Subdue the earth? No!

In graduate school, a classmate remarked that his Jewish family would watch out for Jewish names in the news, whether it was good or bad.  I told him that I found doing something similar--watching out for Indian names.  And, if it was a Tamil name, then it was even more exciting.

Of course, sometimes the names pop up in unfortunate circumstances (like here or here.)  But, and thankfully, those are rare.

The cherry on top of awesome news was undoubtedly getting a dosai connoisseur as the Vice President ;)

It is human, after all, to applaud "our people."  An applause that does not have any baggage of superiority of inferiority.

It was that same graduate school excitement that I felt when I read the name of the lead author of a UK government report on the economics of biodiversity: Sir Partha Dasgupta.

My man!

All I read was the Headline Messages.  I love it.

The report notes this: "The Review develops the economics of biodiversity on the understanding that we – and our economies – are ‘embedded’ within Nature, not external to it."

We are embedded within Nature, not external to it.

The fact that we even need to be reminded about this fundamental aspect of life!

Back in graduate school, one of the discussions was the framework that the Judeo-Christian religions offered in contrast to many others around the world.  In the Judeo-Christian approach, god made man in his image and likeness. Then:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

In the Judeo-Christian framework, god rules over man, who rules over nature.

That relationship is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.  Whether it was Native Americans or people in India or elsewhere, nature was worshiped.  There wasn't a sense of everything on earth as humans to take any which way it pleased them.

Sir Partha Dasgupta reminds us that we are embedded in Nature.  We don't rule over it.  We are so much intertwined with nature that "Dasgupta said assigning absolute monetary values to nature would be meaningless because life would simply cease to exist if it was destroyed."

Dasgupta's report notes:

[Relying] on institutions alone to curb our excesses will not be enough. The discipline to draw on Nature sustainably must, ultimately, be provided by us as individuals. But societal change – particularly growing urbanisation – has meant that many people have grown distant from Nature. Interventions to enable people to understand and connect with Nature would not only improve our health and well-being, but also help empower citizens to make informed choices and demand the change that is needed

Read the 10-pager.  Spread the word.  Be good to Nature.

You are what you eat?

Last night's dinner was a big salad.  Nope, there was no argument or disagreement on who gets credit for it ;)

It is a healthy meal even though it had cheese and oil and carbs!  Damn healthy while being damn tasty.  Unlike the ultra processed foods that are the curse.

Don't worry--this is not a post about the virtues of being vegan or vegetarian or about eating salads.  Nor am I going to argue that that the old days before processed foods were better. Nope. In fact, even students in my classes know how much I critique the "bad old days."  I have also blogged often quoting people like Rachel Laudan that we are much better off thanks to not having to grow our own greens, raise our own cows, make our own breads, ...

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Eating, in these modern times requires some kind of a ethos. A culture.  We need to think long and hard about it.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."  And this requires a new ethos, writes Rachel Laudan.

I agree with Laudan.  Even the big salad that we had is case in point.  We didn't grow the greens that went into the salad.  We didn't make the olive oil or the vinegar. We didn't make the paneer that we fried and added to the mix.  Yes, you read that correctly--fried paneer.  Nor did we bake the baguette.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."

And I agree that in developing a new ethos, we first ought to acknowledge this:

I find the complexity thrilling; the human ingenuity that has so improved our food, impressive. Yes, the systems are flawed, but they always have been. There never was a golden age when everyone in a given society was fed without environmental problems, social and economic inequalities, or nutritional inadequacies. Modern food systems have reduced the proportion of the globe’s population that goes hungry even as that population has soared. They have made safe, fresh food available in cities of a size not even imagined a century ago. They have expanded culinary options so that much of the world can enjoy dishes invented half the globe away. And they have unlocked the secrets of taste that chefs rely on.

From that point of departure, how do we develop a culinary ethos that will be about our health, about the environment, about justice, about ...?

Abandoning the slogan “Our food system is broken. We must fix it” would be a good start to this ethos. It is at best unhelpful, at worst misleading. “Our food system” suggests a monolith, perhaps even a conspiracy, with problems that no one except a chosen “us” has noticed or is trying to improve. “Broken” suggests that in the past this imagined food system was whole when it never was. Instead of such sloganeering, I urge continuing the steady, ongoing work of identifying and solving the multiple problems of our multiple food systems so that, without exploiting workers or endangering the earth, the riches so many have come to enjoy can be spread yet further.

