Seeding the Future

SUBHEAD: One of the few defenses local indigenous people have against big-ag GMO capitalism.

By Michael Meurer on 18 February 2017 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39526-seeding-the-future-against-destructive-neoliberal-capitalism)


Image above: Speakers at a seed exchange near the Río Santiago in México share planting tips. Photo by Michael Meurer. From original article.

There was much bluster about US job losses under NAFTA in the 2016 election, but walking along the banks of the Río Santiago in the pueblo of Juanacatlán, Mexico, the larger impact of the agreement immediately becomes a searing reality. One's eyes and skin burn after only a few minutes' exposure to the toxic spray and sulfurous stench as foaming waves of chemical pollution cascade over a once pristine falls known only a few decades ago as the Niagara of Mexico.

The pollution, which includes large concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, zinc and other heavy metals used in electronics fabrication, is partly driven by unregulated NAFTA and domestic manufacturing, and also by toxic runoff from export-oriented agribusiness that, unlike traditional campesino farming, relies heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Fusion magazine dubbed the Santiago the "river of death." Vice magazine describes it as a "toxic hell" that caused 72 deaths in 2015 alone.

Compliance with barely existent environmental regulations in Mexico is voluntary under NAFTA, something that is rarely mentioned in the US. NAFTA's Chapter 11 even allows foreign corporations to sue the Mexican government for imposing regulations they consider to be unfair or burdensome.

On November 20, 2016, Mexico's Revolution Day, I was invited by my friend Miyuki Takahashi, a native Mexican-Japanese doctor who runs the educational Jardín de Vida project (Garden of Life) in Juanacatlán, to accompany her and nearly 400 residents from towns and villages located near the river as an independent journalistic observer during a protest against its poisoning.

The protest action was organized in part by Un Salto de Vida (USV), or A Leap of Life, a civic organization formed by local farmers near the town of Salto, which is across the river from Juanacatlán.

After the protest, we were invited to the 14th annual reunion and seed exchange organized by USV and the local Jalisco chapter of the Red de Alternativas Sustenables Agropecurias (RASA), or Network of Sustainable Agricultural Alternatives, made up of small farmers who live along the Santiago watershed. They come together annually to celebrate the culture of sacred corn, water and trees and to "sow seeds of rebellion," per the email recap to attendees, on which they graciously copied me.

About 80 small farmers met this year in Juanacatlán to share success stories from their use of heirloom seeds that have often been in their families for generations.

The focus was corn (maíz), which is a historic and sacred staple crop of Mexican rural culture that has been undercut by mass imports of subsidized, genetically modified corn from the US since NAFTA was signed in 1994.

After many speeches, attendees spent several hours exchanging heritage seeds and talking, then shared a meal of roasted pig, beans, organic corn and rice.

One of the speakers, a young man named Alan Carmona Gutiérrez who is a cofounder of USV, gave a speech that started with this remarkable statement: "Seeds are the arms that can win the war against capitalism." ("Las semillas son las armas que pueden ganar la guerra contra capitalismo.")

Alan did not mean capitalism in the abstract. He meant the kind of capitalism that has made the 433-kilometer (269-mile) Río Santiago one of the most lethally toxic and polluted waterways in the world, and that under NAFTA forced Mexico to amend its constitution to allow foreign land ownership. This change opened small landholders, upon whom organic crop diversity depends, to the whims of banks and foreign creditors. These campesinos had been deeded their property for life by the constitution of 1917. NAFTA wiped that legal protection away with the stroke of a pen, leading to a doubling of export farming by large-scale agribusiness by 2015.

Out of necessity, campesinos in nearly every state in Mexico are quietly and irrevocably walking away from this lethal model to create their own alternatives. Small local seed exchanges, such as the one in Juanacatlán, happen across Mexico every year, unheralded by the media. USV, RASA and other farmers' groups like them are engaged in a cooperative, ongoing initiative called the "National Campaign in Defense of Mother Earth and the Territory." The USV announcement of the seed exchange states the goals of this national campaign:

It will not be ideologies that guide us but the desire for freedom, common sense, the sun, the moon and the wind. Against their technology is the knowledge of our ancestors. Against their factories are our spaces for the reproduction of life. Against their repression is our organization.

It is time to exchange our seeds and sow the land with the nobility and tenacity of those who love their mother, it is time to share our knowledge with the transmission of our collective memory of our identities and to recover our own lives, to be guardians and warriors who strive to forge together the world we want, here and now, today and forever.

They fight for all of us, not just themselves, and with good reason. According to the Center for Food Safety, just five companies -- Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer -- account for 62 percent of world seed sales. As Rachel Cernansky recently reported, these same companies own multi-decade patents on many varieties of crop seeds for staple agricultural items found in daily diets worldwide. Alan is not exaggerating at all when he says that seeds are the new arms in the fight for sustainable democratic self-governance.


Image above: A table at a seed exchange near the Río Santiago in México displays heritage seeds. Photo by Michael Meurer. From original article..

Micro and Macro Hope
The seed exchange along the Río Santiago is one of many similar experiences with local micro-initiatives that I have encountered during my travels. Having seen these kinds of localized efforts in the US, Europe and Latin America, I knew that a connecting mechanism was still badly needed, something beyond corporate social media platforms, which are essentially large-scale data mining operations.

Enter VIC (Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas/Nursery of Citizen Initiatives), a new open source, Creative Commons project that is finding, mapping and connecting local micro-initiatives, such as Alan's USV. Their work reveals some of the most hopeful signs I have seen that underneath the media radar, people are taking matters into their own hands, reinventing and rebuilding civic life.

VIC was started by a group of architecture and urban design students in Madrid who won an open bid by the city government to design and build a memorial in honor of 191 victims of the horrific terrorist bombings at the central Atocha Train Station in 2004.

The resulting memorial is a 36-foot-tall glass cylinder that is illuminated from below at night. Floating inside the cylinder is a colorless film that is inscribed with thousands of messages of condolence from citizens of Madrid that visitors see in lighted motion above them.

In addition to allowing citizens to become a living, interactive part of the memorial, the messages provide an illuminating glimpse of an alternative city that is vibrantly alive with unsuspected interconnections and pulsing with an underground civic life that no one knew existed.

This brilliant memorial eventually led to the VIC initiative, which is focused on developing and disseminating what Medialab-Prado calls "collective intelligence for real democracy" ("Inteligencia colectiva para una democracia real.").

Medialab-Prado is an award-winning "citizen laboratory" funded by the City of Madrid for the production and dissemination of citizen-driven projects that embody collaborative cultural exploration using digital networks. VIC's work mirrors and expands this sensibility, and it has now spread across Spain and Latin America, while I am helping with political and academic introductions in the US.

VIC's deceptively simple and powerful central idea, which is both diagnostic and descriptive, is to find and map local citizen-driven initiatives at the micro level and to connect them at the macro level, with all information available interactively to the public under Creative Commons licensing.

The micro-initiatives that are being mapped have always existed. They are what might be called the non-monetized social economy, and VIC field work over the past decade shows that their numbers increase during times of economic or social duress.

What has been missing among the motive elements of the non-monetized economy is rigorous diagnostic analysis, mapping of interrelationships, mutual awareness of other civic actions and an easy, collaborative, citizen-managed way to connect, collaborate and endure.

In spite of the formal analytic rigor they bring to their work, VIC members and their network of collaborators across Europe and the Americas often talk in a language that seems vital and primal compared to the stilted, scripted jargon of the neoliberal media. There is incessant discussion about honoring the "affective environment" of particular social-political projects, of "doing politics with pleasure" in "open spaces of unforeseen possibility," etc.

Their sources of inspiration are too eclectic to be pigeonholed ideologically. I would describe the underlying beliefs as forming a non-ideological politics of joy, collaboration and discovery, but undergirded by rigorous diagnostic research and hard data.

