Monks Succeed in Cyclone Relief as Junta Falters

They paddle for hours on the stormy river, or carry their sick parents on their backs through the mud and rain, traveling for miles to reach the one source of help they can rely on: Buddhist monks.

At a makeshift clinic in this village near Bogale, an Irrawaddy Delta town 75 miles southwest of Yangon, hundreds of villagers left destitute by Cyclone Nargis arrive each day seeking the assistance they have not received from the government or international aid workers.

Since the cyclone, the Burmese have been growing even closer to the monks while their alienation from the junta grows. This development bodes ill for the government, which brutally cracked down on thousands of monks who took to the streets last September appealing to the ruling generals to improve conditions for the people.

The May 3 cyclone left more than 134,000 dead or missing and 2.4 million survivors grappling with hunger and homelessness. This week, some of them who had taken shelter at monasteries or gathered on roadsides were being displaced again, this time by the junta, which wants them to stop being an embarrassment to the government and return to their villages “for reconstruction.” On Friday, United Nations officials said that refugees were also being evicted from government-run camps.

The survivors have little left of their homes and find themselves almost as exposed to the elements as their mud-coated water buffaloes. Meanwhile, outside aid is slow to arrive, with foreign aid agencies gaining only incremental access to the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta and the government impounding cars of some private Burmese donors.

more from the NY Times

Hurricane high-risk areas lose residents

After decades of breakneck growth in high-risk areas, the summer hurricane season is starting with fewer Americans in harm's way.

The number of people who live in coastal areas that are most vulnerable to wind and water has fallen slightly since 2000, reversing an extended boom that brought tens of thousands of homes and high-rises to low-lying regions from Texas to Georgia, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

About 2.1 million people live full time in those areas, down less than 1% over the past eight years.

That doesn't mean Americans are thinking twice about living in vulnerable spots, says Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute. Instead, he says, the slowdown is more likely a result of a housing market crunch that's left some homes vacant — and others half-built — in once fast-growing parts of the South.

"Memories are short, and when the economy does recover, you'll see people snap up those properties in coastal areas again," Hartwig says.

The steepest population losses were in the coastal parishes of Louisiana, flattened nearly three years ago by Hurricane Katrina. In St. Bernard Parish, a flat expanse outside New Orleans surrounded by swamps and the sea, the number of residents in the highest-risk neighborhoods dropped by two-thirds since 2000.

Part of the reason may be that it is simply more difficult to move to those areas.

Across the Gulf Coast, the areas most vulnerable to hurricanes also suffered the worst damage in the 2005 storms. As a result, rebuilding there has been a longer, more complex task than in other places, says Greg Rigamer, head of the New Orleans planning firm GCR & Associates, which has tracked the region's recovery.

more from USA Today

China Sacks Plastic Bags

Ban could save 37 million barrels of oil and alleviate "white pollution"

Thin plastic bags are used for everything in China and the Chinese use up to three billion of them a day--an environmentally costly habit picked up by shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over traditional cloth bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff shirts into them, even street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly into see-through plastic bags that do nothing to protect one's hands from being burned or coated in hot grease. They even have a special name for the plastic bags found blowing, hanging and floating everywhere from trees to rivers: bai si wu le, or "white pollution," for the bags' most common color.

Yet, the Chinese government is set to ban the manufacture and force shopkeepers to charge for the distribution of bags thinner than .025 millimeters thick as of June 1—and no one seems prepared. "I don't know what we'll do," Zhang Gui Lin, a tailor at Shanghai's famous fabric market, tells me through a translator. "I guess our shopping complex will figure it out and tell us what to buy to use as bags."

His wife adds: "Maybe it will be like this," tugging a thicker mesh orange plastic bag she is using to carry some shoes. Such thicker bags may prove one replacement for the ubiquitous thinner versions.

The clothes makers are not alone. "I don't know actually," says a vendor of Chinese tamales, known as zong si, who declined to give her name. "I'm sure the government will come up with a solution. Maybe people will just eat it [the zong si directly.]"

The Chinese government is banning production and distribution of the thinnest plastic bags in a bid to curb the white pollution that is taking over the countryside. The bags are also banned from all forms of public transportation and "scenic locations." The move may save as much as 37 million barrels of oil currently used to produce the plastic totes, according to China Trade News. Already, the nation's largest producer of such thin plastic bags, Huaqiang, has shut down its operations.

more from Scientific American

Forecasters say Virginia coastline will retreat dramatically

Over the next century, most of the barrier islands on Virginia’s Eastern Shore would be lost, the ocean would breach into Back Bay in Virginia Beach and local rivers would swell and cover more than 10,000 acres of undeveloped land in Hampton Roads, a new study about global warming concludes.

