A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

                               by JUSTIN GILLIS, nytimes.com
June 4th 2011

CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico — The dun wheat field spreading out at Ravi P. Singh’s feet offered a possible clue to human destiny. Baked by a desert sun and deliberately starved of water, the plants were parched and nearly dead.

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Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.

“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.

A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously.

“What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”

‘The World Is Talking’

Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the Yaqui Valley, which sits in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico. In his view, global climate change could well be responsible.

“All the world is talking about it,” Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.

Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.

In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in northeastern India, a rice farmer named Ram Khatri Yadav offered his own complaint about the changing climate. “It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season,” he said. “The cold season is also shrinking.”

Decades ago, the wheat farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico were the vanguard of a broad development in agriculture called the Green Revolution, which used improved crop varieties and more intensive farming methods to raise food production across much of the developing world.

When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began working here in the 1940s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yaqui Valley farmers embraced him. His successes as a breeder helped farmers raise Mexico’s wheat output sixfold.

In the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to India and Pakistan, where mass starvation was feared. Output soared there, too.

Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Borlaug became the only agronomist ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, for helping to “provide bread for a hungry world.”

As he accepted the prize in Oslo, he issued a stern warning. “We may be at high tide now,” he said, “but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts.”

As output rose, staple grains — which feed people directly or are used to produce meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish — became cheaper and cheaper. Poverty still prevented many people in poor countries from buying enough food, but over all, the percentage of hungry people in the world shrank.

By the late 1980s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world’s most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.

Just as Dr. Borlaug had predicted, the consequences of this loss of focus began to show up in the world’s food system toward the end of the century. Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed.

That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce. Other factors contributed to demand, including a policy of converting much of the American corn crop into ethanol.

And erratic weather began eating into yields. A 2003 heat wave in Europe that some researchers believe was worsened by human-induced global warming slashed agricultural output in some countries by as much as 30 percent. A long drought in Australia, also possibly linked to climate change, cut wheat and rice production.

In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.

Farmers responded to the high prices by planting as much as possible, and healthy harvests in 2008 and 2009 helped rebuild stocks, to a degree. That factor, plus the global recession, drove prices down in 2009. But by last year, more weather-related harvest failures sent them soaring again. This year, rice supplies are adequate, but with bad weather threatening the wheat and corn crops in some areas, markets remain jittery.

Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may be over. “Our mindset was surpluses,” said Dan Glickman, a former United States secretary of agriculture. “That has just changed overnight.”

Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.

But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.

Dr. Borlaug’s latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world’s farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world’s breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.

“This is in no way sustainable,” Dr. Braun said.

The farmers of the Yaqui Valley grow their wheat in a near-desert, relying on irrigation. Their water comes by aqueduct from nearby mountains, but for parts of the past decade, rainfall was below normal. Scientists do not know if this has been a consequence of climate change, but Northern Mexico falls squarely within a global belt that is expected to dry further because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Braun is leading efforts to tackle problems of this sort with new wheat varieties that would be able to withstand many kinds of stress, including scant water. Descendants of the plant that one of his breeders, Dr. Singh, found in a wheat field one recent day might eventually wind up in farmers’ fields the world over.

But budgets for this kind of research remain exceedingly tight, frustrating agronomists who feel that the problems are growing more urgent by the year.

“There are biological limitations on how fast we can do this work,” Dr. Braun said. “If we don’t get started now, we are going to be in serious trouble.”

Shaken Assumptions

For decades, scientists believed that the human dependence on fossil fuels, for all the problems it was expected to cause, would offer one enormous benefit.

Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by combustion, is also the primary fuel for the growth of plants. They draw it out of the air and, using the energy from sunlight, convert the carbon into energy-dense compounds like glucose. All human and animal life runs on these compounds.

Humans have already raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and are on course to double or triple it over the coming century. Studies have long suggested that the extra gas would supercharge the world’s food crops, and might be especially helpful in years when the weather is difficult.

But many of those studies were done in artificial conditions, like greenhouses or special growth chambers. For the past decade, scientists at the University of Illinois have been putting the “CO2 fertilization effect” to a real-world test in the two most important crops grown in the United States.

They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.

But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. “When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute — this is not what we expected,” said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.

