Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Although the United States has long consumed the lion’s share of the world’s resources, this situation is changing fast as the Chinese economy surges ahead, overtaking the United States in the consumption of one resource after another.
The debate over sustainable agriculture has gone beyond the health and environmental benefits that it could bring in place of conventional industrial agriculture. For one thing, conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on oil, which is running out. [Considers both climate change and Peak Oil]
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reviews Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, by Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute.
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration recently abandoned, without comment, its three-year effort to ban commercial foods made from or containing nonpsychoactive industrial hemp seed and hemp oil.
Journal paper quantifying the degree of
non-renewability of a major biofuel: ethanol produced from industrially-grown corn. Extensive work seriously challenging the right of this process to renewable status, on net energy, soil depletion, and government subidy-dependence grounds.
An excellent practical guide to the techniques of using vegetable oil as a transportation fuel which acknowledges also some of this approach’s large scale limitations.
Industrial agriculture of annual crops may be the most destructive technology on the planet. “Woody agriculture” of perennial nuts may be part of the solution.
You don’t have to be miserable to oppose globalisation and care about the environment. You can eat the tastiest food and drink the finest wine – as an essential part of your mission. William Skidelsky reports
Increases in food production, per hectare of land, have not kept pace with increases in population, and the planet is running out … of arable land. As a result, per-capita cropland has fallen by more than half since 1960, and per-capita production of grains, the basic food, has been falling worldwide for 20 years.
The first phase of a methanol production plant that could become the world’s biggest after completion was inaugurated here Friday by interior ministry and other provincial officials.
A significant surplus in cereal stocks is expected, for the first time since 1999/2000 as global cereal production hits a record 2.04 billion tonnes in 2004, says FAO in Food Outlook.
Almost overnight, South America has driven a historic global shift in food production that is turning the largely untapped frontier heartland of the continent into the world’s new breadbasket.
