FERN’s Friday Feed: Firefighting fungi
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How mushrooms can help fight megafires
FERN and The Washington Post
“[T]he federal government has committed nearly $5 billion … to thinning forests on about 50 million Western acres over the next 10 years. Although this can be accomplished with prescribed burns, the risk of controlled fires getting out of hand has foresters embracing another solution: selectively sawing trees, then stripping the limbs from their trunks and collecting the debris. The challenge now,” writes Stephen Robert Miller, “is what to do with all those piles of sticks, which create fire hazards of their own. Some environmental scientists believe they have an answer: mushrooms. Fungus has an uncommon knack for transformation. Give it garbage, plastic, even corpses, and it will convert them all into something else — for instance, nutrient-rich soil.”
Can Biden’s climate-smart ag program live up to the hype?
FERN and Yale Environment 360
“This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects,” writes Gabriel Popkin. “The first agreements have now been signed; the money is starting to flow. But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ‘We don’t have that understanding yet for most climate-smart management practices,’ says Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.”
From Thomas Jefferson to Kanye, why status-hungry diners embraced French food
Aeon
“In his catalogue of 11 studio albums, [Kanye] West includes more than 140 references to foods, drinks, cooking and eating,” write Kelly Alexander and Claire Bunschoten. “The food rap that made the most impact on US popular culture, as measured by thousands of memes and tweets, comes from West’s track ‘I Am a God (Feat. God)’ … To wit: ‘In a French-ass restaurant/Hurry up with my damn croissants.’ … The implicit logic of those meme-makers and critics, bent on turning his rap into a joke on its creator, suggests they took West at face value, as if he were merely complaining that an American Black man in a French restaurant doesn’t belong or is somehow out of place. But West was, in essence, exposing a politics of food consumption that, in tying French food to class status in the US, and concerning itself only with dominant Eurocentric and colonial foodways, silences the labours of indigenous chefs, chefs of colour and queer chefs. There’s powerful evidence that French food still aligns with class – which in the US can never be separated from race.”
Can a city feed itself?
Bloomberg
“Urban farms like Nature Urbaine are springing up like mushrooms in Paris, which now houses several dozen,” writes Peter Yeung. “Several other French cities are also pursuing this brand of localized food production; advocates for the model say it can cut resource consumption and carbon emissions, green urban spaces under threat of extreme heat, bolster social links in neighborhoods and improve food security and climate resilience. As climate change sharpens the competition for space and resources, there’s an increasingly compelling case to be made for agriculture based in and around cities. But many questions remain about what brand of urban agriculture — vertical farms, edible walls, indoor greenhouses or open-air rooftops — deliver genuine environmental benefits. Where exactly should they be deployed, and who ultimately benefits?”
Extreme heat is threatening Texas’ food supply
The Texas Tribune
“The Rio Grande Valley … is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in America, growing everything from watermelons for Fourth of July picnics to sorghum for animal feed to papaya for salads and smoothies. But when I visited the Valley in 2022,” writes Jeff Goodell, “the Southwest was suffering from the worst drought in 1,200 years … Decreasing snowpack in the Rockies had diminished the Rio Grande’s headwaters. Golf courses and condos along its banks, as well as farmers who grow water-intensive crops like pecans, leached the river’s flow. The water that is left is increasingly salty and tainted by nitrogen runoff and other pollutants. As the heat rose, good water was needed more than ever. But there simply wasn’t enough to go around anymore.”