Working For Jobs

by Sarah Goodyear.

Now that Facebook has eaten
the entire world and drunk its milkshake, the company understandably needs more
space to let it all hang out. So they’re moving from their offices in Palo Alto,
Calif., to a campus of their own in Menlo Park, a corporate park that is being
vacated by the retreating Sun Microsystems.

Here’s the thing about the
move. The choice of the site, which is cut off from the rest of
Menlo Park by roads, railroad tracks, and protected wetlands, makes one thing
quite clear: Facebook doesn’t want to do the work of connecting the brains of
every living human to advertisers while it’s in an actual place, like downtown Palo Alto or San Francisco. That could get
messy.

But hey! They know they’re
supposed to want some kind of placey-ness thing, because places are cool,
right? So they’re remaking the insular kingdom of the campus into a simulacrum
of a real neighborhood. Or something.

The New York Times went to
take a look:

[John Tenanes, Facebook’s director of global real
estate,] said he was
determined to employ small firms like Roman and Williams, [the New York
design firm behind the Ace Hotel and its Breslin and John Dory restaurants]. He said he liked the
“casual eclectic” look of the firm’s Ace
Hotel after he stayed there on a recent trip. (The Ace crowd, which tends
toward 20somethings with laptops, mirrors the Facebook employees’ demographic.)
Unlike the Sun campus, with color-coordinated buildings reminiscent of an
upscale resort, Facebook is looking for “an urban streetscape where no one
architect or designer” dominates, Mr. Tenanes said. “Random is good,” he added.

Robin Standifer, a principal
at Roman and Williams, said Facebook wanted there to be “life and soul and
some idiosyncrasy to the campus.”

“They don’t want to buy into
that corporate structure,” she said. “They want to continue to feel
hungry.”

Putting aside the fact that
it’s probably hard to feel hungry when you’ve just swallowed many billions
of dollars, Facebook is going to be dealing with some real practical changes in
the way its 2,000 employees interact with the world. According to the Times article,
some 40 percent of the company’s workers currently commute by foot, bike, or
bus. It’s unclear when, or if, the new campus can be connected to the outside world in a way that is
friendly to bikes or pedestrians.

To address that issue, as
well as community concerns about what’s in the move for Menlo Park, Facebook recently
hosted
a design charrette where architects and community members tossed around
ideas about how to create connections between the campus and the surrounding
city—maybe a pedestrian underpass to a nearby neighborhood will be reopened, maybe
public transit will be developed.

That’s all great, and some
of it might actually happen. But the bigger question is, why did a theoretically
forward-thinking company like Facebook choose to relocate to a location that—in its isolation and current car-dependence—epitomizes the failed planning
strategies of the past two or three generations?

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by Matt Wasson.

In case you haven’t heard, dozens of proposed amendments to the House Budget Bill would strip EPA of funding to update and enforce safeguards for mountaintop-removal mines, coal ash storage ponds, and emissions of hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants. If these amendments are approved, House Republicans would successfully turn back the clock on all of the clean air and clean water safeguards put in place over the past two years and bring back the polluter-friendly rules of the Bush administration.

The man overseeing the budget is Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky, whose district is home to more than half of the 500 mountains already destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia. Not only does Rogers’ district lead the nation in mountains destroyed, it also leads the nation in human misery according to the Gallup-Healthways 2009 Well-Being Rankings. Of all 435 Congressional districts in America, Rogers’ district ranked dead last in Gallup’s overall well-being index, which combines information on physical and emotional well-being, life evaluation, work environment, and basic access to government services.

As my Appalachian Voices colleague JW pointed out on the Front Porch Blog, while Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood may be “dead first” in mountaintop removal, his district ranks:

435th in life expectancy (dead last)
435th in physical health (dead last)
435th in overall well-being (dead last)
435th in emotional health (dead last)

There could be no clearer indication of where the new House leadership is trying to take the country. What are you going to do to stop them? [Hint: you can start by taking action here].

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National Environmental Law Center (NELC).
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by Kristin Wartman.

Working with people as a nutritionist, I’m often met with resistance.
I try to explain how to make healthful food choices without using trigger
words like “organic,” “sustainable,” or even “local.”

“When I hear the word
organic I think of Birkenstock-wearing hippies in Cambridge or Berkeley,” one of my clients told me
recently. Other clients have referred to whole, organic foods as “yuppie
food.”

There’s no doubt that food choice and diet is an indicator of
class and culture. But what perplexes me is this notion that eating a
diet of processed, sugary junk foods is what “real Americans” eat.

