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12 October 2017
Food
On superior farmlands, limited appetite for local food.
In hyper-fertile Central Illinois, sustainable farmers seek local support, but end up trekking their wares to Chicago.
<p></p><p></p><p>BY LYNN FREEHILL-MAYE | Agroecology, Local Eats, Young Farmers Unite</p><p>10.12.17 </p><p>When Wes Jarrell and Leslie Cooperband took jobs as soil scientists at the University of Illinois 13 years ago, they bought a farmhouse outside Champaign-Urbana, and set off on a bike ride. The glacier-smoothed land was flat as paper, so pedaling was a breeze. The corn and soybean fields seemed to stretch into eternity. But something felt off: in a 10-mile ride past dozens of farms, they spotted just one vegetable garden.</p><p></p><p>“It was kind of shocking, “Jarrell remembered. “All these farms with the best soils in the world and a great climate—and one garden.”</p><p></p><p>Soon after that eye-opening bicycle ride in 2004, the newcomer couple established Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, the state’s first licensed Grade-A goat dairy and farmstead creamery, featuring a small orchard and a herd of milking goats.</p><p></p><p>Jarrell and Cooperband are among the more than 200 new, sustainable farmers who have recently established operations on the fertile farmland of Central Illinois, 100 miles and more south of Chicago.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Wes Jarrell. (Photo courtesy Prairie Fruits Farm.)</p><p></p><p>In the Corn Belt region—otherwise dominated by expansive industrial corn and soy operations—these small farms represent anomalies, producing everything from peppers to chicken using sustainable methods like integrating livestock and crops. Yet despite their commitment to growing food sustainably for their communities, many of these small enterprises find themselves facing a significant challenge: the local community does not embrace their product fully enough to keep them in business, forcing them to make faraway sales in Chicago.</p><p></p><p>It’s a problem faced by food producers targeting their local markets around the country; at the same time, a number of organizations and strategies are cropping up to build local support for local food.</p><p></p><p>The Land Connection, a Champaign-based nonprofit that advocates for sustainable farming in Central Illinois, continually struggles to drum up more residents’ interest in homegrown food, according to Birgit McCall, the organization’s interim executive director. When McCall, a Michigan native, came to the area 13 years ago, she was startled by the limited demand she saw for local meat, dairy, and produce.</p><p></p><p>“Nationwide, people are starting to realize that fresh, local food is important and good for you,” she says. “Here, I drive home through the cornfields and there’s thousands of acres of food that’s primarily fed to livestock. The vast majority of farm ground here is not feeding local people, and we would like to increase the percentage of farm ground that’s used to feed local people.”</p><p></p><p>While Prairie Fruits farm has since supported Jarrell and Cooperband they too encountered a limited appetite for local food. Their first year, they had success selling at the Urbana farmers’ market, said Cooperband, but by the second year, they realized they needed to expand their customer base.</p><p></p><p>“Once you saturate the tiny portion of the population that cares [about local sourcing], you’re sunk,” Jarrell said last March, while taking a break from birthing kids. “We realized if we were going to be profitable, Chicago had to be part of the equation.”</p><p></p><p>And so the couple headed north to the Green City Market, the largest and first year-round sustainable farmers’ market in Chicago. A weekly routine began: a 280-mile roundtrip journey, made in a 14-hour day that started at 3:30 a.m. and cost $300 for gas and expenses. They quickly found the trek worthwhile—star Chef Rick Bayless became a customer, and they could gross $1,500 per trip. But the journey was exhausting.</p><p></p><p>The next day is “unprofitable,” Jarrell said diplomatically. “It’s hell,” Cooperband added.</p><p></p><p>Stoking Local Demand</p><p></p><p>Some small, sustainable farmers in Central Illinois have encountered downright hostility toward the work they’re doing. Cara Cummings, the former executive director at the Land Connection, explained how one resident got in her face to argue that the land is meant to grow corn for ethanol, animal feed, or corn syrup. She took it to mean the that flatness of Midwestern farmland allowed hundreds of acres can support the same crop—unlike in hillier places like Vermont or Wisconsin—and the land should be used accordingly.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Photo courtesy of PrairiErth.</p><p></p><p>Still, the Land Connection has continued to promote community-based food systems by offering education for beginning farmers and finding ways to build the market.</p><p></p><p>Two hundred people have gone through Land Connection training in the past 12 years, and the organization launched a new farmers’ market in downtown Champaign two years ago. Because neighboring Urbana has a more established weekend market, the Tuesday-evening event aims to give beginning farmers a start.</p><p></p><p>There is an ongoing discussion about why more customers haven’t turned out at the market and beyond hasn’t been stronger. Is it because of meal-delivery services like Blue Apron? The new “vegetable butchers” at Whole Foods? Supermarket greenwashing?</p><p></p><p>Based on the idea that people will buy more local food if it’s convenient, the Land Connection has encouraged farmers to consider things like greater social-media presence, delivery services, online ordering, and community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares that include multiple farms.</p><p></p><p>Selling to Chicago</p><p></p><p>For many of the next-generation farmers, selling to the people of Chicago feels compulsory. That usually means going it alone, since farmers’ market rules often prohibit working together—individual producers can sell only what they’ve grown.</p><p></p><p>Farmers in the area take a number of different approaches to make the trek less demanding. On PrairiErth Farm, a 350-acre spread near Lincoln, Katie and Hans Bishop raise a diverse array of food and animals. Bright-faced thirty-somethings, the Bishops do everything the Land Connection recommends. They’re social-media leaders, maintain an in-demand CSA program, and are experimenting with delivery service and cooking classes. They make about one-eighth of their income by selling to Chicago, Katie estimates.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Katie and Hans Bishop of PrairiErth Farm.</p><p></p><p>Because of the farm’s size, PrairiErth can work with a wholesaler to avoid the long haul. “I’ll take a little less money for not having to go up there myself,” Katie says.</p><p></p><p>Slagel Family Farm, an 800-acre farm outside Fairbury, takes a different approach. Realizing in his early 20s that a market existed for pastured, more naturally raised meat like theirs, LouisJohn Slagel began connecting with city chefs in 2007. He now sends four trucks north each week, making deliveries to between 120 and 150 well-known restaurants, like The Publican and Girl & the Goat.</p><p></p><p>Delivery days are grueling, requiring a 5 a.m. wakeup to start loading trucks and an 11 p.m. return back home. But the siblings, and occasionally employees, rotate in and out to spread the burden. “It’d be a lot harder to do what we do without a lot of family help,” Slagel said.</p><p></p><p>While the Slagels sell some locally, they make more on drives to Chicago due to the price-consciousness they encounter downstate. “We’re raising it differently, and we’re going to charge a premium,” he said. “If we weren’t charging a premium, we wouldn’t be able to do it the way we are.”</p><p></p><p></p><p>LouisJohn Slagel leading a butchering demo at the Slagel Family Farm dinner and farm tour. (Photo courtesy of Slagel Family Farm.)</p><p></p><p>At the Land Connection, McCall—who took over from Cummings this summer—hopes she can figure out the keys to expanding local demand. The organization will keep pushing sustainable farmers to sell at their downstate Tuesday farmers’ market, offering farmers trainings in marketing and outreach, and many other efforts.</p><p></p><p>“I’m cautiously optimistic,” McCall says. “This is the fourth year of our market, and the numbers are way up over last year. We’re helping to build awareness that, hey, this is grown locally, this is good for you.”</p><p></p><p>Whatever might limit or expand Central Illinoisans’ appetites for the homegrown, for now the massive market of Chicago—through its farmers’ markets, wholesaling, or restaurants—figures heavily into sales calculations for many Central Illinois sustainable farmers.</p><p></p><p>“Building a local market is a great thing, and if the Land Connection can figure out how to do that, wonderful,” said Jarrell of Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery. “But until that happens, we either go out of business or we go to Chicago.”</p><p></p><p>Top photo: Hans Bishop driving a tractor on PrairiErth Farm. (Photo courtesy of PrairiErth.)</p><p></p><p>VIEW COMMENTS</p>
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civileats.com
11 October 2017
Toxics
A small town in Texas. A huge explosion. An unsolved mystery — and the long road back.
WEST, Tex. — If her son hadn’t stowed that damn ’66 Chevrolet Impala in her garage, Jeanette Holecek would have died the day her town exploded. But its sloping steel bulk was in just the right place, at just the right time, and it shielded her from the concussion that shattered her home.
<p></p><p>If Misty Kaska hadn’t found a coupon for dinner at the Panda Express in Waco that Wednesday evening, she and her husband would have been in their house when it crumpled and ignited.</p><p></p><p>If the blast happened a little later, the old folks at the rest home would have been tucked into bed, vulnerable as the ceilings came down. If it had happened earlier, schoolchildren would have been sliced by flying glass and trapped in ruined classrooms. If it had been a Tuesday or Thursday, much of the town would have been at the sports fields for home games, right in the blast radius. But because it was a Wednesday, many were a safe distance away: at St. Mary’s for weekday Mass, or Bible study at the Baptist church, or the track meet near Texas A&M.;</p><p></p><p>Blessings abounded in the Texas town of West, population 2,800, on that April day in 2013 when the fertilizer plant caught fire and its ammonium nitrate detonated — killing 15, injuring 252 and damaging or destroying 500 buildings.</p><p></p><p>At a house 1,000 feet from the plant, everything collapsed except for a cabinet with glass figurines of angels, intact and unmoved. At Holecek’s home, a bedroom wall was wiped clean of its decor except for a single wooden cross. In another room, two paintings still hung side by side: a generic store-bought landscape and a cousin’s hand-rendered lighthouse.</p><p></p><p>The first one was shredded. The second was not even askew.</p><p></p><p>“You cannot tell me that there is not a higher being that knows Wayne’s painting couldn’t be replaced,” she would say later. “There had to be something protecting us.”</p><p></p><p>Investigators have spent 41/2 years and millions of dollars trying to determine what happened that day in West. The town, though, has already figured it out.</p><p></p><p>‘WHAT MAKES THIS COUNTRY GREAT’</p><p></p><p>Two American cities were wracked by explosions during the third week of April 2013. West, Tex., is the one you didn’t pay as much attention to.</p><p></p><p>On April 15, a small but vicious pair of pressure-cooker bombs ripped through the finish-line crowd at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 264. There were obvious villains and emerging heroes, and the subsequent manhunt transfixed the nation. “Boston Strong” became a national mantra.</p><p></p><p>West was a far larger event, though the circumstances were murkier. The April 17 explosion was roughly five times the size of the blast of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which was also generated by ammonium nitrate. It injured almost 10 percent of West’s population, registered as a magnitude-2.1 tremor and flung debris as far as 21/2 miles away. It was as if a twister had come through town carrying an atomic bomb.</p><p></p><p>“It was literally the worst thing I have ever seen,” said Mike Westerfield, a 37-year veteran of the Waco Fire Department. “I mean, I’ve never seen destruction like that.”</p><p></p><p>West registered only briefly on the national radar. Donations poured in and cable news crews camped for a while outside the cattle-auction building, but it soon became clear that there was no link to terrorism. For many, the narrative ended with President Barack Obama’s speech at an April 25 memorial in Waco.</p><p></p><p>“America needs towns like West,” he said in front of flag-draped caskets. “That’s what makes this country great — is towns like West.”</p><p></p><p>We tend to treat small-town America as both a cliche and a touchstone, of what we used to be and what we still aspire to. What, then, to make of West’s calamity?</p><p></p><p>The blast was a culmination of a century of history, of immigration and agriculture and government and growth. It was also the prologue to an epic investigation, a lingering mystery, a baffling twist and a series of epiphanies — some practical, some incredible — on what it means to prosper, to doubt, to be safe, to recover, to believe, to be a community.</p><p></p><p>APRIL 17</p><p></p><p>The town gravedigger was locking up the cemetery when he saw smoke on the horizon. Jake Sulak pulled the white iron gates shut and climbed into his pickup. Looked like his fellow volunteer firefighters would need help.</p><p></p><p>Bryan Anderson, who owned the local pizza joint, was at the Exxon, on the way home with son Kaden from religious-ed class. “Look at all that smoke, Dad,” the 9-year-old said. Bryan called his wife at their bluffside home overlooking the town, and he asked her to step outside and see what was happening.</p><p></p><p>Next door, Stevie Vanek was having a beer with the justice of the peace when his pager started buzzing. The judge kept gabbing, but then the dispatcher called through his radio: “Structure fire at the West Fertilizer plant.” At that, Stevie broke away. He’d have to grab a truck at the fire station.</p><p></p><p>A fourth-generation Westite, Stevie was manager of a glass company and part of the town’s volunteer fire department, established in 1894 by the community of Czechs and Germans who’d settled on this blackland prairie to raise cotton, corn and cattle. When the hand-cranked alarm sounded, farmers, grocers and doctors would race toward danger to protect the world they were building together.</p><p></p><p>And now the heirs of this tradition converged at the maelstrom on the northeast end of town:</p><p></p><p>The mayor, Tommy Muska, parking his son’s Ford pickup on the grassy shoulder by the high school, about a quarter-mile from the fire.</p><p></p><p>Judy Knapek, an elections administrator for the county, arriving in her own truck and wondering about her cousins already fighting the blaze up close.</p><p></p><p>The local funeral director, Robby Payne, who balked at the size of the blaze and started conferring with other firefighters about whether to back the heck up and figure out a Plan B.</p><p></p><p>The smoke was now whipping on the wind toward nearby homes.</p><p></p><p>In her small brick house 1,000 feet away, Cindy Nemecek Hobbs was sitting on her couch reading, unaware of the fire and wondering about the sweet fragrance wafting through her screen door.</p><p></p><p>What was it, she wondered. Not the honeysuckle. Not the roses.</p><p></p><p>And then the phone rang.</p><p></p><p>Where are you? her daughter-in-law asked. There’s a fire at the fertilizer plant. There’s a chance it could explode.</p><p></p><p>The plant was a mom-and-pop operation, a distribution center where farmers picked up custom mixes of fertilizer to boost crop yields. It was built in 1962 a half-mile outside West. As the harvests grew, so did the town. In 1967, the rest home opened 629 feet from the plant. In the early ’70s, a two-story apartment complex was built even closer. Then a playground and basketball court, a mere 249 feet away.</p><p></p><p>When the plant was struggling in 2004, local farmer Donald Adair bought it and took steps to keep it running as the West Fertilizer Co. The community was grateful. And if there were any concerns about safety — the wooden storehouse had no sprinkler system and the Adairs’ insurer once declined to renew its policy — well, a 1966 government report had declared the chance of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate detonating in a fire as “small or even nonexistent.”</p><p></p><p>But now the gravedigger was peering over his steering wheel at flames the color of blood, lashing the gray sky above the engulfed plant, so high he couldn’t see the end of it. Biggest, meanest fire he’d ever seen.</p><p></p><p>A former firefighter drove by. The plant was “going to blow,” he warned, and everyone should evacuate. But then came a current firefighter, whose day job was at the plant. The fire, he told them, “could never get hot enough for it to go off.”</p><p></p><p>The fire department’s hoses were too short to reach the nearest hydrant, at the high school. So an engine pumped water from a tender truck as four firefighters tried to direct the hose into the open northeast portal of the storehouse, and the inferno inside. The heat vaporized the water before it could reach the flames.</p><p></p><p>“Pat, that place scares me,” Stevie Vanek said to a fellow firefighter in his truck as they approached and inhaled a chemical odor, something harsh and horrifying.</p><p></p><p>Adair had been at church when his cellphone rang. The 83-year-old plant owner came speeding up to the perimeter that first responders had established at the site. He could see that the building was a total loss.</p><p></p><p>“Get the people off the street and off the yard,” he told a firefighter.