TIME Magazine's current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn't news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn't have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not Pollan-esque) prose in a national newsweekly cover story:

With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants — and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you.

TIME Magazine talking about exhausted soil? Whooda thunkit? The importance of Bryan Walsh's piece, of course, isn't in the particulars of its insights or its prescriptions. The importance (aside from its very existence as a cover story) is in its declarative nature.  For openers, Walsh offers a whirlwind tour of industrial ag practices which covers swine tail docking, sub-therapeutic antibiotic use, manure lagoons, ag subsidies, nitrogen fertilizer run-off and the Gulf of Mexico deadzone -- all in the first paragraph. And better yet, Walsh doesn't fall back on that tired journalistic trope of the "third party fact." "Experts" don't "claim" nor do "critics" "observe" nor even does "Michael Pollan" "relate" this or that fact of industrial ag's excesses: they are instead plainly stated as established, if awful, truth. How refreshing.

Indeed, in these two paragraphs Walsh brings into stark relief the very issues over which Big Ag willfully and relentlessly refuses to engage. One of the more surprising aspects of the article is a total lack of any boilerplate denials from Big Ag of all responsibility for the ills of industrial food that typically get some play whenever the topic of food production gets attention from the MSM. I don't think it's an oversight that we didn't hear from the National Corn Growers Association or the American Farm Bureau or Monsanto or Smithfield or any other Big Ag mouthpiece in this article -- it's likely that nothing they said was worth repeating.

Honestly, the best you can expect to hear from them is some paean to American agricultural ingenuity and productivity such as in soy farmer and AFM official Blake Hurst's Omnivore's Delusion (though after you read it, be sure to rinse your brain with Tom Philpott's able riposte). Hurst, as it happens, manages to ignore or elide just about every damaging issue regarding industrial agriculture that TIME Magazine has so pointedly raised. And it's no coincidence -- the fact is that Big Ag doesn't have the answers to sustainability. What they do know about is succeeding in a status quo of abundant oil, chemicals and subsidies. Change the rules of the game -- spiking fuel prices, fertilizer shortages, superweeds, superbugs, etc. -- and they no longer know how to play.

If I have a regret about this piece, it's in the conclusion. Walsh invokes the concepts of "conscious" eating on the one hand, versus "selective forgetting" of the consequences of our food choices on the other. Consumers must be open to change, he declares, if we're to move toward a more sustainable system. This is no doubt true. But I would have liked a final invocation as well of industrial agriculture's "ticking clock." Right now, consumer choice is surely a crucial factor. But if, for example, worldwide demand for meat is in fact set to rise 25% by 2015, it seems to me that we'll be having unpleasant "choices" thrust upon us much sooner than we may expect. And after 2015 things are only going to get worse (Peak Oil, anyone?) America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It may have been one of the most thorough and alarmist articles on the industrial food system ever to appear in a major magazine. Sadly, it may not have been nearly alarmist enough.

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The Obama administration will defend the Clinton roadless rule that has been ping-ponging in the courts for nearly a decade, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in Seattle on Friday. If courts can’t resolve the forest-protection conflict, the administration will create its own roadless rule, he said.

Vilsack laid out a broad vision for the U.S. Forest Service, outlining for the first time his plan for the agency that manages national forests from within the Department of Agriculture. He promised strong conservation measures and an emphasis on restoring damaged forests, especially those left “overstocked and susceptible to catastrophic fire and disease” by a legacy of fire suppression.

He also spoke to the economic potential of forests in emerging carbon and bioenergy markets and their value as a water source as climate change brings increasingly severe droughts. He hinted at the value of new water markets for private land owners.

“The Forest Service must play a significant role in the development of new markets and ensuring their integrity,” he said, speaking near the old-growth forest at Seattle’s Seward Park. “Carbon and bioenergy aren’t the only new opportunity for landowners. Markets for water can also provide landowners with incentives to restore watersheds and manage forests for clean and abundant water supplies.”

Vilsack made an appeal, in a very Obama sort of way, to environmental leaders, asking them for help in moving past the “history of distrust” between conservationists, the Forest Service, and loggers. In short, he asked them to lay off the lawsuits against government plans.

“Certainly appeals and litigation have served as a useful backstop” against poor forest plans in the past, he said. “But given the scale of restoration that must occur, and the time in which we have to do it, a shared vision built on collaboration will help us move on from the timber wars of the past. Litigation and conflict should become less prevalent, because they will be less necessary.”

Patti Goldman, vice president for litigation at Earthjustice, said she was glad to see a clear departure from Bush administration land management.

“They’re moving into the future,” she said. “That’s a wise move.”

To be sure, the speech was more broad principles than specific plans; Vilsack said those would come in a new forest plan, a regulatory rule that won’t have to pass through Congress.

He also said the Forest Service must address the 80 percent of American forests that lie outside of national forests, under the control of states, tribal groups, businesses, and private landowners. 

“The threats facing our forests don’t recognize property boundaries,” he said. “So, in developing a shared vision around forests, we must also be willing to look across property boundaries. In other words, we must operate at a landscape scale by taking an ‘all-lands approach.’”

