The current model for industrial meat production is not sustainable and severely damaging to the environment. At the current time about 30% of the world’s ice-free surface is used to grow crops that support industrial livestock (Time). Most of this feed is grown using mono-cropping techniques on large industrialized farms. This form of farming strips the Earth of its nutrients… Read more »
The Anthropocene, encompassing our impact on the world’s ecosystem and climate through human action, stands out to me in a very polarizing way, in that we have clearly monumentally altered the course of earth, and yet there is this vulnerability to the entire process that is screaming for attention. For one thing, as Michael Carolan discusses in The Real Cost… Read more »
U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance. Results from Surveys of Farmers, Ranchers and Consumers. Nationwide Surveys Reveal Disconnect Between Americans and Their Food. www.prnewswire.com/, 22 Sept. 2011. Web. 6 July 2017. As we look at the changes due to the specialization of labor in the industrial food change there are many notable benefits. After all, because of the specialization of labor we… Read more »
Have you ever wondered what kind of era or epoch we live in today? To be honest, I never have. We often hear the term, “end of an era”, but we hardly ever actually hear that era being labeled a specific word or term. For those of you who are now curious, we are currently living in the Anthropocene…. Read more »
The growth of the human population has always been centered on a civilization’s ability to cultivate crops. Regardless of the Malthusian or the Cornucopian perspective, the trend between the agricultural revolution and the growth of the human population directly parallels technological growth. In terms of sustainable systems most of the world is still in developmental stages today, giving us high… Read more »
The unsustainable course of human evolution over the past century and a half has been driven on by an overarching, undeniable domination of market mentality that pervades all areas of life, including the stuff of our very sustenance: food. The expectation, or even faith, that a market can regulate itself, correct itself, and provide its own checks and balances is… Read more »
What is the real cost of our food? After reading Michael Carolan’s The Real Cost of Cheap Food, I realized there are many hidden costs to the food choices that we make. In Carolan’s book, he outlines the complex commodity chains that our food products undergo on their way to our kitchen tables. At first, we may see this commodity… Read more »
“There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night— many of them with empty plates.” – L.R. Brown1 Think about that for a minute… Every single day on average there are more than two hundred thousand more mouths to feed than the previous day. That’s eighty million more people each year. One might… Read more »
(Source: https://www.parenthub.com.au) The meat industry has continuously grown into a highly commercialized one. In fact, it is amazing that the cruelty continues to be treated as a norm as animals are harvested just to satiate human desires. The Anthropocene makes a good point in theorizing the trend of global impact, especially based on human growth and human behavior. One… Read more »
In lesson two we looked at living and mechanical systems and learned what the differences were. The living systems are biological and mechanical systems are machine based, created by humans. They are both a way of creating energy or outputs that help to keep the environment(s) going. Systems theory helps to put in perspective of how important it is to… Read more »