</p><p></p><p>There were about 300,000 pounds of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate on the premises. It was planting season, after all.</p><p></p><p>Only 22 minutes had passed since a West police officer first caught a whiff of smoke.</p><p></p><p>That’s when radio traffic suddenly went dead.</p><p></p><p>The mayor’s baseball cap flew off.</p><p></p><p>The noise could be heard dozens of miles away.</p><p></p><p>Close by, everything seemed to happen in silence.</p><p></p><p>A scythe of light swept over the ground. The earth collapsed upward around the plant. Fiery hunks of metal and concrete streaked away like meteorites returning to space. A rippling dome of air bloomed from the explosion, crushing the firetrucks, racing out in a wall of pressure, flattening grass.</p><p></p><p>It threw Robby Payne, the funeral director, into a metal tank. It heaved Tommy Muska, the mayor, backward six feet. It pushed the rails of the train track together into one ribbon of steel, and it tipped over a rail car containing 200,000 pounds of fertilizer. It blew out the back walls of the apartment complex, and then the front walls, carrying some residents into the parking lot. Then it hit Bryan and Kaden in their truck, collapsing the cab and blowing the windshield into their faces.</p><p></p><p>“Are we dead?” Kaden screamed. “Are we dead?”</p><p></p><p>“I don’t know,” shouted his dad, reaching for him through shattered glass. “If we’re dead, we’re dead together, because I can feel you.”</p><p></p><p>Up on the bluff, Bryan’s wife was knocked off her feet. Behind her, the front windows of the house exploded, and glass shards riddled the couch she had just been sitting on.</p><p></p><p>Across from the apartments, the rest home folded like a house of cards. At the schools, door frames split, ceiling tiles dropped and glass flew into corkboard.</p><p></p><p>All around West, air bags deployed. Car trunks opened. Tires went flat. Garage doors crumpled out while windows blew in. Insulation dropped from ceilings. Water mains cracked underground.</p><p></p><p>A mile away at St. Mary’s, the stained glass splintered.</p><p></p><p>Six miles away, in the town of Abbott, front doors popped open.</p><p></p><p>Ten miles away, a fisherman on Aquilla Lake ducked, thinking his boat was being struck by lightning.</p><p></p><p>Twenty-nine miles away, at a church in the town of Italy, Tex., an Iraq War veteran whispered to his brother-in-law, “That was an explosion.”</p><p></p><p>And back in West, things started falling from the sky. An 800-pound slab of the plant’s foundation crashed through the rest home’s roof, cartwheeling through a wall and out onto the street. The front end of a forklift landed in Jeanette Holecek’s yard as she lay by the Chevy. A fireball flew past between Cindy Nemecek Hobbs and one of her neighbors. The fire chief, George Nors Sr., was dazed, bleeding from the ears. Judy Knapek looked up and saw a mushroom cloud. A giant U-shaped pipe landed at her feet and disintegrated.</p><p></p><p>The trees were on fire. The gravedigger, still in his truck, thought he was dead until bloodied men came pounding on his window.</p><p></p><p>Walls of black smoke rolled down streets, past houses ignited by flaming debris. The interstate was a flashing artery of red and blue. Firefighters from other towns descended on West, tried to put out fires at the schools, clambered into the apartment complex to unearth residents buried by crumbled walls. In the ruins of the rest home, townspeople ripped doors off their hinges to use as backboards, piled some residents into the beds of pickup trucks and pushed others down the street in their wheelchairs.</p><p></p><p>West residents raced around town, shouting over the sirens in search of lost family as evening descended and helicopters circled. The electricity was out everywhere except, miraculously, the football field, which became the triage site.</p><p></p><p>Misty Kaska had raced back from Panda Express in Waco and, because she is a nurse, went straight for triage. She found plenty of walking wounded, but surprisingly few injuries proportional to the physical violence around her.</p><p></p><p>This is it? she thought. Where are the missing limbs?</p><p></p><p>Doreen Strickland, the president of the Abbott Volunteer Fire Department, helped one old man from the rest home into the passenger seat of her fire engine. In the back were a dozen of his fellow residents. He turned to Doreen.</p><p></p><p>“Am I the grand marshal?” he said in a small, raspy voice.</p><p></p><p>Doreen looked at him. What else could she say? “You sure are.”</p><p></p><p>“And I’m in front of the parade,” he said, lost in his delusion.</p><p></p><p>“You’re leading the parade,” Doreen said gently, as she piloted the engine around smoking boulders of debris. “You’re a very special person right now.” Turning her head to cry, she rolled down the window for him, and he started waving at armageddon.</p><p></p><p>THE PUZZLE</p><p></p><p>Josey Visnovske was in his back yard in south Georgia when his phone buzzed. His boss, asking him to check his email.</p><p></p><p>Twelve first responders dead. Wanna go to West, Texas?</p><p></p><p>No, he didn’t. Not really. A former Marine and undercover police officer, Josey joined the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and became a fire investigator. He liked to work a burn site like a puzzle, to sift ashes for answers. But something about his intensity, his compassionate nature, made him a promising “peer responder” — someone who tends to the knotty hurt of emergency personnel who survive a terrible event. It was a calling he resisted. “It wasn’t part of the plan,” he says. But he agreed to go to West as his first deployment as a peer responder.</p><p></p><p>To his ATF colleagues would fall the task of investigating the cause of the West inferno — a probe that would put a federal team on the scene for 29 days, sorting through obliterated machinery for evidence, conducting 400 interviews, even combing through 300,000 pounds of corn from a demolished silo at the plant. It was one of the largest investigations ever undertaken by the ATF.</p><p></p><p>The fire caused the explosion.</p><p></p><p>But what caused the fire?</p><p></p><p>Josey’s job was more personal. Before he left Georgia for West, he took a handful of quarters and Marine Corps key chains and taped them to a target 100 yards away behind his house. Then he took his bolt-action rifle and, one by one, fired bullets through the objects. He hoped they could be his keys into West: something concrete but personal, a token of his own vulnerability.</p><p></p><p>He got there two days after the explosion and found a town reeling.</p><p></p><p>“Don’t mess with ’em now,” Judy Knapek told the stranger wandering into her fire station. The daughter of a West firefighter whose portrait still hung on the wall, Judy saw herself as the protector of the protectors. And her boys were in pain.</p><p></p><p>They’d just lost five men from their department of 29, including her cousins Robert and Doug Snokhous, and more were in the hospital. In all, about 24 first responders, from West and other jurisdictions, had made it to the scene, and half had died. Some walked away with fractures, a busted eardrum, a concussion; others were carried out in too-small body bags as a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” The difference was a matter of inches, of seconds. That was a puzzle far more confounding than the actual fire scene.</p><p></p><p>Josey made clear that he was there to listen, not investigate. He stayed in West for a week, meeting with responders one-on-one, trying to chip through the town’s stoicism. He gave out his bullet-pierced tokens and explained that he had done the same for his dad when he was dying of cancer.</p><p></p><p>May not mean anything to you, Josey said. But it means something to me. I’m here to help you, if you want help. I don’t have all the answers. And it ain’t my job to make you feel better. I can’t make the pain go away.</p><p></p><p>THE PLAN</p><p></p><p>For those with serious injuries, surgery followed surgery. Robby Payne, the funeral director, was in the hospital for two weeks, unable to perform his duties for fellow firefighters who had perished. Jake Sulak, the gravedigger, buried seven of his fellow firefighters, digging and crying day and night for a week.</p><p></p><p>“I never knew the body could hold so many tears,” said Doreen Strickland, of the Abbott department.</p><p></p><p>There were at least 53 people with traumatic brain injuries or concussions. One young man — his face deformed by lacerations when the apartment complex disintegrated — hanged himself from a tree in his yard that October.</p><p></p><p>Three months after the blast destroyed her home, Cindy Nemecek Hobbs was living in a trailer up the interstate, trying to figure out her next step. She had worked through the chaos and arrived at a revelation. A friend told her that the Bible talks about “the sweet aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing,” and she thought about the fragrance she smelled before the blast.</p><p></p><p>“There were too many lives that were saved,” Cindy said to one of the founders of the History of West Museum, Nancy Hykel, who interviewed her for the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. “There should’ve been hundreds of us that were dead.”</p><p></p><p>Others in West were equally in awe, groping for an explanation.</p><p></p><p>“My gosh, how did people survive this?” said retired nurse Georgia Hutyra, who thought a plane had crashed in her back yard when the sound reached her house, two miles from the plant. “Because it’s just unbelievable that we didn’t have more people die when you look at the damage that was sustained in that area. It’s just unbelievable.”</p><p></p><p>Baptist pastor John Crowder saw the blast inspire people to ask big questions and seek big answers. Himself included.</p><p></p><p>“Now, looking back, I see why it was part of God’s plan to stay here as long as I did,” said the pastor, who came to West 20 years earlier, never intending to stay. “It didn’t make sense until the explosion. I came here as an outsider and I had gained the trust — I’d earned the trust — of the people in the community.” He took a lead role in helping West recover. “I think,” he said, “that was part of the plan.”</p><p></p><p>Townspeople talked about “angel stories,” the near-misses and unexpected graces born of the blast, and they processed it as a biblical accident with divine undertones. “God is good,” they took to saying, “and West is blessed.” Every person Nancy Hykel interviewed spoke of miracles. “There was a healing ceremony six months later,” she said, “and there was a double rainbow in the sky.” On social media, people shared a photo of the fire, with white flames seeming to form a cross in the middle of the blaze.</p><p></p><p>If the judge hadn’t kept Stevie Vanek a few minutes longer . . .</p><p></p><p>If Jeanette Holecek wasn’t behind that old steel Chevy . . .</p><p></p><p>If Misty Kaska hadn’t found a coupon for Panda Express . . .</p><p></p><p>If Bryan Anderson hadn’t called his wife and told her to leave the house, and if Cindy Hobbs’s daughter-in-law hadn’t done the same . . .</p><p></p><p>Separately, they seemed like coincidences. Together, they seemed like a design.</p><p></p><p>But there was another set of ifs.</p><p></p><p>If only West had considered the risks of its encroachment toward the plant over the years . . .</p><p></p><p>If only the state fire marshal had been required to inspect the plant, and if only the plant had been required to install a sprinkler system . . .</p><p></p><p>If the fire department had been trained to recognize the gravity of this kind of blaze . . .</p><p></p><p>The town was not exactly thinking about that. Cindy’s mind kept reaching back into the past, to her immigrant grandparents: the trials they’d endured to come to West, to stay here, to run a business, to make a life.</p><p></p><p>“I don’t know how these people came across America in a covered wagon, not knowing what was laying ahead of them, you know?” Cindy told Nancy. “To strike out for parts unknown in a language they didn’t even speak. . . . They had fortitude that — I guess we all got it in our DNA from them.”</p><p></p><p>In 1997, she lost her teenage son in a car accident. On that drizzly night she looked out her front window and saw the yard filled with boys from the football team, standing in silent vigil. The town that her grandparents had built, against great odds, was made of more than just train tracks and farmland.</p><p></p><p>“We’ll get through whatever we’re given,” Cindy said. “And I hope that I can instill this in my children and grandchildren: that no matter what the obstacle is, have faith and push on and don’t let it get you down. Because something better is ahead of you. That’s why you’re here.”</p><p></p><p>THE REVELATION</p><p></p><p>Time passed. Rubble was cleared. Homes were rebuilt. Roads were repaved. Insurance-related losses climbed north of $200 million. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against West Fertilizer and the fertilizer manufacturers, CF Industries and El Dorado Chemical, alleging negligence as well as defects in the product that caused injuries and death. West Fertilizer was hit with $118,300 in fines for violating several rules about the handling of hazardous materials. Through an attorney, Adair, the plant owner, declined to comment for this article.</p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, 19 other sites in Texas each continued storing at least 10,000 pounds of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate within a half-mile of a school, hospital or rest home. At least an additional 170 sites held some quantity of fertilizer, many in wood-frame buildings.</p><p></p><p>As physical wounds healed, emotional ones festered. There was no clear villain to absorb the town’s anger — even as they sued the Adairs’ business, they perceived the family as fellow victims — and so people lashed out at the committee handling private donations and recovery money from FEMA.</p><p></p><p>And then insult to injury: Autopsies showed that two of West’s fallen firefighters had alcohol in their systems, and the state fire marshal issued a report critical of the West department’s response.</p><p></p><p>The town recoiled. These men were heroes — and volunteers. They had run toward danger so others could flee.</p><p></p><p>“Only two citizens died because 12 men stood up,” said Jimmie Duncan Jr., a firefighter from the Dallas suburb of Irving. “That’s the reality. And you can’t convince me otherwise.”</p><p></p><p>Outside the bounds of an investigation, Josey Visnovske, the peer responder, tended to the fire department’s psyche with his unorthodox and sometimes exasperating ways. He persuaded some firefighters to visit the blast site so they could see it in a controlled state — so it wouldn’t grow into something that haunted them. He confronted the West police officer who first reported the fire, and who was fogged by remorse because it sent his friend, a firefighter, to the scene.</p><p></p><p>“When’s it going to dawn on you that you killed your buddy?” Josey asked the officer point-blank, betting that this harsh tactic would shake him out of his stupor.</p><p></p><p>“I told him, ‘F--- you, that wasn’t my fault,’ and that’s what he wanted me to realize,” says Michael Irving, who helped evacuate the area and divert traffic before the blast. “He kept in touch with us, and made sure we were okay. If he had never done that, I don’t know where I’d be now.”</p><p></p><p>Josey kept coming back to West, and slowly people opened up. It took a year for Judy to even acknowledge to him that she was at the plant when it blew. It took longer for one firefighter, a particularly hard nut, to talk about where he’d worked at the time: the rest home.</p><p></p><p>All the while, the ATF continued to investigate the cause of the fire, building replicas of the storehouse and then using them to test burning scenarios.</p><p></p><p>Through this process, they ruled out the weather.</p><p></p><p>They ruled out a cigarette.</p><p></p><p>They ruled out faulty wiring.</p><p></p><p>And then, on May 11, 2016, more than three years after the explosion, investigators held a news conference in West.</p><p></p><p>“The fire has been ruled as incendiary,” an investigator said.</p><p></p><p>That meant someone set it.</p><p></p><p>WHAT KIND OF TOWN THIS IS</p><p></p><p>“It’s bulls---.”</p><p></p><p>Good Friday, 2017.</p><p></p><p>“They had to come up with something.”</p><p></p><p>Stevie Vanek had just finished frying 170 pounds of catfish at the Knights of Columbus.</p><p></p><p>“In a small town,” he says, “when somebody’s wife is running around, or someone gets drunk, people know about it.”</p><p></p><p>Finally, West had been given a sign that might help explain the inexplicable — but it wanted little to do with it.</p><p></p><p>The ATF’s announcement managed only to rip the scab off the wound, trip up the lawsuits and inspire a tremor of suspicion — much of it directed at the ATF. West was not on board for a whodunit, especially if there appeared to be no leads. The town had already spent years processing the blast, and it had arrived at something other than anger or blame.</p><p></p><p>Stevie, for one, couldn’t say why the blast happened, but he knows why he survived. And that was enough for him to make sense of it.</p><p></p><p>“The good Lord spared me,” he says, “so I could take care of Ann.”</p><p></p><p>A year after the blast, Stevie’s wife had a heart attack in Fort Worth that left her in a coma. Stevie called a former St. Mary’s pastor, who told him to recite seven Hail Marys. Stevie did, and two days later Ann woke up, he says. At a Knights of Columbus barbecue, West raised a heap of money for her medical bills. Two thousand plates of food were sold, in a town of just 2,800.</p><p></p><p>“What kind of town this is — ” Stevie says, then stops, tripped up by tears. “When I was in need, they gave it back. All those people who lost their homes: They were there for me.”