Download or read book Full Planet Empty Plates The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity written by Lester R. Brown and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With food supplies tightening, countries are competing for the land and waterresources needed to feed their people.
Download or read book World on the Edge written by Lester Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.
Download or read book Who Will Feed China written by Lester Brown and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-18 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1995, but with enduring relevance in a time of global population growth and food insecurity, when it was first published, this book attracted much global attention, and criticism from Beijing. It argued that even as water becomes scarcer in a land where 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of agricultural land to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. This book predicts that in an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will come everyone’s land scarcity and water scarcity in China will affect the entire world. China’s dependence on massive imports, like the collapse of the world’s fisheries, will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. Over time, Janet Larsen argued, China’s leaders came to ‘acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? changed their thinking..’ As China’s wealth increases, so do the dietary demands of its population. The increasing middle classes demand more grain-intensive meat and farmed fish. The issue of who will feed China has not gone away.
Download or read book Comfortably Unaware written by Richard Oppenlander and published by Beaufort Books. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Comfortably Unaware, Dr. Richard Oppenlander tackles the crucial issue of global depletion as it relates to food choice. We should all be committed, he tells us, to understanding the reality and consequences of our diet, the footprint it makes on our environment, and seek food products that are in the best interest of all living things. His forthright information and stark mental images are often disturbing-and that's how it should be. As the guardians of Planet Earth, we need to be shaken out of our complacency, to stop being comfortably unaware, and to understand the measures we must take to ensure the health and well-being of our planet-and of ourselves. Oppenlander
Download or read book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor written by Rob Nixon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Download or read book Global Food Systems Diets and Nutrition written by Jessica Fanzo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ensuring optimal diets and nutrition for the global population is a grand challenge fraught with many contentious issues. To achieve food security for all and protect health, we need functional, equitable, and sustainable food systems. Food systems are highly complex networks of individuals and institutions that depend on governance and policy leadership. This book explains how interconnected food systems and policies affect diets and nutrition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In tandem with food policy, food systems determine the availability, affordability, and nutritional quality of the food supply, which influences the diets that people are willing and able to consume. Readers will become familiar with both domestic and international food policy processes and actors, and they will be able to critically analyze and debate how policy and science affect diet and nutrition outcomes.
Download or read book Food in World History written by Jeffrey M. Pilcher and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this concise survey offers a comparative and comprehensive study of culinary cultures and food politics throughout the world, from ancient times to the present day. It examines the long history of globalization of foods as well as the political, social, and environmental implications of our changing relationship with food, showing how hunger and taste have been driving forces in human history. Including numerous case studies from diverse societies and periods, Food in World History explores such questions as: What social factors have historically influenced culinary globalization? How did early modern plantations establish patterns for modern industrial food production? Were eighteenth-century food riots comparable to contemporary social movements around food? Did Italian and Chinese migrant cooks sacrifice authenticity to gain social acceptance in the Americas? Have genetically modified foods fulfilled the promises made by proponents? This new edition includes expanded discussions of gender and the family, indigeneity, and the politics of food. Expanded chapters on contemporary food systems and culinary pluralism examine debates over the concentration of corporate control over seeds and marketing, authenticity and exoticism within the culinary tourism industry, and the impact of social media on restaurants and home cooks.
Download or read book Plan B written by Lester Russell Brown and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new plan for those concerned about rising temperatures, population projections, and spreading water scarcity.
Download or read book Fear of the Animal Planet written by Jason Hribal and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the reader deep inside of the circus, the zoo, and similar operations, Fear of the Animal Planet provides a window into animal behavior: chimpanzees escape, elephants attack, orcas demand more food, and tigers refuse to perform. Indeed, these animals are rebelling with intent and purpose. They become true heroes and our understanding of them will never be the same.
Download or read book Agricultural Resilience written by Sarah M. Gardner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an interdisciplinary exploration of resilience in agriculture, and implications for producers seeking to adapt to change and uncertainty.
Download or read book The Myth of Development written by Oswaldo de Rivero B. and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In order to prevent increasing social and political disorders, the author argues that many countries with primary production and explosive urban growth will have to abandon dreams of development to adopt a policy of national survival based on the search for water, food, and energy security - and the stabilization of their populations."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Rediscovering Geography written by Rediscovering Geography Committee and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1997-04-11 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As political, economic, and environmental issues increasingly spread across the globe, the science of geography is being rediscovered by scientists, policymakers, and educators alike. Geography has been made a core subject in U.S. schools, and scientists from a variety of disciplines are using analytical tools originally developed by geographers. Rediscovering Geography presents a broad overview of geography's renewed importance in a changing world. Through discussions and highlighted case studies, this book illustrates geography's impact on international trade, environmental change, population growth, information infrastructure, the condition of cities, the spread of AIDS, and much more. The committee examines some of the more significant tools for data collection, storage, analysis, and display, with examples of major contributions made by geographers. Rediscovering Geography provides a blueprint for the future of the discipline, recommending how to strengthen its intellectual and institutional foundation and meet the demand for geographic expertise among professionals and the public.
Download or read book Losing Earth written by Nathaniel Rich and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking account of that failure - and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism - is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and John Hersey's Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did - and didn't - happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us in 2019. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.
Download or read book Reducing Inequalities written by Rémi Genevey and published by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reduction of inequalities within and between countries stands as a policy goal, and deserves to take centre stage in the design of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed during the Rio+20 Summit in 2012.The 2013 edition of A Planet for Life represents a unique international initiative grounded on conceptual and strategic thinking, and – most importantly – empirical experiments, conducted on five continents and touching on multiple realities. This unprecedented collection of works proposes a solid empirical approach, rather than an ideological one, to inform future debate.The case studies collected in this volume demonstrate the complexity of the new systems required to accommodate each country's specific economic, political and cultural realities. These systems combine technical, financial, legal, fiscal and organizational elements with a great deal of applied expertise, and are articulated within a clear, well-understood, growth- and job-generating development strategy.Inequality reduction does not occur by decree; neither does it automatically arise through economic growth, nor through policies that equalize incomes downward via ill conceived fiscal policies. Inequality reduction involves a collaborative effort that must motivate all concerned parties, one that constitutes a genuine political and social innovation, and one that often runs counter to prevailing political and economic forces.
Download or read book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.
Download or read book Sustainable Intensification written by Jules N. Pretty and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.
Download or read book The Subterranean Forest written by Rolf Peter Sieferle and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work studies the historical transition from the agrarian solar energy regime to the use of fossil energy, which has fuelled the industrial transformation of the last 200 years. The author argues that the analysis of historical energy systems provides an explanation for the basic patterns of different social formations. It is the availability of free energy that defines the framework within which socio-metabolic processes can take place. This thesis explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available and firewood already depleted or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much longer dependent on a traditional solar energy regime."
