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Gov. Andrew Cuomo Takes Up Torch For A Clean Hudson First Carried By His Father
At a press conference I participated in August 22 on the shore of the Hudson River in Albany, New York State came out with guns blazing regarding General Electric's PCB contamination of the river. Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos, the state's chief environmental officer, announced that New York is officially challenging the effectiveness of GE's cleanup, completed last fall and declared a success by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Commissioner Seggos called on the EPA, which is overseeing the cleanup, to ensure its ongoing review of the project will be objective and take into account the latest data, rather than rely on models. Scientific sampling of the river's fish, water and sediment indicate more cleanup is needed to achieve goals for this project set by the EPA and agreed to by GE -- a clean river whose fish are safe to eat.

U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney played a key role with Scenic Hudson in encouraging the state to challenge the adequacy of the cleanup and also spoke at the press conference.

In declaring "I think it's absolutely clear the job is not yet done," Commissioner Seggos decisively allied the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo with its two fellow trustees tasked with restoring the Hudson's natural resources once the EPA-mandated cleanup is officially deemed complete. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have previously cited significant volumes of PCBs still contaminating river sediment and flaws in General Electric's analysis of fish tissue that make the cleanup appear more successful than it actually has been.

All the trustees now agree that without further remediation, at least 136 acres of PCB-contaminated sediment pose a continued threat to the health of the river, its fish, wildlife and people living along it. Peer-reviewed studies by Dr. David Carpenter, a respected M.D. and public health scientist, document a range of illnesses -- including cancer, diabetes and cardiac disease -- experienced by residents of Hudson Valley communities chronically exposed to airborne PCBs from the river.

Without more dredging, the Hudson will remain the nation's largest Superfund site for the indefinite future, delaying restoration of the river and stifling economic development along it. The good news is that it would probably take only two more years of dredging to address this problem.

Commissioner Seggos boldly asserted that because the expected reduction in risks to human health and the environment have not occurred and so much contaminated sediment remains, the state will consider rescinding its concurrence with the agency's original remedy.

In another major victory, Commissioner Seggos explicitly said that New York is committed to dredging the Champlain Canal once permits are approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This once-profitable waterway, a major shipping link between New York Harbor and Lake Champlain (and eventually the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes), has been off-limits to deep-draft vessels for decades because GE's PCB contamination prevents the state Canal Corporation from undertaking navigational dredging. Dredging the canal -- including portions of its channel within the Hudson -- will make the river healthier and greatly enhance economic opportunity for communities along it. Offering potential relief for state taxpayers, Commissioner Seggos added that "all of our legal options are on the table" concerning who will pay for this project.

In challenging the EPA's conclusion that the PCB cleanup has been a success, Gov. Andrew Cuomo takes up the torch carried by his father and predecessor. During his administration, Gov. Mario Cuomo laid the groundwork for GE's Superfund cleanup.

Andrew Cuomo now stands proudly alongside his father as a champion for a healthy, prosperous Hudson River. The leadership he and Congressman Maloney provide will be critical as we seek to persuade the EPA and General Electric to finish the job all New Yorkers -- indeed, all Americans -- deserve.

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We Grow Enough Food. Getting It On To People's Plates Is The Problem.

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©IFAD/Andrew Esiebo/Panos

World leaders have agreed to the ambitious goal of eradicating hunger by 2030. The scale of the problem is daunting. Every day 800 million people go to bed with empty stomachs and more than 8,000 children die needlessly from conditions linked to under-nutrition. And by the time we reach 2030, the global population is likely to include an additional 1.5 billion mouths to feed.

With these kinds of numbers, it is hard to believe we live in a world of plenty and we actually produce enough to feed every hungry person on earth. It is horrifying to think that one third of the food produced in the world is never consumed due to loss or waste.

When we think of food waste in the developed world, we think of consumable food thrown out of supermarkets, restaurants and homes. In the developing world, it is a different issue. Food is lost before it even gets to the market. Grain losses in sub-Saharan Africa alone are worth up to US$4 billion a year - enough to provide the minimum food requirements of at least 48 million people.

Food losses occur at every stage of the agricultural value chain

If fruit is not boxed properly during harvest, it can be ruined. If maize and beans are not dried sufficiently - all too common with the current climate variability - they may develop fungus or aflatoxins. If grains are not stored securely, they could become infested with rats or weevils. With unreliable transportation and lack of decent roads, perishable food that left the farm edible and sellable, can spoil en route to market.

