What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

Trailer from Al Gore's documentary on climate change

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.  Meanwhile, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. Or…

• Argentina and Uruguay shiver in below freezing temperatures? Hypothermia in the streets of Buenos Aires and snow reported in seaside resort town. Or…

• the Rio Grande actually looks like a big raging river? Some sections along the U.S. / Mexican border have risen 17 feet and more above flood stage, cutting off clean water supplies, affecting tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes and triggering mass evacuations. Or…

• NOAA says 2010 is on track to becoming the hottest year on record? Earth has been on a hot streak for the last 304 months (a little over 25 years), with the average monthly global temperatures exceeding than the average for entire 2oth century. This past June was the hottest on record.

“Warmer than average global temperatures have become the new normal,” says Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these numbers. “The global temperature has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit [0.7 degree C] since 1900 and the rate of warming since the late 1970s has been about three times greater than the century-scale trend.”…

…”Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who headed up the research, said in a prepared statement. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades.”

Was last Spring’s  Nashville flood, which took the region by surprise after 13 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, a local catastrophe or part of much larger trend? What about the 8 inch deluge than drowned Milwaukee last week? Or the second tornado ever to hit the Bronx?

WEATHER HAPPENS / CLIMATES CHANGE

If man-made greenhouse gases are behind the deadly weather, that’s good news: We can still do something about it. But as a new study of historic droughts in Asia shows, the ramifications of disturbed weather patterns can be devastating, no matter what the cause.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spent 15 years collecting samples from more than 300 sites across Asia to create an atlas of tree ring data for monsoon weather patterns. The correlations between major droughts and political unrest are striking, if not completely surprising. From the collapse of the Khmer civilization to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the French Revolution, nothing topples a government faster than a desperate hungry mob.

Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia. Colonial-era policies left regional societies ill-equipped to deal with the drought’s consequences, as historian Mike Davis details in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Famine and cholera outbreaks at this time in colonial Vietnam fueled a peasant revolt against the French.

The political opposition to the now crippled U.S. Climate Bill should be quaking in their boots. Given the staggering amount of scientific evidence linking human-generated greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and climate change, they will bear the blame for blocking action when it could have made a difference. (According to a new survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97% of scientists say climate change “very likely” has a man-made component.)

A BOUNTY OF BLIGHTS: CAUSE & EFFECT OR COINCIDENCE?

The cruelty of blight is uniquely insidious. Hopes, dreams and futures are destroyed along with crops. A blight is promise snatched away. In a matter of weeks, sometimes days, sometime hours, months of labor is laid to waste and investment is turned to debt.

It doesn’t take much: just a few invisible spores carried by the wind to a host plant. Once a botanical beach-head is established, blights – which thrive in the monocultures of modern agriculture – quickly become “community diseases,” spreading from plant to plant, field to field, region to region, painting once verdant fields black with the brush of death.

The first major victory in the The Green Revolution was genetic lab-tweak that made wheat impervious to a blight called stem rust, while also increasing yields – a rare and remarkable “two-fer” benefit. So significant was this breakthrough, plant biologist Norman Borlaug was award the Nobel Prize for it. The dream of eradicating hunger seemed within reach. Yet a little over a half-century later, the solution – crop protection provided by a single gene – has become part of the problem.

In 1999, a strain of rust was discovered in a wheat field in Uganda that had evolved past the genetic barrier. Dubbed “Ug99,” it has since splintered off into several strains or “races,” some of which are impervious to more recently developed multi-gene defenses. In a little over a decade, stem rust has traveled 5,000 miles and now threatens grain production in Africa and Asia, and indirectly threatens production everywhere else. From the pathogen’s perspective, all wheat has become more or less alike as diversity has been systematically bred away.

Wheat is the primary source of calories for millions of people worldwide, and accounts for around 30 percent of global grain production and 44 percent of cereals used as food. Globally, wheat provides nearly 55 percent of the carbohydrates and 20 percent of the food calories we consume every day.

- Dr. Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

With so much at stake, an international collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, is playing a frantic game of defense, developing resistant strains to deploy strategically as barriers to slow the blight’s spread. But the work requires the cooperation of countries otherwise at odds, such as India and Pakistan. And it takes money: steady, dependable funding and lots of it.

Stem rust isn’t the only globetrotting super-pathogen:

• An especially aggressive strain of brown streak virus is attacking Cassava, a staple for 800 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. In the 6 years since it was first spotted in East Africa, it has spread at pandemic speed. Cassava, a drought-tolerant plant that requires very little tending, is particularly important for regions beset with malaria and HIV/AIDS. Its loss means billions of dollars more needed for basic food aid.

• Late blight, a.k.a. the blight that caused Ireland’s Great Potato Famine, turns out to also have a taste for American tomatoes. Last year, its spores not only rode the wind, but took to the highways, hitching on seedling plants trucked to home improvement stores across the country. In only two years, it appears to have become entrenched.