According to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Arsmesto, author of Near a Thousand Tables, food has
always been a marker of class and rank in any particular society. “Food became a social differentiator at a remote,
undocumented moment when some people started to command more food
resources than others,” he writes, and later: “Class differentiation
starts with the crudities of basic economics. People eat the best food
they can afford: the preferred food of the rich therefore becomes a
signifier of social aspirations.”

But this isn’t true in modern-day America. The preferred food of the
rich is now considered elitist and scoffed at by many Americans. In
fact, there is data to suggest that even though many Americans can
afford higher-quality foods, they chose to eat cheaper and less
nutritious foods. Jane Black and Brent Cunningham wrote an op-ed recently about this in the Washington Post:

Many in this country who have access to good food and can afford it
simply don’t think it’s important. To them, food has become a front in
America’s culture wars, and the crusade against fast and processed food
is an obsession of “elites,” not “real Americans.”

I would argue that the advertising agencies that work hand-in-hand
with the big players of industrial food should take much of the blame
for this change. Within the span of three short generations, Americans
have come to accept industrial food as their mainstay—not only have they
accepted it, they defend it like they’d defend the American flag as a
symbol of their patriotism and allegiance to the “real” America.

Prisoners of the mad men

There’s some perverse logic at work here, and it strikes me as
vaguely similar to “Stockholm syndrome”—a paradoxical psychological
phenomenon in which hostages express adulation and positive feelings
towards their captors. While Americans are not experiencing a physical
captivity, they are deeply mired in a psychological condition in which
they’re captive to industrial food products and the corresponding
ideologies that are ultimately harming them. Call it the American Fast
Food Syndrome.

Part of the problem is that most Americans don’t realize that
industrial food is a relatively recent development in the history of agriculture. Although human beings have been cultivating food for more than 10,000
years, industrial agriculture as we know it today has only been around
for about 60 years. To many Americans, industrial food—food processed and packaged into cheap, convenient calorie-delivery vehicles—is simply “food.” They assume this is the way it has always been. Americans have all
but forgotten that food might be the product of a farm and not a
factory.

I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached peak indoctrination: two out of three Americans is obese or overweight and one out of five 4-year-olds is obese. This is more than just a coincidence as we embrace our American industrial food diet wholeheartedly.

The fact that food advertising is a completely unregulated force
doesn’t help. Advertisers spend billions of dollars on campaigns to make
us want to buy their products. In her book Diet for a Hot Planet,
Anna Lappé writes of a sly technique advertisers often use. The food
industry “is skilled at inoculation messaging, and part of its success
comes from the ‘we’re one of you’ pitch … The message,
whether from Perdue, Nestle, or Cargill, is that these companies are
like us; they care about the same things we do. It’s a message that
forms another strand of the inoculation strategy.”

This “we’re one of you” ideology coupled with industrial food products’ corresponding affordability is slick marketing at its best.

You may remember a similar strategy used by Sarah Palin and John
McCain in their 2008 presidential campaign. Palin’s constant invocation
of Joe the Plumber, Joe Six Pack, and soccer moms was the same “we’re
one of you” rhetoric. Palin worked this angle again recently when she
came running to the defense of the “real” Americans as she personally gave out cookies to elementary school students in her effort to stop the food police
from depriving children of their god-given right to eat sugar-laden,
processed foods. (Tom Laskawy wrote about GOP’s anti-good-food backlash for Grist.)

These messages, from advertisers and politicians alike, are drowning
out a sensible approach to healthy eating and improved quality of life
for many Americans.

Free your mind and your waistline will follow

I know that when people stop eating processed foods
and start cooking whole foods, it’s nothing short of a revelation. My
clients experience a transformation when they cut out junk foods—they
lose weight, improve chronic health conditions, and feel better than
they ever have before. Unfortunately, many Americans who really need
guidance on healthy eating and cooking won’t get it. What they will get instead is a constant barrage of advertising for cheap industrial foods, paired
with the all-American rhetoric of Sarah Palin and her ilk.

Until all Americans see industrial food for what it really is,
education about healthier food options will remain a cultural battle. We
can blame specific ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup or
trans-fats indefinitely, but for a large portion of Americans, their
cultural identity seems to be  tied up in Big Macs, fries, and Cokes. As long as
the food industry continues to succeed at imbuing their products with a
particular sense of American authenticity, and as long as Americans
continue to buy this image—and reject the organic, sustainable,
and local food movement as part of some liberal agenda—we will remain a
country in the midst of a dire health and food crisis.

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

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by Holly Richmond.

There are the Christmas trees you buy, and those you consider
buying, and then there are the ones you walk right by because, well, forget
getting hit with the ugly stick—they’re a COLLECTION of ugly sticks. (Maybe they just grew there on
accident and aren’t part of Happy’s Tree Farm at all?!)

