Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Hayden Flour Mills, Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance, Cultivate Santa Cruz, Tubac Historical Society, Amado Farms Joint Venture, and Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage will work with small-scale beginning farmers as well as low-income tortilla makers and bakers in the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area to increase our region’s food diversity and food security in the face of climate change and an evolving agricultural landscape.

Cereal grains are fundamental to the diets of most people in the Southwest, yet local production and processing of regionally-adapted grains is a missing element in efforts to increase our region’s food security and to offer staples to low-income populations at risk of hunger. Through a diversity of complementary approaches, the funded project aims to address this gap by re-introducing Chapalote corn and White Sonora wheat into sustainable food production regimes in the arid Southwest; establishing fruitful exchanges of information among producers, millers, bakers, and other stakeholders; and ensuring that the use of these heritage grains reaches food-insecure families in our region and that they are enlisted in producing value-added products as new sources of income.

Chapalote flint corn and White Sonora wheat have reputations for drought tolerance, yield stability and excellent nutritional qualities, and have deep cultural ties to the desert borderlands. They are the oldest varieties of their species to reach the Arizona deserts as farmed crops, Chapalote arriving roughly 4,200 years ago and White Sonora arriving with Spanish missionaries in the late 17th century. Both crops suffered declines in cultivation as water- and fertilizer-responsive varieties took precedence in irrigated agriculture in the Southwest. They became commercially unavailable in Arizona and adjacent areas of Mexico by 1975, though Native Seeds/SEARCH has maintained both Chapalote and White Sonora in its seed bank and has continued to make them available to growers in the Southwest. Interestingly, two of the project sites (Avalon Organic Gardens and Tubac Presidio State Historic Park) may be on the very ground where Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino first introduced White Sonora wheat to Arizona, and the Community Food Bank’s two farms are within a few miles of where the oldest Chapalote-like maize was found in the U.S.

This project seeks to reduce regional food insecurity by providing these culturally-appropriate staple grains through best practices for sustainable agricultural production which reduce water and energy consumption. The coalition’s shared aspiration is that the recovery of these arid-adapted grains into our food system will reward farmers who are willing to be good stewards of our agricultural diversity, soil and water resources, and improve the quality of life and nutritional health of low-income residents in our region. The project will educate, train and benefit others through several events and training workshops, and collaborators will produce a number of educational publications.

The agricultural community at large in the arid Southwest will benefit from the project’s documentation of soil management techniques that are compatible with winter wheat or summer maize production. The project will also serve as a regional testbed for a formal system of community seed exchange that lowers the barrier to entry for small-scale farmers while simultaneously increasing seed stocks so that additional farmers may participate. By putting such a model into practice, the project will have the effect of increasing the available seed supply of White Sonora wheat and Chapalote corn in the Southwest.

Western SARE is a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that offers competitive grants conducted cooperatively by farmers, ranchers, researchers, and other agriculture professionals to advance farm and ranch systems that are profitable, environmentally sound, and good for communities.

For more information about this project, please contact Chris Schmidt, Director of Conservation at Native Seeds/SEARCH, at 520-622-0830 x111 or cschmidt@nativeseeds.org. Additional information about the project participants may be obtained by visiting their websites:

Amado Farms Joint Venture: http://www.garynabhan.com
Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage: http://avalongardens.org
Community Food Bank of Tucson: http://communityfoodbank.com
Cultivate Santa Cruz: http://cultivatesantacruz.org
Hayden Flour Mills: http://www.haydenflourmills.com
Native Seeds/SEARCH: http://www.nativeseeds.org
Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance: http://www.santacruzheritage.org
Tubac Historical Society: http://ths-tubac.org

Gary Nabhan is co-author of the book Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail

Video games seem to be mostly a boy thing — viewed by young boys and created by big boys. I believe that if more videos games were created by women, the violence in these games — especially against women — would be rapidly toned down.

There's one catch, however. To design these games women have to become computer scientists. Yes, they have to enter a field, which has increasingly been dominated by men, and it's getting worse, not better. While enrollment in math, science and even engineering has been growing for women, computer science is moving the other way. In 1985, 38 percent of computer scientists were women. That figure has plummeted to 17 percent in some years.

A group of Vermont women formed a new networking organization for women in science, math and engineering and finance to encourage more women. A group of Harvard students recently revived a long dormant organization, Women in Computer Sciences. Why?

They discovered that the percentage of women in the field fell from 42 percent in the class of 2013, to 22 percent in the class of 2014.

Why is computer science a good field for women? For one thing, that's where the jobs are, and for another, the pay is better than for many jobs, and finally, it's easier to combine career and family.

But that's not all. Yes, you may get a job at Facebook or Microsoft, but there's more at stake.

"If you completely shut out the entire feminine perspective on the world, you are going to have a different set of products," the president of Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, told Judy Woodruff on the PBS News Hour. The presence of women in computer labs will determine what kind of medical devices get created, what kind of products we buy.

Boys often get attracted to computer science because they like to watch video games. When women begin to create those games, more girls will begin to watch them too, and by the time they start college, they'll be hooked, not only on playing games, but also on a career in computer science. This is how greater gender equality can enrich all of our lives.

Originally published at the Huffington Post.

Madeleine M. Kunin is the author of The New Feminist Agenda, and Pearls, Politics and Power.

Thankfully, the girls were both visiting friends and family for the weekend, leaving us alone to deal with the mess. In a last ditch effort prior to his departure, he went out and bought a gallon of some sort of liquid fire, dumped it down the drain, and hoped for the best.

Things only got worse. The sink backed up like never before, and filled itself with the toxic poison. Bob stared at me, wide-eyed. “I’m SO sorry! I don’t want to leave you with this!” We cooked on the grill and carried our dishes back and forth to the remaining working sinks in the house, and agreed it was time to call the plumber. The next day, Sunday, he left.

Soon after, my mom and dad dropped by, bringing Ula home from her sleepover. They took one look at the state of my kitchen, the contents of the sink cabinets spread around the floor, the dishes scattered around the house and my wild eyes, then loaded her back in the car, and informed me she was sleeping over at the farm until the problem was resolved. They arranged for Saoirse to be dropped off there as well.

And then I was alone. I felt the house sigh around me as we settled in together. Certainly there was a lot of work to be done, but suddenly the pace was my own. My labors didn’t need to be squeezed in between meal times, cuddle times, referee calls for sister battles, potty assistance, story-reading, tooth brushing. There was just me, my dog and cat, and 60 willows to plant and mulch, 32 candles to be made, a few hundred pounds of sausage to make down at the farm, one kitchen with a surfeit of dishes, and dumped-out cabinets, and a backed-up sink filled with liquid fire. Sure it was a formidable amount of work. But now I would be able to tackle it in the luxurious state of uninterrupted peace.

I didn’t get on the phone right away with a plumber who responded to emergency calls. Truth be told, I didn’t want to come up with the funds that an emergency call would require. And as I was now able to have some peace and quiet to think, I concluded that there really was no reason I couldn’t fix that sink myself. And make the 32 candles, plant the 60 willows, clean up the kitchen, then head to the farm the next morning to make the sausage.

In 48 hours of being on my own, I admittedly got a lot done. But I sat down for a total of 7 minutes. My body was in a state of exhaustion. I knew I needed to rest, but each time I found my way to my rocking chair, I would leap up, remembering a load of laundry that needed to be hung out, or noticing a light that hadn’t been switched off, or thinking of some new trick that I could try with the sink . I didn’t read, knit, or even make myself a cup of coffee or tea. I burned through two work shirts and one pair of Carhart pants with liquid fire, acquired several burns up and down my arms, and the only time I talked was to answer my mother’s phone calls with “no, it’s not fixed yet.”

I finally did surrender and call the plumber. I left in the middle of sausage making and drove home to meet him. I fixed my lunch while he was there, and as he worked, we chatted away about myriad things – the differences between his city clients and country clients; how his younger brother, who was accompanying him on the job, had just dropped out of high school to learn the family trade; how he’d always wanted to be a writer. He showed me how to fix the sink and flush the pipes with boiling water. And I wrote him a check for two hundred dollars before sending him on his way. After wincing at the price, I realized that, because he’d shown up, I had finally sat down and rested.

Our house is restored now. Bob is home, the sink works, and I am back to squeezing my work into the spaces between morning coffee with Bob, homeschool lessons and eye therapy, regularly scheduled meal times and refereeing sibling rivalries – all those pesky impediments to my productivity that let me rest, relax, and enjoy my life.