</p><p></p><p>It is a town that is always throwing benefits — fish fries, silent auctions, chicken dinners — whenever there is a need. Three months after the blast, the 4-year-old son of a deceased firefighter got the idea for a hot-dog sale and raised $80,000 for a new playground. It’s there now, mere feet from the old plant site, and features a giant firefighter helmet and a toy ambulance for children to play in.</p><p></p><p>Maybe this was the reason Josey kept coming back to West, long after a peer responder should’ve closed the book. The people got under his skin. The firefighters trusted him. He was like them in certain ways — a hardheaded, softhearted country boy who shot hogs in the woods at night — but he had also learned, from working other cases, about how to pull people through their darkness. He was back for each blast anniversary, and the firefighters hosted barbecues for him. Judy became like a second mom to him, the fire chief like a father. In West he felt accepted and understood in a way that eluded him elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>One day Judy told him, “I’m so glad that I met you.”</p><p></p><p>“Okay, then we’re moving forward,” Josey replied.</p><p></p><p>“How do you figure?”</p><p></p><p>“You met me because a whole bunch of people died.”</p><p></p><p>“I never looked at it that way,” she said.</p><p></p><p>Josey filmed interviews with members of West’s fire department. He presented them at conferences on trauma, where he extolled their strength and talked about how people aren’t wired to process emotions at the speed of an iPhone. He talked about the need to wait. To listen. To go back. To remember as everyone else forgets.</p><p></p><p>He was always telling his two young sons that in life you gotta do your job, but you also gotta do your part. The latter was always trickier, scarier, less obvious, more thankless, and not necessarily part of your plan. It was the reason Josey was returning to West.</p><p></p><p>“The only time I go to church is when they burn,” Josey says. “But being with those people — it makes me feel like I’m surrounded by honor and grace. And freakin’ angels.”</p><p></p><p>The chief’s wife, Fran, believed that, without Josey, George would not have recovered emotionally.</p><p></p><p>“God sent you to us,” she told him.</p><p></p><p>THE PIECES</p><p></p><p>Thunder sends a chill down the spine. A slamming door starts a cold sweat. Some wounds are visible — a light scar roping down the neck, a hitched gait from a cobbled ankle — and some manifest in slight panics, memory lapses, recurring nightmares, lingering guilt.</p><p></p><p>“I still won’t talk about it,” Judy says. “The others were hurt worse. In my eyes, they lost more. I’m just a little piece of it.”</p><p></p><p>“I’m always going to be incomplete,” says Robby Payne, the funeral director. “Healing is taking place. You’re learning to live with what you went through.”</p><p></p><p>“It keeps you down all the time,” says Jake Sulak, the gravedigger. “Sometimes a person tries to make sense of everything. Why this? Why that?”</p><p></p><p>“I can’t forget,” says Bryan Anderson, whose hearing will never be 100 percent. “I live it every day. And even more so through him.” His son Kaden, now 14, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but has come a long way; he’s starting high school and is an offensive lineman on the football team.</p><p></p><p>“We can’t stop,” Mayor Tommy Muska says. “You stop and you drown.”</p><p></p><p>He learned this after his son died in a car wreck in 2005.</p><p></p><p>“Nothing, including an explosion like this, compares to that,” he says. “It hardened me. It kind of prepared me for that time, as mayor.”</p><p></p><p>Over and over, he told his town what he had already learned: “We are going to make it. We are going to be okay. It’s going to take some time. But it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”</p><p></p><p>And the city reached milestone after milestone. Handsome homes of blond rock now populate the north end of town, a former wasteland. In 2015, a palatial new rest home opened, with a marble stone that acknowledges both the blast and “the presence of God” that day. June marked the end of the first year at the new high school, with its soaring ceilings and beautiful gym adorned with another West motto: “RISE UP.” The fire department is holding strong at 30 members, with several recruits. The town broke ground this summer on a permanent memorial to the dead, on a spot 25 feet from where an old Chevy saved Jeanette Holecek.</p><p></p><p>Not all is resolved. West is still sifting the ashes.</p><p></p><p>Individual lawsuits have been settling, and suffering is being measured in dollars.</p><p></p><p>The investigation into the fire itself is still open, and the ATF won’t comment on it.</p><p></p><p>The town’s case against the fertilizer manufacturers and West Fertilizer is scheduled for a January trial in Waco. It “will reveal the explicit explosion risks known by the manufacturers of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate,” says lead plaintiff attorney Steve Harrison, and “how little of that information they shared with anyone else.”</p><p></p><p>But the defendants maintain that the plant and the fire department were well-informed about the detonation potential of ammonium nitrate, and that it doesn’t explode if handled properly. They also argue that the ATF’s ruling of a criminal act opens a flurry of questions that make it “impossible” to identify the exact cause of the disaster.</p><p></p><p>Nevertheless, a “catastrophic incident” such as West’s remains a risk that “exists throughout the state of Texas,” according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, and probably beyond: Across 47 states, there are at least 1,345 facilities working with ammonium nitrate, a substance over which federal authorities have limited oversight, according to the Government Accountability Office. (West Fertilizer asserts that it was regulated by “at least eight government agencies.”)</p><p></p><p>While the Obama administration drafted new safety rules to prevent another West, President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, delayed their implementation to review comments from key players — state governments that argue that disclosing information about chemical facilities poses a security risk, and industry leaders, who cite the ambiguity left by the ATF ruling that the West fire was criminal.</p><p></p><p>What you see in the wreckage depends on how you sort through it.</p><p></p><p>“Sometimes I think that maybe it happened,” Judy says, “because God said we were all drifting too far apart.”</p><p></p><p>That is the modern history of West: big farms swallowing small farms, Walmarts opening in Hillsboro and Bellmead, West’s Main Street getting quieter, young people going off to college and not always returning. Everybody used to know everybody, older folks say, but at some point the fabric of the town began to loosen.</p><p></p><p>“Maybe we were not going the direction He wanted us to,” Judy says, “and maybe when this happened — whether He let it happen or not — it pulled the town back together.”</p><p></p><p>‘THEY’RE BACK’</p><p></p><p>Easter 2017 came and went, as did talk of death and resurrection.</p><p></p><p>The fourth anniversary came and went, as did talk of how to remember and how to move on.</p><p></p><p>“Through hard work, caring relationships, perseverance, and faith, we have discovered the awesome power of community,” Pastor John Crowder said during this year’s memorial at St. Mary’s. “The source of that power is the one who created community, by placing within each of us a need for one another.”</p><p></p><p>In the second row, Judy gripped Josey’s knee and cried, the first time she’d done so at a memorial. That day she, the chief and another firefighter went to the blast site, now patched with switch grass and evening primrose. There was no debris, no crater 90 feet wide. Just an empty lot with a plain white cross by the road. Josey asked for a group photo and was startled by what he saw through his phone.</p><p></p><p>Firefighters.</p><p></p><p>Standing at the epicenter of their pain.</p><p></p><p>Arms around one another.</p><p></p><p>Smiling.</p><p></p><p>A few weeks later, Josey spoke at a trauma conference in Baltimore. His presentation was on how to plot a “road map” for moving forward after a terrible event.</p><p></p><p>“I’d 10 times rather be on a fire scene, digging one out right now, than being here,” he told the audience as he vibrated with nerves and emotion. “But I’m just trying to do my part.” Afterward, he escaped to the lobby, cowboy boots on, wristwatch smelling like smoke from all the fires he’s responded to.</p><p></p><p>The people of West “don’t want ‘oh, woe is me,’ ” he explains. “They want to be remembered because, I mean, it was a huge event. It may not be to the rest of the world, but it was to them.”</p><p></p><p>This is what he wants America to understand.</p><p></p><p>“What if all of New York blew up? This was one town that blew up. They are so proud of their little city and what they’ve accomplished historically. And then they got their ass handed to them. And guess what? They’re back.”</p><p></p><p>America needs towns like West, a president once said.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps this, too, is part of the plan.</p><p></p><p>When Josey explains it, he is in tears.</p><p></p><p>“I think I’ve got more out of West,” he says, “than they’ve got out of me.”</p>
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11 October 2017
Climate
Trump’s Puerto Rico video tells positive story but leaves a lot on cutting-room floor.
A few minutes into a video about Puerto Rico relief efforts that President Trump tweeted out this week is a short clip about U.S. Forest Service workers clearing fallen trees off a road in the rural interior.
<p></p><p>Over the sound of chain saws, the Forest Service’s fire chief explains how this will allow for the easier distribution of food, medical supplies and other aid. But his full comments are cut off by a shift to footage of a ship used as a hospital.</p><p></p><p>Had the road-clearing clip continued for 15 seconds, the president’s millions of Twitter followers would have heard the fire chief praise the people of Puerto Rico for successfully clearing many roads before the federal government arrived. The sentiment seems contrary to the president’s repeated criticism of local efforts and his claim in the tweet accompanying the video: “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!”</p><p></p><p>In the full clip, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency posted on its Twitter account Saturday, Jaime Gamboa says: “So the citizens of Puerto Rico were doing an outstanding job coming out and clearing roads to help get the aid that’s needed. Because that’s occurring, we’re bringing our folks in and they’re just making the roads wider, more usable.”</p><p></p><p>The 8-minute-48-second video provides the kind of narrow, positive view of relief efforts in Puerto Rico that the president has been trying to convey amid the humanitarian crisis there — a montage of stacks of bottled water, helicopters moving concrete slabs and supplies, boats carrying medical items and trucks hauling diesel. There are many more federal workers and military members featured than Puerto Ricans in need of aid, and there is no mention of the fact that 84 percent of the island is still without power and more than one-third of residents do not have access to clean drinking water. The last 81 seconds are devoted to documenting Trump’s four-hour visit to the island last week.</p><p></p><p>The selectively edited compilation shows the extent to which Trump and his administration are portraying the federal government’s handling of the disaster in Puerto Rico in the best possible light, despite the enduring power, water and health problems there nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the video and its formation.</p><p></p><p>During Trump’s trip on Oct. 3, he visited San Juan and a nearby municipality that were not as heavily hit as other parts of the island. Trump characterized the territory as being in full recovery mode, told locals they no longer needed flashlights, made a disgusted face when told how water purification works, playfully tossed paper-towel rolls to residents as if they were basketballs and noted that Puerto Rico’s death toll was much lower than that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After his trip, statistics about access to power and drinking water in Puerto Rico disappeared from FEMA’s main information page about Hurricane Maria but were restored following a Washington Post report.</p><p></p><p>Trump’s tweet of the video landed at 7:37 p.m. Sunday, when those close to Trump say he had grown increasingly frustrated that his administration was being criticized, not praised, for its handling of Hurricane Maria. Earlier in the day, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, attacked by Trump for earlier criticism, tweeted that power had collapsed in a San Juan hospital and the federal government did “NOTHING!”</p><p></p><p>“Increasingly painful to undestand the american people want to help and US Gov does not want to help. WE NEED WATER!” she repeatedly tweeted early Sunday.</p><p></p><p>The video tweeted by Trump hours later opened with the message: “What the fake news media will not show you in Puerto Rico . . .”</p><p></p><p>The production pulls together a hodgepodge of videos from a variety of sources, mostly within the government but also including a charity and a media outlet. All the footage is aimed at an upbeat message.</p><p></p><p>Some of the footage had previously been highlighted by the White House’s social media operation, such as a short news-style package of the Coast Guard delivering medicine to an island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast on Oct. 4. The video shows roads that appear easily traveled — along with a woman in shorts and a tank top who hugs a Coast Guard member and profusely thanks him and others for bringing insulin and other medication. Trump’s director of social media, Daniel Scavino Jr., tweeted it Sunday afternoon with the message, “Amazing stories like this, all over Puerto Rico.”</p><p></p><p>There is a Pentagon video about relief efforts, narrated by white and purple text, that was posted Friday on Twitter. The video, produced by DOD News Now, features troops carrying and delivering aid, more helicopters, relief being distributed in a municipality east of San Juan, heavy equipment clearing brush, and footage of the Puerto Rican governor.</p><p></p><p>Other parts are not clearly labeled. There is footage of two trucks hauling supplies near an airplane hangar like the one Trump visited last week, although it’s unclear when and where the clip was made, or who made the clip, which is repeated later in the video.</p><p></p><p>One clip features work by the American Red Cross, which is not a part of the federal government. It shows the charity’s effort to bring wireless Internet to Ponce, a major city along Puerto Rico’s southern coast.</p><p></p><p>“Thank you to the Red Cross for connecting me with my whole family,” a young woman says in the video, which was posted on the Red Cross’s Twitter account last Wednesday.</p><p></p><p>Many of the clips are missing context. Unlabeled footage of workers emptying fuel out of a tanker truck, for example, was filmed on Sept. 29 as Puerto Rican National Guard members delivered diesel to hospitals relying on generator power. Another series of clips shows Ohio National Guard members passing bottled water and loading a pallet onto a military cargo plan; the footage, posted Oct. 3 on Twitter, was shot as the troops were headed to Puerto Rico and not yet on the island, as might be assumed from the rest of the video.</p><p></p><p>There is also footage of the Coast Guard delivering supplies to a residence for the elderly in Ponce and members of the military delivering food and water to Utuado, the same inner-island municipality where forest workers were working to clear the road. And there is a shot of a helicopter heavy-lift operation filmed by the Independent, a British publication, and published on Oct. 4 before being tweeted out by the Pentagon two days later.</p><p></p><p>The final part of the video is an 81-second documentary that the White House released following Trump’s visit last Tuesday. The quality is higher than the rest of the production, and there is a soaring soundtrack and footage taken from various angles.</p><p></p><p>The president and first lady step off Air Force One waving. Trump chats with some of those at the airport as a horde of reporters records his every move. There is brief footage of fallen trees in San Juan and Trump meeting with local officials in an Air National Guard hangar. Trump arrives on the USS Kearsarge off the coast of Puerto Rico in a helicopter and salutes members of the military. Then the video jolts back in time to Trump touring a neighborhood just outside San Juan — which was easily reached by motorcade and did not require helicopter travel — and visiting an evangelical church.</p><p></p><p>Calvary Chapel is the largest English-speaking church on the island, and many of its members are in the military, federal workers or transplants from the mainland. Jason Dennett, the church’s pastor, said a Secret Service agent who used to live in Puerto Rico suggested Trump visit the church about a week before his visit. The day that Trump visited, Dennett said, there were about 150 locals at the church, although many seemed more interested in getting a photo with Trump than obtaining canned food or paper towels.</p><p></p><p>On the video, the footage goes into slow-motion as Trump hands a can of chicken into the crowd at the church. The camera also zooms in on pro-Trump signs in the church, including one that reads “Let’s Make Puerto Rico Great Again,” a play on the president’s campaign slogan.</p><p></p><p>At the end, it’s back to the helicopter ride to the Kearsarge, into a briefing with members of the military and on to the deck, where Trump shook hands with those aboard.</p><p></p><p>The video then fades to black, and a white icon of the White House pops onto the screen.</p><p></p><p>Joyce Koh, Dan Lamothe and Arelis R. Hernández contributed to this report.</p>
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11 October 2017
Toxics
How the United States plans to trap its biggest stash of nuclear-weapons waste in glass.
