Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

New, upbeat World Bank and UN reports celebrate a global success story: Between 1990 and 2008, the world cut by half the share of the world’s really poor — those living on less than $1.25 a day. And we achieved this goal five years ahead of the “Millennial Development Goal.” Wow! These reports also assure us that since 2008 this positive trend has continued. While big stories on this triumph — based on a World Bank memo — appeared some months ago in The New York Times and a few other outlets, now the news is properly published in full color, along with congratulatory words from the UN’s Ban Ki-moon. But I’m baffled. How could the world have made huge strides against extreme poverty when, since the mid-nineties, the number of chronically undernourished people has risen to record highs — now roughly one billion? Given that the poor spend at least half their income on food and global food prices have hit historic highs, how is it possible that poverty is truly decreasing? And that’s not the only mystery. How could we cut the rate of dire poverty in half when at the same time we learn elsewhere that 71 percent of the world’s people live in countries where economic inequality is worsening? I’m still trying to figure it out, and help has come from Professor Thomas Pogge, a philosopher at Yale and author of Politics as Usual , among many works. First, he clarified for me that the bar for extreme poverty, $1.25, is even more dire than it appears. It’s not set via international exchange rates — which, say, in India would mean 69 rupees a day. Instead, the Bank uses what’s called “purchasing power parity (PPP),” which in India amounts to only about a third as much. It comes to just 19.50 rupees for all daily needs — enough to buy one meal in a Calcutta street market . “PPPs for individual household consumption,” Pogge writes, underrates the cost of food in poor countries “by about 50 percent on average.” Most important, Pogge helped me see, it’s easier to win the game when you move the goal post. And the World Bank and UN have moved it twice. First, the World Bank and UN changed what gets measured to determine progress in overcoming world poverty: Pogge notes that the 1996 Rome Declaration — the product of representatives of more than 80 countries convened by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization — promised to reduce, relative to 1996, the number of hungry people by half by 2015. But in 2000, the Millennium Declaration, and the subsequent Millennial Development Goals, shifted the measurement from numbers of people to their share of the population affected. And this is a telling change, especially because poverty — a root of hunger — itself contributes mightily to population growth. So a poverty-spurred growth in numbers of people has, ironically, helped meet a poverty-reduction target measured by a decline in the percentage of people affected. Note well: The advance-against-poverty picture looks quite different when using absolute numbers: World Bank statistics reveal that between 1990 and 2008 the number of people still in the below-$1.25 category has not fallen by half but by less than a third; and excluding China, the drop is an unimpressive 9 percent. Suddenly, it is much harder to celebrate. And mentioning China brings us to a second goal-post fudge. Pogge points out that while the Millennium Declaration adopted by the UN in 2000 makes that year its baseline, the eight specific Millennial Development Goals are measured against 1990. And how does this baseline shift make the story appear rosier? Starting the race in 1990 makes it possible to include the hundreds of millions of Chinese who officially escaped extreme poverty during the decade following. But, isn’t celebrating success against extreme poverty as a “global” phenomenon pretty misleading if a huge piece of that progress reflects changes in just one country? And in a country whose policies few would want to emulate? Moreover, before we uncork the champagne we need to view poverty through a wider lens. Taking in twenty-seven years, from 1981 to 2008, we see that the number of people living below the still very miserly poverty line of $2.50 per person a day has increased by almost 8 percent to three billion. Outside of China, the number has grown by fully 32 percent to 2.4 billion . Now, to the hunger puzzle. The first target under the Millennial Development Goal #1 , focusing on poverty, is to cut in half the percentage of hungry people hungry worldwide. Since in the Global South poor people spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, shouldn’t three food-price spikes (2007-08, 2011, and now) in five years be enough to scuttle attempts to meet hunger-reduction targets? What has happened? At the 1990 starting line, 16 percent of the global population — 845 million people — officially suffered from hunger. As poor people were reeling from a doubling of the global Food Price Index between 2007 and 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2009 that 1.02 billion , or 15 percent, were hungry. Even though, in 2010 its estimate fell back some, to 925 million — that’s still 13.6 percent of the world’s people, far from the 8 percent that the Millennial target demands. Finally, how is it possible to have less poverty and worsening inequality? “Seventy-one per cent of the world’s people live in countries where income inequality has been increasing,” reports the Conference Board of Canada. These include “large-population countries like China, India, Russia, and the United States,” it notes. Only 22 percent live in countries where inequality in decreasing. It may be statistically possible for income inequality to go up and poverty to go down (if the poor were joining the middle class while the rich were leaping even farther ahead of everybody). But that’s not what I’m seeing. In the U.S., for example, poverty and inequality are certainly spreading together. “The number of families in deep poverty grew sharply during the recent recession and its aftermath,” writes Paul Tough in The New York Times Magazine , “and in 2010, the share of Americans whose families made less than half of the poverty line hit a record: 6.7 percent of the population, or 1 in 15 Americans.” In India, in early 2012, an official commission reported that the country’s population below the official poverty line is now 30 percent, down from 37 percent in 2004-05. Given India’s size, such improvement must have contributed significantly to the World Bank’s positive claims. But, at about the same time we started hearing good news on global poverty reduction, the Times of India reported that “inequality in earnings has doubled in India over the last two decades, making it the worst performer on this count of all emerging economies.” Plus, almost 42 percent of Indian children younger than five are underweight and almost 60 percent are stunted in height. Both estimates are much larger than the overall percent of Indians below the poverty line. But wait: How could there be so many more children suffering from obvious hunger than Indians in “official poverty”? In other words, how could you be excluded from the poverty count if you don’t even have enough to feed your children? So it’s clear I’ve not figured this out. But I do have a new question. Why aren’t more people questioning the World Bank’s numbers game? Originally published by the Huffington Post on 09/13/2012

