An Open Letter To Our Corporate Overlords

January 25, 2010


Dear Masters,

Please excuse my presumption in writing to you directly.  I don't even know the correct term of address, and I fear "Dear Masters" does not express sufficient recognition of the vast differences in our status.  My country's Supreme Court has recently conferred upon You the powers You have sought for many years, and I congratulate You upon your victory in the Judicial Branch.  I expect it will soon be followed by victories in other branches as well.

Let me be frank.  I fear You greatly.  It is only my relative insignificance to Your grand plans that gives me the courage to speak out at all, for I am sure that if I were ever to inconvenience You in any way, I would be crushed.  Even mentioning the possibility that I could inconvenience You is a presumption, I know, given the vast difference in our power and influence.  I may speak of my Dignity and my Rights, but I know that the only reason I have that Dignity and those Rights is that You allow it.  Forgive me.  I do not wish to offend You, for You hold in your hands (metaphorically speaking, of course, since You have no hands) the future of everything I hold dear.  

I hold dear my family, my wife, my lovely and precocious five-year-old daughter.  I hold dear my work; I am a teacher of song, and what more pleasant occupation could there be than sharing the music I love with those of like mind?  I hold dear the beautiful woodlands near my house, for it calms my heart and slows my thoughts to walk through the tall trees.  I hold dear the memories of my teachers and influences, and of those who've been my fellow travelers in this life.  I hold dear the countless links in the human chain — how far we clever apes have come in just a few short tens of thousands of years!

Most of all I hold dear the Web of Life of which I am a part.  When I contemplate my Death, I am comforted by the knowledge that my body is made of EarthStuff and SunStuff, and will eventually be food for other Lives.  

What scares me about You, dear Masters, is that You cannot contemplate your Death, for You are immortal.  And because You are not made of the same stuff as We, You have no bond of sympathy with Us.

So I cannot appeal to Your better natures, for by the standards of Earthly life, You have none.  I can only appeal to Your predatory natures; those, You have in abundance.
In the past two centuries You have built economic systems that depend on Our willingness to turn Ourselves into trash; systems hinging on the requirement that We continue to consume at ever-increasing rates.  Not to consume is to fail our duty to You, our Masters.
But dear Masters, We have recently begun to notice that the power of Your economic systems is killing the planet on which we live.  Countless species are dying every day; in the years and decades to come millions will disappear from Earth at a rate faster than at any time in our planet's history (except, of course, for the day the Big Meteor hit).  We have consumed our planet's SunStuff avidly, as You order Us...but recently We've discovered that the burning SunStuff is making our atmosphere heat up.

If it goes on, Dear Masters, there is a very good chance that all of Us will die.
Not "die," as in "human beings die every day," or "his dog died last week," but "die" as in "the Earth will no longer be able to support any form of life at all, because it will be too hot."

And then, Dear Masters, what would You do?

Lacking physical substance, not made of EarthStuff and SunStuff as We are, You cannot stand upright on the surface of a baking planet, wondering where everyone's gone.   You may be immortal, but even immortals have to eat, and we feed you.  Although You are not made of the same stuff as We, if We die, so too shall You, and Your Deaths will be lonely ones.

I assume You don't want that.

And so, Dear Masters, I timidly plead my case.

Adjust your Economic Systems just a tiny bit, so that You can maximize Your profits from Us in the long run rather than making a killing in the short.  I will pay You what I earn and buy what I'm told to buy; in another decade I will show my little girl how to get her own credit card so She can enter Your service as well.  I don't mind if I continue to be Your indentured labor; I don't mind if my daughter and her child and her children's children to the hundredth generation remain in Your servitude.

But You need to change things just a little, so that they can live.  Otherwise nobody will get the chance, because the Earth will be dead and so will You.

Dear Corporations, You alone have the power to redirect sufficient resources in this world to fix the problems You've caused.  You are our Masters.  It is in Your interest to keep the Earth a good place to live, so that You may continue to consume Us for thousands of years to come.

