Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and

Description: Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe by Maria Rodale Rodale sheds new light on the state of 21st-century farming, examining the unholy alliances that have formed between the chemical companies that produce fertilizer and genetically altered seeds, the agricultural educational system that is virtually subsidized by those same companies, and the government agencies in thrall to powerful lobbyists. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description World, and Keep Us Safe. Notes A case arguing that organic farming practices are our best defence against global environmental destruction. Author Biography Maria Rodale is the founding editor of "Organic Style" magazine and vice chairman of Rodale, Inc., which she led into a hugely successful expansion and business revolution. She has been featured in national media including National Public Radio, "The Oprah Winfrey Show, " and "USA Today." Maria was twenty and unmarried when she gave birth to Maya Rodale, her daughter, and they have been on a journey of mutual self-discovery, honesty, and levity ever since. Maya was graduated recently from NYUs Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she focused on writing and women in literature. Ma Review "Granddaughter to Rodales founder, and its current CEO, the author offers a passionate, evenhanded, nonacademic argument for the overall wisdom (economical and ecological) for farming organic. Deeply aware of the public confusion and suspicion surrounding organic farming as a "hippie" cause, Rodale first persuades readers that years of chemical and pesticide use have poisoned our environment" --Publishers Weekly, May 2010 Prizes Winner of Nautilus Award (Ecology/Environment) 2011 Review Quote Granddaughter to Rodales founder, and its current CEO, the author offers a passionate, evenhanded, nonacademic argument for the overall wisdom (economical and ecological) for farming organic. Deeply aware of the public confusion and suspicion surrounding organic farming as a "hippie" cause, Rodale first persuades readers that years of chemical and pesticide use have poisoned our environment -- Publishers Weekly, May 2010 Excerpt from Book 1. we have poisoned our soil, our water, and our air When I was a little girl, one of my favorite outings was a Sunday drive to the local orchard. Out of the blue my dad would say, "Lets go for a drive," and wed all scramble into the station wagon. When the destination turned out to be the orchard, we would rush to the juice machine and push our paper cups under the spout to get a cup of cold, fresh cider. The autumn air would be filled with the scent of fallen leaves and wisps of wood smoke, and we would always come home with a wooden bushel basket full of apples, or sometimes even two if we were going to make applesauce. None of us wore seat belts and, in fact, I doubt the car even had them--it was the 1960s. We headed home feeling lucky to live in a place where apples right from the tree were so delicious, so fresh, and so close by. These were our good times. My Eden. My family lived right next door to my grandparents on a working farm where chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, and organic vegetables and fruits were raised. The fields were planted with hay and corn. At that time we knew the only way to get organic food was to grow it ourselves and so we did. And it was good. Years pass, and now Im driving my own kids to the local fair. In the intervening years, my grandfather died, having achieved iconic status in the hippie culture (although he himself was not one). My father, too, died, killed in a freak car accident while trying to launch an organic gardening magazine in Moscow. As I drive, I notice that the orchard has been turned into a housing development, and only a few gnarled old apple trees remain at the edges of the manicured lawns. I have often joked that Pennsylvanias biggest farm crop is houses, so while I am saddened to see a housing development there, I am not surprised. Nor, unfortunately, am I surprised when I read in the local newspaper that every one of the 800 water wells in that development tested positive for lead and arsenic. The soil is also contaminated, with levels more than 50 times higher than is deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The families who bought houses on Macintosh or Dumpling Drive, thinking they were getting their slice of the American dream, now are living an American nightmare.1 Its impossible not to feel for those poor families. Their children have a much higher risk of suffering reduced intelligence, behavioral problems, and health issues. Consider the young couples who thought they would be starting families and now find themselves unable to conceive,2 and may even be facing cancer treatments instead of fertility treatments. Consider the hard working people who might never be able to sell their houses. Perhaps you know other families in similar situations. Now consider this: We are all in the same situation to varying degrees. We are all being poisoned, contaminated, sterilized, and eventually exterminated by the synthetic chemicals we have used for the last 100 years to grow our food and maintain our lawns, to make our lives easier and "cleaner" and our food "cheaper." Most of us probably think our species biggest problems, aside from the global economic collapse, have to do with energy and energy independence. The debate over the climate crisis and environmental destruction has been almost completely focused on energy usage--how we drive our cars, heat our homes, and power our affluent and well-lit lifestyles. We havent yet made the full connection between how we grow our food and the impact it can have on our climate crisis and our health crisis. The global economic upheaval in 2008 and 2009 has afforded us a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to rebuild and re-envision an economic model, a government, and a future that is based on what is right for people, the environment, and business. We can and must create a world that is more than sustainable, that is regenerative. Nature, under optimal circumstances (mainly, when we leave it alone) heals itself. Regeneration is necessary to heal the damage we have already done to ourselves and to our environment. It is time to begin the process of healing. WHY CARBON REALLY MATTERS Over the last century weve all been subjected to an unprecedented chemical experiment. While there have been antivivisection movements around the world to protect animals from testing, Ive never heard about a single protest to save our children from this vast experiment. Yet there is increasing and frightening evidence that agricultural and other industrial chemicals are causing significant and lasting health problems-- problems that will be hard to solve and take time to correct even if we start making changes today. The evidence is starting to pile up. Do you know what the number one reason is for kids missing school these days? Its not colds or the normal sicknesses that all children go through during their lives. Its asthma.3 Asthmas prevalence increased by 75 percent from 1980 to 19944 (the last time it was officially measured by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Thirty-four million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma, and worldwide the number has reached approximately 300 million. 5 You could say that its getting harder and harder to breathe on this planet. What does asthma have to do with carbon? Lets think for a minute about the human body and its relationship with the planet. Breathing is fundamental to life. We can live a few weeks without food, a few days without water, forever without cars if we must. But take away our air or our capacity to breathe it in and we are dead in minutes. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide in an ongoing cycle. Researchers have determined that global warming or climate change is caused primarily by too much carbon dioxide being produced by cars, manufacturing, and other uses of fossil fuels. Our collective exhaling is exceeding the earths capacity to process it back into air for us to breathe in. Carbon, the building block of life,6 is one of the most abundant naturally occurring elements on earth--its in coal and inside our bodies, its in limestone and in every living thing (which is how scientists are able to use carbon dating to determine the age of artifacts and fossils), its in oil and its in the air, its in wood and its also in soil. In its densest form, carbon is a diamond. The very same element in a less compact form is charcoal or graphite. Carbon molecules move all the time--and react readily with other elements, especially oxygen. When one carbon atom reacts with one oxygen atom, the result is carbon monoxide, which is both highly toxic and at the same time useful (its the blue flame burning on your gas stove, for instance). The carbon monoxide reaction occurs most often when carbon is burned in an oxygen-starved environment, like a woodstove. We have all heard stories about people who went to sleep on a cold winter night but never awoke the next morning because their faulty heating systems--oxygen-deprived, carbon- burning combustion--killed them with carbon monoxide. When one carbon atom merges with two oxygen atoms, the result is carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide is produced naturally by things like volcanoes and hot springs, but it also occurs when you burn carbon. Like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is toxic in high concentrations and can cause dizziness, headaches, rapid breathing, confusion, palpitations, and at very high concentrations death.7 Oxygen is released into the air by plants through photosynthesis. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, a fundamental reason that plants of all kinds are essential to our survival. Plants generate oxygen we need to survive. The earth doesnt have enough plants to breathe in and store all the carbon dioxide our activities have been producing and recycle it as fresh oxygen. So we either have to stop spewing out so much carbon dioxide or find ways to "sequester" it--hold it someplace. This is the conundrum we now face. This is the essence of our climate crisis. There is no shortage of schemes and dreams to solve this problem--including making "biochar,"8 cap-and-trade programs,9 creating vast underground tanks to hold the carbon, or shooting it out of our atmosphere and into space. But what if we are missing a major piece of the equation? Most discussion on global warming has focused on the energy issue, both because its the most visible cause of carbon dioxide emissions and, more important, because its where all the money and political power are concentrated. Oil, gasoline, "clean" coal, solar, wind, biofuel, and all that goes with those things (wars, power grids, automobile companies, bailouts, deals, lobbying, government appointments) have been hogging our attention. And so in our daily confusion, we just take for granted that we will always have food, comfortable lifestyles, cars, and climate-controlled homes. We take it all for granted--just like breathing. Now imagine for a minute that someone, maybe Bill Gates, has developed a nanotechnology for sequestering carbon (that is, taking the excess carbon dioxide that causes global warming from the air and holding it in a stable, safe form somewhere where it cannot do any damage to the atmosphere). Perhaps it is a technology that you put in the soil that will suck up all the carbon we have expelled into the air. Bill will set up a new business called Mycrosoft that is backed by venture capitalists and has an IPO scheduled for Year 2. People would be all over this like girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. Headlines in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would herald thi Details ISBN1605294853 Author Maria Rodale Short Title ORGANIC MANIFESTO Language English ISBN-10 1605294853 ISBN-13 9781605294858 Media Book Format Hardcover Publication Date 2010-03-01 Imprint Rodale Press Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States DEWEY 631.584 Pages 208 Residence Emmaus, PA, US Publisher Rodale Books Subtitle How Organic Farming Can Stop Global Warming, Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep Us Safe Audience General/Trade Year 2010 UK Release Date 2010-03-16 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:141752211;

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