---ooO-(_)'Spammer
2008-08-19 18:28:07 UTC
Dead Zone Diet: Why Fertilizers Are Taking Fish off the Menu
By Kerry Trueman, Huffington Post. Posted August 18, 2008.
Fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are
causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans.
Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this
question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the
day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over
the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I've got some bad
news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna for you.
Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel
use are causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans, "killing large
swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage,"
according to Scientific American.
It's Agribiz vs. Aquabiz, and at the moment, the farmers are beating the
waders off of the fishermen. Scientific American notes that "there are now
405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s." And once a
marine habitat falls victim to hypoxia, i.e. oxygen deficiency, the outlook
is grim:
Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which
rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a
massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine.
Fertilizer contains large amounts of nitrogen, and it runs off of
agricultural fields in water and into rivers, and eventually into oceans.
This fertilizer runoff, instead of contributing to more corn or wheat, feeds
massive algae blooms in the coastal oceans. This algae, in turn, dies and
sinks to the bottom where it is consumed by microbes, which consume oxygen
in the process. More algae means more oxygen-burning, and thereby less
oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive flight by those fish,
crustaceans and other ocean-dwellers able to relocate as well as the mass
death of immobile creatures, such as clams or other bottom-dwellers. And
that's when the microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments take over,
forming vast bacterial mats that produce hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.
How fitting! More toxic gas from the same chemical companies who gave the
world Agent Orange. Except that in this case, it's an unwelcome by-product.
Oops! Sorry 'bout that!
But don't worry, Monsanto and DuPont are on the job. They've come up with a
great new biotech solution to the mess they've made of our oceans; "NUE"
crops, as in "nitrogen use efficiency." These NUE crops are engineered to
have roots that absorb more nitrogen, reportedly allowing farmers to
"produce the same yield with half as much fertilizer.
"I've got a better idea. Why don't we stop looking to the same corporations
who have screwed up our environment to fix things? As Prince Charles told
the Telegraph the other day, the multinational companies promoting the use
of GM crops are conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and
the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong." Charles has
predictably been labeled a luddite for daring to challenge "a system that is
fundamentally flawed," as Grist puts it. But it's the
Better-Living-Through-Biotech crowd who's just too blinkered to see the Big
Picture -- you know, the one where all their brilliant breakthroughs come
back to bite us on the ass.
There's the Roundup-resistant strain of super weeds Monsanto's helped
create, for example, and let's not forget another great Monsanto innovation,
Posilac, aka rBST, the bovine growth hormone designed to wring more milk out
of our dairy cows. Unfortunately for Monsanto, cows are not sponges but, in
fact, living, breathing creatures whose bodies aren't equipped to cope with
the stepped-up production induced by artificial hormones.
Consumer rejection of rBST-tainted dairy products finally forced Monsanto to
admit that it's looking to dump Posilac, but you can bet they've got any
number of equally ill-conceived "breakthroughs" in the pipeline that promise
to solve all the world's food crises. In fact, the Agribiz apologists will
tell you that industrial agriculture is our only hope.
But as Frances Moore Lappé wrote on the Huffington Post last week, the
notion that we should be looking to Agribiz to feed the world is pernicious
propaganda spread with the aid -- sometimes unwitting -- of a lazy and
uninformed media. The story that's not getting out is the fact that farmers
all over the world are finding new ways -- and reviving old ones -- to
produce food without destroying our soil and water. As Lappé notes:
On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing
GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They're succeeding: The largest
overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in
57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100
million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79
percent.
We managed to feed ourselves for centuries without relying on chemicals and
we can do it again. As environmental journalist Claire Cummings writes in
Uncertain Peril:
Our success as a species did not come about because we imposed our values on
nature. As a survival strategy, domination is doomed ... Our outmoded
engineering technologies require us to exert too much command and control
over nature in an endless cycle of tyranny ...
...Genetic engineering has misled us into believing that we have to
reformulate nature according to our own designs. Even if it works, it's a
dead-end strategy, because it forces us to live within the extremely limited
confines of the human imagination.
Limited, indeed. Who could have predicted that those amber waves of grain we
grow from sea to shining sea would wind up destroying those seas -- aside,
of course, from the marine biologists who've been "sounding the alarm on
hypoxic zones for decades"? Imagine this; if we don't take drastic steps to
halt the growth of these dead zones, the question of whether to order the
meat or the fish could become as obsolete as VHS vs. Beta. Better learn to
love your veggies.
