On February 6th, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and landed the Falcon Heavy rocket. One of the purported goals of SpaceX is to “make life multiplanetary,” locating and extracting resources in space. What happens when we apply the lessons of the biofuel boom and the 2008 world food crisis to SpaceX? This massive investment of earthly resources may not yield… Read more »
Much has been written about Cuba’s shift from industrialized to organic farming after the fall of the Soviet Block in 1989. During this Special Period, with no ability to import equipment or fertilizer, Cuba installed community gardens throughout its urban areas, and rural communities returned to the ‘ways of the campesino’ (Cuba: The Accidental Revolution, 2007). As the world considers… Read more »
The realities of the world food system carry emotional and moral weight. Images of hunger to the point of starvation, especially of children, is not just difficult to see, but difficult to know exist at this very moment around the world. The statistics and numbers are one aspect, but the level of suffering that is ongoing before the statistical metric… Read more »
The common threads I found running through the concepts of hunger, food and energy, and climate change were feelings of both deep foreboding and indomitable hope. It’s really easy as a young person to focus on the main problems we are going to have to tackle with respect to these issues—how will we feed not only the starving people around… Read more »
The rise of sugar as a regular staple in households worldwide is a fascinating example of how the world’s food has changed significantly. Sugar, once a highly coveted luxury item, is now the opposite – available in high volumes in every packaged good sold on the shelves of corner markets globally. The history of sugar demonstrates the “social, political, and… Read more »
Week nine’s information about meat and seeds caused me to reflect upon my own beliefs, practices, and ideas. I became very interested in food and its effect on my health in December 2016, when my sister-in-law’s father-in-law was diagnosed with stage III cancer. Before that, both of my grandfathers had been diagnosed with cancer and one had passed away while… Read more »
I enjoyed reading Karen Litfin’s work in “Thinking Like a Planet.” It goes along with some of the questions I have been asking about using Earth Systems to inform human systems, making them circular rather than linear. It was nice to see ideas and examples of how it is being done, such as virtuous cycles rather than vicious cycles. I… Read more »
The developing and middle income countries feel the affects of climate change the most. These countries face “triple inequality” they are less responsible for climate change, they are more impacted by it, and they have less capacity to adapt to problems that happen because of climate change. I am going to focus on one country Fiji. I read an article… Read more »
From the past few weeks of reflection, I feel as though I’ve found an underlying theme of “if it were you and your family…what would you do?” If in the grand scheme of all in the world, if you knew that your actions such as over utilization of fertilizer that is poisoning the population or growing opium poppy that would… Read more »
Our world food system is broken. The evidence of this is most apparent in the ironic stories of food culture on our divided planet. Developed countries produce many times more food than needed to feed their populations, the US produces 4 times its needed calories (Stuart, TED), while developing nations struggle to produce enough to feed their hungry populations. Indigenous… Read more »