Download or read book The End of Plenty written by Joel K. Bourne Jr. and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD An award-winning environmental journalist introduces a new generation of farmers and scientists on the frontlines of the next green revolution. When Malthus famously outlined the brutal relationship between food and population, he never imagined the success of modern agriculture. New seeds, chemicals and irrigation, coupled with free trade, drove the greatest global population boom in history — but left ecological devastation and an unsustainable agro-economic status quo in their wake. Now, with a greater number of mouths to feed than ever before, tightening global food supplies have spurred riots and reform around the world. Joel K. Bourne Jr. takes readers from his family farm to international agricultural hotspots, searching for new solutions that can sustainably feed us all. He visits young corporate farmers trying to restore Ukraine as Europe’s breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist channelling ancient Chinese traditions, the agronomist behind the world’s largest organic sugar-cane plantation, and many other people and groups, large and small, who are racing to stave off a Malthusian catastrophe. Part history, part reportage, part advocacy, The End of Plenty is a wake-up call for anyone concerned with what the coming decades will hold for our planet and its inhabitants if we don’t take action. PRAISE FOR JOEL K. BOURKE JR. ‘Brings a deep and passionate understanding of agriculture … while finding hope in incipient signs of a sustainable farming revolution.’ The Age ‘Despite the lessons of climate change, water shortages and industrial-scale farming of single crops, “we are [still] literally farming ourselves out of food” … Bourne’s compelling book presents challenges that are immense but not insurmountable … we must also accept a shift in mentality — from a world of plenty to a world of enough.’ The Saturday Paper

Download or read book The End of Plenty The Race to Feed a Crowded World written by Joel K. Bourne Jr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An urgent and at times terrifying dispatch from a distinguished reporter who has given heart and soul to his subject.”—Hampton Sides In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our fight against devastating world hunger in dramatic perspective. He travels the globe to introduce a new generation of farmers and scientists on the front lines of the next green revolution. He visits corporate farmers trying to restore Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist, the agronomist behind the world's largest organic sugarcane plantation, and many other extraordinary farmers, large and small, who are racing to stave off catastrophe as climate change disrupts food production worldwide. A Financial Times Best Book of the Year and a Finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Download or read book Empty Planet written by Darrell Bricker and published by Signal. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape. For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline. Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in. They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before. Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Download or read book Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines written by Celia Deane-Drummond and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The threat of ecological collapse is increasingly becoming a reality for the world's populations, both human and nonhuman; addressing this global challenge requires enormous cultural creativity and demands a diversity of perspectives, especially from the humanities. Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines draws from a variety of academic disciplines and positions in order to explore the role and nature of environmental responsibility, especially where such themes intersect with religious or theological viewpoints. Covering disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, politics, peace studies, economics, women's studies, and the ecological sciences as well as systematic and moral theology, the contributors emphasize how these positions have begun to develop distinct perspectives on urgent ecological issues, as well as pointing toward specific practices at the local and international level. This volume provides a multidisciplinary point of departure for urgent conversations on environmental responsibility that resist simplistic solutions. Rather, the contributors highlight the complex nature of modern ecology, and suggest creative ways forward in the situation of an apparently intractable global problem. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Download or read book Fixing the Food System written by Steve Clapp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's broken food system has provoked an outcry from consumer advocates seeking to align food policies with public health objectives. This book examines both sides of the conflict for solutions. Many believe that America's food system is in dire need of reform, with concerns ranging from the obesity epidemic to exploitative labor practices and negative environmental impact. This eye-opening book answers provocative questions about what changes are needed, who is advocating the changes, what parties are opposing these changes (and why), and what a new food system would look like. Organized into three sections, the work identifies the problems with the current system, reviews the changing landscape of food policy, and suggests workable solutions for progress. Washington insider Steve Clapp takes a comprehensive look at the struggle over the future of food. He examines the vision for a reformed national food policy that includes calculating the true cost of food, providing universal access to healthful food, adopting farm policies supporting public health and environmental objectives, improving food safety, paying fair wages to food employees, treating food animals with compassion, and reducing the food system's carbon footprint. The book explores the ways in which these issues can be resolved, drawing upon lessons learned from the early food advocates of the 1960s and 1970s.

