Puck

I produced and edited this project for work. It took about three months to get to this 3-minute video, in part because I needed to travel to various locations in the state to conduct the interviews and then cull through some 20 hours of raw footage to find just the right sound bites. In any case, I’m fairly happy with it, though some of the shots and some of the sound are less than perfect. I do think the editing is fine and it tells a great story: the importance of science to a premium wine industry and, correspondingly, the key to the science is an outstanding education.

In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia's coast and scooped up the ocean's contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.

via Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish.

Wino, the Seattle-based magazine for wine lovers with an attitude, has just posted my latest column on the science of wine and the importance of micronutrients on grapes.

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.

The Colorado ski town of Breckenridge has voted overwhelmingly to legalize marijuana.

Early returns Tuesday night showed the proposal winning with 72 percent of the vote. The measure would allow adults over 21 to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana.

The measure is largely symbolic because pot possession remains a state crime for people without medical clearance. But supporters said they wanted to send a message to local law enforcement to stop busting small-time pot smokers.

The vote comes as communities nationwide are struggling with how to enforce pot laws at a time when medical marijuana has surged in popularity.

via Colorado ski town legalizes pot.

A story in today’s Science News reports that

Women who lived in villages sprayed with DDT to reduce malaria gave birth to 33 per cent more baby boys with urogenital birth defects (UGBD) between 2004 and 2006 than women in unsprayed villages, according to research published online by the UK-based urology journal BJUI.

A lot of folks don’t realize that Big Ag Chem is still peddling the banned pesticide in the Third World. But, yeah, DDT is still in widespread use; Rachel Carson is still frequently blamed for millions of deaths (they don’t call it junk science for nothing); and chemistry is the path to better living, at least according to a 2006 report from WHO.

And women who stayed at home in sprayed villages, rather than being a student or working, had 41 per cent more baby boys with UGBDs, such as missing testicles or problems with their urethra or penis.

The authors suggest that this is because they spent more time in homes where domestic DDT-based sprays are still commonly used to kill the mosquitos that cause malaria, even in areas where organised mass spraying no longer takes place.

Cindy over at the agribiz-subsidized blog Corn Commentary popped some widgets over my post about her yellow pseudo-journalistic post on the film Food, Inc. Being a corporate PR hack, she of course completely and deliberately (I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; she might just be dumb) missed my point, the point of the film review she critiqued, and the point of Food, Inc. But let’s let bygones be begones. (Although I should point out that Corny calls me “yellow,” but it is she who has closed comments on her post. Now there’s a good way to start a conversation….)

My main point in re Corny Cindy is that she ain’t doing her job. She continues to navel-gaze and assume that her audience knows WTF she’s talking about. Rule number one in being a corporate PR hack: explain your position in short simple sentences. Instead, Corny erects strawmen and duly knocks them down: the amount of corn grown, the types of corn grown, etc. The simple case she needs to make, but can’t because it just isn’t there to be made, is that corporate ag cares about consumer and environmental health more than it does the economic bottom line.

At least Cindy looked up “yellow journalism” is Wikipedia. Now if she and the industry she flacks for would only look in the mirror.

In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world’s biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.

via Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety.

This is in re “Food Bills Coming Due” – the lamebrained legislation being passed in both houses of congress.

Corn is inspiring a spitting contest and the goober fest is probably going to end up in a mutant hybrid of agriculture that, twenty years from now, none of us will recognize.

An example of the yellow journalism inspired by corn is emerging over at Corn Commentary, a blog put up by the National Corn Growers Association. I’ve been studying it for a couple days, and it’s pretty typical of what agribusiness is shelling out in the way of positive spin for the industry. Truly, it doesn’t bode well, at least not if the economy of the food system comes down to a war of words. Alas, tain’t so simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Greathouse has been telling me for years – nay, decades! – that the end is near. Because I’m sympatico with conspiracy theories, I keep listening. But, somehow, the agro-industrial complex keeps chugging along, as it has for the past few tens of thousands of years.

The one thing we can count on, though, is change. So just because everything hasn’t gone kablooie doesn’t mean it won’t. And, as Jay points out, it depends entirely on your point of view. For the many at the base of the agro-industrial complex, the end came some time ago — and just keeps dragging on, like war, tax and biological reproduction.

What I like about Jay is his gritty determination (and determinism): the end may be near, or it may have already banged upside the head, but he’s doggedly gonna hunker down and weather the super storm. To that end, he’s mustering his mighty intellect (and I may tease him about a lot of things, but his intellect is truly in the 99th percentile [he'll gimme shit for that]) in a new blog called Raw Materials Econ: Resilience Economics for Everyone.

There’s a lot of cool stuff already up, including links to info about cannabis pricing, jury nullification, and issues of economic justice. Here’s hoping you’ll give it a read and offer your opinion.

WINO magazine, the wine news and review mag published in Seattle, has been running a Higher Learning column written by yours truly since issue one. They’ve recently pulled all my pieces together into a single page on the WINO blog, complete with spiffy new headlines.