When they grew the soybeans in the sort of conditions expected to prevail in a future climate, with high temperatures or low water, the extra carbon dioxide could not fully offset the yield decline caused by those factors.

They also ran tests using corn, America’s single most valuable crop and the basis for its meat production and its biofuel industry. While that crop was already known to be less responsive to carbon dioxide, a yield bump was still expected — especially during droughts. The Illinois researchers got no bump.

Their work has contributed to a broader body of research suggesting that extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the benefits are less than previously believed — and probably less than needed to avert food shortages. “One of the things that we’re starting to believe is that the positives of CO2 are unlikely to outweigh the negatives of the other factors,” said Andrew D. B. Leakey, another of the Illinois researchers.

Other recent evidence suggests that longstanding assumptions about food production on a warming planet may have been too optimistic.

Two economists, Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of North Carolina State University, have pioneered ways to compare crop yields and natural temperature variability at a fine scale. Their work shows that when crops are subjected to temperatures above a certain threshold — about 84 degrees for corn and 86 degrees for soybeans — yields fall sharply.

This line of research suggests that in the type of climate predicted for the United States by the end of the century, with more scorching days in the growing season, yields of today’s crop varieties could fall by 30 percent or more.

Though it has not yet happened in the United States, many important agricultural countries are already warming rapidly in the growing season, with average increases of several degrees. A few weeks ago, David B. Lobell of Stanford University published a paper with Dr. Schlenker suggesting that temperature increases in France, Russia, China and other countries were suppressing crop yields, adding to the pressures on the food system.

“I think there’s been an under-recognition of just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is increasing,” Dr. Lobell said.

Such research has provoked controversy. The findings go somewhat beyond those of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that episodically reviews climate science and advises governments.

That report found that while climate change was likely to pose severe challenges for agriculture in the tropics, it would probably be beneficial in some of the chillier regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and that the carbon dioxide effect should offset many problems.

In an interview at the University of Illinois, one of the leading scientists behind the work there, Stephen P. Long, sharply criticized the 2007 report, saying it had failed to sound a sufficient alarm. “I felt it needed to be much more honest in saying this is our best guess at the moment, but there are probably huge errors in there,” Dr. Long said. “We’re talking about the future food supply of the world.”

William E. Easterling, dean of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University and a primary author of the 2007 report, said in an interview that the recent research had slightly altered his perspective. “We have probably to some extent overestimated” the benefits of carbon dioxide in computerized crop forecasts, he said. But he added that applying a “correction factor” would probably take care of the problem, and he doubted that the estimates in the report would change drastically as a result.

The 2007 report did point out a hole in the existing body of research: most forecasts had failed to consider several factors that could conceivably produce nasty surprises, like a projected rise in extreme weather events. No sooner had the report been published than food prices began rising, partly because of crop failures caused by just such extremes.

Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today’s high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.

Dr. Rosenzweig, the NASA climate scientist, played a leading role in forming the old consensus. But in an interview at her office in Manhattan, she ticked off recent stresses on the food system and said they had led her to take a fresh look.

She is pulling together a global consortium of researchers whose goal will be to produce more detailed and realistic computer forecasts; she won high-level endorsement for the project at a recent meeting between British and United States officials. “We absolutely have to get the science lined up to provide these answers,” Dr. Rosenzweig said.

Promises Unkept

At the end of a dirt road in northeastern India, nestled between two streams, lies the remote village of Samhauta. Anand Kumar Singh, a farmer there, recently related a story that he could scarcely believe himself.

Last June, he planted 10 acres of a new variety of rice. On Aug. 23, the area was struck by a severe flood that submerged his field for 10 days. In years past, such a flood would have destroyed his crop. But the new variety sprang back to life, yielding a robust harvest.

“That was a miracle,” Mr. Singh said.

The miracle was the product not of divine intervention but of technology — an illustration of how far scientists may be able to go in helping farmers adapt to the problems that bedevil them.

“It’s the best example in agriculture,” said Julia Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who has done genetic work on the rice variety that Mr. Singh used. “The submergence-tolerant rice essentially sits and waits out the flood.”

In the heyday of the Green Revolution, the 1960s, leaders like Dr. Borlaug founded an international network of research centers to focus on the world’s major crops. The corn and wheat center in Mexico is one. The new rice variety that is exciting farmers in India is the product of another, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Leading researchers say it is possible to create crop varieties that are more resistant to drought and flooding and that respond especially well to rising carbon dioxide. The scientists are less certain that crops can be made to withstand withering heat, though genetic engineering may eventually do the trick.

The flood-tolerant rice was created from an old strain grown in a small area of India, but decades of work were required to improve it. Money was so tight that even after the rice had been proven to survive floods for twice as long as previous varieties, distribution to farmers was not assured. Then an American charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stepped in with a $20 million grant to finance final development and distribution of the rice in India and other countries. It may get into a million farmers’ hands this year.

The Gateses, widely known for their work in public health, have also become leading backers of agricultural projects in recent years. “I’m an optimist,” Mr. Gates said in an interview. “I think we can get crops that will mitigate many of our problems.”

The Gates Foundation has awarded $1.7 billion for agricultural projects since 2006, but even a charity as large as it is cannot solve humanity’s food problems on its own. Governments have recognized that far more effort is needed on their part, but they have been slow to deliver.

In 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the political crises set off by food prices, the world’s governments outbid one another to offer support. At a conference in L’Aquila, Italy, they pledged about $22 billion for agricultural development.

It later turned out, however, that no more than half of that was new money not previously committed to agriculture, and two years later, the extra financing has not fully materialized. “It’s a disappointment,” Mr. Gates said.

The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President Obama pledged $3.5 billion at L’Aquila, more than any other country, and the United States has begun an ambitious initiative called Feed the Future to support agricultural development in 20 of the neediest countries.

So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from Congress. Amid the budget struggles in Washington, it remains to be seen whether the United States will fully honor its pledge.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.

In Africa, largely bypassed by the Green Revolution but with enormous potential, a dozen countries are on the verge of fulfilling a promise to devote 10 percent of their budgets to farm development, up from 5 percent or less.

“In my country, every penny counts,” Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of Rwanda, said in an interview. With difficulty, Rwanda has met the 10 percent pledge, and she cited a terracing project in the country’s highlands that has raised potato yields by 600 percent for some farmers.

Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.

Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.

“We’ve doubled the world’s food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. “The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it’s not going to be easy.”

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Shared from Read It Later

Living Large, Off the Land

                               by MICHAEL TORTORELLO, nytimes.com
June 1st 2011

KELLY COYNE and Erik Knutzen do not subsist on a diet of lentils and gloom. Yes, the Los Angeles couple proselytize for a more self-reliant household in their new book, “Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World,” just published by Rodale. And to that end, they include in it illustrated directions for making things like homemade dog food and washable sanitary napkins.

Ms. Coyne sewed one of the latter by making a pad out of her husband’s old flannel shirt. Or, rather, Mr. Knutzen stitched it. “I’m a horrible sewer,” Ms. Coyne said. “Poor Erik.”

But the point is never “self-deprivation in the name of bettering the world,” she said. Like “when you go to a potluck where people have concerns about some issue or another.”

“And because of those concerns,” she added, “they feel obligated to eat a pure vegan diet — not that there’s anything wrong with that — and they talk about the depressing End Times to come. And they serve up a communal meal of lentils. That’s ‘lentils and gloom.’ ”

At a recent Sunday brunch, Ms. Coyne, 43, and Mr. Knutzen, 46, were noshing on happier fare: a loaf of freshly baked levain with a spread of tangy harissa. “It’s so easy to make,” she said. “Ancho peppers, garlic and oil,” plus a shake of sea salt.

“And it’s in the book,” Mr. Knutzen added wryly.

Promoting a do-it-yourself revolution — in the book and on their blog, Root Simple (rootsimple.com) — is an unusual occupation. With their olive oil lamps (see page 8 in the book), dental twigs (page 12) and dry toilets (page 237), the couple can seem like historical re-enactors. Or prisoners of “Frontier House” on PBS.

Their 1,000-square-foot bungalow in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, on second thought, might be a junkyard Biosphere2, an experiment in the future of sustainable homemaking. This is the way we all could live if we weren’t working 50 hours a week, sitting in traffic on the way to the mega-mart, burning gasoline at $4 a gallon.

Just a few years ago, Ms. Coyne and Mr. Knutzen were trapped in the car themselves (a 1994 Nissan Sentra), commuting to jobs. Mr. Knutzen was a researcher and writer at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a semisubversive think tank. Ms. Coyne worked nearby as the administrative director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a meta-museum filled with imaginary natural history and assorted magic.

But the drive to the Palms district of Los Angeles, an hour each way on a typical day, was a haul. “Toward the end, I was biking nine miles to the center,” Mr. Knutzen said.

“And it was faster,” Ms. Coyne said. “That’s one thing I don’t miss. We are both old-time, crunchy slackers, and we’ve tried our whole lives not to have office jobs.”

“I don’t like working for other people,” Mr. Knutzen said.

“That’s why we went to grad school so long,” Ms. Coyne said. “To avoid employment. And then we slid from grad school into these alternative jobs in informal spaces. And we graduated from those to living by our wits.”

The jobs Ms. Coyne and Mr. Knutzen remember fondly; grad school they do not. The couple met at the University of California, San Diego, where Ms. Coyne had wandered into the dense thickets of conceptual art.

“By the time I graduated, I didn’t have any use for it anymore,” she said. “A graduate degree in art is a good way to get anyone to stop making art.”

Mr. Knutzen was enrolled in a program called Theoretical and Experimental Studies in Music. However ponderous that sounds, the music was even worse. “I don’t do music anymore,” he said. “I leave it to the professionals.”

Outside their apartment in San Diego, the couple started growing tomatoes in a container. Unlike their studies, this act was down-to-earth and fruitful, in a literal sense. According to David Wilson, 65, the director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Ms. Coyne and Mr. Knutzen had found a new philosophy to replace their academic training.

“Both Kelly and Erik practice what they call amateurism,” Mr. Wilson said. “They would talk quite a bit about the way in which amateur efforts are viewed in this culture, as a pejorative term.”

The couple’s homestead is just such a project, down to its foundation. The 1920 house sits on a steep hillside on the fringe of Silver Lake. Ms. Coyne calls the area HaFo SaFo, after a revolving podiatrist’s sign (a cartoon of a happy foot and a sad foot) on nearby Sunset Boulevard.

“We bought it in 1998 for $198,000,” Mr. Knutzen said.

“It was worth half that,” Ms. Coyne said.

By the time they closed, the little clapboard box was already sliding, “California-style,” downhill. For $80,000, contractors injected two truckloads of concrete under the house. Now, pylons connect the home to the bedrock.

“We basically have the Hoover Dam now,” Mr. Knutzen said.

“When the Big One comes, our house will stand,” Ms. Coyne said.

Nature itself seems to punish the amateur. Take the arbor over the back patio, which Ms. Coyne calls “the masculinity pavilion,” in honor of her husband’s feats of carpentry. As they finished a pot of coffee after brunch, the couple should have been sitting in the shade of their grapevines. But a pest (the glassy-winged sharpshooter) has infected the grapes with a blight called Pierce’s disease. Now, the vines are dying.

Writing on the couple’s blog, Mr. Knutzen finds a consolation for such failures in “The Odyssey”: “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardships,” Odysseus proclaims. “But once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.”

With the noonday sun glaring overhead, Ms. Coyne waxed less profound: “All I wanted was a shady place to sit.”

MS. COYNE and Mr. Knutzen have a problem with taking work home. Their home is their work and they’re always there.

The dishwasher runs three times a day. Mr. Knutzen has been in a baking frenzy while he masters a no-knead sourdough loaf. He recently helped found the Los Angeles Bread Bakers with the aim of fabricating wood-fired ovens in community gardens.

Ms. Coyne, meanwhile, has started making her own cleaning formulas, body products and natural medicines, with materials from the garden.

“Sometimes it’s actually faster to make your own product than to buy it,” she said. An all-purpose household cleanser (page 70) is no more complicated than mixing in a bottle equal parts vinegar and water, plus a squirt of soap to cut through grease.

Basically, she said, “I don’t like shopping.”

And that leaves the couple at home. “You can see why pioneers killed each other,” she said. “When they were building a house in the middle of the prairie and they had no one else to talk to. And nothing to do but survival activities.”

Until recently, their avocation would have been called urban homesteading. They harvested the term for the title of their first book, “The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City” (Process Media: 2008).

But in October of last year, a Pasadena farmstead registered the phrase with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And in February, the couple’s first publisher, and 16 other parties, received legal notice that they would have to stop using the words “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” in their books and on their blog.

The couple and Process Media filed a trademark appeal in April, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But the dispute captures something about the conflicted nature of the movement known as ... well, whatever it’s called now.

On one hand, Ms. Coyne said, “the bookshelves are crowded with these kinds of titles,” rapturous accounts of how to tend city chickens, city goats (probably city yaks, too). On the other hand, it’s possible to walk for hours across Los Angeles and see no sign of a food garden beyond a lonely lemon tree.

“There’s a lot of hype,” Ms. Coyne said.

“A lot of hype,” Mr. Knutzen said, nodding.

Mr. Knutzen sometimes finds himself flipping through an old copy of “The Whole Earth Catalog” or “The Integral Urban House,” classic D.I.Y. guides from the 1970s. And he wonders: Why didn’t the movement stick?

Ms. Coyne trawls “ancient home-economics books, from the 1880s to 1920 or so,” she said, looking for clues about how women accomplished tasks like conditioning their hair before the chemical age. Indeed, these books have been lecturing and hectoring Americans forever, said Sarah A. Leavitt, 40, a curator at the National Building Museum and the author of “From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice.”

“Every generation would say, ‘These people don’t have the connection to the past that our grandmothers had,’ ” Ms. Leavitt said. “But people have been saying that since the 1840s.”

Over the centuries, she said, the counsel is often the same: homemakers should embrace simplicity, thrift, cleanliness, independence. But the rationale changes with the mood of the times. In the mid-1800s, Ms. Leavitt said, good housekeeping was a Christian virtue; a few decades later, it was sanitary and scientific. During the immigrant boom of the early 20th century, the well-made home was a testament to nativist fervor.

It would be easy to read these “domestic fantasies” with a cynical eye. But then, where you get your food and how you clean your home has always been about something more, Ms. Leavitt said. The question is, “What kind of person do you want to be?”

Ms. Coyne wouldn’t disagree. She doesn’t care to fret about national politics, peak oil or the coming zombie apocalypse. “Within our control,” she said, “is what goes in the house, in the backyard, in the neighborhood.”

Without the obligations of a day job, Mr. Knutzen has made himself a fixture at community meetings and municipal hearings. He recently helped win a $350,000 state-sponsored Safe Routes to School grant for the neighborhood elementary school, to encourage walking and biking. This kind of unglamorous activism makes him “tremendously happy,” he said.

When he is in a particularly expansive mood, he quotes the stoic philosophers. “As within, so without,” he said, citing Hermes Trismegistus. The maxim appears in plainer form on the Root Simple blog: “All change begins at home.”

Mr. Knutzen walked in front of the big picture window in the living room and hoisted his thyrsus.

His what?

“It’s carried by the maenads,” he said, holding out a four-foot-long mace.

The who?

The followers of Dionysus in the procession, he said. Mr. Knutzen had seen an image of a thyrsus in a frieze at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It’s a fennel stalk with a pine cone on top.”

“We realized that because of our Mediterranean climate — —,” Ms. Coyne said.

“We can source this locally,” Mr. Knutzen continued. The fennel was growing right in the backyard.

“I’ve never seen Erik so happy as when he made his own thyrsus,” Ms. Coyne said.

“It’s good to carry around your masculinity pavilion,” Mr. Knutzen said. “I considered mass-marketing it to Target and Wal-Mart.”

Some day the American consumer may be able to find a scepter next to the beer nuts in the bacchanalia aisle. For now, if you want a thyrsus at home, you’ll have to make it yourself.

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/garden/living-large-off-the-land-kelly-coyne-and-erik-knutzen.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all

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Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says

by TARA PARKER-POPE, well.blogs.nytimes.com
May 31st 2011

A World Health Organization panel has concluded that cellphones are “possibly carcinogenic,’’ putting the popular devices in the same category as certain dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides, as a potential threat to human health.

The finding, from the agency’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, adds to concerns among a small but growing group of experts about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted by cellphones. The panel, which consisted of 31 scientists from 14 countries, was led by Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Southern California and a member of President Obama’s National Cancer Advisory Board.

The group didn’t conduct any new research but reviewed numerous existing studies that focused on the health effects of radio frequency magnetic fields, which are emitted by cellphones. During a news conference, Dr. Samet said the panel’s decision to classify cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic” was based largely on epidemiological data showing an increased risk among heavy cellphone users of a rare type of brain tumor called a glioma.

Last year, a 13-country study called Interphone, the largest and longest study of the link between cellphone use and brain tumors, found no overall increased risk, but reported that participants with the highest level of cellphone use had a 40 percent higher risk of glioma. (Even if the elevated risk is confirmed, gliomas are relatively rare and thus individual risk remains minimal.)

Most major medical groups, including the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, have said the existing data on cellphones and health has been reassuring. For years, concerns about the health effects of cellphones have been largely dismissed because the radio frequency waves emitted from the devices are believed to be benign. Cellphones emit nonionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancers. Scientists have said repeatedly that there is no known biological mechanism to explain how nonionizing radiation might lead to cancer or other health problems.

The W.H.O. panel ruled only that cellphones be classified as Category 2B, meaning they are possibly carcinogenic to humans, a designation the panel has given to 240 other agents, including the pesticide DDT, engine exhaust, lead and various industrial chemicals. Also on the list are two familiar foods, pickled vegetables and coffee, which the cellphone industry was quick to point out.

“This I.A.R.C. classification does not mean cellphones cause cancer,’’ John Walls, vice president for public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry group, said in a statement. Mr. Walls noted that both the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have concluded that the weight of the scientific evidence does not link cellphones with cancer or other health problems.

This year, The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on research from the National Institutes of Health, which found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna. The study was among the first and largest to document that the weak radio frequency signals from cellphones have a measurable effect on the brain. The research also offers a potential, albeit hypothetical, explanation for how low levels of nonionizing radiation could cause harm without breaking chemical bonds, possibly by triggering the formation of free radicals or an inflammatory response in the brain.

“We looked carefully at the physical phenomena by which exposure to such fields might perturb biological systems and lead to cancers,” said Dr. Samet. But he said the result was inconclusive, adding, “We found some threads of evidence about how cancer might occur but have to acknowledge gaps and uncertainties.”

The panel made no comment on how large or small a risk cellphone radiation may pose to human health. “Our task was not to quantify risk,’’ said Dr. Samet.

Although the panel did not make specific recommendations to consumers, a representative did note that using a hands-free headset during a conversation or communicating via text message would be options for lowering radio frequency exposure.

The panel’s recommendation is unlikely to have any immediate effect, but is expected to be used as guidance by the World Health Organization, which may make recommendations about cellphone safety.

Dr. Meir Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who is a paid adviser for the cellphone industry, said it was important to remember that the panel’s decision to rank cellphones as a “possible” carcinogen was very different from saying that they pose a real health risk.

“It’s a very thoughtful group, but the important thing is putting it into the perspective of what ‘possible’ means, and the likelihood that this is really something to be concerned about,’’ Dr. Stampfer said. “The evidence doesn’t support that. Comparing this to going out in the sun or any number of normal everyday activities that we’re not really concerned about, I would put cellphones in the lower part of that category.’’

Still, Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a newsletter that focuses on nonionizing radiation, said in an e-mail that the fact that the W.H.O.’s cancer panel had expressed concern had the potential to change the debate about the health risks of cellphones. “It’s a wake-up call for the telecom industry and for the U.S. government to take cellphone radiation seriously,” he said. “The first step should be limiting the use of cellphones by children.”

Henry C. Lai, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in electromagnetic fields, said the credibility of the W.H.O. panel made it difficult to dismiss the findings.

“The debate will go on, except this is the first statement from the W.H.O. saying we should be careful with exposure to this kind of radiation,’’ he said. “It’s quite a mixture of people, and some very respectable researchers. If someone says this panel isn’t good, I don’t know who else we should be listening to.”

Dr. Lai added that the solution to concerns about cellphone risks is relatively simple. “A precautionary approach is the best policy,” he said. “If people use cellphones, they should consider using an earpiece. Just keep the phone away from the head.”

Original Page: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/cellphone-radiation-may-cause-cancer-advisory-panel-says/

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The point of worry
Why Worry? It’s Good for You

by ROBERT H. FRANK, nytimes.com
May 14th 2011

THE late Amos Tversky, a Stanford psychologist and a founding father of behavioral economics, used to say, “My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity.”

In recent decades, behavioral economics has been the economics profession’s runaway growth area. Scholars in this field work largely at the intersection of economics and psychology, and much of their attention has focused on systematic biases in people’s judgments and decisions.

They point out, for example, that people are particularly inept at predicting how changes in their life circumstances will affect their happiness. Even when the changes are huge — positive or negative — most people adapt much more quickly and completely than they expected.

Such prediction errors, behavioral economists argue, often lead to faulty decisions. A celebrated example describes an assistant professor at a distinguished university who agonizes for years about whether he will be promoted. Ultimately, his department turns him down. As anticipated, he’s abjectly miserable — but only for a few months. The next year, he’s settled in a new position at a less selective university, and by all available measures is as happy as he’s ever been.

The ostensible lesson is that if this professor had been acquainted with the relevant evidence, he’d have known that it didn’t make sense to fret about his promotion in the first place — that he would have been happier if he hadn’t. But that’s almost surely the wrong lesson, because failing to fret probably would have made him even less likely to get the promotion. And promotions often matter in ways that have little impact on day-to-day levels of happiness.

Paradoxically, our prediction errors often lead us to choices that are wisest in hindsight. In such cases, evolutionary biology often provides a clearer guide than cognitive psychology for thinking about why people behave as they do.

According to Charles Darwin, the motivational structures within the human brain were forged by natural selection over millions of years. In his framework, the brain has evolved not to make us happy, but to motivate actions that help push our DNA into the next round. Much of the time, in fact, the brain accomplishes that by making us unhappy. Anxiety, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, thirst, anger and fear spur action to meet the competitive challenges we face.

As the late economist Tibor Scitovsky said in “The Joyless Economy,” pleasure is an inherently fleeting emotion, one we experience while escaping from emotionally aversive states. In other words, pleasure is the carrot that provokes us to extricate ourselves from such states, but it almost always fades quickly.

The human brain was formed by relentless competition in the natural world, so it should be no surprise that we adapt quickly to changes in circumstances. Much of life, after all, is graded on the curve. Someone who remained permanently elated about her first promotion, for example, might find it hard to muster the drive to compete for her next one.

Emotional pain is fleeting, too. Behavioral economists often note that while people who become physically paralyzed experience the expected emotional devastation immediately after their accidents, they generally bounce back surprisingly quickly. Within six months, many have a daily mix of moods similar to their pre-accident experience.

This finding is often interpreted to mean that becoming physically disabled isn’t as bad as most people imagine it to be. The evidence, however, strongly argues otherwise. Many paraplegics, for instance, say they’d submit to a mobility-restoring operation even if its mortality risk were 50 percent.

The point is that when misfortune befalls us, it’s not helpful to mope around endlessly. It’s far better, of course, to adapt as quickly as possible and to make the best of the new circumstances. And that’s roughly what a brain forged by the ruthless pressures of natural selection urges us to do.

All of this brings us back to our decisions about how hard we should work — choices that have important implications for the lives we are able to lead.

Most people would love to have a job with interesting, capable colleagues, a high level of autonomy and ample opportunities for creative expression. But only a limited number of such jobs are available — and it’s our fretting that can motivate us to get them.

Within limits, worry about success causes students to study harder to gain admission to better universities. It makes assistant professors work harder to earn tenure. It leads film makers to strive harder to create the perfect scene, and songwriters to dig deeper for the most pleasing melody. In every domain, people who work harder are more likely to succeed professionally, more likely to make a difference.

THE anxiety we feel about whether we’ll succeed is evolution’s way of motivating us. And the evidence is clear that most of us don’t look back on our efforts with regret, even if our daily mix of emotions ultimately doesn’t change.

But evolutionary theory also counsels humility about personal good fortune. As Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests don’t always coincide. A good job is an inherently relative concept, and while the person who lands one benefits enormously, her lucky break means that some other equally deserving person didn’t get that job.

When people work harder, income grows. But much of the spending that comes from extra income just raises the bar that defines adequate. So, from society’s perspective, some of the anxiety over who gets what jobs may be excessive after all. But that’s very different from saying that people shouldn’t worry about succeeding.

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/business/economy/15view.html?src=rechp

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On the words of death. Death and going to Chicago
Doctors and the ‘D’ Word

by DANIELLE OFRI, well.blogs.nytimes.com
May 26th 2011

When I was a first-year medical student, I earned a few extra dollars by working the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift in our hospital’s nursing office, where I scheduled private-duty nurses. One evening, about 9 p.m., a nurse called to inform me that her patient had “expired” and that she would need to be assigned to a different patient for the next day.

Expired?

I had no idea what she was talking about. I had an image of the rubber air mattresses we used during camping trips when I was a kid: When you opened the valve, the mattress would shake and shimmy as the air whistled out, gradually deflating unevenly until it was a flabby rumple of green rubber.

But then it slowly occurred to me what the nurse probably meant. “You mean the patient … died?” I asked, tentatively.

“Yes,” the nurse replied impatiently. “The patient expired.”

Expired. The word rolled so oddly on my tongue. What a strange way to refer to death. My own experiences with death at that time were limited to my anatomy cadaver and the vagaries of the pentose-phosphate cycle.

When I started my clinical clerkships, I began to hear the verb “expire” more frequently, and gradually it ceased to sound strange. As an intern, I witnessed my first deaths and was responsible for writing “expiration notes” in patients’ charts. Cartons of milk had expiration dates. Coupons expired. I guessed people could too.

I could understand why other people might prefer euphemisms for death, but why medical professionals? Weren’t we supposed to be much more comfortable with the workings of the human body? Didn’t we pride ourselves on our technical accuracy? Didn’t we say “umbilicus” instead of “belly button”? Didn’t we refer to the “lower extremity” instead of the “leg”?

Conventional wisdom holds that doctors become inured to death by seeing it so much, but the existentialists posit that seeing so much death has the reverse effect, making us acutely aware of our own mortality.

I think there is a little bit of both. Each time we see someone die, we realize that it could be us, or our parents, or our children. We doctors are just as terrified of death as any other human being scurrying around this little planet. And like any other human, we use euphemism to shield us from that fear. But unlike others who get to indulge in gentler plays of language (“off with the angels” or “at a better place”), we need to institutionalize it as just another piece of medical terminology — terminology that we are in control of.

A few years ago I was supervising on the medical wards during the month of July with a team of new doctors fresh out of medical school. There was one intern who hailed from below the Mason-Dixon line (something of a rarity in our New York City hospital). One morning she came up to me, her eyes heavy, and reported that Mr. Gonzalez had “passed” during the night.

My first reaction was to ask whether it was gas or stool that he had passed, since we’d been concerned about his intestinal symptoms. Then it dawned on me what she was saying.

“Oh, you mean he expired?” I said.

She looked up at me awkwardly and narrowed her eyes, then nodded slowly as she got what I meant. I recognized in her the same uncomfortable transition I had those many years ago, when my everyday words for dying were replaced by the medically acceptable terms.

The experience reminded me of a story published in the very first issue of the Bellevue Literary Review called “Cousin Esther Goes to Chicago,” by Cori Baill. The chief resident admonishes a new intern to stop giving such intensive care to a patient — Esther — who has terminal cancer. “That poor woman should have already gone to Chicago,” he says, trying gamely to convey his empathy. The housekeeper in the story — who is mopping the floors while overhearing this conversation — wonders if in Chicago when someone dies, they say that person “went to Baltimore.”

My intern’s use of the term “passed” also brought to mind a wonderful poem called “Gaudeamus Igitur,” by John Stone, a cardiologist from Atlanta. This poem — the title translates to “Therefore Let Us Rejoice” — was delivered as a commencement address to a class of Emory medical students who probably didn’t realize how lucky they were. I read this poem to all of my students and interns because it speaks to the emotions of moving on in medical training and in life. It includes this passage:

For this is the end of examinations
For this is the beginning of testing
For Death will give the final examination
and everyone will pass.

When Dr. Stone died in 2008, I thought of this line. I know he would have been relieved that he didn’t fail.

Original Page: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/doctors-and-the-d-word/?ref=health

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