Click here for Sangamithra Iyer's biography. She'll be documenting factory farm facilities and trends in India in the coming months. Check back for her blogs and other writing and visual reportage. Brighter Green’s Associate Program is designed to include in Brighter Green's work individuals from around the world who possess fresh and vital perspectives, to provide critical thinking on policies on the environment, sustainability and equity, food security, and animal welfare and rights.

A resolution (PDF) to reduce New York City's collective and individual climate "foodprint" is introduced today to the City Council. Press conference and rally 11 a.m. Wednesday, July 1, on the steps of City Hall. All are welcome to attend.

Brighter Green Executive Director Mia MacDonald is blogging from the Nobel Women's Initiative conference in Guatemala. Click here to read her daily posts.

New links have been added to the Resources section of this website that encompass some of the challenges that China is facing in its encounter with factory farming.

Executive Director Mia MacDonald spoke on a panel entitled, "Eating Green: Food and Climate Change," at The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives conference. See PDF of Powerpoint presentation here.

Mia MacDonald has a blog on attending the Nobel Women's Initiative Conference in Guatemala, May 10–14. Click here to read it.

The latest issue of the "Backgrounder" policy newsletter series published by the Institute for Food and Democracy (Food First) is an excerpt from Brighter Green's Skillful Means: the Challenges of China's Encounter with Factory Farming. Click here to read or download the Backgrounder, "China and Industrial Animal Agriculture: Prospects and Defects."

Executive Director Mia MacDonald spoke at the May 2, 2009 Brooklyn (NY) Food Conference as part of a workshop panel, "Climate Change and the World's Food Supply." Her presentation is available as a PDF.

Author, activist, Nobel Prize laureate and Brighter Green colleague Wangari Maathai's latest book, The Challenge for Africa, was recently released by Pantheon. Maathai offers a compelling analysis of the problems facing Africa and the promises of the continent's future. For an interview with Maathai about "Challenge" from NPR's "Talk of the Nation" on April 23, 2009 click here. More about "Challenge" and Maathai's recent U.S. book tour are available on the Green Belt Movement website.

"Taking Root: the Vision of Wangari Maathai," a documentary film by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater about Nobel peace laureate and Green Belt Movement founder Maathai's life and work will be broadcast on most PBS stations April 14, 2009.

Welcome to Brighter Green's spring '09 newsletter and thank you for your interest in our work. Here's what we've been up to, and what we're planning.

The six person delegation of pastoral community activists and one radio reporter who travelled to Basecamp Maasai Mara in southern Kenya to exchange experiences has reported back. "It was very enlightening and beneficial to the participants," writes Daniel Salau of SIMOO. "We hope this will be the beginning of long-term partnership." The delegation's report offers details of what this peer-to-peer learning visit entailed, and what sustainable development looks like on the ground.

As a result of disseminating Skillful Means: the Challenges of China's Encounter with Factory Farming more widely within China, Brighter Green has gathered some interesting perspectives on how the links between climate change and animal agriculture are being framed by the Chinese government and interpreted by China's people.

To mark the Chinese Year of the Ox (or Cow), Brighter Green undertook a broader dissemination of its policy paper, Skillful Means: the Challenges of China's Encounter with Factory Farming to Chinese media, bloggers, academics and activists.

An interview with Mia MacDonald on Brighter Green's study, Skillful Means: the Challenges of China's Encounter with Factory Farmingconducted by Take a Bite out of Climate Change founder Anna Lappé, appears today on Grist, the online environmental news and feature site.

Brighter Green's initiative, piloted with partners in the U.S., Kenya, and Tanzania, launches this week, with the participation of 10 girls from Maasai communities. "All the girls have now secured places in schools and look forward to start classes in the next one week."

On the steps of city hall today, Councilmember Bill de Blasio and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer introduced Resolution 2049 (PDF) that seeks to tackle climate change through localized food production. The resolution is the first of its kind in the U.S. to link climate change with food choices and production systems (a third of greenhouse emissions, GHGs, are due to agriculture and associated land use changes; fully 18% of GHGs come from the livestock sector alone), and is an important step in increasing access to fresh, healthy and local food for all New Yorkers. Brighter Green and other members of the NYC Foodprint Alliance gathered to celebrate the announcement.

