Plastics at SEA expedition in The Oregonian

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with The Oregonian journalist Scott Learn about the recent research expedition that I participated in to study plastic pollution in the North Pacific Ocean.  Last Thursday, February 7, the interview was published on the front page of the Living section of The Oregonian, under the title, “A voyage through the ‘garbage patch’.”  The online version of the interview can be viewed on the Oregon Live website:

http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2013/02/fishing_for_plastic_in_a_peace.html

Today, The Oregonian followed up with another article on the front page of the Living section, entitled “Plastics at SEA,” highlighting an exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) that my shipmate, Emilee Monson, is curating.  Emilee is giving public demonstrations Fridays and Saturdays, 10am – 5pm, to discuss plastic pollution in the ocean and what we discovered during our expedition.  Visit OMSI to learn more about our research!  You can read about Emilee’s perspective from the expedition in the following interviews:

http://www.omsi.edu/blog/plastics-part-I

http://www.omsi.edu/blog/plastics-part-II

On a related note, the day before I left for the Plastics at SEA expedition, there was another article by Scott Learn in The Oregonian about plastic pollution on Oregon beaches:

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/09/seaside_activist_tracks_waves.html

Although the person interviewed, Marc Ward, was addressing the issue more from the standpoint of an activist rather than a scientist, this article helps to emphasize how this issue is truly global in scale.  Although I cannot say for certain where the trash on Oregon beaches originated, it is highly probably that much of it came from somewhere other than North America.  I personally have encountered quite a lot of plastic trash with Chinese and Japanese writing still intact and legible, and which likely traveled over 8,000 kilometers from its source to arrive at our home beaches.  Ocean currents and atmospheric winds connect us across vast distances and make it impossible to isolate ourselves from pollution created elsewhere.  Likewise, the pollution that we produce here affects humans on other continents and distant ecosystems thousands of kilometers away.  We all live downstream and downwind of somebody.  These problems cannot be resolved without a concerted and coordinated global effort by all major economies.

Last, one person who commented on my interview with The Oregonian pointed out that some research has found that plastics may actually be decomposing in warmer ocean waters, but not in the manner that organic matter would biodegrade.  Instead, some plastics are breaking down into toxins such as BPA and styrene monomers, known endocrine disruptors and carcinogens.  This study is especially alarming because it suggests that not only does plastic pollution in the ocean attract and accumulate existing toxins in the water, it also produces additional toxins that previously were not present, providing a “double hit” of potentially dangerous chemicals to marine wildlife.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plastic-decomposes-oceans-seas.html

Cultivating Life

The Magic of Compost

Orizaba Farm’s new location in Milwaukie, Oregon

The green tarp crinkled as I pulled it back from the large pile of leaves, straw, and kitchen scraps.  Digging my hand into the moist pile, I moved aside the top layers until I reached a mat of coffee grinds.  An eruption of warm steam billowed from the center of the pile and a red wriggler worm squirmed out from beneath a coffee filter.  I tossed another bucket of kitchen scraps and coffee grinds into the hole I created and covered the pile back up with leaves and straw.  Creating a good compost pile is a bit like baking bread.  It needs the right mixture of ingredients; the right amount of moisture – not too wet or too dry; the right environment to foster rapid but controlled microbial growth and activity; and the right cooking time and temperature.  Like baking, the process may seem tedious to the eyes of the uninitiated.  But once the process is complete – and if done correctly – I knew that I would be rewarded with a bountiful garden harvest the following season, as rich and filling as the heartiest loaf of bread.

Our nursery of berries, grapes, and figs

I had only been at our new home for two weeks and had already accumulated a massive pile of leaves from a nearby church, pine needles from a local school, wood chips from the Portland Urban Forestry Center, a tall stack of cardboard boxes from a local appliance store, pallets from an upholstery shop down the road, newsprint from a local printing press, coffee grinds from our neighborhood coffee shop, and 15 bales of oat straw from our community’s organic farm supply store.  We have a trunk full of seeds we saved from our last farm in Maine, two dozen raspberry plants that I had dug as sprouts from Suyematsu Farms on Bainbridge Island, a dozen blueberry bushes, and several grape and fig plants we propagated from cuttings last year.  My parents, grandmother, and our numerous green-thumbed neighbors hold in reserve for us countless varieties of perennials from which we will take cuttings to populate our urban farm:  figs, grapes, kiwis, raspberries, thornless blackberries, rhubarb, and huckleberries.  Our community is full of fruit trees from which we will collect scionwood for grafting onto rootstock.  Our half acre farm plot will be productive, and our plates will be full.

Leaves, firewood, wood chips, and pine needles to feed the soil

This is what it was all about.  Nutrient Cycling.  Feeding Life from Death.  Composting.  The continuous circle of matter and energy facilitated by that miracle of organization and defiance of entropy we call “Life.”  This is why I left academia to become an organic farmer.  This is why I forfeited nearly $100k in fellowship stipends:  to dig my hands into the soil and pull forth Life.  Because, as my best friend Josh Ellis puts it, “Cultivating Life is infinitely more rewarding than studying it.”  And Life begins – and ends – with compost.  So, in a word, compost is the reason that I left the nation’s top Ph.D. program in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology.  Compost:  to create Life; to transform it; to become a true student of Life.  Not by experimentally manipulating and statistically analyzing it as a scientist would; rather, by observing, feeding, producing, and consuming it.  By becoming an organic farmer.

In Praise of an Inspiration

Russell Libby, the Director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), died three days ago after a long battle with cancer.  It is a tragic loss for the Maine sustainable agriculture community.  I don’t believe that I can effectively capture the importance and profundity of his influence in my own words.  So I will allow Russ to speak for himself as he did so eloquently in a portrait by Americans Who Tell the Truth.