The World Bank estimates that if these post-harvest losses were reduced by only one per cent just in sub-Saharan Africa, there would be economic gains of up to US$40 million each year.

This doesn't even take into account the limited natural resources that are being wasted in the production of food that will never be eaten. Annually up to 173 billion cubic meters of increasingly scarce water (almost a quarter of all water used for agriculture) and about 1.4 billion hectares of land (close to 30 per cent of available agricultural land) is used to grow food that is subsequently lost or wasted.

The magnitude of food loss is alarming. And yet, the solutions can be relatively simple.

In Timor-Leste, for example, almost half the population lives below the poverty line and up to 60 per cent of children are malnourished. The annual "hungry season", when food is hard to come by, lasts more than five months. Low crop productivity has long been a problem. Yet local farmers surprised scientists by resisting the adoption of higher yielding maize seeds. As farmers were already losing 30 per cent of their stored maize every year to rodents and weevils, increasing productivity was not their priority.

This problem of inadequate storage presented an enormous opportunity. It showed the potential for people to access almost a third more food - equivalent to about 360 kilograms of grain per farming household - without increasing their production.

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A farmer in Timor-Leste receives a grain storage drum
©IFAD/Ron Hartman

A pilot project supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) tested the impact of low-cost storage equipment. The project distributed 42,000 airtight storage drums, paid in part by the farmers who received them. Farmers who used the drums to store their grains reduced their losses from 30 per cent to one per cent, potentially halving the duration of future "hungry seasons". The anticipated increase in their annual incomes is nearly 300 per cent.

Once the farmers were provided with better storage facilities, they also became more interested in adopting higher-yielding seeds because the storage allows them to sell their surplus for greater profit in the off-season.

That is just one simple example.

What can we do?

If the global community is serious about achieving a hunger-free world, we need to prioritize finding solutions to food loss along the entire agricultural value chain.

We need to increase investments in drying, storage and processing facilities for grains and perishable crops, and in decent roads and market access for people to sell their produce before it is lost.
We need to train engineers to design suitable facilities and equipment that are locally adapted, easily maintained and accessible by farmers.
We need to build more agricultural cooperatives and farmers groups so that farmers can collectively invest in and maintain equipment, lower the cost of threshing, drying, milling and storage facilities and aggregate their produce for secure transportation to market.
We need to ensure that farmers and farmer groups are able to access rural financial packages so that they can invest in food loss reduction.

Right now, many farmers are selling their produce as quickly as possible - even directly from the field - to minimize loss. But if they have the knowledge and equipment to avoid losses, they can store their crops until prices are higher and even start processing them to add value. When food losses are minimized, the world's 500 million small farms will produce enough excess yields to become sustainable businesses. And when that happens, we won't just eliminate extreme hunger by 2030 - we will be on our way to eliminating extreme poverty as well.

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President Obama Continues to Build His Environmental Legacy
As President Obama nears the end of his second term, he continues to use his executive authority to ensure that his sustainability priorities are translated into public policy. His use of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions has been far from easy, but it is clear that a national policy to reduce global warming is slowly grinding into place. The president's action last week to expand the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii is the latest example of his effort to build a lasting environmental legacy. Last week, he created the world's largest marine reserve, and as New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported last week, this is not an isolated policy initiative:

Using the 100-year-old Antiquities Act, which was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Obama has protected hundreds of millions of acres in places of ecological, historical or cultural significance -- more than any other American president. In 2014, he also greatly expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, south and west of Hawaii. But he has often drawn criticism from Republicans for acting unilaterally.

Teddy Roosevelt's designation of national monuments is why we still can visit the Grand Canyon, and Barack Obama's use of this authority will ensure that many lands we have left undeveloped will stay that way. This is particularly important as we become an increasingly urban society. Over the next half-century we can expect that a lower and lower proportion of our society will live in rural areas. This means that building the ethos--or value--of protecting the planet, so important to our survival, will take greater effort. Vacations and school trips will be most people's closest exposure to the natural world. From a very practical standpoint we need more of these spaces to ensure that the ones we have are not overrun by the growing demand to visit them.