• Stripe rust, another wheat  plague, was recently discovered to have an alternate host, the common ornamental barberry plant, on which the fungus sexually reproduces. The resulting genetic diversity of the fungus, set against the genetic uniformity of wheat, supplies the resilience that has made it so difficult to stamp out.

A warming world favors pathogens’ survival over winter, while shifting weather patterns can blow them into new territories. Human-mediated transport (trade and travel) clearly play a large role as well.

Whatever the drivers, these colliding trends of record-breaking weather / climate change and emerging plant diseases spell big trouble for global food security. In just the past month, wheat prices spiked 30%, due mostly to the Russian drought. Russia will still have enough for domestic needs, but higher prices are expected to drive up inflation, and there will be that much less for export. Stem rust primarily affects small farmers gowing for local consumption in the developing countries. Higher global commodity prices also translates into higher food aid costs.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient.

FURTHER READING

• “NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are the Warmest on Record,” NOAA data sheet (2010)

• “Climate Bill, R.I.P.” by Tom Wilkinson, Rolling Stone

• “Rust in the Bread Basket: A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas,” The Economist

• Al Gore’s Amazon books page
  

Growing Power, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Healthier food, better access for poor, landfill relief, reduced carbon footprint, off-the-shelf set up, replicable, scalable, jobs bonanza, includes fish; Can a “small food” paradigm succeed where Big Food has failed?

The next agricultural revolution will not be patented. It will not depend on genetically modified seeds or petrochemical fertilizers. It will not poison or deplete aquifers. It will not erode topsoil that took millennia to form. Nor will distance between “farm and fork” be measured in thousands of gas-guzzling miles.

The next agricultural revolution won’t even take place on the farm – at least as we know it.

It will be potted and stacked, set up in hoop houses and warehouses, sprout from rooftops, vacant lots and lawns. Worms will be celebrated, bacteria will flourish and grubs nurtured. It will be drought and flood resistant and productive all year long.

The next agricultural revolution will be street-smart and urban, yet mimic nature far more closely than agro-giant operations sprawled over hundreds or even thousands of monotonous monoculture acres.

Best of all, the next agricultural revolution is well underway, just 5 blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, off a busy street, behind an unassuming farm-stand surrounded by sunflowers basking in the brilliant light of a mid-September afternoon. Welcome to Growing Power.

BIG FOOD GONE BAD

“The Big Food system hasn’t fed the world,” says Will Allen, urban farmer, MacArthur genius, share-cropper’s son, former basketball star, former corporate marketer, vermicompost evangelist and CEO of Growing Power. He is speaking to a group of environmental lawyers who have spent an hour digging a ditch after 2 hours touring Growing Power’s flagship 3-acre farm. They are flushed and sweaty and hang on every word. Here at last is a genuine answer that could just turn things around, no legal briefs required.

According to UN statistics, over a billion people do not have enough to eat, with tens of millions more added to the tally each year. Even in the  U.S., an estimated 1 in 6 children – more than 12 million – are “food insecure.” A global recession, a series of increasingly severe droughts and floods (at least some likely driven or amplified by climate change), and competition for land between food and fuel crops have sent those living near the edge straight over it. Every 6 seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies from hunger or related causes.

Micronutrient malnutrition affects an estimated 2 billion people. One third of children in the developing world are vitamin A deficient, putting them at risk for blindness. Anemia from iron deficiency during pregnancy is linked to over 100,000 maternal deaths.

In the developed world, malnutrition is often masked by obesity. A diet of high-calorie, high-fat, fast food laced with high fructose corn syrup  is not only a nutritional catastrophe, but also ups the odds for developing diabetes, heart disease and other assorted ills. Cheap food comes at a high cost that the poor, more than anyone else, have had to pay.

Fast food joints and liquor stores dot the neighborhood around Growing Power, but  the nearest full-service grocery is several miles away. For all practical purposes, the neighborhood is a healthy food desert. American cities are rife with them.

Allen’s mission is to fill the gap: to bring fresh, healthy, affordable food to the urban poor, to green food deserts with greens…and eggs, honey, chickens, turkeys, ducks and fish. Lots of fish.

SMALL FOOD, BIG DIFFERENCE

The Growing Power greenhouse - intensive all-season farming generates between $5 and $30 per square foot (photo: Growing Power)

Walk through the door of  the small shabby-neat one-room  store – where a video of Allen extolling the wonders of worms plays on an old television perched on some equally vintage coolers stocked with a few cartons of eggs and miscellaneous produce – into the Growing Power greenhouses and you enter a world that makes such sense, the relief is palpable. It fairly hums with purpose.

Bounty beyond imagining bursts from a substrate of plywood, 2 x 4s, waterproof liners, pumps (some solar powered), pvc pipe, fluorescent grow lights and tens of thousands of plastic pots and seed trays. There is an order to the chaos, a rhythm and logic to the intertwining series of elegantly balanced ecosystems that together support over 150 varieties of vegetables, edible plants, poultry, a few goats and tens of thousands of fish.

So intensively is space used, each square foot generates between $5 and $30. That translates per acre between roughly $218,000 and a little more than $1.3 million, which is astonishing. By contrast, corn currently sells for about $3 per bushel. If you figure 200 bushels per acre – a bumper crop – that ‘s only $600. Comparing commodity grain crops to vegetables isn’t entirely fair: corn and wheat aren’t greenhouse-friendly. Still, this gives you some idea just how distorted and subsidy-addled the Big Food system has become. Factor in the cost of seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, machinery, land and labor and what’s really being raised is a bumper crop of debt.

Allen’s harvest is also healthier because it is fresher, with fewer nutrients literally lost in transit. Tomatoes, produced year-round at Growing Power, sell when naturally ripe. Supermarket tomatoes, however, are often picked green, then exposed to ethylene gas to make them ripen in time for delivery, which usually involves a long-haul truck or an international flight.

In a rather poetic twist, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted from Allen’s greenhouse food because delivery is local.

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Will Allen atop compost bounty: waste + worms + coir + time = fertile soil = everything (photo: Growing Power)

Fertile soil is key to the whole operation, so Growing Power makes its own. As much as 100 thousand pounds of food waste is collected weekly for composting – millions of pounds diverted from landfills annually.

Coir, eco-friendly coconut husk alternative to peat moss, is added to the compost mix to improve texture. An army of ravenous red wriggler worms do the rest. Seven or eight species chow down for a few months, releasing nutrients and leaving little gift trails of mucous that help soil retain water. As a measure of Growing Power’s growth over the last 15 years, the “starter” 30 pounds of worms has ballooned to 5,000 pounds. Their “castings” – staggering to imagine – are another crop, fertilizer gold bagged and sold for $4 per pound. The worms themselves, though, are priceless. To get a bucketful, you have to sign up for a workshop on their care and feeding, or otherwise prove yourself a fit parent: “…(W)e won’t give them to just anybody.”

Alchemy: From garbage to $4 per pound via worms

Compost bins are everywhere. Outside, a massive compost windrow has been piled against a greenhouse wall to provide a bonus geothermal harvest: insulation and heat. Even in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, when zero degrees looks like a warming trend, it is equator hot inside the mound and the party never stops. Feasting on 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of brewery waste each week (this is Milwaukee after all), these worms are so delighted (drunk?) with their lot in life, no thought of escaping into the wild ever seems to enter their tiny happy heads.

Good times.

FISH TALES

Systems thinking is, perhaps, Growing Power’s defining feature. This is biomimicry on a sweeping scale, with careful attention paid to the smallest details and profound delight taken from learning how to work within Nature’s symbiotic set-up.

If you shut your eyes, it is easy to imagine that the pervasive background burble is a stream in the woods and not water being pumped via pvc pipe from a 6-foot-deep, fish-filled trench called a raceway up onto shelves packed with plants several feet overhead. The plants – tomatoes,watercress, basil, among others – thrive on a diet of fish poop-enriched water, which they filter and drip back to the pond/raceway, fresh and clean.

Checking the fish crop at Growing Power

Aquaponics, a closed loop system for raising fish, herbs and vegetables, is so exquisitely balanced, water to top-off the tank only need be added occasionally.

Cold water lake perch and warm water tilapia swim among the greens at Growing Power. In the spirit of endless recycling, heat from the 85 degree tilapia water helps warm the greenhouses, while the fish nibble on plant waste. A moveable feast of floating papyrus – shades of the Fertile Delta – provide tilapia with a treat of tender roots in one of the above-ground set-ups.

Could soldier fly grubs help solve the global food crisis? Protein-rich feed for fish & poultry

Perch are omnivores, so also munch on home grown worms and commercial fish feed. One the dirtiest secrets of commercial aquaculture is the need to trawl wild waters for massive amounts of smaller fish to process into food for farmed fish, so Allen is experimenting with a more eco-friendly solution: raising protein-rich soldier fly grub. Cheap, prolific, and virtually without carbon footprint (no shipping), chickens like them, too.

The perch -  10,000 to a 10,000 gallon tank – not only grow 3 times as fast as their wild cousins in Lake Michigan a few miles east, but are also mercury-free.

TAKING ROOT & SCALING UP

Allen holds a shovel for the ceremonial photo-op, tosses some dirt into a wheelbarrow and darts off to get his own camera to document the lawyers as they set about their appointed volunteer task: Digging a trench 6 feet deep and 3 feet wide for a rain catchment system designed to harvest enough water to handle all the greenhouses’ needs.

The lawyers go at it with gusto, quickly discovering just how heavy dirt can be, gamely whittling their way down a foot or two. It’s not easy. But the real lesson they have learned this day is that it’s not that hard.

Will Allen’s agro-urban miracle, breathtaking in it depth and detail, can be easily replicated and scaled. The steps are straightforward and simple: Start with waste. Honor worms. Think in terms of systems. Study Nature. Then, as Candide eventually figured out, watch your garden grow.

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Imagine: You live in a third world slum, refugee camp or in an isolated village with marginal soil and an unpredictable water supply. A hoop house is set up, which takes about a day, perhaps with the help of an enterprising NGO. Vermicompost bins are built for food waste and a garbage collection program launched. An aquaponics system is set up, with fish below and plants above, powered by a solar pump using a car battery for electricity storage.

More waste, more soil. More soil, more plants. More plants, more fish. Water recycles, replenishes. Now repeat.

These are the real “Biosphere 2′s,” creating resilient little self-sufficient Edens exactly where they are needed most: right here on Biosphere 1.

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In the year since becoming a MacArthur fellow, Will Allen and Growing Power have been featured in everything from Oprah’s O magazine to the New York Times. His rousing call to arms for food justice was featured in the Sofia Joanes’ documentary, Fresh. He has become a popular speaker (appearing this October at both Bioneers by the Bay and  PopTech ’09 ).

What began as project for local teens on the last tiny bit of farmland in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s has blossomed  into a network of small farms and a suite of regional training centers. A steady stream of Ph.D.’s and would-be Ph.D’s, mostly  from the University of Wisconsin, bring a scientific rigor to the operation, measuring, documenting and providing technical assistance for a seemingly endless series of projects.

Big Food may have failed the world. Small, smart, savvy food may just save it. The urban agriculture revolution is alive and well and coming to a city near you.

Let’s eat!

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sidebar: FARM CITY

Although Growing Power now has an enthusiastic national as well as an international following, nowhere has its example been more joyously embraced than in its home city, Milwaukee. Located halfway between Madison, a college town with a hippy past and an obsession for farmers’ markets, and Chicago, all skyline and swagger, Milwaukee mixes a do-able human scale with a some big city flash (read: easier and cheaper to park, a knock-out lakefront and did you see that stunning Calatrava-designed museum?!) In short, it is a very good place for ideas to grow quietly out of the limelight, but with plenty of help and expertise nearby.

As Growing Power ramped up its food business – it now provides thousands of low-income families access to affordable, healthy, fresh food and has built up a robust restaurant / school / grocery store clientele – it also grew as an educational resource. Long before the term “open source” became popular, sharing information was an integral part of the urban agriculture ideal. If Big Food is defined by patents and monopolies, small food counters with choice, education and collaboration. Know-how is a yet another “crop” at Growing Power, packaged in videos and workshops (see schedule / more).

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Erik Lindberg, a carpenter by trade (Community Building and Restoration), signed up for a workshop a couple of years ago. If it didn’t change his life, it certainly changed his roof. His modest one-story building, next to an auto garage and across the street from a Goodwill and a Popeye’s Chicken, now has a double life as a farm. To be precise, a rooftop CSA (community supported agriculture), that provides 7 families with a serial supply of cabbages and carrots, potatoes and pickles, tomatoes, squashes, basil and beans 40 weeks a year. That’s no mean feat in a place where winter feels like it lasts 6 months, even though it’s only 5. But that’s the magic of a hoop house and raised beds.

Gretchen Mead's entire front yard is filled with flowers & vegetables

Gretchen Mead, whose Victory Garden Initiative promotes planting veggies early, often and wherever possible, including front lawns (hers had a particularly tasty crop of ground cherries this year), is a big fan of Lindberg’s. Last spring she rounded used kiddie pools for him to recycle as giant planters – perfect for patty pan squash. If you plant them, they will grow..

The first commercial scale up of Will Allen's aquaponics system

But  the most improbable of Milwaukee’s new farms, Sweet Water Organics, is located in a 6-acre industrial complex, next door to a steel rolling plant, three miles from downtown. Earlier this year, when a Dutch flower-bulb importer tenant was forced to downsize due to the recession, landlord Steve Lindner, another Growing Power graduate, found himself with a spare 11,000 sf. In the time it takes to say, “from tulips to tilapia,” raceway trenches were being excavated for the first commercial scale up of Allen’s aquaponics system (aquaponics has been around for some time, but Allen, with help from University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute, tweaked the design).

Soon worms were munching through small mountains of compost out back, while hundreds of pots filled with basil, watercress and sprouts were put in place under grow lights and tens of thousands of perch and tilapia fingerlings began swimming laps in their respective pools. Within 2 years, plans call for annual production of 100,000 fish, with revenue also coming in from herb sales, compost and worm casings.

Success is still a question mark and Lindner, along with his partners Josh Fraundorf and James Godsil – a Growing Power board member – are working closely with an array of University of Wisconsin aquaculture experts. Over $100,000 has been invested so far, but with perch going for as much as $7 per pound, tilapia for $4 and basil for $18, they’re hopeful.

A lot of people, including Will Allen, are watching closely. If Sweet Water works, it would be easy to replicate in other cities, redefining “industrial agriculture” while greening up the rust belt.

Over the last 50 years, a million farm jobs have been lost from consolidation and mechanization, Allen estimates, noting that the next generation of farmers likely won’t come from farms. Only 2% of the U.S. population still lives on farms and 40% of farmers are now in their mid-50s, staring at retirement. “I believe we can grow thousands of jobs creating this new food system,” he says.

So:

• Healthier food
• Accessible to everyone, poor and rich alike
• Reduced carbon footprint and reliance on petrochemicals
• Smarter waste recycling and water use
• Flexible and adaptable enough to work anywhere
• Better able to survive, recover and rebuild after a catastrophic weather event
• Comparatively inexpensive to set up; no patented seeds required
• Job creation

In a world stressed to its resource limits in so many ways, where merely managing to maintain status quo can feel like progress, Allen and the other urban farmers are pioneering a new promising path. By following Nature’s lead maybe, just maybe, we can get ourselves back to the garden.

First, though, we have to plant it.

(photo: Growing Power)

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MORE READING / VIEWING

Will Allen, MacArthur Fellow:

Growing Power blog & Will Allen’s post, “A Good Food Manifesto”

Video Tour of Growing Power: Vermicomposting:

Video Tour of Growing Power: Greenhouse Growing

Video Tour of Growing Power: Aquaponics

Aquaponics video, University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute:

“Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair article by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Seed Savers Exchange: non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds

“Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress,” USDA – Economic Research Service

“Investing in the Future: A United Call to Action on Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies,” UNICEF report

The Biomimicry Institute, founded by Janine Benyus

“AskNature: The Biomimicry Design Portal,” Brain Pickings article by Kirstin Butler

“Fresh”: clips from Sofia Jones’ documentary – Russ Kremer, Will Allen, Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan

“Fresh” trailer:

“Food, Inc” movie website

“Food, Inc” trailer (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser)

Colbert Report interview with Eric Schlosser, co-producer of “Food, Inc” and author of “Fast Food Nation”

Author Michael Pollan’s website: (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food”)

Urban Agriculture magazine (produced by the RUAF Foundation – Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security)

Urban Farm magazine

Oxfam report summary: "Even the Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling"

If no other statistic about climate change gives you pause, this one should: 1/4 of the world’s population – an estimated 1.4 billion people – rely on water from rivers that source in the Himalayas. As glaciers retreat, snow packs shrink and spring thaws occur earlier and earlier, the precious gift of a well-timed water supply is disappearing before our eyes. Instead, flooding torrents race down mountain streams too early in the spring for crops to use, followed by months of drought when the flows of once reliably mighty rivers slow to a trickle. If that weren’t misery enough, alpine lakes swollen from glacial melt threaten to break their banks, unleashing “Nepali tsunamis” officially called “GLOFs” (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods) that threaten to drown villages and fields and scour away topsoil.

Women, who do most of the water-fetching and firewood-gathering, are forced to walk further and further for essentials each day. Crop failures mean hunger and malnutrition.

Temperatures, like a seasoned sherpa hiking up Mount Everest, climb fast at higher elevations – as much as 8 times faster in the Himalayas than elsewhere on the planet over the last three decades. With warmer weather comes a raft of vector-borne diseases for which these cold-adapted communities have no defense.

Weak, sick, hungry, thirsty. So much for Shangri-La.

WHERE THE RIVERS NO LONGER RUN THROUGH IT

Downstream, as Newsweek’s Sharon Begley notes, “A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China.” Already, 20% of China has turned to desert. And the water table beneath India’s irrigation-dependent “breadbasket” has been so depleted, NASA satellites have been able to detect a change in earth’s gravitational field over the region.

It isn’t just the breadth of the water disaster that is so confounding, but the fact that it is accelerating. As worthy as the efforts by organizations and projects such as charity: water and Ripple Effect may be, it is hard to believe they can possibly make a dent when need is growing both exponentially and quickly. There is a great big climate change hole-in-the-bucket.

So fast is the change, “glacial pace” has had to be redefined. The Extreme Ice Survey, headed by photojournalist James Balog, set up dozens of time-lapse cameras to document glacial retreat in the northern hemisphere (95% of the glaciers outside of Antarctic are shrinking, with flow speeds doubling over the last 20 years). But even they were gobsmacked when a 1.8 cubic mile chunk – the size of 3,000 U.S. Capital buildings – calved off a glacier in Greenland in 75 minutes.

from TED Global:

PROSPERITY SHIPS OUT

Indeed, only the Russians seem to see a silver lining in the global meltdown: For the first time in at least 5,000 years, a Northeast passage has opened up, making it possible for ships traveling from Asia to Europe to bypass the Suez Canal – at least during the summer months. The Beluga Group, which sent two ships as a test this summer, boasts that not only does the route knock 10 days off the journey at a cost savings of nearly $300,000, but that using less fuel means lower CO2 emissions. The lucrative “Arctic Rush” is on and, golly, it’s green, too!

