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Nourishing the Planet

ahwoo — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:23:45 +0000

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planetblog. There are just too many good ideas in this article and I highly recommend their web site for more info.

Every year, 5 million children worldwide die from malnutrition-related causes, including immune-system deficiency, increased risk of infection, decreased bone density, and starvation. But a variety of local efforts are hoping to turn things around.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country struggling with internal conflict, food shortages, and poverty, thousands of lives are threatened by acute malnutrition. When a child is brought to one of the therapeutic Stabilization Centers at regional hospitals, run by the Congolese Ministry of Health with support from the organization Action Against Hunger, they receive rations of specially formulated Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTF). RUTF—such as Plumpy’nut, a peanut butter-based food produced by the French company Nutriset—is infused with vitamins and minerals and is used to quickly rehabilitate children suffering from malnutrition.

RUTF is packaged and requires no preparation or refrigeration. It can be administered at home, allowing families to avoid having to travel to far-off medical centers or pay for long and expensive stays at hospitals. It is also very effective. After about 40 days of two or three servings of RUTF per day, a child can reach a healthy weight. During the 2005 food crisis in the Maradi region of Niger, the non-profit Doctors Without Borders treated 40,000 severely malnourished children using RUTF and saw a recovery rate of 90%.

In addition to obtaining Plumpy’nut from UNICEFor directly from Nutriset in France, Action Against Hunger purchases it from Amwili, a local producer that has partnered with Nutriset. By providing a local source of RUTF, Lubumbashi-based Amwili frees the treatment centers from dependency on supplies imported from Europe. Local production also improves livelihoods by creating jobs, and many organizations around the world are working to link local farmers to RUTF production in order to provide an improved and consistent source of income.

In Haiti, the Zanmi Agrikol Program, run by the organization Partners in Health, is improving agricultural capacity and household food security, in addition to treating malnutrition, by training and contracting with local peanut farmers who provide the ingredients for locally produced RUTF. Currently the project provides malnutrition treatment and prevention for 5,000 children; agriculture training and support to 1,240 families; and has contracts with over 100 local peanut farmers. Additionally, the organization Meds & Food for Kidsrelies on local ingredients and Haitian producers to make its own brand of RUTF, called Medika Manba or “peanut butter medicine.” Meds & Food for Kids saw a significant increase in demand for Medika Manba after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti earlier this year, and many malnourished children were treated with a locally made RUTF that provides the additional benefit of helping to restore the country’s fragile economy.

Companies like Nutriset in France and Valid International in the United Kingdom offer instruction manuals for local production of their specific RUTF products and partner with local producers in countries struggling with malnutrition across sub-Saharan Africa. Action Against Hunger, for example, also purchases Plumpy’nut from a producer in Nairobi, Kenya, called INSTA—a partner of Valid International—to distribute RUTF to its programs throughout East Africa.

In Ghana, the New Frontier Farmers and Processorgroup is processing the leaves of moringa trees, which are high in protein and other valuable nutrients, into powder that can be manufactured into formula for malnourished children. This effort, along with other crop-processing projects, is helping to add value to small-scale farmers’ crops and improve the livelihoods of the nearly 5,000 participating farmers.

To read more about how farmers can produce ingredients for local products to improve livelihoods, nutrition, and food security see: Locally Produced Products for Locally Consumed Products, Using Small Businesses to Create Local Markets, and Protecting Wildlife While Improving Food Security, Health, and Livelihoods.

Thank you for reading! As you may already know, Danielle Nierenberg is traveling across sub-Saharan Africa visiting organizations and projects that provide environmentally sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty. She has already traveled to over 18 countries and visited 130 projects highlighting stories of hope and success in the region. She will be in Burkina Faso next, so stay tuned for more writing, photos and video from her travels.

If you enjoy reading this diary, we blog daily on Nourishing the Planet, where you can also sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly blog and travel updates. Also, please don’t hesitate to comment on our posts, we check them daily and look forward to an ongoing discussion with you

What we need to Become

ahwoo — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:19:30 +0000

Frugal. Elimination of financial debt and dependency.

Focused on investing. In home productivity (energy, food, etc.) rather than global markets.

Thrifty with expenses. New sources of low cost food, energy, security, etc. that are financially sustainable.