NATURE | NEWS FEATURE
<p>Sharing</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>How the United States plans to trap its biggest stash of nuclear-weapons waste in glass</p><p>After decades of delays, a challenging clean-up project is gaining ground.</p><p></p><p>Jeff Tollefson1</p><p>10 October 2017</p><p>Article tools</p><p>PDFRights & Permissions</p><p></p><p>Karen Kasmauski/NGC</p><p>Waste from decades of nuclear-weapons production is buried at the Hanford Site in Washington state.</p><p>There's a building boom at the Hanford Site, a once-secret complex on the windswept plains of southeastern Washington state. Construction crews are working to finish a 27-metre-tall concrete structure there by June. If all goes well, the facility will finally enable the US Department of Energy (DOE) to begin treating the toxic, radioactive waste that accumulated at the site for more than 40 years, starting during the Second World War.</p><p></p><p>Decades after the site stopped producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, the legacy of Hanford's activities is still causing trouble. Just this year, a tunnel holding railway carriages full of radioactive material collapsed. Separately, at least a dozen employees who were tearing down a contaminated building reportedly tested positive for plutonium inhalation. But the site's biggest challenge lies underground, in 177 carbon-steel tanks. Together, these buried containers hold more than 200 million litres of highly hazardous liquids and peanut-buttery sludge — enough to fill 80 Olympic-size swimming pools. More than one-third of the tanks have leaked, contaminating groundwater with radioactive and chemical waste.</p><p></p><p>In a 1989 legal agreement with the state of Washington and the US Environmental Protection Agency, the DOE committed to immobilizing the most dangerous waste in sturdy glass logs through a process called vitrification. Several years later, the agency agreed to vitrify other tank waste as well. All told, the process is expected to generate tens of thousands of logs, each weighing multiple tonnes. Those containing high-level waste would be shipped to a permanent storage facility; the rest could be stored on site. But the effort has been plagued by cost overruns, delays and safety concerns. Although the DOE has spent roughly US$20 billion on the tank problem since 1997, no waste has been vitrified.</p><p></p><p>Four years ago, the agency hit reset. Rather than making a single vitrification plant, it split the project in two. One plant — the building now under construction — would begin vitrifying the less-hazardous, 'low-activity' liquid in the tanks. A bigger, more-complex plant to process the high-level sludge would follow once researchers resolved some thorny safety questions.</p><p></p><p>On both fronts, there have been signs of progress. This year, the DOE reported that it had resolved crucial questions related to treating the high-level waste. And a laboratory needed for real-time analysis of the low-level waste is nearing completion. If work continues as planned, the site could crank out its first glass logs as early as 2022.</p><p></p><p></p><p>US DoE/Office of River Protection</p><p>A sample of vitrified glass.</p><p>Hanford's critics, accustomed to missed deadlines and management scandals, remain sceptical. But even officials with the state of Washington, which has battled the DOE in court for nearly three decades over clean-up goals and deadlines, are hopeful that efforts are now on track. “There's reason for optimism,” says Suzanne Dahl, who oversees tank activities for the Washington Department of Ecology.</p><p></p><p>Scientists have been studying vitrification since the 1950s, and a number of countries have used the process to stabilize nuclear waste, including France, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. The United States vitrifies waste at the DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. But the size and complexity of the problem is on a different scale at Hanford.</p><p></p><p>Established as part of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, the Hanford Site delivered the plutonium that went into the first nuclear-weapon test and the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. It went on to produce the bulk of the plutonium for the US nuclear arsenal. “Hanford is the whole history of nuclear development,” says Ian Pegg, a physicist at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, who works with the DOE on vitrification experiments.</p><p></p><p>Toxic brews</p><p>The ever-shifting suite of technologies used at the site produced uniquely toxic brews that include radioactive caesium, strontium, americium and residual plutonium; salts; heavy metals; and myriad industrial chemicals. The containers also hold other surprises. People “threw everything imaginable into those tanks”, says Albert Kruger, a glass scientist with the DOE in Richland, Washington. His list includes contaminated gloves, planks of wood, rocks and tape measures.</p><p></p><p>Once such detritus is removed, vitrification calls for the waste to be combined with ingredients that include silica and boron, then heated to nearly 1,150 °C. The molten mixture is next cooled in stainless-steel canisters to create large cylinders of borosilicate glass — the same material used in oven-safe glassware.</p><p></p><p>The process is complicated by that fact that each tank contains a cocktail of chemicals and radionuclides that cannot be fully characterized until the waste is extracted. Some of those substances can weaken glass. Others, such as iodine, can't be readily trapped and must be removed. Hanford scientists will have to tailor glass recipes for each batch of waste — a bit like blending different vintages to produce a fine cognac. “Nobody will test the nose, and nobody will take a taste test, but it's an equivalent mechanism,” Kruger says.</p><p></p><p>Multiple contractors have worked on the Hanford project since 1989, including British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a UK-government-owned company that exported the technology it was using at the Sellafield nuclear-decommissioning complex. After price estimates rose, in 2000 the DOE hired construction and engineering giant Bechtel of San Francisco, California, as the primary contractor.</p><p></p><p>At that time, the Hanford plant was expected to cost $4.3 billion and to begin making logs in 2007. But as engineers began working through the safety and technical details, the project ballooned in price and complexity. By 2012, senior officials — including a former DOE employee and two contractors who later filed whistle-blower complaints after being fired — were raising concerns. One was that hydrogen, which is generated when heat and radiation split water molecules, would build up in tanks and pipes, creating a risk of explosion. Another was that mixing vessels meant to keep heavy particles moving would not be powerful enough. Over time, enough residual plutonium could settle out to create a dangerous chain reaction.</p><p></p><p>Then-DOE secretary Steven Chu assembled an expert panel to investigate. Ultimately, Bechtel was ordered to first construct a plant that would vitrify only liquid waste. The liquid represents 90% of the waste volume but just 10% of its radioactivity, and requires less processing than the high-level waste: it can be skimmed off, stripped of highly radioactive caesium and then sent directly to vitrification. “It makes sense,” says David Kosson, a chemical engineer at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who was on Chu's expert panel. If you have got to pick one place to start, he says, “the low-activity waste is not a bad choice”.</p><p></p><p>Lingering questions</p><p>The high-level-waste facilities remain on hold, but the DOE and its contractors have spent years investigating the technical issues using computer models and prototypes. In February, the agency announced it had resolved issues related to hydrogen build-up and uncontrolled reactions. Scientists familiar with the effort says tests of a newly designed mixing vessel are nearing completion, apparently without any major hitches. The vessel is equipped with six 'pulse jet mixers' that pull waste in and out like turkey basters, to keep solids from settling.</p><p></p><p>Researchers are also making progress on the glass recipes. Kruger and external scientists have shown that certain compositions can accommodate more waste than previously estimated, and so potentially save on costs. The number of glass logs produced in the high-level waste facility could drop from 18,000 to as few as 7,000, Kruger says. The low-level plant may need to make just 70,000 logs or so, instead of 145,000.</p><p></p><p>But questions remain. A 2015 DOE report documented more than 500 vulnerabilities that could affect low-level plant operations — including some in the electrical and mechanical systems that would be used to handle radioactive materials. Tom Carpenter, executive director of the watchdog group Hanford Challenge, hopes the plant will work as advertised. But he is concerned that the DOE, its contractors and even the state of Washington are too eager to bring the facility online. “Everyone is desperate to show progress,” he says. “I get that, but you can't paper over the safety issues.” Senior DOE officials at Hanford declined to be interviewed for this story; a Bechtel spokesperson said the company has addressed the vast majority of concerns raised in the report and has submitted its responses to the DOE for verification.</p><p></p><p>Not everyone is convinced that vitrification is the way to go. The DOE is bound by legal agreements and nuclear-waste regulations to pursue the process, but from a technical standpoint there are better options, says Jim Conca, a consultant and former director of an independent research centre that supports the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, the nation's only operating deep geological repository.</p><p></p><p>Hanford's high-level wastes are currently slated for disposal at Yucca Mountain, a long-stalled geological repository in Nevada. Water infiltration is a concern there, so the waste must be encased in glass to help ensure that it remains stable over thousands of years. But Conca says that the tank sludge is safe enough to simply be dried out and sent to WIPP — if regulations could be changed to allow it. Similarly, low-activity waste could be mixed with grout to create concrete-like material, which would be cheaper and, many believe, just as safe. “Does all of that waste technically need to be vitrified for environmental safety? Probably not,” says Kosson. But in the end, Kosson believes that the DOE will press forward with the plan.</p><p></p><p>Chu remains confident that vitrification can work, but says the DOE should be receptive to new science and shift course as needed. More generally, he says, the country has a long way to go in resolving questions about how — and where — it will dispose of all its nuclear waste. “This is a significant problem, and there has to be a lot of good science in figuring out a better path forward,” he says. “Always keep your mind open.”</p><p></p><p>The price tag on Hanford's vitrification facilities now stands at $16.8 billion. Assuming that the latest timetable holds, the plant for high-level waste will open for business in the early 2030s, and operations will continue for decades. In the meantime, dangerous waste will remain underground, out of sight but not out of mind.</p>
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11 October 2017
Justice
Chicken workers sue, saying they were modern-day slaves.
Three Oklahoma men filed a federal class-action lawsuit today alleging that they were modern-day slaves forced by a drug rehabilitation program to work for free in chicken processing plants.
<p></p><p>An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting last week found that judges across the country have ordered defendants into rehab programs that double as work camps for for-profit companies.</p><p></p><p>The investigation zeroed in on Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery, or CAAIR, an Oklahoma program that puts hundreds of men a year to work slaughtering chickens at processing plants owned by Simmons Foods Inc. The men work for free, under constant threat of prison, on products for big-name brands, including Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, KFC and Rachael Ray’s Nutrish pet food. The rehab program keeps their wages.</p><p></p><p>“By defrauding these men and providing virtual slave labor for a private corporation, CAAIR and Simmons are not only violating longstanding labor laws, they are violating basic standards of human decency and the core concepts underpinning our constitutional democracy,” the firm that filed the suit, Smolen, Smolen & Roytman, said in a statement.</p><p></p><p>The men are seeking more than $5 million. Their complaint alleges violations of state and federal labor laws, which require employers to pay employees at least minimum wage and overtime for their work. The men at CAAIR made nothing. The few who graduated from the one-year program were eligible for a $1,000 gift.</p><p></p><p>Among other legal issues, the lawsuit alleges that the program violates the 13th Amendment ban on slave labor and involuntary servitude. The complaint also alleges that the program constitutes human trafficking under Oklahoma state law and accuses CAAIR of committing fraud by not providing men with the drug and alcohol rehabilitation services they were promised.</p><p></p><p>An Oklahoma drug court sent Arthur Copeland, one of the plaintiffs named in the suit, to CAAIR in 2016. He thought he was going to a rehab program, according to the suit, but instead found himself hanging more than 60 live chickens a minute along an assembly line. Copeland was seriously injured in a chicken plant but was threatened with prison if he stopped working, according to the lawsuit. He eventually relapsed while in the program and was sent to prison.</p><p></p><p>Brad McGahey, another plaintiff, was ordered to CAAIR in 2010. His hand was crushed in a conveyor belt while working at a chicken plant. McGahey was featured prominently in Reveal’s online narrative and its podcast.</p><p></p><p>“I’m glad. Hell, I’m broke,” McGahey said of the lawsuit when reached by phone. “Them sorry bastards think they’re untouchable. I don’t want to see them ruin anyone else’s life.”</p><p></p><p>Brandon Spurgin, also named in Reveal’s story and as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, was injured in 2014 when a metal door at a plant fell on his head, causing spinal damage. CAAIR filed for workers’ compensation on his behalf and pocketed the payments.</p><p></p><p>“Maybe finally something gets done,” he said of the lawsuit. “If nothing ever happens, people are going to keep getting hurt up there.”</p><p></p><p>Janet Wilkerson, one of the founders of CAAIR and a former poultry company executive, told Reveal that wages from the men’s work go toward the cost of the program, including paying for their housing, food and classes. Of the three counselors on staff, only one is licensed. She said the program is a good alternative for those who cannot afford to pay for private rehab programs.</p><p></p><p>“Money is an obstacle for so many of these men,” she said. “We’re not going to charge them to come here, but they’re going to have to work. That’s a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job.”</p><p></p><p>Reveal also found that men at CAAIR often performed unpaid work for Wilkerson and her friends and family. She called it community service.</p><p></p><p>The drug courts’ use of the program may also violate Oklahoma’s drug court law, according to its authors. It requires judges to rely on programs certified by the state. CAAIR is not a certified treatment program.</p><p></p><p>Dozens of men told Reveal that injuries were routine at the chicken plants. In several cases, CAAIR filed workers’ compensation claims on their behalf and collected the payouts. The Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission now has launched an investigation into potential fraud, which could lead to criminal charges.</p><p></p><p>Other state agencies also are looking into the program, including the Oklahoma attorney general’s office and the Oklahoma Department of Labor. The Tulsa drug court is reconsidering its relationship with CAAIR. And the Nutrish pet food brand is reviewing its supply chain.</p><p></p><p>Amy Julia Harris can be reached at aharris@revealnews.org, and Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @amyjharris and @shoeshine.</p>
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11 October 2017
Food
Can we trust the sustainable meat we order online?
The best way to know where your beef comes from is to order directly from a farmer. But not everyone can afford to pay farmers’ market prices or to front hundreds of dollars for a cow share and then try to fit all the vacuum-sealed meat into their freezer. For this reason, a host of online resources are now available to ship the most sustainable meats directly from family farms to consumers’ doors. All in manageable quantities at a reasonable price.
<p></p><p>Take Seattle-based Crowd Cow. The start-up stole the scene in 2015 with $2 million in venture capital investments and a first-of-its-kind model for selling meat online. In effect, Crowd Cow founders Ethan Lowry and Joe Heitzeberg used their tech backgrounds to bring the ranch to the internet. Crowd Cow offers whole animals for sale in online “events,” one cow at a time—in retail-cut packages—until they’re sold. They also provide customers with the full story of the ranch and the animals. “We practically give you the address,” said Lowry.</p><p></p><p>While the technology and finance worlds swoon over these entrepreneurs, they also set up an extra layer of mediation between the producer and buyer. And, given the ongoing potential for greenwashing in the food sector and the questions surrounding animal welfare in the USDA Organic certification, it’s worth asking: Can we trust the meat we buy online?</p><p></p><p>Both Crowd Cow and another startup, Butcher Box, have been called out on social media recently for failing to live up to their mission statements, raising questions about transparency in the new digital food economy. Civil Eats followed up with the companies and sustainable meat advocates to learn more about some of the challenges and contradictions involved in trying to source sustainable meat for a profit in today’s economy.</p><p></p><p>Supply and Demand in the Digital Meat Economy</p><p></p><p>Concerns about the overall lack of transparency among well-funded startups led Rebecca Thistlethwaite, farmers program manager for the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network at Oregon State University and author of The New Livestock Farmer, to strike up a conversation with the customer service department at Butcher Box in June.</p><p></p><p>Butcher Box is an online meat subscription service that launched in 2015 on a Kickstarter platform to help consumers learn more about where their beef comes from. According to their site, the company sells seven-to-10-pound boxes of 100 percent “grass-fed and grass-finished beef” from “various farms in the Midwest.”</p><p></p><p>But when Thistlethwaite initiated a chat on the site to find out where the meat comes from, a customer service representative told her that the information was “proprietary.”</p><p></p><p>In follow up emails with founder/CEO Mike Salguero, she learned that some Butcher Box grass-fed meat was coming from Midwest, and some was coming from Australia. She related the incident on her blog, Honest Meat, adding: “If they’re proud of their company and the meat they sell, they should be proud to name [their sources] on their website. It is really that simple.”</p><p></p><p>In a conversation with Civil Eats, Salguero explained that Thistlethwaite’s negative customer service interaction was the result of the company growing big really fast. “At that point, we were shipping 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of grass-fed beef a month,” he said. And he described a larger issue facing every e-food company promising sustainably raised meats, especially grass-fed beef: sourcing a reliable supply.</p><p></p><p>Outsourcing the Grass-Fed Beef Supply</p><p></p><p>While beef consumption has declined in the U.S., the grass-fed beef market is growing dramatically. According to a recent study by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (based on Nielsen data), retail sales of grass-fed beef has grown by 100 percent every year for the past four years.</p><p></p><p>Marilyn Noble, communications director for the American Grass-fed Association (AGA), says that the market’s momentum is undeniable. And with that opportunity comes the potential for deceptive practices. Several sources we spoke to mentioned the practice of feeding cattle manufactured grass pellets rather than keeping them on actual pasture, for example.</p><p></p><p>“There really isn’t anything out there that guarantees that consumers are getting what they think they’re getting,” said Noble.</p><p></p><p>In this muddled market, newcomers like Salguero have taken sourcing grass-fed beef into their own hands, which is how he ended up in Australia. “Beef from Australia is considered to be higher quality and better for you than the majority of meat from America,” he wrote in a blog post on the company website shortly after Thistlethwait’s critique, citing the country’s grading system and animal welfare standards.</p><p></p><p>In a conversation with Civil Eats, Salguero acknowledged that the cost savings is also one of the benefits. “Australian beef is way cheaper, probably 20 percent cheaper,” he said. And plenty of other retailers, including Blue Apron, are importing grass-fed beef, according to Noble from AGA. “It doesn’t surprise me that companies are sourcing their meat offshore,” she said. “They’re just doing what Kroger, Trader Joe’s, and Albertson’s have been doing for years.”</p><p></p><p>The trouble is, since Congress repealed the country of origin labeling law (COOL) at the end of 2015, there’s no way of know whether the beef, pork, and turkey is imported unless the company chooses to come clean on its website.</p><p></p><p>Grass-fed beef advocates take issue with imported beef, citing the carbon footprint and displacement for American farms. “There’s so much grass-fed in this country that’s so good and would probably fill the niche,” said Noble. However, the cost of production for domestic grass-fed beef is higher because of the vast consolidation in the meat industry has caused a “distribution bottleneck” for small-scale producers.</p><p></p><p>Noble believes that companies like Butcher Box could help re-establish new distribution networks and provide the reliable supply that these companies demand—but to do that, they would probably have to pass some of the increased price on to consumers.</p><p></p><p>Salguero believes that the scuttlebutt over imported beef is misplaced. Regardless of the source, he says all grass-fed is better than the factory-farmed alternative. “Here’s the problem: 98 percent of the beef sold in the United States is corn-fed from a feedlot,” Salguero said.</p><p></p><p>From Building Software to Shaping an Industry</p><p></p><p>Crowd Cow has faced similar challenges. Sustainable meat advocates, like butcher and author of a James Beard Award-winning series of butchery books Adam Danforth, followed the company’s ascent beginning when it launched in 2015. He was intrigued by the company’s mission and crowdfunding model to create “something outside the [dominant] paradigm.” Yet he was skeptical about a venture capitalist-funded business upselling and “fetishizing” meats that were disconnected from their local food systems.</p><p></p><p>“I didn’t feel like it ever was a proposed system that would have a net benefit for those who are trying to improve meat accessibility,” Danforth told Civil Eats.</p><p></p><p>Last spring, he noticed a major shift when a Crowd Cow email announced a sale for grain-finished beef from a Washington farm. This is not the same as beef from a feedlot, but some purists decry finishing a ruminant animal on grain, period. Although Danforth is not in that camp, he said, “It wasn’t in the original model or the mission of the company.” But the major blow came when Crowd Cow sold Kobe beef direct from a farm in Japan this last June.</p><p></p><p>Sustainable meat advocates were quick to point out on social media that Kobe beef is not local, sustainable, or humane due to the animals’ continuous confinement. Diana Rodgers, a nutritionist and author who initially championed Crowd Cow to her followers, took note. “I don’t have that much of an issue if a company is selling meat from Japan,” she told Civil Eats. “But for the ethical food community concerned about sustainability and ethical treatment of animals, the vendors need to live up to that expectation.”</p><p></p><p>For their part, the Crowd Cow founders pled inexperience and were shocked by the social media blowback. “We started it as a local little company,” said Heitzeberg. “We came at this as software people,” added Lowry. But the pair also asserted that nearly all of their sales have involved U.S. beef from small-scale farms, and they state that the response from their customers and producers has been nothing but positive.</p><p></p><p>“We see ourselves showing people that beef is not a commodity, and that is going to fuel the success of the smaller farms that have been lost in the traditional production system,” said Lowry.</p><p></p><p>While Crowd Cow would not share specifics on company growth, they reported that at the end of 2016, 65 percent of their sales were within 10 miles of Seattle. Nine months later, they were shipping to all 48 states.</p><p></p><p>On the supply side, independent ranchers are also seeking out Crowd Cow. “We’re giving the producer a viable business model,” Lowry said. And the relationships may translate into the incremental change that advocates like Danforth are seeking.</p><p></p><p>Choosing Transparency</p><p></p><p>For mission-driven entrepreneurs, one of the hardest lessons is that delivering local food on a massive scale is harder than it looks. Like several other similar startups, Amber Lewis’s Charlotte, North Carolina-based prepared meals company, grew out of her own personal Paleo diet in 2011. Initially, Lewis scrambled to find enough locally sourced meats in her area. “Our protein source has run the gamut of every scenario you can imagine to get sustainable meat in our door,” she said.</p><p></p><p>But when she rebranded four years later to become The Good Kitchen with a national launch, she recognized the need to find producers beyond her local area and to change the company messaging as well. “I think it’s about transparency and calling out when you’re making changes,” Lewis said. “I think that consumers understand that changes are going to happen.”</p><p></p><p>“Sustainability has to look like a lot of different things if it’s going to take hold,” said Rodgers. “If buying directly from a farmer doesn’t work for some people, [ordering online] may be a better model than buying [conventional] meat from a grocery store.”</p><p></p><p>Buying meat online involves a certain level of trust and transparency. And while many online meat businesses appear to be eschewing certification programs, such as AGA’s grass-fed standards, Global Animal Partnership, and third-party animal welfare labels, it’s tough to say whether that trend will last. As Marilyn Noble sees it, existing trusted labels are useful tools, even for “young guys coming up with these disruptive ways of getting food into people’s hands.”</p><p></p><p>Either way, Lewis from the Good Kitchen says she sees consumers are getting smarter. “They’re reading labels, they’re doing research and they’re mission-driven with their money,” she says. Indeed, that fact what will likely ensure that the market for alternative meat continues to expand. The question is how domestic producers will flourish along with it.</p>
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10 October 2017
Food
The animal rights advocate reenvisioning the future of food.