Download or read book Thunder Lightning written by Lauren Redniss and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Note: This eBook file contains many richly detailed full-color images and makes use of unconventional page layouts. Because of this, readers will be required to zoom in on each page to read the text and see the finer detail of the artwork. [It has not been optimized for devices that display only in black and white.] From the National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, comes a dazzling fusion of storytelling, visual art, and reportage that grapples with weather in all its dimensions: its danger and its beauty, why it happens and what it means. WINNER OF THE PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND SHELF AWARENESS Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages. This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions—Do I need an umbrella today?—to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change. Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning: the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book’s typeface. The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science. Praise for Thunder & Lightning “[An] aesthetically charged and deeply researched account . . . a wild rainstorm of a book, pelting the reader with ideas and inspiration.”—Nature “A gorgeous and illuminating illustrated study of weather in all its tempestuous variety . . . Redniss’s combo of fact, folklore, and vibrant etched copperplate prints enthralls.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Eerily beautiful . . . Contains plenty of scientific explanation (including more than a few nods toward global warming), but also far-flung personal stories that illuminate the beauty, wonder and chaos inherent in the elements.”—The New York Times “Magical . . . Redniss has . . . shown us how human beings live with nature—fighting, coexisting, taming, predicting via leech barometer and radar and intuition.”—The New York Times Book Review “[A] twenty-first-century genius . . . The reader willing to put herself fully in Redniss’s hands will be rewarded with a delicious feeling of being enveloped by a phenomenon that eclipses the chiming trivialities of daily life.”—Elle “Redniss is one of the most creative science writers of our time—her combination of beautiful artwork, reporting, and poetic prose brings science to life in ways that words alone simply cannot.”—Rebecca Skloot “Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads.”—Adam Gopnik “A strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent.”—Dave Eggers

Download or read book Food Shortage Crisis written by Dawn M. Drake and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the history, causes, impacts, and potential future of global food shortages-a problem for all of humanity, not just the developing world. This important reference work takes an in-depth look at the geographic nature of the problem of global food shortages, helping readers to understand that while this is not a problem that exists everywhere, it is a problem that touches everyone. The book begins with an introduction to the basics of global food shortages, moves through the history of the issue, and then explains the current state of affairs. From there, it examines root causes, proposes solutions, and takes a speculative look into the future. This organization moves readers through the problem in a systematic and easy-to-follow manner, while also allowing them to explore each aspect of the issue individually. A curated selection of further readings at the end of each chapter points readers toward resources for additional research and discovery. The book concludes with a selection of perspective essays written by expert contributors. Each explores a different facet of the topic, from the potential of GMO crops to the impact of food waste. Food Shortage Crisis illustrates that the problems of food scarcity and insecurity are neither new nor confined to the developing world. They are the result of a complex interplay of issues at every stage of the process of feeding humanity, from food production to sale and distribution to consumption. Age-old factors such as poverty and inequality are compounded by new realities such as climate change. Global food shortages affect more than human health; they have the potential to cause economic devastation, trigger civil unrest and international conflicts, and change how we as humans interact with the planet and each other.

Download or read book Nature Prose written by Dominic Head and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.

Download or read book Unstable Ground written by Alex Alvarez and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unstable Ground looks at the human impact of climate change and its potential to provoke some of the most troubling crimes against humanity—ethnic conflict, war, and genocide. Alex Alvarez provides an essential overview of what science has shown to be true about climate change and examines how our warming world will challenge and stress societies and heighten the risk of mass violence. Drawing on a number of recent and historic examples, including Darfur, Syria, and the current migration crisis, this book illustrates the thorny intersections of climate change and violence. The author doesn’t claim causation but makes a compelling case that changing environmental circumstances can be a critical factor in facilitating violent conflict. As research suggests climate change will continue and accelerate, understanding how it might contribute to violence is essential in understanding how to prevent it.

Download or read book The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2017 written by Sarah Janssen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 3377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get thousands of facts right at your fingertips with this essential resource. The World Almanac® and Book of Facts is America's top-selling reference book of all time, with more than 82 million copies sold. Since 1868, this compendium of information has been the authoritative source for all your entertainment, reference, and learning needs. The 2017 edition of The World Almanac® reviews the events of 2016 and will be your go-to source for questions on any topic in the upcoming year. Praised as a "treasure trove of political, economic, scientific and educational statistics and information" by The Wall Street Journal, The World Almanac® and Book of Facts will answer all of your trivia needs—from history and sports to geography, pop culture, and much more. Features include: • 2016—Top 10 News Topics: The editors of The World Almanac® list the top stories that held the world's attention in 2016. • 2016—Year in Sports: Hundreds of pages of trivia and statistics that are essential for any sports fan, featuring complete coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, the 2016 World Series, and much more. • 2016—Year in Pictures: Striking full-color images from around the world in 2016, covering news, entertainment, science, and sports. • 2016—Offbeat News Stories: The World Almanac® editors found some of the strangest news stories of the year. • World Almanac ® Editors' Picks: Time Capsule: The World Almanac® lists the items that most came to symbolize the year 2016, from news and sports to pop culture. • 2016 Election Results: The World Almanac® provides a comprehensive look at the entire 2016 election process, from the roller coaster of the early primaries to state and county presidential voting results and coverage of House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. • The World at a Glance: This annual feature of The World Almanac® provides a quick look at the surprising stats and curious facts that define the changing world. • World Almanac ® Editors’ Picks: The Best Teams That Never Won It All: In light of Golden State's unprecedented regular season success and eventual downfall in the NBA Finals, The World Almanac® takes a look back into sports history for the best teams that fell just short of championship glory. • Statistical Spotlight: A brand-new feature highlights statistics relevant to the biggest stories of the year. These data provide context to give readers a fresh perspective on important issues. • Other New Highlights: Newly available statistics on sexuality, student loans, overdose deaths, state minimum wages, and much more.

