Sometimes its all about the headline...

The Great Lakes 

Carpe diem 

Some are worried that Asian carp are poised to invade Lake Michigan

Jul 28th 2012 | from the print edition

WHEN Eric Gittinger, a biologist, goes to work on the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, he has to look out. The Asian carp that are swimming up from the South, where they escaped from fish farms decades ago, can leap 10 feet in the air or torpedo themselves twice that distance across the water. Larger fish can weigh 40lb (18kg), and Mr Gittinger gets regularly whacked by them.

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Gold-medal grumpies

Its almost a  year since we arrived in Chicago and I'm still constantly reminded of the differences between America and Britain. With the arrival of the Olympics in London, I've been unable to avoid reaching the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference in personality between British and Americans. My former boss at The Economist, and a veteran of one foreign posting, had packed me off with this advice about Americans, "don't make the mistake of thinking they are like us because they speak the same language". He added that it would help for me to "imagine them as Germans".

I knew exactly what he meant.

Not that Americans are in any way like Germans but I needed to constantly remind myself that I was living among aliens if I was not going to trip up by assuming that Americans are just like me. But one of the big tip-offs about our difference in personality was that every American who raises the subject of the Olympics wishes to offer their condolences to me for missing the London 2012 event. And that is because, in their wonderful way, few Americans can spontaneously imagine that anyone would not be thrilled by the presence of a major world sporting event in their nearby vicinity. They are simply not wired in a way that would allow them to realise that the citizens of London and its nearby counties might be aghast, fearful and downright grumpy about the 2012 Olympics.

Now, imagine for a moment  if the Olympics were taking place in any major American city today. The entire city would be whipped up into an orgy of Olympic enthusiasm. Parents, office workers and school children would be eagerly volunteering, applying for tickets, and making plans to attend. Committees would be set up to host Olympic parties in parks, on the beach, in neighbourhoods. Schools would be hosting Olympic-theme days. Restaurants and businesses would be decked out and everyone would take up the event with enthusiasm and gusto. Anyone who failed to get tickets would simply organise an overflow party in a nearby public place. No-one's enthusiasm would be dampened by anything.

In short, it would be just the kind of orgy of enthusiasm and gusto that makes most British reach for the travel-sickness bag. Now I'm obviously not in London at the moment so cannot attest to the reaction on the ground at the moment (and we Brits do quite like to be dragged along to a party at the last minute like reluctant wallflowers) but even a year ago the irritation at the Olympics was palpable. Everyone was making plans to go on holiday during August; refugees, if you like, from sport. The clever ones had even let their apartments to visitors from abroad. Many complained that the tube would be hot and crowded, it would be impossible to get a taxi, a table at a good restaurant and travel through London would be even more difficult than usual. Moan, moan, moan.

It isn't that the British don't like sport, its that we do not like it as much as Americans (crikey, they really, really, really like sport here), and any interest we do have is rather overwhelmed by our dislike of large numbers of people, crowds and idiot dawdling tourists--all of which are expected in abundance this August.

I think it is safe to say that for Olympic officials the cat must finally be out of the bag. Yes London is a great city, possibly one of the greatest cities on the planet, and it really is quite a good place to hold a big sporting event. But the idea that the grumpy, irritable and overcrowded British are going to welcome the Olympics with open arms was always something of a stretch. The crowded south-east of England gets a gold medal for grumpiness.

In praise of charter schools

Wall of inspiration in the library at Harvest Prep School in Minneapolis.

I've spent a few weeks looking into the issue of charter schools and last month went to the recent convention of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Minneapolis. I came to the subject with an open mind as to whether they were useful or not, but having looked at the evidence I'm convinced that they can be a fantastic opportunity for urban and low income children in America. The very students who have been so failed by the education system. I think the evidence is firmer that they don't work in rural areas. One person I spoke with speculated that this might be because they have trouble recruiting good teaching staff.

This actually hints at one real reason why charter schools do better in urban areas. Critics constantly harp that charter schools are cherry picking the best students, or that their parents are in some way more motivated. This sort of explanation harps back to education's long history of blaming the students for being unteachable. In fact, what is far more likely is that charter schools in urban areas are able to attract better teachers and are able to hold them accountable for their work.

Charter schools have far more flexibility in the way that they teach, someone I spoke with described this as 'agency'--which is attractive to those who want to make a difference in education. Furthermore, charter schools can reward the best teachers if they wish to do so.

Links to the piece, and the leader (op-ed) that went along with it, follow:

Education 

Charting a better course 

Charter schools raise educational standards for vulnerable children 

Jul 7th 2012 | CHICAGO AND MINNEAPOLIS | from the print edition 

“EVERYONE'S pencil should be on the apple in the tally-mark chart!” shouts a teacher to a class of pupils at Harvest Preparatory School in Minneapolis. Papers and feet are shuffled; a test is coming. Each class is examined every six or seven weeks. The teachers are monitored too. As a result, Harvest Prep outperformed every city school district in Minnesota in maths last year. It is also a “charter” school; and all the children are black. [More...]

Education 

A 20-year lesson 

Evidence from America and Britain shows that independence for schools works 

Jul 7th 2012 | from the print edition 

FOR decades too many educationalists have succumbed to the tyranny of low expectations, at least when it comes to those at the bottom of the heap. The assumption has been that the poor, often black, children living in some of the world's biggest and richest cities such as New York, Los Angeles and London face too many challenges to learn. There was little hope that school could make any difference to their future unless the problem of poverty could first be “solved”, which it couldn't. [More...]

Happy 4th

Some members of the family are adapting particularly well to the American life..

Blooming marvellous

Patrick Sutter (Dane County), Melissa Malott (Clean Wisconsin) and Jeff Endres (Farmer) discussing nutrient conservation plans in Wisconsin.

Last month it was my great pleasure to be shown around Dane County farmland by county conservationists Patrick Sutter and David Merritt, and Melissa Malott of the conservation group Clean Wisconsin. Wisconsin is one of the many states that contribute to the nutrient pollution of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. With new state numerical limits on phosphorus pollution in waterways some interesting partnerships are forming. The water authorities must reduce the amount of phosphorus they release from sewage treatment, and there is a chance that it may pay for them to ask farmers to take action to reduce run off from their land.

One of the most interesting things I saw last month was a community nutrient digester run by a nice man called Monte Lamer, from the company Clear Horizons. Its basically a municipal sewage treatment works for cows, but with a twist. So each cow, I recall, produces the same amount of poo as 18 or 19 humans. So if you have thousands of cattle in an area (and Wisconsin does make a lot of cheese) you have a huge volume of manure, and nowhere to put it. On my tour one of the conservationists mentioned that some farmers had so much of the stuff that this year they were renting land just to store the vast quantities of manure their cows had produced.

Traditionally one spreads manure on the land. That is fine if cattle are at low densities. But these days with high-intensity farming and big agribusiness hard at work growing food all along the Mississippi watershed, there is more than the land can cope with in some places. Enter the manure biodigester. The basic idea is that the poo from all the cattle in an area is put into giant vats and fermented. This produces methane which is burnt to produce lots of lovely energy. Then the remaining bits of poo are dried into little bits which can then be applied as fertiliser to land that has insufficient nutrients.

Its an incredibly neat idea, and it is being partly funded by Dane County. You can see the response to the announcement by Clean Wisconsin here. And you can find out more about how the biodigester works here. It will be interesting to see how the economics work out. Ultimately, the best outcome would be if these units produce enough energy to actually generate money, which would justify their expansion elsewhere.

So last week, Jon Fasman, our Atlanta correspondent, and myself had a piece published in The Economist about nutrient pollution along the Mississippi. I've since received a letter pointing out that if municipal sewage authorities produce only 10% of the nutrient pollution then they can only trade with farmers to reduce this amount of agricultural output. This is a flaw I'd not considered before. Please someone let me know if there is a solution to this.

Nutrient pollution 

Blooming horrible 

Nutrient pollution is a growing problem all along the Mississippi 

Jun 23rd 2012 | CHICAGO AND THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA | from the print edition

Too much of a good thing SOUTH-EAST of New Orleans, where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico, the North American land mass does not end so much as gently give up. Land subsides to welts of green poking up through the water, and the river grows wider and flatter until it meets the ocean, where a solid line divides the Mississippi’s brown water from the gulf’s blue. On its long journey south the water has scooped up nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, mainly from the fields of the Midwest. So much so that agriculture’s gift to the gulf is a “dead zone”.

The excess nutrients cause algae to bloom, consuming all the available oxygen in the sea, making it hostile to other forms of marine life. Creatures that can swim away, such as shrimp and fish, do so; those that cannot, die. In the four decades since the dead zone was discovered it has grown steadily. Today it covers 6,700 square miles, an area larger than Connecticut. [More...]

Boondoggle harvest

Last month I took a trip to Wisconsin to visit some of the conservation work being done by Dane County officials to deal with nutrients from farmland. While I was there, I was introduced to a farmer called Jeff Endres, who has a farm near Waunakee and who is working with the county on an innovative new project to remove excess phosphorus using farming strategies. He is also very conservation minded, and takes care of the environment around his farm. Behind him, in the picture, you can see a mown strip of grass right next to the waterway--this prevents nutrients from the fertilized fields from running into the streams and creating foul-smelling and sometimes toxic algae from forming in waterways and lakes. More on this in a future blog though.

Farm Bill
In the end, just the way these things happen, Mr Endres ended up first appearing in print in a piece about the US farm bill. Writing about the US Farm bill at the moment is like trying to hit a deflating balloon in a concert hall with a water pistol--its a rapidly moving target and my firepower is limited. The farm bill is an omnibus (i.e. big) bill that comes along every five years. Everyone has a vested interest, either through its spending on the poor (through food stamps) or through its spending on farmers (via subsidies). When this piece was written the farm bill had not been approved by the floor of the Senate, it now has. But this is only half of the story as a bill in the house must also pass and there is not a great deal of progress on this front.

My feelings on the proposed additional insurance subsidies for farmers are that they are an outrageous expense at a time when the American budget needs to be cut and when crop prices are at an all time high.
Vincent Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University and a scholar for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute has looked at the possible costs of such a scheme and points out that the scheme will become extortionate in cost should crop prices dip from their all time high. In any case, the taxpayer should not be in the business of insuring 90% of a farmer's revenue.


Agriculture

Boondoggle harvest 

The new farm bill, although it cuts some unnecessary payments, is likely to increase others 

Jun 16th 2012 | CHICAGO AND WAUNAKEE, WISCONSIN | from the print edition

ON THE land farmed by Jeff Endres in Wisconsin, gently rolling fields are interlaced with streams. To prevent soil and nutrients washing away, Mr Endres has fashioned neat borders of grass between his farm and the waterways. Most farmers are increasingly uninterested in such measures to protect the environment. That is not because times are tough but because they are good, and is it worth planting every inch available.

Indeed, thanks to high crop prices and the rude health of rural America, the unthinkable has happened: farmers are under pressure to accept cuts in the generous handouts they receive from the federal government. Much of the debate over the 2012 farm bill (a debate which comes up every five years or so, when the bill must be reauthorised) is being dominated by the budget deficit and demand for fiscal restraint. Payments to farmers, which include sums for taking part in conservation programmes, have been running at around $12 billion a year since 2007 (see chart). Yet since then farmers have enjoyed record prices and incomes, and increasing yields. Farm income is at its highest in almost 40 years, and farm failures are down to a rate of less than one in 200 a year. [More...]

The jet propelled Republican

This is my piece from Wisconsin. Just to be clear, what I mean at the end of the piece is that a torrent of out-of-state money fuelling a toxic and spiteful atmosphere is not what democracy should look like--but possibly an omen for later this year.

One of the comments objects to the term 'pushy' to describe Scott Walker. I thought long and hard about a fair and accurate way to describe him in one word.

He was voted in on a conservative agenda to transform Wisconsin. Throughout the campaign he described himself as a man who likes to "do" things rather than talk about them. I don't actually think the description 'pushy' is pejorative. It can be, but in the way it is used here means forceful, or aggressively ambitious. I rather imagine that many politicians might consider this a compliment.


Wisconsin’s recall election

The jet-propelled Republican

Jun 6th 2012, 18:34 by N.L. | CHICAGO

IF HISTORY is written by the winners, this was the night for the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to add his name on the ledger. Yesterday Mr Walker faced a recall election to drive him out of office—only the third attempted recall of a governor in America’s history. This was prompted by statewide outrage when, last year, the pushy Republican brought in a law curbing the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector workers. [More...]