From Michael Pollan, The New York Review of Books
It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.
Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.
To Read More…
From Ooze and Marjetica Potrc, de zeen
Rotterdam and Paris architects Ooze have collaborated with artist Marjetica Potrc to create a community garden and water treatment plant on an island in Essen, Germany.
To Read More…
From Eric Zencey, Orion Magazine
[1] The term has become so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”
[2] Nature will decide what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being.
To Read More…
From Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books:
What we eat is what we talk about. Red meat v. non-red, all meat v. no meat at all, GM v. organic, long haul v. local, dirty v. ‘environmental’ and so on; how we prepare a dish, how Heston Blumenthal does it. What makes these conversations possible is the abundance we’re now accustomed to: plenty is the medium in which our anxieties, our pleasures and even our ‘ethics’ thrive. So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.
For more…
Coral reefs, like those in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, are deteriorating rapidly, according to a UN report. (Great Barrier Reef National Park Authority/Reuters)
From cbc.ca:
Far too many of the world’s plants and animals — and the wild places that support them — are at risk of collapse, despite a global goal set in 2002 for major improvement by this year, the UN reports.
Frogs and other amphibians are most at risk of extinction, coral reefs are the species deteriorating most rapidly and the survival of nearly a quarter of all plant species is threatened, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity said Monday in a report issued every four years.
The outlook on the planet’s ecological diversity and health is produced under a 1993 treaty, since joined by most of the world’s nations. It says the planet is falling short of its goal to achieve “a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels.”
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/10/biodiversity-species-un.html#ixzz0nYubI1IJ
From The MacArthur Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today announced grants totaling $5.6 million to ten universities in eight countries to establish new Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) programs. The programs combine training in the natural sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and management to help practitioners address global challenges such as sustainable development, climate change, and extreme poverty. The universities were selected through a competitive process that included reviews by experts outside the Foundation.
MDP programs are designed to offer graduate students training beyond the typical focus on classroom study of economics and management found in most development studies programs. The degree will provide students with substantive knowledge required to analyze and diagnose multi-dimensional problems such as malnutrition, extreme poverty, climate change, and infectious disease control by integrating the core disciplines of health sciences, natural sciences, social sciences and management. At the same time, the programs help develop practical skills through extended periods of field training to provide hands on, problem solving experience for students in a developing country.
To Read More…
The third issue of Volume 6 of