Trade and development are routinely cited by politicians as reasons not to take a more aggressive stance on curbing emissions. Fear of being perceived as standing in the way of progress and its twin, prosperity, has blinded them to stark and utterly inconvenient truth: If the world continues to heat up, there won’t be as much to trade (failing crops, chronically depressed economies) or as many people who can afford to buy. That may begin to change as big institutional investors, feeling increasingly insecure about climate-driven threats to their investments, start to make their financial clout felt. The medical establishment has also come on board, framing the climate change as the biggest public health threat ever.

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Climate change is a braid of the subtle and the profound. Warming air feeds winds that shift sea temperature cycles that change weather patterns. A monsoon misses its cue, or fails altogether. Landscapes parch, becoming fire fodder.

These tragic consequences are often “tipped” and amplified by land use changes that directly affect local climates. Expanding cities are expanding “heat islands,” while deforestation is a multi-category disaster. Lose the trees and you pretty much lose the game. It’s not just their talent for sequestering carbon. Their roots help funnel water to aquifers, while the transpiration – the evaporation of water from leaves – cools the air and provides moisture for rain clouds. Sea breezes blowing over a coastal forest can inland can push moisture inland, so clear-cut the forest and you could trigger a drought hundreds of miles away.

In both Mexico and Kenya, logging, legal and otherwise, have increased vulnerability to droughts, which are becoming more frequent and devastating. Hippos now bask in roadside puddles in Kenya, while water trucks are routinely hijacked in Mexico City. Dead livestock spells the end of a way of life for African nomads, while stunted crops bring debt to Mexican farmers and higher food prices to everyone else.

We know better. Or, more accurately, we have the collective knowledge to do better. The question is whether we have the collective will.

If not…

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MORE READING/VIEWING

“Copenhagen Climate Summit Heat: from business to condoms” by Peter Casier – The Road to the Horizon round-up of issues & article links

“Study of 16 developing countries shows climate change could deepen poverty”: (press release overview / abstract & author links)

“Managing the health effects of climate change”: Lancet / University College London report on public health implications of climate change (free registration required)

The Not Stupid Campaign : from the creators of film, “The Age of Stupid”

“China’s Growing Sands” by Sean Gallagher: slide show produced for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (HT Peter Casier)

The Central Park Conservancy faces months of clean-up and hundreds of thousands of dollars in clean-up costs to repair the damage caused by an unusually fierce storm on August 18. Donations welcome. (photo: Tony Yang)

Making a right from two wrongs; For the love of a park; Inspiration from Aldo Leopold, MLB-branded grass & Neopets; Cyber-seedlings & fundraising; “You had me at orangutan”

By all accounts the storm that hit New York’s Central Park last week didn’t last very long, but the devastation was breathtaking. In a matter of minutes, winds approaching hurricane-strength flattened hundreds of old beloved trees and damaged hundreds more. With roots in the air and limbs askew, and the dead and wounded strewn everywhere, the soft green heart of this hard gray city had taken a direct hit. The days that followed were filled with the cracking of ripped timber, the whine of power saws and the relentless buzz of wood-chippers. Grass will grow where giants once stood. Sunlight will filter down to the urban forest floor for the first time in years. New trees will be planted. And in a few decades, incredibly, no one will be the wiser.

Central Park, after all, was never the forest primeval. Still, there is something sacred about old trees – even if their age is measured in decades rather than centuries, and their arrangement determined by a landscape architect. They grew up with us, or we with them. In a place of constant change they are, simply, constant. If trees can be so easily uprooted, what chance have we? It is unnerving to see how shallow and vulnerable a tall tree’s roots really are.

Although I live in Chicago, I visit New York several times a year and have come to know the Park well enough to have my favorite places. I know Spring has finally arrived when flocks of birders at the Ramble start comparing notes on who’s returned and set up nests, while flocks of Japanese brides/grooms/photographers start flitting to scenic spots to set up Wedding Pictures. In  summer, it’s bicycles, drumming circles, reading on a shady rock, serenaded by an old man playing un-hummable but delicious melodies on a one-stringed Chinese instrument. Fall is filled with the smell and crunch of leaves, walking down the promenade near the statue of Christopher Columbus. And Winter – if I am lucky enough to be marooned by a LaGuardia-closing blizzard – is a trip to the Museum of Natural History for some fossils and stars, followed by a few quick snow angels in the Park.

Always, there are the trees. Budding, shady, raining seeds, etched with a white filigree sparkle.

According to the Central Park Conservancy, the tab for clean up and replanting will easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (donations welcome). The true cost –  lost views, lost homes (nests & burrows) and lost familiarity — is incalculable.

THE TREES WE KNOW & THE TREES WE ONLY KNOW OF

We will do whatever it takes to save the trees we know and love. But in the time it took the storm to turn the Park into a leafy war zone, several thousand trees were intentionally shredded in rain forests around the world.

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  "Borneo's Moment of Truth" / National Geographic

  In Brazil,  nearly 3 million acres destroyed by illegal logging, soy farming, cattle ranching, road-building and mining between 2007 and 2008, according to Greenpeace. Although the rate of destruction appears to be slowing, it is a tenuous triumph at best.

• In Congo, plans are in the works to turn a  staggering one million hectares (2.47 million acres)  into a palm oil plantation, which environmentalists term nothing short of a “biodiversity disaster.”

• In Borneo and Sumatra, the destruction of rain forest, mostly for palm oil plantations, has not only been devastating to wildlife (most famously, orangutans), but has made the land more vulnerable to fire.

The loss of even 1,000 trees in the middle of Manhattan is unlikely to have much of an impact on the city’s “urban heat island,” but the loss of massive swaths of CO2-absorbing, biodiversity-critical, moisture-recycling rain forest will help heat up the whole planet. It can even be argued that without the rain forests, the outlook for New York’s urban forest is fraught. A warmed world could mean more intense storms, droughts and the faster spread of tree disease-carrying insects (warmer winters mean fewer bugs die off).

As I read about the clean-up in New York, I began to wonder whether there might be a way to weave these two tales of arboreal tragedy into an opportunity.

WHAT WOULD ALDO DO? / FINDING “LEGACY” IN RECYCLING

If your path has not crossed Aldo Leopold’s yet, the time has come. Leopold is best known as the author a “A Sand County Almanac an Sketches Here and There,” in which he argues for a “land ethic” that acknowledges and values what Nature provides. Along with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Leopold’s book, published in 1949, shortly after his death, helped lay the philosophical foundations for ecology.

The “Sand County” in title refers to a piece of worn out Dust Bowl-era farmland he bought an hour’s drive north of Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a professor of forestry at the university. With in the help of his wife, five children and a nearly endless supply of pine seedlings (Leopold also founded one of the country’s first arboretums at UW), he set about testing his ideas for healing and restoring land. Year after year, the Family Leopold planted thousands of trees. Many were lost to drought, but they kept trying.

Today, hiking through the 200+ acres of what is now The Aldo Leopold Foundation, giant pines tower overhead. Ironically, too many trees survived, weakening the forest in the competition for limited resources.  In 2003, a selective harvest was organized to help the forest become more resilient to drought, disease and insects.

Logs were dried, stripped, cut into lumber and used to build a LEED Platinum “Legacy Center,” for educational programs, retreats and small conferences (the building was awarded 61 out of a possible 69 points, for those who keep score).

TREES FOR TREES

Unfortunately, Central Park trees cannot be turned to into lumber for fear of spreading insect pests (Asian long-horned beetles & emerald ash borers). Even cords of firewood are out the question. The only option: chipping logs for in situ mulch.

But there is still a way to create a legacy of hope a la the Leopold Foundation. 

If Major League Baseball can license and sell ballpark grass seed and turf, surely Central Park can sell branded tree seedlings at a premium. Now take the legacy global: For every dollar that goes to Central Park, ring up two dollars for rain forest projects. Call it “Trees for Trees.”  The Central Park Zoo could mount a biodiversity exhibit, connecting the dots between animals on display and the dire straits their wild kin face from habitat loss. Perhaps a “Tree Story” show at the Museum of Natural History. Or a website with virtual seedlings that can be “watered” and tended to,  just like Neopets. Buy a cyber-seedling and be part of a Facebook Forest or Twitter Trees…

No doubt there are many other, better ideas out there, but you get the drift. Sometimes two wrongs actually can make a right. Actually a lot of rights: Mend the Park. Repair the rain forest. Help the planet. And while we’re at it: Clean the watershed. Stabilize hillside erosion. Scrub the air. Reduce farm fertilizer run-off. Provide wildlife habitat. Give migrating birds a home to go home to…

So, consider this a call to arms for green-minded marketers: How can we actually make this happen?

YOU HAD ME AT “ORANGUTAN”

There is, of course, no shortage of worthy reforestation projects around the world in desperate need of support. But as long as I have the floor, I nominate Willie Smits’ work in Borneo to start. The projects are comprehensive and practical, a deft mix of tech, cutting edge biology, social entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship (TED talk):

In July, Smits gave another, longer talk at the ESRI Users’ Conference, detailing the use of GIS mapping to monitor deforestation to track down illegal logging operations and for selecting the best sites for reforestation:

Willie Smits' keynote address at the 2009 ESRI User's Conference

Smits’ ideas have been proven in the field and offer genuine hope that there may yet be a way to turn things around.

Imagine that.

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MORE READING

How to Plant & Mulch a Tree – from City Trees: The City of Chicago’s Guide to Urban Tree Care

Orangutan Outreach: website for the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the largest primate rescue project in the world – also information on deforestation, palm oil plantations, habitat loss and what you can do to help.

China: wheat crop failure

It is a one-size-fits-all news story, good for almost any part of the world right now: Cue the video to a farmer standing in a field of parched and stunted plants. Then cut to b-roll of cattle carcasses dotting the landscape, rivers barely trickling, reservoirs sinking fast and caked mud at the bottom of village wells. Under unrelentingly cheerful skies, tell a tale of thirst, hunger, devastation and death.

