Signs From Earth

Fries with that? Study says potato introduction may have been among the most important human advances (via @FP_magazine)

 
 Grumpy potato photo by banger1977/flickr 

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/hot_potato

"...The importance of potatoes first hit home for co-author Nancy Qian during a trip to rural Rwanda, where she noticed something about her hosts' diet. "All they were eating were potatoes," she says..."

"...Qian, along with Harvard University's Nathan Nunn, decided to see how universal the connection was. Looking at population trends from 1700, when the potato was introduced to the Old World, to 1900, they estimated that 12 percent of the population growth and 47 percent of the urbanization during this period was directly potato-related. ..."

Posted via email from Signs From Earth Notes

Climate Change vs. National Security

 A coal fired power plant in Germany. Action against causes of climate change is tied to significant reduction in world use of fossil fuels. Photo: davipt/flickr

Slowly the idea seeps into major media mindset that climate change presents challenges far beyond polar bears and melting ice, that political stability and security of nations also are at risk. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, carbon emissions affect how the atmosphere works, and this in turn impacts stability and security of food and water supplies, and eventually survivability of societies.

The question remains whether these concerns linking continued use of fossil fuels and their impact on global climate will make a meaningful difference in the views and actions of policymakers and the public. 

John Broder reports in an August 9 New York Times article, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security,"  that climate change impacts in other nations, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, could demand an American humanitarian or military response.

“The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Costa Rica Said to Be Happiest Place

The place to be these days is Costa Rica, if you seek a spot on earth where happiness abounds, or at least is in measurably greater quantities than the alternative. This according to the Happy Planet Index 2.0, which gave runner-up status to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Nine of the top ten nations in the index are in Latin America.

Apparently happiness is not in great surplus globally, as the New Economics Foundation, patron and host of the survey, has renamed the index website "The (Un)Happy Planet Index 2.0." 

So if you are looking for a hangout with more happiness potential than your current outpost, here is the resource to locate that new address. To produce its rankings, the unhappy planet index adds up measures such as life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint.

In case you are interested, the United States ranks 114th of 143. Apparently our huge cars, mega-mortgage starter mansions, and endless credit card debt aren't always tickets to happiness. Perhaps, among other things, our ecological footprint is working against us.

Below: A map of the world, color coded by the Happy Planet Index. Countries in red are said by the index to rank poorly in at least two of the three measures.

 

National Security Equals Natural Security

 

The New Security Beat reports on a conference, new blog, and paper out this week from the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the intertwined relationship between national security and natural resources security.

Abstract of Paper, Natural Security: "In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.”  This concept paper outlines a new program of study at the Center for a New American Security to look at emerging natural resources challenges in six key areas of consumption and consequences – energy, minerals, water, land, climate change, and biodiversity – as well as the ways in which these challenges are linked together. Any solution to the country’s energy insecurity is likely to involve water, non-fuel minerals, and land-use issues; climate change and biodiversity cut across all concerns, with broad effects on resource vulnerability. Without an integrated, national-level approach that links together natural security challenges, the United States runs the risk of trading one dependency for another and exacerbating the consequences."

PDF of CNAS Working Paper: Natural Security

Climate Change: The Problem for Others

The political reporting site fivethirtyeight has produced an inverted pyramid graphic that well explains why concern for climate change, global warming, global weirding, you name it, is a problem not for us to worry about. 

It's just too abstract, far off, something for others to furrow their brows for.

According to the results of a survey out this spring, climate change is something for plants and animals, future generations, people in developing countries, and others, but not me, to be concerned with. And this is why little or nothing gets done to reduce carbon emissions. If we have to choose between solving the problems in front of us or those facing others or the future which to choose?

This is a visualization of the results of a study, Climate Change in the American Mind, published recently by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.  

Yet the main problem we face with kicking the can down the road, allowing heat-trapping carbon to keep building in the atmosphere, is that unless we set ourselves on a pathway towards drastically reducing our emissions now, little we do in the future will matter, as has been written here and many places elsewhere previously:

Signs From Earth: A Thousand Years of Warming Ahead

Signs From Earth: Hot Planet - Our Path Ahead

 Sources:

Climate Refugees: Where to Call Home?

The low-lying Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean are vulnerable to rising seas. Photo: danksy/flickr

Polar bears aren't the only ones losing their homes to rising temperatures. Look further along the chain of knock-on effects from rising temperatures, and one sees us in line to reap a harvest of dislocation.

The accumulating inventory of visible impacts from climate change -- melting glaciers and ice sheets, disappearing snowpacks, rising seas, coastal erosion, shifting coastlines, more droughts, more floods, increased frequency and intensity of fires -- are all reshaping the places we inhabit, and in time stand to affect where and how we live.

First in line for disruption -- that is unless you live in drought-and-fire-prone regions of southern California -- are the low-lying islands such as the Maldives, Tuvalu, and the coastal regions of river delta nations like Bangladesh. Significant coastal sections of Alaska along the Beaufort Sea already are melting into the rising sea.

The New York Times reports on Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed's effort to find new lands for his people. With an average elevation of about four feet above sea level, this Indian Ocean island chain will eventually disappear under rising seas. As ice sheets in places like Greenland melt, and the seawater itself warms and expands, places like the Maldives are set to slowly vanish beneath the waves.

Besides seeking a new landing spot for his citizens, Nasheed is also trying to make the Maldives achieve what most of the carbon-spewing first world cannot: carbon neutrality. 

...“What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said, his high voice cracking. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.” Nasheed didn’t use notes for his speech; aides say he never does. “And so today,” he continued, “I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world.”...

New Climate Change Film: The Age of Stupid

Opening in the UK this week is the new climate change film The Age of Stupid. The film is based on the life of a man (Pete Postlethwaite) living alone in 2055 who looks looks back at films from 2008 and wonders why we didn't do anything to stop global warming when we had the chance. 

It was bankrolled by what is called "crowd-funding," with shares sold to individuals and groups. U.S. screenings begin with the San Francisco Film Festival in April, with theatric release said to be September.

Review in The Guardian; CBS News: The Age of Stupid Cometh

Earthman's Jammin' Climate Song

If the relentless media drumbeat of climate doom has you feeling low, check out this rockin', sockin', "Climate Crisis Jam" presentation from the Earthman Project. 

Uplifting, engaging, empowering, fun, great for the kids, and to the point. Thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress for the heads up. 

The Earthman Project is part of the Captain Planet Foundation.

Friedman Channels Jim Kunstler, Wendell Berry

Apparently Thomas Friedman has come to the realization that the rapacious, energy-intensive living arrangements we created the past half century aren't working so well. It's about time.

Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times makes me wonder if he has secretly been reading James Howard Kunstler and Wendell Berry. If he has, he doesn't admit it.

Kunstler for years has said we have been living way beyond our means (and will pay for this excess) via his book The Long Emergency and his weekly column:

(March 2, 2009: What Next?)..."The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.

"If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales..."

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Wendell Berry laid this all out last May in Harpers' Magazine: Faustian Economics--Hell Hath No Limits:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves...."

Friedman's March 8 New York Times piece, "The Inflection is Near?:

"...What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Trees Die for Your Wipes

 

johnarobb/flickr

Our transition from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents appears well on its way. People using CFLs save money on electric bills, the bulbs last longer (mostly), and less energy is needed to light up the night. (Don't ask about the color of light.) 

So if we can change our light bulbs why not change our toilet paper? Fluffy toilet paper appears to be the next resource-wasting target for the environmentally attentive. 

Do we really need all those thick air-laden layers to cushion our derriere? Why not use recycled paper to get the job done? Those questions are unrolled by the New York Times: Mr. Whipple Left it Out: Soft is Rough on Forests

"...fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them...."

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Perhaps we could recycle those old newspapers to make our TP?

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The Guardian: American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'

Australian Herald Sun: Bottom Reached - The Reusable Toilet Wipe

Rebuilding America From City to Farm

 

Map from The Atlantic showing "Top 30" city population across the United States in 2007. A related article contemplates which cities and regions will benefit or wither once, if, the country pulls out of this current economic tailspin.

What will America's inhabited landscape look like, where and how will people live and move about, which cities and surrounding regions will thrive or wither after the clouds clear from our housing and economic collapse? (If they clear?)

Some ponder this post-crisis reshaped landscape, while others like small farmers already invent an emerging future that differs from the recent past.

In an Atlantic article How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida assesses regions and cities that will likely "win or lose." He thinks that some "mega-regions" with educated and creative classes will prosper, but old-line manufacturing and sunbelt regions that built false prosperity on debt-laden housing "booms" will implode. Suburbia and its housing bubble spawn, exurbia, likely will shrink.

An accompanying interactive map The Shaping of America examines trends in patent, income, and population across America to give a geographical sense of our stocks of past and current intellectual and human capital. In a related Q&A Florida ponders whether the recent "stimulus" package will just throw money after places doomed to collapse instead of focusing on building forward-looking infrastructure like intracity passenger railways that can create regional strength. 

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2007 census of agriculture, and within the data are harbingers that the "get big or get out" conventional wisdom espoused by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s is being challenged by new farmers on the ground.

The number of farms is up, and the face of farming grows diverse as the number of women running farms has risen about 30 percent. For sure very big farms dominate in terms of overall production, and mid-size farms are being sucked up by the very big. But within we see a boom in very small farms, where people also hold down a day job. 

Map from NYT, Farm Living 

People are moving back to the land and reclaiming a connection to the food in their lives. Perhaps what goes around comes around, and as the bloom is off suburbia we will see a reshaping of the suburban landscape and continued growth in "subfarmia," more small-scale farms near cities that grow the food city people eat. 

In the interim perhaps it is time to grow your own garden, if you have not already started.

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

Worldwatch Book Offers Climate Solutions

Chris Flavin and associates at Worldwatch Institute released this week their annual State of the World book on global environmental issues, challenges, and opportunities.

This year's edition focuses on meeting the challenge of climate change. Called Into a Warming World, this year's volume provides the most accessible and readable resource available today on understanding climate change and what to do about it.

The book's chapters and other resources are available online.

Started more than a quarter century ago by Lester Brown, Worldwatch Institute has been publishing State of the World for 26 years. This is the series' first single-topic issue, focusing on solutions to this pressing challenge.

Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote the book's foreword, available online:

“This edition of State of the World brings out clearly the difference between inaction based on a business-as-usual approach and action to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

...”State of the World 2009 has framed the challenge appropriately by emphasizing the importance of not only new technologies but also a very different approach in terms of human behavior and choices. An important element of future solutions is a different form of global governance-one that would create a high level of seriousness in the implementation of global agreements.”

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Press Release: Heat and Hope: Time Running Out for Steep Emissions Cuts

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BBC Report: World needs "radical cuts" in CO2

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Worldwatch also has available for free download a roadmap to low-carbon energy that shows how we could create a global economy based energy sources other than fossil fuels.

Written by Flavin, the report surveys the technologies that could build a low-carbon global economy in years ahead. 

Farm Bill: Taking the Long View

Wes Jackson of The Land Institute and Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry propose a different approach to farm bills that transcends the commodity, lobbyist, and subsidy driven approach we have now. 

They propose an approach that addresses the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

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New York Times Op-Ed: A 50-Year Farm Bill

"The extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

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"Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government...

Links:

Edge: World Question Center 2009

The Edge Annual Question — 2009

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"