We have to challenge the idea that contamination is just the price of living in the modern world. Our bodies don´t have systems to process plastics or flame retardants or pesticides. If contamination is the price of modern society, modern society has failed us.

“We eat from the earth, the sky, the water.” (quoted from Robert P.T. Coffin)

It’s up to us—up to all of us—to change the world so every time we look around, we recognize those basic principles of life…I want to talk about our shared responsibility to leave this place better than we found it. Not better from a corporate, make-more-money mode, but a place of beauty, a place that gives us great pleasure throughout our days and throughout our lives. Because that sense of beauty, of pleasure in what we are doing each day, is what is going to carry us forward through the difficult times that we live in now, and the more difficult times that lie ahead.

Let’s work really hard at undermining the entire idea of corporate food. [We should] know who produced everything we eat. And how it was produced. That would be transformational. We know that we can grow the food we need to eat, and grow it with minimal energy inputs. Now we need to share with the public the knowledge that we’ve acquired and that we share with one another. We know we are addicted to oil. [But] each seed we plant this year is another way to capture sunlight and convert it to food. Let’s get growing!

Although Russ Libby’s life has passed, his truly inspirational words will remain with us as we take what we learned in Maine and apply it to our new home in Oregon.

One of our gardens in Bangor, Maine

Thom is Back from Sea!

The Plastics at SEA North Pacific Expedition is finally over, and Thom is back from sailing across the Pacific Ocean (he actually returned home on Nov. 13, but things have been busy here).

The dynamic duo, Thom and Alia, are back to work at Orizaba Farm’s new location in Portland, Oregon.  Stay tuned for updates on Orizaba Farm as Thom and Alia build their soil, connect with their community, and plant the seeds for a sustainable urban food forest.

But first, here are some dispatches from the Plastics at SEA expedition.

The website:
www.sea.edu/plastics

Thom’s writings from the expedition:

October 6 — “The Science of Caring for Our Ship”

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/journal/october_6_day_4

October 9 — “Singing to the Stars”

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/journal/october_9_day_7

October 19 — “When Fish Can Fly”

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/journal/october_19_day_17

November 6 — “This Ship Never Sleeps”

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/journal/november_6_day_35

Thom’s Bio:

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/team/thomas_young

Videos:

He is in the Day 5 and Day 15 videos

http://www.sea.edu/plastics/video_galleryPhoto gallery:
http://www.sea.edu/plastics/photo_gallery
Check out the galleries for Oct. 2, 6, 9, 17, 18, and Nov. 3 for photos of Thom

2012 Trash, Farewell to Bainbridge, and Thom is Off to Sea

Trash that accumulated from Thom and Alia’s home in Queen Anne, Seattle, between January 01 and July 21, 2012. Does not include recyclable and biodegradable/compostable waste.

We promised in a previous blog entry that we would keep all of our accumulated trash for the year 2012. Due to two unexpected moves we were only able to hold onto our trash from January 1st to July 21st. Above is a photo of what we had accumulated during those seven months. We will follow up on this in the near future with some basic tips on how to reduce your non-biodegradable waste. The most important of these: Know Your Farmer. More to come….

We moved from Seattle to Portland last week. Alia has moved to the headquarters of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission in Portland and Thom is starting an organic garden consulting business. More on this later….

Although Thom’s back is getting some much-needed rest from the long hours of weeding, pruning, and planting at Bainbridge Island and Suyematsu Farms, Thom already misses Karen’s perennial smile and positive attitude, Mike’s congenial laugh and non sequitur humor, Carol’s infinite hospitality and amazing baking, and Betsey’s sage advice and dedication to her trade.  As Gerard wisely suggested to him, Thom aims to continue to tackle life’s challenges by keeping his hands in the soil and his head in the bottle (No, Gerard and Thom are not alcoholics; they are both winemakers).

The pumpkins that Thom, Karen, Manuel, Elodia, Juana, and Heather planted and tended at Suyematsu Farms.

Ironically, it will be quite difficult for Thom to follow Gerard’s advice in the next two months, as he will be somewhere with neither soil nor drink to aid him in his pursuits.  For the next seven weeks, from September 27 until November 14, Thom will be participating in a research expedition with the Sea Education Association (SEA).  He will be sailing aboard a tall ship, the SSV Robert C. Seamans (RCS, pictured below), from San Diego, CA to Honolulu, HI while studying plastic pollution in the North Pacific Ocean.  For six consecutive weeks, the crew of 35 will have no land in sight as they explore the impacts of humans upon one of the most remote places in the world.  You may track the progress of the expedition, including daily blog and photo updates, on the Plastics at SEA website (this link will be updated for the 2012 expedition soon).

Thom’s first voyage with RCS in 2003, from Tahiti to the Marquesas to Hawai’i

Thom’s second voyage on RCS in 2005, from San Francisco, through the Santa Barbara Channel, to San Diego.

The Show Must Go On

Three generations of agricultural excellence at Suyematsu Farms on Bainbridge Island.

Sunday, 10 June 2012

“I guess I’m not going to be farming anymore,” Akio told Mike after repeated health problems and a difficult trip to the hospital.

Akio Suyematsu is the 90-year old patriarch of Bainbridge Island and Suyematsu Farms.  His parents had moved to the island from Japan before he was born, and he had lived his entire life farming the land where I now work, minus the shameful interval in the 1940’s when his family was swept off the island and relocated to internment camps for the purpose of “national security,” followed by a stint serving in the U.S. Army in the European Theater.  After the war ended, the family returned to their land and resumed farming.  Of all the Suyematsu children, eventually only Akio remained to continue growing what some consider to be the best strawberries and raspberries in the Puget Sound.

