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MicroGREEN Polymers Raises $10M From Increasingly Active Tribal Investors

The cup that holds your morning coffee is a seemingly simple item to be used and discarded. It probably hasn’t changed much over the years. No big deal, except that Americans go through 137 billion disposable beverage cups each, generating a tremendous amount of waste.

That looks like a huge opportunity toMicroGREEN Polymers, a company with a distinctly Pacific Northwest mix of technology, innovators, customers, and investors, now including two American Indian groups, which represent a new source of venture capital and private equity nationally.

The Arlington, WA-based manufacturer is raising $10 million from investors including theConfederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. The financing is part of a $20 million round, which began early this year with a $5 million investment from the Stillaguamish Tribe, and is expected to close with another $5 million investment, also from American Indian tribes, says MicroGREEN president and CEO Tom Malone. The company plans to use the cash to expand its line of recycled and recyclable hot and cold beverage cups, and to increase production capacity.

The Stillaguamish and Grand Ronde are part of a growing number of American Indian tribes putting their newfound casino wealth to work in more sophisticated ways, including through direct investment in local companies focused on long-term sustainability, among other values that match their own.

MicroGREEN aims to make up to 500 million InCycle cups a year—still just a drop in the bucket of the disposable cup market, which is expected to grow to 159 billion units by 2016, according to the company, which cites research from The Freedonia Group. That would generate around $25 million in sales, and the company forecasts it will turn profitable by mid-2014, “largely because this round of financing enables us to put in place the final production equipment to hit that full capacity,” Malone says.

It plans to nearly double its staff to 100 people by the end of the first quarter of 2014, with a third shift to be added “almost immediately,” he says.

UW Technology

MicroGREEN’s manufacturing process—developed by Greg Branch and Krishna Nadella as graduate students in the University of Washington mechanical engineering department more than a decade ago—injects food-grade carbon dioxide into recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic inside a pressure vessel. The polymer is then heated, allowing billions of tiny bubbles to form in the core of the plastic, expanding it into a material that can be made into insulated beverage cups marketed as InCycle.

The cups have 30 percent the density of solid plastic cups, Malone says, reducing the cost and global-warming impact of the end product. Moreover, the cup is easily recyclable at the end of its life—adhering to “cradle to cradle” design principles—unlike plastic-lined paper cups found in many coffee shops, which are difficult to recycle in most conventional municipal systems.

“All we’re doing is allowing recycled plastic to take another trip through the economy,” Malone says.

And since the MicroGREEN process gives the cups great insulation properties, there’s no need to grab a second cup or sleeve to protect hands from the hot drink inside.

“We can compete against all the legacy producers in a way that enables us to give the consumer what they’re looking for and for us to make a profit,” Malone says.

The company names customers including Redhook Brewery and Alaska Airlines, which will begin using InCycle cups for beverage service on flights beginning Oct. 1. Other airline orders are also in the works, Malone says.

The Alaska deal has helped expose the company to one of the world’s biggest users of disposable cups: Starbucks, whose coffee is served by Alaska and, according to Malone, has approved the InCycle cup to hold its brew. (Starbucks, which uses 4 billion cups a year globally, has a goal of making 100 percent of them reusable or recyclable by 2015. It’s actually a quite complex problem, as explained in this post updating the coffee giant’s progress.)

With this latest investment, MicroGREEN has raised $42 million. Earlier investors include WRF Capital, Northwest Energy Angels, and Waste Management, the garbage giant.

Tribal Investment

The story of MicroGREEN’s investment from American Indian tribes starts with proximity. After receiving an order from the Stillaguamish-owned Angel of the Winds in Arlington, MicroGREEN invited tribal representatives to visit its factory.

Koran Andrews, CEO of the Stillaguamish Tribal Enterprise Corporation, took a tour last year and recognized an investment opportunity in keeping with her organization’s goals of economic diversification and long-term sustainability. Bill Lomax, president of the Native American Finance Officers Association (NAFOA), says of the Stillaguamish: “For one of the smaller tribes in the country that maybe doesn’t get out into the national media as much, they’re probably one of the savviest.”

Malone says Andrews opened his eyes to the opportunity presented by the growing economic might of American Indian tribes. And it was the Stillaguamish who introduced MicroGREEN to the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde at a conference in Seattle earlier this year, says Titu Asghar, director of economic development for the Oregon-based group of 27 tribes and bands.

“MicroGREEN’s philosophy aligns with the tribe’s philosophy of returning back to the Earth, being ecologically sustainable, looking into green investments,” Asghar says.

Those goals inform the Tribe’s investment focus, along with a geographic concentration on historic lands forcibly ceded in the mid-19th century, which stretched from Northern California, through the mid-Willamette Valley, to southwest Washington.

The Confederated Tribes formed an economic development arm in 2011 as a way to diversify and invest revenues from casino and timber operations. It made direct equity investments in two other companies in 2012 and is exploring a few more opportunities currently, Asghar says. The Confederated Tribes target investments in the $5 million to $10 million range, in companies that are sustainable environmentally and economically, with stable management and cash flows. He would not disclose the size of the fund to be invested.

Rather than investing as a limited partner in an existing private equity or venture capital fund, the Confederated Tribes decided to keep their investing activities in house, performing their own due diligence and relying on existing legal, finance, and public relations capabilities. That’s part of being good stewards of tribal dollars, a responsibility the Tribal Council—which has final say in all investments—would never leave to outsiders, says public affairs director Siobhan Taylor.

Malone says companies seeking investment from tribes must be aware that each one is different.

“One step is getting to know the tribe, getting to know particularly the decision-making process and the leadership council,” he says. “It’s also an investment based not only on due diligence, but also on trust in the management team. Getting to know them, them getting to know us—that’s very important to both parties.”

While they may indicate the beginnings of a trend, the Stillaguamish and Confederated Tribes’ direct investments in a cleantech manufacturer remain relatively uncommon nationally, says Lomax, of the NAFOA. “We haven’t seen necessarily a lot of investments like that to my knowledge,” he says. “We’ve certainly seen a big interest in clean energy.”

In the past, few tribes had much extra money, so venture capital investing wasn’t relevant. “And then the casinos came along and that created wealth for a great number of tribes,” he says.

In 2012, Indian gaming revenue was $27.9 billion, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission.

“We’ve seen a real evolution in the tribal acumen when it comes to investing over the last 10 to 15 years,” Lomax says. Over that time, tribes have accumulated significant wealth from their casinos and associated businesses. They are now looking to broaden their portfolios beyond plain vanilla investments in stocks and bonds, he says.

One of the most sophisticated efforts is Growth Fund Private Equity, the Durango, CO-based business investing arm of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which has invested in technology companies including Seattle-based RFID systems makerImpinj.

