Red Meat

Red meat. I love it. 

Steak. Burgers. Boeuf bourguignon. Carne asada. The list goes on.

But it's a guilty pleasure. For years, reports have cited that raising cattle is pretty detrimental to the environment. Two new studies - including one put out by the National Academy of Sciences - add more evidence to the pile. 

Basically, raising cattle requires a tremendous amount of land and a whole lot of water - way more than raising dairy, pork, poultry and eggs. Plus, it puts about five times as many greenhouse gases into the air. As the report points out, if you really want to cut back on carbon emissions, giving up beef is better than giving up driving. 

So what to do? I certainly don't want to give it up, although I'm willing to scale back. A burger or steak just once a week - I can do that. That's probably not going to solve the problem.

But maybe Mother Nature is already providing us with a solution - the Lone Star tick. Its bite introduces a certain type of sugar into our bloodstream - a sugar that we don't make ourselves - and our bodies perceive it as a threat, developing antibodies for the next time we come across it...

...which is probably the next time we eat beef, pork, venison, or even some dairy. Before the tick bite, we had no problems digesting that particular sugar but now that we've been bitten, our immune system sees that sugar as a threat, kicks into high gear - hives, itching, swelling, anaphylactic shock - and sends us to the hospital.

Allergists are still trying to figure out the long term effects of a bite, as well as exactly how long the allergy lasts - it may turn out to be permanent for some people. But they'll have more opportunity to study the tick, as there have been an increasing number of cases across the eastern and southern US.

And one reason for the tick's spread? Climate change, caused in part by greenhouse gas emissions, such as raising cattle. Maybe I'll have a chicken sandwich after all.
 

Off Topic

I wanted to build off of yesterday's post, looking at the agricultural industry and especially the environmental impact of raising cattle, and I'd planned to write about my love-hate relationship with a good steak. But another, much more powerful story kept grabbing my attention - one that seemingly has nothing to do with the environment - so I'm opting to go in that direction.

Mike Brown was an 18-year-old kid who should have started college on Monday.

Instead, he was fatally shot by a police officer as he walked, unarmed, down the street in his grandmother's town of Ferguson, Missouri - a suburb of St. Louis - at 2:15 in the afternoon on a sunny Saturday.

Why? We don't really know. Eyewitnesses say Mike was shot while trying to surrender to the police after a verbal altercation. The police say Mike attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun. 

However it went down, it ended with a dead teenager lying in the middle of the street for hours as an increasingly agitated crowd gathered nearby, with protestors holding their hands in the air and chanting "Don't shoot me" and "We are Michael Brown." 

The next day saw more protests and a candlelight vigil for Mike turned violent, with looting and rioting. Protestors amassed again on Monday and Tuesday, although demonstrations remained largely peaceful.

The investigation of the circumstances leading to Mike's death continues, under the supervision of the St. Louis County police. The FBI is running its own investigation, looking into the possible violation of civil rights by the Ferguson police. One hopes that at least one investigation - if not both - will shine a light on what actually happened last Saturday afternoon.

But it's not just about the death of this young man. This is all wrapped up in a much larger package, containing the same issues that we, as a nation, have been grappling with for decades now - race, police brutality, economic inequality and a long history of discrimination. 

And what - you might ask - does this have to do with the environment?

Directly? Not much.

But I've spent many days reading about this story, following various Twitter trends (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown), watching the events unfold and hearing about the frustration and anger that many people feel. And while the environment is an incredibly important issue - one that affects us all - it's easy to see why it's so unimportant for people who are grappling with much more pressing problems.

Why would you care about the effect of rising sea levels on coastal communities when your kid could get gunned down in the street? And when your own, immediate physical safety can't be ensured, the preservation of endangered species probably isn't a high priority. Even though things like poor air quality and polluted water do pose a danger, they're not nearly as concrete a threat as multiple bullets being fired at you.

People aren't going to get on board with green initiatives when they face more obvious concerns - like hunger or discrimination. And in following Mike Brown's, it's becoming clear to me that we can't deal with environmental problems without addressing social problems, too. 