Kenya: 2 years, no rain

A drought is a stealth disaster. There are no headline-grabbing satellite images of hurricane swirls, no “iReporter” videos of towns blown apart by tornados, no families perched on roofs desperate to escape rising floodwaters, no photographs of cities buried under snow. A drought has a different, much slower rhythm. The signs — a warming ocean, a shift in the wind — are subtle. But the effects can reverberate across continents, last for years, even decades, and spare nothing in its path.

Argentina: dying cattle

Like recessions, droughts are declared official well after serious damage has already been done. It takes time for a patch of pleasant sunny weather to morph into a severe drought. And although scientists have become better at interpreting data for predictions (reading teak rings in Indonesia), options for prevention remain pretty much non-existent. Whether or not man-made climate change is at least in part responsible for the current spike in droughts — as many suspect — the odds of man changing the climate back any time soon are pretty slim.

Taking more of an address-the-symptom-never-mind-the-cause approach, the Chinese bullied a few inches of snow to fall in Beijing by assaulting the heavens with a barrage of  silver iodide-loaded cloud-seeding missiles. But beyond a brief uptick in the number of  tourists at the Great Wall and a little frosty fun in the city, not much changed.

Australia: the "big dry"

Meanwhile, the best plan to prepare for lean harvests remains the old biblical stand-by of stashing away surplus reserves from good harvests. But what do you do when global grain stores are running low and almost every “bread basket” farming region in the world is buckling under the same wilting weather report?

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• Australia: Roughly 40% of the harvest, including $13.5 in exports sold mostly to Asia and the Middle-East, comes from the drought-plagued Murray Darling basin. Irrigated crops such as rice and grapes have been particularly had hit, but even native eucalyptus trees have taken a hit, with a staggering 80% stressed or dead. Water reserves are at just 16% of capacity. To make matters worse, algae are blooming and fish are dying in the warmth of shallower waters.

• The Middle-East: Australia’s bleak harvest is especially bad news here since the region is reeling under its own extreme drought. Annual rainfall totals in Jordan are down over 70%, while Israel experiencing its hottest, driest winter in 60 years. In Iraq, the marshlands of Garden of Eden and Marsh Arab fame are drying up. Water wars are heating up in comparatively moist Lebanon, exacerbated by out-of-date irrigation systems and a growing population. Everything is that much worse in the West Bank and Gaza with the Palestine Water Authority calling the situation “dangerous.”

• California: The recent decision by the federal government to turn off the spigot, at least temporarily, to irrigate the state’s Central Valley farms may have been inevitable, but it didn’t make the damage any easier to take: $2 billion in losses, 850,000 acres out of production, as many as 80,000 jobs lost. Although recent heavy rains helped, the problem is deeper. Or higher. The snowpack that feeds the streams that feed the Colorado river that supplies irrigation water is down by 40%. Ironically, the rains could make things worse, leading a burst of plant growth that will dry out just in time for fire season. In the meantime, sky-high alfalfa prices are threatening the entire dairy industry. Farmers, faced with losing money on every cow, are now sending them to the slaughterhouse instead of the milking barn, while horses, sometimes by the herd, are simply being abandoned by their owners. Elsewhere, Texas is toast and Florida’s looking pretty crispy.

• Kenya & Somalia: According to the World Food Program, 10 million people in Kenya are in urgent need of food aid. The impact of drought has been magnified by political violence and a fractured infrastructure. People are being forced to walk further and further – at great personal risk – simply to get water. It hasn’t rained in two years, the maize harvest is a complete bust and what little ground cover has managed to grow isn’t enough to support livestock. Just over the border in Somalia, the situation is just as dire. Families by the thousands are pouring into urban areas desperate for help. Meanwhile, some aid organizations have reportedly left the area due to fighting between Islamists and pro-government forces.

• Afghanistan: Drought has added yet another layer of complication to an already volatile situation. Taliban fighters in Pakistan routinely attack the Khyber Pass, which is used by the aid workers as well as military convoys to deliver supplies.

• Argentina: Rains have finally come to Argentina, but as in California, it may be too little, too late for many. The worst drought in a half-century has devastated this year’s corn crop, with yields down more than third from last year. An estimated 1.5 million cattle have been died. The  economic tally? Over $5 billion.

• Northern India: The state of  Uttarakhand is almost entirely dependent on rainfall and snow melt  for farming and lately there hasn’t been much. Warmer temperatures has also caused mustard, a key crop, to flower prematurely, reducing yields.

• China: A massive 240 million-acre drought, the worst in 50 years, has left an estimated 4.4 million people and 2 million livestock literally high and dry. Rainfall in some areas is less than 10% of normal totals, threatening half the wheat crop. And due to the global recession, factories in the cities have shut down, leaving an estimated 20 million migrant farm workers with nowhere else to go. Ironically, the water shortage may have been exacerbated by China’s extensive reservoir system, which has diverted water from underground aquifers and increased surface evaporation.

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