MARYSVILLE — The long-awaited Marysville Walmart is finally set to open on Wednesday, Sept. 18, after a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 7:30 a.m. The new store is located at 8713 64th St. NE and will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to provide Marysville residents with one-stop shopping convenience for their grocery and general merchandise needs, as well as pharmacy services.
Marysville city officials have welcomed this new addition, citing increased opportunity for economic growth, commercial development and job creation.
“We want to welcome Marysville’s newest corporate neighbor, Walmart,” Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring said. “This is a grand opening that has been anticipated for several years, but will surely have been worth the wait for the many patient shoppers in our community and around the region.”
“We’re very pleased that Walmart is adding a second store to the Marysville community,” said Caldie Rogers, President and CEO of the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce. “Walmart has been a valuable community partner since its first store opened in 2001. Their Tulalip store has provided their customers with literally hundreds of referrals to neighboring business when asked for a product they do not stock. This newest store addition will provide even more opportunities for economic growth, both in referrals as well as in sales tax revenue for our city.”
Store employees expressed their aim to offer quality, value-priced general merchandise, including apparel, electronics, toys, sporting goods, and lawn and garden items, as well as a full line of groceries, including organic and natural selections, in addition to local favorites. The store’s physical site is intended to serve as a convenient location for a variety of communities, including east Marysville, Lake Stevens, and unincorporated areas of Snohomish County.
The pharmacy likewise touts a full range of products and services. Pharmacy team members can answer product and prescription questions, and customers can ask about health and wellness solutions.
The grand opening celebration is also slated to include presentations of $8,000 in grants from Walmart and the Walmart Foundation to local community groups, including the Marysville Boys & Girls Club, the Marysville Community Food Bank, the Marysville Police Department and the Marysville Sunrise Rotary. The new store will also host a day-long toy drive, in partnership with the Salvation Army, on the day of its grand opening.
The new store employs approximately 300 full- and part-time associates, and more than 1,000 applicants submitted interest in working at the Marysville Walmart.
“Our associates are looking forward to a fun grand opening celebration, and cannot wait to welcome Marysville shoppers as we open the doors to our new store,” said store manager Sonia Smith, who began her Walmart career in 1999 as an assistant manager.
The Marysville Walmart will give customers a chance to meet Smith, and enjoy family activities such as face-painting, cupcake decorating and free food samples, while supplies last, during the store’s “Big Family Welcome” from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21.
If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.
Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.
In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.
The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.
“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”
Still trying to figure out what the big deal with fracking is? Hydraulic fracturing — fracking for short — is the controversial process that has fueled the new energy boom in the U.S., making it possible to tap reserves that had previously been too difficult and expensive to extract. It works by pumping millions of gallons of pressurized water, with sand and a cocktail of chemicals, into rock formations to create tiny cracks and release trapped oil and gas. It’s been tied to earthquakes and has led to a number of lawsuits, including one that resulted in a settlement agreement that barred a 7-year-old from ever talking about it. At the same time, fracking has also created a glut of cheap energy and is helping to push coal, and coal-fired power plants, out of the market.
But for all the fighting about whether fracking is good or bad (and research has shown the more people know, the more polarized they become), many people don’t understand what fracking actually is. The Munich-based design team Kurzgesagt has put together a video that explains why fracking — which has been around since the 1940s — just caught on in the last 10 years, and why people are worried. The video, which was posted earlier this month, has gone viral, and racked up over 1 million views in less than 10 days.
The video gets a lot right, but critics have also taken issue with a few of its claims. For example, the video states that fracking companies “say nothing about the precise composition of the chemical mixture but it is known that there are about 700 chemical agents which can be used in the process.” Energy in Depth, an industry group, has released a response noting that companies dodisclose some information about chemicals used in fracking. What that group doesn’t mention, however, is that companies don’t have to disclose chemicals that are designated as “trade secrets,” which is a pretty serious exception.
Energy in Depth also quotes former EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s testimony (among others) that “in no case have we made a definitive determination that the [fracturing] process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.” The key word here is “definitive” — there is a growing body of evidence that fracking can be linked to increased levels of methane, propane, and ethane in groundwater near fracking sites (likely due to faulty wells), and there are plenty of reasons to question whether pumping billions of gallons of toxic fluid into disposal wells is a good idea. (ProPublica has a couple of great, long pieces on injection wells.)
TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA – Over 2,000 Century-old journals, political messages and medicinal formulas handwritten in Cherokee and archived at Yale University are being translated for the first time.
Cherokee Their researchers and linguistic specialists have helped adapt 21st century technologies with their traditional culture.The Cherokee Nation is among a small few, if not the only tribe, that has a language translation department who contracts with Apple, Microsoft, Google and Ivy League universities for Cherokee translation projects.
One of the tribe’s 13 translators, Durbin Feeling, is transcribing some 2,000 documents at Yale’s Beinecke Library, to catalogue and eventually make public.
The documents, spanning from the late 19th to mid-20th century, are from the collection of the late Jack and Anna Kilpatrick, Cherokee researchers.
“Native American communities have endured some of America’s most sustained forms of cultural oppression, and contemporary Indian nations, tribal members and supporters work tirelessly to reverse generations of assimilation-orientated designs. The work of linguists and language speakers in such efforts is particularly essential, especially in keeping alive and vibrant the languages of the first Americans,”
said Ned Blackhawk, Yale professor of history and American studies, and advisory member at Yale’s Native American Cultural Center.
“The Cherokee Nation works at the leading edge of such linguistic activism. Their researchers and linguistic specialists have helped adapt 21st century technologies with their traditional culture and have developed among the most advanced pedagogical practices in the nation,”
Blackhawk said.
The Cherokee Nation translation department is also currently working with museums in Oklahoma and finishing up its largest translation of 500,000 words for Microsoft.
“Our speakers are taking Cherokee history, in the form of our language, and preserving it for our future by incorporating our written alphabet into smart phones and computer language settings, making it possible for our youth to email entirely in Cherokee,”
Principal Chief Bill John Baker said.
“They are one of our most valuable resources, not only passing on their wisdom to our Cherokee Immersion students learning to speak, but for our future who will know more about our lives and way of thinking, revealed in all these translated archived manuscripts.”
Feeling’s first language is Cherokee. He has a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of California, Irvine, and honorary doctorate from Ohio State. He has traveled across the United States and Germany sharing how to speak, read and write the 85 character Cherokee syllabary. He’s also taught Cherokee language and culture at the University of Oklahoma and Northeastern State University.
“Universities and museums often have all these documents and nobody to read them, to tell them what they say,”
Feeling said.
“They’ll choose the ones they’re curious about and let me translate, which benefits us all.”
The Cherokee Nation has a comprehensive language program that includes community language classes, online language courses, employee language classes, a language technology program, an office of translation and an immersion school for preschool through sixth grade and partners with Northeastern State University on a degree program for Cherokee language.
In addition to these initiatives, the Cherokee Nation also shows a strong dedication to language by including protection of language in the Chief’s oath of office, council resolutions supporting language and a quantity of signs on Cherokee Nation property that are written in the Cherokee syllabary.
Those interested in helping Seattle’s homeless Native population can now do so by picking up a limited-edition, signed poster by Nooksack artist Louie Gong.
Proceeds from the posters, which are on sale at KessInHouse.com for $25 each, benefit Chief Seattle Club, an organization that provides food, services “a sacred space to nurture, affirm and renew the spirit of urban Native peoples.” The poster design is Gong’s “good morning” pattern, which features a pair of hummingbirds and a coffee cup that repeat seamlessly. (The pattern is currently the main motif of Gong’s new housewares line, and is featured on blankets, pillows, and shower curtains — check them out at eighthgeneration.com/collections/housewares.)
‘Good morning’ poster by Louie Gong
The 24″x36″ posters have been produced in a limited edition of 200, and each will be signed by Gong.
EVERETT – Drivers who use southbound State Route 529 to travel between Marysville and Everett should plan for nightly closures of the highway this week.
The southbound lanes of the SR 529 Snohomish River Bridge will be closed as contractor crews working for the Washington State Department of Transportation continue replacing the heavy pieces of machinery that operate the southbound drawspan.
The bridge will be closed nightly from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Monday, Sept. 16, through the morning of Friday, Sept. 20. Southbound drivers will be detoured to I-5 in Marysville.
