agriculture

Today I woke up with another headache, but this one not as debilitating as yesterday’s. Still it was off to another slow start. Fortunately I did not have to be anywhere immediately, as my first event was at 1 p.m. at Place to B – a press conference about Monsanto with environmental and agricultural activist Vandana Shiva. I am falling into a routine of catching up on news and social media posts in the morning before actually going out to do things in the afternoon. That’s okay until I have to be somewhere early.

Vandana Shiva speaks to the media at Place to B.

Before the event Vandana Shiva held her own press conference, and at 1 p.m. she took part in a press conference with several others on an International Tribunal Against Monsanto for Crimes Against Humanity, an activist event planned at the Hague in October 2016. Both events were packed, and I could barely get a spot. While GMOs are a fact of life in the United States – almost all of our corn and soy are genetically modified — they are effectively banned in France. The audience at Place to B was very receptive to the message of this press conference, and many Europeans seem genuinely concerned about the safety of their food and biodiversity in their farming.

Monsanto tribunal press conference at Place to B.

Taking part in the press conference were:

Marie-Monique Robin, film director and writer, author of the movie and book Le monde selon Monsanto (The World According to Monsanto), sponsor of the tribunal (introduction)
André Leu (Australia), president of IFOAM – International Foundation for Organic Agriculture – (about the consequences of Monsanto on health and biodiversity)
Dr. Vandana Shiva (India), general director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (the consequences of Monsanto on farmers and food sovereignty)
Dr. Hans Rudolf Herren (United States), president of the Millenium Institute of Washington (the consequences of Monsanto on climate change)
Ronnie Cummins (United States), international director of Organic Consumers (about the impact on the political and regulatory institutions)
Dr. Olivier de Schutter (Belgium), former Rapporteur on UN Right to Food, professor of international law at Université catholique de Louvain (legal tools of the Tribunal)
Valérie Cabanes (France), spokeswoman of End Ecocide on Earth (towards the recognition of ecocide as a felony).

About half the speakers spoke in French, half in English. This was a gathering that you would not likely see in the United States. Although the event they are planning for the Hague will not be an official trial, the speakers said it is more than symbolic, as their goal is to establish ecocide as a crime and show that Monsanto is guilty. Among other things, they argued that Monsanto promotes an industrial model of agriculture responsible for 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of soil and water resources, and that its highly toxic pesticides have damaged the environment, harmed species, and sickened or killed millions of people. Shiva pointed to the rash of suicides among Indian farmers who went into debt buying seeds and pesticides for GMO cotton. Cummins discussed Monsanto’s influence on regulations in the United States and abroad.

You can watch the entire press conference posted by Place to B (French speakers not translated), read anti-Monsanto stories here, here and here; neutral stories here and here; and a pro-Monsanto story here.

After the Monsanto press conference let out, I headed to Le Bourget for more time in the Climate Generations space. Again it took almost an hour to get there from Place to B, so I didn’t arrive until after 3 p.m. I spent some time hanging out at the Sierra Club booth, then doing a more thorough walk-through of the booths in the C section. I had wanted to get to the A and B sections too, but didn’t make it there, as I had promised to record a presentation on “Plastification of the ocean” starting at 5 p.m.

Unfortunately it turned out that every speaker on the plastics panel spoke in French. Those in the room could wear headphones to get the translation, but there would be no translation for my video, so I did not keep it. However, I did learn some interesting things. Most of the speakers were people who had led or taken part in various ocean voyages to study and document the amount and types of plastics in the ocean. There is now so much that they have a word for it: the plastosphere. Most people now know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a whirlpool of plastic pollution twice the size of Texas in the Pacific. However, there are five such whirlpools across the planet, and there is plastic everywhere. One mission was simply to study it in the Mediterranean. Most of it is not large pieces but microplastics broken down into tiny bits.

Anne-Cécile Turner (second from right), director of Race for Water Foundation, speaks on a panel about plastics in the ocean at COP 21.

One thing the speakers emphasized was preventing plastic from getting to the ocean in the first place through laws like plastic bag bans. But they did not seem all that enthusiastic about projects to clean what is there up, such as this invention by a teenager from Holland. That surprised and disappointed me. Perhaps they don’t think the amount of plastic now in the ocean can be cleaned up. Or maybe they think if people believe it can be cleaned up easily, they will keep on discarding it. Either way, I don’t see how we can not try to clean up the amount of plastics we currently have in the ocean. It is causing untold suffering to billions of sea creatures, and it’s not ethical to allow this. Of course we need to pass laws to prevent it from happening in the first place, but in my opinion we also need to figure out how to clean up what we have put there.

The presentation was in the last time slot of the day, and when it let out everyone in Climate Generations made a beeline for the shuttles to head back to Gare du Nord. My next stop was a meeting of the Sierra Club delegation. There besides going through events of the day and getting an update on negotiations from Fred Heutte, we heard from Sena Alouka, director of Youth Volunteers for the Environment, in Togo, and his colleague, Mavis Mensah. Their organization provides education about climate and environment to schoolchildren.

A group from the Sierra Club catches dinner at a pizzeria in Paris. Clockwise from the lower left are Mavis Mensah, Youth Volunteers for the Environment, Togo; Fred Heutte, Federal and International Climate Campaign; Glen Besa, Virginia Chapter; Sena Alouka, Youth Volunteers for the Environment, Togo; Tyla Matteson, Virginia Chapter; Nicole Ghio, International Campaign; Cathy Cowan Becker, Ohio Chapter; and Steven Sondheim,Tennessee chapter. Photo by Katherine Muller.