Water, Water Everywhere

Let's take a trip along the Snake River, from beginning to end, from its headwaters at the edge of Yellowstone National Park, all the way to where it joins the Columbia River, along the Idaho/Oregon border. It's a journey that author Richard Manning made for High Country News - not to take in the grandeur of the river's 1,078 miles, but to see the effects of industrial agriculture on both the waterway and the surrounding environment. 

Here's Manning's explanation:

Industrial agriculture impacts the entire planet, but the Snake's system – sizable, relatively isolated, discrete and significant – is a good place to assess the impacts at a local scale, examining the nuts and bolts as well as the weight of the whole. This accounting process is simple enough for those willing to pay attention: You begin where the water is clean and relatively natural, then follow the big river across an entire landscape defined by agriculture, to where the abused, exhausted water finally ends up.

Most of the river's journey is across the Snake River Plain; an area of high desert, where the Snake is just about the only source of water, other than the few inches of annual rain. So that river water is key to the biggest industry in this area - agriculture. It used to be potatoes and sugar beets that dominated Idaho farmland but more and more, farmers are planting corn and raising dairy cattle, two very water-intensive commodities. 

Manning gets into the politics of this - the subsidies for big agriculture, the poverty of many of the farm workers versus the wealth of factory farm owners, the fact that much of what is grown and raised on the Snake River Plain isn't exactly good for our health - and it's worthwhile to read what he has to say on these issues. 

But I want to focus on his main point - that the rise of agriculture has had a tremendously negative effect on the environment here. Much of land around the river has been converted to crop and grazing land, at the expense of native plants and wildlife. The dams and reservoirs that punctuate the water's flow prevent the natural rise and fall of the river, destroying the ability of many species to survive - I'm thinking of cottonwood trees, which rely on intermittent flooding; and salmon, which must swim upstream from the ocean to spawn in the Snake's many tributaries. 

And then there's the cow shit:

Basically, a single cow produces feces the equal of 20-40 humans. There's every reason to go with the high end of the range in the case of Holstein dairy cattle, champions in this regard, but assume a middle ground of 30. Under this math, the feedlots of southern Idaho offer to the environment the equivalent in raw sewage of 17 million people, dwarfing the effects of the state's 1.5 million human residents. 

Here's what blows my mind. That sewage isn't even treated. It's pumped out over the ground, where it filters through the porous volcanic soil back into the groundwater and back into the river itself. All those nitrogen compounds from the poop, plus the antibiotics fed to the cows to keep them healthy in unhealthy living conditions, plus the pesticides and fertilizers - all of that makes its way back into the groundwater (into people's wells) and into the river. 

Now where, you might ask, is the federal government in all of this? Aren't there limits on pollution? Something called the Clean Water Act? The state hasn't shown much interest in dealing with this but, according to Manning, the federal government believes Idaho has 13,057 miles of stream that fail to meet clean water standards. 204,091 acres of lakes/reservoirs. Agriculture - surprise! - is the biggest contributor to this pollution. But there are a lot of bureaucratic and legal loopholes that allow big ag to keep doing what they're doing - and regulators have no real recourse.

So all this nasty stuff ends up at the western end of the river, in the last few reservoirs before the Snake joins the Columbia. There it sits in what could be considered giant-sized sewage treatment lagoons, these reservoirs that are slowly filling up with toxic sludge. These are reservoirs are used for both recreation (swimming, fishing) and water supply, but there's no plan in place to clean them up or stop the ongoing pollution that stretches back across the state.

Drink up.

Open Spaces

Open Spaces and Mountain Parks - that's the name of Boulder's long-standing program to preserve land around the city, preventing the kind of development that leads to urban sprawl. 

The city currently holds 45 thousand acres of land – grasslands, forests, mountains. Some of it serves as wildlife habitat, some is used for agricultural purposes and then, of course, there are all the recreation opportunities. 150 (!) miles of trail crisscross this land, for hiking, horseback riding and biking.  That means I barely have to leave my house before I’m smack dab in the middle of some pretty gorgeous places.

