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Umbra on gifts for your school

Hi Umbra, I’m the senior president for my high school class. My cabinet and I want to leave a “green” gift to the school. We would like it to be something that is on campus or easily visible. Can you recommend anything in the $10,000 to $15,000 price range or below? I go to a […]

Videoz

The adventures of Keep America Beautiful Man! Episode 1: Episode 2: Episode 3: (h/t: Hugg)

Money Makes the World Not Drown

British retailers launch climate campaign, UBS unveils global-warming index Eight companies in Britain have launched a campaign called “We’re in This Together,” offering products and price cuts to help customers lessen their eco-impacts. Leading retailers Tesco and B&Q, for example, halved the costs of light bulbs and insulation, and a cell-phone company will pay a […]

Johnson Takes a Pounding

EPA administrator spars with Senate over climate action Senate Democrats badgered EPA administrator Stephen Johnson yesterday about the agency’s greenhouse-gas foot-dragging. They unleashed a barrage of questions at an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, focusing on the recent Supreme Court ruling that said EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide vehicle emissions. Faced […]

Video … on the interwebs!

Hey kids, are you hip to the steez on carbon offsets? Well, check this shizzle out! Here, Christie Todd Whitman talks about Bush and Cheney “flipping the bird” at the rest of the world (probably the first time this blueblood has ever used that phrase): Here, Frank Luntz continues to fail to realize what a […]

Lots o’ goodies

The Nation has devoted its current issue to "surviving the climate crisis," and it’s chock full o’ good stuff. First up is Jim Hansen, the World’s Least Censored Censored Scientist, who recommends the following five steps: "First, there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to […]

Nothing sexier than debates over ethics!

I forget where I found this, but there’s a good piece on Environmental Research Web about the moral aspects of geoengineering. The author, UW prof Steve Gardiner, raises several concerns, but for my money, this is the most telling: It is not silly to think that substantial investment in geoengineering will itself encourage political inertia […]

Feeding the world sustainably

(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)

If heaven was a pie it would be cherry
Cool and sweet and heavy on your tongue
And just one bite would satisfy your hunger
And there'd always be enough for everyone
-- Gretchen Peters, "If Heaven"

Agriculture for food and fiber represents another significant category of environmental impact. Before we worry about how to farm, we should consider how much agriculture we need. If you read the technical news, when this subject comes up it always centers on how to increase food production for a hungry world.

This is completely misleading. There is enough food produced (including meat and fish) worldwide not just to feed everyone on the planet, not just to make everyone fat, but to make everybody morbidly obese. Counting grain, beans, roots, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other plants and fungi (not including animal feed), plus livestock, dairy, fish, eggs, and other animal products raised for human consumption, we produced nearly 2,800 calories per person per year in 2001[1] -- including 75 grams of protein. 2,200 calories per day is generally accepted as the average needed to keep a person healthy -- neither losing nor gaining weight[2]. 56 grams of protein is the U.S. RDA for adult men[3].

Many people have higher requirements than this -- most grown men, pregnant and lactating women, athletic women. (As one instance, Lucy Lawless used to perform gymnastics and horseback riding in fairly heavy armor ten or more hours per day while starring in "Xena - Warrior Princess," and probably burned 6,000+ calories daily at the peak of her schedule.) Children, and median-height adult women, generally need less. Below 2,200 calories, and 56 grams on average, is considered an absolute shortage; if we allow a comfort and safety margin, that would mean we want at least 2,300 calories on average per person available worldwide.

How big an increase do we need to keep up with population growth? According to the U.S. Census[4], if you assume the same production with projected increases in population we will still average ~2,500 calories per person per day in 2010, ~2,300 per day in 2020. Without no cultivation of more acreage or increase in production per acre, we then approach absolute scarcity, falling to 1,900 in 2050. We need no increase in total food production before 2020, and only a 21 percent increase by 2050.

Moreover, in one sense the problem of getting that increase is already solved.

Willie Corduff has taken arms against a sea of Shell troubles

Willie Corduff. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. “We’d never objected to anything in our whole lives,” says Irish farmer Willie Corduff. But when Shell Oil proposed to put a high-pressure gas pipeline through his family farm, Corduff changed his quiet ways. He and a handful of his neighbors refused to allow Shell on their property — […]

Ts. Munkhbayar fights destructive mining in Mongolia

Ts. Munkhbayar. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. Born into a family of Mongolian herders, Ts. Munkhbayar remembers when the livestock was healthy, the water was clean, and kids went ice skating on the nearby river. “I had a very happy childhood,” he says. In the early 1990s, a gold-mining boom overshadowed all that; because of widespread […]