Visit Shannon's blog and hear the latest about her farming life.

Shannon Hayes is the author of Radical Homemakers.

A year like 2012 seems to tell us that chickweed will be with us always. The winter never got really cold where I live. Chickweed, which can grow when the temperature gets above about 50 degrees F., never slowed down much, even in January. In all the garden plots where I thought I had obliterated it, it spread like the plague. By the end of February it was ready to go to seed, guaranteeing immortality.

Then March came and with it weather that we usually get in May. The ground was soaked; the air was warm. Chickweed switched into super-NASCAR growth speed. By the time the ground was dry enough to cultivate, the weed had formed a four inch thick mat and of course was blooming.  Have you ever tried to take on a carpet of four inch thick chickweed with a garden tiller? Might as well try to chop up a mattress with a hoe.  The tiller just bounced off the stuff. So I sharpened my hoe to a razor’s edge and attacked. Chop. Bounce. Chop. Bounce. Chop. Bounce. I knelt down and started ripping great gobs of the green hellion out of the ground with my bare hands. Where it was really rooted down, I didn’t have the strength to pull it out. Where I could get it loose, it came up in great gobs that removed two inches of topsoil with it. I finally got out my big field disk and tractor and ripped through the mat. Then the garden tiller would, in three or four passes, make the stuff turn brown in big gobs that I could remove by hand or manure fork.

Weedkillers will turn the green mattress into a yellow one. The yellow, half dead growth is just as hard to till through as the green stuff.  And soon, oh so very soon, new green troops arrive at the scene.

I haven’t tried it yet, but other gardeners tell me that the best control is a flamethrower. I am not kidding….

Read the entire story over at Gene's blog The Contrary Farmer and hear about Gene's latest plan for immortality!

Editor's Note: The satisfaction of blasting weeds with a flamethrower cannot be overstated. It's awesome.

Gene Logsdon is the author of, most recently, A Sanctuary of Trees: Beech Nuts, Birdsongs, Baseball Bats, and Benedictions

The news stories, which quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out. These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants.

They have become a litany in recent years. The terrifying 2003-2004 national news stories that a Detroit "sleeper cell" had sent Muslim terrorists to blow up Disneyland and other landmarks, including in Las Vegas, was later thrown out of court, with accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, to almost no press attention – the same cycle of hype and failed convictions that have characterized many such stories. The evidence had included a home video taken in Disneyland, "doodles", and a guy with a credit card fraud problem, who had been pressured to diminish his own sentence by accusing his buddies.

But the tales of entrapment and terror hype continue apace – ten years after 9/11. Judith Miller, in Newsmax, writes that one recent case was so lame that even the FBI distanced itself from NYPD: "Despite FBI Doubts, NYPD Convinced Pipe Bomb Case Posed Real Danger", noted the headline on her 28 November 2011 article. A 27-year-old Dominican immigrant, Jose Pimentel, aka Muhamad Yusuf, had been monitored by NYPD for two years. Last fall, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr charged Pimentel with constructing pipe bombs to attack "police cars, post offices, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other targets".

An email in the case, which purports to show that Pimentel was writing about violent jihad to the al-Qaida-supporting "glossy magazine" Inspire, was described to Judith Miller by anonymous "law enforcement officials". Given Miller's journalistic history, this sentence alone should raise eyebrows. But the alleged email is, she writes, "part of a vast investigative file containing over 400 hours of surveillance audio and video tapes, interviews, and other material amassed by the NYPD". New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, in a flashy press conference, called the young man a "lone wolf" terrorist – a recent DHS soundbite. But the case was so shaky that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as federal prosecutors, did not want to join the case: "Too many holes in the case", other anonymous officials told Miller.

Pimentel was one of what has become an army of FBI- or NYPD-entrapped losers. He had no money, no job, and at key points lived with his mom. The New York Times noted that he may have been psychologically "unstable", and that he had made threats after smoking pot. Officials say that in May 2010, he repeated loudly in Arabic that "America is my enemy." This scary guy was a circuit city clerk in Schenectady, New York.

Additional evidence that Miller's anonymous sources give for his being a terrorist? In 2010, he had $100. One witness told police "that he had flashed a $100 bill when he made some purchases."Another? "Pimentel scraped the heads of some 750 matches, officials say." The scenario that entrapped Pimentel involved a surround-sound of informants trying to entrap him in cyberspace and to lure him to incriminate himself in taped phone conversations. But the FBI dropped its involvement after they judged that the informant had been too active in helping: urging or arranging for Pimentel to start drilling into pipe pieces – the evidence that he intended to set off a bomb.

Many other, much-ballyhooed cases of "homegrown terrorism" show this creaky, effortful, farcical quality of people who, left to their own devices by the FBI or NYPD, would have remained harmlessly playing video games in their childhood bedrooms, smoking their doobies, or babbling gently to themselves, on their anti-psychotic meds, about geopolitical forces.

The "Newburgh Four" is another such case, as Russia Today reported: four African-American Muslims were found guilty recently of a plot to place bombs in two Bronx synagogues and to shoot down military aircraft in Newburgh. Another flashy press conference in May 2009 showcased these four men as "the faces of homegrown terrorism". The FBI had claimed that the men had planned to commit their acts of terrorism on the day that they were arrested. Joseph Demarest from the FBI called it "a terrifying plot".

The men were low-income former convicts who could not read or write with literacy. They could not drive and had no passports. Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant who was an FBI employee, got them to say they were going to commit these crimes – paying them $100,000. Hussain presented the men with a fake stinger missile, and Hussain offered these poverty-stricken men cars and money in exchange for their promise to carry out the manufactured plot.

The men's relatives accused the FBI of entrapment. "I do not think this is entrapment. I know it is. This is entrapment," said Alicia McWilliams-McCollum, aunt of 29-year-old David Williams. As with many of these scenarios, one can easily imagine poor people with criminal records, offered large sums of money by a fake jihadist, trying to get the money and then trick the instigator. Also, as any AA or Al-Anon counsellor can tell you, if drugs or alcohol are in the mix, entrapment is a ridiculous premise, too: an addict will say anything, and make any ludicrous promise, to get a giant check. It doesn't mean the addict has any intention of delivering on the supposed contract. David Williams' aunt says that her nephew is in prison because of a pretend terror attack created by the FBI:

"They are creating scenarios; they are manufacturing crimes. That would not have occurred if you had not planted an unconstructive seed into a community."

Attorney Steve Dowds, who tracks cases like the Newburgh Four, argues the US government is systematically employing preemptive prosecution:

"They are taking some down and out vulnerable individuals and not only planting the ideology of jihad on them, giving them all the things they need, all of the material. They are setting up the plan, giving them all the research and then grabbing them and claiming these were homegrown terrorists. It is just a fiction."

Now we have another "underwear bomber" – declared by the Pentagon to have been about to launch a major attack via a US-bound plane, but who appears, reportedly, to have been a CIA-run double agent. What is the evidence that the "device", which is supposedly so sophisticated that there is doubt as to whether existing surveillance technologies in US airports would have caught it, actually exists? As with so many of these stories, we have no independent verification – because reporters from the British Daily Telegraph, to Reuters, to the Huffington Post are simply taking dictation from New York Representative Peter King and from the Pentagon, and scarcely asking for backup evidence of their elaborate assertions.

It is important to note that we can no longer assume that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA work, first of all, for the safety of the American people; they also now represent a revolving door of government officials who become security industry lobbyists and manufacturers, which, in turn, get the multimillion-dollar contracts for tackling the very problems these stories appear to highlight. The stories about the first "underwear bomber" preceded the rollout of former DHS chief Michael Chertoff's costly scanners; the press interviews for this round of mystery "underwear bomber" stories are practically a press release for some expensive technological upgrade – or yet more hellishly invasive and demeaning search technique. The sad truth is that we can no longer report and consume such stories as if there were no commercial vested interests involved in creating and sustaining such "terror theater".

You know we have "terror theater" in the US because nations such as Israel, which are genuinely focussed on deterring terrorism, downplay risk and threats rather than trumpeting them, as DHS does. If the threat is real, they don't reveal all the details of the latest "planned attack" to the news media – because they are busy investigating real planned attacks, rather than doing corporate PR and product placement. Instead of TSA groping, aviation security, from Britain to Israel, to Spain to Norway, uses much less invasive and more acute security processes, such as face-to-face, in-line interviewing. They do not sell commercial products that subvert recall surety issues, such as the various costly and vastly lucrative new "Global Entry Trusted Traveller Network", an apparent government program that is not transparent or accountable. You can sign up for for a fee of $100 a year, after an interview. No TSA representative I interviewed knows who owns the initiative, which they said was private, not a government program; nor could they tell me where the money really goes.

Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash – because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so. In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people – including Americans – are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren't manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush. Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out "lone wolves". The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America

Yes, support for gay marriage has been growing among young people, but the country remains deeply divided on the question, evidenced by the North Carolina vote in favor of a constitutional amendment that bans both civil unions and marriage.

When I was Governor of Vermont in the 1980's, neither same-sex marriage nor civil unions were on the table. I was applauded by the gay community for initiating an official state liaison with a gay organzation. I also spoke at Vermont's first Gay Pride Day, and received some praise but intense criticism for showing up.

After Civil Unions became law in Vermont, a half a dozen legislators lost their seats because of the "Yea" vote they cast. A storm of opposition followed, with "Take Back Vermont" signs springing up on the side of country roads. After Vermont passed a gay marriage act, over riding a Governor' veto, there was almost no reaction. Within ten years, gay marriage had moved from being on the fringe to moving toward the center–at least in Vermont

My state–once a Republican stronghold is now largely Democratic. We sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that the country is moving in the same direction.

Not so. The 31 states that have passed laws and constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage prove the point.

Many courageous citizens had spoken out in favor of same-sex marriage before it was popular—even in Vermont. But the voice of the President of the United States speaking publicly in favor of same-sex marriage changes the political landscape. He establishes a tone of respect and civility that this country desperately needs in these times of ugly and divisive rhetoric.

Mere months before his re-election will be determined, he has taken the risk of alienating many voters who vehemently disagree with him, even while others will agree. The polls on the question are so close that it is difficult to predict the consequences.

One thing is clear. It took guts to state his position and I applaud him for it. But he could not have "evolved" to supporting same-sex marriage without the vocal support of a growing number of Americans who stand with him. I for, one did not expect such an enormous change to occur within a period of less than 25 years. Change is not only possible in America; it happens within our lifetime.

Madeleine M. Kunin is the author of The New Feminist Agenda, and Pearls, Politics and Power.

The workshop featured practical teachings from Sam Earnshaw of Community Alliance of Family Farmers, who has helped plant or restore over 300 miles of pollinator-attracting hedgerows in Western states. Other speakers included Jo Ann Baumgartner of Wild Farm Alliance, Amanda Webb, Gary Nabhan and Laura Lopez Hoffman of the University of Arizona, Susan Wethington of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, as well as permaculturist Kate Tirion and ecologist Ron Pulliam of Patagonia, Arizona.  Co- sponsors included Wild Farm Alliance, Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative, Hummingbird Monitoring Network, the Sabores Sin Fronteras Foodways Alliance, and the Kellogg Program on Food and Water Security for the Southwest Borderlands, University of Arizona, all in support of the larger efforts of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign or “Pollinator Partnership”. Over thirty-four residents of three counties in Southern Arizona became engaged with hands-on efforts to bring a diversity of pollinators back to borderlands farms, gardens and ranches.

Following introductions, the workshop in rural Santa Cruz County was launched with lectures by special guest presenters.  Jo Ann Baumgartner began by talking about efforts by the Wild Farm Alliance to promote forms of agriculture that protect and restore wild biodiversity. She also responded to food safety concerns that wild animals on farms are a risk to production operations.  She highlighted habitat restoration strategies that minimize the potential for contaminating crops with diseases that are then transferrable to consumers in ways that might otherwise compromise human health.  She emphasized the importance of understanding how wildlife, livestock, and other biota can act as vectors or as filters for pathogens on farms.  She concluded that wild species can provide more benefits than risks to farms if ecologically managed.

Sam Earnshaw of CAFF then shared insights gained from his extensive experience implementing hedgerows, green buffers and other wild habitats on farms in California.  He presented many ways that a hedgerow can provide needed support services to a growing operation, and suggested plants that could be used for different applications.  The photos in his presentation helped illustrate how hedgerows function to address site-specific issues, the different forms hedgerows may take, and how they can support pollinators as well as other vertebrate and invertebrate species that can act as natural pest control for crops.

The hands-on portion of the workshop took the form of installing native plants as hedgerows at two different sites.  Gary Nabhan took this opportunity to talk about specific features unique to each of the sites, the crops grown there, and the desired functional outcomes for each hedgerow after it is established.  In addition to discussing how the hedgerows would support native pollinators, he led a demo on constructing and providing bee nesting structures and showed how they could be installed on-farm, at home, or in the garden.  Jo Ann, Sam, and Gary provided continual information to participants about the ecology of on-farm hedgerows through guiding presentations and interactions with individual participants.

The hedgerow designs at the two sites reflected site-specific goals of each of the hedgerows, and both were comprised of a different suite of plant species to reflect those desired outcomes.  Gary Nabhan led the design and implementation of plantings dominated by native vines, sub-shrubs and wild flowers (mostly crop relatives) alongside a mesquite retaque fence. This site was located on a clay-dominated ridge between the Native Seeds/SEARCH  and the Almunya de los Zoplilotes orchard, while  Amanda Webb, a graduate student from the University of Arizona, led the design and transplanting of woody perennials at the Rogers-Wethington orchard on a floodplain.  These examples provided participants with the opportunity to see two different applications of the forms and functions of hedgerows under local conditions.  Plant installation at both sites ultimately included transplanting woody vegetation (shrubs, vine and trees) as well as the sowing of native annual and perennial wildflower seeds.  The spent flowering stalks of desert sotol and century plants were integrated into fences to serve as nesting habitat for carpenter bees at both sites. Many on-site discussions were inspired by these hands-on experiences that give people skills in how to plant native plants, to construct  nest boxes, fences and rainwater harvesting structures, to plan irrigation regimes, and to extend the flowering season to attract and keep a variety of pollinators on the farm.

There were other scientists and farmers present who gave summaries of the related work they do with pollinators.  These included Susan Wethington who talked about the mission and work of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, Laura Lopez-Hoffman who described her research on nectar-feeding bats, and Ron Pulliam who talked about the on-going pollinator habitat restoration and education efforts of the Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative.  These short talks provided an expanded view on pollinator conservation and research while emphasizing that effective pollinator conservation cannot be isolated to one farm or species, but should be implemented for diverse species at the landscape or regional level with a multitude of collaborators, supporters, and projects.    The point was made to participants that the renewed planting of hedgerows on farms is an important step in this larger kind of effort.

Feedback from workshop participants has been overwhelmingly positive.  Along with hearing the lectures and participating in hands-on experiences, they left with a packet of printed information covering a wide breadth of related topics, including information on selecting plants to fit different sites. Printed materials included recommendations for planning pollinator-supporting hedgerows that can thrive in different habitats throughout Southern Arizona.

Gary Nabhan is co-author of the book Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail

• Heat milk to 180F
• Cool to 130F
• Stir in about 1-3 TB per gallon of yogurt from the previous batch or store purchased plain yogurt or use 1/2 tsp of powdered yogurt culture (purchased from a culture supply company such as Dairy Connection)
• Place pot in an ice chest to hold temperature- add 125 F water for better temperature control. Even easier, you can simply leave the pot to sit on the counter if the room is fairly warm. The resulting yogurt won’t be quite as thick, but it will work for kids.
• After 12 hours the yogurt should be set.
• Store in refrigerator.
• Don’t forget to retain a bit to start your next batch!
• There you have it, bon appetit to your young animals!

Gianaclis Caldwell is the author of The Farmstead Creamery Advisor.

What Is President Obama’s Problem With Medical Marijuana?
via Time.com

[T]he Obama Administration is cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries and growers just as harshly as the Administration of George W. Bush did. In 2011, the Department of Justice revised its guidance to U.S. Attorneys, allowing them to target any medical marijuana activity except for ill patients and their immediate caregivers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has made it clear that “medical marijuana is not medicine,” and even called it a “mortal danger.” … In many states, U.S. Attorneys have advised state and local officials to back away from plans to create rules and regulations that would codify the medical pot industry, in some cases raising the possibility that lawmakers could be prosecuted for promoting drug use that is legal under state law.

… Over the last few weeks, I have talked with nearly a dozen people in the medical marijuana business, three U.S. Attorneys, White House officials and local officials who oppose the federal crackdown for a story that will appear in this week’s newsstand issue of TIME. The answer on the ground is, predictably, far more complicated than either medical marijuana advocates or the Obama Administration is willing to describe. And it all comes down to this: Despite Obama’s promises during the 2008 campaign, federal prosecutors have lost faith in the ability of state and local officials to control a booming commercial industry for a drug that is still illegal to grow, possess or sell under federal law. As a result, a once broad exemption from prosecution for medical marijuana providers in state where it’s legal has been narrowed to a tiny one. … [T]he nation is left with an uneasy status quo: The federal government is not trying to eliminate medical marijuana altogether, but it has decided that it cannot stand for the commercialization or large scale production of marijuana for the stated purpose of helping the sick, even when that production is technically within the bounds of state law.

…[I]n a different world, the federal government might work with state and local officials to more tightly regulate the growing of marijuana for medical purposes. But since pot is illegal under all circumstances under federal law, the opposite has been happening. Attempts, particularly in California, to more tightly regulate and thereby provide greater legal protection for the drug, have been shut down by the federal government.

And so, medical marijuana is left in a no man’s land. Individual sick users are safe from prosecution, but they are likely to find it harder in the coming months to get the drug. Growers and dispensers are not protected by state law from federal prosecution, especially if they become large enough to get noticed by federal investigators. And the likely result is that more of the medical marijuana industry will be pushed underground in the coming years, making it more difficult for local officials to track the business. This arguably will only increase some criminal activity, as large amounts of money and a very profitable commodity move through the system by way of small-time dealers working without sophisticated security systems.

…“What this really screams for a cohesive national policy.”

But there is no such policy on the horizon. Obama has shown little interest in elevating the issue. Some in federal law enforcement–and at the Office of National Drug Control Policy–hope that the advent of new pharmaceutical replacements for grown medical marijuana, like the Canadian drug Sativex, [Editor's note: Sativex is a British drug, not a Canadian manufactured product -- though it is legal by prescription in Canada.] will make the entire issue moot in the coming decade. But that looks unlikely in the short term, given the lack of concern among the general public with medical marijuana. A 2010 poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press found that 73% say they favor “their state allowing the sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes if it is prescribed by a doctor.”

In other words, don’t hold your breath for clarity anytime soon. The haze is here to stay.

Originally published here.

Paul Armentano is co-author of the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink

This blog spent most of 2010 talking about the blowout and subsequent spill, trying to make sense out of the nonsense coming out of BP and much of the media.  Hopefully we helped change the conversation by explaining the mechanics and politics about what was going on.  BP was successful, with the help of the US government, in getting the 24/7 news coverage shut down in July of 2010 when they undertook a dangerous shut-in procedure that exceeded the design capacity of several wellhead components.  Since then, the President's Oil Spill Commission did a study of the accident, issuing their report, and the Joint Investigation between the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (the old MMS) completed an intensive investigation.

The fault for the blowout was clearly BP's since they were the operator of record of the Macondo well.  Cultural issues, hubris, and complacency, combined with poor design and poor decision making all collided into the conflagration that was the blowout.  Inexperienced government officials, BP's obfuscation, and politicians' desire to get the blowing out off the television made matters worse.  Since then, the government has continued to ignore the extent of the damage, and Americans are either ignorant or uninterested about where their gasoline comes from.  The beat goes on.

Last week, former members of the Spill Commission issued a follow up report about government and industry actions since their initial report was issued.  Congress got the lowest grade, D, for obvious reasons.  Agencies and industry were also graded in various areas.  No one got an A.  The most infuriating fact that the report pointed out was something I've been watching in the industry: The Center for Offshore Safety, an independent source for research and work towards better operational safety in offshore drilling.  The model was the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations in the nuclear power industry.  Of course, the industry did not support the Center's formation, but finally complied with the recommendation.  What makes the whole thing silly, though, is that it was formed under the authority of the American Petroleum Institute or API.  The API, which used to be a standards setting organization, has morphed into the largest lobbying firm for the industry.  So.  The Center for Offshore Safety is being run by an organization that opposes improving regulation of offshore safety.

We have a long way to go in improving offshore safety.  Equipment, procedures, and people must all be upgraded to prevent another Macondo.  With a deadlocked Congress, dysfunctional regulators, and uncooperative industry, I fear it will take another Macondo before we actually do something.

Originally published on The Huffington Post.

Bob Cavnar is the author of Disaster on the Horizon.