Crews are replacing four steel axles, wheels and dozens of counterweight cables on the southbound lift span. The lift mechanisms are showing signs of wear and fatigue after years of raising and lowering 250 tons of counterweight with each drawspan opening.
ISABELLA INDIAN RESERVATION – The Saginaw Chippewa Tribe’s Environmental Department is pleased to announce the release of a book entitled, “Manoomini-miikaans –The Wild Rice Road.”
The informative book was created in a way that provides respect for natural resources, such as wild rice and a connection to Mother Earth through the Anishinaabe language.
The book is filled with fun games and activities for all ages and tells of two children on their way to an annual traditional rice camp on the Saginaw Bay.
Funding for the book came from the US Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Water Act, Section 106 and Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Funding. The Tribe’s Environmental team collaborated with other departments such as Anishinaabe Language Revitalization, Tribal Observer Graphic Designer, students and teachers from the Saginaw Chippewa Academy and Ziibwing’s Center for cultural and language correctness.
“I’m very proud of our internal departments who came together to produce the book. Wild rice as always been one of our traditional foods and is making a big comeback to the Saganing Bay area with the help our Environmental Team,”
stated Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Chief Dennis Kequom, Sr.
The Tribe will be distributing 10,000 copies of the book to local schools as a supplement to language curriculums, as well as libraries, conservation groups and educational organizations. If you would like to request copies, please call the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe’s Environmental Department at 989.775.4014.
The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan is based on the Isabella Indian Reservation in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
Much of the battle over transgenic crops has occurred in the realm of science fiction. There, entirely hypothetical health risks square off against visions of wondrous but imaginary benefits. This isn’t nearly as ridiculous as it sounds: To decide which technologies to pursue and which to avoid, modern Jules Vernes need to dream up best and worst-case scenarios.
The problem is, the debate tends to get stuck in the future. We’ve had transgenic plants for nearly two decades, which is enough time to fairly ask, who has actually benefited from genetically modified crops? We’ve had these plants long enough now that we don’t have to look to fantastic visions of the future; we can simply look at the reality.
In search of reality, I began emailing economists, lawyers, and advocates to ask them this question. The first to answer was Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety. Kimbrell said the companies that bet on GM technology have been its greatest beneficiaries. “The chemical companies, right? The big five: Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Bayer, and Syngenta … No. 2 would be farmers, specifically big farmers, because it makes their herbicide application a lot easier.”
Farmers pay more to buy the GM seed, and more for the herbicides to treat herbicide-resistant crops, but they save on labor costs. Rather than meticulously spritzing individual weeds by hand to avoid killing the crop, farmers can quickly spray an entire field when using herbicide-resistant plants, Kimbrell said.
Beneficiary No. 3? There is none, according to Kimbrell. “These companies have completely failed, in over 30 years, to come up with a trait that benefits a consumer. Nobody gets up in the morning wanting to buy a genetically engineered food.”
I could think of exceptions: Papaya genetically engineered to resist ringspot virus is more appealing to many consumers than diseased fruit. But these are exceptions that prove the rule; the vast majority of transgenic plants are designed to make farmers, rather than eaters, happy.
What about price? I asked Kimbrell. Do we eaters see lower prices because of genetic modification?
“No. There are no lower prices. GMOs have not lowered prices at all. They have massively increased prices for seed.”
Indeed, seed prices bumped up with the introduction of genetically modified varieties.
What about GM crops lifting small farmers out of poverty? Kimbrell scoffed at that. “Smallholders can’t afford to buy [the herbicides] RoundUp and 2,4-D,” he said.
Ask people on opposite sides of this issue if genetic modification benefits the poor and you’ll hear wildly different claims. Kimbrell’s point is that GM crops are designed to save farmers time and money if they are involved in high-tech agriculture. Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and longtime critic of industrial agriculture, has pointed to cases in which small farmers in India have killed themselves when the debt they’ve taken on to buy seed, fertilizer, and pesticides grows too crushing.
On the other hand, biotech industry consultant Clive James maintains that GM crops are a ladder to prosperity. James has calculated that in 2012, for the first time, farmers in the developing world planted more GM seed than farmers in industrialized nations. These farmers must have a reason for seeking out transgenics.
