Category Archives: Water

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 »

Rainwater Harvesting for Food Security

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Agriculture is generally recognized as the precursor to the world’s first civilizations. The development of irrigation and other farming methods boosted food production and allowed for population expansion and permanent human settlements. Irrigated land expanded at a steady pace until the last century with the advent of modern farming techniques. Modern farming tripled acreage of irrigated land between 1950 and… 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 »

Living Life

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I wish I spent more time in the dirt. I had spring-time dreams of generating enough greens to supplement my diet and quickly realized the many lessons of the soil I had yet to learn. The earth I put in my little garden is still new to me and I know it as living system which requires nurturing and nutrients…. Read more »

No Solutions for the Unheard

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Throughout the research process of writing my paper, I was overwhelmed with the amount of problems and lack of solutions that the people of Ecuador have in terms of water contamination.  Ecuador has been involved in a resource curse, specifically around the mighty oil market.  Their natural resources have been exploited by national corporations such as Chevron/Texaco since the 1980’s… Read more »

The Cost of Cows

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To function effectively, landscape governance ought to consider the whole system, which would account for the ecological impact and food sustenance needs. There is much profit to be found in land. Cash crops offer huge profits that are motivating a change in land investment and moving large corporations into the field where small farmers once predominated. The farms then tend… Read more »