“I think generally, a lot of tribes are now starting to make allocation to passive private equity and venture-type investments,” Lomax says, though he cautions that tribes aren’t moving to this kind of investing en masse.

As in the case of MicroGREEN, tribes tend to focus investments locally, which makes them a promising emerging source to support local innovation, particularly in sustainability and cleantech, he says.

Fukushima crisis new blow to fishermen’s hopes

In this Aug. 26, 2013 photo, fisherman Fumio Suzuki watches the sunrise aboard his boat Ebisu Maru before the star of fishing in the waters off Iwaki, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, Japan. Suzuki's trawler is one of 14 at his port helping to conduct once-a-week fishing expeditions in rotation to measure radiation levels of fish they catch in the waters off Fukushima. Fishermen in the area hope to resume test catches following favorable sampling results more than two years after the disaster, though for now fishing is suspended due to leaks of radiation-contaminated water from storage tanks at the nuclear power plant. Photo: Koji Ueda — In this Aug. 26, 2013 photo, fisherman Fumio Suzuki watches the sunrise aboard his boat Ebisu Maru before the star of fishing in the waters off Iwaki, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, Japan. Suzuki’s trawler is one of 14 at his port helping to conduct once-a-week fishing expeditions in rotation to measure radiation levels of fish they catch in the waters off Fukushima. Fishermen in the area hope to resume test catches following favorable sampling results more than two years after the disaster, though for now fishing is suspended due to leaks of radiation-contaminated water from storage tanks at the nuclear power plant. Photo: Koji Ueda

By MIKI TODA and KOJI UEDA, Associated Press

YOTSUKURA, Japan (AP) — Third-generation fisherman Fumio Suzuki sets out into the Pacific Ocean every seven weeks. Not to catch fish to sell, but to catch fish that can be tested for radiation.

For the last 2 ½ years, fishermen from the port of Yotsukura near the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant have been mostly stuck on land with little to do. There is no commercial fishing along most of the Fukushima coast. In a nation highly sensitive to food safety, there is no market for the fish caught near the stricken plant because the meltdowns it suffered contaminated the ocean water and marine life with radiation.

A sliver of hope emerged after recent sampling results showed a decline in radioactivity in some fish species. But a new crisis spawned by fresh leaks of radioactive water from the Fukushima plant last week may have dashed those prospects.

Fishermen like 47-year-old Suzuki now wonder whether they ever will be able to resume fishing, a mainstay for many small rural communities like Yotsukura, 45 kilometers (30 miles) south of the Fukushima plant. His son has already moved on, looking for work in construction.

“The operators (of the plant) are reacting too late every time in whatever they do,” said Suzuki, who works with his 79-year-old father Choji after inheriting the family business from him.

“We say, ‘Don’t spill contaminated water,’ and they spilled contaminated water. They are always a step behind so that is why we can’t trust them,” Suzuki said, as his trawler, the Ebisu Maru, traveled before dawn to a point about 45 kilometers (30 miles) offshore from the Fukushima plant to bring back a test catch.

With his father at the wheel, Suzuki dropped the heavy nets out the back of the boat, as the black of night faded to a sapphire sky, tinged orange at the horizon.

As the sun rose over a glassy sea, father and son hauled in the heavily laden nets and then set to the hard work of sorting the fish: sardines, starfish, sole, sea bream, sand sharks, tossing them into yellow and blue plastic baskets as sea gulls screamed and swooped overhead.

Five hours later, the Ebisu Maru docked at Yotsukura where waiting fishermen dumped the samples into coolers and rushed them to a nearby laboratory to be gutted and tested.

Suzuki says his fisheries co-operative will decide sometime soon whether to persist in gathering samples.

For now they will have to survive on compensation from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator.

The cooperative also had plans to start larger-scale test catches next month that would potentially also be for consumption if radiation levels were deemed safe.

But those plans were put on hold after more bad news last week: authorities discovered that a massive amount of partially treated, radioactive water was leaking from tanks at Fukushima, the fifth and so far the worst, breach.

The water, stored in 1,000 tanks, is pumped into three damaged reactors to keep their melted fuel cool. Much of the water leaked into the ground but some may have escaped into the sea through a rain-water gutter.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulation Authority upgraded its rating of the leak to a “serious incident,” or level 3, up from a level 1 on the international scale of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It remains unclear what the environmental impact from the latest contamination will be on sea life. Scientists have said contamination tends to be carried by a southward current and largely diluted as it spreads.

Nobuyuki Hatta, director of the Fukushima Prefecture Fisheries Research Center, said the trend had been positive before the latest leaks, with fewer fish found exceeding radiation limits.

The government’s safety limit is 100 becquerels per kilogram, but local officials have set a stricter bar of 50 becquerels, said Hatta, who still expects test fishing to resume in September.

It all depends on the type of fish, their habitat and what they eat. Out of 170 types of fish tested, 42 fish species are off limits due to concern they are too radioactive, another 15 species show little or no signs of contamination. Few, if any, show any detectable levels of cesium.

Tests take over a month and are complicated. The time lag makes it difficult to say at any given point if sea life caught off the Fukushima coast is really safe to eat.

Also, local labs lack the ability to test fish for other toxic elements such as strontium and tritium. Scientists say strontium should be particularly watched for, as it accumulates in bones. TEPCO’s monitoring results of sea water show spikes in strontium levels in recent weeks.

Suzuki has little faith in the future of his business.

“People in the fishing business have no choice but to give up,” he said. “Many have mostly given up already.”

___

Associated Press writers Elaine Kurtenbach and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

34 wild bison released on Montana Indian reservation

34 genetically pure bison were released into a 1,000 acre pasture Aug. 22, 2013, on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana.(Photo: Rion Sanders, Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune)

These bison have no cattle genes, are closest to ones that used to roam the Great Plains.

Karl Puckett, Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune August 23, 2013

FORT BELKNAP AGENCY, Mont. — Genetically pure bison are back at Fort Belknap Indian Reservation after a century’s absence.

Tribal officials released 34 wild bison Thursday that were free of cattle genes.

“It’s a great day for Indians and Indian Country,” said Mark Azure, who heads the bison program for the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes that call the 1,055-square-mile reservation home.

Soon, animals in the herd were just brown specks on the horizon.

The bison were transported from Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Last year, officials from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks transplanted 70 bison from Yellowstone National Park to Fort Peck, ultimately planning to transport half of those to Fort Belknap. The Yellowstone animals are remnants of pure bison that once roamed the entire state.

Legal action from ranching and property-rights interests held up the transfer to Fort Belknap. But earlier this summer, the Montana Supreme Court said the transfers were legal, setting up Thursday’s bison return.

