Featured
Mighty Earth partners with Green Corps to Clean Up America’s Meat
Tyson Foods needs to step up and make a clear commitment to cleaning up pollution from its meat that is contaminating waters across the country. That’s the core message that Green Corps organizers will be bringing to communities most affected by this pollution as part of Mighty Earth’s campaign for cleaner meat.
Mighty Earth has partnered with Green Crops to place seven grassroots organizers in communities across the Midwest and Gulf, including Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago, Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; Fayetteville, Arkansas; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Dallas, Texas. Green Corps is the nation’s leading training program for environmental organizing, and partners with environmental campaigns across the country as part of a year-long training program.
“Green Corps gets the job done,” said Mighty Earth CEO Glenn Hurowitz, himself a graduate of Green Corps’ organizing fellowship. “With the nation’s most talented young environmental organizers on board, we’re building a powerful movement that will end the meat industry’s out-of-control pollution.”
The meat industry is the main source of water pollution in the United States. Pollution from raising meat is contaminating drinking water across the Midwest, and flows downstream along the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico where it causes a massive dead zone every summer- an area so polluted that marine life cannot survive. This year’s dead zone was the largest on record. The pollution comes primarily from producing the vast quantities of corn and soy required to raise meat, although manure is also a source.
An investigation by Mighty Earth into the specific companies responsible for this pollution found Tyson Foods to be at the forefront. Tyson Foods is America’s largest meat company, producing one out of every five pounds of meat in the country, and its vast footprint can be found driving the agricultural practices in all the regions experiencing the worst pollution from meat.
However, Tyson’s new CEO recently stated he wants to ‘place sustainability at the center of the company’s strategy’. Mighty Earth has partnered with Green Corps to make sure Tyson lives up to its word and adopts a clear commitment to cleaning up pollution from its vast meat supply chain. Green Corps organizers are taking the findings of our investigation to communities across the country most impacted by the meat industry’s pollution in order to build the call for Tyson to Clean It Up.
[widgets_on_pages id="Care2"]
Interested in getting more involved? Click here to sign up to volunteer for the cause in your community.
Mighty Earth Calls Out EPA on Dirty Biofuels Proposal
A proposal released last week by the EPA includes troubling news for tropical forests and other ecosystems threatened by encroaching industrial agriculture. The proposal mandates record production levels for biodiesel and corn ethanol. These biofuels, once thought to be ‘green’, are now known to drive the conversion of forests, grasslands and other native ecosystems into crop production, and to rival if not exceed fossil fuels for climate emissions.
Take action and send a comment to the EPA here.
“Biofuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are a cure worse than the disease,” said Mighty Earth Chairperson Henry Waxman. “Supporting environmentally unfriendly biofuels worsens our climate crisis and drives deforestation and habitat loss at home and abroad.”
Only a small fraction of biodiesel is made from waste or recycled sources, like used cooking oil. Most biodiesel used in the U.S. is produced using soy oil, and much of the biodiesel on the global market is palm oil based.
As the U.S. and other governments ratchet up demand for these types of biofuels, agri-businesses meet production by carving new farms out of virgin forests in places like Brazil, Bolivia and Indonesia, as the New York Times, YaleEnvironment360 and our own reports have documented. The forests of Latin America and Southeast Asia are hotspots of biodiversity and critical habitat for threatened species like the tree kangaroo, orangutan, jaguar and giant anteater.
When land conversion is fully considered, soy and palm biodiesel don’t provide any climate benefits, and those of corn ethanol are negligible. In fact, a recent analysis based on a European Union report found that soy and palm biodiesel are worse for the climate than fossil diesel.
Growing corn for ethanol has similar problems, and its effects are seen here in the U.S. The dramatic increase in corn production and has contributed to the conversion of more than 7 million acres of native ecosystems into agricultural land since 2008, according a National Wildlife Federation report based on a University of Wisconsin analysis.
Under the law that governs production of biofuels, the Renewable Fuel Standard, biodiesel production has skyrocketed, from under 10 million gallons in 2001 to 2.0 billion gallons in 2017. Corn ethanol has also seen enormous growth under this misguided government policy.
Mighty Earth urges the EPA to reconsider its biofuels proposal, and reduce mandated levels of biofuels linked to land conversion and climate emissions.
Take action and send a comment to the EPA here.
Waxman blasts egregious biomass rider
Former California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman is criticizing language in the fiscal 2017 Interior Department and U.S. EPA spending bill he said would amount to a "loophole" that ignores carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of biomass for energy.
"It is absurd to think of burning wood as carbon neutral," Waxman, now chairman of the advocacy firm Waxman Strategies, told reporters in a conference call today. Continue reading.
Call on Walgreen’s to stop selling blue whale’s food as nutritional supplements
Sign the petition to Walgreens Boots Alliance
Dear CEO Stefano Pessina,
Antarctica is the world’s last great refuge, guaranteed by treaty to be free from commercial exploitation. Unfortunately, this protection didn’t extend to the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, leaving its immense marine life vulnerable.