Yes.

Where's the beef?

I first wrote about it six years ago, almost to the date.  There was no way that I could not appreciate the moment.  I was confident that it was going to be a big part of the future.

Later, I talked about it with students, even had them read news reports and commentaries. I talked about it with people whenever the topic came up.  A couple of times, I even bought it from the store and tried it at home.  I was sure that I came across as a madman, but I never wavered; so confident I was about it being the future.

What is it that I am referring to?

Meat that is not really meat.

I wrote six years ago:

It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals.  All the old definitions on what foods can or cannot be consumed will have to be redefined.

And then Burger King introduced the Impossible Whopper--"100% Whopper, 0% beef."

The news today is that after the test marketing, Burger King is going nationwide with the Impossible Whopper.

The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations for the next month as it tests the potential demand for the meaty-tasting meatless patty.

When such a powerful company adopts the beefless beef, hey, we are well beyond the tipping point.  It, ahem, beefs up the market:

Burger King wasn’t the first chain to see the value in adding Impossible Burgers to the menu. Roughly a year ago, White Castle became the first major fast food chain to offer an Impossible Slider on its menu. The burgers can also be found at more upscale fast-casual restaurant chains like Bareburger, Applebee’s, Red Robin, and Five Napkin Burger joints.

Burger King going full-speed on meatless meat has its own downside:

For months, many restaurants across the country have been unable to stock the soy-based patties, which taste remarkably beefy. Impossible Foods, their Redwood City maker, couldn’t keep up with rising demand — and even restaurants that had previously served the burgers couldn’t get them. The reason, just possibly, was that the company had promised to supply Impossible Whoppers to 7,300 Burger King locations by the end of the year.
“It disappeared off our shelves and then showed up at Burger King across the street,” said Christian Gainsley, owner of the Bernal Heights restaurant Outer Orbit. “It felt like a betrayal.”

Success is a wonderful thing!

Impossible Foods’ recent wins come as its chief rival, Beyond Meat, is raking in piles of cash as a publicly traded company and building up a sizable war chest to conduct research and development for new products.
Impossible Foods has raised nearly $700 million to date as a private company. Its backers include  Khosla Ventures,  Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project.

These alt-meat products are derived from plants.  And then there is the other approach--growing meat in labs from animal cells, and R&D there has been on an accelerating path.

Why are these important?  For two reasons. One, the ethics of killing animals.  Second, the impact on the environment--our meat consumption is not sustainable in its current structure.

Livestock raised for food already contribute about 15% of the world’s global greenhouse-gas emissions. (You may have heard that if cows were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest emitter.) A quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used to graze them, and a third of all cropland is used to grow food for them. A growing population will make things worse. It’s estimated that with the population expected to rise to 10 billion, humans will eat 70% more meat by 2050. Greenhouse gases from food production will rise by as much as 92%.
In January a commission of 37 scientists reported in The Lancet that meat’s damaging effects not only on the environment but also on our health make it “a global risk to people and the planet.” In October 2018 a study in Nature found that we will need to change our diets significantly if we’re not to irreparably wreck our planet’s natural resources.

If you are like me, it has been decades since you went to the Burger King, correct? Well, head on there, and check out the Impossible Whopper and be a part of the future!

A fruit for all seasons?

I didn't taste my first strawberry until I came to America.

That should not surprise anybody.  I grew up in a HOT near-equatorial place.  The fruits that I ate were bananas and mangoes and guavas and jackfruits.  On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of Americans would not have even heard of something called a jackfruit, leave alone tasting the awesome fruit or the sweet that mothers made.

Living a locavore life is what we humans did until very, very, recently.  In contrast to all our collective history, grocery stores now seem to sell fruits and vegetables that I hadn't even heard of.  I am yet to try out many strange looking produce items that are on the shelves in my grocery store simply because I have no idea what to do with them, nor do I have the remotest idea of how they might taste.