But don’t feel too bad. An Oakland, Calif. fisheries program
is giving unwanted trees a spring in their step.

Pete Alexander of the East Bay Regional Park District
collects unsold trees each year, reports The New York Times, and with help
from volunteers, he takes them to a lucky, barren lake, where nature coats ‘em
in algae. Fish follow.

Similar programs are cropping up elsewhere. Lee Mitchell of Shelbyville,
Ill., says the submerged trees are part of lake habitats for about five years,
adding “Fish use them like crazy.” He recruits volunteers by promising to give them
the GPS coordinates of the trees, so they know exactly where to fish.

Ugly tree, beautiful snack. Top that, Charlie Brown.

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by Tom Philpott.

I don’t feel like getting into the details of a saga with more plots twists than a telenovela; or pontificating at length on a bill that’s already had more analysis than Woody Allen’s nueroses. Suffice to say that the the Food Safety Modernization Act passed the Senate in a surprise Sunday vote and is headed back to the House, where it is widely expected to pass (having already passed twice). For the first time in weeks, the bill seems to have a clear pathway to the President’s desk, where it will be signed into law. And, yes, the Tester-Hagan amendment protecting small farms is intact. If you want more detail than that, here’s Food Safety News and The Washington Post.

My quick take on the bill: Small step in the right direction; unlikely to significantly lessen the ricks of a food system marked by enormous concentration of production; unlikely to damage small players because of the Tester-Hagan protections. For a long and vigorously argued set of perspectives, see our recent Food Fight on the topic.

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by Tom Philpott.

For decades, the federal government has watched idly while a few gigantic companies grabbed ever-greater control of the food industry. As big players gobble smaller ones, they concentrate power at the top of the food chain—and apply relentless pressure to cut costs, giving rise to many of the things I hate about the food system. Workers, farmers, the environment, animals, public health—all get abused so that mega-retailers like Walmart, meat producers like Smithfield, and corn processors like Cargill can keep costs down while profitably selling cheap food.

Well, in a sharp break from its predecessors, the Obama Justice Department is actually acknowledging the problem and contemplating actually doing something about it. The DOJ has been holding public meetings to let players in the food system air out thier views on the issue.

I will be very surprised—and very pleasantly so—if anything substantial comes of the exercise. But it’s fascinating to watch it play out.

Over on Eclectic Edibles, blogger Shwankie found an interesting tidbit while watching the C-Span feed of recent hearings in D.C. Apparently, a representative from the Food Marketing Institute got to mouthing the food industry’s main defense of consolidation: that it benefits U.S. consumers by allowing us to spend less on food as a percentage of income than the citizens of any other country in the world.

Comparing U.S. consumers’ food expenditures to those of the French and Spanish, the flack concluded that our tightly consolidated food industry is serving us a higher “quality of life” along with all the burgers and frozen dinners.

Shwankie very smartly shredded that assertion by coming up with a little chart comparing food expenditures and various diet-related troubles among the United States, France, and Spain. She didn’t give her data sources, so I felt uncomfortable reprinting her chart. Inspired by her, I came up with my own version. I threw Germany into the mix, just to broaden the sample.

Now, correlation does not prove causation. But if the food industry wants to claim that its abundance of cheap crap delivers higher quality of life, it will have to explain why our citizens come down with diet-related maladies at rates so much higher than those in countries where food is pricier. For most of us, “quality of life” does not dovetail with gaining too much weight, getting diabetes, and dying of a heart attack.

I added to my chart a metric not found in Shwankie’s post: the United Nations’ “Gini index” of income inequality. That’s my tribute to U.K. researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, whose book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger has been blowing my mind.

If the food-industry rep is probably dead wrong that cheap food increases quality of life, Wilkinson and Pickett point to a factor that actually seems to: income equality. Below, find their chart tracking income equality against a broad quality-of-life index.

To me, cheap food underpins our highly inequitable income system. If we’re going to have a large low-income class, a perpetually squeezed middle class, and a small caste of super-rich, then a cheap food system plays a vital role in keeping those at the bottom fed—if under-nourished.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s inequality work has provided me with a new way of looking at food-system reform. It may be that that a food system predicated on slashing costs—at the expense of the environment, workers, animals, and public health—is a symptom of a broader problem: an economic system that concentrates power and income at the top. It may well be that we can’t really reform the food system until we reform the economy. That’s an idea I’ll be mulling and teasing out in the new year.    

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by Christopher Mims.

If human civilization as we
know it is dependent on the maintenance of the stable climate in which it
evolved over the past 10,000 years, then we are well and truly @#$%ed. 

Tuesday’s election results
mean it is now virtually impossible to avoid exceeding the targets set forth by
the U.N. for “safe” levels of climate change. This election looks to
be a turning point down the long dark road to the collapse of planet’s cryosphere.

From here on out, we are
mitigating our emissions of greenhouse gases not because we think it’s possible
to avert catastrophe, but because we are attempting to avert a worse catastrophe.

It’s the scenario outlined
by a seminal 2009 paper in the world’s top scientific journal, Nature: “Overshoot, adapt and recover.”

As Obama’s science advisor
John Holdren put it:

We basically have three
choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each.
The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the
less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.

Many scientists have already
been arguing that the window of opportunity for a largely mitigationist climate
strategy has closed—and yesterday’s election underscores that point.

The countless climate
zombies elected to Congress have promised legislative gridlock and even trials
of climate scientists, virtually guaranteeing that we will have no substantive
national laws aimed at curbing climate change for at least the
next two years.

The election of climate zombie governors who will be responsible for
congressional redistricting will make it even harder to get climate hawks into
Congress in the future.

There are ways out of this
conundrum, of course: The EPA could ride to the
rescue. A
series of “climate change
Pearl Harbors”
could trigger a political tipping point that convinces U.S. (and world) leaders
to make mitigation efforts their top priority.

But even if we shut down 100
percent of the world’s sources of greenhouse gas emissions today, we are still
committed to 2.4 degrees C (4.3 degrees F) of warming by the end of the
century, says NASA’s James Hansen.

Hansen also argues that the
slow feedbacks resulting from this degree of warming will, over the course of
centuries, lead to the complete collapse of the Earth’s cryosphere—in other
words, Greenland and the southern ice cap. Antarctica, to give you a sense of
its scale, is a continent one and a half times as large as the United States,
its surface 99 percent covered with ice up to three miles deep. The paper Geoengineering:
The Inescapable Truth of Getting to 350 (which is both unusually readable and open
access) puts it this way:

To describe future climate
change as catastrophic may sound alarmist; however, warming Earth’s climate to
a point that it can no longer sustain the planet’s cryosphere demands the use
of such strong language.

With the cryosphere’s
collapse, global sea level will rise by greater than 80 meters (262 feet),
inundating coastal plains and low-lying islands around the world. Over a
billion people will be displaced to higher ground, amplifying the other impacts
of climate change such as extreme weather events, floods, and droughts. While
the Earth system has experienced comparable cataclysmic events during its
evolution, human civilization certainly has not.

Everyone who has a horse in
this race wants to constrain the parameter space that encompasses possible
futures according to their own particular beliefs: Some, like James Hansen,
argue that a hard cap on emissions is what the uncompromising laws of physics
demand. Others, like The Breakthrough Institute, Bill Gates, and Roger Pielke
Jr., favor technological solutions, and seem to be arguing that innovating our
way out is the only solution possible given the limits of human nature. Still
others, mostly economists, cling to the belief that the world economy will
continue to expand at a rate that will obviate the need to solve climate change
with anything beyond our enormous wealth.

Yet the reality is that
every one of these proposed solutions is in tatters: The momentum behind a
climate bill is gone, and international negotiations over emissions targets are
mired in a tussle between the U.S. and China (or the developed and the
developing world). No technological quick fix is on the horizon. And an economy
that’s down despite an ever-increasing supply of both workers and productivity
seems to give the lie to the notion of permanent growth.

Still, we have to commit to all of these solutions, and aggressively
pursue adaptation too. Every bit of energy infrastructure we build that is
designed to mitigate carbon emissions will also have to take into account the
changing weather patterns of the future. Cities will have to not only reduce
their carbon footprint but increase their resilience in the face of extreme
weather and hydrological crises of every variety.

The anthropocene—the era
in which the earth’s biosphere is dominated by a single hominin species: us—will be characterized by a battle between competing interests of Tolkienesque
proportions, followed by transitions of a scale and nature we can scarcely
imagine at present.

Especially when many of our
leaders have yet to even show up for the contest.

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by Grist.

Gabriel is unpacked and living in a building with 15 other people who intend to live more sustainably.
But good intentions aside, when you’re living with a bunch
of people, things have a way of getting a little messy. Can Gabriel and his roomies sweep
the floors without stepping on each others toes? Read on … And for background on all the characters, and links to every so-called comic strip, visit the My Intentional Life homepage.

Visit the My Intentional Life homepage.

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by Leslie Dorworth.

