Archive for November, 2009
« Older Entries |The environmental toll of wasted food in America
Friday, November 27th, 2009
Roberta Kwok at Journal Watch Online highlights a new PLoS study1 describing the environmental cost of wasted food—almost 40% of our food supply. Here’s a summary of the study:
Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. Here, we calculate the energy content of nationwide food waste from the difference between the US food supply and the food consumed by the population. The latter was estimated using a validated mathematical model of metabolism relating body weight to the amount of food eaten. We found that US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ~50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ~300 million barrels of oil per year.
The implications are significant:
- The 1,400 kcal of food energy wasted by each American every day is almost enough energy to feed another person each day. That’s roughly 300,000,000 more people on the planet we could feed with our food waste alone.
- The oil used to make wasted food is about a 15-day supply for the U.S.
- Let’s also not forget the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow this food, some of which ends up contributing to nutrient pollution issues like eutrophication.
- And if this food waste ends up in the landfill, it contributes to methane production and climate warming.
1 Hall, K. et al. (2009). The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact PLoS ONE 4(11).
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Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, sustainability | 1 Comment »
David Orr ends his column at Conservation Biology with some final thoughts about nature and culture
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
After 21 years of writing a column for the journal Conservation Biology, here are a few excerpts from Orr’s final piece—a retrospective1:
- I believe that all of us working for a habitable planet should have focused more clearly on politics and on the question of how good ideas move across the chasm from being right to being effective in the conduct of our public and international business.
- I think we should have learned to be more adept, personable, and creative in talking to the public and the guys down at the truck stop and the women working two jobs to make ends meet. I think we might have gone to fewer scientific conferences in exotic places and to more Rotary meetings and tedious city council sessions. We should have talked less often to ourselves in a scientific jargon and more often to the public and in the common tongue. And we should have mastered the art of persuasion on radio and television the way some others have. We in the “environmental movement” are sometimes accused of being effete, overly intellectual snobs more concerned about nature than people, and there is some truth to that.
- [W]e know enough right now to make far better decisions than we typically do about wildlife, ecosystems, and landscapes….What ails us, rather, is fundamentally political and is the result of the yawning chasm between the world of science (and intellect generally) and that of public affairs.
- [T]he worldwide conversation about sustainability and the human future is larger than just the issues of biodiversity, pollution, climate change, land use, and resource scarcity.
- [W]e are rapidly becoming an indoor species with fewer people spending time outdoors and with fewer experiential connections with nonhuman nature.
- Finally, 21 years ago it would have been difficult to plausibly imagine the scope, scale, and rising intensity of the global movement to build a decent, fair, and sustainable world. The resilience of the human spirit in difficult times is the news of our age.
1Orr, D. (2009) retrospect and prospect: The unbearable lightness of conservation. Conservation Biology23, No. 6, 1349–1351
Tags: David Orr
Posted in communication and framing, environmental studies, environmentalism, nature and culture, race and class | 1 Comment »
Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 4: Making it happen
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Overview
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 1: What a changing world means for our graduates
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 2: Understanding the cultural context of environmental literacy
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 3: Framing contemporary problems
We should work towards the goal of creating a curriculum where the majority of students are learning environmental perspectives outside Environmental Studies (ES) programs.
ES programs are often the focal point for environmental education and scholarship. It seems natural, then, for ES programs to deliver environmental literacy (EL) to the academic community. But giving ES responsibility for EL absolves the rest of campus from addressing it. Our disciplinary silos remain intact. If, as many suspect, traditional, disciplinary structures produce graduates unprepared to meet contemporary environmental and social challenges, higher education needs to re-frame the disciplines. ES programs are certainly key to this conversation, but all disciplines need to be part of this transformation. Environmental issues are increasingly covered in political science, economics, history, and philosophy courses. We could do more to show students how environmental changes are relevant to civil society, social traditions, and other expressions of the human condition.
Environmental literacy needs to grow from the bottom up—from faculty and students realizing the importance of using multiple frames of analysis. Faculty in ES could take a leadership role in providing information, helping faculty understand concepts, and identifying useful case studies. Issues can be framed through the use of readings, papers, field trips, issues, media, case studies, and other approaches, where students would have the opportunity to explore how an environmental perspective adds meaning and important new perspectives to their understanding of disciplinary issues and experiences. Faculty outside ES programs have an active role to play in thinking about which connections they’d like to emphasize in their courses. There are many courses on the books that include potential ES or ES-related material without being fully self-conscious about it. With a little retooling, it can be as simple as asking a different set of questions about existing reading and subjects.
Women’s Studies, International Studies, and Ethnic Studies programs have undergone this transition and can serve as a useful template. In the last decade, disciplines have become more international, multicultural, and focused on issues of power and identity. The environment now needs a similar nudge.
And there should be reciprocity. As mentioned in the previous posts (here and here), ES programs could do a much better job of incorporating how issues of race, class, gender, power, and culture inform attitudes on the environment.
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Posted in environmental literacy, environmental studies, higher education, nature and culture | 1 Comment »
Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 3: Framing contemporary problems
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Overview
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 1: What a changing world means for our graduates
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 2: Understanding the cultural context of environmental literacy
Understanding environmental change and its impact on natural and social systems is a critical frame of analysis that needs to be added to the repertoire of student perspectives (such as race, class, gender, and power) and competencies (such as writing, quantitative skills, and languages). Each of these frames/skills is an arrow in the quiver of a 21st century liberal arts education.
Upon graduation, students encounter problems—environmental change, poverty, war, disease, injustice. An environment frame, together with race, class, gender, and power frames, is critical for a more-sophisticated understanding of (1) environment within a social context and (2) society within an environmental context. That is, it is not just about habitat, charismatic animals, or big government/corporate policy, but about all of the ways that the social and the cultural intersect with questions surrounding environment — What is nature, how it is implicated in our lives, who benefits and who loses from environmental harm, what issues of power and identity are invested in environmental discourses, how do we make policy or economic decisions given these questions?
Adding an environmental frame to courses does not connote advocating a particular agenda or ideology. Rather, it is one of several analytical frameworks that allows faculty and students to evaluate critically the interconnected dimensions of our contemporary world.
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Posted in environmental literacy, environmental studies, higher education, nature and culture | 2 Comments »
Climate warming worse than previously thought because plants become nutrient starved?
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
The biosphere—the sum of all living organisms on earth—has tremendous influence on our atmosphere and climate. One active area of research is how the biosphere might respond to rising atmospheric CO2 and temperatures and how this change, in turn, can influence (“feed back on”) climate change.
There are several reasons to believe that the biosphere will generate positive feedbacks on climate (i.e., things that cause warming to accelerate) as a result of warming. For instance, rising temperatures can
- increase soil organic matter decomposition, causing the release of CO2 to the atmosphere, which causes more warming;
- increase permafrost thaw, thereby releasing old carbon and methane bubbles previously locked in a deep freeze;
- cause treeline to advance northwards. As conifer trees move north, the formerly tundra landscapes darken as evergreen trees replace open expanses of snow in the winter. This causes regional climate to warm. In fact, one study1 showed that without its boreal forest tree cover, Canada would be about 5-10 degrees C colder in the winter and spring!
Positive feedbacks are a nightmare scenario because they mean that climate can warm faster than we currently expect, indicating that we have even less time to deal with it. This is part of the reason why scientists are beginning to sound the alarm that CO2 is rising faster than expected and the impacts warming are happening faster than predicted.
There are also reasons to believe that the biosphere will generate negative feedbacks on climate (i.e., things that cause warming to slow) as a result of rising CO2.
- For example, because CO2 is limiting to photosynthesis, rising CO2 is causing plants to grow better. This removes CO2 from the atmosphere and can slow warming.
In a forthcoming article2 in Geophysical Research Letters, Wang and Houlton analyze this negative feedback, and offer some sobering news about it’s ability to slow warming.
Specifically, they argue that most models used in the IPCC assessments do not take into account the fact that nitrogen becomes limiting in soils as plants grow more. Nitrogen is one of the most limiting nutrients to plant growth, which is why it’s often the #1 ingredient in fertilizer used on crops and lawns. Many field studies (example) have shown that trees grown in elevated CO2 experiments eventually stop growing any better than those in ambient air after a few years because soil nitrogen runs out.
Without nitrogen limitation, the IPCC models allow plants to grow more and remove more CO2 from the atmosphere via photosynthesis than they do in reality. This means that forests may not be as strong a carbon sink as we suspect, and we are therefore underestimating the rate of CO2 rise and magnitude of warming—maybe by as much as 0.5 degree by 2050 and 1 degree by the year 2100.
1Bonan, G. et al. (1992) Effects of boreal forest vegetation on global climate. Nature 359:716-718.
2Wang, Y. and B. Houlton (in press). Nitrogen constraints on terrestrial carbon uptake: Implications for the global carbon-climate feedback. Geophysical Research Letters
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Tags: trees and forests
Posted in climate change science | 2 Comments »
The cost of warming—393,000 increased deaths from civil war in Africa by 2030
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
A new article1 by Marshall Burke and colleagues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access) explores the relationship between climate and conflict.
Their argument is that historically warm years have correlated strongly with increased warfare in Africa. Based on this relationship and GCM projections of African climate, they forecast a 54% increase in armed conflicts by the year 2030, resulting in 393,000 additional battle deaths.
One might wonder about precipitation changes associated with climate warming—Do they alter this result? Short answer: No. The temperature-conflict model was robust regardless of whether or not precipitation was included.
1Burke, M. et al. (2009) Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:20670-20674.
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Posted in climate change science, conflict | No Comments »
Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 2: Understanding the cultural context of environmental literacy
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Overview
- Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 1: What a changing world means for our graduates
We need to consider how knowledge reinforces or challenges our understanding of nature and human society. How might it influence the ways we choose to deal with environmental and social challenges? In this post, let’s take a look at how efforts to promote environmental literacy benefit from an understanding of cultural context and speak to the ways that environmentalism itself is evolving.
The Western world continues to struggle with a nature/culture divide. In his bestseller, End of Nature, Bill McKibben argued that the worldwide reach of global change has turned all remaining wild nature into human-dominated ecosystems. When Bill Cronon and others asserted in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature that wilderness is as much of a social construction—shaped by individual experiences and values attributed to nature (or lack thereof)—as it is a natural phenomenon, they were assailed as environmental heretics.
Both of these texts force us to consider, What’s nature? Can it include the coexistence of people and ecosystems, or must it be human-free wilderness? If the former, then it’s hard to see how climate change marks an end of nature if we accept the coexistence of people and ecosystems as natural. If the latter, this means that the end of nature happened in most parts of the world with the dawn of humanity and the spread of modern civilizations over the past 10,000 years.
Each philosophy leads to different outcomes. McKibben has focused on nature and the prevention of catastrophe through the mitigation of carbon emissions. Uncommon Ground asserts that “if we hope for an environmentalism capable of explaining why people abuse the earth as they do, then the nature we study must become less natural and more cultural.”
Thinking about the intersection of nature and culture is often uncomfortable and complicated.
It’s uncomfortable when we look historically at how the nature/culture divide was promulgated. For example, the establishment of national parks in the American West was often accompanied by the forcible eviction of Native Americans who had lived there for millennia. “Wilderness,” in the traditional American experience, emerged as a product of conquest rather than by innate properties of the species and environments themselves.
It’s complicated—as Cronon suggests—when we realize that there are multiple cultures conceiving of multiple natures, each with its own notion of the relationship between nature and culture.
The Sierra Club, Inuit peoples, and African Americans, for example, have traditionally thought about nature and culture differently. The Sierra Club was born from the classic wilderness tradition where nature is synonymous with a world without humans. The Inuit’s perspective is (pun intended) the polar opposite: Nature and culture are seamless, and the idea of wilderness without people is completely foreign. And African Americans have become engaged at the interface between environmental and social issues, such as racial and class disparities in harm arising from pollution. Where land has been important to blacks historically, it’s been about land ownership, farming and gardening, and access to public parks—overtones of the post-slavery experience, not the wilderness experience.
It’s not surprising, therefore, to find that the relationship between nature and culture varies dramatically, even among environmentalists (here and here).
Bottom Line: In addition to gaining new knowledge that builds environmental literacy, students should also become aware of when they are operating within specific cultural frames of reference (and the merits and limits of each) and how new information reinforces or challenges those frames. Sure, there are points of contention, but there are also opportunities to forge a vision for what it means for humanity to live sustainably and justly in the modern world, as Julian Agyeman and others have advocated over the past few years. Back to our simple example above:
- The Sierra Club (and other preservationist/conservationist groups, many natural scientists, and some ethicists) shows us why the preservation of other species is beneficial in its own right as well as being instrumental to humanity.
- The Inuit (and other indigenous cultures and many social scientists) illustrate that humans and nature can coexist for millenia and adapt to climate change provided that resource use is sustainable and social systems are flexible enough to accommodate new situations.