The lands and marine sanctuaries are not meant to prohibit us from fishing, hunting, hiking and gazing in these spaces, but to regulate use to ensure that natural treasures are conserved. The politics involved can be complicated. Earlier last week, the president designated 87,500 acres of woods in Maine as the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. Richard Perez Pena of the NY Times reported on the political reaction to this move and observed that:

In a struggling region that has long relied on shrinking timber-related businesses, many residents fear that a national monument could eventually mean new air pollution controls on wood and paper mills in the surrounding areas. "It's sad that rich, out-of-state liberals can team up with President Obama to force a national monument on rural Mainers who do not want it," Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, said in a statement. Earlier this year, the state Legislature passed and Mr. LePage signed a bill opposing the federal takeover.

While the governor's reaction to conserving these lands could be seen as typical conservative reaction to any executive actions taken by President Obama, vocal opposition has long been typical of monument and park politics. People prefer local control of their own lands. Local economic interests are particularly active in the politics of land use. Teddy Roosevelt faced fierce and constant opposition to his monument designations. TR seemed to enjoy this form of political combat, because he was convinced that his view was correct. The importance and value of our national parks and monuments over time has proven that his vision of conservation was ahead of its time. His aggressive steps to preserve nature enhance Roosevelt's legacy as a great president.

This will be true of President Obama as well, because the need for conservation has grown. The national political clout of those seeking to exploit and extract finite resources from these lands and waters has diminished and will continue to decline. This is part of the transition from the old labor-intensive industrial economy to the post-industrial world of the brain-based economy. Automation will continue to replace labor doing routine tasks. Resource extraction, agriculture and other material parts of our economy generate a lower and lower portion of our GDP. It is not only regulation and globalization that is driving these businesses out of their traditional locations, but the fact that there is more profit in software than hardware. Google is more lucrative than HP. This means that the traditional notion that we must trade off economic growth to ensure environmental quality will have decreasing relevance. Politicians may willfully disagree with the idea that environmental protection enhances economic growth, but that concept is fundamental to the growing field of sustainability management. The political power of the new economy is growing while the political power of extraction industries and other parts of the old economy are shrinking.

I think we should look at conservation as an investment in the future, rather than as the ideological choice of rich, out-of-state liberals. Future presidents will continue to look for opportunities to designate more areas for preservation. Preserving these spaces is important physically, but it is also important to our civic culture and national sense of purpose. Imagine America without the Muir Woods, the Grand Canyon, and countless other protected areas.

In an increasingly urbanized world it will take leadership and political activism to reinforce the message that conservation is important, and the natural environment is a treasure to protect, rather than a resource to use up and toss away. We will need to protect our land, air and water to meet our needs for food, clothing, water and shelter. While the national parks and monuments contribute to the health of the biosphere, their impact on major population centers can be indirect and difficult for some to see.

President Obama has also used his executive authority aggressively to update our aging structure of environmental law and regulation. America's environmental regulations are complex and their development and implementation has taken decades to put in place. But once environmental rules are hard-wired into our legal structure they become influential incentives to sustainable corporate, governmental and private behavior.

Finally, the president has used the purchasing power of the federal government itself to build the green economy and encourage changes in how our massive federal organizations operate. The military has been aggressive in pushing energy efficiency and renewable energy. It has also spent massive amounts of money to clean up its own toxic waste sites.

While early in his first term the president failed to secure climate change legislation, he has managed to begin the process of greenhouse gas regulation through executive action. There are limits to how much a president can do without a congress willing to legislate. Barack Obama produced his environmental legacy through the creative and determined use of his executive authority. Let's hope his successor is able to build on that legacy with new law that reflects the 21st century's technologies, and the global economy that is now a fact of life.

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Meatless Monday: Farm to Table, From the Ground Up
Beyond Meat's bleeding beetburger could not exist without beets. Were it not for the butternut squash, Purple Carrot's butternut squash tacos would be bare, bereft tortillas. Dazzled as we are by tech-savvy food innovation, as New Orleans' recent Farm to Table Experience reminds us, what we eat doesn't start in the lab, it starts from the ground up.

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F2Te, a weekend of presentations (including, ahem, mine), growing and kitchen demos, social events, chefs challenges and hands-on workshops brought people who care about the source of their food, whether they're growers, chefs, vendors, public servants, authors, artisans, educators, nutritionists or just people who care about what they eat. We got to connect with each other and reconnect with the source of our food.

In an increasingly app- and meal kit-driven market, a lot can get lost between farm and table, including authenticity. The thing is, we like pretty. Whether you're a celeb chef on Chopped or just take pics of your dinner on your i-phone, you know we eat with our eyes. But our drive for pretty food is at odds with feeding the world and feeding ourselves. Globally, we waste a third -- up to half --of what we grow because we feel it's lacking in the looks department.

