FERN’s Friday Feed: Fighting fire with fire
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Why we need more ‘good fire’ in the eastern U.S.
FERN and Yale Environment 360
“A growing movement of scientists, land management agencies, conservation organizations, and indigenous groups is working to return fire to fire-adapted ecosystems, including forests and grasslands, throughout the U.S.,” writes Gabriel Popkin. “Fire, these advocates argue, is a critical solution to address a panoply of stark and growing challenges: biodiversity loss, wildfire risk, climate change, human health, and more. Fire promoters, however, face stiff challenges … A long-held view of fire as unnatural and destructive—amplified by dramatic images of climate change-fueled megafires in the western U.S. and elsewhere—is proving hard to shake.”
Third-party food delivery apps face a grassroots revolt
FERN and Mother Jones
“At the start of the pandemic, food delivery apps, including the ‘Big 3’ — Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash — were hailed as saviors, facilitating a takeout boom meant to keep restaurants and their staffs working,” writes Dean Kuipers. “But eateries were quickly confronted by a harsh reality: These Silicon Valley and Wall Street–backed firms, which together dominate 93 percent of the market nationwide, are designed to scrape money out of local businesses — sucking up a combined $9.5 billion in revenues in 2020 alone — and send it to shareholders.” In Iowa City, restaurateur Jon Sewell began fighting back, joining with other owners in 2018 “to launch their own delivery co-op called Chomp … Sewell has helped start a similarly successful delivery co-op, Nosh, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and followed it up with LoCo Co-ops, an unaffiliated company that has launched five more enterprises across the country and is now organizing in Chicago.”
The bug whisperer
Craftsmanship Quarterly
“[Mark] Sturges makes compost for clients, and a highly unusual sort at that. Some clients are local, some are scattered around the country. All are at some stage of weaning their land from the chemical dependencies and other problems of what is often called conventional agriculture. He doesn’t advertise and clients have to find him by word of mouth, but find him they do,” writes Kristin Ohlson. “He’s become a master of an agricultural art as old as agriculture itself—an art that is increasingly a science, as researchers from different countries turn their instruments to understanding the world’s most fundamental natural partnerships. These are the first connections we unwittingly began to disrupt when humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to planting.”
Meals on the page that are worth remembering
The Atlantic
“In literature, references to eating tend to be either symbolic or utilitarian. Food can indicate status or milieu (think about all those references to Dorsia in American Psycho), or it can move the plot forward (Rabbit Angstrom’s peanut-brittle habit in John Updike’s final Rabbit book). Even in the hands of the greats, food scenes can seem less than central to a story, more filler or filigree than substance,” writes Adrienne LaFrance. “There are exceptions, however—moments in which food unlocks a higher story form. Here are 12 of my favorites.”
Nonprofit grocery stores struggle to create alternative to big chains
The Guardian
“Jubilee [in Waco, Texas] is one of a handful of small, non-profit grocery stores in America that have sprouted in food deserts, defined as low-income areas where most of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store,” writes Amal Ahmed. “But non-profits such as Jubilee have faced a tough couple of years with the pandemic, and more recently, rising inflation. The closure of similar community-led groceries in other areas of the US shows how hard it can be to create an alternative to the big chains.”