The study released Thursday by the National Wildlife Federation provides one of the most detailed and localized forecasts of what might happen in the Chesapeake Bay region if climate change continues unabated.

Its conclusions are based on conservative assumptions about rising sea levels around the Bay – about 2 feet higher in coastal Virginia by 2100 – and uses computer modeling to create what-if maps of specific geographic areas, from Hampton Roads to Baltimore to Delaware Bay.

The results are not pretty: Ocean beaches decline by 58 percent along the mid-Atlantic coast; 161,000 acres of brackish marshes go underwater; 167,000 acres of dry lands are gone and replaced by open water or salt marshes.

“Even under the low-end scenarios, of sea levels rising 1 to 2 feet, there’ll be significant changes throughout the Bay,” said Patty Glick, a senior global-warming specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, based in Northern Virginia. “We absolutely have to deal with sea-level rise.”

Glick and others urged Congress to pass a bill, co-sponsored by Virginia Sen. John Warner, a Republican, that would set a national cap on greenhouse-gas emissions and let industries buy, sell and trade pollution credits in order to meet new limits.

more from Hampton Roads Pilot

Drowning Villages Threaten Ghana's History and Tourist Trade

Agbakla Amartey trudges through the sand near the village of Totope, Ghana, and points out the submerged concrete walls of a house.

``This used to be my room,'' Amartey says above the crash of Atlantic Ocean waves pounding the coastline. ``Yes, this would have been the roof.''

Totope, on a slip of land that juts off the Ada peninsula east of Accra, Ghana's capital, is one of 22 coastal settlements the local government says may be swallowed by the ocean over the next few years. The rising tides also threaten former slave forts that are luring American tourists searching for their heritage.

Along the Gulf of Guinea in northwest Africa, residents blame climate change for accelerating the destruction of homes and beaches. Lawmakers and scientists say a network of sea walls is necessary to stem the destruction and save Ghana's nascent tourism industry.

"Even this year, Totope we are not sure will be there," says Israel Baako, chief executive of the Ada district.

Average sea levels rose 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) worldwide in the 20th century, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The waters may advance a further 18 to 60 centimeters by 2100, the group estimates.

Ghana's low-lying shore makes it particularly vulnerable says Rudolph Kuuzegh, the government's environmental director, who estimates the ocean claims 1 to 3 meters of land a year.

The new Gulf: Safe enough?

Crews with trucks and bulldozers are laying pipe and asphalt along Main Street of this Gulf Coast town, as customers at the Mockingbird Cafe, seemingly oblivious to the din, sip cappuccinos. Traffic now clogs inland Route 90 on most mornings, and the local building inspector has recently complained of being "swamped" with work.

Well into the third year since hurricane Katrina leveled nearly all the shoreline mansions and tore beachfront shops to pieces, Bay St. Louis is, for all intents and purposes, a boom town, along with much of surrounding Hancock County.

"The country is [about] in recession, but we're not seeing anything like that here – quite the opposite," says Jeffrey Reed, city council president.

Stoking this boom – and similar ones in Mississippi's two other Katrina-walloped counties – is $38 billion in federal aid and private insurance money that has been spread across this coast like a salve. It's a lot of money – as much as $100,000 for every resident in the three counties – intended to help this long, thin sliver of warm sand and live oaks recover from one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

As much as Americans are willing to invest taxpayer dollars to make Katrina country whole, many also want assurances that what rises from the cataclysm is sensible – communities rebuilt to take another direct hit from a Category 3 storm without devastating loss of life or property. Most observers agree that what's going up now is much improved over what was on the ground the August morning the hurricane rushed ashore with its 120-mile-per-hour winds and 27-foot-high storm surge. Many Gulf communities have adopted better building codes, including strapping all new houses to the ground by their studs. Some have pledged to funnel new construction to higher ground, resisting the temptation to let businesses and homes sprawl in low-lying areas where the surge caused the most destruction.

more from the CS Monitor

Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success

Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.

Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.

The farm earned about $10,000 on revenue of $450,000 in 2007, and hopes to make a profit of 5 percent on $650,000 in revenue in this, its 10th year, so it can open another operation elsewhere in Philadelphia.

In season, it sells its own hydroponically grown vegetables, as well as peaches from New Jersey, tomatoes from Lancaster County, and breads, meats and cheeses from small local growers within a couple of hours of Philadelphia.

The farm, in the low-income Kensington section, about three miles from the skyscrapers of downtown Philadelphia, also makes its own honey — marketed as “Honey From the Hood” — from a colony of bees that produce about 80 pounds a year. And it makes biodiesel for its vehicles from the waste oil produced by the restaurants that buy its vegetables.

Among urban farms, Greensgrow distinguishes itself by being a bridge between rural producers and urban consumers, and by having revitalized a derelict industrial site, said Ian Marvy, executive director of Added Value, an urban farm in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.

It has also become a model for others by showing that it is possible to become self-supporting in a universe where many rely on outside financial support, Mr. Marvy said.

more from the NY Times

In Myanmar, Mangroves Out, Flooding In

The destruction of huge areas of coastal mangroves around the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar in the last few decades amplified the flooding and worsened devastation there, according to a report and images released Thursday by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

People have been pushing in closer to the coast, and the combination of dense new settlements and deforestation for fish ponds and farmland set the stage for the disaster, said Jan Heino, the F.A.O.’s assistant director general for forestry. The same trend is evident around the world, he added.

Over all, the area of the Irrawaddy delta covered in mangrove forests has been halved since 1975. Wood harvesting has also reduced the density of the forests.

“Healthy mangrove forests are particularly good at reducing the force of waves because of the resistance provided by stilt roots as well as the trees’ trunks and branches,” the report said. “Mangroves also trap and stabilize sediment and reduce the risk of shoreline erosion.”

The Mongabay blog has some useful additional background on how agriculture, as well as aquaculture, eats away at these vital buffers to storms and nurseries for marine life and birds.

And of course the retreat of mangroves is hardly restricted to struggling tropical countries. In Florida, as some comment posters noted on my recent video blog with my son, Jack, homeowners can hack away at the mangroves to put in a dock for the (affordable) price of a fine or two.

from the NY Times

A City Cooler and Dimmer, and, Oh, Proving a Point

Conservationists swoon at the possibility of it all. Here in Alaska, where melting arctic ice and eroding coastlines have made global warming an urgent threat, this little city has cut its electricity use by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, instantly establishing itself as a role model for how to go green, and fast.

Comfort has been recalibrated. The public sauna has been closed and the lights have been dimmed at the indoor community pool. At the library, one of the two elevators was shut down after someone figured out it cost 20 cents for each round trip. The thermostat at the convention center was dialed down eight degrees, to 60. The marquee outside is dark.

Schoolchildren sacrifice Nintendo time and boast at show-and-tell of kilowatts saved. Hotels consult safety regulations to be sure they have not unscrewed too many light bulbs in the hallways. On a recent weekday, all but one of the dozens of television screens on display at the big Fred Meyer store were black — off, that is.

Yet even as they embrace a fluorescent future, the 31,000 residents of Juneau, the state capital, are not necessarily doing it for the greater good. They face a more local inconvenient truth. Electricity rates rocketed about 400 percent after an avalanche on April 16 destroyed several major transmission towers that delivered more than 80 percent of the city’s power from a hydroelectric dam about 40 miles south.

more from the NY Times

Chinese Quake Likely a Mega-Catastrophe

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Researchers fear that the magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck near the major city of Chengdu today will easily be China's biggest killer since 1976's Tangshan quake, conservatively estimated to have taken 250,000 lives. "I would think there's going to be horrific loss of life in this one," says seismologist Lucile Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) office in Pasadena, California. The all-too-familiar combination of millions of people living by a major fault rupture in quake-vulnerable structures makes for an inevitably bad outcome, she says.

The Eastern Sichuan quake ruptured about 275 kilometers of a fault running northeastward between the easternmost mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and the densely populated Sichuan Basin. Chengdu, population 11 million, lies about 100 kilometers southeast of the epicenter. Jones studied the fault 25 years ago as a major threat because plate motions are pushing the mountains in the west upward and to the east along the thrust fault and over the basin. "This is the big earthquake for Sichuan," she says. "It's like San Francisco or Los Angeles having its big one."

According to data compiled by USGS in the aftermath of the quake, millions of people suffered strong shaking that would have caused heavy damage. USGS calculates that a total of 6.2 million people would have felt severe to extreme shaking that could cause heavy to very heavy damage to structures vulnerable to seismic shaking. Many structures in China are vulnerable, Jones notes. Another 11.7 million people would have felt very strong shaking capable of moderate to heavy damage to vulnerable structures. The 1976 quake--a magnitude-7.8--struck the city of Tangshan (population 1.5 million), leaving two buildings standing, Jones says. If that's any guide, Sichuan has "got to be really bad," she says.

from Science

read the USGS report on the earthquake

The Dangers of the Deltas

Deltas are disaster zones in waiting. From the Mekong to the Mississippi, the rich soils and strategic positions of river mouths have long lured farmers, fishers and traders. But the same geography also guarantees they will be periodically inundated.

A case in point was Cyclone Nargis last weekend. As it roared over the sprawling, crowded delta of the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar, the sea surged up to seven miles inland like a slow-motion tsunami, as up to two feet of rain fell. Tens of thousands of people died.

Still, many experts say it is not nature that largely determines the amount of death and destruction in such circumstances, but investment, governance and policy (or the lack of it).

Governments that do not prepare adequately — either through political inertia and underinvestment as in New Orleans, or willful disregard, as critics of the Myanmar junta charge — will continue to see tragic losses.

There is a long list of reasons for countries with low-lying population centers, particularly around rivers, to do more to gird for the worst.

Deltas are evanescent landscapes, formed and occasionally violently rearranged by water. They are implicitly lowlands, built of sediment settling where rivers meet the sea. Most are sinking naturally, as recently deposited silt compresses over time.

In many cases, the subsidence is accelerated by human activities, including the extraction of groundwater and construction of upriver dams, levees and channels, which cut off the renewing flow of silt. In addition, destruction of coastal vegetation leaves exposed soil open to erosion.

Vulnerability will keep rising as populations in poor countries crest in the next few decades, with much of the increase crowding into coastal cities.

Simultaneously, such regions face a faster retreat of coastlines from the rise in sea levels, as climate and oceans warm under the influence of accumulating greenhouse gases, scientists warn.

But human vulnerability can be reduced, as shown in Bangladesh. Though hammered regularly by cyclone-driven floods, it has seen declining death counts since it began investing in warning systems, shelters, coastal housing standards and evacuation plans.

Cyclones in its deltas killed something like half a million people in 1970, and 140,000 in 1991. Last November, aid organizations estimate, the toll from Cyclone Sidr was about 4,000; in that case, more than two million people had taken shelter when the storm struck.

Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath, on the other hand, provide a vivid study in how poverty and insufficient government investment can turn a natural disaster into an outsize human tragedy, said Debarati Guha-Sapir, the director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Research on Disaster Epidemiology, in Brussels.

“The villages are in such levels of desperation — housing quality, nutritional status, roads, bridges, dams — that losses were more determined by their condition rather than the force of the cyclone,” she said.

from the NY Times

an interactive map of Nargis' impact on Myanmanr

Aging sewers threaten environment, public health

America's sewers are showing their age.

Deteriorating pipes, overwhelmed by volumes of water they were never designed to carry, release billions of gallons of raw sewage into rivers and streams each year. The spills make people sick, threaten local drinking water and kill aquatic animals and plants.
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Hundreds of municipal sewer authorities have been fined for spills since 2003, according to a Gannett News Service analysis of EPA data.

And dozens of local governments have agreed to spend billions modernizing failing wastewater systems over the next 10 to 20 years. Many of those projects will be financed by rate increases.

But the improvements can't keep up with problems affecting the thousands of miles of sewer pipes snaking underground through each community. Foul-smelling waste gurgles from manholes and gushes down streams and rivers somewhere in the U.S. almost every day.

In March, between 700,000 and 1.3 million gallons of human feces and other waste spilled from a damaged pipe into Grand Lagoon at Panama City Beach, Fla.

In January, about 20 million gallons of sewage flowed into Pennsylvania's Schuylkill River after a 42-inch pipe ruptured near Reading, Pa.

That same month, heavy rain, deteriorating pipes and operator error combined to send about 5 million gallons of sewage into Northern California's Richardson and San Francisco bays.

"When people flush their toilets, they think the sewage is going to the treatment plant, and that's where they deserve to have it go," said Nancy Stoner, a project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which says the government isn't doing enough to police sewage overflows.


more from Gannett News Service

Mangrove loss 'put Burma at risk'

ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said coastal developments had resulted in mangroves, which act as a natural defence against storms, being lost.

