food security
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Raising water productivity to increase food security
Drip irrigation is a simple and easy way to reduce water use.Photo courtesy of photofarmer via flickr With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce […]
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Plan B – A Plan to Save Civilization
There is much that we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual, including our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends undermining the world food economy, will not last for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. “The death of our civilization is no longer a […]
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Glenn Beck’s survival guide: Food and energy independence
Thinking I’d catch some of the conservative side-show after health care passed, I moseyed over to Glenn Beck’s website to find out when the healthpocalypse will destroy “our” America. But I found something even more shocking. More evidence for Beck’s closet treehugging is coming to the surface. Colbert slammed Beck a few weeks ago for […]
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Data highlights on the global food supply
World agriculture today faces pressure from many sources. On the production side, the amount of unused arable land worldwide has dwindled. Overworked soils are becoming eroded and degraded, and overpumped aquifers are being depleted. Meanwhile, as the global population grows and increasing biofuel production converts grain into fuel for cars, demand for food continues to […]
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Our other addiction: the tricky geopolitics of nitrogen fertilizer
Your food doesn’t come from here, but it starts here: an ammonia factory. We burn through more of it per capita than any other country; and our appetite for it can only be sated with massive imports. No, not oil — I’m talking about nitrogen fertilizer. With only 5 percent of the world population, the […]
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Money’s coming to cool the planet: What’s the winning spending plan?
With their natural resources pilfered, have Native American gambling casinos been payback, a further pillage (described as Tonto’s revenge during the Abramoff scandal) or perhaps both? It’s a relevant debate for today’s global warming talks. During these next weeks of climate change deliberations in Copenhagen, environmental service payment programs will be hammered out. What’s the […]
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A quarter-century later, lessons from the world’s deadliest agrichemical disaster
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. The number of people affected, injured, and killed has been the subject of debate. But it seems clear that a half a million were exposed to some degree to MIC and other chemicals released and approximately […]
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The Copenhagen Conference on food security
For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought. For countries of East […]
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Lester Brown on his must-read new book “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization”
October 13, 2009 Notwithstanding the Superfreaks, a lot of good books on global warming and its solutions are coming out right now (see “The Invention of Lying about Climate Change“). One of the best is Lester Brown’s “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.” In his book, Brown lays out the too-little-discussed but devastating impacts […]
