Agriculture headlines
•China’s Bad Earth •Pesticides, fungicides harming bee colonies, UM study says •Can Agriculture Reverse Climate Change?
agriculture
Climate headlines
•Reuters’ climate-change coverage ‘fell by nearly 50% with sceptic as editor’ •Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas •Arctic methane ‘time bomb’ could have huge economic costs
Food & agriculture – June 4
•Breaking the grass ceiling: On U.S. farms, women are taking the reins •The USDA’s Latest Report on Energy Use in Agriculture •More Than Honey •Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China? •Peak Water, Peak Oil …Now, Peak Soil?
Water – June 3
•Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust •How to Save Water-Starved Cities •Water may reshape energy industry •Analysis: China: High and dry •Stressed Ecosystems Leaving Humanity High and Dry
The Serious Challenge of Our Time
We are now forced to address the legality of ecological exploitation if we are to achieve the high law of morality to protect our ecosphere.
Much ado about phosphorus
The problem here is, that we’ve switched from a closed loop system where the waste from the farm house goes into the farm yard and all the phosphorus can recycle, to a linear system where the phosphorus gets mined…
Can Rebulding Local Food Systems Help Promote Renewable Energy?
As soon as we begin using the word “farming” again, all of the implicit associations with farming begin to reemerge in our shared thoughts and language
If Climate Change and Population Growth Are Going to Push Food Prices Up by 50%, What Happens When you Add in Peak Oil?
Nearly everyone is failing to take into account the role of geology, oil and energy limits in their predictions – and we’re racing towards disaster.
The Lives of Others
If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from.
Global Food Prices Continue to Rise
Continuing a decade-long increase, global food prices rose 2.7 percent in 2012, reaching levels not seen since the 1960s and 1970s but still well below the price spike of 1974. Between 2000 and 2012, the World Bank global food price index increased 104.5 percent, at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent.
When you can’t dazzle’em with brilliance, baffle’em with definitions
Actually, Jason Godesky is rather brilliant; his 30 Theses deserve a good look. He struggled mightily with defining horticulture and agriculture, did not quite get it right, but made a lot of good points. Can I do better? Or at least, can I come up with something that will enable us to communicate more clearly about these matters? With trepidation, I am giving it a shot. The purpose of this post is not to find the Right and Correct definition, but to untangle the definitional knots so that we can talk with one another and get somewhere.
No guarantees
In Agriculture: villain or boon companion, I argued that we sapiens have been cultivators since time immemorial, that a combination of foraging and cultivation is a sensible, durable way of life that has served us well, and that the “origin of agriculture” really is the intensification of cultivation that becomes visible in the archeological record.