By Kerry Trueman, Huffington Post. Posted August 18, 2008.
Fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are
causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans.
Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this
question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the
day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over
the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I've got some bad
news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna for you.
Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel
use are causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans, "killing large
swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage,"
according to Scientific American.
It's Agribiz vs. Aquabiz, and at the moment, the farmers are beating the
waders off of the fishermen. Scientific American notes that "there are now
405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s." And once a
marine habitat falls victim to hypoxia, i.e. oxygen deficiency, the outlook
is grim:
Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which
rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a
massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine.
Fertilizer contains large amounts of nitrogen, and it runs off of
agricultural fields in water and into rivers, and eventually into oceans.
This fertilizer runoff, instead of contributing to more corn or wheat, feeds
massive algae blooms in the coastal oceans. This algae, in turn, dies and
sinks to the bottom where it is consumed by microbes, which consume oxygen
in the process. More algae means more oxygen-burning, and thereby less
oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive flight by those fish,
crustaceans and other ocean-dwellers able to relocate as well as the mass
death of immobile creatures, such as clams or other bottom-dwellers. And
that's when the microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments take over,
forming vast bacterial mats that produce hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.
How fitting! More toxic gas from the same chemical companies who gave the
world Agent Orange. Except that in this case, it's an unwelcome by-product.
Oops! Sorry 'bout that!
But don't worry, Monsanto and DuPont are on the job. They've come up with a
great new biotech solution to the mess they've made of our oceans; "NUE"
crops, as in "nitrogen use efficiency." These NUE crops are engineered to
have roots that absorb more nitrogen, reportedly allowing farmers to
"produce the same yield with half as much fertilizer.
"I've got a better idea. Why don't we stop looking to the same corporations
who have screwed up our environment to fix things? As Prince Charles told
the Telegraph the other day, the multinational companies promoting the use
of GM crops are conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and
the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong." Charles has
predictably been labeled a luddite for daring to challenge "a system that is
fundamentally flawed," as Grist puts it. But it's the
Better-Living-Through-Biotech crowd who's just too blinkered to see the Big
Picture -- you know, the one where all their brilliant breakthroughs come
back to bite us on the ass.
There's the Roundup-resistant strain of super weeds Monsanto's helped
create, for example, and let's not forget another great Monsanto innovation,
Posilac, aka rBST, the bovine growth hormone designed to wring more milk out
of our dairy cows. Unfortunately for Monsanto, cows are not sponges but, in
fact, living, breathing creatures whose bodies aren't equipped to cope with
the stepped-up production induced by artificial hormones.
Consumer rejection of rBST-tainted dairy products finally forced Monsanto to
admit that it's looking to dump Posilac, but you can bet they've got any
number of equally ill-conceived "breakthroughs" in the pipeline that promise
to solve all the world's food crises. In fact, the Agribiz apologists will
tell you that industrial agriculture is our only hope.
But as Frances Moore Lappé wrote on the Huffington Post last week, the
notion that we should be looking to Agribiz to feed the world is pernicious
propaganda spread with the aid -- sometimes unwitting -- of a lazy and
uninformed media. The story that's not getting out is the fact that farmers
all over the world are finding new ways -- and reviving old ones -- to
produce food without destroying our soil and water. As Lappé notes:
On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing
GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They're succeeding: The largest
overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in
57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100
million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79
percent.
We managed to feed ourselves for centuries without relying on chemicals and
we can do it again. As environmental journalist Claire Cummings writes in
Uncertain Peril:
Our success as a species did not come about because we imposed our values on
nature. As a survival strategy, domination is doomed ... Our outmoded
engineering technologies require us to exert too much command and control
over nature in an endless cycle of tyranny ...
...Genetic engineering has misled us into believing that we have to
reformulate nature according to our own designs. Even if it works, it's a
dead-end strategy, because it forces us to live within the extremely limited
confines of the human imagination.
Limited, indeed. Who could have predicted that those amber waves of grain we
grow from sea to shining sea would wind up destroying those seas -- aside,
of course, from the marine biologists who've been "sounding the alarm on
hypoxic zones for decades"? Imagine this; if we don't take drastic steps to
halt the growth of these dead zones, the question of whether to order the
meat or the fish could become as obsolete as VHS vs. Beta. Better learn to
love your veggies.