Nobody Grows Them Here Anymore

by: Miep

Tue Jun 21, 2011 at 00:30:43 AM PDT

A Southeastern New Mexico Gardening Ramble

by: Miep

Wed Feb 16, 2011 at 18:13:43 PM PST

(crosspost from Daily Kos)

Adapting to Climate Change through Improved Access to Seed and Information

by: NourishingthePlanet

Fri Feb 04, 2011 at 07:32:10 AM PST

In Dhading province in central Nepal, most people are farmers, who depend on rain-fed agriculture for food and income. But erratic rainfall and natural disasters in recent years, including widespread drought and recurring landslides, are threatening the livelihoods of the region's farming communities.

Ocean Acidification and the End of the Food Chain

by: Eddie C

Mon Jan 24, 2011 at 19:15:42 PM PST

For an organism that lives in the water the two most important factors are temperature and acidity. Before the industrial revolution the ocean pH was approximately 8.179. By the first decade of the 21st century humans had pumped over a hundred and twenty billion tons of CO2 into the oceans, producing a reduction of -0.11 in ocean pH levels. As a logarithmic measure, a .11 drop represents an increase of about 30% in "acidity."

Republicans can't even claim that ocean acidity is being made up by scientist on an agenda because going back as far as the Texas oil boom it was thought that 30 percent of the the carbon emissions would be adsorbed by the oceans and anyone who went to high school learned that dissolving CO2 in water produces carbonic acid.

So as we are facing the biggest food chain crash in the planet's history and the possibility that there might not be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain life on earth in the near future Washington's answer seems to be "If we don't talk about it than it is not happening."

Climate Smart Seaweed Farming

by: NourishingthePlanet

Thu Dec 23, 2010 at 12:28:42 PM PST

While U.S. Politicians Play Dumb About Climate Change...

by: JayinPortland

Tue Nov 23, 2010 at 06:00:00 AM PST

While U.S. Politicians Play Dumb About Climate Change, One Country Is Being Pushed Past the Tipping Point, by Jill Richardson

Many Americans hardly feel the impact of the climate crisis. To see the impact of the climate crisis on a daily basis, head south to Bolivia.

Cookstoves and climate change

by: mental_masala

Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 22:53:06 PM PDT

New articles about cookstoves seem to be appearing weekly. Here's one from Yale's E360 blog by Jon R. Louma that looks at how cookstoves represent an intersection of climate change and human health. The big picture:

Some two billion people around the world, [Lakshman] Guruswami [professor of international law at the University of Colorado] notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass - dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher - about three-fourths.

"Think about that," says Guruswami , who directs his university's Center for Energy and Environmental Security. "Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it."

One of the emissions from these primitive stoves is something called "black carbon," which is a component of smoke that is almost completely made up of elemental carbon. The carbon is aligned into agglomerations of tiny particle in such a way that it has a deep black color (recall that glittering diamonds are also made up of carbon, but the atoms are organized in a significantly different way than the carbon atoms in black carbon). In recent years, black carbon has been receiving more and more attention from the climate change research community, with some estimating that black carbon is the second most important climate change agent after carbon dioxide (see, for example, a report from the Pew Center on Climate Change or one from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University , PDF).

The piece looks at the effect of black carbon on the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau (it reduces the reflectivity of the snow, leading to faster melting) and the work of non-governmental organizations like Envirofit (a stove-designing nonprofit); Trees, Water, and People (which focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti); and Project Surya in India.

Whereas much of the climate change discussion is about carbon dioxide and avoiding major calamity in the future, black carbon is a "now" and "here" issue:  reductions in the emission of the pollutant would lead to immediate health benefits in the developing world (e.g., around cookstoves) and the industrialized world (diesel engines emit black carbon), while also helping to defuse the climate crisis, giving us a little time to get our carbon dioxide emissions under control.

Cookstoves are a hot topic

by: mental_masala

Sun Dec 27, 2009 at 09:43:08 AM PST

If you were to list the top causes of death and sickness in the developing world, cooking would probably be in the top tier (I'd guess that lack of clean water is at the top). In villages and cities across the world, millions cook their food while engulfed in plumes of toxic gases and particulate matter (smoke and soot). Women and children bear the brunt of these toxins: women most often do the cooking and children are often nearby. The source of these toxins is the fire that is burning wood, kerosene, dung, or another material underneath their cooking pots. In addition, gathering the fuel can be risky business, exposing the gatherer to bandits and other nefarious people. One study (PDF) estimates that there are 1.6 million premature deaths and 3.6% of the global burden of disease due to indoor air pollution caused by the use of solid fuels.

This toxic burden has been receiving a lot of attention recently, including a long article in the December 21 & 28 issue of The New Yorker. When the issue arrived a few days ago, I made my usual scan of the table of contents to see what was inside. "A stove to transform the developing world"— the subtitle of an article called “Hearth Surgery” by Burkhard Bilger — caught my eye because I've long had an interest in domestic combustion devices.* So excited was I to see such an august publication covering something as humble as the cookstove that I immediately turned to the article and started reading.

In the first paragraph, I saw the name "Dale Andreatta" and just about fell over. Dale, it turns out, was one of my research colleagues during graduate school in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Even back then Dale had an interest in using engineering to solve difficult problems of the developing world. One project that I remember was solar water pasteurization with low-cost materials — some black trash bags, some sand, a hose, and a temperature switch.** I helped out on a few occasions, but at that time in my life I hadn't yet picked up experimental skills (I was into numerical modeling, the serious experimental work would come a few years later).

World farm voices, Mozambique: peasants of the world unite.

by: Natasha Chart

Tue Dec 22, 2009 at 13:33:16 PM PST

Renaldo Chingore João works a 5-7 acre farm with his family. There, they grow maize, beans and vegetables, keeping 15 cows for meat and milk, as well as draft labor. Though it's a small farm, João and his family don't face the world alone.

They're part of a community that's organized itself for advocacy and mutual support, both within Mozambique and the larger global community of peasant farmers.

ACTION: School Lunch, the EPA, and Climate Change

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Dec 14, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PST

First, from CREDO, school lunch should be better than fast food. Kind of a no-brainer, except for the fact that a recent USA Today article revealed that fast food joints often have higher standards than the USDA's school lunch program. Ouch!

Second and third are alerts by the Organic Consumers Association. There's one about the EPA and one about the role organics can play in fighting climate change.

Blog Action Day: Conserve money and resources without spending a dime!

by: rossl

Thu Oct 15, 2009 at 13:04:29 PM PDT

I posted this last April, but there's no reason why it isn't still useful.  I decided to re-post it because of Blog Action Day today (the topic is climate change).  The last few items on the list are either new or were added due to suggestions from the first time I posted it.  I'll be taking suggestions and adding to the diary as them come in.

I've got an investment opportunity for you.  It doesn't involve a Nigerian prince, a billionaire investor, or any kind of mortgages.  It is not the kind of thing that will cause another financial crisis - in fact, it could help solve multiple crises that we as a nation are facing.

Whether you've been laid off or you're doing fine and just care about the environment, I've got some answers for your problems.  In this diary, I'll try to compile a list of things you can do to save money and conserve our resources without spending any money.  If you have any good ideas in the comments, I'll be sure to update my diary as they come - this is a collaborative effort because this community knows more than any individual.

So join me below the fold to find out how you can save money and save the environment!

Meat and climate change: it might be the system, not the meat that matters

by: mental_masala

Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 22:25:17 PM PDT

A guest post by Maine farmer Eliot Coleman over at Grist got under my skin today.  With a provocative title -- "Debunking the meat/climate change myth" -- and a maddening lack of focus and specificity, he eventually comes to the point that it isn't meat that adds to the climate crisis, but the industrial agriculture system.

Although much of the piece drove me crazy, I can't argue with his overall conclusion that much of the meat's climate change impact can be placed at the feet of industrial agriculture and our nation-spanning food system. Items like the production of soy and corn using chemical fertilizer (emission of N2O), transporting feed and animals (emission of CO2), use of machines (CO2), and so on, contribute a significant amount to the carbon footprint of meat. 

Farm Bureau confident climate change bill going nowhere

by: desmoinesdem

Fri Jul 03, 2009 at 10:02:54 AM PDT

Mary Kay Thatcher, AFBF director of public policy, tells Agriculture Online that Farm Bureau doesn't anticipate the massive climate change bill passed by the House last week to pass the Senate this year.

And the New York Times reported Tuesday that opposition from Farm Bureau and other agricultural groups threatens to kill the bill in the Senate. The Times reports that groups such as AFBF wield greater clout in the Senate, because members there must be protective of an entire state, rather than a small congressional district.

Here are the links to the Agriculture Online piece and the New York Times article.

You may recall that the Farm Bureau Federation lobbied members of the U.S. House to vote for Collin Peterson's lousy amendments to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act but against the bill intended to address climate change.

I have my own problems with the ACES bill, especially the deals made to appease the coal industry and Peterson's colleagues on the House Agriculture Committee. That said, the objections big agribusiness and their Congressional allies have raised against the cap-and-trade approach are off-base and short-sighted.

It wouldn't surprise me if Farm Bureau's vote-counter is correct and the Senate rejects the Waxman-Markey bill for the wrong reasons. Frankly, that might be better than letting senators like Claire McCaskill make this flawed bill even worse.

Sampler Platter: "Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone" Edition

by: JayinPortland

Fri May 15, 2009 at 05:30:00 AM PDT

• Scientists with kitchen utensils and model-train glue represent the last hope for the Puget Sound's pinto abalone.

• We ain't gonna bring back paradise to the parking lots, but maybe we can make something out of them after all.  I remain a Kunstlerian skeptic about those places; but at least our thinking is on the right track these days...

• The online link is subscription-only, but if you have one Harper's has a great piece this month on Alaska's disappearing salmon.

• The birds and the bees still can't catch a break from DDT.

• Speaking of which, almost one in eight bird species worldwide currently face extinction.

• Yeah, when you're resorting to having to catch, sell and eat the babies of a popular fish species, that probably does not bode well for the future of said species...

• The number of eels in European waters are down by 95% over the last 25 years.

• The oldest surviving human culture in the Andes, who've been around for over 4,000 years, may soon become the latest victims of climate change.

• Let's close this out with a bit of good news - this piece of Ancient Oregon is now owned by all of us, and will be preserved forever.

Could Food Shortages End our Civilization as we Know it?

by: Ellinorianne

Thu Apr 23, 2009 at 09:55:54 AM PDT

That's the question that Lester R. Brown asks in his fascinating piece for Scientific American, Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?.  And it's a valid question, especially since those of us in America who have a vast abundance of over processed and cheap food could never even consider this a problem.

For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.

I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy-most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures-forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.