Food & agriculture

- The Femivore’s dilemma
- Sharon Astyk: Poultry is a feminist issue?
- Global hunt for phosphates is on
- Vandana Shiva: Water wisdom

-Grow your own' revolution receives major land boost
-Slow foodies are not cavemen
-What’s driving our favorite fruit into decline?
-A Backlash After San Francisco Labels Sewage Sludge "Organic"
-How Locavores Could Save the World
-Increasing Yields and Decreasing Fertilizer Waste on Subsistence Farms
-How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab
-Greenhouse project promotes self-sufficiency

Are Americans willing to jeopardize their health with GMO foods? Probably not. And it might take only 15 million Americans or 5 percent of the U.S. population to establish a tipping point for change.

-World’s Pall of Black Carbon Can Be Eased With New Stoves
-Treasure Trove in World's E-Waste
-City sets out healthy ambitions for local food
-Galleria mall is giant greenhouse, raising organic crops in Cleveland

Last post I covered some guiding principles for urban resilience planning in the face of climate change and diminishing resources (especially fresh water and oil). Considering these guidelines, what aspect of U.S. metro development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term that does not translate well to English, but using a thousand words, perhaps we shall begin to understand. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, but now reflects a meaning more of rustic simplicity, freshness, or quietness. Wabi also refers to the quirks and imperfections that arise during the creation process. Sabi refers to the beauty which comes into being as something ages.

As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent...Yet even within the environmental movement there is no unanimity on this thorny question: should the countries of the South have the right to increase their emissions as they industrialize and "develop"?

The piece builds on Lynas’s previous much publicised conversion to nuclear power, arguing that if we are to apply the scientific rigour that underpins climate science to all other areas of life, in the same way that nuclear power is supported by the science, so is GM. While I strongly disagree with him on both, I want here to challenge Lynas’s conversion to GM, and the belief that if we are serious about climate change, we have no option other than to embrace GM.

-Green fuels cause more harm than fossil fuels, according to report
-Chemists create biofuel from plant waste
-Seeking a More 'Poplar' Biofuel

-A March Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition
-Transition on ‘One Planet’ on BBC World Service
-Transition Sunshine Coast delivers EDAP
-“Genuine resilience results from expanding the human footprint”. Discuss

A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar - essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil...Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society.  So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.

...Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far. The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes. The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.

-Fury as EU approves GM potato
-France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency
-Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
-GM and farming technology 'key to fighting climate change'