Features Archive

American Forests: Preserving Our Green Legacy

American Forests: Preserving Our Green Legacy

by Bruce Boyers,

For me, trees have always been a source of rare and exquisite beauty. I spent the first six years of my childhood in the mountain community of Idyllwild, California—and some of the towering, gnarled, sweet-smelling pines that surrounded my youth had such forceful personalities that I all but named them. I certainly never forgot them; when returning as an adult, it was almost instinctual to seek them out and say hello, and to practically cry if I found one had been cut down.

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Organic Report 2011

Organic Report 2011

The organic industry has gone through major expansion in the last few years, fueled by a steadily increasing awareness of the importance of real food.

News has surfaced about the dangers of pesticides remaining in purchased comestibles, and food-related health issues such as diabetes and obesity have become so prominent that even First Lady Michelle Obama has become involved. All of these factors have led a growing number of consumers to seek out food that is safer and more nutritious; summed into one word, that means organic.

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Andrew Kimbrell: The Role of Organic in Food Safety

Andrew Kimbrell: The Role of Organic in Food Safety

If you were ever looking for an advocate when it comes to food safety, you couldn’t do any better than Andrew Kimbrell. He is a public interest attorney, activist and author. He has been on the front lines of public interest legal activity in technology, human health and the environment for most of his adult life. In 1997 he established the Center for Food Safety, and he currently serves as its executive director. This organization is responsible for knocking down effort after effort of biotechnology giants to pollute our agriculture—and endanger our health—with GMOs, and is directly challenging other harmful technologies such as food irradiation and nanotechnology.

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Frances Moore Lappé: Building a Living Democracy

Frances Moore Lappé: Building a Living Democracy

We are surrounded by many serious environmental, health and economic issues: climate change, an unhealthy and dominating industrial food system, a depressed economy and spiraling poverty, to touch on a few. Some signs of change are evident, yet it’s still easy to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks remaining.

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Philip and Alice Shabecoff: Environmental Toxins and Our Children

Philip and Alice Shabecoff: Environmental Toxins and Our Children

Poisoned for Profit: How Toxins Are Making Our Children Chronically Ill by Philip and Alice Shabecoff is an amazingly comprehensive work on the subject of environmental toxins. It details specific chemical, heavy metal and radioactive pollutions, diseases that run parallel to them, and who is responsible. It also makes an impassioned plea for changes needed in our system to create a safer world in which our children can grow up.

How the book came to be is an illustration of the way that conscience can lead someone to profound and influencing actions.

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Anna Lappé: The Real Food Revolution

Anna Lappé: The Real Food Revolution

Renowned author and food activist Anna Lappé has spent most of her adult life working to bring about a badly needed change in our industrial food system.

Her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, is the author of 17 books including the bestseller Diet for a Small Planet, and Anna herself is now a national best-selling author and sought-after public speaker, respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization and social change. Listed in Time magazine’s “Who’s Who: The Eco-Guide,” Anna has been featured in the New York Times, Gourmet, O: The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body + Soul, Natural Health and Vibe, as well as many other publications.

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Chef Kevin Gillespie: Sustainably Down-Home

Chef Kevin Gillespie: Sustainably Down-Home

If you’re a fan of the Bravo television show Top Chef, you’ve definitely heard of Kevin Gillespie. Proving to be a top contender on the show by winning several Quickfire Challenges and Elimination Challenges, he stood out as one of the sixth season’s final three “cheftestants” who competed for the Top Chef title in Napa Valley. Gillespie was also voted fan favorite by viewers.

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Chef Rick Bayless: Top chef supports local farmers

Chef Rick Bayless: Top chef supports local farmers

Renowned chef Rick Bayless, owner and operator of three of Chicago’s best restaurants, knows what elevates good cuisine to great: the flavors of local, sustainably grown produce. His love of—and absolute demand for—local produce for his own restaurants has resulted in the Frontera Farmer Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports local growers all around the Chicago area. These small and artisan farmers would otherwise not survive in a market dominated by huge-scale industrial corporate agriculture.

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Natalie Jeremijenko: Environmental art + science

Natalie Jeremijenko: Environmental art + science

Meet Natalie Jeremijenko, a new media artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science and engineering. But this is no ordinary artist, by any stretch. She was recently named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. magazine, and her background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Her projects—which explore sociotechnical change—have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. A 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, she currently has an exhibition at New York’s Neuberger Museum of Art entitled “Connected Environments.”

