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What the World Eats (photo essay)
Peter Menzel, TIME
What’s on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book “Hungry Planet”
(June 2007)
At Gristmill, Ron Steenblik writes:
There is a fascinating photo essay over on Time magazine’s website. Using an approach similar to that used by photojournalists who have posed families in front of their entire household possessions, this one shows what a few families around the world typically purchase to eat over the course of a week.
Not exactly a scientific survey, but revealing nonetheless.
Review: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
Jesse Lichtenstein, Book Forum
The Erosion of Civilizations
by David R. Montgomery
“Predictably-and understandably- more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion will eventually determine the fate of modern civilization.” (Never mind the echoes of that useful old tip “If nothing else kills you, cancer will.”)
For terrestrial life forms, dirt is where it all begins. It is “the skin of the earth-the frontier between geology and biology,” a thin, fragile living blanket that covers a hard, rock planet. Early on, Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and author of King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon (2003), examines the organic and geologic processes that produce soil and cause it to erode. Given enough time, these competing tendencies tend to bring about an equilibrium in soil characteristics and soil type specific to a given place. Agriculture, of course, alters things.
With more thoroughness than narrative snap, much of Dirt is given over to an environmental history of civilizations, which wax and wane over hundreds and thousands of years as they plow up their topsoil, push their land to its limits in order to feed burgeoning populations, and watch the exposed dirt wash or blow away. It then becomes a matter of moving on to steeper, poorer land, importing food (as in the case of imperial Rome), melting away into the jungle, or slaughtering one another over rare arable land. This dirt’s-eye-view of history provides an interesting perspective on a vast range of topics, from the vanishing commons and the rise of private estates in Europe to the drive to colonize the Americas, from slavery and the Industrial Revolution to floods and famines in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. And no book on dirt can pass lightly over the Depression-era Dust Bowl or its lesser-known Soviet counterpart.
Montgomery decries the loss of soil husbandry, the intelligent and long-term stewardship that good dirt requires if we are continuously to extract food from it. Instead, factors such as population growth, a variety of economic ideologies, absentee land ownership, and the profit-driven imperatives of fossil-fuel, agrochemical, and machinery producers continue to press- worldwide-for maximum immediate yield, leading to erosion rates orders of magnitude higher than that at which soil is formed. What is needed, writes Montgomery, is agroecology in place of agrochemistry-a matching of practice to place, an intelligent mimicry of nature in place of genetic jiggering and the ever-less-effective application of ever-dwindling petrochemicals. Urban agriculture, efficient small-scale organic farms, and no-till methods on large-scale farms point a way forward. With the world losing an astonishing 1 percent of its arable land each year (that’s from a 1995 study, so say good-bye to 11 percent of it and add another billion mouths to feed), Montgomery warns that it is time to treat soil “as a valuable inheritance rather than a commodity-as something other than dirt.”
(June/July/August 2007)
A Perennial Search for Perfect Wheat
Jim Robbins, NY Times
PULLMAN, Wash. – It is a gleaming prize for wheat farmers, and environmentally correct, to boot: a perennial food plant that requires plowing only once every three to five years and prevents dust storms, stems soil erosion and even absorbs carbon to help mitigate climate change.
The latest search for perennial wheat, which comes up each year, began a decade ago here at Washington State University, said Dr. Stephen Jones, a geneticist, with a big question: What are the genetics that govern a plant’s annual nature?
“That life-and-death question was fairly simple to answer,” Dr. Jones said recently, standing in a thicket of greenhouse-raised experimental wheat plants that towered over him. “It’s only a single gene that convinces a plant not to die.” Once that gene is bypassed through breeding, “the question is, Does it have what it takes to live?”
That answer is considerably more difficult. A successful perennial wheat not only has to live, but it also has to do it in the right ways: it has to enter a dormant cycle in the fall and then return to life in the spring; it has to look like wheat, have a satisfactory yield and thresh cleanly.
…The key is not yield but predictable survivability. As the first plants prove themselves, they will be planted in erodible areas, like hilltops.
Erosion is the big problem. Scientists say that an average of 12 tons of soil are lost per acre per year to water erosion, and high winds can take a whopping 50 tons of top soil from an acre of bare wheat field in just 24 hours.
The quest here is one of several around the world, to perennialize everything from sorghum to chickpeas to sunflowers. It has taken on new urgency for a variety of reasons, like climate change and soil loss.
“You talk about a cure for the common cold,” said Ken Warren, managing director of the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., which is in the process of breeding a mix of perennial crops, like wheat, sunflowers and sorghum. “You name an abuse from farming,” Mr. Warren said, “from soil erosion to the use of hydrocarbons to pesticides and herbicides, and we can get rid of it with perennial crops.”
(5 June 2007)
Excerpts and commentary from Jon Rynn at Gristmill.
Farming the deep blue sea
Erika Engelhaupt, Environmental Science and Technology
Will offshore aquaculture feed the world or spell environmental trouble? NOAA tests the waters.
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In the late 1980s, Neil Sims had a fisheries biologist’s dream job-working on the turquoise waters of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. But things soured when the season opened for giant clams and pearl oysters. “Despite our best-laid management plans, people rushed out to plunder and pillage,” the native Australian says. One day, Sims spotted an old man in a boat loaded with sacks of oysters.
“Papa,” Sims said, looking them over, “you know you’re not supposed to have these. They’re all undersized and I’m going to have to take them.” Sims says the old man started crying. “Why do you stop this?” he pleaded. “There’s still some left. There’s still some left!”
The old man’s plea summed up for Sims the basic problem with fisheries. People just take too much. Over the last century, humans have become so adept at pulling fish from the oceans-a big ship can catch a ton an hour-that they risk driving many species to extinction.
Today, Sims runs a fish farm in Hawaii called Kona Blue, located in deep waters a half mile offshore. The farm raises a species of Hawaiian yellowtail, and Sims says the company strives for ecological sustainability. He thinks farming the oceans, instead of chasing down wild fish, is the only sustainable way to meet the world’s rising demand for seafood.
Others have their doubts. Citing pollution and disease troubles, they call fish farms “the feedlots of the sea”. Either way, the U.S. is poised to join a growing number of countries in a grand experiment, farming earth’s last great frontier-the open ocean.
Copyright © 2007 American Chemical Society
(30 May 2007)
Brookside Farm – Growing Food, Growing Energy (Video and audio)
Peak Moment
Take a whirlwind tour of the one-acre Brookside Energy Farm with Jason Bradford and Christoffer Hansen at planting time. Along with perennials, annuals, a food forest, and dryland crops (grains), they’re growing Jerusalem artichoke and dale sorghum to produce both food and energy (ethanol). Watch Chris cut sod with a Swiss glaser hoe — a 1/6 horsepower guy! Episode 62.
Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action. How can we thrive, build stronger communities, and help one another in the transition from a fossil fuel-based lifestyle?
(5 June 2007)
