Media & Communications

African American Farmers Go Organic, Bring Healthy Food to Southeast

by

At a recent Saturday market, Mary Curley sat at her table, displaying at least two dozen varieties of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. At 70, Mary is the oldest of these African American farmers, and has the smallest farm among them, a quarter-acre. A beatific smile lights up her face as she recites the names of her organic offerings, urging customers to sniff and taste each one: Japanese orange, Thai basil, lemon grass, Cuban oregano, pineapple sage, and serrano, habanera, and banana peppers.

Implications of Unmeasurable Capital

by

I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can’t be Measured.  He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their “capital” is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself.  This rang true to me, and put into words something that had nagged at me in reading about financial reforms, but had not come clearly to the surface of mind.

Make It Forty-Four Shades of Green

by

Last month in “Forty Shades of… Less Brown?,” I described the principle of increasing marginal brownness. This principle establishes that the process of economic growth invariably entails an environmental “browning,” even though some growth regimes are less brown than others. The idea is to use the brown portion of the color spectrum in framing discussions of economic growth. Otherwise it is too easy to fall for the seductive and dangerous rhetoric of “green growth.”

Increasing Global Nonrenewable Natural Resource Scarcity—An Analysis

by

During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time. Supplies associated with an overwhelming majority of the global energy resources, metals, and minerals that enable our industrialized way of life failed to keep pace with increasing global demand during the 2000-2008 period, resulting in global NNR supply shortfalls.