As usual in this debate, I find myself stranded between irreconcilable claims. But fortunately, it turns out there’s a large body of economic analyses that have asked precisely the same question I have: Who has benefited?
One of the people I’d emailed, UC Berkeley agricultural economist David Zilberman, sent me a short note from the Ivory Coast suggesting that the benefits of GE food are widespread:
“The seed companies captured less than 50 percent of the economic gains in most studies (frequently less than 30 percent),” he wrote. “The rest [is] distributed between farmers and consumers.”
The studies Zilberman consulted on this question have found that the biotech industry captures between 10 and 70 percent of the money generated by their transgenic seeds. The rest of the benefit (30 to 90 percent) is shared by U.S. farmers, U.S. eaters, and the rest of the world. That’s a huge range, but it’s interesting that every study examining this issue has found that consumers do benefit from food prices. It may not be much — less than 2 percent is the estimate at the lower end — but the average Joe and Jane are probably getting some extra change thanks to GMOs.
During the first decade of their use by smallholder farmers in developing economies, peer-reviewed research has indicated that, on average, transgenic crops do provide economic advantages for adopting farmers.
Makhathini Flats.
But hold on: That average hides all sorts of highs and lows. I love this review, done by the International Food Policy Research Institute, because the authors carefully noted the problems with each analysis. For instance one study, following the introduction of GM cotton to the Makhathini Flats in South Africa, found that small farmers were major beneficiaries of the technology. But another, more thorough, analysis suggested something more complex: Small farmers had made a little more money with the transgenic cotton, but only because the Vunisa Cotton company had set them up for success.
Vunisa pitched the transgenic seed to farmers; supplied them with pesticides, fertilizer, loans, and advisors; and then bought up all their cotton. Farmers are vulnerable when they can only buy from, and sell to, one company. That company can ratchet up the cost of seed, while ratcheting down the amount it pays for cotton. So in the Makhathini Flats, farmers were making a little more money — at least for the first few years — but they were also in a much more precarious position.
And this example is part of a theme. In general, GM crops do seem to give small farmers an economic boost, but the studies rarely look at the bigger political and economic tradeoffs those farmers are making. Those tradeoffs do sometimes have dire consequences — like farmer suicide.
But it doesn’t look like the introduction of GM crops is responsible for a large percentage of those deaths. Check out this graph from Nature:
The sad fact is that a lot of farmers kill themselves in India. The numbers didn’t budge significantly with the introduction of GM plants. There are, however, many well-documented cases in which debt — in part from the purchase of GM seeds — drove farmers to suicide. That’s absolutely true. It’s more accurate to say that suicides are caused by the bigger economic monster: The system that requires farmers to take on extravagant debt to compete.
A small farmer who owns his land and saves his seeds each year is relatively independent. A farmer who must take out loans to buy GM seeds, fertilizer, irrigation equipment, and pesticides is beholden and making a riskier (though also potentially more lucrative) bet. For each technological innovation, farmers trade some of their independence for a shot at greater profit. Perhaps it’s fair to say GM seeds are a synecdoche — a part that represents the whole — for the larger system that’s causing farmer suicide in India, especially in those areas where the only seed available to farmers is genetically modified.
So who has made money from GM technology? Seed and chemical companies, for sure. Big farmers, too. Little farmers have gained less, and have had to trade away more privileges. And the rest of us probably pay a little less for GMO food (industrial meat, for example). And all of this is a little fuzzy, because economics is an inexact science, and the studies are still coming in.
The question of who benefits goes beyond money, of course. We also need to look at the environment: Some see GM crops as an environmental savior, while other say they are a disaster. I’m going to make my usual kamikaze run into this minefield to see if there’s any way to reconcile the evidence each side presents.
Before I do that, though, I’m going to talk to some farmers and learn what the pluses and minuses look like from their perspective. Do farmers feel they are trading away intangibles for each new technological advancement?
On Friday, ICTMN published an essay, “Fun Racism Quiz: Would NFL Have a Team Called Washington Blackskins?”, and provocative image by Gerard Miller that he had published some time ago, as a college undergraduate. Miller, an African American, said that the piece had convinced some of his fellow students — ones who didn’t care about the controversy over the Redskins football team name — that it was an issue they should care about.