The first time I saw the Grand Calumet River, I was driving
down the Indiana Toll Road. It was 1996, and I had just arrived in northwest
Indiana from North Carolina to take a new job as an aquatic ecology extension
specialist with the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program.

All around me I could see steel mills and processing plants,
and the Grand Calumet, meandering slowly through this highly industrialized landscape
like a rare natural jewel. There were herons, egrets, and other birds wading along the banks, and abundant, luscious greenery such as cattails and
phragmites (reeds), a common invasive species across the country. Since that day, I have had a chance to canoe
portions of the Grand Calumet. From the water, I got a better view of wading birds and ducks diving in the river. Sadly, from up close I could also see that
the ducks resurfaced with a layer of oil on their faces and necks.

In a canoe, you also notice something else that so many
urban rivers have in common: the extent to which the river’s natural course has
been manipulated by humans over the years. The Grand Calumet is frequently
diverted through culverts, impassable by boat. When we came to a culvert, we
would have to portage the area (pick up our canoes and carry them around) before
continuing on our travels along the river. 

As an aquatic ecologist, I study the health of ecosystems
like rivers, streams, and lakes. The Sea Grant program fosters research and
education in the communities of south Lake Michigan. My position is located at
Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Ind., specifically so that I can
participate in local water quality efforts.

Not long after I started my new job, I joined the steering
committee for a local environmental group called the Grand Calumet Task Force. The
group worked to improve the land, air, and water quality of the urban
environment around the river. At the time I joined the task force, the director
was Doreen Carey—a vibrant, enthusiastic, and energetic river advocate. She still has that same energy for the Grand Calumet, even
after all these years. From my perspective, an important goal for the task
force was to spread Doreen’s attitude throughout northwest Indiana, to get the
surrounding communities to turn back to the river, and recognize its potential
beauty and recreational opportunities, as well as its economic value to the
Calumet region.

A person can live in northwest Indiana and not even know the
river is flowing through their community.
It’s not a place where people go swimming, or fishing, or even
picnicking. This lack of awareness presents a great challenge for those of us working
to restore the river.

Before industrialization and urbanization of the area, the
Grand Calumet River supported highly diverse, globally distinctive fish and
wildlife communities. The area has a unique
dune and swale topography and associated rare plant and animal species, such as
Franklin’s ground squirrel, Blanding’s turtle, the glass lizard, and the black
crowned night heron, among others. 

All of us on the Grand Calumet Task Force recognized that
the river would probably never return to its original pristine state. However, we
believed that the river could be restored to a level where people could enjoy
it recreationally, and where wildlife would return. There has been progress towards that goal.

Tougher pollution laws have helped clean up the water that
is discharged into the Grand Calumet. The problem of contaminated sediments—toxic
mud at the bottom of the river, polluted over the past 100 years of industrial
activity—remains. The removal of contaminated sediments will
complement ongoing restoration efforts in northwest Indiana. The good news is
that the removal process has already started. U.S. Steel in Gary has finished dredging a five-mile
stretch of the river near its plant. State and federal officials are overseeing a second dredging
project that is currently underway in Hammond.

My first public meeting about the U.S. Steel dredging
project was a bit contentious. Representatives
from the steel company, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and IDEM (the
Indiana Department of Environmental Management) addressed an audience that
included Gary residents as well as representatives from some environmental
organizations and the media. The citizens
were frustrated with U.S. Steel and its past and current handling of the
contaminants in the river. When one
person insisted that U.S. Steel apologize to the city of Gary, the room went
quiet. The U.S. Steel representative was taken aback by the demand. The EPA official
present stepped in to help defuse the situation, but the mood remained tense.

The people of Gary were also concerned that dredged sediments
would be stored in their city, possibly in an undisclosed location, and they
were very vocal in their “not in my backyard” stance.

Over time, I attended several other public meetings about
the dredging project. Most were much less contentious; people generally agreed
that dredging needed to occur. Reflecting
on these meetings several years later, I believe that the project leaders
listened to the concerns of the people of Gary and addressed those concerns at
the meetings in a forthright way.

In the end, the task force plan called for dredged sediments
to be stored in a landfill-type facility located on U.S. Steel property. U.S. Steel and federal and state
representatives described how the storage facility would function, noting that computers
would monitor the facility for leaks.

Taking part in the visioning process was exciting. The plan that the task force steering committee developed has provided some guidance on future restoration activities for the
Grand Calumet. The rest of the river still needs to be dredged, and it will
take many more years to safely remove all the contaninated sediments. But once it’s done, the cleanup will only enhance the quality of life for the residents of northwest Indiana by making
the Grand Calumet River an inviting recreational waterway, and an environment that
encourages the return of the region’s native animals and plants.

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