If You do this, if You make these changes, then I can die well pleased, knowing that the links of our Human Chain will not end up as slag on the face of a Venusian landscape.  And perhaps my hundred-times-great granddaughter and her fellow Humans can find a way to overcome Your Dominion and live freely and peacefully, without waste or war, on a good green and blue Earth filled with abundant Life.  That's all I want: just to know they'll have a chance, a few centuries from now.

Thank You for listening, if you are.

Your most humble and abject subject,

WarrenS

Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART II

 [see Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART I here]

The original article in Viktor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva's Web Site: Biotic Regulation

4. The right for significance and the right for human virtue

E. Munk. "The Scream"

The right for territory is tightly connected with other natural human rights, the information about which can similarly be gained from a study of the biological design of human beings.
We notice that per capita individual territory of humans is about four square kilometers. At the same time our voice is so powerful, that we can vocally mark a much larger territory. If one screams at full voice, he can be heard over a territory of a few hundred square kilometers.
Since normally no alien intruders are tolerated on individual territories, this means that the normal social group of humans consisted of about 100 individuals, who were closely correlated with each other.

In such a natural population every human being had an average 1/100th impact on the life of the society. Individual significance on average equaled 1/100. In modern overpopulated societies individual significance has shrunk by millions of times, producing unsatisfaction, humiliation, and anxiety.
Most people feel they do not produce any impact on the society, do not decide anything — and suffer. Those people who are on the top of the society, naturally, desperately defend their natural right for social significance against any possible rivals (their co-citizens). As we know, in each country the number of actual decision-makers can be counted in no more than a few hundreds, with all of them knowing each other very well. This exactly corresponds to the size of the natural social group of human beings. Note that such people cannot be straightforwardly blamed, as cannot straightforwardly be blamed people defending their rights for food and water amidst a terrible famine or drought.
That the right for significance penetrates all aspects of human existence can easily be seen from many aspects of modern life. People try to invent ways of re-gaining significance:

• Professional societies organize at sizes close to the size of natural human groups ~ 100-1000 individuals (sportsmen, scientists, musicians etc.)
• Most religions try to compensate the lack of significance in their believers by sending the message of each person being individually valuable and important for God.
• Internet communication competes with religion for this function; people are able to create web societies close in size to natural human groups and get a feeling of influencing life of the society.

Ultimately, people have even lost the right for human virtues. Biological design prescribes every normal human being to possess a certain set of behavioral standards (virtues), which ensure stable existence of the natural population. People have to be clever, kind, honest, capable etc. and competitive, i.e. socially active. In the normally-sized population all these qualities in each individual are monitored by the other individuals with high precision. Those who possess all these qualities, the most harmonic human beings, get to the top of the society.

In a small natural social group all individuals are approximately equal in performance and possess the complete set of behavioral properties essential for a stable existence of the group. The best among the equal rule the society.

The unnaturally high intensity of competitive interaction in huge populations makes human beings choose among human virtues; nobody can afford retaining all of them. The individual has to choose to be either clever or competitive, either kind or competitive, etc. This choice among virtues can be compared to a forced choice between eating and drinking, breathing and sleeping etc. In the result, only those get to the top who spend all their time on competition. But these are no longer are the most harmonic individuals in the human society.

To get to the top of an unnaturally large social group one has to sacrifice the majority of human virtues spending most time on social competition.

Although for different reasons, this situation produces unsatisfaction, moral sufferings and diseases both in those decent people who cannot get to the top and in those who ultimately get there. Needless to say that this critically destabilizes the civilization, because the best human virtues remain undervalued and gradually lost from the society.

5. Conclusions

Thus, having lost the natural human rights, the overwhelming majority of people on Earth will never in their life have an opportunity to feel what it actually means to be a human being. What can this global humanitarian catastrophe be compared with? For example, if all human beings lost the ability to hear and, without knowing what happened, continued to believe that they have everything a human being must have. Or if all people of Earth became of one and the same sex and never knew the beauty of sexual relationships between men and women. Or if people lived under ground and never saw the sunlight, without even knowing that it exists. In the same manner modern humans have lost their right for individual territory, for social significance and human virtues.
Is our planet inhabited by human beings? Or, rather, by pathetic fragments of what once could have been conceived as a majestic design? As we have argued, all problems of modern civilization are the consequence of global overpopulation. Not only is this problem unresolved, but it has not even been set up properly. Usually human population growth is considered as an inevitable law of nature that cannot be modified. It is assumed that all civilization processes must be adapted to this law. Free market economy strongly relies on population growth. Mass-media not only ignore the overpopulation problem, but advertise the need to mitigate the demographic crisis in some developed countries.
In natural species, overpopulation is strongly suppressed and is practically never observed. It destroys the ecological community. But under some rare conditions overpopulation does exist in nature. What are these conditions? It is the abundance of some environmental characteristics used by life. Such abundance arises for species introduced on new territories, like rats and rabbits in Australia, or after volcanic eruptions. In all such cases we observe exponential growth and population expansion.
The reasons for this expansion are not obvious and must get a scientific explanation. Life cannot be stable without competitive interaction of individuals inside each population. Without competition and selection of defective individuals, the number of the latter increases. The species loses its organization and goes extinct.
Under conditions of abundance, defective individuals can occupy free territory and claim free resources, and thus avoid competition with normal individuals. In order to switch on competition, it is necessary to expand the population to occupy all available territory and resources, in other words, to do away with abundance. Life in continuous abundance is impossible. Therefore, expansion is a genetically programmed characteristic of life.
Human brain and thinking put the humanity under the illusion of a continuous resource abundance, which arises during the unstoppable intellectual development of the civilization. This very dangerous situation must be realized and seriously analyzed by modern humanity, in order that at least the future generations of people on Earth would live up to the proud name of the human being.

Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART I

(on humanitarian disaster of a global scale)

The original article in Viktor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva's Web Site: Biotic Regulation 

Disclaimer: Dear readers, here we have attempted to tell you a picturesque story of how it happened that modern Homo sapiens lost all their major natural rights. We wrote this text in hope that it might be of interest even to those of you whose hearts are followed by minds (not vice versa, compared to our target reader). A.M. Makarieva, V.G. Gorshkov, 14 February 2009.

1. Introduction: What determines natural human rights

Something wrong is in the air with the Humanity. What is this and how this should be fought with before it is too late is the issue that bothers millions of people around the globe. Here we will argue that the essence of the catastrophe is that Humans have lost some major rights implied by their biological and ecological design.
Apparently, all living beings, with humans being no exception, are designed to eat and to drink. Accordingly, the rights for food and water are the primary rights reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If we look at the Humanity on a global scale, we will see that some biological rights are largely preserved, although increasingly threatened:

• the right to breathe,
• the right for comfortable ambient temperature,
• the right for food,
• the right for water.

But here we will give scientific evidence that several more natural human rights, as inherent as the above, have been globally lost. We termed them ecological human rights; these are

• the right for individual territory,
• the right for social significance,
• the right for human virtues.

Uniquely, these human rights have been lost without being explicitly recognized. Generally, rights of living creatures follow directly from, and are dictated by, their design and natural needs. A bird is designed to fly, a fish is designed to swim. Accordingly, they have the right for the sky and for the river, respectively.

What is the biological design of humans? Answer to this question will determine natural human rights.

2. Humans are designed to move and have the right
for an individual territory of four square kilometers

The power of human body is equal to approximately 100 Watts. This is the power of two reading bulbs. This power, which is called metabolic power, is used to support all biochemical processes within the human body. The energy comes with food. Food is provided by the biosphere.

The biosphere receives all energy from the Sun. Green plants convert some part of solar energy into organic matter, which is used as food by humans and other animals. Mean global productivity of the biosphere is about half a Watt per square meter. This is a very low power. It cannot satisfy a human body, which demands thousands times more per the same area.
From these two fundamental parameters, the metabolic power of human body and the productivity of the biosphere, we conclude unambiguously that human beings must move and collect organic matter that is produced on a very large territory. Obviously, this territory must be protected against competitors. In other words, humans are designed to move and possess a large individually controlled territory.
Humans are not unique in this design. The right for individual territory is invariably respected in all natural species of animals. There is a fundamental dependence between the body size and the size of individual territory in animals. Home range area grows approximately proportionally to body mass, Fig. 1. Small animals like mice and shrews are granted with small territories of several hundred square meters. The largest animals like elephants or rhinoceros or some large predators defend individiual territories that can exceed several hundred square kilometers.

Fig. 1. The dependence of individual territory on body mass in mammals. Green and black squares denote herbivores and carnivores, respectively. After Kelt and Van Vuren (2001). Red squares denote the natural territory allocated to Homo sapiens (the upper one) and mean individual territory of modern humans (the lower one).

And only in humans this right has been dramatically violated. The unprecedented explosive growth of human population during the last two centuries has resulted in the situation when an average human being can control a territory of no more than a hundred square meters. Of such a small individual territory even some rodents would be ashamed.

3. Major right lost: Consequences

Deprived of air, human beings perish in a few minutes. Deprived of water, human beings perish in a few days. Deprived of food, human beings perish in a few weeks. Deprived of individual territory, human beings are not human beings.
The fundamental nature of the right for individual territory can be traced in all aspects of human existence. What is the main punishment applied to Homo sapiens? Territory deprivation. Vice versa, the highest peaks of human spirit can be reached in solitude when the individual commands a very large territory. Not incidentally, many saints and sacred figures in world religions are known to have reached their perfection in solitude, like, for example, the famous Russian Saint Sergius Radonezhskii.

Vincent van Gogh "Prisoners exercising" and N.K. Rerikh "St. Sergius the Builder"

Another sign of the vital importance of territory for the human beings is manifested in the love of humans for traveling. Whenever free from their obligatory work, the majority of people choose to travel. They try to compensate lack of individual territory by the illusion of vast, although shared, space available to them when they travel.
Given the vitality of territory for the human design, it can be expected that the global loss of this inherent right will profoundly affect human performance and well-being. To realize how many terrible features in the modern civilization stem from the loss of this right, one can monitor the consequences of natural animals being deprived of their territory.
The fact that one does not have a sufficient individual territory signals to the individual about his low social status, results in humiliation and reduced biological performance. A comprehensive study of captive black rhinoceros that are notorious for their poor reproduction in captivity revealed the following. Those rhinoceros who were kept in closed cells with non-transparent walls reproduced worst of all. Both male potency and female reproductive capacity were the lowest. In contrast, those animals that could at least see a large free territory from their enclosures with transparent walls — all reproduced better. These findings, confirmed in many other species, including, for example, the tiny jerboas, indicate that the command of individual territory has a profound physiological significance which can be communicated by visual signals. Looking at the modern humanity, do not we notice a very similar pandemic of sexual disorders? People world over are losing the happiness of sexual life and the ability to leave health progeny. The parallel with territory-deprived animals is straightforward.

Deprived of individual territory, rhinos become infertile.

Another manifestation of the global loss of the right for territory, and this manifestation cries out, is the unnatural aggressiveness of our species. Massive killing of conspecifics is absent in any other species except Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is an unbeaten and unrivaled champion of atrocities in the animal world. Terrorism, extremism all drink from this source.

V.V. Vereshagin. "Apotheosis of War"

To summarize, humans are not mice and cannot normally exist and implement their design on tiny spots. We are not bad, we are deeply unhappy.
The natural territory that is prescribed by the human design is of the order of 4 square kilometers. Four square kilometers of quieteness and relaxation, of solitude, of communication with nature, four square kilometers of home. Are there many people among those reading these lines who have experienced this at least once in their lives? (=Are there many birds among birds who could fly at least once?)

 [see Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART II here]

Hundred dollar hamburger?

Hear interview

BBC BUSINESS NEWS


14 June 2011 

A noted environmentalist and author has claimed that the value of most global resources is 'totally under priced' and if the true economic and environmental costs of producing meat were factored into the price of food, a hamburger would be worth 'about one hundred dollars'.

Speaking to the BBC's Business Daily, Chandran Nair told Lesley Curwen that the current Asian model for economic growth is broken and unsustainable.If economic development in Asia is to continue its rapid pace, 'draconian measures are absolutely needed' in order to combat the deterioration of the environment.
 
Transcript is below.

Chandran Nair: There is so much discussion about the shift of economic power from the west to the east and much of the narrative is a western narrative. And I argue that a sort of intellectual subservience in

the part of many Asian policy makers and economists has resulted in a denial of the scientific based evidence that 5 billion Asians in 2050 cannot live like the average American.

Lesley Curwen: Why not?

Chandran Nair: Simply because there isn't enough to go around. Let me give you an example for instance. Today China is already the world's largest car market and car ownership levels in China today are about 150 per thousand people. In the OECD countries, the levels are about 800-750, depending on which source you go to, per thousand people. India's car ownership levels today are at about 50; Indians even haven't started driving. And the estimates are that between China and India alone, there will be about 1.5 billion cars, which will be three times the current world population of cars. 

Lesley Curwen: In what year would that be?

Chandran Nair: In the next 30 years. So this is simply not possible for a variety of reasons including just the nature of the ability of cities to accommodate these amount of cars, but more importantly is that there are some estimates that it will take the entire oil shipment of Saudi Arabia just to drive cars in China and India if they reach these levels of ownership. And I can go on to talk about meat and everything else.  

Lesley Curwen: What about meat?

Chandran Nair: Well, meat consumption is a particularly interesting one given the concerns about how inefficient meat production is in terms of converting grain to meat et cetera and the water intensity. But, again, here is an interesting stat. Americans today consume something like 9 billion birds per year. Asia with a population of about over 10 times that today consumes about 16 billion birds. If Asian meat consumption increases as it is projected to, Asians in 2050 will consume something like 200 billion birds. This again is not going to be possible because on that journey to these levels of consumption, we will see a huge amount of collapse in terms of the ecological systems that we are very much dependent on here.

Lesley Curwen: You are talking here aren't you about the aspirations of people to do better for their children than they have themselves. It is such a basic human urge. Isn't it unstoppable?

Chandran Nair: You could argue it's unstoppable and then we can all stop the conversation about climate change making the world a better place. If we don't care, because we say human nature is all selfish and it's unstoppable, then let's just hope for the best. But hope is not a plan.

Lesley Curwen: If policies are going to constrain economic growth in Asia, in particular, then how do you get governments to adopt that, because surely in democracies people aren't going to vote for it and is it likely that a country like China would willingly adopt that when so far what we have seen is 'let's have more growth' from the Chinese government?

Chandran Nair: I think we need to move beyond this very simplistic notion about what economic growth is. I think what we are all interested in is development. I argue in the book that it's actually in the interest of governments in Asia to start addressing this problem immediately. A shift, a change in direction will provide them with a better opportunity to uplift the majority.

Lesley Curwen: Are you actually saying there should be limits imposed on the number of people who can own cars in Asian economies, the number of people who can eat meat, is that enforceable? 

Chandran Nair: Draconian measures are absolutely needed. We have draconian measures in many aspects of our lives today. I mean we have draconian measures, that don't allow you and I -I don't smoke - to smoke indoors. Some governments might decide that there would be restrictions on car ownerships, which some governments already do. These interventions can be very direct, but they can also be through fiscal means and taxation, et cetera.
The current economic model is based on one very important thing and that is the under pricing of resources. Most global resources have been totally under priced and extreme capitalism has thrived on this. If you start pricing things properly, then clearly meat will be eaten, but people will pay a proper price for this.
I would argue as some economists who have started to look at this issue have suggested that the price of a burger which I think, I don't eat burgers but, range from US$3 to US$4. The actual price if you have factored in the true economic cost of the externalities would be something like US$100. So the first step in all of this is clearly pricing externalities properly.

Lesley Curwen: If you constrain growth in the fastest growing bit of the global economy, what does that mean for all of us in the end? 

Chandran Nair: This is actually the critical question, the fabricated narrative around issues of resource limits, climate change, et cetera, would suggest that somehow free markets, technology and finance will solve these problems.