“It helped us, our ancestors, survive out here on the prairie,” Azure said of the bison. “So to be able to take that next step and return the favor, so to speak, it feels good.”

Of the 34 bison released in a 1,000-acre pasture with an 8-foot fence, all but two were hauled in a semi-trailer. Two big bulls were separated from the herd and transported separately. One cow was injured and was not released.

Tribal officials see the animals as a way to help manage bison that leave Yellowstone Park each year and are hazed or killed. They also hope to perpetuate long-term survival of the species in Montana.

Fort Belknap will manage a herd of about 150 of the wild bison and use them as seed stock for other agencies or tribes looking to reintroduce bison, said Mike Fox, a tribal councilman for the northern Montana reservation that has about 7,000 enrolled members.

“On the cultural side, they took care of us at one time, and now it’s time for us to take care of them,” he said.

Blood tests were taken Tuesday and Wednesday, and results came back Thursday with all of the animals negative for disease. When the results arrived, the bison drive from Fort Peck to Fort Belknap ensued.

Rows of pickup trucks and cars lined up Thursday as if they were at a drive-in movie to watch the animals charge out of the trailers through a chute and then to freedom. Some of the animals snorted and stomped inside the trailers while a few had to be prodded to escape. A pipe ceremony was conducted to welcome the animals.

“I wouldn’t miss this, gosh,” said Patty Quisno, a tribal council member.

Warren Bell, driver of the semi-trailer that hauled most of the bison, said he departed Fort Peck Indian Reservation 30 miles north of Wolf Point, Mont., for the 180-mile journey west to Fort Belknap. Azure, driving a pickup truck hauling a trailer with the two large bulls, was following about an hour behind.

“Well, they’re pure buffalo. They’re not mixed with anything,” Bell said of the high interest in the animals as kids and adults peered through slits in the trailer to get look at the big beasts at Horse Capture Community Park.

The bison were trucked first to a community gathering at the park, then on to the horse pasture, which is 16 miles south of Fort Belknap Agency. A police vehicle with a flashing light led the semi-trailer down the highway followed by a long line of vehicles.

The tribe has a commercial herd of 500 bison, but they have cattle genes. They’re kept in a separate pasture.

Fox said the last few bison that remained in the area disappeared around 1910.

“It’s a homecoming for the animals,” Fox said.

Elite Native American Firefighters Join Crews At Yosemite

by KIRK SIEGLER npr.org

August 27, 2013

Listen on NPR here

One of the firefighting teams trying to contain the Rim Fire in and around Yosemite National Park is the Geronimo Hotshots team from San Carlos, Ariz., one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the U.S.

On the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, firefighting jobs are one of only a few ways for many young men to earn a living. For team member Jose Alvarez Santi Jr., 25, the work is rewarding — but being away from home fighting fires can be tough.

“I don’t really see it as a job. Being out away from my family — that’s the part that I’m down about, is just being away,” Santi said not long before the team got the call to fight the Rim Fire.

Santi has a 3-year-old son. He’s only seen him for a dozen or so days this entire spring and summer. The 20-member crew works a fire for 14 days, then it’s a long trip home for maybe one or two days of rest, then back out again. This late in the season you can see this is starting to take its toll on a lot of the guys. But they know it’s also good money. In a good year, you could make $40,000. That goes far here.

The Geronimo Hotshots are one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the country.Kirk Siegler/NPR — The Geronimo Hotshots are one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the country.
Kirk Siegler/NPR

“Of course the wife’s lovin’ it,” said senior firefighter Tom Patton. “Right now, just can’t wait to get out of here. I wanna go on another fire. It’s our only means of supporting our family.”

As on most reservations, jobs are hard to come by, and most families live well below the poverty line. There are a few jobs with the tribal government or at the small casino on the outskirts of the reservation. But much of the community is dependent on the fire season.

“It’s Essential”

The only restaurant in town is the San Carlos Cafe. It’s in a worn stone building built by the U.S. government at the turn of the 20th century. The menu on the wall features the hot shot breakfast burrito. The owner, Jo Lazo, says the firefighters are looked up to here.

“I like to say our Apache men are the strongest of all firefighters. I think it just goes down through genealogy and the struggle that we had many, many years ago. We never go down without a fight,” she says.

Lazo is proud and pragmatic. The Hotshot crew members are regulars here, and that’s good for business. But the tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs also employ hundreds more seasonal firefighters. During a big fire year, everyone has more money in his or her pocket, including Lazo. Her cafe caters all the meals for the crews if there’s a wildfire near here.

“And it’s sad when there is a fire because we do lose a lot of vegetation, but it’s essential and it’s been essential for years,” Lazo says.

It’s hard to find someone around San Carlos who doesn’t have a father or brother or sister who’s a wildland firefighter. In fact, by late last week, the town seemed almost empty of anyone between 18 and 35.

“Yeah, right now everybody’s out on the fire. They’re up in Idaho, up in Oregon, up in Washington,” says Frank Rolling Thunder. He has fought fires since the ’70s. He says for a lot of people here, firefighting isn’t just good money — it’s a ticket off this isolated reservation. And opportunities like those don’t come along that often.

“First time we went out to Yosemite National Park … there were sequoias and I’d never seen them,” Rolling Thunder says. “It gives me the opportunity to go see all kinds of different places — the Cascades, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood.”

Representing The San Carlos Apaches

The team had only a short two days of R&R before getting the call to go to Yosemite. As word spread from man to man at the tribal forestry office, the buzz in the room changed. A little anxiety was added to the anticipation. A few guys drifted away to make last minute phone calls. A couple more moved their motorcycles into the garage. They’ll be gone for a while.

“Right now’s the time where everybody kinda double checks, makes sure they got everything they need, make their last calls to their family,” Santi says.

For Santi, this is the moment when it becomes clear what it means to be a Geronimo Hotshot. “I hold the name up high. Wherever I go, my family, they’re proud of what I do,” he says.

Santi says it’s not just about fighting fire or saving people’s homes. It’s about representing his people off the reservation. He says the crew meets a lot of people who have never heard of the San Carlos Apaches or their history.

“We come from a people that were pushed around, shoved into reservations, and to me, I want our people to show that we can do a lot of things other than being pushed around and shoved around,” he says. “It’s a good feeling.”

The white trucks with blue letters spelling out Geronimo are all packed. No more time to talk. Ten men to each “buggy” as they call them. They’ll drive through the night to California and then it’s on to the front lines of the Rim Fire.

It’s time for civil rights and environmental activists to join hands

Brentin Mock, Grist

Somehow environmental justice got lost at the rally commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom & Jobs. The 50-plus speakers at the Aug. 24 gathering, which drew tens of thousands of people to the nation’s capital, spoke out about restoring voting rights, fighting “stand your ground” laws, and pushing for stronger worker wages. But little was said about how people of color suffer disproportionately from polluted air and water, and are the first to suffer because of climate change.

That was unfortunate. Whether the organizers of last weekend’s rally knew it or not, the 1963 March on Washington inspired some of the pioneering activists who created the modern-day environmental movement. Some of those environmentalists participated in the civil rights movement that birthed the 1963 March. Since that time, however, the environmental and civil rights movements have never fully gelled together, despite some efforts to make that happen along the way.

There were signs that the organizers of last weekend’s rally were again trying to connect the dots. The National Action Network, the civil rights organization that lead the 50th anniversary rally, listed environmental justice as one of the issues motivating the march:

In Los Angeles, African Americans are twice as likely to die in a heat wave. 68% of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal plant and this creates more incidences of asthma. Latino children are twice as likely to die from an asthma attack as non-Latino children.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus made climate change and the proposed Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline cornerstones of his short speech, and U.S. Senate-hopeful Cory Booker touched on the environment. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace supported the march, both individually and through the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of progressive policy groups that also includes the NAACP.

But those two speakers were but a tiny sub-set of a sub-set of speakers, and the green posters of the Sierra Club were but small ponds among the ocean of attendees. Organizers largely missed an opportunity to recognize the longstanding connection between civil rights and environmental protection, and to forge a stronger alliance moving forward.

To be fair, environmental protection wasn’t a registered demand at the 1963 march. Those organizers were justifiably more concerned with the frothing, attack-trained fangs of Jim Crow. But the 1963 march is in many ways responsible for at least midwifing the event that brought the modern-day environmental movement into existence: the national Earth Day “teach-in” of 1970.

The concept for the April 22 Earth Day rally came from Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson. But the committee that brought it into fruition was made up of seven people, most of them students, and most either civil rights organizers or people with strong ties to the civil rights movement.

One of them, Arturo Sandoval, was a Chicano activist from New Mexico who was completely clear about racial justice in the new environmental organizing. As a student at the University of New Mexico, he worked to establish a Mexican-American students union and a Chicano Studies program, and fought discrimination against minority workers at the college. He led the Earth Day rally in the barrios of his home city of Albuquerque, where sewage plants and pollution-heavy factories besieged poor communities.

In his Earth Day speech, Sandoval schooled the crowd on the concept of “la raza,” or “the race,” which he said didn’t just apply to Chicano Americans. “We command ‘la raza’ to live, because humanity is dying,” he said. “And America — white America — has lost its ability to cry, and laugh and sing and love and live.”

Steve Cotton, the national Earth Day committee’s press outreach person, had left Harvard to work for the Southern Courier, a civil rights newspaper in Alabama started by Freedom Summer activists. Sam Love, the group’s Southern coordinator, was a Mississippi State University student who helped register black voters in the state where three white Freedom Summer students were murdered. In 1968, Love joined Fannie Lou Hamer and civil rights leaders at the Democratic National Convention, where they challenged Mississippi’s sitting delegation. The national Earth Day coordinator, Denis Hayes, was an ecologist who wanted to marry science with social justice activism.

In the lead-up to the first Earth Day, some African Americans criticized the effort, saying that a day of environmental protests would distract people from the civil rights injustices that were still occurring. But Hayes addressed those concerns upfront. In a press conference, Hayes said that organizers’ “goal is not to clean the air while leaving slums and ghettos, nor is it to provide a healthy world for racial oppression and war.”

At an Earth Day event in Washington, D.C., black civil rights activist Channing Phillips said he was participating “out of a deep conviction that racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitive economic system.”

Of course, the 1963 March on Washington led the way to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and later the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act, and helped elevate the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into a Cabinet-level agency. The 1970 Earth Day helped win to passage of the Clean Water Act, a new Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Given what each of these movements produced independently, it’s scary to think about what they might produce in unison.

This week, I spoke with Quentin James, national director of the Sierra Club Student Coalition, who has also worked with the NAACP. During the week-long March on Washington 50th anniversary events, he co-convened a climate justice workshop, training young people to launch campaigns in their own communities that address climate change and the right to vote. Previous to this, he brought 10,000 students to a rally at the White House to urge President Obama to address climate change and stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. He also helped organize a college student-led campaign that successfully pushed 20 universities across the nation to switch from coal plant-powered energy to renewable energy sources. He has effectively married the best of both March on Washington and Earth Day worlds and achieved results.

James told me he was not bothered by the lack of environment mentions from the speakers at the Aug. 24 rally. While the connections between civil rights and the environment weren’t made at the podium, he said they are being made in communities, where it counts.

“Sure, we could have had 10 speakers on climate and environmental justice issues” on stage on Saturday, James said. “But it’s not about words and speeches, it’s about the actions. We do need a groundswell of communities to uplift our work, but I know that that work is already happening, so I don’t need someone to speak about it on stage to know that it’s real.”

Still, the two movements couldn’t need each other more than they do right now. As Rev. Yearwood said, standing before the Lincoln Memorial at the 50th anniversary rally, with “#NOKXL” stitched in his baseball cap, “The issue of the 20th century was equality, but the issue of the 21st century is existence.”

Or, as he told me when I caught him shortly after his speech, “Climate change may not have been a problem in 1963, but it certainly will be a problem in 2063.”

Extreme weather, more extreme greenhouse gas emissions beckon urgent activism

Patrick Bond; Source: Climate Connections

The northern hemisphere summer has just peaked and though the torrid heat is now ebbing, it is evident the climate crisis is far more severe than most scientists had anticipated. The latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a notoriously conservative research agency – will be debated in Stockholm next month, but no one can deny its projections: “widespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.”

Even worse is coming, for a giant Arctic Ocean “belch” of 50 billion tonnes of methane is inexorably escaping from seabed permafrost, according to scientists writing in the journal Nature. North Pole ice is now, at maximum summer heat, only 40 per cent as thick as it was just 40 years ago, a crisis only partially represented in the vivid image of a temporary “lake” that submerged the pole area last month.

The damage that will unfold after the burp, according to leading researchers from Cambridge and Erasmus Universities, could cost $60 trillion, about a year’s world economic output. Global warming will speed up by 15-35 years as a result.

With these revelations, it is impossible to mask the self-destructive greed of fossil-fuel firms and their carbon-addicted customers. The ruling crew in the United States, Russia and Canada will enthusiastically let oil companies exploit the soon-to-be ice-free Arctic summers with intensified drilling, joined by unprecedented bunker-fuel-burning in the newly opening shipping lanes.

