The BEAT News – November 3, 2016

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Berkshire Grown Hosts Holiday Farmers’ Markets 

Berkshire Grown will host six Holiday Farmers’ Markets from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays: November 19, December 17, January 14 and February 18 at Monument Valley Middle School in Great Barrington and on Sundays, November 20 and December 18, 2016 at Williams College Towne Field House. These festive events feature the freshest locally grown and produced foods and gifts, including fruits and vegetables, cheeses, meats, breads, preserved foods and grilled sausages during months when farmers’ markets are rarely open in the region. Admission is free.

Both markets will feature fun activities for kids, food for lunch and music. In Williamstown there will be traditional acoustic music by the MoCA jam band.

Last year, more than 5,000 people attended the six Holiday Farmers’ Markets, generating more than $181,000 in sales to the vendors.

“What’s wonderful is that every dollar we spend at a farmers’ market grows the local food economy—helps us put money directly into a farmers’ pocket and keeps the Berkshires the pastoral place we love.” said Barbara Zheutlin, executive director of Berkshire Grown.

Berkshire Grown’s Holiday Farmers’ Markets will showcase the Berkshire bounty of apples, potatoes, carrots, beets, winter squash, onions, garlic, mushrooms, and a variety of greens including kale, brussels sprouts, braising and micro greens. Plus there will be the freshest eggs, chicken, goat, grass fed pork and beef, over a dozen different kinds of locally produced cheeses, ice cream, jams, pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut and tempeh, honey, and delicious baked goods.

This year in Williamstown, Deanna Cook, who wrote Farmers Market Create and Play Activity Book, for Storey Publishing, will give kids a chance to play shop with pretend fruits and veggies, and also to play with a simple sensory garden and plant marker craft that teaches them about where food comes from. Storey Publishing, based at MASS MoCA in North Adams, will also be at the market to sell books on cooking, gardening, food preservation and other Do-It-Yourself activities.

Major sponsors of the Holiday Farmers’ Markets include Iredale Mineral Cosmetics and Williams College. As part of Williams College’s ongoing commitment to sustainable food and local agriculture, the college is again co-sponsoring the markets by donating the Williamstown venue, as well as providing funding toward the event. The Williams College Sustainable Food and Agriculture Program in The Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives supports the markets as a community partnership to further incorporate the principles of sustainability into the fabric of campus life. For more information on the college’s ongoing commitment to sustainable food, visit sustainability.williams.edu.

In addition, Berkshire Grown is grateful for generous support from the Williamstown Chamber of Commerce, Ed Herrington Inc. and the Berkshire Co-op Market, Downtown Pittsfield Farmers’ Market, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace, Kimball Farms, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, OLLI – Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Rolling Rock Salt, Sweet Brook Farm, and the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College.

Berkshire Grown supports and promotes local agriculture as a vital part of the Berkshire community, economy, and landscape; its mission is to “Keep farmers farming!”  Through events, workshops, promotions, advocacy, and education highlighting locally grown and produced food, Berkshire Grown helps to create a thriving local food economy. For more information, go to berkshiregrown.org or call 413.528.0041.

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Environmentalists Want Your Help Building a Climate Congress

By Kathy Kiely
Moyers & Co.
October 25, 2016

Faced with a presidential debate season that lacked any real discussion of an issue that the current occupant of the White House, Barack Obama, has identified as a “terrifying” threat, a small but well-connected group of California activists have decided to take matters into their own hands.

They’re building a tool to raise voter awareness about where candidates stand on climate change and they’re focusing their attention not on the White House, but on the institution at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that’s been most resistant to respond to the problem.

Earlier this month, the group launched Climate Congress, a website that aims to provide basic information on where every incumbent member of the US House and Senate and their challengers stand on key environmental questions. The mostly volunteer team behind the project began with an aim of capturing information on the candidates in the 33 Senate seats that are up for grabs in November’s election as well as candidates for 51 competitive House races where there’s a significant difference between the candidates on climate issues. The site has its own Wiki, allowing for group collaboration on the project, and founders are encouraging the public to fill in missing information.

“Every day we are adding,” says Felix Kramer, a self-described “frustrated climate hawk” who helped get the site off the ground. “We’ve started to get crowdsourced information.” He says he and several allies, including Mike Mielke, who handles environmental issues for the influential Silicon Valley Leadership Group, decided to launch the site after discovering there is no one-stop shop for voters to learn where politicians stand on climate issues.

The site addresses the latter problem by calling for volunteers to help with a range of chores, from writing and editing to social media promotion. Researchers will help get information to answer three basic questions about each candidate for congressional office:“The information is scattered around,” says Kramer, who sees that as a “sign that people don’t recognize the urgency and don’t think there is anything they can do.”

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The Dakota Pipeline Could Devastate Some of the Poorest People in America

The tribe has lived in North and South Dakota for hundreds of years, yet members have little say in how their ancestral land is used by the federal government. Meanwhile, sky-high unemployment rates and poverty levels have afflicted the Sioux for decades.

Now, tribe members and protestors say the pipeline could imperil the Sioux drinking water and the environmental health of the land they live on.

Natives have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the country, and the Sioux suffer especially startling statistics. More than 40% of the reservation’s population has an income below the federal poverty line, compared to 13.8% for the U.S. on average. Indian Country Today put the unemployment rate at Standing Rock at a shocking 86% in 2013, and many of the Sioux are without electricity, running water, or complete kitchens, per a 2012 economic outlook report prepared by the tribe.

“They’re poor, they’re dirt poor,” said Richard Monette, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and past president of the Native American Bar Association. “It’s unbelievable what we’ve done to them.”

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is part of the Great Sioux Nation, and its economy depends largely on farming and cattle ranching, according to the tribe’s website, as well as two casinos owned by the Tribe. Almost 60% of those with full-time jobs are employed by the government.

“Social welfare programs such as Social Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)—comprise almost 30% of all income on the reservation,” the report notes.

The sources of the reservation’s poverty are long and varied, but much of it can be traced to land ownership.

The Black Hills Gold Rush in the 1870s led to the forced cessation of some of the tribe’s land to the United States government, breaking peace treaties that had been signed by the Sioux and the government. (Notably, the Natives did not benefit from the discovery of gold in their sacred land.) Continuing that tradition, the federal government seized thousands more acres of land from the tribe in the 1950s and ‘60s in order to build dams across the Missouri River Basin.

That land, which had been used by the Sioux for farming and hunting, was flooded and destroyed, and the reservation never recovered from the economic toll, Monette said. According to MSNBC, hundreds of families were displaced, exacerbating poverty.

“That’s why the placement of this pipeline is so significant,” Monette said. It’s on land that the Sioux still consider theirs—given that, in their eyes, the federal government had no right to take it to begin with, and didn’t compensate them for it.

Nor does the tribe technically own the land they have left, The Atlanticreports; it is held in a trust by the federal government. That means the tribe has little leverage when dealing with massive companies like Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline. It’s not as if they can buy the land the company wants to build on—they have no money. Relatedly, they can’t develop the natural resources in “their” land to earn any income, they can’t borrow against the land, and they certainly can’t sell it.

And, as noted above, they have few other economic resources. Which brings us back to the pipeline.

As Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in the New York Post, the ranchers just off of the reservation who do actually own their land gave permission for the pipeline to be built—and they were paid for it. That’s not an option for the Sioux.

That the Dakota Access pipeline is being built on land that used to be part of the Standing Rock reservation, under its main water source, and through its sacred sites is another affront in a long history of them. To add further insult, the pipeline was originally slated to be built north of Bismarck, but was moved further south after public outcry that a leak would destroy drinking water. That same criticism appears to be being ignored when it’s made by native people.

The Tribe was not consulted on the pipeline (another disrespect to a supposedly sovereign nation). Monette said if it had been, perhaps the state and Energy Transfer Partners could have worked with the tribe to build the pipeline through the reservation, rather than under the water supply, so that the Sioux could reap some of the tax benefits from the project. “Why should they be pure and money-less?” he asked.

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