Daily Loaf

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Fixing sprawl and redesigning suburbia- Grant Rimbey CNU explores a possible strategy towards improving existing sprawl. Fixing the sprawl that we have, along with sprawl demolition and recycling, are strategies that could be employed in the future as a new green industry.

Nation’s largest solar facility to be in DeSoto County by next year- Florida Power and Light is currently building the nation’s largest photovoltaic plant in DeSoto County, a $173.5 million, 25 megawatt solar generating facility.

Fresh: New Thinking About What We’re Eating screening – What’s wrong with the mega-industrial food industry- Struggling small farms, problems with food safety rules and the mega-industrial food industry, and a film about all of the above.
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Scattered about me are books and magazines. On one the poster child of the climate change movement, the polar bear swimming in icy clear water. Audubon chose the title Sink or Swim: Another Assault on the Arctic and How You Can Help Stop It. In all honesty, I think it’s too late. We are currently witnessing the fifth or is it the sixth mass extinction since life first emerged from the slime or rocks or whatever that latest scientific findings happens to suggest. But remember when compared to our life spans this extinction will take an insanely long time. So the urgency just doesn’t seem to be there, because if it did, then we would all be in the streets marching on Washington, D.C. and the United Nations demanding that something be done yesterday.

Another magazine, the April/May 2009 issue of Free Inquiry, has a time bomb on its cover. The number on the clock 6,790,064,816. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of August 16, 2009, at my time of 10:15 a.m., the human population is 6,845,146,634.  In 1960, it was 3 billion. By 2044, 9 billion. That’s a 6 billion jump in less than 100 years. For me, this is the number one problem plaguing Homo sapiens. There are just too many of us, which leads to greater and greater demands on water and food, both quite finite. And the energy demand will only increase GHGs if viable alternatives are not found – think China and India. If human population growth does not slow down, we will not have the resources to feed everyone. I have to smile when I think about the town hall meetings and the misinformation being propagated with end-of-life issues and death squads. If we don’t stop breeding who knows. Sounds like a great story for a movie, though. Oh wait! It’s already been done - Soylent Green.
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What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Steps to becoming greener: Reducing your waste, reusing and recycling: Joshua Poll gives some useful tips for ways to start reducing, reusing, and recycling things you thought you could just throw away.

Genetically engineering cows that will produce less methane, reducing greenhouse gases: Geneticists in Canada are trying to engineer a cow that produces less methane, resulting in less greenhouse gases, reports Brian Roberts.
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This post is partially a retraction and a correction. I have reported previously on how cow farts are filling up the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane. Apparently, its not the gas from the tail end of the cow that’s the problem. Its the belching. My bad.

Either way, it sounds like a premise for a bad episode of Captain Planet and a chain of visual images that eventually ruins lunch.
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I just read a blog arguing the problems versus benefits of organic food.  Though it covered the issue from different angles and had some interesting points, one part that I want to address is the idea that organic fields are 40% less productive than fields that use a bunch of chemicals. That isn’t true of any organic farmer I know personally – I’m not sure where this statistic comes from and I have my doubts it is accurate in any context.

I can say with certainty it is not accurate if a farmer uses any of a number of different organic growing methods such as biodynamic, biointensive, polycropping or permaculture techniques, all of which can produce higher yields than traditional agriculture at lower costs.

The problem with conventional agriculture — and the reason we have to import oil in order to grow corn — is because the way we grow our food is extremely unnatural.  Think of this: We literally kill every living thing in the field before we plant our crops!  To prepare a new field to plant corn, we would have to remove all the plants already growing there, and plow the soil under, which kills even many of the soil microbes that are essential for fertile soil.  All that organic matter that was just removed is what created rich soils in the first place.  Then we import a bunch of chemical fertilizers to feed the plants, because we stripped the place.  One could call that flora and fauna genocide, you know?  Every living thing? Is that really necessary? Read the rest of this entry »