By Molly Fosco
<p>THE DAILY DOSEOCT 10 2017</p><p></p><p>When Nathan Runkle arrived at school one spring day in 1999, he found several of his classmates distraught. Mr. Jenkins, the agriculture teacher, had brought in a bucket of tiny piglets for a dissection lesson — only one was still alive. A fellow 10th grader had picked up the piglet by the hind legs and repeatedly slammed its head into the ground until it bled from the mouth. Runkle helped rush the baby pig to a trusted teacher, who took it to be euthanized.</p><p></p><p>The experience changed 15-year-old Runkle, inspiring him to start Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit fighting to protect farmed animals around the world. Nearly two decades later, MFA has worked to reduce their suffering through corporate lobbying and legislation, and Runkle continues to speak out against animal cruelty from factory farms to classrooms and courtrooms. His goals are twofold: to convince fast-food giants that animals are more important than their bottom line and to encourage the world to stop eating meat.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>Nathan Runkle would have been a fifth-generation farmer in his small midwestern town. Instead, he founded Mercy for Animals, a leading nonprofit organization for protecting factory-farmed animals.</p><p>SOURCE COURTESY OF MERCY FOR ANIMALS</p><p>Runkle’s advocacy training began when he volunteered for PETA, protesting to save animals of all kinds. When he started MFA, he chose to focus on farm animals for one major reason: “Of all the animals that are mistreated at the hands of humans, well over 90 percent are used for food,” Runkle says.</p><p></p><p>As a target of cruelty himself, Runkle feels a unique connection with farm animals. Growing up gay in rural Ohio, he was often bullied and harassed. In 2008, he was the victim of a hate crime in Dayton, suffering a broken nose and facial fractures. “I think that gave me a much deeper level of sympathy and empathy for anyone that’s been the victim of violence or bullying,” Runkle tells OZY. “To me, that includes animals. While animals are different from us, they are like us in all the ways that matter.”</p><p></p><p>Runkle’s drive to protect farm animals has translated to measurable accomplishments: In the past six years, he’s grown MFA’s staff from 13 to 130 and increased annual revenue from $1.8 million to $12 million. They’ve helped pass legislation like California’s Proposition 2, outlawing confinement that doesn’t let an animal turn freely or extend its limbs. They’ve convinced big players like Burger King, Wal-Mart and Perdue to change their animal welfare policies. If you ask MFA executive vice president Matt Rice, he’ll say their success to date is a testament to Runkle’s leadership: “The organization draws really talented, committed people, and Nathan is able to guide that for maximum good.”</p><p></p><p>IF YOU CAN’T USE THE FULL FORCE OF THE LAW TO CHANGE THEIR PRACTICES, HOW CAN YOU GET FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES TO CARE ABOUT ANIMALS?</p><p>Roughly 9 percent of the U.S. population identifies as vegan or vegetarian, according to a 2016 Pew Research poll. Runkle is trying to increase that number through undercover investigations MFA has led exposing shocking cruelty imposed on livestock in the meat and dairy industries. “Investigators are the unsung heroes of the animal protection movement,” Runkle says. “This is dangerous work. It’s not, you know, sexy James Bond missions.” The footage is hard to watch: Dead hens left decomposing next to live ones, piglets having their tails and testicles ripped off and cows beaten with sledgehammers. Videos taken at factory farms and slaughterhouses have resulted in some corporate policy change, but they’ve also encouraged states like Iowa to pass ag-gag laws that forbid recording inside a farm.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>Growing up on a farm in a small Ohio town, Runkle shared his childhood with animals of all kinds — and the family’s cats and dogs were among his best friends.</p><p>SOURCE COURTESY OF MERCY FOR ANIMALS</p><p>So if you can’t use the full force of the law to change their practices, how can you get Fortune 500 companies to care about animals? “It’s a great question,” Runkle admits. “Some companies have people who legitimately care about this issue, [but] sadly that’s the exception. We have to have people protesting and signing petitions, showing these companies there is a liability to supporting animal cruelty.”</p><p></p><p>While MFA works the levers of public opinion to shape corporate practices, Runkle is also focused on developing and promoting “clean meat” technology. “I think there is a humane way to produce meat, and that’s through cellular agriculture,” he says, referring to “cultured” meat made by growing cow, pig or chicken cells in a lab. Runkle describes it as “meat without the murder,” and it’s catching on: Memphis Meats, a clean-meat startup, recently raised $17 million from investors including Bill Gates and Richard Branson. For its part, MFA has launched a venture capital firm, New Crop Capital, and a nonprofit that promotes food innovation, The Good Food Institute, to fund companies making this futuristic food, like Hampton Creek and Mosa Meat.</p><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>In 2009, when he was 25, Nathan became the youngest person ever inducted into the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame.</p><p>SOURCE COURTESY OF MERCY FOR ANIMALS</p><p>But not everyone is singing the praises of cultured meat. “It’s a false notion that animals are inherently bad for the food system,” Nicolette Hahn Niman, livestock rancher and author of Defending Beef, tells OZY. Instead of focusing on “fake meat,” she feels we should improve livestock grazing practices. “When the solution is presented as meat that isn’t actually meat, I think we’re having the wrong conversation,” Niman says. She likes to quote her friend, environmental scientist Russ Conser, who sums it up nicely: “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.”</p><p></p><p>Another hurdle facing cellular agriculture is that it requires the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is obtained by removing the fetus from a pregnant cow before slaughter and inserting a needle in its heart to extract blood. FBS quickly evaporates the idea of cruelty-free meat, which is why companies like Memphis Meats (funded by New Crop Capital) are currently developing a plant-based serum. Runkle points out that FBS is in limited supply as well. “There isn’t enough FBS in the world to produce significant amounts of clean meat,” he says. Cultured meat also faces the twin challenges of scaling production and lowering cost. The chicken from Memphis Meats would retail for about $6,000 per pound, according to a June report from Quartz. (That’s a 99 percent drop since the lab-grown meat technology debuted in 2013 but still has a long way to go before it reaches people’s kitchens.)</p><p></p><p>Despite the obstacles, Runkle is redoubling efforts to push for new laws in the U.S. while prioritizing MFA’s efforts in countries with high numbers of livestock, like China and Brazil, because, he says, “where an animal was born shouldn’t determine whether they’re subjected to horrible cruelty.” Runkle knows the fight’s far from over, but he’s not backing down. “Change is messy,” he says.</p>
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09 October 2017
Food
It takes a village to improve a community’s health.
By Taylor Knopf
<p></p><p>It’s the community gardens popping up around town. It’s baked chicken and water added to the church congregational lunches. It’s the new weight lifting equipment at the community college. These are some of the small ways Halifax County is fighting back against obesity and heart disease.</p><p></p><p>In 2015 and the years preceding, Halifax County came in almost dead last North Carolina’s county health rankings at 99 out of 100.</p><p></p><p>The local medical community was alarmed by this rating, and by the number of people suffering complications from hypertension, cancer and heart disease. Patients were coming in with diabetes-related amputations and blindness, said Audrey Hardy, a nurse and community health coordinator for Halifax Regional.</p><p></p><p>In response, Hardy said, the medical community formed the Roanoke Valley Community Health Initiative. The group talked about changing the healthcare landscape from caring for people who are already sick to preventing disease. An additional motivation was cost: Practicing “sick care” and treating chronic diseases is costly and patients didn’t always have the best insurance.</p><p></p><p>“Maybe if we start earlier on the front end, we would see better outcomes in the long run,” Hardy said. “When you look at cancer, diabetes and heart disease, you are looking at a wide gamut of things.”</p><p></p><p>“What people eat and how much they move,” she said. “That was the common denominator we could latch onto and try to do something about.”</p><p></p><p>Halifax is a rural area with few parks, playgrounds or places to exercise. It also has many areas that are considered food deserts. The county seat, the city of Halifax, doesn’t have a grocery store. Drive through Roanoke Rapids, and you’ll find a plethora of empty stores with faded signs and fast food joints, but few places to get fresh fruits or vegetables.</p><p></p><p>People from health, education, government, faith and community service sectors came together to help the residents of Halifax County eat healthier foods and be more active.</p><p></p><p>In 2017, Halifax County’s ranking notched up to 96th.</p><p></p><p>“We are not pleased with our health rankings. Though it’s improved, we still have a long way to go,” said Halifax County Commissioner Chairman Vernon Bryant.</p><p></p><p>Parks and Rec</p><p></p><p>“We are trying to do a lot of things with the health initiative program without using taxpayer money,” Bryant said. “There are lots of volunteers. Strategically, we have a plan of how to move things where they need to go.”</p><p></p><p>“I’m excited about the Parks and Rec program,” he said, despite the fact the county doesn’t have an official parks and recreation department. But county officials formed an advisory committee last year to make recommendations to the county commissioners and “unify communities by providing social outlets for healthy activities and overall well-being.”</p><p></p><p>For example, there are few playgrounds and walking trails for people to exercise. As part the health initiative, through a health initiative survey, residents were asked what they wanted. The youth asked for a skate park. One just opened last year at T. J. Davis Recreation Center next to the outdoor swimming pools. There is a “map of play” there that shows all the new and renovated places in the county kids can play.</p><p></p><p>A walking trail and outdoor interactive exercise equipment is another new feature added in 2015 at Halifax Community College for the public to use. More projects like these are in the works.</p><p></p><p>“I’m excited about Halifax County. Period,” Bryant said.</p><p></p><p>Partners in Faith</p><p></p><p>Halifax County may not have many playgrounds, but the county does have a lot of churches.</p><p></p><p>“Church is a common way people are coming together regularly,” Hardy said. “We needed to tap into that. Churches are one of our strengths.”</p><p></p><p>In the last year, Halifax churches have started community gardens and sponsored monthly play days for kids, hosting activities such as swimming classes.</p><p></p><p>The church congregations of Calvary Baptist and Park Baptist started a garden in Roanoke Rapids on Park Baptist’s land. One neighbor said they harvested as many as 400 cucumbers each day during peak season along with many other vegetables such as broccoli, butter beans and squash. Some families have individual rows, and if they have leftovers, they are encouraged to donate to local soup kitchens.</p><p></p><p>“They have been able to bless abundantly well,” said Ruth Gee, volunteer coordinator of the Partners in Faith arm of the health initiative.</p><p></p><p>About 45 churches have joined the effort, she said, and 15 to 20 are regularly involved.</p><p></p><p>“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth,” Gee said, quoting the biblical Book of John as she began a presentation at the North Carolina Institute of Medicine annual meeting in late September at the McKimmon Center in Raleigh.</p><p></p><p>“It’s not just the body or the soul, it’s the entire being that we are about,” Gee said. “Faith doesn’t have to be a religion. Faith is what you believe in. And this is a cause we believe in.”</p><p></p><p>Learning healthy eating</p><p></p><p>Partners in Faith is also deeply involved in hosting healthy cooking classes.</p><p></p><p>Church and community members have learned to make apple pumpkin soup, black bean burgers and 20-minute collards. In the South, people traditionally boil collards in fat for up to two hours, which reduces its nutritional value. During the class, people learned how to saute collards with spices to retain the beneficial nutrients.</p><p></p><p>Students also learned how to make healthier desserts.</p><p></p><p>“It’s hard to break an old habit. When you want a pound cake, you want a good old-fashioned pound cake made with butter, eggs and all that good stuff,” Gee said. “But what they did — and it tasted just as good — they used sour cream and skim milk.”</p><p></p><p>Churches are starting to offer more options during congregational meals as well. Instead of only providing fried chicken and sweet tea, they will offer baked chicken and water also, Gee said.</p><p></p><p>“We don’t force anything, but we give them choices,” she said.</p><p></p><p>In addition to cooking classes, last year the health initiative started a food-of-the-month program through the local pediatricians’ offices.</p><p></p><p>Parents receive an actual piece of produce with a fact sheet about it and a suggested recipe. The idea is to introduce people to food they might not usually buy and give them an easy, healthy way to prepare it.</p><p></p><p>Pediatricians have given out produce such as kiwi, oranges, zucchini, tomatoes and apples.</p><p></p><p>Hardy said the apples came with a microwave applesauce recipe without the preservatives, sugar and corn syrup. She said she’s gotten a lot of positive feedback from the pediatricians.</p><p></p><p>Farmers’ market and corner stores</p><p></p><p>The Farmers’ Market on NC Highway 158 in Roanoke Rapids, has become a central place for everyone to learn about the health initiative and its activities.</p><p></p><p>“Farmers’ market prices were considered high cost and only for the well off,” said Chester Williams. “But that’s not true. It has some of the lowest prices around and it’s for everyone.”</p><p></p><p>Williams wears many hats. In addition to chairing the county’s parks and recreation advisory board, he founded a nonprofit, A Better Chance, A Better Community, calling himself the Chief Empowerment Officer.</p><p></p><p>The Farmers’ Market now takes food stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). People can go to the market’s office and exchange SNAP dollars for market tokens, and the market office reimburses the farmers that same day. Williams said this helps with the shame some people feel using SNAP.</p><p></p><p>Williams also advises a group of young people who are working to introduce healthy food options into corner stores around the county. The youth have visited Raleigh to make their case. So far there are seven healthy corner stores in the area.</p><p></p><p>Hardy said kids like to shop at corner stores for snacks, and if they don’t have options, they will eat what’s there.</p><p></p><p>“We stopped waiting on that cavalry horse and started putting resources forward to save ourselves,” Williams said, adding that a few years ago, he didn’t believe Halifax could make this much improvement in such a short time.</p><p></p><p>“We want to be up there with Chapel Hill,” Williams said. “We recognize that we made mistakes and are changing that.”</p>
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08 October 2017
Toxics
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
<p>Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off</p><p></p><p>Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST</p><p></p><p>Click to follow</p><p>The Independent Online</p><p></p><p>POPULAR VIDEOS</p><p> </p><p>Congressman injured in shooting says gun control would be 'dangerous'</p><p> </p><p>Superman is nowhere to be seen in the new Justice League trailer</p><p> </p><p>Emily Thornberry says Labour would stand up to Donald Trump</p><p>“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”</p><p></p><p>To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.</p><p></p><p>Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species. </p><p></p><p>“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”</p><p></p><p>Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”</p><p></p><p></p><p>Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)</p><p>When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.</p><p></p><p>Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.</p><p></p><p></p><p>READ MORE</p><p>Oldest land fossils suggest Darwin was right about origin of life</p><p>More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices. </p><p></p><p>The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.</p><p></p><p>“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet. </p><p></p><p>Wildlife under attack</p><p></p><p>The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.</p><p></p><p>Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate. </p><p></p><p>In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years. </p><p></p><p>Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”</p><p></p><p></p><p>Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)</p><p>The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.</p><p></p><p>The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.” </p><p></p><p>And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.</p><p></p><p>The link with food</p><p></p><p>Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.</p><p></p><p>Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.</p><p></p><p></p><p>READ MORE</p><p>Charles Darwin Disney film: Naturalist gets the Indiana Jones</p><p>What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.</p><p></p><p>One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.</p><p></p><p></p><p>It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)</p><p>According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos. </p><p></p><p>It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.</p><p></p><p>But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat. </p><p></p><p>According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.</p><p></p><p></p><p>READ MORE</p><p>Why we should work four-hour days like Darwin and Dickens</p><p>Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.</p><p></p><p>In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.</p><p></p><p>The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”. </p><p></p><p></p><p>Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)</p><p>“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.</p><p></p><p>Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline. </p><p></p><p>CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.</p><p></p><p>And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”</p><p></p><p>Solutions</p><p></p><p>Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.</p><p></p><p>Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”</p><p></p><p></p><p>Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)</p><p>Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed. </p><p></p><p>Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.</p><p></p><p>Less meat </p><p></p><p>Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.</p><p></p><p>Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.” </p><p></p><p>He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)</p><p>He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.</p><p></p><p>By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard. </p><p></p><p>“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”</p><p></p><p>More about: Charles DarwinEvolutionMass extinctions Reuse content</p>
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07 October 2017
Climate
Investor Jeremy Grantham is worried about the world.
