Full Planet Empty Plates The New Geopolitics Of Food Scarcity
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Author : Lester R. Brown Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company Page : 124 pages File Size : 41,6 Mb Release : 2012-10-01 Category : Science ISBN : 9780393344530
Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester R. Brown Pdf
Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in one decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding; political unrest is spreading. On the demand side of the food equation, there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night. And some 3 billion increasingly affluent people are moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. At the same time, water shortages and heat waves are making it more difficult for farmers to keep pace with demand. As grain-exporting countries ban exports to keep their food prices down, importing countries are panicking. In response, they are buying large tracts of land in other countries to grow food for themselves. The land rush is on. Could food become the weak link for us as it was for so many earlier civilizations? Lester Brown, one of the leading environmentalists of our time, explains why world food supplies are tightening and tells what we need to do about it.
In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.
Originally published in 1995, but with enduring relevance in a time of global population growth and food insecurity, when it was first published, this book attracted much global attention, and criticism from Beijing. It argued that even as water becomes scarcer in a land where 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of agricultural land to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. This book predicts that in an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will come everyone’s land scarcity and water scarcity in China will affect the entire world. China’s dependence on massive imports, like the collapse of the world’s fisheries, will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. Over time, Janet Larsen argued, China’s leaders came to ‘acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? changed their thinking..’ As China’s wealth increases, so do the dietary demands of its population. The increasing middle classes demand more grain-intensive meat and farmed fish. The issue of who will feed China has not gone away.
Deforestation. Desertification. Species extinction. Global warming. Growing threats to food and water. The driving issues of our times are the result of one huge problem: Us. As the population continues to grow, our problems will increase. And this means that every way we look at it, a planet of ten billion people is likely to be a nightmare. Stephen Emmott, a scientist whose lab is at the forefront of research into complex natural systems, sounds the alarm. TEN BILLION is a snapshot of our planet, and our species, approaching a crisis, and a stark analysis of where this leaves us. TEN BILLION is not another climate book. TEN BILLION is a book about us.
Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled. There, he befriended her eclectic neighbors — organic farmers, biofuel brewers, eco-developers — and discovered a sustainable but imperiled way of life. In these pages, Powers not only explores this small patch of community but draws on his international experiences with other pockets of resistance. This engrossing tale of Powers’s struggle for a meaningful life with a smaller footprint proposes a paradigm shift to an elusive “Soft World” with clues to personal happiness and global healing.
Author : Lester Russell Brown Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company Page : 415 pages File Size : 51,5 Mb Release : 2008 Category : Nature ISBN : 9780393330878
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised) by Lester Russell Brown Pdf
Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.
Global Food Systems, Diets, and Nutrition by Jessica Fanzo,Claire Davis Pdf
Ensuring optimal diets and nutrition for the global population is a grand challenge fraught with many contentious issues. To achieve food security for all and protect health, we need functional, equitable, and sustainable food systems. Food systems are highly complex networks of individuals and institutions that depend on governance and policy leadership. This book explains how interconnected food systems and policies affect diets and nutrition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In tandem with food policy, food systems determine the availability, affordability, and nutritional quality of the food supply, which influences the diets that people are willing and able to consume. Readers will become familiar with both domestic and international food policy processes and actors, and they will be able to critically analyze and debate how policy and science affect diet and nutrition outcomes.
The second edition of this concise survey offers a comparative and comprehensive study of culinary cultures and food politics throughout the world, from ancient times to the present day. It examines the long history of globalization of foods as well as the political, social, and environmental implications of our changing relationship with food, showing how hunger and taste have been driving forces in human history. Including numerous case studies from diverse societies and periods, Food in World History explores such questions as: What social factors have historically influenced culinary globalization? How did early modern plantations establish patterns for modern industrial food production? Were eighteenth-century food riots comparable to contemporary social movements around food? Did Italian and Chinese migrant cooks sacrifice authenticity to gain social acceptance in the Americas? Have genetically modified foods fulfilled the promises made by proponents? This new edition includes expanded discussions of gender and the family, indigeneity, and the politics of food. Expanded chapters on contemporary food systems and culinary pluralism examine debates over the concentration of corporate control over seeds and marketing, authenticity and exoticism within the culinary tourism industry, and the impact of social media on restaurants and home cooks.
Sarah M. Gardner,Stephen J. Ramsden,Rosemary S. Hails
Author : Sarah M. Gardner,Stephen J. Ramsden,Rosemary S. Hails Publisher : Cambridge University Press Page : 407 pages File Size : 46,5 Mb Release : 2019-05-02 Category : Business & Economics ISBN : 9781107067622
Presents an unstinting exploration of controversial fracking technologies to consider the arguments of its supporters and detractors, profiling key contributors while explaining how the practice is changing the way energy is used.
