Another approach common among farmers who see organic production as a specialty crop is farming by “neglect.” That means “organic farming” using neither any inputs nor any additional cultural or biological farming practices. The result, not surprisingly, is decreasing yields and increasing weed and pest pressures. These farmers usually give up “organic” production in a few years, convinced that it doesn’t work.

Is organic farming by input substitution or by neglect really organic farming? Technically, yes, by today’s working definitions, but not really, by the standards of traditional organic farmers.

As an aside, it is not surprising that studies comparing the nutritional value of organic and conventionally grown food are inconclusive. Clearly, that is because a lot of “organic” food is essentially “conventionally” grown–by input substitution or neglect methods. It is not likely to be nutritionally different from conventional food because it is grown under conditions that mimic conventional production. I suspect, however, that if we were to test food grown on an organic farm that utilized generous amounts of green manure and compost in comparison with food from an NPK conventional farm, the organic food would be found to be superior in taste and nutritional value.

by Andrew Saito

My memories of Los Angeles’ beaches – Venice, Santa Monica, Redondo – are of brown water, parking lots within striking distance of waves, and large metal trash bins strangely reminiscent of oil barrels. Today, we have far more to worry about than just murky water.

The oceans are facing at least a quintuple assault:

• Rising temperatures due to climate change — certainly not helped by the premeditated extinction of the Red Cars and their peers across the nation;

• Acidification of the oceans, again due to elevated and exacerbating carbon emissions;

• The increasing presence of plastic — I’ve read reports of supermarket bags and Barbie dolls appearing on once pristine beaches of unpopulated islands, to mention nothing of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of trash twice the size of Texas that swirls in the waters midway between North America and Asia; in the long run, this plastic will break down to particles so small that they will be eaten by zooplankton, providing them with a fatal last meal, and thus threatening a foundation of the global food chain;

• Other threats include chemical pollution, from pharmaceutical, medical and agricultural sources, as well as petroleum and human waste — we deliberately dump this stuff into the home of blue whales, dolphins, orca, salmon, seaweed, coral;

• And, of course, there’s overfishing, when a human population forty times larger than when Christ lived demands ever more sushi, ceviche, lobster bisque and crab cakes from critically disappearing marine communities.

Let me not mention open-pit mining. Let me not mention deforestation.

Let me not mention genetically modified seeds appearing in wild spaces. Let me not mention nuclear waste. Oops. My mind simply can’t keep these things in neat little boxes. Just as my father’s childhood has everything to do with my presence here at the University of Iowa, so do the disappearance of frogs, the rise of the automobile, and the assault on the oceans have everything to do with my life, and with playwriting.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare describes theatre as “hold[ing] as ’twere the mirror up to nature.” While theatre has many functions, providing social commentary and an opportunity for introspection is a central one. I am a playwright. I love nature. I love life. I feel broken by the constant war we wage on our home. I feel broken by my own complicity in this war. Thus, I write plays about global warming. I write plays about rivers. I write plays about globalization. I write plays about the ocean. I write plays about life. Click Here

Some twenty years ago and half a continent away, my father recounted memories from his childhood in Southern California. He told me about setting plastic toy soldiers on fire in dirt pits in his backyard. He told me about the Red Car, a light rail and streetcar system that crisscrossed Los Angeles from Long Beach to Downtown to Pasadena to Santa Ana. Profusions of Western toads would make regular nocturnal visits to his
house, a block from the Los Angeles River, in a neighborhood nicknamed Frogtown. When he would go to the beach, the water was so clear he could see not only his feet, but fish. Yes, fish!

Today, all of those memories are nothing more than that. The Red Car’s last operational line discontinued service on April 8, 1961. This was part of what is now referred to as the Great American Streetcar Scandal, when General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, among other corporations, engineered the replacement of light rail and streetcars with buses, to pave the way for broad public ownership and use of automobiles and freeways. In all honesty, I did not shed many tears when GM recently teetered on the brink. We reap what we sow.

Indeed, that seems precisely the position we currently occupy. We are reaping what we sowed, what our parents and grandparents sowed, and what we continue to sow. How many of us drove here? I am flying to Kentucky for spring break. I spent winter recess in Peru. It was long flight. I do not exculpate myself from responsibility, or hypocrisy.

The toads no longer visit Frogtown, and haven’t in years. I had the fortune of seeing one or two here and there when I was a kid, but that pales in comparison with the dozens and, as rumored, hundreds of toads that overran Frogtown in the 1950s. Perhaps they were looking for quarters more comfortable than the concrete channel that replaced a once free-flowing river.