Environmental protection

By Jeff Benedict, a best-selling author and journalist

Before I wrote Poisoned, my wife Lydia spent two years trying to convince me to do a book on the food industry. I resisted, saying guys like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser did that. I write nonfiction stories, usually ones built around legal disputes. I couldn’t see how to do a compelling legal story around food. 

Then something happened. Lydia revolutionized the way our family eats. This did not happen gradually. One week she cleaned out our cupboards and refrigerator, getting rid of everything from brand-name cereal to frozen meat to staple products like butter, flour, and sugar. Even the salt and pepper went. Then she restocked our kitchen with organic foods. We also started growing directly to small local farms to purchase our meat, poultry, and dairy products. 

We didn’t stop here, though. We converted our 20-acre property into an organic fruit and vegetable farm. For a guy who grew up in a beach community in Connecticut, this was culture shock. But our four children loved it because we added horses, guinea fowl and chickens. We now collect close to twenty farm fresh eggs per day. On top of that we plant, water, weed, harvest and can. Now when we say grace, we mean it. 

Besides improving the way I look and feel, this lifestyle change dramatically altered the way I look at food. The transformation got me searching earnestly for a food-related book topic.  That’s when I came across Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer who has emerged as the country’s most influential advocate for food safety. Today, food safety is a serious public-health problem. The CDC estimates that food-borne disease causes about 48 million illnesses per year. Roughly one in six Americans get sick from bad food. Many of these cases are mild gastroenteritis, commonly referred to as the stomach bug. But too many food poisoning cases are more serious, resulting in approximately 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually. The fatalities are often children and the elderly. 

by Jonathan Arogeti

“Cap and trade is not going to happen next year, or the year after that, … or the year after that,” recalled the former staff director and chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, paraphrasing President Obama’s forecast for climate change legislation following the 2010 midterm election.

Gerard J. Waldron, now a partner at Covington & Burling, opened a recent ACS panel discussion, “Global Warming and Political Cooling,” with a reflection on the Obama administration’s efforts to combat this problem. In June 2009, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which according to The New York Times was the first time either the House or the Senate had approved legislation “meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change.” That summer’s apex of optimism only gave way to the “great failure” that was the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. And by the following summer, the Senate still had not taken up the bill.

Against this backdrop, environmental groups are looking to new local, state and regional legislative efforts along with enforcement of national legislation already on the books to combat climate change.

Environment America, one such group, released a report on restoring “momentum in the fight against global warming.” According to its estimates, the United States could reduce emissions standards by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 34 percent by 2030 by adopting clean energy policies that include increased CAFE standards.

“Wherever we can get emissions reductions, wherever we can get them quickly, wherever the public support exists, we’re working to do that,” said Anna Aurilio, director of Environment America’s Washington, D.C. office. “We’re going to have to actually enact comprehensive climate legislation, but there is a ton of stuff we can do to reduce tons.”

She points to these “incremental steps” that will bend the emissions curve downwards and ultimately allow this country to wean itself off of oil. “We’d like to live in communities where people’s houses use no net energy except for the energy that they produce themselves on site, where they can get to work or school or play through alternatives other than driving, and if they have to drive, that their car can plug into the solar panel on the roof.”