Archives

Detroit’s William Copeland: From Climate Oppression to 21st-Century Leadership. What Will the New Black Economy Look Like?

Feb4

By  Become a fanEnvironmental justice activist, educator, and MC from Detroit

Reposted from the Huffington Post 

HURRICANE KATRINA AFRICAN AMERICANI still remember the shock when Kanye West blurted “George Bush don’t like Black people” during the nationwide Red Cross fundraiser. Even more, images of Black people stranded, swimming, struggling on roofs are still branded onto my memory. I remember how our people were packed into the Superdome and labelled refugees. Churches and organizations as far away as Detroit opened up their doors for survivors.

Later, I heard stories of Black survivors being turned away from majority white Gulf towns. I learned later about previous flooding incidents, that many folks to this day think were intentional. Years later I found out how the Katrina super storm was influenced by human impact on weather patterns — “global warming” is not just higher temperatures but erratic extremes in a variety of climate conditions. Furthermore, unsustainable development along the gulf stripped away the natural buffer zones and made the storm’s damage much worse than it had to be.

Hurricane Katrina was the “perfect storm” for climate injustice: extreme weather patterns made worse by development and pollution. Climate injustice affects folks disproportionately based on socio-economic status and value within society. For Black folk in the United States, that usually means we face the blunt end. For working class and poor folks that don’t have the money to pay their way to safety, it’s the rough side of the blunt end.

Climate injustice is more than one-time events and calamities. The same development pressures that add greenhouse gases to our environment which cause chaotic weather patterns have stripped away protective wetlands and naturally occurring barriers. These economic trends and political rationales place polluting, dirty facilities too often in our neighborhoods.

“Environmental racism” is the term describing the fact that communities of color are disproportionately chosen as sites for toxic facilities — even considering income. This aggravates health conditions in our communities from allergies and asthma to cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Detroit does not fight climate change in the abstract. It’s a daily struggle because the oil refinery and trash incinerator are literally in our backyards. Climate injustice is not just a “one day it will happen” event; we feel it when we bury and mourn our sons and daughters. Detroit’s asthma deaths are three to five times higher than Michigan’s average.

The East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC) has joined with Climate Justice Alliance, a nationwide coalition that seeks to advance leadership of communities of color and other communities that have been historically dumped upon. Frontline communities such as Detroit have been located in the proximity of environmental pollution, industrial waste, toxic spills, explosions, and other harmful byproducts of the energy, waste, and production system we live under.

CJA’s Just Transition framework acknowledges that there are economic and political incentives beyond environmental racism that must be restructured. We must transition from being frontline communities and dumping grounds to leaders in this 21st century movement towards economic, environmental, and social justice. Each community will have to decide what institutions it will need to destroy, what must be transformed, and what should be built up in the future. From what I see in Detroit, our Just Transition must include:

  • Recognizing and Challenging Extreme Energy — Coal burning, trash incineration, oil refining is killing us in the short-term and harming the planet in the foreseeable future. Workers in these facilities, especially those from our communities- should be included in widespread planning for decentralized energy and reduced individual consumption.
  • Challenging Economic Exclusion — As communities we must fight the gentrification and destruction of our communities taking place nationwide. Let’s link with indigenous struggles against displacement and resource theft. Foreclosures represent a historic loss of our homes and community wealth. Katrina showed the vulnerability of our poor and working-class community. We must create collective care through institution building for quality of life.
  • De-Silo our Organizing — We can’t look at issues in isolation. We definitely can’t afford to think that some issues are more important than others. The anti-Blackness of this world uses myriad means and tactics against us. We must stay rooted in our vision, yet committed to syncretic thinking.
  • Healing our Culture — Our culture is a multi-billion dollar industry because it is powerful and it has the ability to change lives. Let’s reclaim our culture from being a profit extracting mechanism for others to being our channel for healing, expression, and institution building.
  • Reclaiming the Commons — Public infrastructure such as tap water, education, and roads has been built up with our collective investment. These systems should not be privatized, chartered, or sold off to corporate owners. The answer is more community responsiveness and accountability. The answer is NOT selling off to companies whose (only) concern is their return for shareholders.

In this land where our individual survival is not a given, we assert our highest self. We work towards collective well-being, respect for this planet that has birthed us, and our own ways of being full of dignity and self-awareness. No, we aren’t there yet but we are making this Transition with our arms wide open for our allies and our eyes wide open for any obstacles in our path.

This essay is dedicated to my friend David Blair, poet, activist, artist, and a local casualty of climate injustice who passed in the heat wave of 2011 when his home did not have air conditioning. This essay is also dedicated to Nicole Cannon, a water warrior who recently passed from health related conditions from her water being shut off at home. Her children are fundraising burial expenses here.

This post is part of the “Black Future Month” series produced by The Huffington Post and Black Lives Matter for Black History Month. Each day in February, this series will look at one of 28 different cultural and political issues affecting Black lives, from education to criminal-justice reform. To follow the conversation on Twitter, view #BlackFutureMonth — and to see all the posts as part of our Black History Month coverage, read here.

Weightwatchers Superbowl Commercial and Food Justice

Feb2

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 1.46.46 AMSuperbowl commercials get lots of attention. This is in part because of the amount of money it costs to air one during the big game, but also because of all the “creative energy” invested in tapping into public sentiment. One commercial caught our eye this year, a commercial that focused on current food system and how hard it is to resist all the bad food that is available to us.

The Weighwatchers 2015 Superbowl commercial used a series of images that reflected the unhealthy nature of the current food system, with an emphasis on fast food, junk food and highly processed foods. The voiceover even empresses sympathy for how hard it is to resist eating foods that are unhealthy for us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvUO_jU8XlI

The weightwatchers commercial then transitions to an empty plate with the text that states, “It’s time to take back control.”

Up until this point, the Superbowl spot had potential to get us all to think about the forces behind the food system which both imposes an unhealthy food system on all of us, but also profits from it. However, instead of giving viewers some clarity about what we can do, we are all admonished to join the largest diet-driven company on the planet.

Lets face it, Weightwatchers International is a huge multinational corporation that is not really about promoting public health, rather a company that uses our collective dietary struggle to promote their own products.

Weightwatchers has dozens of its own products and promotes other brands they endorse. The company does not encourage us to think about the food system in any substantial way, instead they prey on our dietary insecurities and convince us that WE CAN BE IN CONTROL.

While OKT certainly acknowledges that personal responsibility is necessary to practice a healthy food system, we also recognize that we cannot resist it by ourselves–and many simply do not have access to healthy foods. More importantly, we cannot change the current food system by simply purchasing slightly less unhealthy food products.

We believe that there has to be a radical transformation of the current food system, where food justice and food sovereignty are central to how we relate to food. https://oktjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/what-is-food-justice-o.pdf We cannot continue to have a food system that is controlled by a small percentage of people, where exploitation of people and the land is the norm and where the public subsidizes this unhealthy food system to the tune of billions of dollars in public tax dollars supporting the Farm Bill. https://oktjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/the-farm-bill-o.pdf.

For our Kitchen Table it is important that we not only understand how unhealthy and unjust the current food system is, we want to promote and practice food justice in the West Michigan community. We provide information and resources to work with people wanting to grow some of their own food. We work with people living in food insecure communities and offer opportunities for people to become more food independent with workshops, garden coaches, a small farmers market and opportunities for people to share food with others wanting to eat healthy and promote a just food system.

Don’t be seduced by companies who can pay millions to run a 30-second ad during the Superbowl. We invite you to join us and be part of a movement that values food justice over food brands.

.

This entry was posted on February 2, 2015, in Policy.

Seedy Business: New Report Digs Beneath Agrichemical Industry’s High-Cost PR Machine

Jan26
Published on
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
by
Common Dreams

‘The tremendous amount of money spent speaks to depth of public unease about GMOs,’ says lead author

by
Sarah Lazare, staff writer
"Since 2012, the agrichemical and food industries have mounted a complex, multifaceted public relations, advertising, lobbying and political campaign in the United States, costing more than $100 million, to defend genetically engineered food and crops and the pesticides that accompany them," states the report. (Photo courtesy of report)

“Since 2012, the agrichemical and food industries have mounted a complex, multifaceted public relations, advertising, lobbying and political campaign in the United States, costing more than $100 million, to defend genetically engineered food and crops and the pesticides that accompany them,” states the report. (Photo courtesy of report)

What exactly is the agrichemical industry hiding with its high-cost public relations and lobbying efforts to convince the U.S. public that genetically modified organisms and pesticides are safe?

According to a just-released study by the newly-formed nonprofit organization U.S. Right to Know, the answer is: A great deal.

Entitled Seedy Business: What Big Food is hiding with its slick PR campaign on GMOs, and authored by Gary Ruskin, the study aims to expose the “sleazy tactics” of corporations like Monsanto and Dow Chemical.

“Since 2012, the agrichemical and food industries have mounted a complex, multifaceted public relations, advertising, lobbying and political campaign in the United States, costing more than $100 million, to defend genetically engineered food and crops and the pesticides that accompany them,” states the report. “The purpose of this campaign is to deceive the public, to deflect efforts to win the right to know what is in our food via labeling that is already required in 64 countries, and ultimately, to extend their profit stream for as long as possible.”

In fact, according to Ruskin’s calculations, the industry spent more than $103 million since 2012 on defeating state initiatives to mandate GMO labeling in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, with Monsanto alone spending over $22 million.

“The tremendous amount of money spent speaks to depth of public unease about GMOs,” Ruskin told Common Dreams.

The biotechnology industry—whose tactics include attacking scientists and journalists—switches its message depending on the regulatory environment, notes the report. For example, St. Louis-based Monsanto backs GMO labeling in the UK, where such labeling is mandatory, but strongly opposes it in the U.S. “Half of the Big Six agrichemical firms can’t even grow their GMOs in their own home countries,” states the report, due to health and environmental concerns in European countries.

Industry PR firms such as Ketchum—whose clients include tobacco corporations and the Russian government—have had considerable success in manipulating public opinion about GMOs. However, beneath the spin are a number of red flags about the environmental and human health impacts of agrichemical products.

According to the report, “big agrichemical companies have a well-documented record of hiding the truth about the health risks of their products and operations,” from the cancer-causing danger of polychlorinated biphenyls produced by Monsanto to the tragic human impacts of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, which was primarily manufactured by Dow Chemical and Monsanto.

Despite this track record, U.S. oversight of the industry is inadequate, according to the study, thanks largely to the anti-regulatory structures put in place by former Vice President Dan Quayle. The Food and Drug Administration, in fact, does not directly test whether GMOs are safe.

“This report presents a new argument for why the FDA regulatory process doesn’t work,” Ruskin told Common Dreams. “The FDA trusts agrichemical companies and the science they pay for, but the industry has repeatedly hidden health risks from the public so there is no reason to trust them.”

According to Ruskin, this is analogous to the pharmaceutical industry, where positive results get published over negative ones. “What we know is that agrichemical companies have repeatedly hidden health risks, repeatedly suppressed scientific results adverse to the industry,” Ruskin continued. “There is no registry of studies, no way to know. There are are no epidemiological studies on the health impacts of GMOs.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Bowing to Monsanto, USDA Approves New GMO Soy and Cotton Crops

Jan20

Reposted from Common Dreams, by Sarah Lazare, staff writer

“This continues the disturbing trend of more herbicide-tolerant crop approvals taking place under President Obama’s watch.” — Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

The United States Department of Agriculture on Thursday approved Monsanto’s controversial herbicide-resistant genetically modified strains of soybean and cotton, in a move that critics say is a bow to the powerful biotechnology industry, at the expense of human and environmental health.

The green-light is “simply the latest example of USDA’s allegiance to the biotechnology industry and dependence upon chemical solutions,” Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter declared in a press statement. “This continues the disturbing trend of more herbicide-tolerant crop approvals taking place under President Obama’s watch.”

Dr. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman of the Pesticide Action Network echoed Hauter’s concerns, calling the new genetically modified crops “the latest in a slew of bad ideas” and a sign of the USDA’s “allegiance to the largest pesticide corporations.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) on Thursday granted “nonregulated status for Monsanto Company’s (Monsanto) soybeans and cotton that are resistant to certain herbicides, including one known as dicamba.” The biotechnology giant still awaits the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of the new herbicide, which contains both dicamba and glyphosate, designed to accompany the resistant strain.

But food and environmental safety advocates warn that the corresponding increase in herbicide use is dangerous to the ecosystem. As the Center for Food Safety points out, dicamba has been linked in epidemiology studies to “increased rates of cancer in farmers and birth defects in their male offspring.” First approved in 1967, dicamba seeps through the environment, causing damage to crops and flowering plants and polluting waterways.

Furthermore, herbicides give rise to resistant weeds, leading the development of new herbicides, accompanied by resistant genetically engineered crop strains. Critics charge that, rather that embark on an endless cycle of pumping chemicals and genetically modified crops into the environment, fostering a “pesticide treadmill,” regulators should take the long-term well-being of the ecosystem into account and change the status quo.

