Archive for September, 2010
| Newer Entries »NYT: U.S. Meat Farmers Brace for Limits on Antibiotics
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
Erik Eckholm’s article in today’s NY Times suggests that the movement to limit antibiotics use in healthy farm animals is gaining momentum in the Obama Administration and Congress (links his):
Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. But the practice is increasingly condemned by medical experts who say it contributes to a growing scourge of modern medicine: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including dangerous E. coli strains that account for millions of bladder infections each year, as well as resistant types of salmonella and other microbes.
Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet, intended to reduce what it calls a clear risk to human health. They would end farm uses of the drugs simply to promote faster animal growth and call for tighter oversight by veterinarians.
The agency’s final version is expected within months, and comes at a time when animal confinement methods, safety monitoring and other aspects of so-called factory farming are also under sharp attack. The federal proposal has struck a nerve among major livestock producers, who argue that a direct link between farms and human illness has not been proved. The producers are vigorously opposing it even as many medical and health experts call it too timid.
Scores of scientific groups, including the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, are calling for even stronger action that would bar most uses of key antibiotics in healthy animals, including use for disease prevention, as with Mr. Rowles’s piglets. Such a bill is gaining traction in Congress.
“Is producing the cheapest food in the world our only goal?” asked Dr. Gail R. Hansen, a veterinarian and senior officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has campaigned for new limits on farm drugs. “Those who say there is no evidence of risk are discounting 40 years of science. To wait until there’s nothing we can do about it doesn’t seem like the wisest course.”
Read more of the article here.
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Photo credit: crispyking
Tags: antibiotics
Posted in food and agriculture, health, organic | No Comments »
How much would climate change if we used existing infrastructure to the end of its life?
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
Here’s an interesting thought question: How much would global temperature warm if we used only the existing energy infrastructure (i.e., power plants, furnaces, motor vehicles) until these machines reached the end of their useful lives? Once they died, they would be replaced by devices that did not emit CO2.
Steven Davis and colleagues addressed this question in the current issue of Science:
We calculated cumulative future emissions of 496 (282 to 701 in lower- and upperbounding scenarios) gigatonnes of CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels by existing infrastructure between 2010 and 2060, forcing mean warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less than 430 parts per million. Because these conditions would likely avoid many key impacts of climate change, we conclude that sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built. However, CO2-emitting infrastructure will expand unless extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives.
Their analysis suggests that CO2 emissions would decline linearly from 35 gigatons/year in 2010 to less than 5 gigatons/year in 2050, with the majority of the remainder being non-energy emissions from things like cement manufacture and land use changes.
On a personal level, this would mean replacing your current furnace, car, and electricity sources with ones that emitted no CO2, so we’re talking upwards of 15-20 years for a personal vehicle, 20-30 years for a furnace, and 50+ years for power stations, depending on the age of these items. The average power plant age in the U.S. is 32 years compared to 12 years in China and 21 and 27 years in Japan and Europe.
It’s encouraging to know that it may be possible to avert serious climate change without having to shut down existing infrastructure right away (especially long-lived fossil fuel power plants) but only if we plow significant funding into developing and implementing carbon-free technologies to replace them. However, Davis et al. acknowledge that this is a tall order:
[T]here is little doubt that more CO2-emitting devices will be built. Our analysis considers only devices that emit CO2 directly. Substantial infrastructure also exists to produce and facilitate use of these devices. For example, factories that produce internal combustion engines, highway networks dotted with gasoline refueling stations, and oil refineries all promote the continuation of oil-based road transport emissions. Moreover, satisfying growing demand for energy without producing CO2 emissions will require truly extraordinary development and deployment of carbon-free sources of energy, perhaps 30 TW by 2050. Yet avoiding key impacts of climate change depends on the success of efforts to overcome infrastructural inertia and commission a new generation of devices that can provide energy and transport services without releasing CO2 to the atmosphere.
Davis, S., Caldeira, K., & Matthews, H. (2010). Future CO2 Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure Science, 329 (5997), 1330-1333 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188566
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Photo credit: Stuck in Customs
Posted in climate change science, energy, solutions, sustainable development, technology | 1 Comment »
The outlook for biodiversity conservation
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
This week’s issue of Science includes a special section on biodiversity. A review article by Michael Rands and colleagues, Biodiversity Conservation: Challenges Beyond 2010, summarizes the current approaches and challenges for conservation.
Here is an excerpt describing their outlook for the future:
The challenges of addressing the social and behavioral contexts for biodiversity conservation are daunting. We are far from including biodiversity in our conventional measures of well-being, which focus on wealth creation and internationally
recognized estimates of GDP. Although there have been attempts to redefine these (including, for instance, the Human Development Index and green national accounts), the mainstream view of well-being and of national development remains focused on narrowly defined economic growth. Furthermore, the current recession only strengthens the emphasis on growth. The transition to sustainability will not be easy, but it is central to securing a future for biodiversity. Conservation strategies, in concert with other environmental policies, must address seemingly intractable and politically unpalatable issues. In both developed and emerging economies, we need to reduce the carbon and material throughput demanded by current patterns of production and consumption if we are to create viable and democratically acceptable trajectories of contraction and convergence in resource use. In parallel, we must recognize that successful human development agendas are underpinned by functional ecosystems, and by biodiversity. This is the year in which governments, business, and civil society could decide to take seriously the central role of biodiversity in human well-being and quality of life and to invest in securing the sustainable flow of nature’s public goods for present and future generations.
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Photo credit: Feuillu
Posted in biodiversity science, nature and culture, sustainable development | No Comments »
Brazil: Amazon deforestation rate plunging
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
In a previous post last week, we discussed a new paper in PNAS showing that new land for agriculture during the ’80s and ’90s came at the expense of tropical forests and savannas.
In this week’s issue of Science, Antonio Regalado reports on satellite imagery (able to record land clearing and fires from slash-and-burn agriculture) showing substantial deforestation declines in the Brazilian Amazon since 2004—from a peak of 27,000 km2/year in 2004 to 7,500 km2/year in 2009.
Why the dramatic downturn over the past half decade?
Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira … credited government enforcement efforts, including cutting off loans to those clearing large amounts of forest for cultivation…
Gilberto Câmara, general director of INPE, said that farmers may now be employing smaller conflagrations to escape detection, and the agency reported a large increase in the number of fires last month. He believes a more accurate survey known as Prodes, due out in November, will show a smaller decline. “We are seeing a process of consolidation in the Amazon, with no new frontiers, fewer large scale cuts, and more small fires to expand existing farms,” he says.
Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, says that recent decisions by large food processors and supermarkets not to buy soybeans and beef from newly deforested areas has helped to slow the rate of deforestation. Some landholders may also be conserving forests in hope of receiving carbon credits.
But Nepstad worries that the picture could change for the worse if prices for
agricultural products, depressed because of a sluggish economy, begin to rebound.
“I think the bigger question is, ‘When the prices come up, will Brazil’s government be
able to hold the line?’ ”
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Photo credit: CIAT
Tags: Amazon, trees and forests
Posted in biodiversity science, food and agriculture, land use | No Comments »
Homes of the future?
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
The NYT is running an op-ed by Bob Dunay and Joseph Wheeler (Virginia Tech) about a new, award-winning home design that challenges people to re-think their conception of the built environment:
Will our children’s homes be anything as comfortable and expansive as our own?
The answer is yes—though it depends on how you frame the question. Our children probably won’t be able to afford to run conventional air conditioners all day long. Nor will they likely have access to unlimited water supplies, particularly in the parched Southwest. But that doesn’t mean they have to live without the same quality of life that their parents and grandparents have grown accustomed to. The key is to use smart planning and technological advances to not merely adapt the home, but rethink its most basic design and function.
To demonstrate what such a house might look like, our team of professors and students at Virginia Tech designed and built Lumenhaus. With functional spaces and a modest size that allows for efficient energy use, Lumenhaus won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe, a competition that brought together 17 college teams from around the world in Madrid.
Check out the film about this house and the interesting interactive feature.
Posted in nature and culture, solutions, sustainability, sustainable architecture, technology | No Comments »
Rethinking personal transportation in small towns
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Mitigating climate warming is going to require a dramatic decrease in carbon emission from the transportation sector, through a combination of driving less, using public transportation, and, eventually, switching to electric cars powered by a renewable grid.
There are many urban centers with outstanding public transportation options, but let’s face it— It’s often more difficult to find alternatives to driving in smaller towns and suburbs.
Brunswick, Maine (home to Bowdoin College) is no different than most small towns (population 25,000). Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, and the physical dislocation of residential areas, shopping centers, supermarkets, and hospitals makes it difficult to avoid automobile use. And roads around here are definitely not bike friendly!
This is starting to change as a result of collaborations across institutions from the local to federal levels.
The town just added a new program called Brunswick Explorer, with a fleet of hybrid electric buses that are wheelchair and bike accessible. The route takes the buses from major residential areas (especially those serving the elderly) to our local supermarkets, hospitals, and shopping malls.
With the extension of the Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Brunswick in 2012, folks will also be able to travel to Portland and Boston easily by train, especially during rush hour and winter when travel by roads is either a hassle or dangerous.
The Explorer and Downeaster are certainly no silver bullets, but they accomplish a few important goals:
- The Explorer allows people in much of downtown Brunswick the opportunity to forego driving for simple, routine tasks, especially during winter when walking and biking are treacherous.
- The hybrid fleet and high-occupancy vehicles will help reduce emissions.
- Reliable bus service makes it easier for families (who are able) to downsize from two vehicles to one vehicle, with the added benefit/incentive of saving on gas, repairs, taxes, registration, and inspections.
- At a cost of $1 per ride or $2 for an all-day pass, the Explorer buses provide an important social service to the elderly and other citizens who may not be able to afford cars.
- It builds transportation resilience in the community, especially for low-income citizens who may find it increasingly expensive to get around the next time gas prices spike.
- The Downeaster provides a redundant transportation network, which makes long-distance travel easy when there are unexpected travel delays due to weather, construction, or accidents. It also has the potential to take many cars off the road for the sizable population that commutes daily between Portland and Brunswick.
- The Explorer bus program provides a model of community collaboration that may be exportable to other towns.
- Perhaps most importantly, they help break the mindset and habits of routine personal vehicle use.
These are small steps, indeed, but they have the ingredients to be successful: alternatives to personal vehicle use that are both cheap and convenient, with substantial community buy in.
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Photo courtesy of Bowdoin College
Posted in behavior, campus sustainability, energy, race and class, solutions, sustainability, transportation | 1 Comment »
Lauerman: Our conflicted relationship with animals
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Salon.com is running an interview by Kerry Lauerman with Hal Herzog on his new book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. The story is worth reading for an assessment of why the public can be outraged by women throwing cats into dumpsters or puppies into a river (last week’s tabloid news) while at the same time consuming more meat than ever.
A few excerpts:
Why is it so hard to think straight about animals?
I think it’s the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote “Animal Liberation” [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that’s been occurring. The question is, why?
And, by the way, I think that the argument against eating meat is very strong.
….
So is the solution just to come to terms with the disconnect between loving our cat and treating it like a family member and enjoying our fried chicken?
I think that’s the human condition. I think this humanization of pets is really fascinating. I developed a tongue-in-cheek scale that I called “feeding kittens or boa constrictors” scale. I asked people, “Would it be OK to feed snakes versus cats certain types of food?” One was mice: Would it be OK to feed a mouse to a boa constrictor? Is it OK to feed a mouse to a cat?
Almost everyone said it was not OK to feed a mouse to a cat. I interviewed a student who had cats. I said, “Would you ever feed a dead mouse to your cat? You can buy them at the pet store.” She said, “No!” She was horrified. And I asked why. She had this great quote. She said, “If my cat ate mice, it wouldn’t be like me.”
I love that. And that really gets it. When we admit cats and animals into our world, and we think of them like relatives and we think of them like us, it makes perfect sense for us to think that, yes, they’d rather have a gourmet natural duck entree out of a can than eat a mouse. No, my pet really enjoys dressing up for Halloween. And so we basically have drawn that moral circle so that we think of them more like us than like them. I don’t really see that as changing.
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And that’s the lesson here. Our modern food system disconnects humans and the animals we eat all the way to the supermarket meat aisle. Ethicists like Singer argue that sentient animals should be given the same moral considerations as people, as many folks already do for their pets.
Would we be willing to eat meat if we raised our own cows, pigs, and chickens and treated them with the same respect and care we show our pets?
For some meat eaters, probably not. But for many others, probably yes…and that would be a good thing to the extent it generated a world with less animal suffering.
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Photo courtesy of sandcastlematt.
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, environmental ethics, food and agriculture, nature and culture | No Comments »
New land for agriculture coming mainly at the expense of tropical ecosystems
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
There have traditionally been two ways to produce more food for an increasing population: Convert native ecosystems like forests and grasslands to agricultural fields (what we call “extensification”) or make the yields on existing croplands go up, through the use of things like machinery, fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, and GMOs (what we call “intensification”).
Historically, these processes have occurred in tandem: an initial phase of extensification and land clearing followed by development and intensification. Converting North America’s prairies to corn and wheat in the 19th century is a classic example of the former, whereas 20th-century rise of fossil fuels, and the machines and fertilizer they support, is an example of the latter.
So while it’s not surprising to learn that developing nations in tropical regions are experiencing significant deforestation for food production, as Holly Gibbs and colleagues at Stanford describe in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (citations removed for clarity), it’s important to understand the magnitude of ecosystem change as well as the drivers of change:
This study confirms that rainforests were the primary source for new agricultural land throughout the tropics during the 1980s and 1990s. More than 80% of new agricultural land came from intact and disturbed forests. Although differences occur across the tropical forest belt, the basic pattern is the same: The majority of the land for agricultural and tree plantation expansion comes from forests, woodlands, and savannas, not from previously cleared lands.
Worldwide demand for agricultural products is expected to increase by ∼50% by 2050, and evidence suggests that tropical countries will be called on to meet much of this demand. Consider, for example, that in developed countries the agricultural land area,
including pastures and permanent croplands, decreased by more than 412 million ha (34%) between 1995 and 2007, whereas developing countries saw increases of nearly 400 million ha (17.1%). Moreover, developing countries expanded their permanent croplands by 10.1% during the current decade alone, while permanent cropland areas in developed countries remained generally stable. If the agricultural expansion trends documented here for 1980–2000 persist, we can expect major clearing of intact and disturbed forest to continue and increase across the tropics to help meet swelling demands for food, fodder, and fuel.
Indeed, recent studies confirm that large-scale agro-industrial expansion is the dominant driver of deforestation in this decade, showing that forests fall as commodity markets boom. Rising commodity prices have been implicated in the destruction of Amazonian rainforests for soy production and peat swamp forests for oil palm production in Southeast Asia. Drivers of cropland expansion may impact forests directly through local or regional demand or indirectly through more globalized demand that may occur via market-mediated effects. Although this study does not specifically assess displacement or indirect land use changes, it does highlight the likelihood that intact and degraded forests will be replaced by agricultural land when such changes occur. Regardless of the mechanism, concern continues to mount about the large emissions of carbon dioxide that result when tropical forests are felled and often burned to make room for new agricultural land.
This was more of a land use change analysis, so it didn’t include a lot on the global drivers causing deforestation. It would be a mistake, for instance, to ascribe all of this change to population growth in these tropical regions or efforts to supply more food to people living there. Rather, extensification today is a global phenomenon driven by international trade, as the developing world loses native ecosystems to feed other countries. And destroying forests and peatlands is a major net source of greenhouse gas emissions, so we’re also warming climate as an unintended consequence.
Why not just halt extensification and switch to intensification on existing farmland? It’s expensive—moreso than simply clearing more land in many cases. When the demand for cheap food rules the world, forest clearing in poor countries with abundant, cheap land is often what you get.
It should make us all pause considering that the environmental effects of the demand for goods like soy and palm oil by the industrialized world are being externalized to tropical countries. We are now chopping down tropical forests to make soy burgers, biodiesel, and snack foods. As Cameron Scott notes, “The Amazon, It’s What’s for Dinner.”
Reference:
H. K. Gibbs, A. S. Ruesch, F. Achard, M. K. Clayton, P. Holmgrene, N. Ramankutty, and J. A. Foley (2010). Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Photo courtesy of leoffreitas
Tags: trees and forests
Posted in biodiversity science, biofuels, food and agriculture, land use, population | 1 Comment »
Gearing up
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
It’s been an incredibly busy but productive summer of research, so I took a bit of time to stay focused on talks, lab work, and writing. Lots of interesting new ideas and developments to discuss over coming months. I’m looking forward to getting back to analysis of issues and primary lit soon.
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photo courtesy of Jphilipson
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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