Afterward several of us walked to a pizzeria that Fred knew, where I got a great dinner and enjoyed even better company. Besides the two guests from Togo, we had Glen Besa and Tyla Matteson of the Virginia chapter, Fred Heutte of the Federal & International Climate Campaign, Nicole Ghio of the International Campaign, Steven Sondheim of the Tennessee chapter, and a new person, Katherine Muller from South Carolina. Steven told me she knew how to work a room, and he was right. She talked to every single person there, got their stories, and told us hers. I ended up there late looking at all the photos on her phone and finding out what she did that day. Turns out she had visited the sites of the terrorist attacks, and the photos were so amazing that I decided I to go myself the next day. By the end of the night I felt as if I had encountered a long lost friend.

Panorama view from the mountaintop restaurant where we ate lunch overlooking the Central Valley. Click to enlarge.

Today was spent driving through the mountains and seeing a couple of small communities on the way to the airport hotel. We really gave the gears of the van a good workout. The road was windy, with traffic coming to a full stop several times, including one long stop due to a traffic accident. But the air was cool enough to turn off the van’s AC and open the windows. This was maybe the first day in Costa Rica when I wasn’t covered in sweat from the moment of walking out the door – even at midday I was pretty comfortable.

Gardens outside church in village of Zarcero.

The view was gorgeous the entire trip. We saw several hills covered with coffee plants or terraced with cabbage. We also passed lots of trucks loaded with sugar cane, as well as a former sugar cane factory that is now a milk factory. This made me wonder if they pasteurize the milk in Costa Rica. Obviously they didn’t at Laureles Farm – they drink it straight from the cow. But probably the milk sold in stores is pasteurized. It also makes me wonder if Costa Rica has large dairy farms with industrial practices as in the U.S. or if most of the milk is sold to the factory from small or organic farms. In fact this whole trip has made me wonder how the representative the animal welfare practices I saw at Earth and the home stay farms are of the rest of the country. Our guide Mario discussed this a lot when it came to organic vs nonorganic crops such as bananas but we didn’t really touch on this regarding animal husbandry or welfare practices. It’s also telling that the students on the trip had never seen the word husbandry applied to animal care because in the U.S. it’s all about animal science.

Wedding in progress in Zarcero

While we were driving through the mountains, the resident director Paul told us that back in the 70s, McDonald’s had deforested thousands and thousands of hectares in the area to create room for beef cattle to graze. This is an area where trees grow very slowly, and it has still not recovered. We did see lots of small groups of cattle grazing – some of them balanced in very precarious spots on the side of mountains. It made me wonder if many of the lose their footing and go tumbling down. They are such large animals with such small legs to support their weight, and clearly were not designed to graze on the sides of mountains the way, say, mountain goats are. I also tried to imagine what the area must have looked like covered in virgin forest. Some of it probably would have been cut down to make way for towns and such, but not nearly as much as to graze cattle. This damage to the mountain forests in Costa Rica a generation ago may be part of why the country has such a strong environmental mindset now.

Deforestation and other land use changes are a major contributor to climate change – not as much as fossil fuels but definitely a major factor that also needs to be addressed. I feel like industrial farming as it has been practiced in my lifetime has been part of the problem, but farming could also be part of the solution if it is done with an eye toward keeping carbon in the ground. The kinds of farming practices we are seeing in Costa Rica definitely help contribute to the solution. I feel like research in this area is just beginning, but it can’t be done fast enough.

View from the mountains. Note the terraced agriculture and full sugar cane truck in the road below us. Click to enlarge.

The earth evolved with certain areas to be used in certain ways – whether grazing millions of hooved animals such as in the great plains of North America or boasting loads of biodiversity in jungles and forest as in Costa Rica. If humans are to become caretakers of the earth and not destroyers, we will have to learn to live in harmony with what the earth itself has evolved to do, even if it is somewhat turned toward our own purposes. That means while we might be grazing cattle in Nebraska where millions of wild bison used to roam, we need to keep forest to act as the lungs of the planet and host the biodiversity that strengthens the web of life — and not coincidentally provides many of our healing products. What is good for the planet is in the end good for us, and vice versa. We can either accept this and live within the planetary boundaries, or we can go extinct and take a bunch of other life forms with us.

Unfortunately after McDonalds and the other large corporations were done with Costa Rica, they moved on deforesting the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. For many years the problem has been acute, with many football fields of forest disappearing daily. After 2004 rate of deforestation had been declining, but recently it has gone back up. It can be dangerous for environmental activists to try to stop this. A nun from Dayton named Dorothy Stang was murdered in 2005 for just this kind of work in Brazil because there is a lot of money to be made in selling off the rainforest for cattle ranches. Hundreds of environmental activists are killed each year in various places around the world. We must find a way to make preserving the planet as it was meant to be more profitable than liquidating it like a going out of business sale.

Biggest ox cart in the world in Sarchi.

The two communities we saw were very relaxing. At Zarcero we stumbled on a wedding in progress at the town church which was really neat. The gardens at that church are famous and tended to by hand by a longtime volunteer. In exploring the town I wandered into what looked like a small business version on PetSmart or Tractor Supply – the store was full of animal feed, boots, bird houses, medicines, saddle gear, and pretty much any animal paraphernalia you might need. In Sarchi we took a group picture at the largest ox cart in the world, which took four years to build, then visited shops owned by the guy who made the cart. We saw where the workers hand paint the wood items sold in the store. I got a great inchworm puzzle with the alphabet on it for my nephew in Scotland, and a 3D cat puzzle and CD of Costa Rican music for my husband.

Group photo near the ox cart.

Ohio State nav bar

Thursday, December 3 – Vandana Shiva, Climate Generations, Sierra Club

Costa Rica – Day 8 – Mountain towns