BARRON'S MFQ
<p>Jeremy Grantham is Worried About the World</p><p>The veteran investor now runs a $900 million foundation focused on protecting the environment. What he supports, where he invests.</p><p></p><p>By SARAH MAX</p><p>Oct. 6, 2017 11:42 p.m. ET</p><p>Tony Luong for Barron's</p><p>Investors know Jeremy Grantham as the chief investment strategist of GMO, the $77 billion Boston-based asset management firm he co-founded in 1977. The venerable value investor is praised for his prescient market calls, including predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns. He also told investors to “reinvest when terrified” in a piece published in 2009 on the very day the market hit its postfinancial crisis low.</p><p></p><p>In environmental circles, Grantham, who just turned 79, is equally esteemed. In 1997 he and his wife, Hannelore, converted their foundation to focus exclusively on the environment. The $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment gives money to organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund, and supports climate-related research and communication at four academic institutions. It has contributed to the training of more than a hundred Ph.Ds in climate-related work, and funded two Pulitzer-winning projects and one recipient of an Emmy. Last year Grantham, who is British, was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his philanthropic contributions to the environment.</p><p></p><p>As an investor, Grantham’s priority is earning the best return. Still, he says, it’s impossible to separate what he knows about the environment and how he thinks about risk and opportunity. “If you believe, as I do, that climate change is so severe that it’s an actual question about survival as a well functioning global society, then you know that I take it extremely seriously,” he says.</p><p></p><p>If we don’t solve climate change, he warns, “all the other things we are trying to protect and encourage are a waste of money and energy.”</p><p></p><p>Barron’s: What sparked your interest in climate change?</p><p></p><p>Grantham: Twenty-eight years ago, I had a series of fairly epic summer vacations with my wife and three kids. The first trip was in the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the Andes, and involved taking dugout canoes up rivers in pouring rain with my four-year-old daughter hiding under my poncho. The next one was in Rwanda, during a pause in the civil war, and on to Tanzania. The final one was to Borneo. We sailed up to the middle of nowhere and stayed in longhouses that had one visitor a year.</p><p></p><p>This exposed us to the masses of clear-cut forests and the interminable piles of logs lying along the side of the rivers. We all became increasingly obsessed by the significance of climate change and the damage to the environment.</p><p></p><p>What is one of your biggest concerns?</p><p></p><p>Acceleration. Carbon dioxide is going up at an increasing rate, with the three biggest increases occurring in the last three years; the climate is warming at an increasing rate; and the water is warming at an increasing rate; and therefore, the level at which oceans are rising is increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.</p><p></p><p></p><p>“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“ —Jeremy Grantham Tony Luong for Barron's</p><p>Tell us about your foundation.</p><p></p><p>Total annual giving runs about $25 million to $30 million. About 30% is in the U.K., where, all things being equal, research costs half as much as it does in the U.S.</p><p></p><p>We fund four climate-change institutes—at Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and Sheffield University, as well as a related investment at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.</p><p></p><p>We give 20% to about a dozen small organizations engaged in communications. We allocate about 40% of our giving to some of the usual suspects, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, and a fourth group called RARE, which is U.S.-based but spends everything abroad protecting the environment.</p><p></p><p>The remaining part is an army of 15 or 20 more specialized enterprises, one of which is based on population. Population is a massive problem, particularly in Africa. All the safety margins, the resilience of these countries, has been chewed up by having so many people. Resources are a threat in the long run. Overpopulation is a threat. Climate change interacts with all of them in a rather pernicious way.</p><p></p><p>What is the foundation’s approach to grant-making?</p><p></p><p>We try to look at critical areas for the future. We require that grantees are urgent in their style and have fire in their bellies. We are especially focused on areas that are important but haven’t yet been recognized—and where the need for speed is critical. We also look for important areas that are politically incorrect and have a hard time attracting money because they are so controversial—like population growth.</p><p></p><p>How does the foundation invest its assets?</p><p></p><p>We have $900 million spread across a family foundation, a public trust, and, to a substantially lesser degree, my personal assets. The three pieces are run as one with the help of Cambridge Associates [an investment consultant]. We have a stunningly large amount, about 45% of assets, in early-stage venture capital funds chosen by Cambridge.</p><p></p><p>We’ve got 35% in what I modestly call world-class, very conservative hedge funds, including GMO. The remaining 20% is invested by the foundation’s executive director, Ramsay Ravenel, and myself. About 12% is in emerging markets, 5% in cash, and 3% is in our GMO Resources IV [ticker: GOVIX] in 2013, and GMO Climate Change III [GCCHX].</p><p></p><p>How has your insight into climate change influenced your investment decisions at GMO?</p><p></p><p>I’m not doing any direct investing at GMO. For the last 10 years, I have spent my time thinking about the big picture—productivity, economic booms and busts, climate change, and resource limitations. But, as an investor, you can never know too much. I can’t separate how my investing instincts were affected by knowing a lot more about resource limitations and the effects of climate change. It was part of the background music, like everything else I know.</p><p></p><p>The two funds you mentioned, GMO Resources and GMO Climate Change, are for institutional investors. Tell us about them.</p><p></p><p>We launched Resources in 2013, and Climate Change this year. Lucas White is the portfolio manager of both funds. One of the advantages for the Resources fund is that, because resource prices are volatile, most investors hate them. Value managers who might normally buy them shy away; they outperform over time because they’re cheap. Meanwhile, these stocks tend to have a low correlation with most other investments.</p><p></p><p>How do you reconcile your views on climate change with investments in the Resources fund?</p><p></p><p>It’s complicated because the biggest resources are fossil fuels. New technology is an arrow aimed at the heart of fossil fuels; after a decent one or two years, the slow burn of green energy will substitute them away. They will have to manage a long, slow decline. [About 30% of the portfolio is in oil and gas, versus nearly 70% for most market-cap-weighted resource benchmarks.] We would expect over the next 10 years to be handsomely underweighted. That does not mean that there may not be a time when the fund will choose to invest.</p><p></p><p>And the Climate Change fund?</p><p></p><p>The goal is to make money by understanding the bewildering amount of change going on. We’re not pretending that every holding is ESG. Our job is to understand this rapidly changing world and make an attractive fund for clients who would like to be investing on the right side of climate change. For example, copper mining can be a dirty business, but it’s hugely critical for electric cars. [ Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the fund’s top holdings.]</p><p></p><p>Where else does it invest?</p><p></p><p>Clean energy is almost a third of the portfolio, including companies focused on solar and wind power, and storage. [The fund owns Vestas Wind Systems (VWS), First Solar (FSLR), and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), which mines lithium used for storage.]</p><p></p><p>Energy efficiency is 24% of the portfolio. One aspect of this is transportation, which includes companies that are making items to increase the efficiency of motors and cars themselves. It also includes energy efficiency in buildings, as well as diversified efficiency enterprises. [Two holdings, Schneider Electric (SU.France) and Eaton (ETN), have multiple businesses tied to energy efficiency.]</p><p></p><p>There is also a fair amount in timber, fish farming, and suppliers of farming materials and equipment, such as Deere [DE], right?</p><p></p><p>We have, by other people’s standards, a stunningly large allocation of more than 17% to agriculture.</p><p></p><p>Can technology help feed more people?</p><p></p><p>Technology in agriculture is much harder, because it comes up against the laws of physics. There is just so much energy you can get out of the sun if you are a plant. We have spent a few thousand years boosting that efficiency level. We are approaching a theoretical limit.</p><p></p><p>On top of that, you have to throw in the increasing effects of storms, droughts, and temperature. Higher temperatures carry more water vapor, 4% to 5% more up in the air than there used to be. You don’t get more storms, but when you get them, they’re heavier. If you chart the incidence of heavy storms, say one inch in an hour, you will find that they are doubly grown over the last 40 years. That is so obviously the case when you read the news.</p><p></p><p>What about new food sources or agricultural methods?</p><p></p><p>There is steady progress on agriculture and feeding the public. We may have to change what we eat. To take a very tough example for Westerners, insects are incredibly nutritious and much, much more efficient sources of energy than chicken. They’re eaten a lot in Africa and the East.</p><p></p><p>Fish are being overfished, but there are great opportunities in seaweed, which is entirely edible. Seaweed can grow 10 to 20 inches a day, four times faster than the fastest-growing land plant. In that context, the sea is amazingly underoptimized. We’ve squeezed the common grains as much as they can be squeezed, but there are plenty of secondary grains important in Africa and Asia that have much more productivity potential.</p><p></p><p>Humans have all the skills and technology required to have a perfectly recyclable world that doesn’t face imminent danger from climate change, and doesn’t have massive poverty. But we have chosen to go on a rather more chaotic and help-yourself route.</p><p></p><p>Capitalism does a brilliant job on millions of decisions balancing supply and demand and so on, but on a handful of issues, it seems, it is clearly ill-equipped to deal with the problem. How do you handle global overfishing? How do you handle long-term erosion of soil and the overdevelopment of underground water, each of which is owned by an individual farmer, or an individual? These require more global cooperation and more concrete internal cooperation, and thinking and planning.</p><p></p><p>Can capitalism help with some of that? Using ESG criteria to choose securities is becoming more common.</p><p></p><p>Interest in ESG isn’t necessarily because of the rush of blood to being good. It could be just good business. If you’re a producer of consumer goods, and people become worried about the plastics in your product, or botulism in your food, you lose business.</p><p></p><p>There’s quite a lot of work that suggests that people who are early movers on good behavior are demonstrating that they are simply thinking more about the future, how it will look, how it will play out over 10 or 15 years. A study by Harvard Business School concluded that in the past, the companies that were good on ESG did exactly that, and they were outperformers.</p><p></p><p>But the heavy lifting [in combating climate change] will still be technological. By the early stage of the next decade, solar and wind will be three cents per kilowatt hour and by the middle of next decade—which is just seven years away—it will be cheaper than the marginal cost of nuclear and coal. The cost of running [a coal plant] and mining will be more than building a solar plant or wind farm from ground zero.</p><p></p><p>When that point is reached you’re talking economics. People who would have stood their ground until the end of time will be eagerly signing up for solar farms, storage facilities, etc.</p><p></p><p>Thank you, Jeremy.</p>
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05 October 2017
Food
They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
The worst day of Brad McGahey’s life was the day a judge decided to spare him from prison.