Paul Hawken, a long-time advocate of natural capitalism (an imperfect concept that nevertheless has value) once described the hundreds of thousands of citizen's initiatives across the world as "humanity's immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption."

Despite the eloquence of Hawken's description, it lacks a deeper diagnostic understanding of motive force and a clear means for interconnection and collaboration. VIC social mapping and diagnostics, along with their highly collaborative open methodology, have the potential to solve this problem.

During just one afternoon amid a 12-day series of Open Labs fora titled "Cities that Learn" ("Ciudades que Aprenden") held from November 28-December 9, 2016, at the National Library in Mexico City, 10 initiatives were showcased to reflect the characteristics of thousands of similar micro-initiatives VIC has mapped in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Brazil and Spain over the past decade.

I watched the presentations for all 10 of these beautiful citizen's initiatives, which ended in a candlelit singalong in the library's grand, open-air Octavio Paz salon. The leaders of these projects are working, often with very little funding, to improve and democratize education, public transportation, public art, historic cultural preservation and much more. And now, in a wonderful development, they are tangibly connected to one another with common open-source tools.


Image above: Varietal heirloom corn is displayed at the 14th annual seed exchange along the Río Santiago in México. Photo by Michael Meurer. From original article.

Rebuilding Civic Life
Civic life worldwide has been in decline for decades. From the publication of the original Bowling Alone thesis by Robert Putnam in 1996, to Planet of Slums, Mike Davis's survey of global shantytowns in 2006, there is an enormous and growing body of academic literature and field work documenting a radical decline in the range, variety and frequency of the kinds of free civic associations that used to bring people together face-to-face to solve community problems, teaching tolerance, civility and political maturity in the process.

Open-source projects, such as VIC alone cannot rebuild this lost civic life. But they can provide a connecting vision, a model, inspiring examples, tools and social mapping for those who are already doing so. As VIC member and cofounder Javier Esquillor explained to me recently over dinner in Guadalajara, this kind of social mapping and open source collaboration could even reinvent tourism as a force for civic good.

The UN World Tourism Organization estimates that more than 1.1 billion people traveled internationally in 2015. Ignoring questions about ecological impact, the UN celebrates this tourism as a great economic stimulus and simply makes tepid recommendations that encourage tourists to "buy local."

Yet, what if a billion people wandering aimlessly around the planet with their tourist guides and selfie sticks were instead empowered to connect with people running local micro-initiatives in areas of mutual interest? The municipal government of Madrid is already using VIC maps as their official city tourist-map-cum-guide.

Having the Courage to Dream
Civic life cannot flourish in an atmosphere of dread over the future. In order to thrive politically, we need dreams, romance, entertaining stories, a bold and engaging vision of a just and sustainable future that is still anchored in our collective history, cultural diversity and the courage to pursue these things most passionately when it is hard. In a world filled with corporate propaganda and miserabilist doomsayers on both the left and right, the joy of doing so is proportionate to the challenge.

Like all newborns, the emerging open-source civic movement that reflects this hopeful sense of experimentation and possibility is tiny and fragile.

But it is also scalable because it is focused on empowering actions and initiatives that are already organically embedded in, or growing out of, the non-monetized part of people's daily lives worldwide. It therefore has the potential over time to reimagine and recreate an open, collaborative civic society of sufficient strength and diversity to dramatically expand the range of what is politically possible.

The destructive ethos of rapacious, late-stage neoliberalism and its regime of globalized capital is not inevitable. In many ways, it exhibits signs of imminent collapse and derangement.

Like the Soviet regime symbolized by the Berlin Wall, what seems insurmountable one day can collapse the next. But that collapse started years earlier with small local civic movements among workers and citizens in Poland, Czechoslovakia and across the Eastern Bloc. Former Polish President Lech Walesa called it the "Power of the Powerless."

Although the technological and social environments are very different today, the world is at a similar crossroads against an oppressively monolithic neoliberal economic philosophy that is losing both its ability to adapt and the reluctant faith of its population.

In this crisis of political legitimacy, the success of the open-source civic movement exemplified by VIC and the enormous potential of hundreds of thousands of micro-initiatives with the ability to connect worldwide, take on a much greater sense of urgency. They may soon be required to engage at a higher level.

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Indigenous groups start telecom

SUBHEAD: Mexico's indigenous people start their own telecom co-op after being refused service from national company.

By Cat Johnson on 31 October 2016 for Shareable -
(http://www.shareable.net/blog/mexicos-indigenous-groups-start-telecom-co-op-after-being-refused-service)


Image above: Computer access to internet is now available to this woman in rural Mexico. From original article.

Villa Talea de Castro is a village in Oaxaca, Mexico with a large indigenous community. Prior to 2013, the 2,500 inhabitants of the village had limited phone service via landline phone booths.

Large cell phone companies refused to provide service to the area so the community partnered with NGO Rhizomatica to install its own local cellular network that provides unlimited local calls and messages and low-cost long distance and international calls.

Now the project has grown. A new resolution by the Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones (Federal Institute of Telecommunications) granted two licenses to the nonprofit organization Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (the Indigenous Community Telecommunications) to serve other indigenous communities.

The licenses enable members of the Mixe, Mixteco, and Zapoteco communities to form their own cooperatively-owned mobile cellular telephone network allowing 356 municipalities in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz access to mobile services and the Internet.

From a statement from the Federal Institute of Telecommunications:

These two licenses will enable Indigenous Community Telecommunications to provide telecommunications services for the promotion, development, and preservation of their languages, culture, and knowledge, promoting their traditions and norms based on principles that respect gender equality and allow the integration of indigenous women into the participation of the objectives for which the licenses were requested along with other elements that make up the indigenous cultural identities.

The Indigenous Community Telecommunications network will be managed by and for the indigenous communities.

As Global Voices reports, “Instead of seeking economic profit the objective will be to serve the people, encouraging Internet access for the communities, supporting their dynamics, processes, and full exercise of their rights. A network that, without a doubt, goes beyond technology.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Build a local low-tech internet 10/25/15

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Zapatistas and Indigenous Congress

SUBHEAD: They seek to revolutionize Mexico's 2018 election with indigenous peoples governing autonomously.

By Dylan E Fitzwater on 1 November 2016 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38169-zapatistas-and-indigenous-congress-seek-to-revolutionize-mexico-s-2018-election)


Image above: Illustration of armed Zapatista woman warrior. From (https://www.kurdishquestion.com/oldarticle.php?aid=women-up-in-arms-zapatistas-and-rojava-kurds-embrace-a-new-gender-politics).

After two decades of declining to engage with electoral politics in Mexico, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress of Mexico (CNI) have announced their plans to form a national Indigenous governing council and choose and support an Indigenous woman candidate in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

For many longtime supporters of the EZLN and CNI, the October 14 announcement came as a surprise, given these organizations' consistent and staunch critique of electoral politics.

The EZLN and CNI have long advocated for the right of Mexico's Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities to govern themselves autonomously from the Mexican state. Given this well-known and unwavering political commitment, why have the EZLN and CNI decided to enter the 2018 elections?

Does this represent a rejection of their commitment to autonomy? Nothing could be further from the case. In fact, their October 14 communique reiterates their rejection of taking state power:

We confirm that our struggle is not for power, we do not seek it. Rather, we call on all of the original peoples and civil society to organize to ... strengthen our resistances and rebellions, that is, the defense of the life of every person, family, collective, community, or neighborhood. To construct peace and justice by weaving ourselves together from below, from where we are what we are.

What may at first appear as a paradox -- a campaign for the presidency that is not interested in gaining the power of the presidency -- in fact invites a deeper reflection on the nature of politics, the meaning of national elections and the possibilities for a different Mexico.

The EZLN and CNI's proposed presidential campaign appears paradoxical when one views it through a strictly institutional lens that considers national elections as straightforward state mechanisms for choosing the next president.

This lens does not see the broader significance of elections as national cultural and media events, where a large portion of the Mexican population imagines what could be different in the next six years.

