This week we bring you a special edition of FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF) featuring a collection of our most recent stories.
A farm-to-table tasting menu in the era of climate change
FERN and Eater
The SingleThread restaurant in Northern California’s Sonoma County is best known for 11-course keiseki-style meals that have won it widespread acclaim and three Michelin stars. But the lack of distance between the restaurant’s farm and its tables offers an example of the challenges that climate change will pose for virtually every restaurant and its suppliers in the coming decades. “Navigating climate disasters has become less an occasional disruption than a way of life,” writes Betsy Andrews of the restaurant. “Their experience, though in some respects rarefied, presents a preview of the future of dining amid the realities of the Anthropocene.”
Pistachio growers vs. U.S. Navy in California water war
FERN and Bloomberg Green
A legal dispute over water rights in California’s Mojave desert has growers for The Wonderful Co. on one side and a town reliant on a sprawling naval base on the other. As Brent Crane reports, the case offers a glimpse of the coming water wars in California, as the state’s all-powerful agriculture interests increasingly square off against thirsty communities over a dwindling supply of fresh water.
Ladies Homestead Gathering, seizing control in a precarious world
FERN and Virginia Quarterly Review
“The women of [National Ladies Homestead Gathering] are attorneys and nail stylists, city clerks and military veterans, college professors and Christian homeschoolers, climate-change activists and loading-dock workers.” What they have in common, reports Michael Meyer, is a sense of being “adrift in a society that has little interest in recognizing or supporting them outside the context of what brand of pork chop they might buy at the grocery store, or which politician they might support … For these reasons and plenty of others, the women of NLHG felt compelled to seize a measure of control. Piece by piece they set out to learn to perform some of the fundamental tasks that had been delegated to industry: butchering hogs, making soap and medicine, growing food.”
From our biodiversity project:
Grassroots push to save birds and bees is reshaping German farms
FERN and National Geographic
All across Europe, species are disappearing, and nowhere faster than on agricultural lands. But, as Bridget Huber explains, The EU, which positions itself as a world leader on environmental issues, has lately recognized its failure to promote a food system that safeguards nature. And over the last couple of years, several regions have shown how the declines in wildlife populations might be reversed—with Bavaria a leading example of the trend.
In Borneo, curbing deforestation and zoonotic diseases
FERN and Popular Science
An innovative conservation group in western Borneo offers healthcare services and training in sustainable farming as a way to curb illegal logging by villagers who have few other ways to earn money. In the process, as Brian Barth writes, the group may have come up with a blueprint to stop diseases from making the deadly leap between wildlife and people by protecting habitat and reducing interactions between villagers and wildlife. “Service industry jobs are disproportionately worked by people of color, who are currently suffering the highest infection and death rates of the pandemic,” writes Casey Taylor. “Most are struggling through it, perhaps taking the odd week off here and there to gather their fortitude if they’re able to take any time at all. Then it’s back to work for another shift of serving complete strangers whose adherence to coronavirus guidelines and restrictions is only enforced by the honor system. They know they are, through a simple numbers game as infection rates rise, serving sick people, just as the owners know that sick people are coming through their doors.”
Urgency grows, at sea and in court, to save Right whales
FERN and Yale Environment 360
With only an estimated 360 left, the fight to save the North Atlantic right whale, one of the most endangered species on the planet, has grown urgent — in the water and in the courts, as Rene Ebersole explains. “Scientists are using cutting-edge acoustic technology to monitor right whales and identify where they are coming into contact with ships and fishing lines … and environmental advocates are suing state and federal agencies to protect the whales by enforcing provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Marine Mammal Protection Act.”“Service industry jobs are disproportionately worked by people of color, who are currently suffering the highest infection and death rates of the pandemic,” writes Casey Taylor. “Most are struggling through it, perhaps taking the odd week off here and there to gather their fortitude if they’re able to take any time at all. Then it’s back to work for another shift of serving complete strangers whose adherence to coronavirus guidelines and restrictions is only enforced by the honor system. They know they are, through a simple numbers game as infection rates rise, serving sick people, just as the owners know that sick people are coming through their doors.”