Heat blowback in the US, China and Durban

But the extreme weather that necessarily results has just hit China, whose world-record CO2 emissions – mainly a result of producing junk purchased by wealthier countries which have outsourced their industrial emissions to East Asia – generate as a byproduct not only thick layers of smog in the main cities. There were also scores of heat-related deaths earlier this month. Shanghai suffered 10 straight days above 38C, with temperatures in some places high enough to use a sidewalk to fry eggs and prawns.

In the second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter (and biggest historically), the western United States is suffering a brutal drought, so severe that 86 per cent of New Mexico’s water supply evaporated, extreme wildfires broke out – this week, for example, scorching Yosemite Park’s legendary redwoods and threatening San Francisco’s water supply – while California’s Death Valley temperatures soared to 50C.

The effects are highly uneven, with environmental-justice research now proving that as climate change hits US cities, the wealthy turn up the air conditioner while the poor – and especially black and Latino people – suffer in “heat islands”. Likewise, poor people in the Himalayan mountains died in their thousands as a result of last month’s floods.

In Alaska, a source of enormous oil extraction, record temperatures in the 30s left thousands of fish dead. The effect of global warming on the oceans is to push marine life towards the poles by seven kilometres each year, as numerous species attempt to find cooler waters.

The impact here in South Africa, from East London to Durban, was a disaster for the local fishing industry last month, as billions of sardines which annually swim to shore stayed away due to warmer waters.

Can shipping survive the climate chaos it causes?

And here along the Indian Ocean, more local climate damage comes from – and is also visited upon – the shipping industry. In the world’s largest coal export site, South Africa’s Richards Bay harbour, an idiot captain of the China-bound MV Smart (sic) tried to exit the port in 10-metre swells on August 20 with a load of nearly 150,000 tonnes of coal and 1700 tonnes of oil. He promptly split the huge ship in half on a sandbank.

This followed by hours the strategic offshore sinking of a Nigeria-bound cargo ship, Kiani Satu, which had run aground a week earlier, further down the coast, close to a nature reserve and marine protected area. As plans were made to extract 300 tonnes of oil from the boat, more than 15 tonnes spilled, requiring the cleaning of more than 200 oil-coated seabirds.

The maniacs whose ships now rest at the bottom of the Indian Ocean can identify with the fly-by-night owners of the MT Phoenix, after that ship’s willful self-destruction off the Durban north coast holiday resorts exactly two years ago. Taxpayers spent $4 million pumping out 400 tonnes of oil and then towing the Phoenix out deeper to sink. A few weeks ago, that salvage operation’s contested audit resulted in the implosion of the South African Maritime Safety Authority.

These are just some surface-level indications that our shipping industry is utterly ill prepared for the rise of both overall sea levels and the “monster waves” which accompany climate change. The Columbia University Earth Institute now projects “sea-level rise of as much as six feet globally instead of two to three feet” by 2100, with higher amounts (three metres) possible if further ice sheets crack from their foundations.

As Susan Casey, wrote in her book, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, “Given that 60 per cent of the world’s population lives within 30 miles of a coastline, wave science is suddenly vital science, and the experts are keenly aware that there are levees, oil rigs, shorelines, ships and millions of lives at stake.”

Her experts need to visit South Africa, because ours are apparently asleep at the wheel, as they now plan an extreme makeover of Durban’s harbour. The shipping mania that made China such a successful exporter – and wiped out so much of South Africa’s manufacturing industry – has generated vessels that can carry more than 10,000 containers (which in turn require 5800 trucks to unload), known as “super post-Panamax”. They are so named because the Panama Canal’s current limits allow only half that load, hence a $5.25 billion dig will deepen and widen the canal by 2015, with a $40 billion Chinese-funded competitor canal being considered in nearby Nicaragua.

Most ports around the world are following suit, including here where $25 billion is anticipated from national, provincial and municipal subsidies and loans for South Durban’s port/petrochemical complex – the origin of our status as the most polluted African suburb south of Nigeria. The project is mainly managed by Transnet, a huge (but hot-to-privatise) transport state-owned agency, and is the second main priority in the the African National Congress government’s National Development Plan, which claims that from handling 2.5 million containers in 2012, Durban’s productivity will soar to 20 million containers annually by 2040 – though these figures certainly don’t jell with the industry’s much more conservative projections of demand.

More examples of state planning hubris: Transnet’s $2.3 billion doubling of the Durban-Johannesburg oil pipeline is still not complete, but already massive corruption is suspected in the collusion-suffused construction industry, given that early costings were half the price. And notwithstanding their “aerotropolis” fantasies, Durban’s King Shaka International Airport and the speedy Johannesburg-Pretoria-airport Gautrain are both operating at a tiny fraction of the capacity that had been anticipated by state planners. The 2010 Soccer World Cup sports stadiums are such blatant white elephants that even arrogant local soccer boss Danny Jordaan felt compelled to apologise.

Climate denialists from Durban to Deutschland

One reason they breed is that climate is not being factored into any of these carbon-intensive white elephants, as I have learned by fruitlessly offering formal Environmental Impact Analysis objections. As a result of a critique I offered last November, Transnet’s consultants finally considered prospects that sea-level rise and intense storms might disrupt the Durban port’s new berth expansion.

But Transnet’s study on sea-level rise by Christopher Everatt and John Zietsman of ZAA Engineering Projects in Cape Town is as climate-denialist as the consultancy report last year by the South African Council on Scientific and Industrial Research’s Roy Van Ballegooyen. I do understand that – like the dreaded AIDS-denialism of a decade ago – the allegation of climate-denialism is a strong insult these days. But what else would you call a November 2012 report (mainly by Everatt) that cites five studies to claim we will suffer only a maximum 0.6 metre maximum sea-level rise this century, but based on data from 1997, 2004, 2006 and 2008 reports. Five years old information is, in this field, ridiculously outdated.

In South Africa, de facto climate denialists are now led by a South African Communist Party leader: minister of trade and industry Rob Davies. Last week, Davies pushed through cabinet approval to build yet another coal-fired power plant plus permission to frack the extremely water-sensitive Karoo, “Land of the Great Thirst” in the original inhabitants’ San language.

Awful precedents Davies tactfully avoided mentioning include the massive environmental damage and the corruption, labour-relations and socio-ecological crises at South Africa’s main coal-fired powerplant construction site, Eskom’s $10 billion Medupi generator which at 4800 megawatts will be the world’s third largest. Medupi was meant to be generating power in 2011, but due to ongoing conflict, may finally be finished only in mid-2014.

Eskom’s main beneficiary, also unmentioned by Davies, is BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining house, a firm at the centre of South Africa’s crony-capitalist nexus dating to apartheid days. Eskom now subsidises this Australian company with $1.1 billion annually by gifting it the world’s cheapest electricity.