I guess I’ve always been one — a panicky perfectionist. Still way-too-vivid is a memory of sitting on the rust-colored corduroy couch of my Pt. Richmond, Calif., home in the spring of 1971. Staring out on the bay, I’m talking with my mom just as Diet for a Small Planet is about to hit the bookstores. Panic had set in, and I’m confessing: “Mom, what my book says — that there’s enough food for all — is so obvious, it can’t possibility be true. If it were, surely someone else, some Ph.D. somewhere, would be seeing it and saying it. What if I got a decimal point wrong and my whole thesis is off?” Since that heart to heart, no one has ever challenged the basic math showing that scarcity of food is not the cause of hunger — a fact even more true in today’s world. Yet, through 17 more books and 41 more years, I’ve remained a panicky perfectionist. My latest book EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want has more than 600 endnotes — an average of three per page. Not only did I ask a really smart assistant Samantha Mignotte to “fact-check,” but I hired an environmental educator to double fact-check. Yet, anxiety about making mistakes has always haunted me. Most recently, I upped the ante on myself. I felt compelled, with colleagues, to challenge, by way of a petition campaign , the standards of the most prestigious publisher in the world, Oxford University Press. What was I thinking? If I’ve been panicky about making errors before, well, this had to be the acid test. Yes, but it’s also turning out to be an acid powerful enough to burn an opening — an opening to a new freedom. One of my most self-mocking but useful mottos over the decades has been this: “When all else fails, Frankie, why not try practicing what you preach?” And what have I been preaching? My latest book, EcoMind , explores what it could mean if we took to heart a global cultural shift flowing from breakthroughs in science and reflections on our species’ historical record. I call the new way of seeing the “eco-mind” because it embodies these truths: 1. All life is connected, shaping all other life moment to moment. 2. Change is the only constant. 3. Therefore we are all co-creating our reality. An eco-mind, focused on the power of context to shape members of any system, also acknowledges that our species sees the world through cultural filters (I call them our “mental maps”) that determine what we can see and what we cannot. With an eco-mind, aware that change is continuous and the shape of reality co-created, “knowing” is not an endpoint but a process, an endless process. All “knowing” is iterative. Bringing that insight down to earth, I realize that my panic about getting all “my facts right” once and for all is a fool’s errand — on several levels. For one, since I, too, am shaped by my context and see the world through my own filters, I will miss things. I will unwittingly distort something no matter how hard I try not to. And what seemed like a fact today may be disproven or greatly refined tomorrow. I’d used Brazil prominently in the first chapter of EcoMind , for example, to make the case that even one of the worst global offenders could successfully combat deforestation. But just weeks before my book went to press, a breaking news story reported an international forestry watchdog group apologizing for vastly overstating Brazil’s progress. So, zip, Brazil was out. Then, earlier this month, I read that Brazil has made significant strides after all. And now, today, an email appeal asks me to sign a petition to Brazil’s president to veto a bill that could result in deforesting an area the size of Chile! So what is the answer? What’s the cure for my perfectionist affliction? It’s to rethink what it means to be a public intellectual. I am actually a public learner, a co-creator of iterative knowledge, not a deliverer of once-and-for-all facts. The Internet makes this possible. It is my liberation. Right now on the Small Planet Institute’s website I have posted all EcoMind endnotes. There I am updating “URLs” as I discover them to be dated. Even more important, readers can find — by chapter — updates, including corrections. I’ve just started this process, but I’m committed to expanding it. I may add others’ feedback by chapter as well. There is a catchword for all this today. It’s “transparency” — exactly the opposite of Fox News-style combat media without transparency or opportunity for correction or refinement. The value of transparency is gaining ground and urgency: Think of the bipartisan anger at the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, enabling the unprecedented flood of secret campaign money. It’s deadly. On the positive, think of Wikipedia, where it’s possible to uncover the identity of any contributor, or Politifact , where I can find not only judgments on the accuracy of controversial public statements, but the reasoning behind them. So I can go behind the spin. Transparency, as a core value of democratic society, also goes right to the heart of the petition appeal to Oxford University Press that colleagues and I are pursuing. We’re simply asking the press for: 1. Citations for evidence-based claims; 2) Disclosure of potential conflict of interest, whether financial or other associations; and 3) Accurate representation of the publication by the Press in its promotion. Pretty basic! Beyond transparency, the Internet enables collaborative knowledge creation. I “crowd-sourced” EcoMind, for example, so dozens of people weighed in on my draft book, offering the equivalent to 80 pages of suggestions. The approach is gaining ground even “within the stately world of peer review,” wrote Jack Hitt in the New York Times last Sunday: “New ways to encourage wider collaboration before an article is published — through sites like ResearchGate — are attempts to bring the modern world of crowd-improvement to empirical research.” Redefining my role as a public co-learner rather than Ms. Never Wrong, I am free. I am free to continue to do my best to be as carefully accurate as possible, and I am free to continually refine what I say. I undertake the later not as the woeful admission of a perfectionist’s failure, but as evidence that I am inhabiting an eco-mind—a mind of continuous change within an endless community of learners. Originally published by Huffington Post on 5/17/12