Strawberries I came to appreciate.  The sweet/tart taste with vanilla ice cream, for instance, is heavenly on a hot summer afternoon.  But then, slowly as I learnt more about the fruit, the more I started getting concerned about the labor used, and the pesticides and other chemicals, the less I became fascinated with strawberries.

After the move to Oregon, in one of my classes, a student remarked that it is easy to distinguish between strawberries from California versus the Oregon produce.  The ones from California are bloated, full of water, and tasteless, he swore.

I started paying attention. He was correct.

Over the past few years, I have been thinking more and more about the fact that the stores always have most fruits and vegetables, as if there is no seasonality/  Especially strawberries.

Today’s California strawberry industry, which grows 88 percent of US strawberries, was born in the 1860s in the Pajaro Valley, straddling Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.7 There, apple orchardists experimented with planting strawberries in the rows between trees. Once they began shipping the fruit to San Francisco markets, they found strawberries to be quite lucrative.8 Land in the Pajaro Valley was ideal for strawberry production, especially in the alluvial plains where the rivers meet the seas. The sandy loam soils drained well to prevent the build-up of moisture and salt and protect a fruit that is prone to rot.9 The Mediterranean climate was no less accommodating. With the vast majority of rain falling between November and April, the warm and dry temperatures of summer protected against molds and other moisture-generated pests and diseases during the harvest season. The natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean was an additional advantage, in the summer bringing cool, moist air into the low-lying coastal areas, while in the wintertime keeping frosts at bay. The benefits of what some call the “eternal spring” included a long harvest season, eventually inducing breeders to develop varietals that could be harvested nearly year-round.

The strawberry story is a complex one.  As demand grew, the use of various chemicals dramatically increased.  Now, we are wiser.  In a tight regulatory framework, strawberries present us with a wonderful example of the urgency to think about sustainability--to grow the fruit in plenty, with as little environmental impacts as possible, and while treating the labor fairly.

the strawberry case illustrates that sustainability itself is not a singular goal that can be achieved all at once. Instead, striving for sustainability in agriculture presents inescapable trade-offs in the use of resources and materials, not to mention social goals around working conditions, farmer livelihoods, and affordability. It’s time we started having a public conversation about the fact that those trade-offs exist and how we want to navigate them.

I, for one, have pretty much stopped buying strawberries from the stores.

Out of Eden

Typically, any new administrator who meets with us will at some point ask us what the difference is between geology and geography.  And we point out to them that geographers look at human environment interactions.

Makes sense, right?  It is not merely about humans and what we do.  It is not merely about the environment.  But, about that intersection.  Which means, well, pretty much everything.  (Therefore, to some, it can also mean it is about nothing.)

Now, what if that natural environment that is close to home--not far away like in the Arctic--is changing for the worse?  Like the paving over of wetlands, or seemingly permanently smoke-filled skies because of the cement factory in town, or ... you get the drift, right?

It is also easy to imagine that plenty of people get distressed over the destruction of that natural environment.  If only there is a word for that condition, you say?

While you won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, philosopher Glenn Albrecht once coined one such word while working at the University of Newcastle in Australia. 'Solastalgia’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California.
It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, explains Albrecht.

The last two weeks here in Oregon made me feeling uneasy.  Forest fires all around the state were blowing smoke and fine particulate matter into the valley.  The blue sky and white clouds, and the hours outside, were gone.  The sun rose as an orange ball, and throughout the day its light was yellow and orange.  Sunsets were eerily spectacular.  People didn't stir out, and those that did wore masks to filter the air that they were breathing.  I couldn't even enjoy the simplest pleasure of walking up to the river, leave alone walking my favorite five-mile loop by it.

One day, I simply gave up.  It was a crappy day.

Turns out that I was down with solastalgia.

The symptoms include an underlying sense of loss, a vague sensation of being torn from the earth, a general out-of-placeness, homelessness without leaving home. ... Solastalgia is the unease we inflict on ourselves as we create a world we don’t want to inhabit, a world stripped of nature.

I am not even an environmental nut-case and I find that I suffer from mild solastalgia.

At least the deterioration in the natural condition around me was temporary.  After a few bad days, the high pressure system let go of its choke-hold.  The wind direction changed.  The temperature dropped.  The blue sky returned.  I said hi to the river.

But, what if the damage to the natural environment near our homes is permanent?  How does one recover from that?

 “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote, “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the beloved place in which one resides is under assault.” The type of assault may vary. The force of the assault may vary. The loss and unease that follows in the wake of the assault do not.
Glenn Albrecht chose “solasta” as a new root word for two reasons. “Solasta” contains the sense both of “solace” and “desolation.”

Desolation is a serious condition, I would think.

The idea of solastalgia came out of a stripped landscape, that of the Australian droughts of the early oughts. They provided direct evidence of the mental health consequences of climate change. The effects were most acute among indigenous groups, scientists who confront climate change directly, and farmers whose land has been destroyed.

Understandable, given that indigenous groups and farmers spend every single day with the natural environment in ways that we city slickers cannot even imagine.

Solastalgia, the researchers concluded, appeared to “give clear expression, both philosophically and empirically, to the environmental dimension of human distress.”

Yes, empirically too.

Solastalgia is the latest human affliction, and like the other human afflictions before it, it calls out for a cure.

If you want, read that piece to find out how the market offers a "cure."  If you are like me, you will be even more depressed at that cure!

There's no business like ... sustainable business?

Profits are apparently better guides than prophets, as we found out post-Charlottesville.  To some extent, it should not surprise us; after all, businesses are all about the here and now, and not about heaven or hell.  So, if even the appearance of siding with the fuhrer would hurt their bottom-lines, then, of course, business leaders would abandon the fascist.

The fascist and his minions deny climate change, and by loosening up regulations and promoting activities that will further destroy the natural environment, they are all set to bring about hell on earth, instead of making heaven right here on earth.  The fuhrer gleefully announced that he was withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement.  What does the market think about all these?  Will business leaders cheer the maniac, or are they taking a different approach?

Harvard Business Review takes this up, which is made clear in the headline itself:

No ambiguity there, right?  HBR has created "the Future Economy Project."

We’ve enlisted prominent thinkers and leading CEOs who understand that sustainable business practices are in a company’s long-term interests. They will help us answer questions like: How does sustainability fit into a company’s strategy? How can you make core business operations more sustainable? How do you convince major stakeholders — employees, investors, the board, and customers — that sustainability is the right path? And what type of leadership will take us there?    

HBR adds:

We don’t pretend to have all the answers — and neither do the pioneering business leaders who are joining this initiative. But over the coming months, we will provide case studies and practical lessons from their experiences to help other executives who believe that profits and environmental responsibility must go hand in hand.
The Future Economy Project will culminate in the publication of a list of principles and actions, endorsed by our partners, aimed at outlining a path for businesses that want to pursue sustainable goals. The principles will reflect our partners’ thinking on how to operationalize sustainability throughout the enterprise.    

One of the HBR essays leads with this:

Despite conflicting messages about climate change from U.S. government leaders, sustainability is getting more and more attention at American companies. Shareholders are ratcheting up their demands on environmental and social issues. Consumers are registering their concerns about how companies make their products. And talented Millennial employees are voting with their feet by leaving laggard companies behind. Meanwhile, new technologies are making it easier for sustainability investments to pay off in the middle to long term.

I have always believed that transformations will be less of a hurdle if we created the appropriate contexts for the profit-motive.  Because, merely appealing to people to do the right thing rarely works, if ever.  And once we tap into that profit motive, things can happen seemingly overnight.

Of course, as conservative organizations, businesses are resistant and reactionary, especially if the change will not help the bottom-line.  But, businesses--unlike politicians--are not ideological and, hence, do change their outlook.  Therefore, in addition to yelling at politicians, we the people ought to yell even louder at businesses.  Chances are that businesses will listen to us and act way quicker than the elected official will.

At the university where I teach, for a year we worked on creating a new academic major called "sustainability."  I think my most important contribution there was to structure it such that students could focus on their business interests in sustainability.  To me, it was a no-brainer that business should be a part of the major.   For once, people actually listened to me! ;)  This HBR report adds that much more validation of the major that we have created.

Your food is a political statement

As a way to stress the importance of the courses that I teach, I often tell students that they have enormous power to influence the outcomes through two roles that they have: Consumer and voter.  I then follow up with how people talk about the voting aspect, but that they vastly underestimate the decisions that we make every single day as consumers.  When we buy a tshirt that was manufactured in Bangladesh, it is a political act too, I tell them.

