Sustainable environment, free flying and occasional fun.
Joint US/China statement 13/04/2013:
The U.S.A. and the People's Republic of China recognize that the increasing dangers presented by climate change measured against the inadequacy of the global response requires a more… urgent initiative... Both sides consider that the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding climate change constitutes a compelling call to action crucial to having a global impact on climate change.
If people listen carefully to the news, in amongst a whole bunch of trivial stuff, they would hear about growing food problems in the world, certainly price increases now, but probably shortages next year too. You’ve heard of guerrilla gardening? These inspiring videos take the concept further, and legitimise it a bit. It’s a sort of modern day Dig for Victory campaign What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humour, Pam Warhurst tells at the TED Salon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.
A whirlwind of energy and ideas, Stephen Ritz is a teacher in New York's tough South Bronx, where he and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery -- and jobs. Just try to keep up with this New York treasure as he spins through the many, many ways there are to grow hope in a neighbourhood many have written off, or in your own. (Filmed at TEDxManhattan).
Just to keep it local, a commenter to this post points out that "St Mark's church in St Helier noted that it had unused land down one side of the church, so it let a member's son build raised beds for local residents to grow vegetables in. If they can do it, so can others..."
And finally here is more or less the swan song of Andrew Wilford – “Wilf”. Filmed at TEDx a few months before he died. It sort of covers the whole problem. It includes some jaw-dropping figures about the mass of people plus our food animals versus the natural world. He touches on the reasons why unending growth, whether of food supply, energy, economies etc, is no longer possible.
Wilf was a Director of "Be The Change" Australia, President of Quest 2025 (an organisation illuminating the illusory nature of current economic systems) and a Director of Best Futures (a global research organisation focusing on biosocial system transformation). Wilf also worked with the Kokoda Foundation developing National Resource Security Immersive Scenarios examining climate, energy, water, food, ecosystem and economic futures. Sadly, he died on 13 August 2012, aged 48.
The US EPA conditionally approved a new herbicide – Imprelis - for sale last October.The chemical name of the product is aminocyclopyrachlor, one of a new class of herbicides that has been viewed as more“environmentally friendly” than earlier weed killers. Imprelis is used for “improving” lawns by killing broadleaf weeds like dandelion and clover and is sold to lawn care professionals only. Unfortunately reports are coming in of widespread severe effects to conifer trees such as Norway spruces and Eastern white pines. Investigations into the cause are continuing but the application of Imprelis to nearby turf looks to be a significant factor.
Dr. Cregg, an associate professor of horticulture and forestry and an extension specialist with Michigan State University who has fielded many calls from landscapers and inspected affected trees, said the problem existed across the country. He said
“This is going to be a large-scale problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of trees, if not more”
Back in 2009, Volvo Trucks in North America joined 31 other companies in a ten-year energy efficiency challenge issued by the U.S. Department of Energy, and it looks like Volvo has beaten everyone else to the punch. The company has announced that it is the first to meet the energy efficiency goal of a 25 percent reduction for its New River Valley plant in Virginia, and then beating it with 30 percent.
Ever wondered about those small bars of soap they give you in hotels? If you just stay one night or so it seems pretty wasteful if they just throw them away barely used, when they clean your room after you’ve gone. People around the world die every day from acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease because, amongst other causes, they have no soap. Each year more than five million lives are lost to these diseases with the majority of deaths being among children less than five years old. Studies have shown that simple hand washing substantially reduces the spread of these diseases.
Clean the World gets soap to people who really need it. They organise soap collection schemes with hotels etc then sanitise it, ship it overseas, and distribute it
There may not be as much US shale gas as the hype suggested. This link to a June 25th New York Times article Insiders sound an alarm amid a natural gas rush shows that concerns have been raised internally that economically recoverable reserves have been inflated to attract investment, and faster than expected field deterioration rates are suggesting that fields will not last as long, or be as productive as expected. Shale gas was thought, in America, to be a bit of a get out of jail free card for their future energy “needs”, insulating them against many of the consequences of the peaking and decline of conventional oil reserves. Here’s another link Is shale gas a huge Ponzi scheme?
For anybody who worries that the advertising and marketing industry is artificially creating insatiable wants in people, the latest edition of Wired magazine makes disturbing reading.
It describes a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, and it is all about how advertising can trick the part of the brain that deals with long-term memory (the hippocampus).
The experiment used 100 students and introduced them to a non-existent new product, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn. Some of them watched adverts based on slogans and text about how delicious it was; some of them watched what are called ‘high-imagery’ commercials, of happy people enjoying the popcorn at home.
Then they were divided again. Half went to a room and given a sample of the popcorn; half were just given a survey. A week later, they were asked what they remembered.
Here’s the scary bit. Those who watched the high-imagery ad were just as likely to say they tried the popcorn as those which actually did.
Even more scary, they rated the product just as highly as those who had actually tasted it. Also they were extremely confident about their memories. They knew why they liked it – not because of the advert, but because it tasted so good.
This whole story is disturbing on a whole range of levels. But one of them is just how subversive the system is. It desperately tries to keep economic growth higher by selling us things we don’t actually want, and our poor befuddled brains say ‘more!’
After San Francisco banned styrofoam in 2007, over 50 other municipalities in the state of California followed suit, and now, the entire state is poised to make it official–35M+ people will now get their take-out food in containers made from reusable or renewable materials as opposed to the lightweight plastic known as expanded polystyrene. The shift this law (beginning January 1, 2014) will have on the take-out industry as a whole is hard to fathom…it’s realistically the beginning of the end for styrofoam.
Like that of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), this eco label should not be regarded as giving carte blanche to consumers to use/eat as much as they want!
Food price inflation is going to reach severe highs by 2030 and many of the world’s poorest people will not be able to afford to feed themselves. A recent FAO report stated that approximately 1.3 billion tons of food gets lost or wasted every year. It goes on to elaborate that consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). Here’s a 2010 map of global hunger to think about (red areas are regarded as “extremely alarming”). Click on the image for a much larger, higher definition, version.
The report is probably the first of its kind to distinguish between food loss and food waste. Food waste is an entirely preventable phenomenon mostly occurring richer countries involving throwing perfectly edible food away by consumers and retailers alike. Food loss on the other hand occurs mostly in developing economies where poor infrastructure does not ensure optimal preservation of food during processing, transporting and other intermediate steps.
The report states that per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia each throw away only 6-11 kg a year. Considering that agricultural land accounts for roughly 36% of the Earth’s land surface, wasting food is tantamount to wasting nature. Agricultural land is often land that was previously a habitat like grasslands, forests, and even deserts which were previously supporting complex ecosystems. Apart from land usage, agriculture is extremely energy intensive using vast amounts of fuel, fertilizer etc. Food wastage therefore is one of the worse kinds of preventable abominations.
Unilever has been recognized as a sustainability leader in a 2011 survey by SustainAbility, and the Ethical Corporation awarded the company its Responsible Business Award in the High Performance category. CEO Paul Polman talks about how the company has lowered its carbon emissions by 40 percent in the last ten years, how, as a large palm oil producer it is looking to move toward sustainable palm oil, and how it is working to change consumer habits to aid in conservation.
Polman urges other businesses to move toward sustainability. “It is a very simple message: you can wait for governments and use it as an excuse, you can wait for technology and use it as an excuse, but there are many things we can simply do now, and that business can do now. And it does make good business sense. There may be a slight cost in acting in some cases, but I think they are the exception. The cost of not acting and the cost of failure is going to be far higher.”
Many products that one can purchase have “planned obsolescence” built in. They are designed to last a certain length of time and then fail – usually they are also designed to be too expensive to repair economically, forcing most to have to buy another one or the “next generation” model over and over again. Good for GDP but bad for pollution, energy use and depletion of resources not to mention bad for one’s wallet. In short, not very sustainable on several levels.
Marcin Jakubowski has started a project (click link for his Ted talk) to give away blueprints of the 50 most vital machines that are needed to run civilisation. Like Firefox or Linux in the computer world, these are open source so anyone can modify them or improve them. These machines are designed to be built with basic tools and to be robust, long lived and economically repairable. Once people have them, they have them for a long time and a lot of time and effort does not need to be wasted buying them over and over again
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
Esau sold his birthright to Jacob in exchange for a "mess of pottage" (meal of lentils) (Genesis 25:29–34). But that was then. Some areas of the world are now selling both the birthright of their own agricultural land and the “mess of pottage” that it can grow to foreign investors and governments!
Developed countries are becoming increasingly aware of the ramifications of global population growth, climate change, peak oil, peak water, peak phosphorus, peak grain and peak fish. These future pressures on developed countries, which will end up with inadequate local food sources, are causing them to invest overseas to help their food security. In Britain it is said that there is currently only between three to nine days food supply available before food riots would break out if the links in the supply chains start to fail.
This image below is taken from ABC news Australia. It shows areas that are having their agricultural resources bought up by foreign nations. Click this link for the original article - the map markers in the original article are clickable so you can see who’s buying what, where and why.
“Selling the Farm” on the great Cruxcatalyst blog inspired this post.
During the 2008 election campaign Daniel Wimberley, Chris Perkins, Mark Forskitt and myself repeatedly mentioned that food security would become an issue in the future as the twin drivers of climate change and peak oil disrupted agriculture. I don't think the man in the street has been very well informed by the powers that be of what is in our future. Whether that is because the "powers" are ignorant, particularly locally, of the facts and the probabilities or whether they are aware but are keeping it quiet, for Machiavellian reasons, is anybody's guess.
I will be commenting on and suggesting things for Jersey's Rural Economy Strategy White Paper, which is open for consultation now, in order to try and give issues such as peak oil and food security the more appropriate higher profile they deserve. A quick glance through shows that the White Paper contains many switched-on ideas, including the idea of a triple bottom line - people, planet, profit although unfortunately they put them in this order - profit, people, environment!! However, the paper is still a bit coy about mentioning the full scenarios and potential consequences we face. The problem with consultation exercises like this is that when they are finalised, the wording is set in stone, so to speak. Having taken part in them before, I can assure the reader that the people responsible for collating responses will tend to reject the more hard-line ideas in favour of a sort of bland consensus average - as if this sort of distorted democratic view will somehow accord best with the realities that we need to face up to. It won’t. The popular vote never changed the laws of physics, biology and maths.
Once these bureaucrat-written and edited documents are set in stone, like the Ten Commandments, they tend to become holy writ to some, thus attracting a spurious faith in their content which unfortunately is to often non-divine… If they are not successfully challenged before they are finalised they will become a deadweight in future because their inadequate scope will be used to shape other policies and documents which will just not be sustainable enough - we would end up jumping 6 feet over a twenty foot crevasse which will initially give (to the naive) the impression of moving rapidly towards our sustainability goal but will end up with us broken at the bottom. It was just such inadequate pseudo-sustainability thinking that was in evidence in the decisions and strategy of the T&TS Department vis à vis our almost complete incinerator...
Here’s a video about the general subject of food security and climate change etc.
I almost titled this post "Peak Everything" but that will be for another day. Anyone who follows environmental matters will, by now, be sick of hearing about climate change - although it's going to have a huge impact on our future. If we voluntarily take action to avoid the worst by transitioning to a non-fossil fuelled sustainable economy A.S.A.P., then a whole lot of the ways we do things now will have to change, or be radically modified. If we don't take any action, or if we don't take enough action, then a whole lot of the ways we do things now will change, whether we like it or not. It won't be voluntary or under our control - we will be forced.
Food security in the future, although less publicised, is another huge problem that we are going to have to contend with. Conventional agriculture cannot give us the security of supply that the 6.7 billion (so far) inhabitants of Earth need. The only way we are feeding that many people is because of artificial fertiliser, which is made - in an energy intensive process – from fossil fuels. Literally, feeding the current world depends on us "eating" oil. If we take no voluntary action now to head off the forecast problems, they will likely overwhelm us as Nature forces changes on our civilisation that will be much worse than any possible effects of the prudent action we should have taken.
Which brings me to the title of this post. Perhaps even bigger than the food security problem is "peak water" which refers to the even less publicised problems ahead with fresh water. Both quality and quantity. Water is even more vital to life than food.
Below is, first, a trailer to “Flow” Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis. After that, in bite-size 10 minute chunks, is the documentary itself. Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question "CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?"
As this is such a huge topic to cover, the film obviously has to simplify and skate over some aspects but that shouldn’t be a criticism – just concentrate on the overall feel of the narrative and the massive relevance to everyone’s future.
Coming up is a new movie to be released very soon called "Food, Inc". It shows graphically how agribusiness has turned the production of food into an industrial process. I'll get back to the film later but first I'd like to talk about why the way that most food is created these days cannot continue for much longer.
One of the biggest “challenges” (hate that word) facing us in the years ahead will be food security. This seemingly innocuous term basically comes down to how will we continue to be able to get enough to eat, seeing as how we have a constantly growing population (6.6 thousand million plus)? The foundations that we base our current agriculture on, that we absolutely rely upon, which include a stable climate and the availability of cheap energy to manufacture artificial fertilisers, are cracking.
There are estimates that, without artificial fertilisers, conventional agricultural methods can only support a global population of around 2 billion tops. As the Americans say – go figure!
Climate change, particularly shifts in temperature zones and rainfall distribution patterns will also have a massive effect. Mostly, not good. The increased CO2 will NOT be a help to growing more food (see my blogpost about the denialist myths about food production and increased CO2).
Perhaps more obviously, the imminent effects of peak Oil (look at this Guardian article for a "sooner than we think" foretaste) will make artificial fertiliser increasingly expensive and eventually unobtainable. Readers will be familiar with the term Peak Oil but there is also the less well known Peak Phosphorus to be concerned about. The main “active ingredients” in artificial fertiliser are N, P and K (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). Potassium is in plentiful supply and will not be a problem. The fixing of nitrogen to make the nitrate in fertilizer is a highly energy intensive process which depends upon cheap, plentiful, fossil fuel supplies, which of course we have to wean ourselves off anyway as they decline, not to mention their destabilisation of the climate. Phosphorus, to make phosphate, is mostly mined - once we get down to the dregs of our phosphorus reserves there is currently no easily or cheaply available alternative supply to prop up conventional agriculture and some say our dwindling reserves will start to run out by around 2050 and that the “peak” will be around 2030 - see this Times article from last year.
Today, June 12, Food, Inc. from the makers of An Inconvenient Truth will begin its national release in major cities across the USA. Use Food, Inc. to make change!.
In unveiling the "highly mechanized underbelly" of industrial agriculture, Food, Inc. covers issues ranging from agribusiness's corporate control of the food system, to food safety, and farmer and food-worker exploitation. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Food, Inc. is more than just a documentary - it's a riveting cautionary tale." Buzz has been many months in the building: Food, Inc. has been showing in film festivals, word-of-mouth screenings, and in government officials' offices around the country
Here’s a good review from the Los Angeles Times. Food, Inc. reveals how a handful of corporations control our nation's food supply while cashing in on the myth that our food comes from idyllic, community-scale farms.
According to food reporter Michael Pollan, "Food, Inc. is the most important and powerful film about our food system in a generation." For months, the documentary has been showing in festivals, word-of-mouth screenings, and in government officials' offices -- including one "uncomfortable" screening with USDA (US Department of Agriculture) head, Tom Vilsack. It will show in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York on Friday, and roll out to fifty-plus cities in the weeks thereafter. Pesticide Action Network is one of 20 social change organizations engaged by the filmmakers to link outraged moviegoers to opportunities for action -- others include United Farm Workers, Humane Society, and Organic Consumers Association. PAN has also contributed a chapter on pesticides and farmworker exposure to the film's companion book, Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer - And What You Can Do About It. The movie touches on issues ranging from its primary focus on Monsanto and other agribusiness's government influence and control over what we eat, to food safety, and farmer and food-worker exploitation.
If people listen carefully to the news, in amongst a whole bunch of trivial stuff, they would hear about growing food problems in the world, certainly price increases now, but probably shortages next year too. 