Another de facto climate denialist is the German development aid minister, Dirk Niebel, an opponent of Ecuadoran civil society’s plan to save the Yasuni National Park from oil exploitation. According toNiebel, “Refraining from oil drilling alone is not going to help in forest preservation.” Of course not, but it could have been a vital step for Germany to make a downpayment on its huge climate debt to the victims of extreme weather.

The Yasuni campaign to “leave the oil under the soil” is excellent, and while there, deep in the Amazon on the Peruvian border two years ago, I witnessed the Oilwatch network mobilising to expand the idea(even to Durban where oil prospecting recently began offshore). Oilwatch generated a “Yasunization” strategy for other fossil fuels, also promoted by the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade scholar-activist network based in Barcelona. Network leaders Joan Martinez-Alier and Nnimmo Bassey are also heartbroken at Yasuni’s apparent demise.

The government of Rafael Correa – trained in the US as an economist – always had the intention to sell Yasuni into the global carbon markets, a self-defeating strategy given the markets’ tendency to both fraud and regular crashing; carbon prices today only about a quarter of what they were two years ago.

So now, because the erratic Correa doesn’t have his hands on the cash yet, in part because he failed to address world civil society to put pressure on governments, Ecuador’s PetroAmazonas and China’s PetroOriental will go ahead and drill. A fresh campaign has been launched to halt the extraction, starting with one letter after another from Accion Ecologica, the eco-feminist lobby that initiated the project, joined by the eloquent leader of the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador, Carlos Perez Guartambel.

Climate activist counter-power gathers

Yasuni is a critical place to draw the line, for it is probably the world’s most biodiverse site. But there are other vulnerable points of counter-power, too, as across the world, many more defenders of nature come forward against rapacious fossil-fuel industry attacks.

South Africa has not been particularly climate-conscious, because the thousands of recent social protests are mainly directed against a state and capitalists which deny immediate needs, from municipal services to wages. Still, in Johannesburg, the Anglo American Corporation and Vedanta coal-fired power plant witnessed a protest of 1000 community and environmental activists last month.

Surprisingly, a Pew Research Centre poll found that 48 per cent of South Africans worry “global climate change” is a “major threat”, followed by “China’s power and influence” (40 per cent) and “international financial instability” (34 per cent). Across the world, 54 per cent of people Pew asked cited climate change as a major threat, the highest of any answer (in second place, 52 per cent said “international financial stability”). Only 40 per cent of the US populace agreed, putting it at seventh place.

Yet even in the belly of the beast, more people seem to be mobilising, and there are growing connectivities in the spirit that what happens in Yasuni is terribly important to the First Nations activists of western Canada (one of the finest blog sites to make these links is http://climate-connections.org/).

For example, fossil fuel projects have been fought hard in recent weeks by forces as diverse as Idaho’sNez Perce Native Americans, Idle No More and Wild Idaho Rising Tide; by Nebraska farmers; by activists from the filthy oil city of Houston who are contesting a new coal terminal; and in Utah where not only have conservationists sued to halt drilling of an 800,000-acre tar sands field stretching into Colorado and Wyoming, but 50 activists physically blocked tar sand mining and construction at two sites last month.

350.org’s Bill McKibben recently mentioned the “Summerheat” rebirth of US climate activism, “from the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned, from Utah’s Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio”.

The growing movement has had results, says McKibben, in part through civil disobedience: “In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of US institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas.”

This is encouraging partly because summertime is a lull when it comes to challenging power in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, our political winter was mostly spent wondering whether the crucial Congress of South African Trade Unions would remain aligned to the government or split in half. The more enlightened wing would logically move towards environmental, community and social struggles, leaving behind the likes of Rob Davies, just as US progressives (should) have shed any last illusions about slick Barack Obama.

But not far from Durban, 100 years ago next month, Mahatma Gandhi began preparing a non-violent mass assault on a white-owned coal mine in support of both Indian women’s right to cross a regional border and workers’ wage demands. The idea known as satyagraha (truth force) went from theory to practice, as militant passive defiance gained concessions that, 80 years later, helped free South Africa from apartheid. This time, there’s no 80-year window; we all have to rise to the challenge as fast as do the thermometer and the greenhouse gas emissions.

Freezing Your Asterisk Off: Farmers’ Almanac Predicts Cold, Cold Winter

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

With yet another heat wave set to descend before summer releases its grip, the last things we may want to think about are puffy coats and long johns.

But that is what’s in store for winter 2013–14, according to predictions from the Farmers’ Almanac released officially on Monday August 26.

“The ‘Days of Shivery’ are back!” proclaimed a statement from the Farmers’ Almanac (not to be confused with The Old Farmer’s Almanac). “For 2013–2014, we are forecasting a winter that will experience below average temperatures for about two-thirds of the nation. A large area of below-normal temperatures will predominate from roughly east of the Continental Divide to the Appalachians, north and east through New England. Coldest temperatures will be over the Northern Plains on east into the Great Lakes. Only for the Far West and the Southeast will there be a semblance of winter temperatures averaging close to normal, but only a few areas will enjoy many days where temperatures will average above normal.”

Further, the Southern Plains, Midwest and Southeast will have more precipitation than normal, the Almanac’s prognosticators said. This means a plethora of snow for the Midwest, Great Lakes and parts of New England. There will be mixes of rain and/or snow just south of that, in southern New England, southeastern New York, New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic region, the statement said. Uncharacteristically, the Pacific Northwest may be drier than usual.

“Significant snowfalls are forecast for parts of every zone,” the Almanac said, predicting especially heavy winter weather during the first 10 days of February 2014—meaning that the Superbowl, scheduled to be played outdoors at the MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey, may be more of a “Storm Bowl,” as Almanac managing editor Sandi Duncan told the Associated Press.

“This particular part of the winter season will be particularly volatile and especially turbulent,” the statement said.

As it has since 1818, the Almanac makes predictions by triangulating the positions of the planets, sunspot activity and cycles of the moon.

Study launched to examine declining salmon runs

Bill Sheets, The Herald

Millions of dollars have been spent to restore fish habitat in Western Washington.

Property owners pay taxes to local governments to control stormwater runoff.

State government and tribal fisheries have put huge investments into hatcheries.

“While all that has been going on, we’ve seen a precipitous decline in the survival rate of both hatchery fish as well as wild fish,” said Phil Anderson, director of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

That’s why the department, along with the Tulalip Tribes and 25 other organizations, are beginning a five-year study to determine why some species of salmon and trout are having trouble surviving their saltwater voyages.

The Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, as it’s called, is an international effort. Canadian groups are agreeing to pay half of the estimated, eventual $20 million cost of the study.

