Biodiversity
Sustainability
Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:42AM PT
A refresher for the interested:
... Since the 1980s, the idea of sustainable human well-being has become increasingly associated with the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres. In 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ...
What does this mean for food? At its simplest, that we should feed ourselves today without compromising the ability of future generations to feed themselves, or otherwise meet their basic needs.
As I wrote yesterday, it also seems a very contrary to the basic human instinct to create a better future for one's children to leave future generations with a diminished ability to care for themselves. In political terms, to leave them with a worse standard of living than we now enjoy. It seems worth drawing attention again to Lakoff's point about the dominant corporate perspective:
... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.
The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.
As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth! ...
The presumption that future people will be, in essence, infinitely richer than we are and capable of solving any problems we leave behind seems overly optimistic.
In regards, once again to agriculture, industrial agriculture promotes erosion and degradation of the soil. It promotes the rapid drawdown of fossil water and surface water supplies in regions where the overall trend is towards increasing droughts, as well as maintaining soil conditions such that water is more likely to immediately be drained to open waterways. It continues to put chemicals that we haven't evolved to metabolize or excrete into the food chain, where they circulate and bioaccumulate - chemicals and heavy metals whose lifetime burden for an adult human may only markedly decrease in women who breastfeed, as they pass their toxins on to their helpless infants. It's made farming such an unappealing profession that its median age has steadily climbed in the US, depriving us slowly but surely of the human capital needed to maintain a diverse food supply.
In the decades since the industrialization of agriculture, a system of practice relating as much to distribution and purchasing concentration as to means of production, US citizens' health has flatlined, then declined. We are already worse off than our parents, but there are those who want to stick with this disastrous present course and see how it goes. Maybe even more profits can be had by making the next generation sicker than the present.
The best that defenders of industrial agriculture can say is that people aren't always made worse off by it. Oh, only some people get cancer and diabetes from what we're doing. Only some ecosystems are ruined. We can't do any better, they say.
How sorry, unimaginative, uninspired, and morose a perspective.
I'd rather like to think that we could have a future where our food system was an aid to maximum attainable health, for ourselves as well as the habitat we depend on for clean air and water. I like to think that we could preserve our current biodiversity, with all its many beauties and benefits, and still eat well.
I like to think that we're creative and intelligent enough to overcome the obstacles in the way of achieving these goals. We did figure out how to land people on the Moon, build the Internet, map the genome, put up skyscrapers, maintain satellite broadcast and cell phone networks, etc. I think we're up to the challenge.
The industry responsible for Agent Orange and DDT thinks that this is an unserious and irresponsible view. They have shareholders to think of, after all.
(Photo credit: Brooke on Flickr.)
The Dead Zone
Published May 28, 2009 @ 01:58PM PT
No, not the TV series. The fish kill:
... Wilma [Subra] explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.” ...
As they explain over at Twilight Earth, the fertilizer used to grow plants on land (including and especially the corn used for animal feed) is killing off ocean fisheries near the mouths of our rivers, pitting one food sector against another.
Fishing is particularly dependent on the health and vibrancy of wild ecosystems, and humans are very dependent on fishing. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fish make up 15 percent of the world population's protein intake. That's a fairly sizable supply of food for which there isn't a ready replacement.
Nor is that the only threat to our fishy food supply. Along with overfishing, other agricultural chemicals threaten the continuity of safe seafood consumption, such as direct pesticide fish kills and the tissue accumulation of organochlorine pesticides (including those that have been banned in the US but are still used abroad,) and mercury from coal plants.
H1N1 Swine Flu Still Spreading, Still Caused by Low Diversity
Published May 19, 2009 @ 02:04PM PT
Today's healthcare roundup by DemFromCT on DailyKos points to a Reuters story about the spread and hospitalization rates from the swine flu virus:
... The H1N1 swine flu virus killed a vice principal at a New York City school over the weekend and has spread to 48 states. While it appears to be mild, it is affecting a disproportionate number of children, teenagers and young adults.
This includes people needing hospitalization -- now up to 200, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"That's very unusual, to have so many people under 20 to require hospitalization, and some of them in (intensive care units)," Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing. ...
Flu season, health officials say in the article, is usually done by May, so new cases should be ramping downward. Up to 100,000 people may have the new H1N1 flu (as opposed to the regular, seasonal H1N1 or H3N2 viruses) and it seems to be hitting young people much worse than the elderly, which is an unusual pattern.
If you've been stopping by here recently, you probably already know that at least one of the viral ancestors of this current flu was a virus first spotted on a North Carolina factory hog farm. Researchers have been warning for years that the immuno-compromised populations of factory farms, plus their constant vaccinations and antibiotic dosing, are a model breeding ground for epidemic diseases.
Certain people in world governments who don't know any better have responded to the public health threat posed by factory farms by ... wait for it ... decrying the threat posed by small, mixed-species farms, and often slaughtering the animals on such subsistence farms without recompense.
But as it happens, the presence of multiple species of animals can be as much a bulwark against disease as cramped, homogenous populations can be encouraging of it:
... It's obvious that biodiversity is a good thing, but we're still discovering new ways that it helps us. Indeed, a new study gives more evidence that reduced biodiversity can increase the chances that certain diseases will jump from animals to humans. "In the last few years, scientists have increasingly noticed that, when biodiversity dips, rates of Lyme disease, West Nile virus, SARS and other infectious diseases rise. Called zoonotic diseases, these illnesses also spread from animals to people." ...
Biological first principles: 1; Modern efficiency: 0.
As the news article covering the biodiversity research points out, scientists still need to determine which combinations of species are best. But I'd guess they're going to find that the usual equilibrium for a given ecosystem is probably healthiest because if it weren't, that ecosystem would have succumbed to negative selection pressure.
That may sound simplistic, but competition in nature is fierce and constant. Poorly adapted species, or species that couldn't stand up to opportunistic invasions, have fared badly.
Anyway, reality is that we aren't getting back to Eden and the swine flu is out of the bag. But in future, maybe, maybe we could be a little smarter about how we manage things. Because if we're being graded on our natural resource management to date, we're probably flunking out.
Food Production as Net Energy Consumer
Published May 17, 2009 @ 10:47AM PT
The sun has been raining down a large amount of energy on the surface of the planet for billions of years, while the molten core of the planet has been sending heat and various reactive substances to the surface and asteroids rained down water, possibly even the organic compounds that were the building blocks of life.
The heat provided by the sun and volcanic vents on the ocean floors has been used by living organisms to power endothermic chemical reactions. (Pause: An endothermic reaction is an interaction between elements that needs an external energy source to get started.)
The net effect of those reactions has been to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, combine it with things like hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus, and form a gaseous envelope around our planet composed mainly of inert nitrogen gas with a reasonable amount of free oxygen and a few other trace elements thrown in. The new compounds contain and store, in those chemical bonds, some fraction of that energy that can be released on dissolution of the bonds. The energy, the work, captured in all these reactions is enormous.
What needs to be understood about phrases like 'destroying ecosystems' or 'reducing biodiversity' is that they mean the slowing of the mechanisms used to capture the energy of the sun and make it available for living things.
While the sun drops a lot of energy our way ...
... The amount of energy from the sun that falls on Earth's surface is enormous. All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine. ...
... neither we nor our photosynthetic friends are very efficient at capturing it. Life has been around for billions of years, after all, and it has managed to store and bury for the long haul only 20 days worth of sunshine. And while we're using that stored energy at an astonishing rate, we're mainly ignoring the solar wealth constantly raining down on us:
... Every year, the sun irradiates the land masses on earth with the equivalent of 19,000 billion tons of oil equivalent (toe). Only a fraction — 9 billion toe — would satisfy the world's current energy requirements. Put differently, in 20 minutes, the amount of solar energy falling on the earth could power the planet for one year. ...
If this explanation has merely put an extra dimension on how ridiculous our situation is, I will have done my job here. But naturally, I had a point specifically about how this relates to agriculture.
Saving Fish
Published April 30, 2009 @ 03:13PM PT
In the last few decades, as overfishing has decimated fish and crustacean stocks, both species with resale potential and tossed out "bycatch" species, there has been exactly one method discovered that provides for dramatic increases in marine populations: no catch zones.
Not restricting catches to certain times of year. Not restricting sport and commercial fishing to certain species. Not trimming catch quotas.
Only designating certain areas as forbidden to fishing has proved such amazing recovery rates that marine life spills over to rejuvenate surrounding areas. It's extremely effective.
Now, the EU is taking no-catch, aka Marine Protected Areas very seriously in response to a growing scientific consensus about the perilous state of the world's oceans, as Andrew Purvis reports in The Guardian:
A third of the world's oceans must be closed to fishing if depleted stocks are to recover, scientists and conservation groups have warned. Such a measure could "set the clock back 200 years" and reverse the decline in fish populations, after which responsible fisheries management could regenerate the industry.
Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, has reviewed 100 scientific papers identifying the scale of closure needed. "All are leaning in a similar direction," he says, "which is that 20 to 40% of the sea should be protected." Friends of the Earth, the Marine Conservation Society and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds all support the idea of a 30% closure. "What we would see is a flourishing of life," Roberts says. "In 20 years, we could get to a point where a lot of species are in a far more productive state." ...
The article goes on to describe the poor shape of EU fisheries, and successes from declaring certain areas off-limits to all fishing in Iceland, Canada and the US.
I'd point out though, without a global agreement, without import controls that mandate appropriate compliance of fishing fleets operating in the waters of countries with weak regulatory regimes, the problem could just be shifted southwards. Wealthier countries have a good opportunity here to provide backbone to international regulatory regimes as the fishing industry competes for access to their markets.
Will they rise to the challenge or once again punt responsibility for the impact of their appetites?
(Photo credit: PhillipC on Flickr.)
Heifer International on Colbert
Published April 24, 2009 @ 03:12PM PT
Last night, The Colbert Report hosted an interview with Elizabeth Bintliff of Heifer International to talk about their efforts to provide healthy livestock and veterinary support to impoverished communities around the world.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Elizabeth Bintliff | ||||
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As Bintliff alluded to, the reproductive capacity of the natural world is the basis of subsistence rural economies that have little access to cash.
Though to extend the point, it would do better to remember that the reproductive capacity of the world's plants and animals is the foundation of every economy or economic system. As biological beings, our life support needs are intimately tied to the health and abundance of living ecosystems, with their wealth of plant, animal and microbial lifeforms. And as we strengthen the web of life that the world's communities in need depend on, we make it easier to solve the global environmental problems we all face.
Consider helping this good work by donating livestock, useful insects or beneficial plants to a rural community through Heifer International and you can be part of the solution on almost any budget.
A Sustainable Food Supply, Pt 2
Published April 22, 2009 @ 01:49PM PT
When the G8 agriculture ministers are complaining about protectionism, the irony just floors me. Could there be less reliable critics?
Though while they may be enormous hypocrites, they aren't stupid. No one really wants their local farming to completely go away. As Italy's agriculture minister noted at the recent G8 summit, countries should be self-sufficient in food, and every country with the power to do so tries to ensure that they grow enough to feed themselves.
What if there's a war? What if there's a falling out with a trading partner? What if your nation is landlocked and your supply routes are unstable? What if fuel prices go up and long distance transportation becomes prohibitive?
No matter how unlikely, it would be stupid not to think of these things when you have a whole nation to worry about.
And wealthy nations do worry about these things. It's obvious from their actions, even as they encourage poorer countries to focus solely on exports destined for wealthy consumer markets. Indeed, those who can afford it are buying up farmland in poorer countries as a hedge against future food shortages:
... Food supply scare after last year's food riots has pushed several countries, such as China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, to buy or lease farmland overseas to feed their own people.
Quickly nicknamed "land-grabbing," this phenomenon has drawn sharp criticism for ignoring interests of local population. A leader of major international farmer group, IFAP, has said there was a risk of "second-generation colonialism" in such deals. ...
Though what else is encouraging one country to get on the treadmill of export-dependent agriculture besides to secure food for another consuming country? While export agriculture isn't inherently bad, as it's been practiced, it's often been highly exploitive.
So when Emily Gertz points out that eating local isn't necessarily the most direct way to cut your carbon footprint, she's right. Though as she also touches on, it keeps local farms in business, where their sustainability practices can be influenced more easily by those immediately affected and seasonality can return to our dietary expectations.
And while that might seem like a luxury in some US communities (seems, that is, because buying local food is a great way to boost local economies in the US [pdf],) supporting the development of local food security is vital to poorer nations who are more vulnerable to global supply chain and price disruptions. Instead of growing biotech foods for export, they need to be supported through appropriate research and locality specific soil management advice:
