Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
How are your holidays going, everybody? I hope you spent a wonderful Christmas season and are still in the delicious between-Christmas-and-New-Year limbo that doesn’t require you to do anything whatsoever but read and sip eggnog and mulled wine and relax. Have you started thinking about your New Year’s resolutions? I often think that resolutions are … Continue reading For A (Climate-) Healthy 2014
Right now, I’m taking a class on “Economic Growth and Sustainable Development”. In it, we discuss a lot of economic notions on how to deal with non-renewable resources that might run out in the future, and how to accommodate economic growth within the confines of a finite planet. While I have found our discussions fascinating, … Continue reading Our Climate Budget – Already in the Red?
Happy Saturday! While environmental management had never been the forte of the Soviet Union, its collapse had even more dire environmental consequences, with the abandonment of mineral and chemical factories and the shirking of responsibilities for clean-ups, and the subsequent development of the oil and gas sector by oligarchs that now constitute one of the … Continue reading Weekend Reads – Post-Soviet Contributions to Fight Climate Change
Environmental economics might be one of the most curious and demanding disciplines, since it tries to combine two fields at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum – environmentalists on the one hand and economists on the other, the one trying to preserve every last bug for the benefits of biodiversity while the others coolly … Continue reading Is Taxing Meat a Viable Green Policy Option?
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) recently wrote two blog posts about one of their papers called “The Roles of Livestock in Developing Countries“, in which their authors argue that the livestock sector needs to be studied and assessed in a much more disaggregated manner in order to acknowledge the roles and impacts of livestock … Continue reading Livestock: The Good, the Bad, and the Facts
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjtIl5B1zXI] This is an interesting take on the interplay between food production and climate change. The video defines a ‘safe space’ defined by the boundaries on how much food we need, how much food we can produce at given levels of climate change, and how that increased food production will further affect climate change.
Flashy headlines are generally needed to grab our attention. The average reader wants information, quickly, and presented in digestible bites, preferably without too much cautioning. However, many times, and especially in this subject, such blanket statements end up being misleading, confusing, or even plainly wrong. I read an article the other day with the headline … Continue reading "Are vegetarian diets Earth-friendly?" – About Research in the Media