Activism Across America

Barack Obama shocked his supporters last summer by voting for the FISA Amendments Act, which provided retroactive legal immunity to corporations who helped George W. Bush spy on the private lives of millions of Americans. The law also legalized such spy operations against Americans going into the future.

Now, as President of the United States, Barack Obama hasn’t done one thing to stop this Big Brother spying against Americans. He hasn’t even reformed it. George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping against Americans is continuing on under Barack Obama.

At least one American remembers this, and was there to confront Barack Obama when he arrived in Columbus, Ohio last week:

One sign on a sidewalk on a windy day for Barack Obama to see as he drives by in his limousine: Does it make a difference?

Well, it makes more of a difference than if no signs on the Bush-Obama spying were there at all.

Cincinnati eaters, pay attention… and that would include, um… everyone in Cincinnati. Your city, on the border of Ohio and Kentucky, has access to a great diversity of local food, what with the southern hilly fields to the south, and the northern flat fields to the north.

There’s a great source for finding out about foods local to Cincinnati: The Cincinnati Locavore blog.

Local foods are great for the local economy, but they’re good for the national economy as well, because local foods cut down on waste, and leave consumers with more money to spend on stuff they actually need, rather than interstate transportation that doesn’t add any value to food (and actually takes a good deal of quality away, through aging and selection of produce varieties that don’t taste great, but deal with shipping well). Local foods keep our economy more diverse and complex, and thus more resilient to bad times.

Local food networks also support farms that are more likely to reject the industrial agriculture model of big monocultures of a very few varieties of produce or livestock. Local food keeps cultural diversity and biological diversity right along with economic diversification.

So, celebrate, Cincinnati. Eat up, and keep it local!

For the last century, Americans have been stuck in a simplistic mechanical model of prosperity: The more we produce, the more prosperous we become. One of the most profound refutations of that model is the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, a great area of the Gulf of Mexico, spreading from the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where no marine animals can live.

This dead zone is created by the great industrial agricultural push in America’s MidWest. For generations, farmers have been told by the government that they’ll be most successful if they fertilize their fields with fertilizers created, not through the natural decay of plant materials, but in factories far from the field. Those fertilizers then run off into streams that feed into rivers that feed into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizers create such an intense bloom of plant growth in the water that the decaying plant material creates a vast stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico that is starved of oxygen, and kills any animal unlucky enough to swim into it.

The maps below show the results of a recent study by the US Geological Survey, tracing these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus back to the states upstream where they enter the Mississippi River watershed.

The following states have only 31 percent of the area in the Mississippi River watershed, but they contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that lead to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone:
Illinois
Iowa
Indiana
Missouri
Arkansas
Kentucky
Tennessee
Ohio
Mississippi

That study ought to have been done by the US Department of Agriculture, given that it’s agriculture that delivers so much of the pollution into the dead zone. People ask what good organic, sustainable farming does us. This new USGS study makes it clear. Organic, sustainable farming could spare us dead zones.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article describing the terrible environmental record earned by California Representative Duncan Hunter in Congress. He got a zero percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters. The reaction of his supporters was an indication of the pathological disregard for a clean environment among right wing activists in America today.

One supporter called the zero percent rating an “impressive recommendation” for the Hunter for President campaign. Another supporter, writing for a blog called Ohio Duncan Hunter for President, remarked, “If you are a conservative, you know there’s always something fun about ticking off the envirowhackos.”

We don’t think that asking someone running for President of the United States to earn more than a zero percent rating on environmental legislation makes us “envirowhackos”. It’s saddening to me to see that defending polluters who trash the Earth is regarded by some Americans as “something fun”.

(Source: Ohio Duncan Hunter For President, December 21, 2007)