Kiera Butler

Senior Editor

Kiera answers your green questions every week in her Econundrums column. She was a hypochondriac even before she started researching germ warfare.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @kieraevebutler

Kiera has written about the environment, arts and culture, and more for Columbia Journalism Review, Orion, Audubon, OnEarth, Plenty, and the Utne Reader. She lives in Berkeley and recently planted 30 onions in her backyard.

Tom Philpott Debates Freakonomics on Local Food

—By Kiera Butler

| Tue Nov. 29, 2011 12:23 PM PST

Yesterday, MoJo food and ag blogger Tom Philpott went head to head with Freakonomics' Steve Sexton on LA public radio station KPCC. If you've been reading Tom's blog, you know that the two have sparred before, most recently on the topic of whether the local food movement is good for the environment. That was the topic of yesterday's debate. Listen here:

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Student Occupiers: It's the Debt, Stupid

—By Kiera Butler

| Wed Nov. 23, 2011 12:40 PM PST

College students have, to some extent, always been poor and hungry. But in the past few years, undergrads' plight has become truly dire. It's not hard to see why the Occupy Wall Street movement has struck a chord on campuses.

Just check out these stats: Unemployment among college grads is twice what it was in 2007. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds is twice the national average; grads under 25 are twice as likely to lack a job than their older peers. The New York Times reports that just half of students who graduated in 2010 had a job in the spring of 2011, and even those who did get jobs were often way overqualified:

An analysis by The New York Times of Labor Department data about college graduates aged 25 to 34 found that the number of these workers employed in food service, restaurants and bars had risen 17 percent in 2009 from 2008, though the sample size was small. There were similar or bigger employment increases at gas stations and fuel dealers, food and alcohol stores, and taxi and limousine services.

Earlier this week, students from an OWS offshoot called Occuppy Student Debt pledged to refuse to pay back their student loans. Some of the members of the group have shared their stories on the group's site. Here's one entitled "Suckit Sallie":

I was one of those kids who always pushed hard and dreamed big. I skipped a grade, was in all the right AP classes, one of 2 or 3 black student on the honor roll, and went out of state for college @ 17 and had no doubts I would make it in life. I used the government and Sallie Mae to make it through grad school within 6 years, and expected to be somewhere way different than where I am now…..

I am 25 now and living back @ home. With a different phone number to avoid all of the harrassing phone calls asking me to pay back $1400 a month I just don’t have. After 10 months of searching, even with my masters from a good school, I could only find an overnight stock job @ toys r us. I get talked to crazy all for $8 an hour. I am back in school, but becuase I went into default prior to getting in school, I can’t get a deferment yet. But there is no way I can pay my way out of default on $8 an hour.

More stats on the dire financial straits of America's college students:

Sticker Shock

Average tuition (in $ thousands) at private and public colleges has climbed steadily over the last decade:

Deeper in Debt

The amount that students owed quintupled between 2000 and 2011.

School vs. Shopping

In 2010, for the first time ever, Americans' outstanding student loans ($ in billions) exceeded their total credit card debt:

Plus: If you're curious about how students are making ends meet, check out the last-resort methods our readers turned to to pay for their degrees.

How Green Is Your Thanksgiving Menu?

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Nov. 21, 2011 3:30 AM PST

So you've got your free-range turkey. Your potatoes are strictly heirloom varieties. The cranberries for your sauce come from the local organic bog. Feeling pretty good about your Thanksgiving dinner, are you? Not so fast: The environmental footprint of food isn't always what you'd expect. Last Thanksgiving, PBS Need to Know took a hard look at the subject, from a diverse range of perspectives. In its podcast, which is definitely worth another listen, we hear from geophysicist Gidon Eshel, NASA agronomist Cynthia Rosenzweig, best-selling author Anna Lappé, agricultural analyst Philip Thornton, and animal rights activist Tara Oresick.

By now, most of us are aware of the outsized environmental footprint of meat. As Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, points out, the production of one pound of beef can require as much as 16 pounds of livestock feed. And that's to say nothing of all the waste associated with raising livestock, the methane and nitrous oxide emissions generated by the cattle, and the carbon dioxide created by trucks and tractors that transport feed and animals.

Of course, not all meat is as resource intensive as beef. Similarly, not all vegetables are as innocent as you might think. Eshel, whom I interviewed for my piece on whether or not vegetarianism is always greener than eating meat, says that in order to lessen the environmental impact of our diets, we should look at the efficiency of foods: How much energy is required to produce them, and how many calories do we gain? From this perspective, labels like "organic" and "local" aren't always the most planet-friendly choices. In colder climates, local spinach and mesclun, for example, are frighteningly inefficient because they have to be grown in greenhouses.

And the efficiency of foods can vary dramatically depending on where and how you live. Thornton, a livestock expert, argues that Americans use cattle very differently from people in other parts of the world. In Kenya, families often depend on one or two cows for income: The animals provide not only milk and/or meat, but also fertilizer, so their overall energy yield is much greater. In some climates, raising livestock can actually require fewer resources than growing crops.

So how efficient are the foods on your Thanksgiving plate? The answer may surprise you. (Hint: Turkey is not as bad as you might think. Phew!) For the answer (plus an inside look at an Adopt-a-Turkey program in upstate New York, and more) listen to the podcast:

On a Turkey Farm, 4-H Meets Slow Food

The kids have the local meat, and Slow Food has the hungry foodies. A match made in heaven?

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Nov. 21, 2011 3:30 AM PST

This post is part of my series on 4-H Club. Read about the club's Big Ag ties here, and about kids raising pigs in Oakland here.

For the past few weeks, I've been blogging about the two heritage turkeys that my friends and I have been raising in our backyard. But our turkeys aren't Berkeley natives. They spent the first 10 days of their lives on the Thode Family Farm in Sebastopol, California. There, the four Thode kids raise dozens of turkeys every year for a collaboration between their 4-H club and the local Slow Foods chapter. Back in September, I visited the farm to learn more about this cool partnership.

4-H alum Zach Thode and his family's heritage turkeys in Sebastopol, CaliforniaThe turkey whisperer above is Zach Thode. A soft-spoken 21-year-old, Zach is the veteran turkey farmer of the family. Seven years ago, he and a few friends began raising heritage turkeys for their 4-H club. Through the club, the kids tried to sell their birds for Thanksgiving, but they had a marketing problem: Their customers wondered why they should pay $7.50 a pound when supermarket turkeys cost a fraction of that. "People didn't understand that organic feed costs more, and so does giving them enough space to live in," Zach told me. "Plus, we raise our birds for six months, whereas most supermarket birds only take three months or less to get to slaughter weight."

Janelle, 16, and Zach, 20, are two of the Thode family turkey farmers. Janelle Thode, 16, and Zach Thode, 21, are two of the Thode family turkey farmers.

But then, Slow Food Russian River got wind of the project. "We were so impressed with how these kids were raising their birds," says Jim Reichert, a poultry farmer and member of SFRR. "We wanted to support the project." It was a natural match: The 4-H club had the birds, and Slow Food had the network of foodies to buy them. The project has grown every year since. This year, 11 kids raised 225 birds. Project leader Catherine Thode expects some kids to earn upwards of $1,000. (A few years ago, Zach used his earnings to buy a used pickup truck.)

By now, Zach has aged out of 4-H, but he still helps out with the project. "I like the 4-H community," he says. "It's a tight group of people." We got to talking about 4-H's corporate sponsorship, a topic I am kind of obsessed with. I asked Zach if he knew that agribusiness giants like Monsanto, Cargill, John Deere, and Philip Morris USA sponsored the club. He shrugged and said it made sense. "The shift from rural to urban living means that very few people want to work in agriculture," he said. "So these companies have to invest in the youth. There is a danger of farms disappearing."