The decline has been seen in fish runs both in Washington and British Columbia.

“The fish don’t know there’s a border,” said Mike Crewson, fisheries enhancement biologist for the Tulalip Tribes.

The marine survival rate for many stocks of Chinook and coho salmon, along with steelhead, has dropped more than 90 percent over the past 30 years, according to Long Live the Kings, a Seattle-based non-profit group formed around fish preservation.

Numbers for sockeye, chum, and pink salmon have varied widely over the same time period.

For some reason, many of these anadromous fish — those that spawn in fresh water and spend most of their lives at sea — are not doing well in saltwater, particularly in the inland waters of Western Washington.

The Snohomish and Skagit river systems have been hit particularly hard, Crewson said.

While there’s a solid understanding of the factors affecting salmon survival in fresh water, according to Long Live the Kings, the issues in the marine environment are more complex.

From what is known so far, the survival problem has been traced to a combination of factors. Pollution, climate change, loss of habitat and increased consumption of salmon by seals and sea lions are all playing a part, Tulalip tribal officials have said.

Tribes and government agencies have been collecting information on their own, but it hasn’t yet been put together into context, Crewson said.

That will be one benefit of the new study — synthesizing the work done so far, he said. More research will be done as well.

The Tulalips, for example, have two smolt traps they use to catch young fish to track their progress and survival rates. The tribe already spends about $500,000 per year on fish survival programs and will increase their sampling efforts as part of this study, Crewson said.

Other studies more focused on certain areas, such as a joint effort between the Tulalips and the Nisqually tribe focusing on the Snohomish and Nisqually river systems, will be folded into the larger effort, Crewson said.

“The survival’s especially poor in Puget Sound (as opposed to the open ocean),” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what’s different in Puget Sound.”

The state recently appropriated nearly $800,000 toward the new study. The Pacific Salmon Foundation, a Canadian group, has raised $750,000 to support project activities north of the border. That group is serving as the organizer for efforts there, as is Long Live the Kings on the American side.

The Pacific Salmon Commission, a joint Canadian-American organization formed to implement treaty agreements, is putting in $175,000.

The rest of the money will be raised as the study progresses, officials said. A report and action plan is expected after five years.

Is climate change humanity’s greatest-ever risk management failure?

By Dana Nuccitelli, Grist

Humans are generally very risk-averse. We buy insurance to protect our investments in homes and cars. For those of us who don’t have universal healthcare, most purchase health insurance. We don’t like taking the chance — however remote — that we could be left unprepared in the event that something bad happens to our homes, cars, or health.

Climate change seems to be a major exception to this rule. Managing the risks posed by climate change is not a high priority for the public as a whole, despite the fact that a climate catastrophe this century is a very real possibility, and that such an event would have adverse impacts on all of us.

For example, in my job as an environmental risk assessor, if a contaminated site poses a cancer risk to humans of more than 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-1 million, that added risk is deemed unacceptably high and must be reduced. This despite the fact that an American man has a nearly 1-in-2 chance of developing and 1-in-4 chance of dying from cancer (1-in-3 and 1-in-5 for an American woman, respectively).

To that 42 percent chance of an average American developing cancer in his or her lifetime, we’re unwilling to add another 0.001 percent. The reason is simple — we really, really don’t want cancer, and thus consider even a small added risk unacceptable.

Yet we don’t share that aversion to the risks posed by human-caused climate change. These risks include more than half of global species potentially being at risk of extinction, extreme weather like heat waves becoming more commonplace, global food supplies put at risk by this more frequent extreme weather, glaciers and their associated water resources for millions of people disappearing, rising sea levels inundating coastlines, and so forth.

This isn’t some slim 1-in-a-million risk; we’re looking at seriously damaging climate consequences in the most likely, business-as-usual scenario. The forthcoming fifth IPCC report is likely to state with 95 percent confidence that humans are the main drivers of climate change over the past 60 years, and the scientific basis behind this confidence is quite sound. It’s the result of virtually every study that has investigated the causes of global warming.

The percentage contribution to global warming over the past 50-65 years is shown in two categories, human causes (left) and natural causes (right), from various peer-reviewed studies (colors).

Yet in a recent interview with NPR, climate scientist Judith Curry, who has a reputation for exaggerating climate science uncertainties, claimed that based on those uncertainties, “I can’t say myself that [doing nothing] isn’t the best solution.”

This argument, made frequently by climate contrarians, displays a lack of understanding about risk management. I’m uncertain if I’ll ever be in a car accident, or if my house will catch fire, or if I’ll become seriously ill or injured within the next few years. That uncertainty won’t stop me from buying auto, home, and health insurance. It’s just a matter of prudent risk management, making sure we’re prepared if something bad happens to something we value. That principle should certainly apply to the global climate.

Uncertainty simply isn’t our friend when it comes to risk. If uncertainty is large, it means that a bad event might not happen, but it also means that we can’t rule out the possibility of a catastrophic event happening. Inaction is only justifiable if we’re certain that the bad outcome won’t happen.

Curry is essentially arguing that she’s not convinced we should take action to avoid what she believes is a very possible climate catastrophe. That’s a failure of risk management. I wonder if she would also advise her children not to buy home or auto or health insurance. Maybe they’ll be a wasted expense, or maybe they’ll prevent financial ruin in the event of a catastrophe.

Climate change presents an enormous global risk, not in an improbable 1-in-a-million case, but rather in the most likely scenario. From a risk management perspective, our choice could not be clearer. We should be taking serious steps to reduce our impact on the climate via fossil fuel consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. But we’re not. This is in large part due to a lack of public comprehension of the magnitude of the risk we face; a perception problem that social scientists are trying to determine how to overcome.

At the moment, climate change looks like humanity’s greatest-ever risk management failure. Hopefully we’ll remedy that failure before we commit ourselves to catastrophic climate consequences that we’re unprepared to face.

On voters’ plates: genetically engineered crops

JUAN MABROMATA / AFP/Getty Images, 2012Transgenic soy plants are seen in an Argentina farm field. — JUAN MABROMATA / AFP/Getty Images, 2012
Transgenic soy plants are seen in an Argentina farm field.

Washington voters will decide whether to label food that contains genetically engineered ingredients, a debate that’s roiling the food industry nationally.

By Melissa Allison, Seattle Times

Get ready for a food fight.

When Washington voters decide Initiative 522 this fall, they will do more than determine whether to label food that contains genetically engineered ingredients.

They also will take sides in a national battle that has raged for two decades about the benefits and safety of manipulating the DNA of food — something many people view suspiciously but do not really understand.

“There’s a lot of uneasiness among consumers on the topic,” said Amy Sousa, managing consultant at the consumer research firm Hartman Group in Bellevue. “They don’t like the sound of it but have a difficult time articulating exactly why.”