One of the things that provoked me to write the book was, and I think this goes to the heart of the question. When the financial crisis hit, you will remember that the urgings of most western economies and governments was to ask Asians to consume. At the same time, we were being told that climate change is probably the biggest challenge facing humanity. Any intelligent person knows that you cannot reconcile asking billions of Asians to consume more like Americans and at the same time deal with climate change.

 

UN Rapporteur On Food Offers Long-Term Answer To Food Crisis: Agroecology

9 March 2011
By Catherine Saez @ 6:29 pm The annual report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, to the sixteenth session of the UN Human Rights Council yesterday is unequivocal. There must be a global agricultural shift toward more productive, environmentally friendly, sustainable modes of production, using natural resources to remediate world hunger, away from industrialised agriculture. In short, the world needs a shift to agroecology.
The global food crisis which began at the end of 2010 mirrors the one in 2008 and the usual reaction to recourse to growing outputs in the hope that prices will go down is insufficient and short-sighted, said De Schutter at a press briefing yesterday.
The “real reason people are hungry” is poverty, he said, because “we have impoverished” small-scale farmers. Policies have favoured a small number of large producers, and now is the time to stray away from an unbalanced agricultural system that maintains poverty, leads to pollution and is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, he said.
Agroecology suffers from a lack of faith, although the international scientific community is showing growing interest, he said. There is a prevailing argument saying that only with the help of chemical fertilisers and pesticides can enough food be produced to feed the planet. But this is “a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” De Schutter said. “We never believed in other types of agriculture,” but the results described in the report show how productive agroecological methods are.
Based on a number of submissions received from region-based experts, and an international seminar, the report [pdf] advocates agroecology as the most likely solution to face a growing population. Agroecology is defined by De Schutter as both a science and a set of practices, created by the convergence of two cousin scientific disciplines: agronomy and ecology.
As an example, he said the push-pull strategy is a good alternative to pesticide use. This strategy, described in the report, was developed by Kenyan researchers and farmers. The strategy consists of “pushing” away pests from crops by inter-planting corn with insect repellent crops, while “pulling” the pests towards small plots of Napier grass, a plant that attracts and traps pests because of it sticky gum.
De Schutter said he is worried that at the policy level, agroecology is insufficiently recognised and used, and he recommended that the high level panel of experts established by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization compares the types of agriculture and their effects on development and long-term food security.
The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition [pdf] includes governments, nongovernmental organisations, international agencies and the private sector, he said.
Agroecology should be discussed within the CFS, he said, as it is a forum that can benefit from shared knowledge and collective learning on the basis of successful experiments, and where this kind of knowledge can gain ground and acceptance.
Core principles of agroecology, the report said, include: recycling nutrients and energy on the farm rather than introducing external inputs; integrating crops and livestock; diversifying species and genetic resources rather than focusing on individual species. Agroecology is described as being based on farmers’ knowledge and experimentation rather than techniques delivered “top-down.” Crop breeding and agroecology are complementary, but agroecology is “more overarching as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems, not just drought-resistant plants,” the report says.
Past approaches have been based on boosting cereal crops, however this led to population having an inadequate diet only based on carbohydrates, the report says, and nutritional diversity is of particular interest to children and woman.
Too Much Attention on GMOs
De Schutter said yesterday he would not recommend genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a solution and also said that GMOs had received too much attention in recent years. GMOs have never really fulfilled their promise, he said, and one of the major problems for countries whose farmers are using GMOs is the extreme dependence of producers and countries themselves on the very concentrated economic power of some multinational companies, such as Monsanto.
He said he was extremely worried about a system where the food chain would depend on an economic power that is extremely concentrated and without any control, and in particular based on one US company.
On climate change, the report says that agroecology improves resilience to climate change because resilience is strengthened by agricultural biodiversity, and it also delinks food production from the reliance on fossil fuel, a major cause for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Poor Research on Orphan Plants
Not enough research has been carried out on orphan plants, those receiving little scientific research, such as sorghum, millet, or sweet potatoes, De Schutter said. He called for more public investment.
Since there is little hope of getting patents on good agricultural practices, the bulk of current agronomic research is focused on patentable biotechnologies, he said. Research should focus on good practices developed by farmers themselves, who invented and discovered adequate solutions in a context of scarce resources and repeated climatic shocks, he said.
Moreover, private research has favoured financially solvent markets, namely the richest farmers of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, who have been the beneficiaries of this research, he added.
Inputs Replaced by Knowledge
Farmers’ participation in agroecology is vital for the success of agroecological practices, as such techniques are best spread from farmer to farmer, the report says: “Farmer field schools have been shown to significantly reduce the amounts of pesticides use, as inputs are being replaced by knowledge.” Agroecology requires the development of ecological literacy and decision-making skills for farmer communities.
Public policies should give priority to public goods, such as infrastructure, storage facilities, easing access to regional and local markets, rather than on private goods such as fertilisers or pesticides that farmers can purchase only because they are subsidised.
===========================================


