FERN’s Friday Feed: The whole dam truth
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Hydropower is a clean-energy darling. But it comes with tremendous costs.
FERN and Truthdig
“Claims about hydropower as a clean, green, sustainable power source,” writes Christopher Ketcham, “issue with equal aplomb from government regulators, enviro journalists, climate academics and green-grid design wizards. Viewed through the prism of fossil fuel emissions, it’s true that large-scale hydropower looks to be one of the more attractive options in the industrial energy lineup. ‘From a climate perspective,’ Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University’s law school, told me, ‘hydropower is much superior to natural gas power.’ Climate writer David Roberts agreed, writing in an email, ‘I’m a big hydro fan! I think most clean energy folks are, notwithstanding some concerns about salmon and such.’ But when viewed in a wider context, one that includes the ‘concerns about salmon and such,’ a more complex, and uglier, picture emerges.”
A life without eating
Longreads
“At first, it was simply a roast chicken recipe,” writes Andrew Chapman. “Then it was everything. I watched a man on YouTube cook the chicken, imagining what it would be like to taste it. Even if he had prepared it in front of me, I couldn’t have eaten it. Inflammation from Crohn’s disease had connected the tissues of my small intestine and my bladder together via fistula, and I did not want to pee out a roast chicken. Instead, I was on a form of artificial food called total parenteral nutrition (TPN, for short). All my nutrition and water were pumped from an IV bag into my veins through a tube in my arm. Even though I had enough functional nutrition in my body, my brain screamed, you’re hungry, constantly.”
The movement to take manure out of organic farming
Corporate Knights
“In just five days, America’s 10 billion farm animals produce enough manure to cover the entire U.S., exceeding what farmland can safely absorb,” writes Nicholas Carter. “Given this dire situation, how do we change farming? Agriculture norms are protected over generations by a cultural shield, seemingly untouchable politically. Organic agriculture has become synonymous with spreading manure. But we can learn from those who have changed their minds … [A]fter several years of working on tropical farms throughout Hawaii and Latin America, [Jimmy] Videle discovered the ease in exclusively plant-based composting and farming. Just like in a healthy native forest where the only manure deposited is by wild animals that pass through, he learned that the vast majority of organic matter should come from the plants in agricultural systems.”
Scientists warming to ‘soil health’ — if they can agree on what it means
Ambrook Research
“Yorkshire, England, is one of the few places in the world where rhubarb is harvested the old-fashioned way: by candlelight. Every November,” writes Corey Buhay, “after the first long frost, farmers transplant their crop into windowless heated sheds, plunging thousands of plants into total darkness. The stress triggers alarmingly rapid growth. Under the right conditions, rhubarb can grow more than an inch per day. That’s fast enough to hear it. Farmers have relied on this recipe of frost, darkness and warmth for more than 200 years. The combo tricks this bright-pink vegetable into growing sweeter, more tender stalks—a product called ‘forced rhubarb.’”
The sinking Arizona town where water and politics collide
The New York Times
“In Arizona’s deeply conservative La Paz County, the most urgent issue facing many voters is not inflation or illegal immigration. It is the water being pumped from under their feet. Giant farms have turned Arizona’s remote deserts about 100 miles west of Phoenix as green as fairways,” Jack Healy writes, “the product of extracting an ocean of groundwater to grow alfalfa for dairy cows … The ground in parts of La Paz County has dropped more than five feet during three decades of farming. Pipes and home foundations are cracking. Wells are running dry … Even as political battles over abortion consume Arizona’s Capitol, Democrats have seized on water as a life-or-death election issue that they hope gives them an opening — however slight — to reach out to rural voters who abandoned the party.”