Capturing bright ideas is a challenge!

From an Article by Michael I. Kotlikoff, Emmanuel P. Giannelis and Glenn C. Altschuler, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, April 27, 2021

America’s dominance is currently at risk, and a new model is needed now more than ever.

More than a century after Thomas Newcomen, a miner, and John Calley, his plumber assistant, invented the first useful steam engine, the French scientist Sadi Carnot developed the theory of thermodynamics to explain it. And in 1903, the bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered flight, but the underlying mathematics of aerodynamic theory were explained by a university scientist — Ludwig Prandtl at Hannover University — almost two decades later.

These examples from The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson, convey an important lesson about the relationship between application and theory that is relevant for future technological innovation — and for research in universities in the United States.

Vannevar Bush, the director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in the 1940s, articulated the inverse relationship between basic and applied research: universities play a critical role in developing the fundamental science that industry deploys to create products. Bush’s linear approach, which led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation, has powered innovation in the United States for decades. But America’s dominance of the innovation economy is currently at risk, and a new model is needed now more than ever.

Bipartisan concern about the erosion of America’s innovation dominance has led Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, to co-sponsor the Endless Frontier Act to invest $100 billion in research for emerging technologies. Echoing their apprehensions about “our national research and innovation enterprise,” Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, added his support for “the infrastructure that we need to support technology development.”

To more effectively harness the potential of research universities, whose basic research has enabled the development, among other products, of the iPhone, RNA vaccines and self-driving cars, we need a paradigm shift in higher education.

The new approach begins with an affirmation of the centrality of discovery, but it explicitly recognizes the role of the marketplace in driving innovation and the marked decrease in the timeline between concept and product. It supplements and complements basic research with investments and expertise in feasibility assessment, design and transitions to commercial markets. This model does not treat exploratory (basic) and translational (applied) research as silos but, as Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, has proposed, like double-stranded DNA, multidirectional and mutually reinforcing.

Dependent on a shift in culture, hiring and allocation of resources within the academy, as well as a new kind of partnership with government and industry, this model calls for unified discovery and commercialization engines, or “D&CEs.” D&C engines in the university are transdisciplinary teams integrating expertise in physical and biological sciences, social sciences, engineering, humanities, business, and entrepreneurship, and which work with government, corporate and venture capital partners to develop next-generation products. Such teams are essential if we are to address global crises, including climate, energy, food, water, health, inequality and poverty.

In practical terms, the shift should be accompanied by changes in pedagogy and curriculum that expose students to business strategies, intellectual property concepts, patent protocols, marketing and supply chains, and experiential learning in companies.

Catalyzing the development of diversified local economies consisting of start-ups, step-ups and established companies will also yield opportunities for students and drive economic development in university towns and beyond. To encourage companies to stay local, universities should work with government officials to identify tax and other incentives.

As universities encourage collaborations between private companies and innovative faculty members, they need to find new ways, where appropriate, to “share” faculty with companies. Such partnerships retain talented faculty in the academy while providing them with opportunities to fully develop and commercialize their ideas.

Universities must also develop investment funds through a combination of philanthropy and venture capital to support the development of new discoveries, provide incubation space for the early proof-of-concept and de-risking stages, and work to identify co-location space for established companies. Seed and gap funding are crucial for validating early-stage technologies, strengthening intellectual property and bringing technology to the inflection point for further development.

Finally, where appropriate, as it increasingly is in computing and information science and genetics, universities should adopt “translational” achievements as metrics for faculty tenure and promotion and include commercialization as part of Ph.D. theses. This new emphasis will not compromise indispensable institutional values, including independence of thought, dispassionate discovery and transparency. But adapting to the indivisible nature of discovery and application will be necessary to increase the volume and velocity of technology commercialization and start-up creation, nurture the next generation of innovators, catalyze economic development, and provide the wished-for returns on federally funded programs like the aptly named Endless Frontier.

>>> Biographical Sketch — Michael I. Kotlikoff is professor of molecular physiology and provost of Cornell University. Emmanuel P. Giannelis is Walter R. Read Professor of Engineering and vice president for research and innovation at the university, and Glenn C. Altschuler is Litwin Professor of American Studies there and the co-author, with Isaac Kramnick, of Cornell: A History, 1940-2015 (Cornell University Press).

Small scale production of egg plants in Bangladesh

By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle, October 12, 2020

The world’s small-scale farmers now can see a path to solving global hunger over the next decade, with solutions – such as adopting climate-resilient crops through improving extension services – all culled rapidly via artificial intelligence from more than 500,000 scientific research articles.

The results are synthesized in 10 new research papers – authored by 77 scientists, researchers and librarians in 23 countries – as part of Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is headquartered at Cornell, with partners from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The papers were published concurrently on Oct. 12 in four journals – Nature Plants, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Food – and assembled in a comprehensive package online: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger.

Ceres2030 employed machine learning, librarian savvy and research synthesis methods to quickly scan a trove of thousands of scientific journals for ideas and websites from more than 60 agencies that can help eradicate world hunger.

Principal Investigator Jaron Porciello of Cornell University

“Moreover,” Porciello said, “we are synthesizing this scientific information to make it useful for an audience – like policymakers – that needs science to make decisions.”

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal No. 2, known as SDG2, calls for ridding the world of hunger by 2030. Currently, more than 690 million people – about 8.9% of the world’s population – are food-insecure, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that global statistic could easily rise by 10 million people a year from now, and by nearly 60 million people in five years.

If recent trends continue, the number of people around the world affected by hunger would surpass 840 million by 2030, according to the FAO.

Ideas from the array of papers published in the respective Nature publications can be implemented instantly. Around the world, for example, small-scale farmers are rooted in their agricultural ways, often holding on to traditional farming methods that may impair their own food security and livelihoods.

In an evidence-synthesis study about small-scale producers in low-and middle-income countries in Nature Plants, Cornell researchers found that a key to adopting drought-tolerant crops was people – extension experts teaching farmers ways to move forward.