Save climate and double food production with eco-farming

Uxbridge, 8 Mar (IPS/Stephen Leahy) -- Eco-farming could double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change, according to a new UN report released Tuesday in Geneva.

An urgent transformation to "eco-farming" is the only way to end hunger and face the challenges of climate change and rural poverty, said Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, following the presentation of his annual report focusing on agro-ecology and the right to food to the UN Human Rights Council.

"Agro-ecology mimics nature, not industrial processes. It replaces the external inputs like fertiliser with knowledge of how a combination of plants, trees and animals can enhance productivity of the land," De Schutter told IPS, stressing that, "Yields went up 214 percent in 44 projects in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa using agro-ecological farming techniques over a period of 3 to 10 years... far more than any GM [genetically modified] crop has ever done." Other recent scientific assessments have shown that small farmers in 57 countries using agro-ecological techniques obtained average yield increases of 80 percent. Africans' average increases were 116 percent.

"Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agro-ecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," De Schutter said.

Agro-ecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems. It enhances soil productivity and protects crops against pests by relying on the natural elements.

Eco-farming doesn't require expensive inputs of fossil-fuel-based pesticides, fertilisers, machinery or hybrid seeds. It is ideally suited for poor smallholder farmers and herders who are the bulk of the one billion hungry people in the world. Efforts by governments and major donors such as the $400 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to subsidise fertilizer and hybrid seeds will produce quick boosts in yields but are not sustainable in the long term, De Schutter said.

Malawi is touted as an AGRA success story by funders such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation who have massively subsidised fertilizer and created a corresponding improvement in food production. However, the country simply cannot afford to continue those subsidies and is shifting its strategy to agro-ecology. "The [Malawi] government now subsidises farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees in their fields to ensure sustained growth in maize production," he said.

De Shutter says AGRA is looking for quick results and is getting them. He has found it difficult to overcome AGRA proponents' suspicions about the effectiveness of agro-ecology, despite the mounting evidence. "I expect countries to express scepticism towards these solutions because they are not in accord with the dominant paradigm," De Schutter said.

The dominant view of agriculture is the industrial approach - of maximising efficiency and yield. However, that system is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and never having to be held accountable for environmental degradation and other impacts. One the most under-acknowledged but astonishing impacts is on the global climate. "It is fair to say that between 45 and 50 percent of all human emissions of global warming gases come from the current form of food production," De Shutter says.

Climate-damaging emissions from industrial agriculture are more than just carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. They include massive amounts of the super-heating greenhouse gases like methane from animals and nitrous oxide from chemical fertiliser. Add in deforestation - which is mostly done to increase farmland or plantations - and that's around a third of all emissions. Now, add on the emissions from food processing and the long distance transport of foods around the world and it comes close to half of all human emissions.

The food system doesn't have to be a major source of emissions, the problem is just the way we have designed it around cheap fossil fuel energy, he said. Eco-farming can produce more food for the world's poorest people, while also resulting in a fraction of the emissions. It can even store carbon in the soil.

"The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis," said Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN, an international non-governmental organisation that produced a report in 2009 showing that industrial agriculture was by far the biggest source of climate-disrupting emissions of greenhouse gases.