The image is a strong one, and it inspired strong reactions from many of our Facebook followers, as well as debate in a comment thread that has now stretched to over 500 entries. There are many insightful comments in the thread—and many that aren’t insightful.
Wayde Sid McCloud contributed one of the first responses, and to some extent hit the nail on the head: “When the African American cries racism, America has your back 100%. When Native Americans talk about racism towards them, it’s ignored!”
He may be exaggerating with “has your back 100%” but it’s safe to say that America has developed pretty good radar when it comes to racist images and words directed at African Americans. The Blackskins image is obviously racist. Nobody could argue that it is a “tribute” to African Americans. Through perseverance, the black community has largely succeeded in educating the rest of America about what images and words are disrespectful and harmful—but, unfortunately, Native Americans haven’t gotten to that stage. When Natives call out an image as racist, they are often challenged. Everything from “It’s a tribute” to “You’re just being politically correct” to “It’s a tradition—get over it.” Would anyone advance those same arguments to a black person who was (rightfully) offended by the Blackskins image?
Some commenters (and there is no telling, on Facebook, whether the people chiming in have read the article) saw the Blackskins image as a “cheap shot” directed at African Americans, and wondered why American Indians would “attack” another group that also faces discrimination but isn’t involved in the Redskins mascot discussions. The Blackskins image was not an attack on African Americans.
Look how far we have come—from a country that allowed slavery 150 years ago to one in which the Blackskins image would not be tolerated for a second. Every thinking American sees that it is racist, and that’s laudable progress. And “Blackskins” isn’t even a racial slur anyone uses.
Unfortunately, take the same image, substitute a 19th-century conception of a noble Indian and print the word “Redskins—which is a slur according to any dictionary—beneath it, and America goes blind to the racism. So blind that it’s considered suitable for t-shirts, bumper stickers, and baby attire. And that’s the point. American Indians have seen black Americans make great strides in reclaiming human dignity after brutal historic oppression. Black Americans in the year 2013 have made progress toward that mountaintop, and as a black man, Gerard Miller knows that. He also knows that American Indians would like to catch up.
WINDOW ROCK, ARIZONA – Since Monday, nearly 50 chapters have called for assistance in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Chinle was hardest hit by the floods as 22 people had to be evacuated from their homes. The floods continued downstream to Many Farms and Rock Point where another 40 people were either evacuated or rescued. In Tonalea, Arizona, officials reported that 20 homes were damaged due to flooding.
Most of the flash flooding happens after short bursts of intense rain.
“I want our people to know we are working with several different agencies to ensure that our people are safe and their basic needs are met,”
Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly said, In an attempt to calm concerns.
“Though we are thankful for the rain we have received, I want our people to know that the Navajo Nation programs and departments are responding to calls regarding flash flooding. Please be careful and don’t drive or cross flooded roadways. We want everyone to make through the rains safely,”
President Shelly said.
President Shelly has been getting regular updates about flooded communities throughout the week.
“We need everyone to exercise caution and be alert to their surroundings. Though it might not be raining in your area, it can be raining in areas upstream,”
said Navajo Department of Emergency Management Director Rose Whitehair.
Whitehair added that it is difficult to predict what areas would experience flash flooding since most of the flooding happens after short bursts of intense rain.
“And with the long term drought, the ground is hard so there is nowhere for the water to go,”
Whitehair said.
County and state emergency departments have all been coordinating efforts with the Navajo Department of Emergency Management along with the Red Cross, the Hopi Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“I want to thank all the first responders and agencies for working together. I know you are all working hard but remember the work you are doing is for the good of all the people in need. We are a strong nation and we will endure through these difficult times,”
President Shelly said.
Since July nearly 60 chapters have reported to the Navajo Department of Emergency seeking assistance for damages occurred as a result of flooding. Issues have been from road washouts, road closures, rescue operations, shelter for flood victims and road clearing.
President Shelly signed a declaration of emergency in August regarding the flooding and plans are to update the declaration for recent flood events.
Navajo Department of Emergency Management and chapters are working according to a declaration of emergency that President Shelly signed in August.
For those unfamiliar with the Navajo Nation, a chapter is a unit of local government most similar to townships found in most midwestern and northeastern states of the US and Canadian provinces.
