FERN’s Friday Feed: Waste not, want not
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Who’s wasting our water?
Texas Monthly
“Mark Twain … has often been quoted as saying that in our country’s driest climes, ‘whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over.’ There’s no evidence he made any such remark, but it’s hard to argue with the sentiment. That’s especially the case when you consider two diverging trend lines of modern Texas — a rapidly increasing population and diminishing water supply. Look no further than Hays County, in Hill Country, where the beloved swimming hole Jacob’s Well has run dry for long stretches each of the past few years. Contributing heavily to the loss of this Texas treasure is overpumping of the Trinity Aquifer … One local utility, Aqua Texas, continued drawing tens of millions of gallons beyond its permitted allotment even after being fined hundreds of thousands of dollars … ‘There’s more people in Wimberley Valley than ever before,’ an Aqua Texas attorney noted. ‘And they need water.’ The same might be said about all of Texas — a worrisome trend as climate change makes our state hotter and drier. Water has never been more precious, which is why overuse of the sort demonstrated by Aqua Texas should alarm us. Texas Monthly set out to examine the factors that allow and encourage wastefulness.”
How two wandering cows started a culture war
The New York Times
“One summer day, a cow and a steer walked away from their farm,” writes Christopher Maag. “This type of thing sometimes happens in rural western New York, where pastures and farms stretch for miles. But [the cows] had crossed not into another farm but into an animal sanctuary whose owner saves farm livestock from slaughter and encourages visitors to become vegans. The next morning, Tracy Murphy, the sanctuary’s owner … herded them into a pen … and immediately notified the local animal control agency. Six days later, an investigator with the agency … interviewed people around the area and learned that a neighbor, Scott Gregson, was missing a heifer and a steer … But when Mr. Gregson asked that they be returned, Ms. Murphy refused … [S]he demanded proof that Mr. Gregson actually owned the cows and also demanded he pay $2,500 to settle a lien she claimed on the cows to reimburse the sanctuary for nine days’ worth of hay, straw and care. Or, Ms. Murphy suggested, maybe her sanctuary could buy the cows.”
In praise of ‘brute force’ cooking
Financial Times
“More recently, I got one of my periodic lectures from my geek daughter about the contrasting styles of cyber hacking,” writes Tim Hayward. “In particular, the difference between logical, systematic code-breaking and what she refers to as ‘brute force’— that is, writing a piece of code that will churn through a billion random combinations in the time it would take me to find my calculator. We were eating, at the time, in a favourite local curry house. ‘The systematic approach is more elegant,’ she said, ‘but brute force is no less effective. It’s a bit like the flavours in this sauce. No idea what’s going on in there, but chuck enough stuff at it . . . it doesn’t matter as long as it works.’ I like this. I like the idea of chefs applying all the rigour of Bletchley Park to the codes and ciphers of the senses. But I really love the idea of brute force cooking.”
Break up the food giants that strangle Britain’s farmers and consumers
The Guardian
“How did it come to this? The answer is that our regulators became blind to the threat of corporate power. From the 1970s they fell prey to a ‘consumer welfare’ ideology, which argued that bigger companies were more efficient, and that these ‘efficiencies’ would trickle down to consumers in lower prices and better products. As long as consumers were OK, they claimed, we needn’t worry about corporate power,” writes Nicholas Shaxson. “One result is that the European Commission, which has an undeserved reputation as corporate power’s most fearsome foe, has only blocked 14 of 6,500 notified mergers since 2005. Yet all the evidence shows that this ideology is nonsense. Monopolists jack up prices, whether it’s our food, smartphones or life-saving drugs, and pocket the difference.”
How ‘carbon cowboys’ are cashing in on protected Amazon forests
The Washington Post
“Over the past two decades, a new financial commodity known as carbon credits has become one of the world’s most important tools in the fight against climate change. Companies and organizations seeking to offset their emission of carbon have spent billions of dollars on them. The Amazon rainforest, because of its size and global environmental importance, has increasingly drawn those pursuing carbon credits … They’ve launched preservation projects across the region, generating carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those credits, in turn, have been purchased by some of the world’s largest corporations … But a six-month Washington Post investigation shows that many of the private ventures have repeatedly and, authorities say, illegally laid claim to publicly protected lands, generating enormous profits from territory they have no legal right to and then failing to share the revenue with those who protected or lived on the land.”