But his health is declining and gone are the days of weeding, planting, cultivating, and fertilizing his beloved fields of strawberries, raspberries, and pumpkins.  Try as he might, he could not bring himself to return to the fields he has seen through nearly 80 years of production.  I had the privilege last winter of spending a brief moment in the raspberries with Akio as we removed clips from the trellis wires.  After an hour out in the cold, Akio was too exhausted to continue and, to my knowledge, has not worked outside in the fields since.  To say that the brief moment of farming I shared with Akio was inspirational would be an understatement.  The man lives, breathes, and sleeps farming.  He is the real deal, an archetypal farmer who understands that life comes not just from the soil, but from the blood, sweat, and tears that growers pour into their profession.  What, then, is life for a farmer who is no longer able to be present with the soil and his crops?

When I heard Mike recount to me what Akio said, my reaction was unexpected.  I became incensed.  I couldn’t believe what Akio had said.

“Not going to be farming anymore?”  Utter nonsense, I thought.  Mike and Karen, my current employer, wouldn’t be farming here if it weren’t for him!

Every good farmer knows that life does not simply end with death, or in Akio’s case, with convalescence.  Life feeds on life.  Life grows from life.  Death produces compost that feeds more life.  What does a radish become once it enters our digestive tract if not the manure that becomes the compost that feeds the soil that supports the next crop’s conversion of solar energy into biodegradable biomass?  The linear, western viewpoint of life – and farming – terminating in death ignores the reality of the hardworking farmers who are only in business because of Akio’s endless knowledge, experience, and generosity.

Bainbridge Island Farms, Paulson Farms, Laughing Crow Farm, Butler Green Farms:  these farms only exist because Akio had the keen foresight and generosity to offer his land, tools, experience, and knowledge at well below market prices in the hopes that his legacy would survive.  Akio is legendary at these farms for his work ethic and humility, his stoic perseverance in adversity, his high threshold for pain, and his meticulously weed-free fields. There is only one Akio Suyematsu. But every legend is still a mortal.  As Akio’s mortal body undergoes what all of ours eventually will, let us not forget that the farms on Bainbridge Island owe to Akio their very existence and will be farming in his image long after he departs.  Mike, Carol, Karen, Betsey, Brian:  these farmers are the repositories of Akio’s knowledge and experience, they are his hands by proxy upon the land he worked, issuing forth a new generation of agriculture.  They are, in essence, his agricultural children.  His grandchildren are alive and well, too, carrying on the proud tradition of growing food from the soil beneath their feet:  Dana and Aaron at Around the Table Farm, Becky Warner of City Grown Seattle, Renee and Luke in search of land, and myself.

Regardless of one’s beliefs about an afterlife, it is a truism that the cycle of energy and matter does not merely end with death.  Our bodies are filled with the very same atoms that coursed through and composed the bodies of prehistoric dinosaurs and pterodactyls, of woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, of giant sharks and ancient ferns, of massive redwoods and hulking Neanderthals, of ammonites and trilobites, of algae, fungi, and bacteria that were living billions of years ago.  Once our consciousness is gone, a mere memory in the eyes of our descendants, our energy and atoms will continue to cycle through life forms as diverse as the most colorful coral reefs and rainforests, for eons to come until the Sun devours the Earth in a fiery ball of plasma, the Universe collapses back upon itself, and we return to the stardust from whence we originated.

Akio is still farming.  He is farming because Karen is still farming, carrying on Akio’s weed-free cultivation style while growing organic raspberries, strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb, currants, pumpkins, winter squash, and sweet corn.  He is farming because Betsey is farming, plowing the earth with her draft horses to produce some of the finest potatoes, garlic, and onions in the Puget Sound.  He is farming because Brian is pumping out some of the greatest volume and diversity of organic vegetables in the county.  And he is farming because Mike and Carol of Paulson Farms are continuing Akio’s tradition of composting yard waste and maintaining the farm’s arsenal of tractors, while milling locally harvested lumber, producing handmade soaps, and growing organic vegetables, nursery plants, trees and shrubs, and eggs.

I think it’s high time we stopped viewing death and illness as an endpoint, but rather as a transitional state.  Akio has passed a formidable torch onto a new cadre of protégés, representing a small but significant transfer of knowledge and culture in an all but endless cycle of life and death, growing and composting.  Meanwhile, the pumpkins and corn are sprouting in the fields, the raspberries are flowering and buzzing vigorously with the activity of bees, and the first strawberry harvest of the season is upon us.  As Karen told me today while heading to the hospital to visit Akio, “The show must go on.”

Because of Akio’s deep commitment to the next generation of local farmers, the show will go on.

What We Have

A recent Seattle Public Radio report highlighted the growing gap between “The Rich and The Rest of Us”, and referred to this division as one between the “Haves” and the “Have Nots”.

 

Small farmers are one of the lowest paid sectors of the American workforce. We are the green-collar working class. We are the over-educated, underpaid, landless “Greenhorns” without health insurance, retirement funds, or other benefits. We are part of the “99%”. But one thing we are not are “Have Nots.”

 

What we have is immeasurable. We have healthy food that we grow with our own hands. We have active, outdoor lifestyles, and diverse skillsets. We have frequent, inspirational interactions with wildlife. We have relationships with integrity, depth, and sincerity. We have strong bodies, bold minds, and calloused, dirty hands. We have starlit nights, beautiful views, and deep roots in our local ecosystem. We have sound ethical principles and practical products of our labor. We have daily periods of contemplative quiet and reflection alternating with intense, rapidly paced work. We have resilience and strength in community and self. We have the deep satisfaction of feeding our family, our friends, and our neighbors. We have the knowledge and confidence that we can thrive at incomes below the poverty line.

