say on whether TTIP goes through or not. All we can do is get educated, tell as many people as possible and demand transparency. By Maryam Henein Maryam Henein (mar...@honeycolony.com) is founder and editor-in-chief of HoneyColony (www.honeycolony.com). Re-posted from www.truth-out.org  |
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How Our Brains Transform Remote Threats Into Crippling Anxiety Posted: 27 Nov 2014 05:52 PM PST
Modern life can feel defined by low-level anxiety swirling through society: continual reports about terrorism and war; a struggle to stay on top of family finances and hold onto jobs. At the heart of issues like these lies uncertainty – the unknown likelihood of how ongoing crises will evolve over time. Worries Knocking on the Door When unpredictability or uncertainty prods us to consider the prospect of a bleak future, it fuels a state of apprehension that scientists study in the form of anxiety. Anxiety sits along a continuum of defensive behaviors we use when threats are somewhat remote from our current experience. It’s less extreme than the full-on fear elicited by direct, acute situations like an immediate physical attack. Anxiety triggers the release of stress hormones and reorganizes our priorities to prepare for a future threat. Cognitive effects include repetitive worries, hyper-vigilant scanning for signs of trouble in the environment, and attentional and memory biases toward threat-related material. In our age of terrorism, for instance, people worry about flying. When they do fly, people are prone to take particular notice of fellow passengers whose ethnicity resembles that of terrorist group members, and thoughts of prior terrorist attacks are likely to spontaneously come to mind. At mild levels, anxiety can be beneficial for problem-solving and stimulating response actions to a future threat – think of Ebola preparedness drills at hospitals. Anxiety can motivate group action that will benefit society, such as fast-tracking some medical treatments or enacting a line of defense to prevent the spread of disease. However, higher levels of anxiety hijack cognitive resources needed for other important tasks. In a laboratory study, we investigated how anxiety affects performance on a visual search task that emulated airport weapon screening procedures. We cast participants in the role of security screeners and asked them to look for “T” shapes amidst others on a screen. When we made them anxious by issuing a few unpredictable shocks, people tended to miss seeing a second “T” in the display. This effect was strongest in individuals who reported high levels of anxiety. Our findings suggest that high threat level alerts at US airports could be counterproductive, actually creating more weapon screening errors by elevating anxiety in workers. Beyond Anxiety to Full-On Fear In contrast to anxiety, fear operates at the other extreme of the defensive continuum. It’s our response to clear and present danger. Fear elicits a full-blown fight-or-flight response and redirects bodily resources to deal with the imminent threat. You know the feeling: imagine you’re walking down a dark alley alone at night and you hear a loud sound – you freeze in your tracks, your pulse quickens, your palms sweat and your muscles tighten. Fear is adaptive in this context because it increases the chances of survival. For example, directing blood flow to muscles used for running means the odds are better you’ll get away from whatever is threatening you. Fear engages the amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient brain structure in the temporal lobe, to exert a powerful influence over other brain systems. In the throes of fear, attention is directed toward the threat, to identify what it is and figure out where it is located. In addition, coping mechanisms kick in. Once the immediate threat is gone, memories are updated so that it can be avoided in the future. Because of fear’s intense physiological demands, prolonged or repetitive fears are particularly damaging for the brain and body. We found that in posttraumatic stress disorder, the amygdala is shrunken and less able to create precise memories for threatening material. Patients are left with overgeneralized fear memories. Rather than being triggered by actual threats, these fears can be provoked by stimuli that only resemble the original danger; or they can even occur out of the blue. The constant interruption of daily life by intrusive traumatic memories cumulatively takes its toll on the health and well-being of individuals living with PTSD and their families. If not properly treated, PTSD often leads to personal and professional difficulties, depression or substance abuse. Fearful Together Communicating the existence of threats is important for protecting other members of our social groups. Special brain mechanisms facilitate the social communication of fear and anxiety. In animals, acoustic properties of defensive alarm calls often signal the presence of specific predators or their proximity to the group. Hearing these calls elicits behaviors – like fleeing or directing an attack – that help the group escape or defend its territory. The amygdala and portions of the auditory cortex are tuned to the specific frequencies used in these calls and defensive vocalizations are initiated by dedicated motor circuits linked to emotional behavior. In human beings, facial and vocal expression can serve a similar purpose. Interestingly, some brain regions respond to both the direct experience of fear and simply observing others experience fear. Neural mechanisms that mirror the feelings of others based on their emotional expression permit empathy and help individuals prepare for threats without having to experience them directly. These capacities, which can be so useful among monkeys spotting a lurking predator, can be counterproductive in people, though, when they lead to an unending, low-level anxiety. One potential benefit of collective anxiety is that it spurs society to engage in risk assessment behaviors and can guide public policy. Establishing international alliances in the wars on terrorism or Ebola are group actions that can protect the world at large. Media outlets are an effective way to widely disseminate information about social threats. But a bombardment of fear through traditional and social media unnecessarily ramps up anxiety levels that can paralyze a nation, even when a majority of the audience is not at direct risk. A balance between precaution and heedless communication is important in trying times so we can keep calm and carry on. Kevin LaBar is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Re-posted from www.alternet.org  |
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Posted: 27 Nov 2014 05:23 PM PST
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us. The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates. Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship. “There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress. If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that. Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault. Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible. Wright explained this further on our call. The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are. And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. As Wright told me: Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear. We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change. If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea. By Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges’ most recent book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.” Re-posted from www.alternet.org  |
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Kathy Faldt
Vice President Logan and Albert Conservation Association
3200 0129