The question of the day

Apparently all that food growing around Salem is not appropriate for a "natural place." Image by Renee_W via Flickr

A regular, local LOVESalem reader writes:

The announcement of compounding problems (algae bloom, very high temperatures and stuck dam gates) facing the City's water supply shows our failing ecosystems, climate and infrastructure are catching up with us. What will it be like in the near future, let along a couple of decades from now?

Almost simultaneously, a friend in Bellingham, Washington, was writing:

The local water treatment plant, which takes water from the huge Lake Whatcom (which in turn stays full by diverting part of a branch of the Nooksack river into the lake), recently had to reduce capacity because of algae buildup (!). Nobody seems to want to inquire about the algae source - the lake is largely surrounded by homes with septic systems and grassy lawns owned by the wealthier folks (at least some of whom must put all kinds of chemicals on their lawn to maintain that perfect look). Duh! Then pile on a bit warmer weather (due to hit around 100 over the next few days - we've not seen that since we moved here in 1995), and payback begins in the form of algae. We won't necessarily be hauling water for miles, but we will be drinking algae.

Bottom line: in one of the wettest civilized places in the u.s. plus a ~~20 square mile deep glacial-dug lake, there is now a water shortage with pleas to limit lawn watering and car washing.

As this was going on, the City Council was apparently embracing a proposal to permanently bar agriculture from 200 acres of Minto-Brown Island Park -- with absolutely no thought to what our future food needs will be, no thought about alternatives to "restoration," only thought on the federal dollars.

The worst part is that one citizen who testified said that "I always thought of the park as a natural space," and the mayor agreed with her.

What volumes those few words speak: Apparently agriculture -- the means by which humans feed themselves -- is unnatural and detracts from "natural space." That's like saying that breast feeding detracts from the natural bottle feeding that God intended. There's clearly a belief among some that agriculture -- the activity that preserved the park in the first place so that its land could be deeded to the city -- is out of place in a "natural space." This mindset doesn't mind tract homes and acre after acre of McMansions, but suggest that we grow some of the food that we depend on nearby or -- gasp! -- keep a few hens in the yards of those homes and suddenly you're detracting from the natural beauty.

Just like US policy has been to encourage all grain farming to be done in the square states and all fruit and vegetable farming in California's Central Valley, we just lopped hundreds of good farmland out of a park in the name of keeping it natural. Because there's nothing more natural than factory-farmed food delivered by jet airplane or diesel tractor-trailer, an average of 1500 miles to Salem.

UPDATE: People don't seem to get that Salem is already suffering from a food security crisis, with the Marion Polk Food Share dealing with an overwhelming surge in demand. Here's a look at a food bank in California. How will Salem residents in the future regard our thoughtlessness about acres where we successfully grew local food for decades?

UPDATE 2: Statesman-Journal notices that we've got a water problem.

We've got that same blindspot in Oregon too

The inimitable Tom Toles, America's best editorialist.

Monday night, 7/27, 6:30 p.m.: The future of Minto Brown Park

Image by OregonDOT via Flickr

The future of Minto Brown Island as a public park is on the table at a public hearing at City Hall at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, July 27.

The paper calls this a proposal for "federal park funds" but, in truth, the proposal is all about spending "stimulus" money as fast as possible, which is why the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in the US Dept. of Agriculture rejected the small plot at Battle Creek and instead asked the City to offer some much bigger chunks of land. (The fact that Battle Creek is privately owned is not controlling; the grants are from a fund that is used to get easements on private lands all the time -- in fact, the standard easement sale contract that NRCS gave the city presumes it's a private landowner ... the city is the odd duck for trying to give control of city park land to the feds.)

In other words, the federal folks are simply looking to get deals signed as fast as possible in order to be able to report that they've "created jobs" as part of the federal activity around the "stimulus" package. Essentially they grabbed a floodplain easement program intended for use along the banks of the big rivers (Missouri, Mississippi, etc.) to reduce federal flood damage payments and are trying to use it to shovel money out.

SOP so far -- except that the (a) there are never any damage claims for flooding on Minto;

(b) the flooding benefits Minto by refreshing and remineralizing the soil;

(c) the feds are terrible landlords and partners because their funding is so inconsistent (see Mt. St. Helens, where the same US Dept. of Ag has closed one of two observation stations). Partnering with the feds is like subleasing your apartment to the football team -- they do whatever they want and don't necessarily listen real well.

(d) the feds would only pay for upkeep of the "conserved" land for three years -- after that, all costs to maintain this land (maintenance we now get for free from a farmer who tends the land) will fall to us -- and you can see how strapped Salem is for funds.

(e) the easements would prohibit even fully organic farming or community gardens -- including on some of the best, highest, driest ground in the whole park! Some use of "emergency flood relief" funds.

Read why the Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board unanimously resolved that the City should reject the staff proposal and learn what the SPRAB thinks the city should do instead. Links to prior posts on this topic there as well.

Please come and speak up for your park. Tell the City Council to adopt the recommendations of the SPRAB:

* reject the staff proposal to take 200 acres out of productive local agricultural use
* put the farming on the island out for competitive bidding
* revise the park master plan.

We can't afford to trade control of our unique urban park with its long history of agricultural use for a quick hit of borrowed federal dollars.

The best possible outcome of the Gates fiasco

We shouldn't have to depend on the luck of having a kid with a cellphone around to catch police misconduct (or to document that there was no misconduct); it's time for all law enforcement to be monitored with "cop cams" that capture all their interactions with citizens. Image via Wikipedia

One simple suggestion, a generalization of the requirement that all police interrogations be videotaped that State Sen. Barack Obama managed to write into the Illinois statute books: build a cell-phone-type movie camera with sound into police headgear, and require that it be turned on at the beginning of every interaction with a civilian. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And in the cases where it's the civilian who acts aggressively, the videotape will help defend the cop against a false accusation of misconduct.

I've been making this same argument for years: we should no longer accept the idea that we can't supervise police conduct in the field -- after all, the police have long since decided to turn America into the surveillance state where the conduct of perfectly innocent people is scrutinized in detail with hundreds of thousands of recording devices and cameras, to say nothing of telephonic/internet spying.

Now is the time to say that the conduct of all law enforcement agents -- anyone having the power to detain and arrest -- must be monitored when they interact with the rest of us, so that we the people can determine for ourselves whether our agents, who obtain their power from us, are using it properly.

As police and prosecutors so often say to us, you won't mind if you have nothing to hide.

Salem should implement this quickly. After all, in these tight budget times, we can't afford to have to pay big-money police abuse settlements.

Maybe the best quick read ever on the industrial phood nightmare

A phactory pharm -- funny, it doesn't look like the image on the packages. They NEVER show the gigantic manure lagoons. Image by SkyTruth via Flickr

A sample:

It is in the 1970s that Smithfield Foods revolutionizes hog production. "What we did in the pork industry is what Perdue and Tyson did in the poultry business," Joseph W. Luter III, chairman and chief executive of Smithfield, told the New York Times in 2000.

According to a Rolling Stone exposé, Smithfield "controls every stage of production, from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through the slaughterhouse. [It] imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The company would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and be responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The system made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business."

In the 1950s, there were 2.1 million hog farmers, with an average of 31 hogs each. As of 2007, there were 79,000 hog farmers left, averaging over 1,000 hogs each. A single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah holds a half-million hogs and produces more shit every day than all the residents of Manhattan.

Rolling Stone's stunning report describes the lakes of shit that surround pig factories as the color of Pepto Bismol because of the "interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs."

Vegetarians who think they are unaffected by this toxic fecal frappe should think again: The sludge is often used to "fertilize" crops that end up on your table.

Beef, poultry and hog CAFOs could not exist without large-scale environmental devastation. Governments at every level exempt these operations from the laws and regulations covering air pollution, water pollution and solid-waste disposal. They are also largely free from proper bio-surveillance, that is, public monitoring to detect, observe and report on the outbreak of diseases.

Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door, writes that scrutiny of the interface between human and animal diseases is "primitive, often nonexistent" because Smithfield, IBP and Tyson would have to spend money on surveillance and upgrade conditions at their hellish animal factories.

Read it all here. Then start growing some food, even just a single tomato or zucchini -- and help get hens legalized here in Salem.

Great idea: Farming in boulevards!

I have seen photos of similar things in N. Europe, particularly in the Low Countries where land is very dear. Also I have seen similar things in Japan -- lush crops growing in small spaces in very urbanized areas.

Yet another recall showing why we need to encourage MORE local food production

Plum tree laden with fruit. With some creative thinking, Salem could create a vast supply of healthy & inexpensive food for the Food Bank and for the Saturday Market just by putting fruit trees in parking strips and starting an "adopt-a-tree" program to ensure the fruit is tended and harvested. Image via Wikipedia

Another industrial phood nightmare, another reminder that what people in Salem need is more encouragement and support for growing or buying locally grown food that has never joined the industrial phood system.

That means encouraging backyard and frontyard gardening, replacing street trees with fruit trees, community gardens, support for small market gardeners just starting out, and, yes, allowing residents to keep some hens.

Don't know how to get started? Call Your Home Harvests.

UPDATE: Great article on how the industrial phood system has mastered the arts of using our evolved tastes against us.

Federal money City of Salem staff should pursue

Image by Trig's via Flickr

One of the most frustrating things about the whole misguided effort to permanently (as in forever) lock up rare and productive agricultural acreage within the Salem urban growth boundary on Minto-Brown Island is that it was totally random, spur-of-the-moment lunge in an entirely new direction for the park, prompted only by the promise of some fast cash (borrowed money).

Salem originally went to the feds seeking money for an easement at Battle Creek, not Minto. It was the feds in Portland -- people with no knowledge of Salem or concern for its needs -- who came back with "No, but what about Minto?" (The feds want the biggest chunks of acreage because that's easier for them to administer.)

City staff, instead of consulting the Master Plan for Minto and saying "Well, gee, there's nothing in here about wanting to reduce agriculture in the park, I don't think we're interested," entered into discussions with the feds about just how much acreage to turn over to federal control. No notice to the public about this huge change in direction for the park, no discussion with the city council (the thing was hidden in the Council's consent agenda until a citizen happened to inquire about farming on the island and learned that there was this proposal being fast-tracked to chase these "stimulus" dollars).

Meanwhile, there's a river of federal stimulus dollars flowing into Portland for energy conservation work, work that Salem desperately needs. Getting a lot more of this kind of stimulus money is what city staff should be focused on--improving the energy efficiency of all structures in the city, because money sent out of town for energy leaves forever. Whereas money spent on weatherization and solarizing buildings not only creates jobs here but permanently improves our economy. Salem's small energy efficiency award ($1.5M) is just a drop in the bucket of need down here.

OSU prof to speak at Peak Oil Conference in Denver in October

Click on the graphic to go the conference page.

Not that people should incur the carbon emissions or use the energy needed to travel to a conference (Nearly all the organizations should reject the "conference" model, but ASPO should be a leader here, figuring out how to use our resources to provide a "distributed conference" in hundreds of cities at once, spreading the knowledge and reducing the energy use.)

However, what's most interesting is that peak oil awareness is ever-so-slowly making its way onto the agenda of Oregon institutions. But if you look at ODOT's plans, you'd see that those plans presume infinite cheap oil for the next century or more (see here and here for just two of the most expensive current examples).

ASPO 2009 INTERNATIONAL PEAK OIL CONFERENCE System Reset: Global Energy and the New Economy Sheraton Hotel, Denver, Colorado October 11-13, 2009 New!! Optional Workshop October 10 Early registration ends Aug 7, 2009! Register now and save $100! ASPO-USA, in concert with ASPO-International, invites you to join energy experts, investors, utilities, representatives from federal, state, and local governments, and others in Denver, Colorado for ASPO-USA's 5th annual Peak Oil Conference. Session Topics Include: The Great Recession and Energy Markets Natural Gas Game Changers Charting a Sustainable Future Analysis from "The Oil Drum" Writers Climate Change, Carbon Capture and Sequestration The Media: On the Watch or Asleep at the Wheel? Navigating Competing Priorities In Energy, Food, and Water Policy Well, Don't Just Sit There! Examples from the Forefronts of the Transition Stalking the Wild Taboo: Population, Carbon Taxes, and Nuclear Energy Saturday Pre-Conference Optional Workshop: Survive & Thrive After Peak Oil: Creating Personal Plans for the Coming Decades Learn More Confirmed speakers include: Matthew Simmons, leading peak oil analyst and author, "Twilight in the Desert" Kevin Phillips, author, "American Theocracy: The Peril & Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, & Borrowed Money" Tom Petrie, Founder, Petrie, Parkman, Inc. / Merrill Lynch Susan Capalbo, Chair, Dept. of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Oregon State University Marcio Rocha Mello, President, HRT Petroleum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil David Shields, journalist, author "Pemex: The Oil Reform, Mexico City, Mexico Chris Martenson, creator, "The Crash Course" Ray Leonard, Vice President of Exploration, Kuwait Energy Robert Hirsch, energy consultant, US DOE, author of the Hirsch Report Lisa Margonelli, author, "Oil on the Brain" Peter Maass, writer, The New York Times, author "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil" The world is at a major crossroads - the convergence of peak oil and climate change. Despite challenging economic times, our nation is moving forward with sweeping initiatives to deal with climate change but ignoring the need to mitigate and plan for the peaking of world oil production. Our conference speakers, which include leading financial analysts, international oil industry executives, and peak oil observers, will offer new data and forecasts of our changing resources. ASPO's four days of information-packed events appeals to a broad spectrum of people in business, public policy, and members of the public concerned with resource supply challenges. Register now to ensure your space and save $100. For more information and details please visit http://www.aspo-usa.com/2009denver/.

Run, do not walk to Salem Cinema to see and hear "Sita Sings the Blues"

This is the best movie shown during the recently concluded Salem Film Festival. AMAZING. Totally worth the money to see on the big screen with the great sound in the beautiful Salem Cinema. Roger Ebert agrees.