The USDA’s green-light follows the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval in October of Dow AgroSciences’ herbicide Enlist Duo, which farmers and scientists warn threatens human and environmental health.

“Monsanto’s genetically-engineered dicamba-resistant crops are yet another example of how pesticide firms are taking agriculture back to the dark days of heavy, indiscriminate use of hazardous pesticides, seriously endangering human health and the environment,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
This entry was posted on January 20, 2015, in Policy and tagged .

Survey Finds Doctors Concerned About Impacts Of Climate Change On Patient Health

Jan8

Reposted from Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -– American medical professionals specializing in respiratory conditions and critical care are concerned about what climate change may mean for patient health, a new survey finds.

A survey of members of the American Thoracic Society, which represents 15,000 physicians and other medical professionals who work in the fields of respiratory disease, critical care and sleep disorder, finds that the majority of respondents said they were already seeing health effects in their patients that they believe are linked to climate change. According to an Ottawa home air quality testing company, seventy-seven percent said they have seen an increase in chronic diseases related to air pollution, and 58 percent said they’d seen increased allergic reactions from plants or mold. Fifty-seven percent of participants said they’d also seen injuries related to severe weather.

An overwhelming majority — 89 percent — agreed that climate change is happening, and 65 percent said they thought climate change was relevant to direct patient care. Forty-four percent said they thought climate change was already affecting the health of their patients a “great deal” or a “moderate amount.” Strong majorities of respondents also said that heat, vector-borne infections, air pollution and allergies would likely affect patients in the next 10 to 20 years.

Numerous scientific studies have found links between climate change and a variety of health problems.

The survey was conducted by the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and will be published in the February edition of the journal Annals of the American Thoracic Society. The center has previously surveyed members of the National Medical Association, a society of African-American physicians, and also plans to survey members of the American Academy of Family Physicians; the American Academy of Pediatrics; and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication and lead author of the paper, said in an interview with The Huffington Post that she was surprised by some of the anecdotes her team heard from physicians who responded to the survey. These included reports of seeing patients whose asthma has gotten worse due to ozone or other pollutant exposure, longer and more severe allergy seasons, and more cases of both acute and chronic lung conditions. Others cited lung problems related to exposure to smoke from wildfires and changes in precipitation and weather patterns that seemed to be affecting patients.

Having doctors engaged and concerned about climate change could help drive public opinion as well, Sarfaty said. “Not too many people personally know a climate scientist,” she pointed out. “But they do know physicians, and physicians are well thought of.”

“Doctors who are treating patients for a living believe they are seeing health effects in patients they are treating today. That brings home the message,” said Gary Ewart, director of government relations at the American Thoracic Society. “Instead of a drowning polar bear issue, it turns into a kitchen-table issue, with real patient care starting to drive the discussion.”

Ewart said the group undertook the survey to see whether members were interested in climate change and what they were seeing in their practices. Seventy-four percent of the survey respondents said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “physicians should have a significant advocacy role in relation to climate change and health,” while 75 percent agreed that medical societies should play an advocacy role.

Sarfaty said that the survey also shows that there is interest among doctors to know more about climate change and how it might impact their work. It “amounts to a call … to provide more information to meet the needs of the doctors,” she said. She noted that many medical organizations are not currently providing information on climate to their members.

Ewart said his group is hoping to change that. “There are a growing [number] of members in my society, and I suspect other societies, that are trying to elevate this as an issue.”

OKT Responds to Urban Food Growing Debate in Muskegon

Jan7
The Muskegon City Commission on has discussed the sales of produce from urban gardens. This garden is in the McLaughlin Neighborhood. (MLive/Dave Alexander)

The Muskegon City Commission on has discussed the sales of produce from urban gardens. This garden is in the McLaughlin Neighborhood. (MLive/Dave Alexander)

Recently, MLive reported that Muskegon city commissioners are discussing regulating urban food growers. Here is our response.

The City of Muskegon has been debating the issue of what restrictions should be placed on urban growers who want to sell what they grow at local farmers markets. This debate, which is happening nationally, is an important debate, since it could have long term implications for food production and food justice.

On the surface, it seems reasonable for people living in urban spaces to grow food to sell, at either local farmers’ markets or food locations in their communities. Within the current economic framework, selling urban produce makes complete sense and is often one of the only options people have to make a living or supplement their income.

However, important distinctions must be made when talking about this issue. First, it is important to recognize that local communities are being confronted by the power of the Agribusiness sector, especially through their use of the State’s Right to Farm Act. (http://www.michigan.gov/mdard/0,4610,7-125-1599_1605—,00.html) The Right to Farm Act was established in the 1980s and driven by the Agribusiness sector. Thus, there is no surprise that this state law benefits those who are part of the current Agribusiness sector, which is reflected in the endorsement of groups like the Michigan Farm Bureau. (https://www.michfb.com/MI/Farm_Business_Resources/Natural_Resources_and_Environment/Right_to_Farm_Act/)

The second important factor in this discussion, especially from a Food Justice perspective (https://oktjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/what-is-food-justice-o.pdf), is that within this discussion it is critical for us to ask larger questions about who access to food and who has access to food production, which means who has access to land.

The economic and racial indicators for Muskegon are consistent with what we see in Grand Rapids, albeit with the numbers of those experiencing poverty slightly higher. According to data from Kids Count Michigan, the number of children experiencing poverty in Muskegon County is just above 28%. However, when looking at child poverty through a racial lens, the numbers of African American and Latino children experiencing poverty are both over 30%.

Further data shows that infant mortality among Latino and African American children is also higher, which is another indication that communities of color experience higher levels of poverty than do their White counterparts. Those experiencing poverty will have less access to healthy foods, both because of proximity to healthy food options and because of limited income. Those disproportionately higher levels of poverty in communities of color ultimately mean that health indicators are worse in those communities from a variety of factors, especially food access and diet.

For Our Kitchen Table, it is important that the City of Muskegon is discussing the issue of urban food growing. However, what we think needs to be included in the discussion and action that is taken, are important if food justice is to occur.

Urban food production should primarily benefit those most marginalized in the current Agribusiness food model. This translates into allowing people experiencing poverty access to public land for food production to improve their health. If more people have the opportunity to use public land to grow food, it will not only translate into better health for those experiencing poverty, it will also foster greater awareness about food justice and even challenge the current Agribusiness model, since those involved in urban food growing will see how they have been subjected to a form of food apartheid in Muskegon. What do we mean by food apartheid? The lack of access to healthy and affordable food and the proliferation of processed and fast-food establishments is the result of economic and race-based systems of oppression, which have historically imposed a bad food system on communities of color.

We understand why people who grow in urban settings want the opportunity to sell their produce, but we believe it is more important to make larger structural changes to allow people who are the most marginalized in the current food system the opportunity to benefit from a more just food system that they actually would have a say in.

Fight climate change with food sovereignty

Dec15

Published on Monday, 08 December 2014 15:02 by La Via Campesina

La Via Campesina and GRAIN release two new documents on food and climate change ahead of the People’s Summit on Climate Change in Lima, Peru. 

Publication4With this year’s UN Climate Change Conference under way in Lima, La Via Campesina and GRAIN announce the joint publication of two new documents that detail how a global programme to support food sovereignty can resolve the climate crisis and feed the world.

The documents show how the dispossession of peasants and indigenous peoples of their lands has laid the basis for destructive resource extraction and an industrial food system that is responsible for 44-57% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

La Via Campesina and GRAIN explain how a worldwide redistribution of lands to small farmers and indigenous communities – combined with policies to support local markets and ecological agriculture – can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by half within a few decades, significantly curb deforestation and meet the food needs of the world’s growing population.

For more information see:

Read La Via Campesina’s position paper, “Environmental and Climate Justice Now!”

La Via Campesina is the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity.

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems

Join OKT for a lively food justice discussion this Saturday

Nov18
Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 2.18.26 PMEven if you missed the first week of our Food Justice class, you can still join us this Saturday as we continue our discussion about the current food system. You can get caught up by reading our Food Justice handouts https://oktjustice.org/resources/hand-outs-and-zines/okt-food-justice-series/.
In week one we looked at part of the documentary, Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis. In addition, we discussed the basic principles of Food Justice and began to look at the historical factors that have determined the kind of food system we currently have.
In week two we will dissect the current food system, by looking at all aspects of the system, from seed to plate and everything in between. Having a clear understanding to how the current food system functions is necessary if we are to create a just and sustainable response.
For those who want to share food during the food justice class, we invite them to bring a dish or beverage to share, while we have lively conversation. Join us at the Garfield Park Lodge, 334 Burton SE, from 10 a.m. to noon this Saturday, Nov. 22. The five-week series continues through December 13.