FERN’s Friday Feed: A blow against plastic pollution
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
A retired fisherwoman’s big win against ocean plastic pollution
National Geographic
“Nearly every day for three years, Diane Wilson and a handful of fellow volunteers spent hours poking through the buggy, marshy grasses of the Gulf Coast … in search of tiny plastic pellets called nurdles,” writes Beth Gardiner. “They found the lentil-sized pieces everywhere, filling gallon bags with them, and submerging bottles to collect water tainted with raw plastic powder. In March of 2019, Wilson, a retired shrimp boat captain and fisherwoman, loaded a trailer with 2,400 of those samples—46 million individual pellets, she estimates—and drove her pickup truck to federal court to face down Formosa Plastics, the company responsible for the spills. The victory she won there led to what is said to be the largest ever settlement of a private citizen’s Clean Water Act lawsuit.”
As ranks of guestworkers rise, so does wage theft
The Center for Public Integrity
“From 2005 to 2020, U.S. employers around the country were ordered to pay more than $42.5 million in back wages to 69,000 workers who perform seasonal low-wage jobs on H-2A and H-2B visas,” write Susan Ferriss and Joe Yerardi. “But labor advocates are worried that many more workers are being cheated. They’re also concerned that investigations by the Labor Department — which has special oversight over guest workers — aren’t keeping pace with a dramatic increase in workers. Closed cases focused on allegations of violations specific to H-2A and H-2B visas increased only slightly from 424 cases in 2011 to 478 in 2019, according to a Public Integrity analysis of department data. Over the same period, the total number of these annual guest worker visas issued leaped from 106,000 to 302,000. Demand for more visas is surging, despite the Trump era rise in anti-foreign worker rhetoric in some states.”
How Russia could weaponize the global food supply chain
Politico
“After just one day of the invasion, Russia effectively controlled nearly a third of the world’s wheat exports, three quarters of the world’s sunflower oil exports, and substantial amounts of barley, soy and other grain supply chains,” write Ian Ralby, David Soud and Rohini Ralby. “Furthermore, Ukraine alone accounts for 16 percent of the world’s corn exports and has been one of the fastest growing corn producers — a dynamic particularly critical to meeting China’s rapidly growing demand for corn. Importantly, while hydrocarbon production can be immediately surged in different places to meet shifts in requirements, grain production cannot be surged in the same way, and even a major expansion cannot make up for the sheer volume of agricultural output that Russia now controls either directly or indirectly.”
The rise and fall of Oakland’s Community Foods
Berkeleyside
“Brahm Ahmadi knew it would be difficult to raise the money to build the first grocery store in West Oakland in 40 years. He also knew that even if he raised the funds, finding an affordable piece of property in the Bay Area’s competitive real estate market might be impossible,” writes Alix Wall. “What he couldn’t have predicted was that once he raised the money and found the site … some food distributors would refuse to deliver to West Oakland because ‘it wasn’t on their route.’ And then, of course, there was a worldwide pandemic less than a year after opening. ‘How this goes down in history and why we failed and where the blame gets put will be important,’ he said. ‘Will people acknowledge it was primarily bad timing, that we opened and got hammered by a pandemic and didn’t have the resources to ride it out, or will they continue to look at these neighborhoods as too risky to invest in?’”
Consultant who vouched for irrigating with oil wastewater had ties to Big Oil
Inside Climate News
In 2015, California’s Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board “found itself under a microscope for allowing farmers to irrigate their crops with oil field wastewater, a practice it had condoned for decades,” after evidence emerged that “testing and treatment of hazardous chemicals in oil field wastewater used for irrigation was inadequate,” writes Liza Gross. The board hired a consultant, GSI Environmental, to study the issue, and then used that study to assure the public that it had found “‘no identifiable increased health risks’ from irrigating crops with water recycled from oil wells.” But it turns out that GSI had “close ties to the oil industry—ties so close that GSI once listed Chevron, ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum as clients ‘we answer to.’”