As you consider the appropriations bill to fund the USDA for fiscal year 2024, I want to request that you: appropriate 7 million dollars to the USDA for Kernza research.
The cultivation of Kernza® perennial grain for human-edible grain, livestock forage, and conservation plantings offers the potential to create new income streams for American farmers, diversify cropping systems, sequester carbon, and support healthy ecosystems in rural communities. Kernza is the first commercially viable perennial grain crop in the world. American researchers, millers, bakers, brewers, food companies, and farmers are paving the path for this ecologically-friendly cropping system to become a major food and forage crop. There is a strong and urgent need to support ongoing work now to foster this growing community of stakeholders.
With an appropriation of 7 million dollars to the USDA in fiscal year 2024 for Kernza research, you will directly support government, academic, industry, farmer, business, and non-profit partners who are invested in seeing increases in yield and acres planted for this perennial grain, growth in our nutritional information for producers, and a holistic understanding of the ecosystem service benefits that Kernza can provide.
2. Fashion...
Examples of Activities/Practices/Institutions Lacking Sustainability
The So-Called “Fast Fashion” Industry
This worker and ecology unfriendly industry makes poor quality clothes, produces them at an extremely rapid pace, and sells them at super cheap prices. It appeals primarily to young people (usually between ages 18 and 24), and marketing takes place to a large degree on social media. Buyers don’t expect the clothes to last much longer than about a month or two, or being worn perhaps ten times. Then they wind up in a landfill...tons of them. Buyers don’t mind the short lifespan because they’re pressured on social media to constantly wear something new with a different design.
In general, workers at Fast Fashion factories are treated much like cattle, and are expected to work long hours, sometimes twelve hours per day. This happens in China, where the industry first took root, and in several other Asian countries. Reports by documentary film makers indicate that finished products from these places sometimes are contaminated with lead-based pigments. On social media, buyers are told to wash the clothes before wearing them. Apparently they believe such action totally eliminates the risk from toxic lead. It does not. In addition to long hours, workers also endure low wages, unsafe conditions, and sometimes physical assaults and sexual abuse. The industry is an egregious disaster.
A company by the name of Shein (pronounced she-in), which was founded in China in 2008 under the name ZZKKO by a U.S.-born Chinese American, is now the top dog in the industry. It’s a $100 billion company. All from junk clothes.
https://steadystate.org/ending-planned-obsolescence-a-nonpartisan-movement-for-steady-staters-to-support/
"Comfort junk" is much like "comfort food". Junk often looks good and seems satisfying, but such does not necessarily mean that it's good for you. For one thing, it doesn't last. You have to replace it about five to ten times more often than you normally would if it were durable. And yet, we keep buying it. Thus, too much waste keeps being dumped into the ecosphere. We're already way over the amount Nature can assimilate, and it just keeps getting worse.
Here are two more things everyone can do to help our journey to sustainability. Whenever possible, BOYCOTT ALL junk. If that involves a change in lifestyle, so be it. Our biophysical, natural support system cannot take ever-increasing amounts of waste without serious consequences to us and all life. SUPPORT laws and regulations (which are starting to spring forth) that combat planned obsolescence. See the online article at the link above. This is a nonpartisan issue through and through, so personal Party politics should not restrain you.
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