- And environmental justice advocates (and some social scientists, politicians, religious leaders, and ethicists) highlight the importance of ensuring that the benefits of social progress and the detriments of environmental harm are considered fairly across race, ethnicity, and class.
Perhaps this is the ultimate challenge for students: In the quest for environmental literacy, how do we navigate these cultural contexts to figure out how we can accomplish multiple worthwhile goals simultaneously.
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Posted in environmental literacy, environmental studies, higher education, nature and culture | 4 Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 11/23/09
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Let’s take a look at interesting ideas at the University of Tennessee, the Kresge Foundation, and the University of Notre Dame.
Posted in campus sustainability, higher education | No Comments »
Most people just don’t care about the lives and fortunes of animals?
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
In a recent op-ed, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable, in the Washington Post, Gary Steiner examines this question and the ethics of eating meat.
Following in the footsteps of James McWilliams last week and Jonathan Safran Foer a few weeks earlier, Steiner puts meat-eating—rather than vegetarianism—on the defensive, arguing that it is problematic to brand vegans/vegetarians as moral snobs when uncritical carnivores/omnivores feel they have a sense of entitlement to meat regardless of the ethical implications of their food choices.
LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?
Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)
None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways…
Continue reading here…
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Posted in behavior, environmental ethics, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
Environmental literacy in higher education—Part 1: What a changing world means for our graduates
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Prerequisite post:
To the extent that all of our disciplines and personal lives are rooted in the natural world, and the natural world is changing dramatically because of human impacts, the foundation for each of our lives and disciplines is likely to change in the decades ahead. And the lives of our students and their opportunities for a rich liberal arts education will be impacted as well.
Responding to these changes is a matter of theory, methodology, and praxis. Higher education needs to develop a curricular strategy to help our students learn how to navigate this change and become important leaders in business, government, science, and civil society.
But it is also a matter of cherishing human-environmental experiences and preserving some of them for future generations of students, faculty, and the rest of the world. Being a scientist, writer, photographer, sociologist, educator, fisherman, hunter, farmer, or islander in the year 2100 may bear little resemblance to these experiences now because of the diminution of the natural world in which these activities thrive. Whole cultures, experiences, and ways of understanding the world may disappear:
- Coastal Inuit in the Polar North, coastal Bangladeshi farmers, and Micronesians living on Pacific coral atolls will be among the first cultures forced to migrate because of sea level rise and permafrost thaw. As they will tell you, physically relocating people is not the issue—it’s leaving their homelands and losing their hunting grounds that marks the end of their culture.
- The Great Barrier Reef (Australia) is expected to be significantly diminished—if not largely dead—by 2050 from a combination of acidification and warming temperatures. How do you tell students to soak up this opportunity because they will be among the last generations to experience this ecosystem in anything other than photos and videos? Tourists will continue to visit the Great Barrier Reef. They will don SCUBA gear and cruise past the remnants of the coral formations we once dove as living ecosystems. But it’s unlikely that they will have similar kinds of experiences when the coral and fish are gone. Eventually nobody will return there to dive.
- Imagine the plot of Old Man and the Sea if Hemingway were to fish off Key West (Florida) today: Instead of battling a legendary marlin to exhaustion, Santiago would have to settle for the all-you-can-eat shrimp platter at the local Red Lobster because of overfishing.
What is the measure of success when our graduates do well in a world that is ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust? Higher education can be a leader in society’s transition to reinvent itself, but to do so it needs to think critically about how disciplines are rooted in an environmental context. We are training students to have disciplinary depth and proficiencies in writing, quantitative literacy, foreign languages, and breadth across natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Now we must take the next step and help our students understand how their lives impact and are dependent upon the natural world. In the short run, technical skills and distribution breadth are undoubtedly important for an individual’s well-being in society, but in the long run, teaching sustainability—which has been omitted from the curriculum taught to generation after generation of college students—is vital to the well-being of society itself.
To extend the Titanic metaphor, higher education is in the business of producing people who can count, speak, and write about ships and icebergs, but it is failing to train them how to recognize that the ship is sinking and how to rescue those on board.
It’s time for higher education to integrate the environment across disciplines to help our students become leaders of this sustainable future and to ensure that the cultures, experiences, and ways of understanding the world we enjoy today can also be enjoyed by future generations.
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Posted in environmental literacy, environmental studies, higher education, nature and culture | 1 Comment »
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