GMO stands for genetically modified organism. Technically, any plant or animal that has been bred for particular characteristics is genetically modified. The difference with so-called GMOs is that their DNA is directly manipulated by inserting or modifying particular genes. Some call such targeted work “genetic engineering.”

The first genetically engineered food to appear on grocery shelves was a tomato that failed because consumers didn’t buy it. By contrast, the handful of genetically engineered crops that have been widely adopted by American agriculture — corn, sugar beets, soybeans, canola — are designed to appeal to growers by withstanding certain herbicides or creating their own internal pesticides.

Many of these genetically engineered seeds are owned by chemical companies such as Monsanto and Bayer — which has fueled some people’s mistrust.

GMO advocates, however, also include powerful non-business players, such as the Gates Foundation, that say the technology can be used to enhance nutrition and other qualities desired by consumers.

To Neal Carter, founder of a British Columbia company seeking regulatory approval for genetically engineered apples that don’t brown, GMOs conceived to appeal to consumers constitute a “second wave.”

“We’re going to see the next generation of biotechnology,” he said.

What he calls his “arctic” apples are a start. Carter grows them at test sites in Washington and New York states but will not disclose specific locations for fear anti-GMO activists could disrupt the work.

“It’s a huge investment, and we can’t afford to let folks know where we’re doing this because of that kind of risk,” he said. He wants to avoid the type of GMO crop sabotage that appears to have happened this summer in Oregon, where 6,500 genetically engineered sugar beets were uprooted.

Monsanto has said it also suspects sabotage in the discovery of genetically engineered wheat in Oregon during the spring, which prompted Japan to stop buying a popular Northwest wheat for two months. GMO wheat is not approved for commercial use, and it was found miles from where the company tested genetically engineered wheat almost a decade ago.

But the real war over GMOs is happening in the political arena.

Airing the arguments

The most recent skirmish took place last year in California, where the biotech industry and others spent $44 million to fight a labeling measure similar to I-522. Labeling supporters spent about $10 million.

The measure lost, but the idea of labeling GMOs appears to be gaining traction.

Maine and Connecticut recently passed labeling laws, although they are contingent upon other states participating. The grocery chain Trader Joe’s said in December that its private-label products contain no GMOs, and Whole Foods said earlier this year that within five years it will require suppliers to label products with genetically engineered ingredients.

The Hartman Group advises clients, which regularly include major food companies such as Kraft Foods, General Mills, ConAgra Foods and Kellogg’s, to discuss the matter openly.

“Trying to suppress labeling and skirt around the issue is not a sustainable approach, especially as more and more food retailers get on board with crafting their own position,” Sousa said.

People who oppose GMOs want labeling because they say genetically engineered crops have not been studied or regulated enough to know whether they are harmful.

They also argue it would be hard to return to non-engineered crops if damage is discovered later. And they point to dozens of other countries, including Japan and those of the European Union, that ban or label genetically engineered food.

“We already have the right to know as Americans what the sugar and fat content is, whether flavors are artificial or natural, whether fish is wild or farmed, what country our fruit comes from — and we have a right to know whether our food is genetically engineered,” said Trudy Bialic, director of public affairs for PCC Natural Markets, which helped write I-522 and led signature-gathering for the measure. It garnered about 100,000 more signatures than were required.

Other authors were Washington wheat farmer Tom Stahl and lawyers from the nonprofit Center for Food Safety and a Washington, D.C., law firm that helped write the California measure.

GMO proponents say the changes made to food using genetic-engineering techniques are not that different from changes that occur when plants and animals are bred conventionally.

They also point out that every independent science group to look into the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences, has found no evidence of ill health effects. And, they add, millions of people have eaten genetically engineered food for 20 years.

“It’s fine for people from rich, well-fed nations with productive farms to decline the use of GMOs. But they should not be allowed to impose their preferences on Africa,” Bill Gates said in a 2011 speech.

Processed-food manufacturers oppose labeling because labels could hurt sales, said Dave Zepponi, president of the Northwest Food Processors Association.

Removing all genetically engineered ingredients to avoid labeling would create enormous expenses, both in tracking down GMO-free ingredients and in segregating GMO and GMO-free ingredients, he said.

“Most of our companies are or attempt to be GMO free, but the risk of having a small amount of genetically engineered material in the product is too great. They would have to put a label on it, which is probably going to hurt their sales,” Zepponi said.

Although most food in the produce section is not genetically engineered, several major U.S. crops are — along with many processed foods.

More than 90 percent of soybeans, field corn and canola grown in the United States is genetically engineered. So is more than 80 percent of the sugar beets.

Those crops are turned into dozens of ingredients — cornstarch, soy lecithin, non-cane sugar — that are in processed foods.

But that is not how the GMO industry began.

The first genetically engineered food, which appeared in supermarkets in the early ’90s, was the Flavr Savr tomato. It was designed to last longer than regular tomatoes, but it flopped in the market.

“The tomato variety they worked with wasn’t that well suited for fresh use; it was more of a processing variety,” said Carter, the orchardist developing the non-browning apple. “It was remarkably ignorant or naive, and it goes to show how technology by itself isn’t the be all, end all.”

The market has not seen more products like the Flavr Savr, with traits that appeal directly to consumers, in part because it costs so much to develop GMOs.

“It’s very hard to get a payoff,” said Daniel Charles, author of the 2001 book “Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and The Future of Food.”

“If you come up with, say, a soybean with maybe healthier oil content, how are you going to make money on that? You have to first convince the consumer they want to pay more for that.”

Making a better apple

While the focus has been on growers, other GMOs are in the pipeline that have functions unrelated to herbicides and pesticides.

One is a genetically engineered salmon that grows to maturity more quickly. Another is rice with higher levels of vitamin A, known as “golden rice”; it has been a project of the Gates Foundation and others for years.

Then there are Carter’s non-browning “arctic” apples from British Columbia.

He said apple consumption has been in decline for years, and one reason restaurants and industrial kitchens don’t want to use them is that they brown.

So Carter, a former agricultural engineer, set up a research facility to create apples that do not brown. His company of seven employees is awaiting regulatory approval in Canada and the U.S. for arctic apples.

Like the Flavr Savr tomato, his genetically engineered apple turns off a gene rather than inserting one. But unlike the Flavr Savr, Carter said, his apples are derived from popular varieties — Granny Smith and Golden Delicious, to start.

Carter plans to label them as arctic apples, not specifically GMO. But information about their GMO origin will be available on the company’s website and elsewhere.

“We’re pretty confident by the time it hits stores, people will know exactly what it is,” he said.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com. Twitter @AllisonSeattle.

Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton contributed to this report.