Earthbytes

Economic Hitmen (video)

John Perkin's view of a "mutant viral capitalism" and how it operates to oppress people and nature.

 

LA recycles waste but waste industry wastes people

I got a link from Cuéntame today with a disturbing video on American Reclamation's deadly business practices:

 

Now check out this blurb from American Reclamation, Inc's home page:

American Reclamation, Inc. (AMR) is a family owned corporation with over 50 years of experience in the recycling and sold waste industry and a Waste Haulers & Recycling business in the Los Angeles area.

American Reclamation, Inc. is an independently owned company which prides itself in Safety,Customer Satisfaction, Quality Service, Clean Equipment, and a good work place for their employees.

This would seem to be yet one more example of a company putting a pretty face forward but hiding its dark side under...well...the garbage.

Check out the website for Don't Waste LA for some good info and other articles.

 

Jeff Biggers: Powerful New Music Video Captures Appalachia's Grief Over Mountaintop Removal

Great article from Jeff Biggers and awesome video from Magnolia Mountain:

As millions of pounds of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations continue to devastate historic mountain communities in central Appalachia, a powerful new music video released this week by the beloved American Roots band Magnolia Mountain captures the haunting grief and stories of stricken families in America's cradle of roots and country music.

Driven by Mark Utley's banjo licks and Magnolia Mountain's effortlessly haunting and plaintive harmonies, "The Hand of Man" joins the pantheon of classic mountain ballads and mining tunes, including Kentucky legend Jean Ritchie's "Black Waters" and John Prine's timeless paean to his family's demise in western Kentucky to Peabody coal, "Paradise," and 2/3 Goat's recent metrobilly hit, "Stream of Conscience."

via www.huffingtonpost.com

 

Knoxville Mayoral Candidates to Debate on Green Jobs and Energy Efficiency

The Steering Committee of the Knoxville Energy Alliance and Partnership for Green Jobs, also known as KEAP Green Jobs, will hold a City of Knoxville Mayoral Debate on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Doors open at 6:30 and the debate starts at 7 p.m.

The steering committee is made up of several organizations that promote energy efficiency and renewable energy in an attempt to bring green jobs to the City of Knoxville and promote environmental sustainability. Groups from the Alliance sponsoring the debate include SEEED (Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development), SOCM (Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment), TSEA (Tennessee Solar Energy Association) and TAP (Tennessee Alliance for Progress) in conjunction with the East Tennessee Chapter US Green Building Council and Jobs with Justice of East Tennessee.

In addition to questioning the candidates on their future plans for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs linked to green job development, the steering committee of KEAP Green Jobs will unveil its proposal to partner with the city in an “energy alliance” program to increase access to quality jobs, energy efficiency, and renewable energy for low and moderate-income residents. Examples of the job-creating projects KEAP Green Jobs proposes include weatherization of houses to save homeowners money on their utility bills and replacing some or all of a building's existing power source with solar power.

Audience questions will be allowed to please come prepared with your best questions for the candidates!

LOCATION: Pellissippi State Community College - Magnolia Campus

 

Bellefonte revival: let it rip or let it R.I.P?

Aerial view of TVA's Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station, Hollywood, Alabama

On August 18th, 2011, the TVA Board of Directors will decide whether or not to raise Bellefonte from the near-dead. It will cost around $12-billion to do it -- if ratepayers are lucky. TVA had already dropped $6-billion into construction of the facility when they decided to pull out (with each reactor more than half-finished) in 1988. Then, almost one year ago, on August 20, 2010, the TVA Board of Directors authorized $248 million for continued developments of one of the abandoned Bellefonte units.

If money-talk doesn't already have you on edge in these days of debt ceiling and budget squabbles that have pre-empted a more critical discussion of getting people back to work, there are other worrisome elements of the plan to bring Bellefonte back from the living-dead. The Babcock and Wilcox Mark C 205 reactor design is an old one, dating back to the 1960's. This particular design has never been operated in the United States. And it has never even been lisenced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After Bellefonte was abandoned, the reactors were targets of asset recovery in which reactor parts were "cannibalized" for use elsewhere.

Some people who live near Bellfonte are -- like many others in the jobless states of America -- less concerned about safety than finding work in the revival. The nuclear industry, along with their brothers in fossil fuels, know that the promise of jobs is cheap leverage in the process to gain support for their ill-advised projects.

In a recent post at EnergySavvy, some pretty convincing number-crunching suggests that for the cost of replacing just one nuclear plant that would create around 2,400 jobs, you could get 1.6-million energy-efficient homes and create around 220,000 jobs. Other studies speak to the promise of clean, renewable and sustainable energy development to revitalize both the economy and the environment. (See articles/reports here, here, here, here and here.)

Many groups in Tennessee are organizing to oppose expansion of Bellefonte and plan to be at the TVA Board meeting on August 18th. But the fun begins on August 5th with a press conference and rally.

Here's a great video invitation to the Zombies Unite Rally on Friday, August 5th at Market Square in Knoxville, Tennessee:

 

You can also find information on the Zombies Unite Rally event page on Facebook.

Among the groups uniting with the Zombies against Bellefonte are United Mountain Defense, Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville (SPEAK), Statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment (SOCM), Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team (BEST), Sierra SCENE, Mothers Against Tennessee River Radiation (MATRR), and Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL).

See also articles from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy SACE:

Prevent TVA's Bellefonte Reactors

Bellefonte Nuclear Plant Factsheet

 

 

Local food markets can create jobs and healthy living

I have no doubt that my first and perhaps strongest connections to nature were anchored through my earliest years of life on a farm in eastern Kansas. Those experiences are part of what led me to start this blog, and from the first post on I have kept the No Farms, No Food, and Friend of Farmland action campaign badges from American Farmland Trust in the sidebar.

When I got the most recent AFT newsletter I decided to see if there was a story that would make a good update on Earthbytes for the work this organization does. That's when I found a great blog article by Julia Freedgood, the managing director for Farmland and Communities at AFT.

In her post, Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers Makes Dollars and Sense, Freedgood talks about a study on Ohio's food systems by Ken Meter that speak to the potential for localization of food markets to boost local economies:

Food is an important industry in the Buckeye state. Ohioans purchase $29 billion of food per year, and the food industry accounts for 13 percent of the state’s economic activity. According to Meter, state policies that focus on distant markets rather than local consumers are detrimental to the economy—resulting in a $30 billion economic outflow each year, more than four times the $7 billion of total farm production in the state.

Recapturing these dollars would create significant economic opportunities, especially in Ohio where personal income increased 70 percent and food consumption increased 32 percent over the past 40 years. In recent years, direct sales from farmers to consumers rose significantly: 45 percent in Ohio (just shy of the 49 percent national average). The value of those sales rose 70 percent in the state. While the total sales figures remain small, farmer-to-consumer sales are one of the fastest growing sectors of the food economy, offering valuable opportunities to keep farmland in farming, especially in areas where farmers have close access to consumers. Indeed, a report on Northeast Ohio proposes that a 25 percent shift to local products could result in the creation of more than 27,000 jobs!

via blog.farmland.org

Some of the goats just down the lane at A Place of the Heart Farm. You can find Mac and Adrienne at the Market Square Farmer's Market in Knoxville. [Photo credit: Cathie Bird]

Everytime I drive past my neighbors' organic farm on my way out of the holler, I can't help but think what a great example it is of how localization of food markets could work for Tennessee. It's at least one way we could move beyond economies that require tearing down mountains and eliminating productive farmland.

Freedgood's full post has links to at least three full reports on localization of food markets and the economic activity it brings. There were other interesting articles in AFT's July newsletter that is available online.

Here's a short video from AFT, Saving the Land that Sustains Us:

 

GMOs and Peru: The Debate Comes to a Head | Truthout

This is a long article with indepth coverage of an important issue.The problems with GMOs run from biolological and systemic to economic and ethical -- yet another example of impacts imposed by large multinational corporations on citizens and their communities.

The use of transgenic or genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is an increasingly prevalent practice throughout the world that has pitted complex policy issues against one another.  On one side of the debate is the ability of GMOs to feed the world’s increasingly large and diverse population and to allow developing countries to economically advance via transgenic crops.  The other side of the dispute focuses on the unknown health and environmental risks posed by GMOs, along with potential monopolistic practices in which large multinational corporations (MNCs) involve themselves.

via www.truth-out.org

Roots and Hollers (Trailer)

Roots & Hollers Trailer from Thomas Gorman on Vimeo.

 

Beverly Bell: Haitian Farmers Organize for Food Sovereignty

A recent truthout.org article by Beverly Bell talks about four critical needs of Haitians would be addressed by giving domestic agriculture the chance to survive:

* Creating employment for a Haiti’s rural majority, estimated at 60 percent to 80 percent of the population;[1]

* Allowing rural people to stay on their land. This is both their right and an effective way to keep Port-au-Prince from becoming even more perilously overcrowded;

* Addressing an ongoing food crisis. Today, even with imports, more than 2.4 million people out of a population of 9 million are estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9 percent, and chronic undernutrition for that age group is 24 percent.[2] Peasant groups are convinced that, with the necessary investment, Haiti could produce at least 80 percent of its food consumption needs;

* Promoting a post-earthquake redevelopment plan that serves the needs of the majority, unlike the one currently promoted by the US and UN, which is based on the growth of sweatshops.

via www.truth-out.org

t r u t h o u t | Chile's Ghosts Are Not Being Rescued

CORECTION posted 14 October 2010 at 5:18 pm: This post originally stated that there were 39 fatalities at the Upper Big Branch mine; the number of miners killed at UBB was actually 29.

I really appreciated John Pilger's article since he reflects on a number of issues that came to mind as I watched the rescue of miners from the San Jose mine in Copiapo, Chile. Just as I was immediately curious about why 29 miners had to die in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia last April, I was curious about why 33 miners in Chile had became trapped in the first place.

Earlier today I suggested that questions of corporate accountability for the red sludge disaster in Hungary parallel what was eventually uncovered about TVA's contributions to the Kingston Fossil plant pond failure in 2008. In the aftermath of the UBB mine disaster, CEO Don Blankenship was called out on Massey's history of violations and screw-ups in the operation of their mines -- in particular, their part in the UBB disaster. Given the documented bad behavior of governments and corporations in relation to environmental justice, Indigenous rights and natural resource extraction around the world, I couldn't help wonder about about the situation in Chile.

Here's an excerpt from Pilger's article:

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and is the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile's gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile's privatized mines. The San Jose mine, where the trapped men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed - but not for long. On 30 July last, a labor department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies," but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed. Read the whole article here...