Category Archives: Animals

Beefy Industry

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In his book Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Richard Robbins weighs the environmental costs of a staple of the US diet: beef. In mathematical number of calories, beef is an inefficient food that requires huge food input. Cattle feed accounts for 80% of US grain production and about half of US water consumption. This inefficiency is magnified as… Read more »

Evolution of Food Industrialization

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What I found interesting this week was the evolution of food systems, from it’s beginning to it’s present forms. The lifestyles of humans have evolved dramatically. In a hunter gatherer society, food was consumed as it was available, and groups would migrate to find more food resources once theirs become scarce. However, as these evolved into settlements and communities, humans began to deplete… Read more »

The Impact Of Industrial Livestock Raising and Alternatives

 (large scale industrial livestock farm) The environmental impact of industrial livestock raising is huge.  It is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gases behind energy production.  Without changes in how we produce meat, the amount of greenhouse gas emitted through industrial livestock raising will only increase.  The population is rising and becoming more affluent.  More affluent populations tend to eat… Read more »

Making Aquaculture Sustainable…

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  “Aquaculture is a rapidly growing, highly valued and extremely important sector of the seafood industry. It is predicted that by 2030 it will account for more than 60% of global seafood production” (Dowle et al.). There are two basic forms of aquaculture, extensive systems and intensive systems.  Extensive systems are powered by the sun, have a relatively low environmental… Read more »

A Life of Embracing Vegetation

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My research paper focused on finding a solution in mitigating the dependency on meat production in the global food production. The problem with animal agriculture is that it uses an enormous amount of our natural resources and creates a high level of greenhouse-gas emissions. Meat production uses a vast amount of water, crops and land. The animals being raised for food create a large amount of… Read more »

Save the Land, Save the Water, Save Everything!

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Political Ecology has different levels of definitions depending on the scope of a given perspective. One concept that I find interesting is how we separate the word nature from environment. Essentially nature has a larger scope than that of what is implied by the word environment. Regardless of what word and what scope we have in mind about our surroundings,… Read more »

Holy Hemp!

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The political ecology of today’s world food system is continuously being shaped by countless influential factors. The world food system is in an utter state of imbalance in terms of waste and environmental degradation. The foundation from which these issues arise can be traced back to governmental and social dimensions and or decisions that took place in the recent past…. Read more »

Diversified gardens over monocropping

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Western institutes employ thousands of people, allocating financial and agricultural resources in attempts to contain the problem of hunger in developing nations, but these efforts aren’t enough. An obvious solution to hunger is… send hungry people food! But the cost of transportation, in dollars as well as environmental pollutants, creates more problems than it solves (Robbins). Instead of providing consistent aid… Read more »

Hungry Planet Paper: Japan and Ecuador

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Peter Menzel’s Hungry Planet depicts the various dietary and health lifestyles choices from various families around the globe. The Western diet, generally consisting of red meats, refined grains, processed foods, high fat and sugar content, as well as large food chains such as McDonalds have become popular making its way to countries like Japan, but not so much in countries… Read more »

What We Eat Affects the World Around Us

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  (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 »