Timothy Wise

Good news on the right to food

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Those of us advocating for changes in global and national policies on food and agriculture just got some good news. The UN Human Rights Council just renewed for another three years the mandate of Olivier De Schutter as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. If you haven’t followed De Schutter’s work since the 2007-8 food price spikes brought renewed attention to the issues of hunger and agricultural development, he has been a clear and uncompromising voice for change. His rights-based approach has taken him well beyond the withering rise of hunger to the roots of the global crisis, linking climate change, agribusiness concentration, commodity speculation, and the ongoing debates of industrial versus agro-ecological development.

Will the UK abandon its climate targets?

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The evidence of this fight at the very heart of government makes it clear that climate change emerges from a structural problem within the capitalist economic system, as green economists have long argued. Both sides in this current spat are right: we must have CO2 emissions, but we cannot have CO2 emissions. The only was to resolve this apparent impasse is to ditch the 19th-century economic paradigm we are still suffering for the ideas of green economics that Caroline Lucas has called ‘the economic paradigm for the 21st century’.

Game Changer: National Wildlife Federation Adopts a Resolution on GDP

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But back to the NWF and its resolution on GDP growth; now that’s a real game changer. For the sake of ecological and economic sustainability, the news could hardly be bigger. We finally have a significant counterweight to the neoclassical nonsense that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.”

Democracy Comes to Town

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On the 6th of May the city council of Sopot in Poland has passed a landmark resolution that starts the process of participatory budgeting in our city. It means that the citizens of Sopot will have a direct say in what the public funds are spent on. We’re beginning with a modest amount of 1.1 million USD – I say “modest”, because it’s less than 1% of the total budget expenditure. Nevertheless, in the city of 37,000 residents many small projects can be funded with this amount.

Sea water farming

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Today mangroves are disappearing fast. Thirty-five percent of mangrove ecosystems disappeared between 1980 and 2000, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Shrimp farms have been a primary cause of mangrove loss, as well as urbanization and agriculture. This is why the message from The Seawater Foundation is of such an importance, as they show how to change and provide hope for the future.

If you don’t like your story, can you create a new one?

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But I realize that, while I’m moving forward in becoming more present in the face of the world’s unbearable suffering, and the violence and other misbehaviour of our human species, I still have much to learn in coping with external criticism and with my deep-seated fears. Maybe by changing my stories that provoke negative emotions, and by changing my coping strategies, I will get better at this. I’m not sure that this isn’t just a rationalization or wishful thinking, however: If I’m really coming to self-acceptance, can I really change those stories or strategies? Is this less anxious, less fearful, less self-hating person really me?

Commentary: A case study of cellulosic ethanol

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The March 28, 2011 edition of the ASPO-USA Peak Oil Review had a brief which I found of considerable interest. It stated: “A perspective paper in Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology makes a case that conversion of biomass to cellulosic ethanol is the most efficient and productive use of biomass to create a high-octane, environmentally friendly transportation fuel. (3/23, #17)”…Is this really the most efficient and best possible use of our wood resources?