Download or read book Eating Tomorrow written by Timothy A. Wise and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful polemic against agricultural technology." —Nature A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.

Download or read book Food and Faith written by Norman Wirzba and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive theological framework in which good eating contributes to the healing of communities and the world.

Download or read book A Leap to an Ecological Economy written by Derek Paul and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the present economy working for you and those around you? Is your government in debt? In your country, is there a real drive to deal with climate change? Are you aware of the great urgency of doing this? Are you aware that many economists consider that one cannot address climate change and other urgent problems within the economic system we now have? If it seems to you that the world has come to an impasse, theres a solution in the form of a new kind of economic thinking, with many practical changes to match. Its called an ecological economy (EE). It calls us to put the health of all life on this planet as the central issue. The EE will focus on resources rather than only money. Money will no longer rule us; rather it will help us do what needs doing. And well measure capital in natural units, not money. Therell be employment for those who want it; and the extra jobs will be found in projects that will be directed at the health of the ecosphere; and that includes your health. The fields and forests that have been denuded of nutrients will, over time, be restored; carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will be eliminated. The costs of such projects will be assessed in terms of resource requirements and the needed human effort, with money as the servant, not the boss. The nations will learn to cooperate betterit will be in all of their interests. The worlds burgeoning population will halt its expansion, just in time to give wild life the breathing space it needs.

Download or read book Farming for the Long Haul written by Michael Foley and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s all but certain that the next fifty years will bring enormous, not to say cataclysmic, disruptions to our present way of life. World oil reserves will be exhausted within that time frame, as will the lithium that powers today’s most sophisticated batteries, suggesting that transportation is equally imperiled. And there’s another, even more dire limitation that is looming: at current rates of erosion, the world’s topsoil will be gone in sixty years. Fresh water sources are in jeopardy, too. In short, the large-scale agricultural and food delivery system as we know it has at most a few decades before it exhausts itself and the planet with it. Farming for the Long Haul is about building a viable small farm economy that can withstand the economic, political, and climatic shock waves that the twenty-first century portends. It draws on the innovative work of contemporary farmers, but more than that, it shares the experiences of farming societies around the world that have maintained resilient agricultural systems over centuries of often-turbulent change. Indigenous agriculturalists, peasants, and traditional farmers have all created broad strategies for survival through good times and bad, and many of them prospered. They also developed particular techniques for managing soil, water, and other resources sustainably. Some of these techniques have been taken up by organic agriculture and permaculture, but many more of them are virtually unknown, even among alternative farmers. This book lays out some of these strategies and presents techniques and tools that might prove most useful to farmers today and in the uncertain future.

Download or read book Stopping Climate Change the Case for Hydrogen and Coal written by C.E. Sandy Thomas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the advantages and limitations of various electricity generation methods. It illustrates how both electricity and motor fuel can be cost-effectively derived from coal, natural gas or other indigenous fuels, thereby eliminating our dependence on imported oil and the power of OPEC. It favours electricity generation systems powered exclusively by natural gas, coal, nuclear and renewables and motor vehicles powered by hydrogen (electricity from coal gasification with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen as the fuel powering fuel-cell electric vehicles produced from natural gas or by gasifying coal With CCS.) The book also demonstrates that the US can meet the Climate Change goal of reducing all greenhouse gases by 80% below 1990 levels in both the transportation and electric utility sectors using hydrogen and coal.

Download or read book Within Our Grasp written by Sharman Apt Russell and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it. A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world's children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential. During the past thirty years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how--with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies--we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the "miracle" of ready-to-eat therapeutic food. Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell writes of her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; fifty percent live below the poverty line; and forty-two percent of Malawi's children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.) As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as "the warm heart of Africa," Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are. Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, "elegant" (The Economist) and "extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching" (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has written an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics written by Zak Cope and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 1457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: