News Roundup
Special Saturday edition.
- 39 rangers are missing in Virunga.
- Putin creates new protected area for Amur leopard.
- Just in time for Halloween Dia de los Muertos, the Pemba flying fox of Tanzania has returned from the brink of extinction.
- They found a new species. Behold: VAMPIRE MOTH!
- Swoon: “I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.”
Posted by Tim on November 1st, 2008 • • 2 comments
Tags: amurleopard•flyingfox•newspecies•obama•virunga
Tags: amurleopard•flyingfox•newspecies•obama•virunga
Welcome back Tim!
I agree with what Obama has said, as it is supported by science. Historically, governments have had agricultural policies designed to lower the costs of food for their supporters. Feed your supporters and you shall lead – kind of captures the policy. We then tried to make food less and less expensive – which led to the subsidy (yes – taxes given to the farmers that would produce the most) – which lowered the price of food on the supermarket shelf (but which we pay out of our taxes anyway). One of the problems is that we subsidize things with our taxes that are not necessarily good for our health – like corn (the stuff we feed our beef cattle), sugar, and wheat (rich in carbs). That ends up being the less expensive food – so we eat too much of it – so we get unhealthy (not a balanced diet at all). The other major problem is that the science behind increasing farm production is based on adding fertilizers and pesticides that are made with petrochemicals (natural gas, oil). We use so much non-solar energy, that our food system is now a huge consumer of energy. So, if we want energy independence, we should reduce our need of petrochemical based supplies and return to the Sun as our source. We can do it..it has been proven that we can produce more nutrients (as measured not by pound, but by nutrients per food unit (nutrients in an orange, loaf of bread, glass of milk) if we use a sun based system (read organic food) rather than a petrochemical based system. When you remove the Ag Policy part (the tax subsidy to our food producers) and let the economics work, organic has a better return on investment as measured by cost of producing nutrients we need to stay healthy.