Entrepreneurial. Energy, food, and more sold/traded/bartered at the local level.

More physical. Not backbreaking 19th Century labor, but the nominal investments required to enable the transition. Re-skilling to accomplish basic tasks.

Virtual. Knowledge work without commutes, offices, etc. sold to global customers via online collaboration. New skills in social software. Free agency.

Cooperative. New geographic and global virtual communities. To share ideas, designs, insight, encouragement, physical work, etc. To build community platforms.

Most suburban properties have a decent sized yard. They have neighbors living in relatively close proximity. And they often have some kind of neighborhood social infrastructure, be it a home owners’ association, or a neighborhood watch scheme. And it’s in Jan Spencer’s involvement with his neighborhood association that the promise of wider change is really making itself manifest—he’s putting on programs to build a resilient neighborhood, he’s organizing panel discussions on community change, and he’s encouraging his neighbors to grow their own food.

Thanks to Peak Moment TV, the folks who have brought us shows on everything from living simply as an alternative American dream, through legal gray water, to a DIY solar home.

Cliamte Change and the Economy

ahwoo — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:41:21 +0000

Today, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an ‘exceptional’ year – exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.

It’s not news, of course, that greenhouse gas emissions are intimately linked with economic success. To a degree, it’s basic common sense. Industrial economies run largely on fossil fuels. To understand just how dependent on those fuels we are, and how ‘renewables’ and even nuclear are currently nowhere very significant on a global level, have a look at this breakdown of global energy use:

Source: Edro

The global economy, in other words, is fossil fuels. To put it another way, it is climate change. Economic growth equals more emissions. Economic collapse equals fewer. The most famous example of this was the collapse of the Soviet empire after 1990. Its economic apocalypse caused a huge drop in greenhouse gas emissions. To this day, the former USSR still doesn’t pollute as much as it did at the height of its economic pomp.

Source: Chris Vernon

What to make of this? Well, if you’re Derrick Jensen, say, the conclusion you draw is that industrial society itself is inherently toxic and must be destroyed, in order to save the biosphere. From the point of view of global ecological health, as opposed to human happiness, there’s clear merit in this argument. It’s clear that the global human economy is an engine of ecocide. The trouble is, of course, that even if you can make yourself comfortable with the massive human costs of bringing down industrial society, there’s no conceivable way of actually doing it. It seems to me that most people in industrial societies, and perhaps outside of them too, will always choose human comfort and safety above what they see as some vague concept of ‘ecological health’. If we are asked to choose between giving up our cars today and giving up the existence of coral reefs in two decades, I think I know what we’d choose. I think we have already chosen.

What to do then? Another approach – far more fashionable and on the surface more ‘realistic’ – is that of ‘eco-pragmatism.’ Eco-pragmatism is very much the in thing right now. Assuming that some grand shift in human consciousness is unlikely, that most people on Earth seem to aspire to Western levels of affluence and over-development and that this is hard or impossible to stop, especially in democracies (and even in dictatorships – look at China), its proponents therefore put their faith in two things: techno-fixes and ‘decoupling’.

The techno-fixes are easy enough to understand: they’re everywhere, and the mainstream green movement has abandoned most of its other aims in order to shill for them. Whether they be giant windfarms or solar arrays, the idea here is to get enough renewable energy sources up and running quickly enough to replace fossil fuels as a significant energy source, and thereby prevent the worst impacts of climate change. I find this narrative utterly unconvincing for a number of reasons we’ve covered here before, and of course I’m not the only one. But questioning it right now is almost impossible; we may have to wait until its proponents hit the brick wall of their own over-excitement before we can have a proper discussion about it.

The second part of the eco-pragmatist equation is the idea of ‘decoupling’ economic development from both emissions and, more broadly, from the material intensity of the economy. As the human economy grows it consumes more stuff. It consumes more fish, wood, ore, fossil fuels, animals, plants, metals and the rest. Some of these are replaceable, some are not, but all of them, taken from the Earth and consumed by us at current rates, has a knock-on effect on the health of the biosphere, of which climate change is only the most all-encompassing example. And it will get worse, for sure. If the projected global population, by 2100, was to live the same kind of lives we currently live in countries like the US, the global economy would need to be 40 times bigger than it currently is. That’s right: 40 times bigger. It has been calculated that if the world economy grows at a rate of 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first evolved. Think about that. Sit back and really think about it.

So – runs the eco-pragmatist argument – this being the case, we need to work out how to develop without doing all this bad stuff. Obviously we need to develop, because it’s everyone’s right to have a telly and a dentist. So we need to work out how to run an economy that doesn’t constantly need to grow, and therefore strip-mine the world.

This argument – that we can ‘develop’ in much the way we are now developing without economic growth – has become a kind of last redoubt for the rhetoric of ’sustainable development.’ Those who push it are well aware of how destructive the human economy is, how democracy colludes in it, and how rising population growth and rising human wants are combining to eat the world. But they see no real way out of the capitalist, materialist society we have built, and they see discussion of alternative systems as ‘unrealistic’ – which often they are. So they alight instead on attempting to maintain the garden of earthly delights that we call modern civilisation without the engine of its creation – economic growth.

It sounds tempting, but I’m not really convinced. For starters, though I’m no economist, I know that the modern economy can’t currently function without growth. Amongst other things, growth is needed in a capitalist economy to offset labour productivity – in other words, to provide new jobs for people made jobless by the economy’s relentless drive towards increasing labour efficiency, which itself is stimulated by the need to grow in order to outcompete others. How you get around this, I don’t know, though various learned people who know a lot more about economics than me think it could be done.

But I think they’re missing something. I think our current societal worship of economic growth, while posing as a piece of economic rationalism, is nothing of the kind. For some reason, this thought crystallised in me this recently when, re-reading the John Fowles novel The Magus, I came across this short passage, spoken by the central character to his young, idealistic, egalitarian protege:

But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a high pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.

This, I think, is what we believe growth will give us; it’s why we cling to it as to a liferaft. Far from being simply a boring but necessary component of a capitalist economy, growth has become the defining purpose of our political leaders. Nobody sensible questions it, and anyone who does is immediately dismissed as a ‘Luddite’ who wants to ‘have everyone living in caves.’ I see growth as an offshoot of progress, or perhaps a new, more contemporary version of it. Progress – the idea that the future is always better than the past, that everything always improves and will continue to do so, that we have ’some destination’ which will take us to ‘a higher state’ – is the defining myth of the modern world. It is beneath all our skins, and without it we are lost. We have nothing to believe in; nothing to strive for.

Our pursuit of growth is not rational – it is atavistic. I don’t think this is just a dry-as-dust debate about how to decouple energy intensity from job creation. I think it is the potential toppling of one of our founding myths, and I think it will take more than pragmatism to knock it off its pedestal.

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto

ahwoo — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:38:56 +0000

Long time P2P Foundation Colleague Kevin Carson from The Center for a Stateless Society has just published his latest book: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto on Amazon. The book details the historical rise and fall of Sloanist mass production, and a survey of the new economy emerging from the ruins: networked local manufacturing, garage industry, household microenterprises and resilient local economies. More detailed info can be found here at the authors blog as well as the book in PDF form. An important book in preparing for a likely possible future.

Matt

Icelandic Volcano Reminds Us About Preparing For Food Waste Hazards

ahwoo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:19:11 +0000

As Iceland’s erupting volcano strands thousands of air travelers across Europe and worldwide, a less publicized but arguably more costly catastrophe is mounting 15,000 miles away: piles of gourmet produce and cut flowers, some of Kenya’s chief exports, are rotting in limbo. Meant to be shipped to upscale grocery stores throughout Europe, lilies, roses, carnations, carrots, onions, baby sweet corn, and sugar snap peas are going bad in heaps, on the vine, and in the ground because airport warehouses are already full and there’s no local market for the expensive produce in a country where half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

As food prices continue to rise worldwide, reducing food waste will be a critical element in alleviating hunger and poverty worldwide. Already, Nourishing the Planet has highlighted the many ways that growing indigenous vegetables for local markets and improving storage techniques can help to both reduce food waste and improve access to food, in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

To read more about food waste and ways it can be prevented, see: Reducing Food Waste, Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera, Farming on the Urban Fringe, and Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa. Also, stay tuned for an entire chapter on the subject, written by Tristram Stuart, in State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

What is Happening with Children Today

ahwoo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:25:03 +0000

As a kid, I had the good fortune of having a lot of open spaces around. Our first house had a huge old cemetary across the street, the second wooded areas and a creek full of frogs and crayfish, and my last childhood home was like living on Walden Pond.
This was my playground – a chance for my friends and I to indulge in the sort of rowdy waywardness that has been an integral part of childhood since the cave days. Sadly, most of those trees have since been cut down and replaced by housing developments. Even if they hadn’t been, it’s unlikely the modern child would be given as much freedom as my friends and I had to explore them.

We are now just beginning to understand that the growing disconnection between kids and the natural world is an increasingly serious social problem. One researcher in the United Kingdom from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Dr. William Bird, has noted a steady increase in the diagnosis of childhood mental illness and in the use of medication to treat it. But he also discovered evidence that simple exposure to nature – anything from unstructured play in a forest to a greening of the view from an urban classroom window – is an effective, non-pharmaceutical means of mitigating mental illness.

“Children undertaking activities in nature appear to improve symptoms of ADHD [Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] by 30 percent compared to urban outdoor activities and threefold compared to the indoor environment,” notes Dr. Bird.

A child using his imagination to play a game in the woods isn’t just having fun; he’s setting a foundation for future independence, inner strength and an ability to resist stress that will last a lifetime.

We could be encouraging natural play, but instead, we’re in the process of forming a new, potentially dystopian culture of childhood. In the United States, Dr. Joe Frost addressed the Association for Childhood Education International Conference on the worsening situation that threatens the nation’s children. The combination of increasing poverty and urbanization, the failure of the No Child Left Behind standardization initiative and the destruction of play represents a crisis, Frost argues. Cell phones, text messaging, video games and online chatting are supplanting free time in the fields and forests. Kids today are suffering from what author Richard Louv describes as “nature-deficit” disorder.

It’s affecting children everywhere. When the Japanese photographer Keiki Haginoya set out in 1979 to document children at play on the streets of Tokyo, little did he know what lay in store for him. His work became a narrative of decline, showing the rapid loss of play space and the alienation of kids from natural outdoor activities and traditional games. By1996, he reached the depressing conclusion that children’s laughter had entirely disappeared from the streets.

The subtle character of this crisis doesn’t lend itself to a rapid solution. The simple and obvious idea that nature plays an important role in our mental health hasn’t really caught on in the public mind, and is far from a priority for politicians. More and more kids are popping pills, and we’re forking out billions of dollars in health care and other costs to deal with the consequences of poor mental health.

Children who survive through adolescence surrounded by gray walls and little time in the wilderness may not necessarily spend the rest of their lives believing that nature is a scary place, but the evidence suggests that their deficit of experience will result in an adulthood of generally higher stress and poorer health. Preserving and encouraging a natural environment is basic wisdom for the twenty-first century. An attractive future for humanity will be one in which all kids have the opportunity to roam, without fear, in an unspoiled land.

What ? Quit Facebook ?

ahwoo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:12:18 +0000

Ironically, the decision to destroy my carefully built-up virtual image came as a result of wanting to enhance my profile. All that particular week I’d been hungry for new quotes on my page, something to reflect the week I’d been having: something introspective. I perused a quotes website and found this one attributed to Aristotle:

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

Click Here To view Quit Facebook!

‘Organic’ Veggie Burgers that contain neurotoxins ?

ahwoo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:26:07 +0000

PeaceLove sez, “Shocking Mother Jones article about a Cornucopia Institute report on how many of the most popular veggie burgers are made with hexane, a neurotoxic byproduct of gas refining.” In order to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers, manufacturers of soy-based fake meat like to make their products have as little fat as possible. The cheapest way to do this is by submerging soybeans in a bath of hexane to separate the oil from the protein. Says Cornucopia Institute senior researcher Charlotte Vallaeys, “If a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or texturized vegetable protein, you can be pretty sure it was made using soy beans that were made with hexane.” If you’ve heard about hexane before, it was likely in the context of gasoline–the air pollutant is also a byproduct of gas refining. But in 2007, grain processors were responsible for two-thirds of our national hexane emissions. Hexane is hazardous in the factory, too: Workers who have been exposed to it have developed both skin and nervous system disorders. Troubling, then, that the FDA does not monitor or regulate hexane residue in foods. More worrisome still: According to the report, “Nearly every major ingredient in conventional soy-based infant formula is hexane extracted.” Here’s some of the soy brands that contain neurotoxins: “Boca Burger (conventional), Franklin Farms, Garden Burger, It’s All Good Lightlife, Morningstar Farms, President’s Choice, Taste Above, Trader Joe’s, Yves Veggie Cuisine.” And here’s some that are free from hexane: “Boca Burgers (Made with organic soy), Helen’s Kitchen, Morningstar (Made with organic), Superburgers by Turtle Island, Tofurky, Wildwood.” This is one way in which the “organic” label is more than just a greenwash! On the other hand, anything labelled as “made with organic ingredients” instead of “organic” can have hexane or plutonium or whatever. Which Veggie Burgers Were Made With a Neurotoxin?

A ‘Less Bad’ Economy ?

ahwoo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:31:45 +0000

“A thief who tells a judge he is stealing less than before will receive no leniency. So why do companies get environmental awards for polluting less – even though they are still polluting?”.

Gunther Pauli is scornful in his new book The Blue Economy of the “do less bad” school of environmentalism.

“It’s an approach which sees billions of dollars invested in less toxic and longer lasting batteries – even though the ‘less toxic batteries’ still rely on mining, smelting and toxic chemistry, are not recycled, and are dumped into the environment to toxify our ecosystems and pose long term health hazards”.

The most entrancing scenario for me is the idea of replacing mining with lichen. Mining, for Pauli, is “one of humanity’s most aggressive interventions. Armed with dynamite, and consuming massive amounts of water and energy, we extract minute concentrations of gold from the depths of the earth”

He asks us to consider that lichens are great miners, capable of extracting specific inorganic molecules like magnesium from rocks and trees. I’ve loved looking at lichen all my life, but had not realised until now that they could be replacements for horrors like this:

Pauli’s wants to build a new economy on the base one hundred of best nature-inspired technologies like lichen. His central principle is the idea of cascading nutrients and energy – the way ecosystems do.

“A cascade is a waterfall. It requires no power, it flows with the force of gravity. It transports nutrients between biological kingdoms – absorbed minerals feed microorganisms, microorganisms feed plants, plants feed other species, with the waste of one being nourishment for another”.

Cascading energy and nutrients leads to sustainability, says Pauli, by reducing or eliminating inputs such as energy, and eliminating waste and its cost – not just as pollution but also as an inefficient use of materials. In ecosystems, there is no waste because the by products of one process are inputs to another process.

VEGETABLE GARDENS TO BLOOM IN DENVER PARKS IN 2010

ahwoo — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:09:19 +0000

The Grow Local Colorado Campaign is thrilled to be partnering with Denver Parks and Recreation and the Parks Stewardship Program in 2010 to grow Edible Public Demonstration Gardens in four Denver parks: Civic Center, Berkeley, Highlands and Highlands Gateway. The produce will be planted, maintained and harvested by local volunteers. The food will go to Denver’s residents in need, delivered to such organizations as The Gathering Place, EarthLinks, and Food Bank of the Rockies.
The purpose of the gardens is to demonstrate the beauty of edible gardens and to inspire and encourage Denver citizens to grow more vegetable gardens. The gardens will also engage community participation by inviting local residents, nonprofit groups, schools and businesses to “adopt” and tend one of the garden plots.
“In 2009 we were thrilled to partner with the City in growing a productive vegetable garden in Civic Center Park,” says Grow Local Colorado Campaign Director Dana Miller. “This pilot project was a great success, so much so that the edible gardens will be expanding to additional Denver Parks. The purpose of the Grow Local Colorado Campaign is to promote local food, local economy and local community, and these gardens support our mission beautifully.” �
Individuals, community groups, nonprofits and local businesses are invited to “adopt” a garden and help plant, maintain and harvest the plots from May through October of 2010. To volunteer and for more information go to: www.GrowLocalColorado.org, or call Dana Miller at 303-300-3547.
The Grow Local Colorado Campaign is a grassroots volunteer organization founded by representatives from Transition Denver, the Mile High Business Alliance, the Living Earth Center and Denver Botanic Gardens.