The October 14 communique makes clear that for the EZLN and CNI, the goal of an electoral campaign is not to take control of existing government institutions; rather, it is to use the election as a pretext for popular organizing from below.

With their campaign, they are proposing a different possibility for the future of Mexico. But what exactly would this different future look like?

A Candidate Who Is Not a Candidate
The EZLN and CNI are not asking the Mexican public to choose a specific person to take the reins of the presidency; rather they are asking the public to choose a different form of politics that has been developed for the past 20 years in Zapatista territory in Chiapas and in the numerous Indigenous tribes and nations that make up the CNI.

The exact text of their announcement states that they will "name an Indigenous Governing Council whose words will be manifested through an indigenous woman, a CNI delegate, who will run as an independent candidate for the presidency in the name of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the electoral process of 2018."

Their candidate will not be a candidate in the traditional sense; she will be the spokesperson for a national Indigenous governing council organized outside the institutions of the Mexican state.

She will represent a rejection and redefinition of Mexican democracy: instead of rule by a male mestizo political elite, she will represent the leadership of an Indigenous woman who will speak in the name of a democratic council of Mexico's Indigenous communities.

The communique makes clear that this council will be organized in the coming year through a process of consultation and direct democracy that includes all the Indigenous communities throughout Mexico that have delegates in the CNI. In fact, this process may result in an entirely different initiative in the 2018 elections.

The communique emphasizes that even the proposal to choose an Indigenous governing council and Indigenous woman candidate must first be approved by every community in the CNI before it can move forward.

Historical Significance of an Indigenous Governing Council
The CNI has slowly developed its system of democratic decision-making and community consultation over the past 20 years.

The CNI grew out of the 1996 peace dialogues in San Andrés, Chiapas, that brokered a cease-fire between EZLN and government forces. During these dialogues, the EZLN insisted on the inclusion of all the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.

The EZLN knew that the lack of self-determination and desperate poverty that spurred their uprising were common conditions throughout Indigenous Mexico. The dialogues resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which promised a reform of the Mexican constitution guaranteeing the right to Indigenous autonomy and self-government.

In her book, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, Gloria Muñoz Ramírez explains that the Indigenous groups that collaborated with the EZLN during the dialogue process formed the CNI to struggle alongside the EZLN for the implementation of the accords.

This struggle continued in the following years, during which the Mexican government constantly violated the cease-fire with military and paramilitary aggressions against Zapatista communities.

In 2001, all three Mexican political parties, including the supposedly leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), refused to implement the San Andrés Accords, and instead passed a watered-down "Indigenous rights" law that did not place the right to Indigenous self-government in the Mexican constitution.

The EZLN has completely rejected engagement with the Mexican political establishment since this betrayal.

The betrayal of the San Andrés Accords only strengthened the EZLN's commitment to self-determination for the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and re-invigorated their struggle for autonomy in their communities.

The Zapatista communities of Chiapas have slowly developed a practice of direct communitarian democracy over the past 20 years. Since the EZLN's 1994 revolution, they have sought to build an autonomous political system and have eschewed strategies aimed at controlling existing state institutions.

Their foundational revolutionary laws established local governing bodies that made decisions through popular assemblies in each locality, and for the past 20 years, they have developed this autonomous organizational structure creating more than 30 autonomous municipalities that were grouped into five zones in 2003 under the authority of five "good government councils."

Similarly, the numerous Indigenous tribes and nations that make up the CNI have followed the EZLN's example and altered it to fit their own traditions and contexts. For example, in 2011, residents of the Purépecha town of Cherán organized their own community self-defense force, expelled all political parties from their community and now govern themselves through their own system of direct democracy.

Their uprising came in response to illegal logging in the town's forests by organized crime groups with the support of local police and politicians. Similarly, the 33 Mexican Indigenous groups that attended the most recent gathering the of the CNI all have parallel struggles that center around local democratic organizations rejecting and resisting attempts to impose resource extraction or mega-construction projects in their territories.

Proposal for a National Participatory Democracy
The CNI and EZLN have sought to build local democratic governments that, in their words, "govern by obeying" -- whose every decision obeys the will of the community where they govern. This form of democracy is the EZLN and CNI's proposal for the future of Mexico.

Rather than lining up behind an individual candidate, they are proposing a candidate as a spokeswoman for this slow democratic process in which each community approves all government decisions according to their own Indigenous or local customs and democratic organizations.

With their presidential campaign, they are hoping to expand their movement for a democratic Mexico beyond their individual territories to create a new form of politics that would include the voices of all Mexicans.

What this new form of politics would look like is still an open question that will be answered in the collective voice of the Mexican people, not just in the voice of the EZLN or the CNI.

This presidential campaign is an open call to redefine Mexican politics "from below," from the perspective of those who are marginalized by the current Mexican political establishment. As Subcomandante Galeano wrote in a recent communiqué elaborating on the EZLN and CNI proposal, "If the mere possibility of an indigenous woman existing as a citizen (with all of its rights and obligations) has the effect of causing 'the earth to tremble at its core,' what would happen if her ear and her word traveled through all of Mexico below?"

• Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater is an independent writer and activist. He has traveled to Chiapas many times during the past five years to participate in and report on EZLN public initiatives and to work as a Human Rights Observer in Zapatista communities. His forthcoming book, Autonomy is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language, analyzes the EZLN's autonomous government system in terms of the political categories of the Tsotsil Mayan cosmovision.

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TPP won't get Senate vote now

SUBHEAD: Republicans will not seek lame duck vote on Trans Pacific Partnership. Thank God!

By Deidre Fulton on 26 August 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/26/good-news-says-sanders-mcconnell-signals-no-lame-duck-vote-tpp)


Image above: People attend a rally protesting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Maui, Hawaii, the United States, July 29, 2015. From (http://thebricspost.com/if-tpp-fails-us-will-cede-trade-leadership-role-to-china-us-trade-rep/#.V8M86LUnqe8).

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that the U.S. Senate will not vote on the 12-nation, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) this year, buoying progressive hopes that the trade deal will never come to fruition. 

Responding to the news, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—whose opposition to the TPP was a hallmark of his presidential campaign—said: "This is good news for American workers, for the environment, and for the ability to protect public health."

McConnell told a Kentucky State Farm Bureau breakfast in Louisville that the agreement, "which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year."

Grassroots groups have led a concerted campaign to prevent a vote during the so-called "lame-duck" session of Congress, after the November election and before President Barack Obama leaves office in January. The White House recently vowed to wage an "all-out push" in favor of such a vote.

"We never thought we would agree with Mitch McConnell on something, but we do agree on not bringing the TPP to a vote in the lame-duck session," said Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder, on Friday. "There's widespread, bipartisan opposition to the corporate-written TPP and an unaccountable, lame-duck Congress voting on it."

However, The Hill reports, "McConnell said that while the trade agreement won't get approved in its current form, it could pass next year with some changes."

"It will still be around," said the Republican from Kentucky. "It can be massaged, changed, worked on during the next administration."

Both Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton say they're against the deal, but that opposition isn't guaranteed. And that's why opponents need to keep the pressure on.

Indeed, added Sanders: "This treaty is opposed by every trade union in the country and virtually the entire grassroots base of the Democratic Party.

In my view, it is now time for the leadership of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the House to go on the record in opposition to holding a vote on this job-killing trade deal during the lame-duck session of Congress and beyond."

To that end, Reuters notes that earlier this month, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan "said he saw no point in bringing up the TPP deal for a vote in any 'lame duck' session of Congress later this year because 'we don't have the votes.'"

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Mexico City superhero

SUBHEAD: Clogged with traffic, the capital is hard for pedestrians. Enter Peatónito, wrestling for safer streets.

By Dulce Ramos on 8 November 2015 for the Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/09/unmasked-mexico-city-superhero-wrestling-pedestrian-rights)


Image above: Masked campaigner Peatónito pushes back a car that has strayed on to a pedestrian crossing in Mexico City. Photograph by Sean Smith. From original article.

The traffic light turns red at the corner of Avenida Juárez and Eje Central, the busiest pedestrian crossing in Mexico City, used by around 9,000 people every hour. Tonight, a driver stops his grey Peugeot exactly on the crossing where the masses are trying to pass. His car is now a steel barrier for those trying to reach the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

A masked man dressed in black makes his way through the river of people, walking purposefully towards the Peugeot. His black and white striped cape, reminiscent of a zebra crossing, flaps behind him. He goes to the car, flings his cape over his shoulder, and pushes the Peugeot backwards to make space.

“My name is Peatónito, and I fight for the rights of pedestrians,” he says, introducing himself. The driver smiles and reverses willingly and eventually the pair shake hands. With the pedestrian crossing again flowing as it should, Peatónito heads back to the pavement where he will wait until he is needed again. The traffic light turns green.

Since 2012, Mexico City has had a “superhero” defending its pedestrians: Peatónito, or Pedestrian Man. Three years after he first appeared on the streets, armed with a highway code and a white aerosol can to spray zebra crossings and pavements where none existed, Peatónito can take pride in the victories that he and his fellow transport rights activists have achieved.

Together, they fight for a safer, more efficient way for people to get around the capital – which has 5.5m vehicles in circulation – on foot.

The triumphs are tangible. This August, Mexico City’s government presented a new set of road traffic regulations with reduced speed limits on primary routes (that is, slower routes) from 70km/h to 50km/h. The reduced speed limit isn’t a mere whim on the part of the activists; it’s possible to measure how dangerous the streets of the capital are. In Mexico City, 52 accidents in every 1,000 are fatal. In the entire country, the rate is 39 deaths for every 1,000 accidents.

Another battle that has been fought and won is the implementation of “Vision Zero”, a series of public policies aimed at eradicating road traffic deaths, which activists worldwide have been backing for years. Their aims: an ethical focus to ensure that human life is prioritised; shared responsibility between those who design the roads and those who use them, and street safety and mechanisms for change.

The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK are among the pioneering countries to adopt Vision Zero (the first two just under 20 years ago). Then came US cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and eight more. In Mexico, the initiative has been taken up – at least as a point of discussion – in Torreón, an industrial city in the state of Coahuila, and in Mexico City.

If today pedestrians are at the centre of Mexico City’s new road traffic regulations – having relegated cars from the top of the agenda – it is in large part the result of years of activism influencing the city’s policies on road traffic safety.

The dangers of walking

But why does Mexico City need a superhero like Peatónito? And how did the country’s first group of pedestrian rights activists emerge in the capital? If you consider that Mexico City combines the biggest concentration of cars, inadequate road infrastructure, and a total lack of road safety culture, it is not surprising that there are more deaths on the city’s streets than on any others in Mexico.

According to the National Council for the Prevention of Accidents, in 2013, 491 pedestrians died in road traffic accidents in Mexico City. This is equivalent to 6% of all the pedestrian deaths recorded that year in the country. In contrast, when we look at the number of fatalities among drivers and vehicle passengers, the figure is cut by half.

Only 265 of those killed in road traffic accidents in 2013 were behind the wheel or in the car at the time. Being a pedestrian in the world’s fourth most populous city is to risk one’s neck on a daily occurrence.

Despite the fact that in Mexico City, just three out of every 10 journeys are made by car, for decades the government has favoured investment in public works that favour car usage. Walking around the city may well be for the adventurous types, statistically speaking, but Mexico City is full of people who make their journeys on two feet: navigating cars, running after buses that don’t stop where they should, risking their lives on the public bicycle system.

Looking after all these people are the traffic police, but there is little they can do in a city of feverish drivers who will do anything to arrive at their destination on time.

Convincing Mexico’s inhabitants to use their cars less would not only reduce the number of traffic accidents, but would improve the functionality of the city by cutting, for example, the time it takes to commute across the metropolitan zone. Daily transport services in the form of ramshackle buses, driven recklessly, head to the centre crammed with passengers from the suburbs. The underground system, the Metro, has not been properly serviced in years and is also packed to dangerous extremes each morning.
Mexico City, like other cities in the world, doesn’t boast services such as “park and ride” or “incentive parking” – those car parks that allow commuters heading for city centres to leave their vehicles and transfer to public transport connections for part of the journey.
With a general outlook like this, it is little wonder that people opt to use their cars each day to get around, despite it taking up to two or three hours for them to reach their destination.
It’s for all these reasons that Peatónito swoops down onto the streets of Mexico City, backed by a network of activists intent on putting a stop to such problems and making the city more civilised and habitable.

Peatónito unmasked

The man behind Peatónito’s mask is Jorge Cáñez, a 29-old political scientist who works in a civic technology lab for the city government. Twice a week, he dresses as a superhero and takes to the streets to expose serious and minor traffic violations.

“In Mexico City, just moving from A to B is the most hazardous, complicated and inefficient thing imaginable,” says Peatónito, in a bar in the Roma district, one of the city’s most pedestrian-friendly areas, where cyclists and motorcyclists can move around in relative safety. He recalls how his activism began when he had to endure the daily torment of travelling by bus from his house to university.

“When I was a student, I told myself: ‘I’m not going to rest until I find out the reason why public transport from my house to university is so bad, and until I find a solution’.” Thus, 10 years ago, Cáñez began investigating how Mexico City’s public transportation policies are conceived. What he didn’t know was that he wasn’t alone.

In 2010, with the arrival in of the Metrobús, Mexico City’s first bus system in the style of busway or BRT (Bus rapid transit), the agenda around transportation began to be more visible. And yet, groups of urban cyclists had already spent more than 20 years trying to highlight the importance of developing a city that is more amenable to different modes of transport. In 2010, the collective “Walk, Build a City”, the first group of pedestrian rights activists in the country, began to make themselves known.

 

That year, on 21 March, members of the collective painted a pavement on a controversial highway that was built without the normal public bidding process and which damaged green areas.It seemed no one felt it important that the pedestrians should have a designated path, despite the fact they were forced to use that space if they wanted to take the bus.

It took those citizens longer to paint the pavement than for the government to remove it. “We promise to paint a better one,” officials said. And although it took some time, in the end they did designate a narrow strip along the bridge to pedestrians. It was the first of many victories for the pro-mobility activists.

‘The road can be a ring’

Was it necessary to create a character that resembled something out of a Lucha Libre fight to raise awareness about the risks to Mexico City’s pedestrians? Jorge Peatónito isn’t sure, but he believes creativity is a powerful weapon for activists.

“Lucha Libre is deep-rooted in Mexican life, but the idea [for Peatónito] came to me the day I took a few foreign friends along to see a fight. If we’ve had Superbarrio (another Mexican self-claimed superhero who fought causes on behalf of the city’s lower classes in the 1990s), why can’t we imagine the street as a wrestling ring?” This is how his activism acquired its comedy touch.

Humour aside, Peatónito is well aware that in real life superpowers don’t exist, and was himself involved in a car crash four months ago, when a car rammed his bicycle near the Tepito neighbourhood, an area of the city that is notorious for its gangs and black market. Fortunately, he was unhurt – traffic chaos is his kryptonite, he says.

Notwithstanding the risks of the job, Cáñez finds it rewarding and has no plans to abandon his superhero persona: “I do it all for the love of art, to do something for the city. Financially speaking, Peatónito hasn’t earned me more than the fee for a few talks and a couple of trips. That’s it. The best thing is the satisfaction of communicating a message in a powerful way.”

In 2010, with the arrival in of the Metrobús, Mexico City’s first bus system in the style of busway or BRT (Bus rapid transit), the agenda around transportation began to be more visible. And yet, groups of urban cyclists had already spent more than 20 years trying to highlight the importance of developing a city that is more amenable to different modes of transport. In 2010, the collective “Walk, Build a City”, the first group of pedestrian rights activists in the country, began to make themselves known.

That year, on 21 March, members of the collective painted a pavement on a controversial highway that was built without the normal public bidding process and which damaged green areas.It seemed no one felt it important that the pedestrians should have a designated path, despite the fact they were forced to use that space if they wanted to take the bus.

It took those citizens longer to paint the pavement than for the government to remove it. “We promise to paint a better one,” officials said. And although it took some time, in the end they did designate a narrow strip along the bridge to pedestrians. It was the first of many victories for the pro-mobility activists.

‘The road can be a ring’

Was it necessary to create a character that resembled something out of a Lucha Libre fight to raise awareness about the risks to Mexico City’s pedestrians? Jorge Peatónito isn’t sure, but he believes creativity is a powerful weapon for activists.

“Lucha Libre is deep-rooted in Mexican life, but the idea [for Peatónito] came to me the day I took a few foreign friends along to see a fight. If we’ve had Superbarrio (another Mexican self-claimed superhero who fought causes on behalf of the city’s lower classes in the 1990s), why can’t we imagine the street as a wrestling ring?” This is how his activism acquired its comedy touch.

Humour aside, Peatónito is well aware that in real life superpowers don’t exist, and was himself involved in a car crash four months ago, when a car rammed his bicycle near the Tepito neighbourhood, an area of the city that is notorious for its gangs and black market. Fortunately, he was unhurt – traffic chaos is his kryptonite, he says.

Notwithstanding the risks of the job, Cáñez finds it rewarding and has no plans to abandon his superhero persona:

“I do it all for the love of art, to do something for the city. Financially speaking, Peatónito hasn’t earned me more than the fee for a few talks and a couple of trips. That’s it. The best thing is the satisfaction of communicating a message in a powerful way.”

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Pope joins battle with GMOs

SUBHEAD: In Mexico the situation is terrible and merits papal intervention. This gives us moral support to continue the struggle.

By Emilio Godoy on 12 August 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/12/pope-francis-joins-battle-against-transgenic-crops)


Image above: There is no papal bull on transgenic crops in Laudato Si, the second encyclical of Pope Francis, “on the care of our common home” – planet earth. Photo credit Norberto Miguel/IPS). From original article.

A few centuries ago, the biotechnology industry would have been able to buy a papal bull to expiate its sins and grant it redemption. But in his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si”, Pope Francis condemns genetically modified organisms (GMOs) without leaving room for a pardon.

In his second encyclical since he became pope on Mar. 13, 2013 – but the first that is entirely his work – Jorge Mario Bergoglio criticises the social, economic and agricultural impacts of GMOs and calls for a broad scientific debate.

Laudato Si – “Praise be to you, my Lord” in medieval Italian – takes its title from Saint Francis of Assisi’s 13th-century Canticle of the Sun, one of whose verses is: “Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”

It is the first encyclical in history dedicated to the environment and reflecting on “our common home” – planet earth.

The encyclical, which was published Jun. 18, acknowledges that “no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings.” But it stresses that “there remain a number of significant difficulties which should not be underestimated.”

“In many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to ‘the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production’,” it adds.

As a result, says the first Latin American pope, farmers are driven to become temporary labourers, many rural workers end up in urban slums, ecosystems are destroyed, and “oligopolies” expand in the production of cereals and inputs needed for their cultivation.

Francis calls for “A broad, responsible scientific and social debate…one capable of considering all the available information and of calling things by their name” because “It sometimes happens that complete information is not put on the table; a selection is made on the basis of particular interests, be they politico-economic or ideological.”

Such a debate on GMOs is missing, and the biotech industry has refused to open up its databases to verify whether or not transgenic crops are innocuous.

According to the encyclical, “Discussions are needed in which all those directly or indirectly affected (farmers, consumers, civil authorities, scientists, seed producers, people living near fumigated fields, and others) can make known their problems and concerns, and have access to adequate and reliable information in order to make decisions for the common good, present and future.”

Miguel Concha, a Catholic priest who heads the Fray Francisco de Vitoria Human Rights Centre in Mexico, said this country “is already a reference point in the fight for the right to a healthy environment, due to the determined efforts of social organisations. This encyclical reinforces our collective demand,” he told Tierramérica.

The priest said the encyclical warns of the social, economic, legal and ethical implications of transgenic crops, just as environmentalists in Mexico have done for years.

The document holds special importance for nations like Mexico, which have been the scene of intense battles over transgenic crops – in this country mainly maize, which has special cultural significance here, besides being the basis of the local diet.

That is also true for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, which together with southern Mexico form Mesoamérica, the seat of the ancient Maya civilisation.

The pope is familiar with the impact of transgenic crops, because according to experts his home country, Argentina, is the Latin American nation where GMOs have done the most to alter traditional agriculture.

Soy – 98 percent of which is transgenic – is Argentina’s leading crop, covering 31 million hectares, up from just 4.8 million hectares in 1990, according to the soy industry association, ACSOJA.

The monoculture crop has displaced local producers, fuelled the concentration of land, and created “a vicious circle that is highly dangerous for the sustainability of our production systems,” Argentine agronomist Carlos Toledo told Tierramérica.

Just 10 countries account for nearly all production of GMOs: the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, India, China, Paraguay, South Africa, Pakistan and Uruguay, in that order. Most of the production goes to the animal feed industry, but Mexico wants GM maize to be used for human consumption.

In July 2013, 53 individuals and 20 civil society organisations mounted a collective legal challenge against applications to commercially plant transgenic maize, and in September of that year a federal judge granted a precautionary ban on such authorisations.

Since March 2014, organisations of beekeepers and indigenous communities have won two further provisional protection orders against commercial transgenic soybean crops in the southeastern states of Campeche and Yucatán.

On Apr. 30, 2014, eight scientists from six countries sent an open letter to Pope Francis about the negative environmental, economic, agricultural, cultural and social impacts of GM seeds, especially in Mexico.

In their letter, the experts stated: “…we believe that it would be of momentous importance and great value to all if Your Holiness were to express yourself critically on GM crops and in support of peasant farming. This support would go a long way toward saving peoples and the planet from the threat posed by the control of life wielded by companies that monopolise seeds, which are the key to the entire food web…”

Laudato Si indicates that the pope did listen to their plea.

“The encyclical is very encouraging, because it has expressed an ecological position,” Argelia Arriaga, a professor at the University Centre for Disaster Prevention of the Autonomous University of Puebla, told Tierramérica. “It touches sensitive fibers; the situation is terrible and merits papal intervention. This gives us moral support to continue the struggle.”

But legal action has failed to curb the biotech industry’s ambitions in Mexico.

In 2014, the National Service for Agri-Food Health, Safety and Quality (SENASICA) received four applications from the biotech industry and public research centres for experimental planting of maize on nearly 10 hectares of land.

In addition, there were 30 requests for pilot projects involving experimental and commercial planting of GM cotton on a total of 1.18 million hectares – as well as one application for beans, five for wheat, three for lemons and one for soy – all experimental.

SENASICA is also processing five biotech industry requests for planting more than 200,000 hectares of GM cotton and alfalfa for commercial and experimental purposes.

“This is an economic and development model that ignores food production,” said Concha, the priest who heads the Fray Francisco de Vitoria Human Rights Centre.

The participants in the collective lawsuit against GMOs, having successfully gotten federal courts to throw out 22 stays brought by the government and companies against the legal decision to temporarily suspend permits for planting, are now getting ready for a trial that will decide the future of transgenic crops in the country.

Arriaga noted that the focus of the encyclical goes beyond GM crops, and extends to other environmental struggles. “For people in local communities, the pope’s message is important, because it tells them they have to take care of nature and natural resources. It helps raise awareness,” the professor said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.




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Indigenous farming is the future

SUBHEAD: Cropland can expand if the encroached lands do not have much natural potential for biodiversity.

By Leah Penniman on 11 August 2015 for Yes Magzine  -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/four-ways-mexico-indigenous-farmers-agriculture-of-the-future-20150810)


Image above: Josefino Martinez explains how the pine trees he planted just three years ago are stabilizing the soil on the mountainside. Photo by Leah Penniman. From original article.

Affectionately called “Professor” by his neighbors, Josefino Martinez is a well-respected indigenous farmer and community organizer from the remote town of Chicahuaxtla, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He watched with patient attention as I showed him photographs of Soul Fire Farm, my family’s organic farm in the mountains of upstate New York.

I tried to convince Martinez that our farms had a lot in common. “Like you, we have marginal mountain soils and steep slopes, and we’ve worked for years to build up the fertility,” I explained.

Martinez finished his simple breakfast of fresh corn tortillas with black beans. Then he rose, donned his baseball cap and undersized school backpack, and took me out to see the land he cultivates. I quickly came to understand that my idea of “marginal soils” and “steep slopes” were naive, if not laughable. It was the height of the dry season and Martinez’s land was hard, brittle, and gray.

The farm was literally etched into the mountainside, with a slope so severe that plowing with tractors or animals was impossible. Yet his storage room was full of maize, beans, dried chili, squash seeds, and fresh fruit that he’d grown right here.

When I asked how this was possible, Martinez explained that he simply farmed in the manner of his ancestors, the indigenous Triqui people.

Western agronomists would have us believe that Triqui farming practices are irrelevant today, but I thought they might be part of the solution to the nascent global food crisis. I spent the first half of 2015 in southern Mexico on a Fulbright fellowship to exchange ideas with indigenous farmers like Martinez on how get long-term high yields out of difficult farmland.

I was fed up with our society’s obsession with corporate, industrial agriculture, which is flooding vulnerable communities with unhealthy food, destroying natural resources, and undermining the independent family farm.

What I learned gave me hope.

According to a detailed report by my favorite think tank, the World Resources Institute, the first thing to know about the impending food crisis is that the human population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050. That’s a 37 percent increase from 2012, when it reached 7 billion. Even imagining massive redistribution of food resources, the world will need to produce 69 percent more calories by 2050 to feed all those people.

But agriculture already accounts for a nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of freshwater use globally. So if we simply increased the scale of what we’re doing now, the ecological effects would be catastrophic. The report goes on to describe a “menu of solutions” that farmers can follow in the future to grow more food without using additional land, water, and fuel.

I had a hunch that rural farmers in Mexico were already modeling some of these practices and not being credited. While it was difficult to leave behind the daily responsibilities of tending the land, I knew that only grassroots farmer-to-farmer exchange could solve the world’s food crisis. So, with my husband and children at my side, I left behind our farm in New York and traversed the windy mountain roads of Oaxaca to trade ideas on how to feed our communities with dignity and take care of the earth at the same time.

What I learned gave me hope. Here are three items from WRI’s list of solutions that the farmers I met are already doing—and one that isn’t on their list but probably should be.



Image above: This degraded land in the Mixteca was restored to lush vegetable gardens under the direction of Jesús León Santos. Photo by Leah Penniman. From original article.

1. Farm like a forest

Not accounting for land covered by water, desert, or ice, about half of the planet is dedicated to pasture and croplands, according to WRI’s study. And the continued expansion of agricultural land is driving biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, an increase in “cropping intensity” could avert the need to clear an additional 62 million hectares for crops by 2050. That’s an area about the size of France. In other words, farmers need to start growing different plants one after another on the same land, as well as growing them closer together at the same time, a practice known as intercropping.

Planting different crops together minimizes soil erosion.

Oswaldo Flores, a Zapotec indigenous man from the village of Yaviche, explained how his community uses intercropping and agroforestry to grow more food without expanding into new lands.
“The forest pulls clouds from the sky so that they drop rain on the fields below,” Flores said, while showing me his shade-grown coffee farm.

The farm is a cafetal, a shady, multistory system with tall, purple-podded guajinicuiles and fruit trees forming the upper layer, coffee trees at the intermediate layer, and smaller food plants and vines (chiles, chives, chayotes) near the ground. The trees protect the plants below from high winds and cold temperatures, and their fallen leaves provide a natural compost that inhibits weed growth, adds fertility, and retains soil humidity. Guajinicuiles also fix nitrogen, making it available in organic form in the soil. This system of shade-grown coffee is almost equal to the native forest in terms of biodiversity, and maintains habitat for migratory birds.

At the edge of Flores’ cafetal, the vegetation transitioned to another complex and even more ancient intercropping system. The milpa is a Mesoamerican technology that integrates maize, beans, squash and other complementary food crops. While estimates of its age differ, it is at least 3,000 years old.

The intercropped milpa system is multilayered, with maize in the upper canopy, beans in the intermediate story, and squash at the bottom.

Bean plants fix atmospheric nitrogen and help reduce damage caused by the corn earworm pest (Helicoverpa sea). Squash plants inhibit weed growth with their dense network of thick, broad leaves and retain soil humidity. Natural chemicals (cucurbitacins) washed from the leaf surface act as a mild herbicide and pesticide.

Planting different crops together minimizes soil erosion because their roots form a dense network that holds soil in place. This system also tends to be very efficient, squeezing the maximum value out of every drop of water, ray of sunlight, and bit of nutrients in the soil. According to studies using the Land Equivalency Ratio—a way of measuring the productivity of agricultural land—intercropped fields often yield 40 to 50 percent more than monocropped ones.

H. Garrison Wilkes, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, calls milpa “one of the most successful human inventions ever created.”


Image above: Local maize varieties harvested from the farm of Josefino Martinez. Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff. From original article.

2. Eat low on the food chain

Aside from the detrimental health effects of getting our protein from animal products, it's also highly inefficient. Poultry is the most efficient conventional source of meat, and still only converts 11 percent of its feed energy into human food. Beef cows convert only 1 percent and are major contributors of greenhouse gases. Shifting toward plant and insect-based protein sources is part of the sustainable food solution.

Amaranth is making a comeback in Brisa’s town.

“You have never tried chicatanas?” challenged Brisa Ochoa, as she served our family a salsa made of mashed ants in her hometown of Ayoquezco. During the first spring rains, the chicatana ant leaves its nest, only to be captured by eager residents who prize its sweet and tangy flavor. Mexico has 300 to 550 species of edible insects, more than any other country in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Among the most popular in Oaxaca are grasshoppers known as chapulines, served roasted and flavored with lime and chili, and maguey worms, served ground up and incorporated into a spicy salt. Insect protein takes some getting used to, but it’s healthier and more environmentally sustainable than livestock, boasting a feed conversion ratio of more than 50 percent.

While insect protein is important in rural Mexico, it mainly serves as flavoring for plant-based protein sources. Brisa served her salsa with beans on a fresh, warm corn tortilla resulting from an ancient process called nixtamalization. She used limestone and hot water to remove the hull from the maize, then ground up the kernels into the dough for tortillas.

Nixtamalization makes the protein in maize more bioavailable to the human body and increases its niacin content. When combined with beans, the nixtamalized corn offers a complete protein.

Brisa’s family also grows amaranth, a native Mesoamerican grain that has been cultivated in Mexico for at least 6,000 years. Nearly eradicated by the conquering Spaniards who feared its role in traditional religion, amaranth is making a comeback in Brisa’s town, thanks to her family’s breeding and sharing its seeds.

Up until this trip to Mexico, I had only experienced amaranth as a “weed” invading my neat beds of vegetables and didn’t realize that its seeds are 13 to 15 percent protein, among the highest for any grain. Amaranth is also high in fiber, calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, folate, and vitamins A and C. Like beans, amaranth can be combined with maize to form a complete protein.

Brisa’s family does eat chicken, beef, and pork, but usually only on special occasions. Plant and insect protein are the basis of their healthful, affordable, and sustainable diet.


Image above: Corn, beans, and squash grow together in this milpa, tended by Oswaldo Flores. Photo by Leah Penniman. From original article. [IB Publisher's note: Where I came from in Western NY the Iroquois practiced milpa under the name "The Three Sisters". In 1994 my wife and I attended a national Greens meeting in Seneca NY and learned that the  "secret sauce" was to place fish heads in the mounds of corn, beans and squash.]

3. Restore health to damaged land

Cropland can expand at low environmental cost if the encroached lands do not have much natural potential to store carbon or support biodiversity. The arid Mixteca region of Oaxaca meets these criteria and has been termed an “ecological disaster zone” by the World Bank. Soil erosion and depletion has damaged about one million acres of cropland, and corn productivity rates have plummeted to the lowest in Mexico.

Jesús León Santos, sustainable agriculture coordinator at CEDICAM, an indigenous farming organization in the Mixteca, blames Green Revolution farming technology for the environmental destruction. The Green Revolution of the 1960s was an U.S.-led international effort to push adoption of farm mechanization, hybrid seeds, and chemical fertilizers in order to increase yields.

León Santos is working to revive and enhance indigenous farming wisdom in order to restore the health of the soil and the productivity of the land.

The first step for León Santos and his farming community was to build trenches, stone walls, and terraces to stop the erosion of the remaining soils and to slow water runoff so aquifers can recharge. He stabilized these barriers with tenacious local vegetation, such as the sweet-smelling vetiver grass, which withstands drought, flooding, and mudslides.

Once stabilized, the barren hillsides were reforested with native tree species, like nitrogen-fixing alders (Alnus acumilata) and pines (Pinus oaxacana). The CEDICAM community saves its own native crop seed, using an in-the-field selection process that has persisted regionally since the pre-Columbian era. They preserve and exchange the best seeds of maize, beans, squash, chile, tomatillo, chayote, squash, sunflower, and prickly pear, as well as local specialties like cempoalxochitl, quintoniles, and huauzontle.

The farmers further improve the soil by planting and tilling in “cover crops,” which add nutrients and organic matter. Some native varieties are especially good for this, like the “frijol nescafe,” ( Mucuna deeringiana) a nitrogen-fixing bean that thrives in dry soil. Finally, farmers add compost and plant debris so that the land is finally ready to receive these carefully maintained crop seeds.

The use of erosion control barriers, intercropping, and seed saving are part of the knowledge León Santos inherited from his Zapotec ancestors. And it’s working. León Santos says he has seen yields increase fourfold after incorporating these ancient and modern sustainable growing techniques. The newly established vegetation sequesters atmospheric carbon and attracts biodiversity.

The art of transforming lands of low ecological productivity into thriving foodscapes is not unique to the Mixteca. León Santos reminded me that the Aztec Empire sustained itself on chinampas, intricate gardens built of vegetation and river muck, essentially artificial islands constructed in shallow lakes.  

Chinampas are widely considered the most productive form of agriculture ever invented, and are so fertile that they can yield four to seven harvests per year. Indigenous Mexicans have long-standing successes in positive ecological transformation.


Image above: A boy snuggles into his grandmother, who wears the traditional woven huipil of the Triqui indigenous people. Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff. From original article.

4. Cultivate reverence for the planet

One essential element missing from the World Resource Institute’s otherwise thorough and brilliant “menu of solutions” for the global food crisis was the ethical perspective that co-evolved with best practices in environmental management. This ethic, known as convivencia, or “living together” with both our human and natural communities, is best summarized by Kiado Cruz, a Zapotec farmer from the Oaxacan town of Yagavila:

The ground beneath our feet is our Mother Nature, who has carried us and sustains us. As we work her, we do not profane her, rather we carry out our task as farmers in the context of the sacred. It is corn through which Mother Nature nourishes us. It is flesh of our flesh, because we are people of corn. So we have to collect it in a manner that shows the respect we owe both our soil and our brother corn.

It is with a similar sense of belonging and reverence that I placed corn seeds into our home soil upon return, establishing Soul Fire Farm’s first milpa, an ancient and intricate tangle of complementary sister crops bringing us one small step closer to a sustainable food future.

• Leah Penniman wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Leah is a farmer and educator based in the Albany, N.Y., area.

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Exodus to Yellowknife

SUBHEAD: Most life forms tend to be preoccupied with the continuation of their blood line, and I assume that you are no exception.

By Dmitry Orlov on 6 January 2014 for ClubOrlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/01/exodus-to-yellowknife.html)


Image above: Aurora Borialis over Yellowknife, Canada. From original article.

Once in a while I get a book in the mail that I haven't purchased. This is often a pleasant surprise, since I rip through books the way most people go through salted peanuts, and having more reading matter laying around rarely hurts.

I do eventually read most of them. The exceptions so far have been a few self-published books sent to me by batshit-crazy authors who have zero chance of getting published. And when the book is a recent release sent to me by a publisher, I incur a debt of gratitude which I discharge by writing a review. And although the publisher is looking to pick up a ringing endorsement from me, I feel free-ish to actually express what I think.

Such is the case with my book du jour, sent to me by my contact at New Society Publishers: Gilles Slade's American Exodus, published just three months ago, cheerfully subtitled Climate Change and the Coming Fight for Survival. To get the unpleasantly honest part out of the way, let me just say that it is an uneven work—written well, edited badly. The same good points are made repeatedly in eerily similar ways throughout the book.

Each chapter reads like a conversation with Slade, focusing on some specific topic, but meandering to encompass the rest along the way. A good editor would have taken a scalpel to this manuscript, eliminating the repetitions.

That said, the book is quite interesting. It is the result of an attempt by Slade to answer a simple question: Where should his son live should he wish to survive? You see, after absorbing a large volume of information on the expected results of climate change, Slade came to the conclusion that his options for survival will be *cough* circumscribed.

But he does arrive at answer. Slade looks at rising ocean levels, at fossil aquifer depletion, at the disappearance of glaciers and of rivers fed by glacial melt, at the probability of various extreme weather events, and, taking it all in, makes a recommendation: his son should resettle in Yellowknife, capital of Canada's Northwest Territories.

The 2011 Canadian census puts its population at 19,234. With the addition of Slade's son, that would make it 19,235. Where the rest of our children should move to should they wish to survive is left as an exercise for the reader. I have worked that out for myself, by the way, but I will save that bit of good news for last.

Slade is a West Coast Canadian who loves California, and his focus is the northern half of Western Hemisphere. He does mention the heat wave in Europe that killed thousands, and another in the Moscow region, but these are tangential to his pursuit.

When he says “we,” he means “we the North Americans.” His world view consists of two slices of whole grain bread—Canada and Mexico, with a fat, juicy slice of baloney sandwiched between them. According to his research the climate of the future does not bode well for the lower slice or the baloney.

Bottom to top, Mexico will turn into a scorched desert where no food crops can be grown. The prairie states of the US will likewise turn into an unproductive dustbowl raked flat by ever-larger tornados, and the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer will spell the end of agriculture even in places where climatic conditions permit.

Agriculture in the Central Valley of California, where much of the country's produce is grown, is likewise going to shut down due to lack of water for irrigation. Meanwhile, rising ocean levels coupled with increasingly energetic North Atlantic hurricanes will destroy much of the East Coast, where half the population and much of the wealth is concentrated.

Similar effects will be felt in Canada: the Maritimes will partially submerge, and the prairie provinces will wither in the summer heat and blow away. But Canada, being the country with the second largest amount of land (after Russia), with much of it far to the north, where temperatures will remain moderate, will, Slade thinks, remain survivable longer; hence his plug for Yellowknife.


Image above: Flooding over a pier in Boston Harbor From original article.

In case you believe that nothing particularly dramatic will happen within your or your children's lifetime, perhaps you should look around. I have: above is a picture of what a part of Boston waterfront looked like during the New Year nor’easter: Boston is becoming like Venice, where Piazza San Marco is routinely awash during winter storms.

A few more feet of sea level rise, and seawater will circumvent Charles River Locks, at which point high tides will inundate Back Bay, making Downtown into an island once again. The problem is much the same up and down the coast. In 2012 we had pictures of cars smashing about in the storm surge in Lower Manhattan and the Jersey Coast transformed into a pile of debris by Hurricane Sandy.

Manhattan, where a great deal of wealth and activity is concentrated, is connected to the mainland by tunnels; rising sea levels will put the tunnel entrances below the high tide line, putting a damper on the activities. Further down the coast, Charleston is perhaps just one major hurricane away from being wiped out.

Taking all of this in, Slade makes an important point that goes beyond just anticipating all of this destruction: he thinks that as each part of the North American continent ceases to be survivable, their populations will relocate to more survivable places—hence the term “exodus.”

First, Mexicans will flee to the US, in a well-rehearsed pattern. Then California and the prairie and desert states of the US will lose the rest of their populations (they have been depopulating for some time already, and this trend will only accelerate). Finally, all of this displaced humanity will slosh across the border into Canada, completely overwhelming the relatively tiny Canadian population.

Slade avoids discussing the practicalities and the mechanics of these mass migrations—what sort of military action will accompany the opening of the US-Mexico border, for instance—but the outline is visible. Projections are that 2050 US will be a majority-Hispanic country.

That majority is unlikely to favor maintaining the Great Wall of Mexico. As far as Canada's chances of controlling immigration, they are scant: most Canadians live along the indefensible US border, well within artillery range of it. Most of their trade is cross-border. Faced with a crisis of the magnitude Slade foresees, the idea of making a stand for Canada's sovereignty will no doubt come to be seen as silly.

Most life forms tend to be preoccupied with the continuation of their blood line, and I assume that you are no exception. You may or may not concur with Slade's dire prognosis, but if you don't then I assume that you have done your own research and, if it happened to be fact-based, inevitably came to similar conclusions, in which case your disagreements with Slade's analysis are likely to be minor.

And in that case you would probably like to know where to resettle your children before entire countries set out on a death march to lands unknown.

I do have such a plan, and it is simple. My son has a certain piece of paper, which I have gone through some pains to secure for him, and which grants him the birthright to some 17 million square kilometers of prime real estate, much of it quite far to the north (compared to Canada's paltry 5.4 million square kilometers). That piece of paper is called a Russian passport.

Slade's analysis concentrates just on North America, but I think North America will be a basket case and find it more worthwhile to look at the planet as a whole, and sort countries into three columns: “destroyed,” “devastated” and “damaged.”

A lot of countries definitely belong in the “destroyed” column: island nations like Palau or Kiribati that are in the process of becoming ocean shoal nations, as well as nations irrigated by rivers that are fed by rapidly disappearing glaciers, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh and quite a few others.

They will experience a decade of floods as the glaciers rapidly melt, followed by permanent drought. Next are the “devastated” countries; these are perhaps survivable, but for a much smaller and much more miserable population.

I suppose that Slade is right and that Canada will be “devastated” because of incursions by its “destroyed” neighbors to the south across its long and tactically indefensible southern border. Russia, I believe, will be “damaged:” yes, there will be huge environmental problems—peat bogs and boreal forests on fire, gigantic floods, loss of coastal cities (St. Petersburg won't be able to hide behind its dam forever)—but Russia will, by and large, remain survivable for a great many people.

Nor is it likely to be invaded: every invasion attempt since Genghis Khan's has gone badly for the invader. There will be large numbers of people moving into Russia's vast empty spaces from abroad, but only to the extent permitted by the Federal Migration Service.

If you don't like this analysis, or if my plan doesn't appeal to you, then do your own analysis, and make your own plan. And if you don't know where to start, then maybe Slade's book will get you started.

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The Colorado River Delta

SUBHEAD: Scientists plan for grand experiment in the Colorado River Delta - Some rewatering.

By Sandra Postel on 12 December 2013 for National Geographic -
(http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/12/scientists-plan-for-grand-experiment-in-the-colorado-river-delta/)


Image above: The dry Colorado River Delta against the Cucapá Mountains. Photo by Erik Rochner from original article.

Once written off as dying of thirst and beyond revival, the delta of the Colorado River is slated to get a rejuvenating flood that for scientists offers a unique opportunity: the chance to study how plants, trees, birds, fisheries, and the vast delta ecosystem as a whole respond to an experimental pulse of river water.

This flood is made possible by Minute 319, the add-on to the 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico that divides the Colorado River between the two neighboring nations.

Signed in late 2012, Minute 319 allows Mexico to store some water in Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind Hoover Dam, establishes new rules for sharing shortages in times of drought, and commits the two nations to return some flow to the delta as part of a five-year pilot project.

The Colorado Delta was once one of the planet’s great desert aquatic ecosystems, boasting 2 million acres of lush wetland habitat. For millions of years, it received a huge spring flood as the winter snows melted in the Rocky Mountains and the resulting flows coursed south. The flood waters spread across the delta before emptying into the upper Gulf of California.

That yearly flood cleansed the river channel and floodplain, recharged groundwater, aided the reproduction of native cottonwoods and willows, and sustained the overall delta ecosystem and its extraordinary bird and wildlife habitat. It also connected the Colorado River to the sea, where fisheries depend on the mixing of saltwater with fresh water for their spawning and rearing grounds.

But the construction of big dams and river diversions during the 20th century siphoned off the river’s flow, leaving little or none for the delta in most years of the last half century. Wetlands have shrunk to about 10 percent of their former area, and fish, birds and wildlife have declined dramatically. The native Cucapá, who fished and farmed in the delta for at least a thousand years, have lost their way of life.

The last time the delta enjoyed a significant influx of fresh water was in the late 1990s, a period of unusually high precipitation in the Colorado watershed that resulted in “surplus” water passing through the basin’s dams, across the international border, and on to the thirsty delta in northwestern Mexico.

Writing in this week’s issue of Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, seven scientists who have collectively clocked decades of research in the Colorado Delta note that those 1990s flood pulses “demonstrated the resilience of the riparian zone and gave hope for its potential restoration, should a regular supply of water be found.”

Minute 319 calls for a flood pulse of 105,392 acre-feet (130 million cubic meters). The water will be released from Lake Mead at Hoover Dam, and then, mimicking the historic natural flood, will flow south to the delta.

Compared with the pre-dam spring flood of some 15 million acre-feet, this pulse appears paltry. But the delta scientists expect it to be sufficient to flood low terraces and backwaters, move channel sediments, recharge groundwater, and promote the germination of native cottonwoods and willows, which create prime habitat for birds.

Last February, a National Geographic team and I traversed parts of the delta with Osvel Hinojosa Huerta, an ecologist with the Mexican conservation organization ProNatura Noroeste and a co-author of the Eos article.

We visited a local nursery that was growing young cottonwoods, willows and mesquite, native trees that are being planted along the river channel and in wetland restoration sites. The anticipated spring flood will help them get established and reproduce.

Teams of scientists from both sides of the border are collecting pre-flood baseline data and, after the flood, they will track the immediate and longer-term effects on the delta’s vegetation, birds, wildlife, and other ecosystem attributes.

The hope is that beneficial results, and the potential for more, will lead the two countries to expand the restoration effort beyond this pilot period and establish a longer-term commitment to revitalizing the delta.

The experimental spring flood offers a rare scientific opportunity, to be sure.

But even more important, it is a crucial step toward restoring a great aquatic ecosystem, and shows the power of political and scientific cooperation in solving our water problems.

To learn more, click here to see our National Geographic videos, blog posts and photo galleries of the Colorado Delta.

• Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project, Freshwater Fellow of the National Geographic Society, and author of several books and numerous articles on global water issues.  She is co-creator of Change the Course, the national freshwater conservation and restoration campaign being piloted in the Colorado River Basin.

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