planted city

Wendell Berry: ‘IT ALL TURNS on affection’

From The National Endowment for the Humanities:

Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In his lecture, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds:  the “boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection” for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.”  The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here. 

Check out the rest of the article here. Berry’s talk starts approximately 10:00 minutes into the video and you can check out media coverage of it here, here, and here.

(Photo credit: NEH)

From Reuters via The Guardian:

Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by human-induced global warming, according to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heatwaves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.

“It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organisation said.

Extreme weather events were devastating in their impacts and affected nearly all regions of the world. They included severe floods and record hot summers in Europe; a record number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2005; the hottest Russian summer since 1500 in 2010 and the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history. In 2011 alone, the United States suffered 14 weather events which caused losses of over $1bn each.

The high amount of extremes is not normal, the study said. Even between 13 and 19 March this year, historical heat records exceeded in more than 1,000 places in North America.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Graphic credit: Nature Climate Change via Climate Progress) 

‘NASA Images Depict Rapid Loss of Thick Arctic Sea Ice’, 1980 - 2012

From Yale e360:

A new comparison of satellite images from 1980 and 2012 vividly depicts the rapid disappearance of thick, multi-year Arctic Ocean ice in winter. Over the past three decades, the extent of the Arctic’s thickest ice has declined by 15 to 17 percent per decade, according to NASA climate scientist Joey Comiso.

Details over at Yale e360 and NASA’s Earth Observatory.

It’s also worth noting that a new study has found an important link between melting Arctic sea ice and extreme weather being experienced in some regions of our planet. BBC coverage of the study explains that:

The progressive shrinking of Arctic sea ice is bringing colder, snowier winters to the UK and other areas of Europe, North America and China.

More here.

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) 

From the Stockholm Resilience Institute:

There is a growing concern among scientists and policy makers that environmental crises are no longer the sole acts of nature but rather the result of an accelerating human-induced global change.

At the same time, a pattern is starting to unfold: crises such as floodings, famine and pandemic diseases are not only turning increasingly intense, they are also increasingly connected.

In an article published in Ecology and Society (request article), an international team of researchers including Oonsie Biggs from the centre asks if we are entering an era of ‘concatenated global crises’.

Concatenated crises are disturbances or shocks that emerge pretty much simultaneously, spread rapidly and interact with each other across the globe.

Biggs and her colleagues explored how crises such as the 2007-08 food price crisis, whose origin and effects stem from far removed parts of the world and diverse economic sectors, turned into a global crisis.

The causes and processes leading to global crises are difficult to untangle, but it appears that the food price crisis started with soaring energy prices.

After three decades of falling prices, the price for staples such as rice increased by 255% between 2004 and 2008, largely because the price of petroleum, coal and natural gas in the same period increased by an average of 127%.

Largely due to soaring costs, environmental concerns and security issues, the EU and the US enacted ambitious pro-biofuel production policies. But the whole project backfired: between 2007 and 2008 the conversion of land from food to biofuel production led to an inflationary pressure on global food prices.

In an attempt to deal with the emerging food price crisis, a number of countries such as India, Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina, Russia and China sanctioned substantial restrictions on food export which inevitably lead to further increase in food prices.

“The food crisis illustrates how a series of crises interacted with national policy responses to propagate the crisis throughout a highly connected global system,” Oonsie Biggs explains.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: SRI)

‘Investing in Ecosystem Services Vital for Improving Food Security’

From the UNEP:

Recognising healthy ecosystems as the basis for sustainable water resources and stable food security can help produce more food from each unit of agricultural land, improve resilience to climate change and provide economic benefits for poor communities, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), in partnership with 19 other organizations.

The report shows how managing and investing in the connections between ecosystems, water and food, through diversifying crops, planting trees on farmland and improving rainwater collection and other practical steps, could help avoid water scarcity and meet the growing food demands of a global population set to reach 9 billion by 2050.

An Ecosystems Approach to Water and Food Security, which was launched during World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, says that policymakers should consider farmland, fisheries and other agricultural areas as “agroecosystems”, which provide sources of food as well as performing diverse ecosystem services such as water purification and flood regulation.

Declines in these ‘regulatory’ ecosystem services - leading to problems such as a loss of soil nutrients or increased vulnerability of crops to disease - have already begun to adversely affect agricultural productivity. Exacerbated by climate change, these declines could result in crop yields that are up to 25% short of demand by 2050, greatly impacting poor communities worldwide.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Ecosystems services infographic: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment)