Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
I just came back from a work trip to Colombia which had taken up all my available time and resources for weeks on end. However, in Colombia I also found inspiration and motivation for more posts, more stories, more writing. Yay for creative breaks and continuations! Colombia is a fascinating place with so many layers of … Continue reading Food Forests in Colombia
In the last weeks, I’ve been wandering between two worlds, trying to bring sense and structure into what I’ve seen and what I am reading. We are currently working on collecting field data from coffee farmers in Honduras, and I was lucky enough to visit several regions of the country while adapting our questionnaire and data … Continue reading Dispatches from the Field: Honduras
“I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably … Continue reading Indonesia’s Forest Fires: Is Ag To Blame?
For our last agricultural history lecture, we were fortunate to receive a guest speaker from the department who is involved in a mammoth project of mapping the world’s food systems across time. What an interesting pastime, but what a challenge! This is what I referred to in my last post – one of the off-hand … Continue reading The Pre-Columbian Amazon – A Pristine Rainforest Or Intensive Settlement?
Well, after another couple of hours of editing (why does the final version always take so long to get consistent? And why did we nearly forget to include our most important source in the bibliography? Questions…) I finally sent off our Cost Benefit Analysis project to our teacher and thought that since my friend and … Continue reading Drilling in the Rainforest – Is it Worth It? Our Yasuni CBA
Following up on yesterday’s post – having to deal with an overpopulation of deer through culling, and the question whether to sell that meat or not -, this TED talk is an interesting alternative approach. This thought came to me after a friend responded to my post that one of the reasons that there are … Continue reading The Opportunities of Rewilding
Before I even had this blog, I was writing about an awesome idea that could have redefined how we approach sustainability trade-offs. The story is about the Yasuni National Park in Ecuador, a vast space of virtually untouched rain forest under which large oil reserves had been found. The Ecuadorian government being the Ecuadorian government … Continue reading What's the Value of Not Drilling? The Sad Truth from the Yasuni Experiment: Not Enough.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6gUnXpBMfyI] We live in a world with a wealth of information at our fingertips, and more and more frequently even extraordinary ways in which this information can be presented. Case in point is this video: it showcases data gathered by satellites on the “greenness” of our planet from 2012 to 2013. Check it out and … Continue reading Our Green Planet
Whenever we think about food security, we think about grain crops, yields, and whatever ends up on your plate. However, as I already discussed in this post about efficient cooking stoves, we tend to forget that most food (specifically grains) has to be cooked before it can be consumed, so that cooking fuel becomes part … Continue reading Can A Bamboo Revolution Increase Food Security in Ethiopia?