At least 22,000 people have died in the disaster, say state officials.

A study of the 2004 Asian tsunami found that areas near healthy mangroves suffered less damage and fewer deaths.

Mr Surin, speaking at a high-level meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, said the combination of more people living in coastal areas and the loss of mangroves had exacerbated the tragedy.

"Encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas; all those lands have been destroyed," the AFP news agency reported him as saying.

"Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces."

His comments follow a news conference by Burma's minister for relief and resettlement, Maung Maung Swe, who said more deaths were caused by the cyclone's storm surge rather than the winds which reached 190km/h (120mph).

"The wave was up to 12ft (3.5m) high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages," the minister said. "They did not have anywhere to flee."

A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More

Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates.

But the city wants more.

So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.

“Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal. His aides said it stood a good chance of passing.

How does he describe his fixation with recycling dominance? “It’s purposefulness that could otherwise be construed as ego,” Mr. Newsom said. “You want to be the greatest city. You want to be the leading city. You want to be on the cutting edge. I’m very intense about it.”

In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.

more from the NY Times

Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market

In the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles.

The Wilkses’ return to farming began in 1990 when their daughter planted a watermelon in their backyard. Before long, Mrs. Wilks, an administrator in the city’s Department of Education, was digging in the yard after work. Once their ambition outgrew their yard, she and Mr. Wilks, a city surveyor, along with other gardening neighbors, received permission to use a vacant lot across from a garment factory at the end of their block.

more from the NY Times

Thousands More Deaths Expected in Myanmar

The death toll from the devastating cyclone that struck Myanmar over the weekend escalated to nearly 4,000 people, the government said Monday, and the foreign minister told diplomats and United Nations officers that it could rise to 10,000.

If the numbers are accurate, the death toll would be the biggest from a natural disaster in Asia since the tsunami of December 2004, which killed 181,000 as it devastated coastlines in Indonesia, Thailand and other parts of southeast and south Asia.

On Monday, Myanmar’s state television and radio reported 3,934 dead, 41 injured and 2,879 missing. All those who were still missing were from a single town.

Hundreds of thousands of people were reportedly homeless and food and water were in short supply after Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta and the country’s main city, Yangon, early Saturday.

The estimate that the death toll could rise to 10,000, which would represent a dramatic increase from the government’s initial estimate on Sunday of 351 people killed, was announced at a briefing in Myanmar by three cabinet ministers, including the foreign minister, Nyan Win, according to Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the United Nations disaster response office in Bangkok.

“What is clear is that we are dealing with a major emergency situation, and the priority needs now are shelter and clean drinking water,” Mr. Horsey said.

A spokesman for the World Food Program, Paul Risley, said the government of Myanmar, which severely restricts the movements and activities of foreign groups, had given the United Nations permission to send in emergency aid.

“Stories get worse by the hour,” one Yangon resident reported in an e-mail message. “No drinking water in many areas, still no power. Houses completely disappeared. Refugees scavenging for food in poorer areas. Roofing, building supplies, tools — all are scarce and prices skyrocketing on everything.”

more from the NY Times

Demand rising for locally grown food

Concerns about food contamination and the environmental impact of long-haul transportation are stoking demand for locally grown food in Connecticut.

Customers at Urban Oaks Organic Farm in New Britain, for example, are likely to end up on a waiting list. Three years ago, the small nonprofit farm sold only a few pounds of greens each week. This year, it's selling 40 pounds a week and is looking for more land to expand.

"For us, the battle is just trying to keep up with the demand," said Ken Zaborowski, a manager at Urban Oaks. "The last year and a half, everything started picking up."

Record fuel prices also are boosting competition as local growers vie with huge agricultural businesses that ship goods across the United States. Still, the high demand hasn't yet produced more growers, with farmland in Connecticut continuing to be pressed by land development.

"We are bumping up against an initial feeling of limited supply," said Jennifer McTiernan, executive director of CitySeed, which operates farmers markets in New Haven. "We do need some more farmers in Connecticut and that is incredibly good news."

The demand for locally produced food has grown so much that trying to find a "crop share" - a system that calls for customers to pay in advance for a portion of a farm's summer harvest - is nearly impossible. Holcomb Farm in Granby, which operates one of the largest crop-share programs, said by last Thanksgiving, it already sold out the 350 shares available for this year.

Supermarkets, restaurants and other large buyers also are finding supplies tight because more farms are starting to bypass wholesalers to sell directly to consumers, agricultural advocates said.

