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Regenerative food, farm, forest, energy, and conservation practices, in combination, can quickly stop global warming.
My 2020 book, Grassroots Rising, (Chelsea Green Publishing) lays out a “Roadmap for Regeneration” in the US between 2020 and 2030, whereby regenerative and organic food, farming, and land use, deployed on approximately 20% of the 1.9 billion acres of US farmland, pasture, rangelands, forest lands, and urban environments, in combination with a transition to alternative energy and energy conservation (reducing emissions by 45-60%), can enable us to reach zero net emissions by 2030.
Now leading global climate experts such as Michael Mann (Penn State) and Joeri Rogelj (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have announced that previous estimations of the “long time lag” between reaching zero net emissions and literally stopping the rise in global warming were vastly overestimated. Scientists and climate analysts have characterized this new model as a “game-changing new scientific understanding.”
This “game-changing” new scientific understanding tells us that if the global community can quickly reach zero net emissions before the oceans are saturated (within 10-30 years) and terrestrial soils and systems are irreversibly degraded, the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have the capacity to draw down enough of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to literally stop all global warming within 10 years.
READ: Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly After Emissions Go to Zero
READ: 60 Minutes, The Guardian, and Game-Changing New Climate Science
While most nations, including the US, have pledged to reach zero net Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, more and more countries, regions, and municipalities are pledging to reach this goal by 2030.
And of course by carbon neutrality we’re not just talking about more excess atmospheric carbon stored in trees, plants, and soils, but also increased soil fertility, soil moisture, biodiversity, and elimination of poverty among the world’s three billion small farmers, herders, forest dwellers, indigenous, and rural communities, who suffer the most from poverty, malnutrition, forced migration, violence, and war.
Bhutan (with 100% organic agriculture) has already moved beyond net zero to being “carbon negative,” to actually drawing down and sequestering more CO2 than it emits. Uruguay is now on track for carbon neutrality by 2030, while Norway’s current goal is also 2030.
As we pointed out last week, Mexico and many of the world’s predominately arid and semi-arid countries (40% of the world’s lands) can achieve zero net emissions, and in fact can become carbon negative, by deploying the new organic and regenerative Agave agroforestry system, which the OCA and Mexican small farmers are developing, on a fraction (1 to 2 percent in Mexico) of degraded farm, pasture, and desert lands.
READ: Agave Power: Greening the Desert
After a year of ignoring or covering up the real facts surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic, New York Magazine, along with a number of other publications have begun to break through the walls of silence and censorship.
On January 4, New York Magazine published this meticulously-researched and carefully written 12,000-word masterpiece by biological weapons historian, Nicholson Baker. If you want to know what really happened, this is the best article thus far.
READ: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
We’ve profiled Robert Kadlec and Christian Hassell, whose government careers go back to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation, respectively.
In the Trump Administration, Kadlec and Hassell have been the Pandemic Industrial Complex’s kingmakers. When Biden cleans house, he should oust these two for corruption, including “seeking $100 million for labs that Hassell told Kadlec in an email were ‘in trouble for shady dealings, illegal accounting, and lack of accountability’ for unspecified Department of Defense projects.”
In this newest installment of the Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame, we add fellow anthrax alumnus David R. Franz, now an adviser to EcoHealth Alliance, the coronavirus-hunting funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that we covered in our profile of Peter Daszak.
Franz is a retired army colonel who served at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) beginning in 1987. He was Chief of the Cardiorespiratory Toxicology Department (1987-1989), Chief of the Toxicology Division (1989-1992), Deputy Commander (1993-1995), and Commander (1995-1998).
In August 1998, Franz left USAMRIID to work at the Southern Research Institute, a Pentagon biodefense contractor. SRI was one of the labs that, like USAMRIID, could have been a source of the virulent Ames anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. We know this because, in 2004, it accidentally sent live spores of this strain to a children's hospital in Oakland. This made news and an SRI spokesperson was quoted saying they had been working with the pathogen since 2001.
David Franz was understood to be within the circle of potential suspects, but he was never fingered in the FBI’s investigation.
To this day, no one knows who did it.
READ: David R. Franz: EcoHealth Alliance's Anthrax-Era Biological Weapons Scientist
Nearly every conversation these days starts with: “How are you doing?” And it should. We have been worried all year, especially about the most vulnerable. We are all trying to take care of ourselves, and each other.
But we should also be asking each other what we are doing—beyond of course adjusting to and coping with whatever havoc COVID-19 has wrought on our personal lives.
What are we doing to make our own immune systems more resilient? What are we doing to put an end to a food, farm, medical, and political system that sets up people for chronic disease and lab-created, genetically engineered bioweapons such as SARS-CoV-2 that prey upon the elderly and those in poor health?
What are we doing to restore and preserve biodiversity, soil health, climate stability, and rural livelihoods—under the gun of industrial agriculture and GMO monocultures?
What are we doing to force our local, state and federal lawmakers to rethink unjust social, economic and environmental policies that leave millions of people unnecessarily and hopelessly vulnerable?
Author and activist Arundhati Roy, in an article about the heart-wrenching impact of the coronavirus on the people of India, writes:
"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. In a tragic way, the pandemic sweeping the globe today validates so much of the work we at OCA have been dedicated to for more than 20 years."
In a good way, the pandemic and disastrous government responses have reaffirmed our sense of urgency.
We are (still) ready to fight and win.
We want to keep exposing the bad players, and perhaps even more important, bring you the “game-changing” good news on the organic and regenerative fronts, but we need your support and your donations.
If you can, please make a generous donation to help continue this fight.
Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Support Citizens Regeneration Lobby, OCA’s 501(c)(4) lobbying arm (not tax-deductible)
Donate $100 or more and we’ll send you a copy of Ronnie’s new book
Click here for more ways to support our work
We were lucky enough to sit down for a conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, pioneer of the New Economy Movement & recipient of the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”
Helena Norberg-Hodge is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures (1991), and Local is Our Future (2019).
She is co-author of the books Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary "The Economics of Happiness."
Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures / Economics of Happiness and the International Alliance for Localisation, and a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food & Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.
WATCH: Live with Helena Norberg-Hodge
Lab Leak the 'Most Credible' Source of Coronavirus Outbreak, Says Top US Government Official
What I Saw Inside the Capitol Riot
Mexico Farm Lobby Blasts Ban on GMO Corn; Organic Growers Welcome It
U.S. Diet Guidelines Sidestep Scientific Advice to Cut Sugar and Alcohol
Does Regenerative Agriculture Have a Race Problem?
Humans of the GREAT RESET: What the Future MIGHT Look Like in 2021 – if the Controlling Elites Have Their Way
Google Workers Form Union to 'Promote Solidarity, Democracy, and Social and Economic Justice'
Roaming Charges: White Riot, They Wanna Riot, They Wanna Riot of Their Own