Researchers and librarians reviewed more than 200 journal articles that revealed how extension and education helped small-scale farmers adopt climate resilient crops to achieve steady production, even in the face of climate change, said Maricelis Acevedo, senior research associate in the Department of Global Development.

“How do we make sure that technologies that we develop based on science can have a positive impact on a farmer’s livelihood?” Acevedo said. “We can do all the science, but if we don’t communicate effectively with farmers, they won’t get the right information.”

Acevedo worked on the study with Cornell colleagues Hale Tufan, senior extension associate in global development; Kate Ghezzi-Kopel, evidence synthesis librarian at Mann Library; and Porciello.

Reviewing scientific literature can reveal knowledge gaps. In the evidence-synthesis paper about feed interventions and the livelihoods of small-scale livestock keepers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in Nature Plants, nearly 23,000 papers were identified by human expertise and artificial intelligence. Only 73 of them were included in the final analysis, and just six reported evidence of adopting new livestock feed methods.

The authors, including Debbie Cherney, professor of animal science, and Erin Eldermire, head of Cornell’s Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library, at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, found that while many papers examined the technical aspects of a livestock feed supply, they rarely accounted for nutrition.

Cornell researchers’ work on accelerating evidence-informed decision-making for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals using machine learning in Nature Machine Intelligence, describes how Porciello group developed Persephone, the machine-learning model they used for the gargantuan task of reviewing research. Joining Porciello on the paper were graduate student Maidul Islam ‘21; Stefan Einarson, director of information technology in the Department of Global Development; and Haym Hirsh, professor of computer science.

In a review of the contributions of farmers’ organizations to smallholder agriculture, in Nature Food, Ghezzi-Kopel and other authors said formal farmer groups not only provided needed structure to market produce, but encouraged natural resource management, improved food security and helped the environment.

Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, will present the entire package of Ceres2030 papers to Gerd Müller, Germany’s Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, at the online event, “A World Without Hunger is Possible – What Must Be Done,” Oct. 13 at 4 a.m. EDT. The program will include remarks by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The prospects for the reaching the United Nations’ anti-hunger goal is promising, Porciello said. “We’re trying something new that hasn’t been done before,” she said. “We know the tools weren’t there, the methods weren’t there and the teams weren’t in place. Now, we’ve created some staircases to make science and world reality connect a little bit more. This approach could be replicated to build a scientific evidence base for many of the world’s most complex policy problems”

Acevedo, Porciello and Tufan are faculty fellows at the Cornell Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

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The 17 United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) to transform our world:

GOAL 1: No Poverty, GOAL 2: Zero Hunger, GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being, GOAL 4: Quality Education, GOAL 5: Gender Equality, GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality, GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, GOAL 13: Climate Action, GOAL 14: Life Below Water, GOAL 15: Life on Land GOAL 16: Peace & Justice Strong Institutions, GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve Goals

Vice Provost Wendy Wolford opens conference

Edited from an Article by Tom Fleischman, Blaine Friedlander, Susan Kelley, and Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle, November 14, 2018

As a pre-eminent research institution and New York’s land-grant university, Cornell is uniquely suited to tackle “grand challenges” like the ones discussed at the November 8 – 9 Global Grand Challenges Symposium, according to Wendy Wolford, Cornell vice provost for international affairs.

University President Martha E. Pollack, who kicked off the event, concurred. “As a university, Cornell is both distinguished and distinctive,” she said. “We have a reputation and a presence that is global, with some of the best faculty and resources of any university anywhere.”

Today’s challenges “require a commitment to engagement, a drive to continue reaching out in a time when connecting across difference is more critical … than just about anything else,” Pollack said.

Wolford organized the symposium, at which panelists from across campus, plus keynote speakers from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Notre Dame, laid out some of the most pressing issues of our times, as well as possible paths to solutions.

One of the goals of the symposium was to identify themes to be considered for Cornell’s Global Grand Challenge 2019-20, a yearlong dedication to a topic through new curricular, scholarly and engaged work across campus. The Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs will announce the selected grand challenge early next year.

Opening Plenary: ‘Bridging Divides’

Wolford, who is also the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and interim director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, moderated the opening plenary. She invoked the words of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her remarks: “[T]here is no single story. There is no single challenge that stands above all others, and there is no single solution. Indeed, one person’s solution can be another person’s problem.”

Wolford encouraged diverse thinking and participation: “By definition, we have to work together to build a just, sustainable and connected world, where differences are valued, where inequality is mitigated and exchange is encouraged.”

Mariët Westermann, executive vice president for programs and research at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, delivers the opening plenary keynote address.

The keynote was delivered by Mariët Westermann, executive vice president for programs and research at the Mellon Foundation. Her talk, “International Education in an Age of New Nationalisms,” was a history lesson, a report on the state of democracy and higher education, and a call to action.

“If the specter of World War III no longer motivates international education as it did in the 20th century,” she said, “today we have violent threats and economic inequality as drivers of mass migration and enmity to take the place of that specter. International education can be a bulwark against these kinds of threats today.”

Rachel Dunifon, interim dean of the College of Human Ecology, identified “the war on facts” – or the notion that facts don’t matter or perhaps may not even exist – as a challenge to be tackled. She suggested three steps that universities can take in the defense of facts: greater engagement in policymaking; improved communication of research; and giving researchers “time, funds and knowledge to collaborate with policymakers and practitioners.”

Daniel Fitzgerald, director of the Center for Global Health and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, sees education as the grandest of challenges. “[W]e need to increase access to education for all children, all the way through adolescence, so that they can all develop to their full potential as adults,” he said.

Lorin Warnick, Ph.D. ’94, the Austin O. Hooey Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, closed the opening plenary by identifying “planetary health” – including issues of disease transmission, mass extinction, sustainable food production – as a major challenge facing humanity. Cornell and the education of its students, he said, can be a big part of the solution.

“We should pursue our research and outreach projects that have value in their own right,” he said, “while always remembering that those activities provide an essential foundation for education programs. It’s through the education and work of our graduates that we’ll have our biggest and most enduring impact.”

Plenary 2: ‘The Way Forward’

“Today we are experiencing a kind of national narcissism that ignores the global nature of the major issues facing our globe,” Provost Michael Kotlikoff said in his opening remarks. “The remedy for this condition is facts, research and education. … This symposium brings us together toward that goal.”

Keynote speaker Raymond Offenheiser, director and Keogh School Distinguished Professor of the Practice at the Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development, University of Notre Dame, and former president of Oxfam America, said a grand challenge should “assume a 20-year timeline.” He outlined five areas that he said were fundamental to human existence: taming technology – including artificial intelligence and robotics – for the workforce; mitigating climate change; managing the migration of people brought about by climate change and political, economic and other upheavals; feeding 9 billion people by 2050; and values: “To embrace agency, voice, equity and inclusion,” Offenheiser said.

Eduardo Peñalver ’94, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and professor of law at Cornell Law School, said migration is an issue where law will play a major role, and solutions will require international agreements. “Law is really the matrix that weaves everything together,” he said.

Kathryn J. Boor ’80, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean and professor of food science in CALS, responded to the need to feed the world. The challenge will be to provide an “adequate, safe and nutritious food supply to meet the needs of a growing global population and to do so without a parallel and commensurate increase in inputs to grow that food, and also to do so without degrading our environmental conditions,” she said.

Panelist David Erickson, associate dean for research and graduate studies and the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering, named a number of key challenges facing engineers. These included developing carbon sequestration methods, restoring and improving urban infrastructure, providing access to clean water, securing cyberspace, engineering better medicine and advancing personalized learning.

Plenary 3: ‘The View From the Regions’

Keynote speaker Kaushik Basu, the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies and professor of economics in the College of Arts and Sciences, said technological advances are creating challenges, such as global inequality and the erosion of global democracy, on par with those posed by the Industrial Revolution. “We are probably at a juncture of that kind,” he said.

These challenges stem from labor-linking technology that allows workers to be employed by companies in other countries. While this technology has resulted in higher wages, workers now receive a smaller overall share of profits.

On the other hand, technology offers an opportunity for developing countries with digital connectivity and the rule of law. The economies of Rwanda, Ethiopia and Bangladesh are growing at 7 to 8 percent per year, he noted.

With one-seventh of the world – nearly 1 billion people – living below the poverty line, Cornell must offer not only top-tier research ideas but also a moral commitment to lessen global inequality, he said. “You’re serving a common human interest,” he said.

Other panelists – directors of Cornell’s regional studies programs – discussed the lessons gleaned from across the globe on issues such as income inequality, the diminishment of democratic institutions, language extinction and climate change.

Closing Plenary: ‘Grand Challenges’

Plant breeder Ronnie Coffman, the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor, suggested two challenges to address: localizing food systems as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and pushing back on science misinformation.

Sustainability, itself, is a grand challenge, said David Lodge, the Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. “Research, the main product that universities have to offer in the sustainability arena, is often – at best – going to contribute a small part of a solution. We need to speak more boldly and more loudly and more publicly about what we know,” he said.

Wolford ended the symposium with remarks that punctuated a day and a half of ideas. “Why do we care about the many challenges facing the world today?” she asked. “We heard two types of answers: We care because we can; we care because we should.”

The facts have been known for over a hundred years

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV, September 4, 2018

What to eat on a hungry planet

Another extremely important result of the warming of the world is it’s effect on food. Take wheat, perhaps the most important food stuff. It is found in everything from bread to noodles, biscuits to cereals, beer to cakes, there is no more widely grown staple crop and more than 170 million metric tons trade every year. This year there will be a weak harvest, but not a disaster. Stocks will buffer through, although the EU and Russia have done poorly. Trade flows will shift, and developed economies can afford to buy it. Poorer countries in Africa and the Middle East will have it tough.

Bread prices affect political stability. In 2010 Russia, not a particularly efficient producer, but having great land area, and so a big exporter, had a heat wave and was not able to export, so world wheat prices doubled. This year production is down a third in Russia, but there are no plans to limit export.

For one specific example from this year, in the United Kingdom the price of wheat for bread rose by a fifth, strawberries by 28%, carrots by 41% and lettuce by 61%. The farm gate price of carrots rose by 80%, according to European Commission figures used by the economists. Spells of frigid and baking weather seen during the winter and summer will likely increase household food bills by an estimated $9.01 a month, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says.

Food business is big money, and Bloomberg takes notice. They have a visual here showing the projected change in wheat production by 2050. The shift is for warmer to cooler climates. Change also affects other foods, too, in the sea as well as on land. North American cod is expected to decline and lobster to increase. Anchovies and squid will increase, cod will come from Iceland and Norway. The U. S. corn belt is edging toward Canada, which now is famous for exported wheat.

Countries most expected to suffer are the tropics. Many now import much of their food stuffs, and production there will decline. Problems there result in emigration to Europe and other northern countries, with all the numerous problems that brings. The recent fighting in Syria is due in part to famine there.

Fine wine will decline in France, but will be possible in England. Weather has already brought disaster to the vineyards of Bordeaux and Champagne. Production there is the lowest in 60 years.

Coffee growing areas in Brazil, Java and other areas are set to decrease, but some California farmers are planting it. Unfortunately, taste must take a hit, since conditions must be just right to ripen the beans.

Chocolate is another delicacy expected to experience decline, as are the very fine cherries used to make maraschino cherries, since both are grown in very climate-sensitive areas.

Elevated CO2 helps plants grow, but reduces essential nutrients. It can reduce the zinc by 9.3% in wheat, for example, and the protein in rice by 7.8%. Rice eating populations use little protein supplement, which is more expensive, so this is significant for them.

Ocean effects are real and current

It is an easy calculation from readily available data that humans have added over 7708 tons per square mile of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere and are adding 203 more tons to each square mile each year. It’s a pretty shocking figure. But not all of it stays in the atmosphere. According to the Scripps Institute, 26% was absorbed by the oceans, 46% goes into the atmosphere, and 28% goes into plants. The surface layers of the ocean which absorb CO2 are mixed downward by circulation, but the heat absorbed at the same time causes water to expand, which tends to slow downward movement, so surface layers hold significantly more CO2 than deeper layers.

Sea life is affected by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel combustion. We have mentioned the northward movement of sea food above, but there are other significant effects, too. The sea has waves of warm water that circulate near the surface. Sea creatures that have evolved to tolerate a rather narrow band of temperature can sometime move out of the hot area, and some cannot. In 2016 and 2017, persistant high ocean temperatures off eastern Australia killed off as much as half the shallow water corals of the Great Barrier Reef, affecting creatures dependent on the reef. One in every four fish in the ocean lives around corral reefs. Much of the ocean’s diversity depends on this small area.

Another important effect on the ocean involves the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC), some times called the world “heat conveyer.” It is one way the earth moves heat from the tropics to the poles. There is a good YouTube representation of it, but the scheme is easiest to understand if you go to the video and watch the first 10 to 12 seconds and stop before going on to conceptualize what you have seen. The rest is detail, watching it is not necessary to understand. Red is warm currents, on the surface, blue is cold currents in the deep. Where it turns from red to blue the water is cooling, becoming more dense and sinking. Where it turns from blue to red the water is warming and raising. Try the video here.

Because of climate warming, this heat conveyer carrying heat from the tropics north is slowing down. Two factors affect the density of water, temperature and salinity, the amount of salt dissolved in it. Melting of ice in the north now dilutes the water in the upper Atlantic and reduces the rate of sinking in previous times. Geologists know it has stopped in the past. If it does again, the result would be catastrophic for Western Europe. It is as far north as Labrador, but enjoys a mild climate due to the warm winds off the North Atlantic. If the heat conveyer stops, the warm winds stop and Europe gets much colder. The Jet Stream would come further south, too, bringing cold air with it.

Another set of problems from the ocean is due to sea level rise presently occurring. A lot has been said about the effects on low lying development in Florida, ports for shipping, such as Norfolk with its naval yards, and those along the Louisiana and Texas coast particularly, and many other places in the world. Islands are made uninhabitable; Holland is being overwhelmed, Bangladesh loosing huge areas and so on. So I will just remind you of them.

Encroachment of sea water in aquifers along sea coasts threatens use of wells, both on islands and porous coasts like Florida. Overwhelmed wetland along coasts allows the intrusion of hurricanes with unreduced force into higher and developed areas. It also encourages coastal erosion and destroys wetland wildlife. Coral reefs and sea grass meadows are also in danger of “drowning” since they can only photosynthesize in relatively shallow water.

Science and Government are our foundation and hope

The first public warning of global warming appeared in a New Zealand newspaper in 1912:
“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

The article also appeared in the U. S. Popular Science and an Australian newspaper the same year. The Scopes article goes on to say:
“The first person to use the term ‘greenhouse gases’ was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere.”

Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide (carbonic acid back then):
“The world’s present production of coal reaches in round numbers 500 millions of tons per annum, or 1 ton per km of earth’s surface. Transformed into carbonic acid, this quantity would correspond to about a thousandth part of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere.”

Though he didn’t explicitly say in that paper that human activity could warm the planet, Arrhenius would go on to make that argument in later works. A 2008 tribute to Arrhenius published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences stated that his ideas about coal and climate were popular and well known in his day but fell out of favor for a while after his death in 1927:
“While Arrhenius’ prediction [of warming] received great public interest, this typically waned in time but was revived as an important global mechanism by the great atmospheric physicist Carl Gustaf Rossby who initiated atmospheric CO2 measurements in Sweden in the 1950s.”

The science naive public, including a lot of people elected to government, hasn’t caught on to this day! In the 1930’s an amateur, G. S. Callendar, insisted that greenhouse warming was on the way. In the 1950s, Callendar’s claims provoked a few scientists to look into the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking measurements by C. D. Keeling drove home the point in 1960, showing that the level of the gas was in fact rising, year by year.

By the 1970’s research became sufficiently robust that the big oil companies became aware of it. They wanted to continue their highly profitable business and recognized their fixed assets; oil in the ground, leases, and vast physical apparatus would become defunct, so began to establish ways to debunk the idea. Vast resources were poured into the fight against the growing scientific consensus. They produced reports that spoofed the science, engaged in public relations on a vast scale, and lobbied federal and state governments. (Few understand the scale of lobbying the government in Washington, there are 22 lobbyists for each senator and representative today!)

The world’s governments created a panel to give them the most reliable possible advice, as negotiated among thousands of climate experts and officials. By 2001 this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) managed to establish a consensus, phrased so cautiously that scarcely any expert or government representative dissented. For a quick, readable summary of the history of the IPCC, read the Wikipedia article. The IPCC provides an internationally accepted authority on climate change, producing reports which have the agreement of leading climate scientists and the consensus of 120 participating governments.

At that point the discovery of global warming was essentially completed. Scientists knew the most important things about how the climate could change during the 21st century. How the climate would actually change now depends chiefly on what policies humanity would choose for its greenhouse gas emissions.

Since 2001, greatly improved computer models and an abundance of data of many kinds strengthened the conclusion that human emissions are very likely to cause serious climate change. The IPCC’s conclusions were reviewed and endorsed by the national science academies of every major nation from the United States to China, along with leading scientific societies and indeed virtually every organization that could speak for a scientific consensus. Specialists meanwhile improved their understanding of some less probable but more severe possibilities. On the one hand, a dangerous change in ocean circulation seemed unlikely in the next century or two. On the other hand, there were signs that disintegrating ice sheets could raise sea levels faster than most scientists had expected. Worse, new evidence suggested that the warming was itself starting to cause changes that would generate still more warming.

In 2007 the IPCC reported that scientists were more confident than ever that humans were changing the climate. Although only a small fraction of the predicted warming had happened so far, effects were already becoming visible in some regions — more deadly heat waves, stronger floods and droughts, heat related changes in the ranges and behavior of sensitive species. But the scientists have not been able to narrow the range of possibilities. Depending on what steps people took to restrict emissions, by the end of the century we could expect the planet’s average temperature to rise anywhere between about 2.5–11°F. It may not seem much to those of us used to a climate we are well adapted to and who have heat and cooling and appropriate clothes, but it is significant in the physical and biological world.

So how is our government responding? Considering how important the inevitable changes are, and caught between science and the oil companies, one must say, “not well.” National Geographic has produced “A Running List of How President Trump Is Changing Environmental Policy.” Some of the points in that article are:

Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan; EPA starts rollback of car emission standards; White House cuts NASA climate monitoring program; FEMA expels “climate change” from strategic plan; EPA mills shake-up to environmental research plan; Trump proposes cuts to climate and clean-energy plans; EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution; Climate change websites ‘censored’ under Trump; Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats; Mining health study halted; climate advisory panel disbanded; Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise; Report: EPA enforcement lags under Trump; U. S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement; Trump budget proposes deep cuts for the environment; EPA dismisses science advisors; Science and environment budget threatened.

And the list goes on. The situation is much the same in many states, certainly those in Appalachia. It is discouraging that the work of people who trained and handle the data daily is ignored, and the interests of companies which have accumulated great wealth impose themselves, retarding the necessary changes in technology that society needs.

Where will it all go? No one knows. It is a very complex situation, requiring public response. Climate change could get out of hand. It will not reverse. The best anyone can do is to communicate: learn and pass it on. There are many other threats to the survival of humanity, but this is certainly one of the most sure.

See Part 1 in FrackCheckWV.net here.

Mother Nature can help us resolve Climate Change, ..... if we let her.

Excerpt from the Book by David Montgomery, November 6, 2017

[NOTE: Today, the 23rd annual U.N. climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, and this week we continues to explore agriculture’s role in causing—and mitigating—climate change. This is an edited excerpt from David Montgomery’s new book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life.

I confess I never thought I’d write an optimistic book about the environment. For many years, I was a dark green ecopessimist convinced humanity was rushing headlong into self-inflicted disaster. While I still harbor some such fears, I’ve become far more positive about our long-term prospects. Over the past few years, I’ve traveled extensively, meeting visionary farmers who are restoring life and fertility to their land. These experiences convinced me that it’s possible not only to restore soil on a global scale, but to do so remarkably fast.

At least I hope it is, since we face the confluence of the end of cheap oil, continued population growth, and a changing climate over the coming century. How farming will adapt remains uncertain, as political, economic, and environmental interests push competing visions, policies, and agendas. No matter how all this plays out, it will shape the fate of nations and define the world we leave for generations to come.

My perspective on this issue started to change a decade ago, after I did something some colleagues might consider unpardonable—I wrote a book about soil and titled it Dirt. You see, soil scientists consider it blasphemous to call soil dirt. This is because there are very important differences between soil and dirt. For one, soil is full of life, dirt is not. So why would a geologist like me write an irreverently titled book about the importance of what covers up rocks? While my primary focus of study is how landscapes are shaped by natural processes and changed by people, over the course of examining the evolution of landscapes around the world, I came to see how soil erosion and degradation influenced human societies.

Some geologists argue that people, directly and indirectly, now move more earth around than nature herself. Earth scientists have even proposed a new epoch, the Anthropocene, or “Age of People.” Although we argue about when this epoch started, it is perfectly clear that of all our world-changing inventions, the plow was, and remains, one of the most destructive.

Yes, you read that correctly. The plow. That iconic symbol of our agricultural roots that helped launch civilization as we know it. The plow enabled few to feed many and set the table for the rise of commerce, city-states, and hierarchical societies with priests, princes, politicians, and all the rest of us who don’t farm. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the plow makes land vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain.

Through fieldwork spanning three decades and six continents, I realized that long-cultivated regions that had lost their topsoil remained impoverished as a result. Telltale signs are etched in ragged gullies and slopes with subsoil exposed at the surface. The poor fertility of the soil that remains on the land is harder to see.

However, it’s worth noticing—and reversing. For restoring the soil can help address the fundamental challenges of water, energy, and climate, as well as a number of important environmental and public health problems. Nitrogen pollution, born of our dependence on fertilizers, is affecting urban water supplies in the Midwest and creating a great dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the Mississippi River. Algal blooms from excess phosphorus in agricultural runoff kill fish in the Great Lakes.

Direct exposure to insecticides and indirect effects of herbicides that kill their food source contribute to crashing populations of pollinators, like bees and Monarch butterflies, with dire implications for crop production and biodiversity. Wholesale reliance on agrochemicals directly affects human health, too, as increased risk of depression and certain cancers are associated with pesticide exposure. Restoring healthy, fertile soil would cast a broad net, helping to address all these problems. So how feasible is it?

After writing Dirt, I received invitations to speak about the history of soil loss and degradation at more farming conferences than I can remember. This gave me opportunities to travel to places I wouldn’t otherwise go (geologists usually gravitate toward mountains rather than to flat farmland), and the chance to meet innovative farmers I wouldn’t normally encounter. At first, I didn’t fully appreciate this opportunity. But after hearing one story after the next of how farmers revived degraded land, I started seeking out their opinions on this pressing issue. In doing so, I began to realize that I shared more common ground with farmers than I thought. Many of them saw the destructive effects of plowing as clearly as I did, if not more so.

In 2010, Guy Swanson invited me to speak at a farming conference in Colby, Kansas. His company sells an attachment to no-till planters that helps farmers reduce the amount of fertilizer they use. No-till farmers don’t plow, they use specialized planters that open a narrow slot in the soil about the width of a kernel of corn. Seeds drop down into the slot, disturbing much less of the surrounding soil than plowing it up would.

Swanson’s system injects a uniform amount of fertilizer adjacent to and below each just-planted seed, putting nutrients right where plants need them—and only there. This uses far less fertilizer than spraying it all over the field. The farmer saves money and fewer chemicals run off to pollute streams, lakes, and oceans. That sounds like a win-win, except of course to fertilizer companies. Swanson had seen me talk at a no-till farming conference and wanted me to come speak about the civilization-killing problem of soil erosion to potential customers contemplating a shift to no-till methods and precision fertilizer use.

As I ended my talk, I looked out on a sea of baseball hats. One elderly fellow in the middle stood up, stuffed his hands down into his pockets, and said he’d taken one look at me and didn’t think I could possibly say anything worth listening to. I braced myself for what was to come. But then he surprised me. He said the more I’d talked, the more sense I’d made. He’d seen what I was talking about on his farm. It no longer had the rich fertile topsoil his grandfather had plowed. Something needed to change if his own grandchildren were going to prosper working his land.

Time and again, at one farming conference after another, instead of walking out or lobbing verbal grenades at me, farmers readily acknowledged the possibility that plowing resulted in long-term damage to the soil. A surprising number said they knew this to be true from firsthand experience. Older farmers would share stories about how their soil quality had gone downhill over their lifetimes, too slowly to notice year to year, but plain as day in retrospect. One after another piped up to say that they’d noticed their soil decline under the now-conventional marriage of the plow and intensive fertilizer and agrochemical use.

In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have been surprised that farmers recognized the twin problems of soil loss and degradation. After all, who knows the land better than those who work it for a living?

After that talk in Colby, I started paying more attention to what individual farmers thought it would take to carry on farming well into the future. I asked them what they were doing—and how they were doing it. It didn’t take long to see common threads running through their answers.

I began to wonder what it would actually take to generate a resilient, productive, and permanent agriculture. I doubted there was a simple one-size-fits-all-farms answer. And I knew the answer wasn’t simply organic farming. Many, if not most, organic farmers plow to suppress weeds and prepare the ground. I realized that the basic question that society needs to focus on is how farmers of all stripes can forgo the plow and leave their soil better off after a crop is planted and harvested—over and over again.

A New Revolution

A look back at our agricultural past reveals a long series of innovations, and a few bona fide revolutions, that greatly reduced the amount of land it takes to feed a person. These changes led to a dramatic increase in how many people the land could support and a corresponding decrease in the proportion of people who farm. By my reckoning, we’ve already experienced four major revolutions in agriculture, albeit at different times in different regions.

The first was the initial idea of cultivation and the subsequent introduction of the plow and animal labor. This allowed sedentary villages to coalesce and grow into city-states and eventually sprawling empires. The second began at different points in history around the world, as farmers adopted soil husbandry to improve their land. Chiefly, this meant rotating crops, intercropping with legumes (plants that add nitrogen to soil), and adding manure to retain or enhance soil fertility. In Europe, this helped fuel changes in land tenure that pushed peasants into cities just in time to provide a ready supply of cheap urban labor to fuel the Industrial Revolution.

Agriculture’s third revolution — mechanization and industrialization — upended such practices and ushered in dependence on cheap fossil fuels and fertilizer-intensive methods. Chemical fertilizers replaced organic matter-rich mineral soil as the foundation of fertility. Although this increased crop yields from already degraded fields, it took more money and required more capital to farm. This, in turn, promoted the growth of larger farms and accelerated the exodus of families from rural to urban areas.

The fourth revolution saw the technological advances behind what came to be known as the Green Revolution and biotechnology breakthroughs that boosted yields and consolidated corporate control of the food system through proprietary seeds, agrochemical products, and commodity crop distribution—the foundation of conventional agriculture today.

What will the future hold as we burn through the supply of cheap oil and our population continues to rise alongside ongoing soil loss and climate change? A recent study authored by hundreds of scientists from around the world concluded that modern agricultural practices must change once again if society is to avoid calamitous food shortages later this century.

We need to ask what agriculture would look like if we relied on building fertile soil instead of depending on chemical substitutes. What would this new, fifth agricultural revolution look like?

Those at the vanguard invoke a variety of names—agroecology, conservation agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and the Brown Revolution. While proponents of these approaches include those who passionately disagree about the roles of organic practices and genetic engineering in the future of agriculture, I am more struck by the common ground they share in placing soil health at the heart of their practices.

When the United Nations declared 2015 the International Year of Soils, I received more invitations to speak at soil-themed conferences. I listened to farmers tell of how they changed the way they farmed, restoring life and fertility to their land. After a while, I started to think we might actually get it right this time. Maybe we could reverse the ancient pattern of farming ourselves out of business.

Seeking to understand what an agricultural revolution centered on soil health might look like, I set off on a trip across several continents to visit farmers who were restoring life to their land. What I learned shattered central myths of modern agriculture and pointed to simple, effective ways to help solve some of our most vexing problems.

Not all the farmers I met did things the same way. How could they? They grew different crops in different regions with different soil and different climates. Some integrated livestock into their operations. Others favored cover crops. A few, perched in the cabs of space-age prairie crawlers, worked fields stretching to the horizon. Others labored by hand in the tropics to coax sustenance from small plots to feed a single family.

As varied as their situations and practices were, they all viewed farming as working with, rather than against, nature. When I realized that they all operated according to a common set of principles, I knew that the foundation for a new agricultural revolution had already been laid.

The singular message that came through loud and clear from farmers I visited was that restoring the productive capacity of the soil could be done quickly and profitably. But it meant doing things differently, a willingness to walk away from conventional practices and to take a chance on the idea that building healthy soil was the best investment a farmer could make. Most of all, it seemed, it took the courage to try new things in the face of regulatory disincentives and skeptical corporate and academic crop advisors. These farmers were not being encouraged to change. They were deciding for themselves that they needed to practice a radically new form of agriculture.

Though already underway, the revolution still has a long way to go. Like all revolutions, it faces entrenched opposition from powerful interests and conventional thinking. Yet if it succeeds, it could solve one of humanity’s most pressing problems: how to keep feeding us all on this lonely rock in space.

Christiana Figueres -- Let's save our planet Earth

From an Article by Fiona Harvey, The Guardian ( UK), June 28, 2017

Photo: Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres: “We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the emissions curve downwards by 2020.”

Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres among signatories of letter warning that the next three years will be crucial to stopping the worst effects of global warming.

Avoiding dangerous levels of climate change is still just about possible, but will require unprecedented effort and coordination from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists in the next three years, a group of prominent experts has warned.

Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.

But while temperatures have risen, global carbon dioxide emissions have stayed broadly flat for the past three years. This gives hope that the worst effects of climate change – devastating droughts, floods, heatwaves and irreversible sea level rises – may be avoided, according to a letter published in the journal Nature this week.

The authors, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argue that the next three years will be crucial. They calculate that if emissions can be brought permanently lower by 2020 then the temperature thresholds leading to runaway irreversible climate change will not be breached.

Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, under whom the Paris agreement was signed, said: “We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the emissions curve downwards by 2020, as science demands, in protection of the UN sustainable development goals, and in particular the eradication of extreme poverty. This monumental challenge coincides with an unprecedented openness to self-challenge on the part of sub-national governments inside the US, governments at all levels outside the US, and of the private sector in general. The opportunity given to us over the next three years is unique in history.”

Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, added: “The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.”

Scientists have been warning that time is fast running out to stave off the worst effects of warming, and some milestones may have slipped out of reach. In the Paris agreement, governments pledged an “aspirational” goal of holding warming to no more than 1.5C, a level which it is hoped will spare most of the world’s lowest-lying islands from inundation. But a growing body of research has suggested this is fast becoming impossible.

Paris’s less stringent, but firmer, goal of preventing warming from exceeding 2C above pre-industrial levels is also in doubt.

The authors point to signs that the trend of upward emissions is being reversed, and to technological progress that promises lower emissions for the future. Renewable energy use has soared, creating a foundation for permanently lowering emissions. Coal use is showing clear signs of decline in key regions, including China and India. Governments, despite Trump’s pronouncements, are forging ahead with plans to reduce greenhouse gases.

The authors called for political and business leaders to continue tackling emissions and meeting the Paris goals without the US. “As before Paris, we must remember that impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude,” they wrote.

They set out six goals for 2020 which they said could be adopted at the G20 meeting in Hamburg on 7-8 July. These include increasing renewable energy to 30% of electricity use; plans from leading cities and states to decarbonise by 2050; 15% of new vehicles sold to be electric; and reforms to land use, agriculture, heavy industry and the finance sector, to encourage green growth.

Prof Gail Whiteman said the signs from technical innovation and economics were encouraging: “Climate science underlines the unavoidable urgency of our challenge, but equally important is the fact that the economic, technical and social analyses show that we can resoundingly rise to the challenge through collective action.”

While the greenhouse gases poured into the atmosphere over the last two centuries have only gradually taken effect, future changes are likely to be faster, scientists fear. Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre said: “We have been blessed by a remarkably resilient planet over the past 100 years, able to absorb most of our climate abuse. Now we have reached the end of this era, and need to bend the global curve of emissions immediately, to avoid unmanageable outcomes for our modern world.”

The OFF Act Is a Climate Game Changer

From an Article by Mark Schlosberg, Food & Water Watch, September 7, 2017

Rep.Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) introduced the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (OFF Act) last week. This visionary bill comes as the nation bears witness to the devastation being brought by the climate change-super charged storm Harvey to Texas and Louisiana and braces for Irma’s impacts. Storms like this and other extreme weather events will become all the more frequent and intense unless bold action is taken.

Gabbard’s bill—the strongest yet introduced in Congress—will put us on a path towards avoiding increased climate chaos: It will place a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and move the country to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, with a focus on a rapid transition in the next ten years. The bill is co-sponsored by Representatives Nanette Barragan (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL).

This legislation could not be more needed. While the impacts of Harvey are readily apparent to all, it is not an isolated occurrence. Evidence continues to build of the severity and urgency of the climate crisis. And while Trump flew to Texas and talked about helping communities there, he and fossil fuel-funded members of Congress continue to put the planet on a collision course with climate chaos. They deny climate change and are suppressing our government’s ability to address it; they are moving to increase drilling and fracking on public lands and off our coasts; they are promoting development of more pipelines; and they are exporting more oil and gas abroad while wrecking the environment here at home.

In this dysfunctional political environment, a broad movement has grown to resist Trump’s foolish and dangerous agenda. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in the streets in DC and across the country. Thousands more have called members of Congress, written letters, and gone to town halls and community meetings opposing this destructive agenda. This is heartening and powerful, but we must do more.

To win on climate—to really move off of fossil fuels and transition our economy to 100 percent renewable energy on a time frame that will actually prevent even greater climate catastrophe—we must continue to resist Trump’s agenda, but we need to do more than that: We need to propel a bold agenda for addressing the crisis—one that will protect our communities while creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs in the renewables and energy efficiency sectors.

This agenda must center racial and economic justice and cannot rely on false market solutions like carbon trading and taxing programs, which are simply corporate pay-to-pollute schemes. What we need is nothing short of a World War II-scale mobilization of our economy around a quick and just transition off fossil fuels and onto 100 percent renewable energy now.

Rep. Gabbard’s OFF Act is a critical step towards that mobilization. It requires 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 (and 80 percent by 2027), places a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects, bans the export of oil and gas, and also moves our automobile and rail systems to 100 percent renewable energy. Additionally, it provides for a truly just transition for environmental justice communities and those working in the fossil fuel industry.