 

What we have cannot be captured or estimated by GDP, or taxable income, or any other quantifiable economic parameter. What we have defies measurement and transcends statistics.

 

We do not have nights out at restaurants or the cinema. We do not have second automobiles or personal watercraft. We do not have servants, maids, or nannies. We do not have “first class” plane tickets and cruise ship vacations. We do not have carefully manicured lawns and “mow and blow” landscapers. We do not have oil, or gold, or stock portfolios. Nor would we want any of those things if given the choice.

 

What we have can be neither bought, nor sold, nor traded on global markets. What we have makes life worth living.

 

We are not “Have Nots.”

 

The Environmentalist’s New Clothes

(aka “Revenge of the SMURF”)

My family spent last Christmas at Gleneden Beach along the Oregon coast. The day after Christmas, my brother Ethan and I went for a run along the beach towards the sand spit to the north. As often happens during beach runs, we began collecting pieces of trash we encountered during the run. Although the Oregon coast has strong community participation in seasonal beach clean-ups and is kept relatively clean, it is still connected to the mid-Pacific garbage path via the North Pacific Gyre, and is perched along the margins of the world’s most wasteful consumer economy, the United States of America. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean basin, one long ocean current ride away, is the world’s most wasteful producer economy, China. Consequently, beach trash is unavoidable. It is really fascinating to see pieces of food packaging with Japanese and Chinese characters marking their point of origin, bringing into sharp relief the large-scale connectivity among the earth’s oceans and landmasses.

Whenever in the company of my younger brother, our conversations inevitably turn into philosophical debates. In this particular case, our habitual endeavor to collect beach trash provoked a discussion about the futility of this behavior within the context of our throw-away culture. We had some ingrained notion that we were “doing good” by collecting non-biodegradable plastics, batteries, and cigarette lighters from the beach and preventing them from killing or harming marine life. But now, all of the trash we collected will merely end up in a landfill, where it will continue to leach dioxins, BPA’s, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and other toxic chemicals into the surrounding soils and watersheds. These chemicals will eventually end up in the oceans in an altered form anyways. So what was the point? By picking up trash from “our” public beach, weren’t we just manifesting a “Not in my backyard” egotism? How is it acceptable to pollute everyone’s soils and terrestrial landscapes with massive landfills that are out of sight and out of mind, but somehow reprehensible to litter a public beach in plain view?

Nonetheless, there we were, merrily jogging along the scenic, “wild” Oregon coast, picking up trash, debating the meaning of life, feeling marginally good about ourselves (i.e., assuaging our consumer guilt) while despairing the trajectory of human civilization, and meditatively watching huge 20-foot waves curl and crash in chaotic break lines. Meanwhile, brown pelicans gracefully surfed the air rising from the wave crests, harbor seals poked their heads out of the surf to inspect the beach, and flocks of sandpipers chased the sea foam back and forth in pursuit of buried crustaceans.

Suddenly, I stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Half buried in the sand, far up the beach above the high tide line, an unmistakable object caught my eye: a green cylinder of plastic mesh fencing held closed with black zip ties, about 1 meter long by 30 cm diameter. I couldn’t believe it (did I already say that?). I did a double take. Looked again. It was still there. I walked over, and with a hard, steady tug, I freed the object from the sand and shook it out, staring at it, my breath held, turning it over in my hands, inspecting it carefully. It was a SMURF¹: a Standard Monitoring Unit for the Recruitment of Fish, in contemporary marine biologist vernacular. A SMURF is a device consisting of bundles of black plastic garden fencing stuffed inside a burrito-like cylinder of green plastic mesh and deployed on a mooring line in the ocean to mimic kelp and attract juvenile fish (i.e., “recruits”) in order to monitor their populations.

A Standard Monitoring Unit for the Recruitment of Fish, filled with other plastic trash and debris found on the Oregon coast. This SMURF was deployed nearly a decade ago by yours truly, subsequently lost in a storm, and now ironically a conspicuous component of the plastic pollution littering the ocean.

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2002, I spearheaded a research project at Oregon State University as part of my honors thesis. I was charged with monitoring the recruitment of young fish to reefs and kelp forests off the central Oregon coast. So I deployed a dozen or so of these SMURFs to mimic kelp fronds and attract young fish in order to monitor their activity. Within a week of setting the SMURFs out on their mooring lines, a large storm struck, tearing apart the mooring lines and scattering the SMURFs into the Pacific. In a misguided effort to understand how nature was working, I had inadvertently polluted the oceans with plastic flotsam, destined to scour the seas like abandoned “ghost” fishing gear for thousands of years.

Ten years later, the harsh and tragic hypocrisy of this reality was now staring me in the face from the surface of the very beach I was trying to clean. I suddenly realized that the oceans not only connect us to each other across vast distances of space; they also connect us to ourselves across time, echoing hollow reminders from our past washing ashore with the crashing waves. Whatever we put into the ocean will come back to us in time.

Alas, it was revealed that the Emperor has no clothes. And the environmentalist has been exposed as the polluter. In a twist of irony, I realized that I was as much a part of the problem as anybody else. Try as I might to create a solution by recovering trash and reducing my consumption, I am still deeply embedded within the materialistic throw-away culture that is responsible for creating the ocean garbage patches and ever expanding landfills. I could not cover my involvement in this problem with any invisible or imaginary fabric of environmental egotism, no matter how many pieces of trash I collect and divert from the oceans and rivers to a landfill (and thus ultimately to the soils and watersheds anyways).