If only they and the rest of the world listened to me!

Take the food that we eat, for instance.  I have blogged in plenty about how much beef is an environmental disaster.  (Like here, for example.)  Beef and chicken consumers are essentially saying, "fuck it, I don't care about climate change."  Because, if they did care, then it will be difficult to justify their actions.

Every small thing, however mundane and a daily boring thing it is that we do, is a political statement.  It is just that we don't think of it that way.

Gidon Eshel talks about in the video that I have embedded here.  But, hey, maybe not everybody wants to spend 45 minutes on that talk ;)  He says:

“When you make a choice between any two competing ingredients or any two competing meals,” Eshel said in a December lecture (on “Rethinking the American Diet”), “you are making a whole cascade of important choices that you may or may not be aware of. For example, in that choice you determine…the nature of rural communities” in terms of structure, land use, and population density; the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted “on your behalf” for food production; the biodiversity of rangelands; the likelihood of species extinctions; and the health of waterways and coastal ocean fisheries, where massive die-offs are one consequence of agricultural pollution. “You even get to take sides in things that we don’t often associate with food choices, like societal strife,” he said, citing the example of a water-rights dispute pitting alfalfa farmers against a Native American tribe in Oregon’s Klamath basin.

You see how even the food that we eat is a statement on various people and natural elements all around?

If I had been asked to guess how much of the agricultural land is used to grow all things healthy, like apples and oranges and nuts and tomatoes, I would never, ever, have guessed anywhere near the neighborhood.  My number would have been like trump's factoids that he grabs from his asshole!  The reality is shocking:

all the lettuce, tomatoes, fruits, and nuts people eat (including apples, citrus, and almonds) are grown in less than one-half of 1 percent of the agricultural lands: “a minuscule fraction of the total” 

What the what?  One-half of one percent of the ag lands in this country?  That's it?  Oh my!

So, what is Eshel's bottom-line?

When making their dietary choices, Eshel said in summing up his research, individuals “get to tip the scale of environmental, social, and political contests,” as well as improve their personal health. Eating healthy foods that use less land, therefore, “is one of the callings of our time….”

Imagine explaining all these to the 63 million who voted for the asshole-in-chief!

Talking trash. No, it is not about university faculty :)

This map from the Economist is three days late as far as I am concerned; I could have made wonderful use of it in my intro class on Monday!

In the US, we are one heck of a consuming population that generates so much trash!

Meanwhile, this report (ht) argues that we are getting ever so close to an ecological tipping point:

In a paper published in today's edition of the journal Nature, 22 researchers from a variety of fields liken the human impact to global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions, permanently altering Earth's biosphere.
"Humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," wrote the authors, who are from the U.S., Europe, Canada and South America.
If current trends continue — exploding global population, rapidly rising temperatures and the clearance of more than 40% of Earth's surface for urban development or agriculture — the planet could reach a tipping point, they say.
"The net effects of what we're causing could actually be equivalent to an asteroid striking the Earth in a worst-case scenario," the paper's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, said in an interview. "I don't want to sound like Armageddon. I think the point to be made is that if we just ignore all the warning signs of how we're changing the Earth, the scenario of losses of biodiversity — 75% or more — is not an outlandish scenario at all."
Global population just passed 7 billion and is expected to reach 9.3 billion or more by 2050. "By the year 2070, we'll live in a hotter world than it's been since humans evolved as a species," Barnosky said.

 Party like it is 2025!

Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

Of course, there is a a lot to disagree with in this essay; but, it is exceeded by the amount to think about ... (ht)

 The weird and unintentional pincer-movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-über-alles brigade has infiltrated, ironed out and reworked environmentalism for its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not about reforging a connection between over-civilised people and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our civilisation has become.Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy....
... What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers.

If that got you thinking, how about then watching George Carlin's bitingly satirical and funny segment on saving the planet:

(un)sustainable agriculture

Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

One might think that such views will not be found in countries like India where not only do poor and undernourished live number in the millions, but also where millions of others have been lifted out of abject poverty and undernourishment.
Think again; more from the article:

Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.