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Farmer Bob Wilt: Soil biology, nutrition and taste

Farmer Bob Wilt: Soil biology, nutrition and taste

Bob Wilt has a lot of faith in the taste of his Sunset Valley Organics blueberries. He should, for over time he has discovered an amazing fact. “If I can get some of my berries into somebody’s mouth, 90 percent of the time I’ll have a new customer,” Bob told Organic Connections. “In addition to selling through stores and over the Internet, we have a stand from which we sell to the local people. The funny thing is, we are the most expensive berries in the area but we have people who will come in and buy two pounds three times a week. And it isn’t because of my bright smiley face; it’s because those berries taste good.”

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David Helvarg: The Critical Mission of Saving Our Oceans

David Helvarg: The Critical Mission of Saving Our Oceans

By Bruce Boyers

When I got the assignment to interview David Helvarg, noted author, journalist, and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, I had no idea of the vault of emotions I was about to open within myself. As the threat to our seas has become more pronounced over the years, it seems that this vault has become quite solidly shut and firmly locked, and shoved back into the farthest, darkest recesses of my mind; and until David started talking, I’d pretty much forgotten about it altogether.

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Chef Suzanne Goin: Market-to-Table Sunday Suppers

Chef Suzanne Goin: Market-to-Table Sunday Suppers

Los Angeles is home to many unique restaurants, some great and lasting, some “places du jour” that will likely disappear in an explosion of paparazzi flashbulbs within six months. Among the first category is one quietly and consistently popular eatery that not only bucks many food fads but has its entire cuisine based on locally and sustainably grown crops, poultry, fish and meat. The chef and co-owner of this restaurant, Suzanne Goin, has now become famous through media coverage of her award-winning cuisine and her own best-selling book Sunday Suppers at Lucques: Seasonal Recipes from Market to Table. Through her work, the importance of locally and sustainably grown food is becoming much more widely known and sought after.

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Marion Nestle: How the Food Industry Hijacked Nutrition

Marion Nestle: How the Food Industry Hijacked Nutrition

Is dietary advice motivated by a real concern for public health or by driving profits for food companies?

American families are bombarded with nutritional information on a daily basis—and it can be very confusing. Food conglomerates hire PR agencies and lobbyists to help influence government dietary regulations and to promote aspects of their products that give them “health appeal.” At the same time, a vast number of these foods and food-like substances are contributing to an out-of-control obesity epidemic and highest-ever cases of diabetes, while our government continues to subsidize crops that are part and parcel of these foodstuff offenders, making them cheap and affordable.

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Robyn O’Brien: Fighting for Allergy Children

Robyn O’Brien: Fighting for Allergy Children

She’s been called “food’s Erin Brockovich.” In case you don’t remember who Erin Brockovich is, she’s the very unlikely heroine who, as a single mother living hand to mouth, came to work as a clerk in a law firm and ended up leading that firm to magnificent glory bringing down Pacific Gas and Electric for their poisoning of the ground water in a small California town—to the tune of $333 million.

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Chef Ann Cooper: Renegade School-Lunch Lady

Chef Ann Cooper: Renegade School-Lunch Lady

It’s a worry to many parents: what kind of nutrition are their kids getting in school lunches? The short answer is, not much. They’re getting processed food, trans fats, drinks with high-fructose corn syrup, and any number of other evils that contribute to low nutrition and childhood obesity.

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David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD: Ending the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD: Ending the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Dr. David Ludwig certainly has his finger on the pulse of childhood obesity—and its causes. He is a pediatrician and endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and holds the position of Associate Professor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ludwig is the founding director of the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) Program, described by Child magazine as one of the most comprehensive pediatric obesity programs in the country. Since the early 1990s, he has provided medical care for several thousand overweight children and their families.

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Anya Fernald: Getting Real with Sustainability

Anya Fernald: Getting Real with Sustainability

There are challenges for anyone entering into a sustainable food business today. The titanic industrial agriculture machine that feeds the bulk of America provides cheap, assembly-line food that costs less to produce than nutritious food grown with consideration for the environment. The commercial media is largely supported by advertising revenues from this same machine and continues to entice consumers with the virtues of cheap, processed and “conventionally” produced food. The question becomes, how can a small-scale sustainable-food business survive in such an environment, bring their products to market, price them affordably, and effectively reach the consumer?

