In Amanda Little’s essay, Power Trip, she examines the ways in which fertilizers, coupled with the seed engineering breakthroughs of the Green Revolution have brought us agricultural abundance. And yet, being able to feed an expanding population has also produced many practices that have put strain on the environment and come at a cost to other living systems. Little explores… Read more »
As I went to get breakfast the other morning from the hot bar at Whole Foods I noticed something that I never took notice too before. The scrambled eggs have citric acid listed in the ingredients. I had just read Amanda Littles essay, “Cooking Oil: How Fossil Fuels Feed the World (and Energy Shortages Starve it).” I was still trying… Read more »
Fertilizer is a major component of fossil fuels—one that has completely transformed the number of crops produced, and in turn has transformed our way of life. Chemical fertilizers are responsible for spiking the production and growth of crops, which has increased the food supply worldwide, allowing for an increase in population. This change in agriculture began with the Green Revolution,… Read more »
Let’s talk about the water where I live in Naples, Italy. I am an American military spouse and living in Italy because my husband is stationed in Naples. Every year the US Navy does a test on the quality of tap water on the US military base. The report is called, U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT ACTIVITY NAPLES SUPPORT SITE – GRICIGNANO… Read more »
With an ever expanding world population and the impending threat of another world energy crisis, food production is in a precarious situation. Food production has been able to keep up with the population due to nitrogen based fertilizers and other technological innovations upping the yield of staple crops. Unfortunately, these innovations are incredibly dependent on fossil fuels and can cause… Read more »
The world food system is complex, intricate, and interacts with many factors (i.e. political, environmental, climate, etc.). It isn’t a simple solution to provide equitable food for all. One underlying theme throughout the past lessons is desire for power. Affluent countries hold a lot of power because of their access to advanced technology, ability to produce agriculture, and access to… Read more »
Hunger is in effect a systemic issue. Our media over simplifies it to a lack of food or resources when we must in-fact look at a broader system that changes how and why there is hunger in a world where we have enough food to feed everyone. There are an assortment of complex variables at play. First we see… Read more »
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 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 »