If you aren’t scared by climate chaos predictions, you aren’t paying attention. Last month Bill McKibben told us that if we use up fossil fuel reserves we’ll overshoot five times over what a livable Earth can withstand. This month climate scientist James Hansen tells us the “grim picture” he painted 25 years ago “was too optimistic.” So, the task of multiplying what is working to keep fossil energy in the ground seems more urgent than ever. And what is working? Within my lifetime — i.e. since the 1940s — the German state, an international pariah silencing citizens and perpetrating mass murder, has become an international hero, showing a path to freedom from fossil fuels that relies on widespread citizen participation. In the early 1990s, Germany had virtually no renewable energy, so I was astonished to learn that in 2010 Germany — slightly smaller in area than Montana and hardly a Sunbelt — generated almost half the world’s solar energy. How could this happen? In part the answer is Germany’s innovative public policy called the Feed-in Tariff. It rewards households for becoming renewable energy producers by obligating utilities to buy electricity from installations like a solar panel or small windmill at a price guaranteeing a good return. And the approach is going global. Germany’s rapid expansion of renewable energy reflects not only its state policy but also citizens mobilizing on a large scale. Consider the vision and courage of one Ursula Sladek . In the Black Forest community of Schönau, Ursula, mother of five, was deeply shaken by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. But instead of just fighting nuclear power, she chose to create an alternative. By 1997, she and neighbors had raised the millions of euros needed to buy out the area’s private power grid and turn it into a clean-energy co-op. Now with over 1,000 owners, the co-op uses and supports decentralized renewable power like solar and wind for 120,000 customers, including households and factories. It’s shooting for a million customers in three years. And as of 2011, all of Germany got on board with Ursula, as it joined about a dozen countries that oppose nuclear power. Something is working in Germany. But why is it working? For me, Germany demonstrates that sane steps to carbon freedom are possible where democracy functions — where private industry is not in control of public policy. Consider this: In a recent global study of the effectiveness of laws governing money’s role in politics, on a scale of 100 Germany scored highest at 83. And the U.S.? We tied Tajikistan for the sad score of 29. Several key elements of the German system reduce the power of concentrated wealth: Since 1958, political parties have received government funding. Private donations are encouraged as well, in part by tax breaks: Individuals may deduct from taxable income half their donations below €3,000 (twice that for joint returns). Or they may claim a tax credit of €825 (€1,650 for joint returns). Private and corporate contributions are not limited but transparency laws are strict: Contributions of more than 10,000 euro per year must be disclosed. Moreover, in Germany, corporations and large private donors (who, if like the U.S., would typically represent corporate interests), don’t wield the power over media messages they do here. As in most of Western Europe, Germany prohibits paid political advertising. Citizens learn about issues mainly from media interviews and discussions with politicians because “broadcasters have the mandate to inform the public on political matters...,” notes a Library of Congress, Law Library summary . Over six decades, Germany’s political rules have evolved to reduce three conditions — concentrated power, secrecy, scapegoating — proven to bring out our species’ worst, whether throughout our long history or in lab experiments where we’ve been the guinea pigs. Rules like those above help to enhance their opposites: dispersion of power, transparency and mutual accountability. Of course, no system is perfect, and democracy has no endpoint anyway. But in this example, and so many others, we have glimpses of what works to create democracy that includes citizen voices. Bringing the lesson home, we realize that we can and we must place every urgent call to block fossil fuel exploitation and to reward renewable development within the frame of democracy itself. We can rally each other to credible steps to create real, accountable democracy now — steps that can succeed in the foreseeable future. Since we can’t wait for a Supreme Court majority that grasps that democracy depends on politics freed from corporate dominance, we must move now for legislation enabling public and/or citizen-financed campaigns so that candidates don’t have to use any corporate money. The approach has worked for three state legislatures. At the same time, we can vote for those supporting measures that mandate disclosure of the sources of money in political contests: DISCLOSE Act and the Shareholder Protection Act. Among proposals to enable candidates to run for office un-beholden to corporate funders, I am working to figure out where to put my energies. If you want to know where I land, please e-mail us at info@smallplanet.org with “money in politics” as the subject line. For me, Germany is a powerful reminder of how rapidly positive change can happen. Its dramatic transformation during my lifetime tells me that that solutions, whether to genocide or ecocide, require democracy. Originally published by Huffington Post on 8/10/12

On April 25th, in a small French café across the street from the Oxford University Vice-Chancellor’s office, Jonathan Tomlin, a classics major and reporter for The Oxford Student , asked me what I hoped to achieve by the act I had just committed. Moments before I’d delivered a petition to Oxford University Press of over 5,000 signers from 55 countries to Alasdair MacDonald, the Private Secretary to the Vice-Chancellor. The Vice-Chancellor was away. For months, six other scholars and I had pressed to speak with authorities of Oxford University Press about a shocking retreat by the Press — the gold standard of academic publishing — in upholding three basic academic standards. But not one of the two dozen Delegates (faculty ultimately responsible for the Press), would meet, even for tea, though we raise foundational questions about the integrity of Press’s policies: One, the Press now publishes some books without citations for evidence-based claims on the most critical issues of our time. Examples include The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier and Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Charles D. Ferguson. Without citations, how can readers evaluate the credibility of a work? Without citations, how can the Press uphold its commitment to a quality review by peers? Two, the Press has said in writing that conflict-of-interest disclosure applies only to financial associations. (The effect of this policy? Its book Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know doesn’t disclose that the author Robert Paarlberg has been an official advisor to the CEO of the Monsanto Company, and in a letter to us the Press said that such nondisclosure is just fine.) Three, the Press promotes as an overview what is an argument by a proponent of one side of a contentious public issue: For example, it promotes Food Politics as a “map” of “conflicting claims and accusations from advocates on all sides,” while the work presents one perspective by a widely recognized proponent. So my response to Jonathan, an earnest young man, about what we hope to achieve, was simple: to reverse these indefensible policies. To that end, we’ll continue our petition and work to arrange a meeting with Vice-Chancellor Andrew D. Hamilton. “But it’s you who have the power— you students,” I told Jonathan. “My biggest hope is that you students pursue these questions.” As we talked more, the obviousness of what I had just said hit me. So through the cold rain, shielding my head by with the plastic sheath that had held our 1 00-page petition , I hurried to the multi-story office of the Oxford University Student Union. I’d hoped to talk with its president Martha Mackenzie, but no luck. So I left her our press release ... and crossed my fingers. The Student Union, I was told, gets involved in critical campus issues like these. And then there’s the Oxford Union — the famous debating society. So as soon as I got back to London, I emailed its president Isabel Ernst. Maybe questions raised by our campaign could be a perfect debate topic, I more than hinted. Now, if you know something of my work — from 1971 Diet for a Small Planet to 2011 EcoMind — and wonder why I’ve taken this on, it’s easy: Without evidence-based discourse democracy itself is not possible, and without democracy solutions to hunger and environmental collapse — the focus of my life — are out of reach. So it’s been immensely gratifying to feel similar passion coming through the comments of so many petition signers. I sense that many see Oxford University Press as I do: a public treasure they do not want to lose, especially as we experience the wider media becoming less and less trustworthy. Ultimately, the question before Oxford University students right now is whether they will demand that their university’s press hold to the same standards that are required of them. Let’s hope so. P.S. So please join in. Sign our petition and leave your comments. For more background, please visit www.scholarlystandardsatrisk.org . And if you want to know what happens next, just send us an email at info@smallplanet.org subject line “Scholarly standards.” Originally published by Huffington Post on 5/01/2012

When Mitt Romney — echoing the writings of novelist Ayn Rand — tells us that half of Americans choose dependency, he reinforces one of the biggest myths in America: the idea that we have to choose. We have to choose between the “individualism” of a Romney/Rand and the “socialism” of an Obama. We have to choose between unleashing personal ambition or nurturing community. The individual or the community... what a choice! The notion of competition between these goods comes through many voices, though. E.J. Dionne, esteemed columnist for the Washington Post, earlier this year released Our Divided Political Heart , a title unfortunately reinforcing the assumption of a national cleavage. Dionne writes about the two “sides of our character,” noting that “we are a nation of private striving and public engagement, of rights and responsibilities.” And many see this tension in how we understand America’s beginning — some viewing our Founders as protectors of individual liberty against an oppressive King, and, then, the state, while others viewing them as celebrators of public service who called fellow citizens to sacrifice for the common good, our beloved young country. Moreover, in the dominant view of ourselves, most of us have chosen. In 2011, about 32 percent of Americans polled supported the Tea Party, with its emphasis on “what’s mine” and its deep distrust of government. At the same time, 39 percent supported the Occupy Movement, calling for government action to address deepening suffering. But in all this a core lesson is missing: Individualism and community are mutually generating. One cannot have genuine community without individual flourishing; and it’s impossible to conceive of the individual developing his or her gifts outside of supportive community. “People are motivated ... when they have more opportunities,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, responding to Romney’s inflammatory comments. “Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.” Thus any minimalist notion of freedom from oppression has never seemed nearly enough to me. Freedom must also mean freedom to . Social philosopher Harry C. Boyte beautifully defines freedom as the “liberation of talents,” and opportunity to liberate our talents is what communities construct together. In this light, take just one specific instance of what’s happened to freedom in the U.S. in a generation. Our failure to make higher education affordable — saddling the 37 million graduate borrowers with an average $23,000 of debt in 2012 — constitutes a radical diminution of individual liberty. It closes down possibility. Or the more general picture: While Romney sees half of Americans as losers trapped in victimhood, in fact we’ve been working longer and harder: Since the 1970s, what American workers produce per hour — productivity — has more than doubled , but corporate owners have captured the gains as hourly compensation has stayed flat. Surely this trend is a big reason half of Americans are struggling at or near poverty, greatly limiting opportunities — real freedom. And a big reason safety-net expenditures Romney derides have swollen. What’s missed in a frame setting individual freedom against societal wellbeing is the deep truth that humans are by nature deeply social creatures whose meaning and sense of personal efficacy are born of community. The two strains are less in tension with each other than they are co-creating. I believe Roosevelt, among many, saw through the false divide. In a 1932 speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Roosevelt noted that each person must “be assured, to the fullest extent attainable...the safety of his savings.” But he added that “... we must accept the restriction [of the operations of the speculator] as needful, not to hamper individualism but to protect it.” And twelve years later in his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt was even clearer on this point. Over time, “we have come to a clear realization,” he said, “of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” He then called for a “second Bill of Rights” — economic rights that he saw as necessary to political freedom. Moreover, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel writes of “the sense of community and civic engagement self-government requires.” Certainly, any society that was purely individualistic — “me for myself “— couldn’t form the social bonds necessary to protecting its liberty from oppressors. The Declaration of Independence itself ends with a sweeping collective commitment in these stirring words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” I cannot imagine a stronger statement of awareness that it is through our deep bonds that we create the conditions of security and opportunity enabling meaningful freedom. Mitt Romney doesn’t get this most basic insight into America. Originally published by Huffington Post on 09/18/2012

Co-authored with Diane Moss* As a historic storm hammers the east — signaling the extremes promised by climate change — maybe we should listen to the wind. Isn’t it telling us to celebrate clean energy’s potential and push it forward with new urgency? Yet we hear instead what can feel like a collective mourning over the demise of the green energy industry. One prominent media voice to show up at the funeral is columnist David Brooks, who eulogizes green technology in his recent New York Times piece “ Sad Green Story. ” The once-great hope for green technology, he suggests, has been destroyed by inept big-government ideologues and their counterparts around the globe. But, mope no more. Green technology is actually an outstanding success story. Brooks and others dismiss renewable energy as a failed jobs-creating strategy. But tell that to the Germans! Over about a decade, their effective renewable energy laws have spurred more than 380,000 new jobs . Even here in the U.S., with our comparatively timid renewable energy platform, analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that despite the recession, from 2008-2010, US jobs in clean energy — like smart grids, solar PV and wind — outpaced our employment growth in other sectors by about two to one, thanks in part to the federal stimulus. What’s more, clean, technology-related jobs already outnumber fossil fuel jobs, even though those dirty jobs have benefited from billions of government support annually over many decades. And green jobs pay on average 13 percent more than other jobs. Misguided voices seem to be trying to scare us into believing that renewable energy is a failed industry, a bursting bubble caused by overinvestment by governments around the world. Brooks assures us that shale gas is different: It “has become the current, hot revolutionary fuel of the future.” But he would do well to confer with his New York Times colleagues, who just released a report showing that most natural gas investors in the US are “losing their shirts,” as Exxon’s CEO puts it. The reason: The recent massive rush into natural gas caused prices to plummet, forcing companies to sell natural gas for far less than they are committed to spend producing it. Brooks also implies that falling solar panel prices are a bad thing. What? Why not instead celebrate this development as helping to make clean energy increasingly accessible? Renewables energy analyst Craig Morris reports that in Germany, the installed cost of solar (18 euro cents/kWh) has already fallen below conventional retail power prices (26 euro cents/kWh). Although Brooks cries that solar manufacturers “will need subsidies far into the future,” he has already been proven wrong. Take Germany again. It consistently surpasses every country in the world in producing power with solar , and is by far the global leader in total solar installation. And keep in mind that the sun’s radiation per square meter hitting Germany (its solar insolation) is somewhere between that of Seattle and Alaska — i.e. it’s no sunbelt. But subsidies do not explain Germany’s solar success. In fact, its feed-in tariff law , which has driven the country’s renewable energy development, is a guaranteed payment to the generator of renewable electricity — not a form of state subsidy. This difference has been clarified by many, including the European Court of Justice . Brooks also resorts to a gross and all-too-common double standard: He complains about solar subsidies but fails to lament the vastly greater sums of government investment worldwide that the nuclear and fossil fuel industries have enjoyed compared to renewable energies over the past several decades. In the case of coal, which benefited from federal land grants as long ago as the early 1800’s , make that the last two centuries! In a display of extreme partisanship, Brooks stoops to blaming Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth for making bipartisan effort to combat climate change impossible. If Brooks were right, President Bush would not have signed landmark, bipartisan legislation in 2007 to increase lighting efficiency; nor would the notoriously right-leaning former president have significantly strengthened his targets in 2008 for U.S. greenhouse gas reductions . Moreover, T. Boone Pickens — Mr. Swift Boat supporter extraordinaire — would not have continued to be a vocal advocate for renewable energy and solving the climate problem. What has made bipartisanship in tackling climate change impossible is not former Vice President Gore, but a radical GOP faction that has taken over Congress in recent years and made thwarting Obama its primary agenda item. Brooks and others blame government “overreach” for picking bad investments (aka Solyndra ) and generating oversupply. But let’s be clear: As Brooks himself notes , “Research and development spending on renewables is set to decline next year, according to United Nations figures, while the oil and gas sector is investing a whopping $490 billion a year in exploration.” So the real problem is the continuing skewing of investments because fossil fuel giants still dominate political decision-making. Now that is something to be truly sad about. But about green energy’s record and prospects worldwide? Wipe your tears, all. Despite the blows, progress in the clean energy transition has been remarkably successful — giving us plenty of reason for hope. Hope we earn if we free ourselves from these myths and demand that our governments answer to us, not to the fossil and nuclear energy corporations. * Diane Moss is a Policy Consultant on Climate and Energy of the World Future Council—a Hamburg-based international body of 50 leaders creating a “voice for future generations”—of which Frances Moore Lappé is a founding Councilor. Visit www.worldfuturecouncil.org. Originally published by the Huffington Post on 10/31/2012

Joblessness and low-wage jobs grab headlines and hearts, but right now we have a chance to back folks who were losing ground way before the Great Recession. Meet the workers of Immokalee, Florida, who pick our tomatoes but make just 50 cents for filling each 32-pound bucket. In real terms, tomato pickers today actually earn about half, for each bucket, what they earned 30 years ago. Ridiculous, yes? WATCH: In other words, just to get the minimum wage a tomato worker has to pick more than 2.25 tons of tomatoes during a day that begins before dawn and lasts 10-12 hours. That’s almost double the amount a worker had to pick to earn the minimum wage thirty years ago. So, if the 1980 piece rate of 40 cents per 32-lb bucket had simply kept up with inflation, today farm workers should get $1.06/bucket in 2010 — not 50 cents. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is an amazingly effective group of farm workers empowering themselves. They ask our simple actions of support, right now: Here’s the deal: Because of the CIW’s ingenious, persistent efforts over years, four huge fast-food companies have signed Fair Food agreements with them — committing to that critical one more penny a pound, as well as a code of conduct that protects workers’ basic rights! They are McDonald’s, Yum Brands, Burger King and Subway. Three large food service providers also signed: Compass Group, Aramark and Sodexo. Now’s the moment to focus on the half-a-trillion dollar supermarket industry, asking them to join Whole Foods, who got fairer nearly two years ago by signing the CIW agreement. But other major grocery chains resist. So the Coalition of Immokalee Workers needs us. They are calling on us to get some backbone, too, and participate in the Campaign for Fair Food. Here’s what they ask us to do right now: Send an email today to the CEO’s of Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Trader Joe’s to demand “they quit stalling and start working with the CIW to protect human rights in their Florida tomato supply chain.” And there are other actions we can take to get into the thick of this much-overdue step for basic justice. Save these dates... Sunday February 27th, when you can join Immokalee farm workers and allies from across the country in Quincy, Massachusetts, for a protest at Ahold’s U.S. headquarters (Ahold is the parent company for Stop & Shop and Giant). Then, a week-long tour down the east coast. Saturday, March 5th, ditto in Tampa, Florida: a second major action in Publix’s backyard. Not motivated enough yet to tell the supermarket execs what you think? Remember that farm workers have no right under law to overtime pay or to organize unions for collective bargaining. Farm workers were excluded from key New Deal labor protections, including the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. And, the seasonal and unpredictable nature of agricultural work mean that average unemployment among farmworkers is double those of wage and salary workers. Thank the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for getting this far, so we can act now on behalf of the most exploited, moving our country one step toward the fair working conditions we all deserve. Originally published by the Huffington Post on October 12, 2010

Fall is about food. Approaching Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, copious food-rich words are written before we all sit down with loved ones to celebrate food abundance. But in this fall food season, what do we most need to know about food for all seasons? It is this: Our exceedingly bright species has ended up creating a “food” system so inefficient that much of it doesn’t really produce food at all! Sound extreme? Here’s what I mean: First, there’s no inherent connection between what we grow on most of the world’s farmland and what human bodies need to thrive. In the U.S., 43 percent of all cropped acreage, and the most fertile share, goes to just two crops — corn and soy. Yet they aren’t really food but raw materials that hardly ever turn up in our mouths directly. Forty percent of corn , the biggest crop, now goes to fuel tanks. The rest, along with 98 percent of soy meal , becomes raw material for creating products like grain-fed meat that (except for cooking oils) greatly shrink the capacity of the original ingredients to meet nutritional needs. For a quick, animated intro to what’s behind it all, see Anna Lappé’s Food MythBusters debut video. Obviously a lot of people care. In just the first few weeks, it’s attracted more than 60,000 viewers. About grain-fed meat, consider this: Over eons of time, there was no such thing. Instead, humans got a great nutritional deal from ruminants — mammals like cows that “double digest” their food. These amazing animals can eat grasses and waste products inedible to us, and convert them into highly useable protein — giving humans eating ruminants a big nutrition boost from stuff they could never digest. But giant-scale, chemical agriculture has created what I called in Diet for a Small Planet “a protein-factory in reverse.” Ruminants still graze, of course, but increasingly they’re fed vast quantities of crops grown on land that could just as well be growing food that humans eat directly. We’ve turned livestock into our competitors. Does that make sense? Beyond wasting the special talent of ruminants, our highly concentrated food industry — on average twice as tightly monopolized as most U.S. industries — is grossly inefficient in another way: Its manufacturing and endless promotion of processed food products — especially those with high-fructose corn syrup — have helped turn the whole system into a “nutrition-factory in reverse.” So today, 40 percent of calories American children eat are nutritionally empty. Then there’s the literal waste. The UN estimates that one-third of our food spoils or is tossed out. One-third! In the U.S., it’s over 40 percent . Additionally, the U.S. diverts over 4 million tons of grain to fuel — an amount that food analyst Lester Brown estimates could provide the entire caloric need of a population as big as ours.And all this, while we’ve made our food into a national health threat: Our diet is implicated in four out of six of our most deadly diseases. Why would humans be so senseless? My hunch is this: We are creatures of the mind. Humans see the world through culturally formed filters — thought-systems that can lead us to accept what defies common sense. Today, our dominant thought-system is driven by fear — fear of scarcity, as agribusiness and even some distinguished scientists warn us that more chemicals, more genetically altered seeds, and more giant-scale farming is needed or we’ll go hungry. Scary. But, guess what? Trapped in this frame, we end up creating the experience of scarcity — no matter how much we grow: Today 868 million are “officially” hungry although the earth produces more than enough, 2,800 calories for each person each day. To stop this massive inefficiency disconnecting food growing and healthy eating, we have to break this mindset’s power. Humans, we now know, can do that, too. With scientists’ discovery of “neuroplasticity,” we now realize the capacity of new insights to create neural pathways, so let’s start with new facts: Authoritative studies demonstrate not only that there’s enough food now, but here’s the really great news: We can align farming with nature’s laws — enhancing soil health, water conservation, species diversity, and helping fight climate change, too — while we produce as much food, and, likely even more. A 2009 report by 400 scientists, now endorsed by 59 governments, affirms that indeed embracing sustainable, ecologically sound farming practices is the only pathway to real food security. This Thanksgiving, take a moment to imagine yourself free from the scarcity scare. Imagine yourself feeling powerful knowing that that your healthy food choices and acts of food citizenship are not a luxury, or mere pastime. They matter: Your choice to support local, family farms using sustainable practices and to grow food yourself. Your choice to demand a shift of public support from chemical to ecologically aligned farming. Your choice to work toward ending the power of private wealth to corrupt our political decision making. All are part of remaking the world’s most inefficient food system. So with every food purchase, every tasty morsel, every brave act to build real democracy, we can help to relink our food system with thriving bodies and a healthy earth. Now, that’s efficient! Originally published by the Huffington Post on November 20, 2012

I first heard about a new Stanford “study” downplaying the value of organics when this blog headline cried out from my inbox: “Expensive organic food isn’t healthier and no safer than produce grown with pesticides, finds biggest study of its kind.” What? Does the actual study say this? No, but authors of the study — “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review” — surely are responsible for its misinterpretation and more. Their study actually reports that ¨Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” The authors’ tentative wording — “may reduce” — belies their own data: The report’s opening statement says the tested organic produce carried a 30 percent lower risk of exposure to pesticide residues. And, the report itself also says that “detectable pesticide residues were found in 7% of organic produce samples...and 38% of conventional produce samples.” Isn’t that a greater than 80% exposure reduction? In any case, the Stanford report’s unorthodox measure “makes little practical or clinical sense,” notes Charles Benbrook — formerly Executive Director, Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences: What people “should be concerned about [is]... not just the number of [pesticide] residues they are exposed to” but the “ health risk they face.” Benbrook notes “a 94% reduction in health risk” from pesticides when eating organic foods. Assessing pesticide-driven health risks weighs the toxicity of the particular pesticide. For example the widely-used pesticide atrazine, banned in Europe, is known to be “ a risk factor in endocrine disruption in wildlife and reproductive cancers in laboratory rodents and humans.” “Very few studies” included by the Stanford researchers, notes Benbrook, “are designed or conducted in a way that could isolate the impact or contribution of a switch to organic food from the many other factors that influence a given individual’s health.” They “ would be very expensive, and to date, none have been carried out in the U.S. ” [emphasis added]. In other words, simple prudence should have prevented these scientists from using “evidence” not designed to capture what they wanted to know. Moreover, buried in the Stanford study is this all-critical fact: It includes no long-term studies of people consuming organic compared to chemically produced food: The studies included ranged from just two days to two years. Yet, it is well established that chemical exposure often takes decades to show up, for example, in cancer or neurological disorders. Consider these studies not included: The New York Times notes three 2011 studies by scientists at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan that studied pregnant women exposed to higher amounts of an organophosphate pesticide. Once their children reached elementary school they “had, on average, I.Q.’s several points lower than those of their peers.” Thus, it is reprehensible for the authors of this overview to even leave open to possible interpretation that their compilation of short-term studies can determine anything about the human-health impact of pesticides. What also disturbs me is that neither in their journal article nor in media interviews do the Stanford authors suggest that concern about “safer and healthier” might extend beyond consumers to the people who grow our food. They have health concerns, too! Many choose organic to decrease chemicals in food production because of the horrific consequences farm workers and farmers suffer from pesticide exposure. U.S. farming communities are shown to be afflicted with, for example, higher rates of: “leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft tissue sarcoma” — in addition to skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate cancers,” reports the National Cancer Institute . And, at a global level, “an estimated 3 million acute pesticide poisonings occur worldwide each year,” reports the World Health Organization . Another health hazard of pesticides, not hinted at in the report, comes from water contamination by pesticides. They have made the water supply for 4.3 million Americans unsafe for drinking. Finally, are organic foods more nutritious? In their report, Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, and co-authors say only that “published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods.” Yet, the most comprehensive meta-analysis comparing organic and non-organic, led by scientist Kirsten Brandt, a Scientist at the Human Nutrition Research Center at the UK’s Newcastle University found organic fruits and vegetables, to have on “ average 12% higher nutrient levels .” Bottom line for me? What we do know is that the rates of critical illnesses, many food-related, are spiking and no one knows why. What we do know is that pesticide poisoning is real and lethal — and not just for humans. In such a world is it not the height of irresponsibility to downplay the risks of exposure to known toxins? Rachel Carson would be crying. Or, I hope, shouting until — finally — we all listen. “ Simple precaution ! Is that not commonsense?” Originally published by the Huffington Post on 09/06/2012

For too long Democrats have been derided as economically clueless tax-and-spenders. No wonder Americans so often vote against their own common interests. We should know better. And now we do. Alan S. Blinder, in The New York Times , drew recently (9.30.08) from Unequal Democracy, a new book by Princeton political science professor Larry M. Bartels. His takeaway could be a game-changer: Over the last six decades, whether rich or poor, everyone has done better with Democrats in the White House. And that is just the non-divisive, universal note that Barack Obama needs to hit and keep hitting, in response to the RNC, and in debates and in the press. So let’s tell our McCain-leaning friends and family about this — and also encourage the Obama campaign to make sure this message gets heard. It’s easy; j ust fill out this form . (See below for the note I myself sent, which you can use as you wish.) Among the most striking points: > From 1948 to 2007 the average annual growth of real gross national product was 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats. Put another way, real per capita GNP grew 69.5 percent faster under the Democrats. > Blinder notes that this 1.14-point difference over eight years would yield 9.33 percent more income per person — and that’s a lot more than most of us could expect from a tax cut. > The best-off families (the 95th percentile) fared almost as well under Republican as under Democratic presidents (1.90 percent growth per year, versus 2.12 percent). > Families at the 20th percentile (the poorest) did significantly better under Democrats than under Republicans. (2.64 percent versus 0.43 percent). Consider this: Eight years of a 0.43 percent annual rate of growth increases a family’s income by 3.5 percent; but eight years at 2.64 percent raises it by 23.2 percent! > Income inequality in the United States has been rising for about three decades, especially in recent years. Over the entire 60-year period, writes Blinder, “income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all.” Now is the time to bury forever the false portrayal of the Democrats’ economic record and replace it with these hopeful facts. [Here now is my own email to the Obama campaign. Please feel free to cut and paste it into the Obama website’s feedback form.] To Senator Obama and his campaign staff: As you head into these crucial final weeks of your presidential campaign, you will face many challenges from those who would like to perpetuate the notion that the Democratic Party’s economic policies serve “Big Government” and not We The People. A new book, Unequal Democracy by Larry M. Bartels, puts this false characterization to rest. I hope you will not only take a look at this summary in The Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/send-this-to-your-republi_b_123270.html ] but take these points up as your own — doing so may be one of the simplest and most effective ways to make people see the stark, historically documented differences between the economic stagnation and division that the GOP consistently offers and the revitalization and greater fairness that the Democrats almost invariably deliver. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/04/2008

In early Obama—that is, pre- nominee presumption—I heard a music-to-my-ears refrain. It went something like this: This historic moment is not about me — a new, courageous leader breaking the race barrier. It is about YOU: Only you can make history, only you —Citizen America — can reverse our nation’s tragic decline. So engage with others and help shape new policies and hold your officials accountable to your values. That is the message Obama should deliver at the DNC Thursday night. I want to hear him say: our problems are simply too deep, too complex, too interconnected to be solved from the top down in the old way. So we must—and can!—move our democracy to a new historical stage. Democracy will no longer be something done to us or for us. It will instead be the practice of empowered, savvy citizens who know what they want. Thus far, a number of convention speeches have called us to vote Obama because we care about poor, struggling Americans whose lives have been made infinitely more difficult by Bush policies. Compassion is important, but this frame can sound like a “do-for” stance — and such a stance is one easily seized upon by the Right, who love to portray Democrats as paternalistic nanny-staters. The frame we most need is one of empowerment, one reminding us that all citizens want to feel powerful, not just a few of us. That’s the message that Democrats need to put forth now; that is what our nation needs. What might that look like? How could such a message be realized? In late July, three national organizations for engaged democratic practice — Demos , Everyday Democracy , and AmericaSpeaks — gathered a diverse group of 50 advocates to create recommendations that the next Administration can pursue to strengthen our democracy, as well as a set of actions that we can each take. Though their work remains in progress, what they propose is not just outside-the-box thinking. It is imminently viable. Their ideas include: * Establishing a White House Office of Participation, signifying Institutional Commitment to Greater Participation, and serving as champion for citizen participation. * Appointing an advocate for spurring expanded public participation in electoral democracy. * Convening a series of national discussions that provide citizens with a voice in the policy-making process and build capacity for greater participation at all levels. * Policy reforms to increase participation that includes legislation to strengthen and enhance the right to vote through election day as well as legislation creating public financing of federal elections. What Demos, Everyday Democracy, and AmericaSpeaks and allies are proposing are real“Change We Can Believe In.” Their ideas are 100% about us. They include us; they don’t draw a line between citizens and government. They blur that line, just as the “early Obama” I spoke of, the one who enthralled so many with his inclusiveness, did. These ideas recognize that any possibility of a living democracy is thwarted by the presence and power of big money in the political process . To reverse that, we can get money out and people in. In fact, the best kept secret in America is that three states have passed legislation that does just that. And i t”s working. To save the democracy we thought we had we must take democracy to where it’s never been. (And I don’t mean some distant shore!) But Obama can’t move us toward a truly living democracy alone. So include us again, Obama! Call on us. If you do, you can’t lose, and we’ll all win. Originally published by Huffington Post on 9/27/2008

Too bad. I depend a lot on NPR, so my heart sank as I listened to Morning Edition’s recent series on the world hunger crisis. Using Honduras as its case study, the four-part series reinforces dangerous myths that actually block us from seeing the real solutions to hunger all around us. We’re told that “across the globe .... [f]ood is expensive and there’s not enough food to feed empty stomachs.” No. In fact the world produces enough to make us all plump. True, today an estimated 100 million additional people are, or will soon be, facing hunger as food prices exceed their budgets, but the deeper lack they’re experiencing is not food itself. It is power. Drawing the distinction between lack of food — a symptom — and lack of power — a cause — is essential to seeing solutions. Yet this series portrays as progress examples that do nothing to correct, and in fact worsen, the underlying power imbalances at the heart of hunger. In the broadcast , we hear that Wal-Mart is a solution because it provides a market for poor Honduran farmers who otherwise would have no way to sell their produce. But if access to a market is, in itself, farmers’ salvation, here at home each year more than 10,000 farmers would not be going under. The question is who controls a market: Where the answer is a few monopsony buyers — what Wal-Mart represents in the NPR case study — power remains with them. They set the terms and they decide whether to stay or to leave. Fortunately, in Latin America and elsewhere some rural communities are beginning to free themselves from distant, monopoly power. Imagine this: In what may be the pesticide capital of the world, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, pests developed insecticide resistance and genetically modified (GM) cotton failed to live up to Monsanto’s promises. Farmers faced catastrophic losses, triggering thousands of suicides, and many then began to move in another direction. Now, almost two thousand villages are embracing community-managed sustainable farming using natural pest controls, not purchased chemicals, and are enjoying improved incomes and health. Yet, the NPR series ignores such hopeful examples. It notes gloomily that most small Honduran farmers will cut back on production this year, despite higher prices for their crops, because “prices for fertilizer and pesticides have gone up even more than food prices.” In a disturbing disconnect, the series still promote as solutions not only purchased farm chemicals but genetically modified seeds; yet the cost of these seeds puts them out of reach of many poor farmers, as acknowledged at the tail end of the second piece in the series. Worse, and not acknowledged, are the documented, serious environmental and health risks linked to GM seeds. NPR misses the real story: 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. NPR chose to reinforce the myth that the only hope for poor rural people is dependency on concentrated economic power when, all over the world, poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives. What a lost opportunity. Originally published by Huffington Post on 9/11/08