Discovery Ramblings - April 23, 2021
Discovery Ramblings - April 23, 2021
Randy Hooper - Discovery Organics
Remember Earth Day – 4/22? Used to be a big deal, but seems more attention goes to 4/20. There shouldn’t be an Earth Day – every day should be Earth Day. I think the same should go for Mothers Day as well.
We just had an unprecedented 12 day long nearly hot spell that is now ending, but it sure moved a lot of greenery forward. I’m somewhat blessed living in the country and being very aware of the growth cycles of so many things, plant and animal, and this year has been great. We have owls – three varieties, and they stop in the forest every so often. But this year we have two nesting pairs of Barred Owls near the house. Whooo Whooo Who Hoooo Whooo Whooo Who Hoohoooow. And they sound off all the time. Their babies don’t make the same sound – it’s quite funny – from a distance you could imagine there were monkey and makaws fighting in the cedar jungle. I don’t mind that they aren’t indigenous and displace the other owls, because they also feast off the non-indigenous squirrels that colonize here as well, who have in turn displaced the native Douglas Squirrel. The other treat is that we have a nesting pair of those big red-headed Pileated Woodpeckers, and their three little guys are out tap tap tapping on any old tree, and will soon realize that it’s the dead ones that have bugs in them.
I got Phizered on Monday, and as you likely found out, or may soon, there is a recovery period after these vaccines. I’ve been zonked all week, and somewhat incoherent, so if this sounds a bit like babble, it is.
So here’s the tragic headline: DO NOT REACT because it’s not news!
Brody reminded me this week about this article. It was published on March 23rd of this year on CBC’s website. We fielded many queries about it and are still seeing the ramifications of it as customers continue to question the supply of Romaine Lettuce.
Except THIS E. coli outbreak occurred in California in late 2018, not last month. This story is 3 years old, but just popped up on their website like it happened yesterday. And the “nearby cattle farms” were also in California. But you wouldn’t know that, if you are a headline reader, which we ALL are, and didn’t catch that it was not a local story, nor current news!
We both emailed CBC and asked them to correct this but have had no response.
So my point? Well I have many, and they may seem argumentative and contradictory, so more of a flow of thought you will have to follow through to get the thread.
Yeah, farms produce billions and billions of pounds of fresh produce across the US and Canada, and a few times a year, people get sick, sometimes tragically. It’s bound to happen. The CFIA sends out recall and warning notices nearly daily. I know, I subscribe to their “channel.”
And once or twice a year, out of hundreds of issues reported, from listeria, glass fragments and mustard allergy notices, one or two will be about produce. The risk that some grower somewhere is going to miss something and tragically impact dozens of lives is just a fact of life.
I remember back in 2002 I think - a frantic call from Audrey Cliffe in Armstrong. ‘Don’t sell those carrots, Darrel just found a dead racoon in the well.” We phoned every customer we had sent them too and told them to trash them and tossed our inventory. Shit happens. Rarely with produce, though, and if you got the CFIA news streamed to your inbox every day, you would agree.
But this isn’t a rant about Romaine, or cows, for now it’s about the CBC. I was raised with the CBC, the way Americans my age were raised with Walter Cronkite and CBS news. Every time some punter Conservative hopeful raises the issue of de-funding the CBC I want to reach out and shake their heads, and mostly for personal reasons. I have defended that institution my whole life. I love CBC. From 22 minutes and Rick Mercer to Quirks and Quarks. But apparently I’m in the minority. How many people listening to me ramble have fond memories of Dead Dog Café on Saturdays? 2? (besides Annie and I?).
And it’s not really a rant about CBC, it’s just my having to face reality that there are no longer 6 major TV networks covering the news in Canada and the US, like there was pre-Bill Gates, but thousands of news streams, and for any national broadcaster that doesn’t want to fall to sunset grace, they have to catch you on the headline – catch your eyes for longer than a second, and lull you to read a story before you move to your next news stream. For that readership / viewership is what it is all about – advertising dollars based on views per minute, per link, per whatever, and a re-hashed 3 year old story about Romaine and Cows was probably great click-bait in 2018, and again in 2021.
But maybe that is the point. Every time I hear anyone talk about de-funding a public broadcaster and hand the news over to the private sector I cringe. Having public information controlled by a corporation is scary enough at the best of times. (Most of you are aware of the tragedy that is Fox News, as my best example.)
I gave a talk a couple of years ago to a crowd of regenerative agriculturalists, and likened their own move to increase carbon capture through better farm management, directly to the global move to plant trees for the same purpose. The Trillion Tree plan it was called. Here’s a bit of what I said back then in April of 2019, including my reference to the CBC.
TREE PLANTING IN THE ELECTION NEWS!
2 weeks before the election, in an effort to trick Green voters to vote Liberal, Trudeau suggested a new policy that Canada would plant 2 billion trees over 10 years. TWO BILLION? I did some math. That’s hardly any. Elizabeth May said she wanted 10 billion. We are the richest nation on the planet and have a higher carbon footprint per person than any other country, by far. Shit, I used to plant 200 an hour for the Forest Service back in my teens, at 12 cents each, and I was slow.
Do the math, at 250 trees an hour, full time for 10 years is 5.2 million, which means to do 2 billion in 10 years would require a staff of 400 people – or really 1200 people planting for 4 months a year.
Consider Ireland, already barren in 1900, their forests now cover 770,000 hectares, and they continue to plant 8,000 hectares a year to get to their goal of 18% canopy. Not to be outdone, China is on its way to plant an area, funnily enough, the actual size of all of Ireland this year; has planted 34 million hectares over the past five years, to the tune of 82 billion dollars, and are currently at nearly 2 billion since they signed on to one of many global tree planting initiatives.
Pakistan has already finished its goal of 350,000 hectares and a billion trees this year. India is at 2 billion, including 50 million planted on just one day in Uttar Pradesh. Ethiopia, friggin’ Ethiopia, a country of 100 million people living on 790 dollars a year planted 379 million in one day on July 25th, and is currently at 1.7 billion for the year, part of President Ahmed’s campaign to plant a total of 4 billion this year to reverse the slow southward crawl of the Sahara. Pakistan a billion, Mexico closing in on a billion, as is Turkey - and Peru and Nigeria and Kenya over ½ a billion. Most of these countries are poor – really poor. You can monitor progress on this through the United Nations Trillion Trees portal.
Why are the people most affected by climate change, the ones who live a daily struggle for water the way most animals and birds struggle every day for food, out there planting trees like its going out of style while we argue about how many electricians it takes to screw in a light bulb.
I haven’t heard anything negative here, no climate shame, just a global imperative. Oh, I have heard one bad thing, from the CBC, who notoriously can find some damp, dark cloth to place over any good news story, who have already announced we can’t do it because it’s too hard, too steep, we need thousands of trained tree planters blah blah blah.
Funnily enough, as I write this, 2 years later, Trudeau just announced a couple of days ago that we were going to plant 2 billion trees over 10 years – his commitment to fixing climate change, sort of, and a repeat of what he said 2 years ago.
On Wednesday, on the same front page on their website, CBC ran another story – here’s a snip.
Which says that BC alone could plant 2 billion in 10 years at that rate.
BC continues to spray thousands of acres of emerging forest land with Roundup, from the air, to get rid of the non-commercial trees (hardwoods) and in doing so, effectively kills the soil bacteria that will harvest carbon dioxide, cast off the oxygen and bury the carbon, the same soil bacteria that will help build stronger healthier and faster growing forests. We plant new trees so we can cut more trees down, nothing to do with this global imperative.
If any of you are as fascinated as I am about trees and their role in climate change, and have nothing else to do, I would highly recommend you fascinate yourself after downloading the New Water Paradigm – a perfect 94 page read for a rainy Saturday. It’s a 15 year old story from Eastern Europe that was ground-breaking research at the time, and still holds water, as it were.
http://www.waterparadigm.org/download/Water_for_the_Recovery_of_the_Climate_A_New_Water_Paradigm.pdf
Back next week to talk about Fair Trade, because that’s our big focus in May as Canada celebrates Fair Trade Month! And a promise for more coherency!