How much fresh water is your choice of food costing the planet? What can you change about your diet to decrease your footprint? Follow this link to a FREE interactive meal footprint calculator to find out which of your favorite foods are consuming the most water during their production.
How efficient is your choice of protein? Protein is an essential component of a balanced diet, but which protein you choose and how often you eat it can have drastic effects on your water consumption.
As our world wrestles with the impacts of climate change and the challenge of living sustainably and justly on this earth, agriculture will remain one of the most important questions we must address. Our current ‘industrial agriculture” is characterized by monocultures, international food trade, and environmentally and socially detrimental practices. For this reason, many believe it is time to transition to a more sustainable model. Agroecology and organic are the two main alternatives. Although promising in several aspects, some raise the concern that these systems will not be able to provide for the growing population. In addition, transitioning the global agricultural system will be a complicated and hard-won process.
It is important that everyone from consumers to politicians to farmers understand the tradeoffs and possibilities in the different forms of agricultural management. Everyone consumes food and therefore everyone both affects and is affected by the agricultural system. If you are interested in learning more about these topics, check out these set of infographics.
Sustainable_Agriculture_Infographics
One provides a comparison of agroecological, organic, and industrial agriculture. The other includes information about how different types of countries might transition to more sustainable agricultural systems.
…in the form, of course, of a Buzzfeed quiz! Find out here what actor you’d be in a hydropower dam siting situation in South America, in a quiz based on case studies from Brazil, Panama, and Bolivia! (If you want to look at the other possible results, let me know and I’ll post them here too.)
If you want you can post your result here, so we get an idea of the spread of results across the class.
Tag-yourself meme coming later, with even less content. (EDIT: find this above!)
Nearly every item of food we buy comes stamped with an expiration date. Even canned food, pickled food, and processed food (which can all last decades) are labeled. This label has power. Consumers won’t buy food past it’s ‘sell by’ date, and so grocery stores are forced to throw it away [1]. If a person finds food in their cupboard that’s “expired”, they’ll likely toss it out. One study found that 20% of household food waste in the UK could be attributed to a misinterpretation of expiration dates [2]. Wasting usable food, when so many people in the country are food insecure, is outrageous. But it’s necessary for public health, right?
Actually, it may not be. Food expiration dates are actually only legally required (nationally) on infant formula [3]. Although some states also necessitate other products like dairy, meat, or vegetables, nowhere is it required that, say, a box of crackers have an expiration date. Expiration date labels became popular during the 60s, as consumers grew further removed from the production of their food and began to worry about the freshness of its ingredients [4]. However, most food can still be safely consumed days, if not weeks, past it’s supposed expiration date [5]. In a world of constrained resources and food scarcity, can we really afford to keep throwing away food over an arbitrary number?
Check out this page. It’s gorgeous, and friendly, and very positively minded. There’s also a very pointed lack of detail relating to political situations of the area.
Still, it’s a wind farm. There shouldn’t be a way for that to go terribly wrong. Alas, humans are bad and awful to each other and also aren’t the best at improving – let’s take a look under the hood.
Tafarya – location of that wind farm – is located just north of the northern border of Western Sahara. We’re not in Morocco, so I’m going to use the words “Western Sahara” to refer to the bit of land that wants to be known as Western Sahara (for future ref: the people whose land is being occupied is the Sahrawi people), which has been militarily occupied by Morocco since something dumb like 1975. The literal Environment Minister of Morocco is quoted here effectively saying Western Sahara? I don’t know her – do you mean SOUTHERN PORTION OF MOROCCO ALSO I CAN’T HEAR YOU ANYMORE. People straight up get mad at you in Morocco if you say the words “western” and “Sahara” together. It’s frankly disturbing.
That second quoted article, by the way, is an extensive report from the Guardian about this wind farm and its surrounding controversy. The bare-bones version: Morocco + “western” investors – here that’s Siemens, the company from the first link – are installing incredibly productive wind farms encroaching into Western Sahara, then taking that energy and selling it to lots of people. This includes selling it back to the Sahrawi, the people of the land where the wind farms are. Are the Sahrawi okay with this? Like hell. This opinion is, I found, best summarized with this quote from an email from Ali Salem Tamek, the vice-president of Codesa, a Sahrawi human rights collective, to the Guardian: “It is amazing to have green energy. It is our responsibility as human beings to protect the world we live in, but if you occupy your neighbours’ yard to produce that green energy – and sell it to them at the end – believe me, your neighbours will not be happy about it.”
To make this even sketchier? Try this on for size. In summary: phosphate is a nonrenewable resource but is Very Heavily used for agricultural purposes, the world ’round. Plant fertilizers need both nitrogen (that’s fine, we figured out nitrogen-fixing into nitrates) and phosphates. The second one is less fine: “a Haber-like technique for creating phosphate will never exist: There is a fixed amount in the Earth, it’s stuck in the ground, and the only way to get it is to mine it.” Morocco currently controls literally-no-one-knows how much of the world’s phosphate mines, because there’s a huge deposit in Western Sahara, and as agricultural needs rise (as they’re predicted to in sub-Saharan Africa) the demand for phosphate is projected to also increase drastically. (The reason I say “literally-no-one-knows how much” is that Morocco sort of doesn’t release data, when it doesn’t want to.)
That last bit is relevant because – and here’s the kicker – phosphate mining is incredibly profitable, and lots of the energy taken from the wind farms goes back into mining. Which, yes, is exceedingly bad for the earth.
Idle comments at the end: Morocco is ranked 131st out of 180 for freedom of press. At one point Ban Ki-Moon (dude in charge of the UN) called Moroccan presence in Western Sahara an occupation, and UN people were promptly kicked out of Morocco. An independent Western Sahara would make its own choices about pricing for phosphates and energy from wind, which isn’t a good business choice for Morocco. Farmers still do rely on nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, across the globe.
clean energy is good and food is also good and people are complicated it’s really sad
Class 1.
Look at this picture and think:
-What kind of relationships between energy-environment-society can you identify?
-What assumptions/ideas/narratives are implicit here?
-What new questions should we ask to make this figure more complex?
-Does this figure represent every country/community around the world?
Energy, Environment & Society 