And towns are clamoring to establish farmers markets to such an extent that state officials say Connecticut may soon have more markets than in-state farmers to support them. The number of markets has grown by 50 percent over the last four years, with 16 new ones expected to start this spring.

more from the Hartford (CT) Courant

The Lost Supermarket: A Breed in Need of Replenishment

Even Kings and Queens are facing their own food crisis.Kings and Queens Counties, that is.

A continuing decline in the number of neighborhood supermarkets has made it harder for millions of New Yorkers to find fresh and affordable food within walking distance of their homes, according to a recent city study. The dearth of nearby supermarkets is most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods already beset by obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

According to the food workers union, only 550 decently sized supermarkets — each occupying at least 10,000 square feet — remain in the city.

In one corner of southeast Queens, four supermarkets have closed in the last two years. Over a similar period in East Harlem, six small supermarkets have closed, and two more are on the brink, local officials said. In some cases, the old storefronts have been converted to drug stores that stand to make money coming and going — first selling processed foods and sodas, then selling medicines for illnesses that could have been prevented by a better diet.

The supermarket closings — not confined to poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. They have forced residents to take buses or cabs to the closest supermarkets in some areas. Those with cars can drive, but the price of gasoline is making some think twice about that option. In many places, residents said the lack of competition has led to rising prices in the remaining stores.

more from the NY Times

Poultry in motion: Chickens adopting urban lifestyle

It's an idyllic scene in a sunny backyard in North Toronto. The forsythia is bright as springtime, and Sally, Heidi and Clucky wander by contentedly. They are plump, vigorous, egg-laying hens that, despite their beauty and utility, are illegal in Toronto.

Nonetheless, their owner has kept them quietly in her backyard coop through the winter and now lets them range freely in the yard, which is shallow but 15 metres wide.

"It makes total sense to me, rather than getting in the car, driving to the grocery store and buying eggs trucked in from a far away farm, to go to the back yard and get eggs," says "Alice," who asked that her real name not be used. A middle-aged mother of two teenagers who works at home in the food business, she had identified herself on the telephone as a "renegade" chicken owner. "Besides, I know they are healthy and what they've eaten."

Toronto bylaws forbid keeping poultry, for health reasons. On the other hand, pigeons raised for sport are allowed, provided they rest, roost or perch only on their owner's property.

Oddly, by raising a few chickens in the city, Alice is in step with a do-it-yourself food movement that is thriving in cities like New York, Portland, Chicago and Seattle. It's legal to keep chickens in those cities and dozens more in the United States.

more from the Toronto Star

Mother Nature Cools the Greenhouse, but Hotter Times Still Lie Ahead

As climate-change skeptics like to point out, worldwide temperatures haven't risen much in the past decade. If global warming is such hot stuff, they ask, why hasn't it soared beyond the El Niño-driven global warmth of 1998? Mainstream climate researchers reply that greenhouse warming isn't the only factor at work. And in a new paper, they put some numbers on that rebuttal. They show that regional and even global temperatures are being held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents. The study "shows how natural climate variability can mask the global warming effect of greenhouse gases," says climate researcher Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., "but only for a few years."

The latest reminder of climate's confounding subtleties comes in climate forecasts that Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues published this week in Nature. Rather than simply predicting temperatures at the end of the century, as most modelers do, they ran their simulations only 10 and 20 years into the future. At such a time range, short-term effects can override the contributions of rising greenhouse gases (Science, 10 August 2007, p. 746). For example, great, heat-carrying currents like the Gulf Stream can slow down and speed up, cooling and warming surrounding continents. As a result, temperatures rise and fall from decade to decade even in the absence of human interference.

To take account of such ocean-driven natural variability, Keenlyside and his colleagues began their model's forecasting runs by giving the model's oceans the actual sea surface temperatures measured in the starting year of a simulation. Providing the initial state of the ocean doesn't make much difference when forecasting out a century, so long-range forecasters don't usually bother. But an initial state gives the model a starting point from which to calculate what the oceans will be doing a decade hence and therefore what future natural variability might be like.

The added observations did in fact improve simulations of past climate variations. Looking into the future, the model forecasts a slowing of heat-carrying Atlantic currents and thus a cooling over the North Atlantic, North America, and western Europe in the next decade. It even predicts a slight cooling of the globe. But by 2030, forecast global temperatures bounce back up to the warming predicted with greenhouse gases alone.

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