When I was living in the mountains of Costa Rica, in the small coffee and dairy farming community of San Luis de Monteverde, I was at first appalled to discover that the people there dealt with their garbage by burning it. “Don’t they realize that burning plastics releases harmful toxins into the atmosphere?” I thought to myself in my hubris of perceived scientific enlightenment. But my academic elitism gradually gave way to a recognition that, in fact, theirs was a far more sustainable practice than the average American. For one, they produced an order of magnitude less trash than the average American. Second, they only burned the trash out of necessity due to a lack of municipal garbage collection services. And third, any garbage collection service, during the act of collecting and transporting the trash, would be spewing its own harmful toxins into the atmosphere, while merely moving the trash from location A, where it was “consumed”, to location B, where it could sit in a landfill for generations. Out of sight and out of mind unfortunately does not mean “rendered harmless.” Ultimately, the residents of San Luis were, inadvertently, making a decision of profound personal accountability by assuming some of the direct costs of their consumption (in the form of toxic gases released by burning plastics) rather than externalizing all of these costs and imposing them upon future generations or distant ecosystems and communities.

So, in honor of my dear friends and family in San Luis, I am writing to offer perhaps another solution to this problem. Let us end our “Not in my backyard” mentality. Let us cease throwing away our trash, forgetting or ignoring its fate the moment it leaves our private property in the back of an exhaust-spewing, taxpayer-subsidized, garbage collection truck.

For one year, anything that we cannot recycle² or compost³, we will keep, in our house, in our own backyard, to fully recognize and acknowledge the costs of our consumption. This will be the Year of Atonement for Trash; the revenge of the SMURF. Since January 1, 2012, we have not thrown away a single item of trash, although we have regrettably recycled many. Thus far, four and a half months later, we have yet to fill a single compacted 6-Gallon garbage bin with the non-recyclable trash that we have accumulated.

¹Marine biologists are very fond of their acronyms; at one point as a research diver, I was working for PISCO* on a CRANE project using BINCKEs and SMURFs.

²Recycling itself is not a perfect solution to the trash crisis and throw-away culture. Many experts correctly have relabeled recycling as “down-cycling” because it merely prolongs a product’s inevitable trip to the landfill by converting it to a lower grade product. Every recycled product will eventually end up either in the ocean or on the land as disposable trash. Another problem with recycling are the sheer quantities of energy and infrastructure required to power and run recycling facilities. Although the amount of fossil fuel energy required to recycle a product are generally substantially less than the amount used to manufacture the product de novo from newly mined materials, the fact that recycling demands considerable inputs of non-renewable resources should cause us all to question its long-term efficacy and sustainability. The sustainability mantra of the 1980’s – “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” – was written specifically in that order to emphasize the order of positive environmental impact for the three behaviors, from best to worst alternatives. Of the three, only reducing our resource consumption has a true lasting effect on global and intergenerational scales.

³The municipal composting of kitchen scraps and yard waste within the city is also a problematic issue, as the waste must be trucked miles away and managed in large piles using heavy, oil-powered machinery, with a commensurately large greenhouse gas footprint. It is then repackaged and sold back to the producer/consumer in plastic-wrapped bundles of compost. The only truly sustainable compost pile is the one sitting in your own backyard that you mix and turn by hand. At Orizaba Farm in Maine, we were able to recycle kitchen and yard waste from soil, to kitchen, to compost pile, and back to the soil all within a few hundred meters total distance. As renters in Seattle, this is not currently an option. Soon enough, we will once again have the privilege of tending the Holy Compost Pile.

*PISCO. Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans; a colorless or amber-yellow grape brandy produced in winemaking regions of Chile and Peru; a port city on the Pacific Ocean in southwest Peru.

CRANE. Cooperative Research and Assessment of Nearshore Ecosystems; a large, long-legged, long-necked, migratory bird of the family Gruidae.

BINCKE. Benthic Icthyofaunal Net for Coral and Kelp Environments; a small rubber nipple-shaped device, usually fitted with a plastic collar and handle, designed to pacify a young child by mimicking the feel of its mother’s teet; a colloquial term describing a baby’s pacifier.

SMURF. Standard Monitoring Unit for the Recruitment of Fishes; a diminutive, mythological, blue-skinned, forest-dwelling creature of popular animation culture.

The Problem with ‘Organic’ Food

(Answer: It’s not really organic)

This is a long one, so here’s the executive summary:

• “Organic” food is defined as not having “synthetic” inputs
• “Synthetic” is defined as being derived from petroleum or natural gas (I.e., fossil fuels or petrochemicals)
• Almost all organic farms use petrochemicals, although not as fertilizers or pesticides
• Therefore, “organic” food is not truly organic, as it is still dependent on fossil fuels
• Modern “organic” farming is nothing like traditional farming practiced prior to the discovery of fossil fuels
• Many “local” foods are dependent on non-local inputs, such as animal feeds and petrochemicals
• Some “local” and “organic” foods actually use more fossil fuels and produce more greenhouse gases than their conventional, non-local counterparts
• Traditional farms were more energetically efficient than modern industrial agriculture, which wastes most of the energy used
• Fossil fuels are non-renewable and heavily polluting, and therefore are inherently unsustainable
• For organic and local to truly be sustainable, it must not pollute or depend on non-renewable resources
• Only “fossil fuel free” food can be truly sustainable, by this definition
• Alternatively, “sustainable” agriculture should be sufficiently diverse and adaptable to changing conditions

My best friend, Phil, and I have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether “organic” food is merely a fad and a marketing gimmick. Phil and I are old buddies from the OSU Honors College, and have taken many science courses together, ranging from genetics to biochemistry. Phil, a pathologist, claims that all food is “organic” by definition because it contains organic molecules, or molecules constructed around a backbone of multiple carbon atoms (either in a ring or chain form). Therefore, according to this argument, the USDA “organic” label is essentially meaningless. Although I cannot argue with the textbook chemistry definition of “organic”, I like to point out that the word has multiple definitions, one of which is “a carbon-based compound”, and another of which is “any substance derived from living organisms”. In other words, “organic” can also mean “not synthetic.”

The current USDA standards for organic agriculture closely follow the latter definition, in that the standards prohibit farmers from using “synthetic” fertilizers or pesticides, but permit most pesticides and fertilizers derived from plant or animal sources, as well as some naturally occurring mined substances, such as copper (used as a fungicide), sulfur (used to lower soil pH), or lime (used to raise pH). So when most well informed people think of “organic” farming, they think of soil whose fertility is provided by cover crops, mulches, and compost composed of plant materials and animal wastes as opposed to fertilizers synthesized from natural gas. Or they envision crops sprayed with gentle compost teas and biodegradable plant oils to ward off pests and diseases instead of using toxic synthetic chemicals. The popular notion that “organic” farms do not use “chemicals” is a common misconception, as compost and animal manures themselves are complex soups of naturally occurring chemicals resulting from the breakdown of plant and animal materials, and USDA organic standards do permit the use of pesticides derived from “natural” sources.

However, the example of lime as an organic soil amendment illustrates a catch in this commonly accepted definition of “organic”. Lime (usually CaCO₃ and MgCO₃) is considered a natural and “organic” substance by USDA standards – even though it is technically an inorganic molecule – because it is mined, usually from limestone or chalk quarries, and not synthesized in a laboratory or factory. Lime also happens to originate from formerly living organisms, as most are the remains of shells from ancient fossilized coral reefs and single-celled marine algae (phytoplankton). Does this description sound at all familiar to you? It should. I’ll give you a hint: think of the most important, and perhaps the most volatile, commodity on the global market today.

If you guessed “oil”, give yourself a pat on your organic back. Here’s the problem: oil – or petroleum, to be more exact – is essentially no different than lime. Like limestone, petroleum is a mined substance that originated primarily from ancient fossilized marine algae and was not synthesized in a laboratory. So why is one considered “organic” and the other “synthetic”? Good question. Both are originally derived from living organisms. Both are effectively non-renewable, as they were formed millions of years ago through very slow fossilization and plate tectonic processes (as an aside, wood ash is another form of lime that is renewable).

It appears that the difference is largely one of semantics; “synthetic” effectively means “derived from petroleum”. Today, whenever you hear of something referred to as “synthetic,” this almost always means that it was manufactured using petroleum, or its cousin natural gas, as a major feedstock. For instance, synthetic fibers = petroleum derivatives. Synthetic wood = plastic wood = petroleum derivative. Synthetic fertilizers = natural gas derivative, and synthetic pesticides = petrochemicals. The issue is not that oil or natural gas are fundamentally different from “organic” substances. They are not. Many “organic” substances are also non-renewable, mined materials of natural origin. Delve deep enough into the philosophy of nature literature and you’ll find that the “natural” vs. “artificial/synthetic” divide is completely a human construct stemming from our western/modern desire to control nature and draw a distinction between what is “human” and what is “natural.” In reality, no such distinction exists. Petroleum is organic, humans are animals, and “artificial/synthetic” products are inherently natural, despite labeling them otherwise. Rather, the problem with The Great Organic Debate is that we have framed the definition of “organic” vs. “synthetic” to set petrochemicals apart from other “organic” substances, even though petroleum meets the classic definitions of “organic” on both accounts: carbon-based compounds of plant or animal origin.

So, in summary, “synthetic” means based on, derived from, or using fossil fuels, whereas “organic” should mean avoiding or prohibiting the use of fossil fuels. Here’s the problem: strictly speaking, there is virtually no organic farm nowadays that does not use “synthetic” petrochemicals in some manner. What was just 150 years ago an all but unknown substance is now, today, the cheapest and most readily available form of energy. With the exception of a few animal-powered farms that grow their own animal feed (e.g., some Amish communities), virtually every “organic” farm depends on petroleum to power tractors, harvest crops, weed their fields, and transport produce. Your “organic” food is just as dependent on petroleum and other fossil fuels as any “non-organic” food. The use of fossil fuels is currently the largest source of greenhouse gases and air and water pollution worldwide. Michael Pollan correctly pointed out the fact that many large organic farms actually use more petroleum and produce more greenhouse gases per calorie of food produced than their conventional counterparts, since they have to rely upon flame weeding or tractor cultivation to deal with weeds, rather than synthetic herbicides. Although the net greenhouse gas footprints of organic vs. conventional farming is a point of controversy, the fact that both systems heavily depend on fossil fuels makes the debate somewhat irrelevant:  both contribute heavily to climate change.

Similarly, many “local” foods are not, strictly speaking, “local.” Most “locally grown” organic vegetables rely upon animal manures that are often transported hundreds or thousands of miles to maintain soil fertility. Hence, the term “manure miles” has been coined to counter the popularized notion of “food miles” and highlight the fact that agricultural inputs are just as important for sustainability and health as the end product. Likewise, many “local” animal products, such as dairy, meats, and eggs, are produced using animal feeds that were grown thousands of miles away. Get this: if you buy a “locally grown” chicken in Washington and a “non-local” chicken, and both chickens were fed grains grown in the Midwest (a likely scenario), then the “non-local” chicken probably has a smaller greenhouse gas footprint if that chicken was raised nearby its food source. This is because it takes a lot more energy, and consequently more fossil fuels, to transport animal feed than to transport the animals themselves, since it takes about two pounds of grain to grow one pound of chicken (feed conversion ratio).