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Marc Koska: The Man Who Saved 9 Million Lives

Marc Koska: The Man Who Saved 9 Million Lives

Unique is a good word to describe Marc Koska. “Since I was a kid, I always wanted to get involved in a large intervention on a big scale,” he told Organic Connections. “I was always looking for something. If I had lived 200 years ago, I would have wanted to be the guy who killed all the rats in the Black Death. And I started having that drive when I was about six.”

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Nell Newman: Defining Natural and Organic

Nell Newman: Defining <em>Natural</em> and <em>Organic</em>

Growing up as the daughter of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward would have to give a person a pretty unique perspective on life. They were two of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars, who, at the height of their respective careers, moved out of Tinseltown to live and raise their family in Westport, Connecticut, away from the glitter and the noise. Paul Newman was not only one of the hunkiest men—and most talented actors—to ever cross a screen, he was a freethinker who actively spoke out against nuclear arms and the Vietnam War. He supported the environment, civil rights, women’s rights and many other causes for much of his long life.

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Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution

Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
Click here to see a clip from Food Beware.

The Gard district of the French countryside is singularly beautiful. Nestled at the foot of the Cévennes mountain range, it is a vision of rolling hills, trees, crops and wildflowers. Against this backdrop, in the small village of Barjac, we see a true story come to life in the French documentary Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution. It is a rebellion through organic food, courtesy of a town that set out to make a difference.

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John Todd: Ecology from 40,000 Feet

John Todd: Ecology from 40,000 Feet
A polluted canal in Fuzhou, China, was transformed with the help of John Todd Ecological Design (shown above left and right), using 12,000 plants composed of 20 native species, to achieve water quality and become a recreational destination for the city’s residents. Above center is the South Burlington, Vermont, Eco-Machine, which is actually a sewage-treatment facility designed to process 80,000 gallons of waste daily.

“When we’re flying at 40,000 feet and we look down, we see a marvelous amount of innovation in agriculture, environmental restoration, green architecture, in systems design and in renewable energy development,” Dr. John Todd tells Organic Connections. “The news on the ground has never been richer, more diverse or in some respects more global. There probably isn’t a continent on which we don’t have something happening, and that just wasn’t the case 20 years ago.”

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Farm Forward: Against Animal Abuse in Factory Farming

Farm Forward: Against Animal Abuse in Factory Farming

Numerous philosophies—and sciences as well—incorporate the principle that all life is interconnected. Harming one sector of life brings harm to others. The evidence in this age of global ecological crisis has never been clearer.

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Healthcare: The High Cost of the American Diet

Healthcare: The High Cost of the American Diet

The headlines have lately been filled with news of the Obama administration’s proposed healthcare plan. Strongly worded opinions, both pro and con, are being volleyed from each side of the political fence. But one aspect of healthcare not being adequately addressed in the plan—as well as not mentioned in most of the pro or con arguments—is the basic American diet. How healthy can a person be when consuming chemical-laden and nutrient-deficient food with an emphasis on carbohydrates, bad fat, salt and sugar? How many healthcare billions are being spent to address health issues that have their roots in poor diet? It’s a hard number to come by, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of healthcare spending goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Treatment for obesity alone runs a tab of $147 billion, and that doesn’t figure in diabetes ($116 billion) or cardiovascular disease.

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SEER Centre: Scotland’s Remineralized Oasis

SEER Centre: Scotland’s Remineralized Oasis

If you were to choose a place to plant your dream vegetable garden, it would probably not be in the foothills of the Grampian Mountains in Strathardle, Perthshire, Scotland. The upland site is infertile, acidic and exposed to severe weather. Around 85 percent of Scotland is classified by the European Union as a “less-favoured area” for farming, and this region, plagued by lifeless, silty soil and boulders, falls right into that category.

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Food Fight: Filming the Food Revolution

Food Fight: Filming the Food Revolution

“Revolution never tasted so good,” states the movie poster for a new documentary by Chris Taylor entitled Food Fight—a film that details the revolution in locally grown, sustainable food begun in California some 40 years ago and now progressing in greater strides than ever all across the nation. The film also explores the reason that the revolution had to take place at all—an industrial food system wholeheartedly bought into by the American public, much to the detriment of our collective health.

Click here to see the Food Fight Trailer

The documentary has already created quite an impact, receiving numerous awards including the International Documentary Association Audience Award 2008, the Environmental Award from the Santa Cruz Film Festival, and the Audience Award for the Washington, DC International Film Festival.

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