"There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will," Hobbelink told IPS. Trade, economic and agricultural policies are all skewed in favour of the current industrial food production system. And many of those policies are pushing small farmers - the ones who are by far the most efficient in terms of carbon emissions and energy use, according to GRAIN - off the land.

De Shutter says the techniques and benefits of agro-ecology are now well established, so his role is to push governments to change policies and support the transformation of food production. His report offers policy-relevant recommendations for countries, such as increasing public funding for research and training.

"Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don't open markets for chemical products or improved seeds," De Shutter said. "If we don't radically transform the direction of the global food system, we will never feed the billion who are hungry," De Shutter warns. "Nor will we be able to feed ourselves in the future." +

To Save the Planet From Global Warming, Turn the Sahara Green

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A team of researchers has come up with a simple plan to halt global warming: All we need to do is turn both the Sahara and the Australian outback into vast, shady forests.
While that might sound so ambitious as to be absurd, the climate scientists say the project would be no more expensive or technologically challenging than some of the other geoengineering schemes that are currently under discussion. And researcher Leonard Ornstein says it would certainly get results. Ornstein says that if most of the Sahara and Australian outback were planted with fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, the forests could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon a year–nearly as much as people emit from burning fossil fuels and forests today. As the forests matured, they could continue taking up this much carbon for decades [ScienceNOW Daily News].
The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, proposes huge desalinization plants on the North African and Australian coastlines to convert sea water to fresh water, and a system of aqueducts and pumps to move the water inland. The young forests would be nourished with drip irrigation to prevent water loss through evaporation, and the sandy wastelands would chang into endless groves of heat-tolerant, tropical trees like eucalyptus. All that water engineering would come at a steep price–about $2 trillion per year–but the researchers say that cost isn’t much more than the projected cost of capturing all the carbon dioxide emissions from the world’s power plants and burying them deep underground. They also note that carbon capture and storage technology is still untested on the commercial scale, while everyone already knows that forests work as carbon sponges.
But like other proposed geoengineering schemes, the researchers note that planting these forests might have side effects. The increased moisture could trigger plagues of locusts in Africa, just as the odd wet year does now. It could also dampen existing soils, stopping iron-rich dust from blowing off the Sahara and into the Atlantic Ocean, where it nourishes sea life, the study points out [ScienceNOW Daily News].

40 Tips for a Better Life

• Posted by Eric Allen Bell on September 17, 2009 at 3:30am

 View Eric Allen Bell's blog

Reading tips from the Internet, I got this useful list where I personally follow some of it to help me sort of improve my day to day life. Read through it and just follow the things you want to believe. Remember, each person has his/her own needs/wants/beliefs.

1. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day. And while you walk, smile. It is the ultimate anti-depressant.
2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
3. Buy a DVR and tape your late night shows and get more sleep.
4. When you wake up in the morning complete the following statement, ‘My purpose is to __________ today.’
5. Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.
6. Play more games and read more books than you did in 2007.
7. Make time to practice meditation, and prayer. They provide us with daily fuel for our busy lives.
8. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 6.
9. Dream more while you are awake.
10. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
11. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, wild Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds & walnuts.
12. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
13. Clear clutter from your house, your car, your desk and let new and flowing energy into your life.
14. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip, OR issues of the past, negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
15. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
16. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.
17. Smile and laugh more. It will keep the nagative blues away.
18. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
20. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

Next 20 after the jump.

21. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
22. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.
23. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
24. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
25. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: ‘In five years, will this matter?’
26. Forgive everyone for everything.
27. What other people think of you is none of your business.
28. Remember God heals everything.
29. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
30. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
31. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
32. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
33. The best is yet to come.
34. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
35. Do the right thing!
36. Call your family often.
37. Each night before you go to bed complete the following statements: I am thankful for _______. Today I accomplished ____.
38. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.
39. Enjoy the ride. Remember this is not Disney World and you certainly don’t want a fast pass. You only have one ride through life so make the most of it and enjoy the ride.
40. Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, and let go of what you can’t change.