37 Articles found
Earth Policy Institute Articles
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Growing demand for soybeans threatens Amazon rainforest
Some 3,000 years ago, farmers in eastern China domesticated the soybean. In 1765, the first soybeans were planted in North America. Today the soybean occupies more U.S. cropland than wheat. And in Brazil, where it spread even more rapidly, the ...
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The localization of agriculture
In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and about the obesity and other health problems associated ...
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A hotter planet means less on our plates
In the Sunday November 22, 2009 issue of Outlook in the Washington Post, Lester Brown discusses the significant implications of food security in the upcoming Copenhagen Conference. As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we ...
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Our global Ponzi economy
Our mismanaged world economy today has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is providing a highly attractive ...
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Learning from past civilizations
To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early twenty-first century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced ...
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The oil intensity of food
Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped ...
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Could food shortages bring down civilization?
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are ...
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Protecting and restoring forests
Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy. Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated ...
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Shrinking forests: The many costs
In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo `ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,` according to ...
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When population growth and resource availability collide
As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with ...
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Planting trees and managing soils to sequester carbon
As of 2007, the shrinking forests in the tropical regions were releasing 2.2 billion tons of carbon per year. Meanwhile, expanding forests in the temperate regions were absorbing 0.7 billion tons of carbon annually. On balance, a net of some 1.5 ...
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Expanding marine protected areas to restore fisheries
After World War II, accelerating population growth and steadily rising incomes drove the demand for seafood upward at a record pace. At the same time, advances in fishing technologies, including huge refrigerated processing ships that enabled ...
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Raising water productivity
With water shortages emerging as a constraint on food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity during the last half of the twentieth century. Worldwide, average ...
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World facing huge new challenge on food front: business-as-usual not a viable option
A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs. Over the past half-century grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led ...
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Plan B 3.0 -- A Plan of Hope
Plan B is shaped by what is needed to save civilization, not by what may currently be considered politically feasible. Plan B does not fit within a particular discipline, sector, or set of assumptions. Implementing Plan B means undertaking ...
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Losing Soil
In 1938, Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking to learn how these older civilizations ...
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Rethinking food production for a world of eight billion
The World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointlyannounced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of theyear. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of peoplewere chronically hungry, this was a landmark ...