Healthy Eating, Healthy World by J. Morris Hicks Pdf
Imagine that the New York Times tomorrow released some amazing news. A health treatment has been discovered that literally cures most forms of heart disease. But not just that. This treatment has a dramatic impact on most of the diseases Westerners face, including cancer, obesity, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, and many many others. And this treatment is so inexpensive to administer that two-thirds of the medical establishment can be shut down as no longer serving any useful function. It's really too much to believe, isn't it? But there's more. This treatment has miraculous implications for the environment. By applying this treatment, we can eliminate the largest source of global warming, and dramatically reduce the waste that is polluting our water supply. We'll also dramatically improve the health and animal population of our oceans and seas. And there's more. By applying this treatment, we'll dramatically increase the supply of arable land, lowering the cost food and allowing us to feed everyone on this planet. Starvation can become a thing of the past. And one last thing. This treatment also has enormous moral implications, allowing us to eliminate almost all of the pain and suffering we are inflicting on the animals, most of which is hidden away from view, but is morally repulsive to anyone exposed to this suffering. Now what if I told you that we don't have to wait for tomorrow's New York Times, that this treatment has been found, and that the amount of scientific data supporting the claims I just made is overwhelming. The "miracle" treatment is simple. It's eating a whole grain, plant-based diet. Skeptical? I'm not surprised. But by the end of this book you'll be exposed to the overwhelming amount of evidence that supports every claim made above. You'll also get to hear the counterarguments made by skeptics and you'll get to decide for yourself whether these claims are true. It's my hope that by the end of this book you'll be convinced and join our movement. You may just save your life and the planet in the bargain. This revolutionary book is Healthy Eating -- Healthy World: Unleashing the Power of Plant-based Nutrition by J. Morris Hicks, and it is the book that finally tackles all compelling reasons for adopting a plant-based diet -- from the environment to solving the world's hunger crisis. Additionally, T. Colin Campbell, acclaimed author of the bestselling book The China Study, provides a riveting foreword to Healthy Eating -- Healthy World. After reading this book, it'll be nearly impossible to ignore the truth: people were not meant to eat animals or animal products, and the time has come to stop.
By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking account of that failure - and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism - is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and John Hersey's Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did - and didn't - happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us in 2019. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.
Reducing Inequalities by Rémi Genevey,R. K. Pachauri,Laurence Tubiana Pdf
The reduction of inequalities within and between countries stands as a policy goal, and deserves to take centre stage in the design of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed during the Rio+20 Summit in 2012.The 2013 edition of A Planet for Life represents a unique international initiative grounded on conceptual and strategic thinking, and – most importantly – empirical experiments, conducted on five continents and touching on multiple realities. This unprecedented collection of works proposes a solid empirical approach, rather than an ideological one, to inform future debate.The case studies collected in this volume demonstrate the complexity of the new systems required to accommodate each country's specific economic, political and cultural realities. These systems combine technical, financial, legal, fiscal and organizational elements with a great deal of applied expertise, and are articulated within a clear, well-understood, growth- and job-generating development strategy.Inequality reduction does not occur by decree; neither does it automatically arise through economic growth, nor through policies that equalize incomes downward via ill conceived fiscal policies. Inequality reduction involves a collaborative effort that must motivate all concerned parties, one that constitutes a genuine political and social innovation, and one that often runs counter to prevailing political and economic forces.
Rediscovering Geography Committee,Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources,Division on Earth and Life Studies,National Research Council
Author : Rediscovering Geography Committee,Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources,Division on Earth and Life Studies,National Research Council Publisher : National Academies Press Page : 260 pages File Size : 52,5 Mb Release : 1997-04-11 Category : Education ISBN : 9780309577625
Rediscovering Geography by Rediscovering Geography Committee,Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources,Division on Earth and Life Studies,National Research Council Pdf
As political, economic, and environmental issues increasingly spread across the globe, the science of geography is being rediscovered by scientists, policymakers, and educators alike. Geography has been made a core subject in U.S. schools, and scientists from a variety of disciplines are using analytical tools originally developed by geographers. Rediscovering Geography presents a broad overview of geography's renewed importance in a changing world. Through discussions and highlighted case studies, this book illustrates geography's impact on international trade, environmental change, population growth, information infrastructure, the condition of cities, the spread of AIDS, and much more. The committee examines some of the more significant tools for data collection, storage, analysis, and display, with examples of major contributions made by geographers. Rediscovering Geography provides a blueprint for the future of the discipline, recommending how to strengthen its intellectual and institutional foundation and meet the demand for geographic expertise among professionals and the public.
Historically, food security was the responsibility of ministries of agriculture but today that has changed: decisions made in ministries of energy may instead have the greatest effect on the food situation. Recent research reporting that a one degree Celsius rise in temperature can reduce grain yields by 10 per cent means that energy policy is now directly affecting crop production. Agriculture is a water-intensive activity and, while public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water and the link between our fossil fuel addiction, climate change and food security is now clear. While population growth has slowed over the past three decades, we are still adding 76 million people per year. In a world where the historical rise in land productivity has slowed by half since 1990, eradicating hunger may depend as much on family planners as on farmers. The bottom line is that future food security depends not only on efforts within agriculture but also on energy policies that stabilize climate, a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, the evolution of land-efficient transport systems, and population policies that seek a humane balance between population and food. Outgrowing the Earth advances our thinking on food security issues that the world will be wrestling with for years to come.