Table of Contents
Overviews:
- BACKGROUND
- One of the first serious studies of humans as a global entity came from Thomas Malthus in 1798 in his Essay on the Principles of Population, when he wrote that human population would one day be limited by the planet's capacity to produce food. But it wasn't until August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, that global awareness truly came of age. A new measure of humankind on a small planet became terrifyingly obvious that day. The interconnectedness of all society clarified, and a new kind of thought became fashionable: world economic policy, united nations, world banks, and think tanks. This was the prelude to the awakening of environmental awareness. MORE.
- PEOPLE
- The equation for providing sustainable food resources on Earth begins with the number of people inhabiting the planet. Clearly less people would be able to live with more, and more people would have to live with less. Thus the optimal number of people for the planet is a function of life quality and sustainability. Right now Earth's populaton is six and a half billion and counting. In his book How Many People Can the World Support, demographer Joel E. Cohen makes the argument that the optimum number is five billion people. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, in his book Eating Fossil Fuels, drops that down to two billion. Others believe that population, like the price of bread, is regulated by the market, supply of food versus human demand, a kind of economic survival of the fittest. As we have already begun to feel the press of natural resources, conscious stewardship of the planet would suggest determining an optimum population for our situation and guiding the world to that number. MORE.
- ARABLE LAND
- Arable land, land that is suitable for farming, is at a premium. Over the last fifteen years our population has grown while our quantity of arable land has diminished. We have been forced to increase yield per acre to keep up with demand. To do this we have turned to industrial agriculture–the use of petrochemical fertilizers, large scale irrigation, and monoculture. These methods, while highly productive, have proven wasteful in terms of topsoil loss, water quality, and energy input. In a word, it is unsustainable. The way we farm must change. MORE.
- WATER
- The planet and its atmosphere hold an essentially constant quantity of water, 1.45 trillion cubic kilometers of it! Though it is used over and over again, changes form, passes through human bodies, through animals, through plants, through the soil, through the atmosphere, it never really goes away or leaves our biosphere. The water is literally recycled naturally in a process called the hydrologic cycle. Open water evaporation, mostly from the oceans, creates moisture content in the atmosphere. It condenses as it cools and falls back to the earth as rain or snow. When it reaches the earth, it flows downhill, in rivers and streams, is dipped into by all living things, and returns to the ocean, to be evaporated again into the atmosphere. Ideal water management involves humans learning to take part in the water cycle with the least interference. This focuses primarly on our management of waste water. Whatever we put in our water systems invariably gets cycled through the atmosphere and the food chain right back through us. MORE.
- BIODIVERSITY
- Earth is very much a garden planet, a veritable living paradise. It gives rise to all variety of grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and a vast array of animal life and insects. All life from invisible bacteria to the one hundred ton blue whale is interconnected through the food chain. To some large extent, the food chain is the process of recycling one life form through and into another. One of the fundamental principles in this system is that variety creates stability. Variety in life forms, often referred to as biodiversity, increases chances for adaptability and deepens the gene pool for evolutionary success during crisis, for example, a changing climate. The more participants there are in the community of life, the more secure the entire community becomes. MORE
- CLIMATE
- Over the course of the last one hundred years, industrial and automotive emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere which in turn has altered the balance of Earth's exchange of heat with the Sun. As a result, the planet is warming, and we face unknown changes in the climate. These changes hold the potential to alter critical biological and ecological relationships for every living thing on the planet and are very likely to impact food security, either by catastrophic weather events, blight, or insect infestation. With these potentials hoving like tornadoes just over the horizon, reducing our use of fossil fuels and thus our greenhouse gas emissions makes a lot of sense right now. Add concerns for peaking oil production, and at a bare minimum, conservation of petroleum should have begun yesterday. MORE
Related Articles:
- RELOCALIZING EDEN
- A region's capacity to produce, process, and distribute some significant portion of its own food has always been a measure of social and economic stability, but as we face the unknowns of peak oil and climate change, securing local food resources will become one of our highest priorities. Oregon's Willamette Valley provides an apt case-study for addressing this situation.
- THE BEAN AND GRAIN PROJECT
- Harry MacCormack of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon is trying to change the way they farm in the Willamette Valley. The Bean and Grain Project is his plan to get grass seed farmers to transition into growing organic beans and grain. This document contains reports from two critical formative meetings.
- THE END OF CHEAP FOOD
- This is an excellent article from The Economist on the changing equation of global food prices.
- FINDING FOOD IN FARM COUNTRY
- Farm economist Ken Meter's Power Point slide presentation reveals the systemtic problems of our current delocalized agricultural model.
- FOOD SECURITY WORKSHEET FOR WILLITS, CA.
- "Food security encompasses a wide range of topics, including sustainable local food production, processing, and storage. This worksheet begins by examining the topic from an individual's basic needs level, and then builds towards those broader topics."
- PEAK SOIL: Why Cellulosic and other Biofuels are Not Sustainable and a Threat to America's National Security
- There's growing public attention from the people, all the way on down to the President, about biomass potential for energy. There's been a public discussion about many aspects and what the problems might be. But there's one aspect of all of this that is conspicuous by its absence–a national discussion of anything about the soil science–the effect growing row crops like corn and soy have on the land and water. An excellent article by Alice Friedemann.
- WATER QUALITY AND WATER QUANTITY: Are They Significant Issues in Bioeconomy?
- This is a clear and concise presentation of water usage and the production of enthanol put together by Rick Cruse and Bill Simpkins of Iowa State University and the Iowa Water Center.
- THE NITROGEN BOMB
- By learning to draw fertilizer from a clear blue sky, chemists have fed the multitudes. They've also unleashed a fury as threatening as atomic energy. David E. and Marshall Jon Fisher provide history and concerns about excess of nitrogen in ecosphere.
- WORLD'S FISH SUPPLY RUNNING OUT
- An international group of ecologists and economists warned yesterday that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates.
- MALE BASS PRODUCE EGGS
- Toxins in our waters are a plague upon all living things. Pollution in the Potomac River is suspected of causing a very unsettling anomaly in male bass.
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