Food & Water

North-South Divide And Tackling Global Warning

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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”?

Living Hero interview with Vandana Shiva

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Around the world civilian rights to food and water are being eroded by the patenting of life forms and by privatization of water systems. Some farmers have been hit with law suits for patent infringement, while they were planting heritage seeds. The outspoken, multi-talented Vandana Shiva, joins us to talk about these and other issues of capitalist globalization. She is a celebrated ecofeminist, grassroots activist, research physicist, author, and international advocate for alternatives to global corporate hegemony.

Why GM Has No Place in a World in Transition

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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.

The Local Food and Farming Revolution

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…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.

Transition Culture roundup – Mar 9

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-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

The Scalability of Biochar

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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.

Recalcitrant Carbon

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KMO welcomes Albert K. Bates back to the program to talk about the themes of his forthcoming book, The Biochar Solution. Could a form of homebrewed carbon sequestration provide a stopgap measure that could buy us time to implement effective atmospheric remediation? Should biochar be considered a form of geo-engineering? How do we prevent carbon credits from becoming the new credit default swaps? All this and music by Zarathrutra.