planted city

From Al Jazeera English:

In the early 20th century the American city of Detroit was a booming industrial powerhouse and world leader in car manufacturing, with a population that reached nearly two million people.

But since the major car companies closed their factories, more than a million taxpayers have moved out of Detroit, leaving behind more than 100 square kilometres of vacant land, and nearly 40,000 abandoned houses.

Now after decades of urban decay, Detroit is undergoing something of a revival as a centre for a new trade - urban farming.

In this half-hour special Russell Beard meets a group of visionary residents who see the city’s vacant land as fertile ground for an urban agriculture revolution.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

Related:

• ‘Detroit: rejuvenation through urban farms, sustainable living and innovation’ (The Guardian)
• ‘Detroit: The Center of Urban Farming’ (Care2)
• ‘City Farmer News’ (website)

Author Michael Pollan’s (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Rules) answer to the question, “What does it mean to vote with your fork?” You can check out the rest of his interview over at Nourish. 

Related:

• ‘Celebrate the Farmer!’ (New York Times)

(Photo source: Civil Eats)

Lester Brown on ‘How the battle for water will reshape our world’

From AlterNet via YouTube:

By 2025, two-thirds of people worldwide are expected to face water shortages as businesses, agriculture and growing populations compete for the ever more precious commodity.

Map source: Water for Life Decade (UN)

From Coursera:

This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.

This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).

All you need to participate is a decent internet connection and an up to date browser. More details including how to sign up here. You can download the class text for free here.

(Image source: Globaia)

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: ‘2012 Drought Update’ (Video)

From The Yale Climate Media Forum via YouTube:

The Drought of 2012 rivals the Great Dust Bowl years of the 30s and is coming at a time of melting arctic ice, shrinking ice sheets, and extreme events across the planet, matching the projections of climate models for global warming.

Related:

• ‘U.S. Drought and Climate Change: Science Points to Link’ (Wired)
• Thomas Homer-Dixon: ‘Climate change’s costs hit the plate’ (Globe & Mail)

(Map source: US Drought Monitor)

From Reuters:

Scorching temperatures in June’s second half helped the continental United States break its record for the hottest first six months in a calendar year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday.

The last 12 months also have been the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, narrowly beating the previous 12-month period that ended in May 2012.

Every state except Washington in the contiguous United States had warmer-than-average temperatures for the June 2011-June 2012 period.

The recent blistering heat wave broke records across much of the United States, threatening the Midwest’s corn crop and helping to fan destructive wildfires.

June was 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer in the lower 48 states than the 20th-century average, but still just the 14th hottest June in the record books, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said in a statement.

…

Such record-high temperatures are in line with a long-term warming trend in the 48 contiguous states, said Jake Crouch, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center.

Climate change spurred by carbon dioxide emissions may not be the primary cause, but these extreme conditions are consistent with what scientists see as a “new normal,” Crouch said by telephone.

“It’s hard to pinpoint climate change as the driving factor, but it appears that it is playing a role,” he said. “What’s going on for 2012 is exactly what we would expect from climate change.”

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘Society not ready for heat waves coming with climate change’ (USA Today)
• ‘Corn growers in hell as Midwest heat spreads’ (Business Week)
• ‘Past 12 months warmest ever recorded in United States’ (CNN)

(Map credit: NOAA)

From Climate Central:

Dramatically reducing emissions of one of the key contributors to global warming – nitrous oxide – will require farmers to change their ways of growing food, and citizens in the developed world to slash their yearly meat consumption, according to a new study published Friday.

The study by Eric Davidson, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, Mass., lays out actions that would be required in order to adhere to emissions scenarios developed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Specifically, meeting the strictest emissions reduction scenario would mean that, in the developed world, the average person would need to cut their meat consumption in half by the year 2050. This would help ensure there would be enough food to feed the planet’s rising population, with nearly 9 billion people expected to call Earth home by 2050, up from about 7 billion today. Red meat consumption is growing in the developing world and is still on the increase in developed countries, trends that pose formidable obstacles to those seeking to reign in nitrous oxide emissions.

…

A decline in meat consumption would have two main benefits, Davidson said. It would reduce the demand for nitrogen-based fertilizers, and cut down on manure production and use.

As for whether a 50 percent reduction in average per capita meat consumption is at all feasible by 2050, Davidson pointed to the relatively rapid changes in cigarette smoking habits seen during the past 50 years.

“If you had asked me 30 years ago if smoking would be banned in bars I would have laughed and said that would be impossible in my lifetime, and yet it has come true,” Davidson said in a press release.

“I don’t have an expertise to say how likely it is that people will change habits,” he said in a phone interview, emphasizing that he is not advocating vegetarianism, but rather is pointing out that in order to reach certain emissions reduction goals, cutting meat consumption in the developed world has to be considered as a sensible option.

The study notes that if people were to take an intermediate step and switch some meat consumption from red meat to pork, poultry or shellfish, they would help reduce nitrous oxide emissions. 

Check out the rest of the article here. For some low carbon food ideas check out Anna Lappe’s article, ‘Seven Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet’ and the Center for Food Safety’s ‘Cool Foods Campaign’.

(Photo credit: Climate Central)

Food with a Smile: ‘1 in 5 Teenagers Will Experiment With Farming’

(Source: Face Your Farmer via FarmFolkCityFolk)

Getting Animated: ‘Food Rules’ by writer Michael Pollan

From Vimeo:

Based on Michael Pollan’s talk “Food Rules” given at the RSA, this animation was created in the context of the RSA/Nominet Trust film competition. Using a mixture of stop-motion and compositing, our aim and challenge was to convey the topic in a visually interesting way using a variety of different food products. We made a little table top set up at home and worked on this a little over three weeks. 

(Photo credit: Michael Pollan)

Connections: Graphing Food Prices and Oil Prices, 2000-2010

This graph comes from energy expert Richard Heinberg’s recent article, ‘Soaring Oil and Food Prices Threaten Affordable Food Supply’. The piece explains that:

The current global food system is highly fuel- and transport-dependent. Fuels will almost certainly become less affordable in the near and medium term, making the current, highly fuel-dependent agricultural production system less secure and food less affordable.

To respond to this predicament Heinberg argues:

What is needed is a major redesigning of both food and energy systems. The goal of managers of the global food system should be to reduce its dependence on fossil energy inputs while also reducing GHG emissions from land-use activities. Achieving this goal will require increasing local food self-sufficiency and promoting less fuel- and petrochemical-intensive methods of production.

You can check out the rest of the article here. Also, if you’re looking for more on local, food oriented solutions you may want to check out ‘The Essential Gardening and Food Resilience Library’. 

(Graphic credit: Post Carbon Institute)