The bill requires that people in impacted communities have a leading role in the development and implementation of clean energy plans and regulations, and establishes an equitable transition fund and workforce development center, paid for by closing an offshore tax loophole and repealing federal tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

Now we must mobilize to build support for this bill. Though the prospects of passing anything in Congress right now are grim, moving members of Congress to support the OFF Act and elevating its profile are important for three reasons:

1. Create Political Consensus for Rapid Transition to 100 Percent Renewable Energy

Six years ago, when Food & Water Watch followed the lead of our grassroots partners to become the first national organization to call for a ban on fracking, conventional wisdom dictated that fracked gas was an environmentally friendly “bridge fuel.” There was lots of support for stronger regulations on fracking, but little serious talk about actually banning it. Yet hundreds of organizations and thousands of people all over the country organized around the issue and held their elected officials accountable.

New York and Maryland have since banned fracking. Rep. Mark Pocan introduced legislation to ban fracking on federal lands. Banning fracking became a top issue raised by Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential race, and a majority of Americans now support a ban. It took lots of hard work, but the political consensus has shifted. We must do the same thing with the urgent need to act on climate, by building support for the OFF Act.

2. Make OFF a Top Issue Now

Even though Congress is controlled by pro-fossil fuel ideologues, it is still critical that we work to get members to sponsor this bill now. If we organize to get large numbers of co-sponsors on the OFF Act, it will become a top issue that representatives will need to respond to. Even as it has just been introduced, the OFF Act already enjoys support from more than 100 organizations including a wide range of major national groups like National Nurses United, Progressive Democrats of America, Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network and People’s Action.

3. Make Space for State and Local Action

At the same time we are working to build support for the OFF Act, there are also campaigns across the country working to move cities, counties and states to 100 percent renewable energy now. Organizing around these local efforts can and should dovetail with efforts to pressure members of Congress to co-sponsor federal legislation. Passing local measures, or getting state and local elected officials to sign the OFF Pledge, will help build the political power needed to push Congress to support the federal legislation. Similarly, getting more co-sponsors on federal legislation to stop fossil fuel projects will open up more space for state and local action. These efforts work together.

Winning the fight to move off fossil fuels will not be easy, as the thousands of people who are working to stop pipelines, ban fracking and build renewable energy projects can tell you. But these are also fights that we can—and must—win if we are to protect people and the planet and avoid the very worst of climate chaos. The OFF Act is a critical first step in what must be a major national mobilization to restructure our energy system now.

Visit OFF Fossil Fuels to get involved in your community and join our grassroots team. Let’s make this happen.

Wendell Berry at home

Wendell Berry’s Farm Manifesto Taking Root

Source: www.courier-journal.com

The book’s theme was simple — that the health of land and the health of people were inseparable. It represented at once a cry of lament and a manifesto written in prophetic fury against industrial-scale agriculture, strip mining and other land exploitation.

In that 1977 work, “The Unsettling of America,” Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote, “We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason.”

People “no longer know the earth we come from,” Berry wrote. “… The people responsible for strip-mining, clear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences.”

This week, some of the nation’s top names in movements promoting sustainable environmental and agricultural practices are gathering in Kentucky to assess the growing influence of the book. Three and a half decades after its publication, “it is remarkable how current and relevant the book is in its critique of industrial culture and in its proposals for a better way forward,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School.

Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, an organizer of the conference on “From Unsettling to Resettling,” said that when her father wrote the book, he had barely any allies outside his family. “And now look,” said Berry, who, like her 78-year-old father, operates a farm in Henry County, Ky. “Good people have this on their minds everywhere.”

People are far more concerned now about supporting local food markets, knowing what’s in their food and preserving the land, Mary Berry said. Still, at the same time, the losses in family farms and topsoil continue.

Conference features speakers –  The conference — which is fully booked — is scheduled for Friday at the Brown Hotel in Louisville and Saturday at St. Catharine College in Washington County and features such speakers as Bill McKibben, a journalist who has sounded the alarm on global warming; Wes Jackson, president of the Kansas-based Land Institute and a leader in the sustainable-agriculture movement; and both Mary and Wendell Berry.

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Commentary Added to Article:

“Our Land and a Sustainable Future”

S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

At one time, almost anyone living in town in the United States was no more than one or two generations removed from the farm. Now cities have absorbed so much of the population many are separated from the farm by several generations. Food has become a commodity. It comes in discrete, wrapped easily merchantable packages. The consumer generally doesn’t know where it comes from, and is encouraged to think it ultimately comes from the corporation that packaged it. They say, “Not to worry, it’s good stuff.”

So the finite nature and the details of process of the world’s food supply is disguised behind the corporate veil, just as is the limitations of the world’s energy supply; and, its unsavory processes are hidden. Only 15% of the food dollar goes to the farmer, and the average item on your plate travels 1600 miles from production to consumption.

I remember reading an article in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several years ago, which showed a graph of the population of China against a several thousand year time line on which was marked the introduction of new crops. Millet, dry land rice, barley, wheat, paddy rice, sweet potatoes, corn, potatoes.

As each new crop introduction occurred, a new step in population also occurred, showing the population was limited by food supply. Our friends who depend on corporations wholly for food might have the idea that the market will spare them. Others may think God will spare humans the fate of microorganisms growing in a Petri plate. But the fate of the Chinese shows us otherwise. God didn’t give us our big brain without the obligation to cooperate and use it.

Corporations operate like primitive slash and burn agriculture. They find a resource and use it until exhaustion, then move the business on to fresh ground. For the primitive slash and burn farmers, the biological world seemed infinite, and in a few decades it repaired itself. The mineral resource world our species is exploiting today is limited and non-renewable. Fossil fuel reserves are very limited given the worlds huge population, and nature can never repair the shortages on a practical time scale.

Environmental protection and energy conservation, including energy efficiency, are essential for a sustainable earth. We may never reach full sustainability, but we certainly must try harder to come as close as we can.  My grandchildren and theirs .  ..   …