When you throw out a bruised tomato or an ugly eggplant, you're throwing out all the resources it took to produce it, from the grower's labor to the water that irrigated the crop. Then consider that one in seven of us is hungry. There's no way that's sustainable in any sense of the term.

Food waste was a big topic at F2Te. A panel led by Food Tank president Danielle Nierenberg addressed both its challenges and its progress, including apps that reduce food waste by feeding more people.

Technology can bring farm and table closer in innovative ways, but often, the real difference happens in person and hands-on, as with Modena chef Massimo Bottura, who stepped away from Osteria Francescana, his best-in-the-world Michelin-starred restaurant, to run a Rio soup kitchen during the Olympics. The menu? Food fashioned from Olympic village discards and donated products. It's the most brilliant use of leftovers ever, and all part of Bottura's brand of activism. He's founder of Food for Soul, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing food waste, reducing hunger and growing community.

That kind of farm to table may not be venture capital bait and or techno-chic. It's fueled by passion and hard work, as Richard McCarthy, another of F2Te's presenters knows. McCarthy is Executive director of Slow Food USA, , but I first met him right 11 years ago, when he was getting New Orleans' Crescent City Farmers Market back up and running after Hurricane Katrina. For a traumatized community, like New Orleans was back then, like Baton Rouge, still walloped by recent flooding is now, having access to fresh, nourishing food means way more than a meal. In means comfort, connection, hope.

Farm to table is not always pretty and it's not always easy. But as F2Te reminds us, it's always essential. It always will be.

Ratatouille

This classic French dish makes the most of end-of-summer farm-to-table produce, including the less-than-lovely bits. As they simmer, they come together, becoming greater than the sum of their parts, as do we when we gather.

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium eggplant, chopped
1 sweet pepper -- red, yellow or orange, chopped
1 large zucchini (or two small), chopped
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
2 tomatoes, chopped (or 1 15-ounce can chopped tomatoes)
1/2 cup red wine
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 dash red pepper flakes
sea salt to taste

In a large pot, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add chopped garlic, giving it a stir. Add chopped onion and cook till they soften and release their fragrance, about 5 minutes. In order, add chopped eggplant, pepper, zucchini and mushrooms. Stir to combine.

Stir in chopped tomatoes, wine, cumin, pepper flakes and fennel seeds. Reduce heat to medium and cover, letting the mixture simmer for 20 minutes.

Stir again and season with sea salt to taste.

Serves 4, doubles like a dream, keeps covered and refrigerated for several days.

More at soulfulvegan.com.

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Our message to Japan: Africa's elephants need your support

Paula Kahumbu: Elephant diplomacy is helping to get Japan on board in efforts towards a global ban on ivory trade

The global coalition for a total ban on the trade in ivory is taking shape. In Africa calls for the ban are led by the 29 nation African Elephant Coalition (AEC). In the consumer countries, both the US President Obama and China's President Xi have made commitments to close the domestic markets which will have a huge impact on demand.

To be sure, progress towards building the coalition is uneven. Key African nations such as Zimbabwe and Namibia are opposed to the ban, and have even petitioned CITES for a relaxation of current restrictions. In Europe, while the French Environment Minister Ségolène Royal has signed a decree banning the trade, in the UK the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says it is still “working” on its pledge to implement a total ban on ivory sales.

Japan is one of Africa's most important development partners. They have made major contributions and commitments to support conservation. Now the conservation community call for 5 actions to be agreed at TICAD:

1. Japan to permanently close legal domestic markets of ivory, and aggressively close down online trading sites that deal in ivory, all to crush demand.

It is important that the international community does not underestimate Japan's role as an ivory consumer and the effect of legal ivory trade. With Kenya having hosted TICAD6, I hope that Kenya will use their friendship with Japan, to win their support on elephant conservation.

I was invited by First Lady Mrs Kenyatta, who is also doing a lot of conservation work, to visit the Sheldrick's animal orphanage. Baby elephants who lost their mothers to poaching… They may have been traumatised by seeing their mother killed right in front of them, yet they come and so innocently play with us.

Feeding them milk, stroking them… I felt a kind of connection with these babies. And before I realized I was in tears. It almost felt like touching God…

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BLOWIN' by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa