When government extension agents first came to Juan Bautista's Yucatan village of Chun-Yah, a tiny pueblo in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, they told him he should start growing pitaya, also known as dragonfruit. Originating in Meso-America, this cactus is now cultivated in parts of Asia, Australia, and Israel. The fruit is tasty, the plant is easily propagated, and it thrives in places with long dry seasons like the Yucatan.

Bautista and other farmers in Chun-Yah followed the agronomists' instructions, clear-cutting nearby forests and building elaborate trellis systems made of concrete and wire to support the vine-like pitaya. Soon after the project began, the funding to maintain those trellises disappeared. The agronomists were at a loss as to how pitaya could be grown otherwise, and they left Chun-Yah. That was 15 years ago.

Rather than give up on pitaya, which by now was their main cash crop, the farmers of Chun-Yah decided to grow it in their milpas, the traditional Mayan field.

Bautista's milpa is no longer an ordinary farm field - it is an intensively managed forest garden, a food-producing ecosystem built in nature's image.

In traditional Mayan agriculture, maize has been the milpa's main crop. But numerous sister crops also provide balance to both the farmer's diet and the milpa ecosystem itself: beans, squash, melons, chiles, medicinal plants, pineapple, trees for fruit and lumber, plus the myriad fauna that call the milpa their home.

So what did Juan Bautista and the farmers of Chun-Yah do differently once the agronomists left? They essentially exchanged concrete trellises for living ones.

Pitaya is an epiphyte, meaning that it pulls moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, and debris that collects on the host plant, on which it depends for structural support. Instead of clear-cutting forest to plant pitaya, the farmers cut trees selectively, leaving Mexican Cedar and other lumber-producing tree crops for later harvest. They then select the host trees on which pitaya will grow, cutting them at head height to allow for easy harvesting of the dragonfruit. The host trees remain alive, their roots holding soil in place while bringing up nutrients from the sub-soil. Regular pruning of the trees provides mulch for other crops. The farmers plant pitaya and other food crops into this living forest system - a well-planned, well-managed agro-ecological system.

There is no irrigation in Chun-Yah. Other than a little fertilizer for the host trees, the only input is the knowledge and labor of farmers who have created this forest ecosystem. Growing pitaya on the concrete trellises was fine, but the only crop produced was the pitaya. Growing pitaya in the polyculture of the milpa means that Juan Bautista gets his cash crop plus all the benefits the milpa brings, with little drop in yield.

There are three main pitaya harvests between June and October. Through the Chun-Yah cooperative, Bautista sells his fruit locally in Quintana Roo. On his three hectares he harvests around 12 tons of dragonfruit per year. At $1/kilo, he's earning $12,000 annually, almost double Mexico's median annual household income of $7,297. And all that food coming from his milpa means a lower grocery bill than most city dwellers.

Thanks to their ingenuity, the farmers of Chun-Yah haven't had to leave their farms to work in el norte, and they are able to live comfortably on several hectares each.

And those agronomists who left 15 years ago? They have returned to learn how to grow pitaya from the farmers of Chun-Yah. Which is proof that these Mayan villages and their ancient agricultural arts are not just vestiges of a lost way of life; they are crucial models that could teach us "moderns" how to farm in ways that work with, not in spite of, our surrounding ecosystems.

Fred Bahnson is a Kellogg Food & Society fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. His writing has appeared in Orion, The Sun, and Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (Mariner). He lives with his wife and two sons on a farm in Transylvania County, North Carolina.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

For the past five years, Worldwatch has explored the history, production method, and environmental and social impacts of everyday products - from chopsticks to pencils - in the Life-Cycle Studies section of its bi-monthly magazine, World Watch. This print-exclusive content is now available for free to Eye on Earth readers. Look for a new study every Friday! 

Overview

The dirty business of laundry has long sought improvements over old-fashioned soap and water. The Celts washed their clothing in human urine. The launderers of ancient Rome rubbed a claylike soil known as "fuller's earth" into their stained togas. During the Renaissance, books of "secrets" circulated through Europe, offering such household stain-removal concoctions as walnuts and turpentine.

Modern dry cleaning is credited to a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Jolly, who in the mid-19th century realized the stain-removal potential of kerosene when his maid accidently spilled a canful onto his soiled tablecloth. Hydro­carbon-based solvents prevailed thereafter until the 1960s, when flammability concerns and the affordability of new synthetic chemicals led to a switch. Tetrachloroethylene, also known as perchloroethylene ("perc"), became the preferred solvent among most of the world's dry cleaners.

An estimated 180,000 dry cleaners worldwide are believed to use perc. More than 30,000 small- and large-scale operations are based in the United States alone. The rise of service economies in the developing world will likely increase demand for dry cleaning, although many countries are shifting toward more casual office dress codes.

Process

The typical dry cleaner uses a combined washing machine/clothes dryer. A rotating stainless-steel basket holds the laundry while a circulating outer shell sprays solvent throughout the clothing. The machine extracts the solvent, recovering nearly all of it for further use.

Although much of the perc is recycled during dry cleaning, some solvent inevitably evaporates into the surrounding air. The cleaning process also leaves a sludge-like byproduct that contains solvent residue, and only a relatively small portion of this is properly treated; most is mixed with other waste products and burned in incinerators and cement kilns.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies perc as a probable human carcino­gen. Those who work in or live near dry cleaning facilities are exposed to various cancer risks, according to the World Health Organization, including bladder, throat, and lung cancer. Damage to the liver, kidneys, nervous system, and memory is a threat as well, according to the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

Perc pollution contributes to the formation of smog. The toxin can also accumulate in water resources; U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists have detected perc at measurable concentra­tions in nearly 1 in 10 tested wells drawing on major aquifers across the country.

Mitigation and Alternatives

Advances in dry cleaning machinery have led dry cleaners in the United States to cut their solvent use by 80 percent in the past decade, according to the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute. Still, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the country's dry cleaners released some 10,000 tons of perc in 2006.

The European Union, Australia, and Canada have imple­mented regulations to further limit perc releases and mini­mize its use. California has passed the only perc phase-out, requiring that dry cleaners transition to alternatives by 2023, but many large dry cleaners have avoided regulation by moving their operations to Mexico.

About half of garments dry-cleaned with perc may instead be cleaned with a process known as "wet cleaning." The technique combines old methods (biodegradable soap and water) with new technologies such as computer-controlled dryers and stretching machines. Another alternative, immersion in liquid carbon dioxide (CO₂), has been commercially available for the past decade. The Union of Concerned Scientists considers the process beneficial to the climate: The CO₂ is nearly all recaptured, and it requires less energy than traditional dry cleaning.

Consumers seeking alternatives can also remove many stains with household substances such as baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, or cornstarch.

Ben Block is the staff writer for World Watch. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

For the past five years, Worldwatch has explored the history, production method, and environmental and social impacts of everyday products - from chopsticks to pencils - in the Life-Cycle Studies section of its bi-monthly magazine, World Watch. This print-exclusive content is now available for free to Eye on Earth readers. Look for a new study every Friday! 

Overview

Microbes: Can't live with them, can't live without them. We focus more on the first of these truths, as shown by the huge sums spent every year on preventing, treating, and researching infectious diseases. But the second is equally valid: Each human body contains at least 10 times as many microbes as human cells. The human gut alone contains about 1 kilogram of bacteria indispensable to digestion.

But sometimes microbes get out of hand, triggering everything from athlete's foot to influenza pandemics that kill tens of millions, and for millennia humans have sought ways to control them. People have tried everything from prayer, to natural biocides (Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old hunter found frozen in an Alpine glacier in 1991, carried fungal oils to treat intestinal parasites), to cautery (scorching wounds with a hot iron).

The results were mixed at best. Then, in 1929, Alexander Fleming noticed a clear zone on an agar plate of staphylococci bacteria "contaminated" with Penicillium mold. Ten years later, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey found a way to isolate the active ingredient. Penicillin was used to treat infections in World War II and was commercialized immediately afterward. From this accidental beginning, the global anti-infective market has grown to nearly US$70 billion a year; antibiotics account for about half.

Production

Producing mass quantities of antibiotics requires a bioindustrial fermentation technique. The source microorganisms, usually genetically modified strains of naturally occurring microbes, are grown in enormous vats of liquid growth mediums under carefully controlled conditions. The antibiotic compounds are actually metabolites of the microbes; these compounds are isolated, often using various organic solvents, then extracted, purified, and refined into one of several drug forms.

Impacts

The chief downstream impacts of antibiotic use involve antibiotic resistance. Resistance is natural; microbes that produce antibiotics do so to stave off competition from other microbes, which in turn evolve to escape harm. This co-evolutionary dance is expanded and accelerated by the immense scale of human antibiotic use - and misuse.

Antibiotic resistance developed almost immediately after commercial production of antibiotics began in 1946. It has since become a major threat to the control of pathogens, nearly all of which are resistant to one or more standard antibiotics. Resistant pathogens have become common in institutional settings such as hospitals and nursing homes; according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, about 70 percent of common hospital infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic. One of the most common institutional microbes, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, kills more people in the United States each year than AIDS.

Microbes' inherent tendency to develop antibiotic resistance is aggravated by human actions. For example, microbe resistance genes are sometimes used as markers in genetically modified crops and wind up in the products made from them. Antibiotics are often misused in medical settings, as when patients demand antibiotics for viral infections, against which they are useless. Even when the prescribed antibiotics are appropriate, patients often fail to use them properly. Both practices increase antibiotic resistance.

Perhaps most important, nearly 70 percent of U.S.-produced antibiotics and related drugs are fed to livestock to promote growth and prevent sickness. These uses help create resistant pathogens that can reach people directly via the meat and byproducts or indirectly via feedlot runoff that contaminates streams and groundwater. Antibiotics are also sprayed on fruit and vegetable crops, and the plants can absorb antibiotics from manure used as fertilizer.

These problems and others-there is some evidence, for instance, that the misuse of antibiotics has contributed to the increase in childhood asthma and allergies-have led the European Union to ban the nontherapeutic use of antimicrobial drugs in livestock. To date the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has declined to do so.

Tom Prugh is the editor of World Watch. He can be reached at tprugh@worldwatch.org.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

The Nourishing the Planet team is exploring the latest approaches to food security in Africa through a series of interviews with policy makers, politicians, non-profit and organizational leaders, journalists, celebrities, chefs, musicians, and farmers. These leaders' thoughts - and hopes - for agricultural development in Africa will be available in a series posted on the Nourishing the Planet blog and Eye on Earth.

Worldwatch Senior Researcher Danielle Nierenberg last week met the new U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, and discussed how to best develop the agricultural sector of a country facing political turmoil, severe unemployment, and high food prices. Click here for the full interview.

Despite the global credit crunch and decreased energy demand in many countries, more wind energy was installed last year than ever before.

Wind power capacity worldwide increased 31 percent in 2009, with an additional 37,500 megawatts installed, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). In 2008, the previous record-setting year, an estimated 27,051 megawatts were installed.

The United States led installations in 2008, but China emerged as the wind power leader in 2009. The rapidly industrializing country doubled its wind generation capacity for the fifth consecutive year, adding some 13,000 megawatts, or a third of installations worldwide in 2009. China installed 6,300 megawatts in 2008.

"China is not waiting to revamp its clean energy economy," said Virginia Sonntag-O'Brien, head of the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) secretariat, at the Renewable Energy Technology Conference last week in Washington, D.C. "Things are happening in China now at a pace that has everyone spinning."

China's wind energy boom suggests that the government considers renewable energy as a long-term investment for the country's development. Many of the installations boast a generation capacity that currently exceeds local electricity demands. "The Chinese have finally found an industry where they can build far into the future and not have all of that [production] absorbed," said Louis Schwartz, president of China Strategies, a consulting firm based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The United States continues to lead the world in total installed wind capacity, adding nearly 10,000 megawatts in 2009, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). After beginning the year with fears that wind power development would drop by 50 percent, the industry nearly tied with the natural gas industry as the leading source of new electricity generation in the country. The two industries combined accounted for some 80 percent of U.S. capacity additions.

"We are, for the last several years in a row, seeing this sector take off in manufacturing and added electricity capacity," said AWEA CEO Denise Bode in a conference call with reporters. "We are one of the only bright spots in this economy."

In Europe, wind energy prevailed as the continent's most popular new source of electricity generation for the second year in a row. The European Wind Energy Association estimates that the region installed 10,048 megawatts of new wind power capacity in 2009.

Overall, clean energy investments, not limited to renewable energy, totaled $145 billion in 2009 - 6.5 percent less than the all-time high of $155 billion in 2008, according to New Energy Finance. While many venture capitalists and private equity firms closed their wallets to energy investments, governments worldwide supported renewables as part of national economic recovery plans.

The resiliency of clean technology investments in the face of the economic downturn demonstrates that the sector has become the "third leg of the venture capital stool, right alongside information technology and life sciences," said Ira Ehrenpreis, a general partner with the investment firm Technology Partners. "It's the fastest growing [investment sector] in venture capital."

GWEC estimates that the 158,000 megawatts of wind energy installations worldwide employ some 500,000 people and avoid emissions of 204 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

A metre of snow fell in the Pyrenees leaving 6,000 travellers stranded and blocking up to 40 roads
In pictures: Barcelona in the snow

Nearly a quarter of a million people in north-eastern Spain were without power yesterday after the heaviest snowfall in decades brought major disruption to the region.

A metre of snow fell in the Pyrenees leaving 6,000 travellers stranded and blocking up to 40 roads on the border between Spain and France. Barcelona recorded its heaviest snowfall since 1962 causing road, rail and flight chaos.

Catalonia's interior minister, Joan Boada, said the power cuts, caused by a fault in a high-tension cable, were affecting the area around Girona, 60 miles north of Barcelona.

Spain's border with France at La Junquera was closed causing 30-mile traffic jams while 170,000 pupils had the day off as schools were shut, local newspapers reported. About 3,000 people were put up in a town hall overnight and many others stranded in their cars as railway lines and roads became impassable, Boada said.

Tens of thousands more were unable to get home after snow fell at lunchtime and many left their offices to photograph the rare scenes of central Barcelona and its beach lying under a blanket of snow.

"I've never seen anything like this here in all my life," said Barcelona resident Raquel Lasmarias, 35.

The Catalan regional president, José Montilla, toured the affected areas admitting things would not get back to normal as quickly as might be hoped. "Some things cannot be repaired in hours," he said.

Girona, where 50cm of snow fell, was effectively cut off from the rest of Catalonia with most roads and rail lines blocked and only five of the scheduled 31 departures leaving its airport. The Catalan meteorological office said conditions would slowly improve but warned that unusually cold conditions would continue with widespread frost and ice.

In the Aude region of southern France, firefighters brought hot supplies to 1,800 passengers stuck on trains, AFP reported.

"In Perpignan, passengers were able to bed down on a sleeper train, but we spent the night sitting up and didn't even get blankets until 3:00 am," complained Jean-Marc Rossignol, escorting his 75- and a 82-year-old parents to Toulouse.

Amateur footage gives close-up view of tornado that damaged thousands of homes in central US state

Jane Bown, Tom Hunter and Daniel Lynch will be among the celebrated photographers auctioning their works in London tonight in aid of the 2009 South Pacific disaster

Earthquake survivors fear mass pullout of troops is a sign of dwindling international support

Thousands of US troops are leaving Haiti in a swift scaling back of US military involvement in post-earthquake security and reconstruction.

A gradual reduction from a peak of 20,000 in early February has accelerated in recent days and by the end of this week fewer than 8,000 are expected to remain in Haiti and on offshore vessels.

"Our mission is largely accomplished," General Douglas Fraser, head of US Southern Command, which runs the Haiti mission, told reporters.

Many Haitians are not so sure. Survivors from the 12 January quake worried that the withdrawal signalled waning international support and that UN troops and Haitian police would struggle to keep security.

"I would like for [US troops] to stay in Haiti until they rebuild the country and everybody can go back to their house," Marjorie Louis, 27, a mother in a makeshift camp at the national stadium, told Associated Press.

Another family sheltering under a tarpaulin at another camp agreed. "They should stay because they have been doing a good job," Lesly Pierre, 35, said. "If it was up to our government, we wouldn't have gotten any help at all."

The 7.0-magnitude quake devastated the capital Port-au-Prince and, according to the authorities, killed more than 200,000 people and left 1.2 million homeless, about half of whom are living in squalid camps.

With basic infrastructure destroyed and the UN and Haiti's government paralysed the US military took control of ports and airports and aid distribution. The troops were welcomed by a stricken population grateful for any help.

However some aid agencies, notably Médecins sans Frontières, complained that military flights hogged the airport and diverted civilian aid aircraft to the neighbouring Dominican Republic. French and Italian officials said the US intervention was clumsy and overweening.

Leftist leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro accused the US of conducting an imperial occupation under a humanitarian banner.

Despite widespread hunger and squalor ? which could worsen with the imminent rainy season ? the feared collapse in law and order did not materialise.

The situation remains potentially volatile. Last Friday crowds looted a UN food convoy travelling from Gonaïves to Dessalines. There is a question mark over the Haitian police and 10,000-strong UN force's ability to fill the gap left by dwindling US troops.

It was unclear how many US troops would remain over coming months. Of the 8,000 still on the Haiti mission about half were offshore.

Prospery Raymond, country manager for Christian Aid, said what people needed most was food, clean water and adequate shelter. "Once basic needs have been provided for, there will be no problem with security. A military presence is very costly, Christian Aid would rather see that money directed towards the needs of the Haitian people."

At least 57 people killed as magnitude-6 earthquake devastates eastern provinces

SeeSouthernForests.org provides a new way to learn about, and protect, the forests of the southern United States.

Changes over a large area are often hard to see. This can be especially true when it comes to forests where incremental forest loss often goes unnoticed until it is too late. A new website and report by the World Resources Institute seek to change this and allow people to visualize the trends and drivers of change affecting southern forests.

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Human waste may be a topic that people generally do not or prefer not to think about. However, its capture and disposal (often referred to in terms of sanitation) play a vital role in human health and development. The importance of sanitation as a basic human need has made it an international development priority and a key target in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Even though since 1990 the percent of the global population with access to improved sanitation has increased (see Figure 1.), lack of improved sanitation still threatens human health and development particularly in developing regions of the world.

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