Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central L.A.’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating.

Written by Stephen Messenger

All too often, it seems that an increase in human population must come at a cost to the environment, like in straining resources and encroachment on once wild habitats. But one quaint village in India has adopted a wonderfully eco-conscious tradition that is actually helping to ensure a greener future with each new generation.

While in some parts of India, many expectant parents still say they’d prefer bearing sons, members of the Piplantri village, in the western state of Rajasthan, are breaking this trend by celebrating the birth of each baby girl in way that benefits everyone. For every female child that’s born, the community gathers to plant 111 fruit trees in her honor in the village common.

This unique tradition was first suggested by the village’s former leader, Shyam Sundar Paliwal, in honor of his daughter who had passed away at a young age.

But planting trees is only one way that the community is ensuring a brighter future for their daughters. According to a report in The Hindu, villagers also pool together around $380 dollars for every new baby girl and deposited in an account for her. The girl’s parents are required to contribute $180, and to make a pledge to be considerate guardians.

“We make these parents sign an affidavit promising that they would not marry her off before the legal age, send her to school regularly and take care of the trees planted in her name,” says Paliwal.

Over the last six years alone, as population there has increased, villagers in Piplantri have planted nearly a quarter million trees — a welcoming forest for the community’s youngest members, offering a bit of shade for their brighter future.

This post was originally published by TreeHugger.

cross-posted from AlterNet

Working hard for 40 hours a week should guarantee a living wage. Who does it benefit if Americans lack the time, money, and resources to feed their families healthy food?

Healthy food is expensive and telling people to eat organic, local food is elitist. Have you heard that argument before?

It’s true. Healthy, organic, local food is expensive. Calorie for calorie, you get more for your money at a fast food drive-thru than at a farmer’s market. And the fast food will be cooked and ready to eat, whereas you might need to take your fresh, organic produce home to cook it. Now, you might say, that’s only a short-term calculation. Today, a $5 burger, fries, and large soda looks like a better deal than a few ounces of spinach, a handful of dried beans, and a bunch of carrots for the same price. But that overlooks the health consequences of either meal. One of these meals, if eaten regularly, will land you in the hospital someday. The other won’t.

Factor the costs of medical care needed to treat diet-related chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes into the equation, not to mention the quality of life problems. Can you put a price tag on a year of your life? How about endless hospital visits? Suddenly, the spinach, beans, and carrots look like a better deal. Yet, this kind of logic assumes that you have enough money right now to make either choice. And millions of Americans don’t. How many families struggling to raise their children and pay their bills simply lack the cash needed to buy healthy foods or the time needed to prepare them?

So what’s the answer? How do we give more Americans the ability to choose healthy foods? Some say we ought to make them more affordable. I disagree. We need to pay Americans a living wage.

Working hard for 40 hours a week should guarantee a living wage. Who does it benefit if Americans lack the time, money, and resources to feed their families healthy food?

Economically, we’ll all fare better if our fellow citizens are able to work and their children are able to concentrate in school. Poor diets and the health problems that they cause lead to increased absenteeism and a weaker performance. That is, when one does show up to work or school. For argument’s sake, let’s examine the alternative: cheaper food. We’ve already got the cheapest food in the world. We spend a mere 9.4 percent of disposable income on food — less than people in any other country in the world.

How does one decrease the price of food? Subsidies are one way. Increasing efficiency is another. But in the United States, we also produce an awful lot of cheap junk and call it “food.” If you grab a box of anything off the supermarket shelves, it’s likely full of the same ingredients: corn, soy, wheat, sugar, and stuff to make it taste better, look appealing, last longer, and appear more nutritious. But it’s not nutritious. This cheap food is the stuff that’s making us sick.

Another way to lower the cost of food comes at the expense of the people who grow and harvest our food. Journalist Tracie McMillan worked in the fields of California, where she documented systematic wage theft from farmworkers. The fruits and vegetables the farmworkers pick are healthy, but exploiting the people who plant and harvest our food to lower prices for consumers isn’t the answer.

There’s no free lunch. Good food costs money, and good health requires healthy meals. So here’s a recipe for a sounder diet: Equip Americans to afford good food.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

Author: Alister Doyle

Air pollution is an underestimated scourge that kills far more people than AIDS and malaria and a shift to cleaner energy could easily halve the toll by 2030, U.N. officials said on Tuesday. Investments in solar, wind or hydropower would benefit both human health and a drive by almost 200 nations to slow climate change, blamed mainly on a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from use of fossil fuels, they said.

“Air pollution is causing more deaths than HIV or malaria combined,” Kandeh Yumkella, director general of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, told a conference in Oslo trying to work out new U.N. development goals for 2030.

Most victims from indoor pollution, caused by wood fires and primitive stoves in developing nations, were women and children. He suggested that new U.N. energy goals for 2030 should include halving the number of premature deaths caused by indoor and outdoor pollution. A 2012 World Health Organization (WHO) study found that 3.5 million people die early annually from indoor air pollution and 3.3 million from outdoor air pollution. Toxic particles shorten lives by causing diseases such as pneumonia or cancer.

“The problem has been underestimated in the past,” Maria Neira, the WHO’s director of public health and environment, told Reuters. Smog is an acute problem from Beijing to Mexico City.

The data, published as part of a global review of causes of death in December 2012, were an upwards revision of previous figures of 1.9 million premature deaths caused by household pollution a year and 1.3 million outdoors, she said. The revision reflects better measurements and changes in methods, such as including heart problems linked to pollutants, she said. The numbers cannot be added together because they include perhaps 500,000 from overlapping causes.

SIX MILLION
“Still, it means more than 6 million deaths every year caused by air pollution,” she said. “The horrible thing is that this will be growing” because of rising use of fossil fuels. By comparison, U.N. reports show there were about 1.7 million AIDS-related deaths in 2011 and malaria killed about 660,000 people in 2010. Solutions were affordable, the experts said.

“If we increase access to clean energy … the health benefits will be enormous. Maybe the health argument was not used enough” in debate on encouraging a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies, she said.

Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out by the end of 2015 a deal to combat climate change. But negotiations have stalled, partly because of economic slowdown and divisions between nations about how to share out the burden of cuts. Yumkella also urged the world to build 400,000 clinics and medical units in developing nations by 2030 as part of U.N. energy and health goals. Vaccines, for instance, are often useless without refrigeration, which depends on electricity.

The United Nations has previously urged 2030 targets for universal access to energy, doubling the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency and doubling the share of renewable energy in global consumption.

(Reporting by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Jon Hemming)