Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

By | |
Comments Off on Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Longhorn beef cattle made Texas, as the statue suggests, and are killing Plainview, Texas, where the statue is located. Whose fault is it? (Photo by Brykmantra/Flickr)

Longhorn beef cattle made Texas, as the statue suggests, and are killing Plainview, Texas, where the statue is located. Whose fault is it? (Photo by Brykmantra/Flickr)

An all-time favorite movie line (The Missouri Breaks), uttered by Jack Nicholson leaning over Marlon Brando, who is starting up from sleep: “Do you know why you woke up? I just cut your throat.” That is the way Plainview, Texas, woke up the other day to some bitter truths, and a shortened life. The food industry giant Cargill on February 1 closed the Plainview beef processing plant that employed 2,300 people, ten per cent of the town’s entire population, representing nearly half the town’s families. The exodus from Plainview (Jimmy Dean’s hometown) has begun, and the town will probably soon be a ghost. But who, exactly, cut its throat?

Continue reading →

Farmers Renounce Industrial Methods, Get World-Record Yields

By | |
1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

This is how you set world records for growing rice in rural India -- no machines, no GM seeds, no chemicals. (Photo by yogendra174/Flickr)

This is how you set world records for growing rice in rural India — no machines, no GM seeds, no chemicals. (Photo by yogendra174/Flickr)

The grotesquely misnamed “Green Revolution” that since the 1960s has been replacing traditional farming around the world with genetically modified, mechanized, chemical-intensive, debt-ridden industrial agriculture has worked so well in India that a quarter of a million farmers there have committed suicide in 16 years. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice calls it “the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history.” Now a group of small-plot farmers in Northeast India has rejected every tenet of modern industrial agriculture, and has stunned the world with unprecedented yields. Continue reading →

Math Unmasks Oil and Gas Boom as Bubble

By | |
1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

a natural gas well using hydraulic fracturing

In the midst of a natural gas “boom,” fracking rigs like this are fast becoming an endangered species. The reason? Mathematics.

There are three kinds of people in this world: the kind who understand mathematics, and the kind who don’t (Irony alert). You can find the latter buying lottery tickets, leaning over casino tables and conducting news conferences about the new American oil boom.  It has become conventional wisdom (oxymoron alert), an assertion not even worthy of discussion by Serious People, that the United States is, as an NPR program host said offhandedly the other day,  “on its way to energy independence.” Here’s what mathematics has to say about this titanic (metaphor alert) scam. Continue reading →

The Tea Party and the Propagation of the Fakes

By | |
Comments Off on The Tea Party and the Propagation of the Fakes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Home page of a Tea Party website put up by a Koch-funded group seven years before the movement took fire.

Home page of a Tea Party website put up by a Koch-funded group SEVEN YEARS before the movement took fire.

Everyone knows that the Tea Party was a spontaneous, populist uprising of ordinary Americans who were fed up with taxes and regulation and who, without national leadership or direction, created in 2009 a potent national force dedicated to “taking the country back.” According to a new academic study of the Tea Party’s origins, what everybody knows is wrong.

Of course, the Tea Party’s Creation Myth has never rung true to anyone with a passing familiarity with what it takes to organize a family reunion, let alone a national movement. Where did all those busses come from, we wondered as the plain people gathered in their thousands to demand the government keep its hands off their Medicare. Where did the money come from for all those professionally printed signs and the goofy hats?  To rent those enormous and expensive venues for populist rage? Continue reading →

USDA Report Foresees Collapse of Agriculture

By | |
4 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Drought-stressed corn, maybe also toxic, bug-bit and weed-plagued, in Kentucky last week. (Photo by CraneStation/Flickr)

Drought-stressed corn, maybe also toxic, bug-bit and weed-plagued, in Kentucky last summer. (Photo by CraneStation/Flickr)