So, what's a foodprint? And what's its significance today? New York City foodprint resolution introduced today, June 30th. See news item for details on Wednesday, July 1st press conference at New York City Hall. Foodprint (n): our food system's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. Why a foodprint resolution? And why in New York City? New York City has approved a number of directives to reduce global warming and encourage environmental awareness. But none addresses the enormous role food and agriculture has in accelerating or mitigating climate change. Globally, some 30% of GHG emissions come from the fossil fuel-based agricultural system —from pesticides and fertilizer production to how food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, stored and disposed.

It's no longer novel to posit that human beings and other species are migrating faster further due to climate change. Another new report makes this case and marshals the global data. But what does this look like on the ground? What are governments responding? China's is, as with many things, acting; and as with many things in China, it's on a large scale. The government estimates that 150 million Chinese will have to move as their home environments are degraded to a level where they can't support human settlements anymore.

The chief drivers of this phenomenon in China? Climate change and over-use of available water. Overgrazing is also a factor, along with deforestation and the clearing of vegetation. Parched lands that have fed too many herds, spread over towns, homes and farms, creating new desert. Such is the case in north-west China. Here the government has moved thousands of people to new settlements, some happily, some not (the river water in one new town was so salty people got sick from drinking it). But how far is far enough when the climate may catch up? One relocated site is called secretly "an ecological disaster area" by government officials, according to the Guardian. One farmer laments the dust bowl - desert in the making - that already greets him not far from his front door.

The World Health Organization has declared swine flu a global pandemic, given its geographic scope and the fact that it appears to be unstoppable. The flu has been reported in 74 countries...and counting (13,000 reported cases in the U.S.; about 100 so far in China, but many more may be uncounted). Its origins, though, still remain a mystery. A locus of attention is a large hog producing facility in Vera Cruz, Mexico, run by a subsidiary of U.S. protein giant Smithfield Foods. The first cases of swine flu were found in Vera Cruz, and residents have complained for years about the facility's stench and pollution (probably about average for factory farms). This piece, from Grist.org, investigates a possible connection. The Worldwatch Institute's Danielle Nierenberg was recently in Mexico, briefing the Mexican Congress about swine flu and also meeting with environmental, food and animal welfare activists. Read her blogs about the trip and the origins of the flu here. Here's an excerpt from Nierenberg's Congressional testimony on the origins of the flu, and what it means -- or should -- for public health and environmental policy:

While the connection between the Granjas Carroll industrial pig operation in Vera Cruz, Mexico (a Smithfield Foods subsidiary) and the emergence of H1N1 is circumstantial, there is some evidence to suggest that factory farming practices are to blame.

It's not all greens. But there have been several interesting, important and yes, readable, articles and reports published recently on food - security and sustainability - that I wanted to note a few here. Since they're tossed together, I thought of salad: a carrot here, an olive there, chickpeas, arugula, butter lettuce and an essential, red onion. Salad days ahead. Read on. First up: "The End of Plenty", a National Geographic special report. How to feed a growing global population? Will (Thomas) Malthus be proved right? What's the role of meat, monocultures and climate change? It's all here in clean, clear prose and the photos are terrific. Then, a lengthy New York Times piece on Smithfield's radical transformation of Poland's and Romania's pork industry. The speed with which it's been achieved: warp. The midwives: a former American diplomat and compliant EU officials. So it's goodbye small farmers. Hello factory pork facilities. Millions of Euros in EU subsidies have helped recreate U.S.-style intensification, to a 'T'.

Pork's more plentiful and cheap, but the number of pig farmers in Poland dropped by more than half in a decade; the shift in Romania was even more precipitous. Methane emissions are way up. Communities coping with factory farm pollution, stench and the dreary landscape aren't happy. "We go crazy with the daily smell," a school principal says. Finally, and aptly, a set of articles and ideas put together by a group that advises investors to move in the direction of "sustainability principles", Vital Systems. Their compendium's called "What About Meat?" organized around the meat-climate link. It's a synthesis, so feel free to graze, as you would over a salad. Now, remind me why it is that U.S. President Obama keeps going out for burgers?! I know there's arugula (or red leaf lettuce) to be had in Washington, DC, or even the White House's own garden, and chefs only too happy to prepare it - as salad, or sauteed to taste. Final toss: here's a video clip of hip hop mogul and vegan Russell Simmons on Obama's burger jones, and why and how he ought to change it. As Simmons says, "He's a leader...we hope he'll learn."