The two organic farms I am currently working for both use propane to power torches for flame weeding (which is a blast, but produces tremendous amounts of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions), and petroleum to power tractors for cultivation. One of them utilizes municipal compost for soil fertility, and the compost is managed and transported using heavy, diesel-powered, equipment. The other uses a combination of horse manure and pelleted chicken waste. In both cases, the animals that provide the manure were fed using crops grown, harvested, and/or transported using petrochemicals. It is exceedingly difficult nowadays to find a farm that provides both its necessary labor and soil fertility without relying upon fossil fuels. In essence, as a consequence, we are all completely addicted to these non-renewable, and heavily polluting, resources.

The difference between organic and conventional farms is that organic farmers are not allowed to apply petrochemicals directly to the crops or to the soil. I personally find this distinction to be a bit arbitrary, although I will concede that synthetic petrochemicals tend to be more toxic (although not always) and more persistent in the environment than “organic” chemicals, due to the inability of microbes to metabolize petrochemicals with which they did not co-evolve. The soil simply lacks the enzymatic and cellular machinery to biodegrade many (but not all) petrochemicals, which is why their use in agriculture is so insidious – many of them persist and accumulate in the environment, with often harmful effects, for years after their application. In contrast, most organic chemicals are derived from plants, animals, fungi, or bacteria and readily break down into harmless chemicals, like water and CO₂, in a short period of time. But again, this is an arbitrary distinction. For instance, the controversial use of copper sulfate as an approved organic fungicide has the potential to pollute adjacent watersheds, since copper – being a heavy metal – cannot decompose.

As a society, we like to romanticize farming as a very traditional profession, steeped in ancient practices that are thousands of years old and deeply connected to a local land and resource base. For ten thousand years, farmers grew food using entirely locally sourced fertility and human and animal labor. They fed their animals with plant materials they grew themselves, on their own farm, and they recycled their animal wastes to maintain soil fertility. They drove their equipment with grass-powered internal combustion engines (i.e., draft horses and oxen), and used human labor for smaller tasks. To buy seeds or deliver produce to market, they traveled by foot or hoof. The notions of “local” and “organic” did not even exist because no alternative was possible; everything was by necessity local and organic in the truest sense as petrochemicals had not yet been discovered and long-distance transportation networks were rarely used due to the great risk and expense they entailed. In modern farming – organic and conventional alike – nothing could be further from the truth. If you suddenly were to take petrochemicals out of the equation, nearly every modern farming operation would rapidly grind to a halt. This should strike you immediately as a serious problem of global food insecurity, especially as concerns about peak oil or Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz loom large.

In reality, there is very little that is romantic about traditional agriculture. It was exceedingly hard and dangerous work, with intense physical labor from dawn to dusk, and the constant threat of catastrophic harvest failures that could not be buffered by crop insurance or mitigated by food transportation networks. To be certain, fossil fuels have alleviated many of these concerns by providing a cheap source of energy (and thus labor), opening up global markets (often at the cost of local ones), and facilitating the ease of importing diverse foods and agricultural inputs from distant regions. But let’s be clear: modern agriculture – both organic and conventional – is anything but sustainable. In fact, industrial agriculture produces vast inefficiencies in food production when compared to traditional farming methods. One estimate holds that industrial farming methods, regardless of whether conventional or organic, only produce about one calorie of food energy (i.e., output) for every ten calories of energy used (i.e., input). In other words, 90% of the energy in the system is wasted, mostly in the form of burning fossil fuels. In contrast, the output to input ratio for traditional farming methods, which are non-mechanized and labor intensive, is closer to one to four, so that four calories of biomass produce about one calorie of food. According to this estimate, traditional “fossil fuel free” farming is 2.5 times more efficient thermodynamically than modern industrial agriculture. If traditional farming were as inefficient as modern farms are today, then the farmers of the past, and their animals, would have probably starved.

Back to my friend, Phil. Phil is fond of rebutting arguments about the virtues of organic food by stating that “organic” is merely a marketing gimmick, an arbitrary label, and a short-lived fad, and that organic foods are not necessarily any more environmentally sustainable, economic, or energy efficient than conventional foods. I admit, I have to concede that he may have a point for all the reasons listed above, which may surprise you given that I am an organic farmer.

So, let’s reframe the debate in a more logically consistent fashion. Should organic foods be permitted to use fossil fuels for inputs other than fertilizers and pesticides? More to the point, is it even possible to grow food sustainably in a manner that uses fossil fuels? I submit that it is not. To be sustainable, farming should rely entirely on renewable resources and should not pollute the air, water, and soil that sustains our lives. It seems a contradiction in terms to claim that a cultural practice is sustainable when it depletes, or depends upon, a heavily polluting non-renewable resource. Sustainable, after all, means to provide for the needs of the present while not compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. Only fossil fuel free farming can fit this bill, but virtually nobody today seems to be practicing this.

I’m sure Phil would have something to say about this conclusion, and as always his perspective would be a uniquely rational and moderate one. After all, why not use fossil fuels for food production while they’re readily available? As a medical doctor, I’m certain that Phil is aware of how tremendously medical research and technology have benefited from the cheap energy and diverse products, such as plastics, made possible by petrochemicals (remember the “Plastics Make It Possible” ad campaign sponsored by the plastics industry?). Certainly, countless lives have been saved through the wise application of medical science and technology enabled by fossil fuels. Likewise, petrochemical based food production and transportation has fed billions of people and staved numerous famines, although often at a great cost to the environment and to small traditional farmers.

Perhaps another reasonable response to the question of sustainability is that, to be sustainable, an agricultural system must simply be sufficiently diverse, adaptive, and flexible that it can easily revert from a dependence upon any particular resource or input when it becomes necessary to do so. I’ll buy that. We have seven billion people to feed on this planet, and if we are to be successful in providing for future generations as the Earth’s resources become increasingly strained, perhaps the best approach is to take as many different approaches as possible. Let’s try a little of everything and see what works as the economic, environmental, and geopolitical conditions on the ground change (and as the climate changes). Let’s provide farmers with the resources, support, and education necessary to adapt to changing markets and pressures, to changing supply and demand, and to a changing climate.

Phil – care for a rebuttal?

“So, What’s Your Day Job?”

About a month ago, I contacted the executive director of a local farming organization to inquire about options for low-income and temporary housing on Bainbridge Island.  I was interested in renting a room in a house that had recently been renovated by her organization for the purpose of housing new farmers and interns.  The woman I spoke with seemed genuinely interested in my involvement with Day Road Farms and the Bainbridge Island Vineyards.

She asked me what my background was, what my housing needs were, what my prospective future in farming looked like, how long I had been working on the island, where I currently lived, how I was commuting, etc.  I told her that I was an ecologist and marine biologist by training but had been farming for five years, that my wife and I ran our own organic farm in Maine for three years before moving to Seattle last summer, and that I had worked for several different organic farms over the past few years.  I felt that the conversation was going rather well and that I had made a positive impression on her.

 

Then she said this:

“So, what’s your day job?”

 

What?  How was I supposed to respond to this question?  “Oh, my day job!  I’m so glad you asked!  Well, during the day I’m an investment banker and a lawyer, which helps to fund this absurdly expensive recreational pursuit, which I only practice at night when there’s a waxing full moon and Jupiter is ascending in Scorpio, of course.”

Last time I checked, farmers do indeed work during the day!  It’s not too often that you can find me out in the fields in the middle of the night (although I admittedly do work by headlamp once in a while).

This episode reminded me painfully of the time that a very close family member stated that my farming was merely a “hobby.”  Pardon me, but I have never known anybody else to practice a hobby for 10-18 hours per day, every day, and to be able to feed their family (and friends) and heat their house with the products of said “hobby,” thereby allowing a rather comfortable, warm, and well-fed lifestyle on an income well below the official “poverty level.”

What’s my day job?  What is that supposed to mean, anyways?  Is that some sort of thinly-veiled insinuation that organic farming is not a legitimate career choice or a respectable, full-time profession?  Was she implying that it is impossible to make an actual living by farming?

Frankly, I was embarrassed, humiliated, and insulted by her question.  I didn’t really know how to answer.  So I balked, and babbled… “Well, I have a Master’s degree in ecology, and my wife is a marine biologist who works for NOAA at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.  I taught high school for the past two years while running our own farm.”  I was getting nowhere with my explanation.  It was pointless drivel that only served to confirm what she had implied.

Clearly, I had taken the bait.  She caught me in a trap; by answering her question I was admitting to her that I also believed, perhaps subconsciously, that organic farming was not a viable profession.  I had bought into the rhetoric and ideology of our technocratic society, which espouses the notion that if you don’t spend your days either behind a desk and a computer in a sterile office environment, or toiling along an industrial assembly line at a manufacturing plant, or spend your nights serving those who spend their days in the corporate boardrooms, then you are not producing anything of real economic value.

 

Getting off the phone, I felt disheartened and defeated.  What message did it send about American culture if the executive director of a farming organization apparently did not believe that farming constituted a viable career choice?  I told Alia what she had said, and she responded firmly to me, with every ounce of confidence she could muster,

 

“Thom, you are an organic farmer.  That is who you are.  Your day job is organic farming!”

 

Alia was absolutely right.  I knew it immediately and had known it all along, but for some reason I could not bring myself to say it to the woman on the phone.  I am not farming as a lark.  It is not a “hobby” or a recreational pursuit.

I farm to feed my family, to heat our home, to clothe and to shelter us.  I farm to protect the soil, water, and air that sustains our lives, and to conserve the wildlife that adds depth, beauty, and a spiritual connection to the planet we inhabit.  I do not spend my daylight hours praising Gaia in drum circles, making hippie jewelry out of flowers, or doing rain dances.  I farm outside in the sweltering sun, in the pounding rain, the silent snow, and the biting wind.  I farm from dawn to dusk, until my hands crack, blister, and bleed, until my back cramps and my fingers go numb, until my body aches in fatigue or shivers from the cold.  And then I farm some more.

I farm until the daylight dwindles, the crickets chirp, the coyotes sing, and the bats emerge in the sky.  Most days, I farm until I can no longer see the soil beneath my feet.  And then I exhaustedly turn the nighttime over to the owls, raccoons, and skunks, and I crawl, covered in dirt, into bed to dream of seeds, soil, and fruit, before I wake up the next morning at dawn to do it all over again.

That is organic farming.

That is my day job.

And I love it.

 

A month later, I spoke to this woman on the phone again.  Remarkably, after discussing the housing situation once more, she asked me:

“So, what’s your day job?”

 

This time, I answered without hesitation:

“I am an organic farmer.  I have been farming for five years.  I am now farming on Bainbridge Island.”