Janelle Thode, 16, shows off one of her turkeys: Courtesy Slow Foods Russian River Janelle Thode, in her 4-H uniform, shows off one of her turkeys. Photo by Slow Food Russian River

In Zach's case, it worked: After a distinguished career in 4-H (he's won many prizes for animals he's raised, as well as a quiz-show-style comp called the Avian Bowl and a poultry-judging contest), he is now majoring in agriculture business at Santa Rosa Junior College and hopes someday to be the manager of a farm or ranch. I asked whether he'd consider making use of the skills and values he learned in the heritage turkey project by working on a small farm. "Hopefully it would be somewhere that I can use what I learned in 4-H and at school," he says, "but probably it will be wherever I can get a job."

Right. The number of farms in the United States has been declining steadily for decades, and as my colleague Tom Philpott recently reported, young farmers say they lack the capital to start new farms. The good news, though, is that direct sales of local foods are on the rise.

"Especially around where we live in California, there really is a growing market for meat that was organically raised nearby, in a humane way," Catherine Thode says. "It is a great fit for 4-H animals, since the kids spend so much time and effort raising them right, but I don't know if it would catch on everywhere else."

There's some evidence that other 4-H clubs are becoming interested in organic and local food: In Pennsylvania, there's this award for organic 4-H projects. In Oregon, this program helps schools start "sustainable living" clubs. A Google search revealed that a bunch of 4-H clubs now offer organic gardening. But when I searched the official 4-H site, I couldn't find any official organic or local initiatives. The club hasn't returned my request for an interview yet, but I'm curious to know whether there's anything in the works.

In the meantime, the Thodes, like me, are getting for this year's slaughter. But unlike me, they haven't made the mistake of getting to know their birds. "At this point, I make sure they are treated well, but I don't really get attached," says Zach's 16-year-old sister, Janelle. "There are just so many of them." Spoken like a true farmer.

Your Prius' Deepest, Darkest Secret

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Nov. 14, 2011 3:30 AM PST

So you're considering buying a hybrid car. Or maybe you already have. Good for you! You're saving a bundle on gas and reducing your environmental footprint at the same time. But fuel isn't the only natural resource that your car requires. Its motor also contains a small amount of neodymium, one of 17 elements listed at the very bottom of the periodic table. Known as the rare earths, these minerals are key to all kinds of green technology: Neodymium magnets turn wind turbines. Cerium helps reduce tailpipe emissions. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths.

This hockey-puck-sized hunk of the rare earth neodymium is currently worth about $350 This hockey-puck-size hunk of the rare earth neodymium is currently worth about $350.And the stuff is good for more than just renewable energy technology. Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you'll be hard-pressed to find something that doesn't contain at least one of the rare earths, from smartphones to laptop batteries to flat-screen TVs. They're also crucial for defense technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, and the navigation systems in smart bombs.

Given all this, it's not surprising that the rare-earths industry is booming. Demand for the elements has skyrocketed in the past few years, and a recent report predicted it to grow by 50 percent by 2017.

For the last few decades, China controlled the world's market for rare earths, producing about 97 percent of the global supply. But in late 2010, China cut its exports by 35 percent in order to keep the valuable metals for its own manufacturers. The prices of rare earths rose almost immediately. Fearing a shortage, US legislators sprang into action. This past April, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) introduced a bill that would kick-start a domestic rare-earths renaissance in the United States.

A few rare-earths mines are slated to open in the United States in the next few years, the most hyped of which is a facility called Mountain Pass in California's Mojave Desert. (It's actually been around off and on since the '50s, but a company called Molycorp has given it a major makeover.) When it's running at full capacity, Mountain Pass will be the largest rare-earths mine in the world, producing upwards of 40,000 tons of the stuff every year.

Which means Molycorp will also have to deal with a whole lot of waste. Rare earths occur naturally with the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, which, if not stored securely, can leach into groundwater or escape into the air as dust. The refining process requires huge amounts of harsh acids, which also have to be disposed of safely. Molycorp claims that its new operations are leak-proof, but the company's ambitious plans have raised a few eyebrows among environmentalists, since the site has a history of spills.

But no matter how quickly new mines open, the United States won't be able to produce enough rare earths on its own—it's thought that North America contains only 15 percent of the world's supply. A recent Congressional Research Service report (PDF) recommended that the US seek reliable sources in other countries.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]