Minnesota’s Threatened Rivers

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Author: Josephine Marcotty | Published: 

PARK RAPIDS, MINN. – The mating dance of the hex mayflies drew John Sorenson to the Straight River at sunset.

As the bugs floated like snowflakes in the fading summer light, he pulled on his waders and waited patiently for the distinct sound of trout breaking the dark water to feed.

“It’s a treasure,” he said, stepping to the edge of the grassy bank and casting his line, as he has for years.

But the Straight River is becoming warmer and more polluted as farm irrigation rigs multiply along its banks. Now Sorenson fears that the fish huddling in the cooler deep spots are a stark sign that northern Minnesota’s only naturally producing trout stream is in trouble.

“In 10 years the Straight River could be a big muddy stream good only for carp,” he said.

And the peril is flowing downstream — into the Mississippi River and across a watershed that covers almost half of Minnesota, signaling a new and rising threat to one of the state’s great natural wonders. Like many others across Minnesota, the great river is heading toward an ecological precipice.

In the last five years, the Upper Mississippi watershed has lost about 400 square miles of forests, marshes and grasslands — natural features that cleanse and refresh its water — to agriculture and urban development. That’s an area bigger than Voyageurs National Park and represents the second fastest rate of land conversion in the country, according to one national study.

That breathtaking transformation is now endangering the cleanest stretch of America’s greatest river with farm chemicals, depleted groundwater and urban runoff. At this rate, conservationists warn, the Upper Mississippi — a recreational jewel and the source of drinking water for millions of Minnesotans — could become just another polluted river.

Here, around Park Rapids, potato fields are replacing forests, and drinking wells show rising levels of nitrate contamination from fertilizers.

Along the western edge of the vast watershed, soaring demand for irrigation is depleting sensitive aquifers and rivers that feed the Mississippi

And where the Upper Mississippi curves like a giant question mark through the center of Minnesota, many of its tributaries are showing signs of stress — phosphorus that breeds algae, sediment that makes the water cloudy, even bacteria in stretches farther downstream.

“What we do to our land, we do to our water,” said John Linc Stine, commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Yet because most land use decisions are in the hands of private property owners and local governments, Minnesota has limited power to protect the river. “We can see it coming and still not be able to do something about it,” Stine said.

The battles over land use along the great sweep of brown river go beyond drinking water, to deeply held values that give the headwaters state part of its identity, said Bonnie Keeler, an environmental scientist at the University of Minnesota.

“Like clear lakes, stewardship, a sense of place and pride, and the identity of Minnesotans around clean water,” she said.

Quite beyond their sheer beauty, forested lands in the watershed also provide immense economic value in purifying drinking water for millions of people, an issue that has drawn the attention of federal regulators. This past summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched a special project to predict how changing land use around the Upper Mississippi affects water quality, part of a larger effort to understand the threats facing major drinking water systems across the country.

Keeler, who directs the Natural Capital Project at the university and studies the social value of such things as clean water and forests, said it’s hard to find the right balance between protecting the Upper Mississippi and preserving economic engines such as agriculture and tourism. But, she added, the debate has thrust a new kind of environmental thinking to the forefront: Clean water, natural landscapes and wilderness have an economic value that deserves a place in the broader equation that defines a healthy economy.

In short, Keeler said, “What would a map of an ideal watershed look like?”

KEEP READING ON STARTRIBUNE

Producing Food and Capturing Carbon

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Author: rty Mangan | Published: 

An interview with Ariel Greenwood, a “feral agrarian” and grazer who manages a herd of cattle while restoring ecosystems.

Describe where you work.

I live and work on a 3,000-acre research preserve in the inter-coastal Mayacamas mountain range region of Sonoma County. Pepperwood has around 1,000 acres of open grassland, another several hundred of mixed oak woodland mosaic, deciduous and evergreen, and some serpentine outcropping, and then some dense dark woodlands. We actually have, I think, the eastern most stand of redwoods in the County. There’s a lot of bay trees and scrubby chaparral too in its own natural state. It’s a really breathtaking and in many ways really challenging landscape.

Pepperwood is a private operating research and ecological preserve. Really, every aspect from the vegetation to the soil to the broader watershed, and then even more largely the climate that we’re situated in is monitored and researched here with staff and other visiting researchers, so it’s very much a progressive conservation-oriented place. This is considered quite a robust eco-tone, the meeting of several different environments.

How does holistic management differ from conventional thinking and methodology?

It’s a broad question, because holistic management is a pretty broad comprehensive platform. But essentially holistic management is a way of managing complexity; it emerged from Allan Savory who is a Zimbabwean biologist and researcher in Africa as a way to attend to some of the problems that were plaguing ranches and grassland preserves in that area. What he found was that while people may profess to have certain values, we often do not manage our projects or ourselves in a way to actually honor those values and those goals.

Here, what that means for our planned grazing is that we regularly compare notes with the preserve about what its goals are in grazing. I graze for a company called Holistic Ag. We are a separate entity from Pepperwood, but we are essentially operating their conservation grazing program. The goal of that program is to steward grasslands, and that looks like many different things, but it’s all predicated on the notion that grasslands need grazing in order to stay healthy. So the grazing here is intended to mitigate the spread of invasive exotic annual grasses and other species. It’s intended to propagate and revitalize native bunchgrasses like Stipa pulchra. It’s intended to improve soil condition and water holding capacity, to mitigate the spread of coyote brush, which in turn mitigates the spread of Douglas fir.

Holistic Ag, of course, has its own goals on top of that. The herd was formed as an ecosystems services company, but because we are doing this with domestic cattle and have to be able to pay for the expense of doing so, we produce and sell beef, which I market under my own brand, Circle A Beef. That means we have to keep our animals healthy. There’s that added layer of complexity, but all of that is intended to be harmonized with the outstanding ecological goal of the place.

So, holistic management allows us to discover those goals, articulate those goals, and then test our decisions against those goals. A really important principle I find very hard to practice, but nonetheless very important in holistic management, is this idea that you’re supposed to assume that you are wrong, so you are actually looking for evidence that you’re right rather than assuming you’re right and, as it often turns out, avoiding evidence that you are wrong.

Because it’s so complex here in California, especially in the Mayacamas, and because we are in not only seasonally dry and wet areas, but pretty significant hills, just moving cattle sensitively across the landscape is another layer of complexity.

Holistic management is just a way to check all of our decisions and make sure they are in keeping with our actual goals. I find that if we didn’t have goals, it would be so easy to drift from our mission. Holistic management puts ecology on the forefront. That is one thing that is kind of non-negotiable with holistic management, whether it is managing a company, a ranch, or a research preserve, or all of those combined. The idea is that if you are managing for the whole, you can’t externalize costs, and the most easily externalized cost is the environmental cost. Social cost is often pretty invisible too.

KEEP READING ON BIONEERS

Can Agroecology Feed the World and Save the Planet?

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Author:Henrietta Moore | Published on: October 9, 2016

You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but right now Africa is facing a food crisis. With Brexit, global terror attacks, the war in Syria and the seemingly endless string of sporting fixtures vying for our collective attention in 2016 so far, the fact that up to 50 million people across east and Southern Africaare at risk of hunger seems to have largely escaped mention.

The continent has been wracked by drought following one of the strongest ever El Niños. And while a natural phenomenon is the immediate cause, however, Africa’s food security has been undermined over recent decades by the rise of monocropping – the planting of single-crop tracts across vast swathes of scarce arable land.

Starting in the 1960s, the “green revolution” saw industrial farming practices transplanted to poorer nations. In the second half of the 20th century, its success seemed unassailable: the global harvest of maize, wheat and rice trebled from 640 million tonnes in 1961 to almost 1.8 billion tonnes by 2000.

Africa, in particular, embraced new maize varieties with alacrity. Corn now covers up to 70% of some African nations’ farmland and accounts for about 50% of calories consumed by humans.

But the enormous cost to the land and people is now becoming clear. A recent report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) summed up the problem bluntly, stating: “Past agricultural performance is not indicative of future returns”.

The meticulously-researched document concludes that the green revolution’s “quantum leap” in cereal production has come at the price of soil degradation, salinisation of irrigated areas, over-extraction of groundwater and the build-up of pest resistance. Add climate change into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. While Africa’s population is set to double to 2.4 billion by 2050, the FAO warns that maize yields could fall by nearly 20% over that period.

The problem is affecting not just quantity, but quality. Lack of rotation and over-use of phosphates and nitrates has degraded the nutrient content of the soil, leaving 2 billion people globally suffering micronutrient malnutrition, many in sub-Saharan Africa.

KEEP READING ON ECO WATCH

How Crop Waste Can Give It Back to Soil and Keep the Air Clean Too

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Author:  | Published on: October 10, 2016

NEW DELHI: US-based Brian Von Herzen and his team at Climate Foundation India believe that agricultural waste can be processed into not just something useful for farmers but also enrich the soil by putting back carbon into it.

Paddy straw and wheat residues are usually burned by farmers in Punjab and Haryana in the absence of affordable alternatives to dispose them of. Every year, in November and February , burning of agricultural res idue in these states causes severe air pollution in Delhi.

According to Climate Foundation India’s proposal for the Urban Labs Innovation Challenge, nearly 60 mega tonnes of rice straw is burnt openly annually . Haryana and Punjab comprise 48% of total emissions due to rice straw burning across India. “During the months rice straw is burned, PM 2.5 (fine, respirable pollution particles) levels commonly exceed 400 parts per million,” it said.

The team at Climate Foundation India proposes to make biochar out of the agricultural residue instead. Inspired by scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which explained how the soil can act as an effective sink for greenhouse gases, Brian’s team developed a “charvester”-an equipment that harvests grain and cuts the straw at the same time.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN

Historic International Monsanto Tribunal Begins in The Hague

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Opening Press Conference, People’s Assembly Mark First of Three-Day Event to Expose Monsanto’s Crimes

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 14, 2016

Contact:
U.S.: Katherine Paul, katherine@organicconsumers.org, 207-653-3090Netherlands: Tjerk Dalhuisen,, tjerk@monsanto-tribunal.org, +31614699126
Mexico, Latin America: Ercilia Sahores, ercilia@regenerationinternational.org, (55) 6257 7901  

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—The organizers of the International Monsanto Tribunal and People’s Assembly addressed international journalists today at an opening press conference preceding today’s People’s Assembly and the October 15-16 Tribunal.

“If global governments and courts won’t rein in Monsanto and hold it accountable for its crimes, the people will,” said Ronnie Cummins, international director of the Organic Consumers Association and member of the Tribunal organizing committee. “Monsanto’s toxic products, toxic commodities and toxic monocultures are destroying human health and our soils, without which life on Earth is unsustainable.”

“A patent of life and on seeds is a crime against farmers who are trapped in debt for costly patented seed,” said Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya and member of the Tribunal organizing committee. “It is also a crime against nature. The claim that by adding a gene Monsanto is ‘making’ life violates the self-organizing, self-renewing capacity of seed. The crime is further aggravated by destroying biodiversity, and spreading genetic pollution through the introduction of GMOs.”

The People’s Assembly will conclude on October 16, World Food Day, with a global citizens pledge to transition to a healthy and regenerative, and socially and economically just and democratic global food and farming system.

The Monsanto Tribunal, supported by more than 1000 organizations worldwide, is an international civil society initiative to examine Monsanto’s accountability for human rights violations, for crimes against humanity, and for ecocide. Eminent judges will hear testimonies from victims, and deliver an advisory opinion following procedures of the International Court of Justice. The People’s Assembly provides opportunity for social movements to rally and plan for an alternative future.

Organizing groups behind the Monsanto Tribunal include the Organic Consumers Association, Navdanya, IFOAM Organics International, the Biovision Foundation and Regeneration International.

Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association, is building a global network of farmers, scientists, businesses, activists, educators, journalists, governments and consumers who will promote and put into practice regenerative agriculture and land-use practices that: provide abundant, nutritious food; revive local economies; rebuild soil fertility and biodiversity; and restore climate stability by returning carbon to the soil, through the natural process of photosynthesis. 

Bill Mollison Obituary

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Author: Matt Dunwell | Published on: October 10, 2016

Bill Mollison, who has died aged 88, was one of the co-creators of permaculture, an agricultural system that works with, rather than against, nature, on the basis that the natural world holds the key to stable and productive systems. Having developed the concept, he then travelled from his native Tasmania for 30 years to embed his approach worldwide. His ideas have spread widely – permaculture is practiced in more than 140 countries and by more than 3 million people – even though in the 1970s the idea was considered, in Mollison’s words, “the highest form of sedition”.

Much of what he espoused was based on his great respect for the wisdom of subsistence farmers around the world, who have long used sustainable methods to grow their crops. In agricultural terms, this means planting diverse sets of crops, using perennial species to form productive stable systems, and ensuring the conditions for soils to be regenerated.
Other characteristics that he observed in the Tasmanian wilderness informed permaculture, for instance that the interfaces between different habitats are the most productive and that elements such as plants and animals need to be placed together so they are mutually beneficial – as once when he pointed out: “You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency!”

Mollison pointed to further beneficial ecological consequences: “The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out 70. A modern farmer who drives a tractor through the gate takes 1,000 units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturalist?” He held that “although the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple”. Ecological systems would enable people to meet their own needs, take back control of their lives and reinforce nature rather than deplete it.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN  

Carbon Cache

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Author: Ginger Strand | Published on: October 2016

Near a bank of windows overlooking the mighty Klamath River, Yurok tribal leader Susan Masten proudly displays photo after photo of intricate Yurok baskets and ceremonial caps, part of a cache of priceless cultural artifacts the California tribe has recently reclaimed. Assembled over decades by a non-Yurok art collector, the collection had a hefty price tag. But thanks to income from the innovative forest carbon offset program that The Nature Conservancy helped develop in California, the Yuroks were able to bring these treasures home in 2014.

“It’s as if you could hear them saying, ‘Take me home, take me home,’” says Masten, the tribe’s vice chair from 2011 to 2015. “We would never have been able to do it without those funds.”

California’s largest tribe is at the vanguard of a forward thinking program—designed to combat climate change—that is also helping them reclaim their past. The Yurok are making money by preserving large swaths of northern California’s forest, and reinvesting that income to conserve salmon habitat, reassemble their ancestral lands and preserve their culture.

Early European travelers to Northern California were surprised to note that instead of using terms like north and south, Yurok people described things as being downstream or upstream. It’s still true for today’s Yuroks: Where you are on the Klamath is where you are in the world. The river is highway and provider, yielding up the salmon and eels that anchor the Yurok diet. Along its banks grow the soaring, ancient redwoods that watch over tribal ceremonies and the grasses and ferns used in the famed Yurok basketry. The slopes around it support tanoak trees that provide acorns, another food staple. Even the name “Yurok” means “downstream.”

The Yuroks once inhabited more than 50 villages along the coast and the Klamath, but the California gold rush brought deadly diseases, conflicts and displacement to many tribal communities. In 1855, the tribe’s remaining members were confined to a reservation that hugs the Klamath for 44 miles upriver from its mouth. After the General Allotment Act of 1887, which aimed to promote landownership and farming among Indians, the federal government deemed much of the reservation unsuitable for farming and sold it off for logging. By the late 20th century, timber companies owned at least half of the land on the reservation.

“At one point, we only had 3,000 acres in ownership on our 58,000-acre reservation,” Masten says. “Reacquiring our lands is imperative to us, and it’s mandated by our constitution.”

That was no easy task. The tribe’s main economic asset was the Klamath salmon fishery. The 20th-century dams constructed upstream for irrigation and hydroelectricity not only blocked the passage of spawning salmon but also reduced river flows and raised water temperatures in ways that were unhealthy for fish. The fishery went into free fall, leaving the tribe with few economic resources besides timber harvesting.

In 2006, California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, a bill designed to ratchet down carbon emissions through a multifaceted approach that includes a market-based cap-and-trade system. And though the soaring redwoods and majestic Klamath might seem to have little connection with the world of industrial smokestacks, the Yuroks saw an opportunity in one of the carbon bill’s provisions: the sale of forest carbon offsets. Not only could they manage the land to restore the watershed and help bring back the salmon, they could also make money doing so. And they could use that money to reassemble more of their ancestral territory.

KEEP READING ON THE NATURE CONSERVANCY 

Young People’s Burden

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Author: James Hansen | Published on: October 4, 2016

Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions, by twelve of us[1], is being made available as a “Discussion” paper in Earth System Dynamics Discussion on 4 October, as it is undergoing peer review.   We try to make the science transparent to non-scientists.  A video discussion by my granddaughter Sophie and me is available.  Here I first note a couple of our technical conclusions (but you can skip straight to “Principal Implications” on page 2):

1) Global temperature: the 12-month running-mean temperature is now +1.3°C relative to the 1880-1920 average in the GISTEMP analysis (Fig. 2 in above paper or alternative Fig. 1 below).  We suggest that 1880-1920 is a good choice for “preindustrial” base period; alternative choices would differ by only about ±0.1°C, and 1880-1920 has the advantage of being the earliest time with reasonably global coverage and reasonably well-documented measurement technology.

Present 12-month running-mean global temperature jumps about as far above the linear trend line (Fig. 2b in the paper) as it did during the 1997-98 El Nino.  The linear trend line is now at +1.06°C, which is perhaps the best temperature to compare to paleoclimate temperatures, because the latter are “centennially-smoothed,” i.e., the proxy measures of ancient temperature typically have a resolution not better than 100 years.  The present linear trend (or 11-year mean) temperature is appropriate for comparison to centennially smoothed paleo temperature, because we have knowledge that decadal temperature will not be declining in the next several decades.

 

2) The growth of the three principal human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs: CO2, CH4, N2O) are all accelerating.  Contrary to the impression favored by governments, the corner has not been turned toward declining emissions and GHG amounts.  The world is not effectively addressing the climate matter, nor does it have any plans to do so, regardless of how much government bureaucrats clap each other on the back.

On the other hand, accelerating GHG growth rates do not imply that the problem is unsolvable or that amplifying climate feedbacks are now the main source of the acceleration.  Despite much (valid) concern about amplifying climate-methane feedbacks and leaks from “fracking” activity, the isotopic data suggest that the increase of CH4emissions is more a result of agricultural emissions.  Not to say that it will be easy, but it is still possible to get future CH4 amount to decline moderately, as we phase off fossil fuels as the principal energy source.

KEEP READING ON CLIMATE SCIENCE AWARENESS AND SOLUTIONS

Rigenerazione Di Suoli Ed Ecosistemi: L’opportunità Di Evitare Il Cambiamento Climatico, Basi Per Una Nuova Politica Climatica Ed Agricola Italiana Ed Europea

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[ Deutsch | English | Español | Italiano ]

Autore: Íñigo Álvarez de Toledo, MSc

Ci troviamo a vivere forse il momento più determinante della storia dell’Umanità, dovuto ai cambiamenti climatici che stiamo producendo con l’emissione dei Gas Effetto Serra (GES) e la distruzione della biodiversità. Questi cambiamenti stanno a loro volta procurando un’altra serie di effetti che aumentano la complessità dei problemi che stiamo affrontando e la velocità del caos climatico1- , anche socialmente, come succede già con l’ aumento di flussi migratori che hanno messo in crisi la stessa Unione Europea:

  • Terrorismo/La causa remota. “Se parliamo di clima parliamo di guerra”. E provato il collegamento tra la siccità e l ́aumento della violenza in Siria. (L ́Expresso, 10 dicembre 2015).
  • -Climate Change: A Risk Assessment: Rapporto per il Governo Britannico che argomenta che i rischi legati al cambiamento climatico devono essere confrontati alla pari dei rischi di sicurezza nazionale, stabilità finanziaria e salute pubblica. (https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/projects/climate-change-risk-assessment/).

In questo Rapporto tratteremo la necessità di dare priorità assoluta alla Rigenerazione di suoli ed ecosistemi come filo conduttore delle nostre azioni, del nostro lavoro e della nostra economia. La Sostenibilità è un concetto pieno di buoni propositi, ma si è visto superato per due motivi: la manipolazione che ne è stata fatta, semplice risultato dell’elasticità del suo significato; e la mancata realizzazione dei propositi di Rio 92, che non solo non hanno portato miglioramenti ma molti indici hanno mostrato una tendenza al peggioramento – soprattutto in quelli che fanno riferimento alle emissioni globali, all’atmosfera e all’erosione del suolo.

La Rigenerazione ecologica ed agroecologica implica un miglioramento dimostrabile nella nostra agricoltura, una presa di posizione costruttiva e positiva e la soddisfazione di generare tendenze che portino benefici a tutti gli esseri viventi. Per tutti: significa ottenere che i suoli naturali, agricoli ed i pascoli riassorbano i gas effetto serra, scongiurando la temibile minaccia del Cambiamento Climatico.

In questo modo migliora anche la qualità delle produzioni e delle proprietà agricole, non solo sostenendole ma arricchendole in un processo virtuoso che si distribuirà sul breve, medio e lungo periodo, risolvendo con esso il sempre più grave problema di giustizia intergenerazionale.

D’altra parte, attraverso l’aumento della resilienza negli agrosistemi si ottiene un maggiore adattamento al Cambiamento Climatico.

SCARICA RELAZIONE DELLA IDEAA

Climate Scientist James Hansen: We Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough to Slow Climate Change

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Author: Natasha Geiling | Published on: October 4, 2016

James Hansen, former NASA director and well-known climate scientist, is out with another dire climate warning: The last time that the Earth was this hot, the oceans were about 20 feet higher than they are right now.

And while that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re in for an unstoppable, 20-foot rise in sea level (although it ostensibly could get that bad), it does mean that the world is leaving a dangerous, and expensive, climate change problem for future generations.

“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem,” Hansen told reporters on a press call Monday. “The misapprehension is based on the Paris climate summit where all the government leaders clapped each other on the back as if some great progress has been made, but you look at the science and it doesn’t compute. We are not doing what is needed.”

Hansen’s warning is based off a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper — submitted Tuesday to the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal — that he authored with 11 other climate scientists. In the paper, the authors argue that the Earth has warmed by about 1.3°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and that the atmospheric concentration of the most potent greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — has been accelerating in recent years. The last time the Earth was this hot was during the last inter-glacial period, known as the Eemian, when sea level was about 20 to 30 feet higher than it is today.

KEEP READING ON THINKPROGRESS