Vilsack didn’t mention specific measures, but Charlie Raines of the Sierra Club’s Cascade Chapter said ramping up funding for the Forest Legacy program would be an effective way to let forest owners make money off their land without developing it.

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Henry Waxman and Ed Markey seem to have mastered the art of the non-concession concession: striking deals with potential opponents in ways that meet their needs while minimizing (though not entirely eliminating) the negative impacts.

Similar to their distribution of allowances, which seemed at first glance to be a massive giveaway but turned out to be far more equitable, the latest compromise between Waxman and House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson seems to fall into this category. The agreement installs a five year moratorium on calculations for how ethanol and other biofuels affect international land use. Climate pollution is released into the air when American farmers switch their land from growing food to growing fuel, and South American agricultural interests burn the rainforest to clear land to grow additional food to fill the gap.

At first glance, that seems pretty bad, and in some ways, it is. As Environment America’s Anna Aurilio pointed out in E & E (sub required), "No one should be trying to legislate away scientific inquiry.” That’s true – and if there’s a possibility of undoing this concession, we should seize it. But in terms of actual impact on land and greenhouse gas emissions, this concession may be minimal. The 2007 law that mandated a “Renewable Fuels Standard” already exempts 15 billion gallons of ethanol from these land use requirements, and production may not exceed that mark, or exceed it significantly, within the moratorium’s five year time frame – meaning that this provision may have little immediate effect.

However, this concession does essentially punt the question down the road, which means that environmentalists and others concerned about ethanol’s impact (like anyone who pays more for food as a result of ethanol mandates), will have to be very vigilant five years from now to ensure that EPA does actually assess whether ethanol and other biofuels that destroy rainforests should qualify under the Renewable Fuels Standard.

There’s another way in which the legislation may make this concession less damaging than it seemed at first glance. The bill’s tropical forest provisions, which I summarized in this Center for American Progress post and here at Grist, will make deforestation much less financially attractive. By valuing forests for the carbon they store – and by providing incentives for reforestation – they make expansion into pristine areas much less likely. At current carbon prices, a hectare of rainforest could be worth $10,000. Depending on the price of carbon and the price of ethanol, it may make more strict financial sense for land owners, communities, and governments to invest in conservation instead of destroying forest for agricultural land for biofuels or other purposes.

In some cases, that will even be true in the United States where agricultural land values are much higher – farmers may be able to make more from reforestation or restoring their land to native prairie than continuing ethanol production, leading to a welcome conversion of at least marginal land to carbon-sequestering Nature.

The other main concession Waxman made was giving the Department of Agriculture primary jurisdiction over deciding what agricultural activities could qualify as offsets. As Tom Philpott chronicled here at Grist, if USDA continues its long tradition of altering science to meet whatever Big Ag’s financial interest du jour is, that could mean farmers would just get credit for pouring Monsanto’s Round-Up pesticide on genetically engineered crops.

But there’s some hope that USDA would actually apply science. In addition to bringing offsets to scale, we must also ensure that the offsets markets have high standards of environmental integrity to ensure that offsets result in real and measurable greenhouse gas reductions while bolstering efforts to conserve soil, water, and fish and wildlife resources. Tom Philpott added in an email (echoed by this post) to me that while we should view USDA’s promises with skepticism, he’s cautiously hopeful all the public scrutiny of these decisions will at least somewhat improve USDA’s commitment to the environment and science.

“I think the ag lobby will be surprised by the amount of scrutiny on ag offsets,” he said. “They are used to operating in obscurity, and haven't fully adjusted to this new era of public interest. Meaning that people like you and me can play an important role as watchdogs as this thing develops.”

At the end of the day, that’s the conclusion we need to draw. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey’s policy mastery and skillful negotiating diminished the negative environmental impacts of the compromises that are necessary to build a majority behind real action to solve this great global crisis – but we’ll have to remain involved for years to make sure those negative consequences stay diminished.

UPDATE: Ben Geman at E & E has news of how the bill’s biomass and biodiesel provisions have been changed:

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Just when America thought it was safe to go back into the grocery store, another food outbreak wakes us up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with its food safety system. This time it's Nestle Toll House cookie dough with E.coli, a treat that nearly every kid in America reaches for a few times a month during the summer. This is yet another reminder why it’s important to get the new food safety legislation, currently winding its way through Congress, right.

Last week a new food safety bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and opinions vary widely on the current bill. Known as H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, the bill is being hailed as everything from as “the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in nearly 50 years” or the “totalitarian control of the food supply,” depending on what you read.

In addition to being supported by Consumers Union, the bill has also garnered the backing of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the American Meat Institute due to compromises committee chairman Henry Waxman ironed out during committee consideration.

Key compromises that brought industry giants on board were the reduction of an annual registration fee for food production facilities from $1,000 to $500, capping the amount any single company would have to pay for both foreign and domestic operations at $175,000 and exempting meat and poultry from oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The latter compromise was made to keep the bill from passing into the hands of the House Agricultural Committee, which would have likely gutted many key provisions of the bill.

