rootstock II's List: sustainable_food_systems

"The frisky birds and their more sedentary neighbors here in a barn on the Delmarva Peninsula are part of an experiment that could help change the way Americans eat, and think about, poultry.
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Perdue Farms, one of the country’s largest chicken producers, has been raising what are known as slow-growth chickens side by side with the breeds that have made the company so successful. The new birds, a variety known as Redbro, take 25 percent longer, on average, to mature than their conventional cousins, and so are more expensive to raise."

"It took three years for Ms. Leonora-Mendelsohn, as JetBlue’s head of sustainability, to clear the bureaucratic hurdles for a farm to be positioned on the airport grounds, just outside Terminal 5, where half a football field of space once sat as an empty eyesore to travelers zipping by on moving walkways.

Now, this rooftop was blooming. It had adopted a color that is becoming more familiar to contemporary airports: green.
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JetBlue’s latest project — replete with 26 varieties of plants, including potatoes, kale, dill and oregano — is perhaps the most extreme illustration of airports’ efforts to infuse natural elements into sites that have been more commonly associated with asphalt, canned air, loud machinery and noxious emissions."

"Volkswagen executives told environmental regulators for more than a year that discrepancies between pollution tests on its diesel cars and the starkly higher levels out on the road were a technical error, not a deliberate attempt to deceive Washington officials.

But this month, the executives made a startling admission: The diesel vehicles it sold in the United States used software meant to cheat on the tests.

VW made the admission only when the Environmental Protection Agency took the extraordinary action of threatening to withhold approval for the company’s 2016 Volkswagen and Audi diesel models, according to letters sent to company officials by the E.P.A. and California regulators."

"A NUMBER of major companies — from PepsiCo to Walmart to U.P.S. — have recognized that corporations have a responsibility to address the causes of climate change before it is too late.

We do not have to wait for an international treaty or new regulations to act. At Siemens, the global industrial manufacturing company I lead that makes everything from wind and gas turbines and automation systems to high-speed trains and M.R.I. machines, we understand that taking action is not just prudent — it’s profitable."

"Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders, and great followers. They possess a wide range of easily defined-;but hard-to-find-;qualities.

A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance.

Here are eight qualities of remarkable employees:"

"In 1971, Richard Nixon was president of the United States, Vietnam War protesters converged on Washington, D.C., and the New York Times caused a sensation when it published the Pentagon Papers.

During that turbulent year, a highly ambitious Francophile and food obsessive named Alice Waters, along with a group of idealistic friends, opened up a tiny restaurant in an Arts and Crafts house along Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.

The restaurant was centered around organic, locally grown food, ecologically sound harvest methods, and environmental stewardship—concepts virtually unheard of at the time. On opening night, Waters wore a used polka-dot rayon dress from a neighborhood boutique called Bizarre Bazaar. She was crouched on the floor, nailing down a carpet, when the first curious diners wandered in. Little did she know that the restaurant would still be thriving more than four decades later—and considered one of the best in the world."

"Visiting the farm at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a personal high point of this series, though I couldn’t say exactly why. It could well have been because there’s an experimental blueberry plot there, and when I went in the spring, it was raining, and the green leaves were sparkling and the wet berries were offset perfectly, and here was this glistening working farm on an otherwise more-or-less normal college campus, which just happened to be on a hill above the Pacific.

Or it could have been because the Santa Cruz campus has a series of beautiful, renowned, well-run gardens and farms, unlike on any other campus in the country."

"Over the last two decades Monsanto has cast off its century-long history as a chemical company and refashioned itself as an agricultural life sciences company, led by its genetically engineered seeds.

But with its $45 billion bid to acquire the agricultural chemical giant Syngenta — a bid Syngenta rejected on Friday as inadequate — Monsanto appears to be trying to get back into a business it largely abandoned. That is a possible acknowledgment, some analysts say, that the biotech seeds might not be the engine to carry the company forward much longer."

By Karen Weintraub Globe Correspondent April 24, 2015
By all rights, Betty Lewis should be a lonely woman.

Now nearly 90, her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — whom she’s never met — all live in California. Her friends have died or moved to faraway nursing homes. Health problems mean she can’t get outside without help, and her vision troubles make reading a challenge.

But Lewis, of Brighton, involves herself in public lectures, continuing education classes, sales on eBay, and visits from friends and volunteers for Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly.

“I’m an optimistic person,” said Lewis, who still laughs a lot and values her ability to put aside unpleasant thoughts. “I think that’s so important for anybody’s survival of a decent, non-unhappy life,” she said.

A growing body of evidence suggests that there could be health consequences for someone like Lewis if she dwelled on the negatives.

Chronic loneliness, it seems, is partly a matter of social isolation and partly a state of mind. Both can potentially drive ill health.

Lonely people over 65 run the same risk for early death as those who smoke or are at least 100 pounds overweight, according to a study published last month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Although the exact mechanism isn’t clear, loneliness “activates a whole host of biological systems that appears to be harmful to people’s health,” said Bert Uchino, a professor of psychology at University of Utah, who was not involved in the new study.

A lonely person’s blood pressure tends to be higher and change more as they age; and they are more likely to have high levels of inflammation, which leads to even more health problems, Uchino said."

"The House and Senate are resolving the differences between the budget plans they adopted in March. Despite some differences, the plans are largely aligned and have in common a number of serious flaws that likely will also apply to the final agreement between the two chambers. "

"It's happened to most regular bike users; it happened to me last week. Biking to meet friends at a restaurant, I had to pedal two blocks uphill on a street without bike lanes. As I started to push up the slope, a man zoomed his car around me, straddling the two lanes and laying on his horn as if I'd done something wrong.

I'd love to be out of your way too, I wanted to tell him. But this parking lane would have to go.

I had every legal right to use the traffic lane. But a 2013 study from the University of Virginia's civil engineering school shows that in a sense, the man wasn't wrong. I was indeed slowing the whole system down.

"Safety, comfort and all that aside, the efficiency of a dedicated facility is that you can maintain varying speeds," said Alec Gosse, an author of the UVA study, in an interview this week. "If you're on some sort of major street with bus traffic in particular, then you end up leapfrogging the bus. And no one is happy about that.""

"The rapidly changing landscape of lighting in the U.S., largely due to the widespread acceptance of light-emitting diode (LED) technology, has opened a universe of new possibilities regarding LED replacement lamps. There are 144 million high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps in the U.S., representing only 2% of the installed lamp inventory. However, HID lamps have a significant impact on energy use, consuming 26% of lighting energy nationwide. HID lamps are used primarily in outdoor applications such as roadways, parking lots and building exteriors, but are also used in commercial interior and industrial applications. Mogul base LED replacement lamps are currently being marketed as equivalent replacements for incumbent HID lamps."

"Walter Scott’s death has focused attention not just on police violence, but also on the use of jail to pressure parents to pay child support, a policy employed by many states today. Though the threat of jail is considered an effective incentive for people who are able but unwilling to pay, many critics assert that punitive policies are trapping poor men in a cycle of debt, unemployment and imprisonment.

The problem begins with child support orders that, at the outset, can exceed parents’ ability to pay. When parents fall short, the authorities escalate collection efforts, withholding up to 65 percent of a paycheck, seizing bank deposits and tax refunds, suspending driver’s licenses and professional licenses, and then imposing jail time.

“Parents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they’re poor,” said Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed a class-action lawsuit in Georgia on behalf of parents incarcerated without legal representation for failure to pay. “We see many cases in which the person is released, they’re given three months to pay a large amount of money, and then if they can’t do that they’re tossed right back in the county jail.”"

"EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. — President Obama on Wednesday made his first visit while in office to the Florida Everglades, choosing the backyard of a former Republican governor of the state, Jeb Bush, and its Republican senator, Marco Rubio, to demand action on climate change in a critical battleground in the 2016 presidential election.

Standing in front of a marsh at the entrance of the 1.5-million-acre Everglades National Park, Mr. Obama commemorated the 45th Earth Day, designating a national historic landmark at the Miami home of the environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who led efforts to rescue the vast area of grasses and forests.

“You can see what makes this unique landscape so magical,” Mr. Obama told a small crowd of community leaders and Park Service employees and guests. But he added a warning: “Climate change is threatening this treasure and the communities that depend on it, which includes almost all of South Florida. And if we don’t act, there may not be an Everglades as we know it."

"When Dan Price announced last week that he would cut his own pay and profits to make it possible to raise the minimum wage at Gravity Payments, his credit card processing company in Seattle, to a hefty $70,000 a year, he had little idea of the whirlwind it would stir.

While the overwhelming majority of the responses on social media and elsewhere were positive — punctuated with labels like “hero” and hand-clapping emojis — there were also a number of skeptics and naysayers."

"It all comes down to individual policies. In the cases of the estate tax, the “carried interest” deduction enjoyed by hedge-fund managers and private equity, and other loopholes that benefit the very wealthy, would-be reformers can appeal to the voters’ sense of fair play, which remains undiminished. In seeking to expand support for working families—for example, by expanding the earned-income tax credit—progressives can appeal to the widespread sympathy for the working poor. When presented in general or ideological terms, redistribution has always been a tough sell. But when the debate gets down to specific proposals, redistributive arguments can still win out."

"And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the endemic cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean hydroelectric projects?"

"Even supporters see Obamacare as a first step on a long quest to bring Americans affordable medicine, with further adjustments, interventions and expansions needed.

There are plenty of interesting ideas being floated to help repair the system, many of which are being used in other countries, where health care spending is often about half of that in the United States. For example, we could strictly regulate prices or preset payment levels, as is currently done for hospital stays under Medicare, the national insurance program for people over 65, or at least establish fair price corridors for procedures and drugs. We could require hospitals and doctors to provide price lists and upfront estimates to allow consumers to make better choices. We could stop paying doctors and hospitals for each service they performed and instead compensate them with a fixed monthly fee for taking care of each patient. We could even make medical school free or far cheaper and then require service afterward.

But the nation is fundamentally handicapped in its quest for cheaper health care: All other developed countries rely on a large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all citizens. That is not politically acceptable here. “A lot of the complexity of the Affordable Care Act arises from the political need in the U.S. to rely on the private market to provide health care access,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, a former adviser to President Obama and president of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care."

"IN recent years we have seen plenty of studies of the impact of fast food on our bodies. But what about our psychological health?

It stands to reason that fast food would have an effect on our mental state. From its production to its consumption, fast food both embodies and symbolizes speed and instant gratification. Moreover, through extensive franchising and large advertising budgets, fast-food companies shape many of the cues in our everyday environment.

While the ubiquity of fast food is undoubtedly driven by consumer demand for instant gratification, it may also play a role in exacerbating that very impatience — and not just for food, but in many facets of our lives."

"We are running out of time. The most recent assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that we have only a few decades left to completely stop burning coal, oil, and natural gas, if we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Most of us would like to leave the earth a better place than we found it, but don't know how to help.

Fortunately, the first steps are easy. It starts with the efficiency of our homes and buildings. These are responsible for the biggest share of our total emissions, and there is huge room for improvement."