<p></p><p>McGahey was 23 with dreams of making it big in rodeo, maybe starring in his own reality TV show. With a 1.5 GPA, he’d barely graduated from high school. He had two kids and mounting child support debt. Then he got busted for buying a stolen horse trailer, fell behind on court fines and blew off his probation officer.</p><p></p><p>Standing in a tiny wood-paneled courtroom in rural Oklahoma in 2010, he faced one year in state prison. The judge had another plan.</p><p></p><p>“You need to learn a work ethic,” the judge told him. “I’m sending you to CAAIR.”</p><p></p><p>McGahey had heard of Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. People called it “the Chicken Farm,” a rural retreat where defendants stayed for a year, got addiction treatment and learned to live more productive lives. Most were sent there by courts from across Oklahoma and neighboring states, part of the nationwide push to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison.</p><p></p><p>Aside from daily cans of Dr Pepper, McGahey wasn’t addicted to anything. The judge knew that. But the Chicken Farm sounded better than prison.</p><p></p><p>A few weeks later, McGahey stood in front of a speeding conveyor belt inside a frigid poultry plant, pulling guts and stray feathers from slaughtered chickens destined for major fast food restaurants and grocery stores.</p><p></p><p>There wasn’t much substance abuse treatment at CAAIR. It was mostly factory work for one of America’s top poultry companies. If McGahey got hurt or worked too slowly, his bosses threatened him with prison.</p><p></p><p>And he worked for free. CAAIR pocketed the pay.</p><p></p><p>“It was a slave camp,” McGahey said. “I can’t believe the court sent me there.”</p><p></p><p>Soon, it would get worse.</p><p></p><p>Across the country, judges increasingly are sending defendants to rehab instead of prison or jail. These diversion courts have become the bedrock of criminal justice reform, aiming to transform lives and ease overcrowded prisons.</p><p></p><p>But in the rush to spare people from prison, some judges are steering defendants into rehabs that are little more than lucrative work camps for private industry, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.</p><p></p><p>The programs promise freedom from addiction. Instead, they’ve turned thousands of men and women into indentured servants.</p><p></p><p>The beneficiaries of these programs span the country, from Fortune 500 companies to factories and local businesses. The defendants work at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Oklahoma, a construction firm in Alabama, a nursing home in North Carolina.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps no rehab better exemplifies this allegiance to big business than CAAIR. It was started in 2007 by chicken company executives struggling to find workers. By forming a Christian rehab, they could supply plants with a cheap and captive labor force while helping men overcome their addictions.</p><p></p><p>At CAAIR, about 200 men live on a sprawling, grassy compound in northeastern Oklahoma, and most work full time at Simmons Foods Inc., a company with annual revenue of $1.4 billion. They slaughter and process chickens for some of America’s largest retailers and restaurants, including Walmart, KFC and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. They also make pet food for PetSmart and Rachael Ray’s Nutrish brand.</p><p></p><p>Chicken processing plants are notoriously dangerous and understaffed. The hours are long, the pay is low and the conditions are brutal.</p><p></p><p>Men in the CAAIR program said their hands became gnarled after days spent hanging thousands of chickens from metal shackles. One man said he was burned with acid while hosing down a trailer. Others were maimed by machines or contracted serious bacterial infections.</p><p></p><p>Those who were hurt and could no longer work often were kicked out of CAAIR and sent to prison, court records show. Most men worked through the pain, fearing the same fate.</p><p></p><p>“They work you to death. They work you every single day,” said Nate Turner, who graduated from CAAIR in 2015. “It’s a work camp. They know people are desperate to get out of jail, and they’ll do whatever they can do to stay out of prison.”</p><p></p><p>To unearth this story, Reveal interviewed scores of former participants and employees, court officials and judges and reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents, tax filings and workers’ compensation records.</p><p></p><p>At some rehabs, defendants get to keep their pay. At CAAIR and many others, they do not.</p><p></p><p>Legal experts said forcing defendants to work for free might violate their constitutional rights. The 13th Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as punishment for convicts. That’s why prison labor programs are legal. But many defendants sent to programs such as CAAIR have not yet been convicted of crimes, and some later have their cases dismissed.</p><p></p><p>“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Noah Zatz, a professor specializing in labor law at UCLA, said when presented with Reveal’s findings. “That’s a very strong 13th Amendment violation case.”</p><p></p><p>CAAIR has become indispensable to the criminal justice system, even though judges appear to be violating Oklahoma’s drug court law by using it in some cases, according to the law’s authors.</p><p></p><p>Drug courts in Oklahoma are required to send defendants for treatment at certified programs with trained counselors and state oversight. CAAIR is uncertified. Only one of its three counselors is licensed, and no state agency regulates it.</p><p></p><p>The program mainly relies on faith and work to treat addiction.</p><p></p><p>Sharon Cain runs the drug court in rural Stephens County and decides where to send defendants for treatment. She said state regulators don’t stop her from using CAAIR.</p><p></p><p>“I do what I wanna do. They don’t mess with me,” she said. “And I’m not saying that in a cocky way. They just know I’m going to do drug court the way I’ve always done it.”</p><p></p><p>The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma now is considering legal action in response to Reveal’s reporting.</p><p></p><p>About 280 men are sent to CAAIR each year by courts throughout Oklahoma, as well as Arkansas, Texas and Missouri. Instead of paychecks, the men get bunk beds, meals and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. If there’s time between work shifts, they can meet with a counselor or attend classes on anger management and parenting. Weekly Bible study is mandatory. For the first four months, so is church. Most days revolve around the work.</p><p></p><p>“Money is an obstacle for so many of these men,” said Janet Wilkerson, CAAIR’s founder and CEO. “We’re not going to charge them to come here, but they’re going to have to work. That’s a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job.”</p><p></p><p>The program has become an invaluable labor source. Over the years, Simmons Foods repeatedly has laid off paid employees while expanding its use of CAAIR. Simmons now is so reliant on the program for some shifts that the plants likely would shut down if the men didn’t show up, according to former staff members and plant supervisors.</p><p></p><p>But Donny Epp, a spokesman for Simmons Foods, said the company does not depend on CAAIR to fill a labor shortage.</p><p></p><p>“It’s about building relationships with our community and supporting the opportunity to help people become productive citizens,” he said.</p><p></p><p>The arrangement also has paid off for CAAIR. In seven years, the program brought in more than $11 million in revenue, according to tax filings.</p><p></p><p>“They came up with a hell of an idea,” said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. “They’re making a killing off of us.”</p><p></p><p>Janet Wilkerson had a problem. As vice president of human resources for Peterson Farms Inc., she was having trouble filling the overnight shift at her chicken processing plants. The hours were long. The pay was low. And there never seemed to be enough workers.</p><p></p><p>Then a convicted meth dealer named Raymond Jones walked into her office in 2003 with a story and a proposal, according to a newspaper story at the time. After finding Jesus, Jones had overcome his addictions and decided to start a rehab. He asked Wilkerson to take a chance and hire his men. They were cheap, he promised, and they could work all hours. Their wages would fund his recovery program.</p><p></p><p>Wilkerson eagerly agreed. She called the arrangement a “win, win, win” for the men, chicken plants and Jones.</p><p></p><p>She was so taken with the idea that four years later, she created a nearly identical program of her own.</p><p></p><p>Her brother had died from alcoholism, and her husband’s drinking had nearly destroyed their marriage. She had long wanted to help others like them. The economics also made sense. The chicken plants needed workers, and Jones’ program was bringing in revenue of more than $2 million a year.</p><p></p><p>Wilkerson had the connections to make it happen. In addition to working in human resources at Peterson Farms, she also moonlighted as a spokeswoman for Simmons Foods and other top poultry companies. Wilkerson enlisted her assistant and another poultry executive and brought Jones along as a $250,000-a-year consultant.</p><p></p><p>Then she pitched the idea to her bosses. The companies wouldn’t have to pay workers’ compensation insurance, payroll taxes or medical care. They could replace the workers for any reason at any time. Like a temp agency, her program would pay for everything; the men just needed to work.</p><p></p><p>Simmons signed on. Later, Crystal Lake Farms and Tyson Foods Inc. did, too.</p><p></p><p>Jones agreed to introduce Wilkerson and her business partners to court officials. But his reputation was deteriorating. Plant supervisors said Jones’ workers sometimes would show up high. Workers complained that Jones wasn’t feeding them.</p><p></p><p>Wilkerson vowed to make her program better. She and her partners hired away one of Jones’ top managers and used men from his program to build their first dormitory. They worked for free, as community service. Then she stopped paying Jones and they parted ways.</p><p></p><p>By 2010, hundreds of men poured into CAAIR from courts across Oklahoma. So did the money, allowing the Wilkersons – Janet as CEO and her husband, Don, as vice president of operations – to draw combined salaries of $168,000 a year, nearly four times the median household income in their area.</p><p></p><p>That’s when Brad McGahey arrived.</p><p></p><p>At Simmons Foods, McGahey first went to work in evisceration, suctioning guts and blood out of slaughtered chickens speeding past him on metal hooks. Then he became a grader, arranging raw breasts, thighs and legs into orderly piles as they moved up a conveyor belt to packaging. It was monotonous work.</p><p></p><p>Growing up in the country, McGahey wasn’t bothered by the sight of dead animals. He’d gutted catfish and skinned deer all his life. But the first time he stepped into the Simmons plant, the stench of chicken blood and feces was overpowering.</p><p></p><p>“I almost threw up,” he remembered.</p><p></p><p>On May 27, 2010, three months into his time at CAAIR, something went wrong.</p><p></p><p>A machine dumped a mountain of parts onto the conveyor belt, causing chicken to pile up faster than he and his co-worker could sort it. As they plunged their hands into the heap of cold parts, McGahey remembers hearing a scream. His co-worker’s rubber glove was caught in the conveyor belt.</p><p></p><p>McGahey grabbed the woman’s arm, wresting her hand free. But the machine snagged his own hand. In a matter of seconds, McGahey’s wrist was jerked backward, lodged in the seams of the conveyor belt as it hurtled toward a narrow stainless steel chute overhead. Someone yanked the emergency kill cord, which should have stopped the machine, McGahey recalled. But it raced upward, dragging him along with it.</p><p></p><p>He felt a flash of panic. Then an excruciating crunch.</p><p></p><p>Medical notes later would say McGahey suffered a “severe crush injury.” The machine smashed his hand, breaking several bones and nearly severing a tendon in his wrist. When he finally yanked his wrist free, his hand was bent completely backward. The pain was so bad that he nearly fainted.</p><p></p><p>A nurse at the plant took one look at him and called CAAIR.</p><p></p><p>“The kid’s hand is mangled!” he recalled the nurse screaming into the phone. “He needs help!”</p><p></p><p>McGahey expected an ambulance. Instead, one of CAAIR’s top managers picked him up at the plant and drove him to the local hospital. Doctors took X-rays of McGahey’s hand, gave him a splint and ordered him not to work.</p><p></p><p>Back at CAAIR, he spent a sleepless night cradling his throbbing hand. He figured it would take months to heal and planned to rest. But CAAIR’s administrators would have none of it.</p><p></p><p>They called McGahey lazy and accused him of hurting himself on purpose to avoid working, former employees said. CAAIR told him that he had to go back to work – either at Simmons or around the campus until his hand healed, which wouldn’t count toward his one-year sentence.</p><p></p><p>Wilkerson said she doesn’t remember the specifics of McGahey’s case but acknowledged that CAAIR has given such ultimatums before.</p><p></p><p>“You can either work or you can go to prison,” McGahey remembered administrators telling him. “It’s up to you.”</p><p></p><p>He already had made up his mind.</p><p></p><p>“I’ll take prison over this place,” he said. “Anywhere is better than here.”</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Most men sent to CAAIR are addicted to alcohol, meth, heroin or pain pills. They are usually young, white and can’t afford stays in private rehab programs.</p><p></p><p>Inside CAAIR’s dormitories, Bible verses and Simmons Foods posters line the walls. Participants usually sleep six to a room, crammed onto wooden bunk beds. They attend church services in a common room down the hall, decorated with quilts and wooden crosses.</p><p></p><p>During the one-year program, the men can’t have cellphones or money. If they relapse or break the rules, they can be kicked out or punished with extra time. In 2014, CAAIR reported that about 1 in 4 men completed the program.</p><p></p><p>Former employees said work takes priority over everything. If counseling or classes interfered with the job, the decision was clear. “It’s work,” said Aaron Snyder, who participated in the program and later worked as a dorm manager. “You’re going to work.”</p><p></p><p>The men also perform free labor for CAAIR’s founders, family and friends. A group of men said they helped remodel the Wilkersons’ master bedroom. Another said he helped one of their daughters pack boxes and move. Still others worked on an egg farm owned by the Wilkersons’ other daughter. The program told the courts that it was community service, according to employees.</p><p></p><p>The strict regimen has helped some men get clean. Those who arrive without a home, steady employment or food said they find their basic needs met at CAAIR. Those who complete the program without breaking any rules are eligible for a gift of $1,000 when they graduate.</p><p></p><p>“I have to say CAAIR was the hardest thing to do in my life,” said Bradley Schott, who graduated in 2014. “I went to basic training at 16. And (Army) Ranger school. And it wasn’t as hard as CAAIR, mentally or physically. But it saved my life.”</p><p></p><p>Jim Lovell, CAAIR’s vice president of program management, said there’s dignity in work.</p><p></p><p>“If working 40 hours a week is a slave camp, then all of America is a slave camp,” he said.</p><p></p><p>Men who were injured while at CAAIR rarely receive long-term help for their injuries. That’s because the program requires all men to sign a form stating that they are clients, not employees, and therefore have no right to workers’ comp. Reveal found that when men got hurt, CAAIR filed workers’ comp claims and kept the payouts. Injured men and their families never saw a dime.</p><p></p><p>Brandon Spurgin was working in the chicken plants one night in 2014 when a metal door crashed down on his head, damaging his spine and leaving him with chronic pain, according to medical records. CAAIR filed for workers’ compensation on his behalf and took the $4,500 in insurance payments. Spurgin said he got nothing.</p><p></p><p>Janet Wilkerson acknowledged that’s standard practice.</p><p></p><p>“That’s fraudulent behavior,” said Eddie Walker, a former judge with the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission. He said workers’ comp payments are required to go to the injured worker. “What’s being done is clearly inappropriate.”</p><p></p><p>Three years later, Spurgin’s still in pain and can no longer hold a full-time job.</p><p></p><p>In addition to injuries, some men at CAAIR experience serious drug withdrawal, seizures and mental health crises, according to former employees. But the program doesn’t employ trained medical staff and prohibits psychiatric medicine.</p><p></p><p>A judge in Tulsa sent Donald Basford to CAAIR in 2014 despite a documented history of severe mental health problems. The 36-year-old quickly unraveled, repeatedly complaining to staffers that he was “losing it” without his medication, Snyder, the former employee, recalled.</p><p></p><p>Basford ran away and was found dead inside a car in a church parking lot a few weeks later, according to an autopsy report. Medical examiners found no drugs in his badly decomposed body and weren’t able to determine Basford’s cause of death.</p><p></p><p>Other CAAIR men who had mental breakdowns or manic episodes were kicked out, according to former employees, opening the door for them to be sent to prison.</p><p></p><p>“You just don’t do that to people who obviously need some kind of help,” Snyder said. “It’s not right.”</p><p></p><p>When the Oklahoma Legislature created the state’s drug court requirements 20 years ago, it was part of a growing realization nationwide of the costs – both financial and human – of handing down long prison sentences for drug-related charges.</p><p></p><p>In drug court, judges are required to put defendants through treatment rather than prison. Follow the rules, and defendants can have their cases dismissed.</p><p></p><p>Lawmakers wanted to ensure the quality of treatment, so they wrote an important provision into state law: Drug courts must use treatment providers inspected and certified by the state Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.</p><p></p><p>But affordable treatment is in short supply. Drug court defendants have waited up to nine months for a bed in a residential treatment facility, meanwhile relapsing or languishing in jail. As a result, some courts turn to uncertified programs such as CAAIR, even though it might violate the law, according to the law’s authors.</p><p></p><p>“That is insanity gone to sea,” former state Sen. Dick Wilkerson said when told of Reveal’s findings. (He is not related to CAAIR’s founder.) “That’s illegal. They can’t do that. That is the law, and it has to be followed.”</p><p></p><p>In Pontotoc County, Judge Thomas Landrith sometimes uses CAAIR in place of certified treatment. He said there’s never a wait list, and it costs the courts and state nothing.</p><p></p><p>“We tried to get residential treatment programs down here, but we never could really pull it off,” he said. “So recovery programs kind of fit that niche.”</p><p></p><p>Other judges said they were unaware of the law or have found ways around it.</p><p></p><p>Tulsa’s drug court, which sends the most defendants to CAAIR, said the law permits judges to use uncertified programs, as long as it’s not for treatment.</p><p></p><p>“The referral is to assist the participants in developing good job skills, life skills, work ethics and personal care skills,” said Vicki Cox, court administrator. “Participants are not sent to CAAIR for drug or alcohol treatment.”</p><p></p><p>But Reveal found that Tulsa’s drug court staff repeatedly described CAAIR as treatment in court records. Cox dismissed that as a record-keeping error.</p><p></p><p>Oklahoma’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services funds and monitors drug courts. The agency knows that judges are using uncertified providers such as CAAIR, but officials say there’s little they can do. All they can do is cut some of the funding to drug courts that use those programs. But that’s little disincentive to judges.</p><p></p><p>No drug court judge has ever been disciplined for using uncertified programs, according to the Oklahoma Council on Judicial Complaints.</p><p></p><p>Brad McGahey went straight from CAAIR to a Marshall County jail cell. Because he failed to complete the program, he had violated the rules of his probation. The judge sentenced him to a year in state prison.</p><p></p><p>McGahey was released after two months due to prison overcrowding.</p><p></p><p>His injury had not improved. One minute, his hand throbbed with pain. The next, it tingled and went numb. Sometimes it turned blue.</p><p></p><p>He found a lawyer and went to court for workers’ compensation. The process was slow, and CAAIR fought him every step of the way. In court in 2012, the program’s attorneys argued that McGahey’s recurring symptoms weren’t the result of the accident in the chicken plant.</p><p></p><p>“If you want to get a lie detector test up here, I’ll pay for it,” McGahey blurted in the middle of his testimony. “I know what happened. … I ain’t no liar, and you’re calling me one.”</p><p></p><p>The judge sided with McGahey. “Sounds like you’ve succeeded successfully in delaying the treatment for this person, counselor,” the judge told CAAIR’s attorney.</p><p></p><p>Three years after the accident, McGahey finally got his surgery. But it didn’t help.</p><p></p><p>“I believe that we got to Bradley so late in his treatment … that Bradley is going to have a permanent problem with his hand,” the doctor wrote in a status update to the court in September 2013.</p><p></p><p>McGahey grew depressed. He sold his four-wheeler to pay off his $500-per-month child support debt. He tried welding for two weeks, but his hand injury got in the way. He sought out other opportunities, such as trading and selling used cars, junk and metal. But something always went wrong, and he got into more trouble with the law.</p><p></p><p>When CAAIR’s attorney offered a settlement, McGahey took it. In 2014, he got a lump sum of $11,000.</p><p></p><p>But today, the pain persists. All that seems to help, McGahey says, are pain pills.</p><p></p><p>Every morning and throughout the day, McGahey chugs a can of Dr Pepper with hydrocodone pills. When his doctor cut him off from his various medications, McGahey found another doctor to write a prescription.</p><p></p><p>Before CAAIR, McGahey had no interest in drugs. Now, he says he can’t live without them</p><p></p><p>“I’m addicted to them pills,” McGahey said. “I have to take them.”</p><p></p><p>As McGahey sat on a plastic chair in front of his mother’s house, littered with items scavenged from garage sales, he remembered when he still had the use of two hands, when he was good at rodeo and could work on his family’s farm.</p><p></p><p>“When you can’t do something you love and it’s the only thing you ever known, then it’s taking part of your life away from you,” he said. “I’ve accepted it now and learned how to do with what I got. I just don’t want to see it ruin somebody else’s life.”</p><p></p><p>Courts still send defendants to CAAIR, and the program is expanding. Simmons Foods even donated funds for a third dormitory to house dozens more men.</p><p></p><p>“I was walking in the parking lot of the Simmons plant, and (Chairman) Mark Simmons told me he needed more men,” Wilkerson told a local reporter at the ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2015. “I told him to build me another dorm.”</p><p></p><p>CAAIR is now planning a fourth dormitory. It’s supposed to be the biggest yet.</p><p></p><p>This story was edited by Jennifer LaFleur, Andrew Donohue and Amy Pyle and copy edited by Nadia Wynter and Nikki Frick.</p><p></p><p>Amy Julia Harris can be reached at aharris@revealnews.org, and Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @amyjharris and @shoeshine.</p>
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05 October 2017
Opinion
Even in farm country, farm to table restaurants are hard work.