A new US Department of Agriculture report looking only at the threat of climate change implies that industrial agriculture will be on its knees in 25 years. “We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.” Ever the cheerleader for industrial agriculture, the USDA insists that corporate farmers will be fine for a couple dozen years as long as they increase irrigation, use genetically modified, drought-resistant seeds — and move. Continue reading →

Rooftop Solar Revered in India and Australia, Still Reviled in US

By | |
1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

solar on roofIndia and Australia are embracing distributed — which is to say personal, rooftop — solar power as a major source of electricity that is both renewable and much closer to sustainable than wind or solar “farms.” [See Solar “Farms” Keep us in the Dark] The United States, meanwhile, continues to focus on massive projects stitched onto the aging grid, causing massive problems for the environment and for grid management. Continue reading →

Industrial Agriculture Losing Ground Faster

By | |
4 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

After Tropical Storm Lee in September, 2011, topsoil stripped from the farms of the Northeast flows down the Susquehanna River into the Chesapeake Bay. (NASA/Goddard photo.)

After Tropical Storm Lee in September, 2011, topsoil stripped from the farms of the Northeast (the brown stuff) flows down the Susquehanna River into the Chesapeake Bay. (NASA/Goddard photo.)

A new study out of Iowa State University confirms that industrial agriculture (please don’t call it farming) continues to squander the precious topsoil on which its existence — and ours — depends. This is a problem that has nothing to do with global climate change, or peak oil, but that may hit us all harder and sooner than either. The bad news in the study is that the losses of topsoil are stunningly large. The other bad news is that they are getting worse, despite billions of dollars’ worth of “conservation” efforts. There is no good news. Continue reading →

Aquifer Pollution: Out of Our Sight, Out of Our Minds

By | |
1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Throughout human history, poisoning a well has been the foulest crime. Now it is approved by the EPA. (Photo by Kashif Mardari/Flickr)

Throughout human history, poisoning a well has been the foulest crime. Now it is approved by the EPA. (Photo by Kashif Mardari/Flickr)

One of the core ideas here at the Daily Impact is that industry, while pursuing profits (economies of scale), simultaneously concentrates risk. What industry has to do, then, is keep us focused on its quick payoffs (We’re job creators! We help the economy!) and distracted from the long term dangers posed by, for example, pollution. As our waters have increasingly been poisoned, our air relentlessly made more noxious, our very climate changed and our land made barren, getting the crap out of sight has become more and more difficult. But necessity is a mother, and it has borne  a new invention.

 

 

Continue reading →

Renowned Scientist Says Global Collapse “Likely”

By | |
7 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

(graph by net_efekt/flickr)

(graph by net_efekt/flickr)

According to a paper appearing in the March Proceedings of the Royal Society, “Now, for the first time, a global collapse [of civilization] appears likely.” The paper makes, in a scholarly, peer-reviewed manner, many of the same points about the existential threats that I made in my book Brace for Impact:Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age. According to Paul R. Ehrlich’s paper, titled “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” the threats include  toxic pollution, land degradation, scarcity of water and oil, plagues, resource wars (perhaps nuclear), over-consumption, overpopulation and the overarching threat multiplier, climate change.

Continue reading →

Microbes Winning War on Terra

By | |
2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A bloom of deadly aspergillus on a cup of coffee. There was a misunderstanding: it likes its surroundings hot and dry, not hot and black. (Photo by Albertstraub)

A bloom of deadly aspergillus on a cup of coffee. There was a misunderstanding: it likes its surroundings hot and dry, not hot and black. (Photo by Albertstraub)

While maximizing its profits, industrial agriculture has unleashed many deadly, slow-gathering threats on humanity. The downsides of mechanistic, chemically intensive (and now, genetically mutilated) food manufacture (please don’t call it “farming”) — air pollution, water pollution, loss of topsoil, food contamination — have become relatively well known, if not much discussed or dealt with. Now it is becoming obvious that mono-culture and animal crowding have set loose a new set of killers — a lethal fungus and a set of deadly bacteria — that no one seems to know how to stop.

Continue reading →