While all this is great, I think it’s even more impressive that the whole thing got started over 100 years ago. In 1898, Boulder used revenue from a bond sale to acquire the alfalfa fields and apple orchards that ran along the community's western edge, right up against the Flatiron Mountains (an area that would later become the Chautauqua National Historic Landmark).  The government followed that up a few years later with a federal grant of 1600 acres of mountain land. And then the city levied yet another bond to purchase an additional 1200 acres in that same area.

But the big push came when Boulder experienced a massive population surge in the 1950s and 60s. The city more than doubled in size, housing underwent a major boom and the Boulder-Denver turnpike opened – all of that meant the open lands around the city were ripe for further development. Concerned about what this meant, a group of citizens created a group called PLAN Boulder County to campaign for land preservation.

One of their first achievements was the establishment of a “blue line,” which would prevent city water from being supplied above a certain elevation. That would limit development in the mountains' foothills.

Then, in 1964, a luxury developer proposed a fancy-pants hotel on a chunk of land known as the Enchanted Mesa, which overlooked Boulder from the west but activists were able to raise enough money from the community to buy the land.

And then, in 1967, voters approved a sales tax specifically for the purchase, management and maintenance of open spaces. Let me repeat that. They approved a tax ON THEMSELVES to protect the land around them. Pretty cool.

The plan has clearly changed the feel of Boulder, especially in comparison with a lot of other places in the west. Rather than a run-on of cities, one stringing right into the next, or a sprawled out suburban wasteland of big box stores, you drive through rural areas on every side before reaching the actual city. It sets the city apart, gives it a separate identity, makes it accessible and preserves some of its history.

But there’s at least one big downside, namely that it contributes to the high cost of living. Land is at a premium here and housing is expensive – meaning that while a lot of people can come visit (approximately 5.3 million a year access the Open Spaces), it’s only a very small few that can afford to stay.

Burning Through Cash

Timothy Egan has a great opinion piece on wildfire prevention in today's New York Times. What it boils down to is that we - meaning the nation - have become increasingly bad at thinking long-term. 

Egan writes, "Smart foresters had been warning for years that climate change, drought and stress would lead to bigger, longer, hotter wildfires. They offered remedies, some costly, some symbolic. We did nothing. We chose to wait until the fires were burning down our homes, and then demanded instant relief."

Those bigger, longer, hotter wildfires are a lot more expensive to combat and the Forest Service has, ahem, burned through its firefighting budget over and over again in recent years. That means they've had to borrow money from other projects such as logging, removing dry, hazardous fuels, and restoring damaged forest land. 

All of those projects are components in preventing future wildfires. So siphoning money from them only increases the risk of more fires. But Congress (God bless them, no one else will) chose to reject President Obama's request for emergency supplemental wildfire funding, saying the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior should be able to pay for firefighting out of the money they have. 

Between those two agencies, there's $886 million left to fight fires this fiscal year. That request from Obama was for additional monies because, as I mentioned earlier, the costs of fighting fires has exceeded the budget multiple times in the past decade. That extra money would have meant enough money to fight this year's fires without borrowing against those other programs that serve as preventative measures. 

Now, so far, this year has unexpectedly been one of the mildest fire seasons in the past decade. But it's only the beginning of August. Dozens of fires are currently burning in the West. There are at least two months of fire season left this year and probably more in California, where the season really lasts all year. There's still plenty of time for things to get worse. And the Forest Service is already putting projects on hold, anticipating that they'll need to money by the end of August. Just this week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack predicted that the firefighting budget would be depleted by then. 

Congress obviously had its doubts, which is why they denied that extra funding. And that brings me back to Egan's point about how the nation isn't exactly thinking about the long-term. Yes, if it's a mild year, the Forest Service won't need extra money. But think for a minute. The budget for firefighting has been exceeded many times in the past decade, there's an ongoing drought throughout the west, and the average temperatures continue to climb - even if this year is mild, the trend is still toward those longer, hotter wildfires. 

It's time to really think about how and when we want to fight fires and what kinds of resources we allocate to those programs. The less we do in advance, the bigger those fires - and the bills - are going to be.