Amerindia US Blog

One would (or should) be astonished about the prevalence of worker slavery all over the world, including the US. Vulnerable populations are forced or lured into jobs where they receive little and are essentially treated like slaves. Much of it happens with the lure of “jobs.” But the “jobs” result in people leaving a sustainable if not prosperous lifestyle, in exchange for “better” living conditions that leave them in financial and/or physical slavery.

This latest incident reported in Brazil

Time to turn concrete back into soil and growing things, to make our environment sustainable. Guerrilla Gardening sprouts up in LA and is spreading everywhere.

Guerrilla Gardening

Sustainable, healthy, environmentally and lifestyle – Design for Sustainable Lifestyle

Sustainable Lifestyle Town

Gay marriage, adoption, legalized in Argentina, first in South America.

argentina.gay.marriage

First in a series of articles in the Boston Globe about “El Sistema”, the energy of young people from around the world putting magic in the music at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Hopefully this new music will send sound waves of good energy to turn war into peace, injustice into humanitarianism, poverty into improvement in living for all, environmental destruction into sustainability – that it will be another path to a general harmony with the earth.

El Sistema music at Boston Conservatory of Music

This article is exceptionally good in covering the importance of good old fashioned farming practices. Well, maybe not some of them, like those that resulted in the US dust bowl of the 1930s. But what healed that disaster is what is being talked about here. Good, sustainable agricultural practices; water, land, and natural resource management that preserves food, water, and the environment in a non-technical way.
The west is currently trying to sell technical solutions to the African continent. But it has the same motivation that keeps it going – to our detriment and poor health – in the west. That is, dependence on artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics – all “necessary” because of intense monoculture production. This is for profit, not for the health of the farmers, the consumers, or the land and environment.
Wherever the “technological food revolution” is being touted, there should be a look back at the Western culture where it started. One can see the poverty, desperation, and elimination of the small farmer, sustainable methods, loss of land and water resources, and poor health of the consumers.
We could go on, but this article really says it best. The only thing it fails to say is that the West should be heading this warning too, not just Africa.
Western policy bad for Africa

The toll of oil drilling, and the inevitability of spills and its effects.
The toll of oil drilling

Turning land into farmland. Sustainable agriculture for farms and farmers, wherever they come from. A lesson that should inform everywhere.
http://www.grist.org/article/Kansas-City-pioneers-new-models-for-urban-farms/

A study going on in Vermont demonstrates how everything is connected, and begins with soil science. We “enrich” the land with fertilizers, pollute it with phosphates from sewage waste and runoff, and some is imbalance in the soil that is eroding away. It’s a loss of soil and a contaminate for our water.

Vermont studies soil, the consequences of phosphates and erosion

Malawi has gone in a few short years from being a starving nation to one that has an abundance of food for its people, and a surplus to assist other African nations. This was done by good government, sidestepping corruption, and instituting good land management practices that match their environment. GMOs were not necessary to reach this outcome, but good government was. There are a couple of great short videos on this link.

http://johnkaranja.com/2009/09/14/malawis-food-revolution/

The fight is on about salt in processed food. This article is an interesting light on how processed foods taste without it. It should raise alarm bells about not only the amount of salt in processed food, but what we’re eating underneath all that salt. First fat and sugar, now we find out how much salt is covering for nutritionally deficient food. It’s the usual line up of Cargill, ConAgra, Kraft, and so on and so on. What we know is that most of our processed food comes from a few major food ‘producers’, with a multitude of brands that are subsidiaries of the major food companies. And we are certain that more is invested in finding out what flavors are appealing than in what nutritional value is being delivered.

The major food producers are fighting back, and the latest argument is that without high amounts of salt, the Processed food “will disappoint the consumer and it won’t sell.” We are not against salt – we need small amounts of salt, and we use unbleached sea salt for the trace minerals we need and a little zip to top off a good, fresh, organic, whole foods. But salt should be the addition we choose; salt should Not be in our food as a cover up for the nasty flavors and textures that we shouldn’t be eating anyway. Take salt away from processed foods, and our primitive taste instincts would tell us – “oh, nasty, don’t eat that stuff.”
We recommend a small amount of unbleached sea salt, and no processed food.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/health/30salt.html?pagewanted=1&hp

We just found this on Twitter. A variety of useful tips on how to save money, and also have an eco-friendly lifestyle.
http://twitter.com/Rubbingnickels

Monsanto, Sygenta, Dupont, Bayer, the “gift” of GMOs and pesticides. The gift that makes us sick, ruins small farming (if they don’t sue you to economic death first). This “gift” that is talked of as what will solve the world’s need for food, is on the march to eventually starve us all. We can’t believe that the executives of these companies eat anything they produce.
Changing their tag line from “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible” to “Imagine.” Oh, we can imagine, and it’s a nightmare in the making. We in Amerindia think these companies are propagating a crime against the people. All people.
This article really sums it up:
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2927

The Queen of Amerindia

“If you have an interest in sustainable living, then we’d like to invite you to join the Permaculture Guild in our mission to support the permaculture community and encourage the spread of more conscious ways of growing and distributing healthy, nourishing foods and promoting the use of renewable sources of energy.”
http://www.permacultureguild.org/

From this article:
“EEB has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion, dwarfing costs of the banking crisis.

“Many economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other lifeforms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (Unep).

“Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050.”

The more that ecosystems become degraded, the UN says, the greater the risk that they will be pushed “over the edge” into a new stable state of much less utility to humankind.

For example, freshwater systems polluted with excess agricultural fertiliser will suffocate with algae, killing off fish and making water unfit for human consumption.

The launch of GBO-3 comes as governments begin two weeks of talks in Nairobi aimed at formulating new measures to tackle global biodiversity loss that can be adopted at October’s Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Japan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10103179.stm

The NYT article says discusses this article with a question mark. They haven’t been paying attention to the state of Vermont, which has outlined what a socially responsible business is. They question profitability, when we should be moving toward a world in which “profit” has a different meaning. Rather than huge returns to investors (who in the high stakes games are just gambling, with their finger on the roulette wheel), return can be interpreted to be ‘benefit to the community.’ So yogurt to children isn’t a hugely profitable enterprise in the now rather distorted sense, but it is a high return for the health and benefit of a community. So maybe we get healthy communities we no longer have to beg charities to chuck huge amounts of relief money into where ‘high rates of return’ have sucked it out. We hope this book makes it big, and creates prosperous communities, not just individuals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02shelf.html?emc=eta1

High Fructose Corn Syrup is just that. They are going to change the name so you don’t suspect the chemicals used in it’s making, and this is a highly subsidized genetically modified crop. Bad science can’t defend it. HFCS Not!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02syrup.html?emc=eta1

US farmers fighting back against giant agrabusiness and animal factories – and winning.

How to move from a lost environment to a renewed environment, climate, and society. Save 20″ to see this worth every second video.
Willie Smits restores a rainforest

We have to seriously reduce, marginalize, eliminate the need for plastics, much of it packaging, and much else that is just junk or could be made of something else. Plastic can be recycled into some useful products, however, recycling in general just uses up more energy, and then we’re making more plastic and the cycle goes on. Until more and more of it shows up in our environment, as giant globs of plastic forming in our oceans and polluting our shores indicates.
Once the word was “Plastics!” (made famous by “The Graduate”). Now it should be “Plastics – Not!”
Plastics in our oceans and on our beaches