Good, Bad and Caution

The current bill is an effort by Congress to revamp our nation’s dysfunctional food safety system, giving the FDA more regulatory power and resources to help stem the tide from the growing number of record food safety outbreaks in everything from lettuce, spinach, peanut butter and now cookie dough.

According to Consumers Union, the new food safety bill contains what they consider to be several steps in the right direction, including: inspection of high-risk food facilities at least every 6 to 12 months (FDA currently averages inspections one every 10 years), FDA recall authority, requirement of food facilities to register and pay an annual fee, and a traceability program.

Those more cautious about the bill include the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

In fact, the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund opposes the new food safety bill, citing among it’s chief concerns are that HR 2749 will “adversely impact small farms and food producers, without providing significant reforms in the industrial food system” and that it “does not address the underlying causes of food safety problems, including industrial agriculture practices and the consolidation of our food supply.”

The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is cautious, bringing up several good questions regarding definitions in the bill and how they will impact small farmers and processors. Russell Libby of MOFGA asks, "When is a farm a food processor that is a food ‘facility’ that warrants FDA regulation and oversight? When does a farm have enough potential impact on the food system to warrant FDA scrutiny?” Additionally, MOFGA states that "it oppose[s] laws that create barriers to entry for farmers and specialty food processors.”

For others who are skeptical of the bill, these remain “unanswered questions”.

What American Food Safety Needs Now is Reform

Even as the debate rages on about how the U.S. will create a new food safety system, with all of the attention focused on FDA’s failure to assure the safety of the food it regulates, a very quiet controversy is brewing at the USDA over the fact that the agency has yet to name an Under Secretary for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

So far, the two leading candidates for the job, both with close ties to the food industry, have been knocked off track due to the efforts of a small collection of food safety advocates and a few advocacy groups who believe that food safety is not something that you should create a “Team of Rivals” around.

After watching the new administration’s efforts to select political appointees that conform to the plotline of a popular nonfiction book, it’s time to remind them why they won the election. Last year when Americans went to the polls in record numbers, they voted for change and the hope of reform.

What is becoming more evident every day is that while Republicans reward their base, Democrats kick their's to the curb.

As one food safety expert who has been leading the charge for food safety reform in Washington for over twenty years said recently, “It’s funny. When Republicans win the election I have to fight the meat industry and when Democrats win I have to fight the meat industry. When is somebody going to stand up for the American consumer?”

We couldn’t agree more.

If the Obama Administration is Serious About Food Safety – We Need a Reformer

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with foodborne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person who knows this fact better than almost anybody else in this country, is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

Marler recently came to the public’s attention with his generous offer to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University, after his book had been removed from the freshmen reading program. What many may not know is that he’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

Marler first leapt to national prominence as the lead attorney in the famous 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since that time, Marler has led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices of major corporations. While dedicated to a high standard of food safety protocols, Marler is also pragmatic about the real economic need for food safety.

Poor food safety practices also have a major negative impact on the bottom line of business, costing U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion each year, which Marler believes could be better spent to keep America’s food supply truly safe.

Despite the food industry’s long contempt for personal injury attorneys, Marler could end up being their dream pick for the FSIS spot if they were willing to allow the motivated attorney to oversee the much needed change in food safety policies at the USDA.

Known as a fair but fierce opponent, Marler draws as much criticism from the industrial meat crowd as he does from proponents of local agriculture, with strong stances on the need for inspection and a concern on the growing interest in raw milk.

Why select Marler as the head of the FSIS? Because he’s a champion of citizen’s rights to safe food and he knows the system better than anyone. He’s also willing to balance the concerns of the meat industry and local foods at the same time.

If the Obama Administration is serious about reforming America’s food safety system, there really is only one choice – Bill Marler for FSIS. Now’s the time.

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The Obama administration announced on Thursday that it is delaying a decision on policy that guides the construction of new roads and other development in areas of national forests for one year. An interim directive will guide land use in roadless areas in the meantime.

Delayed gratification for roadless advocates. The new directive, issued by Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, will require his approval for any U.S. Forest Service projects on public lands that have been declared off-limits for development under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The administration will hold off on long-term decisions on the policy until 2010.

The so-called "Roadless Rule," which the Clinton administration put in place during its final days in office in 2000, prohibited new roads on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. This essentially meant all logging, mining, and other commercial activity were also off-limits. But on his first day in office, George Bush temporarily froze work on implementing the rule; he repeatedly attempted to throw it out over the course of the next 8 years and undermined it by exempting large areas of land from its protections. The rule has been caught up in legal wrangling ever since.

"This interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed," said Vilsack in a statement announcing the temporary directive.

Vilsack will still be able to approve projects if he and the Forest Service determine them to be necessary. And if the administration does not reach a long-term decision on the rule within the next year, the temporary directive can be extended for another year. Today's announcement also doesn't include public lands in Idaho, which has instated its own version of the rule.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to uphold the law, so today's news comes as a first step in fulfilling that promise, though most enviros would like to see the rule reinstated entirely.

"Secretary Vilsack's directive is a critical interim measure to ensure that we safeguard the diverse values of our national forests as the Obama administration considers more permanent protections," said Sierra Club Public Lands Protection Program director Athan Manuel in a statement.

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