When I first opened Hobos, a farm-to-table restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I embraced the grand vision of sourcing everything from within 40 miles of the restaurant. I had worked in farm-to-table spots across the country and trained in Europe and Mexico at restaurants as far from commercial food suppliers as you could possibly get. I assumed that sourcing entirely from sustainable, local farm and seafood purveyors would be easy here; after all, Delaware is a state fewer than 100 miles in length, and claims 40 percent of its land in use for agriculture.
<p></p><p>It should have been a metaphorical piece of corn cake. In truth, I couldn’t even consider a 40-mile menu, given the lack of produce diversity when I opened in 2009. Having even a 100-mile menu would be nearly impossible, and having a restaurant that participated in recycling, composting, and the Slow Food movement would prove to be a Herculean challenge.</p><p></p><p>I’ll say up front that I was very fortunate with Hobos. Like everyone in the restaurant world, I worked tirelessly, but my shop thrived for seven years, which is more than most restaurateurs can say. Given the recent wave of news about misleading “farm to fable” restaurant claims, I think it’s worth exploring what goes into making farm-to-table dining possible.</p><p></p><p>Challenges and Opportunities</p><p></p><p>Let’s start with what’s grown on those local Delmarva Peninsula farms I was counting on to fill my kitchen. In Delaware, “the family farm continues on, ever changing and ever evolving in a world where the demands on food grow stronger by the day,” said state Senator Ernesto Lopez. Yet, 88 percent of the crops now produced in Delaware are corn, soy, and chicken. Sussex County is the nation’s largest producer of broiler chickens, yet all agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of the state GDP. Additionally, the numbers of watermen on the Chesapeake had declined drastically since the 1990s.</p><p></p><p>That said, there is a local farm community that helped Hobos thrive. The best part of my location in Rehoboth Beach was the proximity to the Tuesday farmers’ market. Market Master Pat Coluzzi began the market in 2006, and by 2009, she had more local farmers than she could provide space for. A critical first step for Hobos involved meeting with local farmers the year before I opened and giving them wish lists of the produce my little bistro would need.</p><p></p><p>“For this to work, [chefs] have to be willing to work with the whims of nature and the field as much I do,” said Kathleen Moss of Fox Briar Farms in nearby Salisbury, Maryland, and one of my first farmer suppliers. “That can be difficult, given the demands and margins of the restaurant business. At the same time, I sometimes sacrifice things for my retail customers if I need to. It’s all about the long-term partnership.”</p><p></p><p>The more successful my restaurant became, the less my farmers could keep up with my demand. Organic livestock became nearly impossible to source without a broker. A side of hog would last about three days—not until the next season’s slaughter. I had to rely on a gifted meat broker who sourced organic beef, chicken, and pork from as far away as Pennsylvania. It was a compromise, but nowhere near the only one I would end up making.</p><p></p><p>All told, my first summer season was an epic disaster of unforeseen supplier problems. The vagaries of weather and the volume of clientele meant I simply could not guarantee that I would have enough baby spinach or arugula to get through even one night in my busy resort town. I had to shut down on my first Memorial Day because I had totally run out of farm-supplied food and hadn’t known I would need back up from standard suppliers. I found myself constantly faced with the choice between compromising my standard for even a 100-mile menu or not being able to make it through dinner service.</p><p></p><p>Local sourcing was a challenge that never went away. I’ll never forget my first year serving squash-blossom quesadillas, which I sourced from several local farmers and announced with great fanfare on social media. Thirty minutes after the doors opened, a whole season’s worth of squash blossoms were out the kitchen door in a poof. The whole rest of the night was spent answering the question, “why don’t you have them?”</p><p></p><p>More than once, I found myself correcting servers who would tell patrons we were serving a 90 percent local menu (in my dreams!) or 100 percent organic (not even remotely likely) on a given evening. Sure, their tips increase substantially the more local the meal, but also our wildly varying nightly traffic meant that what was actually behind the menu was unpredictable.</p><p></p><p>My restaurant was located in a tourist area where nightly dinner cover totals could swing as much as 100 percent on a weeknight and over 150 percent on a weekend. Sure, the heirloom tomatoes were maybe from a local farm for the first 20 dishes, but the next 20 may have been from our more reliable produce supply company.</p><p></p><p>Change is Possible</p><p></p><p>In my second year, when I served on the board of Local on the Menu—a project of the Southern Delaware Tourism board to promote the area as a culinary destination—I found I was not alone with these problems. I discovered that simply having three local items on your menu got you a plaque for your door—certainly nowhere close to my goal of 80 percent local perishables.</p><p></p><p>We eventually learned that the unsteady supply and demand of local farmer suppliers made even this low bar impractical to meet. Most restaurants have fixed menus day in and day out—only a culinary zealot insists on changing a menu constantly to reflect availability, since it dramatically increases the daily workload for the executive chef and kitchen staff, not to mention adding server education into the mix. Most chefs and restaurants give up within the first year or two of attempting a seasonal menu.</p><p></p><p>When Chef Hari Cameron opened a(MUSE) down the street in 2009—a profoundly different restaurant with the same hundred-mile-menu mission—we became known as the street for farm-to-table restaurants. He was a local boy, and used his generations-deep bonds with the fishing families of the Chesapeake Bay to create his menu.</p><p></p><p>Cameron used “bycatch”—the incidentals that end up in fishermen’s nets—to provide an Atlantic watershed seafood menu that changed three to four times a week while keeping with sustainable fishing guidelines.</p><p></p><p>Cameron’s approach to the seafood he served changed dramatically over the first year as he began to explore more-sustainable, local fish. “Products like local tautog and octopus began to appear on my tasting menu as part of the bycatch rather than the intended catch,” Cameron said. “It allows me a much more dynamic plate and product as well as the opportunity to enhance my culinary creativity. I have to work with what actually shows up.”</p><p></p><p>Many of the chefs from our board used multiple farmers to grow crop in a rotation, providing a consistent produce supply from three and even four farmers when we needed it. Even so, there were no guarantees, so we also instituted “chef sharing” in our little community, which involved barter and trade between different restaurants.</p><p></p><p>The vagaries of weather, planting times, and crop biomes affected us all, so when I had 60 pounds of quince or acorn squash dropped at my doorstep, I would check in with other chefs up and down the street to see if they could use a local supply of that week’s bumper crop.</p><p></p><p>Our chef-sharing made a difficult situation more workable. Still, it was a constant system of adjust-and-compromise during the summer months, when serving 200-plus meals out of a tiny kitchen was a standard evening.</p><p></p><p>Over time, Local on the Menu got bogged down by its emphasis on connecting only Sussex County producers and consumers; there was simply not enough supply diversity for restaurants to find available suppliers who would deliver. Others stepped in to meet the demand: Local produce companies and even Sysco started buying local produce and keeping the delivery area within a 200-mile radius—not my 100-mile ideal, and not my preferred farmer-to-chef relationship, but it was still a compromise I could live with.</p><p></p><p>The March of Progress</p><p></p><p>After seven years of Hobos, in 2016, I made the decision to close my restaurant and focus on writing and teaching about food instead of cooking full time. Meanwhile, Hari Cameron and other chefs have rapidly expanded their mark on farm-to-table in Delaware, and new farm-to-table restaurants open each season with varying degrees of success. None other than a(MUSE) have yet lasted longer than the three-season mark, but our area is fickle and I have hope that a few of this year’s startups will thrive and succeed.</p><p></p><p>It is still more difficult to embrace a dynamic menu, but the extra work serves a purpose. “Continued support of the farmers and fishermen is paramount for us to continue to have watermen and farmers in our future,” Cameron said.</p><p></p><p>And farm-to-table has become mainstream in Rehoboth. “It’s no longer just the high-end, fine-dining restaurants that shop the markets, it’s now all of the good chefs in town,” said Market Master Pat Coluzzi.</p><p></p><p>A farmers’ market survey of restaurants in downtown Rehoboth showed that at least half the chefs and restaurateurs now source at least some of their food locally. As a result, the market’s profits have reached an all-time high. Local on the Menu may not have changed its requirements, but the savvy and knowledgeable clientele that populate the Eastern Shore know a lot more today than they did 10 years ago.</p><p></p><p>While I was working in restaurants, my favorite day of the week was always the farmers’ market days. I would wait with excitement as the trucks pulled up with their offerings. Sometimes it was a folded handkerchief filled with fiddleheads, sometimes 100 pounds of spaghetti squash, but it always brought the thrill of surprise and feelings of awe for the men and women who grew it.</p><p></p><p>While farm-to-table restaurant work is an even more challenging part of an already difficult profession, I’ve found it to be the most rewarding. In a state that has only two or three degrees of separation between families, restaurants that make the commitment to local produce and farms are what keep our community thriving.</p>
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04 October 2017
Climate
Goodbye - and good riddance - to livestock farming.
What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?
<p></p><p>There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.</p><p></p><p>The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day.</p><p></p><p>A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that “livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss”. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.</p><p></p><p></p><p>In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.</p><p></p><p>Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.</p><p></p><p>Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet.</p><p>Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his “holistic” grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the world’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him, to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity.</p><p></p><p>Similar statements have been made by Graham Harvey, the agricultural story editor of the BBC Radio 4 serial The Archers – he claims that the prairies in the US could absorb all the carbon “that’s gone into the atmosphere for the whole planet since we industrialised” – and amplified by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Farmers’ organisations all over the world now noisily promote this view.</p><p></p><p>A report this week by the Food Climate Research Network, called Grazed and Confused, seeks to resolve the question: can keeping livestock outdoors cause a net reduction in greenhouse gases? The authors spent two years investigating the issue. They cite 300 sources. Their answer is unequivocal. No.</p><p></p><p>It is true, they find, that some grazing systems are better than others. Under some circumstances, plants growing on pastures will accumulate carbon under the ground, through the expansion of their root systems and the laying down of leaf litter. But the claims of people such as Savory and Harvey are “dangerously misleading”. The evidence supporting additional carbon storage through the special systems these livestock crusaders propose (variously described as “holistic”, “regenerative”, “mob”, or “adaptive” grazing) is weak and contradictory, and suggests that if there’s an effect at all, it is small.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The best that can be done is to remove between 20% and 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions grazing livestock produce. Even this might be an overestimate: a paper published this week in the journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that the amount of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) farm animals produce has been understated. In either case, carbon storage in pastures cannot compensate for the animals’ own climate impacts, let alone those of industrial civilisation. I would like to see the TED team post a warning on Savory’s video, before even more people are misled.</p><p></p><p>As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an uncomfortable fact: animal farming looks as incompatible with a sustained future for humans and other species as mining coal.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding: the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife, but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes: the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.</p><p></p><p>Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is – depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) – either here or just around the corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in the land of roast beef. It’s time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.</p><p></p><p>• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist</p>
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04 October 2017
Water
Why factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to all life on the planet.
The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, according to the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups.
<p>Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said: “Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming systems before it’s too late.”</p><p>His comments came on the eve of Compassion’s Livestock and Extinction conference in London which will bring together scientists, campaigners, UN representatives and multinational food corporations including Compass, Tesco and McDonalds. The conference aims to bring together a wide ranges of voices and connect up the many impacts that factory farming has on our planet. </p><p></p><p>The conference comes against a backdrop of alarming exposés of industrial farming. A week ago a Guardian/ITV investigation showed chicken factory staff in the UK changing crucial food safety information on chickens, while a month ago the European commission admitted that eggs containing a harmful pesticide may have been on sale in as many as 16 countries. </p><p>In the US in August, meanwhile, campaigners identified the world’s largest ever “deadzone” – an area in the sea where pollutants from farms create algal blooms that kill off or disperse marine life – and singled out the US’s heavily industrialised factory farm system as a major cause.</p><p></p><p>In an interview with the Guardian, Lymbery said that when he began campaigning on farm animals in 1990, it was still largely seen as a cruelty issue rather than something that went far beyond that.</p><p>Since taking over as chief executive of CIWF in 2005, Lymbery has focused on “moving the issue out of being a technical niche to get people to understand industrial farming as a big, global problem”.</p><p>“We need to go beyond an isolated approach,” Lymbery says. “Not just looking at the technical problems around welfare, not just looking at the technical issues around the environment, not just looking at food security in isolation, but putting all of these issues together, then we can see the real problem that lies at the heart of our food system – industrial agriculture.”</p><p>Lymbery argues that factory farming is not – as some contend – an efficient, space-saving way to produce the world’s food but rather a method in which the invisible costs are actually far higher than the savings.</p><p>“Factory farming is shrouded in mythology,” he said. “One of the myths is that it’s an efficient way of producing food when actually it is highly inefficient and wasteful. </p><p></p><p>“Another [myth] is that the protagonists will say that it can be good for the welfare of the animals. After all, if hens weren’t happy they wouldn’t lay eggs.</p><p>“The third myth is that factory farming saves space. On the surface it looks plausible, because, by taking farm animals off the land and cramming them into cages and confinement you are putting an awful lot of animals into a small space. But what is overlooked in that equation is you are then having to dedicate vast acreages of relatively scarce arable land to growing the feed.</p><p>“The crops fed to industrially reared animals worldwide could feed an extra four billion [people] on the planet.”</p><p>As the global demand for cheap meat grows, the expansion of agricultural land is putting more and pressure on our forests, rivers and oceans, contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, marine pollution zones and the global biodiversity crisis, he said.</p><p>“The UN has warned that if we continue as we are, the world’s soils will have effectively gone within 60 years. And then what? We shouldn’t look to the sea to bail us out because commercial fisheries are expected to be finished by 2048 …</p><p></p><p>“The rainforest homes of the likes of jaguars and the critically endangered sumatran elephants are being razed to make way for intensive crop production and plantations that are feeding factory farm animals ... the mixed farm habitats of once common farmland birds such as barn owls, turtle doves and skylarks are being stripped away, and ... vast quantities of wild fish are being scooped up to feed industrially reared farmed fish and chickens and pigs, leaving the likes of penguins, puffins and other species starving.”</p><p></p><p>Antibiotic use is another red flag area. “There is now overwhelming evidence that the routine prophylactic use of antibiotics is leading to the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, and the World Health Organisation has issued warnings that if we don’t do something to curb antibiotic use in both human and animal medicine we will face a post-antibiotic era where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.”</p><p></p><p>Although some countries, the UK and the US for example, are now trying to cut back, antibiotic use is totally unregulated in other parts of the world: in China the farmers can just prescribe and administer antibiotics for themselves.</p><p>Lymbery believes that we already know the answer to this problem. Compassion advocates a reduction in meat-eating (Lymbery himself is vegan) but is not “anti-meat”. In the long term regenerative farming – a broad term that includes all sorts of practices such as rotational grazing, tree planting, improving soils, reducing chemical inputs, silvopasture and increasing biodiversity – is, Lymbery believes, our only hope and a movement whose time has come.</p><p>“Hilal Elver, the UN rapporteur for the right to food, has talked about the need to move away from industrial agriculture towards agro-ecological models. There is a groundswell – it’s almost starting to be a zeitgeist as key thinkers in civil society start to join the dots and see that actually we do need a new style of agriculture which goes beyond industrial agriculture, which goes beyond simple sustainability, which brings us to a point of regeneration.”</p><p></p><p>On the whole national governments have shown little interest in radical farming reform. But there have been a few notable exceptions such as India, Rwanda and Kenya, and the international community and the corporate world is increasingly interested in financing and supporting these models (USaid is funding a fantastic agroforestry project, although they may be hoping that Trump doesn’t realise this). And in the last few months there has been some support from surprising quarters, such as Michael Gove, the UK’s environment secretary, and his recent statement that US-style industrial farming will not be copied here. In the recent lead-up to the appointment of the head of the WHO, more than 200 scientists and campaigners signed a letter asking the appointee to promise to look at the “global health challenge” of factory farming which was widely circulated on social media and led to an editorial in the New York Times.</p><p>So how likely is it that we will get global action on food and farming? “I am sure that 20 years ago people calling for a solution to climate change were being asked exactly that question,” says Lymbery. “I believe that nothing less will be needed if we are to secure the future for our children.”</p>
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