{"id":408,"date":"2017-07-14T11:56:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-14T11:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/?p=408"},"modified":"2017-07-17T06:44:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T06:44:35","slug":"408-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/408-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Think & Act Globally"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThere will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night\u2014 many of them with empty plates.\u201d \u2013 L.R. Brown<\/em>1 <\/sup><\/p>\n

Think about that for a minute\u2026 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 assume then, based on that information, that human population growth is the biggest challenge facing the global world food system ecology. Taking a more in-depth look at systems theory really helps to unfold, evaluate, and contrast the world food system\u2014and its correlation to human and environmental health\u2014in terms of apolitical individualization versus collective progress or \u201cpolitical ecology\u201d. We can distinctly see that there is an inescapable interconnectedness of multiple <\/em>systems that constitute on overall<\/em> system, one subjective to political and sociocultural traditions, trends, and changes as well as adaptive cycles and feedback loops.2\u00a0\u00a0<\/sup>Managing food-production resource usage will require extensive reform if there should be any hope of sustainability and avoidance of even worse global crises.<\/p>\n

The industrialized system, in terms of food economy, is failing us as a species. Although population growth is an immense challenge concerning food, there is perhaps a greater challenge. The majority of greenhouse gases emission and resource consumption is done by the global wealthy and middle class, and those are of course the ones who will also always be fed. The earth\u2019s ecological sustainability would not level out even with a population growth leveling because levels of human consumption do not directly correlate to human populations. An obvious example of this is how much the average American uses<\/em> from the earth compared to someone from, say, Kiribati. Their footprint <\/em>is what ultimately affects the global ecology (environmentally, politically, and socially).<\/p>\n

Much of the approach to analyzing the industrialized food system has been from a mechanical systems and reductionist perspective\u2014looking at resource extraction, food production, distribution, and consumption in terms of input and output data and postulating that whole [system] is a sum of its parts. Looking at our relationship to food (both individually and collectively, locally and globally) in that objective, \u201cinorganic\u201d way often leads to ineffective policy reform and\/or social movements. However, when approaching a study of the world food system with consideration that it is mostly comprised of many living, organic systems\u2014which includes the ecology surrounding each stage<\/em> of food from farming to government initiatives to consumption to waste\u2014one realizes that emphasizing an onus of individual choice and behavior will not effectively solve world food-consumer problems such as sustainability, nutrition, and environmental pollution.<\/p>\n

If there is to be any solution to the challenge of continued population growth and the world food system, it would entail widespread reform of the wealthier populations, and taking queues from less-industrialized societies to feed more naturally <\/em>while using less (less land, less water, less nonrenewable resources for processing and transportation and storage). And I say naturally as opposed to the attempt that has been made already in the West to feed more with less, which gave us our current overabundance of processed foods with non-sustainable nutritive content (or lack thereof).<\/p>\n

\u201cAs our collective perception of environmental problems has become more global, our prevailing way of framing environmental problem-solving has become more individualized. In the end, individualizing responsibility does not work\u2026\u201d writes Michael Maniates.3<\/sup> In other words, your individual choice to buy organic produce and recycle every juice bottle will not \u2018save the world\u2019. It is of course a responsible thing to do, but the \u201cthink globally, act locally\u201d mode requires a shift to \u201cthink and <\/em>act globally\u201d to see real change and steps towards solutions and sustainability in the political ecology of the world food system.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Brown, L. R. “Full Planet Empty Plates – The new geopolitics of food scarcity”. Oxford University 2013<\/h6>\n
2. Litfin, Karen. \u201cPolitical Implications of Thinking in Systems\u201d ENVIR 385 Univ. of Washington 2017<\/h6>\n
3.\u00a0 Maniates, Michael. \u201cIndividualization: Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World?\u201d Global Environmental Politics Vol. 1:3 MIT 2001<\/h6>\n
4. image source: http:\/\/www.senecacollege.ca\/ce\/environment\/environ-sustain\/sustainable-local-food.html<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night\u2014 many of them with empty plates.\u201d \u2013 L.R. Brown1 Think about that for a minute\u2026 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 »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,23,16,1],"tags":[125,126,34,127],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropocene","category-food-movements","category-systems-thinking","category-uncategorized","tag-footprint","tag-population-growth","tag-systems-thinking","tag-think-globally"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":439,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions\/439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}